Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 80-minute teaching from May 2013, Ven Thubten Dondrub explores the second noble truth—the causes of suffering—as the foundation for understanding how to escape cyclic existence. He begins with a meditation on taking refuge and generating bodhicitta, then unpacks the central Buddhist insight: suffering arises not from external conditions but from disturbing thoughts rooted in ignorance. Through concrete examples—how twenty-five people experience the same food differently, how anger and craving feel in the moment—he shows that pleasure and pain depend on the mind, not on objects themselves. He traces the causal chain: ignorance misperceives a solid, independent self; this spawns self-cherishing; self-cherishing activates craving, attachment, and anger; these create negative imprints that ripen as suffering. He emphasizes that anger is never justified, even in extreme circumstances like being attacked, because a peaceful death leads to better rebirth. He also introduces the meditation on watching one’s thoughts as a practical tool to disengage from disturbing mental states. The talk concludes with Q&A and discussion groups. Suited to newcomers and practitioners working to understand saṃsāra and the roots of their own suffering.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2013 05 14 DB Samsāra week4 Dondrub 140513.mp3
UUID: b8483c3f-4992-4aac-a315-59152825bcc2
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Samsāra & Nirvāṇa (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2013-05-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 79.9 minutes
Words: ~9,686
Okay. So welcome everyone to our fourth class on saṃsāra and nirvana. So we have a lot to cover tonight. There’s definitely I won’t be able to cover all the things that are listed for tonight’s class, but I’ll try and do some things and do the next next week. So as I always say, it’s really important that when we listen to the dharma that we try and listen with an open mind and also with the best motivation possible.
So the best motivation is the bodhicitta thought seeking to achieve enlightenment, to repay the kindness of others. So I’ve explained that a little bit. I won’t talk more about it tonight. So if you feel connected to that motivation, then please try and generate it. At least for the newer people, at least try and generate a good motivation for being here, having the determination to listen with an open mind, trying to really concentrate on what’s being said and so on.
And if you feel comfortable to join in, then please join in the traditional prayer, which I’ll be doing, which is on page nine. Thanks. And to make that prayer as meaningful as possible, then it’s helpful to visualize the Buddha in front of us as the embodiment of the Three Jewels of refuge in all their perfect qualities, thinking that the Buddha is there to remind us of our own Buddha nature and to inspire us to realize it. And also at the same time we try and think of all sentient beings surrounding us. Especially since it’s very difficult to honestly generate a mind that encompasses the thought of all sentient beings, then to make it realistic, we need to at least think of the people we’re connected to in this life. So our parents on either side, family, friends, and helpers behind us, those who harm us in front, and then as much as possible trying to open our hearts and minds to an awareness and concern for all other beings of cyclic existence.
Okay. Trying to have a sense of how all these beings are really in nature, in essence, only kind, but unfortunately only suffering, trapped in saṃsāra. So I have to get out of saṃsāra and to help them get out of saṃsāra. And I have to achieve enlightenment to help all sentient beings to achieve enlightenment. Okay. So to do all of that, we have to understand what saṃsāra is, what nirvana is, what the causes for saṃsāra are, what the causes of nirvana are so that we can avoid the one and create the causes for the other.
So for this reason, we can study this topic tonight. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma, and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create through teaching the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So then we can think the Buddha is very pleased with our motivation and shows this by coming to the crown of our head. And then when directly above our crown, we imagine the Buddha dissolving into blissful golden light so that that light pours down into us, blessing our mind.
And then we can enhance that positive state by doing the nine round breathing exercise just for a short time to help establish a calmer, clearer, more concentrated mind. And to make it more effective, we can imagine with each in-breath of the cycle, within the cycle, breathing in a blissful, calming, clear white light that brings great calmness and clarity to the mind, feeling that awakens all our positive qualities. And with each out-breath in the cycle, imagine breathing out all agitation in the mind right now, all negativity of thoughts and feelings, all disturbing thoughts, all negative imprints in the form of black smoke. We imagine that completely. We breathe it out completely, and it completely becomes nonexistent. Okay. Thank you.
So the essential teaching of the Buddha, the first and essential teaching of the Buddha, which all the other teachings are related to is the four noble truths. So the third noble truth is the most important one, which is that there is a true cessation of suffering. That all our suffering can be completely eliminated because we can eliminate the causes. And the fourth truth is that there is a path that we can follow. There is a definite way that we can go about eliminating the causes of suffering. But to do that, we have to think about deeply and realize the first two noble truths.
And the first of which is that ordinary existence, samsaric existence is in its very nature suffering. That while we are in saṃsāra, there is no way we can experience real happiness. We can have some pleasure, some entertainment, some nice things, the illusion of happiness, but not what we really want, which is peace, which sounds kind of boring, but is what we really want. This state, this blissful state free of all confusion. And it’s what all sentient beings naturally want.
So this is something we have to understand, that our ordinary existence is in is suffering. The more we understand that, not just in an intellectual way, but in a very deep, profound way, when we realize that, this will lead us to think about the causes of our suffering and to discover that what the Buddha discovered: that the causes don’t lie outside us, but actually lie within our own mind. So this is what I want to talk a little bit about tonight. The second noble truth: that there are genuine true causes, valid causes for all our suffering.
