Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute foundational session, Ven Robina Courtin teaches how to approach Buddhist philosophy—not as beliefs to adopt, but as ideas to think through and integrate experientially. She reframes Buddhism as ‘cognitive therapy,’ clarifying that practice works with the mind itself, then covers essential groundwork: consciousness as beginningless and non-physical; Buddha nature as our shared capacity for enlightenment; and the Lamrim (graded path) structure. Through the water-and-pollution analogy, she explains that our true nature is virtuous; negative mental states are temporary contaminants, not our essence. She emphasizes why a qualified teacher is indispensable, comparing spiritual learning to acquiring any practical skill—even the highest aims require instruction. Pitched at those new to Buddhist philosophy or seeking to ground their understanding of foundational concepts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 DAR 2003 06 21.mp3
UUID: b9048b3a-ed81-4881-ad0b-c7ea1cf4cecc
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.8 minutes
Words: ~9,575
Okay. So this first little prayer which we call going for refuge and we did it last night and it just it’s just thoughts. Okay? And thoughts are seeds. Seeds bring fruits and fruits in this case are our own experiences, so it’s sowing very appropriate seeds in our mind.
So this very first one, we’ll talk about this over the weekend, but it’s starting with a very appropriate motivation, sort of setting our motivation as they say before we do an action. And actually, karmically, which we’ll talk about more, I say that like we mentioned briefly last night, the main determining factor in the in the result, in the karmic result that comes from whatever we do say and think isn’t the thing itself. It’s like we just pointed out last night, is your reason to do it, you know, your motivation. So that’s state of motivation. So the second two lines in this prayer are really expressing this altruistic motivation that by the action of listening to these teachings.
And can I see again the prayer please? See if you got the right prayer. Chökyi. That’s right. Exactly.
That’s exactly right. Okay. So so we’re saying by the action of listening to these teachings, may, you know, may we become enlightened so that we can benefit all sentient beings. This is the most altruistic motivation, the most far reaching we could have. So just stating those thoughts is just stunning.
You don’t have to sort of feel too much. It just begins with a thought because they have a saying in Tibetan that everything exists on the tip of the wish. So as you see, the first two lines are expressing our going for refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. So if we’re Buddhist already, then we have that in our hearts. And if not, we don’t have it.
It’s okay. So we’ll do this little prayer three times. Do it in Tibetan. You can read the English or sing with Tibetan or just listen as you wish. So I’ll do another little prayer.
If you know it, join in. It’s making an offering. So it’s auspicious to offer something before receiving it. So here, we’re imagining all the precious things in this universe. There’s a particular way we do it, but if you don’t know how to do, we just imagine all the particular things and all the good things in the universe that beings use offering these to we imagine offering to the Buddha as a request for the teachings.
Imagine receiving from the Buddha himself. Okay. So what we’re gonna do over the weekend, you know, is basically talk about I’ll be talking about these various points of, as we would call it, the path to enlightenment or more broadly, just Buddha’s views about reality if you like, and that’s, you know, Buddha’s philosophy if you wish, but bringing it in a very down to earth experiential way and then relating it experientially, relating it to how we can how we so trying to talk about how we actually work with that to turn it into something that’s called experiential. And so really so first, let me just explain what I mean by that actually. It’s I mean, I think it’s like we all have these right.
Each of us sitting in here, know, we’ve all got a view what we of what we mean by spiritual. We all have a view of what we mean by meditation, you know. And so it’s just like let’s just talk about the Buddhist approach, and particularly the the the Buddhist approach, which is where we what we’re doing here, especially for those of us who have not heard these ideas too much before. You know? But even if we have, it’s still important to remember this to see to try to find the approach to just sort of to articulate the approach, how we should be approaching this, you know, how we make I mean, we very often would think practice, and then there’s sort of like hearing the teachings.
We’d say, well, I wanna practice. Can we meditate, please? You know? As if somehow meditation is nonverbal. So it’s even a question of understanding just what we mean by meditation.
So we get the general principles clear from the start, then we’ll know how to utilize what we’re hearing, you know? So in one sense, it’s not a joke to say that really the Buddha being a Buddhist is being a cognitive therapist, truly. I mean, I’ve been talking in prisons recently and quite a few of the psychologists, which is very nice to see, as they call cognitive behavioral therapists, where they’re saying they’re dropping the behavioral, cognitive therapy, and it is a wonderful phrase. And in a very genuine way, you really can say that Buddha actually is a supreme cognitive therapist. Because honestly, one of the the main one of the things to understand, to get our heads around when we understand Buddhism, is to understand that and it’s certainly the Tibetan approach, that what we’re doing as a Buddhist is not some mysterious thing called meditation that somehow makes you peaceful, which is the the commonest cliche we have, you know.
Somehow, you you know, you you do this thing, you kinda close your eyes and it’s sort of mystical and looks rather nice and you you get calmed down and you get peaceful. And that’s why the Dalai Lama is a nice person. That’s how he loves his enemies and all this. I mean, is sort of like I’m not being rude now, but it’s so superficial that it’s almost embarrassing, you know. It is so much way more than that.
