Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 111-minute opening session, Ven Thubten Dondrub introduces the Buddhist framework for understanding saṃsāra and nirvana, emphasizing that both are states of mind rather than places. He establishes the importance of motivation before all practice, then walks through the five aggregates that constitute a sentient being, explaining how saṃsāra arises when mind is controlled by delusion and karma. The teaching explores the three realms of cyclic existence (desire realm, form realm, formless realm) and the different types of rebirth—human, animal, spirit, hell, and god realms—that can result from karma. Dondrub clarifies that nirvana is the removal of the root ignorance obscuring the mind, while enlightenment (great nirvana) is the full development of all positive qualities. He concludes by introducing the Four Noble Truths, emphasizing that ordinary existence is suffering because it is unsatisfactory and impermanent. The talk includes practical meditation instruction on the nine-round breathing exercise and is pitched at both newcomers and continuing practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Samsāra and Nirvāṇa week 1.mp3
UUID: ee6b446f-9445-4a86-843e-7be954aabba3
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Samsāra & Nirvāṇa (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2018 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 110.6 minutes
Words: ~13,295
I’m just saying that this is what the teachings say, this is what I believe, this is what some people here believe. Of course not everyone believes and accepts these things, so anyway, it’s up to you to decide whether these things are true or not. But I would also suggest, give yourself time to check up whether they’re true or not. Okay, I think that’s enough by way of introduction. So One of the things that all my teachers have emphasised is that at the beginning of teachings, also when we meditate, actually when we try and do anything in our life, the motivation behind what we’re doing is incredibly important.
And this is particularly true from a Buddhist point of view, especially because the very fundamental teaching of the Buddha is about the law of cause and effect, that everything has, every cause, action has an effect and the nature of the cause determines the nature of the effect. So the nature of our the strength of our motivation, the nature of our motivation really depends on what kind of effect we get from what we do. So, I believe the Buddha’s teachings are incredibly beneficial and completely true and totally reliable, and so the Buddha’s teachings are very good, but just listening to them itself doesn’t necessarily become a beneficial thing. Some people listen to the Buddha’s teachings to insult them and pull them apart, some listen to the Buddha’s teachings in order to make money, they think, Oh, I’ll go and teach that, I’ll make some money, I know people who do that. I know this is getting a long story, as usual.
Some my little blab blabs are on YouTube and I met a man in India who’s a Russian man who had downloaded all my talks and he made a program which he sells to rich businessmen in Russia and he makes a fortune out of it. He was so happy to meet me because he’s become quite wealthy, making money out of using dharma talks for how people can become rich. I don’t know how he does that, but that’s what he does. So this is not a good motivation for listening to the Dharma or using the Dharma. So it’s really important to try to listen with the best motivation possible.
At the very least, since the Buddha’s teachings are about working with our mind, one should try to have the attitude of wanting to understand the Buddha’s teachings and put them into practice if one sees them as beneficial in order to work with one’s mind, particularly to subdue the negative aspects of our mind, the negative potentials of our mind, cultivate the positive potentials. And of course, the obvious reason to doing this is for the benefit of this life. But the Buddha’s teachings really emphasise how our mind is something that goes on forever and that we have to work with our mind to ensure that as our mind goes on we move away from suffering towards greater and greater happiness so we can have a stronger motivation to work with our mind for our future happiness. But the very best motivation we can have, which is called bodhicitta, which we’re encouraged to generate in the tradition that we follow here at this centre, the bodhicitta motivation is about working with our mind, awakening our positive potentials to become enlightened, to become free of all negativities, awaken all positive qualities, to be in a position to benefit others and not just to benefit a few people in a limited way, but to be able to benefit all living beings, all sentient beings in a perfect, lasting way.
And the reason behind that, it comes from recognising, which is what Buddha’s teachings emphasise, the Mahāyāna teachings emphasise, that we are connected, interconnected with every sentient being. We always have been, we always will, we will be, we totally depend on them. We cannot exist and survive and thrive in any way without depending directly and indirectly on all sentient beings. They have been, are and will be immensely kind to us. Of course, some sentient beings are not so kind to us, but even those people who are not kind to us in past lives have been very kind will be in future lives.
And the small amount of unkindness we’ve received from any sentient being is far outweighed by the incredible kindness and benefit and protection that we’ve received from each and every sentient being. But unfortunately all these sentient beings are suffering. They are suffering in saṃsāra. And that’s what our topic is, to understand what saṃsāra is because we’re also trapped in saṃsāra as well, whether we know it or not, we are trapped in cyclic existence. But the Buddha’s teachings help us to understand what saṃsāra is and how to be free of it, whereas most people don’t know what saṃsāra is, don’t know how to be free of it.
So by understanding Buddha’s teachings, we can benefit ourselves, benefit others, and not only free them from saṃsāra, but help them achieve nirvana, but even something greater than nirvana, which is the state of enlightenment, state of peerless, everlasting happiness. So this is called the bodhicitta motivation, the motivation to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. So there’s a traditional prayer that we say at the beginning of the teachings, which is on page ten, if you’d like to turn to that in the student material. If you don’t have that, you might have in front of you this little Buddha House prayer book. So the same prayer is on page, page, page, page eight, I think.
Yes, page eight of that. But if it’s in the student material, that’s what we can use. So we do this prayer twice in Tibetan, one time in English. And to make it more effective, more powerful, we try to visualise or think of the Buddha directly in front of us as our source of refuge, inspiration and guidance. Someone who’s achieved that state of enlightenment which we have the potential for, so we visualise the Buddha in front of us, and at the same time to motivate us to achieve what the Buddha achieved, we try and think of all suffering sentient beings surrounding us.
Particularly, because there are so many sentient beings, it’s difficult to visualise all sentient beings, at least we try and think of our mother of this life on our left, father on our right, the rest of our family, all our friends and helpers behind us, people who may have harmed us or disliked us in front of us. We put them there not to generate negativities towards them but to realise that help us realise that they are kind suffering beings like everyone else. They deserve my compassion rather than my aversion, dislike and so on. So at least we try and think of that group of people, but then as much as possible trying to open our hearts and minds to an awareness of and concern for all the different kinds of sentient beings that exist in saṃsāra. So, with the motivation that to free all sentient beings from saṃsāra and lead them to nirvana, I have to understand what saṃsāra and nirvana is, and how to be free with saṃsāra, how to achieve nirvana.
So for this reason I’ll study this subject. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma, and 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 thinking the Buddha is pleased with our motivation, we can imagine that the Buddha in front of us now comes towards us, comes to the crown of our head, and when directly above our crown we can imagine that the Buddha then dissolves into blissful golden light. And that light then pours down into us, blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings on saṃsāra nirvana, blessing our mind to be able to put these teachings into practice correctly, blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain the unmistaken transformative realisations.
Then just for a very short time, can do some breathing meditation. Those who know how can do the nine round breathing exercise just to allow the mind to become a little bit more calm, clear, concentrated so that we can use that level of mind to listen to and think about the Buddha’s teachings tonight. Okay. Thank you. Okay.
Maybe before starting this topic, just briefly for the newer people. On pages twelve and thirteen of the student material, it sets out what is called the eight point Vairochana meditation posture. So, I mean, various meditation traditions there’s different ways of sitting and meditating. So this eight point Vairochana meditation posture particularly comes from the tantric tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism. This is the one that is followed in Tibetan tradition.
