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 explores the six perfections—the core bodhisattva practices in Tibetan Buddhism. Opening with generosity, she challenges the Western poverty mentality, explaining that giving—whether material aid, advice, or even feeding a starving animal—breaks down self-concern and opens us to benefit others. Morality becomes active engagement rather than mere restraint; patience, radical acceptance of obstacles rather than mere tolerance. Enthusiastic perseverance, the fourth perfection, is illustrated through Paul, a prison inmate serving a life sentence who, after a tragic accident, vows to benefit others and later sustains an authentic Tārā practice despite the overwhelming noise of eight hundred incarcerated people. The final two perfections—concentration and wisdom—require accessing a subtler level of mind to directly experience emptiness beyond conceptual understanding. Throughout, Robina frames these not as ideals but as practical daily trainings for anyone willing to work against habitual patterns of avoidance and complaint.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 Unknown.mp3
UUID: abeb4540-c2c0-4771-9810-fee7d6ecc3a2
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: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~8,952
So, these perfections that I talk about, it’s always really continuing to practice the things that we’ve been talking about already, but in a particular form. So the first four of these perfections, as they call them, are the actions that a bodhisattva is doing from life to life, bopping around in relation to others. And they’re called generosity, morality, patience, and enthusiastic perseverance, they call it. So, I’ll just touch on each of these briefly. And then the last two are in relation to the wisdom wing, continuing to perfect that one.
And it’s called, one is called concentration, which is meditation, and one is called the development of wisdom, they call wisdom, how to understand the nature of reality, the true nature of reality, which we’ve been implying it all the way, but I’ll talk about it here. So just briefly, these first four, I’ll just touch on each of these. Generosity, we can hear the word, we all understand it, you know? But the way they talk about having perfected generosity, which is here, and I’ll give you the criterion of having perfected it and you’ll hear what I’m saying, it’s way beyond what we normally think of. You’ve perfected generosity as a bodhisattva if you are capable of feeding your body to a starving animal, without the blink of an eye.
This sounds ridiculous, Sounds a bit extreme, you can’t even give a drop of blood, You’re bit all mozzy. So what this really means is, the person has gone way beyond ego, they’ve done the wisdom wing way, way, and they’ve gone so beyond ego there’s no longer a sense of identification and their compassion for the suffering of others is so huge. So please, all you see when you see a starving animal, and clearly there’s no butcher shop down the road, you’d be dumb if there were, that you see there’s no choice and all you see here is, you know, seventy kilos of meat, please eat, know, boom, cut off bit by bit. As one Lama one Lama said that for a person who’s gone to that level of extraordinary spiritual attainment, the action for them, the action of cutting off their hand and feeding it to a starving animal is as inconsequential as a leaf falling off a tree. I always hear those words, it blows my mind.
So you can’t even conceive of this, right? It seems like beyond the beyond, how ridiculous. But that’s the point, for a person who’s got that much compassion at this point and they’ve just affected this level of generosity, actually able to cut their hand off, what’s in the forefront of their mind is so much this immense compassion, and there’s no longer a sense of identity in terms of neurotic ego, which we usually have on the basis of this body. So as I said, the main thing that’s in their mind is the suffering of the other, so to alleviate the suffering of the other is all they care. It’s like being able to fall over that mountain.
It’s like that, basically, from practice, you know. So generosity obviously is being able to give. Now this sounds a bit cruel, one Tibetan lama, he was asked about Westerners, he said, Yeah, Westerners are really generous. But he said, Not with money. Because somehow, it’s interesting, we are generous, it’s true, people are very generous with our time, but what we have to all learn to do is be generous with whatever we have.
And you start very small, you start to give what a person needs when they need it, you give a cup of tea, you give advice, you know, giving advice is definitely a profound level of giving, when it’s suitable advice. But giving, we need to learn to give, you know, part of our problem, I think, in the West, we have this very strong poverty mentality, we have this very fixed view that, you know, money is this kind of concrete thing that is the real thing and if you give it away, of course you’re gonna have less, it’s kind of fairly obvious, you know, but somehow the view of karma is that why, for example, we have any money at all in this life, why we have even one cent, why we’re able to be here this weekend, why we’re able to make a phone call and get a pizza, or via little credit cards, all people lend us money all the time, all these banks lending us money all over the place, unbelievable. All this is due to unbelievable generosity in the past life, unbelievable generosity. How come a person can’t get a job? The generosity calm is not ripening.
How come they’re living on the streets? How come they’re in Somalia with one grain of rice? How come no one gives the person credit? Whatever the reason, whatever the thing is, it’s the lack of generosity karma ripening, you know? So for us, we’ve kind of got the garden full of veggies right now, but if we just keep eating the veggies up and not sowing more seeds, we’re gonna run out, right?
So you’ve to keep sowing more seeds of generosity. So this is what we have to do, but the real point of generosity here is it’s again a major practice to help us get closer to others, if we can start to reach out to others in whatever way, whether it’s the animals or the humans, and really see that we find a way to give, you know, whatever level is appropriate for us, it’s a way of breaking down the barriers, again, between self and other, to continue to link us with others, it’s a very strong one, it’s like the door that opens us to really be able to benefit others. You know, because one of the ways the ego works is it’s I and then there’s mine, isn’t there? I and mine. So we gotta start breaking that down, that’s it.
