Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Dondrub delivers a 45-minute teaching on karma from a Buddhist perspective, examining why virtuous and harmful thoughts are not arbitrary cultural categories but natural laws of mind. He opens by establishing that positive actions rooted in understanding produce happiness, while negative actions rooted in ignorance produce suffering—the cause lies always within one’s own mind. He clarifies that karma operates through imprints left by thoughts, which ripen into effects typically in future lives rather than immediately; this life itself is already a karmic result, leaving no temporal space for this life’s causes to mature here. Dondrub walks through how ego-grasping and misunderstanding our interdependence drive all negative karma—killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, slander—and how meditation as familiarity with our true nature and positive qualities is the key to liberation. He closes by emphasizing that moment-to-moment choice and understanding give us complete potential control over our minds and destiny. Suited for those new to Buddhist ethics and the causal framework underlying practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 1998 02 19 The Hidden Patterns of Life – a Buddhist View of Karma.mp3
UUID: 37619e9b-9b63-4051-a11a-3536c6d5fbfc
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Public and Sunday Talks (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 1998-02-19
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,213
So the cause has to lie within one’s own mind and be of the same nature. Or in other words, if one does something that is skillful, virtuous, that is somehow connected more with a correct perception of how things are, some understanding of reality, doing something from that perspective, with that kind of motivation, that kind of understanding, when you do actions like that, which are called positive actions from a Buddhist point of view or virtuous actions, then the resulting experience, the effect is experienced within one’s own mind. So that experience is some kind of happiness, some kind of calmness, clarity, happiness. Peace. Contentment.
It has to be like that. And if there is an if one does things with a negative motivation, a negative kind of thought within the mind, it’s based on an incorrect perception of the way things are. Then that leads to a suffering effect, a suffering result. Am I making any sense? It’s getting too complicated.
Right. Right. So on on this point, talking about positive and negative actions, people can say that what what people think of as being positive and negative or virtuous or non virtuous, good and bad, these are very arbitrary things. They change with time within our culture, particularly in our culture, very rapidly now. And also They change what one culture thinks is good, another culture thinks is bad.
So this how can this explain how things work? But from the Buddhist point of view, when we we talk about something being positive and negative, virtuous or not. Virtuous. It is not something arbitrary, cultural, that changes with time. But it is very much related to how one affects the mind.
So any any action, any thought that motivates one’s actions, that obscures the mind, and it comes from an ignorance that is already obscuring the mind, that in its very nature is negative. It’s negating the the the potential of the mind because mind is what knows, and the mind has the ability to know things perfectly, completely, totally. And whenever you know something perfectly, completely, totally, you experience it perfectly and completely. And so it’s totally satisfying. It’s totally meaningful and enjoyable.
In other words, it’s peace. It’s happiness when the mind is able to function perfectly. Now when you know when one is knowing experiencing things completely, which is the function, the potential of the mind while it’s experiencing real contentment, happiness. But we have within us various thoughts that obscure, that that don’t enable us oh, sorry. These these disturbed thoughts that we have within our mind have the function of continuing to disturb the mind, to not enable it to know things perfectly.
Alright. This is what an affliction is by or a disturbed thought by definition. It’s it’s what it does is disturb the mind, disturb the basic clarity, calmness, peace, and potential for happiness, which is always there. So these these afflictions, these delusions that we have in our mind, these negative thoughts aren’t negative arbitrarily. That is their very nature.
They are negative because they disturb the mind. And when the mind is disturbed, it is unhappy. And when it is unhappy, out of confusion, one creates more negativity, more disturbance, and more unhappiness, more confusion, which radiates out to other people as well. So these are not arbitrary things culturally imposed. These are something that applies to all beings at all times in all places, because all beings have mind, and the mind works in the same way.
It all mind has the same potential to know and experience happiness, perfect happiness. If we were just if we just allowed it to function. I don’t know when you sat and did that breathing meditation, did you find the mind becoming a little bit calmer? And clearer, even just a little bit? A tiny fraction.
Yeah. That that experience of some bit of calmness and clarity came because when you try to focus for one’s awareness on one thing, the disturbing thoughts can’t arise so strongly. When the disturbing thoughts don’t arise so strongly, then the natural quality of the mind starts to manifest. It’s natural calmness, clarity, and peace, and natural happiness starts to manifest even just a little bit because it’s always there. It’s not something one actually has to manufacture.
The potential for it is always there. Yeah. But we, in our confusion, always obscure our mind again and again because we follow our disturbing thoughts again and again, which just churn up our mind and don’t just don’t allow us to experience the natural calmness, clarity, and peace of the mind. So surely, anything that does that is negative. It’s negating our happiness.
