Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 97-minute session on karma, Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores the law of cause and effect as the foundation of Buddhist practice, contrasting it with theistic and materialist worldviews. He begins by establishing why karma matters within the Mahāyāna framework—that understanding cause and effect is essential for developing renunciation, compassion, and wisdom—before walking through the four determining factors that shape karmic imprints: intention (motivated by one of the three poisons), object, the act itself, and completion (including whether one rejoices or regrets). He then introduces the four principal aspects of karma (definiteness, unfailing result, endurance of imprints, and expansion of results) and distinguishes between throwing karma, which determines rebirth, and completing karma, which ripens within a lifetime. The teaching moves into the four ripening results of negative actions: the rebirth in lower realms, the experience similar to the cause, the habit similar to the cause, and the environmental result—illustrating each with concrete examples of how killing, stealing, or harsh speech create specific patterns of suffering. Throughout, Venerable Dondrub emphasizes recognizing one’s own past actions, relating the teachings to oneself honestly, and understanding that avoiding negative actions is itself virtuous. Suited for newer practitioners encountering Buddhist ethics for the first time, as well as those reviewing the foundations.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Karma week 2.mp3
UUID: c1c7adcf-8ae3-49f9-a7b5-d306a5f8cbd8
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Karma (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2018 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 97.4 minutes
Words: ~12,766
Welcome everyone to our Discovering Buddhism program All About karma. So this is our second class on All About karma. So this is taught from the Mahāyāna perspective and the Mahāyāna teachings of the Buddha are all about helping us to recognise that we have a mind, our mind has Buddha nature, Buddha potential and it’s so important to Right now our Buddha potential is obscured, but it’s so important to recognise that we have the ability to eliminate all the obscurations that are covering our mind, free that Buddha potential and achieve the enlightened state. And the reason to achieve the enlightened state is, of course, will achieve what we’ve always wanted to achieve, is to be free of all suffering and its causes and to experience peerless, everlasting happiness. But the main reason to achieve enlightenment is to be in a position to repay the kindness of sentient beings.
Recognising, which is what the teachings show us, they help us to recognise that our existence is totally intertwined with the existence of every sentient being, it always has been and always will be, that we totally depend on their kindness and amazingly we’ve received that kindness in every conceivable form from every sentient being many many many times. Every kind of support and help and kindness you can imagine, every kind we have received from every sentient being. Every kind of sentient being, no, every kind of help, benefit that’s possible, we have received in the past from every sentient being, not just one time, many, many times. Even the people who hate us and would like to kill us now have been immensely kind to us in the past and will be in the future. And all these beings are suffering in saṃsāra helplessly.
They’re completely unaware of it. We are also stuck in saṃsāra, but at least having met the Buddha’s teachings, we’re beginning to hopefully recognize this situation but also understand that there is a way to get out of it and we have discovered the method, the path that enables us to get out of saṃsāra. But the Mahāyāna teachings encourage us not to just get out of saṃsāra ourselves, but by recognising we have Buddha nature it means that in the process of getting out of saṃsāra ourselves we can help everyone become free of suffering, to get out of cyclic existence. And more than that, not just to get out of the prison, because, you know, in an ordinary situation someone can be in prison, get out of prison, but it’s better than being in prison, but they’re all left alone out there. So just getting out of saṃsāra’s well, saṃsāra’s quite different because you’re in Nirvāṇa.
This getting too complicated. But anyway, what I’m trying to say is there’s something more than just getting out of saṃsāra, which is this amazing state of enlightenment. So more than just helping people become free of suffering, we can help them to achieve peerless everlasting happiness. And so this is the motivation that Mahāyāna teachings emphasise and this is what our teachers encourage us to try and generate in all the things we do, to motivate ourselves with the thought that whatever I do with my body, speech and mind day after day may it not cause suffering to sentient beings, may it either directly or indirectly lead to their incredible benefit. So especially when we’re studying those teachings, then we really try to generate that bodhicitta motivation as much as possible.
So please try to do so if you can. Thinking about one’s Buddha nature, especially recognising that one has a precious human rebirth, the optimum chance to realise one’s Buddha nature, and there is this incredible need to do so because sentient beings are suffering helplessly and they have been so kind. So there’s the prayer on page twelve if you’d like to join in. One time in Tibetan, twice in English. And as we do that prayer it can be helpful to visualise or imagine the Buddha in front of you as the embodiment, especially if one’s taken refuge, Buddha is our refuge, source of inspiration and guidance, we can, so we can have that inspiration in front of us, but also be motivated by thinking of all sentient beings surrounding us, especially those we’re most connected to in this life, so our mother on our left, father on our right, family, friends and helpers behind us, harmers in front and then as much as possible all other sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create through listening to the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create through teaching the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So thinking the Buddha is very pleased with our motivation, can imagine the Buddha now coming to the crown of our head and then when directly above our crown, the Buddha dissolves into blissful golden light so that that light can then pour down into us blessing our mind, especially blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings the way they’re meant to be understood, blessing our mind to be able to put especially the teachings on the law of cause and effect and blessing our mind to be able to put these teachings into practice correctly and blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain the unmistaken realisation.
So then just for a very short time, we can do the nine round breathing exercise just to let the mind become a little bit more calm and clear so that we can use that more focused mind to be able to listen to and think about the Buddha’s teachings tonight. Okay, thank you. So as I mentioned last week, basically there exists in the world really only three explanations or attempts at explanations of why things exist, why things happen to us. And one of these explanations is related to the theistic view of a creator god or other gods that has created the world and controls the world. There is that view.
There is or there is the view of and of course if this view is true then it we really depend on this God to be nice to us and somehow so we have to pray like crazy and make all sorts of offerings because at least from a Buddhist point of view this God is very unpredictable in bestowing kindness on others. Some people suffer, some people don’t and it doesn’t seem, you know, why does God make some people suffer, others bring them happiness and so on. Then there is the scientific materialistic view or just the materialistic view that basically there is no cause for things happening. I mean, are small causes, you know, why do we have a car accident? Oh, it’s because, you know, this car was going at this speed in these conditions and that, and so crunch.
Yes of course Buddhism doesn’t deny that also but the question arises why was I doing that at that time to experience that car crash? You know, or you know there’s really bad diseases that spread around the world or in a particular area and some people get them and some people don’t and there can be physical explanations up to a point why that happened, why that disease was there at that time, but why did it happen to that person and why did that person get sick or die from it, that person didn’t and that person wasn’t even touched by it. Why? Or a bomb explodes and why did that person die? Well because they were there when the BAM exploded but why was that person there at that time?
