Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute talk, Venerable Robina Courtin challenges a fundamental assumption: that action determines karmic consequence. She opens with a stark example—killing an ant—showing how identical deeds create opposite karmic results depending on whether they spring from aversion or compassion. Moving through euthanasia, the September 11 attacks, and activism, she exposes the core problem: compassion without wisdom causes harm. She illustrates this with the story of Lama Yeshe, who let a sick monk die rather than intervene, having clairvoyantly seen the monk’s karma would purify better through death. She explores collective karma—how victims and victimizers co-create suffering—and argues activists must act with skill, not fantasy. She concludes with a guided meditation on the Four Opponent Powers (regret, reliance, remedy, resolve), an antidote practice for purifying negative karma. Pitched at practitioners with foundational Buddhist understanding.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 DAR 2003 06 21.mp3
UUID: 1cc9dd8c-d26d-4580-aa61-17906f9a6116
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~8,281
Well, I mean, it sometimes can be attachment if you’re attached to eating the flesh of that ant, you know. We kill for attachment. But the the why it’s killing a scene so fearful, we’ve got this kind of resistance to it, is because the motivation is bad. The motivation is the wish to harm. Why do you think people go to war?
Not because they love each other. Come on. Why do you kill the ant on the kitchen counter? Not because you love it. It’s because you don’t like it.
Because you think how dare that ant be on my kitchen counter. Counter. It’s obvious, you know. That’s why so it’s a buildup of energy over the eons of time amongst sentient beings that when the motivation is harmful, when it’s and that, you know, we’ll go more detail into what and why it’s harmful, where that comes from. We’ll talk about it psychologically when we talk about the second scope, which we’ll do tomorrow morning.
We’ll go more deeply into Buddhist psychology tomorrow. But here we can see that this is a conclusion that the motivation is harmful. You harm the ant. There’s a mozzie, you know? How dare, you know?
Boom. Take my blood. One tiny, tiny drop of my blood, as Lama Zopa says, you know? That’s all it wants. It’s just one tiny drop of blood.
But look how upset. Even mildly, but it’s still like, you know? Excuse me. You know? How dare it?
That’s called aversion. You know? It’s called anger. It comes it it leads to what’s called anger. Aversion is the state of mind that the when I am confronted with what I don’t want, I get this thing out of my way.
I harm it. You know? Well, that’s where killing comes from. That’s not we call it bad. This is convention.
You know? But it’s not ultimately bad. We can see in a minute. I’ll explain. The other condition that plays a major role in the karma we create, and we’re talking here about the karma that we create.
And this one we can see in the Jeffrey Dahmer case, habit. The more strong the habit, the deeper the karma. And then the other factor, again poor Jeffrey Dahmer, he had all three unfortunately, the poor thing, you know, was the way you do it. He tortured terribly. He did terrible things.
You know, tortured these creatures, tortured the humans. So, you know, in other words, you delight he he got his orgasms from torturing, you know? It’s because of some but if you look at certain animals, I’m sorry, you look at animals. Where do you think we got these habits from? From being in the animal kingdom, that’s where?
Have a look, know? Look how they do things. I mean, you look at those animal shows with a fresh eye and you are seeing a nightmare basically. Absolutely unbearable. The things that they do are beyond belief, you know?
Where do you think humans get them from? Past animal lives, that’s where. So, you know, we can see what the human so then and then humans do it, do dreadful things to each other, and then they get born even more twisted as more twisted animals, and then they do it, they get more twisted, they get born as more deluded animals, and we just keep degenerating ourselves lower and lower and lower and lower, you know? It’s just the way the world goes. This is called saṃsāra.
It’s fraught with suffering from habits, you know? So the motivation is the main one of all. The motivation for doing it. The habit, whether it’s a habit, and the way you do it. In terms of negative karma, these all play the role in determining the karmic seed that you plant in your mind that will determine the future experience to you.
Now, let’s look at an action when it’s killing, when it can be not a bad negative karma. So let’s say John sees this ant and it’s suffering, you know, and his heart completely reaches out to it. Oh, poor little ant, really full of compassion. Right? And so he’s he thinks, you know, like most of us do, that if I kill it, I’ll stop its suffering.
Now Buddha would debate with that point. But here we’re not discussing wisdom yet. There’s two things, there’s compassion and wisdom. We’re looking at now at what causes us to create good or bad karma, and the main determining factor is our own motivation, as well as the other factors. The main ones are motivation.
So in this case John has got genuine compassion. He sees the ant, he can’t bear the suffering for that poor little ant, and he really believes if he kills it, he’ll stop the suffering. So he instantly kills the ant. I see an ant, and I have aversion for it, how dare it be on my kitchen counter, so I instantly kill the ant. Now as far as the ant’s concerned, it doesn’t care if it got good or bad motivation, it’s dead, you know?
