Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Sanghy Khandro grounds Buddhist ethics in everyday life, showing how slanderous speech, harsh words, and gossip seed conflict and anger in others’ minds. She offers practical strategies for working through negative emotions skillfully rather than suppressing them. Moving to mental precepts, she addresses the roots of harm: rage and spite, covetousness tied to greed, and false beliefs that limit our potential. The talk then expands to three stages of the spiritual path—renunciation, bodhicitta (mind of enlightenment, commitment to free all beings), and wisdom. Throughout, she emphasizes how ethical practice sharpens mindfulness in daily life and meditation, and how an altruistic motivation—acting for others’ benefit rather than selfish gain—gradually becomes real through honest self-observation. Suited to beginners exploring Buddhist foundations.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 Basic.mp3
UUID: 76426a59-b51d-4025-83d9-ed4e14fcf722
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: ~5,741
And you, you know, you’re you’re you mouth that off all the time. Then other people pick up on that. They might have a little feeling like that, but your speech feeds that and increases that. And this is how wars start. Big wars and little wars, conflicts, disharmony, disruption of peace.
That’s what’s meant by slanderous speech. And on the other side, speech which brings harmony. So instead of putting down other people, putting down the other side, trying to say positive things about them. We’re trying to at least appease any conflict that there might be. In any way we can, if we can say something that will bring peace and harmony, trying to practice that kind of speech.
Then the last one of speech is what’s called gossip or frivolous talk. And that can mean yeah. It can mean talking about other people, what they do and what they don’t do, this kind of thing. Or it can be just conversation which is fairly empty, meaningless and useless and doesn’t really help. That’s a difficult one, of course, because if we tried to give up all such sort of talk, we wouldn’t be talking very much.
And in some cases, to be polite or to be you know, when you’re with your family, you pretty much have to talk about what they’re interested in, even if to you it’s meaningless and you’re not interested in it at all. But if you just sat there without saying anything, then they’d be hurt and they’d be upset and they’d wonder what was wrong with you, you know. So we have to be skillful as well with this and considerate and sensitive, but still mindful. All these things have to do with being mindful and just thinking, well, is it really useful to be talking about this? Is it helping me?
Is it helping other people? Helping, then fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. But if it’s simply done to pass the time, to fill in empty silence, because you’re bored, because you don’t want to do something else that you should be doing, that kind of thing, then we can perhaps give up some of that kind of talk. And on the other side, on the positive side, try learn and develop talking about things that are meaningful, that are helpful.
And we can practice the other kinds of speech, speaking positive things, saying nice things about people, saying things that will appease other people’s minds, bring greater harmony and peace between people and so on. Positive types of speech. So if we going to say anything, we should try to make sure that it’s positive and not negative. And even if we feel negative, of course, there’s going to be a lot of things that we don’t like and people that we don’t like. And so if we have to work out that negativity, do it in a situation that is going to help.
Like, for example, if you’re angry at somebody, or there’s something going on that just gets you really angry and really upset, instead of just going around complaining about it to anybody without caring who hears you and what kind of effect it might have on them. Like that you’re just stirring things up, you’re just stirring up more problems in other people’s minds. Your own anger isn’t getting solved. It’s just increasing, you know. There are ways we can work things out, like sitting down with somebody.
It could be a friend, a counselor, or a psychologist, or somebody who is also concerned. Sitting down and trying to work things out in a positive way, trying to come to some conclusion or resolution about the problem that will really solve it. Sometimes it’s really helpful to communicate about things. There are some things we can’t just work out in our own minds in meditation. We just can’t come to a solution.
Things just keep going around and around. If we can work things out with another person, communicating with them, then that’s great. That’s a different kind of communication because it’s not just coming out of anger, abuse, dumping our problems, dumping our bad feelings on somebody else. Are genuinely trying to work out what’s wrong and what can be done about it, trying to come to an understanding of the situation and so on. That sort of thing can be done, and it’s very positive.
That’s that’s for speech. Then for the mind there are three kinds of actions. The first is giving up the unskillful action. It’s funny to say action of mind. We don’t really think the mind is active.
