Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin takes a rigorous, cognitive approach to love and compassion, arguing that emotions are habits of thought rather than ineffable feelings. She uses concrete examples—bike riding, the furry subculture, loneliness—to show how we deconstruct and retrain our minds. The core instruction centers on Tonglen, a visualization practice where you breathe in others’ suffering and breathe out happiness, building toward the bodhisattva ideal: a state where the sense of self dissolves and all beings become your constant concern, like a mother thinking of her sick child. She then explores the first four of the six perfections—generosity, morality, patience, enthusiastic perseverance—showing these are not passive virtues but active, courageous practices. Pitched at serious practitioners ready for demanding psychological and spiritual work.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 DAR 2003 06 22.mp3
UUID: 49e36574-fb4d-441b-a740-aee439dea253
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.0 minutes
Words: ~9,828
Whereas if you had this correct view, you’re able to see everybody else’s marvelous qualities and you’re able to rejoice in them and truly it gives you courage and happiness, you know. And that of course is, for most of us, it’s really tough to go to that point, but that’s an amazing capability if we’re able to do that, you know. I mean, isn’t that what practice is? You gotta do it realistically, but when you hop on a bike as a little kid, you’re faking it, baby, but, know, it’s only because you’re confident and you can have a vision of you being riding on a bike. Faking it till you make it.
Of course, you are. That’s what practice is. But you gotta have confidence that it’s a it’s a workable method because that’s all that’s all not grateful for the usual But are you false when you just a minute, really, though. Are you false when you’re a little kid and you jump on the bike and you’re off more than you’re on? Would your mother say, you’re so stupid.
You think you can ride a bike? Look at you, you can’t ride a bike. I mean, excuse me, she’s gonna encourage you. You you are faking it. You’re not really riding a bike, but you gotta do the faulting, you gotta do the mistakes to become a bike rider.
Come on, it’s how you learn anything. So why not love and compassion too? And that’s a bizarre thing in our culture. We think, oh, I love all saying, oh, may all sentient beings be happy, would be cheating, you know? You’re not cheating, you gotta just start with a thought.
Everything exists on the tip of the wish, the thought. Then you start to practice, and you know, love, we think of love as this big, emotional, amazing, incredible, mind boggling kind of cosmic experience. That’s attachment, baby. Love is this hard work of wanting another to be happy, practicing patience and generosity and forgiveness and spaciousness and compromising that you want them to be happy and you want them to be happy and you do what you can to be. It doesn’t mean that you’re excluded from it.
No way. So it’s hard work, it begins small and ends up very big, you know, if you’re doing it the right way, but it starts with the thoughts. Nowhere else. So, yes? Alright darling we talked exactly about it this morning, it’s very good.
No, never mind darling, go on, say your point. Totally connected, this is the whole point the Buddha’s saying sweetheart. Buddha’s view of the mind is that all the emotions are just habit of having certain thoughts so often that they’re now virtually instinctive and it comes along with this great big packaging of cotton wool of energy and they have very interesting ways of talking in tantra, like we were talking this morning about all the physical energies. So, you know, the wind energies get all kind of like a storm inside which is connected to anger so it’s explosive and the blood rises explosive and the blood rises and the heart beats, but we think the emotions are physical or we think it’s some feeling that’s beyond thoughts. But they’re totally, once you start to harness that energy, you start with meditation and with practice, you start to see your mind deeply and you get to the bare bones of those emotions and anger is nothing other than a bunch of thoughts dressed up in lots of emotion.
So you’ve to get to the level of seeing the thoughts and what are those thoughts? He is so horrible, how dare you do this to me, I hate him, he is ugly, he, it’s all thoughts honey. But it’s dressed in this huge emotional package. So we have to first look at, start to harness the emotion and get deeper, deeper, this is why we can call it cognitive therapy because it comes to how you think and that’s what you’re changing. You start to harness the emotion and we can do this, not suffocate it and then we just start to see the thoughts at the base.
Darling, in emotion, excuse me, what’s loneliness? Analyze, what’s the words? You tell me, what are the words of loneliness? Say the words. What’s loneliness?
Say the words. No, say the words as if you’re feeling it. Now speak the words. Speak your feelings, say the words of a lonely person. Say, go on, say what, go on.
So I’m saying I don’t be loved, no one loves me, I feel lonely, I need someone else to love me, I’m so unhappy, I’m no good without anybody else. They’re words, aren’t they? They’re thoughts, aren’t they? It’s a viewpoint, isn’t it? It’s a viewpoint, isn’t it?
You change your viewpoint, you got to recognize it first and you slowly change it. You argue with it. This is what practice is. You have to start hearing it. That’s why you first go to a therapist, no, excuse me, when we’re two years old we had this and three years old we run to mommy.
Mommy says, darling, it’s alright, you’re a beautiful little girl and then, oh, I am my mommy, but excuse me, we’re still three years old wanting someone else to tell us. We haven’t weaned ourself yet. We still need mommy to tell us we’re lovely, it’s why we crave everybody else, please tell me you love me, you love me, please, I’m no good without it. I’m not being mean to us. But the trouble is, when they do say it, we go, oh, you don’t really love me.
So who doesn’t believe it? I don’t believe it. That’s where the problem is. The men I blame everybody else for not loving me, but I don’t, I can’t let them love me because I think I’m a creep, but I blame them, that’s why we’re so wicked. I don’t mean it in a mean way, but look how we work, but we have to see our mind doing all these games.