So in a nutshell, I mean really there isn’t time to go into this in any profundity, this is just an introduction and I’ve said a lot of this before, but what the Buddha discovered is that the immediate cause of our suffering, any kind of suffering, is the ripening of negative imprints in our mind. And the point I always want to go back to is that suffering is a state of mind and there can only be three explanations of why things arise, why we experience things. One is that there is no real reason, things just happen, which is kind of the scientific materialist view. There is the theistic view that there is a creator who has caused everything basically. And then there is the Buddhist view that there are causes. And the nature of the cause determines the nature of the effect.
So since the effect, suffering, is something that occurs within the mind, it is a state of mind, then the only thing that can cause it is something within our mind. Of course, there are conditions in the external world, but they are just that. They are conditions. They’re not the root cause. Like I think I have explained a couple of times already about tomatoes and tomato bushes and the plot of land. You need the conditions, but you have to have the tomato seed. That’s the crucial thing. Tomato bushes, even though there can be many areas, lots of land where you can grow tomato bushes that are suitable in climate and soil, the only place that actual tomato bushes appear is where tomato seeds are sown in those conditions. Right? So this indicates how the seed is the most important thing.
And if you check in your life, if you check out what we believe as the causes of things, you know, in other words, if conditions or situations were the cause, then if they were the cause of everything, everyone would experience things in the same way. Yeah. But even when many people are affected, generally speaking, by the same conditions, people don’t experience the same results. So this indicates there’s something within us that is involved. Yeah?
Like if twenty-five people were to eat the same dish of food prepared by the one person at the one time, people would experience that food in different ways. But if the pleasure or, you know, the taste, the good taste of the thing existed, the pleasure of the food existed totally in the food, we would all experience it in the same way. But we don’t. If the pleasant or unpleasant taste of the food existed in the food, we would experience it the same way, but we don’t. Some people like this food, some people dislike it, some people are indifferent.
And also if you check, you know, one can eat the same, the one person, oneself can eat the same kind of food many times, cooked by yourself, the same conditions. You know? And sometimes it tastes nice and sometimes it doesn’t. Yeah. And I’m not talking about when you mess up the recipe. I mean, when it’s cooked really nicely and it’s still, you know, you just don’t enjoy it. Why? Because it’s not totally dependent on the food, on the conditions. It depends on the mind. There has to be something, something is operating in the mind. Yeah. And what is it? It’s a karmic potency. Yeah.
Good ones bring pleasure and happiness and help out in a sense our positive potentials to function, whereas the negative imprints bring suffering and confusion and obscure our positive potentials. And yeah, it’s like that in a nutshell. Yeah. So why those negative imprints are there, why the negative imprints are there which bring suffering is because we have followed disturbing thoughts, particularly of craving, attachment, and anger. We follow these disturbing thoughts or what are called delusions or afflictions. The Sanskrit word is klesha. So we follow those, we act on them, these negative imprints are generated. When they ripen because the conditions come together, suffering occurs.
But also suffering occurs because of the ripening of negative imprints, but also the disturbing thoughts themselves are suffering. That’s why they’re called disturbing thoughts. When we are controlled by anger, not only are we creating the cause for future suffering to ourselves, but our anger is painful to ourselves. We are suffering when we’re angry or irritated or annoyed. Yeah. We are suffering. That is suffering. When we are experiencing craving for something, that is suffering. Yeah. And attachment is suffering. Attachment in the Buddhist sense of attachment, you know, not the usual meaning that attachment is something nice, meaning I like someone or something, but attachment is suffering.
So if that acts as the cause, the effect can only be suffering. This is basically what the law of cause and effect that the Buddha discovered that governs the functioning of the mind, the whole universe, is that disturbing thoughts, you know, they are suffering. They can only produce suffering. You know, we think following craving brings happiness, but it doesn’t. The actual result, the actual effect of it is suffering. We have to check this out. This is very important to really check out in your life. Alright?
But it’s, if the more we can see that we do have disturbing thoughts and that they are suffering, the more we can start to understand that these are the real cause of our suffering, of all our confusion, that we can’t have happiness while we have disturbing thoughts, while we have an uncontrolled mind that gets taken over again and again by disturbing thoughts. So if you check, anger is a disturbing thought. I think everyone can see that. It’s fairly easy to see. Especially if you look at other people when they’re angry, it’s easy to see that they are disturbed. Yeah. The mind is disturbed.
But if we check our own anger when we are angry, we are not happy. Also, a fundamental understanding of Buddhist psychology is that your mind can only be doing, in one moment, one thing. And when the mind is knowing that thing, it can only be in a positive or a negative state. It can’t be both. You can either be happy or suffering. You can’t be both. Right?
So when anger arises, you check, it is painful, it is suffering. It is mentally painful and it can also bring physical discomfort. You know, you get really hot and sweaty and it can lead to actual physical disease. It’s being discovered more and more in modern science that anger leads to all sorts of physical problems. Yeah. So we get angry in order to protect our happiness or the things that we think are the source of our happiness, such as our family, friends, our possessions, our money, our reputation. When those things are threatened, we respond with anger. But our anger is what actually destroys our happiness. But we blame it on the enemy. You made me angry. You brought all this suffering to me. But actually it’s one’s own mind that did it.
