Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin addresses a central tension in Buddhist practice: how can you embrace the law of karma without becoming cynical about suffering or blaming victims? She explains karma’s four ripening results—determining your rebirth, shaping your personality, creating your experiences, and forming your environment—then grounds these abstract concepts in contemporary tragedies: Columbine, Afghanistan, September 11. Through extensive Q&A with students, she shows how understanding karma deepens compassion rather than judgment, and resolves the apparent cruelty of the doctrine across many lifetimes. Designed for practitioners new to karma’s central role in Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 Unknown.mp3
UUID: 8d8f564e-160d-40af-ad81-23a00ad8aae4
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Unknown 1988 9 Cassettes (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1988 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~8,688
Just putting it into our minds. And it’s like this, you know. If you look into your mind now, or you don’t have look into your mind, you’d feel it, you know. If you’re sitting here, full of this overwhelming sense of urgency to become a Buddha as quickly as possible, because you just can’t bear the suffering of others, well then you know you don’t need to worry about thinking about your compassion, you already got it. But if we’re not like that, then this idea here is we’re trying to, you know, put these thoughts into the mind.
Everything exists on the tip of the wish. The first step in doing anything is the thought. So you know, we don’t think of emotions like that. But it’s true, the first step is the thought. So again, we’re looking at each of these points, touching on the various, you know, views that Buddha has about what’s real and what’s not, you know?
And again, to remind us that the the the the the process for internalizing these ideas, just like the process for internalizing music, carpentry or anything, is a question of familiarity. It’s familiarizing. Even the meaning of the word meditate in Tibetan. It’s it’s gom. It means to familiarize your mind.
So how you’re familiarizing your mind is in the context of meditation, which is a formal way. That’s all, a formal way of doing. But in the broad sense, sitting here listening right now, each one of us, listening to this, nutting it out. We’re familiarizing our mind, aren’t we? It’s clear, you know.
Thank you very much. The job is to familiarize our mind. Sort of the spiritual process, the way we’re talking here, the way the Buddhism would describe it, is nothing mysterious. There are certain kinds of meditations that yes would appear to be fairly cosmic and not the usual way we would tend to use the mind. This is true with visualization and all that.
But even visualization, as we did this morning. Even visualization is not something that’s totally unfamiliar to us. Every time you, let’s say you’re in love with somebody, virtually you’re doing a visualization meditation. You’re putting in your mind strongly the picture of this person and you’re thinking about them the whole time. Well that’s all.
We just did that this morning with the Buddha, know. Except it’s a foreign image so it doesn’t feel the same thing. It feels like unusual. But it’s the same principle. All this process we’re doing here, using the mind in different ways is something already that we’re doing in an ordinary sense.
Analytical meditation is exactly the same as when you’re familiar with that. If you think about someone you don’t like, you’re thinking of all the disadvantages and all the things they did to you and how they did it and what they said and what you’re gonna do. That is a perfect analytical meditation on anger. Truly, it’s just like this. So all we’re doing is using, what we’re doing, the methods we’re using in Buddhism to internalize the stuff that we’re describing here, is Buddha’s views, is all the methods we’re already using to lead our lives.
We mystify these things so much. We kinda put them up in the sky and think of something magical. But it’s not. It’s down to earth, in your face, hard work. The first thing we mentioned, which is a really good starting point to even recognize what on earth is our potential.
And where it exists, this potential exists in our mind. Which as we’ve said, is something that isn’t our body, isn’t our brain, doesn’t come from mom and dad, doesn’t come from God or Buddha, doesn’t come from nothing, and is its own thing. And as it’s not physical, it doesn’t need, finally, are subtler levels of our minds that don’t need a body for its existence. It’s obvious, you can see our conceptual and emotional levels of mental awareness, which is this way we experience things from day to day, obviously need this body. Know, if you didn’t have eyeballs, you wouldn’t have eye consciousness, would you?
If you didn’t have a decent working brain, the concepts wouldn’t all come out straight. They’d be all scrambled. So clearly the body and the mind at the gross level are interdependent, and for the gross level of mind to function, you do need a body. But Buddha would say that’s just the gross level, and it’s deceptive anyway. And we need eventually to access a subtle level.
And that level, as we’ve indicated already, doesn’t need a body for it’s existence. It can leave the body. It goes from life to life. When we possess this Buddha nature, is how we’re saying it. Then we look at the need therefore to, if this is our potential to become this perfect person, which really is just the development of the positive within us, something kind of tangible.
Then we need someone to show us how. So ideally we need a teacher. And there are various ways, and I’ll just touch on those very briefly. In the various texts there are various ways to familiarize ourselves with how to devote ourselves appropriately to get the maximum benefit from the relationship. Which means to become a Buddha as quickly as possible.