You know, and they say, I mean, Pabongka Rinpoche, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, he said one time, this is how they talk about karma and he’s talking about the Yogi in the mountain who’s meditating, really practicing, let’s say he said when you’re really practising, meaning what we’re talking about here in the best of our ability in our lives, if you were really practising he said the food will roll up the hill to you, That’s the power of karma. I mean, look at Harry, he reversed direction on a bloody mountain, falling down. That’s certainly karma taking care, isn’t it? If it wasn’t generosity, that was kind of whatever it was. But you know, the food will roll up the hill if you’re really, you know, really practising.
Many of these old Yogis, you talk to these old Tibetan Lamas who’ve spent their lives meditating in caves, right? They’ve seen and one of them said well, when I need a dentist, the dentist is there. I need food, the food is there. I need money, money is there. I mean it sort of sounds scary, you mean I’ve to give up my job and just kind of twiddle my thumbs and hope it’ll roll up the hill?
No, you know but we have to have the kind of courage to know it’s not a finite identity possessions, money, all this it’s something that we’ve got due to our past practice and one of the most basic and marvellous ways to help benefit others is to be giving, is to give at whatever level we can, you know, okay, organise it, budget it, whatever, but have courage, you know, it’s the best way to get, Which isn’t finally your reason for doing it, but we should remind ourselves to give us courage because it can just you know, it’s helpful. So then, like I said, you’ve perfected generosity, when you’re able to give your body to a starving animal, then you really know you’re on the right track, you know? Like I said, start with giving the mozzie a drop of blood, just one, as Lama Zopa says, just one tiny, tiny drop of blood, not even a big drop, okay? Little belly can’t take more than one little baby one. So the next perfection of the Bodhisattva they talk about is morality.
Obviously all we’ve been doing here is talking about morality, the whole wisdom wing is the practice of morality, abiding by the laws of karma. Lessening your delusions, developing your qualities, right? But you can say that in the wisdom wing, the way of practicing morality, as we’ve discussed, at the basic level, is mainly in terms of refraining from harming others, it’s like a playing safe level, already amazing level, like I said many times, if everybody in the world were to do this, the world would be a blissful place but this level of morality in the Bodhisattva wing is actively practising morality, actively benefiting others so you know, your first level you’ve got to refrain from harming others first, that’s really already fantastic. Then you have a basis for being appropriate in your capacity to benefit others. So how do you benefit others according to their needs?
You benefit the poor, you benefit the rich, you benefit the crazy, you benefit the sane, you benefit people here, you benefit people there, benefit whomever you can, whatever way you’re capable. It’s a question of learning to keep your eyes open, you know, the more you get practicing the wisdom wing, the more you’re practicing getting rid of self-cherishing, the more you’re likely to notice what people need, you’re likely to notice what they need, so you give it, you’re likely to notice how they need help, you give them help, you know, Again, it kind of makes us scared right now to run around doing all these things, we’re gonna get exhausted. Well, based on wisdom, we’d be intelligent with it, you know. The one about giving again, it’s interesting. There’s the giving, you know, in terms of things, we need to give material things at whatever level that we can and which people need this includes giving homeless people money, right?
There’s a big thing in the West, we don’t like doing this at all. We practically want a contract with them, don’t we? To ensure they won’t use it for something we don’t approve of before we give our precious money to them. Well, me, would you imagine if your boss, who pays you every month, wanted you to promise you wouldn’t use it for alcohol and you wouldn’t use it for guns and you wouldn’t use it for drugs and you wouldn’t you’d sue the man for daring to invade your personal rights, right? Well, you know, it’s like that with a homeless person, they’re there, you’ve agreed to give them money, you put your hand there, well, just let them pretend what they like okay, they’re gonna kill somebody, maybe you think twice but you know, it’s pretty outrageous we have to practice this giving with an open heart, you know the highest level of giving, can say the most profound level, of course, is giving advice, giving teachings as they say, but as Pabongka Rinpoche points out, you don’t have to be sitting on a high throne to do that, you’d be sitting on the bus giving a person a bit of advice for their mind, you know, again, that’s based on wisdom, that’s amazing and interesting, as Lama Zopa said, you feed person on this earth and that’s an inconceivable action of generosity but he says you could give one piece of good advice to a person’s mind that is infinitely superior because all the people you feed with their bodies, they’re gonna die and then there’s still nothing help, no help.
Just help their body, that’s all. But the person you give advice for their mind can help them over many lives and can benefit many other people as a result. So it’s just kind of comparing, not to say we don’t give materially, we give it in every way we can, you know? That’s idea. Then, morality, okay, benefit in all sorts of ways, benefit in whatever way you can, you know, maybe in our lives we’re doing that, that’s fantastic, in our jobs, let’s say, amazing.