Why that particular person at that particular time? The scientific explanation doesn’t really explain that other than to say bad luck or good luck, which is no real explanation. And then there is the Buddhist explanation, the Buddha’s explanation, which is that things have a cause. So of course this is extremely difficult to prove and the law of cause and effect is very, very complicated and very, very subtle and it also takes a really long time to really think about all the aspects of it. But there are indications, there’s a lot of logic to it.
Why do things happen to us? And especially if we start to understand, which is an even more, you know, equally complicated subject, one of the essential teachings of the Buddha about the nature of reality, which particularly emphasises that things exist very much depending on our mind. So if one starts to see that, you know, understand those teachings to some extent and the truth of those teachings, then the law of cause and effect makes so much more sense. Because also the idea of a creator God makes sense if the world exists the way it appears to us, as something completely out there, separate, independent of us, then why is it, how is it there? Well, the idea of a creator god makes some sense if the world is really out there totally separate from us, very concretely there, but many scientific views and philosophical views and especially the Buddha’s teachings say that the world isn’t out there concretely the way it appears, even though it appears so convincingly that way, it doesn’t exist that way.
It actually is very much dependent moment by moment on our mind and also the collective minds of all beings. And if that’s true, then the law of cause and effect makes so much more sense that what we encounter in our life and the way we experience that encounter, if it depends on our mind, then the law of cause and effect makes a lot of sense, that everything has a cause and it’s really and what we think of is that we as ordinary confused people, especially worldly people think is the cause of our happiness and the cause of our suffering — these are causes but they’re only secondary causes or what in Buddhist terminology are called the conditions of happiness and suffering. They’re not the actual root cause. The root cause, the Buddha says, is coming from within our mind. Because I can’t explain this properly myself because I don’t really understand it all myself if I’m honest, which I have to be, but I have some inklings and I do have some faith in these teachings.
But, for example, if we have a car crash, of course there’s all that physical stuff going on, you know, head bangs into the glass thing and the thing puffs up, you know, what’s the name, metal bangs into you and all these stuff and you know, skin gets torn and blood comes out and bones get broken, it’s all very physical concrete stuff. But at a more deeper level, how is this happening? It is an experience of mind. The mind is experiencing this. So why does the mind experience a car crash?
Just because a car crunched into you for no reason? That’s the totality of the explanation? No, it’s not from a Buddhist point of view, there has to be a cause. Because I will now go into my I forgot to well, there’s so many things to say. But, you know, I was saying last week that, you know, if this was a pot of water, cold water, and you want to make it hot, you have to have a cause that will make it hot.
And the cause has to be of the same nature as the effect. So if you want a hot effect, you have to have a hot cause, but also there has to be a direct relationship between the cause and the effect. You can’t have the fire here and the pot of water there, it’s not going to turn hot. There has to be that absolutely direct connection. So also just to maybe extend that analogy back to the tomato seeds and some of you have heard this all this stuff before but anyway, if you were given like a box of soil produced by the CSIRO as the perfect tomato growing soil, yeah, in a nice tomato growing box.
And you were given from the CSIRO does that still exist, that poor or has the Government stopped funding it anyway The best tomato seeds possible, yeah, so if you have the box there and packet of seeds there you’re not going to get tomatoes, right? You have to plant the tomatoes and you put the seeds in the ground and you need all the right conditions of not just the good soil but right temperature, sunlight, right amount of sunlight at the right time and blah blah blah. And so you put the seeds in the soil and where are those tomato bushes going to grow? They will only grow where the seed is. If you put the seed there, you’ve got the tomato seed and you put the tomato seed there and you’ve got all the right conditions, the bush doesn’t grow here.
It grows where the seed is and only where the seed is. I don’t know if this is valid logic but for me what I’m trying to say is this shows that although you need the right conditions, well you need the right to get a tomato or tomato bush with tomatoes on it, you not only need the core, the tomato seed, but you also need the conditions. But the fact that the result only is where the seed is shows that although you have to have the cause and the conditions, the most important thing is the seed. Because even though you’ve got all the conditions for the tomatoes to grow here, it’s the same soil, same water, same sun, if the cause isn’t there you don’t get the plant. If you’ve got a tomato plant here and no conditions, you’ve got a tomato seed here but no soil etc, you don’t get a tomato plant.
But where you’ve got the conditions and the seed you get the soil. Did that make sense? I hope so. Right. So you can be in the middle of a bubonic plague, right, all the conditions are there but if one hasn’t created the cause to get the plague, you don’t.
You know there were people who looked after people dying of the plague in the ancient, you know, medieval times who died from taking care because they got exposed and there are other people who didn’t. Why? Oh, good luck, bad luck. No, that doesn’t say anything. That’s saying there’s no cause for anything or God smote them or didn’t smite them.
But the Buddha says, yes, there is a reason why some didn’t get the plague, some did, some did. Some didn’t create the cause, some did. That’s what the law of cause and effect is all about. And it’s not saying, you know, you suffer because you’re bad and people don’t suffer because they’re good, it’s if we create a cause we get the result. People go out to get a suntan and later on, twenty years later, you get skin cancer.
People who went suntanning didn’t do it to get skin cancer. They did it to get a suntan but they didn’t know that if you do this, you know, you can get cancer. But if you create the cause, you get the result. Whether you know about it or not, yeah, you may not know it’s good, you don’t know if it’s bad, you just do it because this is at the time, this is what you want, you think it’s necessary, whatever, but you create a cause, there is a result. Mostly, most of the time we don’t know what the results are.
We think we know what the results are. We think if you rob a bank the result is you become rich very quickly. Looks like that but actually the cause of robbing a bank is you end up, you know, well, there’s many horrible results. Buddha says you get reborn in the lower realms, even when you eventually get bored as a human being, the karmic result of stealing is you experience incredible poverty, a lack of resources of every kind. The karmic result of stealing is not to become rich, the actual result is to become incredibly poor.
Whereas the karmic result of giving is not to end up losing your resources, you get a lot eventually. Unfortunately not straight away usually, but later on. That was, yeah, I got carried away there as usual. So anyway what I’m trying to say is please think about this, there’s only these three things that there’s God control a God or Gods controlling everything or there’s nothing controlling anything, it’s just total chaos and arbitrary or there is a law functioning for why things happen and particularly if we relate this to ourselves, why do I experience things? Why do I experience them in this way?
And the Buddha says there is a cause so one has to decide what is the truth, what explains things. So the Buddhist view is that there is a law of cause and effect and I would say, I mean of course one can say that the wisdom teachings of the Buddha are the most important teachings of the Buddha, one could also say the teachings on bodhicitta about loving kindness and compassion and benefiting all sentient beings are the most important teachings of the Buddha, but also one could say argue that the most important teaching of the Buddha is the law of cause and effect because all of the teachings of the Buddha are about achieving enlightenment and to achieve enlightenment one has to develop three major qualities which is renunciation, renouncing cyclic existence, developing bodhicitta and developing wisdom. And all of those three things are dependent on understanding and putting into practice the law of cause and effect. Because in a very, just very very simply, to renounce saṃsāra one has to renounce the causes of suffering and create the causes of happiness and that’s all, and that can only be done by understanding the law of cause and effect and understanding certain things I do are negative, are creating the cause of suffering and perpetuating saṃsāra, whereas other actions bring positive results and can actually undermine saṃsāra.
