Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin opens with a striking question on responsibility and compassion: why taking blame unfairly can be a genuine act of compassion rooted in karma. She then describes a month-long pilgrimage to Nepal and India, featuring a five-day course at Kopan Monastery with daily teachings and visits to sacred Buddhist sites, where participants learn to create merit for animals through mantras and circumambulation. The teaching broadens into a discussion of prison reform, violence, and education from a Buddhist perspective. Central to the second half is her core teaching on the two wings of practice: wisdom (inner clarity and strength) must develop before compassion (helping others) can be effective. She concludes by teaching how to transform suffering through acceptance and conscious choice. Pitched at serious practitioners, particularly those in criminal justice work.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 Unknown.mp3
UUID: b66001c2-5508-4c5a-89a8-012470014354
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: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~9,102
I was saying I was so holy, believe me, I’m not. But sometimes when it’s really extreme, it’s almost easier to see it. Or like a child, know? Think of this child, two year old, stabbing their feet and crying, You’re so mean, you did this! Oh darling, I know I mean it, it’s alright, I won’t do it again.
It’s so easy, isn’t it? Just to take the blame and immediately they’re subdued, hopefully. But we can see, but this is really based on karma. But even if it weren’t based on karma, if it’s really just based on compassion, because you can see the suffering of the other person, you’d be happy to take the blame, no problem. If you’re feeling comfortable enough in yourself, no problem.
Even up to blame, who cares? Make them feel better. You’ve got to be brave to do it, it’s true. What do you think? That’s about twenty to twelve.
Any thoughts, any feelings about all this so far? No? Yes? Yes. What we do?
Okay, this pilgrimage, yeah. Well actually, it’s interesting, Last year, or was it the year before, what year are we, two, two, two, one, maybe last year, I don’t know. No year before last, late year before last, two thousand, a friend of mine, we were discussing how to raise money man for different things and one of them was the prison project because said, know, I have to raise the money for it. And she just said, Rameen, you should lead a pilgrimage. I’ve never even been on a pilgrimage, must have led one, right?
At that point. Mean I’ve been to the east and been to holy places but never done a proper pilgrimage from holy place to holy place. So I thought oh, that’s interesting and I never thought of it. She said there must be a lot of people around the world you meet who might like to come with you, know, because they know you and they like to go with someone they know. So I happened to have friend, two friends in San Francisco, who are both in the travel business, both Buddhists.
One of them leads little groups to Nepal, has for years, and the other one has got a little thing called Himalayan high treks, and she’s been leading little groups to Nepal, India, Tibet, and those things. And they’re both just gorgeous people. And I just rang them up and said what do you think, what do think of this idea, how’d we do it? And they both thought it was a great idea. So Effie, who was the travel agent, she started putting the whole thing together, she then organised the entire thing, she’d made some profit for herself I think, not much, but whatever profit there was, we organised it, had the first one, we had twenty eight people come, including me, everybody, twenty eight, which is an amazing number of people to have, the first one, and Effie organised the whole thing and then Silla, the other person, she came on and organised internally, the tour leader and everything, and it was this wonderful experience, I mean Sandy was there, wasn’t it?
Just an amazing experience, everyone you talked to and I had amazing experience, I thought it was an amazing experience, was so lovely. What we did was, was about nearly four weeks we started we came to Kathmandu, all flew to Kathmandu. Then we did a few things around Kathmandu for several days. The second one we’re doing this year is gonna be bit different, it’s much the same. So okay, this year what we’re gonna do is this, we arrive in Kathmandu, we go up to Kopan Monastery, is the main monastery of the FPMT, it’s about thirty years been there, now Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa started, right, and I’ll talk about that later maybe.
With about three hundred monks and then down the road about three hundred nuns, and it’s also a facility for Westerners, they have courses there throughout the year, it’s been a wonderful place for Westerners to do courses, it’s a great place to go. So we did a five day course, we will do a five day course, we did similar last year, six day course, but every second day during that we’ll go off to one or two holy places around Kathmandu. There’s like Boudhanath Stūpa, which is one of the most amazing stupas in the world, extraordinary, very blessed. Then there’s another one called Swayambhunath Stūpa, and then we go to a place called Pharping, which is an hour out of Kathmandu, a very holy place connected with some many of the holy beings, and especially the old Indian ones, you know. What we do there, a couple of months before we went on the first which was in October last year, I spoke to Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the phone and got various practices from him that we should do at these places.
So I got like two hours of information, I put this little book together, it’s all the practices and all the information, what to do, how to do it, here prostrations there, the Heart Sūtra, this one there, so we had a little book, we had a little book, and then we went to each place and we did these various poojas and different things and offerings and practices, and then we travelled, so then we travelled on a bus and went to these various places, so basically the places in Nepal, two or three of those, and then in India the various places connected to the Buddha, where he was born, where he died, where he taught, where he got enlightened. Four or five places. And in most of India we had this nice air conditioned bus that we all travelled in together, you know. And that’s really what we did, was a pilgrimage. Mean actually pilgrimages they say you’re supposed to walk everywhere, that would take us six months, so we won’t do that.
