Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro explains the Four Noble Truths through the prison metaphor: saṃsāra confines us not through physical walls but through ignorance, attachment, and hatred. Even our pleasures are temporary, leaving us fundamentally unfree. Yet the Buddha showed that liberation is possible, and everyone possesses Buddha nature—a clear mind obscured like clean glass covered in dirt. She then introduces renunciation, the first stage of the path to enlightenment, and dispels a common misunderstanding: renunciation is not about monasticism or worldly withdrawal, but a shift in priorities—gradually investing less energy in material pursuits and more in spiritual practice and ethical living. The teaching concludes with Buddhist ethics grounded in karma and the principle of non-harming.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 Basic.mp3
UUID: 28e69cd9-261e-453f-ac21-4bd34d306972
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: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~5,388
Truths. And these two explain the the situation that we’re in at the moment that all living beings are in, not just ourselves, but all those who are not enlightened are in that wheel of life, the wheel of saṃsāra. We’re passing through life after life under the force, you might say, of greed, hatred and ignorance. Those three mental factors are what keeps us going, keeps us moving through this kind of existence, what keeps the whole thing going. The point of looking at the first two truths is to recognize the situation that we’re in, to try to see that it’s really unsatisfying the way things are, and that one should really meditate on the situation and to get this sense of wanting to get out of it, you know, like trying to recognize.
It’s often compared to being in a prison because the sort of basic component is that we are not free. Are not really free. Freedom being having the ability to choose what we experience, what happens to us, where we go, and so on. We don’t have any choice. The experiences just happen to us in life, many of them unfortunate, unwished for experiences, and it’s totally beyond our control.
We just sort of have to cope with things the best we can. But we’re not free to choose the experiences that we have. We’re not free to choose how long we live or if we’re happy or unhappy or if the things that we enjoy are always there for us to enjoy, those things are just beyond our control. So in many ways we are not free. And also the fact that whenever we die our karmic propensities, the karmic impressions that we have in our mind throw us into another life.
And again, it’s often beyond our control, beyond our choice. It happens sort of spontaneously. So the whole situation is like being in a great big prison. In a prison, there are some experiences which are better than others. There are some pretty unpleasant things that happen in a prison or unpleasant places.
You might be stuck in solitary confinement for a while, or a really cold, damp place. You might be stuck with cellmates that have really horrible habits or are very aggressive. So there are some very unpleasant experiences that can happen in a prison. And there are also some nice things that can happen in a prison, you know? Maybe get a really nice meal on Sunday evening, a movie on Friday night There are these kind of lighter moments of prison existence, even the nicer experiences are not really all that fantastic, if you consider the fact that you’re still stuck in a prison.
Momentarily you might forget that you are in this situation and it’s not really fantastic. You might sort of forget about that and enjoy yourself for a moment or two, nevertheless, you are not really free, are not really out of prison. The same way, saṃsāra is like a prison in that there times when we are really bad off, when things are really unfortunate. There’s a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of experiences that we really can’t bear, we don’t want at all. But then there are other times when things are really nice and we enjoy ourselves.
But it’s only temporary. Whatever enjoyment we have, whatever fun we have, whatever nice things there are, are just temporary. They fade, they go away, they disappear, and then we’re back in we realize we’re still stuck in this prison. And the prison walls, the prison itself, is only a fabrication of our minds. It’s not like there are any physical walls or any physical boundaries or anybody, any person that’s keeping us confined in this prison, the confinement is totally an inner one, a mental one, a psychological one.
So it’s the confinement of ignorance and attachment and hatred, those three things. But chiefly ignorance, not understanding things as they are, but instead thinking that things have some kind of reality of their own, that there is real good, real bad, real beautiful, real ugly, real inherent qualities or features of things that are there, just solid, concrete and real and true. Being stuck in that way of seeing things, that is what confines us. That’s the determining factor of our being in this kind of prison. So that’s the main thing that needs to be overcome and eliminated to become really free.