Remember what is saṃsāra? It’s not a place, a thing, it’s referring to our mind being controlled by delusion and karma. So if we want to get out of saṃsāra, we want to get out of saṃsāra, if we want to get a good rebirth, if we want even just less suffering in this life and a bit more genuine happiness, we have to understand and put into practice the law of cause and effect. And then, you know, bodhicitta. bodhicitta is, you know, this unbelievable wish to achieve enlightenment but it’s based on developing great compassion for all beings and great love for all beings, but to develop that one has to first develop genuine love and compassion for oneself and I think it’s so important to understand that the law of cause and effect which can also be kind of brought down to being a moral person, eek, no one wants to be a moral virtuous person in our world, that is so uncool, even the word ‘virtuous’ makes people want to vomit.
But that’s what it’s really all about. You know, people don’t have teachers saying I’m trying to be virtuous, you would never get a boyfriend or a girlfriend with a tagline that says that or maybe some places you might but sorry I’m raving, I can’t help it, where am I? Yeah, but actually the law of cause and effect and practising morality, what is it really about? At the most basic level it’s about developing love and compassion for oneself. Compassion, you know, is about not wanting to suffer, so avoiding negative actions is avoiding the cause of suffering.
One is being really compassionate to oneself when one stops engaging in negative actions. And what is love? Love is wanting happiness and so when we engage in virtuous actions we’re creating the cause of happiness. In other words, it’s an act of love for ourselves. But also if we stop harming others with our negative actions, this is being compassionate to them.
If we have some compassion for people, we will stop harming them and if we, you know, and if we have some love for sentient beings we will engage in virtuous actions to benefit them directly or indirectly. So observing the law of cause and effect is an intimate aspect of developing this amazing mind of bodhicitta and loving kindness and compassion. And then of course wisdom is all about understanding how everything arises depending on causes and conditions in one’s own mind. So it depends on understanding the law of cause and effect. And the Buddha said and his, that, well no, probably the Buddha said this as well, but specifically the great Nāgārjuna, the great bodhisattva Nāgārjuna who reintroduced the wisdom teachings, the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras, into the world after they’d disappeared after the Buddha’s parinirvana.
Nāgārjuna said something along the lines of until you have realised the wisdom, you know, the wisdom of emptiness that you know frees us from all suffering, how did he say, something like, until one’s realised that wisdom, the ordinary person’s wisdom is the law of cause and effect. We are being incredibly wise by following the law of cause and effect and by following it we, our wisdom, you know, the heart, you know, the different levels of wisdom will increase. Because why do we engage in negative actions for example is because we’re grasping that this person is, you know, an I, you know, this truly existing I is being harmed and person is truly existingly evil, you know. Why do I crave things because this is truly, truly beautiful, inherently existing beautiful, so we are just reinforcing our wrong views. So when we avoid negative actions and engage in virtuous actions, we are indirectly but still to some extent lessening or we’re not reinforcing the wrong view of self, the wrong view that I and everything is inherently existing.
And yeah, so it’s all connected. So the law of cause and effect to understand it and live one’s life by it is incredibly incredibly important. It is a very key to all aspects of the Buddhadharma. So just very quickly, so if everyone wants to turn to page, what is it, page twenty. So just quickly what we went through last week were the four factors of the four principal aspects of karma, which is that it is definite, that a negative cause always produces a negative result, whether we know it or not, believe it or not, conscious of it or not, this is how things work.
A positive cause, a virtuous cause always produces a positive result. A result always produces, you know, to get a result you have to have a cause. If we’re experiencing happiness, it means we’ve created the cause for it. If we’re experiencing suffering, it means we’ve created the cause for it. If we’re not experiencing some kind of happiness, it means we haven’t created the cause.
So if we’re experiencing something, it means there is a cause for it and the cause has been generated by our mind sometime in the past. Then the third factor is that once those imprints are created by our actions of body, speech and mind, they endure, they don’t disappear. They will stay with the mind and eventually ripen, with the two exceptions that we are able to purify negative imprints, and there’s a specific way which I’ll go into later on in the course, and but also unfortunately our positive imprints can be destroyed by especially very strong anger but also very strong craving and other strong disturbing thoughts. And the final of the four major aspects of karma is that when the karmic imprint does ripen, the result is of a far greater intensity and duration than the energy that goes into creating it. You know, one small positive or negative action can result in lifetimes of suffering or happiness.
There are many stories of in the Sūtra of like for example someone killing an animal and as a result they had five hundred, were born for five hundred lifetimes in the lower realms. And each of those lifetimes can last an awfully long time. So the four determining factors, I went through those pretty quickly last week, but also another thing I mentioned is that there are two kinds of karmic imprints generated. Very strong ones are called the complete, very powerful ones. They’re so powerful that they determine the type of, you know, when we die, they determine what general kind of rebirth we will have as in the lower realms or the upper realms.
So these are called the throwing karmas. They sort of throw, in a sense, throw or project the consciousness into the next life. And then there are the completing karmas which are not as strong, not as complete, and those completing karmas ripen within a lifetime. So they don’t ripen at the time of death but during a lifetime, right. So the four determining factors are: the impulse or the intention or the motivation.
So it has to be directed to an unmistaken object. If you want to harm a particular person but you end up harming someone else by mistake, then it doesn’t create such a strong imprint in some mysterious way. But anyway, so it has to be directed to an unmistaken object and but to create a negative karma it has to be motivated by either attachment or anger or ignorance or of course it could be a combination of those. But one of the three major negative minds or three poisonous minds, right. So that is actually the most important determining factor in determining the intensity of the karmic imprint and therefore the intensity of the result.
And then there’s the object that you direct the motivation towards, so there has to be an object, an unmistaken object and again depending on how much suffering you cause that object, that much suffering you create the potential for one’s self to experience enormous suffering. So generally speaking, because a human being has more potential for benefit than animals, animals have same nature of mind as ourselves, same Buddha nature, but as an animal that being cannot practice the Dharma, cannot be of great benefit, whereas human beings can. So harming it, like I said last week, these are general guidelines but just so that we can base our behaviour on these general outlines. So generally it is worse to harm any human being than an animal and of course the more virtuous the human being is, more genuinely beneficial to others a human being is. To harm such a person is more negative and especially to harm people that you’re close to, especially your parents or someone who’s helped you in any way is far more negative than to harm someone you’re not connected to or hasn’t benefited you or someone like something like that.
