Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 118-minute session, Ven Thubten Dondrub introduces the Four Immeasurable Thoughts—equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy—as the foundation for generating and sustaining bodhicitta in Mahāyāna practice. Beginning with preparatory prayers and a mandala offering, he walks through why these thoughts are called “immeasurable”: they extend to all sentient beings without exception and accumulate limitless merit. The core teaching focuses on loving-kindness, starting with the insight that real happiness is not worldly pleasure but the peace of a mind free from delusion. Dondrub emphasizes that genuine love for others begins with honest love for oneself—recognizing we lack true happiness and must create its causes through virtue and mental discipline. He then guides practitioners to develop a felt sense of connection with all beings by reflecting on their kindness: how we depend utterly on others for survival, comfort, and spiritual growth, how all sentient beings want happiness and fear suffering just as we do, and how in beginningless rebirth each being has been our mother. He stresses that understanding this intellectually is not enough; practitioners must meditate repeatedly on these points to imprint them in the mind and gradually awaken the natural capacity for love that already exists within. The teaching concludes with the Mahāyāna commitment that goes beyond wishing happiness for others to actively working to help all beings achieve enlightenment. Suited for Buddhist practitioners and those interested in developing compassion through structured meditation practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2014 08 21 Four Immeasurable Thoughts Week 2 21-08-2014.mp3
UUID: 77bd1a50-8390-4727-9e84-6e9dbb1d1fea
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Four Immeasurable Thoughts (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2014-08-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 117.6 minutes
Words: ~11,585
To our Thursday night class. Our topic is the four immeasurable thoughts for the next few weeks. Especially as practiced in the Mahāyāna tradition. So in the Mahāyāna tradition these four immeasurable thoughts help us to generate the mind of bodhicitta. Having generated bodhicitta it is through continuing to practice the four immeasurable thoughts that one is able to sustain one’s bodhicitta and also increase it as well.
It is an important practice. So since Thursday night is our traditional night for people who consider themselves to be Buddhist, then we do some more prayers than normal. So we start with I don’t know if we should do the Heart Sūtra every night, every Thursday night. Maybe it’s a bit too long. I don’t know what you think.
Maybe we can have a vote on it at some time. Anyway we will start off on page five with the prayer to the lion faced Dakini which is from the tantric tradition and it is recited to help eliminate obstacles to understanding the teachings and being able to put them into practice. After saying the four line prayer there is the mantra of the lion faced Dakini, so that is recited twenty one times. We are on page five. I prostrate to the gathering of dakinis in the three chakras who abide in the holy yoga of using space.
By your powers of clairvoyance and magical emanation, look after practitioners like a Buddha’s child. By the teachings of the three supreme jewels possessing the power of truth, may inner and outer hindrances be transformed, may they be dispelled, may they be pacified, may they be completely pacified, may all negative forces opposed to dharma be complete pacified. May the host of eighty thousand obstacles be pacified. May we be separated from problems and harmful conditions to dharma. May all enjoyments be in accord with the dharma and may there be auspiciousness and perfect happiness here right now.
Then we do the mandala offering which is a ritual way of imagining offering everything in the universe, especially all the beautiful things of the universe and particularly those things that we are most attached to. We offer all of this up to triple gem and as a way to request the teachings and by making this offering it helps us to overcome, reduce our attachment and that and all the other disturbing thoughts connected with it are obstacles to understanding and practicing the Dharma. By making this offering as sincerely as possible then this accumulates great merit which helps us access a basis to be able to understand and practice and realize the teachings. In this case, the four immeasurable thoughts. So as we continue to visualize the Buddha in front of us as our source of refuge, inspiration, and guidance, at the same time we can think of all sentient beings surrounding us, especially at least thinking of those that we are most connected to in this life.
And as we think of them trying to generate the bodhicitta motivation for being here and listening to the teachings, trying to generate that mind that thinks no matter what I have to use this in all my future lives to achieve enlightenment, to be in a position to repay the kindness of all sentient beings. So try and generate that strong awareness right now of how one is connected to all sentient beings, how immensely kind they are in countless ways, that I have received this kindness from every sentient being infinite numbers of times in beginningless saṃsāra. Most particularly, I have received the kindness of a mother and a father from each sentient being numberless times in beginningless saṃsāra. But also that all these beings who I depend on, who I am interconnected with are suffering in cyclic existence. The vast majority of these beings right now, compared to myself, have so much more suffering but have far less ability at the moment to make sense of their suffering, to modify it, transform it, or eliminate it.
Thinking along these lines, we can generate that wish to achieve enlightenment in order to perfectly repay their kindness. Helping them to become free of every kind of suffering. Helping them to achieve peerless everlasting happiness. So for oneself to accomplish that, I first have to achieve enlightenment. Depends on following the path.
That depends on understanding the path. That depends on listening to the teachings. And at the heart of the Mahāyāna path is developing the good heart. We need to develop wisdom and a good heart. These are the two main wings to fly to enlightenment.
Particularly in developing a good heart then cultivating the four immeasurable thoughts is very important. For this reason I will study this practice. So if you would like to join in the traditional prayer it is on the bottom of page seven. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create by teaching the Dharma.
May I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So now we can imagine the Buddha being very pleased with our motivation and showing this by now coming to the crown of our head. And when directly above our crown we imagine the Buddha dissolving into blissful golden light and then that light pouring down into us, blessing our mind. Particularly blessing our mind to be able to practice in a very powerful, genuine way the four immeasurable thoughts. So then briefly we can enhance that positive state of mind by doing some breathing meditation such as the nine round breathing exercise.
As a way to make our mind a little bit calmer, clearer, more concentrated so that we can use that level of mind to listen to and think about the Buddha’s teachings tonight. Okay. Thank you. As I said last week, the four immeasurable thoughts are said to be immeasurable because these thoughts should include all sentient beings. So the number of sentient beings is immeasurable.
They cannot be counted. Is one reason they are called immeasurable thoughts because they are meant to extend, or if one is doing it properly, one extends that thought to every being without exception. So all the different beings of cyclic existence, the immeasurable number, the countless number of beings in cyclic existence. So it is not just for human beings but all the beings in the animal realm and the preta realms, the different hell realms, in the Bardo state, in the desire realm. The gods of the desire realm, the gods of the form realm, the gods of the formless realm.