Pabongka Rinpoche, the author of one book that I recommend that if someone wants to go more deeply into this whole packaging of the teaching, it’s called the Lamrim. His name is Pabongka Rinpoche and he’s the author of the book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, which I think is available in the shop. He says, you better choose your guru very carefully because you’re gonna end up like him. So I think it’s a good point. There you go.
That one there. That’s the big one. That’s it. The big one. That’s the one.
So then, okay. So then we thought, we need to contemplate again and again, which is a very unusual thing for us to do. There’s a lot context there, it’s this idea of really appreciating by thinking about it. This doesn’t come by saying I appreciate my perfect human rebirth. Wait for it to happen.
You’ve gotta analyze and familiarize your mind again and again with the various advantages that we clearly have if we compare ourselves even with other humans. And the various advantages, you know, the disadvantages we’ve avoided having. Again, if we merely compare ourselves with other humans, we can see how fortunate we are. And of course the point here is, according to Buddha, we’re not fortunate because we’re lucky. We’re fortunate because we worked really hard to set this up.
To add a great appreciation for the hard work of the past person. We should want to use this life. It’s sort of like, you know, we’re like a resource. We don’t think of ourself in that way. We’re so involved in being me.
We don’t see ourselves objectively. Basically what we are, this body, this combination of body, mind and various conditions is an incredibly precious resource. And we all know a resource is something that you use, you don’t just look at it or appreciate it, you gotta use it. Just like you know, if you have a cupboard full of money, and I’ve never heard of money before and it’s in my house, I’ve got a cupboard full of money let’s say. I’ve a bunch of boring bits of plastic with little numbers on the end and I’ve got no clue what they mean.
I don’t like the design, I don’t like the color, I don’t like the plastic anyway and I put it back in my cupboard and you faint because you see I’m, Robina, you’ve so much money there, you’re insane. Don’t you realise what you’ve got? That’s a really dumb example but it’s a very simple example. We appreciate. That when we even find one with a five in the corner on the road we kinda feel happy.
Like we just found something precious. Not because we’re attached to purple or little pieces of boring bits of plastic. You can’t do anything with them, they’re so small. Because we know the value of it, it’s a resource. If you give that to someone, you’ll get five dollars worth back.
Well that’s way to think about yourself. You’re this precious resource, know. So appreciating it isn’t just kind of saying, oh I’ve got five dollars and put it back in the drawer. What a stupid thing to do. You go spend it.
So you use this resource to do what? To develop these amazing qualities. Which all beings have but which very few beings have the conditions to enable them to really generate, you know, to develop that potential. So Buddha’s saying, and if we analyze it we can see it’s objectively true. That as a human, it might be the best kind of type of life to have but it’s certainly the most useful.
Because we’ve got some choices, which is the miracle of having a human mind. So I don’t wanna waste this precious life. Then we start the first step on the first scope, which is the one of meditating on impermanence and death, as we’ve briefly described. Which again is using it from our own experiences. We use things from our own experience to pad out these bare bones.
Again and again, hearing these things, thinking about them, contemplating. And then using this as the way you refer to what you see out there in the world instead of the usual deluded gossip kind of mind about people dying out there. You’re sorry for the ones you do like. You don’t care about the ones you don’t like and you don’t care about most. That’s the usual view.
So we learn to shift the way we see what we’re seeing in ordinary daily life. You don’t need to look into deep Buddhist texts to understand about impermanence. Buddha gives us the clues and then we use that to refer to what we see out there every day. To interpret what we see out there every day and bring it to our own experience and wake ourselves up and realize we have to not waste, to increase our wish not to waste this life, but to use it in a precious way to get the results that we want. Then we contemplate the suffering of so many sentient beings.
The types of lives that Buddha says all beings have the potential to be born into depending the karma that ripens, you know. So really that’s a fresh idea for us, very interesting. But even if with some objectivity, we can still look at various creatures, ants, scorpions, rats, dogs, chickens, you know, cows, birds, and see them in a different way. Their life in terms of how it is suffering. Which is maybe a fresh idea, again a fresh idea for us.
Like I said, we can see how little chickens who have their claws cut off and have to sit in little, you know, be battery hens all day. We can feel sorry for them. But when we see nature, what we call nature or the wild, we actually kind of glorify it. I mean, excuse me, know, Buddhist point, if you’re looking at it, it’s like living in hell. Such mental suffering, such pain, such physical suffering all the time.
Just seeing it freshly and then having a strong wish not to have that kind of life. Thank you. Then we looked at, okay, we think well whom do I turn to? Know, to give me some methods so I can avoid this kind of life, I can get something reasonable for myself when I leave this body and take another one. This is the first level of practice, the minimal level.
So here we talked about refuge, know, the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha. Learning to rely upon them in our practice. So then we start putting our money where our mouth is. We start abiding by the laws of karma. Okay, so what are these laws?
