Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Robina Courtin opens by challenging a misconception among practitioners: that completing 21 Vajrasattva mantras constitutes genuine purification. In this 30-minute talk, she teaches the four opponent powers that actually matter, with sustained focus on the first and most misunderstood—regret—and methodically distinguishes it from guilt, blame, and denial. Using everyday metaphors (poison, polluted water), she grounds the teaching in Buddha’s view of karma as natural law rather than external punishment, explaining what real accountability looks like: owning precisely your role in harm-doing, no more and no less. She explores how karma operates interdependently—anyone harmed also carried past karma enabling that harm. The teaching is direct, conversational, sometimes pointed, aimed at practitioners already engaged with Vajrasattva practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 VP 2011 09 07.mp3
UUID: 400aa378-e7f3-4db8-b073-6efcf0ce94df
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Vajrasattva Practice (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2011-09-07
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.9 minutes
Words: ~6,008
And these things all seem to sort of come together, you know, so we’ll carry on. We’ll keep carrying on. We’re finishing talking about the power of vows, which is actually a a complete a completely crucial thing, part of purification. So I’ll sort of where will I go now? Let me think.
Motivate for those you just got here, we think we’re gonna listen to these teachings of the Buddha about the mind, about karma, about how to create it, and how to purify it, and how to commit, you know, this is the fourth step in the purification process, the one of commitment not to do again. So this is like a vow. So we’ll maybe go into that later, people. The vow business will emphasize it there. So we’re gonna listen to these ideas of the Buddha to see if there’s something useful we can take as tools in our own life to use because we’re sick of all the rubbish.
We want to change. We want to become better people. We to develop our marvelous potential for our sake, and why not the sake of others too. Thinking this way, that’s why we’re here. Okay.
The four opponent powers. You know, we often when you’re you’re Buddhist, take you do this practice called Vajrasattva, and we think you have a commitment to do your twenty one mantras. You say, oh I’ve done my mantras. I’ve done my twenty one Vajrasattva mantras, you know. But this is not nearly enough.
Lama Tsongkhapa in one of his Lamrim texts, that one of his Lamrim songs of experience says, know, that in reliance upon these four opponent powers, can purify all the negative karma from the past. So as the results don’t come in the future. And this is an absolutely fundamental point for a Buddhist. You know, the view of karma is really the absolute center of Buddhist teachings. Without this really thinking that being mindful is being a Buddhist, you’re kinda missing the point.
It’s better than nothing. Okay? But says, excuse me, but thieves need mindfulness. It’s hardly holy to be mindful. In the context of trying to work on your mind, yes, it’s a crucial it’s a crucial step.
Okay? But the real the essence of being a Buddhist is having is taking as your hypothesis, this view of the mind as a non physical continuity of mental moments that does not come from mommy and daddy, and does not come from a creator. It only comes from previous moments of itself. It’s its own entity. You take this as your hypothesis.
Second, the second thing you take, this is the front one I think of as like the two pillars, you know, Buddhism, is my phrase. It’s just law of cause and effect. The law of karma. It’s absolutely central to all Buddhist teachings, you know. But even for many Buddhists don’t even know what it means.
We just see we use a cliched word, oh, yeah, karma. Like as if it’s like a big stick used to beat yourself up, you know. Very naive how we think about it. But for the Buddha, it’s a natural law that every microsecond of what every mind does is a karma. And every action on the basis of those thoughts or feelings done with our body and speech leaves an impression or a seed in the mind that will just necessarily necessarily ripen in the future unless of course you pull it out.
And that negative seeds, those motivated by neurosis, by ego, by fear, by anger, by attachment, will necessarily ripen his suffering. This is this natural law in Buddhism. No one does it to us. And that necessarily the virtuous ones, the positive ones motivated by love, compassion, wisdom, and these things will leave virtuous seeds in the mind that will necessarily ripen its future happiness. This is a natural law like gravity.