And all the time what you’re seeing is learning to go beyond, it’s like we’re learning to go beyond our own comfort zone. The more you do the wisdom wing, the more able you are to expand, expand, expand and literally, eventually become this bodhisattva who no longer has the view of self. Like I said, there’s no longer this sense of I need or I am or I want or I this or I that, there’s just no longer that, which seems impossible to us right now, but all Buddha is doing, we’re just trying to describe here, how it is psychologically possible, but of course it’s very advanced and it’s based on the wisdom wing, you put yourself together, blah blah blah blah, you know, like that. The next perfection is the way I call patience. This is very interesting because when we think of patience, isn’t it we think of it, oh, waiting for this terrible thing to finish.
That’s not patience, right? Patience really, it’s like the one of transforming problems, it’s really this huge, it’s like opening yourself, accepting a hundred percent, this hideous thing that you cannot stand, whether it’s as mild as the green light, as the red light or it’s that cell for that woman who was on death row undeservedly what she was able to do was practise profound patience that’s what patience is, it’s this huge opening, you know, accepting this is what’s going on and that’s fine that’s what patience is, it’s huge, you know so we can see we have very short, very little patience about the tiniest things, I mean, don’t need a prison cell to make us lose patience, do we? The tiniest things can irritate us, which is aversion, irritation is aversion, okay, it’s the basis of not patience so then we can practice with tiny little things, don’t wait till you’re chucked into prison to start practising, practice now, the lights are red, you get the wrong cake, the person says the wrong thing, the person says not quite the right thing I mean, there’s a million opportunities a day, isn’t it? A million opportunities in the day when we get what we don’t want.
And remember, anger or aversion is the response when we don’t get what we want, or we do get what we don’t want. That’s when aversion or impatience arises, which is naturally. And it’s based on attachment. So, what a marvellous opportunity to practice patience in the daily life, when a thousand things a day happen to us that we don’t want, that we don’t like, that shouldn’t be this way so part of our problem with this, of course, is because we make a big philosophy out of it, because we think it’s for the benefit of the world, or the benefit of other people, we kind of give all these rationale, you You might be right, it might be for the benefit of the world, this is where it’s painful, especially when it’s social things and political things we’ve got this big philosophical view that it’s for the benefit of the world we’re doing this, so of course we have to be angry well, excuse me, it doesn’t need anger to benefit the world, it needs the opposite which is why I think the Dalai Lama is a great example like I say, everybody can see what a great person he is, everybody can see he’s not angry, he’s not neurotic, he’s not impatient but he’s not a wimp either you don’t have to have anger to see there’s injustice and that’s something that we really have to see and this is very hard for us to split off, to separate off we assume now, because there’s injustice out there, of course I’m going be angry and actually it’s good to be angry, but we’re missing it, you know, this is the Buddhist one, this is what I’m learning myself, being an angry person but you can see injustice and you can be more effective when you’re not angry but when you can see it and then you decide you do something about it, not because you’re angry, that’s the point angry is this this is where it’s very hard for us, anger is this response, you know, like I said, when our attachment is thwarted and there’s no way around this, anger is not a virtue and this is where we have to in the same way we have to split off attachment and love, we have to split off anger and kind of whatever else you want to call it in a good way.
Seeing injustice and wanting to do something about it, call it that. That’s fantastic, please see injustice and want to do something about it, how amazing! But anger is not a logical response, although that’s what we think there is, you know? So, patience is a million times a day to accept, to open yourself up to, to walk into, to accept whatever the obstacle is, whether it’s the suffering, whether it’s the stuff, the insult, people, you know, the harm that people are doing to you, whatever it is, know, it’s unbelievable, we all have this opportunity a thousand times a day. Atisha, the one who wrote this text that this Lamrima is based on, the eleventh century Indian master, he had this really rude cook apparently and one of his students said, why do you keep him, he’s so terrible, he said, well how else would I know I have anger?
So, welcome your enemies, welcome the problems, welcome the insults, Of course it’s hard, and again, please, you’ve gotta be pretty amazing to be able to do this, and if you’re not able to do it, then you don’t try, because if you’re gonna go crazy and kill the person, please, do not try to bear the problem, okay? You gotta know you can bear it, and you gotta really know yourself well. If we haven’t done enough of the wisdom wing yet, don’t try to take on a burden that’s too big. This is already assuming we have done a lot of inner work and have a great sense of inner strength and know where we’re at and know what we can bear. We have to know this very well, it’s so important to know where we’re at on the path.
Just like it is if you try to play a piece of piano that’s beyond your poor little fingers, you’ll make a mess. So be realistic, you know? Don’t live in some kind of ideal in the sky or I should be transforming problems. I’m sorry. One step at a time, you know.
Then the fourth one is enthusiastic perseverance. And this is interesting because the opposite to this is called laziness, Which is kind of a bit, you know, uncomfortable to think about. And there are three kinds of laziness. The first one is that the ordinary, everyday, just, you know, wanna sleep, can’t face it. Again, not being cruel to us, just looking at it, you know.