But it’s also spontaneous that we don’t even notice the thoughts because we think what we feel is true. Do you see? It’s all a cognitive process. It’s just that it goes to very subtle levels and so spontaneous, second nature. And is chemistry karma?
What’s chemistry? Chemistry means that something is living. Oh, you mean between two people? The only reason, darling, know, you vibrate and he vibrates, assuming it’s a he, is because you’ve got strong karmic connection and you’ve been very kind to each other and so you see each other now and all the virtue ripens, you get all sparkly and lovely, you know? That’s all.
That’s just a physical chemical balance, chemical reaction. Yes, it is. But the trouble is because we think that means he then that makes us think he’s so totally divine. And then you think he’s then you expect him to make you happy and that’s where all attachment plugs in because that we talked about this morning too. And then you have all these expectations, then you get upset when he doesn’t make you happy, and then so on and so forth, all the dramas come, you know.
So, yeah, sure, good feeling between two people is just the result of virtue. Angry feeling between two people is a result of non virtue, that’s why. Same thing. And even this attachment, which is the response to the good feeling, attachment is, oh, this is nice, you know, he must cause this so I better keep having him make me have this nice feeling. But it’s just the build up.
Attachment is also just the build up of life after life after life after life of seeing that particular kind of person like, you know, let’s say it’s a male whom you’re attracted to. You know, we’ve ourselves to think this thing with a dangly thing and two legs and a flat chest is appealing. That’s what we’ve thought about it, life after life and so when we’re in the animal realm and the human realm, we keep practicing it and practicing it and practicing it, right? Now if you find the other one, you know, with the one with two blobs and a hole in the middle, we find that appealing because it’s just karma, there’s nothing inherently beautiful about a female body or a male one, it’s just life after life after life of seeing it as nice, so we build up this big picture of it being nice, and when we meet it, it gives us a buzzy feeling. Now excuse me, darling, this just shows how bizarre it is, but I know I read lots of magazines, right?
And in a magazine called Vanity Fair a few years ago, read this fascinating article about people called furries and they are people, it was mostly in America but I’m sure they’re everywhere. Not being rude, I’m about to tell you. You listen. They’re people mostly, it’s interesting that they worked out that it’s mostly white intelligent sort of techie males. They are people who are totally attracted sexually and have sex with their furry toys.
So look at this, it shows how empty everything is. They have a piece of cloth cut in the shape of a little fox or a little Mickey Mouse, you know, two little bead eyes, they completely get turned on and they have sex with it. This boy pointed to the, you know, the broken stitches on his toy. That’s their sexual object. So if you think of this karmically, it’s in the western world, the fetish with comics, the personification of animals, then the fetish with pets.
So please be careful with your attachment to your pets. I’m very serious. They’ve got morality. They got born as a good human being, you know, but they’ve got obsession, this fetish that’s built up from attachment. Attachment means you look at my little children, you’re completely, and forget about us little children.
Well how attachment works is you have a certain thing and you make this huge, we call it fantasy, okay? That can be very useful if you can get good learning from it, but it just becomes this huge attachment object. Attachment builds up and builds up and the next life it literally becomes sexual attachment. All a sexual attachment is is very intense attachment. That’s all it is.
It’s question of degree and we can see in this strange world we’re getting more bizarre by the minute in terms of what object turns you on. It’s just familiarity with a certain object being totally so you look at the kids. I mean, I’m so grateful that my snobby mom didn’t let us have comics in our house. She didn’t let us. I’m grateful because I didn’t get obsessed with all these comics things, these cute animals, you know, and you personify them, make them so cute and gorgeous little cutie cuties.
I mean, these furries, they’re their own all these there’s this glossary of terms they use, how they behave, they now found each other on the web naturally and you know and they go to these conferences and hotels and they all get dressed up in their furry fox uniforms and their Mickey Mouse uniforms and they all dance and they jump onto each other, do special things called scritching and all kinds of things. They don’t have sex with each other. The weird ones upstairs do very strange things. You don’t talk about them, know, they’re weird. But the normal ones, they don’t have sex with each other, they have sex with the furry animal itself.
A piece of cloth cut in a certain shape. Pardon? Excuse me, but Buddha would say we’re all furries, it’s just we have obsession with humans. Things cut in a certain shape that happens to have a mind in it. So we make our projections and our fantasies.
Okay, the saving grace is we can actually develop love and compassion for each other. You can’t do much with a furry toy. But it just really shows that everything’s empty, nothing has an inherent nature. We see this female form or a male form, we get completely excited and especially you poor men, you can’t help it, can you? You know, how they talk about men, the poor things, you know and you know all their bits do the thing, you know.
I mean this is an interesting point, my Greek friend Panos, actually I used to tell his story all the time and I felt embarrassed I hadn’t asked his permission. I’d asked him last time in Athens, said, Robina, you have my permission. Tell this story. He’s completely, he’s now forty and he’s calmed down, he said, but he’s completely, totally attached to women. I mean, when he was six, he remembers walking on the street in Athens with this mummy, saw a cinema, the naked lady on the cinema and he said, mommy, why is my penis standing up?
And of course, she totally died of embarrassment being a very strict Greek Orthodox mummy and then the lady in the cinema made a joke about how to be a lady killer. But he remembers this vividly, so the Buddhist view of this is because there’s so much familiarity with sex and attraction to female forms that just there he is, he’s programmed. He’s programmed, that’s all. So all his little body parts do their thing. Because the attachment, the mind is just triggered and all the energies are triggered and all the things do the right bits, know.
