Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute teaching, Venerable Robina Courtin explores self-centeredness as the root of suffering and offers Buddhist practices to transform it. She starts with meditation on one’s mother’s kindness—recognizing mere survival as sufficient reason for gratitude—then expands to the hidden kindness in everyday objects: tracing a can of baked beans through farmers, factory workers, designers, shopkeepers. This lojong or mind-training practice teaches exchanging self for others, beginning with recognizing all beings equally want happiness. Drawing on her prison ministry, Courtin illustrates how genuine compassion rooted in understanding is powerful, not weak—a vital insight for those facing violence. She concludes by introducing tonglen, the transformative practice of breathing in others’ suffering and breathing out relief and happiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 Unknown.mp3
UUID: df006233-3e00-4102-80d3-52ab1d2f0b24
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: 46.1 minutes
Words: ~10,172
You’re rude to it, you know, don’t give her a tip or whatever. Well, people don’t tip in Australia anyway, do they? I know, I’ve discovered. So it’s really interesting, have, again, we just take all these things for granted, we don’t analyse the very basis of all our thoughts, feelings and emotions and our basis here is self centeredness, yet again, I’m sorry to be so cruel to us, we can see the logic, you know? The basis of whether a person is kind is whether they do what I want.
I’m sorry, that’s not kindness, we all know kindness if a person simply does any mean, you can actually see kindness as a person doing anything for you at all. Facilitating you, even bringing you food. And this is the thing, there’s another meditation here that you can do that’s more profound even than this one, We meditate on how all beings have been kind to us, are being kind to us every moment, this isn’t a shocking idea. Well, let’s look this one, you know. But let’s look first if our mother’s been kind, it’s really helpful for our mind, especially when we think they haven’t been.
Especially if they have beaten us or they have given us up since when we were a baby, we think, I didn’t have a mother, how can they be kind? Well, know, there’s one reason we can thank our mother and be grateful and develop great kindness towards her in return, and this is so simple, it’s that we are still alive. If you analyse it, I think I’ve heard figures that it’s probably true that more human beings who get the karma to be born in a human womb die before they’re even born. Do you understand my point? In other words, more fetuses die, human fetuses, they’re human, they won the lottery, they’ve got the human womb, they die even before they’re born than those who are actually born who then die.
Now it’s an interesting perspective, We were one of the ones who lived and here we are even living till now. We didn’t die when we were two or three or five or ten or whatever. So the one thing we can say that our mother who gave birth, and we all know we got born out of a mother’s womb, this is no new ways I haven’t heard about, then she didn’t kill us. I swear to you, this is one reason to have eternal gratitude towards your mother. She didn’t abort you.
That’s enough. If she did nothing more in her life, this is a reason to have gratitude. This is a fact. If you think about it, we don’t think about it like this normally, but you think about it. How fortunate.
Probably, not even talking about the miscarriages, but there must be so many millions, billions of humans who are aborted, I’m quite sure. I don’t know what the figures are and if already does, I’d be interested to hear it actually. So that’s a reason to be grateful to our mother, to thank her for her kindness. That even if we did have a mother who kept us, right, who kept us and looked after us, we’re still here, educated, we got fed, yes she might be neurotic and have attachment and have anger and be manipulative and be demanding and bossy and needy and all these things we think our mothers are, and they probably are because they’re human like us, nevertheless you’re still here, you’re alive, you’re educated. You know?
There’s many, many, many reasons to think. Not just because you didn’t get what you not just because you got what you want, but because here you are. Know? So it’s in this way we can then expand the mind and and do another kind of meditation, which is thinking about the kindness of all beings, this one is again very, very obvious, but again one we absolutely never think about because we’re so eye centered. The way to be analyzing this one is to think of any single thing you wanna point to right now that we use in our life, Your clothing, your watch, my beads, my glasses, the house itself, the food we’re eating.
Anything at any moment you want to point to that we use in our life, there are numberless sentient beings involved in the bringing of that to us. Numberless. You won’t ever be able to find the beginning of those numberless sentient beings. It’s a fact. Anything you wanna point to.
For this reason, every single one of those beings, just by doing their job, by being killed, all the beings who suffered for example, when the vegetables were picked and when the tree was chopped down that and the wood was taken to the factory that turned into pencils that we used to write things. The cloth, this cloth here, polyester and cotton. No idea where polyester comes from. Nylon, don’t know what it is. Probably something, no idea.
Let’s just say the cotton part. Where does cotton come from? Cotton comes from trees, right? Little human beings planted the trees. Little human beings working away planting trees.
Them, all little sentient beings that could die when they watered the trees or when the rain came. People who then picked the cotton, the people who then put it in the truck and took it to the cotton factory, the people who made the truck, check it, check it. People who made the truck, but for the truck he couldn’t truck the cotton, but for the cotton, couldn’t have truck, he couldn’t have my shirt, I’d be naked, know? How embarrassing. Is everything you point to, the people who served me, the people who made it, the people who picked the man in the shop in San Francisco in Union Square who took the big bolt of cloth off the shelf and kindly and politely showed me all the different ones until I got the color that I wanted, right?
Very polite, the person who took my money from me, the person who put it in the bag, the person who made the bag, the car park man who took my money when I parked the car in Union Square underneath and to go blah blah blah like that, you know. All these people involved, this myriad number of human beings who are all involved in the simple little tasks of doing their everyday job that facilitate you having anything at all. At all. This is sentient beings being kind. You know, you go to the supermarket, get a can of boring old baked beans, you never think of all the kindness of all the people who swept the floors, who opened the doors, who unlocked the doors, who were allowed to even in, you know?