Multitude of reasons, no doubt, can be mixed with depression, can be mixed with all sorts of things. But we can see there’s a strong tendency, you know, to that one. Then, the next one, which is more scary at all, you know, it’s harder to see, is actually what we call being busy, with everything else but what we should be doing. Look into your life, most of us live in this chronic disease of putting off the things we should do, right? Or the things we really think we want to do.
We find a million reasons why we don’t do them. Oh I’m so busy, we say. Tibetans can’t believe how busy westerners are. You just, you do so many things they say, they can’t believe it, they’re kind of blown out. We fit ten times more things in our life than they ever do.
So we’re keeping really busy, busy busy busy busy, but achieving what, basically? Well, you think about it with great respect, eating, sleeping and going to the toilet. We’re very, very good at it. Mean dogs are much better, they’re more efficient. We spend all our money, all our life working to get all that money, all the education, to get job, to work, to eat, sleep and go to the toilet.
With great respect. So that’s called being busy, isn’t it? So then what happens, you know, we keep putting off the things, and I’m even talking about our relative life now, we put off all the things we know we really want to do, the things we’re yearning to do, if only we could do. Now I’m not even talking yet about our practice. Because that’s really what we’re talking about here, this type of laziness is the kind of laziness of being busy doing everything else but your practice.
Putting it off, oh I can’t meditate, I’ve gotta go to work. If I can’t go to that course, I’ve gotta work. If I can’t do this, I’ve gotta do that. You know, always kind of this, and the thing is, it’s rationale that we believe, it’s like the truth for us, you know? We’ve gotta be brave to go against it, of course we do.
We’ve gotta develop a strong sense of priorities, then we’ll make a decision that’s more appropriate, and then we’ve got to make effort, because the opposite of this laziness is one here called enthusiastic perseverance, or they also interestingly call it joyful effort. Now, let’s forget about the joy in the beginning, alright? Just call it effort. We all know effort is painful, I mean, we all know when you start to do your push ups, because you wanna get nice and fit, it takes enormous will to do it, doesn’t it? You wanna put it off all the time, that diet, that gym, that everything.
We live in the fantasy, I’m gonna get fit this time, I’m gonna get fit this year, then we keep putting it off, keep putting it off, keep putting it off, we all know this one. So then we have to make effort. Forget about joyful first, no way it’s joyful, it’s exhausting. Well that’s how it is when you start to practice. Then you’ve to have the will to do it again the next day, and the next day, and then when you’re fortunate from having practiced often enough, it will become joyful effort, you will want to do it, you’ll be happy to go to the gym, you’ll feel like you’ve missed out not going to the gym, right?
So the same with your practice. So it takes time, then it becomes joyful, enthusiastic. And as Lama Zopa points out, we will not create much virtuous energy at all unless we make effort. Why? It’s because the tendency so strongly to follow attachment and anger and pride and laziness and all the rest is completely deep in our being, you see.
So the third kind of laziness is the worst of all, it’s the subtlest, and that is the one that really, deeply believes in my bones, oh I can’t do that, you know, it’s like a virtue, we think it’s humility. So here we’re talking in terms of practice, oh I can’t meditate, concentrate, I can’t go to that retreat, I can’t do those things, I can’t study, I can’t understand emptiness, oh I can’t practice bodhicitta, I forgive, I can’t do that. It’s just this huge concrete view we all have, which is this view of self stuck, frozen, you know, that can’t bear the thought of all the effort, and anyway just too tired, that really then believes I can’t do it. So it’s like these triple problems, you know? So these are obstacles.
Enthusiastic perseverance, they call it, this particular one, they say is the most important one for success. Now you look at anybody you know, the one who is the most successful is the most enthusiastic, is the one with perseverance, perseverance, with effort. Not always the most intelligent or even the best, they’re the ones who try hard, who never give up. This reminds me exactly of this story of one of my friends in prison, Paul, who was this white guy who had a car accident and he killed somebody, was a drunk. So he had this incredible grief, he was a nice kind person, know, he got a life sentence, he’s on a life sentence right now for this accident and he had this incredible grief for days, said, he was paralyzed in hospital, he was going to be paralyzed, they told him, for the rest of his life.
He was in absolute grief at the harm he’d done, the killing of this person, plus the absolute grief at the waste of his life, he said. Huge, just total waste of his life, he had this huge grief for many days thinking about it all, so then he made this huge determination, this is a byproduct, this is a part of the story, this is incidental, this part. Anyway, he made this huge determination, a bit like Francisco, but in his case he said I will only ever benefit others from now on. Anyway, the next morning he said he woke up and he had no paralysis. And I just think it was because that’s his bodhisattva vows, like Francisco, their bodhisattva vows ripening from a past life.
Anyway, Paul started the AA groups in prison, he’s still doing that now, he started developing an interest in Buddhism. And he developed a real love for Tārā, like we did this morning. So he’s put together a really authentic practice. He didn’t know anything about it yet, but he put this very authentic practice together, with all the right prayers and all the right visualisation, then when he’d sit down and do his practice, he’d really try to concentrate properly, to really do it well, concentrate properly on the visualisation. Now the point is, he lives in this prison, Folsom in California, where there’s eight hundred other people in a unit, you know.