It really means attitudes or thoughts. So the first mental attitude is hatred or harboring anger and spite, revenge, kind of unkind or cruel or angry feelings against another person, just hanging on to that, feeding it, keeping the fire going, you know, that kind of thing can very easily grow, increase and spill over into what we say and what we do. Whenever we have any complaint about another person or irritation or anger, we really should try to work it out somehow so that it doesn’t just fester in the mind. So we shouldn’t suppress it, pretend it’s not there. Should acknowledge it and try to resolve it, at least to the point of coming to accept the situation.
If there’s nothing we can do about it, then accept that that’s the way it is. And we feel angry, if we can’t get rid of our anger. We at least feel angry, but try not to let the anger become so strong and influential that you do something harmful, hateful, hurtful. So so then on the positive positive side, to overcome the anger and transform it into either acceptance, tolerance, or even further than that into love and compassion. And the second one of mind is what’s called covetousness, which means well, it’s tied up with greed and attachment.
It means wanting something that belongs to somebody else. It doesn’t belong to you, you know, just wanting it and thinking about it all the time, just sort of living in this state of want and greed. Basically, it’s just greed, desire. So if we have that experience in the mind and we don’t do anything about it, we just let it happen in the mind, that’s this kind of unskillful action. We should, if we notice ourselves feeling that way, we should do something about it, if there’s something that can be done.
I don’t mean going out and taking the thing that belongs to the other. Getting the thing that you want, that’s not necessarily the solution. Well, it does. That’s what leads to stealing. Steal things that we want, that don’t belong to us.
So that’s where stealing comes from. So this is like the basis of stealing. So we should try to work on those feelings whenever we have them and learn the positive side of that, learning contentment, learning to be happy with little, with few, with what we have, you know, with what we can afford. The last one of the mind is what’s called wrong views, which means believing things which aren’t true, holding on to views, ideas, so called truths which are simply not true, which are false, which are incorrect. So like, for example, believing that there is no possibility for people to work out their problems and evolve spiritually and become enlightened, thinking that we’re hopeless, we’re permanently inferior and worthless, we’re always going to be confused, we’re always going to be deluded.
There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s something to be checked up. You believe that, who’s to say you’re right or wrong? Buddhism says it’s wrong because we can progress, we can evolve and get out of the situation that we are in and reach higher states of mind. That is possible.
It’s very harmful to believe otherwise because then we don’t do anything about it. We don’t make the effort to get higher, to get beyond ourselves. With this thing of wrong views, we just have to check up which is right and which is wrong. And we can check this one up, the example I gave, by just seeing what happens to you when you do try to work on yourself. If you try working on yourself and nothing happens, it’s impossible for you to change.
You can’t change your anger, can’t change anything about yourself. Well, then it looks like maybe it’s true that we can’t improve. But if we try a while, we try working on ourselves and we can see improvement, even a little bit of improvement, then it looks like that it is actually true, that we can improve. Or another example of a wrong belief would be believing that there are no consequences to our actions, that we can get away with whatever we do. Doesn’t matter.
You can be dishonest, you can cheat, you can lie, you can hurt people, and it doesn’t matter. No consequences, no results to that. That would be an example of a wrong view. As I say, wrong views are dangerous because many people in the world live with these sort of wrong views, thinking they can get away with murder, thinking that there are no consequences to actions or thinking that there is no possibility of improving our psychological and spiritual state of being, that we are just stuck with what we are. We just have to accept it.
That’s it. The result of that is that they don’t even try to better their lives. Don’t try be careful about what they do. Wrong views doesn’t necessarily mean people kind of believe that to the point of declaring that or writing it down. It’s more like habitual ways of thinking and conceiving and acting.
So there are actually a lot of wrong views that we have that we may not even know about. We just assume things to be true and never check them out. So it’s quite important to have a kind of skepticism about whatever we hear or read or whatever we may have learned in our education, in our life, have a kind of skepticism questioning if this is true or not before we decide on anything. In a way, being doubtful or being skeptical is positive. As long as we do something about it, as long as we’re thinking and checking, trying to work out the solution, that’s much more positive than just blind faith believing whatever we hear, something because the person who said it seems to know what you’re talking about, or has a very charismatic personality.