People who put the trolleys there so you can pull it out and go into the trolley, people who made all the door things nice and clean, people who made all the shelving up, who put all the baked beans in nice order, who put the prices on the shelf, who made, you know, put the not to mention even the baked beans yet, just getting to the able to get the baked beans. All the human beings involved, know, countless, it’s obvious, you know, shelves didn’t fall out of the sky. It was human beings, little human beings like you, who walked up and did their job. But you think, well, excuse me, how are they kind? They didn’t think of me.
Of course they weren’t thinking of you, but the fact that they did it is enough to be it’s facilitated you getting your baked beans, isn’t it? Easily, especially for us in our culture. Then there’s the baked beans themselves. Where do they come from, trees? Beans grow on trees or what?
Oh, where do beans come from? Oh, it’s the same, plants, under the ground, okay. Just trying to think, baked bean trees, know. Okay, under the ground, the people who picked them, all the sentient beings who died, people who put them in the truck, and the people who made the truck, and the who the factory, and the people who made the metal, and the metal coming from the mountain, the people that mined it, all the hard working miners, trucking it to the baked bean can factory. The people who made the label, trees where the paper came from, we’ve trucked the trees.
I mean, just you can go on and on and on and on and on, and where, all the way along the line, you’ve little sentient beings working away. Come on, know, it’s unbelievable. Mr. Hines, who invented the baked beans, know, then the person, you know, then all people he made and then the people who designed them, I mean, sort of design, so I usually pick the baked beans that looks the nicest design, I don’t care about the nutritional value, right, so I look at the best design packet. So you know, the person who designed it, I really appreciate the designer there, person with their pencil drew the design, conceived of it, the typesetter, the person who invented the type, Mr.
Gaudi, you know, way back in the whatever century. The people who did the typesetter, who did the proofreading, who wrote the words, the copywriter, the person who taught the copywriter English, so the little copywriter could write the words, you could have nice words and you could bake bean cans so you know what’s in it. I mean, all this is true, it’s a fact isn’t it, can’t deny these things are facts, they’re not religious ideas, these are facts. And where? What’s involved?
Who are doing it? Little sentient beings. So but for the work of countless trillions of sentient beings, we would have zero. But for sentient beings, we wouldn’t even have a body, wouldn’t even exist. Your mommy and daddy kindly having sex, so you can have a body, you know?
Or getting a petri dish, like my friend in Seattle, was thinking my lesbian friend in Seattle who got her gay friend to squirt some sperm into a bottle and so then she squirted it into her vagina with a big fat syringe and she had a very nice looking daughter. So I mean, maybe you got born like that. But you think of your body, what’s your body? Your mommy and daddy working hard and this egg and sperm come and they join up and then what happens? It goes into your mommy’s body and then your mommy starts to eat.
All the blood and all the things because of the food she eats, your body, even before it gets out of the womb, is a mountain of potatoes and tomatoes and carrots and chickens, isn’t it? You think about it, where is your body apart from the chickens, apart from the carrots, apart from the tomatoes, apart from your mommy’s hard work, apart from the milk, all the things, in the body already, even in the womb? Where’s my body, excuse me, apart from that? It’s a joke, you know? No way you have a body unless it’s all those things.
All the kindness of all those creatures, you know? Then you get out of the womb. Then the kindness of nurses in the Mercy Hospital in Melbourne, you know, dawn on the twentieth of December nineteen forty four, all scurrying around on the early shift, this wretched baby being born, disturbing their sleep, so they get up and they put blankets around me and they clean me and they wash me, my mother feeds me and takes me, so but for the kindly nursing in the hospital in the middle of the summer in Melbourne, there’d be no Rubina, you know? But for the little nurse who wrapped me in the blanket, in the little blanket, in the warm water, there’d be no Rubina’s body. Then all the food my mother fed me, the milk and everything, and what’s the milk but from the food that she ate?
All the kinds sentient beings, you know? I mean, we can see. Up until this point, this fifty seven year old body, where does it come from? Again, mountains and mountains and mountains of chickens and carrots and tomatoes, you think about it. Where is my body apart from all those things but for all the work all the farmers did?
So excuse me, there’s enough here to make you absolutely weep with compassion for every living being and want only to repay their kindness. Now okay, we can hear these things are facts, right? I’m not making up stories here, these are facts, but why aren’t these facts in the forefront of our heart? Because I’m in the forefront of my heart and so full there’s no space for anything else. And what I want and what I don’t want, and selfishness, and not being mean about it, but just observing, this is why Buddha’s saying this is what causes us suffering, because we can’t see the truth.
And this seeing the truth isn’t something kind of abstract, like only emptiness. We can’t see the most obvious truths, like I just said them all, they’re all truths, know, they’re not things made up. We know they’re facts, but they don’t have impact upon us because we are overwhelmed by the self centered, completely, this powerful sense of I, and what I do have, and what I don’t have, and what I do need, and what they don’t give me. We understand this, we can see. So it’s just the wrong assumptions in our mind that are very ancient and old, that we’ve dragged along with us from life to life, you know, that blind us from truth.
So the truth we’re talking about here are the truths in relation to others, you know? By thinking this way, we slowly open our hearts, and so if you were a bodhisattva, they’d probably be prostrating their way into supermarket with an unbelievable gratitude and tears, every moment at the thought of the kindness of all beings. They say that’s what a bodhisattva is, when they finally have achieved this bodhicitta, the first moment of bodhicitta, after many, many, many, many lives of working on equanimity, love, compassion, great compassion, blah blah blah, doing all these techniques which we’re talking about. One of the criteria of having achieved the first moment of bodhicitta is that there’s no longer, they say, no longer the thought of I. Now I mean they don’t make a mistake and think they’re you, I don’t mean like that.
