Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 108-minute opening session of a six-week course on taking refuge in the Three Jewels, Ven Thubten Dondrub introduces the foundational Buddhist concept of refuge for both newcomers and returning practitioners. He establishes the framework by explaining why refuge matters: the mind is the source of all suffering and happiness, and without a reliable method to transform the mind, we remain trapped in saṃsāra—the cycle of suffering births. Dondrub walks through the three objects of refuge (Buddha, Dharma or teachings, and Sangha or realized practitioners), explains why they are precious and trustworthy, and contrasts them with false refuges that may seem helpful temporarily but ultimately harm us. He introduces the three levels of motivation for taking refuge: seeking a better rebirth, achieving liberation from saṃsāra entirely, and the highest aspiration of achieving enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings. The teaching emphasizes that refuge is not passive belief but active commitment—a daily practice of taking care of the mind through Buddhist methods. Dondrub assigns homework including meditation on the Buddha using visualization and mantra, reading, and daily mindfulness practice. Pitched at those new to Buddhism and those considering formal refuge, though accessible to experienced practitioners as a foundation refresher.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2014 08 12 DB Refuge in the Three Jewels Week 1 12082014.mp3
UUID: a5c8ffdd-a139-4f32-881a-cc026fadace3
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Refuge in the The Three Jewels (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2014-08-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 108.7 minutes
Words: ~12,671
I would like to welcome everyone to Buddha House, especially those people for whom it is their first time here. Buddha House was established in nineteen eighty one, and it is a member of a worldwide organization called the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition which was started by a Tibetan Lama called Lama Thubten Yeshe who passed away in nineteen eighty four. He was the first and his main disciple is a Nepalese Lama called Lama Zopa Rinpoche who is now the head of the FPMT. So Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche were the first two lamas of the Tibetan tradition to ever come to Australia. They really introduced Tibetan Buddhism to Australia.
So oh, sorry. What? No. Before I go on, what I’m going to say is actually on the website did people have a chance to check the website about the introduction to the course? A couple of people.
Okay great, so I’ll just do this very very quickly. My ordination name is Thubten Dondrub. I come from Adelaide. I met Buddhist teachings in Australia. I became a monk.
I took the first level of ordination in Australia in nineteen seventy seven. I became fully ordained also in Australia in nineteen seventy nine with Lama Zopa Rinpoche as my abbot. I’ve had the good fortune to receive teachings from many great lamas of the Gelug tradition which is the tradition that we follow in the FPMT. There are four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. So we follow the Gelugpa school which was established by a great master called Lama Tsongkhapa.
His Holiness is most closely connected with the Gelug tradition. So I have had the good fortune to receive teachings from many of the great Lamas of the Gelug tradition including His Holiness. And I was asked by Lama Zopa Rinpoche to come here in December twenty twelve to be the resident teacher here. So one of the courses that is conducted in the FPMT centers around the world is Discovering Buddhism which is meant to introduce the main ideas and practices of Tibetan Buddhism particularly of the Gelugpa tradition mainly to people who are not familiar with Buddhism but also it’s a good refresher for people who do have some idea about the teachings and maybe even who’ve been practicing for some time. It’s always good to hear the same basic teachings over and over again.
Because the more one hears them, more especially if one’s been practicing, the more one starts to understand the depths of the profundity and how wonderful the Buddha’s teachings really are. So the topic we’re going to look at for the next following six weeks is the topic of refuge in the Three Jewels. So this is a very important topic because it’s basically about how to become a follower of the Buddha to follow the Buddhist teachings. So I’m not sure how many maybe just how many people here have actually taken refuge. Okay, So this course is particularly more for people who haven’t taken refuge or maybe for people who have taken it but don’t really know what they’ve done.
But also even those people who may, well, I mean it is really applicable for people who are interested in following the Buddhist tradition because this is really about discovering what refuge really means, about committing oneself to the Buddhist teachings. So the purpose of the Discovering Buddhism course is that to really encourage people to not just listen to the teachings which is what tends to happen in many Buddhist centers around the world. People come to centers, listen to the teachings and may enjoy them or not but maybe don’t necessarily put them into practice. So what this course tries to encourage people to do is really whether they’re Buddhist or not to get a taste of the teachings rather than just passively listening to them but to go home and practice them as much as possible just to see whether these really work for oneself and bring any benefit. So for that reason each week or at the end of each course, sorry, each talk you will be given a homework sheet.
It’s a very simple one page thing which gives you asks you to do a review of the evening’s talk. This is why I would encourage people to take some notes so you can actually review what went on, so you can remember what happened in the talk unless you’ve got a photographic memory. And then there is some reading so most of the reading is contained in here. Sometimes we give some extra handouts and little booklets or whatever. And there’s also a daily meditation practice that we ask you to do and also a daily mindfulness practice.
It’s all very very simple and the homework is not something you pass or fail, it’s just something to encourage one to put into practice in a simple way what was taught during evening course. Because the more you practice the more benefit you will get. And the Buddhist teachings were given for the purpose of practicing not just for the purpose of listening to them. So there’s no way I can make you do this. If you don’t do it, you don’t do it.
But I would really, really encourage everybody to do the homework and to try and to do it as well as possible. I also ask for people to make some comments about what they found difficult to understand or difficult to accept, what they found easy to understand and accept. So there’s just a few lines where you can comment on that. But if you want to comment more extensively that’s fine so you can write on the back or add some extra pages yourself if you wish to. You’re most welcome to do that.
So also for the first sheet I ask people whether they’ve done any Buddhist courses before, whether they’ve done any discovering Buddhism courses before, and also whether you are Buddhist and if you are Buddhist, if you’ve taken refuge. Also I ask people if they’re not Buddhist do they consider themselves Christian or belonging to some other religious group or uncommitted. So I’m not asking people if they have a Buddhist Christian background because virtually most of us have that in one way or another or you have some other kind of religious background. I’m asking whether you feel actually still following that and wanting to follow that tradition or whatever. It’s just helpful for me so I don’t make any insulting remarks about other religions or something like that.
Not that I would, but anyway, just to have an idea of what people’s reason for being here is. So of course if you don’t want to answer these things, you don’t have to answer them, but it’s just really helpful for me to know some of these things. Okay. Right. So especially for the people who are quite new.
So there are people here who never sort of really studied any Buddhism at all. Yes. Yes. Little bit. Teeny bit.
Read a bit. Yeah. Right. So anyway, I would encourage people, especially the the new people, it’s very important to listen with an open mind and immediately judge things as good or bad, especially bad, but really give a chance for what’s being said to sink in and maybe connect with other things that are said later on in the talk or later on during the course. To really listen with an open mind.
