Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 104-minute session, Ven Thubten Dondrub presents Week 4 of the Graduated Path teachings, diving deep into the Second Noble Truth and the Middle Scope practitioner’s work on renouncing cyclic existence. After opening with motivation-setting through refuge and bodhicitta, he systematically explores the nature of suffering across eight and six categories, unpacks the subtle “suffering of change” that masquerades as happiness, and walks through the Second and Third Noble Truths by examining how ignorance gives rise to disturbing thoughts and negative karma. A substantial section develops the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination as a lens for understanding rebirth cycles. Throughout, Dondrub emphasizes that saṃsāra’s suffering stems not from external conditions but from mental delusion, and introduces the Three Higher Trainings—morality, meditation, and wisdom—as the sequential path to liberation. The teaching is anchored in direct experience: recognising impermanence as an antidote to craving, understanding emptiness as the antidote to ignorance, and building a calm, clear mind as the foundation for transformative wisdom. Suited to serious practitioners working through the Lamrim systematically.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Presenting the path week 4.mp3
UUID: 6407e04e-3d9e-462e-b3d4-af6c0d4d6c90
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Presenting the Path (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2018 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 104.1 minutes
Words: ~11,403
So welcome everyone to our fourth class on presenting the path. So the path that’s being presented is the path to complete enlightenment. So in being able to complete that path, one has to be able to generate the bodhicitta motivation, the determination to achieve enlightenment. And so when listening to the teachings, if on the path, then it’s important that our motivation for listening matches with the purpose of the teaching itself. So that’s why, as much as possible when listening to this presentation, from our side, we should try and generate the bodhicitta motivation as much as possible.
Of course, to generate the actual bodhicitta is many lifetimes of work, but at least we can direct our mind in that way, and we can at least temporarily generate what my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche calls the ‘effortful bodhicitta’, which is putting effort into thinking about the causes of bodhicitta. If we put that effort in right now, then sort of temporarily a state of mind can arise that is not actual bodhicitta but it’s kind of an approximation of it, a temporary short term version of it. And of course the main ingredients in generating bodhicitta are firstly having some faith that we have Buddha potential, and that comes from developing an understanding and faith in the Buddha’s teachings and developing a faith that the enlightened mind, the Buddhas, do exist. If they exist, it means that we have Buddha nature. And then, especially on that basis, what enables us the main things that enable us to generate bodhicitta is developing that awareness, that deep awareness of our connection with all sentient beings, how we totally depend on them and how amazingly we constantly receive the support of sentient beings in so many different ways, especially the unconditional love of a mother, which we’ve received from every sentient being many times in beginningless saṃsāra.
And the other aspect is to be aware, to develop that deep awareness that all these kind beings that we need moment by moment, life after life, all of these beings are suffering in cyclic existence. We are also suffering in cyclic existence, but right now we are in a very fortunate position, whereas the vast majority of sentient beings are trapped in the lower realms and are really quite helpless. So thinking and even the beings in the god realms, they’re having a wonderful time, but it’s going to end and it’s only going to be replaced by obvious suffering. They’re just burning up all their good karma for no, you know, beneficial result. So thinking along these lines, we can generate the thought that no matter what, I must use this in all future lives to achieve enlightenment, to be in a position to repay the kindness of mother sentient beings, helping them to be free of all suffering and its causes, helping them to achieve peerless, everlasting happiness.
So to do that, I must become a Buddha, and to achieve enlightenment, I have to follow the path, and to be able to do that, I have to understand the path, so that’s why I’m studying it tonight. So as we say the prayer of refuge in bodhicitta, if people would like to join in, which is I think on page something eleven, Roman eleven. Yes. And as we say this, we can think of the Buddha in front of us as our source of refuge, inspiration and guidance, someone who has realised their Buddha nature completely, and we can be motivated to achieve what the Buddha achieved by thinking of all sentient beings surrounding us, particularly those we’re most connected to in this life, so our mother on our left, father on our right, then the rest of our close family, all our friends and helpers behind us, harmers in front, and then as much as possible all other sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma and the Supreme Assembly.
By the merits I crave through listening to the Dharma, now I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So then we can imagine the Buddha pleased with our motivation, and the Buddha shows this by now coming to the crown of our head, dissolving into blissful golden light, so that that light can then pour down into us, blessing our mind. So particularly thinking our mind is blessed to be able to understand the teachings on the path, blessing our mind to be able to put those teachings into practice correctly, and blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain the unmistaken transformative realisations. So then reinforcing that positive state of mind by briefly doing the nine round breathing exercise, combining it if you feel that it’s helpful, with the visualisation of breathing in white light with the in breaths that brings great calmness and clarity to the mind, and then breathing out all one’s agitation, disturbing thoughts, negative imprints and so on in the form of this very dark liquid dark smoke with each out breath. Okay.
Thank you. Right. So as usual, there’s a lot to cover. And I’d just like to make the point again that this course on presenting the path we can only really do it very just give you a very brief overview of all the topics. And some of these topics are themselves become module whole modules of the DB, of Discovering Buddhism.
So don’t get too upset if you can’t, you know, if I’m not going into too much detail and one finds it difficult to understand something because only a little bit has been said about it, this is just to give an idea at least of the path and what makes up the path, the essential topics that we have to think about, meditate and put into practice that will transform our mind. So as I was saying, the path the Buddha appeared in the world essentially to show us that we have Buddha nature, that we can achieve enlightenment, that we can not only be free of suffering, not only be free of cyclic existence, but we can achieve this amazing state of enlightenment. And it’s incredibly important to do so because in that situation, in that enlightened state, we can be of immense, perfect, lasting benefit for countless beings. So to achieve enlightenment, as I mentioned, we have to generate this mind that is completely determined to achieve enlightenment that is bodhicitta. But to achieve bodhicitta, to develop bodhicitta, which is based on developing great love for all beings and great compassion for all beings, then to develop that mind, firstly, we have to get out of cyclic existence.
We have to and the way to do that is to recognise that its very nature is suffering, that while our mind is controlled by delusion and karma, there is only suffering. It varies from heavy suffering to light suffering to suffering that we think of as happiness, but it’s not the real thing. It doesn’t last, it’s not fully satisfying. So it’s an example of what is said what in Sanskrit is called dukkha, which we, for want of a better word, we call suffering. And to achieve that great renunciation, we firstly have to realise that the things of this life that we think are so important are not because they’re either so good or so bad.
