Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Thubten Dondrub guides students through a structured morning meditation on bodhicitta in this 19-minute session. After preparatory breathing exercises and posture checks, he establishes refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, then expands that foundation into bodhicitta—the awakened heart wishing to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all beings. He walks through the Four Immeasurables, a purification visualization where white light from Śākyamūni Buddha clears obscurations and installs clear, stable meditative focus. The core work involves analytical meditation on the Three Principal Paths drawn from Jang Gonsar’s translation, specifically on renunciation, bodhicitta, and emptiness—each explained with vivid imagery of samsaric suffering and the logical chain of dependent arising. The session closes with a determination to hold the mind steady on this analysis, free from dullness and distraction.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14a. Day 4 Prayers for Meditation Bodhicitta.mp3
UUID: 54d4356b-d312-4c99-996d-83e4999ad634
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Meditations DTL (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2006 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 19.2 minutes
Words: ~1,430
Again we need the morning prayers, page twenty four, twenty five, and then we’ll go through the Jang Gonsar translation. Read that, Three Principal Paths, Exodus 5. And I didn’t want to get too ahead of Geshe la’s teachings with the three principal paths, but we’re not going to cover the three principal paths in the teachings, so I thought we could at least do a little bit of meditation on them. So we’ll do some on bodhicitta this morning, just brief, simple. So, again, we begin by sitting comfortably in the correct posture as much as possible, and then checking our posture by placing our awareness at the crown and then moving it down through the body for a short time.
And then cultivating a calm, neutral mind with nine round breathing exercise and conjoining that with the visualization we’ve been doing that I’ve described. So then we’re completely determined to gain mastery over one’s mind in this life, to protect the mind from creating more causes of suffering, to be able to cultivate the positive potentials of the mind to enhance one’s well-being, and to ensure that we are able to take a good rebirth again. We generate strong refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, recognising them as completely reliable, unbetrayable in being able to help us completely achieve this goal. So we visualize the Buddha in front of us as the very embodiment of all objects of refuge and all qualities of refuge. Seeing Buddha seated on a magnificent lion throne with cushions of lotus, sun and moon, appearing as a pure renunciate, very embodiment of compassion and wisdom.
And then we expand that basic mind of refuge with the thought of bodhicitta, wishing to practice refuge, to engage in the whole range of the Buddha’s teachings in order to achieve the complete result of enlightenment, not only because that will fulfill our own everlasting wish for perfect, pure, lasting happiness, but will enable us to lead all sentient beings away from suffering and lead them to experience the purest everlasting happiness of their own enlightenment. And in this way, we can perfectly repay the kindness we’ve depended on life after life. It has come without exception from every sentient being in countless ways: kindness of a mother, the kindness of a father, brother, sister, best friend, teacher, doctor, nurse, every kind of support we’ve received. So we feel all these beings around us right now and their suffering, their helplessness, their confusion. Thinking of our parents on either side, family and friends and so on behind, enemies in front, then the different beings of the different realms surrounding us.
So as we practice the Dharma, we depend on them. So how can we practice just for our own sake? We have to include them continuously. So the very heart of achieving enlightenment is generating the mind of bodhicitta. So for this reason, I will meditate on bodhicitta in this session.
I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the Supreme Assembly. By my practice of giving and other perfections, may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. May all sentient beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all sentient beings be inseparable from the happiness that is free from suffering.
May all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free from desire for friends and hatred for enemies. Reverently, I prostrate with my body, speech, mind. I present clouds of every type of offering and praise. I declare all my negative actions accumulated since beginningless time and rejoice in the merit of all holy and ordinary beings. Please remain until the end of cyclic existence and turn the wheel of Dharma for living beings.
I dedicate my own merits and those of all others to the great enlightenment. So thinking we’re very pleased with our practice so far, imagine the Buddha seated just on the lotus, sun and moon, going to the crown of our head, turning to face the same direction as ourselves. And then we make a strong request from the depths of our heart for our mind to be completely free of all disturbing thoughts, negative imprints, obscurations, all the hindrances that we have to practicing, meditating on the graduated path, and in particular on meditating on and gaining the realization—all the difficulties we have in meditating on and gaining the realization of bodhicitta. So then think that the Guru Buddha happily responds, sending powerful, blissful white light and nectar from his heart into us. This causes all these negativities and hindrances to leave the mind in the form of very thick black liquid that pours out from the lower part of our body, dissipates and becomes non-existent.
And then from Śākyamūni Buddha’s heart comes blissful golden light and nectar blessing our mind to be able to meditate effectively, single-pointedly, and to be able to gain an unmistaken, stable realization of bodhicitta. So then we’ll do the glance meditation on three principles. We’ll just skip the first paragraphs and go to the section where it says, ‘Without real renunciation.’ Without real renunciation there is no way to end your struggle for pleasure sought in the seas of conditioned existence, and to cling to such existence will utterly enslave you. Thus, at the outset, seek the will to awaken.
Freedoms and riches are hard to find, and life does not last long. Keeping this always in mind will alter the priority you give to this life. Thinking again and again about the infallible relation between actions and their effects and the sufferings of cyclic existence will alter the priority you give to future lives. Meditating in this way, when your thoughts are turned night and day towards liberation, and not even for a moment do you entertain a wish for the splendours of cyclic existence, then you have given birth to the will to awaken. But even such a will, if not conjoined with the complete awakening of your heart, does not serve as the cause for the perfect bliss of highest awakening.
Thus, those of you who truly understand go on to develop the supreme awakening heart. Think about what is happening to your minds, how they are swept along in the currents of four raging rivers, bound by the near unbreakable chains of compulsive actions and held in the iron grip of self-grasping. Think how they are enveloped in the thick darkness of ignorance, are reborn into limitless lives, and in those lives are relentlessly made to bear the three sufferings. Thus, give birth to the highest of hearts. But even if you were to instill within you the will to awaken and the awakened heart without the wisdom realising reality, the awakened mind, still, you have no way to cut the root of conditioned existence.
Thus, work with the means of realising dependent arising. Whoever sees the infallible relation between a cause and its effects in all things of cyclic existence and beyond, and brings to an end holding them as real, has entered onto the path that pleases the Buddhas. As long as the two—appearance as infallible dependent arising, and emptiness as freedom from assertion as true—appear distinct, one from the other, you have not yet realised the subtle thought. But when they no longer alternate but coincide, such that in the mere seeing of the infallibility of the dependent arising, definite knowledge totally destroys the way you conceive of things as real, then your analysis of the view is complete.
Moreover, the extreme of true existence is dispelled by appearance and that of nonexistence by emptiness. If you understand the way emptiness finds expression within the context of cause and effect, you no longer will be captivated by extreme views. Then, when you would realise just as they are, these essentials of the three principal aspects of the path, retreat to solitude, intensify your joyous effort and quickly, my child, fulfil your ultimate dream. So again, make strong determination, having put this much effort in so far to prepare our mind to do the analytical meditation, then make the determination to keep your mind always within the borders of this analysis, not letting it go beyond, not letting it be subject to all the different meditation hindrances of dullness and sleepiness, boredom, or agitation coming from being distracted by sounds, different sensations arising in the body, and our own thoughts.