It doesn’t care. So as far as the consequences for the ant are concerned, that’s another discussion, and we’ll do it in a minute. But we’re looking here at the karma that John creates, the karma that I create. Now you can say if anybody looks on and they don’t know what’s in our mind, they will see an exactly same action, two people killing ants. But as far as karma’s concerned, because his motivation is pure, You can almost say he created virtually no negative karma, even though the ant, you know even though, if we look at the wisdom side, let’s say the ant’s consciousness left the body and took a much more suffering life.
In fact, he he put it from the frying pan into the fire, actually, the ant’s point of view. But he he out of ignorance, he didn’t know that, but out of compassion, he killed it because he really wanted to stop its suffering. His motivation overrides all the other stuff from his point of view, such that the karma he creates will bring virtually no negative results. In fact, even compassion brings can bring good results, you know. My motivation is aversion.
My own I has been offended, and I therefore have a negative motivation, so my karmic action will bring suffering to me. So our own mind, in Buddhist terms, is what brings the results to our self. We are the creators of our own actions. We are the creators of our suffering. We are the creators of our happiness.
You know? So, okay. From the point of view now, okay, it’s interesting, you know, isn’t it? When we had this one of compassion, lots of this, we, you know, we call it euthanasia. We mightn’t call it when we think of the ants, but it’s actually called euthanasia.
And usually, the reason we kill our old auntie or the ant is because we have compassion, isn’t it? But the Buddha says, that’s great for you. You’ve just created good karma. That’s fine for you. Great.
Go for it. But excuse me, you ought to ask the question, well, I wonder if I did benefit the ant. But we never asked that question because we had this fixed view in our mind because we mean well, it’s good enough. I’m sorry, you know, like we discussed last night, we have to know the consequences of an action we do. And even if we’re not sure what the consequences are, we’d better not act.
We would never do that in our ordinary life, you know. If you’re not sure of the consequences of an action, and there could be the possibility of dire consequences, excuse me, we would not do that action. We’d rather have it as it is now. Like I said, you know, if I’ve got a headache or John’s got a headache, you know, and I have enormous compassion for him, and I have a pill, but I forget whether it’s the cyanide or the aspirin, just can’t remember. Excuse me, I’d rather and he would rather have his headache than take the risk.
Right? It’s very obvious. So in the case of the ant, here we’re talking that the Buddha says that the ant has a continuity of consciousness, which means its consciousness will continue when you kill it, which means its mind will carry on and due to whatever karma ripened at the time of its little death when John whacked it on the head, its consciousness will take another rebirth. Now if you cannot guarantee that that will be a really good rebirth where it can meet a spiritual path and get become a Buddha, then excuse me, don’t intervene. Mind your own business.
Be kind to the ant, give it a little comfortable environment to die peacefully, but don’t you intervene with its karma. You have no right. But if you see definitely that it will really benefit the ant, if you actually have the clairvoyance to know that it will benefit the ant, then please kill it immediately. In fact, if you know that if you kill me now, you can definitely seek as you are a powerful being, that I will take a much better rebirth, and I would request that you kill me now. That’s an extremely compassionate and a wise action.
And that’s the perfect action. In other words, as Lama Yeshe says, compassion is not enough. You need wisdom. Because actually compassion, which is the good heart, which is the feeling, oh my goodness, that’s suffering, that’s what causes us to open our hearts, but it’s not what gives us the skill to benefit somebody. It’s wisdom that gives us the skill to do the action that will benefit.
Compassion is just the wish to do it, you know, that’s all. But we only work around with a good heart, just thinking, well, because I mean well, it must be good enough. But half the time, even in our own lives, and with our friends, we make a mess, you know, because we don’t have the wisdom to know what is the right thing to do. So we’re talking here, though, specifically, what is it that determines that an action is a good one or a bad one? And we can go more detail into the nitty gritty of this tomorrow, but here, it’s the motivation in your mind for why you do it.
Now the trouble is, of course, when you’ve got a very deep habit in your mind, you don’t even notice the motivation. If a person’s got a really strong habit to kill, the mozzies, the rats, the fish, the this, you just do it like second nature. You don’t even think you’ve got a motivation, you know? Why? Because you’re so caught up with it being a good thing, you actually think it’s good, believe it’s good, and never even begin to look into your mind.
I mean, we just, know, I’m being kind to John, chatting away, thinking about his headache and so full of compassion, and a mozzie comes, I’m even killing it without even thinking, without even a blink. Because the habit is so strong, it’s like second nature, and I don’t even notice the habit. The habit is the killer. The habit is the killer because it blinds us to even seeing our motivation. That’s why, again, we find it so hard to change our own minds.