More profound, but not in a serious kind of stuck up sense, but in a very genuine sense. It’s more than that, you know? So when we understand it as cognitive therapy, it brings a new twist. So what does that mean? Well, really, one way of saying what you’re doing as a Buddhist, if you know, if one is a Buddhist, or one is attempting to look into it, even to think, check it out, you know, you’re listening.
As we were saying last night, you’re listening to Buddha’s views about how things exist. And why we even put it that way? Because Buddha is saying that we suffer and have problems, I mean, look at the world, because we’re not in touch with how things exist. Now this itself is a curious idea because we don’t think we suffer because we’re not in touch with reality. Meaning, we don’t think we’re suffering because we’re delusional.
Excuse me. You know, we think we’re suffering because someone is mean to us, because the job is awful, because I’m depressed. We don’t, you know, we don’t have a very articulate view actually, you know. It keeps changing why we think we’re suffering, but we usually think we’re suffering because there’s something out there. So then, of course, that’s why we spend a lot of energy trying to change the stuff out there.
It’s obvious. Look at the world and it’s very clear. If we look at the behavior of most of us in the world, that will tell us what our philosophy is. So because we’re all spending so much energy changing the outside world, getting better things and nice and moving here and going there and changing the job and changing the relationship and changing the clothes, it tells us immediately what we think happiness is, getting better clothes, better relationship, better job. We in other words, we search for happiness, don’t we?
And we determine that happiness is getting the thing out there somehow right. It’s obvious. It’s so taken it’s so we so take it for granted that it’s almost silly to have to even say it. And this is the as we mentioned last night, that’s the essential point that Buddha is disagreeing with, and and this is the point upon which all of Buddha’s practice is turning, you know. That what Buddha is saying is it’s an internal thing, and we we have in the mind now this is what he means by being samsaric, you know.
We have in the mind now deeply held, deeply held misconceptions, wrong views about oneself, what happiness is, what suffering is, how to get it, the causes of it, etcetera. But these deeply held misconceptions are so totally, you could say, completely our mind is so suffused with them that they’re at the level of normal for us. We just assume we don’t even think we think a certain way. We just think what we think and what we feel is real. That’s it.
That’s just life, you know? So what Buddha’s really getting us to do, I mean, cognitive therapy at a very sublime level actually, to really it’s like learn first. I mean, okay. One approach is to hear Buddha’s view about how things exist, which he immediately can confront. Buddha says, for example, that karma is is the law of, you know, is the law of reality, not creator, not parents.
That already is a very fascinating concept. So we don’t you know, the aim is not to leave that at just an interesting philosophical level and then decide, oh, I don’t like that, so I don’t believe in karma, or I do like that, oh, I believe in karma, which is how we think of religion. You believe in something, you get a set of values and then you say, that’s a good one, I believe in that one. Now I’m not being cynical, but just, you know, just looking. So first of all, this is the point, this is the part of the problem, just believing in something is not is not helpful because that’s like a thought up here and then we act differently here.
The separation is dualistic, you know. We have to look, we have to hear the various views of reality, if you like, and then really start to give to think about it. Think about it. Think it. Think it until and this is this is where a lot of meditation comes in in Buddhism.
It’s a conceptual process. It’s an analytical process. It’s not some non-mystical in-the-sky non-thinking process. It’s a process of listening, thinking about it, nutting it out, and then through deeper meditation when we get, you know, more skillful, integrating it, having it trickling from our head to our heart. So in other words, a person who has who is a Buddhist and has been practicing for years, let’s say, and who really is has thought about it and listened to it and thought about it and contemplated it in here, then that means that the view of karma for them isn’t just an intellectual process here and then your life is somewhere else doing separate things, that they actually live according to it.
That is what’s in the fabric of their being. Their mind is now suffused with that, so therefore their behavior is completely different. Cognitive behavioral therapy. How we behave tells us how we think. Change how you think, you behave differently.
It’s just completely how Buddha is talking. It’s exactly how Buddha is talking. You know? If we have to so, you know, bigger Buddhist sense means listening to Buddhist teachings, thinking, working it out. And you do this when you learn to make a cake, when you learn to make a table.
You listen to the instructions. You then think about it to see if it’s conceptually sound. You then do the job hands on. You put your money where your mouth is. It’s exactly the same with this.
The only difference is that the whole process happens in the mind but at different levels of the mind. That’s all. You know? One thing is to know something, but another one is to experience it here. And that’s the difficulty sometimes to get it from our head to our heart.
But again, it’s a very simple process. It’s just a question of time. Time. That’s all. Practice makes perfect.
We all know that, you know? So that’s it’s like so the way to approach all this this weekend, let’s say, is to listen even though we’ve heard it a thousand times or none, hear it freshly, hear it so almost like put aside what we think ourself right now, all our own views. Not to dismiss them, but just put them aside so we can have the space to hear these ones, and then we think about it and we go away and mull it over, mull it over, even as we’re hearing it, we’re mulling it over, and, you know, not immediately come to some emotional conclusion. Wow, that’s just great. I love karma.
Or, oh, god, karma’s ridiculous, you know. Neither of those. In fact, had this nice way they say that we need to listen the way they talk in the teachings in Tibet, and they say this. That, you know, the first not they use the example of being not like the three kinds of pots, which is how we shouldn’t be listening to the teachings. The first kind of pot is a pot I forget which order.