And Buddha, again Buddha is, he’s not saying he invented karma. He’s not saying you should abide by the laws of karma because he said so. And I’m not criticizing. This is actually the teaching in Christianity in general, think. I was discussing one time with a friend, Catholic.
We were discussing what is the nature of negativity, sin, And he said it’s that which goes against the will of God. In other words, that’s what makes it negative. And that’s a very profound idea. It happens not to be the Buddhist idea, that’s all. So sort of like the Christian view in general would be that you don’t go near the fire when you’re a kid because your mother tells you not to.
But the Buddhist idea, you don’t go near the fire because it’ll burn you. This would be the reason. So the reason not to be angry, to lie, not to steal, not to kill, is not because Buddha says so. The reason is because it’ll burn you, it’ll harm you. Not to mention other people.
We’re looking first at the most fundamental one of karma, which is the results to oneself. We’ve gotta have a really strong sense of awareness of this process first before we can even begin to have great compassion for other beings. Gotta first have some sense of recognition of our own suffering and an ability to protect our self from suffering. So we have to understand the laws of karma. Is, like I said, this is Buddha’s view of how things are.
Again, I’m not saying Buddha says you must believe it. Buddha of course is saying he’s right, otherwise he wouldn’t be saying it. He’d be very stupid to say he’s saying something he doesn’t think is right, wouldn’t he? He’d arrogant, be outrageous. Like if Einstein says well, maybe e equals m c squared.
I haven’t really worked it out but you know, it’s a good idea, why you believe in it? Mean people would laugh him out of town. We all know that. So the same you know. Jesus Christ says what he says because obviously he’s discovered that to be true.
That’s his assertion of truth. Or same with Buddha you know. But he’s not saying you have to believe it. He’s just saying this is what I have found to be true. Know, and so to hear it in that way gives it some credibility.
Gives us some space too to hear it well. So okay, Buddha’s view of how things are. Like I said earlier, the creative principle in Buddhism is called karma. Or as I have to say when I’m in America, karma. Because when I say karma, everyone hears c a l m e r, you see.
So okay, what’s karma? Well like I said the word, just the word itself is Sanskrit and it means action. Simple meaning, action. And the normal way we understand action doesn’t give us the feeling, right? But when we understand action in the dynamic sense of implying a reaction, then it has a really tasty meaning.
So everything we say, everything we do, everything we think is a karma. You can say it like that. So if everything you say, do and think is a seed, then you have a real sense of something, don’t you? You recognize because you all know that a seed is something that just won’t stay a seed. We all know that.
Seeds, when they’re nourished, become fruits. So if every single second of the day, every single moment we do with our body, speech and mind is a seed, well then we’d have a great sense of anxiety to know what kind of fruits we’re producing, wouldn’t we? And the fruits are our future experiences. The experiences we have now are the fruits of the past seeds. Like I said, that’s the creative principle in Buddhism.
There’s no other it’s not as if sometimes things are karma. It’s not possible. In other words, some things just don’t have a cause. They just are that way, you know? But some things are karma.
Ridiculous. Everything’s karma, you know? So one of the fundamental laws of karma, as I’ve said already, is that actions, karmas that are so called negative, and Buddhism again would describe what’s negative is not because Buddha says so but is in its nature negative. Comes an action that is negative, an action of body, speech and mind that’s negative comes from an unhappy distorted place inside. We all know the words.
Anger, attachment, jealousy, pride, fear, confusion, ignorance. We know these words. All clear. Then we have to describe exactly how they function. We’ll do that in the second scope.
It’s sort of more where you’re really more looking deeply into being your own therapist in the second scope. It’s far more psychological. So you know, and then negative action will necessarily ripen as future suffering experiences. For whom? For me, in this consciousness, when I’m called Fred or Mary or bird or dog or whatever.
And what a positive action is, is something that’s necessarily coming from a reasonable place in here, which is called kindness, happiness, love, generosity, patience, you name it. Again, we know these things well. That will ripen necessarily in happiness for me in the future. This is the basic principle of karma. Another principle is that as we know with seeds, fruits, the results expand, karmas expand.
So a tiny apple seed brings thousands of fruits, doesn’t it? Begins the whole thing. Many fruits come. So a tiny karma of good or bad one brings many, many fruits. It’s just energy expands.
karma’s definite. Same as seeds in the sense that if you plant a seed and obviously you give it all the appropriate conditions, then of course it will ripen. Equally, if you don’t plant the seed, as much as you might give it all the appropriate conditions, you’ll never get a fruit. It’s not possible. You can water the ground until doomsday.
You won’t get an apple tree. You gotta put the apple seed in you know. But equally too, you can have the apple seed in there but if you don’t give it the appropriate conditions equally, it won’t grow. But the seed is there waiting for the conditions to ripen. So if you want the result, want some kind of result, it’ll never ripen unless you plant the seed.