So I would encourage people to become a little bit familiar with this, use this as their guideline of how to sit in meditation if they can. I mean, the most difficult part is the placing of the legs, but don’t worry about that one too much. I won’t go into the actual physical posture. The one part I just want to very briefly explain is point eight which is not actually part of the actual physical meditation but having sat in the posture as much as one can. The point eight is to do as a very preliminary practice at the very beginning of whatever meditation one’s going to do, what is called the nine round breathing exercise and this is meant to it’s just a simple exercise to do at the very beginning of a meditation session just to bring some basic clarity, calmness into the mind and sort of expel any kind of bad energy and breathe in some good energy.
So this is a simplification of a more complex technique, but this is like the essential part of it. So basically, so it’s called the nine round breathing exercise. So when we’re breathing, of course the breath is coming in through both nostrils and out both nostrils. But in one cycle of the nine round breathing exercise, what one does is as one breathes in through both nostrils you start by focusing on just being aware of the breath coming in your left nostril and then when you breathe out you focus on the breath coming out the right nostril. So you do that for the first three breaths.
So the breaths coming in both and out both, but you focus on the breath coming in the left and out the right. In the left, out the right, in the left, out the right. So then for the next three breaths, you change the focus from as you breathe in you focus on the breath coming in the right nostril and out the left, in the right, out the left, in the right, out the left. Right? And then the last three breaths of the cycle, you focus on the breath coming in both and out both, in both, out both, in both, out both.
So that’s nine breaths of the nine round breathing cycle. One cycle of the nine round breathing exercise. So we do that at the beginning of each session, like after the motivation. We start each session by doing that briefly. And also, since part of the homework is to do some meditation exercises, then I ask people to do that at the very beginning of the session, of the meditation session.
So it’s good to be familiar with that. And to make that a bit more powerful if you want to, it’s sort of an optional extra. With the in breaths, sometimes in breaths are in the left, sometimes they’re in the right and sometimes they’re both. So when one breathes in, one can also imagine breathing in white light. So we as Buddhists imagine the white light is coming from the Buddha but you can imagine it coming from Christ or whoever or just some universal goodness or something or just don’t worry where it’s coming from just imagine it as you’re breathing in this very peaceful, calming white light when you breathe in.
But what is particularly important and helpful is when you breathe out to imagine you’re breathing out whatever agitation is existing tension, nervousness, anxiety, fear, worry that’s existing in your mind right now, you breathe all that out, breathe out all your disturbing thoughts and also negative imprints, karmic imprints that are obscuring the mind. You breathe all that out in the form of black smoke and you imagine it just disappears and you replace that with each in breath with the white light. Get rid of all the blackness and you breathe in this white light. This is, I think, the very first meditation I was ever taught and it really changed my life. Yeah, doing that.
I mean, no guarantees it will change your life, but it can be very helpful if you really get into it. Okay, any questions on that? Old or new students? No. It’s all clean clear, right?
It’s clean clear? Okay, right, saṃsāra and nirvana. So what is saṃsāra? What is nirvana? These are bit commonly used words these days but I’m not sure if people really understand what they mean.
So one basic thing to understand is that both saṃsāra and nirvana are states of mind and they’re states of our mind. So saṃsāra is the state our mind is in now. We are all in a state of saṃsāra right now and nirvana is a state of mind we could be in. We have the potential to exist in this state of nirvana but we’re not in it, we are, and that’s the trouble. We’re not experiencing nirvana and unfortunately we are experiencing saṃsāra.
And the whole aim of the Buddhist teachings are to be free of saṃsāra and to achieve nirvana. One can say that there are two kinds of nirvana. There is the nirvana which represents the freedom from all suffering and its causes and then there is what can be called the Great nirvana which is another term for enlightenment. Just at this stage, there’s so many things to explain, especially for the newer people, nirvana and enlightenment are different. This little nirvana and enlightenment are different experiences.
And one form of the Buddhist teachings, there are two major forms of the Buddhist teachings and one, or let’s say two major traditions of the Buddhist teachings, and one major tradition which exists mainly, has developed mainly or has been preserved mainly in South East Asia, in Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka where else have I mentioned? Parts of Vietnam and so on. This tradition is really about achieving nirvana. Whereas the other major tradition of the Buddhist teachings, is called the Mahāyāna tradition, which has spread from India to China, Korea, Japan and Tibet and that region, that tradition emphasises achieving rather than achieving nirvana or everyone has to forget that. Anyway, rather than achieving nirvana or existing in nirvana, the Mahāyāna teachings emphasise achieving the great nirvana of enlightenment, becoming a Buddha.
Someone who achieves just nirvana is called an Arhat, but someone who achieves enlightenment, full enlightenment, great nirvana is Buddha. And there is a vast difference between an Arhat and a Buddha. So the Mahāyāna teachings emphasise achieving, becoming a Buddha because a Buddha can be of continuous perfect lasting benefit to all sentient beings. And Mahāyāna teachings emphasise that every sentient being, every living being with mind has Buddha nature, the potential to become an enlightened being, a Buddha. So without hopefully driving the older students crazy, I will ask the question, what is the mind?
Buddhism is all about the mind. So this is a very big topic, it’s one of the Discovering Buddhist modules that we started the year with. But just very basically, the mind is defined in the Mahāyāna tradition very simply as that which is clear and knowing. The mind is that which is clear and knowing, which very basically, very simply is by saying the mind is clear is emphasising that the mind is not something physical, it’s not the brain and it’s not a by product of the brain, it’s not some activity of the brain. The mind is something non physical, it is formless like space and this formless space like insubstantial thing we call the mind what it does is to know things in every conceivable way and nothing else can know.
The only thing that functions to know is the mind. And so the mind is that which knows, it’s what experiences things and with every moment of knowing and experiencing there are feelings. Only mind has feelings. The feelings of pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering. It is our mind.
Happiness is a state of mind, suffering is a state of mind, pain is a state of mind, pleasure is a state of mind. They’re not chemicals, electrical events, not something happening in the brain. They are states of mind, believe it or not. That’s up to you. I can’t prove this, but this is the Buddha’s teachings.
So, all minds are the same, have the same potential, the same qualities, the same natures, but all our minds are separate entities, separate unique entities, discrete entities. You know, how many there’s about fifteen, sixteen people in this room, so there are sixteen minds here, and each mind here is basically the same but separate. Our minds, we’re not part of one big mind, our minds are separate. What experience is separate from my experience, it may be similar, for example, we’re all experiencing this room but your experience of this room is not my experience of this room. It may be similar but it’s definitely not the same.
You know, all of you are listening to my talk, or hopefully you’re listening to this talk, so each of you, you know, I’m saying one thing, but your experience of what I’m, this one thing being said by this one person is different from the person sitting next to you, because what you are hearing, what you’re understanding and what it’s doing to you, it depends totally on your mind. And although your mind is basically the same as the person sitting next to you, your mind has had different experiences. And those experiences, not just in this life but past lives, influence how we experience things. Check up. Don’t believe me, just check up.