So it extends to all these beings. So that is one reason they are immeasurable. And the other reason they are said to be immeasurable is that by cultivating these thoughts strongly and sincerely towards all sentient beings then it accumulates immeasurable merit, skies of merit, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche would say, skies of merit. And of course by accumulating merit this also means that it is purifying our mind as well at the same time. The more merit we accumulate then it also means we are purifying the mind.
So the four immeasurable thoughts, each one of these is to be able to realize anything. The four immeasurable thoughts. Do you have a copy of this sheet with the four immeasurable thoughts on it? Do we have some copies? You’ve got some spares.
It’s okay. We’ve got some coming. It’s done. Or who hasn’t got one? No, I I I think I left them at home.
Sorry? No, no, no. It’s a bit far away. Yeah. Are are you okay?
You’re comfortable? Yes, you will be right? Yes. Okay, the four immeasurable thoughts are equanimity, developing equanimity, love, compassion and sympathetic joy. So each one of these is actually a major project.
If we were to be able to develop even one of these in any significant way in this life would be a truly wonderful accomplishment. But these are all lumped together in these four thoughts and one could make the mistake of thinking this is something very easy to do. And there is this prayer, This is the prayer of the four immeasurable thoughts but it really is encompassing something that could take lifetimes to really accomplish. The prayer is there just to remind us what we need to do. Just like there is the prayer of refuge we try and say three times every day.
So that is to remind us to practice refuge all the time meaning taking care of the mind all the time using the Buddha’s methods to do so. So we say the prayer of the four immeasurable thoughts to remind us to actually practice the four immeasurable thoughts. Just saying the four immeasurable, saying the prayer itself is no big deal. It is very nice. It is a nice thing to say but we shouldn’t leave our practice at just saying those words.
The words are there to encourage us to be mindful that when there is the situation to practice these things, to practice equanimity with friends, enemies and strangers, to practice loving kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy. So this prayer is one of the group of prayers that I think anyone who is seriously trying to follow the Tibetan tradition, any of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, needs to know this prayer off by heart. I mean there are different versions of it but one should know this prayer and say it regularly to put the imprint in the mind, to memorize it and say it regularly every day. If one doesn’t have a meditation practice at all, this would be a great start just to be able to say this prayer every day first thing in the morning to reflect on it a little bit or even a lot. But even a little bit first thing in the morning would be a wonderful way to prepare the mind for whatever is going to engulf it during the day because all sorts of waves of experience wash over us day by day, most of them unexpected.
Even when we expect them the way they happen is never quite the way we expect them. So to prepare our mind for what did Shakespeare say? The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then very good to meditate on the four immeasurable thoughts first thing in the morning. And for those people who are familiar with the traditional way of meditating on doing analytical meditation on the lum rim topics, the topics of graduated path to enlightenment.
Then there are the various prayers one can say at the beginning to prepare the mind and reciting and reflecting on the four immeasurable thoughts as one of those prayers. Really good to do that. So anyways I try to talk a little bit about equanimity. I am only going to go through these very briefly in these few weeks because one could spend a lot of time on each one of them. But anyway so I talked a little bit about equanimity last week.
So in order to really be able to develop love and compassion first one has to really develop equanimity. Of course we can try and develop all of these things at once, practice a little bit of equanimity, put some time in training the mind in equanimity, some time in training in developing love, developing compassion. But the way the mind evolves is that we have to get some basic things first and the stronger our foundation is in the basic things then the other things will start to really develop in our minds. But if we haven’t got the basis first, if we put a lot of effort in the more advanced things then of course we are putting positive imprints in our mind but we may not be able to develop that quality or realization properly because we haven’t got the foundation. So the foundation of love compassion is firstly developing equanimity where we try to have this equal attitude to all other sentient beings whether they are friendly towards us, whether they are indifferent towards us, or whether they are even antagonistic towards us.
From our side we try and train the mind to have this equally positive, open, friendly attitude towards them. As I said last week the reason for doing this of course is because if we lack equanimity and we constantly focus on directing our positive energy towards friends, aversion to enemies, indifference to strangers, then we will never be able to cultivate fully the positive potentials of our mind and we will be creating obstacles to doing it at the same time. So we really do need to have some equanimity. So that’s really worth putting effort into developing that mind of equanimity. Because while we’re in saṃsāra, no matter how nice we try to be, there will always be some people who like us, some people who dislike us, and some people who are indifferent to us.
Even the Buddha experienced this. So if Buddha experienced this, certainly we are going to because we have created the karma for people to be indifferent to us. We have created the karma for people to dislike us in past. And we’ve created the karma for some people to like us. So we’re going to have this experience over and over again in this life, in future lives of friends, enemies, strangers.
But if we just keep focusing on friend, having aversion to the enemy or the people who dislike us and indifference to those who are indifferent to us, we’re never going to develop and we’re going to constantly create obstacles to our development. We will remain very limited beings. So we need equanimity. So the more equanimity we have, the more we can begin to cultivate loving kindness. There are two kinds of, well in the Tibetan tradition they talk about many different, in the Tibetan tradition they love to break things up and categorize things and make divisions So one can divide love into many kinds of divisions but I won’t go into too much detail about that.
But they do talk about two significant kinds of love. One which in Tibetan is called Yid ‘ong Champa. So Champa is the Tibetan word for love and this basically translates as, one could translate it as affectionate love or maybe just affection or even perhaps friendliness. And then there is love itself. Firstly one needs to cultivate affectionate love before one can develop the deeper kind of love itself.
So love as it is understood in Sanskrit we have this word Maitri which in Tibetan is translated as Champa and the word that we have in our language which use to translate that is love. But this word love in our language is used in all sorts of strange ways. We talk about loving our parents, loving our children, loving our partner, loving children, loving our kids. We also we like food, we like movie, I love this movie, I love this, I love that. So all of these are quite different, you know, have quite different meanings.
I don’t know what the actual definition of love I should know by now in the English language of love is. What is it? What does love mean in English? But in the Dharma there is a very simple definition of what love is and that is it is the mind, it is this mental factor which wishes oneself and others happiness. That’s what it is.