But it’s so important to check that our anger, it is painful, so it can only bring suffering. So it is never ever justified to get angry. Yeah? Even, you know, we could, I think we can all see that, I’ve talked about this in the karma course, but this is just a quick summary. If you remember that we can all mostly agree that when someone just insults us, it’s better not to get angry. But we feel that certain situations are justified to be angry, such as if someone is about to kill us, then we are justified, especially if we’re completely innocent of anything. We feel justified to get angry to protect ourselves.
But actually, in that situation, this is the least time, the least, I can’t speak English. I wish I could speak something else. One is least justified in getting angry at such a time. Because if one is actually going to be killed by someone, meaning one’s mind is going to leave this body, one wants the mind, one needs the mind to leave the body in a peaceful state because only if the mind is in a peaceful state will one have a good rebirth. But if one dies angrily, there is no way one can have a good rebirth. Even if one’s lived an incredibly virtuous life one’s whole life, if one dies with anger, one has a bad rebirth.
So there’s no point getting angry if someone’s chopping you up to kill you. It just doesn’t help. It makes it worse. As my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche once said, or I’m just paraphrasing, that even if someone dropped all the atomic bombs in the world on top of you, they can’t send you to the lower realms. All that can do is kill you. What sends you to the lower realms is your own anger. Alright? So just check up. So anger is really painful. So its actual effects on oneself, of course, the effects on others are bad, but the effects on ourself, especially in the future when the karmic imprints ripen, are horrendous. Alright?
But it’s much more difficult to see that craving and attachment are negative disturbing states of mind because we follow them so much. And when we meet the object of our craving, then there appears to be pleasure and happiness. You crave something, and here’s the beautiful object. You crave it. You get it, and there is some pleasure. So it looks like the way to get pleasure is to have craving and to follow it. Yeah?
But if you check up, if you have some craving for something and you can’t meet the object, what happens? What is the feeling? What is the experience of craving when one craves and craves and doesn’t get the object? Whether it’s, you know, you want to have a boyfriend, girlfriend, can’t get one. You want people to like you in general. It doesn’t happen. You want some praise, and you don’t get it. You want respect, and you don’t get it. You want some piece of clothing, and you don’t get it. You want a piece of bread, and you don’t get it. You want lots of money, and you don’t get it. Whatever it is and you don’t get it, what happens to us? Is that a pleasant feeling to crave and not get something? No. It’s not.
It makes the mind very agitated and stressed and nervous and tense. Lots of tension. What was that one? Tension and anxiety, that was a mixture of anxious, tense, and so on. Yeah. So in other words, it is actually painful to experience craving. And so it follows that the actual result is suffering, not happiness. Because craving for something is not the actual cause to get it. If I crave a vase of yellow flowers and wow, here is a vase of yellow flowers. But the fact that I’m able to experience this vase of yellow flowers is not because of the craving for them. The fact that I’m able to have the pleasure of a vase of yellow flowers is, I did something good in a past life to experience, believe it or not, to experience the pleasure of seeing some nice yellow flowers. The craving for them isn’t the cause to experience the result. The craving for this is the cause to experience suffering in the future. That is really important to check up. Yeah.
You know, you crave for money, so you rob a bank and you get a lot of money. Robbing a bank is not the cause to become rich. Believe it or not, according to Buddhist understanding, for a bank robber to rob a bank successfully and get the money, to have that money they had to have done something good in the past to get the money. But the condition to get it was a negative action that will bring great poverty in the future. The effect of stealing is poverty, not riches.
One of my teachers, Geshe Ngawang Dhargye, who has passed away many years ago now, was the abbot of Sera Je monastery. He lived for a time at Chenrezig Institute in Queensland many, many years ago. He was the abbot of the biggest monastery in the entire world, and he came to Australia and taught about ten of us at Chenrezig Institute. It’s an amazing time. Anyway, he gave the story about how he came from a nomad family, and nomads in Tibet every now and again would kill an animal to eat it. You know, that’s what they had to live on. They had to do that to a large extent. There’s very little food in Tibet. There’s hardly any vegetables or anything. They just subsisted on meat to some extent and tsampa.
Anyway, so Geshe Dhargye gave this example to a group of us. He said, does that, and so he said regularly his family would kill animals and have a big meal of meat and enjoy it very much. So he said, does that therefore mean that killing brings happiness? If that’s true, then the Buddhist teachings are all wrong. You know? And he said, no. It’s not, it looks like that, to get this pleasure of eating meat, you do this negative action of killing an animal. But it looks like that, but that’s not the case. He says, actually, the fact that my family or any nomad could enjoy eating some meat was, they created the cause, some virtuous action to be able to have some food and enjoy it, possibly by giving food in the past. And because they did engage in something virtuous, in this life, they had the ability to have food and enjoy it. But the condition to have it was to kill animals, and the effect of that comes in the future. The effect of killing an animal is not getting a nice barbecue. The only effect of killing is great suffering. And not the great suffering of a human being, but much worse than that.
