Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro begins with a guided breath meditation to explain mindfulness and how the mind works. She uses concrete metaphors—a gatekeeper watching people, thoughts as bubbles—and addresses the frustration of a wandering mind by assuring students that constant mental activity is normal and that even imperfect practice counts as meditation. She outlines two main Buddhist approaches: concentration meditation (focusing steadily on one object like breath or a visualized image) and analytical meditation (investigating ideas to transform negative patterns like anger into understanding). She emphasizes meditation as a discipline—like learning to jog—that becomes easier with daily practice. She concludes by introducing Buddhist philosophy as a radically different worldview worth approaching with an open mind rather than blind belief. For beginners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Basic.mp3
UUID: 7d16104a-ddd6-46bb-a1ac-bf37d5eed306
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Basic Buddhism (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1985 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~5,790
That was ten minutes, if anyone is interested. You tend to lose track of time when you’re meditating. Sometimes a few minutes can seem like an hour. Sometimes an hour can seem like a few minutes depending on how how concentrated you are, how good you feel. So I hope that gave you a bit more understanding of what I was trying to explain before.
Mindfulness is sort of like one part of the mind keeping an eye on the rest of the mind. It’s like one part of the mind standing aside and then just watching whatever is going on with the rest of the mind. In the meditation we were concentrating on the breath, and that’s a way of settling the mind, getting the mind to stay in the here and now rather than wandering all over the place. So it’s concentrating on one object to get that clear clearness and calmness and clarity to be able to see what’s happening in the mind without getting involved, without getting distracted by it. Any questions?
One analogy that might explain it is say you had the job of being a I don’t know what you call it, gatekeeper? Like, somebody like, if there’s a big factory or something and all these people going in and out. And the person who stands at the gate and sort of watches to make sure that, you know, only the right people go in and out. And and, you know, you can’t get involved. You just you just have to kind of watch the coming and going without sort of stopping people to talk or or, you know, getting involved and judging them, you know, as or whatever.
So the ideal stance, you might say, is you simply watch whatever happens, whatever comes up as another analogy that’s often used is like bubbles coming up, all the different thoughts, feelings, images, whatever. Just bubbles. Bubbles. They come and they go. They come and they go.
And you don’t react in the sense of saying, oh, I like that one and I don’t like that one. Mean, that’s really hard to do, of course. It’s something you you learn because all the we’re all the time we’re reacting. You know, we’re kind of judging ourselves and we pat ourselves on the back for whatever good things we might feel or think, and we condemn ourselves for whatever ugly thoughts we might think. We’re all the time reacting and judging, so the idea is to get beyond that, to not judge, to not react, and to not get involved in the sense of feeding the thoughts, feeding them, getting into them, elaborating on them, getting carried away.
Very, very difficult today, as you can see. Of course, there will be times when something will come up in the mind which you feel does need attention. Like, you might suddenly recognize something in yourself which is a real problem, which is or or a recurring attitude or habit. And you suddenly realize, gosh, I’m like that. I didn’t realize I was like that.
Something like that, a problem which you suddenly recognize, which has been there. Been churning away in your mind, but you’ve been trying to ignore it or you simply weren’t aware of it. That will suddenly become obvious while you’re meditating. Now, in that case, you can choose to put it aside and say, Oh, this is some business that needs to be taken care of, but I’ll take care of it later. You just decide to keep on with your meditation and then take care of that one later.
Or you might decide that this is the time to take care of it, you know, that it really needs taking care of, it really needs dealing with now and no point in putting it off. You, you know, interrupt your counting, your mindfulness, and breathing, and just take care of that problem. Because often, that will happen because we do have this tendency to not wanna deal with problems, you know, something unpleasant, something ugly, something painful, too painful to to wanna look at. And it will just suddenly come up while we’re meditating because the mind has become clear and calm and there’s space and the problem just comes, you know, manifests itself. And then and and, like, some of these problems really do need to be taken care of, and perhaps putting it putting it off putting it aside or putting it off might be just another way of escaping, important to learn this technique of counting and staying with the breath.
