Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 94-minute session, Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores the mind’s capacity for both suffering and happiness, arguing that the quality of our mental experience depends not on external circumstances but on the state of our mind itself. He walks through the seven ways of knowing—from wrong consciousness and inattentive awareness to inferential and direct perception—to show how our habitual modes of understanding obscure reality. The core teaching centers on Buddha nature: the idea that our mind’s true nature is blissful, compassionate, and omniscient, but these qualities are temporarily obscured by ignorance, attachment, and anger. Dondrub explains saṃsāra as the mind trapped under delusion and karma, manifesting across six realms of existence, from hell realms to god realms, with humans occupying a precious middle position where dharma practice is possible. He uses meditation experience—the calm and clarity that arise when agitation subsides—as evidence that happiness comes from removing obscurations rather than adding anything external. Throughout, he emphasizes that understanding and working with mind is the single most important task in life, and that liberation alone is insufficient; the ultimate goal is full Buddhahood, where omniscient awareness naturally overflows with compassion for all beings. Pitched at serious practitioners engaged in the Discovering Buddhism program.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Mind and its potential week 4.mp3
UUID: 53b9bf61-d634-4e1f-ad78-59630f986a2b
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential 2017-18 (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2017 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 94.1 minutes
Words: ~10,952
So just to remind everyone if they could put in their homework and collect their old homework. There’s a couple of people I haven’t marked their homework yet so in the discussion time if your homework from last week isn’t marked there, it’ll be there by the end of the night. Just a couple. Okay, so welcome everyone to our fourth class on mind and its potential. So and this of course all of these courses of the Discovering Buddhism program are presented from the Mahāyāna point of view, encouraging us to become Buddhas for the sake of all sentient beings.
So this is why at the beginning of the teachings it’s emphasised a great deal of trying to listen with a really strong and sincere motivation, trying to make one’s motivation as the best possible. So the very best possible motivation is called bodhicitta, which is the mind seeking to achieve enlightenment and wanting to do so on the basis of recognising one’s Buddha nature and wanting to realise that Buddha nature, that Buddha potential in order to repay the kindness of sentient beings recognising that every sentient being has been our mother and father countless times, has been helpful to us in every conceivable way life after life. And, but also all these kind beings are suffering like ourselves in saṃsāra, trapped in saṃsāra. But unlike ourselves at least we’ve met the Buddha teachings, hopefully are developing faith in them and can see a way to understand why we’re suffering, what are the causes of it and how we can overcome those causes and realise our Buddha nature. But the vast majority of sentient beings have no awareness of their situation and in their confusion trying to bring about happiness actually are creating the causes of suffering, more suffering, more saṃsāra over and over again.
So thinking about this, you know, the more we can really understand and realise that, this becomes really quite unbearable. That we can so that we can’t just waste our life doing ordinary things or even practicing the Dharma just to get a good rebirth for ourselves or even to get out of saṃsāra ourselves. But the more we realise the kindness of sentient beings and how much they are helpless, then it becomes obvious that we have to help them, we have to repay their kindness. But to do that we have to be in a really powerful, strong position. We can’t be suffering sentient beings ourselves and prone to all sorts of problems and difficulties.
We need to become Buddhas free of all limitations and where all our qualities are fully developed, perfectly undeceivingly developed. So then we can repay the kindness of sentient beings by helping them to become free of all causes of suffering, helping them to achieve peerless everlasting happiness. So that all begins by real understanding our mind and its potential. So we can think that for the sake of all kind Mother sentient beings, I will look into my mind and its potential, its potential for great suffering, but also for great happiness and benefit. So if you’d like to join in the traditional prayer, which is on page ten, which we do twice in Tibetan, one time in English.
This prayer was composed by this great Indian master called Atisha who lived in the tenth century, came to Tibet from India. So he composed this prayer. And it’s been used ever since then in all the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. So to make this prayer more effective, more powerful, one can imagine the Buddha in front of us, thinking of the Buddha as our source of inspiration, refuge and guidance, and at the same time trying to think of all kind sentient beings surrounding us, at least those that we’re connected to in this life. So thinking of our mother on our left, our father on our right, then our, the rest of our family, our friends and helpers behind us, those who have harmed us in front, not to reject them but to realise these beings are suffering, they’ve been my mother, so they deserve my compassion.
So at least thinking of that group of people, but as much as possible then opening one’s heart and mind to an awareness and concern for all other sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, 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 now if you find it helpful, we imagine the Buddha being very pleased with our motivation and showing this by coming to the crown of our head. And when directly above our crown, we imagine that the Buddha dissolves into blissful golden light, so that that light can then pour down into us, blessing our mind.
Blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings correctly, blessing our mind to be able to put them into practice properly, blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain the unmistaken realizations. So then just briefly, we can do the nine round breathing exercise combining it with the visualization of white breathing in white light and breathing out all one’s disturbances of every kind in the form of black smoke, in order to generate a calmer, clearer, more concentrated mind so that we can use that level of mind to listen to and think about the teachings tonight. Okay. Thank you. So just to in the course outline I’ve changed the course outline so instead of what was listed as oh, dread.
Christina, Christina, in the the room, in that drawing with the with the little drawers, at the top drawer, there’s a clip, a set of pair of glasses. Can you give me those? A clip. Pair of glasses. So, I taught class four last week and so now class three I’ll do tonight.
So, last week I talked tried to talk a little bit about the three levels of mind, the six types of consciousness, primary minds and mental factors, and perception and conception. I didn’t get about, get around to talking about conditions for awareness, but I’ll leave that, because this is meant to be an introductory course on mind and its potential. I think I’ve bombarded people with too much information as usual. Oh great, thanks. Thanks.
