Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this two-hour introductory session, Ven Thubten Dondrub launches a six-week exploration of the four immeasurable thoughts—equanimity, love, compassion, and joy—foundational practices in Tibetan Buddhist training. He begins by framing the motivation for study: recognizing that without practice, we remain trapped in endless cycles of aging, sickness, death, and rebirth. He then walks through a concrete method for developing equanimity, the essential first step: visualizing three representative people—a friend (not your closest), a stranger, and an enemy—and investigating how our habitual responses to them are shaped by attachment and aversion rather than reality. He explores how these categories can flip across lifetimes and even within a single life, encouraging practitioners to question why they cling to these distinctions. Even reciting the words of these practices, he suggests, begins to reshape the mind. Suitable for those new to formal Buddhist meditation and study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2014 08 14 Four Immeasurable Thoughts Week 1 14-8-2014.mp3
UUID: 2683df7b-8dec-4d45-a863-b77e8a6016d6
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Four Immeasurable Thoughts (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2014-08-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 121.8 minutes
Words: ~559
So And so the the puja of course comes from the general sūtra tradition of Buddhist teachings, try and offer all beautiful, especially all the beautiful things in the universe, especially those things that we are most attached to as a way to request the teachings. So it’s a way to say, to develop a mind that wishes to give up everything in order to receive the teachings, realizing that Buddhist teachings are the most precious thing in the universe. Nothing stops us from getting old, sick, dying, being reborn in saṃsāra, over and over, if we don’t begin practice.
It was teaching. So So then as we continue to visualize the moving come to this, then it’s really important that we try to develop right now the best motivation for listening to and starting to do the dedication. Because depending on that motivation, then that’s that So four immeasurable thoughts. So the four immeasurable thoughts are equanimity, love, compassion, joy. So I’d like to try try to talk briefly about these in the coming six weeks. Towards measurable is that if we if we are able to cultivate them properly and sustain them genuinely, then the merit that is accumulated in our mind, generated in our mind, is also immeasurable.
So there are different prayers, short prayers expressing the four immeasurable thoughts that are the traditional ones. And sometimes the order of them there is sometimes it starts with equanimity, then love, compassion, joy. Sometimes So very specific way of developing equanimity is to select three people that you know as being representatives of your friends, strangers, and enemies. So you think of someone who is a friend, but you don’t choose someone who is a very, very close, very strong friend, but just like other people. Yeah?
Someone who are friendly to you, but is not one of your main closest friends. And then choose someone who is a stranger. So, obviously, you can’t choose someone you don’t know at all. That’s ridiculous. So if you choose someone you do know, you know their existence, but have little feeling or connection to them.
So then you think you can imagine those three people in front of you. And then then it’s it’s really important that this is the problem: if the friend gives to the same charity. And because they’re nice back to me, guess what? I’m nice back to you. And so usually, they’re nice back to me.
So that just proves that they’re. Also, what we do when we create it is our karma that creates this trend and circumstance. If one can try and investigate this, and actually reality, you can’t say So would I still see them as a stranger? No. So why hold on to this idea?
So what so one can try and think what the wrong things like. And and and similar so with the stranger, we’re trying to reduce indifference to the stranger, trying to build up a more positive feeling towards But especially so one one tries to take the broader perspective to to realize that not only the friends and these strangers, not only can they change in this life. So just quickly, in summary, So even just just in in conclusion, just even reciting these words,