Well, it’d probably take us two years to walk from here to India. Forget it. Okay, so we don’t walk, so we take air conditioned buses and have and I wanted it to be kind of reasonable quality, not too hippie quality, kind of like nice hotels with bathrooms and everything. And it was, they were mostly nice, weren’t they? And so that’s what we’re doing, so it’s about a month.
Oh yeah, there were teachings every day, we’ll do more this time, more meditations and teachings every day, we’ll do meditation in the morning I think. And yeah, it’ll be like that. And it was a very wonderful experience and so because of that and because it was very good for the prison project too, profit from it went to us and Effie was so delighted to do that and Silla did a wonderful job as well but this year Sandy will be doing Silla’s job, this person here. She’ll be organising all the internal and running around being mum during the thing and then that’s it, it’ll be about a month. Part of it is this course and going around.
So, that’s what it is. So if you’re interested in getting even information about it, we’re doing a brochure soon, then you put your name on that piece of paper out there. Put your name and address down. When? Oh it’s October twenty fifth to November twenty two, twenty nine days.
And if we have more people, if we have extra people, won’t do more than thirty five people. Twenty eight worked very nicely, maybe we can go to thirty five and if there’s more people we’ll do a second tour I think, I’ve kept aside another. So next one will be November twenty two till about December twenty, if we have a second one. If you just put the name and address down, we’ll send you the brochure. And the thing is because of the Australian dollar, it’s a bit difficult because it makes it a lot for Australians.
But we’ll try and give a good discount to Australians for that reason. Because if you have to go to India and Nepal, it’s based on India and Nepal prices, right? Yeah, last year we had mostly Americans, but three Malaysians and five or six, seven of us were Australian, altogether seven Australians. This year probably would be different. So that’s what it is.
Excuse me? Children can come like four and ten? Yeah, sure. Yeah, As long as they enjoy it. Absolutely, sure, no problem.
Absolutely. Not lunch yet, any questions? Yes darling? Tell the story about how we bless it with your dogs. That’s why you asked me that didn’t you?
Well, remember to say, because the teaching is that all sentient beings have a Buddha nature and every single thing that any sentient being experiences through their senses, whatever goes in, whatever you see, whatever you hear, it leaves an impression. Impression. Which when you hear this, it makes complete sense why the world, you know, in terms of external conditions, why we’re so berserk in the world. I mean look at the input that we’re getting through our senses in the world, it’s outrageous isn’t it? I remember as a little kid stories, I’m coming back to it.
I remember as a little girl, I always remember those two Columbine boys killed and did all those berserk things, and of course in the west we’re trying to struggle a bit to ask why did they do it, so they look to the parents, like I said, they find nice white middle class Christians, they can’t be that, right? Unless they’re cheating, we think. But then I think it would have to be the videos, it has to be the mean kids at school. But everybody could see from their experiences, okay, got insulted, they got kind of abused sometimes, they weren’t raped or murdered or stabbed every day, these two kids, they saw videos. So as another boy pointed out, excuse me, I saw the same videos but I didn’t wanna go around and kill thirteen people.
So the point is though, what I’m getting here, this is the one to the story, that whatever we do experience from the outside, if we have got the imprints in the mind, they play a huge role in how we are, so given this, given that every sentient being has all the imprints for Buddhahood and all the imprints for virtue in their mind, then every being, dogs, ants, fleas, mice, have these too, so whatever you can put into their mind, even if they don’t understand it, through sound or through seeing, or doing certain activities in relation to holy objects like circumambulating statues and stupas, then that leaves strong karmic imprint in their mind to meet the Buddha in the future, or to meet Hitler, whoever it is you have karmic connection with, you know? When we were discussing to Richard and the one about how certain actions we do in relation to certain objects, because of the power of the object, has its own benefit to us, huge karmic merit, huge meritorious results. And one of these is relation to holy objects, so the tradition, as you know, the Tibetan Buddhism, one of the practices that people do, which seems kind of weird, but it’s circumambulate, just walk around.
A stupa, for example. So stupas are a real focus of this holy energy, you know? And this one in Bodha is a very special one, Boudhanath and Swayambhunath, amazing ones. And the one, of course, in Bodhgaya where the Buddha got enlightened, know. Rinpoche, having this understanding, he will never pass by an opportunity, like I said about the ape in the zoo and the porcupine, he never passes by an opportunity to help a sentient being, an animal, create merit.
And so regularly he will do that, regularly he will get the dogs, gather up all the dogs from and all the dogs around, and you drag them all down in the trucks and the jeeps, and get them down to Bodha, and they get to circumambulate the stupa, you know? Or you’ll get very commonly, when we do a practice called liberating animals, when let’s say one of the practices we can do as a center or as a group, it’s very purifying, is to go buy a bunch of worms that are destined to be bait, right, and you’re saving the lives of these creatures from this terrible suffering, right, plus you’re saving the people who are gonna buy the bait and to hurt the worms from creating negative karma, hurting those, okay, they’ll hurt something else. But at least you save those worms from suffering. You gather up all the worms, all the goats, all the beings that you’re trying to save the lives of and one of the jobs you do is you get something there and you want them to form the thing, you’d get them to circumambulate, the worms, you’d carry the worms around the stupa.