Not silly or anything. They have no longer this sense of I that we just that pervades our being that we take as an assumption of truth and this sense of neediness because they no longer have that. They fulfilled, if you like, by doing the first wing, they fulfilled their own needs if you think about it. So now there’s this massive space to put others in there. So others become now the main focus of their lives.
And it’s not in the kind of the codependent way we talk about it. So try and adhere it as something way above the usual garbage. It kinda sounds tiring. I agree. You mean I gotta love everybody like that?
How exhausting, you know, isn’t it? So you need hard work loving one person. There’s no space for more than one inside our head, isn’t it? That’s only because we’ve got delusion, that’s all. So just looking at these things to expand ourself.
And the point is with all this stuff, it’s not enough to hear it just once. We can even hear the truth of some of this stuff just hearing it once. But the second we walk out the door, the default mode returns. So we eventually have to make all this the default mode and that does take time and that’s what practice is. Doing kind of these habitual contemplations, thinking in this way.
So every time you go to the supermarket, instead just thinking you want the baked beans with that and that and just taking it all for granted, not just thanking the people who are kind to you get out of your way or hand you the can or take your money and smile at you when they say have a nice day. But you see that, just you think of all the beings who’ve worked to make this happen. But usually again we see everything through the filter of attachment, we see that I’ll see the baked beans in terms of whether they’re nicely designed, or we might see the baked beans in terms of whether they’ve got good nutritional value, we might see it in terms of whether the price is what suits us, we might see the supermarket in terms of how ugly or beautiful it is. So because I like things that are nicely designed, I’m gonna be very happy if I walk into a gorgeous shop with gorgeous design, I feel they’ve all done a lovely job, but if walk into an ugly shop, I’m gonna know how disgusting these people, haven’t got a clue how to make nice shops, you know?
So we don’t thank anybody then, isn’t it? Again, why? Because we have attachment, attachment likes nice things, we don’t like nice things, we don’t like the thing they make, conclusion, the people are ugly. That’s how we all judge everybody, isn’t it? Completely false, completely not true.
We can think if we have kids, you know, and our little kid makes something for us and they make this hopeless looking thing, you know. Oh darling, thank you, our little hearts are so touched, right? I remember our mother when she died, I wasn’t there, but they told me, and I knew this anyway, she had seven children. All her drawers were full of every little tiny thing, the little seven children they had ever given us since we were born, you know? A little stick, a little sixpence, a piece of hair, a something, I mean, you know what, I mean, if you’re a mother, you know what it’s like, she treasured everything we gave her.
Not because they were beautiful design things, my mother was a real snob, she loved good quality things, but she loved anything her children gave her. Why? Because her heart was touched by our kindness. Well, that’s what kindness is, you know? Seeing the kindness and having in return a wish to repay that kindness, that’s what comes from this.
This is this gradual development we’re talking, these meditations, brings us to this huge space of wanting to repay the kindness of all sentient beings, not just the kindness of the one or two people who have helped us, which is how we are now, because of attachment. But we’re expanding, expanding, expanding, going beyond our usual limits, trying to repay the kindness of every living being. This is what eventually culminates in bodhicitta. Much, much, much contemplating in many ways on these points. Then a whole area of these techniques is actually a type of practice that they call exchanging self for others, which is a sort of a lineage of teachings that have come from Atisha and his disciples.
Actually they said there were, it’s a certain kind of practices that you need to be, as I say, a suitable vessel to really hear them and work with them appropriately. Because this whole approach is quite of astonishing. It’s like the example of Harry. We call it actually mind training. All of this is mind training, but a type of very extraordinary meditations of really learning to really learn to exchange yourself for others.
Harry put himself in the danger spot in order to save others, without a second thought. So all these types of meditations, there are many, many, I’m just touching on a few points in this tradition. They’re called in Tibetan lojong, mind training, and they’re called techniques whereby you learn to exchange yourself for others. The very first step, and this is again contemplate again and again and again on how others are equal to me. Equal in wanting to be happy and in wanting not to suffer.
It’s like the same logic you’re using for the equanimity one, but in this one, the equanimity you’re thinking equal to each other. Now we’re looking at learning to exchange self for others. So we’re learning to see how others are equal to me in wanting to be happy and not wanting to suffer. So therefore we’re equal. Whereas, you know, even if we’re lonely and depressed and have low self esteem right now, again being very honest with ourselves, we don’t have any appreciation for others at all.
Even though we are feeling miserable and lonely, we also actually don’t like anybody else. So we really still, in our own sad way, are being self centered, just like an arrogant Self centeredness. And it’s also thinking mostly of ourselves. Again, being cruel. Don’t take this sort of like in a being cruel way.
We have to have the courage to see that this is why we suffer. Not to have guilt for it, but to have our hearts break for ourself that the way we are is why we’re suffering. When we have low self esteem, it sort of sounds like we have high esteem for everybody else. It’s not true. We like resent anybody else because I’m lower than them and how dare they be higher than me.
It’s not really like a happy mind at all. You know, you think about it. So to exchange yourself, to learn to see that others are equal and wanting to be happy, of course it’s gonna open your heart hugely to others. But this one of being a suitable vessel to hear these teachings is very reasonable. That means that you’ve done some work on the first wing because if you haven’t done much work on the first wing, it means we’ve got huge attachment, huge low self esteem, huge depression, huge anxiety, huge anger.