So particularly people who are dedicated to the spiritual life, then it’s worse to harm such people, especially if they are realised beings and of course to harm one’s teacher, one’s root guru or one’s spiritual teachers, is the worst of all. So then also there’s the act itself and the way it is done so you can do good things in a really nice way so that makes the imprint very strong or you can do something good but in a not a particularly nice way so that weak doesn’t make it means the potency of the imprint is less. You can do a negative, you know, a harmful thing in a really harmful way or you could do a harmful thing in a not so harmful way. So there’s many fluctuations, many varieties how much intensity or potential of positive or negative imprint is generated. And then there’s the final factor is the completion that, So we can complete, we create karmic imprints with our body, speech and mind.
So with mind one can have like a really strong train of thought about something very positive or something very negative. So when that train of thought is completed, you come to the conclusion, I will do this thing, for example, I will do this good thing or I will do that bad thing, that is the completion of the mental karma. Right? One may not actually physically act out that thing later on that you’ve decided to do because that’s another type of karma. May decide, I’ll say this nice thing to Fred tomorrow.
Yeah, I will definitely say something really nice to cheer this person up, I will do it. So that creates a karmic imprint and the karma has been completed. But the next day you completely forget to say anything nice to Fred, so you don’t create the karma of speech or you don’t, you know, pat Fred on the back or give him a present, you know, or something, so you don’t create some physical karma. But there is that mental karma has been created, right? So there’s the completion of the act.
But then you can, there’s the other aspect of the completion is when you actually do the thing, how you feel about it, whether you rejoice or you regret it. So rejoicing in a negative action makes makes it more negative, regretting the negative action weakens the negativity, rejoicing in a good action increases the imprint, the positive imprint, the potency and regretting something positive reduces the intensity of the positive imprint. Right? Was that, yeah. This is why rejoicing is one of the very best things to do, is the easiest way to create good karma.
Once upon a time one of the kings of India went to the Buddha and said, how can, you know, I’m a very busy man, I’m married, I’ve got lots of wives, lots kids, I’m a king, I’m very, very busy, I have a palace and lots of possessions and blah, blah, blah, but I do want to practise the dharma, but I don’t want to become a monk, don’t make me become a monk, don’t want to renounce all my stuff. So how can I possibly create any merit because I’ve got all these things, possessions and family and blah blah blah? So the Buddha said, Don’t worry, rejoice in the virtuous actions of others. So of course one can rejoice in one’s own virtue but also one can rejoice in the good things other people do. That creates merit, positive karmic imprints in your mind.
When you read the news or hear the news of someone doing something really good and you rejoice, one is creating merit. If you hear about someone doing something bad and you think, oh great, I’m glad they did that, one is creating lots of negative karma. Do not rejoice in the negative actions of other people is not good. So, sorry, I’ve been Lamrim on a bit. So are there any questions so far that I’ve said from what I’ve said tonight or last week or what you’ve been reading during the week or thinking about during the week.
If there’s anything I can talking about like virtuous karma and non virtuous karma Can you try and speak up a little bit so everyone can hear? Yeah. So when we’re talking about virtuous karma and non virtuous karma, I’m just trying to think about a formal question. So I understand that any action that leads to a happy result is a virtuous action, vice versa. An action which has a suffering result is a non virtuous action.
Yeah. I understand that, but is there a way to be a bit more specific in that? Specific in that? Specific in what sense? Like how do we know, say we’re in a situation and we’re not sure what to do, how do we know if it’s going to be virtuous or non virtuous?
That’s a very good question. Well, this is a very good question but it’s very difficult to answer because like the trillions of things that we do, the varieties of things that we human beings do, there’s trillions and trillions of things. So it’s impossible to have like a calmer dictionary where you look up, you know, what to do in this situation, it’s impossible. So we can, there can only be the genuine, general guidelines for things, right? So you have to check up your, honestly and this of course is not as easy as it sounds, one has to check up your motivation.
Why am I doing this? Yeah. What is the reason I’m doing this? That’s the main thing, because the motivation, that’s the first, the impulse. Are any of the three poisonous minds involved?
Of course, this is pretty heavy, but it is said anything that is done just for the happiness of this life is not good karma because it’s usually caught up with attachment. And is this just for me, for this life, for now? And you know, and to just sort of check what are the possible consequences. But also to know just generally some things you know the Buddha has spoken about and what can be clear. Like we’re getting into the ten non virtuous actions right?
Is it one of those or does it approximate one of the ten non virtues? But it’s really checking up your motivation and is it mixed up with, you know, we talked about last, you know, in the last course on the precious human rebirth, the eight worldly concerns. Is it motivated by one of the eight worldly concerns? So we have to try and avoid, you know. And also to be honest, we also have to accept in this life we all create some negative karma.
It’s practically impossible. You know, we have to accept that, but we have to, you know, in one way we have to accept it. But we to try and reduce how much negative, how many negative actions we engage in and we have to try and if we do engage in a negative action try and do it not rejoicing in it and also trying to purify afterwards. I don’t know if that helps. Because, you know, the mind’s very tricky because at the time of doing something we can I have some embarrassing examples from my own life, which are too embarrassing to explain in public, but of doing things which at the time I thought were okay, even you know, dharmically okay, but actually looking back the motivation wasn’t good at all?
But at the time you kind of convince yourself, you know, this is all okay and virtuous and, you know. Because you can do like a dharma action activity but the reason for doing it might be completely non dharma. You may think it is but it can be completely, you know, you can do a retreat just to impress people. I didn’t do my retreat. It was a very unimpressive retreat by the way.
Or you can go around reciting mantras and hoping everyone sees how holy you are. Or you can become a monk for all the wrong reasons, a monk or a nun for all the wrong reasons. You you can give away your money, know, be generous, so called generous for all the wrong reasons. And you think at the time you’re being virtuous, but then you look back and think, oh, actually I did it for this reason. So it’s very, very tricky, yeah.
So it’s, I mean, one of the factors in all of this is in purifying, in living a purer life and avoiding negative karma and so on is purifying the mind, becoming more sensitive to what is actually going on in one’s mind and also realising that certain things are harmful to other people. Even though our culture accepts that this is good, I’m a monk so I’m about to apologise for this but I shouldn’t because I’ll just be straightforward. Like in Buddhism, one of the five lay precepts which a lay person is encouraged to follow is avoiding out, you know, intoxicants of every kind. But in our culture, you know, not just Western cultures but most worldly cultures, going out and getting drunk and everything is a good thing to do. You’ve got to do this with your friends or have a few not necessarily get drunk but lots of drinks and giving alcohol to your friends is considered a very nice present.
