Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 20-minute talk, Ven Thubten Dondrub teaches the foundation of Buddhist meditation practice, starting with a guided nine-round breathing exercise that pairs breath awareness with visualization—breathing in white light through the left nostril to cultivate calm and clarity, exhaling black smoke through the right to release negativity. He then frames why meditation matters: the Buddha’s core insight that suffering arises not from the external world but from mental afflictions like anger, attachment, and ignorance, and that genuine happiness comes from cultivating wisdom, compassion, and loving-kindness. Dondrub stresses that effective Buddhist practice requires three things—understanding the teachings behind meditation, learning actual techniques, and integrating practice into daily life rather than treating it as an isolated exercise. He addresses common obstacles head-on: the mind’s natural resistance to control after beginningless time, physical discomfort in meditation posture, and the sustained effort required. Suitable for beginners and anyone establishing a regular practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 DB White Light Mp3.mp3
UUID: 16bc9c37-f6b2-4257-b131-3a96f4b0a60a
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB How to Meditate (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2013 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 20.5 minutes
Words: ~1,945
So then, to to make this, time of listening to the Dharma as effective as possible, we can spend a little bit of time doing the nine round breathing exercise. So firstly, we can start by just sitting comfortably in the correct posture, the Vairochana posture, as much as possible. So just placing your legs in whatever way is comfortable, but particularly paying attention to the positioning of your spine so that it’s as straight as possible. Your upper body is positioned so that you’re not leaning forwards or backwards or to either side. And can raise your shoulders up and back a little bit and then relax them and then straighten your head.
Tuck your chin in slightly to position your head properly so that it’s not tilted down or lifted too high. Also place your right hand on top of the left with the thumbs lightly touching resting your hands in your lap close to your body but so your elbows and upper arms are not touching the sides of your body just a little bit away. So relax your jaw, have your mouth lightly closed and the tip of your tongue resting at the top of the back row of teeth. And you can have your eyes closed but it is much better to meditate with your eyes just a little bit open. Just very slightly directing your gaze just a short distance down in front of you but without actively looking.
So then just for a very very short time place your awareness at the crown of your head and then just move it down through your body just for a very short time this time not over a long period. Just to fine tune your posture. And you may notice different points of tension as you move your awareness down through your body. And you might start to be aware that that tension tends to exist because one is unconsciously pulling inwards and holding on as one does that. So simply by being aware of that process we can start to gently let go of it.
So now move your attention away from the awareness of the body to your breathing and we do the nine round breathing exercise. But this time as we do it we can add another aspect which is with each in breath in the cycle, imagine as you’re breathing in and you focus we start as we breathe in through both nostrils, but we focus on being aware of the breath coming in the left nostril for the first three breaths. So with those three in breaths focus on imagining as you breathe in and being aware of the breath that you’re also breathing in this blissful white light. You can imagine it coming from the Buddha, this perfect source. And that white light as you breathe it in brings great calmness and clarity and stillness to the mind.
And then with the out breath, where you focus on the breath going out the right nostril for the first three breaths, imagine that you breathe out any agitation existing in your mind right now. All disturbing thoughts, all negative imprints, all negative habits and instincts and so on, All suffering and confusion. Imagine you breathe all of that out in the form of black smoke with each out breath. And that smoke just completely disappears. So you do that for three breaths.
Breathing in white light through the left nostril. Black smoke out the right nostril for three breaths. Then the next three breaths you reverse it, breathing in the white light through your right nostril. All negativity is in the form of black smoke out your left nostril. And then for the final three breaths of the cycle breathing in the white light through both nostrils.
Breathing out all negativities in the form of black smoke through both nostrils. Okay. Thank you. So tonight I particularly want to talk about, as it says in the outline, about concentration meditation or placement meditation. But just briefly again just to recapitulate a few points.
So the very basis of Buddhism is an understanding that we have a mind. Our mind is the basis of all experience, particularly every experience has an aspect of either being something pleasant or unpleasant. It has a quality of either being suffering or happiness. And what the Buddha discovered, the most simple discovery, discovery of the Buddhism is that the source of our suffering doesn’t lie in the external world but in our mind. And specifically the source of our, the very root of our suffering lies in what are called, well in Sanskrit they’re called klesha which are translated as either delusions, afflictions or disturbing thoughts.
And the three principal ones are anger, afflicted desire and attachment. Afflicted desire and attachment are like a little team that go together and the very root of all suffering, ignorance. So when those are active, they are suffering and they lead us to create the causes of more suffering. They create negative karma, we act on them and create negative imprints. Those negative imprints ripen as more suffering.