It simply occurs, you know, like botany. It just occurs. Put certain conditions together and you get a flower, you know. Do this kind of thing, the mind does this, does this with the body and the speech based on this and this. It’s very technical, very clear, then that result will come.
It’s a law. karma takes care, as Lama Yeshe puts it. The more we understand this, the more we can become accountable rather sort of feeling guilty and bad like I’m a bad person, you know. So of course, the the purification process is naturally involved in discussing the negative states of mind. We have to keep remembering with karma, and we really do forget this That it involves the positive as well.
We forget this. We’re so used to thinking of karma as negative, and every time we ever have a question about karma, it’s always about that child suffering, and how they’re this, and I must have been a bad person. But excuse me, or even sitting in this room right now, relatively peaceful except for my voice, you know. No one dropping bombs on us, no one abusing us. We just think, oh, this is natural.
Everyone’s being nice, it’s reasonable, but there are causes for this. This is a result of virtuous karma. You know, if we could realize just how much virtuous karma every single one of us have accumulated in our minds in the past that have led us to sit in this room right now to even be thinking about spiritual methods. It would blow our minds. So this is the result of karma.
We don’t think of this, we don’t think bad things are the result of karma. It’s so silly, you know. All the flowers in the garden are the result of seeds as well as the weeds, not just the weeds, know. It’s a natural law. So clearly we’re going to be discussing the negative ones because we don’t want the suffering that will come from it.
That’s reasonable. But the bigger picture of karma is to have in our mind is kind of important. So in relation to the four noble truths, the second noble truth where Buddha lays out the causes of suffering and he narrows it down to two main causes of suffering. One is the past seed we sowed in our mind, you know, two two lives, twenty lives, a thousand lives ago when we did a negative action motivated by negativity that left that that seed stays in the mind, you didn’t pull it out, then it will eventually ripen as one’s suffering. That’s the first cause of suffering.
But the cause even of that negative karma is the delusions, the negative states of mind, and so the two subsume down to this one. This is the fundamental cause of all suffering, it’s in the mind. That’s why we need to understand the mind. We as we’ve talked last week, you know, or whatever day it was, I don’t remember. That’s why we need to understand the mind, Buddha’s view of the mind, Buddha’s model of the mind.
Pretty straightforward. It’s fundamental. Buddha’s expertise is the mind, you know, how it functions. And then the law of karma explains how the mind does what it does, and the results of that mind will experience in the future as a result of what it does. Because we are the boss.
We are the creators of ourselves. We program ourselves every second. This is this this is a fundamental way of talking about how Buddha talks, which is quite unique to the Buddha. There’s no there’s no concept of someone out there judging or rewarding or punishing. There’s no concept like this.
So it’s quite tasty view that Buddha has, you know. We’re the boss. Okay. So given that every microsecond of every thing our mind does, and every microsecond of what our body and speech do, because let’s face it, they’re just the servants of the mind, necessarily, as I’m saying, programs the mind. And there’s only three options.
We have negative actions, positive actions, and there are neutral actions. Well forget the neutral. They’re literally neither positive or negative. Don’t worry about them for now. Then we’ve got the positive and the negative.
So at this first stages of practice in junior school, is part of the first stages of the Lamrim which is where we talk about karma and the process of purification, are concerned about the negative ones. The context is our wish to be free of the suffering. So we have to sort of like if you’ve got water, we know water is pure clear stuff. Now, Buddha says our mind is pure and clear in its nature, but right now it’s polluted. We all know the water can be polluted.
So our job then, knowing that you can depollute your water, isn’t to keep going about, oh, is my water lovely? Can we just talk about the nice things, please? The water is so nice. No. Bugger that.
Excuse me. We need to be involved in the negativity because that’s the pollution. That’s what’s causing the pain and the suffering. That’s what’s polluting and destroying the the positivity of our minds. So in this first stages of practice, we have to be involved But the context is the wish to have this marvelous blissful mind of ours.