Anyway, this is the law of cause and effect. So the nature of craving is, and it’s different from, you know, we don’t have the words in English, but, you know, we could call it desire. But there’s also desire to achieve enlightenment. There’s a desire to practice Dharma, the desire to be a good person, to be kind and generous, etcetera. So that is not craving. That is not afflicted desire.
The nature of afflicted desire is that the object is what is called a contaminated phenomena. A contaminated phenomena is a true suffering. A contaminated phenomena is something produced by delusion and karma. And everything in our world is a contaminated phenomena. Even the nice things, the good things, they are produced by delusion and karma. Right? So this is an example of a contaminated phenomena. Our body is an example of a contaminated phenomena. This clock is a contaminated phenomena.
So the object of afflicted desire or craving is a contaminated phenomena which is conventionally pleasant, but what the nature of craving is, what it does, is it projects that this object is more desirable than it is. And why? Because it makes me happy. It seems to make me happy. So it must be wonderful. It is wonderful. And what’s mixed with that confusion is that this desirable thing seems to be permanently desirable. It will always be like that, and therefore, it will always make me happy. And that makes me crave it because if I have it, I will be permanently happy. Yeah. So that is what is craving or afflicted desire.
And, of course, then when you crave it and you get it, and then the other aspect of craving, because they go together, sets in, which is attachment. You can’t let go of it because how can you let go of permanent happiness? You can’t. I mean, it isn’t permanent happiness, but our delusion tells us it is. I mean, it’s illogical, but when the delusion is operating, fortunately, the delusions aren’t operating all the time, and a little wisdom creeps in occasionally, which does a world of good. We’d be totally doomed if it didn’t. But when we’re in the thick of the delusion, it is telling us this really stupid stuff, that this is permanent and will make me permanently happy.
So then you get stuck to it, attached, you know, like a band-aid. You can’t separate because it’s gonna hurt. You know, you’re convinced, we are convinced that it will be painful to let go of this even a little bit. Yeah. So attachment brings dependency. Something we didn’t depend on before we’re now dependent on. You know, desire and attachment tell us that following it, I will get lots of friends, family, possessions. I will be protected. I will be strong. I will be secure.
But in fact, the reality is the opposite. Attachment weakens us because we become more and more dependent on more and more things. You know, don’t take this too concretely. But when I was young in Australia, about the only food you could have was pies and pasties and chops. And people were quite happy. Now you have to have this gourmet boutique food that, you know, when I was young, the food went that way on the plate. Now it goes up like this, you know, and it’s little and it’s got little sprigs of things on it. And it’s only cooked by, you know, international chefs or you wouldn’t touch it. You know? And one needs that to be happy now. You know? One needs this very, very special stuff. But are we happier with this special stuff? I don’t think so. Anyway, check up. Yeah.
So also if you check up the nature of how the delusions work is that anger, why does anger exist? It exists actually because of craving and attachment. If that wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be angry. We get angry because, if you check your anger and resentment and irritation and annoyance, which are all, you know, the same kind of mindset or offshoots of it, underlying those disturbed thoughts is some kind of attachment or craving. You know? Why we get angry is because we are attached to a view of ourself and someone threatens that. Yeah? Or we’re attached to our people and someone threatens them. We’re attached to our ideas. We’re attached to our possessions, our reputation. There’s some kind of attachment always underlying anger. Craving and attachment is underlying anger.
And I gave the example in the karma course I think that, you know, even when you’re in a hurry and you’re trying to get a key in the keyhole and you can’t do it, and you get upset and angry and annoyed. And why? Because one is attached to doing it quickly. Because one wants to do a particular thing quickly. Or, you know, something should happen this way. We are attached to something happening this way or at this time. We’re attached to people treating us this way, and they don’t, so we get upset. It’s all due to attachment and craving.
And why do we have craving and attachment? And so here we come to the very root cause of cyclic existence, which is ignorance. The only reason we have disturbing thoughts like craving, attachment, pride, jealousy, fear, and worry, depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and all that stuff is because there is this very root confusion in our mind, this root source of all suffering, which is ignorance, which ignorance obscures the mind so that the mind generates this false image of oneself and of all things. And that factor of ignorance believes that that false appearance is true, that it is real.
So what ignorance does is very difficult to really understand. There is a whole topic DB course on this, on ignorance, which I hope you will stick it out to eventually do at some point. But in a nutshell, and try to very simply, like, for example, we have a body and from a Buddhist point of view, we don’t just have a brain, we have a mind. These two things do exist. But on top of that, we talk about me. And we experience me as not the body and not our mind because we talk about my body. Yeah. My body. My mind. So this is my clock. This is me, and this is a clock, two different things. This is my cup. You know? There’s me and a cup, two different things. So we say my body. My body. So there’s me who’s got a body. My mind, me who’s got a mind. So what’s this me? What is it? Where is it? What is this me that is not the body and is not the mind? What’s it made of?