So tonight I’d like to try and talk a little bit about the potential of the mind for happiness and suffering and talk a little bit about Buddha nature and about saṃsāra and maybe not so much about nirvana but about saṃsāra. So last week I foolishly talked a little bit about or tried to talk about the seven ways of knowing. Because I thought it might be interesting I’ve never mentioned bothered to mention this before I think in the courses on mind and its potential but it is a little bit useful. But it’s actually quite a complicated subject and, so I just basically wanted to mention those and clarify them. So one can divide the ways of knowing as there is perception where one sees things directly and there is conception where we experience things or know things in a secondary way, in a sense via concepts about things.
And actually much of what we’re knowing now is conceptual, it’s not although our senses, our five sense consciousnesses know things directly through perception, our eye consciousness sees shapes and colours and our ear consciousness distinguishes sounds as meaningful or meaningless and so on. So that’s directly done, but unfortunately our mental consciousness, the most important aspect of our mind functions mainly via concepts. We have conceptual concepts about everything. And so that’s one way of understanding how we know and experience things, but also another way is we know validly and invalidly or directly and in, and it’s mixed with being direct or indirect. So if we do you have that little handout of the seven ways of knowing?
Did you collect that tonight? Yeah. Remember if you could check out on the table at the very beginning of the class because they’re usually well, there won’t be every night, but many nights there will be handouts. So it’s good to have those at the beginning of the class. So, if we look at those seven ways of knowing, I’ll just go through them very briefly again.
So it starts out with wrong consciousness, so where we’re perceiving or conceiving us about something completely incorrectly. Particularly as I mentioned last week, one can relate this to knowing the most important thing which is about how things actually exist. So right now we are experiencing a completely wrong consciousness. All our sense consciousnesses and our mental consciousness are experiencing things falsely. Things are appearing to all of our consciousnesses in a false way.
There is something wrong about them. So then when we hear the teachings, and hopefully if we have faith in the Buddha’s teachings about the nature of reality, then we can develop some doubt about how we are experiencing things. And then another way of experiencing or knowing things is through inattentive awareness and the usual example that is given, or maybe it’s a modern example, but a general simple example is like if one is involved in watching television or reading a book or the newspaper and someone calls out your name to go and wash the dishes or something, then because your mind is focused mainly on reading or watching the TV, although your ear consciousness does hear, it does register, it does know something, it detects the sound, it is inattentive, so it’s not really knowing it completely, correctly, fully. It’s not totally involved with that. So a lot of our knowing is like that.
Even I hate I don’t mean to insult you, but what you’re doing right now may be an example of it, maybe not being fully attentive to what I’m saying. Maybe you want to be, but the mind can get very easily distracted and not fully focused on things partly because you maybe you’re quite tired from working all day or something like that, so the mind is not really fully attentive. And this and because of that we don’t register things, you know, because we don’t engage with them fully, we can’t understand them properly and remember them. Alright. Then another way of knowing things, and for many of us, for example, in trying to as new Buddhists, a lot of our beliefs, our knowing of Buddhism is what is called correct assumption, that we just believe it, but we don’t really know why we believe it.
It’s just because it seems good, the people teaching it, excluding myself, but other people who teach it seem very good and reliable and all those sort of things. So one thinks, well, that seems right. I kind of don’t really understand it completely, but it kind of seems to make sense. And so there are things which are true and we believe them to be true, but we don’t really know. So this is an example of correct assumption.
Right? But we can’t really explain why we believe that. Then there was another thing which I didn’t mention last week, this gets very complicated, but it’s called subsequent cognition. And really this is basically referring to the way of knowing that occurs in the second moment of consciousness, like for example, there is the first moment when one directly perceives with the eye consciousness, one perceives the shape and colour of an object of eye consciousness, and then in the second moment that gets overlaid with other stuff, and so that is called subsequent cognition. This is just talking about it very generally, there’s lots of complicated details about this, but this is just to give you just a very rough idea of what our mind is doing.
Then, the two most important ways of knowing, which are much more valid ways of knowing, is what is called firstly inferential cognition. So inferential cognition is where one uses reasons to establish something. You don’t directly one is not able to directly we’re talking about using the mental consciousness, but one uses logic and reasoning to establish something which is true as being true. And I gave the traditional example last week, which is the famous example that has been taught for hundreds of years in Tibetan monasteries, is that if there is some mountains in the distance, which there are lots of mountains in the distance in Tibet, and you can see continuously smoke continuously appearing behind those mountains, you can make the logical assumption that even though you can’t see it, there is a fire there. Yeah?
So this is an example of inferential cognition. You can know something by using logic, and what you know is correct. I mean, of course, can use incorrect logic and think you know something correct, But this is an example of correct inferential cognition. One and again, in the for example, in the case of understanding the true nature of reality, the Buddha has taught various logical reasonings that one can understand that destroys we can sorry. Which when we understand this logic, we can realize, oh, the way I am perceiving things is false because things could not possibly exist this way because the only way they could exist is this way, you know, this is the logic and I that reasoning is logical, it makes sense.
So the only way things could exist is like this. But the way I’m seeing them doesn’t fit with that. So what I’m seeing and believing is wrong, that things are actually existing in this way. So one can inferentially, conceptually, indirectly know what is true. But then, but then there is the final way of knowing, which is direct, valid cognition, or even more accurately, fresh, valid direct cognition where one directly perceives, and freshly means in fresh.
Well, valid means of course it’s unmistaken and it’s direct and it’s not conception, it’s perception and it’s fresh in that it’s completely new, it’s that in that very first moment one is seeing it exactly as it is without anything, any layers over it, any concepts or anything else. So it’s fresh or new, it’s valid, it’s direct cognition or perception. So that’s what we’re aiming to achieve, that. And that’s what the Buddha’s got all the time, all the time. So for example, they do say that with our mental consciousness, even now as ordinary beings, we can, in the first moment, we can directly perceive with our mental consciousness certain things, but then in the very next moment what happens is that gets laid over, that direct perception of something gets laid over with all sorts of concepts, and that then becomes subsequent cognition.
But a Buddha doesn’t have that subsequent cognition, a Buddha just has this continuous, new, fresh, valid, direct perception of everything. One of the epithets of the Buddha is he is a valid knower. That sounds really boring, a valid knower, but actually it’s the best description of what the Buddha is. The Buddha is the only being who knows things validly, completely, truly, unmistakenly, vividly, all the time. That’s why the Buddha is the perfect refuge, the perfect being to rely on, or his consciousness, his or her.