And the Buddha discovered that the real source of happiness lies within our own mind specifically the positive mental factors, particularly of wisdom, compassion, loving kindness, and so on. These are the true source, the actual source of happiness. When those mental factors arise, there is happiness, and we act on them and create the causes of more happiness. And all of those virtuous mental factors are a reflection of the true nature of our mind because our mind in reality is complete, pure and perfect. We have this Buddha quality within us.
But that Buddha quality is obscured by ignorance and all our disturbing thoughts. So the whole purpose of Buddhist practice is to get rid of those obscurations so that we have not only have less suffering, we don’t have any suffering, and more than that, we awaken to the state of enlightenment which not only does not cause or lead to any suffering to anyone, it leads to all sentient beings experiencing perfect happiness. Learning to meditate which is how to really effectively work with the mind is really important. Actually it is vital If one believes the Buddha’s teachings, it’s absolutely vital. However much we do it and however well effectively we do it, that much we will free ourselves from suffering.
That much we will create the conditions for genuine happiness and well-being. So what we need to do is to get into the habit of learning to meditate and practicing meditation as much as we can or at least establishing some kind of regular continuity of Dharma practice. And as I was trying to say, started to say last week, Dharma practice I’m sorry, not Dharma practice, but meditation practice needs to be done for it to really work, especially when we’re looking at it from a Buddhist perspective. It needs to be in the it’s it’s not something that is done in isolation, which is what a lot of people are doing these days. You know people do yoga classes, they do meditation classes or they just meditate at home.
But it’s just something that is done for a short time, but it’s not really an integral integrated with a real understanding of what it actually exists for, what its purpose is. So to do it properly in the Buddhist context, we really need to know the Buddhist teachings as much as possible. Right? And and also we need to receive teachings like I’m trying to do a little bit in a simple way here on how to meditate the actual techniques themselves. So we need to understand the Buddhist path as much as possible so that we know how to meditate, why to meditate, and we have the proper motivation to meditate.
And we can sustain the practice by knowing how how vital it is. Because if we don’t understand those things, then we won’t meditate much. We won’t meditate very effectively, and we will tend to give it up because although I shouldn’t emphasize this, maybe I shouldn’t even say it at all, real meditation is, involves hard work. Yeah? Like one or two people wrote down saying, I find it very difficult to control my mind.
I find it almost impossible to control my thoughts. I find it even difficult to sit still. But this is usually the case for most people unless they have very, very strong imprints from past lives. Most of us find it difficult to sit still and also to sit comfortably. It’s very painful sitting this way.
That’s why most of you are sitting in chairs, but I would encourage you to try, especially when you’re meditating, to sit on the ground. I am not trying to embarrass you or make you feel guilty or give you a hard time and all those things but it is good to try and put that effort because yeah anyway. There are all sorts of reasons to sit in the actual position and put up with the pain. Really. Is great purification really.
Great purification of putting up with all of that somehow. Yes. So the body gives us lots of problems, difficulties, but also for sure our mind gives us lots of problems. It’s not easy. Concentrating the mind doesn’t come naturally.
Our mind since beginningless time has naturally been uncontrolled. And this is another way of looking what the Buddha’s teachings are about. The Buddha is telling us that an unknown what’s the word? Anyway, the uncontrolled mind is the source of our suffering. Whereas when we learn to control our mind, that’s when real peace and contentment starts to come.
The more we are able to really control our mind, which I and I don’t mean by that, like really giving our mind, you know, repressing things in our mind, but learning to to work with our mind in a in a wise, compassionate way so that we can pacify all this this stuff going on. When we the more we learn that, then there is real there is some real genuine peace and contentment right now, and it is the sort the basis to be able to create the cause for for everlasting peace and contentment. So knowing the teachings, is is an important aspect of learning to meditate, especially when we come to the other type of meditation which is analytical meditation which is very much emphasized in the Tibetan tradition, especially the tradition that is followed at Buddha House which is what is called the Gelug tradition established by Lama Tsongkhapa in the fourteenth century. It’s the tradition that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama is most associated with. Okay, so that’s one thing to know the teachings more and more, to put effort into learning those.
That’s really important. But also another aspect in establishing a Dharma practice, sorry, a meditation practice so it will be effective is integrating meditation with one’s daily life. If we lead a life which is extremely busy and stressful and full of anxiety and also involves a lot of, from the Buddhist point of view, not so virtuous actions. But we also then meditate. These two things are just fighting each other.
Right? We need to harmonize the two. In other words, to use this horrible expression, our lifestyle our lifestyle should should harmonize with what we’re trying to do in meditation. So what we’re trying to do in meditation is at the very least subdue the negative tendencies within it.