Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Dondrub continues his fourth class in a series on presenting the Buddhist path, covering the foundational logic of the Lam Rim stages of spiritual development. In this 84-minute teaching, he walks students through the essential psychological framework motivating practice: recognising the precious human rebirth and its rarity; meditating on death and impermanence to understand that all conditioned things decay moment by moment; contemplating the danger of lower rebirths to generate wise fear of suffering; and taking refuge in the Triple Gem—Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—as the method for protection. The core principle he emphasises is karma, the law of cause and effect: that virtuous actions plant positive imprints yielding happiness, negative actions plant imprints yielding suffering, and only by protecting the mind through understanding this law can we avoid cycles of suffering. Throughout, he illustrates with concrete examples—impermanence in decaying sounds and physical objects, karmic causation through the seed-and-soil analogy, and the fragility of positive imprints destroyed by anger—making the abstract logically clear. Suitable for serious practitioners new to or deepening their study of the graduated path framework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2016 03 08 DB Presenting The Path Week 4 08032016.mp3
UUID: 0adef277-477b-42e8-828d-804ac5ed1b0d
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Presenting the Path (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2016-03-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 84.2 minutes
Words: ~9,949
Okay. Welcome everyone to our fourth class on presenting the path. So I’m way behind and there’s a lot to cover tonight, so I’ll just try to keep it focused and concentrated, just the essence. So it’s really important to try and listen to the teachings free of the three faults of a vessel, if you can remember the three faults of a vessel, and to try and to listen with the best motivation that one can have. And from Buddhist point of view, the very best motivation is the bodhicitta motivation, wishing to achieve enlightenment, to realize one’s full potential, which involves eliminating all one’s negative qualities, awakening all one’s positive qualities, understanding that it’s only as an enlightened being that one is able to repay the kindness of all sentient beings and bodhicitta involves wanting to do that, recognizing their incredible kindness of sentient beings, how we totally depend on them, and how they are suffering helplessly in saṃsāra.
The best way to repay them is to help them to be free of all causes of suffering, and to help them achieve peerless, everlasting happiness. To do that, we have to achieve enlightened ourselves. That means following the path, and to do that successfully, we have to understand the path, and so that’s why we’re studying it tonight. So this we can try and cultivate that thought as strongly and sincerely as possible. And to help us, if you feel that connection, then we visualize the Buddha in front of us as the embodiment of the Three Jewels of refuge, the source of these teachings, the originator of them, the perceiver of them, the person who perceived and followed the path to enlightenment, and at the same time, we try and think of all sentient beings surrounding us, at least those we are 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, trying to think, have some feeling for all other sentient beings.
So the prayer, if you want to join in, is on page eleven, X1, XI, Roman eleven. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create by listening to the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. Thinking the Buddha is pleased with our motivation, we imagine that the Buddha shows this by now coming towards the crown of our head, and then when directly above our crown, the Buddha dissolves into light, so that that blissful light can then pour down into us, blessing our minds, so that we’re able to understand the teachings on the path that put them into practice and gain all the realizations. So then we can reinforce that positive state of mind by briefly doing the nine round breathing exercise, just to let our mind become a little bit more calm, clear, and concentrated, so that we can use that mind to listen to and think about the Buddhist teachings tonight.
Okay. Thank you. So the path to enlightenment the teachings on the path to enlightenment are based on an understanding that we have a mind. Our mind has this incredible potential, our Buddha potential, to experience peerless everlasting happiness and to be a vast benefit to others. But that mind right now is obscured, and because our mind is obscured, we are in saṃsāra, we are suffering limited, create causes for suffering for ourselves and have the effect of causing problems and suffering to others.
And so the whole aim of the Buddhist teachings is to get out of cyclic existence, that’s the basic aim of the Buddhist teachings, but more than that, on then being able to be free of cyclic existence to help every sentient being to become free of cyclic existence, and even more than that, to help them achieve their full potential of enlightenment. So there is a graduated path to accomplish that. It’s something that can only be done step by step. And the first step, the first major step, it’s a very big step actually in that path, in that process, is to renounce this life, to let go of our obsession with the things of this life so that we can direct our mind more and more to taking care of our mind, avoiding engaging in negative actions that can only bring suffering reverse, engage in more and more virtuous actions so that when we die, we can definitely have a good rebirth and continue the path. So having done that, we can then develop the mind renouncing cyclic existence, and then on that basis, we’ve got the correct foundation to be able to generate bodhicitta and achieve enlightenment.
So to renounce this life, we need to understand that we have the optimum chance to do so, the precious human rebirth. We need to recognize we’ve got one, what it means to have one, how incredibly rare and precious it is, and that will motivate us more and more to let go of doing meaningless, ordinary and negative things and making our life more and more meaningful. And of course, main way, the best way, total way to make it meaningful is to practice the Dharma, at least from a Buddhist point of view. So then what will then encourage us to do this more and more is to realize, as I was trying to say last week, that we are definitely definitely going to die, and we could die at any time, and we need to realize that it is our mind that goes on from this life. The body fades away, but the mind never ceases.
Never ceases, and it never ceases to give rise to experience. So when it moves from this life and starts giving rise to a new set of experiences, we want to ensure that that new set of experiences are not suffering experiences but beneficial experiences. So anyway, the more we realize we’re going to die, we could die at any time, and that really only having a virtuous state of mind is going to help at the time of death, then this will again help us to renounce this life, the obsession with the things of this life. And also, which I didn’t get to talk about in any detail last week or the previous weeks, was also not only are we going to die, but everything that we’re obsessed with in this life, good or bad, it’s all impermanent and we don’t realize that. We think it’s permanent.
