Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro establishes the philosophical foundations for understanding Buddhist symbols and rituals. Rather than jump into practice, she begins with a core Buddhist insight: our everyday perception of the world is a subjective projection of mind, not objective truth. Using the rope-and-snake analogy, she shows how we mistake our mental constructs for reality. She explains emptiness (shunyata) not as nihilism but as freedom from false projections—the direct experience of reality as it is. She then describes the Buddhist path to enlightenment as requiring both purification of negative states and cultivation of positive qualities like compassion and wisdom, undertaken to help all beings, not for self-benefit alone. The talk concludes by introducing a Chenrezig sadhana as an example of how Buddhist ritual serves inner transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Symbols and Rituals.mp3
UUID: ebb5a75e-d816-4cff-8acf-14ce64325842
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Symbols and Rituals (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1986 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.1 minutes
Words: ~5,350
This evening I’ll be talking about symbols and rituals in Tibetan Buddhism. In order to really understand these things, these different aspects, it’s important to have some understanding of Buddhist thought. I’ll begin the talk by just talking a little bit about the background of the foundations for these very symbols and rituals that are used in Buddhism. One thing that’s important to understand is that this tradition, the Buddhist tradition in general, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in particular, is mystical tradition. A mystical tradition is one which involves making contact with a realm, a reality, an experience or a state which is outside of normal human experience.
Just about every religious or spiritual tradition has its mystical side. In some traditions, this may be explained as, say, a union with God or with some kind of divine nature or divine entity or cosmic consciousness or a reaching beyond, a transcending normal reality, what most human beings consider reality. Reaching a higher reality, another reality, separate reality. Now it’s quite possible that the actual experience of mystics, those who have actually attained this experience, this transcending normal reality, this experience of a higher reality, that regardless of their tradition, the mystics of all the different religious and spiritual traditions might be experiencing the same thing. Some people believe that, that once you get beyond the realm of conceptions and words and philosophy and ideology, that you’re talking about oneness, a one truth, a one reality.
So that’s possible, and I feel it’s not for myself to say that one characteristic of that kind of mystical experience is that it’s said to be difficult to express or impossible to express. Once you try to put it into words or concepts or into images, it loses its real feeling, its real nature. It’s possible that a Christian mystic and a Buddhist mystic and a Hindu mystic and a Taoist mystic might all be experiencing the same thing in their meditation, in their deep awareness of reality. But then when it comes to expressing it, to explaining it to others, it takes different forms. But again, I say, it’s not really for us to judge.
One needs to actually experience these states to know. The Buddhist mystical tradition or mystical experience is explained as an awareness of reality, a wisdom. Wisdom is a mind, it’s a consciousness, an experience of a person. The object of that wisdom, of that mind, is what’s called reality. The name for this reality is shunyata in Sanskrit, which is usually translated in English as emptiness or voidness.
This is said to be the real nature of all things, of ourselves and other people, the world around us, and all the individual, infinite things in the universe around us. That everything has this kind of essence of reality abiding in it. It’s something other than our usual experience of reality. To really understand emptiness, we have to begin by understanding what our usual experiences are. Buddhism says that people, living beings, are abiding in a state of ignorance.
People don’t like to hear that. A friend who was here recently giving some talks said that his father, who was interested in Buddhism, was quite upset about that, you know, and he was told about this idea of everybody being ignorant. He really took offense to that. And that’s understandable because I think especially in the West, we tend to regard ourselves as the highest form of life, the highest form of intelligence on the planet, we have an intelligence superior to that of animals and other forms of life. We don’t see anybody who’s more intelligent than we are, who knows more than we do.