It’s negating our potential for happiness. It’s not something cultural. It’s just very within the nature of the mind, the mind of every living being. So negative thoughts have to produce suffering, confusion, limitation. And the negative thoughts, the principal negative thoughts are our own ignorance, not understanding our true nature, which produce thoughts of anger, attachment, pride, jealousy, worry, fear.
Why do we fear things? It’s because we don’t allow ourselves to know things properly, correctly. Why is there bigotry in the world? We fear other people because they have a different color skin or they have a different religion or they have a different language or they have a different culture or they do things differently, and I don’t know these things. And because I don’t know them, I’m afraid.
Yeah. It frightens me. But if you know things perfectly, there’s no no reason for fear. Absolutely no way the mind can experience fear if it is knowing things completely. So all fear and disturbing thoughts come from our confused nature.
This this is what is negative karma. These negative thoughts, and they produce suffering. That is the effect. That can be the only effect. It’s not imposed by anybody else or by a god or anything.
It’s not imposed by the weather. One’s bad husband, wife, parents, anything else is just coming from within one’s own mind. When we follow our own disturbing thoughts, we eventually have to experience experience the effect from them, which is suffering. If we develop the if we follow the positive thoughts within our mind, such as love, compassion, patience, perseverance, our intelligence, our wisdom, if we if we do actions motivated by those thoughts, those things have to produce happiness, peace, contentment. Not because somebody is controlling the situation, It’s because that is how the mind works.
So if this is true, if there is mind, it’s not the brain, and we all have mind, it has it works in a particular way, and this is the law of cause and effect. Negative thoughts produce suffering, and virtuous positive thoughts coming from love and compassion and wisdom, these produce happiness. Nothing else produces happiness. Other things can produce some temporary pleasure or the illusion of happiness, but they don’t produce the real thing because the real thing is an experience of one’s own pure mind, purified, clear mind. And, actually, everything that we’re experiencing out in the outer world for us even to come in contact with physical things, it has we experience it through our mind.
To be have this body actually, this body is an expression of our mind. To be to have this this life is an expression of our mind. It is an experience coming from our mind fundamentally. So the cause for this body, this life, this world doesn’t lie out there. It lies within the mind.
The cause is within the mind. This is the law of cause, in fact. It’s a completely different way of thinking, of course, than what we normally think. It’s something very radical. So one should think about it quite a bit to check up.
But just some, you know, some simple points that many of you have already heard. If the if the world was really like we perceive thought it was, it’s something independent of us, not dependent on our mind. If it was really like that, and this is what we assume is true. If it was like that, then all our everything that we perceived and experienced, people would agree with. They would say this is true.
The way I perceive things is reality, and everyone would agree with that. But if that was true, the world would be in perfect peace because we would all agree about everything, because we’d be all experiencing because there’s just this world. Right? There’s just one world, this round thing floating in space with trees poking up out of it and bits of water floating through it and stuff like that and a certain number of human beings. And if they’re all exactly like we think they are from their own side independently, then everyone would be perfectly happy because we’d all agree on it because it’s all exactly like that, but it’s not because we all see things with our own mind in our own way, and that’s why we fight because we’re so convinced my perception is true.
But we’re only experiencing our own movie, basically. And the cause of that movie is our own mind. So if this is true, it means that we we have to work with our mind. We have to avoid creating negative karma, that is following negative thoughts, not because these negative thoughts are something imposed by some religion in some arbitrary way, but that is the nature. Some thoughts are negative by their nature, and they naturally produce suffering.
They can’t do anything else. Just like in the physical world, if you take poison, it will naturally kill you. That’s its nature. It’s not being controlled by anything else. It’s just how things work, and our mind works in a particular way.
When you negate the potential of the mind with with harmful thoughts, ignorant thoughts, one has to suffer because one is creating obscured experiences, limited mental experiences. If you start to clear the mind, make the more the mind more expansive with love, compassion, tolerance, patience, intelligence, wisdom, equanimity, more more selflessness, when the mind expands like that, what can happen? You can only have a more expansive experience, a more open, enjoyable, anxiety free experience. How could it be any other way? I have to make one special point.
We’ve gone on too long about the one thing. But also in the teachings the Buddhist teachings on the law of cause and effect, what what it’s also pointing out is that it’s very obvious that we can see in this life, if we check, that when we do something, it produces an effect in this life. This is obvious. Right? If you do something good in this life, it can have a good effect in this life.
