Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this six-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro introduces the five powers, foundational Lojong practices for transforming selfish attitudes toward compassion. She emphasizes their importance when practiced at the time of death—the pivotal moment that determines one’s transition to the next life. She focuses on the first power, the power of the white seed, which involves purifying negative karma, releasing attachment and anger, and renewing faith in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Rather than viewing this as selfish, she reframes pursuit of good rebirth and enlightenment as ultimately serving others: better conditions enable greater capacity to help, and enlightenment frees one to dedicate fully to benefiting others.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 3.12 The Five Powers.mp3
UUID: 270a1216-5c27-4004-bc7c-99e98a983a5d
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 6.1 minutes
Words: ~905
And finally, I’d like to explain what are called the five powers. So these five powers are explained in a genre of teachings known as Lojong, which means mind training or thought training, thought transformation. So, the Lojong or thought transformation teachings are about how to transform our mind from being selfish, self centred, egotistical, angry and hateful towards others, greedy, proud, jealous and so forth. Having these kind of negative attitudes in our mind. To transform our mind from having those kinds of attitudes to attitudes of love, compassion, being concerned about others, wanting to help others, and being able to help others, and so forth.
So it’s that’s the meaning of thought transformation. Transforming our thoughts, transforming our mind from negative and self centered egotistical to being positive and altruistic, caring for others. So the thought transformation teachings explain various methods for how to bring about this transformation. Things that we can do to work on transforming our thoughts and make them more positive. And the five powers are five practices that we can engage in during our life, while we’re alive, but in particular at the time of death.
It’s said that if we can practice these five powers at the time of death, then it’s the best thing we can do to ensure that our transition from this life to the next will be a positive one, will be born in a good situation, have good experiences. And that mainly means not just having a good time, but again, being able to meet with spiritual teachers and spiritual teachings so that we can continue our journey towards enlightenment and make our lives truly meaningful and beneficial for others. So if we can practice these five powers at the time of death, then it’s certain that we’ll be born in a good situation, be able to continue our spiritual journey to enlightenment. So the first of the five powers is the power of the white seed. And what this means is to work on purifying negative karma that we have created.
So even though we may try very hard during our life to refrain from negative actions, it’s very difficult to do that perfectly. So we probably did engage in some negative actions. So as we are dying, before we die, it is good to do purification practice. If we are unable to do that on our own, we can ask our spiritual teachers, spiritual friends to help us do a purification practice. So that we purify mistakes we made, whatever wrongs we did, whatever negative actions or karma we created during our life.
So that our mind, as it goes from this life to the next, will be one that is pure, clean. And we also need to purify our attitudes such as attachment to our possessions, anger or hatred towards enemies or anyone else. And it’s also helpful to renew whatever attitudes of devotion or faith that we have. If we are Buddhist, that means taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Renewing our commitment to take them as our guide and follow their guidance as well as we are able to.
And just in general, this power of the white seed is to create or accumulate positive energy, what we call merit in Buddhism. Again, it’s important that we have positive energy or good karma as we move from this life to the next. Because it’s mainly good karma that determines a fortunate rebirth, which we naturally want. We want to be born in a good situation and have good experiences. That only comes about if we have good karma, we have positive energy.
So, before we die, but of course during our life as well, it’s important that we try to accumulate as much positive energy as we can to ensure a good transition from this life to the next, and ensure good experiences in the next life, and be able to continue our spiritual journey towards liberation and enlightenment. And in case this sounds somewhat selfish like I’m only thinking of myself, it isn’t necessarily because if we’re born in a good situation in our next life, that means not only will we be able to have good experiences, but we’ll be able to have more love and compassion and be able to be of more help to others. So, that’s what we really aim for is helping others. To be able to help others we need to be in good conditions ourselves. And if we’re aiming ultimately for enlightenment, the attainment of enlightenment, that puts us in a situation where we can be of the greatest benefit to others.
Because we’re free of all our own needs, own problems. We’re able to just give ourselves completely, dedicate ourselves completely one hundred percent of the time with one hundred percent of our energy to helping others. So the idea of aiming for a good situation in the next life and aiming for enlightenment is not at all a selfish one. It’s really so that we can help others to the best of our ability. So in general, the power of the white seed means accumulating good karma, good energy, positive energy that will enable us to move from this life to the next in such a way that we’ll be in the best possible conditions to make our life, our experiences meaningful and beneficial to others.