Also if you’re quite new don’t try to understand everything at once because there may be some aspects of Buddhism I think are very easy to understand and accept but other aspects may be quite strange and take longer to digest. So don’t try and understand everything at once. Relax and let it go in and take time to think about it. Maybe that’s all I should say for the time being on all of that. So When we first come to the Buddhist teachings we come to not knowing much, wanting to know what the Buddhist teachings are about, whether they fit with one’s own mind, could be helpful and beneficial and so on.
So we need to study the teachings to find out. After listening to the teachings, reading them for some time, one may decide to leave them and one may decide to get a bit more involved. So if that’s the case, the reason for continuing to listen to the teachings is to gain a deeper understanding of them. And the reason to do that is really to put them into practice. So that’s the ultimate purpose of the Buddha’s teachings.
Why the Buddha himself appeared in this was to teach so that people would hopefully put what the Buddha taught into practice because if practice the teachings then we’ll get the result. If we don’t practice them we won’t get the benefits. And all of the Buddha’s teachings were meant to help us to become free of suffering and to achieve genuine happiness. And that’s what we all want. We all want to be free of suffering and we all want to experience real happiness.
And so maybe the Buddhist teachings can help us to do that. And if one starts to feel that that is the case, then this is when one begins to consider taking refuge, that is committing oneself to following the Buddhist teachings in order to move away from suffering towards happiness. So the way the Tibetan teachings of the Buddha have been set out and presented over many hundreds of years especially in the Gelugpa tradition, is to emphasize that there are three levels of motivation that we can have for practicing the Buddha’s teachings. So the first level, or maybe there is an initial level, which is most people including myself when we first come to the Buddha’s teachings, come to them wanting to improve this life, To have less suffering, more meaning in this life, to make our life more meaningful, to have more happiness in this life. But as we study the teachings of the Buddha we start to realize that the teachings are emphasizing not so much this life but future lives.
So then from a Buddhist point of view the first level of motivation for practicing the teachings is to create the causes to have a good rebirth and by using this life to create the causes of a good rebirth then this will ensure this life will also have less there will be less suffering, confusion in this life. This life will become more meaningful, more peaceful, more joyful. But then a deeper level of practicing the teachings is not just to have a better rebirth but to eventually become completely free of suffering because this is one of the essential messages of the Buddha that we all have the ability to become and capacity to become completely free of suffering. So one can develop that motivation. But the most wonderful, profound, greatest motivation one can have for practicing the teachings which is the motivation that is emphasized in the Mahāyāna teachings of the Buddha is to put the teachings into practice not just for one’s own benefit in this life, not just for one’s benefit in future lives, not just to become totally free of suffering for oneself, but to develop the mind, free the mind of all confusion and negativity, awaken all the positive qualities of the mind in order to be able to benefit others.
And not just a few others but all other living beings, all other sentient beings. What is a sentient being? A sentient being is a living being with consciousness, with a mind. So plants are living beings but from a Buddhist perspective they don’t have a mind, they don’t have consciousness. Which is in one way very fortunate because if they were sentient beings then we would be eating lots of sentient beings every day and killing them.
So the Mahāyāna teachings emphasize working with the mind in order to be able to be a vast benefit to all living beings, all sentient beings. And as His Holiness says, until we reach the point where we can be of continuous perfect benefit to others, at least we can develop the way of life that doesn’t harm other living beings. Why should we benefit all sentient beings? There are two main reasons. One, the first reason is because sentient beings are immensely kind to us.
Sorry if I bore the older students because I say the same things over and over again. But if we just check, just in order to exist, to merely survive day by day, if we really check up we can only do it depending on others. And not just a few others, but countless other sentient beings either directly or indirectly. Just to eat, to have something to wear, to drink, to have some shelter, just merely to survive then we depend on countless sentient beings directly and indirectly. And on top of that for all the good experiences we have in life, ordinary and spiritual, again they can only come about depending on the kindness of others directly and indirectly.
And then all the skills that we develop, ordinary and spiritual, all the qualities that we develop, ordinary and spiritual, can only come about, and to the extent they come about, depending on the kindness of others directly and indirectly. So we really do depend on the kindness of others an enormous amount. So this is one reason to develop this motivation of working with our mind, of using the Buddha’s teachings. And the other reason comes from realizing more and more that all these people, a human and non human, who’ve been immensely kind to me, whom I totally depend on, whom I’m totally interconnected with are suffering just like myself. We are all suffering.
We don’t have that and we lack the happiness that we really want. But also if we check, if we just look at the human beings in this world, the vast majority of human beings right now are experiencing more suffering than ourselves and with less ability to overcome their suffering, to make sense of it, to transform it, or to eliminate it. So if we think like this we can generate what is called eventually at some point we’ll be able to generate this amazing mind called bodhicitta which is the determination to achieve the state of enlightenment which is a state where our mind is completely free of all negativities in such a way that they will never come back and to awaken all our positive potentials in a way that they will never decline so that in other words we become a Buddha. And as a Buddha we will have the continuous ability, continuous undeclining energy, wisdom, compassion, patience and so on to be able to perfectly repay the kindness of all sentient beings by helping every one of them without exception to become free of suffering and to help every one of them achieve what my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche calls Peerless Everlasting Happiness.
So the key to doing all that is to take refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddhadharma and Sangha. So that’s what our topic is. So that’s my introduction. So when we listen to the teachings for them to have the greatest impact, the greatest benefit on our mind then it’s important that we listen to them with an open mind but also with the best motivation possible. And the best motivation is I just described, bodhicitta, the wish to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings.
So there is a traditional prayer that is said at the beginning of the teachings. So as a Buddhist monk trying to teach the Buddha’s teachings, I have some kind of obligation to say this prayer at the beginning. And anyone who has taken refuge also has that same obligation. And those who are interested in studying the Buddha’s teachings they can try and generate bodhicitta motivation and in order to discover what Buddhism is about you may feel encouraged, inspired to join along and say this prayer as well. We say it twice in Tibetan, one time in English.
The prayer is on page eleven. This prayer was composed by a great Indian master called Lama Atisha. And as one says this prayer traditionally to make it more effective we imagine the Buddha in front of us and we imagine the Buddha seated on a throne covered in jewels and the throne is held up at each corner by two white snow lions who symbolize the great protectors of the Buddha’s teachings. And on the throne is a lotus that symbolizes the mind of renunciation. Above the lotus hovering sort of horizontally above the lotus is a golden sun disc that symbolizes the wisdom of the Buddha.
And above that a white moon disc that symbolizes the mind of bodhicitta, the mind of great compassion in bodhicitta. And then we imagine seated above the center of the moon disc is Śākyamūni Buddha having a hollow body of golden light and wearing the saffron robes of a monk and his right arm outstretched with his hand resting on his right knee. The left hand in the meditation posture supporting a deep blue begging bowl which we imagine is filled with wisdom nectar that overcomes the causes of all suffering. So if you can, one can try and imagine the Buddha in front of oneself and at the same time and we imagine that the Buddha is there to remind us that within us we have the potential to become a Buddha. We can imagine that Buddha is appearing there to inspire us to realize our Buddha potential and at the same time to help generate this all encompassing compassionate motivation to benefit all living beings.
