Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin teaches a counterintuitive practice: taking full responsibility and apologizing sincerely, even when you genuinely believe you’ve done nothing wrong. The method works through karma—past actions create patterns that attract blame toward you regardless of present innocence, so authentic apology can dissolve conflict. She opens with John’s story: how a sincere apology and a thoughtful gift of golf balls transformed an angry neighbor from hostile to genuinely grateful. She then traces this principle through a striking example—a woman who recovered from twenty years of suffering with childhood sexual abuse only after writing apology letters to her abusers, following Lama Zopa’s advice. Robina explores why such practices feel nearly impossible, then broadens to Buddhist approaches to prisons and governance, media’s impact on children’s minds, the necessary balance between wisdom and compassion on the path, and the practice of transforming difficulties through acceptance and right choice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 21 2002 01 20 BYT.mp3
UUID: 3e6a15aa-a8f8-4514-aa63-b4534a1c382f
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Be Your Own Therapist (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2002-01-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~9,663
He wants to try and find a solution. Just know where to go with this. So he asked everybody their advice, and one person said, well, you know, scratch his car, call the cops, whatever. And Renata said, well, I’ll tell you what Lama Zopa would do. What he would do is he would find out what this guy liked, then he’d buy him a very beautiful, very expensive gift and wrap it beautifully and offer it to him, and apologize, and apologize.
You’re hearing me straight? And apologize. So he thought this was a great idea. So he bought him these golf balls. He apparently liked golf, this old guy.
Very beautiful golf balls, very expensive, wrapped them beautifully, and then went to his back door, knocked on the door, and offered them to him, to this guy’s surprise, and apologized for anything he’d done wrong. So the old guy took it. And John was comfortable. He felt like he’d just finished the whole thing. He was happy, you know.
He was in the kitchen having a cup of tea, and this old bloke comes in beaming from ear to ear with his golf balls unwrapped. And the old bloke said, this is the kindest thing anyone’s done. Thank you so much. And then he said, everything is forgiven. Can you hear that?
Isn’t that interesting? So everything was okay. Mean, obviously, this is a point about this is an interesting point about karma. You know when you get to not like somebody, like I say, person at work or anywhere. You know?
Now better still, when a person doesn’t like you and you know you’ve done nothing wrong, you understand, you just know you’ve done nothing wrong and you know they’re predicting like crazy on you, and you’re just kind of speechless because you realize this is so unfair. They’re saying you did all these things and you know you didn’t do them. And that’s usually in terms of what they think you thought. Right? They’re criticizing you.
You did this and you said this, and how dare you this. Do you understand what I’m saying? We all have that experience. Well, that’s the point. That’s because of past karma.
You can be completely innocent. I mean, you can even I mean, many people I know in prison, for sure in prison, they haven’t done something wrong. They’ve even been accused of doing murder, they go to prison, you know. But it’s the same kind of thing. It’s due to what you’ve done in the past.
Then you meet the person again, and they don’t even know why they hate you so much. And you know they’re projecting onto you. It’s past garbage, you know. It doesn’t come from the sky. It doesn’t just come from their delusions.
It comes from your past karma. So you’ve accused other people. You’ve hurt other people. Now you’re getting it back, you know. So when you can recognize that, like, you know, let’s just say this guy did, John, then by taking responsibility and apologizing, the other person does believe you’ve done some harm, and then you apologize, they kinda feel so relieved.
You know? It’s all now better. Or another story which is even more outrageous for us, another student of Lama Zopa. Be careful if you choose Lama Zopa as your guru. You’re gonna get tough practice, I’ll tell you.
So this this a friend of mine in California, Lenny, she she said she had some kind of, like, not very severe, but some kind of sexual abuse from her step father. And she really struggled for twenty years going to therapy, trying to get trying to work through it, really trying hard to work through it. She got stuck the whole time, you know. So then she met Lama Zopa, became a Buddhist. And her first meeting with Lama Zopa, she told him all about this, and then she asked him for, please, to help to help give her a method to try and go beyond it, try and fix it up.
And he said, well, what I’d like you to do is write a letter to your mother and your stepfather and to apologize to them. And she thought, oh, poor Rinpoche, he doesn’t understand. So she told him the whole story again. So he repeated his method, which sounds shocking. He repeated to apologize.
So she said it took her two years to have the courage to somehow find the way to say the words from her heart that meant this, you know, because she understood about karma and everything. And she said it took her two years, she said it worked. I know it’s too long, but it’s like, your heart’s in your throat when you think about these things. I mean, it’s really impossible for us to take the blame even when we are at fault. Could you imagine when we’re not at fault?
I mean, it’s almost like demented, isn’t it? But in in one of the verses, in this eight verses, this is one of the approaches, one of these mind training techniques, you know, to when you when you take the blame, you take responsibility. And I know sometimes yeah. I mean, I know one time when a person couple of experiences now, some people I know, who got extreme mental suffering, and all I mean by that is extreme paranoia and extreme anger. You know?
I mean, that’s all mental suffering is, and there’s to to such an extent that they’re truly, like, seeing nightmares all the time and imagining you’re doing these terrible things to them. I mean, really extreme. Like, extreme. When a person’s that extreme, then it’s easy to apologize because you know they’re completely out of their brain. You see my point?
So when it’s really extreme, it’s easy to really apologize to that person for what they you just did. It’s easy because it’s so outrageous. When it’s sort of a mild one, especially when it’s a friend, it’s very hard. You know? But it was so clear for me that this particular person who just accused me of doing these unbelievable things, you can’t even imagine.