A pot that’s upside down. Nothing goes in. Your head’s so full, you can’t hear a word. You know? The second kind of pot not to be like is a dirty pot.
Your mind is so full of kind of really negative criticism and hostile hostility. This is so stupid and idiotic things. What are you talking about? I mean, it’s not to your own advantage. It might be stupid, but there’s no point in thinking that first.
You know? Listen to it with a big open clean mind. And the third one is, don’t be like the pot with a hole in it. In other words, in one ear and out the other. You know?
So it’s very helpful. It’s a cute little thing, but it’s rather nice. So be like a nice clean pot that’s clean, clean, that is up the right way up and no holes. So it can go in, you know. And then it’s up to us.
We’re the boss. It really is important. This is the approach in Buddhist religion, Buddhist spiritual path. The aim is not just to simply hear it and believe it. And I’m not criticizing of what has that view, but that is not the Buddhist view.
You can say at some point, so called faith or belief plays a role, but that plays a role in everything you’re doing. You can listen to Einstein about relativity and you think it’s great and you really feel attracted to it, but then you’ve to start at the right at the bottom learning one and one is two. You haven’t got a clue what he means by relativity, but, you know, you’ve listened, you’ve thought about him, and I’ll talk about all this. You thought about him, you realize he’s valid, so you’re prepared to give the man a go. So you start at the bottom.
But in a sense, you have confidence. You have faith in Einstein because you’ve checked up. So that’s why you even engage in his path. You haven’t got a clue what relativity is, but you have faith because you’ve checked up the basic ones, and so you keep moving. So they would say in Buddhism that just to have faith, to have confidence, but it’s based on wisdom.
It’s based on your own intelligence. You’ve checked up. I can tell you how to get to Melbourne. You might never have met me before, so you don’t just believe me just because I’ve got a nice nose or something. You check up that I’m valid, know what I’m talking about, I’m not crazy, I’m a good source.
You check on me as a valid source. So you have to have faith in me then, don’t you? Otherwise, you’d never even take one step. How are you gonna get to Melbourne, you know? So we do this all the time in our life.
So it’s perfectly reasonable. But you don’t just trust somebody because you you know, they’ve got a like I said, because they’ve a cute nose. Mean, look at the problem people get into. Look at the people who trusted Hitler because they were all excited about him. I mean, you can see many people get misled, and especially in spiritual paths, we get all so emotional and airy fairy.
You know? I mean, for example anyway, we’ll talk about this when the time comes. Okay. So that’s the way to listen. Listen to it with a very open mind.
And even if you’ve heard it before, listen to it as if you haven’t heard it before because the commonest way we listen to things with our busy intellect is kind of, yeah, know that. Yes. We hear it. We anticipate it. We know all those words.
Yes. Yes. Yes. We’re not really taking it in. And this is the key to listening.
There is a way to listen all day to all these words and to treat it like a really deep meditation. There is a way to do that and that is to hear it freshly and to hear it in the with the thought, but allowing it to trickle into the heart, to to taste it as Lama Yeshe would say. We need to learn to taste it. Then you never get bored when it’s your practice. You never get bored hearing the teachings.
I know when I first went to Dharmasala, when I first became a nun, it really struck me, you know, that there in the front row in the temple of his holiness were all the, you know, fifty, sixty, seventy year old abbots who’ve been hearing this since they’re five years old. And they are the little five year olds hearing it for the first time, you know. But they’re both listening as if it’s for the first time because every time you hear it, if you’re doing it properly, every time you hear these things, you hear it, you you get something more. And I tell you that from having to speak it, you know. I mean, I’m so fortunate.
I’m so happy for myself. I’m a Buddhist. I’m trying to practice this stuff. So, you know, my job is to go blah blah about it. Well, excuse me.
I’m telling you, I’m hearing it all the time. It’s like I’m hearing. Oh, wow. As I’m I saw like part of me is going as I’m saying it. Oh, that’s interesting.
Like I’m hearing it, honestly. So it’s I’m extremely grateful for all you people coming. You give me the opportunity to have to go blah blah to myself, you know. I look a bit silly talking to myself, so thank you for coming, you know. I mean, honestly, when you’re really trying to practice, you never get bored hearing the most simple thing because you can the the point is it’s like hearing music.
We don’t go we don’t say with intellectual stuff, we say, oh, I’ve heard that. Tell me something more. But with a beautiful piece of music, you don’t say that. You know every time you hear it, you get something more from it. Any great musician will tell you that.
They can hear the simplest piece of rock and roll and they hear they get something profound from it because they’re hearing another level of it. Because the words are just words. It’s what you invest in those words. That’s your realization of them. So the words are like a trigger for you, for your heart to be touched, for you to get a taste.
That’s practice. And I swear to you, that’s meditation. That’s what insight means, you know, little real it’s like a little mini realization. Okay. So let’s look at what Buddha says.
You know? Look at what Buddha’s ideas are, and then see and we’ll we’ll do some little med I’ll just try a few little meditations during the weekend just more than anything to give you a flavor of the different types of meditation, and I’ll talk about meditation. But the real one is to bring those, you know, if one wants to, to bring one that uses those oneself, and we’ll have discussion. What was the weekend called? What was the label on the weekend.
Oh, thank you very much. That’s better than thank you for telling me. Okay. I was gonna this is workable. Talk about the same thing in the end anyway.