So the Buddha says, conventionally, there is a me, there is an I, but it’s not what we think it is. We think of I, me, as something quite separate from our body and mind. That’s deep down what our ignorance grasps, that there’s a real findable me that’s not the body, not the mind. Yeah. That’s why we can overeat and we won’t get fat because I’m not my body. Other people can eat and get fat but not me because I’m not my body. I can smoke three million cigarettes a day and I won’t get cancer because I’m not my body. I’m independent of all those things. I can drive like a lunatic, but I won’t be in an accident. You know, I can drink as much as I like because I won’t get drunk or become an alcoholic. No way. Because I, there’s this real independent I that’s not affected by any of those things.
And the biggest mistake of all is we think I can be happy without taking care of our mind. Everyone in this universe mostly is living a life thinking I will be happy separate from my mind. Well, they don’t even know they’ve got a mind. I will be happy by having money and possessions and blah blah blah. But one can’t because the I that does exist is totally dependent on the mind. If the mind is like that, I am suffering. If the mind is like that, I’m okay. But the I that we grasp at is something just there from its own side under its own power, so I can be happy not taking care of my mind. That is utterly impossible. That is utterly, utterly impossible.
Buddhism is not supposed to be dogmatic. That was a totally dogmatic statement, and I’m totally unashamed of it. Because if that’s not true, then Buddhism falls apart. But if you check, you can’t be happy if the mind is disturbed. If there are disturbing thoughts, there’s no way I can be happy. Utterly impossible. Yeah. But we believe that because we believe in a truly existing I. And we do that with everything else. We think these flowers truly exist. Everything here, this Buddha House truly exists. Adelaide truly exists. Everything truly exists.
In other words, we think it’s out there independent of its own side under its own power with its own characteristics, but it actually isn’t like that at all. Nothing is. Everything arises depending on causes and conditions, depends on parts, depends on our mind. This object here has no ability from its own side to make us experience it as a flower. And yet every time we look at it, we cannot help but think that is a flower. And we think that because somehow this is telling us it’s a flower, that our mind is like a mirror that just reflects what is there. But our mind potentially is a mirror that reflects what’s there, but our mind isn’t like that now. Our mind is a very curvy and dusty, broken mirror.
But this thing, if you check, has no ability to make you experience it as a flower. Really? Nothing? What is doing that is our mind is projecting onto this thing, flower. Beautiful, ugly, good, bad. We project it on, and then it appears back as though it’s really there from its own side. This is a daisy, right? This is a daisy. Yeah. So if this was a truly existing daisy, did you know that was a daisy? No. Right. Now you do. How do you know? Because I told you. But now every time you look at that, if you’ve been paying attention, you will know that this is a daisy. And when you look at it, it looks like an inherently existing daisy that is just from its own side. Just like we look at that and we know for sure it’s a flower. How do we know it’s a flower? It just is. Yeah.
So when we look at it as a daisy, how do we know it’s a daisy? Oh, it’s just a daisy. Obviously, it’s a daisy. But the only way we can know, experience, that this is a daisy is depending on the label daisy, and that depends on hearing this label being explained. The label daisy applies to flowers, and flowers that look like that. Yeah. But when we look at one, we don’t think the flower depends on all those things. It just looks like from its own side, it is a daisy. Did you understand that? No. Does it make some sense?
This is the most important thing to check up, that just the very way things exist, we make a fundamental mistake about the way they exist. They seem to exist out there from their own side under their own power, but nothing actually does exist that way. But because of that fundamental error about the fundamental existence of our self and things, it’s only because of that fundamental ignorance that we see things as not only flower, an inherently existing flower, but we see it as inherently beautiful or inherently bad. And that’s where the problem starts because then we have craving for what is beautiful and good, and we have hatred and aversion for what is ugly and bad. And that’s the only reason we have the disturbing thoughts is because of this fundamental ignorance that sees things as separate from ourselves, unconnected to ourselves, not dependent on our mind.
But this thing has, you know, just taking it as an example, you know, it’s just a rough example of something that is conventionally, you know, I think we probably agree kind of nice looking, pretty, nice yellow, nice flower. But this object has no ability from its own side to make us think beautiful, nice. It has nothing there. You can’t find anything there from its side that is inherently beautiful. And yet we think it is. We experience it that way. And it’s only because of that that we have craving, attachment, anger, etcetera. It’s the only reason. Those state, we could enjoy the flower without attachment and craving. We would actually enjoy it a whole lot more, in fact.
But as soon as we experience a little bit of pleasure, our mind goes berserk. This is fantastic. This is the most wonderful thing in the universe. And we believe it. And then we get attached to it. And then we get angry to protect it. Jealous of people who’ve got a better one, proud because I’ve got the best one, worried if we’re going to lose it. So it’s all, yeah. So it’s all due to ignorance.
So the ignorance is suffering. It produces suffering disturbing thoughts and those produce suffering negative imprints which ripen as suffering and everything that brings suffering. Because this whole world looks like it is just out there separate from us and we just kind of plump into it. But the only way it’s there for us, the only way it exists is depending on our mind. So whatever comes into our life comes there depending on our mind. Nothing can come into our life that is unconnected to our life. And what connects everything to our life is the causes we’ve created.