There’s no way that you’re gonna hear something about how other people are equal to you. You even hear how you’re worth anything either, first, you know. So you gotta first know that you’re worth something before you can start to see that others are worth something. That’s what happens on the first wing. It’s so important.
So there’s a whole series of techniques, there’s like one little text that’s used a lot for practice called the Eight Verses of Mind Training. And the very first verse in that says, basically, when you’re with others, you will see yourself as the lowest of all and others as most precious. Now that for for those of us for most of us who haven’t done much work on the wisdom wing, who already have low self esteem, this feels like really cruel, doesn’t it? Excuse me. Buddha’s telling me I’ve got to see everybody else as, you know, myself as lower than others, but I already do that.
We’re thinking, what’s the benefit of this one, you know? So that’s why he says, Pabongka Rinpoche in his commentary says, we have to be a suitable vessel to really hear these teachings appropriately. In other words, the only person who can really hear that appropriately is a person who’s already done the work in the wisdom wing and got enormous sense of their own worth. Great self confidence, or definite good self esteem, who’s really gone beyond attachment, anger, jealousy and pride and all the rest because they are what are preventing us from having high self esteem right now. They are what cause us to have low self esteem.
So we need to have done all that work first, then we can really begin to hear in a very tasty way the meaning of this type of approach, to see yourself as the lowest of all. So what does that actually mean? For a healthy person even, what does that mean? How can that be good? So what’s interesting about it is it sounds like it’s still our emphasis on I, and so the constant wishes, if you’re with others, keep thinking I’m very low, I’m really low, I’m really low, I’m really low rubbish, it doesn’t mean that at all, in a sense what it means, that you’re seeing everybody else as wonderful, not in the kind of miserable oh they’re so fantastic, who do they think they are, they’re so more beautiful and better than I am, you know, really it’s like anger actually, it’s like resentment, it’s not a happy mind at all.
So it’s having this sense of kind of just being who you are, but a genuine ability to rejoice in the qualities of others, a genuine respect for other human beings, whoever they are, that’s what it is. So really, the emphasis when you say to see yourself as lowest of all, is the emphasis is really on on the goodness of others and it encourages you and feeds you, it doesn’t make you depressed, whereas now when we have low self esteem and we meet other people who are better than us, which is we think the whole world, then we feel even more miserable, don’t we? It’s kind of interesting, you know, because it’s I centered, it’s kind of this neurotic grasping at I, in the same way as an arrogant person walks into the room completely with this overdeveloped sense of I, but actually is very fearful, it’s a neurotic state of mind. All the delusions are based in I, right, in the neurotic sense. Pride, which sounds so strong, is really very scary, it’s like this little person inside all kind of inflated saying, please see me, see me, see me, acknowledge me, acknowledge me.
Whereas a person who’s got low self esteem, in a way is wanting just the same thing, but is all walking around all kind of scaredy baby. They’re both sentient beings of the same problem. Like I said, one looks in the mirror and says I’m great. One looks in the mirror and says I’m what a creep. But they’re both So you check what happens to the proud person, the arrogant person.
They’re scared of having anybody who’s better than they are, more beautiful, more rich or whatever the basis of the pride is. So they’re constantly kinda reaffirming themself and just trying to squash the competition. So as soon as they do meet a person who is better and they they win, they lose the competition, they become completely deflated. Now they become low self esteem, I’m so hopeless, I’m so miserable, I’m so ugly, I’m so horrible. Hate, hate, hate, you know?
So it’s kind of interesting, we can see this. So really low self esteem, it sounds cruel, is the flip side of pride, it’s like deflated pride. And the emphasis is I. It’s like a blaming mind, it’s a negative mind, it’s a critical mind of other people. It’s not kind to other people at all.
It’s a person who’s got low self esteem, a person who’s got good self esteem but has humility which comes with it perfectly. That’s a person who’s got not a strong neurotic sense of I, a very content sense of I, such that they’re able to see others very comfortably. And a person who’s really good at something but has humility is delighted to meet a person who’s better. Please show me more. They learn from it.
But a proud person is terrified of it. Feels very scared. All the delusions are so painful. Even if they look arrogant and they can be very destructive to other people, of course they can. But in that person, fractured sense of self, no decent sense of self at all.
The commonest thing a lot of my friends in prison say, especially the guys in America and the gangs, they say that to be seen as kind is to be seen as weak. So it’s a really hard balance for them to learn to wanna give up being violent. It’s very hard actually. That’s incredibly hard for them. Unbelievable, it’s like saying, when they make the vow, they say when they become a Buddhist and make the vow never to kill again or never to harm, that’s really like terrifying because it’s really saying okay, I’m ready to be stabbed.
Because they say it’s like you’re living in a war zone all the time, you can be stabbed at any moment, especially if you give up the gangs, you become an outcast and that is the scum of the scum, you know? You deserve everything. So one of these, I mean very nice stories, there’s one story of one guy, a Mexican, called Francisco. And he was about thirty when he first wrote to me and he’d been in the self of another person who’d writing to me already, who’d been practicing, a younger guy, Mexican. And he just talked a bit about himself and how this experience happened to him in this cell, he was in this prison in Pelican Bay in California where they’re in their cells twenty three hours a day.
And they shared the self and they’ve been friends, they’ve been kinda like homeboys for years, know, in prison mostly, fighting all the same wars because they’re both on the same side, they’re the southerners. Did I tell you about how the southerners are the northerners, the enemies? I didn’t tell you that. Unbelievable, these gangs. I could tell I spent a whole weekend talking about these gangs, they fascinate me.
