Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores the roots of suffering and attachment in this 47-minute teaching on letting go. He traces how ignorance creates a false sense of isolated self, which then generates desire—the exaggeration of external things as sources of lasting happiness. Dondrub explains that desire is not mere wishing but an afflicted thought that colors all perception and keeps the mind fixated outward, unable to recognize that genuine, lasting happiness arises from within. He illustrates this with everyday examples—a child’s ice cream melting, housewives selecting the best vegetables, the futility of pursuing ever-larger worldly achievements—to show how desire reinforces a sense of inner worthlessness. As desire intensifies into attachment, the mind becomes trapped and dependent, believing it cannot survive without its objects. The teaching emphasizes that when the mind sees clearly that desire causes suffering, it naturally lets go, but old habits repeatedly pull the mind back into illusion. Suited for practitioners familiar with Buddhist terminology and concepts of mind.
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File: Letting go_2.mp3
UUID: eec0baea-1a45-4733-a6fb-04265cc985f8
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Letting go of attachment (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.5 minutes
Words: ~5,317
We’re here for the talks that I gave the last two. Yes. Some people not? No. Right.
Okay. I just like to go over a couple of points I try to make in those talks, which most of you are probably very familiar with. But the basic point is that we’re always looking for happiness in every moment of our existence, but we never really find it that what we experience is dissatisfaction. We get some temporary happiness, some pleasure in various ways, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot, sometimes it lasts a short time, sometimes it lasts a long time, but it always fades away. It doesn’t last and is replaced by dissatisfaction.
This is our life and this has been going on not just in this life but all previous lives. Until we eliminate eliminate the causes for this situation, it will go on forever, endlessly. So this is our what is experiencing this happiness or this limited happiness and dissatisfaction is our mind. It is our mind that is experiencing this. So this situation is not satisfactory because what we really want deep down, whether we’ve ever thought about it or not, is perfect happiness, not just some kind of imperfect happiness, but we want perfect happiness and we want it to last forever.
Because anything else other than perfect lasting happiness is completely unsatisfying. All right, how could the mind not want perfect lasting happiness? It’s just impossible not to want that. As his Holiness, the Dalai Lama points out, this is a natural aspect quality of the mind, to seek genuine happiness, genuine, lasting happiness. It’s impossible for the mind not to do that.
Although the mind deep down is always seeking that, it never experiences it because the mind that is trying to achieve that has been obscured. It has been obscured by ignorance, which is also a mind itself, but a very ordinary mind, a confused mind that doesn’t understand the nature of phenomena. Doesn’t understand the nature of ourself, it doesn’t understand the nature of other people, it doesn’t understand the nature of all phenomena. Not only does it not understand or know things correctly, it actually distorts the way things are. As I mentioned, if we ever think about it at all, we tend to think that our mind or our perceptions are completely accurate.
Right? We never doubt that what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch is as it actually is. Perceptions or, in other words, we never doubt our mind. We never doubt that our knowing, our experience, is correct. If we ever thought about it, we would think, we would probably agree that we think of our perceptions, our mind, as like a perfect mirror that just reflects things as they are.
But this is not true, in fact, from the point of view of a Buddha, from the point of view of a very pure mind. Our mind is not pure. It is like a dusty mirror. And more than that, our mind is like one of those mirrors in a fun parlor that completely distorts things. But we’re not aware of that because everyone else has the same problem.
So we all agree. We all agree, Yes, I see things like that, and so we think it’s like that, but things aren’t exactly the way we perceive. And it’s because of that that we suffer, in fact, that we’re not at ease and that perfectly happy. It is this distorting mind that obscures these distorting perceptions that prevent us seeing things as they really are. One of the ways this mind that distorts things, that obscures the true potential, the true function of our mind, this mind is called ignorance in Buddhism.
This is fundamental problem that all sentient beings, all living beings have. We have this problem called ignorance, a mind that not only doesn’t know things properly, but it actually distorts things. How ignorance distorts things is the main teaching of the Buddha, the most unique special feature of the Buddha’s teachings, or one of them actually. The Buddha’s teachings have many wonderful, unique, special features, but perhaps this is the most unique special feature of them all. It’s the heart of the Buddha’s teachings.