That’s why poor Jeffrey Dahmer, the only thing we can do is have compassion for him. And, yes, indeed, keep him locked up. He when he was asked, do you think you’d do it again if you were if you were released from prison? He said, well, of course, I would. Now we hear that as saying, yes.
I’m gonna make the choice to go and kill. Of course I will, because I love killing. People don’t hear it properly. What he was saying was, I recognize this deep propensity inside me, and I know I haven’t got the strength to go against it. That is an extremely honest human being.
He understood his propensities. And this other dude on the same show, he didn’t just have the propensity to kill, he was also extremely paranoid, extremely a liar. You could tell that this man was really deluded. You couldn’t trust a word he said, you know. Full of these negative habits.
Poor old Jeffrey Dahmer just had this particular one, but he was very straight and honest, but you could hear how he could be misinterpreting him, this evil person. And of course he says he’s doing it. We think he’s saying, oh, have a rational free will, I’m gonna rationally choose to kill people. Rubbish, he could see his propensity, that’s all. He knew he was doing wrong, but it was such a deep habit, like a junkie, you cannot stop.
You know? It’s arrogant to say, oh, you choose to be a junkie. Nobody says that about an alcoholic. Now, we don’t say that. We see it as we call it an illness, but it’s not even the way the Buddha would say it.
It’s, you know, you’ve got a very strong object, and then you have a very strong delusion. That’s why you can’t help doing it. Everybody accepts that. But when it and but Jeffrey Dahmer is the same. The very strong object, these hundreds of sentient beings who have the karma to be killed by him because they harmed him in that way.
So when he meets them and his delusions arise, conditions come together. Boom. No choice. Virtually no choice, you could say. And yet, at the same time, he did have the wisdom.
He could see it. So that’s why you would never expect an alcoholic to give up alcohol while still drinking alcohol, would you? So why expect poor Geoffrey Dahmer to go against these powerful habits if you took him out into world and put him amongst sentient beings again? So yes, keep him away from the object. How intelligent.
It’s one of the most practical things we need to do at the very first level of practice. We recognize our strong habits, and then we keep away from the objects that activate them. This is common sense, you know. Because the mind is the main thing, the habit, the karma, but the conditions, the external condition, the alcohol, the animal, have a play a powerful role. Know?
This boy, Simon, who had this propensity to kill, who was a professional fisherman for thirteen years, you could say that the hundreds of thousands of fish that he killed in those thirteen years, or since he was a little boy actually, they each one of them had the karma to be killed by him. Each one, they came running to his hooks, to his nets, you know. So karma is a collective, and karma is a collective experience. So those if there if there were no fish that had karma with that man to be killed by him, he could go fishing every day. He’d be a lousy fisherman.
He’d never get a fish. He’d be called a failure. Well, actually, should rejoice, he didn’t get the chance to kill. But he had lots of fish coming, so we called him a successful fisherman, is why he became professional. Well, every reason to have compassion for him.
I went fishing once to please a boyfriend. I couldn’t get one, you know, because I didn’t have the the the, you know, the the the habit to kill, and I didn’t have beings who had the karma to be killed by me, you know. And this is why we don’t ever factor this in because we love to have oppressors and victims in our world, you know? We love to have someone we love to find someone to blame, and some innocent victim to feel sorry for. So, you know, September eleventh in Bali, we love to feel sorry for all the victims.
Look at all the news reports, they’re so distorted, you know? I’m not being rude now. Of course, it’s suffering. It’s unbearable suffering what happened. But we love to read it in this way, these, you know, these innocent victims, this evil, evil person, this wretched Muslim person, this evil Malaysian man.
We love to bring up all these kind of archetypes, you know, the the the the Osama bin Laden’s. I mean, the Americans are kind of orgy of loathing for this latest enemy, you know. And now it’s Saddam Hussein, isn’t it? Before it was Hitler. We love to find somebody to dump all our delusions onto.
And we can’t we and we do not wanna find one redeeming feature about because we love to have wicked enemies and then wonderful saints. You know? This is this gross way we act. It’s deluded. You know?
The point is this is what sounds shocking, but this is the one about karma, that karma is a collective thing. But, you know, you could say that everybody in that building on September eleven who got killed, whose body got pulverized into dust, had the karma to be killed like that. And you can even say you can even say the main cause, one of the one of the main causes for why it was so, quote, successful, unquote, in terms of the people who did it, was the powerful, powerful karma of the people to be killed like that. I think the people who did it, the terrorists, were as surprised as anybody that those buildings fell down so beautifully. Nobody could believe it, you know?