I mean also just the fact that what, you know, some minds are in male bodies and some minds are in female bodies affects how we experience things. And some minds are in young bodies and some minds are in old bodies. So it influences, affects how the mind experiences things. And some minds are in, what, European bodies, some are in Asian bodies, some are in African bodies and so on. And because they’re in those different kinds of bodies then, and the experiences that go with that, you know, the mind is affected and experiences things in different ways.
But the mind itself is basically, the way it works is the same, it’s formless and knowing. So this is a quick summary of what I’d spent five weeks talking about. I talked about five minutes. So in a nutshell, what the Buddha discovered is that our mind, every mind, or let’s just say mind, a mind, is in its very nature pure and perfect. There is nothing missing from any mind, it is perfect.
It possesses, every mind possesses the potential of every good quality, every mind has them, even the most evil minds like Hitler’s and, you know, whatever’s mind possesses every good quality. That is their Buddha nature. And every mind has the potential to be omniscient or knowing because what does the mind do? It knows. So it has that potential to know everything.
But the mind is obscured, our mind is obscured. The mind is pure and perfect and complete, has this Buddha nature but it is obscured. And that obscured mind is basically what saṃsāra is. saṃsāra is basically referring to, I’ll give you a little bit more detailed definition, but basically saṃsāra is not a place, saṃsāra is not the ordinary world which is some people think, you know, or, you know, but saṃsāra is our mind under the control of delusion or disturbing thoughts, negative thoughts and karma. This is what saṃsāra basically is.
Okay, the mind has two levels of obscurations. This is getting too complicated, right? We have this wonderful pure mind but it has two levels of obscurations or covers preventing it functioning and being omniscient and etc, and fully compassionate and loving, which is what the enlightened mind is. So the first layer of obscurations, when they are removed, I’ll just keep it very simple for the state, that first layer of obscurations when they are removed, that state is nirvana. And that first layer of obscurations, what is obscuring our mind, what the Buddha discovered is obscuring our mind is something called ignorance.
We have this ignorance existing within us right now that prevents us experiencing ourself and all things as they actually are. We think right now, you know, have all of us right in the heat right now as we sit here, every one of us here and everyone in the city and country and the whole universe, as we sit here we have this fundamental sense of me, of I, not I but I, you know, I, me. I am going here, I am going there, I think this, I think that, I am this, I am that, I am good, I am bad, blah blah blah. But there’s also this very fundamental sense of just I, not I am this or that but just I, yeah, and we grasp onto that as being very real. But this I that we grasp onto as being me, that experience is false.
It is an illusion. And everything else we experience, we think the way we’re experiencing it is the way it is, but it’s false. Just like we have two vases of flowers here, and I don’t know if you checked up, but it looks like there are two vases of flowers, but there are not two vases of flowers here. This is a vase of flowers because these are actual flowers and those are false. They’re not flowers.
They look like flowers, sometimes they can look even more real than real flowers. So right now everything looks to be the way things look one way but they exist. This looks like a flower but is not existing as a flower. This looks like a flower and exists as a flower. Right?
But actually even these flowers don’t exist. The way they actually exist is not the way they appear. So things seem are appearing in a particular way to us right now, but the Buddha said that things don’t actually exist the way they are appearing to us. And that’s the problem. And because of that ignorance we have all these other disturbing thoughts, principal ones being afflicted desire or craving and attachment and anger and jealousy and pride and all sorts of other disturbing thoughts.
Yeah, and they obscure our mind. The Buddha said, the Buddha discovered that part of our Buddha nature is that our, and the part of, an important aspect of the purity of our mind is that our mind is naturally blissful and joyful. But we’re not blissful at the moment. Right? That’s because our mind is obscured by these disturbing thoughts, well, because of ignorance and all these other disturbing thoughts and the imprints of those thoughts and on top of that we follow those disturbing thoughts and generate negative karmic imprints.
When those imprints ripen they ripen the suffering, but right now they’re obscuring our mind. But if we get rid of that level of obscuration of our ignorance and all the disturbing thoughts and the imprints of those disturbing thoughts and the negative karmic imprints, the mind is free of suffering. There is no suffering because there is no causes of suffering existing in the mind. And that state is nirvana. The person who achieves that is called an Arhat.
You could call them Fred, but they’re called, generally speaking, in the tradition we call them an Arhat. But an Arhat still, according to the Mahāyāna tradition, has another layer still has this other layer obscuring their mind. A very, very subtle obscuration over their mind. And when that is removed, that level of obscuration is removed, then the full potential of the mind can manifest that quality of being omniscient, all knowing. And that mind also, yeah, within our heart the negative aspects of the mind have been eliminated but the positive potentials of the mind haven’t been fully developed.
Whereas, when the mind is free of both levels of obscurations, the very subtle level, not only are all the negative qualities of the mind removed, but the positive potentials have been fully developed. And that’s the state of enlightenment. And that’s what the Mahāyāna tradition encourages us to achieve, that great nirvana, not the little nirvana. Did that get too confusing? Any questions?
Yes? Just one question. How is that identified? Do they know themselves that they have? Yes, yeah.
I think it’s very tricky to explain. I don’t honestly understand it all because I’ve been a monk for forty years and in that time I’ve met people who think they are highly realised. They genuinely think so, you know, but of course they’re not. To an outsider it’s very obvious that they’re not, that they’re really quite confused people, but for them they sincerely believe that they I met a person who thought they were an Arhat and it was very obvious that they were not anywhere remotely close to being an Arhat. But somehow when you actually are, you really do know.
Yeah, it’s the nature of the mind, yeah, if you practise correctly and go through the stages of purifying your mind, you know. But part of that process is as you’re doing it, rely on teachers who can also qualified teachers who can verify that you’re practising correctly and gaining certain, you know, qualities and realisations. But that would be proof that you’re not. Yeah. There is a Sūtra called the Diamond Cutter Sūtra, in which it says, what an Arhat says, If I was to think I am an arhat, it means I’m not an arhat, but I am an arhat, but I don’t think I am an arhat.
It gets quite complicated. Don’t worry about that too much yet. So basically, because the mind is obscured, this mind which we can, and so state of being in saṃsāra is a situation of suffering, right? Our mind is obscured by ignorance, by all sorts of disturbing thoughts and the nature of those disturbing thoughts is painful. We act on those disturbing thoughts, engage in negative actions that bring suffering in this life, but generate negative imprints that ripen us more suffering and project us into suffering future lives.
So being in saṃsāra, being in a state of having a mind controlled by delusion and karma involves death and rebirth. That’s what saṃsāra also means. So saṃsāra is often translated as cyclic existence because the mind that is controlled by delusion and karma has to experience well, the mind is usually always, you know, associated with some kind of body. You know, right now we have a mind and it’s in this particular body. But this body dies, but then the mind goes on and it goes on into it takes rebirth into it gets caught up in another body and then another one, and that body dies and so there’s rebirth.
So saṃsāra also means, it means the mind controlled by delusion and karma, but which also means cyclic existence, because our mind is trapped in bodies that die, we are reborn, and this goes on and on and on. Whereas nirvana is a state of complete peace, the complete freedom of suffering because all causes of suffering have been eliminated from the mind. So that is a blissful state, you know, a blissful experience, the state of saṃsāra is suffering, nirvana is peace or bliss and it’s also sometimes described as the deathless state because once one achieves nirvana there’s no more rebirth, no more death, no more rebirth, It’s the deathless state. Of course enlightenment is also a deathless state because there’s no rebirth, no death and rebirth for an enlightened being. But what an enlightened being can do is manifest taking rebirth, to appear back in the world consciously, voluntarily.