These also are all very illusory, temporary things and that we end up creating so much negative karma being caught up in them. So we have to really let go or renounce our obsession with the things of this life. So that’s the beginning. So to do that, it’s very important. What if we want to follow the whole path to enlightenment?
We really need to rely on a qualified teacher, someone who has more than just a correct understanding of the teachings, but some genuine deep experience of them. And the more authentic experience of the teachings they have, the better it will be for us. And we need to recognise that we’ve got the precious human rebirth, is this optimum chance to practise the Dharma, to take care of our mind, the optimum chance to free ourselves from suffering, to free others from suffering. Because if we don’t use this optimum chance, when are we ever going to practise the dharma? I often give this analogy, which I made up, it’s probably not very good, but it’s like someone who wants to climb Mount Everest, and so they’re very young and fit and healthy and strong, but they say, Oh, I won’t climb Mount Everest, and they’ve got the money to do so, and they say, I won’t do it now, I’ll wait until I’m really old and then I’ll try.
So that’s really stupid. Know, when one’s fit and young and healthy, then you’ve got the greatest chance to be able to climb Mount Everest, to try and do it when you’re old and sick and probably maybe spend all your money. It’s just too hard. So that’s really dumb. But for us to waste this precious human rebirth is even worse, using or doing ordinary things when there’s something really spectacular we could do, which is far more beneficial than climbing Mount Everest.
All you can do once you’ve climbed Mount Everest is go down again because you can’t stay up there. But once one’s achieved enlightenment, you’re there forever, and it’s much better than being on the top of Mount Everest. So we really need to recognise that we have this incredible opportunity to benefit ourselves and others, and it may not come again for a long time if we don’t use this opportunity. So but we need to realise that this is impermanent, everything that we spend our time on is impermanent, doesn’t last, our life is impermanent, we’re definitely going to die, we could fall into the lower realms, which are pretty horrific. And once we’re in there, it’s very difficult to get out of them, and while we’re there, we can’t be of any benefit to others, and in fact, much of the time we end up harming others.
So that leads us to think about refuge. Is there some way we can protect our mind from all of this suffering? Then we can develop hopefully some faith or a lot of faith that the Buddha, having that perfect mind, that perfect understanding, and able to present that perfect understanding to the world, we can rely on that, we can practice that and protect ourselves. And that leads to the study of the law of cause and effect, which is really the fundamental teaching of the Buddha. It’s all the other teachings and practices that are associated with it.
And it’s by observing the law of cause and effect that we can stop creating the causes for suffering, particularly the suffering of the lower realms, create the causes for good rebirths. It’s, as I tried to say last week, it’s the basic practice of really developing love and compassion for ourselves. So it’s the basis for then being able to develop love and compassion for others. So I think that’s where we’ve got a lot, isn’t it? Oh, then we were talking, yeah.
So these are the practices that help us renounce this life, and which is also what it also really means, another way of looking at it, of developing basic love and compassion for ourselves and beginning to replace our self-cherishing, which looks like something good, but which is actually a real disaster, the second greatest obstacle to achieving, you know, free of suffering. The main obstacle is our ignorance, but our self grasping ignorance, that’s the very source of all our suffering, but what perpetuates that is our self-cherishing. Thinking just about ourselves, but having a wrong view of self, and then trying to take care of ourselves by following attachment, desire, anger and jealousy and so on. Right. So, as I mentioned many times, that’s the first major step in the spiritual path, renouncing this life, doing everything with the attitude of wanting to have better rebirths in order to begin to get out of cyclic existence and achieve, and then eventually achieve enlightenment.
So the next phase in the spiritual path is the practices of the being of middle scope, which is where one is trying to renounce or become free of cyclic existence. And that comes from, as I said, realizing more and more deeply that our cyclic existence, which is referring to our mind being controlled by delusion and karma, that existence is suffering. You remember the first teaching of the Buddha’s The Four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth that realised beings, beings with unobscured minds perceive, is that ordinary existence is in its very nature suffering. So ordinary existence is referring to cyclic existence, you know, samsaric existence, having a mind controlled by delusion and karma.
So the First Noble Truth means that when we have a mind controlled by delusion and karma, not only is there suffering sometimes, it means there is suffering always. Our existence all the time, from the point of view of someone who has a very clear purified mind, our existence is suffering, it is unsatisfying, unfulfilling, frustrating, incomplete, imperfect. That may be a very harsh message to hear and to accept many people don’t want to hear that or believe that. People want to think that their life is fine, that they’re happy and content and etcetera, etcetera. But we are suffering.
All of us, you know, we all have ignorance, we all have an obscured mind, we don’t experience ourselves as we actually are, we don’t experience anything as it actually is. Because of that, because we experience things in a false way, and only because of that do we have disturbing thoughts of afflicted desire and anger and pride and jealousy. We all have those things, everyone has them, no matter how intelligent or educated or whatever we are people are. We all have Unfortunately, we don’t have these all of these disturbing thoughts all the time, but we have the potential for them all the time, and when we meet the conditions for them, they arise in our mind, instinctively, uncontrollably at first. And this is what the Buddhadharma is one essential aspect of the Buddhadharma is to help us control those uncontrollable, disturbing thoughts, to be able to recognize them and begin to subdue them.
So the mere fact that everyone is subject to these disturbing thoughts means that everyone, rich and poor, healthy, unhealthy, good looking, not so good looking, powerful, weak, whatever, everyone is suffering. It’s undeniable. And no amount of money will ever stop suffering. It can only be stopped by working with the mind. One has to change one’s mind.
So that’s why there’s such an emphasis on suffering in Buddhism that people don’t like so much. But actually it’s very compassionate, the Buddha taught it, not to upset us, but out of great compassion, because the more we become aware of our suffering, the more Ideally what should happen is that we should start to question, Why am I suffering? Why is this suffering? And this leads to the Second Noble Truth of that there are actual causes, definite specific causes, of why we’re suffering. Maybe just to go back a bit, in the way the Lamrim, the Graduated Path teachings are set out, at this point it talks about the eight sufferings, the six sufferings, so I didn’t time to go into all of those, but I think the set of eight sufferings are very easy to understand and relate to.