Why do we get upset? Why do we have so much attachment for things? Why do we desire so many things and get attached to them? It’s because even though intellectually we may know something else, emotionally we grasp that these things, relationships, people, possessions, money, status, knowledge, that all of these things are permanent, and that reinforces how important they are in our mind, that they are permanent, and these good things are associated with permanent happiness. If I this beautiful thing, it is permanent, it is happiness, so I will be permanently happy.
This is a lie. This is not permanent. It’s definitely not. Nice, but it’s not permanent. And all the bad things that upset us so much can lead us to be angry and do so many unbelievable terrible things.
It’s all impermanent. It’s not permanent. It’s not going to last. The most horrible things aren’t going to last. So if we really understood that, we wouldn’t get so upset, we wouldn’t be so bothered by these things.
The more we could really, not just intellectually know that or say it, I can say it, Oh, that’s impermanent, but to realize it, to experience it, to actually experience that whatever is happening to you is impermanent, impermanent, that really changes the experience of it. It becomes so, the mind has so much more space to deal with things in a meaningful way, a beneficial, skillful way. So that topic is very important. I’m tempted to talk more about it, but I’ll just leave it at that. I’ll just quickly, not everything is permanent, but the vast majority of things are impermanent.
There are only a few things which are permanent, virtually everything else is impermanent. What is impermanent is everything that arises depending on causes and conditions. If something comes into existence depending on causes and conditions, the Buddha perceived, understood that it is impermanent, it changes moment by moment. Impermanent doesn’t mean it just ends, it comes to an end. Impermanence actually means changing moment by moment, and the moment is very short.
According to traditional Buddhist philosophy, they talk about there are sixty four moments in a finger snap, and in every sixty fourth of a finger snap, things are changing, but of course, with modern science, have concepts like nanoseconds. So every nanosecond, or if there’s something even shorter than a nanosecond, everything is changing. I can’t do nanosecond snaps, but in it, you know? Right. What also that means is that they’re decaying.
It’s not like changing for the better, but things decay every moment. They come to existence depending on all these factors coming together due to causes and conditions, and in one moment, something exists in its totality, and in the very next moment, although it may look as though it hasn’t changed, it has changed. It’s decayed. And every moment keeps doing that, moment by moment, irreversibly. And if you check, everything in our world has come into existence depending on causes conditions.
Our body, our clothing, our food, everything we use, our houses, our cities, our countries, the world itself, the whole universe is coming to existence depending on causes and conditions. Although it doesn’t look like it, it is all changing and decaying moment by moment, and there’s absolutely nothing to be done about it. You can paint over cracks and crumbles and things, but the paint you put on it or the new cement you put on top, as you are putting it on, is decaying moment by moment. There’s nothing you can invent that will stop impermanence because an invention depends on causes and conditions. The thing that you invent has depended on causes and conditions and is impermanent and decay.
And we investigate why is it that things which are impermanent, depending on causes and conditions, are impermanent and changing moment by moment, what is the reason? And the reason is there is no other reason than the mere fact that something depends on causes and conditions. There’s no other reason. There’s no other factor. The mere fact that something arises, is born, created, produced, depending on causes and conditions, means it has no ability, nothing from its side to remain the same beyond the very first moment that it comes into existence.
And I always do this little thing where if you spend a long time on it, it’s much powerful, but I’ve just done this very quickly so it doesn’t have the same effect. But an example of this is creating a sound. The sound comes into existence depending on causes and conditions. And if you watch, what happens? What you can’t watch?
Listen. Don’t have to answer, but was a sound created? Yes. Does the sound still exist? No.
And I have checked with scientists who know this, because once I asked this question to some smart aleck young guy, I said, Oh, keeps going into the universe. Wrong. According to scientists, that doesn’t happen. It’s finished. Yeah, finished.
Yeah. Right. It doesn’t exist anymore. Did something come along and stop it? No.
Nothing came along to stop it. It just simply could not sustain itself. Nothing. Yeah. Because it depended on me moving this to this, and air, and blah blah, and ears sound waves, hearing sound waves, blah blah blah.
It had nothing from inside to sustain. And if I keep hitting this again and again, that is not making the sound permanent, it’s just making a whole series of new sounds, each one of which is fading away moment by moment, irreversibly. And there’s no way that sound can come back. I can make a similar sound, perhaps even exactly the same sound, but that sound I made some moments ago, there’s no way you can ever get it back. You can make a recording of it, but the recording isn’t the sound, and that recording won’t last forever either because it, you know, depends on stuff, which is made by causes and conditions.
So everything is like that. So the mere fact that we are born means we’re going to die. That is proof that we’re going to die. As I jokingly point out, if you’ve ever had a hair fall out of your head, a toothache, a gray hair or a wrinkle, that proves you’re going to die. That is proof that you’re going to die, because it shows you’re impermanent.
Because if you were permanent, none of your hairs would fall out, you wouldn’t get any wrinkles, you wouldn’t get toothaches or anything like If you’ve had any of those, if you’ve got any one wrinkle, which I can guarantee everyone here has, that means we’re going to die. Sorry. Oh, you jolly Buddhists. We’re such a jolly lot. Anyway, but this is the point.