That is the power of the karma of those victims. Their karma from their past karma, who knows, a thousand lives ago, so strongly for this thing to completely be so outrageous, for their bodies to bust pulverize into dust, for the building to just disappear. That was the power of their negative karma. That’s why it was successful in those terms, you know. How come all those Jews, you know, all those gypsies and Jews and homosexuals and whoever else in Europe, you know, were perfectly organized?
I mean, okay, the Germans have got a propensity to be very organized, so they did a very good job. But it worked so beautifully because the victims had the karma. If they didn’t, Hitler would be flailing in this in the in the air. You know? He couldn’t have killed anybody.
You can’t kill somebody if that person is not there to be killed, and the person is there to be killed because they’ve got the karma to be killed. You can’t do any good either, but the same thing. You know, we we can do sort of things and do really be very beneficial and make things really happen nicely. It’s because people have got the result. People have the karma to have virtuous things happen to them.
You can try as much as you like. Do you know? You know, let’s say, for example, you’ve got a group of people in a starving country, and all the NGOs are going around all these organizations, and then by the time the rice goes from there to there to there to there, and one grain gets down to the people. You know? We all evil people are stealing on the way.
It’s true. But the real reason they don’t get the rice is because the karma of the people, their general there’s no such karma to be there to be ripened. So that no matter how hard we all try, the rice just disappears on the way, and they get nothing. You know? I mean, in the third world, for example, in Nepal, the number of you know, you’ve heard about them I mean, heard about the millions of dollars that they say the Japanese have given to the people in Lumbini to where the Buddha was born to build things.
By the time you get it’s got to Lumbini, everyone tells you there’s just nothing. No one can see anything. All the dollars have gone into people’s pockets, you know. Because the karma of the people there was just there’s no karma to get something. I remember reading one time about, you know, one starving country, remember which and one big company had sent all sorts of things, and the only thing to get through was the great big fat empty stainless steel pots.
They got through easily. The shipment, no obstacles. But the rice to go in it, not a grain. This is the karma of peace. Now this is not meant to be judgmental or, you know, or an excuse or just not, you know, it’s just explanation of how come.
In other words, everything that happens is due to collective karma of some beings all playing their role, you know? So, yeah, we you know, to change it is what we have to do, of course. Absolutely, of course, we have to change it. But we have to start here, you know? A person who’s got no karma to get a job, let’s say, we think all these smelly old homeless people, they’re just being lazy, you know?
And indeed you could say that, and you could say they’re deluded, but we can look on, and why a person even has delusions, to have so low self confidence they can’t even see if they can get a job. You can say, oh, they’re you know, they’re lazy, they’re this, they’re that, why don’t they just go get a job, just get themselves nice clothes and walk in and get a job, you know, we think. It’s not as simple as that. When your mind’s so deluded and so full of negative karma, or good karma, whatever it is, you’re not being critical, you know, then it’s like you can’t even see the option of doing that. You can’t see the option because the karma of the lack of generosity karma is so strong that no matter what you do it just turns into dust, you know.
We can see some people just have to do like this, and they can be lousy business people, but they make money falling off a log. Other people have impeccable qualities and no matter what they do they can’t earn a dollar. karma, you know? Meaning all the conditions aren’t there in place. All the right conditions aren’t there.
It’s like why you never get an apple tree, it’s because all the conditions aren’t there. Either the seed’s no good, or the earth is no good, or the water’s not enough, or the sun is not enough, or the sun is too much. All the conditions aren’t coming together beautifully, you know? This is due to karma in Buddhist terms. So, you know, the Buddhist explanation of this is, you know, if you’re trying to find the solution to this, you look in terms of the karma and you realize if you why you’re never making money is because you haven’t got enough generosity.
So you start practicing generosity. Instead of thinking, oh, I’m so poor, I can’t give anything. You start having a generous attitude you try to give, you know? That creates the course to get. Why we have even one grain of rice in our life?
Not to mention the ability to get a pizza by making a phone call and money in the bank and almost like a miracle, you know? We might be called very rich, but look at our lives like a miracle. Just have to make a phone call and things happen now. It’s so simple, you know? All this is due to our generosity, karma.
The two main causes of having our decent human life. One is morality, which causes to even get a human life in the first place. And the other is generosity, is the cause for having anything. I mean, anything. Even one grain of rice or a piece of cloth, or the ability to get anything just like we are able to do.
This is the result of incredible generosity karma. It’s sort of like oils the wheels to make life work, you know, which gives us then a life which we can have leisure, where we can come to things like this and think about the meaning of life more than just having to work eight hours a day to get a bowl of rice. On. Okay. If you’re an activist working for an organisation working against the ill effects of globalisation, yes?