Okay. So we can talk about that’s good. Alright. Good starting point. Thank you.
Okay. This that brings us then, this is interesting, to one of the major tenets of Buddhism, if you don’t want a Buddha’s assertions about reality, which is that everything’s impermanent. You know? But before we touch on that, let me just talk I’m gonna I wanna talk about that in the context of this package of Buddha’s teachings. They really like packaging things in Tibet, you know, which is just how we do.
You learn music, you start at grade one, and you go you go forward in a very structured way, don’t you? So you know where you’re at, you know? Well, the same with this. So let’s look at Buddha’s teachings and Buddha’s this view of impermanence. It’ll be the key sort of the central point in the context of this bigger package.
So this package is called the Lamrim in Tibetan, which means it’s a graded path. And it’s like I said, how we learn everything. You start, you know, at the basic level and you go more advanced. Well, on the and one way of presenting this path, this Lamrim, which is unique to the way they presented in Tibet, and it comes from this person called Atisha back in the eleventh century who was an Indian who was asked to come by the local king to bring the Dharma more Dharma to come and teach in Tibet. And basically, you could say that at that point when he came along, Dharma had been there a couple hundred years, you know.
And he sort of he what he saw was they kinda lost the plot a bit. There are very extensive practice going on. There’s in Buddhism, there’s these different levels of practice, which I’ll talk about. And they were really into the esoteric stuff, you know. And he sort of saw that there was the esoteric stuff over here and the simple stuff over there, but but nobody had the kind of coherent package.
They kind of, as I said, lost the plot a bit. So what he did was write this, I mean, deceptively simple little verse, little text, you know, called the lamp for the path to enlightenment. The lamp for the path that will guide you on the path. And all it was is him taking from the vast literature of Buddha’s teachings, the esoteric, the metaphysical, the philosophical, the psychological. It’s very easy to lose yourself in all that because it really is quite extensive.
It’s a bit like someone, you know, just you want to learn music and they hand all these things, you know, all Bach and your Mozart and your Miles Davis and your rock and roll, and you don’t know where to start. You haven’t got a clue. You really want someone to put it in a graded course for you. It’s very normal, you know. So what Atisha did was write this little text which has been used ever since as the basis for this kind of generic way of presenting the Dharma in, you know, the all the views of Buddha in a coherent, structured, step by step, experiential way.
Because, again, it’s very easy to hear the philosophy and not know how to taste it. You know? So he put he presented each of the points in this structure in such a way that one is forced to work with it, experience it, practice it. You know? So the very so he divides the whole path into three, what they call scopes, and just means three stages like junior school, high school, and university.
That’s all. But they call it scopes, and not obviously, all it refers to is the scope. You know, the first scope is is is the is the basic practices, which are the the scope of the beginning person. You know? The the middle scope and the advanced scope, if you like.
That’s how they’re called. You know? It’s just the three stages. So the very first of these, on the first scope, is the one of impermanence, the teaching of Buddha impermanence. But before that, there are a couple of preliminary things that Atisha says we should contemplate as a basis to sort of prime our minds to being able to hear to hear and then practice, to internalize these concepts of the Buddha, you know, to make them tasty.
So let’s start with those first, then we’ll get on to the impermanence one. So the first one, which is actually put there not by Atisha in his text, but it’s very it’s it’s a traditional way. Lama Zopa Rinpoche, for example, since he started teaching, he’s the lama of this center, the main spiritual director of this center, who has requested Geshe Doga, who’s the resident lama, to come and teach here in Geshe-la as well. So Lama Zopa Rinpoche, his way from teaching since the seventies in in Nepal when he first came to teach Westerners, you know, was to talk about the nature of mind because it’s very clear that the mind, as we discussed last night, the is the basis of all of Buddhist practice. It’s where it’s where you do the work.
As he says, that’s where the workshop is. So you gotta know what the mind is, you know, and what it’s not. And you’d in big trouble if you think when you hear the Buddhist views that mind is the brain because it’s gonna smash into that argument the whole time. So to get a a very clear view, convention as I’d say, conventionally and ultimately about the nature of mind. Then the second one, which I which Tsongkhapa, the fourteenth-century lineage lama of the Gelug tradition, which is the tradition of this center, Buddha House, and of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s centers, how he he he he said it’s really important to contemplate another point, which is the so called guru devotion, which is the appropriate role of a lama, a teacher.
So I’ll discuss that one. And then the third one, which is where our teacher began, which is a preliminary contemplation before we get onto the path, is to contemplate what what they call what he calls this that we have how we have this precious human rebirth. So we just touch on these things first. These are what just to contemplate, you know, these to yeah. As I speak them, as I say them.
And taking notes is a good idea too if you want to, or just kind of meditate on it. You know? So this mind of ours, we talked about this last night, but the essential points here are just, you know, to to just to recall, just in order to even hear Buddha’s discussions, even if you haven’t got this view yet, but just to hear it, is at first that the mind is not physical. The word mind doesn’t refer to your brain nor does it merely refer to the conceptual process. It refers to the entirety of your inner experiences, and it’s a much more dynamically word.
It’s sort of not so much the mind as if it’s some static thing that does something. It’s more that for the experiences themselves. It’s like for the process itself. One’s own experiences themselves. That’s no it’s like that’s why they use the term your mind stream or your mental continuum.