This is like the person’s really gone out of a poor poor mind. They’ve obviously passed karma too, and I know I haven’t done them. It’s very simple. It’s so clear. So because it’s so evident that she’s suffering.
But it’s easy to say you’re sorry. It’s so easy because you know that’ll alleviate their pain, you know, because it’s clearly insane. I’ll say I’m so holy, know, believe me, I’m not. But sometimes when it’s really extreme, it’s almost easier to see it. Or like a child, you know.
So just think of a child, a two year old, stabbing their feet and crying, you’re so mean. You did this. Oh, darling. I know I mean it. It’s alright.
I won’t do it again. It’s so easy, isn’t it? Just to take the blame and immediately they’re subdued, know? Well, hopefully. But we can see.
But this is really based on karma. But even if it weren’t based on karma, if it’s really just based on compassion because you can see the suffering of the other person, you’d be happy to take the blame. No problem. If you’re feeling comfortable enough in yourself, no problem. Even not to blame, who cares?
You know? Make him feel better. You’ve gotta be brave to do it. It’s true. What do you think?
That’s about twenty to twelve. Any thoughts? Any feelings about all this so far? No? Yes?
Yes. You mentioned the Egyptian and India. Oh, yes. What we do? Okay.
This pilgrimage. Yeah. Well, actually, it’s interesting. Yeah. Last year or was it the year before?
What year are we? Two two two one. Maybe last year. I don’t know. No.
Year before last. Late the year before last, two thousand, a friend of mine were discussing how to raise money for the monastery for different things, and one of them was the prison project because, you know, I have to raise the money for it. And she just said, Rameen, you should lead a pilgrimage. I’ve never even been on a pilgrimage, much less led one, right, at that point. I mean, I’ve been to the east and been to holy places, but never done a proper pilgrimage from holy place to holy place.
So I thought, oh, that’s interesting, and I never thought of it. She said, must be a lot of people around the world you meet who might like to come with you, you know, because they know you, and they like to go with someone they know. So I I happened to have a friend two friends in San Francisco who are both in the travel business, both Buddhists. One of them leads little groups to Nepal, has for years, and the other one has got a little thing called Himalayan high treks. And she’s been leading little groups to Nepal, India, and Tibetan, those things.
And they’re both just gorgeous people. And I just rang them up and said, do you think? What what do think of this idea? How did we do it? You know?
And they both thought it was a great idea. So, you know, Effie, who’s a travel agent, she started putting the whole thing together. She then organized the entire thing. She made some profit for herself, I think not much. But whatever profit there was, we organized it.
We had the first one. We had twenty eight people come, including me, everybody, twenty eight, which is an amazing number of people to have, the first one. And and Effie organized the whole thing, then Silla, the other person, she came on and organized internally, you know, the tour leader and everything. And it was just wonderful experience. I mean, Sandy was there, wasn’t it?
Just amazing experience. Everyone he talked to, those and I had amazing I thought it was amazing experience. It was so lovely. What we did was was about nearly four weeks, we started but we we we we sort of based in we came to Kathmandu. We all flew to Kathmandu.
Then we did a few things around Kathmandu for several days. The second one we’re doing this year is gonna be bit different, but it’s much the same. So, okay, this year, what we’re gonna do is this. We arrive in Kathmandu. We go up to Kopan monastery, which is the main monastery of the FPMT.
It’s about thirty years been there. Now Lama Yeshe’s reincarnation has started. Right? And I’ll talk about that later maybe. With about three hundred monks and then down the road, about three hundred nuns.
And it’s also a facility for westerners. They have causes there throughout the year. It’s been a wonderful place for Westerners to do courses. It’s a great place to go. So we did a five day course.
We will do a five day course. We did similar last year, six day course. But every second day during that, we’ll go after one or two holy places around Kathmandu. There’s like Boudhanath Stūpa, which is one of the most amazing stupas in the world, extraordinary, very blessed. Then there’s another one called Swayambhunath Stūpa.
And then we go to a place called Paping, which is an hour out of Katmandu, a very holy place connected with some many of the holy beings, and especially the old Indian ones. You know? And we what we do there, a couple of months before we went on the first pilgrimage, which is in October last year, I spoke to on the phone and got various practices from him that we should do at these places. So I got, like, two hours of information. I put this little book together.
It’s all the practices and all the information, what to do, how to do it. Here, prostrations there, the Heart Sūtra, this one there. So we had a little book. We had a little book, you know, and then we went to each place, and we did these various pujas and different things and offerings and practices. And then we, you know, traveled.
So we we then we traveled on a bus and went to these various places. So, basically, the places in Nepal, two or three of those. And then in India, the various places connect to the Buddha, where he was born, where he was when he died, where he taught, where he got enlightened. Four or five places. And then most of India, had this nice air conditioned bus that we were traveling together.
You know? And that’s really what we did. It was a pilgrimage. Mean, actually, pilgrimages, they say you’re supposed to walk everywhere. That would take us six months probably, so we won’t do that.
Well, it’d probably take us two years to walk from here to India. Forget it. Okay. So we don’t walk. So we take take, you know, air conditioned buses and have and I wanted it to be kind of reasonable quality, not too hippie quality, kind of like nice hotels with bathrooms and everything.
And it was. They’re mostly nice, weren’t they? And so that’s what we’re doing. So it’s about a month. Teachings.