Anyway, whatever. The Mexican gangs, let’s say in Los Angeles, they’re most strong, there’s numberless gangs, according to what neighborhood you live, what block just about, what street. So all these different gangs, given names, they all have their own dress code, I mean, precise dress code, and the way they behave, how they talk, how you speak, and when you meet an enemy you have to do this and you do that and you hold your gun this way, I mean it’s like unbelievable, it’s like rule books, know, this big, there’s only their heads of course. So then they go to prison, all that thing goes out the window, then they’ve got two gangs in prison, the Northern Mexicans and the Southern Mexicans. And the division line is roughly Fresno, is sort of halfway between LA and San Francisco.
So the Southerners all come from LA and South of Fresno, and all the Northerners come from San Francisco and North of Fresno, and they become the most, their worst enemies, so now they’re the worst enemies, so they’re the one, they hate each other most. So any wars the Mexicans have is between the southerners and the northerners, you know. I mean, if we could go out on the streets, they could have been mortal enemies in LA, but now they’ve become the best of friends in prison, because their gangs keep changing. Right? So anyway, anyway, even when so when they had their wars, and they love their wars, I mean, you know, the authorities call them what do they call them?
Riots. They call them war, you know, it’s very serious business. And they all have their own knives. They make their own knives in prison and everything. Even out of plastic bottles, Francisco said, I asked him what you make them out of, he said, but then they melt, you can only use them once.
Anyway, they have their wars. When they have their wars, they have really big full on wars. They hate also the blacks and the Mexicans, the blacks hate the Mexicans, the Mexicans hate the blacks, and the Asians hate them all, and they all hate the Asians, everybody hates everybody, and then the white fascists. So when they have their big wars, the northern Mexicans team up with the blacks against the southern Mexicans and the white fascists, Cause they don’t hate them quite as much. They team up, know.
Then they have their wars on the yards, all their knives and everything. Anyway, why am telling all these stories? Oh yeah, I’m talking about Francisco, that’s right. About giving up violence in prison. About being kind is said to be weak.
Okay, this is a nice story. So Francisco has been a gangster since he’s a little kid, been in prison, in and out since he’s a boy, know? And he sort of, he said since I was twenty, I wanted liberation, he said, but I didn’t even know such a thing existed or even how to get it. But in his heart, so you can sort of think about karma, the imprints were strongly in his heart, know, in his mind from past. So yearning for something, but yet there he was, everywhere he turned was violence and gangs and this is what, you know, you couldn’t see any other way to get out of it, know, and it’s their total world, they never go past it, you know, never go anywhere else but the gangs, right?
So there he is in prison with this guy Francisco, and Francisco’s been practicing for six months, but of course he doesn’t tell anybody because you don’t trust anybody, even your own homeboys, because you never know, you know? So one day they had this really nice talk and it was a very good feeling between them, said they really opened up for the first time and talked about things. Then Arturo, Francisco said he reached for a copy of mandala, the magazine, to share some quotation with him about something or other. And he said I happen to get a glimpse, he said, of a photo of this particular lama, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche. He said of the great Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche.
I got a glimpse of his picture and he said this ineffable feeling went through my body. He said I didn’t say anything to Arturo because I wasn’t sure any sound would come out. So I lay in my bunk for a long time looking at this picture. And then he said, when I came out of my trance, the joy that I experienced, which was so clean and so pure, was what I knew, and which I had never experienced in my whole life, was what I knew I wanted all living beings to experience. And then he said, from then on he vowed never to harm another living being.
And actually it was the most scary thing because he knew that he had no defence, he could easily whatever because he had to announce that he was no longer a member of the gang, they could soon see that from his behaviour. And there’s many like that who won’t even take refuge but yet are Buddhists because they really feel they’re not brave enough yet to be able to say they won’t harm anybody because it’s too scary because you’re being attacked every day you know. But what I’m getting at here, point was, this is the point about the mind, the power of the mind. This is what I’ve discussed with quite a few of them and they they understand it, you know. Because they often say, like I said, they say but to be seen as kind is to be seen as weak.
And the point is this that I’m getting to. That with a person like Francisco, when he really made this decision, it came from a very deep place in his heart, a very courageous place. So somehow that courage, you know, to bring up that amount of courage, but not out of arrogant courage, not sort of like defensive courage, but genuine heartfelt coming from love, which had happened with him, then he had the courage to say I will never harm another living being and because of that, then somehow he wasn’t being weak. He wasn’t being weak, he was being unbelievably strong and somehow that is the message he would convey to others. Do you see what I’m saying?
So usually the way we’re kind now, it is weak, because why? It’s coming from attachment. So you look craven when you’re being kind, because most of the time we’re kind now, it’s kindness because we want the other person to love respect us, although we don’t think of it like that, and we can all smell that, you know? Especially when we’re into sort of things like gaining so much power, the psychological thing, all the time. You can smell a weak person, and you come smashing down, you know?
But when a person’s really strong, really their own person, which is what happened to Francisco, then his being kind and not wanting to harm, actually it would be strong, so he wouldn’t be harmed. Do you see my point? So we really have to look into our minds deeply to see even the kindness we have now is coming from attachment. It’s kind of like craven kindness, like codependent kindness. So when it’s genuine kindness coming from a strong place in the heart, then you are not seen as weak.
Actually people would leave you alone, and they left him alone. It’s an interesting point. Do you understand what I mean? So we have to look at it really into our own hearts, you know? Because even when we think of kindness now, it’s sort of all this kind of California huggy kissy kind of kindness, you understand what I mean?