The context to have pure mind. So you never forget that. That’s your reference point. So the thing you’ve gotta be involved with in is the negativity in these first stages. But we can easily forget the big picture and start getting all fundamentalist and miserable and guilty and beat ourselves up, you know.
That’s foolish. We’ve got to know why we want to be involved in the negative. Why do you gotta go wading knee deep into that stinky pollution? Not because you like pollution, because you want to investigate its nature, learn to understand it so you can remove it from the water so you can get pure water. That’s the context.
Then that’s what gives you enthusiasm to want to practice, to want to purify, to want to do this practice of of the four opponent powers. As says, we are insane not to do this every single day. And the more we understand the Buddha’s view of the mind, how it functions, and the law of karma, the more it makes utter sense to us, you know. It’s a it’s a practical practical marvelous approach to to lead our life, you know. Okay.
So what is the purification practice? Lama Yeshe, you know, Lama Yeshe says it’s good. You know, are as a friend of mine actually in Adelaide, oh I’m in Adelaide, aren’t I? Oh I forget where I am sometimes. I kind of think I’m an American, no no no, that I that I have to get myself like I say, sometimes I wake up in the morning, I haven’t got a clue what country I’m in, forget about what side of the bed I’m sleeping on, know.
I’m in Adelaide, that’s interesting. Yeah, Venerable Gloria, Kyabje Rinpoche’s student. She talked about it, first time I heard it anyway, she’s about the four R’s. It’s a great vehicle to remember the four purification practice, know. They’re basically four psychological steps.
This entire process is psychological. Do not think it’s come holy religion. It’s it’s a psychological procedure for practical steps because Buddha’s dealing with the mind, and guess what? That means psychology, doesn’t it? So it’s the four r’s.
The first one is regret. The second is reliance. The third is the remedy. The fourth is resolve. It’s a good way to remember.
Let’s analyze what they mean. The first one, excellent, utterly necessary, absolute starting point. Without this, as Rinpoche says, we can’t go anywhere. It’s obvious, first step. So if we use the analogy then, this is a very good analogy about creating negative karma quote unquote, just instead think you’ve eaten poison.
Now as soon as we say this, we get some energy. We go, wow. We know what that means, don’t we? We know that what eating poison means is you’ve just ingested something, and this is the point of it, that if you leave it there, will cause you terrible suffering. So we we have a real sense of this when it comes to food, our bodies, our health, you know.
We know when someone says, oh my god, you better give up smoking. We know what they’re talking about. They’re not just being fundamentalist. They’re not just trying to be like, you know, being you’re a naughty person, you shouldn’t smoke, which is how we think of spiritual stuff. This is a big mistake we make.
We get all fundamentalists when we think about someone says you shouldn’t do something. That’s how we think of religion. It’s so mistaken. If someone says you shouldn’t smoke, you don’t think they’re being fundamentalist. They’re being very kind to you, because everybody knows, let’s say, that if you smoke, it’s possible you could get cancer, let’s say.
So we know we don’t want cancer. In other words, the crucial point here, this is karma, is that we know that smoking when I smoke, I will get the consequences. But if we think of morality and religion, we think if I smoke, God will punish me. That’s why we say, well, don’t you tell me what to do. I’m allowed to do what I like, we think.
Or we think I can get away with it as long as no one sees me. So that’s a really childish view. We have this very deep in our bones. This is the view of ego, you know. Like with our mummies and daddies.
Mummy says don’t do this. So we think if she doesn’t see us doing it, we will get away with it because that’s how we think of morality. We don’t think of our health this way. In other words, we understand the law of cause and effect when it comes to cigarettes and eating good food. We know it means consequences for me, and we know it’s not punishment.
It’s just the natural law that if you eat too much, you get too fat. If you smoke too much, you could get cancer. Hear this point please, it’s crucial. We get this. So we love to go to the doctor, we love to go on diets and do all these good things because we don’t want the consequences.