If you do something bad in this life, one can see some bad effects in this life. This is very obvious. But the so this is not this is not what is really meant by the law of cause and effect when one creates a good karma and produces a good result. Because what what is really meant by by the law of cause and effect and creating karma is that when you when you generate a thought, and we’re generating thoughts all the time. We’re generating subtle thoughts, gross thoughts.
We have some thoughts that last for a short time, some thoughts that last a long time. But we are generating thoughts all the time. So every time we generate a thought within the mind, it also creates an imprint in the mind, a karmic potential, a karmic energy, a mental energy, maybe anyway an energy in the mind associated with the mind. So it is that energy that will produce at some future point when all the causes and conditions come together, it will produce an effect, a result. And but these results usually don’t come, generally speaking, for us as ordinary people, they don’t come in this life.
They come in a future life. So, of course, some effects come in this life. If you say nice things to people in this life, then people like you. You get a good reputation, it’s easy to make friends, and good things happen to you in this life. But that’s not really what is meant by the law of the main teaching on the law of cause and effect.
Because when you say something nice to someone, also there is a thought motivating that thought that saying something nice. There’s some kind of thought of love, tolerance in the mind that has motivated you to say that. So that thought that motivates one’s good speech, that thought creates an imprint, a karmic energy. And that karmic energy will produce a result not in this life, but in a future life. And when it produces the result, it will produce the result of happiness when all the causes and conditions are met.
So from one good action done in this life, you can get good results in this life, but the main karmic result doesn’t come in this life. It comes in a future life. Just like when you in the physical world, when you plant a seed in the ground, that seed can remain in the ground for a long time. It you put the seed in the ground, it doesn’t grow straight away. It takes quite a bit of time and it depends on all the causes and conditions coming together.
You have to have a right amount of nutrients in the soil, the right amount of moisture, the right amount of heat. When all those things come together, then the plants, the seeds sprouts and produces an effect, a result, but not until all those conditions come together. So it’s a little bit like that with the mind. With every thought, we create a karmic seed, and that karmic seed remains with the mind. And then at some point, all the causes and conditions come together and that karmic seed ripens.
So depending on the cause, the seed ripens with a particular effect. If it was a negative thought, it’s created a negative imprint that produces suffering, which manifests in either having a suffering body, being being born in a suffering environment, meeting suffering situations. Because of those things, one suffers. This is the law of cause and effect. And the reason why one doesn’t experience the main results of our actions in this life, one doesn’t experience the real karmic result in this life is because this life itself is a karmic result.
This life is an effect. It’s an experience. It’s an effect that has a cause. So the cause has to be come before this life because the effect is now. The effect is this life.
So the cause has to be before this life. Just as, you know, with a pot of tea, to have the effect of a pot of tea, you have to put the tea in the pot sometime before to make the tea. Then you have a pot of tea. So right now we have this life. So this life is an effect.
So it has a cause. So the cause has to be before this life. You can’t create the cause while the effect is going on. The effect the cause has to be before the effect. So because this effect is going on now, there’s no space in it.
It’s just roughly speaking for the the causes we’re that we’re creating in this life to have an effect in this life. They have to wait somehow until the effect of this life has run out, then these other causes can produce their effect. The causes that we’ve created in this life can then start to have their effect in a future life. This is very important for people who are Buddhists who are trying to follow these teachings to remember this point because often when we follow a spiritual practice and and we try to do all these good things and and change our mind, to get rid of our negative thoughts, modify them and become, you know, loving, virtuous, wise, wonderful people. When we try to do all these things and we, you know, and work and work and work at it, but after some time, we think, oh, I haven’t changed very much.
It doesn’t work. But this is because we haven’t understood the law of cause and effect. Of course, are some changes in the lot in this life, but the real changes, the great changes won’t come about until our future lives. This is what we have to understand and accept and be patient with. Because the mind we’re experiencing in this life is being influenced by all the karma created from before.
I mean, just generally speaking, if we if we really advance and become very powerful practitioners and develop insights, then the karma can be experienced in this life. The great results can be experienced in this life. But generally speaking, the positive and negative things we do in this life, the real results, the main results can’t be experienced in this life. So one should bear that in mind in terms of the good things we do, that we shouldn’t be disappointed that we don’t get wonderful things in this life as a result of it. But in future lives, the good results will definitely come.
But also one should be aware that all the negative things that we do in this life will produce suffering in the future. This is something really important to understand because often we think, you know, we do negative things and we think, oh, if the laws of cause and effect works, I should suffer right now. Yeah. But nothing’s happened. It’s okay.
I’m happy. I’m smiling. And then you kind of think, oh, I got away with it. I did this negative thing and the sky didn’t come down on me. So, you know, I’ll I’ll sneak in another one.