In one way, it’s very simple. It is that mind usually it is defined as saying wishing others to have happiness but of course it has to include oneself. Because really to be able to develop love for sentient beings genuinely, very profoundly and purely and completely, one has to have love for oneself. And the more one has the wish for oneself to have happiness, the more one will want that for others. Similarly in order to develop equanimity or wanting others to have equanimity one has to first want oneself to have it.
The more one sees the need for how beneficial it would be to have equanimity ourself, genuinely, then we see how wonderful it would be if everyone could have equanimity. That would be fantastic. The more we develop genuine love for ourselves, the more we would think, as the first line says of the prayer, how wonderful it would be if everyone could have happiness. So firstly we have to develop this wish for ourselves to be happy. And of course most people would think, well of course I want to be happy, of course I’m doing that!’ And of course the teachings say that deep down, as many of you I have bored many times by making this point, that we do have this natural wish for happiness.
As Holiness says, because of our Buddha nature there is this inevitable natural wish for happiness. Anyway, maybe before going on I have to go back as I usually do. When we say love is defined in Buddhism as the wish for happiness, wanting self and others to have happiness, what happiness are we referring to? And this is the interesting point. What is happiness?
So there is a very worldly idea of happiness and then there is the dharma idea understanding of what happiness is. The dharma explanation of happiness in some ways is quite boring or it sounds quite boring because what real happiness is, which is the happiness that love wants self and others to have, is the absence of suffering. That is what actual happiness is. It is a state the mind experiences when there is an utter absence of suffering, which means there is also an utter absence of the causes of suffering. Some of you or maybe all of you are familiar with the teaching called the Four Seals of the Buddhadharma, the four things that distinguishes the Buddha’s teachings.
One of which, although the one that is mentioned last, is that where it says nirvana is peace. So nirvana is the state of perfect bliss, perfect happiness, and that is peace. That is happiness. nirvana is peace, happiness, bliss. And nirvana is that state where there is an utter absence of the causes of suffering.
Because when that happens, when those obscurations are removed from the mind, the natural state, the natural bliss of the mind is experienced. So anyway, love is that thought wishing oneself and others to have perfect happiness. And from the Mahāyāna point of view, it’s not only wishing others to have the bliss of nirvana, but the bliss of enlightenment, Which my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche calls Peerless, everlasting happiness. There is nothing higher, is peerless and it’s everlasting. So real love is wanting oneself and others to have that, that state.
Peerless, everlasting happiness. And we have that natural wish for peerless everlasting happiness. I am tempted to do my magician talk again but I’ll just do a simple version of it. If we really check what kind of happiness do we want. We don’t want third rate happiness.
We don’t want second rate happiness. Deep down, whether we’re conscious of it or not, what we really want is perfect happiness. Perfect happiness. And how long do we want it for? We want it not for a short time, not just for a week, a month, a year, or this life, but we want it forever.
We are very greedy. We want perfect happiness forever. Deep down we have that wish all the time. Every sentient being has that wish. Whether they are conscious of it or not, they have it.
It’s not to have this wish for perfect, lasting happiness. But the trouble is because our mind is obscured, that wish gets distorted by our delusions and our self-cherishing into simply chasing after worldly pleasure and distraction. Actually I would argue that because our mind is obscured there is always some kind of suffering occurring in our minds, some dissatisfaction. When that satisfaction, which may be under the surface, starts to touch the surface of our mind and we become aware of it, our solution, our confused, samsaric, self-cherishing solution to that is to distract ourselves. And there’s many, many ways of distracting, some very primitive ways of distracting ourselves, some very sophisticated ways of distracting ourselves, some acceptable ways of distracting ourselves and others not so acceptable.
But when we distract ourselves from that being aware of our own inner dissatisfaction, that’s what our confused mind calls happiness, in a sense. We always settle because of our self-cherishing for the illusion of happiness, for just worldly pleasures at the most. So the average person would say, Oh yes, I really do love myself. I am taking care of myself. I am doing all these things, I’m getting all these things that make me happy, but they’re all mainly distractions.
We think we have love for ourselves, but in fact what we think of as love for ourselves is in fact in many cases just self-cherishing. So the first step in developing genuine love is developing genuine love for ourselves. Replacing, overcoming our self-cherishing with genuine love. Seeing that our self-cherishing doesn’t bring real satisfaction, it doesn’t bring lasting peace and contentment. Following the self-cherishing thought actually because of it we engage in negative actions that in the long term bring us suffering.
They don’t bring us happiness and they actually bring us suffering. So if we really start to see that more and more, if we really start to feel it more and more, we can reverse. We can begin to reverse the self-cherishing thought, give up the eight worldly concerns which are the reflection of the self-cherishing thought, put effort into avoiding negative actions of body, speech and mind, and cultivate, put effort, use this life more and more to take care of the mind so that we engage in more and more virtuous actions of body, speech and mind. Because these virtuous actions of body, speech and mind are the real source of happiness. These are going to bring not straight away peerless, everlasting happiness, but they are leading us in the direction of that.
They will bring us a more genuine peace and contentment and well-being. So if we really love ourselves, we will start taking care of our mind, meaning protecting our mind from the disturbing thoughts and cultivating our positive potentials and engaging in more and more virtuous actions. This is what developing love for ourselves involves. The more we have real love for ourselves, we will take care of our mind. Not put so much effort into taking care of our body, our appearance, our possessions, our money, our reputation, and all of that stuff, but our mind.
If we really love ourselves, we will take care of our mind because that’s the source of real happiness, not our body, not our reputation, not how much money we’ve got or anything like that. So anyway, in developing love there are many things to do actually. Many many things to do. So in developing love for others firstly we have to develop love for ourselves. Or at least as we develop love for ourselves we are able to develop more love for others.
That. That’s a very important thing that can’t be left out. One thing in cultivating any qualities such as, and in particular in relation to the four immeasurable thoughts, in developing these immeasurable thoughts we have to work on cultivating those qualities but also at the same time we have to work on eliminating or subduing the things that oppose those qualities. It’s not enough just to try and cultivate love. One has to work on reducing the things that are opposed to that.
Because if we don’t work on that, no matter how much positive effort we put into cultivating love, it will never fully develop because we haven’t dealt with the things in ourselves that oppose it. I always go back to this very simple analogy of a garden. No matter how much effort you put into cultivating the seeds you put in a garden for flowers and fruit and whatever, fertilizing it and watering it. But if you don’t get rid of the weeds, the flowers and whatever aren’t going to grow very well. They’re really going to struggle.