So because of the power of the stupa, create merit, see. So that’s commonly what Rinpoche would do or like I said, would, one time in New Zealand, he got us to gather all the goats in the field, he closed the field off, put speakers up, loud speakers, and he read sutras to them. Not because they understand, clearly they don’t. But like story about that bird who lived on the yogi’s window sill, he got born as a student, this is a well known story, everyone quotes in the text, right? He got born as a student of the, obviously somebody who’s clairvoyant to see it, of the yogi. And Lama Zopa said he even wrote good commentaries on the various texts the yogi used to talk about but he wasn’t very good at anything else.
It was just those texts, right? That’s what they say. You know, and this is one thing you can do, even if the animal’s dead, like I said, you can blow mantras on flesh. I’ll give you a few mantras too, if you wanna take those away with you in your heart. Also, could, you know, you’re talking to meet an ant, or a fly, or a mosquito, before you think of swiping this mosquito, even before you swipe it, you don’t swipe it, but then you blow mantras on it, then you can blow it away, you know?
So you bless the creature, Gives it great blessing, that’s what they say. And this is something too to help your animals. We have all our pets, let’s say. And we think we love our pets and we do love our pets, there’s no doubt. But remember, it’s probably attachment.
I mean you don’t love the rat in the same way, do you? You do not. You don’t love somebody else’s dog in the same way, do you? No. So it’s attachment, we can see.
So we spend all this money and energy on our pets and get all so emotional. But then you know, leave them in their house all day, leave them in their house all day, with sitting in their own completely ignorant mind, creating no virtue whatsoever. And then you come home and give them all huggies and kissies and think you’re being loving to them and all you’re doing is helping them use up their merit and not giving them any virtue, new karma, good karma. So what you should do, one of the most marvelous things you can do for your animals, if you go to work every day, you put on tapes or CDs that replay all day of the teachings or of mantras. So all day, their little minds are being kind of stuffed full of the Dalai Lama’s teachings.
They’ll probably get ahead of the path quicker than you. I mean it’s a really good, it’s like, if you’re gonna have an animal, don’t just be kind to it, it doesn’t help. Help it create merit, know, that’s the point. Help it create virtue, help it have virtuous seeds in its mind. Help it activate the seeds that are there already, that are completely buried right now and are spoilt animal seeds.
That’s one way you can really be beneficial to your animals. Yep. What is it, quick? My question is how do you view the culture in societies where you’ve got some understanding? Sure.
Well you know, we’re human beings and we gather in groups, don’t we? We seem to gather in groups and the groups are very big now, they’re like millions of people, they’re big cities. So it does seem reasonable that we have the ideal scenario of a society that you have rules that we all agree to. There’s nothing wrong with that. So you know, Tibet is a Buddhist society, ninety nine percent of the people I’d say were Buddhist there, and still had their few thieves and their criminals and their this and their that but of course not nearly as many as we would have in our societies.
But they had a government and they had policies and had, actually they were incredibly political, they had all these kind of politics back and forth and dealings with China and blah blah blah and things that, laws in the society and so on. Nothing as sophisticated in the good and the bad sense of ours because our societies are so complex. I’m not as insane as ours, you know? But still, they’re there, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s perfectly reasonable to have a kind of agreement. It’s like in a family even, there’s some kind of agreement, does this and mommy does that and we all have our jobs.
And so we support by all being harmonious together in that group, we play our roles. It’s not written on a piece of paper, they don’t have too many things written on pieces of paper. So there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s fine, nothing wrong. But the ideal scenario of course would be that let’s say you’re a judge or a policeman, according to what society it is, if you were also being, let’s say we’re all Buddhist and being genuine practitioners, you could still be a policeman and you could still tell someone else for doing something or do the job of being a policeman, it would come from compassion. It would genuinely come from compassion, that would be the ideal, can you imagine how blissful?
Do you see? There’s no contradiction. But it’d be far more compassionate, I mean if you had a prison, in the way that we try to make the prisons and I’m seeing for sure, comparing the prisons again in poor old America, just there are a lot more prisons there, there’s probably ten, fifteen times the number per head in America than here, it’s two million plus, I think the figures I’ve heard are in most states in this country. But in general, experience of this country, visiting all the various prisons I’ve visited and seeing various people in all the different states, without exception, are more programs, there are more people who seem to have budget to be able to provide programs to help people get better and do this and do that. Whereas I know I was told in, I read in a long article about the prison system in California, sorry, that in the 70s, they made a conscious decision that it would be incarceration and not rehabilitation.