So even in the unit where they’ve got these sixteen guys in their little kind of two man cells where they’re stuck in their cells all day, even there they say it’s like a rock concert, just for sixteen people. Can you imagine eight hundred? There’s tiers, I’ve seen the pictures, know, five tiers, all metal, just metal rungs and metal walls, I mean, concrete walls and metal doors, it’s just like an echo chamber, unbelievable, beyond belief, eight hundred people, can you imagine? So he said in the morning it’s no problem, I get up before dawn. So already theirs, that’s the one of patience and perseverance.
For most of us, the thought of getting up before dawn is ridiculous. Of course I can’t meditate, I’ve got look after the kids. Of course I can’t meditate, I’ve to go to work. Excuse me, he doesn’t say that, he knows he can’t open that door, he knows he wants to meditate, so he gets up before they do, gets up at dawn, before dawn, three sometimes, to get some peace. But he said, Rabina, nighttime is another story, eight hundred people wide awake and wound up.
So he doesn’t say, well, can’t meditate, so he’s like in a rock concert, remember? And he has to meditate, he’s got no choice. So he’d do his meditation authentically, really concentrate, really do his prayers properly, do everything really nicely. But he said one day, he was about to give up, it was just too much, he couldn’t handle the noise and he was gonna give up. He had his visualization all there, you know?
So he said all of a sudden, all the noise went away, he felt his mind way above the prison and then he said he had something like this, bliss in every atom of his being and what happened basically was, and I haven’t talked too much about meditation yet, but if we have time I might, yeah, the fifth perfection, what happened was, because due to the past merit, due to his present effort, and also as Lama Zopa Rinpoche said when I told him, yes, he said, the blessings of the Buddhas, he actually accessed the subtler level of his mind, you know, where the senses and the concepts had completely ceased, which is why he had the experience of being out of his body but then he set it down and then what he had was his bliss and every atom of his being and he had a complete vision, he said, of Tārā and the entire merit field, he said, as real as you and me Meaning, he actually saw the Buddha, he had a vision of the Buddha, the real Buddha, that’s how they say. Because a subtler mind has that capability. So the point was, he said it lasted for a long time and when he came out of it all, he said I’ve never had it since.
But what he said was, and this is the point of it, in capital letters in his letter, he said What I learned from this was never give up. Isn’t that an amazing story? That’s enthusiastic perseverance, okay? And again, look at the result, you know, Went beyond his limit, pow, something happened. So you’ve to have great courage to do that.
Enthusiastic perseverance is the key. Amazing. The fifth one is concentration. Technically, this is not even a Buddhist practice, it’s actually a Hindu practice, how to develop concentration in meditation. They kind of come from a long tradition, but they’re used by Buddhists.
And really, these next two, wisdom and concentration, are actually taught in the Hīnayāna path. But here we’re teaching them in the context of the six perfections of the bodhisattva. The first wing though, it’s now in the second wing. So okay, what’s concentration? So what’s this one?
So meditation, like I said, there’s two modes of meditation. One is concentration, one is analytical, one is insight. So then, okay, so what we’re trying to do in the long term, the long term job, the very essence of the job we’re trying to do in terms of developing the wisdom wing, right, is remove from the mind the root delusion that’s the mother of all of the rest. So like I said, the default mode of the mind from day to day, the effective main cause of our suffering from day to day is attachment. But the main cause of attachment in the first place, and even having a body in the first place, is the one we call ignorance, or colloquially ego grasping.
And its function is to grasp instinctively at everything that exists, including self, as having a kind of inherent, solid, real, frozen, in and of itself, permanent, independent nature. Now, didn’t think that’s how we saw things, did we? Well, Buddha’s saying that’s how we do all the time, it’s just intuitively in us. So, okay, it’s really hard to recognize. So Buddha says we’ll never be free of suffering completely until we get rid of this one.
And the antidote to this one is the state of mind called wisdom that realizes that everything is empty of existing like that. Empty simply means lacking, that’s all, just means lacking, the way the word is used. So let’s say, you know, trying to get our head around how the word emptiness is used now, it’s very helpful. Let’s say this, you know, you see this cup here, and if you’re not color blind, can all see it’s not red, you agree? Yeah?
Well then you would say, wouldn’t you, that this cap, cup lacks redness. We don’t talk like that, but you get the drift, right? You agree it lacks redness? Now therefore, you can say also, simply, it’s empty of being red. That’s the use of the term empty.
It simply means lacking something. So what’s lacking what? Okay? Well, Buddha says whatever exists, lacks, or is empty of, it’s a term they use, lacks this independent, solid, real, inherent, permanent, you know, in and of itself ness nature. Which, like I said, we don’t even notice, we think things have.
But that’s what Buddha’s saying, this primordial ignorance within our mind grasps at everything as if it were like that. And Buddha’s simply saying everything lacks that mode of existence. So it all sounds a bit abstract to us, so the more we can look into this and meditate on it and think about it and study it and see it and think about it and blah blah, the more we’re able to understand experientially this Until eventually it’s an irreversible experience at the subtle level of our mind in meditation, where we know it directly. That’s when we’ve finally perfected that, then we have perfected wisdom, We have gotten ourselves out of saṃsāra, stop suffering. That’s how they talk, okay?