So because we’re otherwise we’re being accountable. But when it comes to morality, we’re not accountable. We’re like children, you know. Come in sweetheart, grab a chair over here. There’s one over here too.
Over here there’s one. So when it comes to you know, when it comes to this thing of morality, we are we’re like children. We think someone’s telling us I should be a good person, and that’s how we give up religion because we’re sick of someone telling us what to do, which is a good step. But now we’ve to come back to it and realize this is a Buddhist approach, that you’re the boss, you know. Buddha’s not the boss.
He’s he’s telling us not to kill, not to lie, not to steal, but the crucial difference is like this. It’s not because he’s gonna punish us, which is how we think, which is indeed is the Christian teaches, I’m not criticizing this. That’s the law. God made the world, so you gotta do what God says. I’m not complaining.
That’s not the Buddha’s deal. Buddha did not make the world, Buddha did not make me, Buddha did not create the laws of the laws of karma. He’s he says a natural law like gravity that just occurs, and he happens to have observed it. So he’s like a doctor who warns you that if you kill, it will cause you suffering. Don’t think of it as punishment.
This is a I can’t describe the difference this makes to our world. We really grow up, and we can get this point. It goes beyond the usual guilt and shame and blame, you know, which is what we which is a function of ego. It’s so important to get this one, to think of it again and again, to get the point. So the first step is to regret the actions that I have done today, yesterday, this life, past life, whatever you can take in, that have been negative, that have therefore left seeds in my mind, which if I leave them there, will therefore ripen in my future as my suffering.
That’s the logic of it. Well, I would regret those. That’s why the poison’s a perfect analogy. If you’ve eaten if I say, oh, you know, Bill, there’s poison in your dinner, if he’s a sensible man, he’ll go, oh my god, what an idiot. Quick, where’s the doctor?
He will say. Now listen to what he won’t say, and these are the three options we have right now which shows how pathetic we are. All of us, join the club. Imagine if he said, oh I ate poison. I’m such a bad person.
Every day he’s getting sicker and sicker and sicker. Rabina I ate poison. I can see him crippled, know. Worse and worse every day. Rubina, I ate poison.
I’m such a bad person. I’m such a bad person. I ate poison. I ate It’s like, excuse me, what good is that? That’s called guilt.
It is utterly useless. You just keep going on about it. You’re we’re just involved in our own misery. I’m a bad person. I’m a bad person.
I’m a bad person. I ate poison. How completely useless that is. Think about it. It’s utterly foolish.
That’s what we do. That’s called guilt. It’s worse than useless. It’s just blame, but you’re the object. That’s bad enough.
Look at the next one. Bill, you’ve just eaten poison. Who put poison in my dinner? And he spends the next five years trying to find the person to sue. Meanwhile, he’s dying.
I’m very happy you’re gonna blame Marlboro for all your cancer, but meanwhile, can you fix your cancer first? Blame them later. Okay? But how foolish. Who put poi I’m allowed to I’m allowed to be angry someone poisoned me.
Well, who cares? Do something about it. This is accountability. Listen to listen to the third one. This is the most ridiculous.
Bill, you got poison in your dinner. There is not. So we have blame guilt, blame, denial that we are excellent at these three, and we live in these three. These are the responses of ego people. These are the responses of the self pity me.
This is the usual ridiculous view we have. So the one of karma, like taking poison, hardly rocket science, you recognize that poison will bring you suffering, so you’d better regret it. So that’s the regret. I said this earlier to the people, know, His Holiness mentioned one time the difference between guilt and regret. Someone asked, you know.
It’s so perfect, the answer. He said, guilt, you look in the past, I did this, I did that, I did this, and then you say, and I’m a bad person. You wallow in it. You beat yourself up. You feel hopeless.
And because this is the terrible part, if we’re not religious, at least if you’re religious and you believe in God, you you ask God to forgive you. This is already marvelous. But the materialist world, what options do we have? Like if your mommy’s dead, and you’ve harmed her all your life, and now she’s dead, she can’t forgive you, that’s why we want to kill ourselves because we feel guilty. It’s no help people.