We often do that. We often just believe something to be true without having checked questioning it. So we hold a lot of wrong views in our mind. Propaganda I mean, the world is full of propaganda, you know, and we have to be careful. So the opposite of that would be trying to develop an honesty and truthfulness about what we think and what we believe and what we commit ourselves to, always wanting to know the truth about things, the reality of things, and not being satisfied with just half the truth or a quarter of the truth or glossy lies, wanting to get down to the truth of things.
Buddhism consists of nonviolence, non harmfulness, honesty, and being positive as much as possible in whatever we do, whatever we say, whatever we think. So if we can try to practice those things, or at least some of those things in our life, it helps mindfulness. To be able to practice them, need to be mindful. We need to be observant and conscientious about what we are doing, the results, the consequences of what we do. But in turn, to practice these things helps us be more mindful.
I imagine that’s how that works. Many people, there’s you know, when a person when a person gets more into Buddhism, there are different levels of vows that you can take, like you can become a monk or nun. Even not becoming a monk or nun, there are vows or precepts that you can take and try to live according to and just carry on with your life. For example, you can take a vow to not kill. People find that it’s very helpful to take a vow like that because it makes you more mindful.
It’s quite a strong thing to make a promise to a teacher, to a lama, to make a promise that you’re not going to kill. It doesn’t mean that you’re never going to kill, because quite often we do things accidentally or through habit, but having made that promise makes us more aware and more mindful of what we are doing, and so in a way easier to try to live in that way, to try to keep yourself in that way, making a vow to not lie. If you have made that promise, then you’re much more likely to be careful about what you say than if you don’t, and so on. And that in turn contributes to your I see how that helps mindfulness. Because then when you sit down to meditate, you’ve been practicing, you’ve been more mindful in your daily life, when you’re out doing whatever you do.
Then when you sit down to meditate, your mind is naturally more clear. You are more aware of what you have been doing. Even if you have blown it, even if you have told lies, or killed, or been dishonest, or whatever, at least you are aware of it. Because so much of the time we’re not even aware of what we do. So if you try to live according to precepts, that means you’re trying to carry your beliefs, your mindfulness, your practice into your life, into your dealings with people, into the work that you do, and so on.
Naturally you are going to be more aware, more alert all through the day. And then when you meditate, when you sit down and meditate, that alertness has been there all the time. It’s not like between one meditation session and the next, you’ve just been totally mindless. You have no idea what you’ve been doing. You’ve just been running wild.
You sit down and meditate, and your mind is still going to be like that. It’s still going to be crazy and wild. Trying to carry the mindfulness all through the day, it just makes it easier to meditate, to be mindful, to be concentrated and clear in our minds. So it’s said that practicing ethics, trying to live these ethical practices, just naturally helps us in our meditation, in our development of concentration, mindfulness, and then further developments of insight into the reality of things and so on. So it’s not like there is a big separation between practice of morality and ethics and the practice of meditation.
It’s all really just part of it’s just your way of life. Buddhism is really a way of life. Trying to be aware, kind, constituents, honest and sincere in everything that we do. Maybe that’s enough for now on renunciation. Practice of ethics is actually part of renunciation because it helps us, you know, these practices help us to be less attached, have less attachment, desire, greed, and less hatred and anger.
So naturally get into a more pure, positive way of life. The second stage of the path to enlightenment is called in Sanskrit the word is bodhicitta. We don’t really have an exact equivalent in English, but that translates as mind of enlightenment. bodhicitta Well, it’s composed of love and compassion, a universal love and compassion that takes into account all living beings, not just some, making any exceptions, having this regard for every living being, seeing their beauty, seeing their worth, and appreciating them. More than appreciating them, wanting them to be happy, wanting them to be free of problems, wanting them to be enlightened.
And it goes further than that, because that kind of love and compassion is fairly passive. It’s an attitude that appreciates and loves all living beings. But bodhicitta involves more than that. It involves taking upon oneself the responsibility of doing what has to be done so that they get to enlightenment. Way to do that is to get enlightened oneself.
bodhicitta is something that you develop in meditation. You develop this attitude of bodhicitta by opening up your mind to others, learning to get beyond hatred and attachment and any kind of prejudices that we might have that close us off to others, learning to have this equal love and compassion for all living beings just because they’re there. And then you think, ‘Look at the suffering that they have, look at the confusion that they have, ‘ and it’s all because of ignorance, it’s all because they don’t understand reality. They’re just stuck like me, they’re stuck in this prison greed, hatred and ignorance. And they don’t have to be, you know?
