Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro teaches the three main causes of suffering: attachment, anger, and ignorance. Rather than abstract theory, she grounds each in concrete examples — the friend who walks past without saying hello and the story we invent, the person we instantly dislike, the alcoholic escaping reality. She explains how attachment makes us avoid facing problems, how anger doesn’t solve anything, and how ignorance means projecting judgments (good/bad, beautiful/ugly) onto things and treating those projections as truth. Throughout, she emphasizes personal responsibility: we make ourselves unhappy, not external circumstances. She introduces meditation and questioning as tools for investigating our fixed views and seeing through distorted assumptions about people, objects, and ourselves. Pitched at newcomers encountering Buddhist teachings for the first time.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 Basic.mp3
UUID: 5896c2fa-44f6-4e09-9dcb-85e55bdb5073
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: ~5,753
Causes, one of the factors in the mind which leads to problems, to suffering. Well, maybe to elaborate on that: when we have this attitude of we think we need something for our happiness and we become dependent upon that for our happiness, What happens is we don’t really face up to reality. In a way, whenever there’s a problem, whenever things are going bad, whenever you’re unhappy, you tend to want escape the problem, escape from yourself and turn to that person or that whatever food, you know, to to make you feel better. And it might give you a little bit of relief, a bit of distraction, make make you feel better, but it’s not it’s not a real solution because it’s only a temporary relief. And and, eventually you know, the problem is still there, of course, and eventually, you know, it’s gonna come back.
So in a way, having attachment to things, becoming dependent and clinging to things causes us to not face up to our problems and to not deal with our problems in realistic way, in an effective way, such that we really deal with them, we get beyond them, we get over them. That’s one of the problems that comes from attachment. If we take the really gross example of a heroin addict or an alcoholic, you know, all the time turning to the drink or to the drug to escape from the realities of life, the problems of life. And what happens if a person doesn’t grow, doesn’t become mature, becomes totally dependent, totally obsessed, and then physical problems come as well. And as often happens, the person just destroys himself or herself.
And we do the same in our own little attachments, you know, in our attachments to people, in our attachments to food or to music, whatever it is we run to, whatever it is we try to escape to, to get away from our problems, to avoid facing up to things. Every time we do that, well, we develop a habit, you know, it becomes habitual. It becomes it’s an easy way out, and it and it becomes a habit. And but like I said, the problems aren’t getting solved, they’re not getting dealt with, and they they grow. They get worse.
They get they get they increase. And eventually, I mean, to really grow, to really develop, to mature, we have to learn to face the problems that we have. I guess the more we indulge in running away, in turning to objects of distraction or attachment, the harder it will become to finally to really face up to the problems. So if we ever do finally decide to, it’s going to be that much harder. That’s why I think, like I said, my experience was when I first started looking at suffering, was so depressed.
It’s because I’d lived so many years of my life not wanting to face up to it. It was just habitual to avoid looking at problems, Once I did, finally decided to, it was really, really difficult. Whereas, if we could do that right from the beginning, it wouldn’t be so painful, wouldn’t be so difficult. Other problems of attachment. We’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment and for grief and for pain because whatever object we become dependent upon is gonna let us down at some point.
You know? Even even a person that we that, you know, we have a really good relationship with, we might spend our lives together, eventually, one of you is gonna have to die before the other. So eventually, ultimately, you’re going to have to separate. And the more attachment you have, the more dependency you have on the person, the more painful it will be to have to separate. And so there’s no there’s nothing we can rely on.
There’s nothing we can depend on that is always going to be there, that is dependable, ultimately, for all time. As I say, becoming dependent on something is setting ourselves up for disappointment and for pain when that object isn’t there. Those are some of the problems are caused by attachment. There’s a lot of misunderstanding, I think, when people get into Buddhism because it sounds like we shouldn’t have friends, we shouldn’t have relationships, shouldn’t you should cut yourself off, be alone, just sit by yourself and meditate. That’s wrong.
That’s that’s not the right that’s not what it’s saying at all. It’s The ideal is to carry on with your relationships, to carry on with your friends, to carry on with your life, to continue enjoying whatever you enjoy in life, but do it without attachment. That’s why I mean, it’s so difficult to do. That’s why most people, you know, they they have to, at least, sometimes, you know, deny themselves the things that they enjoy because trying to enjoy something and at the same time give up the attachment for it is very, very difficult. But it is possible.