We try and think of all these living beings surrounding us. So since it’s very difficult to generate awareness of infinite numbers of sentient beings, at least we can try and think of those people that we’re most connected to in this life. So we think of our mother of this life on our left, our father on our right, and then behind us we imagine the rest of our family, all our friends, all the people who have helped us in this life. Psychologically we would like to put them in front but the idea is to reduce our attachment to them. We put them behind us and in front we put those people that we would prefer to think way behind us, which are the people we dislike, who dislike us, who may have harmed us.
And we put them there not to generate negative thoughts towards them, but to help us realize that those beings are suffering. In some ways I depend on them as well. And since they’re suffering they deserve my compassion, not my aversion. So at least if we can try and think of that group of people, but as much as we can we can also try to extend our mind to open our hearts and minds to an awareness of all other sentient beings. And we can think that I will study this topic of refuge as a way to maybe commit myself to the Buddha’s teachings and for the purpose of being able to benefit all sentient beings without exception.
I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma, the supreme assembly By the merits I create through listening to the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings? So then, if you find it helpful, can imagine that the Buddha in front of you is very pleased with your motivation and shows this by now coming towards the crown of one’s head. Firstly we imagine that the lions and the throne dissolve into light. That light absorbs up into the lotus sun and moon. And then the Buddha seated on these now comes to the crown of our head.
And then when directly above the crown of our head, we imagine that the Buddha then dissolves into blissful golden light. And then that light pours down into us, blessing our mind. Helping us to be able to understand the Buddha’s teachings, helping us to be able to put them into practice, helping us to be able to eventually gain a complete insight and realization of these teachings. Okay. Thank you.
So this course is going to go on for six weeks. There will be six talks. And at the end of that six weeks, on the Sunday of the last week, the course finishes with a one day retreat. So that’s the twenty first of September. So I’d encourage everyone if they last out the course to come to that retreat because it really is meant to be an integral part of the course as a way to really integrate what one has learnt during those six weeks.
By the way I would encourage everyone to do the entire course, to stick it out because it really does take time. Any aspect of the Buddha’s teachings really does take quite some time to explain. Even after six weeks there’s a lot more to understand about refuge. In fact, one can spend one’s entire life really understanding what it’s all about. Maybe in the break time or at the end of tonight you can collect I’ve just made a little outline of what topics we will cover in this six weeks so you have some idea.
Tonight basically I just want to talk about the reasons for going for refuge and the need of a valid refuge. So the word ‘refuge’ implies some kind of protection as something that one can rely on to protect oneself. So what do we want to be protected from? What we all want to be protected from in some way is from the sufferings and difficulties and problems of life. So one of my I have how many I think I’ve got nineteen, I can’t remember now, nineteen main teachers, nineteen gurus, But of all those nineteen, I suppose there are five main ones.
And of those five main ones there are three main ones. My main teacher is Lama Zopa Rinpoche, then there is Lama Yeshe, and there is His Holiness the Dalai Lama. These are the three I really rely on. Lama Yeshe once said when he was talking about refuge that whether one is Buddhist or not everyone takes refuge because everyone takes refuge in something. Everyone goes for refuge when they are suffering.
We always try and find someone or something to protect us from that suffering and difficulty. So when we’re young our refuge is our mother usually, our parents, but particularly our mother. She seems to be the one who is going to solve all our problems. She is our refuge, the one we run to. And when we are little, usually our mum can solve many of our problems.
Usually just with a big hug or something and that is probably good enough. But as we grow older, we encounter more problems and we also realize that our mum isn’t capable of solving all of them. So we look for other sources of refuge. And probably as a teenager our source of refuge is having lots of friends. And as we get older we still rely on friends but also we think of maybe lots of money will protect us, maybe having power and influence, having lots of knowledge, having a good job, all of these things are some kind of refuge for us in some way or looking beautiful, something like that.
These are all some kind of refuge. But if one checks, they are all incredibly limited types of refuge. And especially they may work, they may seem like a good refuge if we have a very limited idea of what kind of suffering we are subject to. But one of the unfortunate messages of the Buddha’s teachings is that we subject or potentially can experience an awful lot of suffering. So if that is true, then we need some very vast, all encompassing refuge.
So, to explain this I have to say the usual things that might drive the old students mad because they’ve heard it so many times before. But the Buddha’s teachings are all about the mind. The Buddha’s teachings say that what the Buddha discovered and therefore what the Buddha taught is that our mind is the source of all experience, that all suffering of every kind comes from our mind, and all happiness comes from our mind. Suffering is a state of mind, happiness is a state of mind, and for us now as confused, limited beings, we tend to think the source of our happiness lies in the external world and the cause of our suffering lies in the external world. But what the Buddha discovered and taught is that the very cause and source of all our suffering, every single kind of suffering imaginable comes from within our mind.
And the very source of all our happiness comes from within our mind. So just very briefly, what is the mind? What is meant by mind in Buddhism? What is meant by mind is not the brain or something that is a byproduct of the brain, But from a Buddhist perspective, the mind is this very unique phenomena that is something quite separate from the brain. The mind is defined as that which is clear and knowing.
Our mind is something formless, non physical, insubstantial, like space. You can’t see it, smell it, taste it, touch it. It has no physical properties whatsoever because it isn’t made up of any kind of physical form. It’s not some kind of subtle physical energy whatsoever. It is completely insubstantial it does like space but it does exist.
And it’s the most important thing that exists in the universe because from a Buddhist perspective, if it didn’t exist, the universe wouldn’t exist. The world wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t exist. We only know of the existence of anything else because of the mind. Because that’s what the mind does.
It knows, experiences and feels. Nothing else does that. And from a Buddha’s perspective, nothing ever will be able to do that. No computer will ever be able to experience things, know things, or feel things. It may be able to compute much better than the mind or more quickly, but as it’s computing it doesn’t know it’s computing, it doesn’t experience computing, it has no feelings.
Only the mind does that. There are three kinds of feelings: there are pleasant feelings or happiness, unpleasant feelings or suffering, and then there are neutral feelings. Neutral feelings are not a lack of feeling they are feelings which are neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So throughout our life we experience these pleasant, neutral and unpleasant feelings. So the neutral feelings we are not going to talk about anymore because they are not a problem.
The problems are especially the unpleasant feelings or suffering that we have too much of that and the other problem is we don’t have enough of the pleasant feelings and happiness. So before going on about that another thing about the mind is an essential point I can’t prove any of this and anyway there’s no time to anyway. I wish I could prove these things. If I could then everyone would become a Buddhist. Possibly.