So the first two truths then, it’s a question of us understanding them, coming to see if that’s appropriate, coming to see that that’s how things are, that’s how life is for us. And then the second two truths show the way out. So the third truth is the truth of the cessation of suffering. And this means that there is an alternative to this situation. There is the possibility of eliminating once and for all all suffering and all the causes of suffering, tearing down the walls of the prison, just dissolving the prison and reaching a state of real freedom, real peace of mind, in which suffering never occurs mainly because the three poisons are no longer in the mind.
We are no longer subject to feeling anger or hatred, attachment or desire and ignorance. We free ourselves from those three things, And once we’ve done that, then our problems are finished. So the third truth simply points out that that’s possible, that there is that state that can be attained, that state of real freedom or peace, which is sometimes called nirvana or liberation or enlightenment. Then the fourth truth is the truth of the path, and that is how we get there, how we reach this state of cessation or liberation or nirvana. I suppose most of the teachings that the Buddha gave would come under this fourth truth because that’s what he spent his life, his teaching career doing, explaining to us what we have to do in order to free ourselves from suffering.
Anyone accusing Buddhism of being pessimistic is really off the mark because Buddha started off talking about suffering, pointing out the suffering which is there anyway. It’s only reality. It’s nothing secret, nothing mystical. It’s just the reality of life, that there is suffering. Then he went on to explain that there is a cause of suffering, and if you eliminate the cause of suffering, you can go beyond suffering and just not have to suffer anymore and reach this state of nirvana or peace.
To me, the whole thing is incredibly optimistic, because every one of us it’s not that there are some who are gifted or blessed or special, and they are the ones who will be able to reach enlightenment. Others are doomed to always be ignorant and inferior somehow, but that’s not the case. In fact, everybody, every being, every living being, not just humans, but every living being has this potential to reach enlightenment. It’s called the Buddha nature. We have within us basic purity.
It’s sort of, I suppose, like a common denominator of all beings. It’s actually the nature of the mind. The real nature of our mind is clear and pure. It’s compared to a piece of glass, you know, brand new clear sparkling glass, you know. Looking through that glass you can see everything very clearly.
That’s our real nature, our basic nature. However, this glass is dirtied up. It’s covered with all kinds of obscurations. It’s dirty, it’s filmed over with the delusions, basically ignorance, greed and hatred that distort our perception so that we can’t see through the glass clearly. Glass is dirty, in other words.
But when that dirt can be cleared away, then the glass resumes its natural state, its clear, pure, sparkling natural state. Same with the mind. When we can clear away the delusions, the poisons, the negative states of mind that we have, then the pure state of mind is just left there to shine through. So that’s what’s called our Buddha nature. That’s with all of us.
Through the practice of meditation we work to clear away obscurations and just reach that pure, basic state of mind. That is what becomes enlightened. The bulk of Buddhist teachings deal with how to go about doing that. That’s what’s called the path to enlightenment. And it’s only a path when we travel it.
We ourselves become the path. The path is a psychological path. It’s a psychological journey. Journey would be a better word because path sounds as though it’s already there, laid out for us to travel on. But it’s more a question of making the journey, doing it, getting on the way and actually working towards or getting towards enlightenment.
So only then is it really a path when we practice it. The path itself is quite difficult to explain, there is a whole lot involved. One could easily spend one’s whole life studying the path in order to gain an understanding of it. It’s not just a simple thing that can be explained in an hour or a couple of weeks even. It’s very, very complicated.
There is, however, a way that has been developed in Tibet a way of explaining the path and a way of well, it’s more a way of practicing the path that lays out the whole path in such a way that you know where to go step by step how to get from where you are now to enlightenment. Now in Tibetan that’s called lam rim. Lam means path and rim means stages. So it’s the stages of the path or the steps of the path to enlightenment. Those who developed this system of teaching made an extensive study of the Buddhist teachings, not only studying it but working on it, obtaining the understanding, the insight, the realization of those teachings, and then set up this way of explaining the path for people to practice.