That’s all, it’s just programming. It’s just karma, life after life after life. So of course what happens is, it’s feelings we say. What can I do about feelings? I’m made this way, I didn’t ask to get born, it’s not my fault, so I can’t help raping women.
I mean, you see my point here. Just the way we think. We’re like this victim of this body and this is the point that I said before, we give all this power to our body but it’s just, it’s all coming from the programming in the mind, from life after life of attachment. That’s all. And then you know, you vary your things, vary what you like and you’re gonna turn into a furry or you turn into the, you know, who want people who want to pee on each other or they want to kind of do the heavy duty things.
Mean the variations of it in our desperate wish to get satisfaction, look to the lengths we go to, you know. Look at four old, what’s his name? The one yesterday I mentioned, Jeffrey Dahmer, torturing and skinning and doing the most bizarre things to suffering sentient beings and he got his orgasm from that. It’s just karma, that’s all endless life after life and habits. That’s why we’ve got to watch everything our mind does, every moment, every thought, everything because everything counts.
It’s not being neurotic, it’s just the law of nature. Just like if you’re a gardener, you watch every seed that goes in your ground, you know, because you know the consequences. Was the edge though to attachment? Demystifying it, saying it’s not like this. I mean it’s very hard and everything’s doing its thing but it’s to not believe in your karmic appearances, and I can see.
One of the first ones is don’t believe it, it’s true. I mean it’s very hard when you get it. This is a tragedy of attachment why it’s so hard to see it’s bad, so called bad, know, suffering. That everything seems to be causing you to have good. Even the fairies, I’m not being rude about them, they said, you know, we thought we’re all weird and now we’ve realized we’re like, you know, we’re all the same and we realize we’ve now found our purpose in life, and we now feel very happy.
So our problem is in our general view in the world is if it feels good, it must be good. We really have that as a fundamental philosophy. Buddha says it’s not a valid philosophy. He’s not being moralistic. I mean, people felt good when they heard Hitler.
Excuse me, it’s no criterion. Because it feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Only reason something feels good is because you’ve done it that often. And this is a tragedy, like I said yesterday, about delusions. One of the consequences of the habit of a certain delusion is it makes you feel good.
The person who’s upset is very angry. I know in my life I felt so good being angry, so important, so righteous. The person who goes fishing, they don’t know why they’re attracted to it like a magnet but they just feel good. That blinds you from seeing the suffering you’re causing the fish. That blinds you from seeing the suffering you’re causing yourself.
So we have to start questioning even what our feelings are. This is the Buddha’s view, you know. Deconstructing our own mind, not believing in our karmic appearances as Lama Zopa says. And understanding how these states of mind work. And how do we know this?
This is Buddhist psychology now, okay? You don’t have to have Buddha’s, you can have Jung if you wish, it’s up to you. This is describing the according to Buddha’s view, which I find frankly quite intelligent, quite sophisticated, and quite workable. That’s my view. So that means I have to know it.
If I don’t even know how to identify attachment even verbally, how the hell can I see it in my own mind? Therefore, how the hell can I recognize it’s a problem and how the hell can I change it? I can’t. So I have to hear it, think about it, meditate on it, study it, hear it, debate it, think about it, meditate until it begins to become real for me, then I’ve got something to apply to my life, you know. And of course here we’re talking about karma too, you know.
The process, how it works. Is it possible to have a connection or relationship with somebody without that attachment? Oh darling, that’s the whole point. That’s why you know it’s better to have a relationship with a person than a furry, with an animal, with a toy because it’s something to give back. You know we can act in relation to each other and develop something.
That’s why you’ve got a karmic connection between people. So the Israelis and the Palestinians have a very strong karmic connection. They’re like family. Look at them, you can’t even see the difference between them, just about. In this little piece of land, I’ve been there, it’s thirty kilometers wide.
I mean, at the fuss and bother. It’s thirty kilometers wide, you know. It’s from here to the other side of Adelaide. That’s Israel. And look at the energy.
The karma between these groups of people is just stunning, you know. So if you’re really trying to practice which is extremely hard, you know you’ve got the karmic connection and that’s an opportunity to start lifting it up. So you can either drag it down into an incredible attachment and destroy each other like vampires, you can drag it down and have incredible enemies, or you can start working with it and bring it up and start developing love and compassion and wisdom in relation to each other, that’s the job. That’s why we need karmic connection first. You’ve to have someone to balance against and that’s our practice.
That person in our life, our mother, our father, our sister, our lover, our dog, our cat, our teacher, they are our practice. How fantastic. Okay, the chocolate creaks practice too but the real one because we can benefit sentient beings as well. That’s the point, you know. It’s up to us.
You gotta have the karma connection, you know, to do that. So it’s up to us, you know. So the heart technique in this type of way, in this type of approach to developing enormous love and compassion which culminates in great compassion, culminates in bodhicitta, then in combination with the wisdom wing culminates in this simple meditation, a deceptively simple technique called Tonglen in Tibetan, means giving and taking, giving and taking. People go into retreat and do this for years. And it’s really simple and simply speaking, the essence of it and there are very many variations of how you can do it and once you get the idea, you can do it as many ways you like, it’s up to you, you know, it’s so simple.
A five year old can understand it. Essentially, it’s a method for developing love and compassion. That’s all. Love is the wish that others be happy and wanting to make them happy. That’s the altruistic level.
Compassion is the wish that you don’t suffer and wanting to take away the suffering. So Tonglen is a method for doing this. And it’s a simple technique and you know, you could visualize one person in front of you to say your friend with a headache. When you breathe out, so you can do it using your breath. You can do it many other ways too in your mind because it’s again your mind.