And as much as you mightn’t want a result, if you have planted the seed, you will get the result whether you like it or not. Yeah, I understand. I’ll tell you, it’s a really good point about showing about regret, how that functions basically. I’m gonna talk about how we purify karma later and it’ll come in there. So I think I’ll discuss it then.
It’s very appropriate there. Thanks. So okay, there are four ways you can say that karma ripens. Four ways in which our actions result. Four types of results.
Broad categories, okay? The main one, like I said already, is in terms of the type of realm that your consciousness gets born into. human, animal, God, spirit, whatever, okay? As I said before, that’s the karmic seed that would ripen at the time of your death that becomes what they call the throwing karma, that throws your life. So the first karma, they call it the throwing karma, or the fully ripened result.
So any action that we do that has four particular conditions all in place brings a fully ripened result. And many, many of those. That’s the first main way karma ripens, which I’ll go back to in a second. I’ll give you the fourth. Then the second one is in any life that you have, whether it’s a dog or a human, the next kind of karma, and all these don’t always come at the same time, it’s highly complex you know.
But this one is called actions similar to the cause and it is a term that refers to all of our personality, our propensities, our thoughts, our attitudes, the wish to kill, the wish to lie, the wish to steal, the wish to love, be compassionate, be forgiving, whatever it is. All of those, basically we’re a bunch of habits, aren’t we, we analyze it like that. We’re just this great mass of habits. From the time we were a tiny kid, all the imprints are there. You’re this empty little thing that your mother then produces into a Hitler or a Mother Teresa.
Basically the Hitler ness of Hitler or the Mother Teresa ness of Mother Teresa came from their own past karmic actions. So they brought with them those particular sets of habits. So they both had a decent, remember I said virtue is the cause of a human throwing karma. Virtue is a throwing karma that brings the fruit of a human life, for example. So obviously, Hitler and Mother Teresa shared a similar throwing karma.
Virtue ripened at the time of their previous death and they got the human form. Now obviously that’s where the differences begin, isn’t it? That’s where the similarities end. Their actions similar to the cause is where the huge differences are, isn’t it? In their habits.
Look at their habits, their mental tendencies. Completely different. And all of them are due to having done them before. It’s very obvious. For twenty years, you practiced being angry in this life.
I mean, excuse me, you’ve really got down anger, haven’t you? You’re a master of anger. You really have perfected anger. It’s obvious, we all know. Just like the piano or tennis.
We all know practice makes perfect. So all our positive and negative emotional attitudes and whatever, they’re all the same. This is how come little kids have all those habits, boom. Some kids just cry if they see something die, other kids happily kill another one. It’s not accidents, their mother hasn’t taught them yet.
Their mothers are as shocked as everybody else when they see either way. It’s due to their past karma, it’s habits, bunch of habits. It’s a very kind of interesting, for me it’s a very comfortable explanation actually. Sort of interesting, it’s very logical when we look at it. Okay, gotta make that leap that your consciousness was existing in something before this body was, that’s all.
But this is where the thinking has to come in to really get to analyze how anger and love and kindness and generosity and the wish to kill and the wish to lie or whatever are not physical. It’s kind of fascinating, isn’t it? We think about DNA, genes and all that, they’re even mapping the genome, whatever they’re doing these mapping the genomes or something, whatever they’re doing, I think it’s amazing. But you check that even with all these things, the DNA and everything, they’re seeing that there are propensities for cancer and for this and for that. But excuse me, no one’s pointing out in genes, the propensity for anger or lying or stealing.
No one ever talks that way. And it’s obvious why, because Buddha said you can’t find it in the genes. It’s not a thing that comes from your parents. And if it were, please excuse me, this means to be a stark kind of contradiction. Even the way we talk about the brain for a start, how that’s the mind.
Anger here, this, that. I mean we’ve already tried in the 30s, isn’t it? It’s a terrible result, pulling out, cutting out bits and pieces, trying to form a nice brain so you cut out the anger and the aggression. You just end up getting a vegetable. I mean we can cut out cancers without a problem, it actually brings the result we want.
How come cutting out the bits of brain doesn’t work? It seems to indicate it’s not the brain. It seems to me that’s a conclusion you know. Somehow if their mind were the brain, check it out. You you get Hitler’s brain and Mother Teresa’s brain.
I bet if they got them mixed up, couldn’t tell the difference. You’re not gonna see anger, all the bits of brain with evil like things, there’s anger, that’s Hitler, come on please. I’m not trying to be naive because I don’t know much about science. But in front of taking these almost in a naive kind of innocent way but looking at it quite easily, it seems clear to me that the mind isn’t the brain. There are too many contradictions, you know?
It seems clear to me that anger and violence and killing and stealing and all those things and the good qualities too don’t come from the parents. I mean it’s fine if you have, I remember in America, you know, those killings of the kids a couple of years ago. There’s one killing for example of one little boy, a black kid, mommy was in prison or daddy was in prison, mommy’s a junkie, oh yeah, that’s satisfying. Now we understand why he’s like he is. It all sort of fits the logic.