Oh, yeah. Sorry. There were teachings every day. We we do more this time, more meditations and teachings every day. We’ll do meditation in the morning, I think.
And, yeah, it’ll be like that. And it was a very wonderful experience. And so because of that and because it was very good for the prison project too, because profit from it went to us, and Effie was so delighted to do that, and Silla did a wonderful job as well. But this year, Sandy will be doing Silla’s job, this person here. She’ll be organizing all the internal and running around being mum, you know, during the during the thing.
And, and, you know, then that’s it. Be about a month. Part of it is this course and going around. So that’s what it is. So if you’re interested in getting even information about it, we’re doing a brochure soon, then you put your name on that piece of paper out there.
Put your name and address down. What’s number of student number? When? Yeah. Oh, it’s it’s October twenty fifth to November twenty two.
It’s twenty nine days. And if we have more people, if we have extra people, we won’t do more than thirty five people. Twenty eight worked very nicely. Maybe we can go to thirty five. And if there’s more people, we’ll do a second tour, think.
I’ve got I’ve kept aside another. The next one will be November twenty two till about December twenty, if we have a second one. And we’ll if you just put the name and address down, we’ll send you the brochure. And the thing is because of the Australian dollar, it’s a bit difficult because it makes it a lot for Australians. But we’ll try and give a good discount to Australians too for that reason.
But it because if you have to go to India Nepali, it’s based on India Nepali prices. Right? But, yeah, we had last year, we had mostly Americans. There were three Malaysians and five or six. Seven of us were Australian, actually, altogether.
Seven Australians. And this year, probably, would be different. So that’s what it is. Excuse me. Yeah.
Children come, like, four tenets Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Oh, as long as they enjoy it. Yeah.
Absolutely. Sure. No problem. Absolutely. Not lunch yet.
Any questions? Yes, darling. Tell me a story about the Amazonian dogs. Oh, I’m sorry. You asked me that, didn’t you?
Well, remember, Tate, it’s just it’s just that’s one of because the the teaching is that whatever all sentient beings have a Buddha nature, and every single thing that any sentient being experiences through their senses, whatever goes in, whatever you see, whatever you hear, it leaves an impression. Which when you hear this, makes complete sense why the world, you know, condition in terms of external conditions, why we’re so berserk in the world. I mean, look at the input that we’re getting through our senses in the world. It’s outrageous, isn’t it? I remember as a little kid I’m sorry.
I can’t help but go off into other stories, but I’m coming back to it. I remember as a little girl, I always remember when the Columbine those two Columbine boys killed and all those berserk things. And, of course, in the West, we’re trying to struggle a bit to ask why did they do it. So they look to the parents, like I said, they find nice white middle class Christians, and they can’t be that. Right?
Unless they’re cheating, we think. But then the thing that we have to be the videos. It has to be the mean kids at school. Everybody could see from their experiences, okay, they got insulted. They got kind of abused sometimes.
They, you know, they weren’t raped or murdered or stabbed every day. They these two kids, they saw videos. So as another boy pointed out, excuse me, I saw the same videos, but I didn’t wanna go around and kill thirteen people. So the point is though, what I’m getting here, this is the one to the story, that whatever we do experience from the outside, if we have got the imprints in the mind, they play a huge role in how we are. So given this, given that every sentient being has all the imprints for Buddhahood and all the imprints for virtue in their mind, then every being, dogs, ants, fleas, mice, have these two.
So whatever, you know, you can put into their mind, even if they don’t understand it, like through sound or through through seeing, or doing certain activities, like in relation to holy objects, like circumambulating statues and stupas, then that leaves strong karmic imprint in their mind to meet the Buddha in the future or to meet Hitler, whoever it is you have karmic connection with. You know? When we talk, you know, that one about when we’re discussing to Richard and we and the one about how certain actions we do in relation to certain objects because of the power of the object has has its own benefit to us. Great huge karmic merit, you know, huge meritorious results. And one of these is relation to holy objects.
So the tradition, you know, from the Tibetan Buddhism, one of the the the practices that people do, which seems kind of weird, but it’s circumambulate, circ just walk around. A stupa, for example. So stupas are a real focus of this holy energy. You know? And this one in Boudhanath is a very special one.
Bodhana and Swayambhunath, amazing ones. And the one, of course, in Bodhgaya where the Buddha got enlightened. You know? So Rinpoche, having this understanding, he will, you know, never pass by an opportunity. Like I said about the ape in the zoo and the porcupine, he never passes by an opportunity to put to help a a sentient being, an create merit.
And so regularly, he will do that. Regularly, he will get the dogs, get you to gather up all the dogs from Kopan, all the dogs around. He drag them all down in the trucks and the in the jeeps, and get them down to Boudha, and and they get to circumambulate the stupa, you know. Or, you know, you’ll get very commonly, when we do a practice called saving you know, liberating animals, when, let’s say, one of the practices we can do as a center or as a group, it’s very purifying, is to go buy a bunch of worms that are destined to be bait. Right?
And you’re saving the lives of these creatures in this terrible suffering. Right? Plus, you’re saving the the people who are gonna buy the bait and to hurt the the worms from creating negative karma from hurting those. Okay. They’ll hurt something else.
But at least you save those worms from suffering. So you gather up all the worms, all the goats, all the beings that you’re trying to save the lives of. And one of the jobs you do is you get something there, you want it before the you you get you circumambulate the worms. You carry the worms around the stupa. So because of the power of the stupa, they create merit, you see.