Can do it using your breath because it’s helpful and you do is one one approach would be you’d visualize at your heart like a rock, which is your self-cherishing. They say the main obstacle to all this love and compassion is what they call self-cherishing, is like selfishness, you know, putting me first. The main obstacle on the wisdom wing to realizing emptiness is self grasping, this primordial mistaken sense of self. The main obstacle to bodhicitta is self-cherishing, you know. So you visualize it at your heart and say, this little rock which is your self-cherishing, putting self first, I in the middle of the universe, you know.
So then, you know, you just simply simply, what you do is when you breathe out, when you breathe in, you breathe in, you would take upon yourself, you would visualize literally sort of in every way you like, stripping off them their headache and putting it onto yourself and it, breathing it in and kind of smashing yourself, cherishing. When you breathe out, you breathe out all your good qualities like blissful light, your happiness, your lack of headache, your health, and you give it to them and you imagine them having it. Now it’s interesting again, it’s the same attitude of seeing yourself as lowest of all. If a person with a lot of low self esteem and self hate and misery does this, it wouldn’t be very practical, it would not be a good meditation, I wouldn’t advise it because there’s going to be this vivid sense of self. Oh, I’m taking upon myself all this suffering.
I’m giving them all my happiness. I mean, it’s really unhealthy because you’ve got a wrong sense of self. So if you’ve got the appropriate sense of self, then it’s not so much you’re saying I’m making on this, I’m taking on this suffering, I’m taking on this suffering, that’s not the point at all. What you’re really thinking is I’m taking away their suffering, I’m taking away their suffering, I don’t care, I’m having it, who cares, I can handle it. I don’t want them to suffer.
The emphasis is on them, not poor me taking on this suffering, martyr, martyr. That’s not the point. And then giving, you’re not thinking, oh I’m giving them all my happiness, I’m giving them my happiness, I’m giving them my happiness. No, you’re saying, oh good, I’m so happy they’re happy now. It’s like the love of the mother, they say, you know.
I mean, even one of my friends in prison, my friend, I remember said Silencio, you know, my Mexican friend, my gangster friend. Even he, this compassion in his heart blows my mind sometimes. He said when he sees all the suffering of these young guys, his young or his people, he means the Mexicans, you know, these young gangsters, well, their hearts breaking. He said, they’re all so young, you know, these young boys coming in, fifteen, sixteen, all this. He said, I’d rather me than remember being.
I’m here the evil eye. I wish I could take on their suffering and they could leave, because I’m here anyway. I mean, that’s profound to have that thought. You’ve got to have a sense of, a powerful sense of self to be able to do this appropriately. So it’s not a much that you’re taking on suffering and I’m giving them my happiness, it’s that you don’t want them to suffer and you want them to be happy and I might as well do it, you know.
I can handle it, no worries. It’s like a very strong attitude, you know. And so of course doing it is what huge can open your heart to compassion, love, these things. It’s the most simple but practical technique for hugely growing love and compassion, love and compassion. When you give the happiness, you’re developing love.
When you take upon yourself the suffering, you’re developing compassion, you know. So this culminates in the development of love and compassion. This is the essential technique. There are other things that you think about before, you know, to get yourself to this point, various techniques that you use. I didn’t say all of those.
Like contemplating how others are you know, you’re equal with others. And you start to contemplate how others are more important than you and this kind of thing, you know, step by step. You think these things, seeing the logic of them, the logic of them, the logic of them. So they build build up new, brand new concepts until they eventually become packed into feelings. Right now, we’ve got really wrong concepts packed in feelings called anger and attachment.
We wanna deconstruct those and change them. So now we’ve gotta build up, you know, new concepts. Love starts with the mind as well. It’s a simple bare thought, may you be happy. But it builds up and it becomes very emotional.
So when it’s love and it’s very full of emotion, that’s amazing and compassion. We just gotta change the emotions, make them positive, that’s all. Grounded in positive thoughts, that’s all. These are extremely practical techniques, all these, but you gotta do it. It means you gotta employ, you gotta actually think these things and that’s where definitely meditation it does count, it does help.
But in broad terms, we can still do it hugely in our life. I mean, can do Tonglen every day. I’m sure you see homeless people. And the first thing that will probably occur in our mind, especially on a chilly day, let’s say, when you see a homeless person, the first thought that usually occurs would be, God, what a relief it’s not me. But how about thinking just to think of it, just to practice?
Imagine going over to them, Hi, here’s my car key, look, here’s my address, there’s my house, you give me your clothes and your raggy thing now and I’ll sit here, you go go home and take my house. Think that even for a minute, that is mind boggling, I tell you. Don’t think, oh, what what good does that do? Excuse me, you’re training yourself to think differently, then you can act differently. Gotta start with the mind.
So just to think that is so outrageous, you can’t imagine. I’ve heard lamas over say just even have one kind thought about anybody is like a miracle, is like an absolute miracle. This is stunning, you know, like eons of purification. Incredible. So don’t be surprised that one day you’ll be able to do it.
That’s what you’re doing when you meditate on these things. You’re training yourself. Like, you know, George just didn’t become a dentist overnight, oh I want be a dentist, want to be a dentist, I better go and take people’s teeth out. You have to go and sit and look at his boring old books for many years, looking like he’s all being selfish. Why aren’t you out there helping people, you know, with their pain?