No. Okay. Does that make you there I understand. Does that make you therefore think, oh, what? There’s no point in, you know, trying because they haven’t got the karma.
No. I think the Dalai Lama is a good example of this in the Tibetan situation. Here, they’ve been going for forty five years, haven’t they? So they all accept that it’s the karma of their people to have this experience of of the harm from the Right? And it’s still happening even just as strongly, almost.
You can say that. A number of people still being tortured and still being imprisoned and the country being overrun by Chinese and the and and the all the buildings being broken down. Mean, just awful things are happening. Know, the the environment collapse, all the I mean, forty for even ten years ago, saw a video where they’ve been trucking trees out twenty four hours a day for forty years. I mean, it’s like, your heart’s here.
You can’t bear it. You know? All the wild animals destroyed. Awful things happening. But look at the Dalai Lama.
He knows the view perfectly of coming. He can probably even see which life, when, what, how, because he’s said to be a Buddha. But look at him, never stopping trying. Because every every thought counts, every seed does bring a fruit, and eventually the fruit will ripen. It’s just that our problem is we get angry if it doesn’t ripen when we want it.
So the option you have to recognize karma, then you continue to do, but you use wisdom to do what you think will be beneficial and not bash your head against brick walls. It’s like you can bring a horse to but you can’t make it drink, so you’ll be skillful when you bring it to the water. And it might look like you’re being mean, but when the time is right and all the conditions come together, it’ll happen. But every seed you do, every thought you have, it will all add to it, and eventually the results will come from the people’s efforts, but with patience and skill and kindness. You know?
So you keep trying to help others. Never stop. Never stop. Never stop. Of course, because that’s an action from our our job is to on the basis of understanding karma, our job is the compassion wing, is to benefit others.
But this is again where compassion isn’t enough, one has to have the wisdom to know how. And, of course, the big wisdom in Buddhist terms is based on karma, seeing the minds of others, knowing what’s valid. You know? So it doesn’t mean we stop ever doing anything. Continue to act politically, socially, every way we can to try and make the world a better place, but with no fantasy expectations of when it will happen.
That’s the point. Okay, now it’s interesting. The real wisdom to know how to help is interesting because there’s one story that is really quite shocking actually for us because, you know, who has this kind of wisdom? We do not have it. But at our monastery one time in Kopan, Kathmandu, one young monk there, one a Tibetan monk, was very sick and like crazy and really ill.
And one of my friends, Harry, was trying to help him. The same man I mentioned last night, think Harry, who fell off the mountain, nearly fell off the mountain. I told that story. I’ll tell that again later. So anyway, this Harry also was trying to help this monk, and then Lama Yeshe, you know, our Lama, was there.
Lama basically told Harry, just leave it alone. Let it be. Just leave it alone. Give me an explanation. So as much as anything, this is a story about Harry’s confidence in Lama, his wisdom.
And then what happened is the monk died. Now that sounds a bit shocking, right? Back off Harry, let him be, and he dies. That sounds cruel, you could say. But Lama Lhundrup, the abbot of Kopan, said to Harry, well, basically he explained what happened.
Due to Lama’s clairvoyance, I mean, he’s said to be a holy being who sees the minds of people, so he could see the mind of this monk, he could see what karma he created, he could see the cause of this sickness, and so he could also see? And so he could also see with his wisdom that actually, if the monk had gotten better, he would have had a fine life. But because this particular karma was an intense one, he would have still had some karma left over, he would have had even a worse next life, more suffering. Whereas by being sick and then in fact dying, he purified the whole karma, therefore fantastic future life. In other words, that was incredible compassion, but very incredible wisdom.
So, you know, as very often the Buddha would say, you can’t really begin to help somebody until you’ve got clairvoyance. But it’s bit depressing, because I mean, look at us, who’s got clairvoyance? And if we do, we might have flashes of it, oh, I was an Egyptian princess fourteen lives ago, you know? We don’t have the clairvoyance that can see anybody’s mind and know how to diagnose their problem very precisely. We don’t know how to do that, you know?
But that’s kind of interesting. So, the point here is, we’re talking about karma here, but if we’re now going to talk about the compassion one, which is the wish to benefit, which is to see the suffering of others and find it unbearable and think it’s my job to take it away. That’s phenomenal, that’s compassion. But like I said, it doesn’t exist on its own. You’ve got to have the wisdom to know how.