It’s a bit like a physical discipline. It’s a bit like, say, learning to jog or learning to swim or play tennis. It’s training. You’re training yourself in a particular mental discipline or mental activity. The more you do it, especially if you can do it regularly every day, spend a certain amount of time each day doing it, the more easy it becomes, the more familiar it becomes.
Then when it’s become more familiar, when you’ve developed your ability to be mindful, then you can be more creative, play around with it, use it in different ways. But I think probably it is good in the beginning to just train yourself in the in the counting and and staying with the breath, bringing your mind back each time it wanders away, being really trying to be really, really firm with yourself. Any other questions? Any other problems? It’s important to not to get frustrated with oneself because it often happens that you sit down, you decide to meditate, you decide to do this practice, and and it just seems like your mind is is totally berserk.
You know? There’s just so many thoughts, even more than usual. But that’s not the case. It’s just that our mind is like that all the time. But most of the time, we don’t know it.
We don’t because we don’t really turn our attention within and just sit and say, Okay, what’s happening in my mind? And when we do, we see what’s happening, and there’s a lot happening. But it’s like that all the time. It’s always busy. As I say, most of the time we’re only aware of the most obvious, the sort of thoughts and experiences which are just on the surface.
Beneath that, there’s many, many different layers of and activity, mental activity, and we’re just not aware of it most of the time. And I find it’s it’s incredibly interesting, you know, it’s more interesting than watching football or TV because we’re finding out about ourselves. We’re finding out what kind of person we are, what kind of thoughts we have, what kind of attitudes we have, what kind of feelings and so on that we have. And there’s always new things coming up, you know? Tend to think maybe maybe we might think, Oh, I know myself myself pretty well, you know, but there’s always more to be learned about ourselves.
It’s it’s it’s really fascinating. It’s it’s almost endless, this process of getting to know oneself, getting to know what’s happening in one’s mind. Always new things appearing. Not appearing, it’s not like they weren’t there before. They’ve always been there, but we just didn’t recognize them because we’re so familiar in a way.
We live with ourselves all the time. We tend to just take a lot for granted. So there’s a lot of things that involved in, that we’re just so much a part of that we don’t even see them. But with this kind of practice, which, as I say, the mindfulness is sort of stepping aside and looking at the rest of the mind, looking at all the thoughts and feelings, and trying to be objective, trying to see them for what they are. A lot of things will suddenly appear, and you’ll suddenly realize, Oh, you know what?
It’s quite surprising sometimes because you might have thought, Oh, I wasn’t like that, or I don’t have that kind of problem, I don’t have that kind of attitude. Like prejudice, we all think we’re free of prejudice, but everybody has prejudice. We all have our own set of likes and dislikes, and we’re really stuck in them. We really cling to what we think is right and wrong, what we think is good and bad. So we might think, Oh, I’m not prejudiced against blacks or aboriginals or Jews, but we have other prejudices that we might not be able to recognize until we’ve been practicing mindfulness for a while.
It’s really fascinating. But what I was saying before was not to be frustrated with oneself. If there’s a lot of stuff happening in the mind. If you can’t get beyond two and you’re counting, know, you get to two and the mind wanders away, you have to start again. That’s okay.
I remember once somebody saying to me trying to meditate for a while, I said, I can’t meditate, you know, I just can’t do it. That’s not true. Everybody can meditate, and anybody can meditate. And just the process of trying, just trying to do these practices, meditation, you know? It doesn’t mean that you’re only meditating if you can get to ten.
Even if you only get to two, you’re still meditating. Because you’re trying to be mindful, you’re trying to keep your attention on the here and now, on what’s happening in your mind. So that itself is meditation. There’s a lovely quotation from one of the saints, I think it was Saint Francis de Sales, about something like, even if you have to even if you have to bring your mind back to the object of meditation or concentration fifty times a minute. It doesn’t matter.
Don’t get discouraged. Don’t get frustrated. Just keep at it. Keep trying. Keep working.
It’s only with persistence and patience, patience with oneself, that we will get anywhere in this sort of practice. Over the weekend, we’ll be practicing this meditation again to get more experience with it. We’ll be doing other kinds of meditation as well. As I said, in Buddhism there are many, many different types of meditation. They can be comprised in two main categories.