Buddha’s consciousness is the perfect mind to rely on. Okay, that’s a little bit about the seven ways of knowing. So tonight’s topic is, yeah, is what? So the potential of our mind. So our mind is knowing or experiencing, things all the time.
And with every moment of knowing and experiencing, there is feeling. So and the two main feelings or experiences are the the feeling or experience of pleasure and the and the experience of pain or the feeling of happiness and the feeling of suffering. So what we should understand is this very simple thing that happiness is a state of mind. It’s not something out there. Happiness is not out there.
You cannot find any happiness out there at all. It’s just not there. It’s not in people, it’s not in things, it’s not in money, it’s not in the world itself, it just isn’t there. We live our lives believing it’s out there all the time. Even if even if some of us call ourselves Buddhists and intellectually we’re supposed to know something else that it’s not, we still believe because we have these concepts in our minds so strongly that happiness is out there, and we also believe that suffering is out there.
It’s really out there. It’s other people and things and the weather and the government and just life itself. All of that stuff out there is where the suffering is, and I have to avoid it or eliminate it, and then I’ll be happy, but the suffering isn’t out there. And of course, as someone said in their homework, well, it looks like, you know, I can’t remember who said it, I’m not trying to make be rude about them or insult them, but someone said if a baby gets cold and is suffering, isn’t that the cause? Being cold, isn’t that the cause of the suffering?
Well, of course, that’s what we all believe, because it looks very obvious that that is the cause of why this little baby is suffering because it doesn’t have any clothes on and the weather’s cold. So the weather and not having clothes is the cause of suffering. But it’s not. It’s the conditions for suffering or what do conditions actually mean? Conditions, we talk about in Buddhism causes and conditions.
There’s the causes and conditions of happiness and then there are the causes and conditions of, suffering. So actually conditions actually means secondary causes. They are secondary causes, but we think they’re the real main causes. What the Buddha says are conditions of suffering or the conditions of happiness, which means the secondary causes of happiness and suffering, we believe to be the main ones, and this is what we put all our effort in working with. But what the Buddha discovered is that they are only secondary, the real cause of everything is our mind, the root cause, the main cause.
Yeah. So if this is true, the single most important thing we have to do in life, moment by moment, as much as possible, is to take care of our mind. Yeah. We cannot the message of the Buddha in a nutshell, is there is absolutely no way to be happy and content and well, you know, comfortable if we do not take care of our mind. It is impossible.
It is absolutely impossible. And most people are not doing that. Yeah. People spend thousands of dollars to go to university, or their parents do, or they do to go to university, and you learn things at university stuff that will get you a job to make some money, but it doesn’t take care of your mind. I mean, a teeny bit.
There’s some good things you learn at university that can be useful and whatever, but it’s kind of indirect. It doesn’t really directly take care of your mind. It doesn’t directly subdue in any way our disturbing thoughts, or and it doesn’t directly develop, awaken and develop our positive potentials. It may develop one aspect of our intellect to some extent, but not much else. Alright.
So one thing to consider is, even if, because I don’t know how to put this, but you know, just even if happiness or suffering you know, let’s start with happiness. Even if happiness is out there, it’s there’s this happiness, this big lump of happiness out there, you know, is it going to make me, this lump of happiness out there, how is it going to make me happy? How can this stuff out there, whatever it is, this happiness thing, how is it going to make me happy? You know, can it make, if there is this, you know, here’s happiness, this is happiness, and here is this jar of water, can this happiness, this real happiness, make this jar of water happy? Any suggestions?
No, it can’t. No. Right. Why not? Because this jar of water has no potential for happiness.
Has no well, it doesn’t have a mind. And it’s it and it so it has no potential for happiness. And if this was suffering, a great big lump of suffering, this cannot make this jar of water suffer because it has no potential for suffering. So the only way we experience happiness, can experience happiness and suffering is because we have the potential for it. Yeah.
We have the potential for it. And where is that potential? That potential exists in our mind. It is the very nature of our mind to experience happiness suffering, and it does it moment by moment. And if you go back to the seven ways of knowing, to inattentive cognition, we are suffering all the time and we’re not even attentive to it.
We don’t want to know about it for a start, we don’t want to know. Most people do not want to be Buddhists because Buddhists talk all the time, like me, about suffering all the time. And people don’t want to hear this, because they think, Oh, that will make me miserable. But the Buddha taught about suffering as key to lead to happiness. Yeah.
The first thing the Buddha taught was that life, ordinary life, not his life, but ordinary existence is miserable. It is in its nature suffering. Yeah? Not that it has a little bit of suffering floating on the edges, around the edges, on top, but the whole thing is imbued with suffering. And the Buddha taught that to then teach that there is a cause of that suffering, and he taught that to then say that that cause can be totally eliminated forever.
And he taught that in order to explain that there is a way to do that, there is a path. And he’s I followed that path. I mean, Buddha. Buddha said, I followed that path and became totally free of suffering. And when you become totally free of suffering, you don’t experience some kind of boring neutral state, you experience what we’ve always wanted, which is what my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, calls Peerless, everlasting happiness.
It’s peerless, there’s nothing better, and it’s everlasting, it never ceases, it never declines, it never deteriorates. That’s the because it’s the nature of our mind. Because the very nature of our mind is blissful. This is part of our Buddha potential. It is blissful.
I think my great talk is jumping all over the place, but anyway, I’ll try to go back to that. Remind me to go back to that. Anyway, I’ll try to go back to our mind has these two potentials for suffering and happiness. Yeah. Because we have these potentials, and it’s because of those potentials that when we meet the outer conditions, we experience some happiness or suffering.