I’ll get away with it again. But the mind doesn’t work like that. One one, in fact, doesn’t even have to know that one is creating negative karma. One can do negative things believing they’re good, but if they are in their nature negative in a sense that they obscure the mind, one will suffer in the future. Because karma doesn’t work because you believe it or not.
If it if it worked like that, then it’s better not to believe it. Then we’re we’re free of it. But plants grow because of sunlight, not because plants don’t have to believe that photosynthesis works. It just does. So karma also works because it’s the natural working of the mind.
And in fact, all suffering grows out of ignorance, not because we’re innately evil or terrible, but we do things out of ignorance, ignorance, out of confusion. And out of our ignorance and confusion, we obscure our mind and therefore suffer. People kill other people to be happy, but it’s out of ignorance. And so they will have to suffer for that because they’ve obscured their mind. And that obscured mind in the future life will be a very suffering state of existence, existence, a very suffering experience.
People kill animals thinking it’s entertaining or very manly or it’s something good to do. But the mind, that is an ignorant mind misunderstanding reality, and that mind in the future will suffer from those actions no matter how many people say it’s okay to kill animals. Because one yeah. Anyway. Because one can also see, if one really checks, that animals have minds.
Animals have feelings. Feeling is mind, and there’s only one kind of mind. There’s just mind. It’s all the same, and all our minds are interrelated. They’re separate, they’re unique, but they are interrelated.
And we’re all interdependent. All totally we are all totally interdependent. So another way of looking at what negative karma is is all our negative thoughts are all come from a like a very strong selfishness, strong ego grasping, holding the view that I am so important. I am the center of the universe. My happiness, my problems are the most important thing in the world.
We all have that ignorance that holds this view, thinking I am so important. That is the source of all our suffering. In our wish to have real happiness, we just follow our egocentric mind, our selfish mind, and all negative karma comes from that thought. One kills because my happiness, my happiness right now or my problem right now is more important than the life of another living being. Alright.
That is a very ignorant, confused mind thinking that. A mind that doesn’t really understand the nature of other sentient beings and our interconnection. We steal. That that is a negative thought. Wanting to steal is a negative action.
Why do we steal? Because I want this thing right now. Right? And it doesn’t matter that this belongs to someone else. I want it.
The thought of I is so strong that it blinds one’s awareness of other people and their needs. Right? One creates harm through, sexual misconduct for the same reason. My desires right now are so important. We lie because my needs, my reputation, my my personality, I have to maintain me like this right now.
This is so important. So I lie about things to maintain a certain appearance of myself in the eyes of others. Not caring about the effects on other people. We criticize other people. We slander out of jealousy and pride.
We cause we cause division between people because of our pride and jealousy. Think my wish is so important. It all comes from this wrong view of our self, this inflated view of our self, all our negative thoughts. Negative thoughts. And this inflated view completely misunderstands how I exist and what my relationship with other people is, my actual relationship with other people is.
This inflated sense of I says, I am independent. I am so wonderful and special from my own side. I don’t depend on other people. I don’t need other people. I can use other people.
And that is completely false. It is utterly false. We are all totally in dependence upon each other. Always have been, always will be. The more we deny that, the more we suffer because we’re denying reality.
So if we want to experience happiness, we have to create the cause ourself. If we don’t want suffering, we have to avoid the causes of suffering and these causes of happiness and suffering are within our mind, not out there. These are only secondary conditions and even to experience these secondary things, good and bad out there, these are again, really they come down to our their experiences within our mind. So even to meet external good conditions and bad conditions, this is the ripening of our good and bad karma. If we haven’t created the cause, we can’t experience the effect.
If we’re experiencing the effect, we have created the cause. The cause is coming from within our mind. These are the main things to understand about karma, how our mind works. And if we don’t work with our mind, transform our mind, subdue — not repress, but subdue — our negative thoughts in a skillful, compassionate, loving way. If we don’t do that, we will never have happiness.
We will only have suffering. Because the key to everything is our mind, our own mind, and only we can work with our own mind. And also, I haven’t left time to say this but some people think about the the teachings on the law of cause and effect seems to say that something everything is very fixed. These causes have been created in the past, so therefore I have to experience them without any control. It doesn’t mean that.
It means actually the very opposite because we’re in this situation as human beings with intelligence and the intelligence to understand things, we can change our situation. Moment by moment, every moment, we can make the choice. We can make the choice to follow our negative thoughts and therefore create more negative karma and encourage the condition for all our previous negative karma to ripen and therefore experience suffering and more suffering again and again, more confusion again and again, more limitation again and again, more suffering to others again and again, or in each moment, we can make the choice to purify our mind. And we can make the choice each moment to to follow and develop our positive qualities, to develop our intelligence, our wisdom, our love, our compassion, our patience. Because these qualities exist within our mind right now.