So that’s commonly what Rinpoche would do. Or like I said, he would you know, one time in New Zealand, he got us to gather all the goats in the field. He closed the field off, put speakers up, loud speakers, and he read sutras to them. Not because they understand. Clearly, they don’t.
But like the the story about that bird who lived on the yogi’s windowsill, he got born as a student. Lama said he got born as a student this is a well known story. Everyone quotes in the text. Right? He got born as a student of the obviously, somebody who’s clever wanted to see it.
As this of the of the yogi, and Lama Zopa said he even wrote good commentaries on the various texts the yogi used to to to talk about, but he wasn’t very good at anything else. It was just those texts. Right? That’s what they say. So, you know and this is one thing you can do, very even if the animal’s dead, like I said, you can blow mantras on the on the flesh.
I’ll give you a few mantras too if you wanna take those away with you in your heart. But, also, you could, know, when you’re talking to meet an ant or a or a fly or a mosquito before you, you know, before you think of swiping this mosquito, even before you swipe it, you don’t swipe it, but then you blow mantras on it, then you can blow it away. You know? So you bless the creature. Gives it great blessing.
That’s what they say. And this is something too to help your animals. You know, we have all our pets, let’s say. And, you know, we think we love our pets, and we do love our pets. There’s no doubt.
But remember, it’s probably attachment. I mean, don’t love the rat in the same way, do you? You do not. You don’t love somebody else’s dog in the same way, do you? No.
So it’s attachment. We can see. And so we spend all this money and energy on our pets and get all so emotional. But then, you know, we leave them in their house all day leave them in their house all day with sitting in their own completely ignorant mind, creating no virtue whatsoever. And then you come home and give them all hugs and kisses and think you’re being loving to them.
And all you’re doing is helping them use up their merit and not giving them any virtue, new karma, good karma. So what you should do one of the most marvellous things you can do if you go to work every day, you put on, you know, like tapes or CDs that replaying all day of the teachings or of mantras. So all day, their little minds are being kind of stuffed full of the Dalai Lama’s teachings. They’ll probably get ahead of the path quicker than you. I mean, it’s a really good it’s like, you know, you gotta have an animal.
Don’t just be kind to it. It doesn’t help. Help it create merit, you know. That’s the point. Help it create virtue.
Help it have virtuous seeds in its mind. Help it activate the seeds that are there already that are that are completely buried right now and it’s for little animal animal seeds. You know? So that’s one way you can really really be benefited to the animals. Yep.
What is it? Quick Sorry. How do you think about the Uh-huh. Sure. Well, you know, we we we’re human beings, we gather in groups, don’t we?
We seem to gather in groups, and the groups are very big now. They’re like millions of people in big cities. So it does seem reasonable that we have you know, the ideal scenario of a society is that you have rules that we all agree to. There’s nothing wrong with that. So, you know, Tibet was a is a Buddhist society.
Ninety nine percent of the people I’d say were Buddhist there. And they still had their few thieves and their criminals and their this and their that, but not, of course, not nearly as many as we would have in our in our societies. But they had they had a government, and they had policies, and they have mean, actually, have very political. They had all these kind of, you know, politics back and forth and dealings with China and blah blah blah and things that laws in the society and so on. Not as not as nothing as sophisticated in the good and the bad sense of ours because our societies are so complex.
I’m not as insane as ours, you know. But still, they’re there. Know? There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly reasonable to have a kind of agreement.
It’s like in a family even. There’s some kind of agreement, you know. Daddy does this and mommy does that, and we all have our jobs, you know. So we support by all being harmonious together in that group. We we play our roles.
It’s not written on a piece of paper, so, you know, they don’t have too many things written on pieces of paper. So there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fine. You know? Nothing wrong.
But the ideal scenario, of course, would be that, let’s say, you’re a judge or a policeman, what according to what society it is, if you were also being let’s say we’re all Buddhist and being genuine practitioners, you could still be a policeman, and you could still, you know, tell someone else for doing something or do the job of being a policeman, but it would come from compassion. It would genuinely come from compassion. That would be the ideal. Can you imagine how blissful? Do you see?
There’s no there’s no contradiction. But it’d be far more compassionate. I mean, if you had a prison, it would be I mean, in the way that we try to make the prisons, and I’m seeing for sure, comparing the prisons again in poor old America, just there are a lot more prisons there. There’s ten probably ten, fifteen times the number per per per head in America than here. It’s two million plus.
And I think that the figures I’ve heard are in most states in this country. But in general, experience of this country, going to visiting all the various prisons I’ve visited and seeing various people in all the different states, without exception, there are more programs. There are more people who seem to have budget to be able to provide programs to help people get better and do this and do that. Whereas I know I was told in I mean, I read in a long article about the prison system in California, sorry, that in the seventies, they made a conscious decision that it would be incarceration and not rehabilitation. You know?
So maybe they’re changing now, but it’s clearly that. The prisons are bursting at the seams. They’ve got all these different rules. It’s getting tougher and tougher and heavier and heavier. Not complaining.
I mean, because the violence getting heavier and heavier, you know? But it seems if you have compassionate rules I mean, even just one state I go to in Connecticut, there’s a prison there, a women’s prison, where for a while they had a reasonable governor. And so she got them to build a school for the prison. This is a wonderful school. I mean, when you’re inside there, you don’t know you’re in prison.
You know, these women have this school. They have dogs. They’re the seeing eye dogs that they train. They’ve got a lot of freedom inside the school to go here and go there and have a cup of tea when they want to. It’s a marvelous environment, you know.