They have this pure basic nature just like I do. They can be enlightened. And they don’t even see it, you know, they don’t even realize their potential, but they could all be enlightened. And I’d really like to do something. I’d like to make them all enlightened, but I can’t really help them as I am now, long as I’m still stuck in my own delusions and confusion, there’s not very much I can do to help them.
So the way to help them is to get myself clear of these things, to get myself out of greed, hatred, and ignorance, to get myself enlightened, and then I can help them. Then I’m in a situation where, you know, I’m no longer limited by these delusions, and I know the way out so I can help them, I can lead them. Okay? So bodhicitta then is the attitude of wanting to become enlightened so that you can help all living beings. So enlightenment isn’t like the goal.
Beings. Enlightenment isn’t like the goal. Enlightenment is the means to the goal. The real goal is helping all living beings, helping all the living beings become free of their delusions, to become enlightened themselves. And the means to do that is you become enlightened yourself first.
You find it yourself, you discover it yourself. Then you can help others to get there, too. So it’s an attitude of total commitment to others. Along the way, of course, have to get rid of your own ego, your own selfishness, because mostly what we do is we’re just doing things for ourselves. Even if we help others, even if we’re kind to others, it’s usually there’s some feeling of what you’re going to get out of it, some sort of self satisfaction.
So it’s very rare that we will do something without any consideration for ourselves and what we’re going get out of it, but solely for others. And that’s all coming from the ego, But it’s possible to get beyond that, to get to the point where we don’t care about our own happiness, we don’t care about our own enlightenment, we don’t care about what we experience, but we’re just totally committed to helping others. And in the process, of course, you find your own happiness, you find the greatest peace and happiness possible, but you’re not doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for others. In fact, they say there’s no way to become enlightened if you’re only seeking it for yourself.
You have to get the ego out of the way in order to reach enlightenment. It’s part of the path. It’s part of the process of becoming enlightened, to get the ego out of the way. There’s no way to become enlightened for selfish reasons. So that’s a real kind of essential practice.
Like I said, this is the second stage on the path to enlightenment, but it doesn’t mean that you first develop renunciation, renunciation and then you go on to develop this one, bodhicitta. But in fact, you are working on both at the same time. They say that you can be thinking in terms of bodhicitta right from the beginning and at least try to think that whatever you do, you’re not doing it just for yourself, but you’re doing it for others, even if it isn’t genuine, even if it’s just your head saying that. It gets you thinking in that way. And in the beginning it might seem like you’re a hypocrite.
It’s not genuine at all. But gradually it becomes more real, it becomes more plausible. And at the same time you can see your ego more clearly, you can see your selfishness more clearly, and you can be working with it, dealing with it, and getting rid of it. So it’s a process, really, of getting beyond selfishness and self centeredness and egotism, and opening up more and more and more to others, learning to become more and more committed and dedicated to others. Even from the beginning when we start practicing meditation, it’s really good if we can think to ourselves.
I mean, we have some motivation. Whatever we do, there’s some motivation for why we’re doing it. And if we try to check up on our motivation and if we see that our motivation is selfish, that we’re sitting down to meditate because we want to get high, we want to feel peaceful, we want to feel good, well, that’s not really so so nice. So if we think, okay, I want to I want to meditate now because I’d like to be more peaceful, more happy, more clear, so that I can help others, so that I can be more loving and helpful with others, so that I can contribute a bit of peace to the world. You know, that kind of thing.
Making trying to make our motivation more universal or altruistic. There’s a word altruistic, which I’ve just learned recently, which means this universal love and compassion. Trying to make that our motivation and thinking like that. Like I said, in the beginning, it’s just up here in the head, but gradually, it gets more and more and more into the heart, you know, and it becomes more and more genuine and real, more part of your what you’re doing and how you think. And we can do it in other areas of life as well, like eating.