So maybe they’re changing now but it’s clearly that, the prisons are bursting at the seams, they’ve got all these different rules, it’s getting tougher and tougher and heavier and heavier, not complaining, I mean because the violence is getting heavier and heavier, know? But it seems if you have compassionate rules, I mean even just one state I go to in Connecticut, there’s a prison there, a women’s prison, where for a while they had a reasonable governor and so she got them to build a school for the prison. Is a wonderful school and when you’re inside there, don’t know you’re in prison. These women had this school and they had dogs there, they’re the seeing eye dogs that they train, they’ve got a lot of freedom inside the school to go here and go there and have a cup of tea when they want to, it’s a marvelous environment you know. But this is the interesting thing as a society these days and certainly this is the prevalent feeling here and in America I’d say, that people in the world get very furious when they hear about prisons that are too comfortable.
So this prison, they very care about the publicity they get because people get really angry when they realise all these people in these prisoners are treated like human beings and are educated, mean how dare they, they’re wrong, they should be suffering. So we can see if it’s vaguely enlightened, the system, it helps benefit human beings and yes you have a prisoner and yes you put them away but yes you help them. If you understood karma, can you imagine how different prison systems would be if you understood karma? You’d know the psychos who’ve got really deeply imprinted suffering, extremely suffering minds, you could discriminate between them and the people who just due to karma, kill somebody by accident. There’s so many people who do that, it’s not because they’re evil, but you see a very different view would it be, still have a prison, you still have a system, nothing wrong but it would be coming from intelligence and compassion, wouldn’t it?
I’ve heard that, definitely. Certainly in California, now for example, the governor who’s a democrat, he prides himself on his strictness with crime, a lot of this is a really big deal in America, with crime, because there is so much crime. So he has, but he there has a policy that anyone who’s ever killed anybody, and he said I don’t care what the reason is, Even if it’s completely accidental, if anyone’s killed somebody, they will never get out of prison alive as far as he’s concerned. I don’t know if this is worse, no if anybody’s died, I think that’s definitely the worst one. I mean I’ve got many people that I know who somehow is dumb, someone’s died and they’ve got life sentences but even, yeah so there’s many of the gangs, the gangsters, these young Mexicans.
They’ve got like one guy I can think of, three life sentences for just somebody getting a bullet in his bum you know because they’re trying to get tough with gangs. So they give these very, very heavy sentences. Yet with drugs, people are getting twenty years for possessing marijuana or something. Even stealing for less than that, they’re getting twenty years so? Oh I think it’s just the whole environment.
When there’s more violence, there’s more fear so increases more violence which brings more fear, which brings tougher sentences, which brings more, and then it’s very political, people are trying to win people’s votes, so people are finding out what do people want. I mean it’s just this whole environment all feeds each other, doesn’t it? And I think it’s, I remember even when I first went to live in New York, this was thirty years ago, it really shocked me, not shocked, it’s interested me to see the amount of fear in a city. I’d always heard about it but the amount of palpable fear that people had about walking in the streets. And it really struck me then, I wasn’t even a Buddhist then, it struck me then that when you have that energy in a place where there’s lot of fear about violence, that produces violence and then the violence produces the fear, they feed each other, so there’s just this environment.
And I mean just my own speculation, let’s say using an example like America for example, where there’s this huge thing about guns, it’s almost like a God given right, it’s in the constitution. So it’s almost like that’s coming down, it’s like the tablet coming down from Moses with the laws on it, you’re allowed to have a gun, so it’s almost like this God given right. Remember the thing that happened in Tasmania and the federal government took all the guns away, whatever they did, I don’t know how effective it was, there would be civil war I think, anybody Americans here, would you agree with me? Would there be civil war if you even attempted to do that, wouldn’t there be in America? There’s this huge kind of energy in so many people’s minds that it’s this special right to have a gun.
I think it’s come from the Constitution, since the Constitution isn’t it, it’s just been for hundreds of years like this. So it’s just built up this culture of it, isn’t it? It’s kind of interesting, I’ve met many people who had guns and ordinary people. Pardon darling, who? Christians, thou shalt not kill the Lord.
Oh dear, all agree with it. Excuse me, eighty percent are agreeing with George Bush and they’re all Christians, I’m not being rude about Christians. Yeah. Yes darling? Oh it’s lunchtime.
What does that say, it’s twelve o’clock. That’s okay, we’re not late. Okay, let’s dedicate. Go on darling, you speak. One more.
Okay, then the difference is how you receive it. When it’s just kind of blind, when you’re a kid got no, when you’re a kid you’ve got no thermostat yet, you’ve no way to work with it, it can be just unbearable to have all these imprints in the mind. As you get old and you’re intelligent and you learn to work with things, then nothing can deter you, doesn’t matter how much violence you see, it doesn’t throw you because you have a way of interpreting it that makes it understandable and increases your compassion. It’s only when there’s no control. I’m not trying to You understand my point, it’s a really important point.
I mean then, once you’re more developed and you know what’s going on, you can be in the middle of a war and you can gain compassion from it. It won’t make you worse but if you’ve got a young mind that’s very I mean I remember when I was eight and we didn’t have television, there was not television in Australia when I was eight and I’ll never forget this as long as I live, I still in my mind, very vivid. My grandmother used to listen to all the radio serials, know, they had these serials on the radio and one of them was called D24, do you remember that? Okay, it was all about the Melbourne police, there was a section of the Melbourne police called D24, so there’s police show on the radio and this one, and my grandma, nanny we called her, wouldn’t let me listen because I was only eight but she let my older sister, so I was really jealous you know, because she let Janet listen and not me so I sneaked out and stood behind the door and listened to this radio show and I’ll never forget it. It was the first time I heard such a thing.