It’s like a river of mental moments. All of that. You know? You can say too that the word is used synonymously with the word consciousness, which I think gives it a nice flavor. And it’s it’s your intellect, thoughts, feelings, emotions, unconscious, subconscious, instinct, intuition, soul, the whole deal.
What you mean by all of these. You know? That’s the first point. The second one, crucial to the understanding of really all of Buddhist teachings. You know?
Again, it’s up to us how deeply we go into each of these points, but just to state them here. But it’s not created by anybody. Buddha would say that’s not reasonable. I mean, just to say that isn’t enough. Obviously, one has to look at the arguments for that, but this is what one can do.
You know? But the the the mind is in a sense is one’s own experiences, and one’s own experiences aren’t made by someone else. They’re one they’re one’s own experiences. That’s the point. My anger is my anger, my love, my kindness, my potential, my this, my that.
They’re mine. You know? They don’t come from god or Buddha or a creator, and they don’t come from mommy and daddy. And they don’t begin. This mind, if you if it’s not created, not physical, can’t come from nothing, then the only other option you can invent in your mind is the is the option that the mind comes from itself, which is an easy concept to get our head around.
We’re just we’re not used to thinking that. That’s all. Your consciousness is yours, you know, meaning the mind is beginningless, which emotionally is not at all satisfying. We for for some interesting reason, we have this deep wish to find a beginning. In fact, we see it as absolute logic.
We see it as illogical that there’s no beginning. It seems a bizarre concept to us that something can’t begin. You know, the the the consciousness itself. Yes. You began.
We can all point to the space of the time at the moment you began in the womb, but we know that what was there came from something before. In Buddhist terms, your body came from your parents. In in Buddhist terms, your mind came from previous moments of itself. It’s being not physical. And so if you trace it back for ten lives, or maybe I began then.
No. The moment you say that’s perhaps I began then, but there has to have been something out of which your mind came. Not god, not Buddha, not mommy, not deity, not material, so it’s itself. So you can’t find a first moment. I mean, just conceptually, it makes sense.
Just emotionally, get our head around it is what we have to do by thinking about it. You know? So this is interesting as background. This is sort of the basis, really, upon which to build Buddha’s views because Buddha’s views of reality are based in these fundamentals. You know?
Now the other way to look at the mind is to see its potential, to understand the nature of mind in terms of its potential, and this is an incredibly important starting point, honestly. And this is really when we look at if we look at Buddha’s view, Buddha’s view is that we all possess what the words they say is we all possess Buddha nature. We all possess Buddha nature. So we don’t talk like that in the West. You know, if you see an acorn and you’re a kid and you say, mom, what’s that?
And then, you know, she’ll say two things about it for you. She’ll she might say, well, that’s that little brown thing with a hat on it, you know. That’s true. She’s not wrong. Right?
But somehow, you know, you’re not satisfied. No. But what is it, you know? Oh, I see. It’s a potential oak tree, she’ll say.
Then you get it. I see. That’s what it is. That’s its real nature. You don’t say those words.
It’s hidden. It’s not evident, isn’t it? Look at a little brown thing with a hat on. You can’t see an oak tree there. Oh, it’s very mysterious.
But when you understand botany, you know that’s true because you’ve got the evidence, you know. But now once you know that that little brown thing with a hat on it can become an oak tree, now you know, don’t you, what its nature is, what it really is, and therefore it tells you what to do with it. Now if you don’t know that it can become an oak tree, of course, you can be forgiven for thinking it’s a little brown thing. You wear it as jewelry. You polish it.
You put a little hat on. You put it on your shelf. You do all sorts of things with it, which is all very nice, but somehow you, you know, you haven’t got the right point. You’ve gotta know that it’s a potential oak tree. Well, Buddha’s saying, here we are, the samsaric, you know, human being.
We’re a human being. It’s not wrong to say we’re a human being, but what Buddha’s saying is it’s not who we really are. It’s not all that we really are. It’s like, you know, you’re not just a little brown thing with a hat on it, so you polish it and put it nicely and all that. No.
And that’s what we’re doing in a sense now. He’s saying we’re identifying ourselves as who we are now, you know, which is what we really are as a Buddha, a potential Buddha. We’re not a Buddha yet, but it’s so tasty to talk about Buddha nature like this as as if it as if we were really a Buddha, but we haven’t quite become it yet. It’s so tasty to know when you see that little boring little brown thing that it can become that magnificent tree that almost you can visualize the tree. But don’t ever you know, almost you can say it is the oak tree, but it’s not an oak tree yet.
I mean, it’s not an oak tree yet. You try to get shade from it, you’ll be disappointed. But it’s tasty to know that you just have to give it the water and the soil and the sun and a bit of time and it’ll become the oak tree. That’s the approach to have towards ourself. So yes, I am a human being right now, but what is the essence?
Well, they say, how do I take the essence of this human life? As we talk when we talk about the perfect human rebirth, and that is to know, to get in touch with what Buddha would say is our reality, that actually I’m a potential Buddha, you know. Then there’s a whole different approach to yourself. But we have to think about this again. So what does it mean in practical terms that I’m a potential Buddha?