We do tend to pride ourselves in our abilities to think, to reason, to communicate and of course to build, to invent, and to well, the great discoveries that have been made in science. Being able to penetrate into realms where just an ordinary human mind cannot penetrate, like the world of the well, the microscopic world, the subatomic world, the depths of the ocean and even beyond our planet and into other worlds in space, as well as our discoveries just within this worldbiological and genetic and looking into the corners of the mind, the body and so on. In a way, we do have a lot to feel proud about in terms of knowledge, intelligence, abilities. So then when we hear this idea that we’re actually ignorant, it can be a shock, it can be disturbing to some people. Of course there’s different levels of ignorance and there’s different levels of awareness or wisdom or intelligence.
What’s being referred to then in the Buddhist view when it’s said that we are ignorant, the idea is that we are ignorant of ultimate reality. What we’re normally aware of is a kind of reality. It’s called relative reality. Our usual perceptions of things, our usual understanding of things is relative. What that means is that it’s very much subjective.
It’s different for each person. Even though we may all agree on certain things, like for example, we all agree that this object here is a tape recorder. Any one of us walking into the room looking at this thing would think, That’s a tape recorder. Or if somebody asks you, Do you know what that is? We’d say, Yes, it’s a tape recorder.
In fact, tape recorder is just a name. It’s just a word, group of sounds, which has been arbitrarily attached to this kind of object. It’s only agreed upon by people who speak English. People from another country who speak another language would not call it a tape recorder. They’d call it something else.
To say or to think, We know. I know what this is. This is a tape recorder. Is that true? Do we really know what this object is?
Just because we know its name. Does knowing the name of something mean that we know that thing? We know what it is. This is where a lot of our knowledge, our so called knowledge lies. We learn names of things And then we tend to think we know those things, we understand them, we’ve mastered them, which isn’t at all true if we really check up, if we think about it.
If then one were asked, No, that’s just the name. Tape recorder is just the name. But do you really know that object? Do you know what it is? We’d probably be stumped.
Wouldn’t know what to say, wouldn’t know what to answer. What does it even mean to know something? To know? Does it mean to be able to see every part of that object inside and out and to understand how it works, to understand how it came into existence, how it was made? If somebody understood that, then of course they would have more right to say, I know that object.
Especially if they made it, you know, if somebody made that object, they started off with bits and pieces and put them all together, and they know very well how it works and how take it apart, put it back together and so on. Such a person could say, Yes, I know it. But most of us don’t have that kind of knowledge. That’s just an illustration or an example. That idea could be applied to anything.
Say, a person. To say, I know so and so. Do we really know that person? We know the person’s name. We know what the person looks like.
We can recognize that person in a crowd of people, call that person by name. We might know certain things about that person, but there’s an awful lot about the person that we probably don’t know. So then is it right to say, I know that person? That’s just giving us some food for thought about our ideas of knowing and understanding. How much do we really know?
Again, as I said, most of our knowledge is subjective. What I mean by that is that we have our own particular way of perceiving things and interpreting things and understanding things. For example, if you take a group of people, a number of different people who all witness the same event taking place, and then afterwards you go and ask each person to describe what happened. You would probably get a different story from each person. It’s just slightly different, but sometimes completely different.
Each person, each one of us has our own way of perceiving things and interpreting things and also reacting to things. Say, for example, the flowers here and the altar, just our perception. We would all agree that these flowers are called gladiola. Again, that’s just the name that we’ve agreed upon to call that. Well, we haven’t really agreed.
Somebody at some point in time decided that that was going to be the name of this kind of flower. Then through the ages, we’ve all been taught that and we all accept that and we go on assuming, okay, that’s the name of that kind of flower. It could be called anything. It could be given any kind of name. Again, that’s going back to the idea of how much we really know.
Again, the way we perceive, the way we actually perceive, what happens in our minds when we see these flowers would be different for each of us. Some people would feel very pleasant. Some people might really like this kind of flower. Other people would feel unpleasant because they don’t like this kind of flower. Other people would be indifferent.
Maybe they don’t even notice flowers. That’s not something they’re really interested So there would be different reactions, different feelings, different ways of experiencing and perceiving these flowers. It’s the same with any kind of object. I think you can probably think of examples in your own experience of how this is true, of how your perception interpretation of something was quite different than another person’s. Each of us is quite certain that our perception of things is true, is reality, because it’s happening inside.