You know, we have to eat every day. You know, if we check our reason for eating, much of the time it’s just to satisfy our hunger or satisfy our greed, which is very limited, you know. It doesn’t satisfy us anyway. It gives us little bit of relief from hunger, a little bit of pleasure, there’s no real satisfaction there. But still we have to eat in order to stay alive.
So we can think that if we can try to develop the attitude that we’re eating so that we can stay alive, so that we can help others, you know. Like medicine, they say we can learn to feed ourselves like taking medicine, ourselves healthy, keeping ourselves alive, so that we make our existence meaningful for others, so that we use whatever energy we have, whatever resources we have, for the benefit of others. You know? And then actually trying to practice that by just being as kind as possible with others, being considerate and sensitive. You know, doesn’t mean you have to go off to some third world country and help the people who are starving.
I mean, that’s really wonderful to do, but that’s not the only way of helping others. I mean, it’s the people around us, you know, our friends, our relatives, our neighbors. Those people need love, those people need goodness and help and kindness. Everybody needs it. Try more and more to practice kindness, consideration, peacefulness with whoever we come in contact with, and at the same time trying to be less selfish, less aggressive, less angry, less irritated, less unkind, working those things out.
So this is how we can begin to work on bodhicitta right from the start of practice. And like they say, even if you’re not looking what did they say? There’s some lovely quotation. Something like, if you want if you want to achieve the best for others, bodhicitta is the way to do it. And if you want to achieve the best for yourself, bodhicitta is the way to do it.
So this process of going beyond the ego, getting rid of our selfishness, self centeredness and anger, and so on, and and opening up more and more to others, being more and more kind and considerate of others, is the best way to find peace, happiness for ourselves. We will never find real, lasting peace and happiness with a selfish attitude, as long as we harbor selfishness and self centeredness. Then the third stage of the path is wisdom. Well, I talked about this yesterday when I talked about ignorance and what ignorance is and how to overcome it and how to develop its opposite, is wisdom. Basically, means understanding things as they really are, the reality of things.
I won’t add much to what I said yesterday, but basically it just means having a questioning approach to what we normally think of as real. Whenever we can, whenever we can remember to, sort of check up our attitudes and our ways of seeing things and perceiving things and of question, is this the way they really are? Even just seeing the way we see things, very often we’re unconscious about how we think and how we feel, how we react to things, you know. We just sort of act very impulsively, unconsciously. So even coming to see how it is we think things are, how it is we assume things to be.
Sometimes that alone will enable us to see that we’re really quite deluded. You know, like the example I gave of somebody that we really don’t like. And it’s funny how we’ll have a negative reaction to somebody almost without knowing it, you know, and we’ll go along with that reaction. We’ll act and behave negatively, coldly, you know, avoiding that person as much as possible, almost as though we’re not aware of it. We don’t do it consciously.
It’s not like there’s something up here that’s directing us to behave in that way, but it just happens instinctively, almost. And Even just becoming aware that that’s what we’re doing, oh, look at me, I’m being so cold to this person, I’m ignoring this person, I’ve got this kind of barrier between me and this person. Why am I doing that? Where is that coming from? Just sort of questioning that, just seeing that happening, we can realize how prejudiced we are, how deluded we are, and then trying to undo that in whatever way we can.
All the time we are reacting to things. Whatever we see, whatever we hear, whatever we feel, whatever we come in touch with, whatever we think in our head, are reacting. Are sort of labeling good, bad, neutral. That’s happening all the time, mostly without our being aware of it. Trying to become more and more aware of that happening and less not believing in it so much, less how am I saying?
Not allowing ourselves to just fall into that and behave and instinctively follow those feelings and those reactions, but questioning them, you know, questioning what we assume to be true, what we assume to be real. That’s the best way to go about developing wisdom. Wisdom comes in other ways as well, like when we open up to others and we can start to see the sort of underlying sameness of all living beings, that basically we’re all the same, we all have the same feelings, we all have the same wish to be happy and to be loved, and we’re all somehow trying to find fulfillment, trying to find wholeness, trying to find enlightenment although most people don’t know it, you know, but that’s what we’re all, in a way, yearning for. When we can open up to that and see that, that’s a kind of wisdom as well. That’s an insight into reality which goes against living with prejudice, making divisions between us and them, me and them, and these sharp divisions we make.