It’s possible by just by reflecting on and coming to an understanding of how the attachment just isn’t realistic and how it isn’t going to work. If you think like, if you love somebody, if you think about, this person isn’t going to be there forever. We don’t like to think about that, but if we do we prepare ourselves for that. We prepare ourselves for the time when that relationship just won’t exist anymore, the person won’t be there anymore, or you won’t be there anymore. You know, just come to an acceptance that it’s impermanent, that it’s it’s going to change, that it’s going to go out of existence at some point.
Then automatically, the attachment decreases, you know, because attachment carries with it that kind of expectation that the person’s always gonna be there, the thing’s always gonna be there when you need it. Okay. So when we can realize that, when we can see a time when it isn’t gonna be there, when you’re gonna be you’re gonna need the help, you’re gonna need the whatever comfort, love, pleasure, and it isn’t gonna be there. If you can prepare yourself for that, then in the you know, then automatically your your attachment, your dependency will decrease. Also, attachment can be lessened by becoming more self reliant, realizing that we have the means to be happy within ourselves.
And we don’t need other people. We don’t need distractions. We don’t need things outside of ourselves. We can make ourselves happy. I think we have to be able to experience that either through meditation, through some kind of inner work, working on oneself, spiritual work, looking inside yourself, seeing how it is we make ourselves unhappy.
How do we get unhappy anyway? The same with unhappiness. It’s not external things that make us unhappy. We make ourselves unhappy. We get ourselves into a state of mind where we’re negative, where we’re negative, where we’re unhappy.
So how do we do that? This is something you can do in meditation. You can get more understanding of the workings of the mind such that you can see how it works, what it is that gets you into an unhappy state of mind, and how you can change that, how you can stop that process and change it and practice and train yourself in the process of making yourself happy, so you can see for yourself what makes you happy, what makes you unhappy, and work on that. Make sure that you’ve got the factors, you do the right things to keep yourself in a happy, peaceful state of mind. You can do that on your own to a certain extent, by just coming to understand how you work, how your mind works.
But also in the teachings of Buddhism, are many different methods of meditation. Many of them may not be designed so much to make us happy, but they’re designed to help us become more realistic, to help us have a better understanding of things as they really are. The more we open up to reality, the more we can accept things as they are, the more happy, naturally, the more happy you are, because you’re not running away from anything. You’re not living in a fantasy world, way you want things to be. There’s it again, happiness maybe I should explain what I mean by happiness.
It isn’t the kind of happiness, the, you know, excite excitement, the sort of temporary high that we get into, which we always fall down from. But when I when I say happiness here, I mean, I don’t know a better word for it. Maybe contentment or peace of mind. Peace of mind may be good, although it’s a bit overused. But it’s a state of acceptance of things as they are, a state which isn’t easily ruffled or upset, which is open and clear and quite peaceful and content.
Know? I mean, much of the time, we’re we’re like on a seesaw, you know, up and down, happiness, unhappiness, happiness. So this other thing I’m talking about, this other state of mind is a more neutral state of mind. It’s not you know, you don’t get really high. You don’t get really excited so much, but also you don’t get down so much.
Just more calm, peaceful, neutral, and, like I said, open and accepting things as they are. So that’s when I’m talking about happiness and meditating in order to be more happy, that’s that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. That’s the kind of experience. Anyway, we can learn to do that. We can learn to keep ourselves in that kind of state of mind.
And then, naturally, we won’t need to depend on others. We have to look to other people or objects out there to make us happy. We’ll be able to do it ourselves. Naturally, then, attachment will become less. Attachment, desire, clinging will lessen.
That’s the first of the three poisons, are the causes of problems. The second one is hatred or anger. It’s like the opposite. It’s the attitude of whenever we encounter something or someone that makes us feel bad, that seems to be the cause of problems, that seems to yeah. It seems to make us feel lousy.