Guilt is a terrible state of mind. It’s self blame, and it’s exactly anger. You listen to anger. You did this, and you did this, and you did this, and you’re a bad person. It’s exactly the same, and it is a terrible state of mind.
It will destroy you, and we do it spontaneously, I tell you. Regret, as his holiness said, instead is you look into the past. That part’s the same. I did do this and this and this, but now you change and you say, what can I do about it? This is the major difference we have to do, and we have to cultivate this view cause it doesn’t come naturally.
So this is so this first step regret has got another major major component, okay. It’s really important this this other part. It’s got several little pieces in this, you know. Right now it’s one split second it turns into guilt, doesn’t it? And then we just wallow, and feel bad, and ashamed, and try to hide it, and then we blame other people, and we just go around in circles getting worse and worse every day.
Instead of this, we have to have this, you know, breaking regret down. It’s very precise. Okay? Don’t think of it as just some feeling. It’s got a very precise components.
The first step, and it’s totally based on the logic of karma, the first step is to recognize that I did do it. And that already, I tell you, is a tough one. We will do everything in us not to own it, you know. That’s the irony of ego. This is the way ego is, people.
This is the way ego is. We try to hide it, you know, from someone else, from ourself. It’s because it’s too painful, and because the thing is in our material as well, we don’t think we can change it. We think we are bad. We think it’s immutable, you know.
This is why we wanna kill ourselves. Many of our friends in prison were profoundly depressed because they didn’t know where to go with this. So they were on the edge of their seats listening to the purification practice, not believing, my god, you mean there’s no karma I can’t change? It’s Buddha’s point. So the first step, what regret is is ownership, is accountability, is owning it.
I did do it. This is already I can’t describe the power of this. It’s already in ninety percent there. Once you can do this, if you can’t do this, nothing can you can’t go forward. So you’ve got to get regret right.
Okay? Regret first is I did do it. Now you see guilt also over exaggerates what you did. It over exaggerates it. It you know, it’s as if like for example, let’s say you did kill somebody.
Let’s say we and lots of us do, we kill people. You know, I killed somebody in my womb when I was twenty three, called a fetus, you know. Bill apparently killed a few people in Vietnam. Whatever. He killed more than me.
He’s the worst, you see. So listen, just think of this one. Guilt wants to take all that responsibility and we live with it forevermore and go crazy, you know, have all these post stress things and what do they call those diseases you have if you go to war and think about being sarcastic. Thank you that one. Okay.
And I’m not being mean. Usually when I am being mean, first say I’m not being mean. But I’m not being mean. I’m just kind of being a little bit jokey about how we all get caught up in our misery in this earth, you know. But listen, listen to this.
Excuse me, he might have gone to the Vietnam War and he might have had his gun. He might have had the intention to kill because he was trained this way and he had obviously some karmic imprints to kill otherwise he wouldn’t have gone to Vietnam or he would have acted like he was stupid and shot the gun on the earth. But he shot his gun and then guess what? Twenty how many? Twenty three people died, okay?
The ones you know about. Could have been more. You’re naughtier than you thought. Okay, so listen to this. Listen to this people, we don’t like to think this in our world because we want to take he wants to be guilty for all of it, but excuse me, he’s not all responsible.
Guess who is the main cause of being killed? Those twenty three people. If they did not have karma with him from having killed him in the past, believe me, they would have missed they would have ducked the bullet. It wasn’t because he was such a good shooter. Those people who did those, you know, those the September eleven people, they probably thought it was a gift straight from God, isn’t it?
Those towers disappearing into smoke. No, it was the negativity. This is a bit shocking to our minds, we can’t cope with this. This is the negativity of the past actions of a thousand lives ago of those three thousand two hundred and twenty three people, or whatever it was that is one of the crucial components in that particular event occurring. In other words, it’s interdependent.