Well, Buddhism is about what the Buddha is telling us, the only thing that is going to protect us from our suffering is the truth, not lies or denying the truth. It’s only understanding and accepting every kind of truth that is liberating and enlightening. Pretending we’re not going to die, pretending that everything is permanent when it’s not, can be okay for a while, but eventually it produces lots of sufferings, problems, and fears and worries and difficulties. We have to face the truth and work with the truth, not with lies and illusions. So understanding that more and more and using that mindfulness in our daily life, then we can enjoy things, but not get so much craving for them, so much attachment to them.
Why be attached if it’s not going to last? There’s no way you can make it last. What’s the point? There’s no point. You can enjoy it.
In fact, believe it or not, one can enjoy things more when one is not attached to them than when you are attached to them. That’s the Buddha’s message. We think we have to have desire and attachment to enjoy things, but actually, they are obstacles to really enjoy appreciating. Anyway, that’s enough on that one. But the purpose to think about it and combine with one’s going to die is to put things into perspective and what is really meaningful in the context that actually everything is changing and fading, I can’t hold onto it, it’s like trying to hold onto water, and as I’m trying to hold onto these impermanent things, I myself am dying, getting older and etcetera, etcetera.
So in this situation, in this reality, what should I do with my life? And the answer is take care of the mind and create the causes. Work towards achieving something that will never fade away and decay, which is liberation and enlightenment. Because anyway, technically, enlightenment doesn’t depend on causes and conditions.
If it did, it wouldn’t last. You have to create causes and conditions to get rid of the obscurations, but the state of enlightenment is there, in a sense. The potential is always there. You have to create the causes and conditions to get rid of what obscures it, but you don’t create enlightenment, technically. Anyway.
So then in the psychology of the teachings on the path to enlightenment, the next thing we should really think about is, So I’m going to die, I’m going to be reborn, so what kind of rebirth am I going to have? What could I experience? And the simple thing is that, again, this is very difficult to face, but if we’re honest with ourselves, it is so much easier to engage in negative actions than in virtuous ones. As I often say, none of us have to go to school to learn how to be angry, to have desire, attachment, to be jealous, and so on. That comes extremely instinctively, even for tiny children, babies.
Incredible. It’s there. Whereas to be really kind, to be really compassionate, to be selfless and altruistic and patient and persevering and generous, these things are quite difficult to be. We have the potential to do it, we can do it to some extent with some people sometimes, but not much. It takes effort.
Of course, some people here are much better, certainly than myself, much better than I am at doing these things, but still, we have to really work on it, and we have this incredible potential to be totally kind, compassionate, generous, patient, with everyone and everything all the time. We have that, believe it or not. We have that potential. So what this means is that because it’s so easy to engage in negative actions, we probably have, not probably, we do have more negative imprints in our mind than positive ones. And that means there is a high chance if we don’t take care of our mind during this life properly, then there is a high chance that when we die, one of the negative imprints will ripen rather than one of the positive ones.
Because what the Buddha taught, because this is what the Buddha perceived, is that at the time of death, just to simplify it, a particular karmic imprint will ripen to determine, in a sense, what kind of rebirth we will have. There’s negative and positive imprints. So the main determining factor of what kind of karmic imprint will ripen at the time of death to bring a particular kind of rebirth is the state of mind we’re in at death. If we’re in a negative state of mind where we’re very frightened, agitated, particularly having lots of attachment or anger, then it’s almost guaranteed that that will force a negative imprint to ripen and bring a very bad rebirth. Whereas if we die in a calm, peaceful, virtuous state of mind, where the mind is where there isn’t much attachment, but there’s more kindness and love, compassion, faith and so on, then that state of mind is almost guaranteed to enable a virtuous karmic imprint to ripen that has to bring a good rebirth.
So this leads into the next topic, which is to think about the possibility of experiencing a bad rebirth. And the reason to think about something so horrible and scary is to do that, to scare us, but in a good way, to generate a wise fear, a wise dread, if you don’t like the word fear. I know many people turn away from religion because it’s all about fear, so here it is again. But of course, there are certain fears that are important to have. They protect us.
If we don’t have these fears, we will suffer. If we don’t fear fire, when there’s a fire there right in front of us and we walk into it, Oh, I don’t care. I’m not afraid of fire. What, you’re going to get seriously singed? So that fear is useful, but of course, it isn’t useful to be afraid of fire one hundred percent of the time when there isn’t fire around, but when a fire is around, it’s very helpful, it’s useful, right?
It’s appropriate. But there are a lot of fears we have which are totally we are afraid of what people think of us. We’re afraid of, Do people like me? Do I look this right? We’re afraid of so many things that are completely pointless and not helpful at all, and yet there are things that we should be afraid of, which we are completely unmoved by, and what the Buddha is saying we should be afraid of is the suffering of a bad rebirth, because it’s very easy to have one.
It’s very easy to create the cause. So of course the question is, does such rebirth exist? So this is a very big topic, but in a nutshell, I think it all for us, well, why I believe in it, what helps me believe in it, is that having met Buddhadharma, I didn’t believe this before, but when I met the Buddhadharma, I came to the belief that animals have mind, have consciousness. Consciousness means it’s the mind that knows and when you’re knowing, you’re feeling. So something that feels has consciousness.
This computer is able to store lots of knowledge and various computers and whatever can compute all sorts of amazing things immensely quickly, much more quickly than human minds do. But do they feel? I don’t think so. They don’t have feelings. But animals, I think, one can see, have feelings.
And that means they have consciousness. And if they have consciousness and also they have intelligence, if you check and more and more things have been shown of how intelligent animals can be, and they use logic. They even invent things. They make tools, some kinds of animals. Of course, at a very primitive level, no one’s saying that any animal is as intelligent as a human being.