The set of six sufferings maybe need a little bit of explanation, but maybe there’s not so much time. But if you have any questions on those, I’m happy to try and answer them now, if I can. Which are Have you got the No, I’ve probably got them here anyway I should know them, but the order can vary. What was it? Dissatisfaction and uncertainty.
Well, these two are very, very similar, but the suffering of uncertainty is because everything changes, everything is impermanent. So friends can become enemies, enemies can become strangers, you know. Success can change into failure, you know. What goes up goes down, you know. You have people who are extremely rich and powerful and then all of a sudden they’re not.
Nothing is really certain in cyclic existence because everything is impermanent, but also our minds are constantly changing. What we like one day, we dislike the next day, or are indifferent to. And people like us one day and they’re indifferent to us the next day, etcetera, etcetera. And so because of all that change in so many ways, everything is uncertain and that’s very unsatisfying. It can be very frightening in some cases, very disturbing and very stressful, And the suffering of death And increases that is our own reaction to all these changes and things because of our attachment and, you know, for example, the eight worldly concerns when people’s attitudes change towards us, we get very upset because of our attachment and desire, wanting to be liked and this and that, and believing this relationship is permanent, and then people change and we get very upset.
So there’s not only the external change of things, but then there’s our reaction to, you know, there’s that, we don’t expect it, and then we have all these attachments and so on that make it worse. And then there’s the suffering of dissatisfaction that because we have afflicted desire and attachment, no matter what we get, somehow we want more. We want more and more. That’s okay. Yeah.
You know, it always amazes me that there are people with fifty billion dollars but they’re still working like crazy to make more. Somehow you never stop. Someone asked the question whether it was I understood, sometimes I find it difficult to read people’s writing and their homework about whether it was a good idea to focus on developing financial what was it, financial freedom first before really focusing on spiritual life. So in one way, of course, that’s a nice idea, but the trouble is, as one focuses on what starts out as, I’m focusing on financial freedom for the sake of in order to be able to have money to practise the dharma, ‘ one can end up being very attached to that to the money and one’s you know, one’s spiritual goals can get lost. But also why one’s trying to obtain financial security, one could die long before one ever gets it.
So somehow the answer is that we have to practice now. I mean, that’s what the meditation on death is about, yeah. We have to practice now because we just don’t know when death is going to come. We have to practice and we have to practice now as much as we can because, you know, we all have this idea that we there’s this perfect situation where we would practice, you know, when we’ve got, you know, all these things are in place, and then I’ll be really able to practise the Dharma. But that perfect situation will never come.
Or to put it another way, it already has. We’ve got the precious human rebirth. That is the perfect situation. It doesn’t get any better than what we’ve got. And while we’re waiting for the kids to grow up and to have the better job or move house or this or that, you know, the time is going, we’re losing this precious human being, so we have to practice now.
So anyway, just briefly what I wanted to talk about, in the three kinds of suffering, I can’t go into this in detail now, which I’d like to, but actually one of the most important topics, I think, to understand in Buddhadharma is the suffering of change, because that’s what we think of as happiness. Of course it’s very easy for us to recognise obvious suffering, but there are many experiences and situations that we think of as happiness, you know, that we as a culture or a group or whatever, or just individually think of as happiness, but the Buddha says all of the things that we think of as happiness aren’t happiness, they’re just a subtle kind of dukkha in the sense that these things are incomplete, they’re imperfect, and the obvious way to understand that they are not happiness is because they don’t last. And deep down, what we all want is lasting happiness. We don’t want happiness to last for a week or a month or a year or ten years or even twenty years. We want happiness to last for as long as we last.
And actually, we’re going to last forever. We’re not going to last very long as this person, but we, our mind is going to go on forever. And we want really, when we understand that, we want our mind to be experiencing peace, happiness, contentment, well-being all the time, not just occasionally. Right? So from that perspective, everything that we’ve ever labelled or think of as happiness isn’t because it just doesn’t last, and it can’t last.
Because all our all the happiness that we kind of think about depends on things, people and things, all of which are impermanent, so impermanent things can’t produce permanent lasting happiness. And the other reason why, which one can go into this in more detail but I don’t have time, why what we call happiness isn’t really happiness it’s because it only seems to be happiness relative to greater suffering. When our actually, when one starts to investigate everything that we label, happiness, is just because it’s a relief, a temporary relief from some obvious suffering. That’s a pretty depressing part. It’d be super depressing if that was the only reality, but the Buddha is telling us this because there is the greater reality that we can experience peerless, everlasting happiness.
We can do this. But we can’t experience it while we while our mind is attached to all ridiculous little things believing this is wonderful, this is real happiness, it’s going to last forever, because it’s not. So we have to let go of our attachment to those things. And also, in developing bodhicitta, if we think being in cyclic existence is okay for us, that somehow I can be okay in cyclic existence. If my love for myself extends to putting up with saṃsāra, then it means our wish for the happiness of, you know, our love love is defined as wanting happiness.
So if my love for myself is wanting to stay in saṃsāra, which is actually suffering, then my love for other people is I want them to remain in saṃsāra, meaning, actually, I want them to remain miserable, and that’s not love at all. If we think this is Okay for me, then it’s okay for everyone, but the Buddha says it’s not. It’s not okay. It’s suffering. So if we want everyone to remain in saṃsāra, it means we really love them, we don’t have any compassion for them or love for them.
It just may, you know, we call it that, but it’s not at all. It’s not the real thing. It’s not even getting close to the real thing. That’s why the whole path to enlightenment, everything about it, is about really developing love and compassion. Renunciation of this life and saṃsāra is about developing love and compassion for oneself and others.
Right. So, we have to think about suffering, we have to acknowledge our own suffering, and the more we can acknowledge that, the more we can also understand that everyone else is in the same position or actually far worse, has far more suffering. And then, so that leads to the second noble truth, that there is a real cause. And we think the cause is out in the external world, but the Buddha says, No, if you really check, it’s our own mind. It all comes from our mind, our disturbing thoughts.
As I’ve said many times before, one of the first things that really struck me when I first heard Buddhist teachings, which was I was very fortunate to hear them from Lama Zopa Rinpoche, when he said that, how can you believe you’ll ever be happy when you have a mind controlled by delusion and karma, or by desire, attachment and anger? How can we? How can we expect to be happy if our mind constantly comes under the control of those things? You know, how much money we have, possessions, family, friends, nice house, nice climate, all these things, but still our mind is controlled by delusion. It always gets in the way.