Then we develop or we have this attitude of hatred and anger and rejection. It’s a rejection. Attachment is like a clingy, wanting to cling, wanting to draw something closer to us and keep it with us and never be parted from it. Anger or anger or hatred is the opposite. It’s a rejection.
It’s a pushing away. It’s closing off to, not wanting to deal deal with something, not wanting to see or touch or have anything to do with something or someone. So I think we all know what anger is. And it can it can be even a mild irritation. It doesn’t have to be a great big roaring, raging anger, but even irritation.
When we feel irritated with sound that somebody’s making or or a habit that a person has, that’s also included in this, you know, because it’s also that kind of a kind of it’s a way it’s like blaming something else for our problems. It’s like saying, you make me unhappy or you whatever. That that thing or that person person makes me feel lousy, makes me feel bad, is the cause of my problems, my pain. So again, it’s a very unrealistic attitude. It’s not taking responsibility for one’s own problems and trying to push it off on somebody else, trying to put the blame somewhere else.
The more we understand the mind, the more we look into ourselves and see how the mind works, then the more we can see how that is unrealistic, because we can see how it’s not really that person or it’s not really that sound or that whatever that’s making me feel lousy. It’s something else in here. Like, I find whatever whatever I don’t like in somebody else or in the world, it’s something that I have in myself, and I haven’t come to terms with it. You know? Like, if there’s a certain quality or a certain habit or a certain attitude which I react to when I encounter it somewhere else, in some in some other person.
If I look honestly in myself, I can see that I’ve got it in here, and I hate it in myself. I can’t accept it. I can’t accept that I’ve got that. It’s a part of me. I’m carrying it around with myself carrying it around with me.
And yet, I don’t like it, I don’t accept it, I reject it in myself. I try to pretend it’s not there, try to cover it up, hide from it, and so on. But whenever I encounter it out there, it just causes this aversion, this irritation, this anger to flare up in me. So the real solution isn’t to, you know, blame something out there, but to come to terms with everything in oneself, with all the different aspects of one’s own mind, one’s own personality. Come to terms come to an acceptance of at least patience and a tolerance of those things in oneself.
But that’s very difficult to do, of course, especially if you spend your whole life reacting in that way, hating certain things, reacting negatively towards certain things, to change and just try to change that and come to accept, come to be patient with. It’s very, very difficult. Anyway, think we can all see how anger doesn’t doesn’t help at all. Of course, people always come up with examples of how anger can help, like if some sort of injustice is being done. Know, husbands beating up wives, mothers beating up kids, whatever, something like that, which is which is very unjust, you know, and and you get really stirred up about it and go out and demonstrate or you set up councils to look into it and to try to deal with it and so on.
In that kind of situation, of course, the feeling of anger, the feeling of the injustice or the injustice of the problem will stir you to take action to stop that problem, to change that problem. And that’s very good. But again, it’s not the anger itself which brings about the solution. Because usually anger, what anger stirs us to do is is to just act act recklessly, you know, to lash out and hit somebody or break something yell or scream, know, act very immaturely and and violently. And that kind of action, of course, doesn’t help.
Doesn’t bring about any solution to problems. If anger we experience anger about something, and that will stir us to think, Okay, now what can I do about this problem? I’ll write to my congressman, or I’ll go to this demonstration, or, you know, go door to door and hand out leaflet something like that, you know, that that is a rational and nonviolent kind of action. That kind of activity does does bring about solutions. But that, again, that that kind of action is is is brought about by thinking carefully and reasonably and rationally.
Okay? It isn’t it’s it’s inspired or fed by by anger. But but the anger itself, you see, is doesn’t bring about the solution, doesn’t help. So the problems that come from anger, you know, we we hurt other people. You know?
Nobody likes an angry person. You know? We we we can all just look at how how we feel when somebody else is angry, you know, the the kind of unpleasant feeling we have to be to be around such a person. Very, very difficult. And so then if we think about how we affect others when we’re angry, how frustrating it is for them, how unpleasant it is for them.
So so seeing that, then we can see the the problems of anger, how anger leads to problems. And and in ourselves as well. When we get angry, afterwards, we feel really lousy and and guilty and ashamed of ourselves, we think about you know, it sort of increases a feeling of negativity towards ourselves. We feel really bad about ourselves. We don’t feel positive.