So let’s look at what this means, going into it a little bit. So Lama Tsongkhapa says, has a very interesting way of presenting how things exist. So you know, he would say, this is Buddhist view, that things do have a conventional nature, there are microphones and cups carpets and Sams and jackets and toes and who knows what, right? Things and people do exist. So even this, there’s a lot of work we have to do to establish when you study Buddhist philosophy, really have to look into how to establish how things do exist.
Not just to well there’s a goo gah, you know, oh because I think it exists and therefore does, rubbish, you have some kind of basis for establishing that things do exist. So then, once we’ve established what does exist, then Buddha is saying that one way of describing how things exist in terms of the conventional reality and the ultimate reality, or the relative and the ultimate. The relative and the ultimate. And everything that exists, cups, like I said before, everything, has these two modes of existence. So let’s look at the cup, just an example.
Let’s look okay, sorry, one more step. This approach, which Lama Tsongkhapa is using, and is using Buddha’s teachings but it’s his way of approaching it, is that we need finally, what’s the Buddha saying, we need finally to realize how everything is empty of existing from its own side, in other words, okay, which again at the moment is completely abstract for us, it doesn’t touch our hearts. Because Buddha is saying, the ignorance within us clings profoundly and primordially at everything as having an inherent existence which they don’t have, so we have to recognize how it isn’t true, then we’re released from saṃsāra. So, Je Tsongkhapa says, a very skilful way to do that is don’t try to kind of go into what is emptiness, how is emptiness, what do you mean empty, try and kind of nut out emptiness, I’m just paraphrasing now, okay? But instead of this, instead of trying to work out what is the ultimate nature of reality, because it’s a very subtle, and it’s a negating way of talking, things don’t have this, and they don’t have that, and they aren’t this, and they aren’t that.
Instead of looking at that, let’s look at how things do exist, let’s look at the conventional reality of phenomena, and discover how they actually do exist. What he’s saying is that it will lead us inexorably to the conclusion of how they don’t, which is the one of emptiness. He says look at the cup, okay? For example, you’ll see, anyway, one step at a time. I’m exhausting myself.
So it can be said that cup, once we’ve established cup, we’ve defined it, you know, we’ve all agreed upon that, that cup is this flat bottomed round container for drinking your hot water out of, once we’ve all established that’s the definition, we can all agree that’s cup, okay? So now we can start discussing it. So okay, conventionally speaking, Buddha says no problem, there is a cup. No problem. But how does it exist?
Now we never analyze this normally, we just kind of take it for granted. But let’s analyze. So the key phrase here, the little shorthand cliche, the little phrase for conventional reality, or how it exists in a relative way, is dependent arising. Dependent arising. The shorthand over here for ultimate reality is emptiness.
So you can say, correctly speaking, in these terms, there is no cup, you know, brackets from its own side. Here we can say conventionally, there is a cup, and it’s dependent dependent arising. So let’s analyse how a cup exists in terms of its being a dependent arising and the implication of this is eventually once we realise it, what it does is lead us, as I said before, inexorably to the conclusion that therefore it doesn’t exist in the way that ignorance thinks it does. So by looking into dependent arising, we’re arguing with ego’s view to break it down. Right?
So let’s just do it. And actually, this this discussion which I will now have, you’ll you’ll see, you’re familiar with it. When we did the one about how all beings have been kind, you can’t find the beginning, can you? All the beings have been kind because everything you have is dependent upon this person, that person, that being, that aunt, that, this, that, that. It goes for an eternity.
Well, it’s the same argument here, but it’s in terms of everything. Interesting, I first heard this way of understanding when I studied with this particular lama, Geshe Tekchok, who was the abbot after Khensur Rinpoche here. Khensur Rinpoche here, right, was the abbot of Sera Je. Well, this other Khensur Rinpoche who was abbot after him is called Jampa Tekchok, and he’s also Khensur Rinpoche, which means precious former abbot. So anyway, Geshe Tekchok, when I was studying with him years ago, he was discussing these things and he used Robina as the example, okay, not cup, he used Robina, which is of course why I don’t remember it.
And so, what he said was that it can be said that everything in the universe before the first moment of Robina is a valid cause and condition for the existence of Robina. So let’s just now go to cup. And I thought that was pretty mind boggling when I heard it and I was supposed to be studying logic, I thought how’s that logical, you know? But now I kind of get it. So let’s look at it, okay?
Cup, okay. What’s cup? We start off with cup. So okay, one of the things they say, think of this first. The cup, there’s three levels of dependent arising.
Three levels, okay, we’ll talk the first level. Cup, right, cup is nothing other than, in fact, countless, beginningless causes and conditions, but you can’t find CUP among any one of those causes and conditions. So let’s look at that, okay? So what is cup? Well, know, what’s one of the first causes of this cup?