This is really not good. I’m No, I’m not sorry to say. I have to say this as a Buddhist monk, this is not good karma. It’s not good karma to drink and to encourage other people to. Sorry, there I go again.
I know that’s not a popular thing to say and it just sounds a big wowza thing and whatever but this is it. Because the Dharma is about having, trying to have a clear mind. Lama Yeshe used to say, one of his little things was clean clear my dear. He’d give a talk about you know doing this and all the crazy lives we live and he said just we’re trying to be clean clear my dear. It all comes down to being clean clear.
When you, you know, even a few sips, you know, the mind starts to We can be happy without this stuff. And while I’m on the topic, you’ve got, oh, sorry, we’ll never get into the topic. You know, one of the reasons it’s, you know, Buddha is encouraging us to discover is that saṃsāra is awful. Our mind controlled by we can only renounce something if we think it’s horrible. If we think it’s nice we will indulge in it but the Buddha was saying fundamentally, actually when you get down to it saṃsāra is awful, it is awful.
It’s full of suffering, yeah, and the more we see that and the quickly that we see that we will let go and begin to experience some real freedom, some joy and happiness. So, but what do we do when we’re suffering? We try to block it by taking drugs, acceptable drugs like alcohol you know. And the trouble is to some extent it works and that’s the problem from a Buddhist point of view is that it works. It hides the suffering for a while so that one doesn’t do anything serious about it.
One just few glasses of bubbly or a couple of beers and she’s right mate. Sorry, I’m sounding like a real bowser, I know. I’m really into people being happy. I’m not a very good example of a happy person, you have to oh, a Lama passed away. But you meet the llamas, they have to deal with the sufferings of, like His Holiness the Dalai Lama has to deal with the suffering of all his people being wiped out.
But he himself has this incredible joy and just being around him brings that joy. He doesn’t need all that stuff. Excuse me if I’ve upset people and put people off the dharma, I didn’t mean to do that. But I know the dharma doesn’t fit with ordinary mind, know, just that’s why one of the definitions of dharma is that if it’s contrary to what ordinary people think, that’s dharma. If it fits with what ordinary people think, it’s not dharma.
Right. Any questions more? Do I see a hand raised somewhere else? No? Don’t be shy.
Oh yes, yes. Margaret? Is there a simple explanation of karma being expandable? What? Why?
Is there an explanation of why can karma is expandable? Why does it expand? I don’t know, I don’t think there’s a real explanation other than the analogy the Buddha himself gave is that when you plant a seed of a tree you get this huge result. One can see this in ordinary life, why wouldn’t it be the same with our karmic imprints? Because it works both for negative and positive karma.
You could do a small, very small positive action, the karmic result can be enormously good. In the teachings it mentions that in many previous, long before this Buddha appeared in the world, the person who became the monk Ānanda, who was the attendant of the Buddha for thirty years or something, in a previous life he was travelling and he stayed overnight in destroyed monastery. This was, you know, in countless eons ago somewhere in the universe and on the wall at night he saw this image of the Buddha, of a Buddha and he thought how incredibly beautiful that was and he had this thought how wonderful it would be if I could be the attendant of such a being. And that is said to be, that one thought he had became the cause for him to become the attendant of Śākyamūni Buddha and become an arhat. In the teachings it says, if you give a glass of water to your Guru with the thought that the Guru is Buddha, sky is the merit.
It is inconceivable the karmic result of giving a glass of water to your root Guru thinking with genuinely thinking that my Guru is a Buddha, I am offering this water to the Buddha. You cannot conceive the karmic result. But there’s no explanation of that, you either have to believe it or not. You can say, oh this is just Buddhist advertising or there’s some very profound truth to it. But look, in our life when we do things the ripple effect can be enormous.
That can go on for years and years and also affect many, many people but also ourselves in so many, many, many ways. Just one thing, good or bad. Oh, no, I’ve some people complained I didn’t finish last week and I’m not gonna I haven’t even started tonight’s tonight’s topic. And who’s ringing the bell? When?
How much have we got more, half an hour? Or less? Twenty. Because we’ve got to have a discussion, right? Yeah.
Oh, and that’s it? Oh my god, no. Okay, so then the other thing I wanted to talk about is, well there’s a whole lot to talk about, but there is the So if we create a complete karma with all of those four factors present and strong, that creates a throwing karma. So a throwing karma has four results, four results. The first result which is called I should know all these things after forty years but there’s different meanings, yeah, is the ripening result.
This is in topic number three or the three results of negative actions, actually there are four because result number two is divided into two bits, so really there are four results of negative action. There’s also four results of positive actions but in the teachings it’s always easier to give examples in relation to negative karma. But anyway the first one is the ripening result. So if one creates a strong negative throwing karma, yeah, then the ripening result is definitely to be reborn in one of the lower realms, you won’t be reborn as a human being, depending on how bad that negative action was one will be reborn as an animal or as a preta or in the hell realms. So there is the ripening result, yeah.
So then, now this, some people get confused about this, I’ll try and explain it, is that so for example in this life we kill someone with a very bad motivation and we never regret it, so there’s that throwing karma and for example it ripens at the end of this life and we get reborn in a lower realm. And that rebirth goes on for an enormously long time but because one’s been born in the lower realms there’s many conditions to create more negative karma so one could be reborn in the lower realms for many many many rebirths, yeah. But eventually some good karma will ripen where we get reborn as a human being again, yeah. So then because one is in the human realm again, the conditions, remember the tomato box, the conditions are there for the three other results of having killed someone can ripen as a human being. Yeah?
Are you with me, not lost? So those three results are, in this human life, what one experiences is what is called, the second result is the result similar to the cause and that has two aspects. One is the experience. So for example, and we’ll go into detail about this later on, but just for example, the experience similar to the result of killing is that when one is reborn as a human being one could experience being killed or having a very short life or having a lot of sickness. Yeah, I know, we’re getting on to that later on.
Don’t jump, I’m just giving a general thing here, right? Okay. I do know about these things, yeah. I put it together. Yes, so relax, don’t jump, I’m just giving general introduction rights to give an idea of the results, okay.
So there is the experience similar to, so whatever negative action we do, one of the karmic results is to experience something similar. So if you steal, the karmic result is to have things stolen from you or you may have things but they break very easily or fall apart or you can’t enjoy them properly, like you might inherit a million dollars but there’s a huge illegal wrangle so you can never get the million dollars, so technically you’re a millionaire but you never see the money, yeah, things like that. Anyway so there’s many examples like that. So that’s, and then the other result similar to the cause is that you have the habit. So in this life we murder someone and fall into the lower realms, eventually become a human being, then as a human being one has the tendency to kill, like animals, insects or possibly even human beings.