We create the cause to have experiences, good and bad, over and over, which means to have a good experience with a person or a bad experience with a person, you have to meet the person. So the mere fact that we meet people is we’ve created the cause to meet particular people. It just doesn’t happen. The Buddhist view is there is no such thing as chance or what’s that other word? Luck or, yeah, there’s no such thing. There’s no such thing as coincidence or luck, good luck, bad luck, or accidents. It’s all karma. It’s all the result of karma, of actions. Oh, I’m doing really well tonight. Don’t ask a question yet because I’ll try and finish.
So that was a whole in a nutshell. Right. So what is the cause of ignorance, you could ask. Right? This is, you know, what is the cause of ignorance? Now it gets very tricky. The cause of ignorance, guess what? The cause of ignorance is a previous moment of ignorance going back and back beginninglessly. Now to try and explain this, people get very annoyed by this because the mind is beginningless. It never started. The mind is naturally pure and perfect and blissful, but it has to follow that the mind has always been obscured by ignorance because if it wasn’t, you would have to say that at some point the mind was unobscured and then suddenly it became obscured by ignorance.
Which would mean that before it became obscured by ignorance, the mind was in the state of nirvana or even in the state of enlightenment. But just leave aside enlightenment for the time. Even if it was in the state of nirvana, that is a mind, an unobscured mind where the mind is perceiving everything clearly as it is unmistakenly. That is a natural feature of what nirvana is. You know, there’s no confusion in the mind. The mind is what knows, so it is knowing everything as it is unmistakenly. If that was the case, it would be impossible for the mind to then become obscured and start seeing things as they’re not. That just couldn’t happen.
And if it could, for some of you, we’ll just say for the sake of argument that it could happen, if it could happen, there’s no point following the Buddhist teachings because we could work and slave ourselves away silly to achieve nirvana and even enlightenment, and then all of a sudden, ignorance would come back again. And then we’d slave away and achieve nirvana again, and ignorance would come back again and again and again. But then you would have to ask yourself, what would cause it? What would cause this ignorance to come back again? How could it come back again? If wisdom, this fundamental aspect of the mind which is able to perceive things as they are, if that was functioning, how could wisdom suddenly become ignorance? It can’t.
Once the very nature of wisdom is it is seeing things perfectly. Once that mind is fully operating, ignorance can’t operate. It’s utterly impossible. That’s why there is a third noble truth. There is a true cessation. Once ignorance is eliminated, it can never come back. So that means that since we have ignorance now, we’ve always had it. Nothing caused it other than a previous moment of ignorance within our mind stream. No being out there made us ignorant. There’s no devil who made us ignorant. No sort of nasty entity out there that made us ignorant. We are ignorant now because we were ignorant yesterday going back and back and back.
But just although ignorance is beginningless, it is not endless. It can be removed. Why it continues and seems to be self-perpetuating is because we don’t know it. But once we start to know that we are ignorant and we can then learn what ignorance does, how it creates this illusion, and we can start to identify the illusion. Just like, roughly speaking, you know, on our altar, we have what we can say conventionally are real flowers and artificial flowers on our altar right now. If you check, you can work out which are which. Even though the artificial flowers are very realistic, they’re not real.
What is appearing to our mind now is very realistic, but it’s not real. It’s not the truth. And our mind has the ability to work this out. And once we’ve worked it out, we can then eliminate this false appearance because we can understand this false appearance just cannot be true. Just like, you know, an adult can explain to a small child that what they’re watching on television or in a movie, although it looks real, isn’t real. It’s just acting and clever stuff. What do you call it? Special effects. Alright. And once you know that, then, you know, you’re not fooled anymore.
But if one never questions, and most of us including the most intelligent people in the world, we don’t question what appears to our mind. You know, why do people have arguments? Because, you know, someone disagrees with you, but, of course, they’re wrong. Of course, they’re wrong. Because it’s opposite to what I’m experiencing. What I’m experiencing is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So if you’re disagreeing with me, it’s because you’re an evil, nasty creep or you’re completely stupid.
But in reality, what is happening is that there are two people fighting, saying it’s like this. No. It’s like that. And each one is sort of thinking they’re both lying or just being nasty. But this person is saying it’s like this. Why are they saying it’s like this? Because that’s what they’re actually experiencing. And this person is saying it’s like that. Why are they saying it’s like that? Because that’s what they’re actually experiencing. You know? It’s like this. This is the thing, and this person says it’s like this. No. It’s like that. No. It’s like this. No. It’s like that. And everyone’s thinking there is something really there that has a fixed characteristic, and there isn’t because it all depends on our mind. Not allowed to ring the bell.
I just, another way of looking at the cause of our suffering is because of ignorance, because of this wrong view that we have of ourself and others, we have all the delusions. And the whole bunch of our delusions together in a sense can be called self-cherishing. Or because of self-cherishing, we activate our disturbing thoughts. So self-cherishing sounds like something good that we should have and cultivate, but it is actually something really horrendously bad. Because the self involved in self-cherishing is not the self that does validly, conventionally exist. It is the self, the illusory self created by ignorance, which in fact doesn’t exist. The illusion exists, but this self that we’re grasping at as a reality doesn’t exist.