Well I’ve got to learn it first, says. Well same as sitting in your meditation, doing Tonglen, you got to learn it first and become it first, then you can do it. And that’s like on that did I tell the story about Harry falling off the mountain? I did. The only reason Harry could be up there and see these four people and step the side rather him fall down than them and actually not have a second thought about it was because he’s done these meditations until he’s eventually realized them.
In other words, he actually did put people first. It was of it was a second nature and he wasn’t sitting there being some drama queen, oh, I’m putting you first. Look at me, look at me. Excuse me, a low self esteem person could never do that. You see my point?
There’s no way you could do that. A low self esteem person would be hysterical. That’s like joining the human race, all of us. Couldn’t do that unless you’ve meditated to the point that you’ve perfected those realizations and then you could do it without a second thought. Happily put others first.
That’s why meditating. Practice, training, faking it till you make it, absolutely. So then all this culminates in bodhicitta. And bodhicitta is simply a level of what they call great compassion which is it’s my job. Dalai Lama calls it universal responsibility.
That’s my job, know. What can I do about it? This kind of brave attitude rather than this sort of, you know, either seeing the compassion and weeping and weeping but not thinking what can I do about it because that’s what gives you strength? Or seeing all the suffering and getting dragged down by it. That’s no good at all, you know.
So the bodhicitta one is a very specific, focused type of great compassion. It’s the one that finally says, listen, this suffering is so unbearable. You have such heartfelt compassion for all beings. You’ve already totally taken on the responsibility to do what can, but now you think the only way I can truly benefit all these sentient beings, truly be qualified, is to become a Buddha, which means the fully developed wisdom wing and the infinite development of all this compassion, you know. So now you enter the bodhisattva path.
From the first moment of having this, they say the the criterion of the first the criterion of having achieved even the first moment of bodhicitta, it means enlightening mind. It’s the mind of enlightenment, this huge level of great compassion that wants to become a Buddha as quickly as possible. Single pointed focus. I see all these people with horrible teeth problems, I have to become a dentist. Focus on becoming a dentist.
Nothing else. Have to become a dentist to benefit others. That’s the bodhicitta, you know. Because you know you’ve got to do it yourself. So you become a Buddha as quickly as possible.
That’s your wish. So the first the criterion one of the criteria of the first moment of bodhicitta is it’s no longer the thought of I. Not doesn’t doesn’t arise. I mean, you’re not stupid. You know you’re you.
Don’t make a mistake. It’s not, you know, cutting someone else’s toenails instead of your own. You know you’re you, but there’s no longer that usual sense of self, that sense that isolated, miserable, poor me, unhappy me, depressed me, jealous me, angry me, lonely me, tired me, no longer that concept. Just does not occur. Just doesn’t occur.
It’s just others. Like a mother, they say it’s like a mother whose child is very sick and all the mother does day and night, she’s thinking, sleeping, dreaming, she’s cooking, she’s on the toilet, going to the shopping, smiling at people in the back of her mind, isn’t it? Constantly is the thought of her sick child. Or they say Bodhisattvas are like that, but it’s all living beings are their sick children, you know. So no matter what they’re doing, they say even their breath is a benefit to others because they’re all the time on their mind to be doing.
Not anxious, not neurotic, but powerful. So you’re constantly working on this path so that you can become this Buddha because then you’re fully qualified. Then you have these omniscience to see their minds perfectly. Perfectly. You have this infinite level of compassion, and you have this effortless power to do whatever needs to be done to benefit each one perfectly for as long as it takes.
As Dalai Lama said, bodhisattvas have huge ego. Or the other time he said, they think in terms of eons. Never give up. So then you go through the practices to perfecting this bodhicitta and wisdom as well. You do, you know, so you do, you practice what they call the six perfections of the bodhisattva.
That’s just a way of describing the various practices that you now continue to do through which you perfect all these qualities which culminate finally in Buddhahood. So the first of these six is called generosity. Now this is a very interesting one, or giving or charity, as Lama Zopa calls it because that’s a common term in the West, isn’t it, for sort of institutional giving? Charity. So there’s different levels of giving.
The first is giving what sentient beings need, giving a mouthful of food to a dog, giving money to a hungry person, you know, giving giving something else, giving material things to beings. Then there’s giving advice, giving spiritual advice. I mean, we loved that one. That’s easy. We don’t like giving things.
Mean, sounds cruel, but one Tibetan lover asked what he thought of the West. Westerners. He said, Westerners are really generous, but not with money, he said. Because we consider money this kind of this real, you know, that’s that’s power. And if you give five of them away, you get very nervous.
I’ve got five less we think. But I mean actually we don’t understand we don’t understand it because we haven’t thought about it enough because we don’t understand that the reason we have anything in this life, even a grain of rice, not not to mention sitting here with all these things and are easy to get like we talked before, is because of unbelievable giving in past lives. The two main causes for a human life, for a reasonable human life. Morality is the cause of a human body, generosity is the cause of having anything. Past generosity.
So you know, if you’ve got a garden full of flowers, there’s no point just sitting there, you know, possessing everyone and being nervous about cutting any flowers. You’ve to keep giving them away and then you keep planting more seeds. It’s just obvious, you know. You keep pruning the trees and you keep encouraging the growth. If you grasp onto your little trees, you’ll get nothing.
So that’s really we to practice, and I can see this in my own life. I had to really practice it, you know, especially with it for myself with this prison project over the years. It was like I saw I had no choice. If I wanted it to grow, I had to do it, you know. And it was really difficult because, I mean, I’ve never had anything in my whole life.