And as I’ve said, the things that we say are the actual cause for suffering, they’re just the condition for suffering. If we didn’t have the potential within us to suffer, these external things couldn’t make us suffer. But we have these inner potentials for suffering. An immediate cause of our suffering, the immediate potential that leads to our suffering, are our negative karmic imprints. Why are they there?
No one put them there, or in a sense we did. We put them there by following our disturbing thoughts. And why do those disturbing thoughts exist? As I try to say, it’s because of ignorance. Our ignorance creates this false appearance about how we exist, how everything exists.
This is a huge subject, it’s one of the DB modules at the very end, the most complicated topic in whole universe. But in a three minute nutshell, what our ignorance does, it when we experience things, it’s easy to talk about external things, when we experience external things, they appear to be out there, separate from us, just existing somehow in and of themselves. Of course, most of us, even the really intelligent people, educated intelligent people, don’t go around questioning reality. I mean, a few philosophers do over the years, over the centuries, but most people don’t understand what philosophers are talking about anyway. There’s what was his name?
Oh, it doesn’t matter, I can’t remember. This famous Swiss philosopher. No, no, no. No. A fairly recent one, he lived in the thirties.
Or in the fifties, he was alive in the fifties. What’s his name? Einstein? No, no, no, philosopher. Well I suppose Einstein’s a philosopher, wasn’t he too?
But no. Oh anyway, someone said only about three people in the world understood his philosophy. Oh, I’ve forgotten his name. Alan Alan Watts? No, no.
Sorry. Don’t think he No, I’ve got lost. Where are we? Yeah. So if we start to try and think about things just seem to be there from their own side and having their own entity, their own they exist under their own power with their own qualities, Things seem to be just because we’ve used this word really, you know, this is really good.
It’s really good. This is really bad. I mean, use that word pretty mindlessly, but it also reinforces that it is like that. From its own side, this food is really delicious, this flower, fake flower, is really beautiful. And so what all that is saying is that somehow all of these things exist independently of me.
And the Buddha says, this is not true, that everything depends on our mind. That when our mind changes, the world changes. For something to appear beautiful, our mind has to conceive of it as beautiful. We think it’s the opposite way around, that something is beautiful, and because it’s beautiful, we perceive it as beautiful. Perceive it.
It’s really beautiful, and so we are our mind is like a mirror that just objectively perceives it as beautiful. But the reality is there is this something there, and our mind conceives of it as beautiful, and then it appears back to us as really beautiful. Yes, that’s conditioning, yes. To some extent, yes, that’s it, yeah, that kind of thing. But also, all of us as human beings, we’re also not only conditioned by our culture and history and blah blah blah, but also we are karmically conditioned from lifetimes.
We come into the world karmically conditioned, and we’re all conditioned to see things as inherently existing, that they’re since beginningless during beginningless time, we are conditioned to experience things as though they are really the way they appear to our mind. But it’s only because things appear thinking that this is really beautiful and this is really bad, from their own side, independently of us, it’s only because of that. If you think about that, even if one doesn’t really actually understand that bit, but if that’s the way things appear, it’s only because of that that things seem out there, separate, independently like that, that we crave them, desire things, that this beautiful thing, you know, if I have it, I will be happy. It’s not as if we necessarily logically think that because much of this is just instinct by now, from millions of lifetimes. There is something there that appears pleasant, and of course all pleasant things mean happiness, so the happiness is out there, separate from me.
But if I make it less and less separate, you know, if I get this closer and closer to me, you know, the happiness I’m getting this happiness which is out there, separate from me, then I’ll have it, then I will be happy. And because this thing also appears permanent, I will be permanently happy. So that’s why we get attached. We get stuck with it, we find it painful to separate, and we become dependent on this thing, and therefore we become very proud, perhaps, that we’ve got something that other people don’t have, and also frightened to lose it. Partly, you know, we think we’ve got it forever, but also somehow underlying that, there is this fear, I’m going to lose this, and then there is anger that anything that will threaten my happiness, my happiness and the things that, you know, the people and possessions that make me happy or secure.
So it’s all because of our ignorance that we have these disturbing thoughts, which are painful, and then we follow them and create negative imprints, suffering imprints. This is what the Buddha taught at least. So each of the disturbing thoughts are labelled that because they are disturbing, they are painful. Jealousy is painful, pride is painful, anger is painful, and especially what we need to realise is that desire is painful, because that’s the hardest to accept, because we have so much desire and attachment, and we think we couldn’t live without desire and attachment. But remember, in Buddhism, we are translating very the Sanskrit language and Buddhist languages have very precise words with very precise meanings, you know, like, the Sanskrit is a language of the mind, whereas our languages, Western languages, are particularly languages of things.
So we don’t have these precise words to capture the meaning of the Sanskrit very well. So there is a particular Sanskrit word, which I don’t know what it is, which is translated as attachment, but in our language attachment often has a very nice meaning. In some cases it doesn’t, but in Buddhism attachment always goes with afflicted desire. Afflicted desire is a negative, disturbing state of mind that always goes with attachment. You have these two things together.
So attachment is not a good state of mind to be in, it’s a harmful state of mind. It’s got nothing about caring for other people and being fond of them and appreciating them, it is this mind that is neurotically, you know, dependent on something and unable to separate it from it because it’s mixed with desire, and the nature of desire is to exaggerate how good something is. Something is, you know, conventionally good within our society, we’re conditioned to believe this is conventionally good or beautiful or this or that, and and we contacted it and it makes me happy, and because it makes me happy, it must be fantastic. So desire completely exaggerates how wonderful something is. And also believes it’s permanent, it’s not changing, it’s going to last.
And actually afflicted desires, so also all the disturbing thoughts are in relation to ordinary things, not things of high spiritual value. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to become enlightened. That is not a disturbing thought, the thought wanting to become enlightened or wanting to be a kinder, more patient person or something like that. That is not afflicted desire. That wish doesn’t disturb the mind.
I’ve got lost. Where am I going? All right. Any questions, comments so far? How much time have I got?
Half an hour. Twenty Twenty five. Right. Okay. Alright, so the main topics of the path to enlightenment in this second section of the person of middle spiritual capacity who’s working to renounce cyclic existence is especially thinking about the suffering nature of cyclic existence.