We don’t have to make them up. They’re actually there, but we’ve buried them in a sea of confusion of negative thoughts. If we work with our mind just like we did for one minute, two minutes tonight, a result comes straight away. Some clarity comes. There’s a chance for our our wisdom, our compassion, and and love to develop in in in that space already.
So it it all lies within our own hands. Not anybody else on in this world, in space. It doesn’t depend on the Buddha, God, anybody. It all depends on us, moment by moment. It all depends on us making the right choices with our own wisdom moment by moment.
And every time we make a right choice, our wisdom and clarity develops, and it’s easier to make a better choice the next time. And our wisdom and clarity grows and grows. We’re less confused, more at peace. We don’t cause confusion to others. We can bring more peace into the minds of others just because we have more peace in our own mind.
And actually, as we develop our mind, develop the inner potentials of our mind, we can actually really influence people in a very profound, positive, lasting way. And this is the real potential of being human being. The potential to give real happiness to others. So I’ll stop here. Sorry.
It was a bit long. There is just a few points on karma. But it’s a very, very profound subject. But if you have some questions, if I can try to answer. But we just wait for somebody to hear me.
This was extremely clear and you understood perfectly or you’re totally confused. Yes? Something that came up with when you were talking about independence. Yeah. My notion of independence is that everything causes everything else.
There isn’t a cause. Right. Right. Yes. There’s no single cause.
That’s what I’m trying to say. So there’s no no single cause of anything? Yeah. There were yes. But yeah.
There are many causes, but also secondary causes, but one can also say that for our own experiences, the root cause, the main cause lies within our own mind. For each each effect, there is a cause. But for that cause to come about in the past, it depended on many causes, of course. Yes. But we can create all these causes moment by moment.
I understand, and and and I and I can like, I hear what you’re saying, and and and what I get is if everything is interconnected like this, I do No. But within your own mind, you do. In in the whole world, the whole universe is such. No. But still, you can have a very profound influence in the whole universe.
But within your own mind, you are the key. Only you. Your mind is experiencing itself, no other mind. So if you don’t want to experience suffering, your mind has to avoid the causes that lie within itself. If your mind wants to experience happiness more and more, then your own mind has to allow its innate potentials to to develop.
That’s all within your mind. Mhmm. Right. Period. Yes.
Yeah. Of course, you can learn from pain and that’s exactly what as human beings now with a clear mind, we can do that. We can learn how that our our pain is coming from our own causes and we can learn not to create those causes in the future or even right now. There is a view that, you know, we we are we are born into the world to learn things, but this is implying something is controlling that. So this is contrary to the Buddhist view and the law of cause and effect.
That if you say these things, I’m placed here to learn something, someone’s put you here. If someone’s put you here, then you have no control. And you’re just an arb you’re a hopeless helpless little thing that something something else is manipulating? You learned this, you don’t learn that, now you learn this. We have no hope, I think, from this point of view, but the law of cause and effect says everything is coming from one’s things you’ve done yourself and that means we have complete control.
We have the potential for complete control. Right now, we are out of control. We don’t have much control out of our lives because we haven’t understood that we have the ability to understand right now. And as soon as we understand, and that is the nature of mind. Mind understands.
Mind knows. And mind has the potential to know everything perfectly. That’s that’s what it does. So as soon as you allow the mind to know things more and more, one has control more and more and more until eventually one is perfectly free, perfectly liberated, completely enlightened. So this comes from the inner knowing Yes.
From meditation. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Meditation means to as some of you know, the Tibetan word for meditation simply means familiarity.
What and that familiarity means being familiar with one’s own innate qualities, becoming familiar with what is true, positive, meaningful. At the moment, our mind is unfortunately familiar with what is not true or not completely true and what is not very virtuous and positive and meaningful. Sorry to insult you, but we’re all in this boat, me too especially. We’re all like that. So meditation is a process of moving away from being familiar with what is not so real and not so beneficial to becoming familiar with what is actually true and meaningful and positive for oneself and others, which means, in a sense, becoming familiar with the true nature of one’s mind, Not the superficial confused aspect that we we’re a little bit aware of and we don’t want to know, which we continually try and distract ourselves with.
But becoming going beyond that and becoming familiar with our true nature, our Buddha nature. Yeah. From a from a Tibetan Buddhist personal experience, there’s no such thing as a random event. But like his holiness Dalai Lama points out that when a when a a like in a forest, when a a branch falls off a tree