So it’s easy think, oh, I’m poor, how can I give? But what I have seen is the more I’m able to give, more I get, more comes. Just as like a miracle and I can say it with absolute confidence from my own experience, you know. So we can still be practical and have budgets and everything, but we have to practice in many ways giving. Giving to homeless people and I don’t mean giving fifty cents.
I’m talking about giving five or ten dollars which even one would have done twenty years ago without a blink, know, because we’re so mean we can’t better do it. Then we have all this rationalization, well, excuse me, they’re smelly and they could be drugs and they might buy guns and how do I I mean you want to contract with them before you give them five dollars you know? Don’t do this with it, this with it, this with it. I mean imagine if your boss wanted you to swear you wouldn’t use drugs and you wouldn’t buy guns and you wouldn’t buy bad things, you wouldn’t buy unhealthy food with the money they’re going to pay you, you’d sue him. Well why should we expect that of a beggar, know?
I mean they’re there, it’s a deal, you don’t have to give but if you give, give freely. Give with them an open heart, know? Just give, just give, know? They need it, they’re there. And also this is on a karma, they’re in front of you now, they’re not in front of me.
They’re your beggar, okay? They’re your homeless person. Give them what they need. Not a banana. They don’t want a banana.
They want five dollars, please. Reminds me, where’s Joe? Owe you that twenty dollars I have to give back to him. We gave this old drunk twenty dollars yesterday, day before, wasn’t it? So he’s around to put it’s better than alcohol.
Who cares? You know? Excuse me. It’s not anger’s worse than alcohol. Come on.
So anyway, giving. Giving in whatever way we can, you know? And I mean, giving, we even have to understand it too. There’s more sometimes it’s more skillful. If you really wanna give and you wanna budget into your life, and I think it’s important to budget into your life, and everything I’ve ever done, jobs I’ve always done, we always budgeted every month a certain amount of money to give to different projects.
Give to Lama Zopa’s projects, give to the monastery to do pujas for us, but just budget it in, you know? So budget it into your life. Don’t just say, yeah, I’m a bit generous when I’ve got enough money. Excuse me. Giving creates the cause for you to get money.
I know many people who really say that, and I know it’s true too. You budget it. And so it’s also skillful if you can only give to some things. Well, it’s best to give to things that help people’s minds as well as their bodies, you know. Lama Zopa says, giving to even one dog one mouthful of food is inconceivable.
Giving food to the entire universe is just beyond imagination. But giving one piece of spiritual advice to one person is even superior because it could benefit them for countless lives and therefore countless other people. Whereas giving food to everybody on this earth only benefits their bodies, and they die anyway. So it’s skillful giving too, you know. So giving to your dharma center is the most sublime way to give.
You’re just infinitely more meritorious, more beneficial in the long term than the short term, you know. So be skillful how you give. And give small amounts, it’s okay. One tiny dollar goes a long way when it mixes with other dollars, you know. But it’s the attitude of wanting to give and we have to train in that.
And I’ll tell you one very good way to train in that, you know when we get bills from the gas people, from the phone company, from the visa, the first instinct is to curse it, know. How dare, oh my god, oh how much and we’d wait till thirty days comes and we would begrudgingly write the check. Excuse me, practice being delighted and I’m serious now. Practice when you open it up being delighted. And how kind the phone company are for giving you a service for this entire month and they’ve given you credit, how kind they are.
I must quickly pay my bill and I’m happy to pay my bill. Honestly, it’s an attitude. It’s an attitude you’re developing of giving. It’s very, very profound, you know? We’ve got all these mean attitudes, you know?
Don’t want to give, don’t want to do this, and we don’t mean, interestingly, even we were talking about this at lunchtime. We even don’t like we don’t even like to give to ourselves, you know? Because we’re so mean. I wanna spend this much. I might not have enough money, but not have too much this, not too much that, you know?
I was just we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves. We’re generous with ourselves. I don’t mean in a selfish way, but I mean in a kind way. Then if you can’t know how much to take care of yourself, how can you take care of someone else, you know? So practicing generosity is incredibly important.
I cannot tell you. It’s a doorway. Lama Tsongkhapa says in one of his lovely little Lamrim texts called Songs of Experience that, what does he say? Generosity is a wish fulfilling jewel with which you can fulfill the hopes of all sentient beings. It cuts the selfish knot of miserliness, and it’s the basis of the activity the Bodhisattva that develops the selflessness and undaunted courage to lead all sentient beings to enlightenment.
And he said it’s the basis of your good reputation throughout the world. I mean, that’s a nice bonus, you know. You get a good reputation as well, which is good because you can help people more. So generosity in us is the doorway. It’s the first of the six perfections.
It’s the least difficult but it’s the doorway to connect and you check what you’re doing with being generous. Instead of me and mine, you know, it’s always me and mine and kind of tight and nervous. When you start to give, you’re encompassing others, aren’t you? You’re expanding yourself to encompass others. It’s a way to connect with others and if more than anything, what you’re trying to do on the Bodhisattva wing is expand your consciousness out of this miniature me to encompass the universe, you know?
So the criterion of giving, of of having perfected giving, this is where it shows how shocking it is. This is how far we have to go. The criterion of having perfected this perfection of generosity is that you can give your life to a starving animal without the blink of an eye. I mean, I know that sounds over the top, but this is how they describe in the text, like when the Buddha, when he was a Bodhisattva in a past life, saw the mummy tiger, the starving tiger about to eat her babies. And he was so full of compassion for the mummy tiger because she creates such negative karma eating her babies, he happily offered his body without a second thought to the mummy tiger out of compassion.