So this is the way in Tibetan Buddhism, the common way of explaining the teachings of the Buddha and the path to enlightenment. There are three main features of the path, or we could say three main stages. There are actually many, many stages, but they can be divided into three. When you study Buddhism, guess it’s more a characteristic of Indian philosophy, everything is divided up numerically. There’s two of these, and there’s five of those, and there’s ten of these, and there’s one hundred and twenty of those.
It’s it in one way, it makes it quite easy because if you wanna learn something, then you learn in that way. You know? I suppose it’s the same in science. In chemistry, you learn so many properties of this or so many of those. So anyway, there are these three main stages of the path, so I’ll try to cover those this afternoon.
The first one is renunciation. This is something that is to be developed and practiced. It’s like one main stage of development that a person needs to proceed through to reach enlightenment. Basically, renunciation is just the opposite of attachment. It’s easy to get a wrong understanding of renunciation and to think that it means forcibly cutting yourself off from whatever it is you’re attached to.
It actually often sounds like that if you read the classical texts, whether it’s Buddhism or Hinduism, because Hinduism also talks about renunciation and Christianity as well. There’s advice given about leaving your home, leaving your loved ones, going off to an isolated place and eating bread and water, and a really extreme kind of life. People often get the idea that that’s what renunciation is all about, and it sounds pretty horrific and impossible, maybe. But that’s not really what renunciation is about. Renunciation is simply a change in one’s attitude, or perhaps a change in priorities.
Talked about attachment, and attachment is one of the biggest problems that we have. Causes temporary problems, just in our daily life. Many of the problems that we have are rooted in attachment. And it’s also a hindrance to our spiritual development, to our growth and maturing as a spiritual person. So attachment needs to be dealt with and overcome somehow.
Renunciation is like the opposite of that. Renunciation is developed by seeing what’s wrong with attachment, by recognizing that we have attachment, for one thing, kind of admitting it and acknowledging that we have attachment, and coming to understand what’s wrong with attachment, how it causes problems and how it keeps us at a stage of immaturity and and anyway, how it keeps us down and doesn’t allow us to grow. So it’s really recognizing that attachment is a problem and wanting to overcome it, wanting to deal with it. And then there are methods of dealing with that. I mentioned a few yesterday.
For example, coming to understand impermanence, the fact that everything is changing all the time, and so whatever it is that we are attached to is bound to change and go out of existence eventually. And so it isn’t really reliable. It isn’t a reliable object for us to rely on or depend on or become attached to because it’s not going to be there all the time. It’s going to disappear. There’s really no point in being attached to something that is going to disappear.
We are only setting ourselves up for pain. So that’s one way of working on attachment. And then also, developing one’s ability in meditation, mindfulness and awareness, learning to find inner peace and strength and happiness without having to always turn to somebody else and run away from our problems and seeking comfort and pleasure in other people, in other objects, situations. So becoming stronger on one’s own, know, that is also a remedy to attachment. The real remedy, the ultimate way of overcoming attachment, is understanding reality, the wisdom that understands how things really are.
When we see that the object that we are attached to, the people that we are attached to, the things we are attached to do not exist in the way we think they do. They don’t have any kind of real, static, solid existence from their own side in the way that we see them. They don’t have any definite qualities of good or bad or pleasing or unpleasant, whatever. None of those things are kind of real in any ultimate sense. When we can see that, we can see through the kind of picture our mind paints and projects of reality, then that’s sort of like the real solution.
That automatically cuts through attachment, because we’re attached to things with the kind of idea that they’re real, that they’re really the way they appear, that this beautiful person that you fall in love with is really beautiful and really wonderful and loves you and can make you happy and so on. That’s how we think, and that’s why we get so attached. But when we can see through that, that there is no real person there, there is no real beauty, there is no real anything the way we think it is, then it just sort of pulls the rug out from under attachment, you know, because there’s just no reason to be attached. There’s nothing to be attached to. It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing existing at all.