But this starts to get a bit more complicated, but I don’t think I want to really try and get into this and explain it at this stage, because I can’t. But ultimately, what what the Buddha is telling us is that when one purifies the mind, gets rid of everything that’s obscuring the mind, one reaches a point where one doesn’t need the outer conditions for happiness. You don’t need them anymore because the mind is completely free and one is experiencing the true nature of the mind which is blissful, utterly blissful. So this point I’d like to explain a little bit, try to explain, give my reasons for explaining this. So, I hope everyone here has tried to do some of the homework to meditate at least the nine round breathing for some time or has in their life done some breathing meditation.
And of course, probably no one here including myself claimed to be great meditators. We haven’t we’re a long way from perfecting it. But as I’ve tried to explain before, the mind can only do two things at once, right? And our mind starts off when we meditate, when we sit down to meditate, our mind is agitated and upset and confused and whatever to some extent. And if we don’t work with our mind, there’s always stuff going on in our mind to reinforce that agitation.
But if we then take, consciously take an object of meditation and put the energy of our mind on that, then that weakens the energy that is feeding that. Right? You can’t the energy, if you know, can’t, you know, is not a hundred percent on this anymore. It’s going into something else. And so that agitation will decrease to some to whatever extent one can stay with the object, this will decrease, at least temporarily and for a short time, for however long one can stay with the positive object or the object of meditation.
So, when that happens, what is the experience? Is the experience of meditating in general or when it goes well, when one feels like one is able to do it to some extent, when one is in that state, is it more pleasant than and and is the mind calmer and clearer and in a more peaceful state than when than before one started? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. That’s the right answer. Yes, it is. Yeah. And this more peaceful, pleasant state, if you check, is not because we have added anything to our mind.
We haven’t taken any drugs in our body, we haven’t done anything with our body or our nervous system or our brain. In a sense, what we have done is subtracted something from the mind, all that agitation. Even temporarily, we’ve reduced or subtracted something that didn’t need to be there, which isn’t a true aspect of the mind. And so in a very, very simple, very, very tiny way, we started to experience something of the true nature of the mind. This calm, clear, peaceful aspect of the mind, which when one is able to access that mind completely, you experience the bliss of the mind.
Yeah. You haven’t injected it in any way. It’s not the bliss that comes from external things, being entertained and distracted. It’s come it’s come from just simply experiencing a more subtle level of mind, a less agitated level of mind. And of course, when one is able to, through tantric methods, experience the very subtle mind, then you experience great bliss.
The great bliss of a Buddha. But the point or the a point to think about is that this bliss or the potential of it is always there. It doesn’t just sort of pop up every now and again. This it is always there. Why?
Because it is of the very nature of mind. The mind is bliss or blissful. The true nature of the mind is utter bliss. And this bliss is not like, when people I don’t know what sort of background you’ve come people some p talk about blissing out, and that usually means you become pretty unconscious. You’re not really aware of too much else.
But this bliss is not that kind of sort of self absorbed state. The bliss of the mind goes with this utter clarity and total awareness. Right. So this is one very important aspect of our Buddha nature. There are very technical ways of talking about Buddha nature, which I don’t intend to do at all here, but one way to understand what Buddha nature is is that, which I find helpful anyway, is to understand that it’s talking about the blissful nature of the mind, how the mind is in its very nature pure and perfect, and which basically means that the mind in its very nature is compassionate and loving and patient and persevering and virtuous and concentrated and so on.
So the the mind is defined as that which is clear and knowing. That’s what the mind does. It knows, it experiences. Nothing else knows. Right?
And at the moment, our mind is capable of knowing as it is, is capable of knowing many things in many, many different ways. But I think we can all be have some sense that our mind is obscured in some way. I don’t know when I was a little kid. Believe it or not, I was a little kid once. Not sure if I believe that anymore, but I seem to have some memory of being a little kid.
I used to lie in bed sometimes, and I have I would have this sense of, like, some sort of darkness weighing down on my not I wasn’t depressed or anything, but just something like some vague idea that I could do more with my mind than what it was doing. Yeah? I think many people have had some sense of that. Yeah? And that, you know, when we’re trying to understand something we can we think, you know, why can’t I understand this?
I, you know, should be able to understand this, something is blocking me from understanding this, being able to do this and so on. You know, so our mind is obscured and sometimes we can we can think more clearly than at other times and understand things better than at other times. This shows that our mind is obscured. So I don’t know if this is very, you know, high-tech Buddhism, but I’m not very high-tech. But for me, if you just try to imagine, if if my if one’s mind is knowing, that’s what it does, and nothing can stop it, it’s always knowing something.
Yeah? Either it may not be knowing it correctly, but the mind is always knowing something, but this wonderful mind is obscured by stuff, things are obscuring our mind. Imagine if all of that was removed, that it was all removed. There was nothing stopping, that is stopping the mind now, if that was removed and there was nothing stopping the mind from knowing, yeah, then why couldn’t it be omniscient? Why would it not know everything?
It’s just knowing. And it isn’t anything physical, so it has no barriers, no boundaries, no limitations, so why couldn’t it know everything? Isn’t that the potential? If mind is that which knows, it follows logically, seems to me, that the nature of the mind is to know everything. That’s its nature.
It’s not doing it now, but that is the very nature of mind, which is to know everything. And if nothing is obscuring the mind, why would the mind know things falsely? It wouldn’t. Why would you misunderstand something if there was nothing preventing you understanding it. You would just know everything exactly as it is unmistakenly, Which then follows, it seems to me, that if one if the mind was experiencing ourself as we are, we we we not just had concepts about ourself and others, but we were directly perceiving without any any interference who we actually are, how we actually exist, how everyone actually is, we wouldn’t just guess what they were thinking and feeling, we would directly know everything and how everything’s working.
Now let’s just keep it to people, then if the mind was knowing oneself and another person unmistakenly, why would you hate them? Even if they were screaming at you and wanting to kill you, because you would know exactly why, what they were thinking, and what they were feeling, and you would know all the mistaken reasons why they hated you, and all their history and why they had so much uncontrolled hatred. And why would you hate them? You would feel incredible compassion because compassion is a valid way of knowing. Hatred is an invalid way of knowing because it’s perceiving or it’s not perceiving, it’s conceiving another person in a particular way in relation to a wrong view of me, and it’s about me, you know?