I know that’s the way it is. This is how we feel. We’re so convinced that our way of seeing things is true. But then when we come across somebody else who has a very different way of seeing things or perceiving things, then we don’t quite know what to make of that. Sometimes we get angry and defensive.
We want to argue, we want to convince the other person that they’re wrong and we’re right. Or we might become very confused because then we might think, Well, who is right? We might even go so far as to think, Well, is there such a thing as right and wrong? These are some of the questions, actually, that in Buddhism we’re encouraged to contemplate, to ask ourselves, to question what we consider to be reality. Is it really reality?
If it were reality, if there were an objective reality out there, then everybody would agree upon it. Everybody would see it the same way. But because of the fact that that’s not true, that each person sees things differently, then that sort of throws some doubt on this whole idea of reality. Is there an objective reality that stands by itself, that’s there in itself from its own side, regardless of how we think about it or how we interpret it, does that exist? According to Buddhism, it doesn’t.
All reality, what we call reality, is subjective. You know? That we create it in our minds. We project it from our minds, from our own experience, depending on what we’ve experienced before, depending on our own particular mental or psychological makeup, what we like and what we don’t like, what we think is good, what we think is bad, the way we see ourselves, the way we see other people, and so on. We have our own way of perceiving things, which is created inside, in our mind, and then we throw that outside.
We project that outside onto the world, onto external things, and we think that is reality. Each one of us is going around projecting our own little movie and believing that that’s it, that’s reality. Then the Buddhists say, Well, if you really examine that, if you really question that, check that out, investigate that, you’ll discover that it’s not true, that what we think is reality is not reality. So that is what’s meant by ignorance. When the Buddha said that all beings are ignorant, it means we are ignorant of reality.
I was just talking about relative reality, but that doesn’t mean that things don’t exist at all. It’s quite common for people, especially in the West, to get the wrong idea about Buddhism, about Buddhist philosophy, what’s actually being said by this idea of shunyata or emptiness, this ultimate reality. Even the name is a little bit deceptive. As I say, the English translation is usually emptiness or voidness. This sometimes gives people the idea that they’re talking about nothingness or non existence.
This is not true. In fact, you even read sometimes in books written by westerners who’ve done a bit of study about Buddhism, and then they write books about it. Unfortunately, a lot of these books are full of mistakes. One of the mistakes that’s often made is this misunderstanding or misinterpretation of shunyata or emptiness. They say that the Buddha taught that nothing exists, that there is no reality, that everything is just an illusion and things don’t really exist.
That’s not true. That’s not what the Buddha was teaching. That’s not what the Buddha meant by his theory of shunyata or emptiness. Emptiness you see, the word emptiness means it’s a state of being empty. And the state of being empty of something.
We can say the refrigerator is empty of beer or the room is empty of dogs. That means there’s no dogs there. There’s no beer in the refrigerator. Emptiness then implies the absence or the lack of something. The Buddhist theory of emptiness refers to an absence or lack of a certain kind of reality.
That certain kind reality is what I was just talking about, what we think is reality, our subjective projected idea of reality. This idea that we go around projecting our own ideas, our own perceptions, our own interpretations on things and thinking that that’s the way things are. This projection, this projected supposed reality, which I call relative reality, that is not existing, that is not real, that is not really there. The view of emptiness refers to the emptiness or the absence of that kind of reality. It just isn’t there.
That what we think is real, what we think is true, is not true, is not real, is not really there at all. But that doesn’t mean that things don’t exist, that there’s nothing there at all. It’s a little bit difficult. No, it’s very difficult to understand this idea. Maybe I can throw in an analogy that’s often used to illustrate this.