When we talk about rebirth in Buddhism, it’s referring to something like it’s something that has to happen, we are forced to do it by our karma, either our bad karma or our good karma. It has to happen, there’s that energy forcing the mind to take another rebirth in samsaric existence. But for an enlightened being, one can, you know, one can well, at a very oh, this starts to get too complicated. At a high level of practice beings can voluntarily choose to take rebirth, but for a Buddha it’s not a matter of choosing to take rebirth, they just simply manifest being, having a body. They don’t really have an actual, I know this sounds far out, but they don’t actually have a body at all, it just looks like they’ve got one, just like, it looks like it’s a flower.
Some parts of Buddhism are very hard to get the mind around, some of it is very down to earth and common sense, but some of it at the upper levels starts to get a little bit strange sounding. But the basic teaching is that the mind is formless. And many people believe that already, Buddhists, non Buddhists. I mean, this is one of the things that attracted me to Buddhism is that or when I sort of accidentally fell into it, is that I already I believed my mind was not the brain or something like that. I believed it was some formless thing.
I never thought of all the implications of it but I believed I had a mind and then I found out Buddhism was all about the mind. But ordinary, this ordinary confused mind we have does amazing things, experiences amazing things. So why can’t it produce bodies to benefit others? Why not? And this makes much more sense when one starts to understand the Buddha’s teachings about the nature of this apparently solid, fixed, concrete reality.
Because the Buddha says, and not just the Buddha, but a lot of modern scientists are discovering that this solid, fixed reality isn’t so solid and fixed as concrete as it appears. So if that’s true, then what, you know, and if Yuri Geller could twist, bend spoons, although I think it was proved he cheated, I’m not sure, but anyway, maybe you don’t know who this guy is, but he was famous in the 70s for using his mind to bend spoons. I think he appeared on television bending spoons and stuff. Anyway, if the mind can do that, why can’t it manifest in various ways? There many stories of, you know, Aboriginal people, you know, a white guy seeing an Aboriginal person there, spot air, and then one hour later, three hundred miles away, same guy is there.
And the Aboriginal guy did not get in the car. I know some people who work with old Aboriginal elders and they say those people have some amazing qualities of mind. Anyway, that’s I can try back to the topic. So a more concrete definition of what saṃsāra is, is that it is the mind no, sorry, saṃsāra is the five aggregates under the control of delusion and karma. So, if you have this handout which is called has the Four Noble Truths on it and at the bottom it’s got the five aggregates.
So the concept of five aggregates is a very important and common concept in Mahāyāna, well in all of Buddhism. It’s a very important concept to understand if one wants to study Buddhism. So this is basically what a sentient being is made up of, what we as human beings are made up of. Can everyone find that? Yeah, you got it?
Yeah. So a human being or any sentient being is made up of these five aggregates. So, you know, like the word aggregate is, you know, an aggregation, it’s a collection of stuff of different things, right. So, and this term is used to emphasise, to break this wrong view that we have, that when we experience things they seem to be inherently existing as one thing not dependent on anything else. For example, when we look at a flower and we say this is a flower, one thing, but when you investigate it’s made up of many parts, it’s aggregated on many parts and we say my body, I have a body, a body, one thing.
But when you investigate it’s made up of a whole lot of stuff. It’s made up of not much, I’ve got a bit of hair and skin and bones and blood and flesh and all sorts of other stuff, nails and everything. But also, the body I have now is the continuation of the body I had yesterday, last year, the year before that when I was a tiny child. My body is like a constantly changing aggregation of things. It’s not just one fixed solid thing.
So there is the aggregate of the form which is referring basically to our physical body, there’s that aggregate. And then the other four aggregates are referring to our mind, our consciousness. So there is the aggregate of feeling. So one aspect, a very important aspect of our mind are our feelings. But there are many feelings, There are actually physical, there are mental feelings and physical feelings, but even the physical feelings are mental.
But they’re more closely associated with the body. For example, if we cut our body, a bit of our body, there’s that obvious physical pain but then our mind thinks, oh, you know, damaged my body, oh, how terrible. So there’s the physical pain and the mental pain. But even that physical pain is not actually just the body itself, it is the consciousness associated with the body. So there are physical feelings and mental feelings, and then there are pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feelings.
So there’s a whole aggregation of feelings that we experience, right, constantly changing moment by moment. And also, you know, just to remind you, neutral feelings are not a mixture of pleasant like a pleasant and a pleasant feeling together, a neutral feeling is separate and it’s not a lack of feeling, you know, this thing here, you know, if I hit it, it doesn’t have a, you know, suffering feeling, pleasant feeling, or right now because it’s not being hit, it doesn’t experience unusual feeling, it has no feelings because there’s no consciousness connected with this. But right now, like we could say our, you know, at the palm of our hands, I can’t experience any pleasant feeling, no pain, just kind of like a neutral feeling. There is a neutral feeling there. Right.
So then there’s the aggregate of discrimination. So discrimination, without going into lots of detail, is basically that very extremely important aspect of the mind, of the consciousness, which is able to distinguish one thing from another. You know, like our mind is able to distinguish, like on this table, that there are many different things, quite separate and that like also even here one can discriminate that this one thing, the flower, has many separate petals, right? I can just the consciousness can discriminate that and I can discriminate that although, even though all these flowers are the same colour and the same type of flower, I can discriminate that they’re all separate. They’re separate.
It’s not just one blob thing, can separate, discriminate, distinguish separate things and stalks and leaves and separate flowers and whatever. And I can distinguish that this is separate from that, which is separate from that and separate from that and etc, etc. And, yeah, there’s not just one big blob. But of course that’s the very basic discrimination but there’s many other kinds of ways the mind distinguishes things as good and bad, this and that, and all sorts of things. So this is a very fundamental, vital aspect of consciousness, to be able to distinguish or discriminate things.
And then another let’s jump the compositional factors for a moment, that’s always a bit tricky. And then there was the aggregate of primary consciousness. So we have six primary consciousnesses, eye consciousness, ear, nose, tongue, body and the mental consciousness. So there’s this five sense consciousnesses and then the mental consciousness which puts everything together. And the mental consciousness is the most important aspect of our mind.
So the aggregate of compositional factors is referring to everything which is part of the mind, is not feeling discriminations and primary consciousnesses. So this is referring to all our secondary thoughts such as all our negative thoughts, our disturbing thoughts of anger and attachment and pride and jealousy, but also our good emotions of love compassion and so on. It’s referring to all our dreams, the mind that dreams. It’s referring to all our thoughts, all our perceptions, you know, everything else which is not feelings, discriminations and primary consciousnesses. So saṃsāra, going back, saṃsāra, the actual definition of saṃsāra is the five aggregates produced and controlled by delusion and karma.
So this body we have is the product of our karma. Some good karma, some bad karma. Good karma in the sense that we are human beings, it’s very good karma to be born as a human being. But also our body ages and gets sick, this is due to bad karma. The mind we have now is the result of good and bad karma.
You’re all here having some interest in the dharma, so this is good. This is good karma ripening. But also, we may all try to be good people, but also we have disturbing thoughts and negative imprints that ripen. So we’re under the control of those things. All sorts of good and bad things happen to us day by day.