Even the most intelligent animal is nowhere near as intelligent as even an unintelligent human being, but they have intelligence. That means they have consciousness, but their intelligence is obscured. But if an animal has consciousness, then I don’t know if I’ve got the logic to prove this, but not maybe the time, but really, it becomes illogical, I think, to say there are different significantly in their nature, different kinds of consciousness. Mind is mind. My mind is different than your mind, but the nature of my mind is no different than yours.
You could say to some extent, Women have different minds than men. They think slightly differently, and maybe people from one culture think differently than other people. I think that’s true to some extent, but thinking is not the way people think is not the sum nature of consciousness. It’s just a function of consciousness to think. Consciousness does more than think.
It perceives, it feels, it knows in all sorts of ways, can directly perceive things, and all consciousnesses do that. There are not different kinds of consciousness. There are more obscured levels of obscuration of consciousness, but the consciousness that is obscured, that consciousness is the same. All consciousnesses are in nature the same. It doesn’t mean they’re one consciousness, I don’t mean that.
This is not Buddhist view. We’re not one big consciousness that don’t know about and think we’re separate. We are separate consciousnesses, but all the same. So then you have to ask, why is consciousness of a dog in a dog body and not in a human body? Therefore, being in a dog body is so much more limited than a human being.
And the answer is that created a cause, and not a good cause, a negative cause. And then it starts to follow, I think, that if you create more negative karma, you experience something even worse, which in Buddhism, they talk about the preta realms, the realms of hungry ghosts, where one has a life of thousands and thousands of years, where one is tormented by hunger and thirst all the time. Basically just craving and never experiencing what you crave, just unrequited craving of every kind. Then if you engage in even more negative actions, you get the result of continuous suffering, which we can call hell. So according to Buddhist teachings, these realms exist.
A lot of modern day Buddhists, particularly Westerners, like to interpret the sutras on this as saying, Well, actually, it just refers to the human realm. The Buddha was only talking about there are humans whose lives are like hell, like hungry ghosts, like animals. And of course, there are humans whose experience is like hell, like hungry ghosts, like animals, but the Buddha is saying there are other realms far, far worse than this. And these aren’t created by the Buddha or some god or something. They are created by our mind.
How do you create them? By obscuring your mind. How do you obscure the mind? By engaging in negative actions, following the disturbing thoughts. If you don’t do it, those experiences just cannot happen.
So even if one doesn’t want to or finds it hard to believe in those realms, which they are hard to believe in, and the suffering, if you read the suffering and how long they go on for, it is extremely difficult to believe. But even if you only think there are human beings, then consider that if we use this life to obscure our mind more, or some negative karma from the past ripens at the time of death, it is so easy, if you look around this world of seven billion human beings, to have a life far worse than anything we’ve got. I heard a program just I even know people who are academics who are involved in this. There is an estimated thirty eight million slaves in this world at the present moment. Thirty eight million slaves being trafficked all the time, people sold into slavery in the most appalling condition, like in the sex trade, in factories, child slaves, adult slaves, all sorts of horrific stuff.
Imagine being born in Syria, in places controlled by ISIS or the Islamic State at the moment. Wouldn’t that be a lot of fun? That would be just terrific. Or just born as a peasant in practically anywhere in India or Africa or South America. I mean, just kept excuse me, been born as an Aboriginal in Australia.
Actually, I think this is one of the worst sufferings in the world, what Aborigines in this country have to endure, many Aboriginal people have to endure. It’s very easy to create the cause. If one creates the cause, one gets the result. We could have a much worse body than we’ve got from various much stronger sorry, much weaker body than we’ve got, a much less healthy body than we’ve got, and we would suffer so much more. Even just from a conventional point of view, we could have a less pleasant appearance, attractive appearance, than what if a degree of pleasant or attractive appearance we’ve got, and we would suffer if we had less.
Who wants to be worse in one’s next life than this life? None of us. We would all like to look better, right? There’s a lot of money made in this process. And then we could have a mind much worse, far less intelligent, or our delusions are more berserk than they are now.
Or we could be born in a place where there’s so much more violence, poverty, political repression, geographical disasters and whatever than now. Or we can have a wonderful, wonderful combination of all those terrible things. The possibilities of human suffering in this world are endless, and it all depends on creating the cause, which is so easy. So we should think about that. It’s not a good thing, it’s not a fun thing to think about, but in the tradition, we are encouraged to meditate on thinking about what it would be like, the suffering of a lower rebirth, even a bad human rebirth, or what it would be like to be born an animal.
And the purpose of that is not just to terrify ourselves, but to motivate ourselves not to create the cause, because we have the optimum chance to stop doing that. And we have the optimum chance to purify the imprints that we’ve generated creating negative causes earlier in this life or in past lives. So then in the Lam Rim, the psychology of the path to enlightenment, the next thing, what this leads us to then consider is how can I be free of this possible suffering? What can protect me? From a Buddhist point of view, the answer is taking refuge in what is called the triple gem.
The triple gem of the Three Jewels of refuge are the Buddha, the Buddha’s teachings, the Dharma, and the great practitioners of those teachings, the Sangha. And here the Sangha as one of the Three Jewels of refuge, is referring to those people who are on the path, who have directly perceived the true nature of themselves. So those beings are objects of refuge, something that we can trust and rely on. Refuge is actually a very complicated, vast subject, but just in a nutshell, for the purposes of this quick short talk, introductory talk, the objects of refuge are the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The reason for taking refuge is the basic reason for taking refuge is recognizing that one has the potential to experience not only suffering in this life, but a lot of suffering in one’s next lives when one dies.