There’s suffering of you know, the eight sufferings and the six sufferings and so on. There’s the suffering of the lower realms, the intense sufferings of the lower realms. And then there’s the very subtle sufferings of the god realms that even that incredible bliss of the god realms, it goes on for eons, but it doesn’t last, it stops. And then one can then, from that incredible bliss, experience the suffering of the one could be immediately reborn in one of the lower realms or as a human being, and it just goes around and around and over and over again. Actually it is said that the worst suffering in cyclic existence is not in the hell realms, but amongst the desire realm gods at the very end of their life, because they’ve been having this incredible bliss for eons, and they have these incredibly beautiful bodies of light, where everything is beautiful and wonderful, and then at the very end of their life they start to realise that they are dying, that the beauty of their body fades away, and all their beautiful friends stay away from them.
And then they become they become aware that this is all this incredible bliss and joy and unbelievable beauty is coming to an end. And that is said to be the worst suffering of all. Being aware they’re still having the bliss, but they know it’s going to end. And they say that mental suffering is worse than the lowest hell realm suffering. Oh, yeah, well they’re a long way from being Buddhas.
They’re just enjoying the good karma they’ve created, yeah, that manifests as this bliss. It’s a reverse. Yeah, this is still cyclic existence. Remember, the god realms are cyclic, still an aspect of our limited mind. The obscured mind can still give rise to that God realm experience.
Yeah, so one thinks about the suffering, this leads us to think about the causes that lie within our own mind and to realise that while the causes exist, there will be suffering. So if we can get rid of the causes, this is what the Buddha says, If we can get rid of the causes, suffering ceases. So the immediate causes of our suffering are the ripening of our negative karmic imprints, They’re there because of our disturbing thoughts. But the only way to get rid of our disturbing thoughts firstly, we can pacify them, subdue them if we subdue them, we will engage in fewer negative actions, create fewer causes of suffering. If we subdue our disturbing thoughts, it’s easier to cultivate our positive potentials and engage in more and more virtuous actions that are the cause of real happiness.
But even subdued disturbing thoughts, we still they’re still there. So the only way to get rid of them is to get rid of the cause of the disturbing thoughts, which is ignorance. And so the Third Noble Truth is, what the Buddha taught, is that there is a true cessation of suffering. We can completely eliminate all suffering because it is possible to eliminate ignorance from our mind. Because the wonderful thing is that what the Buddha discovered, right now we experience everything as though it truly exists, that things, the I that I’m believing that this is me, that that really exists, this body really exists, this this solid world really exists.
But in fact, it doesn’t. It is existing, but it’s not inherently existing from its own side. It’s not existing independent of causes and conditions, it’s not existent independent of parts, it’s and it’s certainly not existing independently of our mind. Nothing exists that way. Nothing exists inherently, truly, independently.
Nothing can exist that way. So ignorance exists. It’s existed during beginningless time, but it doesn’t inherently exist. And because it doesn’t inherently exist, it can be eliminated, because it arises depending on many factors, and we can overcome those factors. We can eliminate them.
And as I mentioned I think last week, one of the main reasons ignorance exists or continues to exist is because we’re not even aware of it. Until we meet the Buddha’s teachings, we don’t even think about these things. We have no sense. You know, for most of us, you know, philosophy about the nature of reality is, you know, what’s that got to do with life? That’s just what a few egghead intellectuals in ivory towers waste their life doing, you know, just having fancy ideas about reality.
But actually, what the Buddha is saying, understanding reality is absolutely vital to our existence. Because we’ve got it wrong. We’ve got it completely wrong, and we have no idea we’ve got it completely wrong. And the trouble is, having it completely wrong means we’re suffering. But as soon as we start questioning things, we can begin to reduce our ignorance.
Our ignorance thrives in ignorance, in not knowing. Was it Freud? No, it wasn’t Freud. I’ve got it on the tip of my tongue, but it’s Not so many. James? So James?
No, no, he’s Swiss. He was Swiss Jewish man. No, no, no, no. He lived in he was alive in the 50s. He died sometime in the 1950s, I think.
He lived in England. He was Swiss he escaped he came from an extremely Antler. Who? Antler. No, no.
He came from an extremely no, wasn’t Swiss, he was Austrian. He came from an extremely wealthy family in Austria. No. No. It’s a bit off the topic anyway.
I don’t even know half the people you’re saying, but it’s not I know it’s not you. Okay, yeah, so we have to think about the causes, yes. And anyway, the main thing about the second noble truth is to realise that all the suffering, the causes of our suffering is coming from our mind. Yeah, that’s the thing, it’s coming from our mind. Yeah.
So we need to change our mind, work on our mind, and the Buddhist, the teachings on the path help us do that. Because in this section it explains, you know, what discusses the nature of the disturbing thoughts and also the antidotes to them. So there are many each disturbing thought has its own antidote, specific antidotes, but there are some general antidotes to the disturbing thoughts, one of which, of course, is general antidotes which works for all of them, and the main one is understanding impermanence. What helps subdue any of our disturbing thoughts is having a deep understanding of impermanence, that the objects of our desire are impermanent. So if we could remember that, reflect on that, we wouldn’t have so much desire for things and attachment for them.
Because our desire and attachment is based on this beautiful thing is permanent. It is it will be permanently like this, and therefore I will be permanently happy having this permanently beautiful person thing situation. But if we understood it’s not permanent, it changes and decays, we could still enjoy the thing, we could possibly enjoy it a lot more, but we wouldn’t have this craving, this neurotic craving and attachment and dependence. And the same with anger. If, you know, what makes our anger really, you know Anger is when our mind can’t bear something, it explodes because we can’t bear it.
And what makes something unpleasant really unbearable is this subconscious thought that this is never going to stop. Right? But it’s all impermanent. So just saying it’s impermanent, of course, is not going to subject the disturbing thought. We have to really meditate on this and come to some real understanding and acceptance that things are impermanent, that they really are.
And this particular thing is impermanent. So the more we practise that meditation, then we have a very powerful antidote to subdue our disturbing thoughts. So then another very important topic and practice in this section of developing renunciation of cyclic existence, but it’s a very complicated thing. We’ve talked a little bit about it in previous modules, is the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination. So I think you will have a handout on that for tonight.
So we’re not really going to go into it because as much it’s one of the in my personal opinion, it’s one of the most complicated topics in the Buddhadharma. And, yeah, and much less interesting than emptiness. It’s not as complicated as emptiness, but anyway, shouldn’t say those things. I shouldn’t. Anyway, but it gets to be a very tricky topic.