Everybody has karma, you know. The only reason you can harm me is if I’ve got karma to be harmed. So he’s only part of the blame. I’m sorry, Bill, you’re not to blame. You’re just this idiot with a gun and they will you you know, you weren’t even such a good shooter.
But they were right there to grab your bullet because they ran like like the you know, think of a fisherman, you know, those fish due to past karma, they run to that with you know with that that bait with their mouth open waiting with a hook. You’ve got to remember this. The same with virtuous karma. If you don’t have merit, infinite amounts of merit, infinite amounts of virtue from the past from accumulating one moment at a time, lots and lots of virtuous actions of body, speech, and mind. If you didn’t have this, you wouldn’t be sitting in this chair even in this room in a Buddhist center, you know.
You wouldn’t. You would not even have one good thing happen to you. Nothing would happen. But the stuff in our life that we totally take for granted, it’s a result of phenomenal virtuous seeds in the past that we personally grew. We should be weeping in happiness at every good thing that ever occurs to us, not because we’re lucky, you know, but we even feel guilty for the good things.
All the poor people out there, you know. I’m sorry. Don’t be guilty. Rejoice and delight in your past virtue and realize you do like nice things, you better keep in creating more virtue. That’s the logic behind rejoicing in your good karma and being and having regret for your negative.
It’s a wholesome, full on, appropriate accountability procedure, you know, because we are the bosses. We’re creating our causes. So all those victims that he shot, I’m sorry, they created the cause. So when he has regret, he doesn’t take responsibility for all the killing, just for his part. They had the karma to be killed, which doesn’t mean you should kill him.
That’s not the point. It just means it’s an interdependent scenario. They would not have been killed if they did not have the karma to be killed. It’s very simple. I mean, I went fishing once to impress a boyfriend.
He was pulling him out like crazy. I couldn’t get one. No fish came to my hook. I did not have the karma to kill because no one had the karma at that time to be killed by me. Can you hear my point people?
We’ve got to remember, it’s an interdependent. So guilt also over exaggerates our responsibility. It’s inappropriate. It’s not it’s not precise enough. I remember being really mad at my mother, know, because she had terrible guilt about all the bad things that happened in our family.
And even before I had the view of karma, I remember getting furious at her. I said, excuse me, mom, back off. I did some I I had some role in my life, you didn’t do everything. You get my point here? Mothers love to take all the responsibility.
Well, mind your own business please, get out of my head, take responsibility for your part, not for my part. Are you hearing my point people? I mean, remember even when I was three, I I I would have killed me if I’d been my mother or father, believe me. And my father nearly killed me several times because I was so I knew I had I was manipulating my father. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Okay. I’m only three, it’s true, and little girls are little girls. But believe me, I somehow knew I was getting my father, and I knew I was making him enrage, and I would enrage him beyond speaking, you know. So even though I’m only three, my little mind was working overtime. You’re with me people.
So we’ve got to be responsible, know. And when you can have guilt over exaggerates your badness, like blame over exaggerates his badness. They all over exaggerate. Delusions always exaggerate. So if you when you’re regretting, you’re regretting your part of it.
Your role only. So if you have a fight with your hubby, excuse me, he fought as well. So you take responsibility for your part. Regret your anger, and your provocation, and your negativity, and your jealousy. Let him have his own, please.
You’re not the cause of all of it. Okay? This is a really important point, I tell you. So regret is owning. I did do it.
Rat, I did it. Kicked the dog at eleven o’clock, stole the money at one o’clock, killed me grandma at two o’clock. Whatever it is you did, you’d better own it. Okay? Instead of guilt, blame, denial, they are they’re disaster.
But this is already painful because one of the interesting points, I remember Lama Zopa Rinpoche saying one time, was very helpful. He said, especially like it was a vow, and I will explain vows in a minute. He said, when you break a vow, if at the second you’re doing it, and this means anything you do bad, okay? At the moment you’re doing it, if you don’t try to hide it, you don’t really you don’t fully break the vow. This is really tasty because the ego wants to hide it.