To understand this ignorance and how to overcome it by the wisdom that clearly knows how things are, and that this wisdom actually destroys ignorance. It has the power to undermine and destroy ignorance. So this subject is something very, very complicated and profound, and I’m not going to go into it in any complicated, profound way. I just want to point out that as a result of this ignorance, it has the effect of creating the illusion, the experience that we all have of feeling somehow isolated and separated from the world and separated from each other. We all have that experience.
Sometimes it’s stronger than at other times. Sometimes we’re more conscious of it than at other times. But it is somehow always there in every moment of our experience. That we feel alone and separated from everything. We experience things as being separate and in dependence upon us.
I mean, not consciously, because most of the time, even as Buddhists who have heard all the teachings about this, go around in a daze and don’t think about it very much. But actually, if we allow ourselves to become aware of this, that’s how we experience the world. Actually, most of the time we don’t want to be aware of it because it upsets us. It is suffering to feel isolated from everybody and everything, to be just this kind of strange solitary phenomenon wandering around amongst all these other unknown solitary things. This is the first noble truth, the truth of the noble ones, the first truth of noble beings.
Noble beings are ones who have clear perception of truth. They perceive that life is suffering, is unsatisfying because of this, because we have this sensation all the time. And it comes from ignorance, this distorted way, perception of who we are and how we exist in the world. It’s there all the time. You may ask, How come we’ve got this?
Why is it there? This is also kind of difficult to answer other than the only way I can answer it is to say that it’s always been there. No one put it there. It’s just somehow mind has always existed, but it’s always and mind has always had this Buddha nature, this Buddha potential, which means a potential for perfect happiness, perfect wisdom. But that wisdom, that potential, has always been obscured by ignorance.
And it has to be this way, logically, if you think about it, because otherwise you would have to say that this mind, our mind, was Buddha at some point, was perfectly free, perfectly wise, perfectly happy, and then it got obscured. Something made it ignorant. But that’s kind of illogical. If the mind had perfect wisdom, perfect clarity, how could it become obscured? It couldn’t, and even something else couldn’t make it that way.
Implant this ignorance into the mind if the mind had perfect wisdom in the beginning or in the beginningless beginning, in beginningless time. It’s just impossible because these two things are mutually exclusive. If you’ve got ignorance, you don’t have wisdom. If you have perfect wisdom, if the mind is functioning perfectly, then therefore possessing this wisdom, this clear knowing and experiencing, if the mind is in that state, how can there be ignorance? These two things are impossible.
They cannot exist together. So if there was wisdom, were ignorance can’t replace it. Alright? So logically it does mean if mind has existed before, then it’s always existed in a state of ignorance. But the good thing is it’s illogical that if there is wisdom always, you can’t replace that with ignorance.
But the other way does work. If there is ignorance always, you can eliminate that and develop wisdom. That is possible because that’s the nature of the mind, because mind is what knows, and if you just stop obscuring the mind, which is what the function of ignorance is, it just obscures the mind again and again. If you stop that function, if you eliminate that function, then the mind knows. And as the mind knows more and more, as our wisdom, as our intelligence develops more and more, our clear knowing develops more and more, we develop perfect wisdom.
And that perfect wisdom, once that is developed and established in the mind, there is no way ignorance can replace it ever again. So the point is we’ve always had this ignorance creates this sense of isolation and separation that we all have. Yeah. And so because of that, because we have have this ignorance and this sense of being some kind of isolated phenomena in the world, it sets up this fundamental ignorance sets up a situation that creates other disturbances in the mind. All other disturbances It itself is the fundamental disturbance or obscuration or affliction.
It’s the fundamental affliction in our mind, the fundamental delusion, but it acts to create all the other afflictions in the mind. From that, all the other branches grow. So just very generally, because we have this kind of sense of isolation, there’s this sense of self, this very strong sense of self, and other, this dichotomy, this dualism between self and others all the time. Then this ignorance acts as a basis for the arising of attachment and desire attachment. Without this ignorance, desire attachment wouldn’t arise because we have this sense of self, this isolated self separate from others, and this sense of self we’re always trying to bolster and make strong and real.