That’s not what I’m talking about. And actually, I’ll talk more about this later. But I just want to point out that that’s sort of the ultimate solution recognizing or realizing how things really exist. When we see how things really are, then we see there is nothing to be attached to, so there is just no more attachment. It doesn’t even come up in the mind anymore.
It doesn’t even occur to us to be attached. Attachment comes from ignorance. And when we get rid of ignorance, we get rid of attachment. As I said before, renunciation is really more a question of changing our priorities. It doesn’t mean changing your lifestyle in any drastic way.
But as you begin to develop mindfulness, as you begin to see more clearly how things are, then naturally you are less attached to food and entertainment and parties. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with those things, but you begin to realize that those don’t really make you happy. They are nice, they are enjoyable, but they are kind of empty in a way. They occur and you feel good, you enjoy them, and then they are finished and you are left back where you started. You have still got your problems, have still got your life to cope with.
So you begin to just lose your interest in those things, and you have less attachment, less the attitude looking to those things for any kind of real, ultimate pleasure and satisfaction. Instead, you begin to look more towards meditation or spiritual work, spiritual communication with others as being more satisfying. Because that’s your experience, your real experience, is that those things are more satisfying. I mean, you probably already experienced that to a certain extent. You wouldn’t be here.
So your priorities shift, you know? You’re less interested. You want to spend less time cooking gourmet food and buying nice clothes and whatever it is you were interested in before. Less of your time and energy goes into those things, and more of your time and energy goes into spiritual things. And that continues and gets to where eventually you’re you’re you’re interested in those things at all anymore.
It doesn’t mean you no longer go to parties. It doesn’t mean you don’t eat nice food. It doesn’t mean you you don’t go to the beach or go skiing or anything like that. You you know, you can still do those things for relaxation, for pleasure, but you no longer see those things as being really satisfying, really meaningful. So that’s the process then of renunciation.
So it’s really, like I said, a shift shifting your priorities, shifting interests away from external material type things and activities and more into inner work, spiritual work, that type of activity. People who do choose to go away from the world, go into a monastery or hermitage or a little hut in the forest or a cave in the mountains and spend their time meditating, well, that’s really tricky, that one. I think many of us get this romantic notion about doing that, living that kind of life. But it’s really, really difficult. And we have to be very careful that we’re not doing it as an escape from problems, you know?
The world is such a hassle, you know? You just want to get away from it all and go somewhere peaceful and quiet where you don’t have to deal with nuclear arms and fanatical presidents and prime ministers and all the problems that are going on in the world just in your relationships with people. Wanting to get away from all that. That’s not the right motivation. That’s not the right reason for going away and living some kind of solitary life.
If one does it like that, it’s not going to work. You won’t be successful. Because it’s so easy to fool yourself, you know? You can go away and live by yourself for a while, and meditate and feel really peaceful, really good. But then as soon as you get back into the world, or as soon as you get back with people again, anger, you get angry, you get irritated, and any kind of spiritual work, any spiritual accomplishments that you might think you have attained just disappear, you know, because it isn’t genuine.
The right motivation for going away and spending time meditating alone is compassion, wanting to work on yourself, wanting to clear up your own mind, clear up your own confusion, get free of the stickiness of attachment and yuckiness of hatred. Cleaning up your mind so that you’re in a better position to help others working on yourself so that then you can deal with people without being stuck into those things, without being influenced by attachment and hatred and ignorance. That whoever you meet, whatever situation you find in, can act with clarity, with wisdom, with compassion, with love and really be able to help others. So that’s the motivation that one should have for retreating from the world and going into meditation. And if one does it with that kind of motivation, then it will probably be successful.