But if you get rid of the weeds and make the soil really nice first, make the soil really nice and I don’t know what the word is, friable isn’t it? Friable? Fryable? Not fried chips type fryable, fryable and also free of weeds, the effort one puts into taking care of those seeds will really bear fruit. So this is again what we have to do with our mind.
We have to cultivate the positive potentials but at the same time put effort into reducing those things which are the very opposite to what we’re trying to accomplish. So more about that later. Any questions, disagreement so far? Peerless, without peer meaning there is nothing higher, nothing superior. Peerless.
So firstly we have to develop affectionate love or it would be a good thing to develop affectionate love before developing love itself. Let’s go back even further. In order to develop both affectionate love and love itself, Firstly, we need some equanimity, but also something else that we need as a basis for developing love for others is a sense of connection with others. This is something so simple that we forget about. But in order to be able to open our hearts towards other beings, we have to feel a basic connection with them.
That there is something similar between myself and another person for me to be able to want them to have happiness, for me to want them not to suffer. There has to be a sense of connection. We read about all these horrors going on in the world at the moment or at any time one can read about some horrific thing happening to human beings somewhere else in the world. Something truly horrific happening to thousands and thousands of people and one reads about it and then you turn the page and you read you think, oh, this is terrible, awful. I might send some money to help and that’s it.
But one doesn’t, that’s it. One isn’t, oh, maybe this isn’t just me. But it’s very difficult, quite honestly, to be totally moved by it. But if someone in the house next door to you was to experience that or a friend, yeah, it would affect you, it would affect us a great deal because there is a much closer sense of connection with the people around us. Those people are real to us.
They are real people and we feel connected to them. And at the moment, because of our self-cherishing, our very limited mind, we don’t feel connected to many people. And of course what the lack of equanimity does, it makes us feel connected to very, very, very few people. So what we need to try and do is train the mind to feel, experience a sense of connection with more and more people. And this is what we do through meditation of thinking about these things in a very strong powerful way as much as we can.
But also doing it Most of us maybe aren’t able to meditate in a very powerful way because we haven’t developed much concentration yet. So at least, even if we don’t think it in a powerful way, what we need to do is think about it regularly to put the imprint in our mind over and over again because that builds up also just like as the analogy says in the teachings, one drop of water in the bucket and then another and another and another and eventually the bucket is filled. So if we put a small imprint into our mind again and again and again and again, eventually it can have a very powerful effect. So we need to think about how we are connected with all sentient beings. The very basic way to do this, which is one of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama’s essential messages to all people on this planet, is to reflect on how all sentient beings want happiness just like me.
All sentient beings want to be free of suffering just like me. If we if we look at other people, we can see they have different appearances, different cultures, different ideas, the things they do are different from me. So if we focus on the external differences between ourself and others, then we don’t feel much connection and we can feel a great separation from other people. And it opens the heart no, it doesn’t open the heart. It opens the mind all sorts of negative attitudes of fear, jealousy, this and that, pride and whatever.
But if one looks below the surface and looks at inner motivation of why people are doing things, then one can start to see that they are doing things simply to be happy, just like me. Lee. Don’t make yourself too comfortable. So this is what we should focus on. Some people do very intelligent things to be happy, some people do really stupid things, people do very virtuous things to be happy, Some people do really horrendous things to to to be happy.
Yeah? Presumably, all these people, all these terrorists murdering everyone, beheading everyone, blowing people up, are doing it to be happy. They think this is gonna make them and their group happy. So the thought behind it all is just the same as me. I just want to be happy.
I just want to be happy. Everyone is trying to be happy. If we could just focus on that, then we could see a connection between ourselves and others. There is a possibility we don’t have to deny the terrible things other people do, but we could start to understand why they do it. If someone is confused enough, their wish to be happy leads them to do really awful things if someone is obscured enough.
But what they’re doing is just trying to be happy just like me. They’re just like me. Similarly, from another point of view, people are just trying whatever they do is also because they don’t want to suffer. Again, people do stupid things not to suffer. People do intelligent things not to suffer.
Good things in order to avoid suffering. Terrible things in order to avoid suffering. But the reason is they just don’t want suffering. Just like me. Just like me.
Exactly the same. If we could be aware of that and hold on to that thought, then we feel a connection. And then there’s a possibility of the mind, the positive mind, the heart opening to that person. Sense of understanding, a sense of forgiveness, a sense of wanting that person if only they could do the right thing to be happy rather than the false thing. And of course this also applies to all animals too.
Why are they doing what they do? Just to be happy, just like me. They are doing it also to avoid suffering, just like me. There is that basic wish just to be happy. It’s very difficult to make distinctions between one being’s wish for happiness and another’s and mine.
It’s just the same. It’s basically the same. So if we focus on that, then we can feel a sense of connection. And because of that sense of connection, not a sense of alienation, but a sense of connection, then we can begin that is a really powerful basis, a very genuine valid basis to start to have this feel affection for others. To have this affectionate love.
And so the basic way to develop affectionate love for others is to remember their kindness. It’s that simple in a way. But we have to remember it and feel it that sentient beings are actually kind to us. So of course the most powerful way to do this is in the Mahāyāna teachings there is the emphasis of how every sentient being has been our mother. Because our mind is beginningless, we have had an infinite number of previous bodies, therefore an infinite number of previous mothers.
Therefore there has been time in saṃsāra for every sentient being to have been our mother at least one time. But the teachings say that every sentient being has been our mother many, many times. So that is the most powerful way to develop this sense of how kind sentient beings are. But that is quite difficult to really, I think for most people, to get their heads and minds around that every sentient being has been one’s mother. So if one finds that difficult, one can at least reflect that I’ve said this a million times, I usually say it at the beginning of every teaching so I will do it again.
An easier way to reflect on the kindness of sentient beings is to think about how existence, just to survive day by day, we depend directly and indirectly on all other sentient beings. As I say, if take you know, one if you have one piece of toast, one slice of toast in the morning, yeah, so that comes from a piece of bread which you bought at a shop. So there was some person who kindly sold you the loaf of bread, the person behind the counter. Also there was someone, all the people who nicely built the shop and all the things in the shop, made all the things in the shop, all the cabinets. But anyway, just stick with a piece of bread.