But unfortunately nothing is easy to prove. And people if they don’t want to believe things, no matter how many proofs you put in front of them they simply will not believe it. Simply won’t. Recently I was in Spain, or just a few days ago, was there for two months. There is this person in Spain that a lot of people know, I won’t go into the gory details, but he is not Spanish, and he’s learning the Spanish language, and everyone tells him that he cannot speak Spanish.
His Spanish is appalling. But no matter how many people tell him this, he refuses to believe it. Even when he was shown a book on how one of the most famous books in Spain about how to speak Spanish, when he said something and it was pointed out by a person that what you say is wrong. This is not how you say it in Spanish. And look, here is the proof, it’s in the book.
He said the book is wrong. This is from an extremely educated person. So no matter what you say to some people, they just won’t believe it. If they don’t want to believe it, they won’t. So I’m not going to waste my time trying to prove these things, but these are fundamental aspects of Buddhism.
That the mind exists, it’s not something physical, it’s more like a process, it isn’t a thing, it’s this ongoing process of knowing, experiencing, feeling. And because it is like space, which is also non physical but exists, space is not something that you can damage. You can’t chop it up. You can’t hurt it in any way, you can’t destroy it, you can’t stop it because it’s non physical. It always exists, it always will exist.
And the mind is the same. From a Buddhist point of view, our mind being formless, non physical, has always existed, always. There was never a point in time when it started. It is quite literally beginningless. Beginningless.
And it is also literally without an end. It will never stop. It goes on forever. It’s a rising moment. There’s a stream of consciousness.
There’s not this one thing that lives forever but it’s a you know, in one moment there’s an experience, and then in the next moment there’s another knowing, another experience with a feeling that goes with it. There is a stream of consciousness, and each of us has our own unique stream of consciousness, a discrete stream of consciousness. My stream of consciousness is not your stream of consciousness. What I’m experiencing is different from what you experience. Here is a rose.
My experience of this rose is not your experience of this rose. It’s mine. You can’t have it and you never will. And I’ll never know, I will never have your experience of this rose. Because different mental continuums, separate.
So my mind will go on forever, your mind will go on forever, every sentient being’s mind goes on forever, and it goes on experiencing pleasure and pain, neutral feelings, different experiences, basically. So this body will die because it is something physical, but the mind that is animating it goes on forever. As soon as death occurs, which occurs in one moment, in the next moment, the mind is experiencing something else, the next life. And so the next life, the next rebirth. So there are only two kinds of rebirths we can have, good ones or bad ones, pleasant or unpleasant.
So the Buddha’s teachings really are about avoiding bad rebirths so we can have good rebirths. So a little bit more about the mind. One needs to know this in order to understand what refuge is really about. So the Buddhist view, what the Buddha discovered about the mind is that the nature of our mind is that it is something complete, it is perfect, it contains every good quality, every mind is complete, every mind is perfect, every mind contains every good quality, every mind has the potential of perfect love, compassion, wisdom, generosity, patience, kindness, forgiveness, courage, tolerance, etc. Etc.
In fact, this is what makes up the mind. The mind is that which knows when it is allowed to know correctly. It knows with love and compassion, kindness, forgiveness. It doesn’t know with hate and pride and jealousy because these are false ways of knowing. They are very common ways of knowing.
They are very easy ways of knowing. But the Buddha discovered they are completely false. So the nature of our mind is complete, perfect and blissful. The nature of our mind is blissful. There is the potential for this perfect bliss existing in our mind all the time.
My proof of this was not a proof but an indication that it is true is that if one practices meditation, even if one isn’t very good at it at all, but if one tries, in meditation there’s many different kinds of objects in meditation but basically have to have an object of meditation and the point of it is meditation involves placing your mind on that object whatever it is. It has to be something virtuous or at least neutral not a non virtuous object. One places the mind on that object and has to keep it there as much as possible. It tends to wander, but one has to bring it back and keep on the object. So what happens this wonderful thing symbolizes your mind.
The mind in essence is like pure water, just absolutely perfect. You can’t make water better, it’s just pure and perfect. And when it’s pure and perfect and completely still, it has the ability to reflect things like a mirror, just like the mind when it’s completely still and calm and in its pure state, is able to know everything. Because that’s what it does. It knows and experiences.
So if you don’t prevent it doing that, it will be able to know everything exactly precisely. But right now our mind is quite agitated. So in meditation and it’s agitated by all sorts of different thoughts and perceptions and this is and that’s going on in the mind. So by focusing, putting the mind on this one object, all of this agitation, you can’t feed that agitation so much. And so the more energy of the mind goes on to observing the object of meditation, the less energy of the mind goes into maintaining that.
And so as the meditation goes on, what tends to happen is that the agitation in the mind reduces. It may not completely stop but it does get less. For a very advanced practitioner, the agitation may completely stop. At least temporarily. But even for just a very ordinary beginner meditation, the agitation reduces.
And if you’ve ever tried any meditation, which I presume most of you here have tried some, what is the experience as one meditates? Is it suffering or a pleasant feeling? Yeah, it tends to be a pleasant feeling, more pleasant than at the beginning, when the mind was more agitated. Why did that pleasant feeling arise? One didn’t add anything to the mind.
One didn’t take any drugs or anything during the meditation. And in a sense what happened is that we took away, extracted something unnecessary in the mind, which was all that agitation, and let the mind some extent go back to its natural state. And when it’s in its natural state or tending towards its natural state, you experience this pleasant feeling because the true nature of the mind is blissful. The true nature of the mind isn’t confused and suffering. The true nature of the mind is a state of utter clarity and clear perception, and with that clarity and insight goes bliss.
The perfect happiness we are always looking for is existing always in a potential form in our mind such as right now. So that pure nature of mind which is complete, perfect and blissful is called our Buddha potential. So all these things exist in a potential form. But the trouble is our mind is right now obscured and it always has been. And what obscures our mind are many kinds of disturbing thoughts principally anger and afflicted desire and attachment.
There are many others but these are the main ones and these disturbing thoughts or afflictions or delusions exist in our mind because of a fundamental delusion or affliction or disturbing thought which is called, in English, ignorance, which is this mental factor that obscures the mind, causing the mind to misconceive mis experience in a false way, our self and all phenomena. Because of that false experience of our self and phenomena, and only because of that, we have all these disturbing thoughts of afflicted desire, attachment, anger, pride, jealousy, all sorts of fears, worries, doubts and confusion. We act on these disturbing thoughts and therefore engage in negative actions. As we’re doing that the Buddha discovered that we generate these negative potencies in the mind or karmic imprints And at some time so these karmic imprints, these negative karmic imprints also obscure the mind. And at a later time, when all the conditions come together, these negative imprints ripen as more suffering.