What is a Buddha? Well, it’s a word, Sanskrit, that means fully awake, that is the word used to refer to the person who has become the oak tree. So what are the qualities of a Buddha? Well, simply speaking, you know, there’s this nice analogy I mentioned last night that a bird can have a bird a bird needs two wings, wisdom and compassion. And it’s a really nice way of presenting the entire path, the three scopes into the two wings.
The first two scopes are the wisdom wing and the third scope is the compassion wing. It’s another way and I like that analogy. I use it a lot. It’s very helpful. All the practice of all your all the things you’re doing from a to zed on the path can be divided into these two wings, you know.
And so the the the combination of the wisdom wing, we’ll be describing this a lot, the practice of this, is really in Buddhist terms is is called omniscience. Now when my when I told my Catholic mom that we can all become omniscient, she was quite shocked. That was extremely arrogant because God is omniscient. Right? But the Buddhist view is this is the difference where the major difference, I think, in Buddhism is that each of us and depends how you say it.
Each of us is is a potential Buddha. By the fact that you exist, it’s not as if the Mother Teresa’s of the world are Buddhas. They, like, kinda won the lottery and we didn’t. You know? It’s the very fact that you exist, the fact that you possess a mind.
The term in Tibetan for sentient being, as we say, kind of oddly in English, I find it’s a curious phrase, but the term in Tibetan is semchen, which means mind having. We’re all we’re all mind havings. We’re all mind possessors. So what defines us as a living being is the possession of mind. The very fact that you have mind, it means you can become a Buddha.
It’s like the fact that you’re an acorn means you can become an oak tree. It’s not that some acorns have the potential to be an oak tree, you know? You might an acorn might never become an oak tree if you don’t give it give it the water and the soil. That’s true. But the fact that it exists means it can become an oak tree, same with us.
So this is a kind of empowering concept actually. So, you know, so we okay. We have this potential. So the first characteristic of that potential is the wisdom wing. When it’s fully developed, it’s called omniscience.
What does that mean? It means knowing everything. So this is the wisdom wing. What Buddha says is the the very nature of mind is that it can know or cognize that which exists. Cognize that which exists.
When you study Buddhist philosophy, you learn the various synonyms for that which exists. Object, phenomenon, established base, existent. There are several synonyms, you know, and they’re all defined slightly differently, but they’re all words to use to refer to that which exists. And this is a crucial point in Buddhism. Why?
It’s because Buddha’s talking about how we’re in touch with things that don’t exist. We’re living in la la in relation to reality. So one of the main jobs of being a Buddhist, developing wisdom, establishing that which exists. I mean, it sounds curious to us, but it’s very real and tasty. It’s not just some abstract philosophical thing that you learn so you can get full marks in your philosophy exam.
What Buddha you know, so we need to learn that which exists. And so Buddha’s saying the nature of mind is one of the function the function of mind is to know that which exists. In other words, it’s axiomatic. That which exists is necessarily that which is can can be known by mind, and mind, a valid mind, eventually enlightened mind, is that which can know, cognize, be aware of that which exists. So in other words, eventually, when we fully develop the mind, when we remove the pollution from the mind, then the nature of your mind simply is that it knows whatever exists.
It’s just its nature. It’s just natural, Buddha says. It’s not a mysterious process. It’s not only a superior being, a god who who who who has this potential. If you exist, honey, you have that potential.
You’re a living being. You’re a sentient being. You possess that potential. You don’t possess the conditions at the moment. Being a lion, no chance.
But your mind will never lose that potential. If your mind exists and it can never not exist, then you always, as they say, possess Buddha nature. But being very simple about it, as long as it’s an acorn, it can become an oak tree. That’s its nature. It’s not you can’t turn it into a pear tree.
That’s its nature. No no choice. So we’re all potential Buddhas. I mean, it’s mind boggling if we begin to think this. You know?
So the first quality of a Buddha is wisdom, eventually developing the mind to the point where it literally knows that which exists. Buddha just says that’s just natural. You know? Something mystical. And we’ll discuss how to do that.
That’s the job. The other wing of the bird is the compassion wing. And then, you know, that word, okay, Buddha defines these things very precisely. I mean, as I think I might have mentioned yesterday. I forget if it was here or in the prison.
But the precision and clarity and depth of analysis, yeah, think we did, that we know we need to employ in order to become, you know, a scientist, a carpenter, a musician. We’re very precise with our millimeters and our doses. We know exact we’ve got to be precise. We all know that. We pride ourselves on being scientific in the west.
But when it comes to the mind, we are like children. We everybody in this room would define compassion differently. Everybody in this room would define mind differently. Everybody would define love differently. We think that’s just fine.
We’re allowed to have our own views. Thank you. Well, excuse me. I can have my own view that that’s called who I are. Of course, but I won’t communicate with you.
It won’t help. No wonder we don’t communicate. I tell you I love you. You tell me you love me. We think we are communicating because we say the same word, but we’ve both got different definitions of it.
I mean, it’s a joke. Why don’t we have suffering, you know? But if I tell you I want two and a half apples, you know how to give me two and a half apples, so we we don’t have fights over that. So we the the precision and clarity that we use with external reality is what Buddha says we gotta use for our mind, which is why. I mean, it’s so intelligent actually.