And you can see that in the extreme form of serial killers who kill many people and often for very kind of obscure reasons why they’re doing it. They’re not people they hate necessarily, they just latch onto someone that they kill. Or like those kleptomaniacs who steal things, they don’t really need them, but they just have to steal. And then there’s also, then the third or fourth result is the environmental result that one is born into, when one is reborn as a human being, one is reborn into an environment that somehow reflects that original negative action. So if one is experiencing the karmic result of killing in a past life as a human being, one is born into an environment which is very violent where there’s perhaps a lot of war and murder and mayhem and violence and also a lot of disease and things like that.
And also depending on the intensity, you know, may experience that one’s whole life, where one is just in a situation of incredible violence and brutality or you know, a place where there’s just horrible sickness all the time or it might just be experienced for a short time. But there is a reason, a cause why we experience everything. And of all of these results my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche says in a sense the worst result is the habit because for example we kill somebody in this life, then as a result one falls into the lower realms, eventually one gets out but then one experiences the other result of perhaps being killed, living in a horrible environment, but then you have the habit of killing, so as a result of that you get reborn in the lower realms again, come back in a horrible environment, you know, get killed again, but you have the habit to kill. So that’s how saṃsāra goes on and on and on and on. On the other hand, on the good side, which I should emphasise, is similarly if we do a virtuous action, we save lives, this is a cause to have a good rebirth, in a very peaceful environment, to have very good health.
One of the things, if you’ve got a terrible disease or sickness, one the very good things that can help that is saving the lives of animals that are going to be killed. There are many interesting stories about how people have, especially if you’ve got some really weird disease, you know, it is possible by saving the lives of lots of animals then one can be cured from that or you know, many things like that. When I lived in Taiwan we did some animal liberation, we’re doing this in Australia as well, but we did it in Taiwan and I was telling the stories to my students in Taiwan and they said, oh that’s nothing, we do this all the time and so many people get all so many benefits yeah because it’s a very popular practice among Chinese Buddhists doing animal liberations. But when I lived in, oh anyway it doesn’t matter, long story. Yeah but anyway my teacher says the habit in many ways is the worst because, yeah, it just perpetuates things but if we get into good habits engaging in virtuous actions then we get all these good results, good rebirths, you know, all these conducive conditions as a human being and then we have the habit.
It’s so much easier to do virtuous things, we want to do virtuous things, we enjoy it. More merit, more good rebirths. How much time have I got? So what I meant to go through with you, but it’s all written out but I wanted to try and just, you know, is starting on page twenty five the ten non virtues are set out and the four factors. That affect the intensity of the karmic imprints and therefore the results.
So the ten non virtues, if one develops some faith that in the law of cause and effect that this is coming from the enlightened mind of the Buddha who perceives things unmistakenly, vividly, directly, exactly and one develops faith that the law of cause and effect is true, then the essential practice in our daily life is really to avoid the ten non virtues. Of course there are infinitely more than ten non virtues, but these ten non virtues are the main ones to avoid because if one engages in any of those with the four factors present then it definitely creates a throwing karma to be born in the lower realms. Definitely. Yeah. And the other reason these are emphasised is that we can as human beings with a precious human rebirth, we can avoid these actions.
We all have the ability to avoid these actions and to purify, you know, if we have done them in the past. A bit of bad news, I’m sorry to pass on to you, is that what we should understand from knowing that we have a mind that is beginningless is that we have in the past, all of us, engaged in all of these ten non virtues many, many, many times. So we have the imprints of these in our consciousness. So if we don’t purify they will ripen at some point. The good news is we have also engaged in the ten virtuous actions and the ten super virtuous actions also many many times so we have all those positive imprints in our mind.
So we have many many terrible negative imprints but we also have many many super positive imprints in our mind. The other bit of bad news is we don’t know, we have no control which ones are going to ripen. Well, but we can start to gain some control because practising the Dharma ensures that, especially when we take refuge, if one feels, develops faith in the Buddha’s teachings, then one can, you know, take refuge and commit oneself to following the Buddha’s teachings, which really means taking care of one’s mind, using the Buddha’s methods to do so because one’s developed the confidence confidence that the Buddha’s teachings, the Buddha’s methods are true and they work. They will work if I practice them. They’re safe, they’re completely safe, they’re totally trustworthy.
So if we take refuge that itself begins to purify all our negative imprints but also we can apply the methods to purify. So that’s incredibly important. So the ten non virtues are divided up into there are three non virtues of body which is killing, stealing and sexual misconduct and then there are four of speech, the four non virtues of speech which is lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, I think harsh is better than in some ways translation than insulting words but harsh speech and idle gossip. And then there are three non virtues of the mind which are covetousness, harmful intent, I think ill will, I usually use the term ill will rather than harmful intent is a bit long. Ill will is about the shortest.
And then wrong views. So these are the ten non virtuous behaviours that we really need to avoid as much as possible. And if we can’t avoid them and engage in and we do end up engaging them in them we should try and develop strong regret for doing it and purify our mind, do the practices to purify the mind. So just very quickly, to engage fully in the negative action of killing it involves killing a living being other than oneself. Suicide is also a negative karma but it’s not as negative as killing another person.
Killing yourself is negative karma. This is the very sad thing, find their lives unbearable so they believe I will stop that suffering by killing myself but they have not the understanding that the mind goes on. So really by killing oneself one is, you know, it can vary but generally it is probably creating the cause for more suffering than the suffering the person is trying to stop by ending their life. So then there’s the intention or the motivation, so that’s you have to recognise unmistakenly the person that you intend to kill, then there has to be that actual conscious motivation to kill the person. It’s not like if you kill an insect or something by walking and you haven’t seen them, you’ve killed them but this isn’t, you’re not creating the full negative karma because there’s the, you don’t have the unmistaken object and you don’t have the conscious wish to kill and you don’t have the disturbing thought motivating that, right.
So you have to have the recognition, the motive and then that motive has to be driven by one of the delusions, either anger, attachment or ignorance. So when we think of killing, you know, we normally think that the motivation for that is anger but it could be attachment, you kill out of attachment either to that person you kill or what, well you’re attached to someone and then someone else’s or that someone you were attached to is going off having an affair with someone else so you kill the other person, something like that. So you might anyway, so the main motivation can be attachment or it could just be simply ignorance, thinking killing a particular person or killing animals is perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with killing animals, they’re just things. So many people believe that.
That it’s okay to kill. You go fishing, know. You retire and go fishing. Spend the rest of your life creating an awful lot of negative karma. Or you go hunting, you know, which is, you know, killing animals, which is considered, you know, very cool and sophisticated and upper class.