But for most of us, it wouldn’t work, it would be too difficult and we would be too much stuck in our own ego. So it’s better to Most people, say, in the people that I know, Western people who have taken up the practice of meditation and are interested in working on this path to enlightenment, we find that the best thing is to spend periods of time in the world with people, with your work, just living a normal life, practicing meditation, doing your meditation on a daily basis, and learning to integrate whatever you learn in your meditation in your normal life, you know, learning to be more compassionate, more kind, less angry and irritated, less selfish and so on. Just sort of training yourself in your ordinary life. And then if you want to have periods of time where you go into retreat, a couple of days or a couple of weeks or a couple of months, then that’s really helpful too, because there’s so much that happens to us in our daily life that we can’t take care of everything in our daily meditation. Just in the course of an hour you do so much, you think so much, and you have so many reactions that are kind of faulty and problematic and confused that it’s really too much to take care of at once.
So those things tend to accumulate. Then if you go into a retreat, then you’ve got more time to kind of look back and see what you have been doing and how you have been living and the kind of mistakes you have been making and get a bit of clarity into the problem areas that you have. And then you can see what you need to work on, what you need to do, what you should avoid doing. Then you go back into your other life and try to continue working on those things. So most people find that that is the best way of practicing, spending most of your time just in the world and dealing with people, dealing with work, dealing with the world in the best way you can, and then periods of time to do retreat or to do courses, you know, to go to a meditation course where somebody is teaching.
A more experienced teacher is sitting there giving advice and instruction and helping you in your meditation. So that sort of way is found to be most useful. Something else that would come under the subject of renunciation would be ethics. Ethics are quite important in Buddhism. Probably for most of the people, say, Asian people who are Buddhist by birth, you might say, by upbringing, this would be their way of practicing.
I get the feeling that people in Asia aren’t that much into meditation, whether it’s lack of interest or what, but they don’t seem to meditate very much, But they have their prayers, they chant, they have a little altar in their homes and they offer incense and flowers and food and they go to the temple on special days each month. That sort of constitutes their way of practicing, and then living their lives in accordance with Buddhist ethics. In a way this is really more important than meditating, because it’s how you live, it’s how you relate to people, it’s how you act and speak and think is really more important than the time you spend meditating. Because the time we spend meditating is really quite limited. It’s only maybe half an hour a day at the most, or a couple of hours a day, depending on how much energy you have.
Whereas the rest of the day we spend doing other things. In all that time we’re creating karma. We’re planting seeds or propensities or impressions on our mind which carry us into the future, which bring about our future experiences. It’s how we live our lives most of the time that determine our future, and so that’s where we need to be careful. That’s where the system of ethics comes in.
Buddhist ethics is mainly based on the law of karma. It isn’t a question of an arbitrary set of rules, dos and don’ts, shoulds and shouldn’ts. It is based on what the Buddha himself realized with regard to karma, the law of cause and effect, what kind of actions that people do lead to what kind of results. With his own insight, looking at himself, looking at his own past experiences, his past lives, looking at the lives of others, he sort of realized, well, when a person does this, then this happens when a person does that, then that happens. So that’s how this system of ethics was formulated.
That’s what he explained. And again, it’s something we need to check up for ourselves. And it isn’t very different at all from Christian ethics, I must say. The main consideration is consideration for others. The main thing is avoiding any action that hurts another being or that hurts ourselves, that causes pain, distress, confusion, disturbance to any living being.
That sums up Buddhist ethics: non violence, non harmfulness. There is a list of ten unskillful actions to be avoided. They are actually explained very well in this little book. It’s called The Ten Pillars of Buddhism. I think I’ll just go through these ten fairly quickly.
The first one is the unskillful action to be avoided is killing. That goes for human beings and also animals and insects, any kind of living being, because what is most precious to anybody is their life. Nobody wants to lose their life. So that’s like the worst thing we can do to anybody, would be to kill them. Like I say, we can see that pretty clearly with regard to people, but normally we don’t consider animals and insects in that.