And so one wants to be free of that, and then one has to find something that can protect oneself from all of that suffering. Just to go back a little bit, all people, to some extent, take refuge throughout their life, whether they’re Buddhist or not. And what we take refuge in changes. When we’re very small, our objective refuge is usually our mother. As we get a little bit older, we start to break away from our mother and we focus on our friends.
As we get a bit older, our friends can remain our refuge, but people often take refuge in money and power and reputation and things like that, believing, If I have this, this is going to protect me from suffering, this is going to make me happy. Well, we have a combination of refuges, but all of these refuges are based on a very limited understanding of how much suffering we are likely to experience and how long it will last, thinking we’re only going to have a certain amount of suffering, possibly for just this life, there are these limited refuges, but once we meet the Buddhist teachings and start to open our mind to the possibility that our mind, our mind is what gives rise to experience, and our mind is never going to stop. Our body is impermanent, but the mind, the subtlest level of mind, this goes on forever. That doesn’t fade away, and it’s always giving rise to experience. So there’s the potential for the mind to continuously, forever, to give rise to suffering.
Or keep, maybe a little, some happiness, then suffering. A little bit of happiness, and lots of suffering. So then, what is going to protect us from that? Is there anything? And the Buddha says, Yes.
The Buddha says, The Buddha is the protection. Because what taking refuge or going for refuge means is you recognize that you’ve got a mind, not just a brain, but you’ve got a mind, and that your mind is what is giving rise to all your experience, good and bad. That it’s only because of your mind that you have a sense of self, of who you are. You can’t have a sense of self without a mind. And the only way you experience your body is through your mind.
Your body doesn’t experience your body. It’s your mind that knows your body. And then what experiences this body and this self interacting in this world is your mind. Refuge is recognizing that even if we don’t deeply understand it, when we have refuge in the Buddha Triple Gem, we are accepting that fact, and we’re understanding that since it is our mind that’s giving rise to all our experiences of happiness and suffering, the only way that we’re going to have less suffering and more happiness is to take care of our mind. One could argue, Well, if I had more money, I’d be happier than I am now.
I don’t only have to take care of my mind, but the main thing is to take care of one’s mind because even if we won a billion dollars tomorrow and our mind remains the same as it is, those billion dollars are not guaranteed to make us happier. It’s quite likely that billion dollars will make us much more miserable because we could get awfully attached to a billion dollars. And we could also have a lot of fear about losing this newly acquired billion dollars. And then there will be an awful lot of people suddenly interested in us. And our pride could go completely berserk, and then we could get quite depressed.
Do they love me for my money or for me? Our mind could go completely insane if we won a billion dollars. That is not exactly a guarantee of happiness. As my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, said a long time ago, How do you ever expect to be happy when your mind’s controlled by delusion, by anger and attachment and desire? But most of us live our life thinking, I’m going to be happy.
We don’t consciously think that, but we live our life thinking, I’m going to become happy without taking care of my mind. I’m going to become happy even though I’m full of desire, attachment, pride, jealousy, fear, anger, blah, blah, blah. It’s impossible. So we reckon taking refuge is recognizing I have to take care of my mind. That is the most important thing.
Nothing else is really going to work properly, especially forever, Because remember, everything else is impermanent. All the other things are impermanent. Then, to take care of our mind, we need a method. So what method are we going to use? Doesn’t it follow that if our mind is something most of it, I certainly myself, I hardly know anything about my body or bodies in general, what’s inside, even where bits and pieces are.
I’m not even sure where my liver is. But the body is something you can see. What’s inside you can’t actually see, but if you chop them up, you can see them. Well, there are books on it, but our mind, we can’t see. Most people don’t even know what the mind is, never think about it.
So how am I going to work with this thing which is so subtle and unknown? We need an expert. We need a method that has complete knowledge of the mind, Pure, unmistaken, total knowledge of the mind. And who’s got that? Well, from the Buddha’s point of view, the Buddha has the unobscured mind, the mind that has eliminated all obscurations and has awakened all positive qualities.
Many people put their trust in other human beings just because they’re interesting, they’re nice, they’re entertaining, they’re charismatic, and blah blah blah, or they can perform a few miracles. But just because you can perform a few miracles doesn’t mean you have pure, unobstructed mind, that you have great compassion, great love, and perfect wisdom. If you think about it, one needs a perfect refuge, one needs a perfect method that can only come from a perfect source, and from the Buddhist point of view, the perfect source, the only perfect source, is the enlightened mind. A mind that is free of all faults in such a way that they can never come back, has awakened all positive qualities in such a way that they are always functioning, never declining. And one can then trust the teachings coming from that pure, unobstructed mind, that mind that is pervaded by perfect, great compassion and love and wisdom.
And we can also rely on the people, not the ordinary practitioners, but the really advanced ones, those who have developed an authentic, undeclining experience of those teachings, especially the wisdom teachings about the nature of reality. So that’s the aryasangha. So one can take refuge in the triple gem for three reasons. The first one is simply for oneself, wanting to be free of suffering in this life and possibility of suffering in one’s next life, A deeper level of motivation for taking refuge is to be free of cyclic existence by having refuge in the Buddha’s teachings. We start to understand about being in saṃsāra, and therefore we can then develop the wish to be free of it.