So we understand that when it comes to ordinary things, like, you know, I was talking about, say to George, we were talking earlier, he’s a dentist, right? Now he can have compassion for let’s say he’s not a dentist, but he can have compassion for all these people with their toothaches. But then he rushes in and tries to fix it, he hasn’t got the skills. I mean, excuse me, we’d like him to please leave us alone, let us stick with our head, in our toothache. So we understand it in physical things and technical You gotta have the skill to do it.
But when it comes to emotional things, we just think any old thing will do and I mean well, and that’s good enough. But we don’t have any wisdom, you know? So we have to have the wisdom. So, okay, of course, what wisdom is is, again, very specific in Buddhism. Wisdom is what you get when you do all this work on this wisdom wing that we’re discussing here yet, still, which is the wisdom wing. Okay.
Finally, wisdom is what you get when you get rid of the delusions in your own mind. And we’re just beginning the first stage of this now by learning to abide by the laws of karma, by controlling our body and our speech, therefore our mind, and refraining from harming others. This is the first level. And then we’ll move tomorrow to the second scope, where we look in a more sophisticated way at how the mind functions, and where we really then begin to understand the delusions, and really then begin to understand to go against them. And then the removal of our delusions is is is what brings wisdom.
Because what prevents me from seeing John’s mind is just my own I’m blinded by my own delusions. You know, if I think he’s handsome and gorgeous, then I’m gonna think he’s a cute guy, then I wanna be happy, then I want him to be happy, and I love him. But this is coming out of my attachment, you know, I’m not seeing John really, I’m seeing a fantasy of my own projections. If I don’t like John, then I’m seeing him equally a fantasy of my own delusions, my own aversion. So I won’t wanna help John.
In either case, I’m not seeing John at all. I’m seeing my projection, which is what we all are. So right now, you know, someone like Lama Yeshe at that level, he was able to see this monk as he was, as Buddhism would say, see his mind perfectly, know his past karma, therefore know validly what action to do with it would genuinely benefit him. I mean, that’s true compassion, you know. So this is why we have to do both wings.
Wisdom’s not enough, and compassion’s not enough. Bird needs two wings. Well, was going to talk about purification practice, so I don’t know if it’s time to do that and do the practice. Do you think it’s time to go home? What do you want?
I mean, that was a question last year, was there? Yes, there was. Yeah. Karmically, mean? Is it positive or negative, you mean?
You mean is it a good thing or a bad thing? Well, the Buddhist idea like we so if you apply what I’ve just said about motivation and everything, then let’s look at a person who’s trying to kill themselves. I can’t say other people’s minds, but I think if most of us look into our minds and we felt suicidal at some point, it’s not because we’re blissfully happy, is it? Would you agree? And it’s not because we’re really being loving to ourselves.
Would you agree with that? So we maybe can deduce that the wish to kill myself is again a bit of a desperate motivation, it’s bit like depression, can’t bear the pain. So therefore we can deduce perhaps that it’s a negative motivation. Negative motivation is what determines whether something that we do is a harmful action. I think it’s a nice theory, but we have to look at how we feel.
I’m not being judgmental against it. We have to look at what we feel, what the genuine motivation. If it is true compassion for oneself but again, it still has be wisdom. Will killing myself stop the suffering? Unless you’ve got clairvoyance, you can’t see that.
I can imagine how someone killing themselves could be compassionate. I can imagine how someone else sacrificing their own life instead of someone else, which we technically wouldn’t call suicide, but actually is killing yourself. You could see a person who is full of compassion could do this, but I think in general, think usually we want to kill ourselves because we’re so desperate, we can’t see the answer, we don’t know how to bear it, you know? It’s quite a painful motivation perhaps, I don’t know. Don’t you think?
Most Most of time, that’s what I mean. It’s not a question of judging, we just want to assess it, you know. Just look at it technically. What would be calling it? Why is it negative?
When would we be negative? How is it negative? What makes it positive? Didn’t we discuss the four opponent powers last night? I didn’t know.
Were you all you weren’t all here for that, were you? Most of you? Four opponent powers? Well, maybe should I just lead you through that meditation just very briefly? Just to give you a taste.
Okay? Then we can do it longer tomorrow. And also George isn’t coming here with the course notes. He’s off going to the footy and have a beer, isn’t he? Just sneaked off pretending he’s going to do our course notes.
Has he got the has he got the mobile phone? Mobile. Oh, you’ve got it. Okay. So we we don’t know.
He might come. He might not. Maybe it’s taken longer than he thought. Never mind. We’ll get them tomorrow.
And if anybody is not coming back tomorrow, then make an keep put your name and address down, and then we’ll send you these notes. Okay? Just a few things. Just a bit about mine and the karma and the death process and and all the different things like that we’re talking about so far. Do I have to pick it up from Buddha House?