Excuse me, what about those two Columbine boys? Those two nice white Christian boys, those nice white Christian mummy and daddy, a thoroughly fine, ordinary middle class white life and they become these two insane maniacs living in some complete insane world of their own, or of their own making, who go around multi murdering people. I mean, excuse me, it seems bizarre when you look at their ordinary life and their good mother and father. You can see there’s no relationship. So it’s obvious those imprints in them come from not from their mommy and not from their genes.
It seems clear to me, which is why there’s so much agonizing in our culture about why, why, why. People can’t find the answers, know. Because Buddha says they’re looking in the wrong place. They’re looking in the brain, they’re looking in the DNA, know. I’m not complaining about that.
Amazing is gonna help health and everything. But even that, even the DNA, you might have the propensity to get cancer. It doesn’t follow you will get cancer. So even that can’t be proof you know. So anyway, your personality is a second kind of karma called actions similar to the cause.
There are the words, actions similar to the cause. You do what you’re used to doing. You know, like that. And the third one was much harder to take, very hard to take. The first one, this action similar to the cause, maybe we can bear to think about that I’m responsible for my own anger.
Perhaps we can be brave enough to do that. But this third one, this is really too much for us. This is called experiences similar to the cause. Which is all the stuff that happens to you. A person who gets killed, because they killed.
A person who gets lied to, because they’ve lied. A person who wins a million bucks, because they’ve been generous. A person who has nothing, is because they haven’t been generous. A person who’s sick, because they’ve killed. A person who lives in an ugly looking old place is because they’ve done this and that.
I mean there’s actually this list they give of all the vision, actions and the kind of karmic results they all bring. I forget them all, haven’t got it with me. This is called experiences, similar to the cause. So if you look at the world, and you just point to any person you know can see, and that person has experiences. This is including dogs and rats and everything you know.
Every person, every being, including dogs and rats, has a personality. So deer, for example, are an animal. They’ve got the throwing karma of being born in the animal realm. But then their personality, their actions, similar to the cause, quite friendly. They don’t eat meat, they’re vegetarian, they’re kind of a bit nervous, know, they don’t hurt people.
Isn’t it? Deers don’t fight or anything, do they? Deer, do deer fight? They all. Oh they do, the boys do, okay, that’s unusual.
That’s not true, I’m the worst fighter of all. So know, so we can see there’s a different personality. That’s the action similar to the cause. You compare a deer with a lion, they’re quite different. You compare a lion with a mouse, know, little mouse kind of shaky little nervous thing.
Lions come booming out, know. We can see different personalities. Action similar to the cause, different. Experience is similar to the cause, different. You know so you can have a person who lies and steals and kills, mean and nasty, but everything good happens to them.
They get money, people are good to them, they die, they live to a nice ripe old age you know. Cause these two karmas don’t always work in the same way together. You can have good experiences similar to the cause, everyone treats you nicely and trusts you and believes you and loves you. Or you can have bad actions similar to the cause, lying, stealing, killing, harming. Or absolutely the reverse, is exactly the answer to why bad things happen to good people.
These Tibetan lamas, holy beings, spent their life in virtue, now being tortured, know, have bad experiences similar to the cause, but they have good actions similar to the cause. So we can see, it doesn’t ever fit. And the usual logic is, if I’m a good person, why do bad things happen? It feels very painful. Well, because it’s past karma, Buddha says, you know.
In the ordinary worldly sense, I agree, there is not a skerrick of logic to the things that happen on this earth. No wonder we’re all confused. No wonder we’re asking why all the time because in terms of just one life, there is no answer. And this is an interesting point, know, talking about you and everything about reincarnation. But I agree with you.
But this is for me, the more I think about the unanswered questions that come from the view that the mind is merely physical, that forces me to have to look at another view. It forces me to. Because I think I’d go mad if all the time I just had this view that, which is what we have in the West, well nobody knows, know. It’s just kind of luck. It’s all their fault.
I mean it brings insanity. Somehow it’s interesting, even if karma’s wrong for me, I find it quite practical for my life. It helps me become sane. So good enough for me. I mean almost I can say that, you know.
Because it’s an explanation that gives an answer, that therefore enables me to become less angry, less neurotic, less blaming. It doesn’t always feel evident to that. But when we internalize this view of responsibility and karma, and we have an answer to why that person harmed me, then it enables me to get on with my life and deal with it and accept it and move forward. But if I don’t have an answer and I can’t see what I’ve done that harmed that person, that person’s coming and harming me back, of course I’m gonna go crazy. Of course I don’t have the answer why are they harming me, which is where we most of us are stuck.
And why most of us, when we have injustice happen, go mad. But you look at any of the biographies of any of these Tibetan lamas who’ve been in prison for years and years, yes, unjustly in terms of this life, they come out of that experience more compassionate, more happy, more content, more forgiving. I mean it’s kinda like bizarre, know. You can’t work it out. I mean why do we think that Dalai Lama is such a nice person?