And then the most profound level of motivation for taking refuge is the bodhicitta motivation, wishing to take refuge in order not only to free oneself from saṃsāra, but to help everyone become free and achieve enlightenment. Oh dear. Alpha. When do we stop? Can I just keep going for a while before the questions?
People’s minds are going pop. Question? A question? All right, just very quickly. I haven’t got much time.
I’m very proud. I’m at least on to the last topic for tonight, which is so the next step in the logic of the Lamrim, the stages of the path, is so we think I’ve got a mind, it’s obscured, but it has this Buddha nature. I’ve now got a precious human rebirth, the optimum chance to realize my Buddha nature. So that starts to motivate us to practice. What motivates us more is realizing everything I’m wasting my life on is impermanent and I’m going to die.
Then what motivates us more is thinking, when I die, I could fall into the lower realms and spend a lot of time screaming and being miserable, pointless, I don’t have to do that, I can get a good rebirth, and that motivates us to take refuge in the triple gem, and the essential refuge, oh, left this out, of the three, the actual refuge is the Buddha, but we can’t directly perceive the Buddha or phone up the Buddha or talk to the Buddha and so on. So at our level, the main refuge, the essential refuge, is the Buddha’s teachings, the Dharma. Within the Dharma, there’s countless teachings. Traditionally they talk about eighty thousand of teachings of the Buddha, that’s an awful lot of teachings, but the essential teaching, which all the other teachings are connected to, is the law of cause and effect. Everything is connected to that.
That is the very basic one, not basic in the sense of the most simple, but it’s the basis of everything. It itself is a very complex subject, in many ways even more complex than the wisdom teachings of the Buddha. But it’s the basic one, the most important, the single most important teaching of the Buddha in many ways. When we take refuge, when we do refuge, when we practice refuge, we’re recognizing we’ve got a mind that is a source of our suffering and happiness, and we’re committed to taking care of our mind, we’ve committed to using the Buddha’s methods to do so, because we’ve come to the conclusion that the Buddha’s methods are perfect, because they come from an enlightened mind, and therefore those methods, if I practice them properly with a good motivation, then they won’t betray me. They will work Because they worked for the Buddha and all the other people, the beings after the Buddha.
So the essential method to rely on, because all the other methods and teachings are connected to them, is the law of cause and effect. Connected to them is the law of cause and effect. And the essence of that is avoiding all negative actions and engaging in virtuous actions. Because negative actions obviously are going to bring some suffering in this life, but, so this leads to the next topic of the law of cause and effect. By taking refuge, we commit ourselves to observe the law of cause and effect.
Because the law of cause and effect is saying that when we engage in an action, good or bad, of course there is some effect in this life. There’s no question of that. We don’t need the Buddha to explain that to us. But what we do need the Buddha to explain to us, because we don’t understand this, cannot see this working in any way, is that when we engage in actions, positive or negative, karmic imprints are generated. A negative action generates a negative imprint, a positive action, a virtuous action, generates a positive or virtuous or meritorious imprint, and the negative imprints can only ripen suffering, and the positive imprints can only ripen as happiness.
This is what the Buddha perceived, didn’t make it up. This is what the Buddha perceived, and therefore taught. And he said, if you want to avoid suffering, this is what you have to do. You have to avoid the causes. If you want if you want to experience happiness, you have to create the causes.
Because everything depends on causes. Nothing happens just by itself, and things don’t exist for no reason, no cause whatsoever. Everything has a cause. And since we’re experiencing it, the cause, the root cause comes from us, from our mind. Since our mind is experiencing something, the root cause comes from our mind.
We, as ordinary people, tend to think that the causes of our experiences are out there, that what the Buddha is saying according to what he perceived from the law of cause and effect is that what we think of as the main causes of our happiness and suffering are just the conditions, but the real cause lies within our mind. Just very quickly, for a plant to arise, you have to have the soil and the moisture and the heat and everything, all the conditions, but you need the seed. You need the plant seed. For example, to take an original example, tomatoes. To get a tomato plant, you need tomato conditions, nice tomato growing soil, but you need a tomato seed.
Just the soil won’t produce tomatoes, just the seeds all by themselves won’t produce tomatoes. You have to have both. And what is most important of the conditions in seeds is the seeds, because if you take this area and you plant a tomato seed here, the only place the tomato will grow This is all wonderful tomato growing soil. The only place the tomato will grow is where you put the seed. Conditions everywhere, the only place where the plant pops up is where the seed is.
Ebola spreads through a country. The conditions are everywhere. The only people who get it are the people who have created the cause for it. Only where the seed is does the result come. You haven’t created the cause, even if the conditions are there, you don’t experience the result.
But also, if you’ve got the seed for experience, but the conditions aren’t there, the seed can’t blossom. And that’s the point, we’ve got billions of seeds in our consciousness right now, good ones and bad ones, And if the conditions, we suddenly meet the conditions, bingo, you get the result. And of course, while we’re experiencing these conditions, we can’t experience the conditions of the lower realms, but as soon as death comes and these conditions stop, you can meet another set of conditions, and wham, something very interesting could happen. So the Buddha taught that karma is definite, that a negative there’s a definite relationship between cause and effect. If there is an effect, there has to be a cause.
If there’s no effect, it means you haven’t created the cause. And the nature of the cause determines the nature of effect. This is definite. It doesn’t change. It’s always the same.