But this is the interesting thing because of society these days, and certainly, this is a prevalent feeling here and in America, I’d say. That get people in the world get very furious when they hear about prisons that are too comfortable. So, you know, this this this this prison, they very care about what the publicity they get because people get really angry when they realise all these people in these prisons are treated like human beings and are educated. I mean, how dare they? Know, they’re they’re wrong.
They should be suffering. So we can see if it’s if it’s if it’s vaguely enlightened, the system, it helps benefit human beings. And, yes, you have a prisoner, and, yes, you put them away, but, yes, you help them. If you understood karma, can you imagine how different prison systems would be if you understood karma? You know, you’d know the psychos who’ve got really deeply imprinted suffering, extremely suffering minds.
You could discriminate between them and the people who just due to karma, kill somebody by accident. There are so many people who do that. It’s not because they’re evil. But you see, so one has a very different view of It’d you’d still have a prison. You’d have a system.
Nothing wrong, but it would be coming from intelligence and compassion, wouldn’t it? Oh, I’ve I’ve heard that. Definitely. Well, not I mean, certainly in California, now, for example, the governor, who’s a Democrat, he prides himself on his strictness with with crime. You know?
And a lot of this is a really big deal in America with crime because there is so much crime. You know? And so he has but he he there has a policy that anyone who’s ever killed anybody and he he said, I don’t care what the reason is. Even if it’s completely accidental, if anyone’s killed somebody, they will never get out of prison alive as far as he’s concerned. So that so I don’t know if it’s worse.
No. If anybody’s died, I think that’s definitely the worst one. Even I mean, I’ve got many people that I know who somehow circumstances are dumb, someone’s died, and they’ve got life sentence. But even yes. So there’s many of the gangs, the gangsters, these young Mexicans.
They’ve got, like, one guy I can think of, three life sentences for for just somebody getting shot in his bum, you know, because they’re trying to get tough with gangs, so they give you very, very heavy sentences. Yep. With drugs, people are getting twenty years for possessing, you know, marijuana or something. Even stealing for less than that, they’re getting mhmm. What do you mean by this environment?
Oh, I think it’s just the whole environment. When there’s more violence, there’s more fear. So it increases more violence, which brings more fear, which brings tougher sentences, which brings more and then it’s very political. People are trying to win people’s votes, so people are finding out what do people want. I mean, it’s just this whole environment all feeds each other, doesn’t it?
And I think it’s I remember even when I first went to live in New York, this is thirty years ago, It really shocked me to not shocked, it’s interested me to see the amount of fear in a city. I’d always heard about it, the amount of palpable fear that people had about walking in the streets. And it really struck me then, and I wasn’t even a Buddhist then, it struck me then that, you know, when you have that energy in a place where there’s lot of fear about violence, that produces violence. And then the violence produces the fear. They feed each other.
You know? So there’s just this environment. And, I mean, just my own speculation, let’s say, using example like America, for example, where there’s this huge thing about guns, it’s almost like a god given right. It’s in the it’s in the constitution. So it’s almost like that’s coming down it’s like the the tablet coming down from Moses with the the laws on it.
You’re allowed to have a gun. So it’s almost like this god given right. I mean, you remember the thing that happened in Tasmania, and then then the federal government took all the guns away or whatever they did. I don’t know how effective it was. There would be civil war, I think.
Anybody Americans here? Would you agree with me? But there’d civil war if you if you even attempted to do that, wouldn’t there be, in America? There’s this huge kind of energy in so many people’s minds that it’s this special right to have a gun. I think it’s come from the since the constitution, isn’t it?
It’s just been for hundreds of years like this. So it’s just built up this culture of it, isn’t it? It’s kind of interesting. I’ve met many people who had guns and ordinary people. Pardon, darling.
Who? Oh, dear. They all agree with it. Excuse me. Eighty percent are agreeing with George Bush, and they’re all Christians.
I’m being rude about Christians. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, darling. Oh, it’s lunchtime.
What’s that say? It’s twelve o’clock. That’s okay. We’re not late. Twelve o’clock.
Okay. Let’s dedicate. Go on, darling. You speak. One more.
I was just gonna ask before you’re saying that everything that you can recollect with in life has somehow depend on the culture. And I was just wondering where you sacrifice Okay. Then the difference is how you receive it. Okay. So When it’s just kind of blind, when you’re a kid who’s got no you know?
When you’re a kid, you can’t you’ve got no thermostat yet. You’ve no way to work with it. It’s gonna be just unbearable to have all these imprints in the mind. But as you get older and you’re intelligent and you learn to work with things, then nothing can deter you. It doesn’t matter how much violence you see.
It doesn’t throw you because you have a way of interpreting it that makes it understandable and increases your compassion. It’s only when there’s no there’s no control. I’m not trying to you understand my point. It’s a really important point. I mean, then once you’re more developed and you know what’s going on, you can be in the middle of a war, and you can grow you can gain compassion from it.
It won’t make you worse. But if you have got a a young mind that’s very I mean, I remember when I was eight, and we didn’t have television. There was not television in Australia when I was eight. And I’ll never forget this as long as I live. I still, in my mind, very vivid.
My grandmother used to listen to all the radio serials. You know? They had these serials on the radio. And one of them was called D24. Do you remember that?