Yeah. Good idea. Pick it up from Buddha House, whichever you prefer. Or even more simple, you can email me and I’ll email it to you. Maybe that’s the best.
I’ll email it to you. You if you’re not gonna be here tomorrow, email me [email protected] and I’ll send it to you. [email protected] Okay, so just close your eyes and relax. We’ll go through these four steps. Just a quick one to give you the feeling of how it works.
So the first step, like we said last night, is called regret. Regret is this very specific attitude that looks at yourself and sees what you’ve said and done and thought that’s harmed others but also your own negative thoughts as well, that are harming you. This is the point. Regret is really compassion for yourself. You know, my lying and my bad mouthing and my attachment and my anger.
If I leave these seeds in my mind, it’s just gonna cause so much more suffering for myself, and I’m really fed up with suffering. It’s like extreme kindness towards yourself, you know? Like I said, it’s a bit like you’ve taken poison. You don’t wanna keep that poison in you because it’s gonna cause you suffering, so of course you wanna get rid of it. So it’s the same with this stuff.
It’s like poison, you know? The harming and the bad mouthing and the and their own unhappy minds, they’re all negative minds, depression, anxiety, all this stuff, attachment, low self esteem. It’s poisoning me, and I’m really fed up with suffering. So just contemplate for a few minutes, you know, today any particular actions, in this life particular actions you’ve done to harm others that you can remember, you know, strong things, mild things, and then anything in your own mind, all the things you can’t remember. Just have this sense of I really regret it.
I really do because I don’t want more suffering. So we sometimes find it embarrassing to do this because we don’t have a very good relationship with ourselves, you know? We don’t like to think this way, of kindness towards ourselves, but it’s extremely important, you know? So just contemplate for a few minutes. Also, keep contemplating, but if any of us have taken vows of no lying, no stealing, no killing, whatever, just strongly regretting the breaking of those vows, breaking our commitments, again for our own benefit.
And then thinking, you know, if it makes sense to you, imagine whatever you must have done in countless past lives, you know, countless lives as when we’ve been animals, especially when we do so much brutalizing of others. Regretting from the depths, you know, again from the depths of our heart, whatever we must have done to harm any living being whatsoever. Whatever we thought even that has left imprints in our mind that’s been destructive, that will ripen as suffering for me. Absolutely, I regret all of this because, again, I don’t want the future suffering because karma is the cause of my happiness and karma is the cause of my suffering. So we for our own sake.
Absolutely, I’m sick of suffering, so I deeply regret having done, said, and thought these things. And then let’s think, well, know, we’ve taken that poison, we immediately think, well, whom can I turn to? To give me the medicine, you know? So here, of course, we’re turning to the Buddha. Obviously, if you’re a Christian, you turn to Jesus, whoever, you know?
Here we’re turning to the Buddha. So the second step, reliance. So visualize above our heads the Buddha in a particular aspect. If you’re familiar with it, then fine. If not, then just get the feeling of the presence of this enlightened energy above your head, you know.
So it’s Buddha called Vajrasattva. You visualize him sitting above our heads facing the same way as we are or sitting on cross-legged on a lotus. Everything’s radiant light, you know? The Buddha, we imagine he’s white light, white light, very radiant, blissful, like you see in these pictures, know, this Indian style, you know, light silken clothes. Not in the aspect of Śākyamūni the monk, it’s a different aspect, you know?
With his left hand holding a bell crossed at his heart, with his right hand over it holding what they call a vajra. So the bell in the left hand represents the development of wisdom, and the vajra in the right hand represents the development of compassion. The two wings, completely unified. Everything is made of light, radiant. You visualize this powerful enlightened energy above your crown.
Radiant face, very blissful, made of light. Like you see in the pictures, his hair held up on a top knot. This five pointed crown on the front of his head like a tiara, you know, that way you see it, five-pointed crown, they call it. Radiant light. And if we have a a a lama, a guru, a teacher, we visualize actually, we think it is they, their very mind manifesting in this aspect of the Buddha for my benefit.
It makes it very personal. Personal. And if you haven’t got a teacher but you think you’d like one or there’s one out there, some of whom you haven’t recognized, you also think that that’s my lama manifesting in this aspect of the Buddha for my benefit, out of enormous affection and love for me. So having a sense of reaching out to the Buddha, like a doctor who’s got the medicine you want, you know, a strong sense of reliance in your heart. So grateful to have someone who has the methods, whose methods we can use.
The second part of reliance, it sounds a bit curious to call it reliance, we can talk about it tomorrow, is where we generate now compassion for others. The first one is compassion for ourself. So here we think of those we have harmed, that we can think of and remember. You know, the fish maybe, the ants, the rats, the humans, we can remember. And any of course we’ve done without thinking, we really have compassion for these sentient beings now.