This person is insulting me, this is bad, therefore I hate them, I have to stop them. How do I stop them? With my hatred. But if there isn’t any wrong, if one has no false perceptions about me and could understand that there’s no way anyone can harm me, why would you hate anyone? Or why would you get attached to anyone?
Why would you crave anything when you’re completely blissful? Why would you be jealous? Why would you be resentful? Why would we be afraid of anything? We wouldn’t be afraid of anything.
We wouldn’t get stressed. Anxious, we wouldn’t get impatient, we wouldn’t want to harm anyone. All these are invalid ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves. In other words, it seems to me it follows logically that the very nature of the mind is love and compassion and tolerance and patience and perseverance and virtue and being generous. And the mind would be fully concentrated, it wouldn’t get distracted uncontrollably.
And it would be wise, it would see things as they are. Why wouldn’t it? That’s all it does. It just knows. That to me is Buddha nature.
That’s the nature of the mind. It is just perfect. That is its potential. And if we check, if we check, all of us now, we have some ability to be generous, sometimes with some people, when we’re in the mood. We can be generous with some people, and we can be virtuous some of the time, and we can be, what is it, patient some of the time, and persevering, and concentrated, and wise some of the time.
So this shows that we have the potential of those things. But if we have the potential to be a little bit of those things, it means we can be them all the time, a hundred percent. That is the nature of our mind. You can’t implant those qualities in the mind, they are the very nature of what it means to know and experience. But those things get distorted, there’s something obscuring our mind, and because of that, we know things in these false ways of knowing with anger and attachment and afflicted desire and so on, and fear and worry and all that stuff.
So the wonderful thing is that because these qualities, these good qualities, these virtuous qualities are a natural part of the mind, you can’t eliminate them from the mind. They are the mind. They are what how the mind knows. So you can never diminish them. You can’t get rid of them, you can’t reduce them, but what one can do and what we do do, unfortunately, is we obscure these qualities.
Because we have ignorance, and that ignorance So this is the big question you can ask me, why do we have ignorance? Why do we have ignorance? If our mind is pure and perfect, why are we ignorant? Why are we obscured? Well, there is an answer, but you won’t like it.
It’s so simple an answer that people just don’t can’t accept this. But basically, maybe if I won’t go into the details now, maybe you can discuss it in the discussion time, But basically, the Buddha says that our mind is beginningless, and that beginningless mind has been beginninglessly pure and perfect, has beginninglessly possessed Buddha nature, but the mind has been beginninglessly obscured. It’s always been obscured. And one way to try to understand this, and because this makes logical sense, because if our mind at some point was not obscured, it means that before our mind was obscured, we were Buddhists. We were omniscient, loving, peaceful, gentle, virtuous, omniscient ordinary beings.
That’s the whole point of becoming a Buddha. You don’t don’t turn into a frog later on. You remain the prince or the princess all the time. So it doesn’t make sense that at some point we became obscured. And also, if at some point we became obscured, one would have to say, Who did that to me?
Or Why? What did it? And then there’s no logical answer for that. But there is some logic to argue that the mind is beginningless and it’s always been obscured. But just because it’s always been obscured doesn’t mean it always will be.
Because the nature of the mind is to know, and if we let it know, it will. But we have never thought, almost never thought, about the nature of reality. We have always accepted that this is how I am, this is how things are. But the Buddha did. And if we listen to the Buddha, and the Buddha says, Check up, you think things are think you exist this way, you think the world is like this, but if it was like this, there’s this this consequences.
You know, in a very, in a simple nutshell, the way we perceive the world and ourselves is that we think, we experience ourself and everything as existing without any causes, without any conditions, without depending on our mind. Because if you look at, if we look at ourselves, but it’s always easy to look at other people, if you look at other people going around trying to be happy, how do they do that? They do it by not taking care of the mind, because they don’t think I exist depending on my mind. I will be happy ignoring my mind. That’s how people live their lives.
I am going to be happy ignoring my mind. If I have enough fancy clothes, enough money, enough friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, blah blah blah, I will be happy. It’s got nothing to do with taking care of the mind. That just shows very clearly that we have this total, you know, we believe this in even the word, because we don’t even think about it, we have this, we just grasp this view of ourselves and everything has nothing to do with causes and conditions, it has nothing to do with the mind. But the Buddha says, the only way anything can exist is depending on causes and conditions and the mind.
Check up. So if we start to check up, we can start to see, maybe we don’t believe it, understand it fully, completely, but we can start to see, get some idea that yes, things do depend on my mind. And if the more we do that and the more start checking up these things with a mind like that, so it’s very difficult, but if the mind becomes calmer and clearer and we listen to the teachings of the Buddha with that kind of mind and check up with that kind of mind, the mind will know, and I don’t mean just conceptually, it will start to have these deep, direct experiences. And we can get rid of this ignorance and all the stuff that goes with it, our hatred, our anger, our jealousy, our pride, our fear, our afflicted desires and attachment, all of that stuff which is a byproduct of our ignorance will fade away. And then there’s just unobscured mind.
Any questions? Disagreements? Actually create that in ourselves? Yeah, to some extent, yes, yes. Yeah.
When used when Lama Yeshe was alive, people used to complain, well they still do, but not to him anymore, but because Lama Yeshe was very kindly taught tantra a lot, made it very accessible, and tantra involves visualising oneself as a deity and all these various things and people would complain, I can’t do that. And Lama would say, But dear, you can, because you’re visualizing yourself right now. But the trouble is you’re visualizing yourself as this ordinary, miserable, suffering being. And that’s what we’re doing. Unconsciously, we grasp that this is really me.