We don’t feel hopeful that our life is really worthwhile. It sort of causes a whole general feeling of negativity towards ourselves. So those are some of the problems of anger. And the third cause of problems or suffering is ignorance. Ignorance is also the cause of the other two.
It’s a cause of attachment and it’s a cause of hatred. There’s different kinds of ignorance. Basically, means ignorance about reality, ignorance of the way things really are. According to Buddhism, there’s a whole explanation about ignorance and about its opposite wisdom, the right understanding of things, the wisdom that sees things as they really are. So there’s a lot of explanation of that, of how to overcome ignorance and how to develop that wisdom.
Because that is the real solution, that’s sort of like the final ultimate solution. If we can get rid of ignorance, if we can develop a wisdom that understands things as they really are, then we’ve gone beyond problems. We no longer have attachment, we no longer have a hatred, we no longer have selfishness, we no longer have an ego to cater to, to worry about, and you just get beyond any problems. Like I said, there’s a lot of emphasis put on coming to understand what ignorance is, how to get rid of transform it, and develop wisdom. This kind of ignorance that they talk about is more than just ignorance that doesn’t understand things as they are, that is just blank when it comes to reality.
It isn’t like that. It’s more than that. Not only do we not understand how things are, but we have a whole view of things existing in a certain way, which is completely wrong. It’s like we have a whole wrong understanding of things. We have a whole picture, a worldview of things like who we are, what we are, what our nature is, what our existence is all about, the world, other people, things in the world, physical things, and so on time, space, everything.
We have a whole way of seeing things, a way of conceiving things, is totally mistaken, which is completely distorted, like a hallucination, like a person who lives in a fantasy world, thinking they’re Napoleon, wife is Josephine, this country is the realm of France. It’s a completely fantasy world and believing in that and living in that and not seeing any way out of it, not seeing that there’s any other possibility, that there’s any other way of saying things. That is reality. So that’s the way we are. We have this whole picture of things which is a mistake, which is a fabrication of our own mind, of creation of our own mind.
We cannot see beyond it. We can’t see around it even. We just totally live in it and believe in it. So the point is to be able to see that, to be able to recognize that it’s wrong, to be able to see that picture of reality is full of holes. Slowly, slowly, slowly.
First of all, start to question it. Just question the way I see things. Is that how they are or not? The way I see this table, the way I see this watch, the way I see this, the way I see myself, the way I see this other person, the way I see this and so on. Questioning how it is we see things and if the way we see things is reality or not.
That’s where we have to start. We have to start by questioning. By doing that, if you do that, if you put your energy into that kind of persistently, start to see that things fall apart. You start to see the holes in your picture of reality. Things start chipping away from the picture, and great big contradictions in it all.
Slowly, slowly, through a process of investigation, using this type of meditation I was talking about before, analytical meditation, chiefly using that kind of meditation, investigating how you see things, your picture of reality. By doing that, it starts to fall apart. Eventually, the whole thing falls apart. You realize that it is just a mistake, that it’s just a creation of your mind, that it doesn’t exist like that. And when we can strip away or peel away or dissolve our mistaken picture of reality, only then can we see things as they really are.
There’s a whole explanation of Buddhism about how things are, reality of things, the way an enlightened person sees them. But it doesn’t help much. We can’t really understand that as long as we’re still stuck in seeing things with this distorted view, We can’t even imagine, we can’t even conceive of that other way. We can’t even conceive of what lies on the other side of the picture as long as we’re so hung up on the picture that we paint. The real solution is to work on that.
How we can do that is like I said, just questioning. We do this anyway. We often, not intentionally, but sometimes by accident, we come across holes in our picture. Like the example I gave this morning about how we see somebody do something and we kind of think, oh, they’re doing this because such and such, or they don’t like me. Like, for example, you know, you maybe you’re walking down the street and you see somebody you know, somebody you think is a friend, you know, and that person looks at you and just walks right by, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say hello, doesn’t show any recognition.
And you and you just feel struck with this hurt, you know. Oh, he ignored me. You know? Something like hurt. That’s probably how most of us would respond.