If we can all have the same basis for we can all have agreement about love, compassion, good, bad, hate, this. Can you imagine the blissful world we would live in, you know? This is so obvious. So compassion is defined as, you know, simply the basis of the starting point of compassion is the wish in my mind that you don’t suffer. So more more more more tastily, the empathy with your suffering, the wanting of you not to suffer as compassion.
So the whole work of the third scope, the bodhisattva path, the Mahāyāna component of the path, you can simply say it’s the compassion wing, you know. So it’s all the work we would do to develop these parts of ourself. And the culmination of this is you could say absolute empathy, absolute identity with every living being without exception, as if they were you, no separation. I mean, to a degree We’re talking here to degrees that we would never think is possible in our ordinary culture, you know. This is the characteristic of a Buddha.
The third characteristic of the Buddha No. Specifically too, it’s this infinite empathy with their suffering and the absolute spontaneous wish and to to take away their suffering. Absolutely clear. Then there’s a third characteristic, characteristic, is the power to do so. So there’s the compassion for every living being as if they were you and finding their suffering unbearable and knowing it’s your job to take it away.
There’s the absolute effortless power to do whatever needs to be done to do that job, including manifesting your mind in many forms, in many universes, for millions of years, and millions of beyonds, long as sentient beings exist, based on the wisdom that sees your mind perfectly, sees all the minds of all beings perfectly, and knows exactly what to do. So it’s extremely kind of integrated, psychological. There’s the wisdom that sees that all things or all phenomena, to the minds of all beings. The compassion with all beings, the wish they don’t suffer and and the and the wish to take their suffering away and the ability to do so. They’re the three essential characteristics of a Buddha.
And Buddhism would Buddha would say we all have this potential. That’s what when we’re fully developed, that’s who we’ll be, and it’s natural. It’s just innate. It’s just what we are. There’s no choice.
So in that sense, Buddha would say you don’t have a choice. I mean, don’t have a choice about an acorn. You can, of course, make it a a piece of jewelry. But really to do I mean, why not use it for what it is? Why not develop it into into its real nature?
Why stunt its growth? You know? Let it allow it to become what it really is, an oak tree. Well, we must allow ourselves to become what we really are, a Buddha. We don’t have a choice.
You know? So, you know, that and so what the job is is is to learn the the methods, that’s all, for how to do this. So this a starting point. There’s gotta be a starting point. This is the starting point of why one even would be a Buddha, you could say, you know, a Buddhist, I mean.
Okay. There’s a a subtle way of talking about Buddha nature in terms of the ultimate reality, in terms of emptiness and so on, but we’ll discuss that later. So contemplating this, trying to make it real, not just a belief, but real. Real. You know?
You don’t just believe an acorn to become an oak tree. You gotta see the experience. You gotta see the logic of it. You know? Another way to talk about our pure nature is very in this very simple way I was describing yesterday, the analogy of the water.
I was using that, wasn’t I? The analogy of the water. Yeah. It’s a really simple one there, but it’s, again, very tasty. What we mean when we say the word water, what we mean by water is that pure clear stuff, don’t we?
We don’t really mean the pollution at all, although we know water can be polluted. What we mean is the waterness of the water. And we know the pollution’s an additive. We know the pollution doesn’t belong. Okay.
We can kind of accept it and think, well, you know, make the most of it. But what we we mean by water is the pure clear stuff and that the pollution is an additive. It doesn’t belong there. So the same with our mind. What Buddha says, another way of talking about nature of mind, is that the the very nature of what mind is is is the pure clear stuff.
So the pure clear stuff of our mind, the h two o of our mind, if you like, the very components of the mind, the very substance of mind, is the virtuous states of mind, the positive ones. They are who we really are. This is really surprising to us because we all think we’re the opposite. We all think, and it’s even in our religions with great respect, that we’re naturally bad. Buddha completely completely disagrees.
He says we’re naturally good. Now we have to understand what he means by that because we can be forgiven for thinking we’re naturally bad because we we know it’s easier to be lazy and it’s easier to be jealous and it’s easier to be angry than the opposite sometimes. So then we conclude, well, that’s natural. And I mean, look at us. We all say, well, I didn’t ask to get born.
I was made this way. All humans are the way they are. The way you know, this is just how we are. What to do, we say. So actually we had this very strong philosophy not based on much logic or not based on thinking, just based on hearsay and actually based on karma too, Buddha would say, that we’re just in other words, that we’re naturally bad.
In other words, we identify ourself as being the pollution. It’s kind of bizarre when you think about it. And that’s the irony of ego. We’ll talk about this quite a bit. That’s the irony of ego, you know, that we identify ourself.
It’s like identifying yourself as this limited acorn, this little brown thing, trying to make the most of it. We identify ourselves by the pollution. I mean, it’s shocking when you think about it. Why do we go like a magnet to the anger, to the laziness, to the jealousy? Because that’s what we know.
We are addicted to it. This is the tragedy of ego, you know, the irony of ego. Is this the suffering stuff? And what Buddha says, if we think about it intelligently, we will I’m using this analogy of the water, which I find quite helpful, you know, is that what water is is not the pollution. It’s like it’s been this for so long that, of course, we’re gonna just assume pollution is there.
We just take it for granted. Oh my god. There’s a river. And we’ll say, oh my god. Keep away.