Among the upper classes, you know, fox hunting and all that stuff. So our culture says that’s fine. Among some people it’s considered, a great thing and blah blah blah. But again this goes back to what I was talking about in the first talk, know, are so many ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, but these change in cultures and time and everything, but the law of cause and effect I believe is based on something unchanging and universal is that how things affect the mind and the Buddha has seen this and we don’t have to have complete blind faith in this because we can start if we are open to the Buddha’s teachings we can start to check that certain states of mind are suffering. Yeah.
So that suffering cause can only bring more suffering, it can’t bring happiness. Just on that topic, some people might say that, oh, I came to Buddhism because I was suffering a lot, because I was suffering and unhappy I met Buddhism and that now I’m practicing the Dharma and getting happier and happier. So the cause of my happiness is the suffering but that suffering is not the cause of practicing the Dharma, it’s a condition. It’s a condition that led us to meet the Dharma and practice it it and so on. But to have met the Dharma and to have faith in it, one has to have created the cause.
Well I almost finished one of the ten tonight. I’m getting worse as I go along. I’m not improving, yeah. Can I just Are you supposed to discuss that in the discussion group? I can’t give an, I don’t want to give my opinion Well the answer is no.
It’s not. Well put it this way, if the teachings are saying if you do a certain thing, if you, you know, if you do a certain thing and you don’t, having done that thing, then a negative, a new imprint will definitely be created. So and if you don’t, like if we talk about something negative, right, you do a negative thing, a negative thing because karma is different, it will definitely produce a negative result. So if you don’t do anything about that then it is absolutely completely fixed that that will ripen and suffer, but that, but, so it not absolutely definite that that negative imprint will ripen because there are so many things we can do to stop that, modify it. And there are so many many factors operating in relation to, you know, how we deal with that situation.
Fate says you do something absolutely, this is absolutely what is going to unchangingly happen. But karma is not saying that exactly, it is saying, as in one of his wonderful quotes, I don’t know if you read them, it was part of your homework but, from, yes, the quote from the Japanese Zen master, Every existence is a momentary form appearing according to prevailing conditions without a fixed form of its own. The absence of a fixed form is freedom from the law of causation. Having a form which accords with the conditions of the moment is subjection to the law of causation. Therefore the very subjection to the law of causation is tantamount to our freedom from Isn’t that great?
Oh come on, think about it. Well basically it’s saying there is a law operating, you know, it’s not total chaos and because there is a law of how things work, if you work with that law you can be free, you know. But if there was no law operating about how the universe works, we’re doomed, you know. If you throw this up, you know, it comes down. That’s very helpful law.
If you threw it up sometimes and it stayed up things start to get quite difficult operating. You know and if I pour this, you know, it comes out. That means there’s a lot of freedom to do stuff because there’s a law operating. And like if this is molten lead then if I do this then that’s going to be really bad. So now if I know it’s molten lead I won’t do that because I know what the law is, right?
So that being subjected to the law is freedom from it. But fate there’s no freedom. Right? Now I’ll go home and try myself. Tea break.
Good evening everyone. So does everyone have a copy of their homework sheet for for the coming last week. So so some of you are new to this. So the idea is to so firstly, please put your name on there. Sometimes people forget so I know, you know, who who who who you are.
And then the idea is to to try and review the the material that’s been covered in the class. So that’s why I do encourage people to take some notes because I do cover things that are not necessarily in the student material and or necessarily easy to find elsewhere. So it is good to take some notes. So or at least to listen to the the recording. Everyone, good old Peter sends the recording out.
Oh, John. Sorry. Oh, John said in the hiding in the corner there, sends out the recording. Usually, when does it go out, John? What Tomorrow afternoon.
Oh, right. You see? So you can listen to it again. So that that is good. So and it’s really nice to know to find out what you find found sort of interesting relatable and also what you found difficult to understand or accept or whatever.
I’m not asking if you think it’s easy to practice or not because it’s all difficult to practice practice is whether you find intellectually it’s difficult to accept or to understand or whatever. So and then I ask people to tick if they’ve done the reading. So please, you know, bad karma to lie. So don’t tick it if you haven’t done it. I’m not gonna, you know, give you a hard time if you haven’t, but it’s really good to know.
Yeah. So also to any questions you have about reading or maybe there’s just words in the reading. Oh, by the way, in in this while I think of it, as I was trying to explain last week, many of these readings see this I mean, you’re you’re most welcome to read it, page forty one to forty five, which is this article, karma and Emptiness by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Starting from where this student asked what is pervasive compassion. From there to the end of page forty five, just delete all of that because this is all about emptiness and it’s not the topic and sort of especially the newer people might get completely confused by all of that.
So it’s not really directly on the topic. We I mean, of course, you’re welcome to read it, but don’t worry about that. Good to read when we come to the topic of emptiness much later on. But yeah. So, yeah, if there are any words that you you find difficult to understand, jargon words, so, you know, right now, I can try to explain.
Of course, you can always Google them. And I the student material does mention at the beginning somewhere that there is a or should it used to does it? Yeah. Glossary of terms on page nine. It gives you a link to a glossary of dharma terms so that you can look up.
So that that can be can be useful. There probably if you Google things on Google, can find other dictionaries and meanings, but that’s a that’s an FPMT one because I’d like to make the point, you know, on Google and YouTube and blah blah, there are millions of Buddhist things and some of it is just pure rubbish, you know. And there’s all sorts of self proclaimed gurus and teachers and talkers appearing. So but the FPMT website is totally reliable. Yeah.
This is, you know, an authentic Dharma website. You know, it’s our website. And and the and the material there, you can rely on. There’s many other things that may look very impressive, but could be just a load of rubbish. You know?
So there yeah. I mean there are other good there are other good websites of course but our FPMT website is trustworthy and whatever. Yes. So I either try to answer the questions on the piece of paper if it’s easy and whatever or otherwise I try to answer them in the class. So it’s really good to comment you know because it really helps me to find out whether I’ve explained things so that people have understood or people have got completely wrong ideas of what I’ve said and and so on.
And then the idea is with the homework, the meditation is to tick if you’ve done it that day or not. So the homework this time is really to go through, to meditate on the ten non virtuous actions from the point of view of how they’re created and with the four determining factors. So the idea is to use the material on page twenty five to twenty seven. So like for example on tomorrow the idea of Wednesday is to meditate on killing. So there’s just that brief section on the basis, the intention, the deed, the final step.
And so just to reflect on that, the four factors and to think how they could vary and various kinds of killings, how you could kill and who you could kill, not with the idea of doing so, but just to see the varieties of negative imprints one could generate. But also to think that particularly with all of these meditations and all the teachings, it’s so important to relate them to one’s self. And to think, oh, well, you know, honestly, maybe I what have I killed in this life and what factors were you know, try to remember, if one can, what sort of, you know, motivation was there and how what how it was done and whatever. I I have a, you know, I have a very poor memory and I mean, I hardly remember anything from my childhood, but unfortunately, remember when I was a little kid living in Goodwood, I found this little little bird, baby bird with no feathers, you know, this little blue ugly thing. And I picked it up and put it on the chopping block and chopped its head off.