Opening up to others, up to the reality of things, like change, how things are changing all the time, when we can begin to see that, to see how everything is changing and everything arises. Nothing was there from the beginning, nothing was there always, but everything comes into existence and goes out of existence, and the whole world is involved in that process of change. Seeing that is also a kind of wisdom. Understanding cause and effect. Seeing how when this happens, that is a consequence.
When I do this, or when I say that, this is how it affects others. That is also a kind of wisdom. Learning to rely on your own intuition, learning to have confidence in and understanding of your own perception of what’s right for you, what isn’t right, and so on. That also is a kind of wisdom. Like my teacher said, we all have inner wisdom.
We all have a guru inside which can tell us which way to go and which way not to go. It’s really important to learn to get in touch with that inner wisdom and rely upon it and use it, and not always run to somebody out there, a guru or friend, thinking that they’ll have the answers for us. But we have all the answers inside. The real wisdom, and the wisdom is meant here as the third stage of the path, the wisdom of reality. It’s called emptiness.
Emptiness is the English word. Śūnyatā in Sanskrit translates as emptiness or voidness. That is the way things exist. It doesn’t mean that things don’t exist at all. Like I was saying before, we have to learn to see that most of what we assume to be true isn’t there, that there isn’t any real inherent qualities of good and bad.
There’s no real inherent anything. But that doesn’t mean that nothing exists. That doesn’t mean that, you know, like the whole thing is a hallucination. You know, myself, world, other people, everything is just a like a dream or a fantasy. I’m just creating it.
And you strip that away, and then there’s nothing. People get that impression sometimes when they read books or they hear about Buddhism, but that’s not really that’s not really true. There is the danger of falling into what’s called nihilism, which is an attitude of denying any existence at all and saying, oh, nothing exists. That’s wrong. That is a mistake.
And so we we should be careful not to jump to that false conclusion. Things do exist. In fact, there’s there’s another way of well, how should I say? There’s a subject in Buddhism that’s called the two truths. Two levels of truth is more appropriate.
It’s more like two ways in which things exist. The two truths, one is relative conventional truth, the other is ultimate truth. The two truths are really like two sides of a coin. There are two ways of existing that apply to everything. It’s like if you any object, any kind of phenomenon, like one’s self, there’s a relative way that we exist, and then there’s an ultimate way that we exist.
So those are the two truths: the relative truth of our existence and the ultimate truth of our existence. Now the relative truth, the relative way that we exist, is that we come into existence. We haven’t always been here, but we started at some point to exist, and that coming into existence was a coming together of physical elements, the cells, the egg and the sperm that started us, the growth from that, the cells, whole physical thing, the body, the development of the body. And also the mind, the mind which comes from another life, with it karmic propensities to think in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, to have a certain kind of personality and so on. All these propensities to experience things in a certain way.
So that mind joined with the body in the womb, that is the development of a person. That’s where we came from. And we’re changing all the time. It’s not like we start off, we suddenly come into existence, and then we stay the same way all the time. But constantly changing.
Every moment of our existence we’re changing. And learning new things, making mistakes, having good experiences, bad experiences, falling in love, falling out of love, so on. All these things that we have that happen in our lives. And then eventually, at some point, we go out of existence, either through some accident or old age, sickness, whatever. Something happens that causes us to die.
Death means the separation of the body and the mind. So the body becomes the body’s body becomes disposed of somehow, cremated or buried or dumped in the sea, and the mind carries on to another life, another existence. So that is our relative existence. That is the relative reality, way in which we exist. Person called Kathy MacDonald began to exist at such and such point, and exists until such and such point, and all the experiences that I have, and all the things that I do, and so on, the ways that I affect other people, all of that is my relative reality.
And that’s true, you know, that I’m here. I am here. I feel. But the other side of the coin is the ultimate level of truth, the ultimate way in which I exist. And ultimate here means, sort of, what’s behind it all.
Because in a way, this relative way in which things exist, like it’s changing all the time, it comes into existence depending on all kinds of different things coming together and it goes out of