What’s one of the first causes of the existence of this cup in Robina’s hand? One of the first causes. Do you think? The idea. Yeah precisely, that’s it.
The idea, where? In whose mind? That’s it, in the designer’s mind. So the person who first conceived of this cup was this design, this shape, this size, you understand what I’m saying? We know it just didn’t fall out of a tree looking like this, right?
So it’s sort of obvious. The person who first visualized it, saying Mary Jones is the designer, thought of this cup, so she was one who conceived of it, so she it, she got a pencil and she wrote it down on a piece of paper. So here as we go to the story like we went on before, where’s the pencil come from? Without that pencil she couldn’t write the cup, wouldn’t write the shape on the piece of paper for the design factory, for the cup factory to make it. If she didn’t have the pencil, if she didn’t have the paper, so where’d they come from?
From the trees. Where’d they come from? Previous trees. Where’d they come from? All the creatures who died, all the rain, all the things coming, and the weather and the sun.
But for all of this, there’d be no tree, there’s no tree, there’s no paper, there’s no paper, she couldn’t have written the design, there’s no written the design, there wouldn’t be a cup here. It’s kind of logic, isn’t it? And you can see any direction you go in. Mary Jones had a mum, but for the mum there’s no Mary Jones, but for no Mary Jones, there’s no Mary Jones’ mind, but for no Mary Jones’ mind, there’s no cup in Robina’s hand. Mary Jones’ mum had a mum, you can go for an eternity, never ending mums, right?
Every way you turn, you can find all the infinite number of causes and conditions and just as Geshe Tekchok said, everything in the universe, finally, is a valid cause and condition for the existence of this cup sitting here. And cup is nothing other than all of that, but you can’t find cup among any one of those. I mean, let’s just like the one about kindness of all beings, we can also see even just briefly a glimpse, this is truth. This is truth, we can hear it, it’s fact, it’s not religion shoved down your throat, it’s truth. But again, just like with the kindness one, why isn’t this in the forefront of our mind, this sense of interdependence, this profound one of dependent arising, that there’s no cup apart from all the causes and conditions, there’s nothing, know, is nothing other than that and you can’t find cup among it.
Why doesn’t it blow our minds when we realise emptiness? Because that’s the conclusion here, when we get this, it will lead us inexorably to the view, therefore cup is empty of existing from its own side, which is meaning having none of those causes and conditions, as if it was some kind of isolated, inherent, in and of itself ness cup. Which is what Buddha says is how ignorance grasps at it. You know, like that. So, you know, you meditate on this for thirty years, if you’re lucky, you might get a glimpse, right?
They say, or if you’re very good at it, you might get it completely. Realize it at the deeper level. Because eventually this is where I missed completely concentration, didn’t I? I forgot concentration which comes fifth. So this is the sixth one, okay?
So anyway, we’ll mix it up with concentration. So how do you really understand this one? This is the point. Intellectually, most fascinating. We can all understand, we can all learn this very well, very excellent philosophical presentation, it goes far more deep than that, it’s a wonderful presentation of reality, most fascinating.
But the point is, how do you, you know, the terms are how do you realise it? How do you get it? Well, can never happen at the conceptual level. This is the point. So this is why, in the long term, Buddhism is saying that the conceptual level of mind, as we indicated already when we discussed the causes of suffering in the second in the second noble truth in the second scope.
The conceptual is the gross level of our mind. We’ve got the conceptual and the sensory, which is at the very gross level of our conscious awareness. So as I said before, remember we broke down mental consciousness into two parts, All conceptual, includes the emotions and the head. Then, but that’s just the gross level, and the analogy of this, and the subtle level, which we never touch virtually until we learn to meditate, says, until we’ve learned to access the subtler level of our conscious awareness, which has the capability of experiencing something like emptiness directly, way beyond concepts. So the analogy here is sort of like conceptual knowledge is like the recipe for the cake.
Direct knowledge, direct knowledge, real knowledge, actual knowledge is like tasting the cake. Makes sense, right? The conceptual knowledge is having the map. The direct The direct knowledge is being in the place, the direct experience of it.
So here we’re talking having direct experience of emptiness, direct experience of karma, direct experience of reincarnation, past lives, future lives, all of these things which Buddha says we are capable of. So how do we approach all that stuff? Because it’s clear we can’t at this moment in time, without only our conceptual mind remember a past life, understand emptiness, do karma, blah blah blah blah, you know? But, doesn’t mean you should, know, in the same way, that in order to get to Paris, let’s say, I always use the analogy okay, never mind, get to Paris, you can’t just kind of, oh, gotta get to Paris, and suddenly you’re in Paris. You gotta learn the word, you gotta learn the route, you gotta go to a travel agent, gotta know how to do it, you gotta learn how far it is, where it’s close to, you gotta learn to recognise when you get to this stop, you know you’re on the way, you learn the whole deal.
Then when you’ve got the concepts correct, you can follow the steps and you’ll be able to taste Paris, won’t you? Well, it’s the same with emptiness, it’s the same with a cake, it’s the same with everything. It starts with the conceptual knowledge. So in the long term, conceptual is artificial in the sense that it’s only the recipe, but the shape of the recipe. But this is the problem, this is the thing about busy mind before, you know.