One is called concentration meditation, or it’s actually called placement meditation, but what it means is concentration. It means meditation which involves focusing the mind, focusing the attention on one thing and sticking with that, not thinking about anything else. So what we just did was an example of that. We chose the breath as the object, and we concentrated on the breath and didn’t allow the mind to get involved anywhere else. You can use the breath as an object, or you can use something that you look at in front of you, or you can use a visualized image.
Sometimes there’s meditations that involve visualizing something, creating an image in your mind, like a color or shape or an image of the Buddha is often used, or an image of Christ if you’re a Christian, using that as an object of concentration. Could be a sound or a phrase. It could be a particular thought or state of mind like love. You know, you can generate a sense of love and just concentrate on that and make it stronger, more clear, more kind of strong fixture in your mind. Okay.
So that’s that’s basically it. You just concentrate on one thing and to the exclusion of anything else. The other type of meditation is what’s called analytical meditation. That involves using more creative type of mental activity, thinking about things, analyzing, investigating. It could be an idea.
This type of meditation would be used with regard to the philosophy or the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha taught many different things, and a lot of these things are things that we need to understand. We have to come to an understanding of them. This type of meditation is used to think about that subject and look at it from different points of view, bring in your own experiences, bring in things that other people have said and heard, and so on. So it’s a question of trying to understand something with our intellect.
This could also be used not just with intellectual things, but again, with love. An example would be if you want to develop more love, there’s ways of meditating that involve Say, for example, trying to understand anger, which is like the opposite of love anger and hatred. Looking at those states of mind and seeing how they feel and seeing how unpleasant they are for yourself and for others and just seeing the whole situation of anger and hatred, what it’s like and where they come from, trying to understand how they arise, how they come, how they come into the mind and take over the mind. And then learning to deal with them, learning how to not respond in that way, learning to have a different way of responding, developing patience, developing tolerance. Love is a further extension of that.
Not only should we learn to have patience and acceptance of people, but even really difficult people, people that irritate us, but how we can learn to love them. So there’s ways of meditating to increase, develop, expand feelings of love. That’s a kind of intellectual meditation or analytical meditation, although the goal is to develop this sense, this feeling, this experience of love. Those are the two main types of meditation. Every meditation that’s done in Buddhism will fit into one of those two categories, or it might be a combination of both.
So like the example I just gave of meditating on love, trying to transform anger into patience and acceptance and then into love. If you did that meditation and you actually did generate this sense of love for one person, maybe, if you’re trying to just learn to love one person or trying to learn to love all living things, when you get to the point where you feel this experience of love, this wonderful love, then you can stop thinking. You can just stop that process of thinking, analyzing, and so on, and concentrate on it. Concentrate on it. Just hold that experience.
Concentrate all your attention, all your awareness on that experience of love. Hold on to it and try to keep it going, try to keep it burning, let’s say. And don’t think about anything else. Don’t get involved with anything else. Just concentrate on that.
Then if it fades starts to fade, you might wanna continue go back to the meditation. Try to generate it again, build it up again. So that’s how the two types of meditation can be used at one time in one situation. Another example would be, say, what’s often done by the Buddhists is you meditate on the Buddha, and you might create an image of the Buddha, visualize the Buddha, and think about the qualities, think about who the Buddha was and what he did and what it means to be enlightened, what it means to be a Buddha. By doing so, you generate this sense of love, this sense of faith and respect and admiration and inspiration, wanting to emulate the Buddha, wanting to be like the Buddha, wanting to follow his teachings and so on.
You generate this incredible kind of, well, respect for the Buddha. And then you When you feel that, when you get that experience, you might hold it, hold the visualization of the Buddha and hold that sense of respect and faith in the Buddha. Try to keep your mind on that, try to hold that experience in your mind as long as possible. Because By doing so, strengthen that experience. If it was just a fleeting thing that just passed through the mind, then it wouldn’t be very strong.
It wouldn’t change us very much. But when we can generate a really positive experience, like love, or faith, or aspiration, wanting to become enlightened ourselves, we can generate that experience and hold it in our mind as long as possible, it becomes much stronger and it has a really profound influence on us. It will bring about changes in our life, in ourselves. And that’s the real point of meditation, anyway, to bring about changes. It’s to change ourselves for the better, not for the worse.