Feeling hurt, feeling angry, you know? How could he do that to me? We might just, in our mind, think this whole story that this person doesn’t like me and maybe it’s because I said this and maybe it’s because I talked to his wife last night. You know, this whole kind of story we might create in our minds to explain why the person reacted in that way. And then we feel angry, you know, and say, Well, I’m not gonna talk to this person anymore.
We think about what we’re gonna do in revenge. And we sort of believe that story that our mind creates. Now, it could very well be that the person had just received some devastating news. Maybe the mother died or father died or wife died. Something awful that they were totally occupied with.
Maybe they just lost their job, you know? They were just in this state of total despair or depression or whatever, and they didn’t see anything. It had nothing to do with oneself, it had nothing to do with liking or disliking oneself, but they were just in this other state of mind. Or just being preoccupied, thinking about some problem that they had or some project they were working on, and they just didn’t see us. We might find that out later afterwards.
We might find out that that was the actual reason why the person didn’t say hello and smile. And then we feel, oh, god. That’s you know, how awful yeah. How how could I have thought that? So this this whole picture that we built, this whole story that we’d created in our mind just falls apart.
We realize how silly we are, how foolish we were to have believed that. Things like that happen sometimes, right? We have an idea of something, we a picture of something, and we tend to believe that’s the way it is. And then later on we find out that that wasn’t the way it is at all, and it’s completely different, we were completely wrong. Now, we do that all the time, but we don’t always find out that we’re wrong.
Say, for example, we meet somebody and we have this instant feeling of dislike for that person. I think we all have that experience, instant dislike. And we don’t always know why. We can’t really pinpoint it. We might think, Oh, it’s the way they dress, the way they laugh, they remind me of my mother, or something like that.
You know, we might think of some reason that we can attribute it to, but we but maybe that’s not the reason at all. There’s just something we don’t like about that person. We tend to just go along with our feelings and our reactions, first impression. We tend to just believe it. We don’t think about We don’t question it.
Most of the time, we don’t make any effort to change it. And then we just carry on as if this person is an enemy, as if this person is some kind of Sort of untouchable. We don’t have well, we do have untouchables, I guess, in our society. We have our own personal untouchables, people we don’t want to touch, people we don’t want to deal with, people we don’t want to have anything to do with as if they had leprosy. And like I say, most of the time, we would not make any effort to change that.
We wouldn’t make any effort to try to think in positive terms about this person, to try to love this person. Positive terms about this person, to try to love this person. We might out of a sense of guilt, you know? We might think, oh, I have to be nice, you know, I have to smile, you know? But it’s not genuine at all, you know?
It doesn’t really come from the heart. It’s just I should. You know, it’s more like it comes from a sense of should because of our Christian background or whatever. But, you know, heart, we still hold this this kind of aversion, this kind of hatred for that person without even knowing why. And we might just carry on like that without ever changing, without ever questioning that view of things.
Now if we just think now, we just how how is it possible that a person could be so totally despicable? Is it possible, really? And if we think about it, I’m sure even the most ugly person, even the most repulsive person in appearance and in habits, there’s always somebody who loves that person. The person’s mother, wife, children there’s always somebody that sees that person in a positive way, positive way, that loves that person. So if we have such a totally negative picture of that person, is that the reality of the person?
We can’t see anything positive. But somebody over here can. Some other person can see positive features, positive traits, lovable traits in that person. So why is it that we cannot? If we just think in that way, then that causes us to question, well, what is the reality of a person?
We believe the reality of a person is something ugly, repulsive, unpleasant, negative, unlovable. Is that the reality of that person? Is that the way the person really is? That’s what we see, that’s what we believe. We believe it because that’s how we respond to that person, that’s how we treat that person.
Is that the reality of that person? If it is, then this other person who loves that person must be wrong. That person must be crazy. This is what we think, too, isn’t it? How can anybody love that person?
Must be crazy. Well, who’s right? Is there even such a thing as right and wrong? But I think just thinking like that, we can see that there is a hole. There are holes in what we believe to be reality, what we believe to be true, good, bad, ugly, beautiful, right, wrong, and so on.