Because he’s worked hard at accepting the view of karma for centuries, know, for many many lives. And has internalized his view and sees it no doubt as it is, which is a Buddhist understanding, plus as a result has enormous compassion for sentient beings, including all the Chinese communists who destroy his country. Because he knows why they’re harming, because they have been harmed before by what are labeled now the Tibetan people. So having that explanation gives an answer, it’s all interdependent, therefore no reason for anger, therefore absolutely no reason for war because you don’t want more of the same in the future. I mean he’s not just nice because he’s got this nice cute nose and people think oh lovely, lovely Dalai Lama, he’s nice because he’s worked really hard at practicing in the way we’re describing here.
He is the fruit. He is the proof of the pudding basically. I think I said maybe on Thursday, if you were there then, that I remember in America very strongly, people love the Dalai Lama, like here you know. But now they don’t wanna know about him. Because his answers are too difficult.
It’s all very nice when things are going cool to say yes, isn’t it wonderful, forgive your enemies, excuse me, just drop one of their buildings. Not being rude. Eighty percent wanna bomb the life out of the Afghanis now because of this. Was full of anger and blame and fear. Believing it’s right.
Don’t wanna know about the Dalai Lama saying have peace now. People are even thinking what does he know? Mean one sixth of his population have been Can you imagine if fourteen million Americans have been slaughtered? They’re bombing the entire earth. I’m not being rude.
It’s interesting, this view of karma is, this is what’s interesting too, this one of the end result of all this practise is what you get is a really nice person. That’s the end result. A person like the Dalai Lama, forgiving, kind, ordinary, practical, down to earth, that’s what the person looks like. You look profound, know. But it comes, that niceness comes from this kind of stuff that we’re talking about.
That’s what he’s internalised in his being, you know. Changes views of reality fundamentally. Then you become a nice person. But of course, interesting too, we know in the west there are many nice people. I mean look at the Mother Teresa’s of the world, pretty amazing examples.
But what is so interesting, we never ask, wow, I wonder how she became like that. What am I supposed to do to become like that? That ought to be the question. You’re seeing any of these great tennis players, you start to aspire to be like them. You know you’ve gotta go off and learn the techniques.
But we very rarely ask what do I do to become like Mother Teresa. We just think well I’m born this way, she’s born this way, it’s potluck. Mean how fatalistic can you get? So okay, throwing karma. The one that determines which realm you’re born into, which is determined by the karma that ripens at the time of your death.
Then according to all the complex rules and the laws of karma which all work out themselves and no one determining it, there’s no one up there ticking things and judging, you know. Then you get a certain personality. Then you have certain experiences. And all of these are determined by your past karma. The cause of the person punching in the nose, the cause of you getting a million bucks, is your past actions.
That’s the main cause. And the fourth karma is called environmental karma. And this is even where you explain how even the universe comes into being. Like I mentioned before, know. It’s not mother nature or god or buddha or accident or merely physical.
Not like that. Buddha says the coming together of all these external elements, the elements into this universe as we know it, you know. Whether it’s earthquakes or volcanoes or beautiful or ugly or harmonious or you know, covered in, I mean, even things like the polluted environment, we know the external causes of it, or even if you’re living in an environment where it’s covered in land mines and things, I mean, at the suffering of so many people. This universe has got very many different scenarios, and this is all due to the karma of the individual beings who experience it like that. So if you’ve good environmental karma, you’ll be born into a place like Adelaide, know.
Pleasing weather, nice changes in seasons, reasonably pure air, reasonably pure water. Everywhere you look it’s very pleasant, know. I mean that’s incredible. That’s the result of incredible virtue in the past. And how come some other little innocent kid who’s been sort of, you know, something else in another life gets born to some Afghani mummy starving to death, with everybody hating them, especially the little girl, you know.
And then you’ve this ugly environment. You walk down and you lose your feet for God’s sake. That’s due to your past karma, you know. Okay, the minds are there because people put them there. But the fact that you get born there, that’s the result of your past karma.
This is how Buddhism said, you know. Yep. I understand. Okay so she’s confused because it sounds fatalistic. So why don’t you tell me what you think fatalistic means?
Then we can discuss. I understand. So she’s saying that what she’s hearing is me saying that this is the way karma is. Tibetans are suffering now because of their past karma. And then she’s saying that she’s hearing me say well then this is just the way it is and nothing to do about it.
Well I didn’t say any of that second part. You’re deducing that second part. Do you accept that or not? Yes. Okay, I didn’t say that, did I?
Never once. But that’s what’s interesting, you’re deducing that. I haven’t got to the point about how you purify karma. We’re just looking at what the causes are first. So if the first thing we have to do is look, if we’ve a garden full of weeds, we’re always trying to work out what the cause of the weeds are, so we’re realizing that because we didn’t pull them out and because we left the seeds in there.