Or as someone said one time in talking about Bodhisattvas, you know, that the action for that person, the action of cutting off his hand and feeding a starving animal was as inconsequential as a leaf falling off a tree. I never forget those words. So that’s interesting too. There’s no way you can do that with just compassion. The only person who’s capable of that, like Harry, doing what Harry did, there’s no way you could do that with just compassion because it’s too limited because ego is invested in our compassion now.
Have to have accomplished to some extent the wisdom wing. You have to have gone beyond I. You have to have realized emptiness. Then your compassion can just soar, and you can give your body with that without a second thought because the Bodhisattva who can cut their hand off for a starving animal, and clearly there’s no butcher shop around the corner because Bodhisattva is not trying to prove something. You know, they it’s because there’s no longer the concept of I.
There’s just meaningless. All they can see is suffering. And what they see is here, you know, however many kilos, seventy kilos of meat. Please eat, you know, no worries. I mean like that, so maybe we can start with giving as Lums Over says, one tiny, tiny drop of blood to the mosquito.
Just a tiny drop of blood, know. Just watch it, it’ll feed up, a little tiny belly will fill and leave you in peace. What do you do for the each six weeks later? Come on. Six weeks later, it won’t.
Fleas do. Well, fleas do, I know. But this is where, you know, okay, you’re someone like Lama Yeshe, know, he’s he feeds his, you know, he feeds his body to the creatures. One time somebody said that they when they were his attendant and that was very hot in India, and they had to serve him a cup of tea early in the morning, and they came in and he was meditating. And he had a cloth over his head, but his shirt, his his body was naked.
I mean, this top part and all the mozzies eating, you know, happily feeding on his blood. I mean, we got to start small with one mozzie, you know. I can just be humble about it. So then that’s generosity, okay? Perfection of generosity.
The second one is the perfection of morality or ethics if you like and really what we’ve done up until now is not stop, non stop practicing a morality. Morality, as I said, is too well, I mean, what level we’re practicing up until now is morality of not harming others, which is an amazing proactive action. We don’t think of it as very active as merely not harming, but it’s a stunning thing to do. If you stop killing, my god, look at all the happy roaches and mosquitoes and rats, you know? They’re all living now.
They’re so they’re so fortunate. All Look at all those happy people who, you know, when you stop lying, when you stop stealing. There’s so much of benefit to others. It’s the first level of morality which is in the first scope and the second scope. The second level of morality is the more energetic external one where you actively benefit others.
You get out there and work for others. You benefit the sick, you benefit the poor, you benefit those in prison, you benefit those here who need it, you benefit those whoever need it. The rich, the poor, the crazy, whatever, okay, know, can get a bit mind boggled thinking you kind of have a long list, well, what will I do? Where will I go? You know?
Oh my god. It’s so exhausting. You don’t have to think that way. Just deal with what’s in front of you is enough. The only reason I’m doing the prison project, believe me, I didn’t choose it as a career.
A person wrote it. It came on my desk. What choice did I have? There it was, karma ripened, know. Then another letter came, oops, another letter came, what can I do by the two years at the end of the first year, forty letters?
I had no choice. Okay, I did, I could have, it was a bit nerve wracking, but I felt, what can I do? There it is, these guys, they need me, they’re so desperate, they’ve got to have it. The need was there, I had the means, do it. You take it, you run with it, you know?
You don’t have to go off and be Mother Teresa somewhere, you do it with your life. I mean, this great guy, this person I said, seemed like a bodhisattva, sitting quietly in a big city in America taking care of his old auntie with cancer. That’s it, that’s his job, plus his meditation. He is not like a bodhisattva, but he’s this amazing being taking this simple opportunity in front of him. The dog that’s in front of you, the rats, the mice, the humans.
Just deal with your life, you know, what’s in front of your life. If you take each door as it opens, more doors will open. If you block yourself off, you’ll stay stuck, you know. So you take the opportunity that arises, the wish to benefit others. Don’t be walking around like an all holy person with a halo.
Just when it arises, the people in front of We’ve an opportunity a thousand times a day if we want to take it, you know. This leads to the next one which is called patience. Now patience is interesting because we use such a wrong we have such a wrong meaning on patience, you know? We think patience is kind of gritting your teeth and waiting for this horrible thing to go away. We really just think another variation of anger, frustration, isn’t it?
That is not patience, believe me. Patience is this hugely brave, courageous attitude that when something comes along that you can’t change, like the mean person, the person at work, the red lights, doesn’t matter what it is, you know. A thousand times a day we have an opportunity. Something comes along that is what our attachment doesn’t want, right? Then that’s an opportunity to welcome it.
Totally welcome it. It’s a challenge, challenge, it’s like a push up. When you’re forced against the muscles, it’s gonna force you to develop patience and patience is this welcoming attitude, this very brave attitude that welcomes, brings into, you walk into it, you welcome this thing that you do not want. And of course, the first kind they talk about is accepting the abuse. Okay, we mightn’t get anybody who abuses us.
We always have people who are mean to us at some level, you know. Even the people we love all the time, upsetting us, saying wrong things to kids, the husband, whatever, you know. There’s a thousand opportunities a day to welcome that difficulty, that abuse or that other one is the sickness and the suffering, you know. In other words, say in Buddhism, if you can change something, please change it, you know. But if you can’t, excuse me, why worry?
I mean, sounds sort of ridiculous, it sounds outrageous, but it’s an extremely profound attitude. And it’s very brave because we analyze again like we talked yesterday. Fear, panic is at the basis of all our delusions. There’s this kind of current of panic just at the surface. Sometimes it comes so strong, we all know.