We do see the world in that way. We do tend to judge things in terms of what we think is right and wrong, what we think is beautiful and ugly and so on. That’s how we see the world. We’re all the time judging things, all the time projecting. This is good, this is bad, this is beautiful, this is ugly, so on.
All the time, whatever we see, whatever we encounter, this is what our mind does automatically. And then we just tend to believe that that’s true, that that’s the way things are, and we respond to them. And this is how, as I said before, ignorance is the cause of attachment and anger, those other two poisons, those other two causes of problems. Because from ignorance, seeing things in a certain way and believing that that’s how they are, From there, then we’re attached whatever we see that we like that’s beautiful, that’s good, that fits in with our conception of what’s good and so on, then we become attached to that. Attachment develops.
Whatever we encounter which fits our picture of bad, negative, ugly, and so on, we react with aversion, with hatred. So it all comes from ignorance. It all comes from this view that we have of how things are, what’s good and what’s bad, you know, and so on. And and that is mainly just projected by our own mind. It’s not the way things it’s not like things tell us from their side, I am good, I am bad, and so on.
It’s our subjective projection or interpretation of things. We just live with the belief that that’s how things are. Rarely, if ever, do we question, Am I right? Is my way of seeing things the way things are or not? So that’s what’s meant here by ignorance.
We’re sitting here thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe, and the world just revolves around this person here. Whatever happens to come into the picture, you know, like I said, we’re judging it good, bad, beautiful, ugly, I like this, I don’t like that attachment, rejection, and so on. Never questioning, just living with this belief that that’s how things are. That’s ignorance. And the solution to that is to start to question: Is that person really so awful?
Is that person that I hate really so despicable? Or is there something lovable about them? Is there something good, something positive that could be loved, that could be appreciated in that person? The same with the person that we adore. Is that person so adorable?
Or are there things that are unpleasant? I mean, most of the time, I think we can see unpleasant, negative things in people. It’s not too difficult. But still, there’s a tendency to not wanna look at those things, you know. If we love somebody, we sort of want to overlook the negative things.
You know, we don’t like to admit that that lovely person, that wonderful person has any faults, at least in the beginning when you first fall in love. We don’t wanna see any faults. Fall in love. We don’t see any at all. Our view is just totally, in a way, starry eyed, rose colored, everything is beautiful, everything is wonderful.
We don’t see any faults, any problems at all. That lasts for some time. And okay. So we just the thing is to just question, you know, whether it’s with regard to people or music, food, whatever it is that comes into our sphere of life, comes in our perception or experience of things, question, you know? We’ll probably find that nothing is all good, nothing is all bad, and I think most people know that anyway.
But it helps us to see how prejudiced we are, how we do tend to be very much influenced by prejudices, our own personal prejudices about good and bad and right and wrong. When we can see that, when we can see our prejudices, then we should try to work with them, try to get beyond our prejudices, try to see good qualities in the people we don’t like, try to see the negative side of things that we’re attached to, things that we tend to idolize or adore. Really hard work. It isn’t easy because it goes against our usual way of doing things, our habitual, familiar way of doing things. This whole thing is like going against that and and learning to see things differently.
Maybe before I go on to the next two truths, maybe we well, are there any questions? I thought we could have a break now, but maybe there’s some questions before we is called Yama and it’s death. It’s called the Lord of Death, but it’s actually death. I mean, that’s the way it’s said sometimes, our existence is in a way cyclic rather than linear. We go around in circles.
Keep repeating the same experiences again and again and again, both within one life. In this lifetime we can see how our experiences often run-in patterns. We have the same problems over and over again. In terms of as well, one life to the next, because Buddhism believes that each time we die we are reborn. It’s the mind, what I was talking about before, this stream of consciousness, stream of experiences.
That is the factor which links one life from the next. So when we die, it’s a question of the physical body decaying and being disposed of somehow. The mind leaves the body, separates from the body. That is what death is, is the mind leaving the body. And then finding another body, finding another life.
And sort of a frightening symbol. She can use just supposedly have a lot of attachment. Those three things are in the center of the hub of the wheel. That’s the thing that sort of keeps the whole wheel going, keeps it all together. So those three factors, they’re in our mind.
The hatred, the greed, the ignorance in our own life is what keeps us going, what keeps us going from one life to the next.