And just very quickly, because there’s a key point that talks about, of course, good and bad, virtuous, non virtuous, right and wrong, and so on. And of course, people can argue that the ideas of right and wrong vary from culture to culture and from time to time. So this is true, but from a Buddhist point of view, there is a universal, unchanging standard for saying something is right or wrong, and that is the mind. Everyone has a mind, all our minds have the same nature, and all minds work in the same way, and certain things obscure, and the nature of the mind is blissful, but certain states of mind negate that blissful mind and obscure it, and that is bad. No one wants that, because everyone, everyone, every sentient being, at all times, throughout all the universes, only want to be happy.
No one wants suffering. So anything that negates our potential for happiness is bad, in all cultures, all civilizations, at all times, for humans, animals, predators, hell beings, gods, every sentient being. And anything that enables that potential for happiness and joy to manifest in any way is what we want, and everyone will say, that’s good. That’s the basis for what is virtuous and non virtuous in the Buddhist tradition, the way it affects your mind And how what is negative and bad and non virtuous are manifestations of what is obscuring our mind, which is our disturbing thoughts. And everything we label as good, virtuous, moral, meritorious, blah blah blah, reflections of the true nature of our mind.
So that’s all definite. Sorry, definite. So that’s the first of the basic aspects of karma. Second one is that and very connected is that if you are experiencing the effect, it’s because you’ve created the cause. If you’re not experiencing the effect, you haven’t created the cause.
So if we want happiness, we have to create the cause. If we don’t want suffering, we have to stop creating the cause. It’s that simple, because if we keep creating the causes of suffering, it will happen, whether we believe it or not. If something is naturally negative, even if we don’t know it but we do it, we will suffer. That’s why we need to know what is positive and negative.
And it doesn’t depend on what society tells us, because that changes all the time. What was good one day is bad the next. What is good in one society is bad in another. We need something, and we have to know what is actually true, not something that changes all the time. Third fundamental aspect of karma we should know about to protect ourselves is that once an imprint is generated in the mind, it will stay there, and it will bring the result.
When the conditions come, it could ripen later in this life, next life, millions of lifetimes in the future, but because there’s no end to time, no end to consciousness, there is tons of time, several tons of time, for the conditions to eventually come together to ensure that that imprint will ripen. So there are two exceptions to that. Is that fortunately we can purify the negative imprints so that they don’t ripen to bring horrible suffering, but unfortunately our positive imprints can be destroyed when we get really super emotional, particularly when we get angry. Every time we get really angry, that wipes out lots of positive imprints. That’s why we’re still in saṃsāra.
It’s kind of snakes and ladders. Because both Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe have said that obviously in previous lives, many of us have gained various realizations, been Geshes and Lamas and all sorts of things in past lives, then we just blew it. We were up there, just about to do something, make a real breakthrough, and then wham, got really angry, destroyed all our imprints, a lot of them, zonk, down we go, start again, kind of. Fourth one, fourth final factor, a fourth basic factor is that, oh, this has got a good side and a bad side. The good news is that when a positive karmic imprint ripens, the result is far greater than the energy that goes into creating that imprint.
So you could offer a grain of sugar to an ant with a good motivation, especially bodhicitta motivation. So the karmic result could be many, many lifetimes of happiness, where lots of nice things are offered to you continuously. But one moment of a negative mind can create a negative imprint that can create enormous suffering, lifetimes of suffering in the lower realms. So the fourth basic aspect is that karma is expandable. The result is far greater than the cause.
Therefore, we should really avoid as much as possible even small negative actions and engage in even small virtuous actions. That was yeah, okay. Questions? Yes? That’s okay.
So can collective consciousness cause karma, As in collective consciousness of a culture, collective consciousness of a gender, collective consciousness of a can that cause karma? Remember the word karma just means action or activity and it’s referring to the activity of your mind or, well, but also the activity of your speech and body motivated by your mind. So although there’s a group of people who have been affected by the same kind of mindset, of some kind of rather good or bad, you don’t each mind is creating some karma in that situation. For example, at a football match where everyone goes berserk when someone kicks a goal or something, well actually that’s maybe a case like when a whole bunch of people from one side boo a player from the other side and have a really negative thought and they’re all influenced by each other in that situation so they’re generating a negative each individual is creating a negative thought or emotion towards somebody, but it’s also influenced by everyone around them, right? But each one is individually creating their own negative karma.
But does it grow because there’s a, like, is it greater because there’s a a mass of people? So, like But what does what grow? Well, the karma. What karma? The bad karma, so if it’s the booing.
Like, say, you know, somebody’s booing at an individual, there’s like a thousand This gets very complicated. One person. When something like that happens, various things are happening. When we talk about karma, which is the law of cause and effect, we’re not talking so much about what is happening in this life. So when a group of people get together and get into kind of a negative state, of course, because there’s a lot, this one little person has gone to the football match just to enjoy it, but they’re in this bunch who really hate the other team or something, and they get influenced and they get into a mindset that they possibly wouldn’t have before.
So of course, because of the conditions, they’ve got into a negative state of mind, but they’ve got the imprint to do so, and then they start screaming and yelling and generating negative thoughts. Because of external influences, they’re creating, but they are individually creating their own negative karma. I don’t know how to explain this. But of course, by a lot of people coming together with negative minds, they’re having lots of maybe other negative effects in this life. It seems to be a lot easier to be negative when you have a lot of negative around you.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Absolutely. Or it seems to be a lot easier to be positive when you have a lot of positive That’s why we have dharma centers. Yes, that’s what they’re for. That’s why it’s good to have dharma friends.