Yeah? I think grasp is the only word because it’s not conscious, we’re not consciously doing this, we’re doing it with our mind, but this is, you know, part of the aspect of what Alexander Berzin tries to explain in that article that everyone’s having so much trouble understanding. But I really recommend you to read that over and over again because it is really very good. But, like the mind can know, but not, it often doesn’t, isn’t conscious it’s knowing, Yeah? But we in a very deep way, we are we are holding on to that this body is me, that this is me, and the way I can think and behave and whatever, this is this is all I can do.
We grasp at this permanence. I am permanently like this. So this is, you know, this is thinking, this is concepts we have, unconscious concepts that we grasp onto so strongly that limit us. So for sure, know, a sense we become what we think. And if we think, I can become a Buddha, I can do this, then that makes it easier.
But if we think, oh, I can’t do that. I mean, so many people, I think I’m guilty of this myself, we think when we hear certain aspects of the teachings, oh, this is so difficult to do. I can’t do that, or I could never do that. I could never do that. Well, sure, there’s many parts of the aspects of the Buddhadharma practice that we cannot do now, but that doesn’t mean that we could never do them.
We can, because the mind is changing never get there. But if we head there, we will get there. It may take a long time, we may not get there as quickly as we want, but if we keep heading there, we will have to get there. Right? That’s why motivation is so important.
That’s why the teachers say, generate, try to think bodhicitta always. Head in that direction. That’s the best one, and you’ll eventually get there. Right? Yeah.
No. Just to get at a realistic level of course because people can then think, Oh, I just think like this and in three weeks I’ll be a Buddha. Of course it doesn’t happen like that. Because our grasping, our wrong views about everything, we’ve been grasping for an immensely long time, not just one lifetime. So changing, we can change the mind, the mind does this, the nature of part of the wonderful aspects of the nature of our mind that it can change.
I mean, the very nature of the mind doesn’t change, but this ordinary mind can change. It is changing moment by moment. But to bring about these radical deep changes, you know, it takes a lot of work and takes a lot of time because there is this embedded stuff that we are grasping onto, and we’ve been grasping onto it not just in this lifetime, not just for ten or a hundred or a thousand or a million lifetimes, but beginningless lifetimes. So that can be a bit depressing thinking like that, so I don’t want to emphasise that. But sometimes it’s helpful to remember that because one can get too unrealistic and think it’s all going to happen overnight.
But that’s not going to happen. But if we work on our mind, it it the mind will be affected, guaranteed, one can have utter confidence in that. And the more we work on our mind in the right way, the more it will be affected in good way. So, just very briefly, so because our mind is obscured by ignorance and because of that ignorance we have all the disturbing thoughts, particularly we have afflicted desire And then the nature of afflicted desire is it sees something that is conventionally pleasant, and so it becomes the outer condition for happiness, but afflicted desire believes that is the happiness, sees it as permanent, and therefore it craves that thing. It draws our mind out into something, believing this is happiness, this is you know, I will if I have this, I will be happy, I will be permanently happy.
And of course, all of that is we don’t consciously think, and in some cases we do, but much of the time this is not conscious thought, it’s just this instinctive grasping of afflicted desire. Yeah. And the nature of it is to take us away from looking within. As I’ve said many times before, is that what the obvious nasty thing about afflicted desire is that it tells us that happiness and goodness and beauty is out there. And the very nasty secret message of afflicted desire is that there is no happiness, goodness and beauty inside.
And the reality is, that’s where it actually is. So it creates this life that we believe. And then on top of afflicted desire, you have attachment, which, you know, when you get this, you can’t let go. You’re attached, you’re stuck. Because this is happiness, how can I let go of it?
Because I’ll be miserable without it. And of course, we become the desiring person we become. Before, there was no we didn’t have this, we were kind of maybe okay. But now, because of this afflicted desire and attachment, we become this attached person. We become this dependent person.
And we follow desire thinking that if we have all these objects of desire, then I will be secure, I will be safe and secure, because I’ve got all this stuff, my family, friends, my insurance policy, my house, my car, my clothes, my reputation, you know, my bank account, I will be happy and safe and secure. Reality, we have become unbelievably insecure because we are now totally dependent on many things which we weren’t dependent on before. Check up. And then because of attachment, afflicted desire and attachment, we have anger, you know, anything that interferes with my desire and attachment, woah, yum. And of course the thing we’re most attached to is me, so anything that interferes with me, wow, we get angry.
And then we have jealousy and pride and all the other, you know, the long list, you have the list of disturbing thoughts that come. And then we follow those, engage in negative actions, generate negative imprints, which obscure the mind, weigh down the mind, and ripen the suffering. So then this lead how many seconds have I got left, Wendy? Are you the time who you’re is the official timekeeper? You’re fired, you’re fired, you are fired.
Can I have seven minutes more? Right, just very briefly, so because our mind is obscured, we so we have saṃsāra. Remember? What is saṃsāra? saṃsāra is our mind under the control of delusion and karma, the delusions of ignorance, desire, anger, and all the others.
But, you know, anger ignorance, desire, and anger, these are the three poisonous minds, the three main delusions that keep us in saṃsāra. And one of the very first things that registered in my mind when I first heard Lama Yeshe teach in nineteen seventy six is that he said at one point, how can you possibly imagine that you can oh, he said something along the lines there. How can you possibly imagine you can ever be happy while you have ignorance and desire and anger obscuring your mind. How can you? Not even a little bit.
Not even a little bit. Really, it all gets mangled up and destroyed by ignorance, desire, and anger. So So that’s the the basic definition of saṃsāra. It is the mind obscured by delusion and karma, but because the mind is obscured by delusion and karma, we have the different realms of cyclic existence. So right now our mind is obscured, our Buddha nature is obscured, our Buddha potential is obscured, but, compared to many other beings, our mind is relatively unobscured, and that’s why we’re experiencing this realm, the human realm, where although there is a lot of suffering and potential for suffering, there is also a lot of pleasure and the potential for happiness.
And particularly, it is in the human realm where it is easiest to practice the Dharma. Because we have the example of suffering, and we have the example of happiness, and our human our mind is not the our human level of mental awareness is such that our intelligence is not too bad. We can understand the Buddha’s teachings, and we can practice them. Yeah. But if we engage in more negative actions and obscure our mind more and then we die, then it is possible that that more obscured mind ends up in a non human state.