If you imagine the situation of walking in a forest in evening after the sun has set. There’s some light, but not enough light that you can see things clearly, so things are appearing a bit vague. If you see on the path in front of you this object, this long, thin, twisting kind of object lying there in the path, your first reaction might be, It’s a snake, especially if it’s a place where there’s likely to be snakes. I think this analogy probably originated in India where there are lots snakes in the paths and in the jungles. It’s quite likely that there will be a snake.
You see this object and you think, That’s a snake. You react with fear and panic, paralysis even, depending on how much fear you have of snakes. But then you might sort of draw back a bit and then see that nothing is happening, it’s not moving, then you might begin to doubt, Well, I wonder if it is a snake, really. If you look closer, check it out more closely, then you realize that it’s not a snake at all. It’s just a piece of rope that’s coiled in such a way as to look like a coiled snake.
Then when you perceive that, when you perceive that it’s a rope and not a snake, then the fear goes away. There’s no more fear, no more panic, no more of this reaction. Then you realize, Oh, it’s just a rope. Then your perception is that of a rope. In the first instant, your perception was that it was a snake.
You saw a snake there and you reacted to a snake. Then when you checked up, you see that it’s a rope. And your reaction is that of, Oh, it’s a rope. No need to fear. That analogy is used to point out In the first instance, this idea of the snake, it’s just something we create in our mind.
There’s no snake there. There’s nothing whatsoever related to a snake there. It’s just our idea that there’s a snake. So it’s completely projected from our mind, the snake that we thought was there. That’s compared to our usual idea of reality.
We project from our own mind, from our own experiences, we project things out there and we think that’s it. And then we react to them as if things are existing in that way. If we check up, as the Buddha says, we should investigate what we think is reality. Check it up. Is it true?
What you think to be true, is it really true? Does it coincide with other people’s conceptions, other people’s perceptions? Now, he says if we do check up and investigate, then we’ll discover that what we think is reality isn’t reality. It isn’t there at all, other than being projected from our own mind. Then we will reach the point where we can see things as they really are.
That is like the second perception seeing that there’s no snake, there’s just a rope. When we don’t check up, when we don’t investigate, when we just go on assuming that our particular movie is true, is reality, then we’re like the first instance, thinking there’s a snake and reacting as if there is one. The Buddha recommends checking up, and when we do check up, when we do investigate, then we’ll reach the second kind of experience, where we see things as they really are. We free ourselves from fear, from anxiety, from all the negative feelings and reactions that we normally have to things. That also points out then that there’s a positive side to this view reality in Buddhism.
There’s a positive side to emptiness. That emptiness is not negating things totally. It’s not saying that there’s nothing, there’s no existence at all. It’s just saying that we have to wipe out, clear away the mistaken ideas of reality that we have. Then we can see things as they really are.
Now, how is that? What is that reality? What is it to see things as they really are? This can be explained, this can be expressed, but that’s not good enough. We have to experience it.
This is what I was talking about, this mystical experience in Buddhism refers to that experience of reality, of things as they really are. It isn’t enough just to read about it or to hear somebody explain it or to think you have an idea of what it is. But that’s not enough. We have to come to an actual experience of it, a perception of it, a direct awareness of it. This is the goal of the Buddha’s path.
Everything that the Buddha taught, he taught for forty five years and there’s a lot to his teachings. All of it, everything that he taught, everything that he gave to people in his lifetime was for the purpose of helping them to gain this experience of reality, to get beyond their mistaken ideas of reality, which isn’t really reality, to clear that away and have this direct experience of reality. The reason for that and what’s the point? Why do we want to have that direct experience of reality? Is because that experience frees a person from all problems, from all troublesome states of mind, from all suffering, fear, all the things that human beings normally experience and normally spend their lives trying to get away from, trying to solve, trying to heal, but normally don’t manage to do so.
The real goal of the Buddha’s path is to attain what’s called enlightenment. This is what the Buddha himself discovered. As I say, everything that he taught was a means of showing us how we could attain that state as well. Now, what I just mentioned as this mystical experience, the direct experience of reality, that is not the same as enlightenment. That is actually something that can be experienced before enlightenment.