I’m always criticising America, I’m not really trying to criticise America, I live there, I’m not criticising, but you know what I’m trying to say, we think of kindness as all kind of all kind of all heck, good to see you, give me a hug, kiss kiss, you know, all kind of expressive. That’s not necessarily being kind, that’s being emotional attached sometimes. So we kind of always overdo it, know, kindness is coming from some genuine appreciation of the qualities of the other human beings and just allowing them to be, you know, having a warmth in our heart and accepting people, not having to all the time express and hug and everything. That’s not necessarily kindness at all, or doing things all the time for people. Half the time it’s inappropriate because we haven’t got the wisdom to see what is the right thing to do, and just kindness is just being who you are sometimes, allowing people to be, you know, that’s kindness.
Instead of all some interfering and kind of poking our nose into everybody’s heads, you know, which is what we do. Calling it kindness. It’s not kindness. So anyway, exchanging yourself for others. And I was giving the example of this little particular text in this particular kind of tradition of practice called the eight verses in the first verse saying, when you’re with others, see yourself as the lowest of all.
So what I’m emphasizing here is that this kind of when you’re a strong person within yourself, confident about yourself but not arrogant, comfortable, therefore humble and unassuming and naturally kind of who you are, then you’re very capable of being around a grouping of other people and having genuine respect for other people. Not walking around thinking I’m low, I’m low, which is what it sounds like because we’re always thinking of I, you know? But it’s more an emphasis on others and having a delight in their qualities. Even we practice, we have to practice this, going around each person in the room, even just with the group in here, know, finding something really good about each person in this room, quietly to ourselves, privately, know, to rejoice. Whereas if we look at our mind, have strong attachment or strong anger and even if we’re not doing it very strongly and it’s hard to see it, it’s embarrassing to see it, we’re always finding fault, know, don’t like that person, that person’s too fat, that person’s too this, and don’t like those clothes, and don’t like the way they talk, and they talk too much, we can’t help it, even if we’re smiling and chatting and being friendly, with all the critical minds all the time going.
I know it’s painful to look at it, it’s true, isn’t it? We can see. So we have to practice using those voices, don’t suffocate the voices, just change the voices. Find something nice about a person you just find in mind criticizing. Don’t feel bad and guilty and then beat yourself up, it’s ridiculous.
It’s just natural because we’re so addicted to these views. Just find something good to rejoice about that person, and do it with each, and we train ourselves in this way, so learning to delight in the qualities of other people. Eventually that becomes spontaneous, you delight in whoever you meet, eventually. It comes, it just takes time. So it’s a conscious thing we’re trying to do, and observing all the time our own mind, all the little tricks our mind’s playing, all the little voices, you know.
And of course there’s so many layers of them, it’s hard to see it clearly. To see our minds is a very, very difficult job, and of course it keeps getting more subtle and more subtle and more subtle. We keep unraveling more and more of the complexities of all the stuff inside, deeper and deeper, know. That’s what we need to do. We’ve got to start where we are, you know.
So eventually we meditate many, many, many times in many, many, many different ways thinking about how others are equal to me. And eventually we can even go to the next contemplation which is to learn to see the disadvantages of cherishing oneself. So the way they talk very much on this wing, in the first wing, you can really say the main problem, the cause of all the problems in the first wing, the wisdom wing, is what they call self grasping, or ego grasping or really this ignorance, the root delusion that is the source of all our suffering that gives rise to attachment, anger, pride and all the rest. Grasping, and we’re to talk more about this later, this primordial mistaken sense of an independent, inherent, lonely, separate, bereft me ness. Ego grasping, they call that.
So in this compassion wing, effectively they talk about the main problem being self-cherishing, or simply what we call in the West selfishness. But again, it’s hard to hear. It sounds cruel, know, to say I’m selfish. It’s a painful thing to hear. So we have self-cherishing, we cherish self most now because of self grasping, because we have this fundamental wrong view.
But we can talk about this effectively as being the main, opposite of bodhicitta. The direct opposite of wisdom that realises emptiness is self grasping. The opposite of bodhicitta is self-cherishing. Just the way they’re talking. So to learn to see how because we have this sense of self that is mistaken, we then have a sense of separate self, which gives rise to seeing friends, enemies and strangers and all the other things we have based on all those delusions, you know.
So the whole world view we have now is this one, which Buddha is arguing with and saying they’re all wrong assumptions, know. They’re coming from the wrong place. So here we’re trying to learn to see the disadvantages of cherishing self most. So it’s so deep in us. I mean, even if I’m saying the words, it almost seems like a silly thing to say.
Well, you think, I think, excuse me, of course I cherish me most. I am me, for God’s sake. And then you think of cherishing others most, it sounds like one of those goody goodies, you so it’s really hard to get kind of a sensible view of it. But it’s only because of strong ego grasping, that it just comes intuitive. Just cherish me most.
So then of course, like I’m saying, if we haven’t done the wisdom wing properly, we’re not gonna have healthy cherishing. The cherishing of others won’t be healthy. The goodness and kindness we do won’t be healthy. It’ll be that codependent neurotic kind like we’re talking. So here we’re talking of a kind of love and compassion that’s kind of got itself beyond all the grasping and the ego.
We’ve already done a lot of work on cleaning up our ego, we were very clear now, the idea is much more clear and more balanced and more self confident and more relaxed in who we are with less neurosis and less ego games, then we can really soar in the development of this love and kindness and compassion and cherishing others and all the rest. So all we’re talking here are various techniques to get us to the point of developing enormous love and then eventually enormous compassion. So this whole kind of scenario of practice is called exchanging self for others, are ways of developing strongly love for others, in which they be happy, compassion for others. And the very heart okay, I’m talking here, this is one of learning to see others are equal to you, then eventually thinking about how self-cherishing is the cause of your suffering, and then expanding your mind even further going the other way and thinking of the advantages of cherishing others, and then eventually being able to do the very heart meditation in this whole tradition, this little package of teachings, which is called Tonglen in Tibetan, giving and taking, giving and taking.