It’s just we’re kind of trying to make it go away most of the time, you know. So when a strong thing of really mean person comes and insults or hurts you, it’s just if you look at the profound panic, it’s just so painful. It’s like you’re dying, you know. And so then the hurt and the anger and resentment and the blaming and the bitterness and the pointing fingers and the on and on and on on, we never let go of it. The attitude of patience is this very courageous attitude of, due to karma, here it is, you know, there it is, and welcoming it.
If you can change it, fine. If not, then it’s a marvelous opportunity to strengthen yourself, to deepen and expand yourself, to harden, you know, to grow grow your compassion, to grow your all these things. It’s an amazing quality actually of patience. Not at all like we think it is. It’s a very deep and big brave attitude.
I mean the guys in prison, I can especially see where you can’t even get a glass of water when you want it. You can get nothing. You can’t move without being told what to do. The door open, the door close. You can’t cook for yourself.
You can’t do anything for yourself. Everything is bureaucracy, endless forms, endless waiting. It’s like a war it’s just like a nightmare of bureaucracy, not to mention all the other things. So unless you’ve got patience, unless you’ve got this attitude of accepting this is how it is, this is how it is. You go mad.
You go mad, definite. It was a hugely brave attitude, patience. And they say, you’ve perfected patience. They say this in the Lama Chopa, in that Guru Puja text. You’ve perfected patience when even if everyone on this earth harms you, lies to you, steals from you, kills you, you happily, happily continue to work for their benefit in response to that harm.
So again, way to go, you know. That’s the perfection of patience. As Geshe Lhundup Sopa one time said, you know, this wonderful old lama, one of Lama Zopa’s root gurus, as he said, and he’s on the throne, he led forward and he said, Bodhisattvas need their enemies. It’s If you’re trying to develop good muscles, you need do you need the tough ground to do your push ups against. It’s gonna be really painful but you’ve got to have it.
We need enemies. We’ve got to be very brave to have that attitude. So of course, at the first level of practice, if we can’t bear it when it’s when people harm us and indeed the life is full of suffering and it’s very crushing, if we’re still at the level of having delusions, we need to remove ourselves from the enemies. It’s very obvious because you’ll be crushed to death, you know, you’ll die, you’ll go mad. But when you’ve really strengthened yourself and you’ve developed a wisdom wing and you can go along to the compassion level, you can then have this courage of bearing your enemies.
And you want your enemies around because that’s the biggest challenge, you know. The next one is called enthusiastic perseverance and the opposite to this is called laziness. It’s kind of scary what George and I were talking about this morning, you know. Laziness is this, you know, laziness is the main obstacle for most of us, you know.
The attitude of enthusiastic perseverance or joyful effort is what we need to develop and this is the fourth of these six perfections and it is the most necessary one in order to succeed. We can all see in our life the person who’s successful is the one who’s got enthusiasm. Effort, they make effort. They go against the grain, they push beyond their comfort zone. And you have enthusiasm doing it.
That’s the person who’s successful. And again, I can see this with my gangster friends. They’ve really got enormous enthusiasm for their gangs and now they’ve got it for the dharma. The same enthusiasm. It’s the one that makes you successful.
And the opposite is laziness, like I said. There’s three kinds of laziness. The first kind is ordinary, can’t be bothered, need a sleep, it’s too much effort, just can’t do it, you know. Just go for a while, you just have to rest, just exhausted. It’s a major one, the grossest one for us.
The second one is very sneaky. We don’t think of it as laziness. It’s the one of really of this attitude we all have about the things we don’t want to do. Oh, we’re too busy. Put it off, put it off.
It’s that chronic disease we all have of putting it off. But we rationalize we make it virtue by saying, oh, I’m too busy. So definitely when it comes to our practice, when doing our commitments, doing our practice, I mean, you know, doing the things we promised we’d do every day like we’re talking, George and I were talking this morning again about this, you know. One has commitments and we don’t do. We don’t do because, oh, I’m too busy.
I can’t do it. I’m too busy, you know. And we say it as if it’s a virtue. But it’s just a great big cop out because we just we always put off the things we don’t want to do. We always run to the things we do want to do which means we go to the things we’re attached to and we avoid the things we don’t want to do.
There’s just too much effort. It’s the worst disease, you know. It’s the biggest obstacle for all of us and we make it sound like a virtue. Oh, I’m too busy, we say. The third one is the deepest delusion of all.
It’s the one that truly believes, oh, I can’t do it. I’m not capable. And it’s the worst cop out because we actually say it again like it’s like humility. It’s the biggest cop out of all. It’s a lie.
We’ve all got Buddha nature, Buddha says. We’ve all got the potential to do everything. It’s just a question of trying, that’s all. Being, you know, in the right place at the right time with the right conditions. So it’s a major cop out.
And when it comes to, let’s say, for example, if we’re spiritual practitioners, we’ve got these Lamas, you know, who are really amazing, like Lamas Opa doesn’t sleep. He’s said to be not sleeping. Right? I mean, you see him in the middle of the night, three o’clock in morning dealing with his students and blah blah blah, and then he meditates from when he stops the work, then the other students go to bed exhausted, his attendance, and then he goes from four in the morning till midday he does his practice. Then he works, then he teaches, and that’s his life.
Right? Now it sounds insane to most people. It sounds incomprehensible and impossible to attain. So of course we say, oh, that’s a slumbers open. I couldn’t do that.
But we’ve got to start first with the thought, Oh well, you know, I’d like to do that. But I mean that’s so exhausting because the thought of not having