So we’re looking at the very basics first. It’s not as, do you see my point now? So take it one step at a time because it isn’t fatalistic. Because we know we first have to establish what the cause of all those poisonous weeds in the garden. We have to really understand, don’t we, what caused them.
So first of all Buddha’s saying we’ve got a bunch of reasons in our mind now that aren’t correct. Okay, just telling you what Buddha says. He’s saying the reasons we think the weeds are in the garden now is because someone else planted them. So what we’re trying to do here is first recognize that they’re our weeds. We’ve gotta start taking responsibility, they’re our weeds because we planted them.
So that’s all the point I’m saying here. We then get to the point of how we start changing those weeds, okay? Kasuk, pardon? For the one that comes in there, the land mines in there. Yes.
For the land minds, so what’s, tell me about the problem with that. Well, we have done here, we’ll plant them. No, of course not. So then? Well, that’s what I’m saying.
What I said before. What I said before, one of the rules about karma or the laws of karma is that whatever a person experiences, so let’s use the example of Afghanistan, Afghani people, Afghan people having their, you know, environment destroyed, and land mines and all the other terrible things that are happening, then the Buddhist view is, like I said also before, there’s nothing that any living being experiences that isn’t the result of karma. There is no force. So yes, the answer is of course it’s their karma. So what’s the problem with that?
You have a problem with that. I understand but talk about it. What do you mean by evil? We all know people put land mines in. Yes, there are evil people.
You’re absolutely right. Totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. Of course it’s evil. Of course it’s outrageous.
Remember that I just said now, one of the kinds of karma is called action similar to the cause. So a person is kind because they’ve practiced kindness. A person is negative because they’ve practiced negativity. A person puts land minds in because due to the habit of having done that before in various ways, harming others, they continue to harm. Secondly, they continue to harm because also they have been harmed.
So they’re harming back the people who’ve harmed them. This is the Buddhist view of how come things happen. Go on. Okay, well that’ll come. That’ll come, I promise.
As you can see, for our mind, it’s not an easy one to get our head around all this because we have a bunch of assumptions the moment. And please, no one’s saying you have to change your assumptions, I’m just giving you the Buddhist approach. So we have these other assumptions right now, know. And the main one that’s implying in what you say, which is the view we all mostly have now, and it’s kind of reasonable in a short term sense, that yes, of course there’s evil. I mean, it’s very clear, look at the world.
So many people do such outrageous things to other people. The Buddhist answer though, so most of our view is, there’s just this evil, that’s just how they are, and they are the cause of this suffering, and so that’s why we hate everybody. So we have no choice, with that view we have no choice but to hate those people. It’s very hard to forgive them because we can’t find a reason to forgive them. But the Buddhist view is when you the view of karma is a person is the way they are because one, that has been done to them before.
Two, it’s because they have had the habit of doing it. So they’re kind of locked into this old habit. So they keep doing it, you know. I mean it sounds like simple words. It takes a while to really get your head around this one and start to use this in one’s life.
But when one does, this is what I’m saying, you turn out like the Dalai Lama. Kind, funny, intelligent, forgiving, compassionate, but never ceasing to try to change the world. Don’t sit back like some kind of wimp and do nothing. But it takes, I mean, yeah, whatever. Yeah.
Yes, environmental calamity. Yeah, absolutely, yes. What do you mean not necessarily related to the environment? The way the trees and the moons and the stars and the rivers are. That’s the environment.
Then it’ll be called experiences similar to the cause. That’s that kind of karma. Collective? Much of it’s collective. That’s also, experiences similar to the cause are also collective, definitely.
This group of people here, look, a group of people who win the lottery, a group of people who have their country taken over, a group of people who are living in a good country like Australia, there’s collective karma of a group of people called Australians right now. Who? The Australians. Okay, okay, we won’t necessarily as a group of Australians because we first of all as a group of Australians, we can say that every one of us in Australia didn’t do that action. So it’s the people who did it and who supported it, who in a future life, will experience the result of that karma.
But maybe it’s a bunch of dogs, maybe it’s a bunch of another nationality. I mean the Tibetans are experiencing the karma as a group of people labeled Tibetan, but they didn’t harm the Chinese as a group of Tibetans. They probably were a thousand lives ago, who knows where that they harmed a group of people who are labeled Chinese now. It wasn’t as the Chinese that they harmed them, so now there’s a group of people called China who due to history are the way that things are happening. And then there’s a good people called Tibetans who due to history are now those people.
And boom, their karma is ripening. Same with the Palestinians and the Israelis. It doesn’t follow that everybody who’s harming the Palestinians now, as an Israeli, has been harmed as an Israeli or a Palestinian in the past. Okay, assuming Richard was human one hundred and fifty years ago, yeah? Well, assuming I wasn’t here.