Because the teachings say that because even anyway, for basically a human life is pretty good, and so the cause of a human life is engaging in virtue, practising generosity and virtue. It’s not the result of engaging in negative actions, but if some negative karma ripens at the time of death, one will never get a human rebirth. One can end up with the mind taking rebirth in an animal body and then one gets reborn as an animal. So if one checks, would like to spend more time on this, I’ll end up talking about other things too much, but if you check on animals, if you come to believe that an animal, any kind of animal, insect, fish, bird, reptile, shows signs of consciousness of knowing and feeling and experiencing, then it means it’s got a mind, which means it has Buddha nature, which means its mind is exactly the same as one’s Of course, it’s much more obscured, but it’s exactly the same. And then we have to ask ourself, why is that mind in that kind of body and not a human being?
Because once you’re trapped in an animal body there is so much more suffering. And some people will say, all cats and dogs have wonderful lives, I’d love to be a cat or I’d love to be a bird and fly in the air, much better than a human. It’s just human viewpoint, it’s, you know, who do you know, how do you know that animals aren’t happier? Well, I don’t, but the Buddha says they’re not. I believe the Buddha, not that I personally or anything, but anyway.
When the teachings say that animals are experiencing more suffering than humans, in many ways there is obvious, that’s obviously true, but what it’s particularly referring to is that as an animal there is no way you can practise the dharma. In other words, stuck there, you have to just endure that suffering, and as an animal, you know, there are so many more conditions to create the cause to be reborn as an animal again and again even in a worse state. Whereas a human being, even like terrible human beings, can change, they can purify their mind, they can create the causes for a better rebirth. But once one’s in the lower realms, that is unbelievably difficult. Alright?
But really check out, I don’t know if I have to I always tell this story and I don’t have much time do it now, but years and years ago when I was first a monk, read this, National Geographic magazine article about a woman in America who was teaching some gorillas to sign language and she had this particular female gorilla whose name was Coco and she taught her several hundred words in sign language so that she had an IQ of like a young child. And there is now, actually films have been made about this and everything that’s quite amazing, it blew my mind. But there’s a few stories I could tell but at one point this woman in sign language asked this gorilla, Coco, Who are you or what are you? And this gorilla, who I think was six years old at the time, in sign language said to her, this woman, I am a fine female gorilla. I am a fine female gorilla.
That is not a robot, that is not just a lump of meat wandering around by accident, that is a sentient being, that is a living being with sentience consciousness, that is a living being with Buddha nature, like me. So that mind was at other times a human being, just like at other times I was a gorilla. We’ve all been fine female gorillas, maybe. Maybe not so fine sometimes. Recorded this thing and unfortunately it’s on her TV recorder hard drive and she’s not sure if so we could all crash her place one night and watch this thing or get her TV here or if someone knows how to transfer this onto some other form, I would I haven’t seen this particular thing, but this article was quite amazing.
The other story is that there was also she had in another cage a young male gorilla, and Coco really liked this male gorilla. And when the male gorilla learnt a word, he was allowed to go into the cage with and she liked that a lot. But he was not as intelligent as Coco, see, he was very slow learning. So one day when this lady was teaching the male gorilla some sign language and he was really slow about it and couldn’t get it, she turned around and Coco was behind her in the other cage sort of trying to explain to her him how to do it. She also invented her own swear language.
From the words she’d been taught, she used some of them when she got angry with the lady to swear at her. And she would cry when the woman went home. So anyway, so some people might say, oh, this this gorilla’s got consciousness, but as an exception, I mean, is I mean, I think that’s rubbish logic. If there’s one gorilla with consciousness, all gorillas have consciousness. And if all gorillas have consciousness, I think it probably means all sentient, all animals have consciousness, like us.
It’s just far more obscured. But many animals, many people who have pets say, you know, their pets are incredibly intelligent, they’ve got, you know, characters and personal ities, it’s all a sign of consciousness. Yeah. Of course it’s functioning at a very limited level, but it’s consciousness. Some human beings, because of, you know, brain damage are functioning at a very low level of consciousness, but they are human.
They are still you don’t say this person is not a human anymore. They are a human being. Just very quickly, if we obscure our mind more, we end up in what are called the preter realms, where one experiences the torment of suffering at what appears to be the torment or there’s the torment of what appears to be suffering and sorry. There is the torment of of experiencing hunger and thirst for an immensely long time. One doesn’t eat anything or drink anything, but you don’t die, you just are tormented by hunger and thirst.
This is what the mind gives rise to. And then unfortunately, there are the hell realms of intense suffering and long duration. This is what the Buddha taught. No one wants to believe this, I don’t want to believe it, but I do because I do believe this is the potential of my mind. If you obscure the mind enough, this is what happens.
And we human beings actually are pretty good at creating hell, you know, small hell realms on this on this planet, but nothing like the actual hell realms. Then if one’s mind is less obscured, there are the god realms. There’s a whole variety of god realms. Many god there’s the god realms of the desire realm, there’s the god realms of the form realm, and then the super refined experiences of the gods of the formless realm. So this is saṃsāra.
And the point is we’ve been each of us here has been born into every single one of those realms an infinite number of times. Yes. Because we’ve been born infinite times, we die depending on the karma, sometimes we go up into the god realms, then we go down, we come down as a human being, down into the lower realms, up into the god realms, around and around. It’s cycles. Because in our consciousness right now, our consciousness has many imprints, infinite numbers of positive imprints from good things we’ve done in countless past lives, but our consciousness possesses many, many negative imprints from many negative things we’ve done in countless past lives.
And these can ripen at any time. This is what is happening to us now. You know, we wake up one morning feeling terrific, we wake up the next morning feeling terrible. One day people are just so nice to us, everything goes great because our good little good karmas are ripening, and then all of a sudden everything goes wrong. No one likes us, everything goes wrong, things break, we lose things, people don’t laugh at our jokes anymore, they just don’t like us anymore, you know.