Buddha is saying right now, we’re full of concepts, bad enough. Cause all we’re doing is learning about things, we’re never learning direct, we don’t have the direct experience of anything, it’s all about everything. There’s many, many more things to say, but it’s about concepts, we could spend months on this, it’s most fascinating, how the mind functions and everything. But you know, got a head full of concepts, but the big problem is now, bad enough that they’re just concepts and not the real thing, but they’re wrong concepts. So it’s bad enough that you think you’re a cook and all you’ve is a recipe, but honey, you’ve got the wrong recipe!
So you’ve got double trouble, you know? So first job to do is to clean up the recipe and get the right recipe, chuck out the wrong recipes. So what you’re doing here in this course, you know, hearing is Buddha’s views of what the right recipe is reincarnation, interdependence, karma, this, that, emptiness, compassion, blah blah blah, the whole deal, right? That’s Buddha’s view of what the right recipes are. He says once you’re on the right track conceptually, it’s just a question of time before you get the direct experience, it’s easy then.
It’s you know, it’s falling off a log. So, okay, this is where meditation comes in. The conceptual level is the mode of mind we function at all the time apart from our senses, okay? So what we need to do is learn to use these very sophisticated techniques for developing these states of consciousness which as I said before in our Western view, don’t even exist, right? There’s no positing of a subtle level of mind, even though we all experience it every time we dream, every time we leave our bodies and have these visions and things but no one kind of understands or accepts them, that’s fine, I’m just not complaining, just talking because no one accepts anything, it’s not the brain, right?
But the Buddhist view is that we have this subtle level of awareness which when we access it in meditation, so Paul got it just once by some like a fluke, know, from his past karma and from a blessing but he couldn’t get it again, hasn’t got the skill. When we are able to access it at will, when we’ve accomplished this fifth perfection called the single pointed concentration or Samādhi, you know, when we have accessed this subtle level, then at will can we take the mind where it wants to go, bring past, future, you name it, get clairvoyance, you have extraordinary experiences, and the deeper you perfect this quality, the more profound your experiences come, the more you remove all the delusions, the more profound your mind comes until eventually you become a Buddha whose mind is completely clairvoyant and sees everything, this is how Buddhism talks. It’s the nature of mind anyway to do this. It’s just obscured right now. So, what we need to do, we learn conceptually all these things, and particularly emptiness, we learn the right words.
But even hearing, you know, the words can actually generate some kind of feeling in it, some sense of it, know, we can get a glimpse of it. And that’s why we have to keep meditating upon it and thinking about it, and indeed in the Tibetan monastic universities they debate on it, using these very sophisticated techniques to really break through, as Lama Yeshe said, you can get realisations on the debate yard. So even using concepts. In other words, don’t underestimate the power of the conceptual mind, when it’s correct, when the words we’re saying are in sync with reality, those words have a lot of power. When words are just kind of blah blah blah, all our rubbish emotions and all nonsense and projections, of course they have, they’re completely depressing, they drag us all down.
But words, if they are linked to reality, have great power, because they resonate with that reality, you know? You think about that, makes sense. In other words, if the words are truthful, in terms of reality, in terms of anything, there’s power behind those words. So we use the conceptual mind because that’s where we’re at, but meanwhile we learn to start practising developing single pointed concentration. We learn to access and it’s very difficult, we can do it though if we really try.
But usually, in the traditional way, talk about you’ve to have all these appropriate conditions to do it which you have to completely subdue all your delusions, pretty much, have no social responsibilities, be able to be completely content with whatever you have and be not fussy and not worried, find some perfect environment up in the mountains is best with an appropriate set of friends who can support you and take care of you for a year or so, then you’re ready to go get single point of concentration. That excludes probably ninety nine percent of us. But we can start somewhere, don’t be too miserable, just start doing it a little bit every day. So what you’re doing is you’re developing that single point of concentration and then the thing that you’re meditating on in the second meditation mode, in insight, by initially doing some analysis, then the way analytical meditation and concentration meditation work is sort of like this, let’s say you’ve some understanding about emptiness, some words, you’ve got to have the words to do analysis, right? You develop some concentration, then you do your concentration mode first, you get your concentration nice and fixed and clear, then you take your thing that you’re going to meditate on which is using these words emptiness, this, that, dependent, arising, you use logic, it’s what it is, and then at some point in the use of your, because your mind’s quite subtle, it’s still conceptual, not a problem, and you’re doing this analysis and at some point because your mind’s very focused, get strong insight into it, a strong kind of awareness of it, you’ll get a taste.
So what you do is you hold that taste, you revert to your concentration mode and you concentrate on the taste, you hold it, you concentrate, you don’t keep analysing. And then when that insight wears thin and wears out, you go back to the analysis, and you go back and forth like that, that’s how you get, then eventually when you’ve single point of concentration, you can go straight to the deep level, immediately, without effort, You can hold the taste at a very deep level, and it’s in this way that you build up insight into emptiness and eventually perfect it.