But what it’s about, it’s explaining how one takes rebirth in saṃsāra. So just very briefly, the first link that binds us and helps us take, you know, is the basis for taking rebirth again and again in cyclic existence and therefore experiencing suffering is ignorance. So on the basis of that ignorance, we engage in various actions and we create karmic imprints. And particularly link number two, karmic formations, is referring to creating throwing karmas that you remember are the ones that ripen at the time of death and lead us to take particular kinds of rebirth. So once we follow ignorance, we create these karmic imprints, and once we create those karmic imprints, this leads to the third link, which is having a consciousness that is carrying those karmic imprints.
And once there is that consciousness carrying those karmic imprints, this leads to the fourth link, which is the link of name and form, which is referring to the beginnings of very beginnings of a new life form. Name is referring to the various aspects of the mind, and form of course is the physical form of the new rebirth. This is particularly in the case of being reborn as a human being again, the link of name and form is referring to the first moments of the foetus in the womb. And so once you have that established, that leads to the next link, is the sixth sense powers. So within the tiny foetus in the womb, then these sixth sense powers start developing, which are the basis for us to be able to hear, see, smell, taste and touch, and so on.
And once they develop, that leads to the next link, is contact, which is of this mental factor that arises when there’s a meeting of the sense power, of the coming together at the same time, of the sense power, the object and the consciousness. So for example, there’s the eye sense power, there’s the object of the eye, which is shape and colour, and then there’s the eye consciousness. So when those three things arise together, you have this meeting of the object, the sense power and the consciousness, so this is contact. So once that occurs, this immediately leads to the next link of feeling, pleasant feelings, painful feelings, neutral feelings. This immediately leads to the next link which is craving, so one craves for more pleasant feelings, one craves for the reduction of unpleasant feelings.
Once that takes place, that leads to grasping, which is an intensified form of craving. And once that occurs, you have existence, which is So craving and grasping are referring to So we have craving, grasping, of course, throughout our life, but in this presentation of the twelve links, the craving and grasping here are referring to the craving and grasping that occur in consciousness, in the mental continuum, at the time of death. Not just at any time, but during the death process. And because of that craving and grasping occurring at the time of death, that acts to sort of nourish or nurture the karmic imprint, the throwing karmic imprint that is going to ripen at the time of death to bring about the next rebirth. So this is what existence refers to, it refers to the, that moment when the karmic imprint is just about to ripen, it hasn’t actually ripened, it’s just about to produce its effect.
But once that happens, once that, you know, that karmic imprint is just about to produce its effect because of the power of craving and grasping, then birth occurs. And birth here, like, doesn’t refer to actually like coming out of the womb, but the meeting of, in the case of a human and going to be reborn human being again, it refers to the meeting of the sperm and ovum in the womb, where the consciousness and the sperm and ovum come together. So this is birth, and of course once that occurs, once that occurs then you get actual birth, and once that occurs you get ageing and death. And all the miserable stuff in between. So by reflecting on that, one starts to see how the whole basis of taking rebirth in saṃsāra is because of ignorance.
Every time we follow ignorance, then karma is created, and because of that, then all these other links start to take place. Yeah. And so one starts to see how we cycle in saṃsāra over and over again. And the scary thing is that, you know, in one lifetime we create many twelve links. Yeah, we start off many twelve links.
Many causes for many future rebirths, good and bad. On the reverse side of this, it explains that one can meditate. A simple way to meditate on these is to think how, due to the condition of ignorance, action or karma arises due to karma, consciousness arises so and so on and finally, due to that, due to birth, ageing and death arise. So then you can meditate so ageing and death are produced by birth, birth is produced by existence, existence is due to grasping, grasping is due to craving, which is due to feeling, due to contact, due to sense powers, name and form, consciousness, karma, it’s all due to ignorance. So one starts to get this really strong sense of how it all comes down to the whole root of suffering, every suffering is ignorance.
So then one can meditate when ignorance ceases, karma ceases when karma ceases, the consciousness carrying that karmic imprint ceases, so finally down to ageing and death, and all suffering cease. And then one can reflect the cessation of ageing, death and suffering depends on the cessation of birth, which depends on the cessation of becoming, which depends on the cessation of grasping, craving, blah blah blah, which depends on the cessation of ignorance. And now I’ve got four minutes left to talk about the three higher trainings. So those are the basic meditations, topics and meditations, to reflect on over and over again to develop some renunciation of cyclic existence. And that will also lead us, how can I get out of cyclic existence?’ And that leads to the next topic, which is meditating on the three higher trainings?
That to get out of cyclic existence, I have to destroy ignorance. How do I do that? It’s by developing the very so there’s this mental factor of ignorance that is perceiving things in a false way and believing in that false appearance as true. So what one has to do is to develop a mind that is the exact opposite, the antidote, the very exact to that. In other words, we have to develop a wisdom consciousness that is able to see things as they actually are, which also involves recognising that one is seeing things in a false way.
I am actually seeing things like this, and in fact, things can’t exist that way. Right now if one doesn’t check, one can think this is a vase of orchids, because they look like orchids, but they’re not orchids at all. Right? These are not orchids, they’re just some kind of plastic. But they look like orchids.
So without checking, we see orchids, we believe they’re orchids, and we hold that very strongly in our mind. But we can develop but if we check, if we get closer and feel, and even though they look like orchids, we know they’re not orchids when we don’t grasp that they’re real orchids anymore. So that’s easy to do with something like this. But it’s much more difficult because also our conditioning You know, we haven’t been conditioned to see these You know, we haven’t been really heavily conditioned to see these as real flowers. That’s one thing.
And also it’s very easy to check that they’re not, you just have to touch them. Whereas, you know, we are seeing everything as inherently existing, that it’s really there, out there. So this is much more difficult to do, to check, especially with a mind like that, which is what our mind is like now. But if we can get Don’t be sorry. But if we could get our mind calm and clear, then really, really very calm and very, very clear, then we can check and we have our mind has the ability to start to realise that things, yes, they do appear in a particular way, but actually they couldn’t possibly exist that way, especially if one has studied the teachings.