This sense of self that we have, this isolated sense of self we have, is a false self created by ignorance, the illusion of an independent self separate from others. It appears very real, but it’s an illusion created by ignorance. But it does arise in the mind, and we grasp at it all the time as being real, as being true. But in fact, the sense of self that we have changes all the time. Sometimes it’s strong, sometimes it’s weak because it’s not actually there.
It’s just an illusion. Not knowing that, not really experiencing that, we try to strengthen that sense of I all the time. That’s our main main job in life, trying to make the sense of I real because sometimes it seems so real and strong and other times it fades away. So when it fades away, we get very worried. When the sense of self starts changing in some way, we get very panicky and insecure.
Right? Because one minute it was there and it was sort of kind of clear, and then somehow things happen and it’s not there anymore, or it’s not so strong. I’m not so sure about myself anymore what happened. This is very frightening. So one has to rush around mentally and physically and verbally to make it come back, to make me real.
And grasp and you grasp, and it comes back, and you hold onto it. We try to hold onto it. So this ignorance is also called self grasping. It’s trying to create the illusion of me and grasp onto it. So this is called self grasping.
So anything in the external world that makes this sense of self really strong, comfortable, secure, real and happy, content. Because we are sort of happy. There is the illusion of happiness when I feel strong, real, definite, clear, strong, secure. So anything that does that in the external world, in this strange, mysterious world, anything that appears to do that, that must be good. Right?
It must be good because it makes me feel good and me. So use I won’t use grammar in the correct way because just to make the point, but anything that makes me feel good, that must be good. Because me is the center of the world. Everything is experienced through me, through the sense, this filter of me. And the need for me to be strong and clear and something definite, this focal point for everything.
So anything that makes that strong and clear and secure, that must be good because it makes me feel good. How can anything that makes me feel good not be good itself? It must be good. And more interestingly, how we perceive this goodness out there is that it must be good from its own side. It’s really good, and it’s really out there.
It’s really good from its own side out there. Not because I’ve said it’s good, because it makes me feel good. I’m not aware of that in the emotional moment that these things happen. I make create the illusion, the label, this is good, but I’m not aware of that. My ignorance doesn’t allow me to be aware of that.
My ignorance creates the illusion that this thing that is making me feel good, it itself must be good, and it’s out there, it’s really out there with its own characteristics from its own side. There’s this wonderful thing out there. It’s really like that from its own side, and it’s out there and it’s making me feel good. So what happens? This is a creation of my own mind, basically.
I mean, there is relatively something out there, but my mind is exaggerating its importance and how wonderful it is because it makes me feel good. And we have no control over that at the moment. If we see something or someone making someone else happy and we don’t have any connection with either of these people, that doesn’t make us happy, generally speaking. Right? Because it’s not me.
It’s not making me happy. I mean, to some extent, if we see people being happy, you know, it makes us happy a little bit. But I’m just trying to exaggerate the point to make the point. But it doesn’t make us as really happy as when something is directly affecting me. So when something is directly affecting me, it is so good, it is so wonderful, so the mind exaggerates how important it is, how good it is, because it’s making me feel good.
Not someone else, but me. So it must be so good. It’s really out there. It’s so good. So what does the mind in that confused state do?
It wants it, of course. It wants it, and it wants it very badly. The more our own ignorance creates the illusion that this thing is out there separate from me, and the more creates the illusion that this thing is really so good, so wonderful. And also another thing our ignorance does is it creates the illusion illusion why we’re experiencing it, that this thing, this wonderful experience, this goodness, this happiness out there is lasting. Right?
If we check, it’s going to last. If you look at a little child licking its ice cream so happy and then plop, the ice cream falls down, and then the little kid screams because there was the illusion it was going to go on, and the mind was not prepared at all for this sudden change. Because there was the illusion of this wonderful you’re caught up in the moment. It’s just going to go on forever. That’s what our ignorance does.