But according to Buddhism, animals and insects are also living beings. They have mind, they have feelings, they have consciousness and awareness. They want to live, they don’t want to die. So if we kill anything, we are causing great distress and suffering. It includes not just physical killing, but any kind of violence, any kind of aggressive, harmful, hurtful action that we might do to any living being.
And on the other side, the opposite thing is to try to be kind and considerate. So if we can save a life, if we can protect anybody or anything from danger, from pain, we should try to do that. If we can, if we are in a position to do something, we should try to save and protect and and and help in whatever way we can. And then these these ten, do I call them? Ten actions can be divided into actions of body, actions of speech, and actions of mind.
So the first three are actions of body. So that first one is killing, and that’s something that’s done with the body. The second one is stealing. Stealing is something to be avoided. On the other hand, the other side is we should practice generosity, we should give whenever we can.
Stealing is, I think, pretty self explanatory. Stealing is, again, something harmful. If we steal something that belongs to another, are causing them pain. We just think about how we feel when our things are stolen. Of course it’s all tied up with attachment, but still we don’t have the right to think we can help somebody else overcome attachment by taking the things they’re attached to.
It doesn’t work like that. And the third one that’s an action of body is sexual misconduct. Again, that’s any kind of sexual activity that harms another. So rape, of course, adultery. That means mainly if there are two people who are in a partnership, in a relationship, and we get involved with one of them and that causes suffering to the other, then that that’s what constitutes sexual misconduct.
So it’s sexual activity that gives harm, that gives pain to anybody else. That’s the essence of it. And on the positive side, consideration and care about where we put our energy and what we do with our body and trying to overcome extreme attachment or obsession with sex, learn to be more content with what we have. So those are the three actions of body. Then there’s four of speech, and the first one is lying.
That means saying anything which isn’t true or withholding the truth when it should be told, kind of speech that deceives others, that causes harm to others, that causes pain to others through being dishonest. And on the positive side, trying to be honest. That’s really difficult. These are things that a Buddhist would just be working on and trying to develop, trying to be as truthful as possible, as honest and sincere as possible with our speech. But again, with consideration and kindness.
So if you think somebody is ugly, you don’t have to say so. It’s honest, but it may not be the most appropriate thing to say. Also have to temper our honesty with compassion, consideration, sensitivity to the needs of others. And then the second one of speech to be avoided is harsh speech, which means saying things that are unkind, any kind of verbalization that comes from anger, that comes from cruelty, the intention of hurting somebody else. So I suppose saying somebody is ugly would be harsh speech even if it’s truthful because it’s hurtful to another person.
It’s not necessary to say. Also, swearing because swearing may not be directly hurtful, but it disturbs people. It can be very disturbing, Especially, as I say, if it comes from anger. Most of the time, swearing does come from anger. And it’s quite careless.
The point, again, is just trying to be mindful as much as possible, not only of what’s happening in our own minds, but of what effect we have on others with what we do. If we think about the result of how other people are affected when we do certain things, or when we say certain things or speak in a certain way, what kind of effect that has on others. And we can just know by what effect it has on ourselves when other people are acting in that way. So in a way, I guess we can say in Buddhism, not only is the golden rule Do unto others what you would like them to do to you, but Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you. And the opposite of that is try to say things which are kind and make other people feel good, pleasing words, kind words, positive, talking in positive ways.
And then the third of speech would be what’s called slander, which basically means any kind of speech which causes disharmony. So if two people are friends and happen to like each other, you maybe through the intention of breaking up this friendship, maybe because of jealousy or because of dislike of one other person or something, you sort of have this intention you’d like to see them separate or dislike each other or argue or something. So you talk about one to the other behind the first one’s back, that kind of thing. Any kind of language or speech that causes disharmony, whether it’s between two people or groups of people. I suppose if you’re into football or if you’re into if you’re very patriotic or something and you’re putting down the other side all the time, you can see that