So basically, you can do this in a multitude of ways, but there is a way to do it in formal meditation and it’s a very amazing meditation. So simple, so difficult. So basically you can first, you can visualize in front of you, anyone. Even begin with yourself, Pabongka Rinpoche says. Even in the morning you do this meditation, he says you think of yourself in the afternoon with a headache.
Even yourself, you start with that. And then you imagine in this meditation, you visualize that when you breathe out, when you breathe in, you imagine the suffering of you in the afternoon, even this is when you first begin, you breathe in now the headache upon yourself. You take upon you you take upon yourself the suffering. And then when you breathe out, you give all your good qualities, your health, your happiness, all your good things to this person. Giving and taking.
So the thought of giving to others is development of love, isn’t it? Giving them what they need that causes you to want them to be happy, to give them what they need. And then taking upon yourself their suffering is a very specific way of having compassion. So We can see that we can be as creative as we like with this meditation, it’s so simple. They often say to visualize it your heart, your own self-cherishing, like rock.
When you breathe in, it kind of comes in with this kind of yucky smoke and it smashes yourself cherishing. Then when you breathe out, there’s blissful light, you give whatever it is this person needs. So of course you graduate from yourself in the afternoon to a dear friend. It’s easy for a friend, but we start with that. We have to have courage.
Eventually we can go to strangers and even enemies you know. You can do it in your meditation very formally, there are very extensive ways you can do it this way and then you can do it in the street. Wherever you go, you walk down the street and there’s a smelly old homeless person whom the first thought that arises that brings up in your mind is oh what a relief, that’s not me. Well this one is the opposite. You imagine, almost you can do it like this, it doesn’t say this in the book but it makes sense.
You can imagine that you sit there in their place and you give them the key and they go home to your nice comfortable house. Just even imagining this is outrageous. So we might think, well, me, how does that help? Well it doesn’t help them at all because you’re not really doing it actually, but what you’re doing is training yourself to be able to do this. You can’t do anything unless you train, you know?
So you can’t do these things unless you unless you you can’t become, you know, a compassionate person who actually genuinely loves others until you train yourself to think this way, and so eventually the thoughts become your status quo. They become your default mode. They become your instinct. That just takes time. We have to train in the mind.
So thinking in these ways is how you do it. This an amazing meditation, Tonglen they call it. One of the most amazing meditations. Hugely purifying for oneself and hugely growing like, you know, virtuous seeds in our mind. It can heal.
Mean, I’ve got so many Lama Zopa Have you got his book Ultimate Healing in the shop? You have? This is a I really recommend this book, Ultimate Healing by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. It’s an amazing, wonderful book, talking about healing, you know, how you use various meditations to help heal, many multitude of things Lama Zopa talks about, it’s a very big thing, he talks a lot about this. Using the medicine Buddha, many many things and he has many stories in there of people who’ve had AIDS, cancer and so on who’ve healed themselves by doing meditation on compassion, by doing something like Tonglen.
And not even intentionally, it wasn’t their intention. There’s one story, I always remember he quotes it in the book, of this young Chinese boy, I can’t think of where he’s from, but Rinpoche, he talked to this boy, was his own lama, this other boy’s lama who gave him this simple practice of compassion, maybe it was Tonglen, I can’t remember, and he had AIDS, right? I mean he was actually infected, he was sick, I don’t know what the right words are but you understand, he was sick. And so he was given this meditation to do by his lama and he apparently completely cured his own AIDS. And basically what he did was he meditated, he took, I think it was Tonglen or he just had compassion for the suffering of other people with AIDS.
He contemplated it and it moved his heart so strongly that he healed himself. It wasn’t his intention, but he healed himself. The power of the mind, in other words, it’s like the power of Harry’s mind, it saved him. Compassion for others is like this extraordinary, extraordinary level of transformation. I mean we can really do it.
I mean the story of Harry for me was a classic. Unbelievable one. Wasn’t it so powerful that story? Another story, interesting too, very interesting, this one. There’s this bloke in New York, he’s a very devoted student and he keeps his vows very purely.
He wants to not lie, not steal, not kill, very sincere practitioner. And he owns a cheese store and he’s called Joe the Cheese Guy, I can’t remember what his name is. And apparently the health inspector came in one day and started telling him what to do here and what to do there and kill the rodents and do this and do that. He kept saying, well, I can’t I can’t kill them. No.
No. I’m a Buddhist. I couldn’t kill. And she getting annoyed with him. And she had a clipboard and this fly landed on her clipboard.
And she said, you kill that fly now or I’ll close your store down. He said, I’m sorry, I can’t, you know. So, she stopped, she burst into tears, she hugged him, she said, please pray for me, she wrote a perfect report and she left. Isn’t that amazing? For a fly.
I mean, this man was brave enough to do this for a fly. I mean, you gotta be brave, isn’t it? That’s the point, know, that’s not weak. She saw mean, that you know, to save the life of a fly can look like really wimpy, but that was so powerful, so strong, it completely transformed her, you know. The same with did I tell you the BMW story?
These are three stories I always tell. I didn’t tell the BMW story? No. Okay. I’ll tell that story too.