We have no idea every day when we wake up what is, you know, what’s going to happen to us. We think, you know, today will be like yesterday I go to work and I’ll have this sandwich at lunch and, you know, I’ll go home and make this for dinner and I’ll watch this program. It’s Tuesday night if this guy doesn’t talk too long, I’ll be able to get home in time for such and such a program and I’ll watch that, you know, blah blah blah. But who knows what’s going to happen? We have no idea what karma could ripen today, tomorrow.
Something amazingly good could happen, something amazingly horrible can can happen. We have no control over this at the moment. No knowing, no control. That’s saṃsāra. We do things expecting it’ll produce a good result, nothing happens or it’s a disaster.
Some people work incredibly hard all their lives and just nothing goes right. Other people hardly do anything and become rich and famous. That’s saṃsāra. Yes. Well, are fifty one secondary minds, may remember.
Are fifty one main secondary minds, there are many more. But in Buddhist Abhidharma or psychology they talk about fifty one secondary minds that they bother to enunciate. There were twenty one virtuous minds. I can’t remember, I should know all this back to the front, there’s twenty one virtuous minds and what is it, there are six root delusions and yeah, the rest are all negative ones. There are, yeah, the five omnipresent mental factors and so on like that.
But there are many, many, you know, yeah. I don’t know if they’ve been listed, all the different kinds of compositional factors, but yeah. But you yeah. Okay. When do I have to stop?
I’ve got forty how how long? Thirteen years. Right. Okay. So the so the main definition of saṃsāra is the five aggregates under the control of delusion and karma.
But in many ways it’s just easier to think of it as the mind being controlled by delusion and karma, that’s the main aspect. It’s really our mind being controlled by delusion and karma. This is what saṃsāra essentially is. But because our mind is controlled by delusion and karma, also our body is as well. So the five aggregates are saṃsāra is the five aggregates controlled by delusion and karma.
And because of this we experience death and rebirth over and over again. So the nature of saṃsāra without is that it’s kind of self perpetuating. Until we meet the Buddha’s teachings, we have no idea, most people have no idea that they have a mind. If they think they have a mind, they associate it with the brain. If the mind is the brain, the brain ceases with death and that’s the mind is finished, so there’s no future lives.
Or one could have the Christian view that there is a soul, whatever that is, that goes on into heaven or hell. But the materialist view is that there’s just this life. But the Buddhist view is we have mind and the mind when this body ceases because of delusion and karma, then the mind itself goes on because the mind is indestructible, because the mind is like space. You can’t harm space, it’s non physical. As I often go on and on, you can’t chop space up, you can’t hit it, it doesn’t go rusty, it doesn’t fall apart, you can’t blow it up, you can’t burn it, you can’t do anything to space.
It’s just there. It’s just there. It’s just the lack of obstruction. You can’t destroy the lack of obstruction. You can’t hit it, you can’t move it.
It’s all pervading and the mind is like that. So it just goes on and on and on, giving rise to experience again and again and again. And because we don’t know our mind is controlled by delusion and karma, then our delusions just keep operating. We don’t do anything about them to a large extent. We may try to modify them a little bit because of social, you know, niceties and whatever, maybe because of some religious teachings, but not in a profound way.
And we don’t get rid of them because there’s no understanding in other traditions of the idea of ignorance, the wrong view of self and phenomena. This is to some extent it exists in the Hindu tradition, but I believe that the Buddhist view is something really the most profound, unique teaching. And so because of that, because the very root of suffering is never touched, the delusions keep popping up, we follow them, engage in negative actions, create negative imprints that project the mind into another life and another life and another life. And we may think that that just means one gets reborn as a human being again and again, sometimes a good human being, sometimes a bad human being, but it’s not like that. Because the Buddha perceived that there are other kinds of experience that we can have that our karma can create other than being a human being.
And the only other obvious one we can see is animals. More and more people are coming to the belief, including quite a lot of behavioural scientists and whatever, that animals actually do have minds, that they are intelligent feeling beings. But if you can see that any animal has any kind of feelings whatsoever or even the most primitive level of intelligence, that means they have a mind. Because intelligence, the ability to work anything out, is a function of mind. If you hit a dog, doesn’t like it?
It doesn’t like it, because it doesn’t want suffering. It like us, it has wishes, it has feelings, it likes being patted, It likes it. You know some scientists you dismiss that as just looking like liking. Anyway. Lots of magpies show up at people’s house doors for food because they know someone in there has something, and if I stand out here they’ll come out and give me something.
That’s pretty smart. That’s knowing something and working something out. May not be a very high level of intelligence, but intelligence. And intelligence is intelligence. It is a function of mind.
And that means even if the mind is obscured, that mind is mind like ours. It has Buddha nature like ours. But those minds that are in animal bodies now or in human bodies at some other time, and our minds which are in human bodies now can enter, can become stuck in human bodies in the future depending on delusion and karma. That’s saṃsāra. But also the Buddha taught if you go to your handout, there’s this handout called The Realms of cyclic existence.
So of course for new people, maybe even for older Buddhists, this gets very spacey and very hard to believe because probably most of us here were brought up to believe in a world where there was a creator god and there was basically just this planet where human beings, you know, living beings are, and when we die we either went to heaven or hell and that was it, or if you didn’t have that belief there was the materialist belief that we were just these, you know, beings floating on this little round thing in the vastness of space, and that was it. Right? Or we had a mixture of both those views somehow. But the Buddhist view is quite different, quite different. Buddhism doesn’t say the Buddha says there is no creator, no individual creator of things.
Things didn’t start. There was no beginning to anything. And that there are many realms of existence. So there are basically three realms of existence. There is what is called the desire realm, the Form Realm and the Formless Realm.
So these are all expressions of our mind, how, what our mind, and these are all realms of cyclic existence of saṃsāra. While our mind is controlled by delusion and ignorance, delusion and karma, our mind is existing either in the desire realm or the form realm or the formless realm. And what the Buddha is saying is that all of these realms are basically unsatisfying places or situations to be in or what is called suffering. The Sanskrit word that we translate as suffering is dukkha and the Tibetan word is dugngäl and we translate it in English as suffering because dukha is just one word in Sanskrit so we translate it with one word suffering. But everyone thinks of suffering as horrible pain but dukkha doesn’t necessarily mean horrible pain.
Dukkha means horrible pain, but everything else that is incomplete, frustrating, unsatisfying, unwanted, unfulfilling, not lasting. And the whole idea of the Buddha’s teachings is to become free of saṃsāra, to become free of cyclic existence, to become free of the formless realm, free of the form realm, free of the desire realm. So the desire realm is called that because it’s the basic delusion that is operative for the beings in the desire realm is desire, afflicted desire, afflicted desire. You know, we can desire to, you know, practise the dharma to be a good person. This is not a delusion.
This is not a painful thought. This is not a non-virtuous, negative thought. But there is a state of mind which we can call afflicted desire which is negative, virtuous, painful and leads to suffering. And that’s what controls our mind basically. We have ignorance, because of ignorance there is desire, because of desire there is anger, and then because of those three essential poisonous minds we have pride and jealousy and fears and worries and also, you know, irritations and prejudices and all sorts of negative minds.