So then that bread came from some factory, so there were all the people who made the bread in the factory somewhere. And then that depended on people delivering the bread from the factory to the shop. And then that bread was made by flour that was delivered to the factory by various people. And that flour was made in a mill somewhere and hundreds of people worked there. And that flour came from the farmer who grew the wheat.
And the farmer could only grow the wheat because people had been growing wheat for several thousand years. And then you think of all the machinery involved and the people who made the machinery and then the petrol, that ran the machinery and who dug up the petrol, dug it up or whatever they do, and then the pipelines to get it here, there and everywhere. And then all the before machinery, what do you call it, driven, engine driven machinery. There were animals ploughing the fields and then you need animals and insects to make the soil viable, friable and fertile. Directly, indirectly, just to have one piece of toast in the morning, one can’t count the number of sentient beings that is responsible for that, that we need, we need it.
If they weren’t there, we wouldn’t have that one piece of bread. Forget about the butter you put on top or the vegemite or jam or honey. And that’s just for one piece of bread. And then there’s all the clothes we wear, all the things we use, all the products we use in our house, and the house itself, the furniture, the car, everything. Just to survive, just to exist.
We depend on all these people. So they are incredibly kind. And one could argue, some people would argue because people always say this, but they’re paid to do that, that’s not very kind of them. They’re paid. They got paid.
It got more money for me for doing it. Lady in the shop, she was paid to give me the bread and she didn’t do it very nicely. But even if people are paid to do their work, still it’s very kind of them. If they didn’t do it, then what would I do? If someone didn’t take away my garbage each week, what a disaster.
It’s very kind of these people who are paid to take away the garbage to do it. And even if they’re paid, a lot of people wouldn’t want to do many of these jobs. So it’s incredibly kind that people do these things. So we should really think along those lines again and again to see our connection with others and how kind they are at what they do. And sometimes people who hand you the bread in the shop do it really nicely.
They don’t have to, but they do. Which is really kind. And then if one checks on top of all the things that we need just from our mere survival, then all the pleasant experiences, the good experiences we have in life, just ordinary ones, worldly ones, but also spiritual ones. For all of those to occur, again, they only happen because of other people, because of their kindness. Of course, they were able to do that because they were helped by others who were helped by others.
So again directly, indirectly for all the good things that happen to us in life we are connected, we depend on the kindness of everyone somehow. And then all the good qualities we develop, ordinary qualities, spiritual qualities, all the skills we develop, ordinary and spiritual, again the only way we can do it is through the kindness of others who in turn were able to able to be kind to us because others were kind to them and helped them going back and back and back. And that’s true just in this life. So then if you think this was the case in all my previous lives, will be the case in all my future lives, then it shows we just receive an enormous amount of kindness from others. And of course some people who persist on being negative, finding faults with the teaching, saying, ‘But there are all these people who are nasty to me as well.
Not everyone is nice to me, they are nasty.’ But if you check, in any life, the number of people who are really unkind and unhelpful and hurtful to oneself is very, very few in any one life. So the kindness in any life always outweighs the unkindness, the harm. But anyway, it doesn’t benefit to think about the harm we have received. That only just generates more negative thoughts. Does benefit to focus on all the kindness we’ve received.
Often if you think about it, which we should, we should think about it more and more because we are so usually caught up in our own self-cherishing little bubble that we don’t often even recognise the kindness we receive. We take it for granted. Like, for example, when we’re children, I don’t know about you, but all the kindness I receive from my mother and father, I just absolutely took it for granted. Never thought about it. Just absolutely took it for granted that that’s what would happen, that my mother and father would be kind to me and look after me, which they did, fortunately.
Very well. The disaster I turned out to be is my own fault, not theirs. Yeah. You know, all you know, all even all all the food my mother cooked for me, all the dishes she washed, all my clothes she washed my I just took that for granted. Of course, that’s what your mother does.
Never think about how much hard work it might be, how painful it may be, that my mother might have wanted to do something else than look after me all the time. I just took it for granted. And also, even as adults, we can do this with people. There’s all these little kindnesses and things that happen around us that we don’t really think of, we don’t recognize as a kindness but actually is. So we should really think about this and see how kind sentient beings are.
And this has always been the case in every life. So then we can develop this affectionate love, My teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche describes as seeing others in beauty, Seeing other which is not a very grammatically correct way of speaking, but somehow it’s a very beautiful expression anyway. Seeing others in beauty. But that’s what affectionate love is. It sees the beauty of another person.
Not their physical beauty, of course, but the inner beauty of someone because you recognise this person as kind And kindness is something very beautiful. It’s what we thrive on. This is what we all need, is kindness. And so anyone who is kind to us somehow appears beautiful. If we have the good fortune to have had a nice mother who was kind to us, our mother, I think, always appears beautiful somehow.
Not beautiful like some movie star, beautiful nonsense, but one sees the beauty of her. Even when our mother is very, very old, she is beautiful. Another old lady may not look beautiful to us, but our mother somehow has some appearance. We see our mother in beauty because of her kindness. So that is what we need to develop first.
That affectionate love, seeing others in beauty by remembering their kindness. Even if someone hasn’t been obviously kind to us in this life, we can understand through logic that this person has definitely been kind to me in past lives, will be kind to me in future lives. So they are kind. So that becomes the basis for then being able to develop this love wishing them happiness. Because once one feels that connection with another person and has that affectionate love, seeing and remembering the feeling the kindness of others, then it becomes easier and easier to cultivate this thought of wanting that person to have happiness, which is love.
So we have to train the mind in thinking along these lines. There are people who are born into this world who one says naturally are very loving. But from a Buddhist point of view, this is because somehow in previous lives they have cultivated this quality. So the beauty, the wonder of the Buddhist teachings is that it shows us, for us who are very ordinary people, who don’t necessarily have all these wonderful qualities just spontaneously erupting from us from the moment we are born. So if you are like me, if you are in that category, I am in that category, then the beauty of the Buddha’s teachings is it gives you these methods how one can cultivate these things.