It was this simple story about this, I’ll never forget, this girl who was waiting for her boyfriend on the road and then the car stopped and said, oh is that you John? He said, no no, John sent me, so he took her off and he went off to Mount Martha and he murdered her. I’ll never forget the story, it’s vivid in my mind because was the first time I heard this kind of stuff and I thought about it and thought about it and visualized it, it was very moving for me, I worked with it okay. But if you’ve a disturbed mind of so many children now, and then you hear all this stuff and you see all these videos and you’ve all these imprints like those two Columbine boys, then all that stuff feeds, those seeds like just like a rampant forest, know, so then of course, they end up killing thirteen people. It wasn’t as if the videos did the job, but they fed what was there.
Was as if somebody had known their minds and understood them since tiny children and could have helped nurture the good parts and work through their own minds with understanding them and dealing with them, you understand? That’s the point. So anything that we can see and understand and work with, fantastic. No limit to what you can see. That makes a difference, a that understands, it?
Yeah. How do you educate your children then? Well that’s what the difficult thing is, know, it’s very hard to protect the children, not to do it in a neurotic way, they’ve got the calm and be born now in this crazy society so that’s why it’s so important from a basis of a person who’s already looking at their own mind, really working on their own mind, their mother, whoever looks after them, and then providing some kind of nurturing, I mean ideal, some kind of nurturing spot, place, where they grow up to get love and develop their good qualities, then they’re capable of bearing the unbearableness out there, then they’re capable of dealing with the insanity. But unless you have this one, you can’t grow up, if you can’t grow up you just become a maniac and look at us in the world, know. Do you see what I mean?
That’s how. The first step is to do it yourself. Then if you’re gonna have a baby, make sure you have it, not in a neurotic protective like refusing to let them go outside or anything, that’s insane. But if you give them grounding and you know their mind enough and you can see their mind is stable and they’ve got good qualities, then there’s no reason to fear, know, then they’ll able to handle somehow. Does that make sense?
Let’s dedicate, go to lunch. So just thinking, here we’ve been since six o’clock, whatever we’ve been doing, how amazing all these hours, all these moments, all these karmic imprints in our minds, we rejoice, we delight in these, may they ripen as quickly as possible in the development of our amazing potential, for the sake of all beings. That’s all. Thanks everybody. And don’t forget to bless your lunch, see it as nectar, big as the ocean, and offer it to all living beings.
No. So just say it after me, Om Mani. So also the way to recite the mantras is, you know, you can sing them like you’ve seen we’ve done. We’ve sung these tunes. They’re nice tunes. Actually, I’ll sing the there’s a nice Om Mani Padme Hum tune as well.
There’s quite a few. I’ll sing that and you just done the Omtara, I could hear you. But also, when you’re reciting them on yourself, especially if you’re using your mala, whatever the your mala to count, then you would you’re supposed to recite them silently. You move your mouth enough that you can hear it, but if the person next to you is there, they shouldn’t hear it. That’s the way to recite the mantras.
And so also when you’re doing many, let’s say you have to do hundreds of thousands in a retreat or something, actually the faster the better, you know, the faster the better. Because the more you say, the more powerful, but the crucial thing is to say them very clearly. So, you can say them very, very fast but they must be clear, you mustn’t garble the syllables, you know? So I’ll just sing the tune a little bit for Om Mani Padme Hum just for you to hear it, in case you like the tune. I think there are various tunes but that’s the one I tend to do.
The Śākyamūni Buddha mantra, did Venerable Thubten Gyatso give you that? No, that’s what we did yesterday morning. So that’s it. Tayata. Om.
Muni Muni. Tayata Om Muni Muni Maha Muni Muni Okay, maybe what write Maybe somebody can write them at the end, somewhere on a wall or something, if you need them you can copy them down. I’ll also give you the Medicine Buddha mantra, this is a very good one to do. So, Tayatha Om Bekandze Bekandze Maha Bekandze Radza Samudgate Svāhā Okay. Then there’s wisdom, Mañjuśrī, gentle voice Om Ah Ra Pa Tsa Na Dhi.
Om Ah Ra Pa Tsa Na Dhi. It’s very good for sharp, for mind, for intelligence, for clarity, for cutting through the ignorance. Sounds like it too, isn’t it? Om Ah Ra Pa Tsa Na Dhi Om Ah Ra Pa Tsa Na Dhi And the way they all do it in the monastery, the little monks, the little nuns you hear them first thing in the morning, all doing it very, very fast as they go to the gompa, and then when you finish doing it, what you do is you hold your breath, and then you they call the last syllable the seed syllable, it’s like the essence of the mantra. In this case it’s Dhi, D H I, Dhi.