It’s creating these layers of illusions all the time, illusion on illusion, and all interacting with each other, creating one huge delusion, one huge fantasy, which we call reality, which we all are involved in, and we’re all reinforcing with each other in this fantasy that life is wonderful and happiness is really out there. If you cut off a big enough slice and grab it and stuff it inside, you’ll be happy. We will be happy. This is a huge illusion. What is creating this?
What exaggerates how beautiful they are, creates the illusion that they are permanent, lasting, creates the illusion that if I have it, if I possess it long enough, I will get this happiness inside. This is desire from Buddhist point of view. It’s not just wishing something. Wishing things is okay. As a Buddhist, you’re allowed to wish for things.
There’s no problem with wishing for things, but just wishing is okay. But there is this thing, what is called an affliction that arises from ignorance, which is desire. Desire only comes from ignorance. You can wish to be enlightened. That isn’t coming from ignorance.
That doesn’t afflict your mind. The wish for good things, for real happiness, doesn’t afflict your mind. Desire is what is called an affliction. It is a delusion because it harms the mind, it afflicts the mind, it disturbs the mind. Lama Zopa Rinpoche, my teacher, usually calls delusions disturbing thoughts.
Desire is a thought. And when you have a thought and you’re under the control when we’re under the control of a thought, we see the world, we experience the world in that thought. Thoughts aren’t just kind of little things that dance around on top of our experience. They create our experience. They create our perceptions, roughly speaking.
Sorry, I’m not a great Buddhist philosopher and can speak sort of super technically like Khensur Rinpoche, but I’m just kind of speaking in a very general way, which I hope is not too inaccurate, of how our mind is working. But that’s what our thoughts do. Our thoughts determine our perceptions, the very subtle thoughts we have and then on top of those strong thoughts, of course we have all sorts of other little superficial thoughts that dance around it and color it in and whatever, but particularly strong thoughts desire, they completely dominate our perceptions and completely color the way we perceive the world and ourselves. Of course, one should be aware that with every afflicted thought, such as desire, we become that. It’s not like I Didn’t we say, of course, I think this and I think that?
But when those thoughts are these very strong afflicted thoughts and we allow ourselves out of ignorance to follow those more and more strongly, we become our desire. There’s hardly any difference between what we are and our desire. Yeah, we’re completely caught up in it. So desire is this wanting something out there, just wanting it and wanting it, and exaggerating it, believing it’s happiness. And if one checks the nature of this mind, and you have to do it yourself, which is quite fairly easy to do actually, not so difficult, you can discover that it has the nature of upsetting the mind.
We think, generally, if we ever thought about it, that desire is something that we need and is essential for our happiness. By following our desires, we will be happy. That is the underlying assumption of our life. We have to have desires, and by following them we will be happy. This is what the Buddha said is completely false.
Now, this only produces suffering, dissatisfaction. So this is something our mind, under the control of desire, doesn’t doesn’t want to believe because we are so habituated with our desires. And we think, Oh, if I give these up, I will suffer. But if we really want happiness and want to follow the spiritual path, particularly the Buddhist path, we have to investigate the nature of our own desires and to understand that desire is suffering. Understand that desire is suffering.
It is disturbing the mind in its very nature, not because the Buddha or religion say it’s bad and evil. We have to discover from our own experience that this is true. Because my understanding of the Buddha’s teachings are why I have faith in them is because they are perception of what is true coming from a very clear, undistorted mind. The Buddha saw what is there as it is, just very, very clearly without any distortion, pre conceptions, and the Buddha described it. That’s all.
This is how things actually are. If you want to avoid this, do that. If you want to avoid suffering because I can see what suffering really is and what really causes it, then stop creating those causes. Stop following those causes. If you want real happiness, this is what real happiness is because I can perceive it and it has causes, then one has to create those causes.
This is our choice. And we can see these things too because we have the same kind of mind as Buddha. We have the same because mind has the same nature. There aren’t different basically, aren’t different kinds of minds. Superficially, conventionally, there are happy minds, unhappy minds, clever minds, unclever minds, stupid minds.