Before a person attains enlightenment, there are many stages, many levels of experience. This direct experience of reality is just one of those stages before enlightenment. It’s something that is attained or experienced in meditation. A person who’s been meditating for a long time, really working on his or her mind, checking his or her conceptions or perceptions of reality, penetrating through those, seeing through them, seeing that they are illusory, that they are dreamlike or movie-like, and eventually being able to let go of them and then reaching this experience of reality. All this is done in meditation.
A person can sit down and meditate and experience this reality. That experience is described as a union which goes beyond the normal duality that we have. Normally when we experience things, when we perceive things, we see things, or we know things, there’s always a sense of subject and object. The subject: myself, I, the knower. And then this object that I know, that I perceive.
So there’s a duality there. There’s a separation, subject and object. Now, when a person, a meditator, experiences reality, the sunyata directly. There’s no more of this sense of duality. It is said that the person feels that the mind, the awareness, merges with the object reality.
Like water poured into water, let’s say. If you take a glass of water and you pour it into a pitcher of water, it all becomes water. You no longer perceive the glass of water in the pitcher. It’s completely united, completely joined. You can’t distinguish them anymore.
This is the kind of experience that a meditator has in meditation. When meditating on reality, you sort of lose yourself and there’s only an awareness of reality, completely beyond duality. It’s said that it’s really an incredible experience. There’s great joy, great clarity, freedom from any kind of tension, any kind of problems or any kind of negativity. This is then the mystical experience.
But as I say, this is not the ultimate experience. There’s still more to do, more work to do, farther to go. The person then cannot maintain that experience constantly. As I said, there’s more work to do. A person can have that experience in meditation, but then outside of meditation has to continue working on themselves.
The main work involved can be seen in two aspects. One is what’s normally called purification. This means clearing away, clearing out of our mind all of our negative energy, negative attitudes. Negative meaning whatever is harmful, whatever hurts ourselves or others. Harm can be physical, it can be verbal, it can be psychological.
Whatever keeps us down, whatever keeps us in ignorance, this is what is meant by negative. It’s not a question of evil or anything. It’s just whatever is harmful, whatever obstructs us from experiencing reality, experiencing the joy, the peace of enlightenment. All of those aspects or attitudes in our mind need to be cleared away, need to be purified. So that’s one area of work that a person needs to do on themselves in order to reach enlightenment.
The other aspect is that of building up all of our positive qualities and our positive potentials. Enriching and developing all of those things that are helpful like love, compassion, generosity, selflessness, whatever helps oneself, wisdom, and whatever helps others. So those are the two things that need to be done in order to become enlightened. Actually, enlightenment isn’t the best translation of the Sanskrit or Tibetan word that is usually used to denote that state. In the Tibetan, the term is jangchub.
There’s two words involved. Jang means purified or cleansed. Totally purified, totally cleared out. Any kind of negativity, any kind of problem is just gone, is transcended. That’s one aspect of enlightenment.
Chub, the other word, means perfected or accomplished. That refers then to this total accomplishment or total perfection of all the good qualities, all the positive and beneficial qualities such as love, compassion, wisdom, and so Those are the two things that are involved both in the path to enlightenment. On the path to enlightenment we have to work on purification of negativities and development of positive things. Once that work has been fulfilled, has been completed, one achieves this state of enlightenment of jangchub totally purified and totally perfected or accomplished. Those are the two things that are involved in working towards enlightenment.
As I said, everything in the Buddhist teachings, everything in the Buddhist path is for that purpose. Everything is some kind of means whereby we human beings can work our way along the path to this goal of enlightenment because every one of us has that potential. It’s not a question of Some people are blessed or gifted or chosen to have these mystical experiences, to have this experience of reality, to attain a state of enlightenment. It’s something that is possible for each one of us. It’s a question of working on ourselves.