That’s true. So the question is about that collective consciousness. A collective yeah, a group consciousness can act as a condition for people to engage in much stronger positive or negative karma. But that karma is their own individual imprint. But this is connected to another thing.
There are many stories in the sutras where it talks about how of course, can never think of an actual story. Because you need to do it accurately to but anyway, along the lines of a group of people kill someone in one life. So each of them has created the karma to kill, but since they did it together, this is an example of group karma. So what can happen is that in many future lives, somehow these people, like maybe as a result of killing, you get born in the lower realms, you get, due to some good karma, can become a human being again. But then as a human being, some other aspect of the negative karma ripens, and that group of people who kill that person together somehow come together and experience some horrible thing together.
That’s an example of group karma. Did that make some sense? It did make sense. Yeah. But of course, it’s fifty million other questions that arise from that.
Your cup. Which I won’t ask. Right. But, you know, Let’s take a break. Okay, any final questions?
Anything that came up? And then I can try and clarify any debates. Yes. Well, always give the example of anger as what harms positive karmic imprints. And for many years, I thought that was the only one, but the lojongs actually say any of the emotions are very strong, can have the effect of disturbing, of harming the positive imprints.
Is that what you’re talking about in relation to that? Yeah. So it’s not just anger, but yeah. Oh, yeah. I’ve got a question.
So you’re not from that. Would that be because essentially extreme emotions would be a point where your, I suppose, ignorance would be at its most highest level when you’re experiencing that kind of extreme emotion? Would that be why it’s so harmful towards your You will certainly the self grasping, grasping at the self is very is super strong when you’re angry. Yeah. But also when you have a lot of desire too, it’s just different.
Yeah. From some side like It’s just a different when it’s really heightened and really potent is because the self cherish the self grasping or both self grasping and self-cherishing is very strong. Yeah. So that’ll be true even if you don’t act on it because you’re still you’re not outwardly showing your anger Yes. Yeah.
Showing your anger. Yeah. Does any does anyone have any violent disagreement with what I’ve said so far? Wanna throw rocks at me or the Buddha?
Lama Zopa Rinpoche once said that, I’m sure he said it, well, I heard it one time, something along the lines that whether you’re religious or not, it’s got nothing to do actually with religion or believing in anything. According to Lama Zopa Rinpoche, if you’ve actually involved in a lot of if in your life you’ve been involved in a lot of negativity or some maybe not a lot, but a particular very negative thing in your life, then the way karma works is that at the time of death, you will have a lot of fear. And it’s got nothing to do with, you know, of course religious teachings can compound that, hellfire and brimstone, but even without that, people can have a lot of fear of dying because of what they have done. And even if they don’t believe it’s negative or anything, but the imprint is there and that has an effect at the time of death. But that, we’re not trying to, you know, the fear that is being cultivated in Buddhism is not that fear.
That is a I mean, unfortunately, I don’t think we have a proper word to really describe what one is trying to cultivate, but the fear we’re trying to cultivate is a fear of not of dying as such, but the fear that I’m going to die having led a negative life and not purified it, such a death should be feared because there’s a good chance one will have a bad rebirth. And Rinpoche says, whether one is religious or not, have any religious belief or not, if you die with a good heart, you will die peacefully and you’ll have a good rebirth, no matter whether you believe in future lives, whether you have a particular religious belief or not, you will have a good rebirth if you die with a good heart. And you won’t have that fear, that you just naturally won’t have that fear. Or even if, you know, your religious beliefs say you should be afraid to die, if you’ve got a good heart, you won’t have fear at the time of death. I had a I had a lovely Yeah.
Well, that because that’s due to attachment. Attachment always produces fear. The underlying theme with attachment is fear. The more attachment we have, the more we’re going to fear losing it. Even though, yeah, it’s a bit schizophrenic, I don’t know if that’s not the right word, but contradictory because on the one hand, we get attached to things because we think they’re permanent and we’ll have this permanent experience with it, but underlying that is a fear that we’re going to lose it.
I mean, that’s why, although anger is the most kind of explosive, nasty looking delusion, the worst one is attachment. That’s the main problem. No. No. Have you enrolled for our, what is it, Adelaide Lam Rim retreat?
Enroll now, folks. Remember This is the problem of Buddhism, that we have to use English words which have all sorts of connotations in English. I don’t even know the word. What is it in Tibetan? What’s the Sanskrit word for attachment?
I understand what you mean. Honestly, I do. Well, you shouldn’t have said that. No. Was just her beautiful way of, like, spaceships existing in the world, and all the beautiful things Yes.
But you can get attached to that or just life, this is what the teachings are saying. Don’t be attached. You can enjoy this stuff, but don’t get attached to it because this is believing it’s permanent, then you get dependent on it. And also limited mind thinking this is the most you can have. That’s why we’re attached to certain things because you think this is it.
You know? And and and Buddhism is saying, you know, what we can is you know, what we can experience is infinitely greater than any of the this rubbish in this world. Okay. Thank you very much. We can dedicate we can we’ve created some good imprints tonight by listening to all this depressing stuff.
We can dedicate to protect these positive imprints from being destroyed by strong emotions such as anger, we dedicate them, this is what the Buddha taught, and to ensure they bring the best result, we try and dedicate them to the best result, they bring a good result, not just an ordinary one, we dedicate them to the best result, enlightenment, which covers everything up to that. Due to the merits of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of the Guru-Buddha, and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the precious Bodhimind, not yet born, arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore. Okay, thank you very much.
So for those of people who find it meaningful, we can finish with three prostrations.