So this whole situation of our mind being controlled by delusion and karma, and experiencing rebirths over and over again, and experiencing suffering over and over again, is called saṃsāra. saṃsāra is not a place, it’s not something out there. saṃsāra refers to one’s own mind, one’s own mind obscured by delusion and karma. And because the mind is obscured by delusion and karma, we die and are reborn again and again. So the whole point of the Buddha’s teachings is to get out of saṃsāra.
Because while we remain in saṃsāra, or while we remain having a mind controlled by delusion and karma, we will continue to suffer. Because we will continue to create the causes of suffering. Because all the causes of suffering exist within our own mind, not outside. There are conditions for suffering in the external world, for sure, but the real cause lies within our own mind. There are conditions for happiness in the external world, but the real cause lies within our own mind.
This is one of the essential insights of the Buddha’s teachings. To prove this point or to indicate something of its truth I will now bore you all again with my wonderful analogies of tomatoes. If you want a lovely bush of tomatoes, you need two such things. On the one hand, you need tomato seeds, and on the other you need the right conditions for those tomato seeds to grow. Some soil which has a nice amount of nourishment in it, fertility, the soil needs to have a certain amount of moisture and it needs to have a certain amount of heat, sunlight.
When you get all those conditions together then the seed in the soil will sprout, grow into a nice tomato bush and produce lots of tomatoes. So to get tomatoes you need seeds and conditions. You need both. So one could argue that both the seeds and the conditions have equal importance, but this is not the case. The seed is much more important because if were to imagine you had a box of soil, really good tomato growing soil and it had all the right fertility, the right amount of water, right amount of sunshine, The only place tomato bushes will grow in that soil is where you put the seed.
Even though all of the soil is equally good for growing tomatoes, if there are no tomato seeds in the soil, you don’t get any tomato bushes at all. And if you put some seeds in that equally good tomato growing soil, the only place the tomato bushes grow is where you put the seed. Nowhere else. If you put the seed there, the bush doesn’t pop up over here. Only there.
That indicates that to get a tomato bush the most important thing is not the conditions but the seed. To get suffering, the most important thing are not the conditions but the seed. To have happiness, the most important thing are not the conditions but the seed. And the seed, the Buddha discovered, is in our mind. Our perfect mind, our pure mind, has the potentials, the seeds of every good quality and therefore every kind of happiness, perfect happiness.
But the obscured mind has the seeds for every kind of suffering. And when the conditions come, the result comes. This is what the Buddha discovered. So this is what we can try and discover ourselves. Because the Buddha said, don’t just believe me because I said it, but check up.
Oh, so maybe I will take a break now. I have been talking too long. Oh no, maybe just before we do, any questions so far? You don’t have to agree with me. No?
Alright, we have a how long do we normally have? Ten minutes. Ten minute tea break. So people are welcome to make cup of tea, coffee for themselves. There’s some biscuits maybe.
Yes, please enjoy. Okay. So just very quickly for the new people. When we talk about saṃsāra, I mean this idea of saṃsāra is referred to a great deal in the Buddhist teachings. So as I was saying saṃsāra refers to our mind controlled by delusion and karma.
Because the mind is controlled in this way we take rebirth again and again in saṃsāra. One should try to understand or at least be aware of that from a Buddhist point of view there are many different kinds of rebirths we can have. The human rebirth is only one kind of rebirth that the mind can give rise to. But they are both from a point of view of temporary pleasure and temporary suffering. There are worse rebirths than the human one and there are better ones.
So the ones which show worse than the human rebirth is for example the animal rebirth because from a Buddhist point of view animals have minds exactly the same as ourselves. If one can see that animals have aspects of consciousness such as being able to feel, having some kind of intelligence no matter how limited, some ability to reason no matter how limited, and so on. These are all signs of consciousness so if there are some signs of consciousness it means there is consciousness. You can’t have just a little bit of consciousness, you’ve either got the whole thing or nothing. A computer doesn’t have any bits of consciousness whatsoever, any aspects of consciousness.
But one can start to see that animals do have some signs of it and so that means they do have mind and all minds, although they are separate minds, all minds in their nature are the same. They are clear and knowing. So one could ask oneself all minds are the same, why is one mind trapped in an animal body and therefore has to experience suffering and another mind which isn’t the same in nature in a human body where there is so much more potential for happiness? And of course the answer is, from a Buddhist point of view, that one has created the cause, the karmic cause, either to have an animal body or a human body. If one engages in negative actions, one ends up with an animal body.
An animal, the mind is more obscured, therefore more suffering. If one engages in more negative actions, then one can experience an even more suffering rebirth than the animal one which is what is called the realm of hungry ghosts. The Sanskrit term for it is a preta. Just like there are many kinds of humans, there are many kinds of animals. You know there are insects, fish, birds, all sorts of two and four legged animals.
Some with fur, some with feathers, some with scales, all sorts of different kinds of animals, different kinds of human beings. Some human beings are very intelligent, some aren’t very intelligent, some are all sorts of different kinds of human beings. So there are different kinds of beings in the preta realms and then if one engages even more negative actions, in the very extreme negative actions, the Buddha perceived that one can take a rebirth in the most suffering realms of all, which for want of a better word are called the hell realms, of which again there are many versions. So these are all potentials of our mind. These haven’t been created by somebody else to torment us.
Our mind creates these suffering states. This is what the Buddha taught because this is what the Buddha perceived. Also if one engages in more virtuous actions one can have a rebirth that is even more pleasurable than a human rebirth. It’s still in saṃsāra so it comes to an end and one can fall back into any other kind of rebirth. But one can be reborn as what is called a demigod or the Sanskrit term is an asura or one can be born in various kinds of god realms, the Deva realms.
So in the Deva realms and the asura realms the lifespan is much much longer than a human being. There is far more pleasure than in the human realm. But again it is a rebirth state that has a length that when the karma runs out, death occurs and that being, that consciousness takes another rebirth. So from the God realm you could become reborn as a human or an animal or a hungry ghost or even in the hell realms. So this cycles over and over again.
What keeps the cycle going are our disturbing thoughts of following anger and attachment and we follow those because there is always the root cause of our suffering, which is ignorance. So we need to get rid of ignorance in order to get rid of our delusions, to get rid of negative karma that brings these suffering rebirths. When we get rid of ignorance, when we remove that from our mind, all delusions are finished, all negative karma is finished, saṃsāra is finished. And then one experiences the bliss of the mind, the continuous bliss of the mind, is called nirvana. But this is not the ultimate aim of the Buddha’s teachings.