That step by step through the power of familiarity can develop not only affectionate love, but great love for for all sentient beings because the potential is within us. This is an integral aspect of our mind, this potential of love. Something that can it can be obscured, but it can never be eliminated from the mind because is the very nature of mind to be able to love and have compassion for others. Yes, stopping tea break. Wanting you all to have happiness.
I will stop so you can have the happiness of a cup of tea or coffee and a biscuit. That will make Peter happy. I’ll have a small, weak coffee, thanks. With milk and one. I’m sorry I can’t help myself but I have been accused more than once of repeating myself a lot in talks but this is my style.
There is some purpose to it. Actually, the way one is supposed to give the teachings in the Lamrim correctly, the very traditional way, is within one talk you repeat everything three times. Introduce the topic, run through it in a general way, then you go into details it and then you summarize it all. People get everything three times. I don’t do it that way.
I just repeat myself over and over again. I just want to repeat this point to make the imprint in your mind which is so many aspects of the Buddhadharma such as things about developing equanimity, loving kindness, they are not very difficult to understand at all. I think they make common sense so we can all nod our head and say, oh yes, yes, that’s true, that’s true.’ And one tends to think, ‘Now I understand.’ So maybe intellectually we understand but that’s not good enough. We have to really reflect through analytical meditation as much as we can on these points even though we may understand them, even if we agree with them. But we need to do that, reflect on it, imprint our mind with these thoughts over and over again because this is what builds up the energy.
This helps to awaken and that potential for for loving kindness or whatever we’re trying to cultivate that already exists within us. So we hear these talks. The idea is to try and think about go home and think about them again and again and again. And the more we do that, the more through the power of familiarity we will be able to cultivate these qualities, develop these qualities. So we need to develop a sense of connection on the basis of developing some equanimity.
We need to train to see our connection, that basic connection with others. And then through that, we develop affectionate love through reflecting over and over again on the great kindness of each sentient being that they show that kindness in so many, many, many ways. And that becomes the basis for then being able to develop great love for all sentient beings. You take the example, maybe this sounds stupid at first, but probably no one in Australia goes around deeply wishing that Gina Reinhart has I hope she gets another ten dollars I really, really want poor old Gina to get ten dollars. Yeah.
The the reason no one goes around really developing that wish that Gina Reinhart gets or wins ten dollars is because she’s already got twenty billion dollars So she doesn’t need ten dollars She just doesn’t need ten dollars at all. Right? I think she does. Maybe I know. So the point is, love is the thought of wanting self and others to have happiness.
This genuine, free, strong wish for self and others to have happiness. So the point is you only develop that thought when you realize for example, to develop real love for oneself, the only way it’s going to arise is by understanding I don’t have happiness. I don’t have twenty billion dollars Well, that twenty billion dollars isn’t happening. But you don’t wish Gina to have ten dollars because she’s got it. But someone who doesn’t have any money, you may want them to have some because they don’t have it at all.
There’s no point wishing someone who has something to have it, cause they’ve already got it. It’s only when you realise this person doesn’t have this. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they had it? Especially if you have this sense of connection with them and affection for them. So if we have affection for ourselves and we realise that everything, no matter I may have all this money, all this success, all these possessions, reputation, good health, blah blah blah, but this is all just worldly stuff.
It’s just momentary pleasure. It’s just the illusion of happiness. It isn’t real happiness. It isn’t genuine, lasting happiness. So when one realizes that oneself does not have genuine happiness, that oneself is not actually creating the causes of experiencing happiness, then one can start to develop real love, wanting oneself to have the real thing.
How wonderful it would be if I could have real happiness, and especially how wonderful it would be if I could create the causes for it. And that comes from understanding the dharma that worldly happiness is not real happiness. That real happiness comes from experiencing the mind free of disturbing thoughts, free of all obscurations, free of ignorance. So that’s perfect happiness, but even some kind of genuine happiness comes from when the mind is pacified to some extent. The the the controlled mind, when the mind when we have some mastery over our mind, real peace and contentment and well-being comes.
So this is the Buddha’s message, isn’t it? Yeah. That real happiness isn’t out there. It never will be out there. It’s not out there.
The source of it lies within our own mind. So when we realize we don’t have the real thing, then we can want it. I want the real thing. I don’t want the illusion. I don’t want something that just is entertaining and distracting for a short time.
I want the real thing. So then one develops love for oneself. And because of that genuine wish, then one will act accordingly to create the causes, the proper causes of happiness, and give up those causes that don’t lead to happiness, that lead to suffering. So if we check our own experience we talk about, oh I wish for this, I wish this could happen, I would like this for myself. We have many wishy washy wishes which are very, very weak, which we don’t do anything about.
So when we talk about love is the thought of wanting happiness, it’s not one of these feeble, pathetic kind of thoughts that is at the very superficial level of our mind. It’s this determination to have it. This complete commitment, wanting happiness. Which arises from saying I don’t have it and I am not creating the causes of it. So I want it, therefore I have to create the causes for it.
So the more we develop that state of mind for ourselves and give up or start to give up our self-cherishing and our obsession with the eight worldly concerns of chasing after just worldly happiness that leads us to have incredible fear of suffering. And we give up chasing after stuff thinking that is going to make me happy. We give up worrying about not getting stuff or losing it. When we give up all of that nonsense or try, you know, work to give it up and replace it with taking care of our mind, then we are really starting to develop genuine love for ourselves, creating the cause for the actual experience to occur. And the more we do that, then we have the basis to see that, sadly enough, the people around me, the people I care for, my family and friends, if we look at them objectively, we can see that actually, no matter how successful they may be, they also don’t have real happiness.
They may say they’re happy, but they don’t. Most people don’t have any idea of what real happiness is, as Śāntideva says. In the very first chapter of Śāntideva’s text, when talking about bodhicitta, how amazing bodhicitta is because bodhicitta is that mind wanting all sentient beings to be free of all suffering, to have perfect happiness, to experience the peerless everlasting happiness of enlightenment. Śāntideva says: Do even fathers and mothers have such a beneficent intention as this? Do the gods and sages, does even Brahma have it?
If those beings have never before even dreamt of such an attitude for their own sake, how would it ever arise for the sake of others? So even our parents who love us, their love is very limited in a sense from a dharma point of view because the average parent has the worldly mind equating happiness with worldly happiness. So they want their child to have a nice job so that they’ll have a nice amount of money and they will get married to a nice boy or girl because that will make them happy. And then they’ll have two point five nice children because that will make them happy and like that. But it isn’t the wish for the person to have peerless, everlasting happiness.