Mean, in a way, you can say we already do meditation, but often in a negative way, like anger, going back to an example of anger. If you don’t like somebody, this person that you know has done things that irritate you or has done things really stupid or maybe deliberately or not deliberately, it doesn’t matter, but anyway, you find you have lots of complaints about that person. And what we normally do is we sort of churn them over in our mind. We meditate on them. We meditate on that person, and he did this and he did that, and he did this, and now he’s such an idiot, and da da da da da, you know, we go on and on about all these things that we don’t like about that person.
So it’s a kind of meditation, an analytical meditation. And in doing that, we generate this sense of anger, this sense of hatred, this sense of hurt, you know, to strangle him. And And we concentrate on it. We don’t let it out of our mind. We feed it, we give it more and more energy.
And you can see what happens as a result of that. The more we indulge in that kind of thought, in that kind of mental activity and in that feeling, that experience of anger, the stronger it becomes. Such that whenever you meet that person, whenever you just see that person or see the picture of that person or think about that person, this whole experience of anger and hatred comes up very strongly. So this is something we tend to do anyway. Maybe we don’t intend to, we don’t do it so much because we enjoy it.
Well, suppose in a way we do enjoy it, we wouldn’t do it. But it’s more a habit. It’s more we do it out of habit. We’ve been doing it all our lives, it’s just so easy to do. And there is a kind of satisfaction that comes from indulging in anger and hatred for somebody else.
But then again, if we look at the consequences of that, it doesn’t really make us happy. It doesn’t really make us feel more peaceful. It doesn’t make other people feel happy and peaceful, so it doesn’t really have such good results. So the idea in meditation is to use that same kind of process but in a reverse way, to generate positive states of mind and to become familiar with them. As I said, the meaning of meditation is becoming familiar.
So it’s learning a whole new way of thinking, a whole new set of attitudes and ideals and ways of thinking, ways of behaving, ways of talking, are positive, which make us feel better, which bring about more happiness and peace of mind, more satisfaction for ourselves, and help us in our dealings with others, in our relationships with others, in the work that we do, in the influence that we have on others, just make the whole thing healthier, more positive, more satisfying. And that’s possible by doing meditation and learning generating positive states of mind, learning to hold on to positive states of mind when we have them so that they don’t disappear so quickly, and to increase them, and to gradually decrease the negative states of mind, like anger and hatred, jealousy, selfishness and so on. So that’s the whole general idea of meditation. There’s many, many different types of meditation, and they’re all different ways of helping the mind, helping ourselves to be more positive, to be more happy, and to be more realistic as well. Because so many of our problems come from having distorted ideas about things, having mistaken ideas, not understanding things as they are.
So many problems come from just not understanding. Sometimes we deliberately ignore, we just don’t want to know about something, we just choose to not think about it, to not deal with it. That’s a kind of not understanding. There are other misunderstandings which are just total mistakes, like having a complete idea about something which is completely wrong. We can think of examples of that.
When a person that we know, say, does something and we interpret it in a certain way, and we think, Oh, that person’s really awful, That person really doesn’t like me, or That person is this or that, or whatever, we kind of have this negative interpretation of what the person did. And we live in that, we believe in that. And then maybe later on we find that we were completely wrong, that in fact it was just the other way around. And we realize how stupid we were, and how problems came from that misunderstanding. We do that a lot, having a distorted or perverted or mistaken understanding of things.
So many problems come from that. Another point of meditation is to try to clear up misunderstandings and mistakes in our way of seeing things, in our way of dealing with things, and try to get a really clear, correct picture of how things are, an honest and and and genuine understanding of things. Because by doing that, just so many problems are just wiped away. That’s an introduction to meditation. As far as Buddhism goes, what I’ll be doing in the course actually, first of all, it looked at ten thirty when we were supposed to start it a bit doubtful that we were going to have this course and all because of the short.
Are all of you intending to do the whole course, whole weekend? Yeah. Yeah. It’s okay. I think there’s somebody else who’s coming late today.
Okay. So it looks like it’ll happen. Maybe maybe it’d be a good time to have a break now. So this afternoon, I’ll begin talking more about Buddhist Buddhist view of things. Now in looking at the view of another system, another philosophy, whether it’s Marxism or whatever ism there is that explains things in a certain way.