And then it changes again. Our karma is ripening uncontrollably all the time. And then at death, you know, we don’t we have because we don’t have much control over our mind, you know, we could die in a peaceful state, we could die in a negative state. Peaceful state is a great condition for good karma to ripen, the negative mind is the condition for negative karma to ripen. And so we cycle.
But if we start to understand this, understand our mind and work with it, we can break out of all of this. This is why the Buddha taught all these things, so that we can gain control of our mind. And not just for our own sake, but for the benefit of others. So we stop harming others and we start benefiting them. A question.
Yeah, I know there’s many things about this and some of them are very interesting, but the Buddhist view is that plants are not sentient, they are not they are living beings for sure, but they do not possess consciousness. Plants themselves do not. Although, according to my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, there are things that look like plants, which are sentient beings, but plants which are plants are not sentient beings. But also, there are kind of, in some cases, sentient beings, you know, in from other realms that live closely with plants. For example, it is, and I I believe this, according to Tibetans, because, you know, there is this the the what are called the spirit realms.
There are beings living in this realm. Although the realms are quite separate, some of like the hell realms, you can’t see the hell realms in the human realm, but some, but we can see animals, you know, the animal we share this earth with another realm, which is the realm of animals. And some beings from the preta realm are able to be seen sometimes in this world. And some of the god beings also appear in this world. So some of these beings live with some plants, and so that gives the impression that the plant has consciousness, has consciousness.
According to Tibetan belief, which I believe, very, very, it’s very likely that extremely old trees have beings living in them. And I don’t mean koala bears, you know, beings from other realms. And they’re very attached to those trees, so if you chop them down or their branches, they can often give you sickness and things like that. Know some stories along those lines, got to be careful. I think Aboriginal people believe the same thing.
And like that Uluru is like rocks, huge rocks are often the homes of spirit beings. So Buddhists would say the same, that certain, you know, very old places. Do you believe that the the realms converge through dreams? So, you know, you you have this concerning dream. You you envision things that you never seen before in your life.
Talk to us about gut health and and spirit sort of entering your dreams and the other realms. We’re getting to a big topic. I think we have to can we leave that? Yes. Some of that is possible, but but as a human being, we cannot, as a human being, experience the other realms because they’re just too horrific.
Yeah. Maybe a little taste of being an animal, but not one couldn’t as a human being experience the suffering of the hell realms. It would would be impossible. Or we don’t have the ability experience the bliss of the god realms. But we could maybe have visions of, like, in some ways of something.
Yeah. But Buddhists do believe you can get possessed by nasty spirits, that’s for sure. That does happen. Yeah, can happen. Now everyone will stop coming thinking this is a lot of superstition.
Other people love all this, don’t you? But that’s if you’ve got an uncontrolled mind, you know, the mind becomes very negative and on some negative karma ripening, then, I mean, the mind is in a good state, then you can’t get possessed or whatever, but, yeah. There has to be the causes and conditions, just don’t get zonked, you know, don’t worry that you’ll wake up and be under the control of a zombie or something. Okay, thank you very much, break time. So please, where are we?
The groups, everyone knows their groups, groups here, maybe group one and two in here, group three and four in the in the living room area. But according to the Mahāyāna tradition or the Mahāyāna teachings of the Buddha, so if if and you can achieve a liberation and if that’s your motivation, you then become an arhat. But the mind of an arhat is still slightly obscured because there are still very very subtle imprints of the delusions obscuring the mind. And because of that, an arahat who who is liberated from saṃsāra is not enlightened, is not omniscient and is not able to benefit sentient beings. Alright?
Whereas with enlightenment, you become a Buddha and Buddha mind has eliminated these very subtle obscurations, which is sometimes referred to as the dualistic mind. Or dualistic mind has many term meanings. It depends on the concept. But the the the very subtle dualistic mind is is eliminated with enlightenment. Because what the just very simply, the the main difference between an arhat and a Buddha is that an especially when an arhat dies, you know, you just take the example someone practices and they become an arhat as a human being in this life.
So as an arhat, they have no delusions, they’re very kind and compassionate and blah blah blah so they can help sentient beings but they have not generated bodhicitta, they haven’t generated the wish to become Buddhas. But then when the body, the the karmically created body dies, then the consciousness of that arhat then continues, but it exists in this blissful state, but is but it is unaware of anything, it’s absorbed into this mental, this concentration, this absorption that is just experiencing the bliss of mind without any awareness of anything outside. So an arhat in that state has no awareness of the of the universe and the sentient beings in it, so it doesn’t benefit them. Whereas a Buddha is experiencing an even greater bliss of the mind, but that bliss is omnisciently aware of all sent ient beings and pervaded by great compassion for them and therefore, is actively benefiting sentient beings in countless ways. So there’s a huge difference between achieving liberation and enlightenment.
You to to achieve enlightenment, you first have to get liberated from saṃsāra, but there’s still a lot more to do before becoming a Buddha. Is that a little bit clear? So we are going to become Buddhas, not just liberated, right? We’re going to unleash the full potential of our mind, not just a bit of it. Right?
Good. Okay. So maybe we should dedicate the merit of this time because we have created some good karma by having good motivation and a good topic and hopefully we involved ourselves as best we could. So this has generated some positive energy, some positive imprints in our consciousness. So we can dedicate this in the best way and the dedication has two aspects.
It protects that positive imprint from being destroyed because unfortunately our positive karmic imprints can be destroyed by anger and other delusions. And the second thing is that it directs that positive imprint in a particular way which is because the positive imprint could just ripen as a little bubble of pleasure in saṃsāra, but we don’t want bubbles of pleasure in saṃsāra, do we? No. We want enlightenment. So we direct that energy to becoming a cause of enlightenment.
But in the process, it brings about all other good things as well. So if we page ten. Due to the merits 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 bodhi mind, not yet born, arise and grow. May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore.
Okay. Thank you very much. So