Oh, weren’t here, right? Ago, yeah. No because you only can be No that’s right. Well no, you experience the result of what John Howard’s doing because you’re not doing it. I’m gonna talk now about how you create karma.
And the only time you’re gonna experience the result of something that John Howard is doing is if you agree with John Howard in your mind and support him one hundred percent. Then you will get the fruit of that karma. But you know, just because we’re labeled Australian, doesn’t mean we all do the same things. It’s gotta be your mind that does it. I’ll talk about that in a minute.
This is a really crucial point. So for me, it’s the, I always have problems with I understand. She basically has some trouble with the idea that your suffering is caused by your past negative actions. It seems like you’re blaming the person for misfortune. Especially say in Afghanistan.
Especially like Afghanistan. I understand. Okay, especially Afghanistan. Okay, the crucial point here that is the central point in karma that makes this one reasonable is the idea the Buddha is saying there cannot be an experience that I have, there can’t be an experience that I have, that I haven’t created the cause to experience. The way my mind works now, having learned to kind of integrate this view and find this view reasonable, the best I can come up with so far for why things happen and the one that helps me become a compassionate, reasonably more compassionate, content, non angry person, the thing how my mind works now is that I find the fact, which is what the view we have now, that suffering is random because that’s really the only other option.
Cause if I’m a good person and then bad things happen to me, the only explanation we can have is I have nothing to do with it so therefore it has to be random. I find that absolutely outrageous to contemplate. I find that a million times worse. I find it very consoling and reasonable to say that whatever I experience has to be the fruit of what I have done. And don’t forget, we’re talking countless bloody lives here, not just as Robina.
It’s obvious that Tibetan lama that I can think of, just one person I’m thinking of who’s in prison and tortured for thirty years, it’s obvious as that person. He didn’t hurt a fly in his life, not even one fly in this life. So it is absolutely obvious as in this life. karma is an insane concept. It has no logic whatsoever.
So clearly that’s true. So from that point of view, of course you’re right. The little innocent Afghani girl just had her foot blown off, of course she’s done nothing wrong. It’s so obvious. Of course she’s done nothing wrong.
You’re absolutely right. But Buddha’s not saying that. Buddha’s saying that she has had, like Hitler, like Osama bin Laden, like all the wicked evil people, has had countless lives from countless way back since beginningless time, countless karmic imprints. And at this moment in time, she got a human rebirth due to virtue, but she got a certain other karma called experience similar to the cause, which caused her to be harmed. Now I mean, it’s every reason to have unbearable compassion for all sentient beings when you start to think like this, not anger and blame and bitterness and they deserve it, know.
I mean, the view we have now, this is the point, the assumption that we’re having now that is the basis of what you’re saying, I’m not being rude now, I’m just analyzing, okay, is that we have had only one life, that we are innocent victims, and that things happen unfairly, and that of course if someone harms, they’re a bad person and we must blame them, and if I’m an innocent person, you must feel sorry for me. So as soon as we say, well the Afghani girl has done something to deserve this, we feel, well I have to think she’s a horrible person, therefore I have no compassion for her. So of course it’s monstrous, I agree. But once we change the assumption that we’re all these living beings with beginningless countless lives, with countless karmic actions in our mind, with countless experiences, and they’re ripening because we’re blindly not realizing what we’ve done and your heart breaks for all sentient beings, including the pilots on September eleventh. More for them than for the victims because the victims are simply purifying their karma.
Their karma. The pilots are just beginning hundreds of lives of unbearable suffering. That’s the approach. I know it’s a different one, it’s a bigger one. It would happen, maybe stupid, I don’t know, but I’m telling you the Buddhist one.
To hang on a tick. So is there something more just to remind us to think about? Do you want me to That’s still the issue though, did you say to the Afghan girl who’s had a foot blown off? Yeah. Know, it’s your karma And why would you want to tell her that?
And why would you want to tell her that? I don’t know because I’m asking you, please, you’re suggesting it. Why on earth would you want to do such a dumb thing? Please tell me. Because aren’t you putting forward Buddhism as a way to the end of suffering?
Yes, but the intelligent thing to do is to say something to somebody who has a wish to hear it and whom it can help. Well that little Muslim girl who’s had her foot, I would no more say a Buddhist thing to her than fly for a minute. What I do is give her a hug and hopefully give her a foot as well. Do you see my point? So just because you’re, I mean you’re hearing it because you’ve booked into a Buddhist course, know.
So therefore, you know, I have a right to talk and you can walk out anytime you like. You understand? But she’s not here, so you don’t dump this on other people. Of course, you don’t. Our job is to be kind to others and so that means doing whatever they need at any given moment according to what they need, you know.
So if a person says to me why is this happening to me and you really have a sense that the wisdom in you says yes, this could be helpful for them and it could really help their mind, please say it.