Okay. It was all about the Melbourne police. It was a there’s a section of the Melbourne police called D24. So there’s a police show on the radio. And this one and my and my grandma, nanny, called her, wouldn’t let me listen because I was only eight.
But she let my older sister. So I was really jealous, you know, because she let Janet listen and not me. So I sneaked out and stood behind the door and listened to this radio show, and I’ll never forget it. It was the first time I heard such a thing. It was this this simple story about this I’ll never forget.
This girl who was waiting for her boyfriend on the road, and then she’s and the car stopped. She said, oh, is that you, John? He said, no. No. John sent me.
So he took her off, and he went to up to Mount Dandenong, he murdered her. I’ll never forget the story. It’s vivid in my mind. It was the first time I heard this kind of stuff, and I thought about it and thought about it and, like, visualized it. It was very moving for me.
I I worked with it okay. But if you’ve got a disturbed mind of so many children now, and then you hear all this stuff and you see all these videos and you’ve got all these imprints like those poor Columbine boys, then all that stuff feeds those seeds like just like a rampant forest. You know? So then, of course, they end up killing thirteen people. It wasn’t as if the videos did the job, but they fed what was there.
Was if somebody had known their minds and understood them since childhood and could have helped nurture the good parts and work through their own minds with understanding and dealing with them. You understand? That’s the point. So anything that we can see and understand and work with, fantastic. No no limit to what you can see.
That makes a difference. That makes they understand, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. How do you educate do you educate your children and then things there?
Well, that’s what the difficult thing is. You know, it’s very hard to protect little children and not not to do it in a neurotic way. They’ve got to come and be born now in this crazy society. So that’s why it’s so important to from a basis of of a person who’s already looking at their own mind, really working on their own mind, their mother, whoever looks after them, and then providing some kind of nurturing I mean, is some kind of nurturing spot, place where they grow up to get love and commit you know, develop their good qualities, then they’re capable of bearing the unbearableness out there. Then they’re capable of dealing with the insanity.
But unless you have this one, you can’t grow up. If you can’t grow up, you just become a maniac, and look at us in the world. You know? Do you see what I mean? That’s that’s how the first step is to do it yourself.
Then if you’re gonna have a baby, you make sure you have it not in neurotic protective, like refusing to let them go outside or anything. That’s insane. But if you give them grounding and you know their mind enough and you can see their mind is stable and they’ve got good qualities, then there’s no reason to fear, you know. Then they’ll be okay then if if they’ll be able to handle somehow. Does that make sense?
Let’s dedicate. Go to lunch. So just thinking, here we’ve been since six o’clock, whatever we’ve been doing, how amazing all these hours, all these moments, all these karmic imprints in our minds, we rejoice. We delight in these. May they ripen as quickly as possible in the development of our amazing potential for the sake of all beings.
That’s all. Thanks, everybody. And don’t forget to bless your lunch, see it as nectar, big as the ocean, and offer it to all living beings. No. So just say it after me.
So also the way to recite the mantras is, you can sing them like you’ve seen. We’ve done. We’ve sing these tunes. They’re nice tunes. Actually, I’ll sing the there’s a nice Om Mani Padme Hum tune as well.
There’s quite a few. I’ll sing that, and you just done the tune. I could hear you. But also, when you’re reciting them on yourself, especially if you’re using your mala, your mala to count, then you would you’re you’re supposed to recite them silently. You move your mouth enough that you can hear it, but if the person next to you is there, they shouldn’t hear it.
That’s the way to recite the mantras. And so also when you’re doing many, let’s say you have to do hundreds of thousands in a retreat or something, actually the faster the better. The faster the better. Because the more you say, the more powerful. But the crucial thing is to say them very clearly.
You can say them very, very fast, but they must be clear. You mustn’t garble the syllables. So I’ll just sing the tune a little bit for just to show you to hear it, place you like the tune. I think there are various tunes, but that’s the one I tend to do. The Śākyamūni Buddha Mountain, did venerable Gloria give you that?
No. That’s what we did yesterday morning. So that’s Say it. Soh. Soh.
So do you wanna write so maybe what somebody can write them somebody can write them at the end somewhere on a wall or something. You can just walk out. If you need them, you can copy them down. I’ll also give you the medicine Buddha oh, good. The medicine Buddha mantra.
This is a very good one to do. So, Om. Okay. Then there’s Mañjuśrī mantra. Okay.
It’s very good for sharp, for mind, for intelligence, for clarity, for cutting through the ignorance. Sounds like it too, isn’t it? Om Ara Pa Tsa Na Dhi, Om Ara Pa Tsa Na Dhi. And the way they all do it in the monastery, the little monks, the little nuns you hear them first thing in the morning, all doing it very, very fast as they go to the gompa. Then when you finish doing it, what you do is you hold your breath, and then you they call the last syllable the seed syllable.
It’s like the essence of the mantra. In this case, it’s d, d h I, d. And then what you do is, with one breath, you recite it very, very fast, like your tongue, and then you eventually swallow it, thinking you’re swallowing this mantra, the the that blesses you and makes and develops wisdom. So you do like this, you know, go, you go, like that until you run out of breath. It’s very good for wisdom.
For speech, clear speech. Om, I don’t know how you spell this one. But also, by the way, the way I’ll tell you. The way the Tibetans say the mantras is they’re all Sanskrit, by the way. Mantras are Sanskrit.