And then what you do is, with one breath, you recite it very, very fast, like your tongue, and then you eventually swallow it, thinking you’re swallowing Speech. Clear speech. So OM, I don’t know how you spell this one. But also by the way, way the Tibetans say the mantras is they’re all Sanskrit by the way, mantras are Sanskrit, they’ve never translated because they talk about how Sanskrit’s like this holy kind of sound, you know? So, if you see the Sanskrit you wouldn’t even recognise because you hear it quite differently from the way the Lamas say Over the centuries, Tibetans have said it in their way.
But they say the best benefit, the best way to say it, like I said before, is the way you get it from your teachers. The way I say it is how I’ve heard it from my Lamas. So, om, you just spell it, it’s not at all the correct Sanskrit spelling, how it’s said is om, om ah ra ra pa pa sa na na D, D H I. It’s not spelled like that at all in Sanskrit. That’ll do.
Okay. And finish this path to enlightenment while we’re here. K. Alright. Okay, now where were we?
Wisdom and compassion, the wisdom wing, we’re talking about the various techniques, just touching on them briefly, the different techniques we need to develop in order to, blast open our minds, to expand our minds, to encompass others. But the thing to say again and again and again, is we tend to think of a spiritual path, and we think of the compassion side. And we think of love and compassion, we think of it as a really good feeling. So then we think, well how do I get that, you know, so it’s all a bit of a mystery to us. But you know, the way we can see from the Buddhist approach is a step by step, and you start at the level of thoughts, you know.
Love, beginning to love somebody isn’t the attachment one, isn’t the good feeling one, it’s the one that says, may you be happy. So if you’re genuinely building up love in a gradual way, it starts with the may you be happy, and eventually, of course, it develops into huge affection, you know? There’s no question. We’ve got to start on the ground and build up. Of course, way we think of love now, isn’t it, that you have all this good feeling for so many people and you feel so attached to somebody that say, you think, you mean I’ve got to love everybody like that?
It’s completely exhausting, you know? Because it’s all attachment, it’s all kind of all attachment, it’s all exciting. But that’s not love actually, that’s just attachment. Or it’s just good feelings. I’m not criticising good feelings either.
But love is something very stable, and very genuine, and deep that builds up from the thoughts, and really thinking about it, like we’ve been discussing, you know? Compassion the same. Eventually it develops into extraordinary feelings, there’s no question. But then they’re stable because we’ve done the wisdom wing, and this is the key, you know. The genuine development of the compassion wing is completely dependent upon the development of the wisdom wing, and the development of the wisdom wing is you putting yourself together, getting rid of all the neuroses and the delusions and the self hate and the depression and the anxiety and the fears and the rubbish.
So it’s interesting, but we’re just, you know, it’s often we can see, if we look into our personality and our life, some of us have much more emphasis on the wisdom, the compassion wing, let’s say. Very kind, always going out of the way to be kind to others, to help others, to support others, that’s what we do, it’s our job. And we’re very good at that, but often, we can lack the wisdom side. So we become vulnerable, we get hurt easily, we get dragged down easily, it makes us crazy easily. Because we absorb everybody else’s stuff and we’re trying to make the whole world better.
But we haven’t got the wisdom, know. We haven’t developed the wisdom, we haven’t got the inner strength. I know it sounds awful, I’m gonna have to say it. It’s like developing the wisdom wing gives your compassion like balls, know? Excuse me, I have to say it like that.
Do you get my point? Yes. Thank you. I had to get a translation. It’s really true.
It’s really interesting, know. We can have all this goodness and compassion, you look at, like I say, working for others, in jobs where you’re working for others. The classic syndrome of the services industry, you’re helping others, you completely have mental breakdown, you collapse, you get stressed out, you get exhausted, you gotta go have a break, know. Because we haven’t got a thermostat. We don’t, and also, not too much, but emphasis on the compassion without the wisdom means we’re not noticing what’s going on inside here.
You we don’t notice. And we always say, oh well I can’t think of myself, I’ve to think of others. You’re absolutely right. But you’ve got to be prepared, you’ve got to be, like we said, a suitable vessel to accomplish the compassion wing. You’ve got to done the work on yourself first, you’ve to have this clarity and wisdom about your own mind and lessen your own attachment and lessen your own depression and lessen your own anxiety and lessen your own anger.
So if you can’t even see it, you’re in big trouble. And all the time we try to cover it up and cover it up, it’s very common. Then of course there’s some people who’ve got more of the wisdom side, which means maybe they’ve got kindness, but it’s much more kind of in terms of their own self and kind of clear and sharp and they can be quite mean sometimes. So we’ve really got to do both. We’ve got to develop both, so important.
We need both wings. Then the compassion we do have, while I’m talking here, it goes way beyond the limited compassion we can have now, which is ego based. Just naturally it’s ego based now, because that’s how we are, know, not being mean about us. So we’ve got to do the wisdom wing first. And the extent to which we’ve accomplished any of that, which means the extent to which we’ve lessened attachment, anger, jealousy, pride, depression, you name it, is the extent to which our compassion can be that much more amazing.
This is no doubt. Then your compassion wing intelligent. Right now it’s got no thermostat, automatically trying to protect others and help others, but with no real wisdom. So it’s like this one of tough love. Tough love is like the skillful ability to know how to help a person.