It’s not a question of somebody snapping their fingers or sending us a vision and then we’re there. We have to do it ourselves. We have to work towards it ourselves. All this is background then to the introduction to the symbols and rituals of Buddhism. Because, as I say, all of these things, the symbols, the rituals, the images, the colors, everything involved in the practice of meditation in Buddhism is designed to help us then work on this path, purify whatever is negative, whatever is a hindrance, and develop whatever is positive, whatever is beneficial, and eventually reach this state of enlightenment by means experience of reality.
That is the chief thing. Wisdom directly perceiving reality is the main thing that has to be developed in the work towards enlightenment. Of course, I have to mention the other main aspect is that of compassion and love. This is the actual motivating force for this work because it’s not that we work on ourselves and become enlightened just to fulfill our own needs and our own desires and our own wish to be happy, to have peace of mind. It’s not just selfish, self centered, but it’s for the benefit of others.
It’s done with love, with compassion, with the desire to do the best for others. Because the very best way we can help others I think everybody, of course, feels compassion and caring for others and would like to solve the world’s problems. We’d like to eliminate famine and sickness and war and aggression and unhappiness and so on. All the different problems that people experience. I think we all feel that it would be wonderful to just do away with all these problems, but the problem is, well, how do you do it?
You can make little contributions here and there, send off a check to this charitable organization, help this friend who’s going through a crisis. Some people are able to do quite a lot, but it still hardly makes a dent in an overall situation. But the Buddhist idea is that we can actually help the situation of the world, the situation of all living beings and their suffering, by becoming enlightened. If we free ourselves from all the causes of pain and all the causes of problems, then we’re in the best position to help others. We cannot help others get beyond problems that we are still caught up in.
So as long as we are still hung up on problems, as long as we are still stuck they use the analogy of being in the water and not knowing how to swim. There’s somebody else over here who also doesn’t know how to swim, who’s drowning, and is calling out for help. Well, if you don’t know how to swim, you can’t help the other person. The two of you are just going to go down together. To really help others, we have to get out.
We have to take care of ourselves, get beyond our own limitations, get beyond our own problems and so on and so and reach this state of enlightenment. From there, we have no limitations at all. We have the wisdom, we have the knowledge, and we have the means, the skills to be able to help others. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen like magic. It still requires time, patience, energy, work, but it is possible that everybody, every living being, can eventually get out of this situation of suffering.
We can contribute to that. We can help out by getting ourselves out and then helping others. That then is the real motivating force behind this whole work, this whole path, is doing it for others, doing it to help others. I thought to There’s so much, really, it comes to symbols and rituals. There’s just so much, and it’s really not possible to cover everything in one talk.
What I thought I’d do would be to go through one practice of meditation and explain some of the symbols, some of the reasons behind the various practices that are done. All the different practices have pretty much the same elements, Understanding one can help gain an understanding of the others. This is a practice that we do here, and it’s quite a common practice in Tibetan Buddhism. Actually, there are copies of it. Kathy, do you want it up there on the shelf?
Do you want to pass out copies just so you can look at it yourself? I call this a practice, The Sanskrit term is sadhana. In Tibetan that translates as drubthab. Literally it means means of achieving. That sounds a bit complicated, so we generally just call it a practice.
It’s a practice in the same way that we do football practice or piano practice or something like that. Practice is a repetition of a certain kind of activity in order to become good at it, in order to become an adept, you know, that when it comes to sport or when it comes to music or art, it’s necessary to practice, to repeat this activity or this work, to become familiar with it and to become good at it, to become skilled at it. So this meditation we can call it a meditation as well. It’s a meditation, but it’s done in the same way that we practice other things. It has to be done again and again and again in order to accomplish something, in order to become familiar with it.
This is a practice of the Buddha of compassion who is called Chenrezig. In Sanskrit his name is Avalokiteśvara. Now I’ll just go through this and explain some of the different elements in it. As I said, this should give you of some of the symbology and also some of the ritual practices that are common in the Tibetan tradition. The first that is done is a prayer of refuge and generation of bodhicitta.