I remember one time being in a shop recently, there’s a good little Buddhist nun, you know, in Singapore, this fancy shop with all this expensive crystal. I’ve gotta be careful because I’m a bit clumsy, so I knocked one and I chipped a piece. I instantly looked around to see who saw me, you know. Instantly, that second, the first thing I did was try and hide it. You understand what I’m saying?
This is very deep inside us. So this impulse to hide it is very strong inside us because we can’t bear. If we do own it, we then get all guilty, you know. So it’s really tricky to regret precisely our role in things, what we did, fully own, without spluttering and it’s not my fault and all this kind of business. Own the fact that we did it due to negative karma, due to the habit, whatever, I killed, I lied, I stole.
You know, and Buddha is there’s not I mean, we can see an awful lot of harm in the world, and we can think of the thousands of negative actions we’ve done, but you can narrow them down actually. There’s only so many negative actions of the body. There’s killing, there’s kicking, in the Buddha’s list of ten negativities, he doesn’t talk. He doesn’t use one he doesn’t say that one of them is punching in the nose or kicking, you know.
But we can see that there are variations, aren’t they? You use your body to harm people. Killing is the worst one. So killing is an example of harming. Then of course the other variations of harming from aversion in other words.
Then you’ve got the stuff dependent on with your body, dependent on attachment, stealing and sexual misconduct. They’re dependent on attachment, aren’t they? So there’s the harming actions you do based on anger, and then there’s the other harming ones which are based on attachment, stealing and sexual misconduct. There’s only so many, you know, there are variations of them. Then you’ve got the actions of speech, four of those, and you could have you could you could say more variations.
But there’s, you know, lying, speaking bad about people behind their backs which causes terrible disharmony and causes division, harsh speech, I do that one, swearing and things and just harsh speech, know. And then the other one, just rabbiting on about nothing which is what we do all the time. Rabbiting on about nothing, hot air coming out the mouth, know. No interest whether the person wants to hear it. That’s called idle talk.
We can see we do this, all of them. There’s only so many variations of speech that you can do, so it’s not that many things you analyze the list. There’s just only ten. It doesn’t take too long to analyze those as we do in our day. Know we might not do that many.
We might not do that many in this time, maybe in earlier in our life we’ve done it. But we can guarantee if we analyze Buddha’s view about mind, continuity of mind going back and back and back, which we’re taking as a hypothesis, remember? Most of us don’t remember. Then it’s logical for the Buddha. We’ve had countless lives, and we’ve had countless lives as animals.
Like I mentioned before, you know, earlier before you people, all of you came. One whale, big fat whale, opens its mouth one morning for one mouthful of one breakfast, and forty million little sentient beings float in. That’s an awful lot of people to kill, it? One mouthful of one breakfast of one whale one morning. So can you imagine how many a whale kills in one life?
Because it’s that water is teeming with sentient beings. You can’t breathe without breathing them in. We might have a couple of abortions. We might have killed a few fish. Might have killed a few humans, know.
I’m I’m getting some perspective, know. In other words, have it, own it, recognize it, recall it because it will bring up the regret, and that will remind us all the other actions we’ve done like that. The seeds of which are sitting in our mind right now. That’s our real concern. So in the second noble truth, there’s two main causes of suffering.
One is the past action, which is karma, and the other one is the delusion. Well as Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, the most immediate level of practice is in relation to the delusions. At least when you get punched in the nose, you don’t respond back. You try not to create more negative karma. But in relation to the karma one, which is all the countless seeds in the mind from countless lives in the past, and everybody join the club.
Okay? We’ve all got them. We’ve all had there’s no life we have not had countless times. If Buddha is correct in asserting as he does, that your mind is beginningless and has had countless lives. It fits.
It’s a logical coherent picture, you know. If it’s if it’s true, we’ll find out