They’ve never translated because they talk about how Sanskrit’s got this holy kind of sound, you know? So if you see the Sanskrit, you wouldn’t even recognise because you hear it quite differently from the way the Lamas say it. Over the centuries, the Tibetans have said it in their way. They say the best benefit, best way to say it, like I said before, is the way you get it from your teachers. The way I say it is how I’ve heard it from my Lamas.
Om, you spell it it’s not at all the correct Sanskrit spelling, but how it’s said is Om, Om, om ah, a h, ra, r a, pa, a, sa, n a, d d h I. Om Ara Pa Tsa Na Dhi. It’s not spelled like that at all in Sanskrit. That’ll do. Okay.
So let’s carry on and finish this path to enlightenment while we’re here. Okay. Right? Okay, now where were we? Wisdom and compassion.
The wisdom wing. We’re talking about the various techniques, just touching on them briefly, the different techniques we need to develop in order to, you know, blast open our minds, to expand our minds, to encompass others. But the thing to say again and again and again is, you know, we tend to think of a spiritual path, and we think of the compassion side. And we think of love and compassion. We think of it as, like, a really good feeling.
So then we think, well, how do I get that? You know? So it’s all a bit of a mystery to us. But, you know, the way we can see from the Buddhist approach is a step by step, and you start at the level of thoughts. You know?
Love beginning to love somebody isn’t the attachment one, isn’t the good feeling one. It’s the one that says, may you be happy. So if you’re genuinely building up love in a gradual way, it starts with the may be happy. Eventually, of course, it develops into huge affection. You know?
There’s no question. We’ve got to start on the ground and build up. Of course, the way we think of love now, isn’t it, that you have all this enormous good feeling for so many people, you feel so attached to somebody, let’s say. You think, you mean I’ve got to love everybody like that? It’s completely exhausting, you know, because it’s all attachment.
It’s all kind of all attachment. It’s all exciting. But it’s not love, actually. That’s just attachment. Or it’s just good feelings.
I’m not criticizing good feelings either. But love is something very stable and very genuine and deep that builds up from the thoughts, really thinking about it like we’ve been discussing. You know? Compassion, the same. Eventually, it develops into extraordinary feelings.
There’s no question. But then they’re but they’re stable because we’ve done the wisdom wing, and this is the key. You know? The genuine development of the compassion wing is completely dependent upon the development of the wisdom wing. And the development of the wisdom wing is you putting yourself together, getting rid of all the neuroses and the delusions and the self hate and the depression and the anxiety and the fears and the rubbish.
So it’s interesting. We’re just you know, it’s it’s often we can see if we look into our personality and our life. Some of us have much more emphasis on the wisdom the the compassion wing, let’s say. Very kind, always going out of way to be kind to others, to help others, to support others. That’s our that’s what we do.
It’s our job. And we’re we’re very good at that. But often, we can lack the wisdom side. So we become vulnerable. We get hurt easily.
We get dragged down easily, but it makes us crazy easily because we absorb everybody else’s stuff and we’re trying to kind of we’re trying to make the whole world better. Haven’t got the wisdom. You know? We haven’t developed the wisdom. We haven’t got the inner strength.
I know it sounds awful, but I’m gonna have to say it. It’s like developing the wisdom wing gives your compassion like balls. You know? Excuse me. I have to say it like that.
Do you get my point? Yes. Thank you. I had to get a translator. It’s really true.
It’s really interesting, you know. We can have all this goodness and compassion, but you look at, like I say, we’re working for others and in jobs where you’re working for others. The classic syndrome of the, you know, the services industry, when you’re helping others, you completely have mental breakdown. You collapse. You get stressed out.
You get exhausted. You gotta go have a break, you know, because we haven’t got a thermostat. We don’t and also, when we’re too much not too much, but emphasis on the compassion without the wisdom means we’re not noticing what’s going on inside here, you know, You don’t notice. And we always, oh, well, I I can’t think of myself. Gotta think of others, you know?
You’re absolutely right. But you gotta be prepared. You gotta be as like we said, a suitable vessel to accomplish the compassion wing. You’ve gotta done the work on yourself first. You gotta have this clarity and wisdom about your own mind and lessen your own attachment and lessen your own depression and lessen your own anxiety and lessen your own anger.
So if you can’t even see it, you’re in big trouble. And all the time, we try to cover it up and cover it up, you know, it’s very common. Then, of course, there’s some people who got more of the wisdom side, which means, you know, they may maybe they’ve got kindness, but it’s much more kind of in terms of their own self and and kind of clear and sharp and but they can be sort of quite mean sometimes, you know. So we really gotta do both. We’ve got to develop both.
So important. Both we need both wings. You know? Then the compassion we do have, but when I’m well, I’m talking here. It it goes way beyond the limited compassion we can have now, which is ego based.
Just naturally, it’s ego based now because that’s how we are. They’re not being mean about us. So we’ve gotta do the the wisdom wing first. And the extent to which we’ve accomplished any of that, which means the extent to which we’ve lessened attachment, anger, jealousy, pride, depression, you name it, is the extent to which our compassion can be that much more amazing. There’s just no doubt.
Then your compassion wing is is intelligent. Right now, it’s got no thermostat, automatically trying to protect others and help others, but with no real wisdom. So it’s like this one of tough love. Tough love is having the is like the skillful ability to know how to help a person. So compassion, for example, is we need to develop this in our minds all the time, is the wish to benefit others.
There is no doubt. But that’s not what gives you the skill to benefit them. That’s just the wish. That’s why we make a big mess. The skill to know how to benefit a person is what you get from the wisdom practice, from developing, from lessening your own delusions, increasing your own clarity and wisdom.