But we try to make this self, this truly existing self which doesn’t exist, we try and make it happy. And how do we try and make this illusory self happy? By following craving and attachment and getting angry and proud and jealous and so on. So it is a complete disaster. Somehow, probably most of us at some time have some inkling that we’re not happy. Right? We’re not as happy as we would like to be or not as happy as we think we should be because we look around at everyone else, and they all seem to be happy and successful and blah blah blah. And there’s this little voice inside that’s saying, what’s wrong with me? I am not happy. You know, I am a disaster. And some sort of just, you know, disquiet. I think we all have that to some extent.
And as soon as that feeling becomes noticeable, we distract ourselves. We don’t want to look at that. Most of us, most of the time, don’t want that feeling, and we don’t want to look at it. We don’t want to know what it means because most of the time, we don’t know what to do with it. It’s just too scary. And so we try and distract ourselves. And if we manage to distract ourselves, we call that happiness. Happiness is distracting ourselves from our suffering.
So there are good ways to distract ourselves and bad ways. There are very good ways and very bad ways to distract oneself. There are conventionally acceptable ways to distract yourself and socially unacceptable ways. But people try them all sooner or later. And the nature of, so that’s what self-cherishing is. It is the mind that wants to distract from suffering. And more than that, it wants to just bring about this distraction. Of course, it doesn’t see it as a distraction. That’s what it is.
But what self-cherishing also wants to achieve is to achieve that distraction as quickly as possible. And the quicker we do it, the better it is. So we now have the instant society. Everything is instant, and everything, like our computers have to be faster and faster, and the broadband network has to be faster and faster because we can’t wait five seconds for the thing to boot up because, you know, die of boredom. Right? So you have sound bites on TV which last, what, five seconds because we’re bored after five seconds, you know, everything else. So it has to be very quick.
And, of course, the nature of the self-cherishing thought is this distraction has to be easy. It can’t be hard. Self-cherishing hates hard. Everything has to be quick and easy. This is what I call self-cherishing is the easy, happy, now mentality. And if you check at that, that is the template for all kinds of stupidity, suffering, confusion. Alright. If it’s hard, it’s bad. If it takes time, it’s bad. Yeah. If it’s not distracting, it’s bad. That is self-cherishing.
Because of self-cherishing, we follow craving because it tells us, oh, there’s something quick and easy out there to distract me. That means it’s fantastic. Yeah. And if I can’t be distracted quickly and easily, that is bad. That is very, very, very bad. So you have people with, you know, two mobile phones in their hands, you know, earplugs and things stuck in all the time. So that’s good. That is very, very good. That’s happiness. If you don’t have to think, a lot of people in Buddhism, meditation, you don’t think, that’s good. Not good. Meditation that is not thinking is creating the cause to be a chook. Chooks don’t think very much. Anyway, that’s it for tonight. Any questions?
So anyway, in summary, because of ignorance we have self-cherishing, and then because of self-cherishing we have craving, attachment, anger, negative imprints, suffering. The suffering of sickness, old age, death, meeting what we don’t want to meet with, separating from what we don’t want to separate from, not getting what we want to get, and everything else. The whole shebang, the whole kit and caboodle. We have saṃsāra. And, you know, we have to separate from this body, go into another one, which may not be another human one. It might be another human one, but much worse, uglier, more diseased. But then we could be in another kind of body in another realm. But then we keep thrown out of that into another realm, into another body again and again and again because we keep perpetuating the causes.
So we have to really let this touch us until we get disgusted with our saṃsāra. Be completely fed up because we don’t have to experience saṃsāra forever. Well, I mean, we can’t stop it instantly, but we can stop it. It will take some time to put on the brakes, to screech to a halt, but we have to start applying the brakes now because we’ve got the perfect opportunity. And I can never capture the way Lama Zopa Rinpoche once said something like, just living an ordinary life, you know, following ignorance, disturbing thoughts, that is suffering. That is an example of the first noble truth of life, you know, existence being suffering. But as soon as we start practicing the Dharma, then every time we are practicing the Dharma sincerely, we are doing something which is meaningful, which is satisfying, and that is not suffering. If something is meaningful, it is satisfying, and it is no longer the first noble truth.
Some questions, clarifications, disagreements, rejections. Come on. Say something. Come on. You make these cryptic comments in your homework. You have to ask me an insulting question. Come on. Not insulting. Disagree. Yes.
I mean, you have to label things. If you don’t label things, labeling just doesn’t mean saying the word. You know? Labeling means conceiving things in a particular way depending on words. But the problem is we label something good, we conceive of something good, but then it appears back as though it’s really good from its own side. That’s the problem. We label someone an enemy and then they appear back as an enemy and we believe that that is what they really are. But no one is an inherently existing enemy. If they were, the Buddha would have enemies. But the Buddha doesn’t have any enemies. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. We put onto things more than is there and we believe it. Yes. Yes. Sure. Sure. The less attachment, the more enjoyment, believe it or not.
It’s tea break. Oh, okay. One more when we’ll finish. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Mhmm. Yes, yes, you don’t, yeah. There’s no rebirth after ignorance is finished. But the mind goes on in a blissful way, non-suffering way. No.