So what we need to do is see through the illusions of this life that people can have so much success and possessions and fame and good looks and and influence and power and blah blah blah, and yet are not happy. They’re not happy at all. So then one can think how wonderful it would be if they could have happiness. Also, you look at the people around us, they are not creating the causes of happiness. Not the actual causes.
So few people in the world are creating the causes for happiness. So few people in the world at the moment are creating the cause to have a good human rebirth. From a dharma point of view, hardly anybody, including all the successful people in the world, are not really creating the cause for a good rebirth. They’re creating the cause for success in this life, but not for even the happiness of a good rebirth. One has to remember that what we call happiness is actually the suffering of change.
Dukkha, the Sanskrit word dukkha, the first noble truth, ordinary existence is dukkha, is suffering. So dukkha is translated as suffering. It is a very strange word in English, suffering. But we equate suffering with meaning pain, physical and mental pain. But dukkha means that, but it also means anything, any experience which isn’t complete and perfect.
In other words, which is unsatisfying, incomplete, ultimately disappointing, not lasting. And so there are three kinds of dukkha. There is the suffering of suffering, obvious pain. Then there is a much more subtle kind of dukkha, which is what we call happiness. What ordinary people think of as happiness is the suffering of change because many reasons.
Obvious one is that our our happiness doesn’t last. Worldly happiness doesn’t last. It is very rare for any pleasure or happiness in this life to last all this life. But even if it does last all this life, with death, it stops. Finished.
So that’s not satisfying. There are more subtle reasons to go into but there is no time at the moment. Definitely no time. Actually, is one of the most important topics in the whole of the Buddhadharma to understand that what we think of as happiness is a type of suffering. We spend all our time and energy trying to get something which is just the suffering of change.
Even if we put all our time and energy in this life chasing after something that most people aren’t successful at, but even if they are, all the result is the suffering of change. Just worldly pleasure, worldly happiness. So if one then sees that, one thinks how wonderful it would be if actually this person could have real happiness, create the causes of real happiness. That’s love. Really wanting that.
Of course we can want people to have worldly happiness as well because it’s better than obvious suffering. But real love is wanting others to have the real thing. So the first line says how wonderful it would be if all sentient beings had happiness and the causes of happiness. Because you can’t have happiness without the causes. Causes.
No point wishing sentient beings to have happiness without wishing them to create the causes. Because if they don’t create the causes, they won’t have happiness. And each person has to create their own causes. We can’t create the causes of happiness for others. We can’t create the causes for suffering for others.
We can we can create the conditions for someone to have happiness or suffering, but the person themselves has to use those conditions to then create the causes themselves. But we can want them to create the causes, the real causes for actual happiness. In other words, how wonderful would be if my family, friends, all sentient beings looked after their mind, protected their mind from delusion, cultivated their positive qualities, then they will begin to have happiness. To some extent, yes. In a simple way, one could look at it that way.
Conditions really are like secondary causes. There’s a root cause and secondary causes which we call the conditions. And the conditions usually refer to sort of external things. If you want a tomato plant with lots of tomatoes on it, you have to have two things. You have to have tomato seeds and you have to have the right conditions for growing tomatoes.
The soil, not good soil, friable soil, which is fertile and a certain amount of moisture and sunshine all together. So those things constitute the conditions and then you need the seeds. You need both. Yes. So we can’t make another person happy.
We can’t make another person suffer, but we can change or create the conditions around a person so then we can make some conditions around that person whereby they are encouraged to create the causes for happiness. Or we can make the conditions around that person that can make it easier for them to stop creating the causes of suffering. Or we can make the conditions around this person, so like for example, if I scream at someone enough and insult them enough, that acts as a condition where they create the causes to get angry and therefore become unhappy and miserable. And then they will blame me for it. We say, oh you made me angry, but from a Buddhist point of view this is technically not completely true.
We make ourselves angry because there’s the condition someone screaming at us and insulting us, doing things we don’t like. But that actually doesn’t make us angry because we don’t have to be angry by those things. But in a sense we listen to all that stuff and we decide, oh, bad, this shouldn’t be done’ and the mind gets agitated and then we are angry. So, does that make any sense? Ourselves, meditating on these four immeasurable thoughts where we generate the thought how wonderful it would be if family, friends, strangers, enemies, all sentient beings could have happiness in its cause.
That thought itself is creating a condition for people to have happiness. If enough people got together and sat down and meditated on loving kindness, then that acts as a very powerful condition in the world because that energy didn’t exist before. It’s like the situation in or any of these conflict situations now where so many people are full of hate towards each other and wishing to harm each other. If for some reason you have these five people here hating these five people and these five people hate each other, then you have ten people hating each other. That’s a lot of hate reinforcing.
But if one of those people stops hating those people, just one, the amount of hate has changed. And if that person actually instead starts generating the thought wanting these people to have happiness rather than to be miserable, a whole new thing has entered the equation. And if you got more and more, how wonderful that would be. Because our thoughts do have an effect. Thoughts are mind.
Mind is immensely powerful. That’s why we come to teachings, for someone’s thoughts to affect us. So my thoughts are trying to reflect the Buddha’s thoughts but because my mind is a disaster the benefit is not much. But if you hear the teachings of the Dalai Lama, this is coming from the mind of a truly great practitioner. So that mind has incredible influence on our mind.
I mean, if we are open to it, if we want to be influenced by it. So by doing this practice, cultivating the Four Immeasurable Thoughts, it’s definitely benefiting our mind but we should also think that it is contributing something to the world. As His Holiness says, if we can’t benefit others, at least don’t harm them. So by cultivating these thoughts sincerely, we are reducing our negative thoughts and tendency to react with negative thoughts to people.
So this itself is a contribution to the peace and happiness of others and acts as a positive condition where if one is in a loving environment then it is easier for oneself to develop loving kindness. If one is in a hateful environment, it’s very easy for oneself to fall into the tendency to be hateful. Very quickly in the last five minutes. One reflects firstly how wonderful it would be if oneself and all sentient beings had happiness and the causes of happiness. So we start with ourself, then we we then develop that, try and generate that thought sincerely to those people we already like, have affection for, family and friends.