Some bad karmic killing imprints there. I don’t do that now, but I remember that. That I I mean instant I’ve heard stories of little kids who just cannot bear to kill anything at all. It’s impossible for them. Because they they they recognize it has some feel you know, that there’s feeling where I didn’t have that.
I just somehow I’ve I’ve never done anything like that before or after. But I remember that and you think why? It’s horrible. Of course, I have killed other things later on too. So then you think, you know, yes.
I used to bounce tennis balls on ants as a pastime. So, you know, it’s not good. So we have these imprints in our mind. So it’s important to reflect, you know, on these things and how easy we we get caught up in these things and also our society can say it’s okay. Yeah.
This is the point I was maybe I missed my point when I was did this one is that about the that there is a law because what I was trying to say is that there could be examples where like in life, it looks like sometimes people get away with terrible things and good people suffer from doing good things. So for example, you know, just to give a ridiculous example that, you know, someone could see like an ugly old guy pouring liquid lead on their heads and they turned into a young good looking person. So you think, oh, I’ll do that. I’ll pour some liquid. But of course then you get your face all blistered and ugly or you may even die.
But if there was no law, you know, one day you do something and it’s good, and the next day you do it, it doesn’t work, and the next day something terrible happens. But it’s not like that. Just like in the ordinary world, there are laws of the, know, physical laws and chemical laws and blah blah laws is functioning, which also indicates how everything has a cause. Just like the physical world is interconnected and there’s all sorts of causes that one can see why things happen, especially the more you investigate. So because there are those laws, we can work in the world.
And so then and then when we understand the subtler karmic laws, then because some things can look like if you do this, it leads to this result. But in reality, that’s not what’s happening. There’s another much more subtle law operating. And if we know that and have faith in it, then we can avoid the causes of suffering and create the causes of happiness. And also avoid harming others.
So that’s basically what to do is just to reflect on and particularly try to relate it to oneself and think, and not to give oneself a hard time. Right? It’s just to recognize that one has engaged in these negative things and how easy it is to do. And and of course later on, you know, it goes on in in but don’t do that yet. But there is it talks about the results of, you know, the karmic results of generally, what are the karmic results of the ten non virtues.
So, again, this is really very powerful to meditate on and especially when you see, oh, I’ve experienced that result. And then you can realize why, oh, why did I experience that result is because at some point I engaged in that kind of negative action. Maybe not in this life, but in a past life, and now this result is happening. So, yeah. I’ve done more time.
I’ve got three minutes to finish. No, I’m trying to behave myself. And so also the daily mindfulness practice is just to be aware if sort of negative thoughts are arising then you try to be mindful of this could lead me to saying something really negative, doing something really negative. And one tries to remember four principles aspects, the karma is definite, all those things that can help us to pacify the mind that is because if we don’t have that mindful ness, the mind is so habituated to indulge in these thoughts and just do it. Yeah.
But we have to develop this awareness of the law of cause and effect is working. And, it leads us to engage in negative actions and once they’re done, the imprint is there. It’s so easy to create the imprint and although it’s true they can be purified, we shouldn’t fool ourselves that it’s easy to purify them. It takes time and effort and it has to be sincere. And all the time spent purifying, we could be spent creating it’s it’s like, you know, if you spend all your money, you have a huge debt.
Instead of the money the money you earn going to, you know, using it to get things that you you really want, you have to use your money to pay off the debt. So although it’s important to purify, to put energy into purifying, it’d be better not to have anything to purify. This is why our tradition is called the Gelugpa tradition, the Gel Luk, which Luk means, if pronounced correctly in Tibetan, tradition. If it’s pronounced another way, it means sheep. But and the word gay gay is gaywa, means virtue.
So the the tradition of which we follow here is the virtuous tradition because said the whole basis of the spiritual path is morality, observing the law of cause and effect. And that is much more important to engage in in virtuous actions than to well, it’s so much more important to avoid negative actions. So we don’t have to spend energy purifying those and we can put all our energy into doing virtuous things. And of course, it’s important to remember that avoiding negative actions is a virtuous action. Killing is a non virtuous action, consciously avoiding killing, like if a cockroach runs across here now, I can kill it.
That’s a negative action. But I can consciously decide I don’t have to kill this cockroach. I can be happy with this cockroach running across. I can live. Okay.
My mind, my life is not destroyed if a cockroach runs across this table, even comes back several times. I I can actually survive. I don’t have to kill the cockroach, so I won’t. And actually, this cockroach is just trying to be happy. That was my mother, mother.
So I won’t kill it. So that conscious decision not to engage in a negative action when I could, that is a virtuous action. And then on what I call because I haven’t read this anywhere, but on top of that. So there’s killing there’s negative action, avoiding negative action, which is virtuous, and then there’s what I call super virtuous actions is instead of this on top of not killing the cockroach, I could be nice to it. I could recite some mantras over it so it gets the imprint because it’s not gonna create any positive karma any way.
So that’s a super virtuous. You know, I don’t I avoid killing it, which is virtuous, and then I’m nice to it. Maybe give it some food or and recite some mantras over it. So that’s a super you know, I’ve been nice to it. I’m not just not avoided harming it.
I’ve done it doesn’t know that, but it has been benefited. So that’s a soup what I call a super virtuous. Yeah. Yeah. Lama Zopa Rinpoche has designed little insect scoopers.
Yeah. Assume. You you can assemble them. Yeah? Yeah.
Cockroach catchers. Yes. Sometimes I don’t know why, putting them over their heads. Yeah. Also, you have to be skillful, but, yeah, try and put them under a bush where the birds can’t get them, something like that.
Yep. So I’ve gotta stop talking. That’s it. So we have created some good karma tonight with the four factors. There was the action, bodhicitta.
Yeah, the motivation. No, I don’t know. I’m getting lost. There was the object, which is the dharma. Yeah?
And then there was the motivation. Hopefully, wanted to hear the Dharma and you had a good motivation for doing so. And then there was the active listening. So I hope you all listened very attentively and didn’t criticize me too much as you were listening. So there was that good act.
And then it’s been completed and you’re happy. Not that it’s just completed, but you’re happy that you stayed and did it. Right? So that makes a very powerful positive imprint. So we dedicate that to protect it so it doesn’t get destroyed and we dedicate it in the best way that it brings the best result.
So the best way to dedicate it is to dedicate it to enlightenment because that guarantees everything else. Alright. Okay. Page page what? Twenty?
No. Ten. Page when’s where’s our dedication for you? Thirteen. Page thirteen.