It’s just one aim. The ultimate aim is not just to get out of saṃsāra and experience the bliss of nirvana, but to achieve enlightenment so that one is in the position to help all beings become free of saṃsāra. Because someone who has freed their mind from saṃsāra, they’ve got rid of all their negative qualities but they haven’t fully developed all their positive potentials. So someone who’s not only got out of saṃsāra but fully developed all the positive potentials of their mind is a Buddha and only a Buddha has the ability to be of perfect benefit to all sentient beings. So anyway, there are three major things that one can achieve in the Buddhist path.
One can get a good rebirth, so that’s really necessary. No one wants a bad rebirth. Even if you don’t believe it is possible to be reborn as an animal or you don’t believe in the hungry ghost realms or the hell realms, if you only believe that there are human beings with consciousness, if you have some belief or accept even the remotest possibility that the mind goes on and the only way it could go on is in a human form. As I said at the very beginning, if you look in this human world, so many human beings have tremendous suffering in their life. If we just look at the Middle East at the moment, what is going on there is truly appalling in places in Africa as well.
And of course those terrible situations could develop in our country anytime. It doesn’t look like it, it doesn’t feel like it could happen, but these things can happen at any time. Think we look at the Middle East and think maybe one thinks how barbaric this is. But then in the nineteen forties, Europe was, you know, as as barbaric. Millions and millions of people being killed.
So and anyway, even in peaceful countries, even in Australia, there are people whose lives are hell, are like hell. If we look at the Aboriginal people, I mean, the the the I mean, there’s their life for many Aboriginals is truly appalling. But even if you look in wealthy families who have got everything, there are people whose lives are like hell. There is so much suffering and misery for all sorts of reasons. So from a Buddhist point of view, all of this suffering has causes.
And the causes are basically engaging in negative actions, following afflicted desire and anger, etcetera, etcetera. If you create the cause, you get the result. If one is experiencing something, if the mind is experiencing something, there has to be a cause. This is the mind. Right now, this is the experience of calmness or something pleasant.
Right? That symbolizes that. But in the next moment there is suffering. The next moment the mind experiences suffering. Why?
What made the mind experience when it was in a peaceful or neutral state? Why did the mind suddenly change to experience suffering? In the case of the bottle, the bottle has to move for all of that to happen. There has to be a cause. And in the same, something has to cause the mind to have an experience.
And as I try to say, there are external conditions, but there has to be the inner cause. You have to have the seed, you have to have the tomato seed and the tomato conditions. And the most important thing are not the tomato conditions, but the tomato seed. So you can have all the conditions for suffering in the external world, but you have to have the inner cause. So what really brings about our suffering are inner causes within our mind.
You have to have both, the conditions and the inner cause. This is the Buddhist view. There are other views, but this is the Buddhist view one can check out. Because even among ordinary people, let alone people who have really trained their mind and we shouldn’t forget about but just using the expression forget about Buddhas and so on, there can be a situation where a lot of suffering is occurring, all sorts of conditions for people to feel very unhappy and suffer, and some people experiencing those conditions do suffer a lot and others don’t. It doesn’t disturb them so much.
I mean, maybe you can think of situations but with Tibet, when Tibet was invaded, horrific things happened in Tibet. Many people were killed, so many people escaped. And for some people, Tibetans leaving their country, their their their religion, their culture, everything behind, all their possessions, family coming to India, a completely different country in every way, it was just too much. And although they survived the journey, after some time they just gave up and died. But other people continued and even began to prosper because different minds said.
The outer conditions were the same, more or less, but it really depends on the mind. We check our own experience. One day something can make us happy and the next day we’re indifferent to it, and the next day we may even can’t stand that thing. It all depends on our mind. So where am I going?
Anyway, if the Buddha’s teachings are true, let’s assume they are, because there’s lots of good reasons to believe they are, then if we’ve got a mind and our mind is the source of our suffering, then the more we understand this, the more we feel it, it becomes obvious if we want less suffering, even in this life, and we want more happiness even in this life, but especially if we start to understand that our mind goes on and on. So if we want more happiness in saṃsāra and less suffering in saṃsāra or if we want to get out of saṃsāra and have no suffering at all or we want to go even beyond that just the state of enlightenment where we can have perfect bliss and help all beings become free of suffering, then if we want any of those things it becomes obvious that the only way to achieve them is that I have to take care of my mind. I have to reduce, at least reduce, pacify, subdue, not repress, which is another thing altogether. But I have to pacify my disturbing thoughts, which are the source of my suffering, and cultivate my good qualities.
I have to take care of my mind. So if I want a good rebirth, I definitely have to do it. If I want to get out of saṃsāra, I definitely have to do it. If I want to achieve enlightenment, I definitely have to do it. So if I want to achieve any of those things, then I have to take care of my mind.
And to do that, I need a method. Alright? I need a method. If you want to take care of your body, you need a method to do so. If you really want to take care of your body, you know, you need a method to do so.
If you buy something and you want to take care of it, you need to know how to. You need a method. Right? And if the mind is the source of every happiness and every suffering and if one doesn’t take care of it properly, it could give rise to an enormous amount of suffering for an incredibly long time, then one needs a really, really good method. In other words, one really needs a complete method, a perfect method, a method that if one uses it properly will never go wrong.
That is not a fake, that is completely reliable, or as my teacher Lama Zopa says, completely unbetrayable. Because if you use a method for your body and it goes wrong, the worst that can happen is that you will die. But from a Buddha point of view, it’s okay because we’ll get another body. If you use some kind of method to take care of your television set and it doesn’t work, you lose your television set. But you can always get another one after some time.
Not a big deal. But if you mess up your mind, the consequences are horrendous. Not only for oneself but for others. Sorry to put it in such a but this is the Buddha says we have to face the truth. There are all sorts of fluffy teachings out there.
If you want a fluffy teaching don’t come to Buddha House. The fairy floss ones are out not here. We are trying to preserve the Buddha’s teaching. It’s the foundation for the preservation, not the corruption of the Buddha’s teachings, the preservation of them. So the Buddhist teachings can be quite confronting but very liberating.
So anyway, so we need a complete perfect, unbetrayable method to take care of our mind, to work with our mind. So if you think about it, a complete, perfect, unbetrayable method can only come from a perfect source. And what is that perfect source? From a Buddhist point of view, it is the enlightened mind, Buddha mind. So that is why, from a Buddhist point of view, the Buddha is the perfect refuge, the perfect protection.
Not that the Buddha himself will somehow make all our suffering go away. The Buddha can’t do that. But by relying on the Buddha, having faith, it’s not blind faith but a reasoning logical faith that enlightened mind does exist, the Buddha mind does exist, then we can trust the teachings of the Buddha. Because a Buddha by definition, having a mind that is free of all negativity in a way that it never returns even for a moment and has all positive qualities constantly in a present, active, in a way that they never even decline, even for a fraction of a second, such a mind cannot lie. That mind sees the truth totally, all the time, not just knows it intellectually, experiences the truth of everything all the time, doesn’t lie about it, can explain it exactly without any mistake.