And then we also think of those who’ve harmed us, and we have compassion for them. Strong recognition that by their harming us, they’re creating suffering for themselves, We have compassion for them, wanting them not to have suffering. Contemplating this. And now we think, you know what, now we take the medicine, we’ll do the practice. We thought this is the power of the remedy, the antidote.
So we’ll just do it quickly and simply. We’ll give you the idea, and the practice is written in the course notes so you can do it more leisurely. The third step is where you take the medicine. So we’ll do the visualization. So we imagine we’ll just do one time.
There’s actually three stages of visualization. We can do tomorrow more slowly. We’ll just do one. So you visualize from the heart of the Guru Buddha. The Guru as the Buddha, the Buddha as the Guru.
He stands very powerful, like a hose of energy from his heart, very strong, this intensive blissful white light, like nectar, like nectar liquid, like a hose, very powerful. And it enters your crown and forcefully fills you up, just fills you completely, and forces out, you imagine, all the imprints of all the harm we’ve ever done with our body and speech to any living being, and all the imprints of all the delusions which are the source of this harm, and it forces all this energy out through our lower openings, you know, through our body like filthy liquid, just driving it out, disappearing into space, strongly visualizing this, wanting this happily, you know, as we recite the mantra, the Vajrasattva mantra. So if you know it, join in. If not, just concentrate on the sound and on the visualization. Just do three times.
He made it full of this radiant nectar and all the negative karma, all the filthy liquid disappeared into space. Not one atom left, full only of all the blissful qualities of my natural state. Delighted with this. Remember there’s no karma that can’t be purified, not permanent. Now the fourth step, in a way the most important, the resolve, the determination.
So, you know, if we can, if we’ve already got vows, or we’ve taken the vows never to kill, so of course we reiterate that vow, I will never kill, never lie, never steal, never whatever the vow is, know, that’s great. Now if you’ve never done that before, but you could say, maybe I will never kill again, then say that, state that. It’s extremely powerful. This guides your mind to do exactly that action, and you grow it every day stronger and stronger, you know. Now if you can’t, don’t lie to yourself, as Lama Zopa says.
You know, I won’t be angry again. Don’t say that if it’s not true, but give you don’t just be hopeless and say, oh, I’m so bad, I shouldn’t be angry again. Give yourself a a really accurate timeline. Like we mentioned last night, you know? You know, like if you’re not gonna you’re gonna do your practice at ten at night, let’s say you do it at night, and there’s no chance you’re gonna talk to anybody between now and tomorrow, then you can pretty much say I won’t be angry for ten hours, you know?
You really keep it, you’ll be delighted. So for us ourselves now, just your own some of your humane habits, know, your own rubbish ones, we all know them. Attachment, anger, depression, laziness, pride, whatever. Just make this determination. Say the ones you can say, I’ll never do again, but say the other ones, give yourself a reasonable timeline.
And be very practical, very kind to yourself. But mean it with own inner strength. This is how you build up, you know. Even if you can say for five minutes I will not gossip, that gives you power to say seven tomorrow, and eventually after twenty years you can say never, you know. It builds up, just like anything.
Practice makes perfect, you know. But we have to have the confidence to say this and know that this is the cause of our changing, our own determination, our own will, realistically, slowly, slowly. So contemplate. Make your determination to yourself. So now you imagine Guru Vajrasattva, kind of like a parent, a loving parent, so delighted with us, dissolves into white light and absorbs through our crown and comes to our heart chakra, imagine, right at the center of our chest.
And there you imagine the energy of the Buddha, the energy of the Lama, and my energy itself all merge, becoming one. I’m just thinking this is who I am. This you know, I am oneness with the Guru Buddha, my true nature. And then we finish the day just by dedicating. Think, you know, we sing the little prayers if you like on the yellow sheet.
We think, you know, as many moments as there have been throughout the day, all this listening we’ve all done, all this contemplating sussing things out, you know. As many moments as there have been is as many seeds I’ve planted, so delight in this, truly delight in these seeds, making the strong wish that they grow as quickly as possible, that we nourish them from this moment forward with our virtue, with our positive qualities. Allow them to grow, may they ripen as quickly as possible in the development of my own amazing potential for my sake and the sake of all living beings. And in the second little prayer we can just make the aspiration that, you know, compassion grow and grow. Then we can sing the third one which is the long life prayer, I think, for his holiness at Dalai Lama.
We also think it’s for the long life of Lamas of Rinpoche, for Khensur Rinpoche, for Geshe-la, for all the holy beings in this earth who are bringing goodness and benefit to others. We make the strong prayer they live long lives for the benefit of all of us.