If we check, because the easiest way to understand emptiness, the reality, is to understand that things actually arise dependently. They depend on causes and conditions, they depend on parts, and they depend on mind. And that’s the only way things can exist. They can’t exist any other way. So when one sees that, you know, things are appearing, and when we check, we can start to see that this isn’t things are appearing as though they don’t depend on causes and conditions, they don’t appear to depend on parts, and they don’t appear to depend on my mind.
But when you start to check, you can’t find anything that doesn’t depend on causes and conditions. Even this, you know, this was made, it was created depending on stuff. You know, this was, this was, every this this was, my body was. Everything depends on causes and conditions. It all depends on parts.
See, I am holding a flower, one flower, you know, one thing. But then when you start to investigate, this one thing is made of many things, many parts. And then even this little one flower, you know, we call that one flower, but oh, look, it’s got it’s made up of and this this this well, a flower, but this flower has parts. Yeah? Anyway.
And you can’t find anything that doesn’t have parts. Even space has parts, directional parts, parts of time, present space, past space, future space, and everything depends on the mind. If, you know, like, this is everyone agrees this is supposed to be an orchid, right? I’ve given this away in case you didn’t recognise this is an orchid. There’s also probably some special kind of orchid that has a name, right?
But if if this if this truly existed from its own side, we would know what kind of orchid it was. It wouldn’t depend on being named. But it does, for it, for this object to exist as a specific thing for us, it depends on a name. And where does that name This object doesn’t say I’m an orchid. This thing is not telling me I’m an orchid.
What is telling me telling me this is an orchid or even this is a flower or that this is a fake flower that looks like a real flower. This this object isn’t saying that to me. What is? My mind. My mind is saying all of that.
Nothing else. But it doesn’t appear as though my mind is doing it. It appears to be doing it. And it’s also saying, I’m a beautiful orchid. Someone thought it was a beautiful orchid to buy it.
They didn’t buy it because it was an ugly orchid. And that’s all coming from our mind, but it doesn’t appear that way at all. Because it’s there. It is there. Buddhism says, the Mahāyāna, the Madhyamaka philosophy says, this pot of fake flowers is here.
This is here, but it’s not here the way we’re experiencing it. It’s not like there’s a pink elephant here, what is really here is a pink elephant, or diamond orchids. Fake plastic orchid is here. But we’re not experiencing the fake plastic orchid the way it actually exists. It seems to be an inherently existing fake plastic orchid.
But it’s not an inherently existing fake plastic orchid, it’s a dependently arising fake plastic orchid. But this is Anyway, the simple point I’m trying to make at the moment is to destroy ignorance we have to develop this wisdom that is able that can perceive, not conceive, but directly perceive reality as it is unmistakenly, and our mind has that potential. But to develop that, we can’t develop that wisdom with a mind like that. We have to develop a calm, peaceful mind. In other words, we have to develop what is called calm abiding, single pointed concentration, calm abiding.
Yeah. And to develop that and that involves being able to completely subdue our disturbing thoughts, to train in meditation to really subdue our disturbing thoughts. And to do that, that in turn depends on practising or training our mind in morality, pure morality, the basis of which is observing the law of cause and effect in our daily life. So that’s the three higher trainings in a nutshell, sorry. On the basis of developing, living a life of pure morality as much as possible, then it becomes easy to meditate effectively, to calm the mind.
And when we’re able to develop a really calm mind, that is the basis, the strong basis, for being able to develop wisdom. I mean, of course, one has to study the wisdom teachings, but to be able to then for that intellectual understanding to transform into something that is a powerful direct experience of reality, one has to have that concentrated, that calm, concentrated mind. And to get that, one has to train in living a life of yeah, pure morality as much as possible. Because what, you know, we when we engage in negative reason we engage in negative actions of body, speech and mind is because we’ve given in to our disturbing thoughts. We’ve act they’ve become active and we’ve let them remain active and we’ve believed them and acted on them.
And of course, every time we do that we just reinforce our disturbing thoughts. So the more we live a life of observing the law of cause and effect, then we are beginning indirectly to subdue our disturbing thoughts. And then by training in meditation, we’re able to subdue them even more, pacify them even more, then we are able to eventually gain calm abiding, and then we combine that calm abiding with our training in studying the wisdom teachings of the Buddha, and then eventually we’ll be able to develop penetrative wisdom into reality, destroy, completely undermine ignorance. So if we do that without bodhicitta, then we can achieve freedom from saṃsāra, we can become an arhat, but in following the path to enlightenment there’s more work to do. So this is why in the presentation of the path to enlightenment, the teachings on emptiness are not taught at this stage, but at the very end.
So the emphasis is that in developing in practising the middle scope in the Mahāyāna tradition, one particularly has to put emphasis on the first two of the three higher trainings, which is pure morality and training the mind in calm abiding. Yes, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yes, Steen, or however you pronounce it. Yes. Good old Ludwig Wittgenstein.
You’re a bit of a philosopher, are you? Right. Do you know about Wittgenstein’s Duck? Do you know? I don’t know.
But here’s some of his ideas, very close to Buddhist ideas on emptiness. He had this concept of private language, which I don’t understand at all anyway. Any questions, any simple questions? I have a question. Yeah, good.
Of course. So you can continue to work? Yes. Yeah, you’ve got you have to have yes. You’ve met the Dharma, right?
So if you have faith in the Dharma, in triple gem, and you practice, But, you know, as sincerely as you can. Yeah. Because having a precious human rebirth is the best situation to get another one, that’s the whole point. If we don’t use this one, we won’t get another precious human rebirth and then it’s Especially if we have the good fortune to make a connection with a truly qualified spiritual master, then this is the greatest protection. If we devote ourselves correctly to that person, then that is the greatest protection our mind can have, if we have that faith in the spiritual master.
Okay, break time so if people can grab a drink if they want and then Yes. It doesn’t exist. Is that thing? There, right? Yes.
Yes. Which we can always name something. Yeah. You can name it. Some people call it a thing.
It’s a thing. But that’s all it is. It’s just a thing. So your experience of it is if we can only call it a thing, that’s a very limited experience, isn’t it? But if you can look The color and the shape and the smell.
Sorry? My experience of saying that’s a real flower is the colour and the shape and the smell. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Even if I don’t know its name, I can still experience all of that. Yeah, yes, that’s that’s true.
But arguing that way is missing the point of how things do exist. Right? They are named. And here naming doesn’t just mean like a fancy name, but naming is really meaning conceiving. You conceive things only exist because we conceive them to exist in a particular way.