Then to strangers. And then what is really important is to try and cultivate that thought to people who we know dislike us, people we dislike, people who are negative in some way. So again, one should start with people, not people who one has a great aversion to, but try and generate a sincere thought of love towards someone who has a little bit of dislike to train the mind step by step. And then try and encompass all sentient beings, all human beings, all the beings in the different realms. As I said last week in relation to equanimity, first we can you know, the statement says the prayer says how wonderful it would be.
But maybe firstly, we should check up, would it be wonderful? Do I agree it would be wonderful if all sentient beings had happiness? Do I really want all sentient beings to be happy? Or are there some sentient beings I would like to be miserable, who I want to suffer? Are there these bad, evil people I want to suffer whom I want to suffer because they’re bad.
In fact, this is the general human attitude that there are people who deserve to suffer because they’ve done bad things. But of course, if there are other people who deserve to suffer because they’ve done bad things, terrible things, because there are people, of course, who have done terrible things, are doing terrible things right now, will do terrible things the future. So if I think they deserve to suffer, they should suffer, they must suffer, it’s only just that they suffer, then that means I should suffer. I deserve to suffer because I’ve done terrible things. Maybe not in this life, but in past lives for sure.
So if there’s anyone else who deserves to suffer, I deserve to suffer too because I have done that terrible thing in a past life. We’ve all done these terrible things in past lives. Because there’s been infinite past lives, and as I was saying, when the conditions are there, it’s very easy to do terrible things. It’s very easy to be nice when things are going well. Sorry if I repeat.
The story of the Titanic is a wonderful example. When the boat is going along and everyone is nice, wearing their diamonds, having parties, being charming to each other. But when the boat when the boat starts sinking, then people’s, you know, nice manners completely change. Then the really ugly self-cherishing thought takes over. Sometime ago, a few years ago, there was a ferry boat that sunk somewhere in Sweden on there was a a regular ferry boat that went from one island to the mainland or something like this.
People were on a shopping trip, hundreds of people. It was at night and it sank. Virtually the only people who survived that ferry, that sinking, were young men. All the old people, know, women and children first, completely forgotten. The young men, because they’re the strongest ones, just climbed over everyone else and saved themselves.
I’m not trying to blame them, but that’s just a self-cherishing thought. It’s just when the fear of suffering and dying comes, you just want to survive. So when horrible conditions are there, people will do Of course sometimes people do wonderful things in horrible situations, unbelievably selfless things. But in general, when the horrible conditions are there, that’s when people can do our self-cherishing and can cause us to do truly horrible things. Why am I talking about this?
Oh, so in past lives we have been in horrible situations, therefore done terrible things. Just like people now do terrible things because of all sorts of conditioning. Conditioning from this life, conditioning from past lives. So if there are people who deserve to suffer, I also deserve to suffer. But the Buddha is saying no one really deserves to suffer because everyone does things out of ignorance and out of confusion.
If the Buddha thought people deserved to suffer, he would never have come and taught us. That’s the really important thing to reflect on. If we’ve all created the causes to suffer, and if the Buddha thought then you deserve to suffer, then he wouldn’t have taught the Dharma of how to avoid suffering. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all sentient beings could have happiness? Especially the horrible people, because if they were happy, they wouldn’t do terrible things.
I’m going to stop there because we have our concluding sorry, any questions? Or maybe just very quickly in one line. Mahāyāna practice is not just wanting sentient beings to have happiness but it is particularly in the third line where it says ‘I myself will cause them to have this’. It is not good enough just to want sentient beings to have happiness because they are lacking it but I have to help them. I have to help them.
I have to create the conditions around each being so that they will create the causes. So they will know what the causes of happiness are and so that they’ll be able to create them. So I’m going to do that. That’s my job because they’ve been so kind to me. So to do that, I have to really work on myself.
I have to overcome my negative limitations and obscurations and really cultivate all my positive potentials so I can help every sentient being create the causes of happiness. Okay. That is our job description. So we can dedicate the merit. Hopefully some merit, some positive imprints made in the mind.
Some merit, some good understanding. So we can dedicate that this becomes a cause for us to be able to develop great equanimity, great love, all the immeasurable thoughts so that we can quickly achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. If you would like to turn to page eight, we do the dedications in English. Through the merit of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of a Guru Buddha and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the precious Bodhimind, not yet born, arise and grow.
May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore. The objective refuge of myself and of all transmigratory beings in all our lifetimes is the embodiment of the Three Jewels, the all encompassing three refuges in one, the Guru, the wish granting jewel, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, the Master Padmasambhava, the Dharma King Songtsen Gampo and Trisong Detsen, the Abbot Shāntarakshita and the numberless holy beings who preserved and spread the Buddhadharma in Tibet and the Tibetan people who practiced and served Buddhism so faithfully for a thousand years, as well as those who along with many others died sacrificing their lives for Tibet and his holiness. May all their positive wishes be fulfilled immediately. Due to their limitless kindness, the Sun of Tibetan Buddhism has now risen in the West, which was a dark land. I have met with the Dharma.
I have received the perfect human body, enabling me to lead a meaningful life. Our refuge and savior, the supreme one, his holiness, the Dalai Lama, and the Tibetan people have been so kind to us. Remembering this, we make the following dedication prayers. May all his holiness, the Dalai Lama’s wishes be successful immediately. May the snow land of Tibet achieve pure freedom and develop the Buddhadharma even more than before in Tibet.
And may all mother transmigratory beings achieve enlightenment quickly. Savior of the snow land teachings and transmigratory beings who makes extremely clear the path that is unification of emptiness and compassion to the lotus holder Tenzin Gyatso, I beseech, may all your holy wishes be spontaneously fulfilled. You who uphold the Subduer’s moral way, who serve as the bountiful bearer of all, sustaining, preserving, spreading Mañjuśrī’s victorious doctrine, who masterfully accomplished magnificent prayers honoring the Three Jewels, savior of myself and others, your disciples, please, please live long. Lord of Dharma, who in accordance with the various dispositions of those to be subdued, makes clear in the light of your well spoken advice the sacred Ganden tradition essence of Buddha’s teachings. O foremost and holy Lama to you who are supreme.
O Lama, please, please live long. Thank you very much. So we finish