So compassion, for example, is we need to develop this in our minds all the time, is the wish to benefit others. There is no doubt. But that’s not what gives you the skill to benefit them. That’s just the wish. That’s why we make a big mess.
The skill to know how to benefit a person is what you get from the wisdom practice, from developing, from lessening your own delusions, increasing your own clarity and wisdom. Wisdom comes when you decrease your delusions. The more delusions you have, the less wisdom you have. Meaning simply, the more I’m caught up in my own eye, my own attachment, my own needs, even if I’m not aware of it, the less I can see clearly what the hell’s going on. That’s what wisdom is.
So then having this, but having a lot of compassion, you just make a mess, you know? You mean well, we mean well, but we make a mess. So don’t lessen the compassion, but just increase the wisdom. And wisdom is the compassion is the wish to benefit another. The wisdom is to know what to do when that will actually bring the benefit.
And that’s the point, sometimes when we have compassion that’s all just kind of all open and our hearts are really open and vulnerable, we will all the time do whatever we can to help, but we might very often have the skills, we end up making a mess. We end up doing something that wasn’t effective. Whereas when we have wisdom, we are just as compassionate, but maybe we’ll do nothing because you can see there’s nothing to do. It can almost look like you’re being detached sometimes, doesn’t matter, it’s wisdom. It’ll be much more effective, the compassion we do then, because wisdom is there.
So we’ve got to have both. You can see some people, you know, may say more the wisdom side, very intelligent minds, always analyzing everything and knowing everything and knowing the answers to everything, but completely self centered. Don’t have much compassion, know. Don’t help others at all, it’s all theories. Bright minds, very intelligent, always knowing what’s going on, this, that, way, way, blah, I’m this, I’m that, you’re this, he’s this.
Not much active, not much compassion, you know? Gotta do both. You need both. Wisdom is very genuine when it’s based on compassion, and compassion is very effective when it’s based on wisdom. So anyway, moving on this path and doing all these techniques, we’re talking now actually in numberless lives doing these techniques, perfecting, perfecting, perfecting, getting more and more amazing in our equanimity, in our love and compassion, doing all these different things, using these transformation techniques, using the one of exchanging self for others, all these things, amazing, amazing, incredible.
And a whole other level of practice, which we just touched on before, within this scope practices, is the one we call transforming problems. So based on the idea of karma, that whatever you’re experiencing is a fruit of what you’ve done before, based on the fact that whenever you experience something bad or negative, it’s the ripening of your past karma, therefore the finishing of it, therefore you learn to find an attitude, you have an attitude that makes you happy when the problems come, because it’s all grist for the mill. Okay, initially we mightn’t delight in it, but we’ll eventually learn to know this has been good because I’m learning something from it. It’s useful. It’s an attitude we all understand, you know?
All grist for the mill. It has to be based on the attitude of karma, right? That somehow, you know, is coming, okay, I can’t change it. This is really learning to own what’s happening. Really learning to have the courage to recognize this suffering I’m having, this pain is due to my past, know.
Now, as Buddhists, there’s a saying among Tibetans I think, it’s very, it’s so simple, but it’s almost, it seems like ridiculous, know, it’s so simple. If you can change something, I’ve said it already, if you can change something, please change it, okay? If you can’t change it, I’m sorry, why worry? But I mean it’s so painful to hear this, it seems outrageous, isn’t it? And this is what I was saying before, one of the things we really need to learn to do, and I mentioned my friend Sheila and the crazy husband, is we need to learn to have the courage to make whatever situation it is in our choice or leave it.
If we can, then we take great courage and we leave because we feel we can’t bear the burden. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if we feel it is good for not good for us, but we feel it is right that we stay in that situation, although it’s painful, then we make it our choice to stay in it. We make it our choice to stay in it. Then everything becomes different.
But we have to recognize, this is the key too, we have to recognize our limitations, we have to know where we’re at. If you try to carry a burden on your shoulders, that your shoulders are not strong enough to bear, then you’ll break your back. That’s very stupid. So if you can’t bear a certain situation, then you must find a way to make it bearable for yourself. You must adjust it and you must take the control and change it to help you.
And if you have to leave and don’t feel like you’ve failed, you have not failed. You have to know what you can bear and what you can’t. That’s wisdom, okay? It’s like the same as trying to help somebody when you’re just not capable. You’ve approach because you’ve really done so much work on yourself, that actually you can sacrifice yourself and actually do what is most beneficial for another person.
That of course is more amazing, it’s unbelievable. But we have to know where we’re at ourselves and if we can’t bear the burden, if we can’t take the suffering, then there’s no point in hanging around, it’ll just make us insane. It’s not appropriate, that’s why most people go mad. But the big tragedy is, you know, most of us stay in a situation that’s no good, but then we blame the other person. And it’s like the person might be horrible, but if I open the door every time and let you come in and say you punch me, excuse me, at some point I’ve gotta realize I’ve gotta stop opening the door, not keep blaming you for punching me.