You know, because the view of karma is, of course, as we’ve been saying, that whatever suffering you get is because you’ve done it to others before, done it to that person before. So and then if by pure by taking responsibility and purifying that, like I said already when I talked about purification, that can even have the delightful and surprising response of of stopping the suffering coming at you. Although we never think that way, but we can really do it this way by taking responsibility and having deep regret. So anyway, what happened in this story, roughly speaking, there’s a friend in Sydney, a group of people of Buddhists in Sydney, and one of them Renata who’s a student of Lama Zopa, and they were all John, this bloke, can’t think of his name, let’s call him John. He’s a Buddhist and he’s a therapist, a very good man.
And he said his next door neighbor, they found, discovered his next door neighbor was scratching, had scratched his fancy new BMW. So he got it fixed and didn’t say anything, then it got scratched again. So clearly this guy next door’s got some problem, know? And obviously this person, John, done nothing, so called nothing to deserve it in this life. But he wants to try and find the solution.
He just know where to go with this. He asked everybody their advice and one person said, well, you know, scratch his car, call the cops, whatever. And Renata said, I’ll tell you what Lama Zopa would do. What he would do is he would find out what this guy liked, then he’d buy him a very beautiful, very expensive gift and wrap it beautifully and offer it to him, and apologize, and apologize. You’re hearing me straight?
And apologize. So he thought this was a great idea. So he bought him these golf balls. He apparently liked golf, this old guy. Very beautiful golf balls, very expensive, wrapped them beautifully, and then went to his back door, knocked on the door, and offered them to him, to this guy’s surprise, and apologized for anything he’d done wrong.
So the old guy took it. Then John was comfortable, he felt like he’d just finished the whole thing, he was happy, you know. So he was in the kitchen having a cup of tea and this old bloke comes in beaming from ear to ear with his golf balls unwrapped. And the old bloke said, this is the kindest thing anyone’s done, thank you so much. And then he said, everything is forgiven.
Can you hear that? Isn’t that interesting? So everything was okay. I mean obviously, this is the point about, this is an interesting point about karma. You know when you get to not like somebody, like I say a person at work or anywhere, you know?
Now better still, when a person doesn’t like you, and you know you’ve done nothing wrong, you understand, you just know you’ve done nothing wrong and you know they’re predicting like crazy on you, and you just kind of speechless because you realise it’s just so unfair, they’re saying you did all these things and you know you didn’t do them, and that’s usually in terms of what they think you thought, right? They’re criticizing you, you did this and you said this and how dare you this and Do you understand what I’m saying? We all have that experience. Well that’s the point, that’s because of past karma. You can be completely innocent.
I mean you can even I mean many people I know in prison, for sure in prison they haven’t done something wrong. They’ve even been accused of doing murder and they go to prison, know. But it’s the same kind of thing, it’s due to what you’ve done in the past. Then you meet the person again and they don’t even know why they hate you so much. And you know they’re projecting onto you.
It’s past garbage, it doesn’t come from the sky. It doesn’t just come from their delusions, it comes from your past karma. So you’ve accused other people, you’ve hurt other people, now you’re getting it back, know? So when you can recognize that, like let’s just say this guy did, John, then by taking responsibility and apologizing, the other person does believe you’ve done some harm and then you apologise, they kind of feel so relieved you know. It’s all now better.
Or another story which is even more outrageous for us, another student of Lama Zopa. Be careful if you choose Lama Zopa as your guru, you’re really gonna get tough practice I tell you. So this friend of mine in California, Lenny, she said she had some kind of like, not very severe, but some kind of sexual abuse from her stepfather. And she really struggled for twenty years going to therapy, trying to work through it, really trying hard to work through it, she got stuck the whole time you know. So then she met Lama Zopa Rinpoche and became a Buddhist, and her first meeting with Lama Zopa, she told him about this, and then she asked him for please to help give her a method to try and go beyond it, try and fix it up.
And he said, well what I’d like you to do is write a letter to your mother and your stepfather and to apologise to them. And she thought, oh poor Rinpoche, he doesn’t understand, so she told him the whole story again. So he repeated his method, which sounds shocking, he repeated to apologise, so she said it took her two years to have the courage to somehow find the way to say the words from her heart that meant this, because she understood about karma and everything, and she said it took her two years and she said it worked. I know it’s difficult, but it’s like your heart’s in your throat when you think about these things. I mean it’s really impossible for us to take the blame even when we are at fault.
Can you imagine when we’re not at fault? I mean it’s almost like demented isn’t it? But in one of the verses, in these eight verses, this is one of the approaches, one of these mind training techniques, know, when you take the blame, you take responsibility. Sometimes, yeah I I know one time when a person, couple of experiences now, some people I know, who got extreme mental suffering and all I mean by that is extreme paranoia and extreme anger, know? I mean, that’s all mental suffering is, to such an extent that they’re truly like seeing nightmares all the time, and imagining you’re doing these terrible things to them, I mean really extreme, extreme, when a person’s that extreme, then it’s easy to apologise, cause you know they’re completely out of their brain.
You see my point? So when it’s really extreme, it’s easy to really apologize to that person for what they think you just did. It’s easy because it’s so outrageous. When it’s sort of a mild one, especially when it’s a friend, it’s very hard, know. But it was so clear for me, this particular person who just accused me of doing these unbelievable things, you can’t even imagine, this is like the person’s really gone out of a poor mind, they’ve obviously passed karma too, and I know I haven’t done them, it’s very simple, it’s so clear.
Because it’s so evident that she’s suffering. But it’s easy to say you’re sorry. It’s so easy because you know that’ll alleviate their pain, you know? Because it’s clearly insane.