So in the desire realm there are different karmic states we can be born into. And the one we’re born into of course is the human realm and the only other one that we can see of course is the animal realm. But the Buddha says there are other realms as well. There is what is called the spirit realm or realm of hungry ghosts, where one is born, yeah, in a like, yeah, where one experiences incredible hunger without dying for an enormous period of time. So this is a realm that we can’t see, but it is a state of mind that we can experience after this life.
And then of course there is the hell realms of extreme torment and there are different kinds of hell realms. There are hot hells and cold hells which last, yeah, for a very long time. These are all states of mind, of samsaric mind, that we create the cause for. These are not, yeah, These are not created by the Buddha or by some god, they are something that is an output, an outcome of our mind generates negative thoughts, negative actions and it creates, and as a result, our mind creates these experiences. Right.
I know some people I’ve met over the years, people who said, I got away from Christianity because, you know, of all the hell realms and everything. Now you tell me there are hell realms according to the Buddha. Well, I’m sorry, but this is the Buddha’s teachings. Basically this is what the Buddha’s saying, our mind can give rise to all sorts of experiences, good and bad. The obscured mind can give rise to good experiences and bad experiences.
If you I mean, for me, what I always do is just I check my own mind. And my mind in this life can give rise to some version of hell and some version of heaven. Sometimes I behave like a human being, sometimes I behave like an animal, sometimes I behave like a hungry ghost and sometimes I’m just really miserable and I’m in hell. And sometimes, but not very often, I’m in the hell, the God realms and blissed out and very happy. Because also in I’ll just quickly finish this section that again, so due to our negative karma, of following our delusions a lot, creating lots of negative actions and so on, that creates the cause to be reborn in the lower realms.
Negative actions cannot bring a good result, they have to bring a bad result. Our virtuous actions lead to the good result of being reborn as a human being or as what is called an asura or demigod or in the god realms themselves, of which there are six kinds of god realms in the desire realm. It gets very complicated. And these can look, and so according to the teachings, the God realms where one experiences incredible pleasure and bliss for an enormously long time, but still it is just a rebirth state, so eventually it comes to an end. And then a death, a new karmic imprint ripens.
So that new karmic imprint could be to be reborn in the god realms again, or it could be to be reborn as a human being, or as an animal or a hell being or a hungry ghost or a demigod, it just depends what karma is in the mind. So saṃsāra can go, our mind is like a yo yo, just like during one day our mind can go up and down, during one week it goes up and down, during a lifetime our mind goes up and down happy and sad, you know, the sun comes out and we’re happy and then the clouds come and we’re depressed again. And but also our mind lifetimes we can go up into the God realms, down into the hell realms, depending on the karma there, we created. And once the karmic imprints are created, they have to, if we don’t purify them, they have to ripen at some stage. So eventually the negative karmas will ripen and then we fall into the lower realms.
This is what the Buddha taught, because this is what the Buddha perceived with this pure mind, this unmistaken mind. And that’s why his, you know, the whole idea is to avoid engaging in negative actions and purifying the mind so this doesn’t happen in the future, that we can actually start controlling our rebirth and get good rebirth and better rebirths and eventually get out and become free of cyclic existence. So that the mind is just clean clear, no suffering. But also get into a state where not only are we free of suffering, but we have this amazing mind that is able to help others to be free of suffering. So we’ll take a break?
Tea break? So each and every one of us has the potential to experience all these different kinds of rebirths in the desire realm, in the form realm and in the formless realm. And in fact, according to the Buddha’s teachings, believe it or not, we have been reborn in all of these realms, every single one of these realms, countless times. saṃsāra has no beginning, it’s beginningless. We’ve always been in cyclic existence, but even though we’ve always been it, it doesn’t mean it will continue forever.
It will if we don’t do anything about it. That’s why the Buddha appeared in the world to tell us, We are trapped in saṃsāra, you don’t have to be in this experience, you can get out of it. And not only that, you can help others get out of it. But if we just keep following our disturbing thoughts and creating negative karma, then saṃsāra will just go on and on. And it has been going on and on for a time, know, immeasurable, without any beginning.
So we’ve we have been born in in the hell realms, in the highest god realms, countless times, countless times. Yeah. So I know this may be very hard to believe, but this is Buddha’s teachings and there is some reason to believe these things, that the mind has amazing potential, even the obscured mind. So there are the god realms in the desire realm and then the form and formless realms are also what could be called god realms where the experience is even more and more refined. So in the form realm the gods are described as having bodies of light, incredibly beautiful bodies of light, and in the formless realm they don’t have any body whatsoever.
And the state of mind gets progressively in the higher realms of these god realms, the mind gets progressively more and more subtle until in the formless realm, in the fourth level of the formless realm which is called the peak of cyclic existence or the state of neither consciousness nor non consciousness, the mind is in such a subtle state you don’t even know whether you’re conscious or not conscious. Which is, you know So it’s actually a very blissful state. It’s so blissful that you’re not even aware it’s blissful, I think. And it goes on for an enormously long time. So there’s no obvious suffering, but there’s no benefit to it.
It’s this incredibly subtle blissful state that lasts an enormous amount of time, but then it comes to an end. And like when everything comes to an end, it’s finished. Like a life of ten years, a life of a hundred years, when it’s finished, or an experience of, you know, ten minutes, an experience of ten years, when it’s finished, it’s gone, never to come back. So it’s pointless, you know, because for some people in some situations, some traditions, the whole idea is to practice in order to be reborn in these god realms because they’re so beautiful and blissful. But from a Buddhist point of view, there’s no point.
They’re they’re all experiences of saṃsāra. They’re experiences where the mind is still controlled by delusion and karma, and they come to an end. And the main to be born in the desire realm, the cause of being reborn in the desire realm is to experience the lower realms of the desire realm, the cause is creating negative karma. To be born as a human being or a demigod or in the god realms of the desire realm, the cause is creating good karma, especially practising morality and generosity. But to be reborn in the form realm and the formless realm, the cause is much more difficult and that is to develop as I explained in the last course, one has to develop very high very advanced levels of single-minded concentration, these meditative states of single pointed concentration, are very difficult to achieve, especially in these days where the world is completely crazy and busy, because you also need a very special isolated, peaceful environment to develop it.
And isolated, peaceful environments are not very common anymore in this world. There are some, fortunately. But, yes, and so if one develops these very advanced levels of Samādhi or single pointed concentration, but with just a very ordinary motivation or worldly motivation, just seeking the bliss of those states or because there’s all sorts of other side effects, you can fly in the sky, you can walk through walls, you can develop clairvoyance and read other people’s minds. So you get all these other side effects from developing these levels of concentration, which can be very beneficial, but they can also be very harmful if you haven’t developed a virtuous mind to go with them. So people develop, you know, want to develop these concentrations because they want to develop all these supernormal powers or just the bliss that goes with it.
So these are all worldly motivations. And if you have those, when you die, you end up being reborn in these particular god realms. So from a Buddhist point of view, the main aim is to get reborn as a human being again where one can meet the Dharma and have the conditions to practise it. Another possibility is to be born in a pure land, but I don’t think I have time to explain that at the moment. There’s so many things to talk about.
I’d just like to leave that for the time being. So basically, this is saṃsāra. It has these two aspects. It’s basically referring to our five aggregates, especially our mind being under the control of delusion and karma. And because of that, we are reborn again and again.