But these are just superficial aspects. The mind in its very nature is the same. So we have to allow ourselves to see what the Buddha saw. Because when we see things or start to see things more clearly, particularly the suffering in our own life, dissatisfaction, not necessarily suffering as gross physical and mental pain because that’s very easy to see. But when we start to see the more subtle kinds of what is called dukkha, this Sanskrit word that is translated as suffering suffering, means much more than just pain.
That means, you know, really dissatisfaction, basically. All the very and going down to the most subtle levels of dissatisfaction. When we see that, when we allow ourselves to see that ourselves, we just naturally begin to let go of it. Because, as I said at the beginning, our mind just naturally wants happiness, and when it sees that it’s not getting it, it lets go of it because our mind basically isn’t that stupid. We are not that stupid.
Right? Nobody is that stupid. Right? We are really quite intelligent people. We just make ourselves stupid.
Intelligent people. We just make ourselves stupid. And we can when we stop making ourselves stupid, we automatically become quite intelligent. Intelligent. And when our intelligence is functioning, it is just seeking real happiness.
And when it starts to see, This isn’t what real happiness I thought it was, but it’s not, then we let go. We start to let go, because that’s the nature of our mind. Of course, unfortunately, there is the old habit to go back, right? That’s the trouble. That’s why the spiritual path is difficult because we see these things, we have some glimpses of what is true and what is false, but there’s the old habit, the old mind comes back again and again.
So this is the main problem, the main fight. We have to allow ourselves to see these things more and more clearly again and again and again and undermine those old habits of believing that this is happiness. But the more we allow ourselves to see that, the more our mind lets go of it. I lived for three years in Taiwan in Taipei, one of my favorite horrible cities of the world. And I lived alone there most of the time, and I used to go shopping myself to buy my food to the local markets.
I just I could speak a few words of Chinese to get to bite, you to buy some vegetables. And I noticed that all the Chinese housewives tradition is there generally, although it’s changing because it’s becoming modern and progressive, people would go out and buy their food, the fresh vegetables, every day for the lunch and whip it up, you know, nice fresh things. So the housewives would go out. And I often noticed, like, like me, I would just point to some beans and I’ll say, I’ll have this many beans, and the guy would grab them, put them and weigh them. But the Chinese housewives don’t do that.
They go through every bean. They pick out the best beans, every they throw out the the, you know, the flaky ones, the wobbly ones, the ones that are not so crisp and fresh, leave those take out the very best beans. Put a lot of effort into that to pick the best. Yeah. Why?
Because they want happiness. Yeah. If you if you know what you know, this is a very limited kind of happiness, but you want the best. We just naturally want the best. So you leave leave the the limp beans, which are happiness, and you take the best ones.
Right? Our mind just naturally does that. So this process of picking out the best beans, this is exactly the spiritual path as well, recognizing that some things aren’t as good as other things. Yeah? Some won’t give the satisfaction we want.
We do that. If you go and buy a car, we do the same thing. With the money we get have, we try to get the very best from that money according to our knowledge. If we don’t know much about cars, we may end up buying a real bomb with the money. But if we have some knowledge and we’ve got the money, then we will get a bargain.
We will try depending on our knowledge. Right? So as our knowledge increases and the mind just naturally is always making those choices, discriminating all the time, then we can make better and better choices. But even the most intelligent, sophisticated people in the ordinary world from a Buddhist point of view are continuously making the wrong choices because their knowledge is a very fixed knowledge And it’s always looking for the best thing out there. It’s looking for happiness out there.
But you will never find the best beings, the best car, the best happiness out there. Because the real happiness is inside. The potential is in there. It is there all the time. But our desire based on ignorance is always thinking happiness is out there.
So we desire the main problem of desire, afflicted desire, the delusion of desire, the main problem is just that. It takes us out there. That is the main problem. It may not sound like a big problem, but if one starts to really understand that happiness isn’t out there, that it is in there, then one can start to see that it is the biggest problem of all. Because our desire doesn’t allow the mind to stay at home and have a good time and to discover there’s all sorts of hidden chambers in our home full of all sorts of wonderful things, figuratively speaking, yeah, because we’re never at home to discover what’s there long enough.