Wisdom comes when you decrease your delusions. The more delusions you have, the less wisdom you have. Meaning simply, the more I’m caught up in my own eye, my own attachment, my own needs, even if I’m not aware of it, the less I can see clearly what the hell is going on. That’s what wisdom is. So then having this, but having a lot of compassion, you just make a mess, you know.
You mean well. We mean well, but we make a mess. So don’t lessen the compassion, but just increase the wisdom. And wisdom is the you know, compassion is the wish to benefit another. The wisdom is to know what to do when that will actually bring the benefit.
And that’s the point. Sometimes, when we have, like, you know, compassion that’s all just kind of all open and our hearts are really open and vulnerable, we will all the time do whatever we can to to to help, but we we might very often lack the skills. We end up making a mess. We end up doing something that wasn’t effective. Whereas when we have wisdom, we are just as compassionate, but maybe we’ll do nothing because you can see there’s nothing to do.
It could almost look like you’re being detached sometimes. It doesn’t matter. It’s wisdom. It’ll be much more effective the compassion we do then because wisdom is there, you know. So we’ve got to have both.
You can see some people, you know, they say more the wisdom side, very intelligent minds, always analyzing everything and knowing everything and knowing the answers to everything, but completely self centered. Don’t have much compassion, you know. Don’t help others at all. It’s all theories. Bright minds, very intelligent, always knowing what’s going on this, that way, why, blah, blah, I’m this, I’m that, you’re this, he’s this.
Not much active, not not much compassion, you know. But do both. You need both. Then the wisdom is very genuine when it’s based with on compassion, and compassion is very effective when it’s based on wisdom. So moving on this path and doing all these techniques, I mean, we’re talking now actually in numberless lives doing these techniques, perfecting, perfecting, getting more and more amazing in our equanimity, our love and compassion, doing all these different things, using these transformation techniques, using the one of, you know, exchanging self for others, all these all these things.
Amazing, amazing, incredible. And a whole other level of practice, which we just touched on before, within this scope of practices, is the one we call transforming problems. So based on the idea of karma, that whatever is whatever you’re experiencing is a fruit of what you’ve done before, based on the fact that whenever you experience something bad or negative, it’s the it’s the ripening of your past karma, therefore, the finishing of it. Therefore, you learn to find an attitude. You have an attitude that makes you happy when the problems come because it’s all grist for the mill.
Okay. Initially, we mightn’t delight in it, but we’ll eventually learn to know this has been good because I’m learning something from it. It’s useful. It’s an attitude we all understand. You know?
All grist for the mill. And that it it has to be based on the attitude of karma. Right? That somehow, you know, this is coming. Okay.
I can’t change it. This is what really learning to own what’s happening. Really learning to have the courage to recognize this suffering I’m having, this pain is due to my past. You know? Now as Buddhists there’s a saying among Tibetans, I think, it’s very it’s so simple, but it’s almost it seems like ridiculous.
You know? It’s so simple. If you can change something I’ve said it already. If you can change something, please change it. Okay?
If you can’t change it, I’m sorry. Why worry? But, I mean, it’s so painful to hear this. It seems so outrageous, isn’t it? And this is what I was saying before.
One of the things we really need to learn to do, and I mentioned my friend Sheila and the crazy husband, is we learn to we need to learn to have the courage to make whatever situation it is in our choice or leave it. If we can, then we take great courage, and we leave because we feel we can’t bear the burden. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if we feel it is good for not good for us, but we feel it is right that we stay in that situation, although it’s painful, then we make it our choice to stay in it. We make it our choice to stay in it.
Then everything becomes different. But we have to recognize this is the key too. We have to recognize our limitations. We have to know where we’re at. If, you know, you try to bear carry a burden on your shoulders that your your shoulders are not strong enough to strong enough to bear, then you’ll break your back.
It’s very stupid. So if you can’t bear a certain situation, then you must find a way to make it bearable for yourself. You must adjust it, and you must take the control and change it to help you. And if you have to leave and don’t feel like you’ve failed, you have not failed. You have to know what you can bear and what you can’t.
That’s wisdom. Okay? It’s like the same as trying to help somebody when you’re just not capable. You drag them down along with yourself. It’s ridiculous.
You’re both drowned. We’ve got to know what our own limitations are. We’ve got to and then we’ve got to choose what is right. You know, if you have such profound approach because you’ve really done so much work on yourself that actually you can sacrifice yourself and actually do what is most beneficial for another person. That, of course, is more amazing.
It’s unbelievable. But we have to know where we’re at ourself, and if we can’t bear the burden, if we can’t take the suffering, then there’s no point in hanging around. It’ll just make us insane. It’s not appropriate. That’s why most people go mad.
But the big tragedy is, you know, most of us stay in a situation that’s no good, but then we blame the other person. And it’s like the person might be horrible, but if I open the door every time and let you come in and say you can punch me, excuse me, at some point, I’ve gotta realize I’ve gotta stop opening the door, not keep blaming you for punching me. Do you see my point? That’s wisdom, and that’s protecting yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that.
You do it with the right motivation. It’s the perfect action. You know? It’s not being selfish. It doesn’t mean, oh, I gotta think of we often say you gotta think of yourself more than others sometimes.
It’s true. In a sense, you can say that. That just means you gotta do more wisdom work so that you can really think about this in a genuine, more much more profound way later. Doesn’t mean become more selfish. It just means notice what’s going on inside