Do you see my point? That’s wisdom, and that’s protecting yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. You do it with the right motivation, it’s the perfect action, you know. It’s not being selfish, it doesn’t mean, oh, gotta think of We often say you gotta think of yourself more than others sometimes.
It’s true, in a sense you can say that. That just means you gotta do more wisdom work, so that you can really think about this in a genuine, much more profound way later. Doesn’t mean you become more selfish, it just means notice what’s going on inside yourself, know what your limitations are, know what your barriers are, know where you begin and other people end, you know? Know what is right to do so that you can gather your strength and build yourself up to become the amazing person you can become, so you can really be beneficial then. Otherwise, insanity, it’s no benefit to anybody.
The analogy, it’s just very simple. It’s just like, say, you you’re still the suffering people out there and they all got cancer and you know there are methods to help them get rid of their cancer. You just don’t go and kind of cut away and hope you’ll cross your fingers and hope you’ll cut the right bits out. You’ll kill them all. What you gotta do is go off for seven years and study to be a surgeon, right?
Now it might look like you’re being so selfish, all these people out there starving, Robina, look at you just look at your head in a book. Excuse me, you know why your head’s in a book. You’re learning to develop the skill to help each other. That’s the Wisdom Wing. You’ve to develop the Wisdom first, then you can go out there and you can heal everybody.
Of course, if you’re gonna die in the seven years but you can’t help it, you’re not qualified. So don’t rush out and try and heal people if you’re not qualified. We’ve got to become qualified first, which means the Wisdom Wing, put ourselves together, then we can do it. So anyway, what I’m saying here is one of transforming problems. If we have the courage and if we can’t change a situation, well even if we don’t have the courage, if you can’t change a situation, if you know, like the guys in prison, you can’t open the door and walk out, it sounds outrageous, but what choice do you have but to make this your choice?
Meaning to accept that this is my reality, this is my reality. I remember reading in a yoga magazine, someone gave me an article recently, she wasn’t a Buddhist, was a yoga practitioner, this woman in America, she’d been accused of murdering somebody and was put on death row, in fact she got out seventeen years later, she didn’t murder anybody, for a complete mistake but the fact is, for the first few years or the first while, I can’t remember how long she said, she was absolutely out of her brain with rage so she was unbearable, it’s like insane, but then slowly she realised that she could control her own life, so she said I decided this is not a prison cell, this is a cave, I am not a prisoner, I am a monk, she said. Then she started privately, secretly, she didn’t want to share it with anybody else, she didn’t want to show it to the guards or anything, she started practicing yoga and meditation and she put herself together, completely put herself together, amazing and she eventually got out as well but given that she was still in prison, she made herself sane this is exactly what transforming problems means it’s the most profound level of being realistic But we’re not realistic.
You look, we live in the world of if only, and should be, and shouldn’t be, and how dare, and why not, and who do they think they are, and this is not right, do you understand my point? We’re never being realistic, we’re not looking at what is. We’re living in the fantasy of what should be or what might be, you might be right, but it’s not helpful. To transforming problems, there’s this powerful capacity to recognize this is what is happening. Now, can I change it?
That woman clearly couldn’t. So what did she do? She made that her choice and she therefore transformed herself. That’s what many of my friends in prison are doing. Sitting in their cells, eight by ten foot, until the day they die, some of them, they’re only eighteen at the moment.
So that’s very brave, isn’t it? That’s courageous. But you look at us, know, we’re not even in prison, but we’re living in fantasy worlds all the time. That what should be and what shouldn’t be, and if only, and why not, and pointy fingers, shouting and yelling and complaining, never looking at reality. Again, if we can change something, please change it.
If you can’t, then why worry? I mean, sounds so outrageous, but so simple, you know? That’s what transforming problems means, dealing with what is and welcoming the problem. Because we can see we haven’t stopped the problem, we created the karmas, come up, boom, we didn’t pull the seat out in time, so here it is, you know? So, make the most.
It gives us great courage, know, great strength, inner strength. This is why Lama Zopa Rinpoche, I told you this one, when he wrote a twenty first birthday card to my friend Arturo who was in who was in prison in his cells, he said your prison is nothing in comparison with ordinary people, prison of ordinary people and he means us, okay? The prison of attachment, prison of depression, the prison of pride, the prison of anxiety, it meant living in the fantasy world of all those, not being mean about us again, it’s my mantra isn’t it, not being mean about us because the irony is that sometimes we can see when we don’t have a choice, that’s when we start to do something. But when we live in this fantasy of all these choices, you know, we just become paralyzed. So then, anyway, along this path we’re going, this is life after life after life, and by this summer eventually we’ve been doing all these practices, a person achieves bodhicitta, and now, you know, this is when only the thought of others is in the mind and it becomes to become a Buddha as quickly as possible.
We’re talking like extraordinarily developed person, way, way, way beyond anything we can conceive of, actually. So this person now, they practice what they call the Six Perfections of the Bodhisattvas and they’re really just continuing to practice in relation to others and then in their meditation, you know, practicing the wisdom that realises the nature of reality. So here I’ll just talk briefly about that because we’re going to run out of time.