Always and when we’re in there, we were we were rushing around, you know, ready to go outside again, getting dressed to go outside. Yeah. And that’s what desire is. So we have to it’s so important if one starts to have some understanding understanding of what our mind is, what its potential is, and that its potential there is this potential within it for lasting happiness. The more we start to understand that, then the more we can start start to see that desire is the greatest obstacle to developing our mind.
And then if we even if we intellectually understand that, we need to use that intellectual understanding to really feel our desire, to feel that it is suffering and the cause of suffering. It is unsatisfying. Desire is unsatisfying, and the things that it produces, the results it brings, are unsatisfying. Of course, we can’t deny that they bring pleasure. We follow our desire, and there’s some pleasure.
There can be lots of pleasure, lots of happiness, but it isn’t real happiness. It’s not what we really want. We want perfect, lasting happiness. Object of desire is always something limited. That’s that’s one of the defining characteristics of desire, afflicted desire.
It’s something out there, and it’s something limited. Someone may desire to be the king of, you know, president of America, king of England, or, you know, create some new empire in the world, which looks like a very big object. But from a dharma point of view, it’s still something incredibly Because all those people, Hitler, Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander, they had very big objects of desire, but it didn’t make them happy at all. Some momentary elation, pleasure, some pride. I’m the biggest guy in the world, most important person.
But pride also is another affliction. If you investigate that, pride is not a happy mind. Anyway, that’s another story. So with desire comes attachment. These two things are really not a separate mind, although in some ways you can mentally separate them, classify the differences between them, but actually they go together.
So in Tibetan they have this word which is called ‘dod chags. And I think ‘dod is desire and chags is attachment. So you have ‘dod chags, desire attachment. It’s one package. The two come together because you desire something because it’s it’s real happiness.
It’s lasting. Yeah. You desire it and desire it. And because of that desire, you meet the object. You want to meet the object.
Right? So if we meet the object, and what happens? There’s some pleasure. Sure. Right?
And so oh, I want that more and more. How do I get it? I have to remain with that object. I have to hold that object. But what happens in that process of holding onto the object is that we get stuck to it, as in the word attachment implies.
Attachment doesn’t mean affection. Unfortunately, we don’t have the right words in our English language because all the Buddhist words that we use in English often have all sorts of connotations in our mind, but they’re translations of words from a Buddhist context that have very, very clear, precise meanings that aren’t quite right. So we have to bear that in mind. Attachment there are nice connotations of this word in our language, but we’re not talking about attachment as some kind of nice, pleasant thing. Attachment isn’t that.
Attachment isn’t affection and warmth and all those things. Attachment means and only means in Buddhism getting stuck to something. The mind is stuck, trapped, obsessed with things. Yeah. Because of desire, because of thinking this is happiness and this lasting.
And I need it thinking I have to have this. It’s essential for me. I’m nothing without it. I’m empty without it. Empty without it.
Because this is where our where does our desire come from? It comes from a sense of incompleteness. Right? It doesn’t come from a sense of fullness. It comes from a sense of incompleteness, that there’s something wrong with me, something missing in my life.
But if I have this, I am full, I am right, I am okay. I am worthwhile. So in a very sneaky way, following desire just reinforces our sense of worthlessness. It doesn’t look like that from the outside. But in fact, in a very sneaky, very subtle way, that’s what desire is doing.
And being especially the more we’re attached to our objects of desire. I have to have this. This is doing the same thing, saying, I, by myself, am not good enough. But with this thing, whatever it is, I’m okay. I’m worth you know, I I have value because I’m with this thing.
This gives me value. Yeah. Attachment means being obsessed with something, dependent on something, unable to detach. You know, like if you take a bandage off, it hurts, it stings a bit. Attachment has that awareness: If I let go, I will suffer.
So attachment has within it, again, this quality of fear. They go together. I’m dependent on this. I’m stuck to this. And