We have this cycle in the sense that we get reborn, you know, we can go up in the cycle into the god realms, but we can fall down into the hell realms and so on, over and over again. Because in some traditions, I think in some Hindu traditions, also talks about karma and rebirth and the different realms, they argue that one continuously progresses up, but this is not the Buddha’s view. I mean, one can do that if one follows the spiritual path, one can eventually just move away from suffering more and more and more. But in general, without practising and gaining control of one’s rebirths, then one can, because we have positive and negative imprints, so there are many factors influencing which imprints will ripen at the time of death. So it could be a good one, it could be a bad one.
So that’s why we go up and down, you know, like that. And just like in this life, which is basically the result of good karma, nevertheless, some bad karma ripens in our life. We have bad experiences. Because the Buddha’s teaching is that everything we experience has a cause, and our mind created the cause for it. There are the outer conditions of unpleasant people and all sorts of other things, diseases and floods and famines and wars and all sorts of things, they are the outer conditions, but if one hasn’t created the cause, we don’t experience the result.
Right. So, you know So even though we have a generally good life, you know, due to good karma, good actions, the result of good actions, we also have you know, we can experience sickness and bad relationships and arguments and we meet with people who they just look at us and don’t like us. Have you had that experience? I’ve certainly had that experience. People just look at me and just don’t like me.
When I was in Taiwan, being one of the few, about the only Western Buddhist monk, and many people didn’t even know I was a Buddhist monk. My taxi driver Chinese was basically people would the taxi driver would ask me, what are you? And I would say, I’m a monk and they would say, I’m a Buddhist monk. And they’d say, are you married? Because every Chinese knows that Buddhist monks don’t marry, so I had to say, No, I’m a monk, I don’t get married.
Was that leading to? What was I doing? The The same as some people don’t like you. Oh yes, and so I can remember when I was in Taiwan one day there was a woman and her little kid walking in front of me and the little kid turned around and saw me and just burst into tears. He was horrified, terrified of me.
But another time when I was in a super crowded bus there was a young woman getting out of the bus and she was holding her baby. So she saw me and smiled and then she walked past, so then her little baby was being held like that so the little baby could see me and he just smiled like But I think he picked up on Mum’s vibes because Mum smiled at me, so Anyway, yeah, got carried away there again. But yes, our karma ripens in so many ways, you know, good things, bad things happen. We just have no idea. So that’s saṃsāra.
So when the Buddha achieved enlightenment or manifested enlightenment, the very first teaching the Buddha gave was the Four Noble Truths. And one can say, argue that all the teachings that the Buddha ever gave are connected to the Four Noble Truths. Would be more accurate The Four Noble Truths is a very catchy title, but it’s more accurate to say the Four Truths of Noble Beings, because a noble being or an ārya being refers to someone who has directly perceived reality as it is. So someone who’s done that is able to perceive four essential things, and certainly the Buddha was able to see these four essential things. And it’s very interesting that I think it’s interesting that the Buddha, who achieved complete enlightenment and was omniscient and was in a state of total bliss and could read everybody’s minds and could fly through the sky and perform miracles.
When he was asked to teach by his first disciples, he never said those things. He said, I’m omniscient, I can fly through the sky. I can read your mind, I can turn water into fire and blah blah blah. I can do all these fantastic things.’ He never taught or said, you can achieve those things.’ He taught the Four Noble Truths. And the first Noble Truth, which is the one that no one wants to hear, is that there is the truth that ordinary existence is, in its nature, suffering.
This is a very heavy thing to hear and most people turn away from Buddhism because they say it’s all about suffering and it’s so depressing. But the Buddha and Buddhism ever since that, since the time of the Buddha, has emphasised suffering not to depress people, but to motivate people. There’s no point talking about suffering if we can’t do anything about it. The Buddha talks about suffering, and all the great masters since him have talked about suffering and emphasised that we are suffering to emphasise that we don’t have to be suffering. We can be free of it.
But in order to be free of suffering, we have to admit and recognise that we are suffering. If we think we’re okay, we’re not going to do anything. But if we realise that even if we’re not obviously suffering, we always have the potential for suffering, then we need to do something about and we can. This is the point, the Buddha says, everybody has the especially once we, you know, have a human body, we have the ability and a human intelligence, we have the ability to become free of suffering. So that’s why the Buddha, the first teaching and the first of the Noble Truths emphasises that ordinary existence, not Buddha’s existence, not enlightenment existence, but ordinary existence is in its very nature suffering.
What is ordinary existence referring to? It’s referring to our existence, samsaric existence, having the five aggregates, especially the mind controlled by delusion and karma. While our mind is controlled by delusion and karma, we are suffering, whether we want to admit it or not. I have said this in classes many times before, and you get people who say, you know, they walk out because I’m not suffering. How dare you say I’m suffering?
I’m completely happy. My life is wonderful. They got upset. That’s suffering. They are suffering.
They got upset and walked out. They couldn’t even bear to hear the words, You are suffering. That shows that something is, I’m not trying to criticise these people, but something is wrong with the mind, that it can’t even bear to hear that. Yeah? But we are.
It doesn’t mean we’re in, you know, horrific, wracked pain, but we are experiencing dissatisfaction. And even that’s a week where you’re like, oh, I’m dissatisfied, you know, like, not satisfied with that. But that term being dissatisfied can have quite a heavy meaning to it. This is what, this is the very beginning, the real beginning of spiritual practice is admitting that I am suffering. I am suffering.
We are all suffering. No matter what we look like, how good looking we are, how big the smile on our face is, or how big our bank balance is, how big our house or car is or swimming pool, we are all suffering. You can be in the biggest swimming pool in the world and be suffering. In fact, one is suffering according to the Buddha. My teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, when I first met him, was not very famous at all.
He was very admired among a lot of Tibetan people, but in the general world not known at all. Rinpoche has become relatively famous, not that Buddhism is such a big thing, but within the Buddhist world Rinpoche has now become quite a famous person, and he has a number of quite wealthy disciples now. And Rinpoche says often when he’s been visited, very wealthy people invite him to his home, and they show him you know, their big house and their big swimming pool and all these nice things. And then Vrind Rinpoche says, At some point, then they talk about their problems. Everyone has problems.
Everyone is suffering. A billion dollars doesn’t stop you suffering. A billion bot dollars doesn’t stop one getting sick, growing old, ageing, having relationship problems. In fact, with a billion dollars, I think you could have more relationship problems than, you know, without. If ugly and poor and someone is nice to you, they know you can know they’re being nice to you because they like you.
If you’ve got a billion dollars and that people are being nice to you, you can never be sure why they’re being nice, I think. Anyway. Where am I? Yeah. So the first noble truth is that ordinary existence is in its very nature suffering.
And that’s you know, it doesn’t mean there is some suffering from time to time. It means the very fabric of our existence all the time is suffering, is incomplete, frustrating, unsatisfying. There are very all sorts of subtle reasons for that which I hope to find time to explain later on, But the basic reason to understand one of the reasons to understand that even what we call happiness, what we as ordinary beings call happiness, the Buddha calls suffering, is because it doesn’t last. It just doesn’t last. Every happiness that we as ordinary people experience doesn’t last.