It’s quite important to just have very open mind. Buddhism itself, actually, the Buddha was teaching, he would tell his followers that they should always check everything out for themselves. They shouldn’t just believe what he’s saying because ‘s saying it, sort of hang on every word that he said, which is the tendency sometimes. So he advised his followers not to just accept what he said and believe what he said without checking it out for themselves. That goes for us as well, for anyone who looks into Buddhism.
There’s no stipulation that we just accept anything, but that we should think about it. We should have an open mind, you know, and listen, think about but really investigate for ourselves whether or not this idea is valid according to our own experience of things, according to our own understanding, to our own perception, and so on. Now, for some things, of course, we cannot really validate or invalidate things, like, for example, the idea of reincarnation. Nobody can really prove that there is transmigration of a person or a soul after death, but also nobody can disprove it. So it’s one of those things that we just have to wait, you know, hang on and just wait and see what happens.
Some things we can’t really prove or disprove based on our own experience, but other things we can check out and see if it fits, if it matches what we experience, the way we think we experience things. But at any rate, that’s the idea when we approach Buddhism. Think it’s the way we should approach anything. We should have an open mind and a sense of willingness to listen, willingness to understand, to try to understand what’s being said, what’s being taught, but not grasp and not reject anything until we have checked it out for ourselves. Okay, so the Buddhist worldview in many ways would be different from the sort of worldview that we have.
Now I suppose many of us don’t even know what worldview we have. We don’t really think in that way. But we do have a view of things. We do have ideas and attitudes and ways that we perceive things, ways that we relate to things. And we’re so totally involved in it that we just assume that that’s reality.
We just assume that’s the way things are. When we come into this world, we’re just pretty empty, an empty little baby. From then on we learn from our parents and from our friends and teachers and from the society that we grow up in. So we learn. We learn to see things in a certain way.
We learn to react to things in a certain way. We learn to behave in a certain way according to that society. As I said, by the time we’re adults, we’re just totally habituated to that way of saying things, that we hardly question it. We might question it sometimes, but perhaps we don’t know any other way. We don’t know any better way of doing things or seeing things.
In most ways, we just go along with what we’ve been taught, what we’ve learned. It’s good to try to understand what our worldview is. Like I said, it’s quite hard to do that when you’re living in a society and you tend to just do things the way everybody else does them, believe things that everybody else believes. It’s really hard to get perspective on that, to be able to see things from another point of view. But if you did something really drastic, like if you went to even if you went to live with some Aborigines for a while and you tried to really get into their way of seeing things and do things their way, that would enable you to get another perspective on what you’ve been used to doing, the kind of views and attitudes and culture that you grew up in.
Or if you go to another country and try things out in a different way, that will give you perspective on the past, what you’re used to. I think traveling is really wonderful because it does enable you to get a taste of another way of doing things, another whole set of attitudes and values which we can’t even imagine, which we never even think of on our own because, you know, we’re we’re so enveloped in this one one set of values, one set of attitudes. I mean, just one obvious example is is with regard to food. Probably most of us have never had to go hungry. We’ve all been hungry, we’ve all experienced hunger, and we may have chosen to go without food for maybe to lose weight or to get high or because we’re just so busy, you know.
So we may have experienced hunger in that way, but experiencing hunger without choice, but because the food isn’t available or you just don’t have the money, the means to procure food. So you’re hungry, but you can’t have food if Food is denied to you somehow. Most people in the West never had that experience. I’ve never had it myself. But I would say probably half the people in the world have had an experience like that, sometime in their life, where they’ve had to go hungry without choice.
Having that kind of experience would give one a very different outlook on things. Because food is such an important part of life. We take it for granted because there’s just so much of it around. We can throw it away. But for many people in the world, one would never throw away food.
One wouldn’t think to throw away food. Even if it’s refuse, you can feed it to your animals. That’s just an example. The attitude we have towards food we can take it or leave it, we can throw it away, and not give a second thought about it is one sort of attitude that we just live with, but is so different. If you travel to another part of the world, you’d find things completely different people would have a very, very different attitude towards food.