Don’t go near the river. Why? Because we’re, you know, we’re identifying as being polluted. We don’t know how to not pollute it. So we think, oh my god.
Rivers are poison. Keep away from them. But water in its nature is the pure, clear stuff. So we have to find this. We have to first remember that it can be depolluted.
So we have to start already by identifying with our with with the positive part of us, with our Buddha nature, to identify. Meaning simply to keep remembering every time you see an acorn that it can become an oak tree. As long as you if you keep thinking it’s a it’s a little brown thing, you’ll never think of the oak tree part. You’ll forget what you should be doing with it. If you all the time identify with it with the delusions, you’ll stay stuck and go in in those and go round and around and and and solidify them and concretize them and back them up and support them and rationalize them.
Look at what we do, you know. This is who we think we are, and it’s as scary as hell to go beyond them. It’s unknown. It’s uncharted waters for us, you know. So we like our comfort zone even though it’s the pollution, even though it stinks.
And then we reinforce it by blaming everybody else for it. And then we say, well, I didn’t ask to get born. It’s not my fault. All these philosophies we have, which we take as truth, that keep us supported in our pollution, you know, that prevent us from even thinking of our true nature, who I really am, identifying with the positive stuff, wanting to develop those, you know. So this is a way of talking about Buddha nature.
In a sense, again, Buddha would say we don’t have a choice if we think of it like this. And you think of it another way, that what Buddha is saying, which we talked about last time, we’ll put it in the context today, you know, we all wanna be happy. We don’t wanna suffer. That’s clear. And all Buddha says is, well, honey, develop your positive qualities because that’s how you’re gonna get happy.
Lessen your negative ones because that’s how you’ll stop suffering. When we really can get that, well, we have no choice, zero choice. We must lessen our delusions. We don’t have a choice. You know?
But we have to think about it like this so we can become convinced ourself, and we can become convinced of its being logic, not something mystical. We have to see how it’s logic. I cannot stress this enough. You know? So okay.
If it is true, I’m a potential Buddha, a potential oak tree, then I better learn to know how to do it. This is a common thing in religion too because we kinda mystify everything. Why would I need a teacher? Can’t I do it myself? Well, excuse me.
Can’t you don’t even how to make a cake without someone showing you. And you wanna become a Buddha without someone showing you? You wanna become omniscient, omnipotent, and infinitely compassionate for all living beings throughout the universe without learning to know how? Excuse me. I mean, that shows how we are so we don’t even begin to see that it’s a practical job.
We just think of it as something mystical, you know. Just like thinking you can learn all about, you know, relativity without anybody showing you how. It’ll somehow mystically come to you when you close your eyes and have a have an experience. I mean, excuse me. It’s totally just it’s like insulting, you know.
We all know this is the guru devotion one. We all know that the best way, the simplest, most direct way to learn something is to is to get someone who knows how to do it to show you. Now, you know, that means books. We all love to do self help. We’re all brilliant at that.
But excuse me, yes, it’s self help, but you know, you just don’t look in the sky for the instructions, you look in a book or you ask a person. Everything we have ever learned, walking, tying our shoelaces, going to the toilet, wiping our bottoms, doing anything, somebody has shown us. Somebody, in other words, using the Buddhist terminology, know, we’ve been kind of like, you know, somebody in the lineage. So, you know, when I learned how to make a cake for example, I wasn’t five, I was twenty eight actually. I was an old hippie in in London and I wanted I was going back home to see my family and I decide I wanna make a carrot cake, I think, you know.
And I so I thought I’d ask my mom. Now I can use this as a really excellent example for the whole approach to guru devotion. Well, let me describe. So the first step is this is the Buddhist view very much. The first step is you have to want to learn something.
No one can take you know, you can all be dragged to the water, but you can’t make you know, no one can make you drink, which is why in Buddhism, you don’t try to force people to be Buddhist. It has to arise in the person, the wish, even not say, oh, I want Buddhism, but you you know, we have to have the wish to know we want something. We go looking for it then, you know? Well, I had the wish finally at the age of twenty eight. It rose in my mind.
I remember it. I want to make a cake. So then when I went back to to Melbourne, then whom did I ask? Well, you know, didn’t think of it like this, when I analyzed my experience, I did exactly what Buddha would suggest we do in the search for a teacher. First, I have to want it.
First step. It’s gotta arise inside you. Then, you find a person who’s qualified. Well, I knew mean, it happened to me that I knew my mom was qualified, and this is what they say about a teacher. You have to want to find a spiritual path.
Then you have to want to find someone to show you how. So you have to then choose a valid person. You just don’t again, you don’t just base it on emotion. Again, with practical things, we don’t go to some, you know, a carpenter because we know, he’s really handsome. Oh, okay.
If we’re attached, we will. That’s our problem. That’s why we a boyfriend or we choose a girlfriend because they look nice. You know, we don’t look deeper, then we that’s why we have problems, you know, we’re superficial. So if you really wanna do it properly, you’ve you know, I had to find a person who was a valid cake maker.
Now I happened to be my mother, and believe me, I wasn’t so kind that I would choose my mother just because I was being kind to her. I was very mean to my mother. But I asked my mother because I knew she was a good cake maker. How come? I’d done the research.
Okay? I’d checked on her her cakes. It’s the better direct most direct way.