So those teachings we can trust. They are complete, perfect and unbetrayable. And those teachings contain the methods that we can rely on to work with our mind because the Buddha used the same methods because the Buddha was an ordinary suffering being like ours. His mind or her mind, Buddha’s mind, was an obscured mind like ours. And the Buddha used the methods to get rid of those obscurations.
And the Buddha came to this world to say, If you apply, if you use these teachings the way I use them, they will work the same way they worked for me. And then the third jewel of refuge is the Sangha. The Sangha refers to those people who have practiced the Buddha’s teachings in a very profound, perfect, pure way for a long time and have gained deep experiential insight into those teachings. And although the Sangha are people who may not have fully achieved liberation from saṃsāra or enlightenment yet, they are on the actual path to do so, so one can also rely on them. So this is what is referred to as the Three Jewels of refuge: the Buddha, the Buddha’s teachings, which is the Dharma, and then the Sangha or technically the Aria Sangha, the community of practitioners who have directly perceived the nature of reality.
And because of that they are on the path out of saṃsāra to enlightenment. So they are called the Three Jewels of refuge. The perfect refuge, the perfect protection. Also what I was trying to say is the Buddha himself can’t make our suffering go away but the Buddha taught the method that we can apply to make our suffering go away. And the Buddha can inspire us and guide us directly and indirectly to meet those teachings, practice them, and enter the path.
And the Buddha does that in many many interesting ways. So the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha are called the Three Jewels of refuge because a jewel or the triple gem or the Three Jewels of refuge because a jewel is something that is very precious and very rare. And the Buddha, the Dharma and Sangha are the most precious things because even the most valuable jewel in the world or even if all the jewels in the world put together, even if you had the Queen of England’s collection of jewels and Elizabeth Taylor’s collection of jewels and what’s his name Some of those American rap singers who seem to have lots of jewels these days. Even if you put all these jewels together, even as my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche said, Even if you had a Mount Everest of jewels, all of them together wouldn’t be able to stop one headache. Wouldn’t stop you getting sick, wouldn’t stop you aging, can’t stop you dying, can’t stop you getting reborn in saṃsāra.
Mountains of diamonds couldn’t do that. But the Buddha’s teachings can. Not magically, we have to practice them. But the practice of the Buddha’s teachings can stop eventually every suffering and bring every happiness, including eventually peerless everlasting happiness. The direct experience of the bliss of our mind.
So there’s nothing more precious or rare than that. The great practitioners also are extremely rare and precious. These are the Three Jewels of refuge. So the reasons for going for refuge are to avoid suffering. Traditionally it is said the proper cause for going for refuge is to avoid the suffering of the lower realms.
So probably most of us when we first connect with the Buddha’s teachings we don’t have any knowledge of the lower realms and even if we start to get to know about them we may not believe in them or believe in them very much. So at least our motivation should be recognizing that even as a human being there is so much potential for suffering in this life. But if I get reborn as a human being again I could experience there are so many horrendous situations I could be born into as a human being and I don’t want that suffering. So I need to avoid the causes. What will help me is the Buddha, the Buddha’s teachings and the great practitioners.
So basically it is said there are three levels of motivation for taking refuge or practicing refuge which is firstly to avoid a bad rebirth, a stronger reason for taking refuge is to get out of saṃsāra and the highest form of refuge or motivation for practicing refuge or relying on the Buddhadharma and Sangha is to achieve enlightenment in order to benefit all sentient beings. So of course in the Mahāyāna tradition and Tibetan Buddhism is a form of Mahāyāna Buddhism, we were all encouraged to go for refuge and practice refuge not just for our own good rebirth, not just for our own liberation, but so that we can eventually become a Buddha to help all sentient beings to repay their kindness. So just briefly, what is refuge? I’ve already said it but I’ll just try and repeat it. There are the objects of refuge which is the Buddha, the Buddha’s teachings and the great practitioners And then there is the practice of refuge, of going for refuge, taking refuge or what my teacher Lama Yeshe used to say was you do refuge.
You have to do it all the time. So what is it? What is doing refuge? It it it has various aspects. The first aspect is recognizing, admitting, accepting that one has a mind and one’s mind is the source of all one’s experience.
Even if we don’t deeply understand that yet, we have some belief in that direction that actually yes, my suffering is coming from my mind, my happiness is actually coming from my mind. There are conditions out there for it but the real cause actually lies within my mind. So that’s the beginning of refuge. And in life whenever happiness and suffering comes is recognizing it’s really coming from my mind not because of that stuff out there. So then on the basis of that recognition refuge involves making the determination that if I want less suffering and more happiness, I have got to take care of my mind.
And I’m going to. That’s what refuge is. It’s being determined to take care of one’s mind, either for one’s own sake or for the sake of others. Hopefully eventually having this Mahāyāna refuge, wanting to take care of one’s mind, eventually for the benefit of all sentient beings. And then the next component of having refuge is realizing I need a proper method and the fourth feature is realizing the best method, the perfect method, the unbetrayable method is the Buddha’s teachings because the Buddha is the perfect refuge.
So therefore I will take care of my mind using the Buddha’s methods because they’re perfect, complete, unbetrayable. Reliable, completely reliable, unbetrayable. So I’ve got to stop there. Didn’t get oh no, no, there’s still no, there’s ten minutes more, isn’t it?
Nine fifteen. Yeah, ten minutes more. Yes. So some people these days are looking for something they don’t want old religions, they want something new and just simply because it’s new it seems very appealing and good. But just because something’s new doesn’t mean it’s good.
I’m not sure if I can tell this story very well. You don’t have to believe in the actual story, it’s just the point of the story. But I love this story. It’s one of the first Buddhist stories I heard. It sounds maybe very bizarre for new people but anyway, and some of you have probably already heard it from me a couple of times, the story goes that once upon a time there was a man who had a goiter in his throat, this huge lump due to this deficiency.
He was traveling somewhere from one village to another and night came and there was a storm brewing or something and he couldn’t find any shelter or something so he spent the night under a bridge, a small bridge or something and there was this kind of negative spirit, a harmful spirit lived under this bridge. And everyone knew that but because he couldn’t find anywhere else to stay for the night He stayed under the bridge so he made a little prayer to the spirit saying, he made a little offering there, put some offering there and said please spirit don’t harm me, I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to upset that you’re living here so please accept this little offering and don’t hurt me. So when he woke up in the morning his goiter had gone and he put this down to the fact that the spirit had eaten it. So he was really happy about this. And when he went back to his village he told another friend of his who had also an equally bad goiter to go to that place, make an offering to the spirit and pray to the spirit to remove the goiter.