Good. That helps if you Sorry? Conceive, yeah. We think we’re perceiving things, but we’re actually conceiving things. But the aim is to perceive them rather than conceive them.
Right? Sorry? By which you mean perceive them in their essence? I think one has to be careful saying it that way in Tibetan, because to say something to perceive it in its essence is implying it truly exists. Because when you talk about selflessness, when we talk about things the Buddhist view of things are selfless.
They don’t have a self. And what is self is referring to is having an essence, that there’s something really findable that is really there. And this is what the teachings on emptiness are saying, that there’s nothing there is something there, but there’s not something really there that you can find. But that it’s there by itself. Yes.
It’s a very, very difficult subject. And there’s lots of different versions of the subject, interpretations of it. Schools Buddhist schools of philosophy about the nature of reality. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. So I think I’ve said this before, but maybe just in conclusion to say this again, that the path to enlightenment presents many, many topics in a graduated sequence, and So for us, what we should, as beginners, if one is interested following the Buddha’s teachings and following the path, that the for us, as beginners, we should put the main emphasis on the practices of the being of initial spiritual scope, because that’s we’re just at the very beginning of that. So the main thing is to try to reflect on the precious human rebirth, impermanence, death, you know, the suffering of the lower realms, refuge and karma. These are the main things. But also so these are the things we should really try and put emphasis on, particularly thinking about impermanence and the law of cause and effect.
But also, although the other topics are meant to be for more advanced practitioners, the way the Lamrim practice works is we should try to study all of them and think about all of them and meditate on all of them and try to gain some experience of all of them. But in fact, the mind evolves step by step. So if we haven’t really got the foundation strongly established, if we put effort into the more advanced things, we may get some experience of them, but it won’t really last or develop because we haven’t got the underlying foundation. But the whole idea is that because the more we, like, we understand the general topic of the suffering nature of saṃsāra, the more we will want to renounce this life anyway, right? Which of course doesn’t mean giving up on life, right?
Renouncing this life, renouncing attachment to this life doesn’t mean sort of staying in bed and becoming depressed. It’s not like that at all. It’s quite the opposite. Because this life is very precious, but we’re trying to give up on the attachment to, you know, the worldly view of life of just money and possessions and reputation and blah blah blah and all that stuff. But using this life to work with the mind and benefit others, Yeah.
That’s what it’s about, especially the Mahāyāna view of things. Okay. So the homework, just So Wednesday Unfortunately, the reading material see, the reading material is established, is put together by people in America, and it’s a lot of work, but actually I find the reading material for this course is very poor, there’s not much of it. And there’s a huge section taken from Pabongka Rinpoche’s book, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, a huge section here which is not really relevant, I don’t think, to the course at all. I should have checked and we should delete it in future and put something else instead, but anyway.
So the homework for this coming week is to read some of the previous material, let me just read it again. But for the daily meditations, does anyone have questions on that, on generally what one’s supposed to be doing? Which is to do some analytical meditation or checking meditation or it’s just really thinking about the topic, the subject, about what’s provided in the reading and also what I’ve said. So, like, for this week, the first tomorrow’s meditation, if you do it, is on the First Noble Truth, by which I mean to again reflect on the eight sufferings, the six sufferings, the three sufferings. And particularly what I would encourage people to think about is in the three sufferings, the suffering of change, to try and see how you know, what we label happiness is not, you know, so fantastic.
It’s not real happiness, it’s not perfect, it’s not lasting, and the basis of it isn’t anything perfect or lasting. Often to achieve this illusory happiness, we engage in all sorts of negative actions following craving, desire, attachment, getting angry when we don’t get it and so on. So we buy this, we pay a high price for something which which is fake. It’s not the real thing, but but we pay in real suffering to get it. We pay in real suffering to get actually just more suffering when you think about it.
Which we should, to motivate ourselves to work, to create the causes for the real thing. This is the purpose of doing these meditations. It’s not to upset us and get depressed, but to realize we’re in the perfect position to begin to create the real causes for what we really want. Right. So then the next day is to think a little bit about ignorance.
I know this is a very profound topic, but at least to maybe reflect on a few of the things I’ve said or what you know about the topic, especially as it being the very cause of all the other problems, that ignorance as the root of all suffering, particularly trying to reflect how to see it as the basis for all the other delusions. It’s because we see things as, you know, really there, you know, really beautiful, ugly, good, bad, this, that, that that’s why there was that craving or rejection. We wouldn’t have it if we perceive things as they are, as, know, the beauty is really projected. I mean, there was something pleasant there, but our mind is what, you know, says it’s really like that and so fantastic. If we experience things as coming from our mind, we could enjoy them, but we wouldn’t get hysterical about things the way we do.
So basically to look at the nature of the delusions and particularly how they, you know, one experiences them oneself. And then I need to do a little meditation on the twelve links, you’ve got the outline just to do it in a very simple way, you know, especially the part about, you know, on the reverse side, the forward and reverse order meditating, is really quite helpful. And then to really think about this point I made that Lama Zopa Rinpoche said, is, do I think can be happy while my mind is still controlled by delusion and karma? How am I going to do that? We have to push ourselves to realise, I have to take care of my mind.
We have so much energy doing other things, but all that we want to achieve by doing those things is undermined by our delusions. So wouldn’t it be better to work on, put the energy on the delusions? Yeah, and then to think a little bit about the three higher trainings, how they’re connected, that depending on good morality, one is able to develop a more it’s easier to develop a concentrated mind if I mean, it just doesn’t automatically happen, but if one is training in developing a concentrated mind, if one’s living a good moral life, it’s much easier to do so. And then having developed a concentrated mind, it would be easier to understand it would be easier to understand the intellectual teachings on wisdom, but also it would be easier to actually have the experience with that very focused, very clear, very stable mind which comes with calm abiding. Right, that’s it.
Thank you very much. We can dedicate the merit that we’ve accumulated, some positive maybe a good set of twelve links has been started tonight, hopefully, so we can dedicate that to not only getting a good rebirth, but also to getting out of saṃsāra, and especially to achieving enlightenment in order to be able to enlighten all kind suffering mother sentient beings. So page eleven. 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 bodhicitta mind, not yet born, arise and grow may that born have no decline but increase forevermore.
May the precious bodhicitta view not yet born arise and grow, may that born have no decline, but increase forevermore. Okay,