That’s nirvana. We have to explain there’s a difference between, a big difference between nirvana and enlightenment. Yeah. We have to get to that yet. Yeah. Once you’ve achieved nirvana, there’s no falling back. Yeah. You’re still not enlightened.
Tea break? We’ll have an inherently existing tea break. Can you have a tea break without tea?
I was supposed to talk about tonight, which there’s not enough time to do tonight. It was about how to deal with, how to kind of work with our disturbing thoughts. So that itself is a very big topic. But just one thing I’d like to talk about in relation to that, just a simple technique in working with our disturbing thoughts is simply a meditation, which is called watching one’s thoughts.
So this is a very, very helpful practice to do whereby, and it’s part of your homework, which is just to settle your mind, you know, just observe your breath. And normally when thoughts come, one tries to let go of them and bring the mind back to the breath. But in this case, what one does or tries to do is you try to just see that thought as a thought rather than getting involved in it because normally when thoughts arise in our mind, mostly we are unaware of them and they take over the mind. And so we tend to identify with them. We feed them. They become very strong. We become our thoughts.
You know, when anger arises, there’s not me wearing a suit of anger. We become a different me, this angry me. Or if loving-kindness arises, you know, we become a particular kind of person. And because most people live without awareness of their thoughts, they dominate the mind. They control the mind. So one way to begin to not be dominated by these disturbing thoughts is to practice just simply watching them and realizing these are just thoughts. You know? It sounds very simple but it can be immensely effective to realize that a whole lot of the stuff that we feel that we are caught up with and controlled by is not reality. It is just thought. It is just a cloud in the sky that if we don’t feed it, like everything else, because it doesn’t inherently truly exist from its own side, if you don’t feed it, it can’t continue.
But as soon as we pay attention to our thoughts in the sense of identifying with them, we feed them, we give them strength and power and tenacity. Yeah? But if we don’t do that, then they’re like a cloud in the sky. They start to just kind of disintegrate, fall apart in all directions. And then there’s the clear sky again, which is the true nature of our mind in a sense. So one can go back to just the awareness of the breath, and then another thought may arise. And I mean, it sounds easy to do. It’s not so easy to do. But just trying to do it is very worthwhile. By training the mind, one can do this more successfully. And by identifying the thoughts, one starts to control them.
And the more one does this and trains in meditation to do it, then there’s the carryover effect that you start to be aware of thoughts in your daily life which are operating all the time. You know, one thing that many people say when they first try to meditate is just at the very time when I’m trying to control my thoughts in meditation, I’ve got more thoughts than I’ve ever had before. But it’s not true. They were always there, but now the person is learning to meditate, we start to become aware of all the thoughts in our mind. But they’re there all the time.
So by training to do this meditation, one starts to be more mindful in daily life of your thoughts, and you can be mindful of, you know, the positive thoughts. We don’t have to worry about them. They’re okay and we can feed them, but it’s the negative ones that are the problem. So it’s really helpful to be able to see the negative thoughts as thoughts, as negative, so that one can, you know, withdraw from them, not feed them, not identify with them, just see it. This is just a thought. That’s all it is. That’s all it is.
I mean, there’s things like clinical depression which are very, very difficult to deal with. But everyone experiences some kind of depression from time to time, and you can catch that that is just thought. You can. It is possible. I mean, without going into gory details, I met the Dharma at a time when I was pretty unhappy. And, this sounds very pompous, and I’m not claiming any real realizations at all. But by being introduced to the idea that the mind existed and what the potential of the mind was, I got some insight at that time that, yes, I was unhappy, but that wasn’t the totality of my mind. It was just a bubble I was stuck in. And I could sort of see that, you know, I’d let myself get caught into that bubble, but that wasn’t the totality of my mind or my reality. My reality, my mind was something, you know, infinitely vaster than that, and that was very liberating. It changed my life, well, I wish it was completely, but it did change my life a lot. Yeah.
So it does work, you know, if you can, and yeah. Because sometimes we get into negative states and we kind of feed on those negative states. But then you can see that we don’t have to be in that state. We really don’t have to be this angry person or this self-pitying person or whatever. We don’t have to be that. There’s no obligation. It’s just we’ve got into that through the power of familiarity with identifying with this rubbish.
Okay, folks. Guess what? It’s discussion group time for what time there is left. So, I should have given you, okay. Discussion groups. I bet I’ve lost the sheet now. Oh, no. So group one is Adam. Just if you put your hands up so people can see. Sheridan, David Cranston, Kathy Davis, who’s not here tonight, Judy. Okay. So you’re in group one, so you can take some discussion group things and go.
Group two is Christina, Linden. Is Linden Grimmer here? Oh, okay. Sasha, Grant, McCreery. Yeah. And Peter. So that’s group two.
Group three is Arnold, Vince, who’s not here tonight, Richard, Michelle, Andrew Clark, Andrew Clark’s not here tonight, lost Andrew, and Carol Williams. No Carol. There’s only three in that group at the moment. Okay. You’ll have to have a very serious discussion.
And group four is Maggie, Bill, Bea, William’s not here, Bill Goulding’s not here, and Danny. Is there someone called Petar Cherventrov? He’s not here. He dropped out of the course. Right. Okay. Go forth and discuss.