If you take refuge in this spirit, he will take your goiter away from you. So this man did that. But when the spirit came at the request of this man to take the goiter away, he remembered that the other goiter tasted so bad and disgusting that he spewed it back onto this man so he had an even bigger one when he woke up in the morning. So the moral of that story is be very careful what you take refuge in. Because what may benefit you for a short time may be extremely harmful in the long run.
There are many people maybe I shouldn’t say this because I don’t know what people’s experiences are but there are many people here these days who sort of invoke kind of beings who they think are God or some benevolent spirit or deva from the God realms who do lots of healing and help people and so they really take refuge in these beings. Some people are like mediums and healers or people go to these healers and rely on them. But from a Buddhist point of view, in most of these cases, these beings who come in to healers and heal and who say wonderful things are actually quite harmful beings. But they say all these nice things and do all these nice things to attract people to them and hook them. So they benefit them for some time and it may even be quite a long time because these spirits live a very long time, much longer than any human being.
So they can afford to wait a long time to be nice, to hook these people, and when they’ve got them, then they’ve got them. So one should be very careful. Just because something looks good and it seems beneficial for a while doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Maybe some things that are done which are called meditation could do that although I’m not sure. I’ll say that Buddhist meditation Yeah, well I don’t either.
Now what I was going say is that maybe some kinds of things which are labeled meditation may lead you open to that, but if one practices Buddhist meditation properly the way the Buddha taught it, it certainly won’t. And this is why at the beginning of a meditation the motivation is emphasized a great deal. That one needs to do it with as positive a meditation a motivation as possible. That protects the mind. But negative spirits really can’t get into your mind if you’re in a positive state, generally speaking.
Yeah. Sorry? How would you argue that? I wouldn’t. Just I wouldn’t bother.
Just, you know, if people like I said people believe and there’s yeah if that’s what they believe that’s that’s it. Anyway, so my point is one should really check if one starts to understand that the mind has, although it has an incredible potential for good and to experience amazingly wonderful good things, unfortunately the obscured mind has the potential to experience a lot of suffering but also bring a lot of suffering to others. Our own uncontrolled mind can be extremely damaging to other people as one can see what’s happening in the world now with these people with very extreme views which they want to impose on everyone else no matter what. Where if someone doesn’t agree with you then you kill them. You just simply wipe them out.
I’ve lost my point. Where am I? So if we can see that our mind has a lot of potential to suffer itself but also bring so much suffering to others then we really need a method to work with our mind and it needs to be a perfect one. Not ninety percent good and missing a few bits here and there. We need a method that is complete.
Takes into account every contingency, every possibility of the mind. A method that’s complete, perfect, unbetrayable. So it can’t come from a person whose mind isn’t perfect. It needs to come from a mind that is perfect and that is the Enlightened Mind. So of course the question arises: Does Enlightened Mind exist?
That’s the big question. This is very hard to prove but I’ll try and talk about that next week because I’ve run out of time. But that’s something to think about. Do I have a mind? Is my mind the source of my suffering?
If so, I need a method to take care of it because I just can’t make up a method myself or rely on someone else who has made up a method. Well for example, I’m sorry, there are many diets of how to lose weight, many many and they’re all fantastic and they all have lists and lists of people who this person worked out this diet, they used it themselves, it was fantastic. Many other people used it and worked and it’s fantastic. And maybe this is all true, but the point about those is they only work for some people. The person who developed it, it worked for them because they worked out how it worked for them and they changed it, modified it and some other people have a similar kind of meditative stabilization and blah blah blah so it works for them but not everyone.
So it doesn’t work for everyone. And the other method doesn’t work. It works for some people but not other people. And that method works for some people but not other people. So one doesn’t want a method like that for your mind and you discover that it works for a little while but not all the time or it works in one way, some aspects work, but the other aspects don’t work.
One needs a method of the mind that works all the time in every aspect. Yeah. That’s what we need. Otherwise, we’re in trouble, sooner or later. And the Buddha is saying, I got the method, Cause I’m a Buddha.
I freed my mind from everything suffering negative and woke up every possible good quality within me. So one should think about that and check up. Okay, just very quickly with the homework. I I I meant to talk about some of these things but didn’t have the time. But so the homework is to oh no, the daily meditation is what I want to talk in the reading, in your book in section one, talks about the eight point meditation posture and also this breathing meditation exercise, the nine round breathing exercise.
So the daily meditation I’m asking people to do is to do that, try and sit in the meditation posture as much as possible. Don’t worry about the crossed leg bit so much, but all the other parts are important. Do the nine round breathing exercise. Then, having done that, cultivate a good motivation. Try and generate the bodhicitta thought.
And if you feel comfortable after generating the motivation or while you are generating motivation you could say the refuge bodhicitta prayer that is in the book. And then try and visualize Śākyamūni Buddha as I described. We will go into this in more detail next week and recite the mantra of the Buddha which is Tayata Om Muni Muni Maha Munaye Svāhā. So as you’re reciting that, you can imagine just for a short time this light coming from the Buddha, white light coming from the Buddha, helping you to see the need for a refuge, the need to take care of one’s mind, the need to free the mind of all confusion and with a method that is complete and perfect and unbetrayable. Or can recite the mantra for a short time to clear the mind and then just think about that point, the need for a refuge and what kind of refuge one needs.
And then after doing that one could start reciting the mantra again for a short time and then think about that maybe the pure mind of the Buddha is the perfect refuge, that the teachings of the Buddha, are a reflection of that pure mind, are the perfect refuge. And that the great practitioners of those teachings can help one to put them into practice oneself. So one can meditate along those lines. And below that are the days of the week, and as it mentions, if you do the meditation on that day, please tick. If you don’t do it, don’t tick it.
No cheating, please. Right? This is not good. So, also, in the reading, please tick the bits you read. You know, if you don’t read them, don’t tick them.
I won’t tell you off if you don’t do the homework, like I said, but it’s nice to know if people are doing it or not. I wish there were prizes I could give to encourage people to do this, but maybe I should try and get some prizes somehow in the future. And then there’s just a simple daily mindfulness practice. I hope it all makes sense. Try and sorry, I always run out of time to do all the bits and pieces.
Anyway, just try to do what you can. What you don’t understand, I will try and explain next week. Please ask questions. Thank you very much for your attention. Just like we started off with trying to develop a good motivation, From a Buddhist point of view this means we have generated some positive karmic imprints in our minds, some good energy, some good understanding, so we can dedicate those positive potentials, that good karma or good karmic imprints so that they become a cause for us to be able to have a good rebirth, to achieve liberation from saṃsāra, but especially to achieve enlightenment so that we can be of perfect benefit to all suffering beings.
So if you’d like to join in the dedication, it’s on the bottom of page eleven. We’ll just do it in English. 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.
Okay, so for those people who feel comfortable to do it and meaningful, then the tradition is we finish the teachings with three prostrations.