That’s one thing. I was also talking about attitudes that have more to do with beliefs, you know, like belief about God or belief about the relationship of this planet to the rest of the universe and so on. That kind of belief is more intellectual. But even things like our attitudes towards food, our attitude towards material things, again, our societies are so rich. There’s just so much of everything around.
We can throw things away so easily. In other countries, in other cultures, nothing is thrown away. Everything is precious. A plastic bag a scrap of paper can be used for something. Just things like that that we tend to take for granted.
The point I’m trying to make here is that when we’re looking at Buddhism or when we’re looking at any other of view of things, in a way, it’s giving us an opportunity to see a reflection of ourselves and to see a reflection of our set of values, our set of beliefs and attitudes and habits from a different perspective. So it’s a really good opportunity to get that perspective on things and to question, well, this is the way I’ve always been, this is the way I’ve always thought, and this is the way I’ve always done things, here’s another way of doing it. Well, what about that? It’s very good to reflect on that, to think about that, think in those terms. And even just to be able to see things, like I say, the values, the attitudes that we just live with, that we just assume to be true, to be reality, to question, to say, Well, is this really reality?
Is this really the way things are? Is this really right and valid? What I’ve always believed, what I’ve always done. So now I’ll try to explain the Buddhist worldview. Probably the best way of doing this is in terms of what’s called the four truths, which if you pick up any book about Buddhism, you’re sure to find something about the four truths.
This is probably the most well known aspect of the Buddhist teachings. It’s also the first thing that he taught after the Buddha attained enlightenment. The very first teaching that he gave was on the subject of four truths, and that’s quite significant in a way because it’s a very compact way of explaining his whole worldview, his whole philosophy. Just about everything else that the Buddha taught in his career can be fit into this teaching of the four truths. It’s sometimes called the Four Noble Truths, that’s the usual title, Four Noble Truths.
Even the meaning of the word truth here Truth might be better to say reality, in a sense of the way things are. These are like four points that explain the way things are as the Buddha saw them and as other people have seen them. So again, it’s up to us to check that out. So it’s more like of four facts or four realities or four points about the way things are rather than truth as just some sort of idealistic idea that comes into somebody’s head. We often talk about truth, it seems to be something very subjective and arbitrary in many cases.
The first truth is called the truth of suffering. Means what this refers to is the fact that life itself, existence itself, is kind of steeped in suffering. And suffering suffering sounds like a pretty heavy word. You know, we tend to think when we hear suffering, we think of the suffering of the people in Ethiopia, the suffering of the people in South America, the suffering you know, other people having really heavy experiences or heavy problems. But suffering doesn’t only mean that.
Suffering means any kind of experience which is unpleasant, which is undesired. So we need to look at our own experiences and see the suffering that we have physical suffering. Our bodies are always suffering in a way. Hardly a moment when there isn’t something out of whack in our bodies. There’s always some little ache, pain, discomfort, you know, after eating maybe we hardly ever eat just enough, you know.
Usually we eat too much or we don’t eat enough, so our stomachs are always either too full or empty. And that goes on all day long, you know. You eat a little while later you’re hungry again, and you have to eat again, and then you have to deal with food. That itself is a kind of suffering. Fatigue.
Every day we get tired several times a day, at least at night. Fatigue, that’s a kind of suffering. We wouldn’t think of it like that, would we? We wouldn’t call that suffering. But the fact that it’s discomfort, the fact that it’s not pleasant and it’s not a state of happiness and peace and contentment.
That’s what’s meant here by suffering. Then headaches, getting colds, toothaches, sore throats, aches and pains in the body. Those are all different types of physical suffering. So just in the course of a day or even in the course of an hour, we can find many, many instances of physical suffering. Also, just the fact that the body is so vulnerable to suffering.
In the West we tend to have this idea that the body is such a wonderful thing. In a way, it’s true. It’s quite miraculous how the body is formed. You know how it starts off as this tiny little seed in our mother’s womb and it grows into this wonderful human creature, you know, with everything intact and and it keeps growing. And the way everything just works without you know, we don’t have to think about breathing.
We don’t have to think about pumping blood through the body. It just happens, you know? It’s quite wonderful. It’s quite miraculous. So it’s quite, I think, valid to have awe and