It might, you know, certainly it doesn’t with death, comes to an end, for sure. It just doesn’t last. So it’s not fully satisfying, it’s not complete. And if you think about it, way, a simple way to understand that why our saṃsāra, We have our own individual saṃsāra because saṃsāra is our mind controlled by delusion and karma. Why is our saṃsāra the nature of suffering?
Because whatever we do with our mind controlled by delusion and karma, it will never be perfect. There will always be mistakes. Fortunately, we can purify it, you know, but just generally speaking, and of course we live with people, we are surrounded by people, good and bad, but even the nice people have minds controlled by delusion and karma. Even the most brilliant people have minds controlled by delusion and karma. So even the most brilliant people, the best people make mistakes.
Things always go wrong. Yeah. If you think about it, maybe you can find an example, but every good invention that’s been made of any kind has a bad, a negative side to it. That’s saṃsāra. There’s amazing medicines that can cure this and that, but they can have horrific side effects.
Cars were an amazing invention, but they kill lots of people. Mobile phones are terrific in many ways, but they’ve also had all sorts of horrible side effects that no one thought of. And really terrible things. Nothing nothing works perfectly in saṃsāra. Even the best brains get together and leave things out.
Something’s wrong. It’s yeah. We try and do our best, but it’s never completely the same. One may love another person, try and make them happy, but sometimes it works, but maybe not always. That’s saṃsāra.
You would like to make the person you love happy, but you can’t. You can’t because that other person has a mind, and their mind is controlled by delusion and karma. We can try and help, we can create a nice situation as much as possible, but we can’t do it. That’s saṃsāra. First noble truth.
Ordinary existence is in its nature suffering, unsatisfying, frustrating, things go wrong. It’s a miracle that they go right. It’s kind of a miracle that they go right. They do go right sometimes, for some time, for some of the time and sometimes. As I’ve often said before, and I’m going to say it again, one of the first things I heard from my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, many, many years ago that really grabbed me, I think which started moving my mind into the Dharma, was he was saying that, how can you possibly think you could be happy when you have a mind when you’ve got anger and attachment in your mind?
Desire, craving and hatred in your mind. Uncontrolled, they’re uncontrolled, they pop up when we least want them. Rinpoche said, How can you expect to be happy when those exist in your mind? You’d think when someone’s got a billion dollars, they would stop and be satisfied. But the people who’ve got a billion dollars are still working for two billion, three I mean, Bill Gates does very good things and donated billions of dollars, but I think he’s got ninety billion now, still.
Still. But there are people with billions and billions of dollars desperately trying to make more money, but not, you know, for any good purpose, just somehow it just seems they have to have more money and more power because that’s the nature of desire and attachment. The more one follows desire, the more it creates more desire. Like drinking salt water, as they say. So the Buddha emphasised this because the more we but also one of the important things is to remember is that if because people could think, well, my life is going on really nicely.
I’ve got a nice job, nice family, good health and this and that, all these nice things. That’s true. But within us, there is even in that situation, even if it goes on all this life, still there is the potential for suffering in our mind because we have these delusions and we have these negative imprints. And we never know when the object of our delusion arises, when we meet the object of our delusions, we never know when our negative karma is going to arrive. That is unsatisfying.
And we never know what kind of rebirth we’re going to have. So the Buddha emphasised that to lead us to understand, to look for why am I suffering? This is the big question, why am I suffering? And there’s all sorts of answers, you know, that there is a creator who’s created the world in a particular way and wants us to behave in a particular way and we’re not doing it, so we’re suffering. Or this creator is testing us for some reason.
And then there’s the scientific materialist view which, from my point of view, seems to be saying basically there’s no reason for things. We’re suffering because of chance, by accident, because of good or bad luck, which doesn’t really mean anything, which means we have no control over stuff. But the Buddha says, we are suffering, there is a reason why suffering exists. There are because there are causes for it. There are very particular causes.
And while those causes are there, there will be suffering. If the cause isn’t there, there is no suffering. And basically what the Buddha is saying is that the immediate cause of our suffering is the ripening of our negative imprints. And why do those negative imprints exist? It’s because a more subtle cause of our suffering are our disturbing thoughts that have created those negative imprints.
Those disturbing thoughts are suffering. It’s time. Sorry, I’ve gone over time. No, it’s your fault. Blame her, blame her, not me.
We’re all suffering because of Wendy. Sorry, I’ve once again never covered the topic. What was I going to do? Yeah. Quickly, so there are the causes, there’s the negative for instance, the delusions and our ignorance.
The third noble truth is the good one, the beginning of the good ones, is that the Buddha said and discovered that the causes of our suffering can be eliminated from our mind, and not only temporarily or partially, but completely forever in a way that they will never return. That’s the good news. That’s what the Buddha discovered because he achieved it. And then the fourth noble truth is that there is a method, a path we can follow, a path we can follow. So by step by step we can eliminate the causes of our suffering.
Right. Move away from saṃsāra to nirvana and then eventually the great nirvana. So we’ll carry on next week, okay? I know it’s a couple of minutes over time, but please, if you could just bear with me. I hope you’ve got the homework sheet with you.
It’s good to collect it in the break time or at the beginning of the class. Just with the homework, it asks you, like on Wednesday, to think about, to meditate on, reflect on the potential of one’s mind for happiness and suffering, just to think about that. Does my mind have any potential for happiness, suffering, what kinds of happiness and suffering I’ve experienced in the past? Could my mind experience other kinds of happiness, suffering in the future of this life? Do I think my mind could give rise to more kinds of happiness or suffering even beyond this life?
Just think about that. Do I believe this is possible? Do I believe in these saṃsāra and the different realms? Then just Thursday is just to reflect a little bit about the meaning of saṃsāra, the five aggregates controlled by delusion and karma, the mind being controlled by delusion and karma, and therefore there is rebirth and the different kinds of rebirth. Just to reflect on those points, just for ten minutes or so.
And then to think about the three realms of saṃsāra and, could my mind experience these? Is there any reason to believe that these realms exist in any way at all? And then Saturday to reflect on thinking of, does my mind, do I believe my mind could give rise to the different rebirths in the desire realm? Do I experience some version of these in this life which could then become even more extreme in the future? Then Sunday, just to think a little bit about the five aggregates, what that means, what are the five aggregates.
Monday to reflect on the four noble truths, especially the first one, oh no, the four noble truths in general, and Tuesday to especially think about the first noble truth. Is it true that my existence is in the nature of suffering because of being controlled by delusion and karma? So it just means to think about these things a bit, yeah? Do I believe these things? You know, what I’ve been talking about.
Do I accept them? If I don’t, why don’t I accept this? Why don’t I believe this? Are there some reasons why, even though I haven’t accepted this, believed this in the past, are there ways I could open my mind to consider the possibility of these realms and so on. Okay, thank you very much.
So just as we began by developing a good motivation, then the tradition is to conclude the class with dedicating so we’ve created some positive imprints, some positive potential in our mind by listening to the teachings, so we can dedicate this positive potential that it becomes a cause for us to have a good rebirth, so that we can continue to practise work on our mind, so that we can eventually be free of cyclic existence and eventually achieve enlightenment for the sake of all mother sentient beings. So if you’d like to join in, page ten, Dedication of Merit. Due to the merits of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of a Guru Buddha and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the precious bodhicitta mind not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore.