Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 91-minute teaching, Ven Thubten Dondrub addresses the common misconception that Buddhist compassion is merely external charity. He argues that real compassion begins with acknowledging one’s own suffering—not just obvious pain, but the subtle dissatisfaction woven into samsaric life. Drawing on Buddhist analysis, he explores three levels of suffering: the suffering of pain, the suffering of change (why pleasure doesn’t last), and the pervasive suffering underlying all conditioned existence. A key theme is that everyone deserves compassion, even the seemingly fortunate—the wealthy cling to riches, the beautiful fear aging, the intelligent grow proud. Dondrub challenges his audience to see that genuine compassion for others requires first developing genuine compassion for oneself by recognizing delusion and self-cherishing as suffering. He concludes that meditation and mental training are themselves compassion in action, and that stable internal transformation best supports effective external help. The talk ends with a guided contemplation on universal liberation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 2000 05 28 Compassion in Action.mp3
UUID: d95ed857-b4db-40af-b4b3-7d53d165ccf3
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Public and Sunday Talks (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2000-05-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 90.9 minutes
Words: ~9,099
In the existence of Buddha and the perfect qualities of the Buddha of great compassion and wisdom, We take trust, place our confidence in the qualities of the Buddha’s teachings as being a perfect, unbetrayable guide to the path to liberation and enlightenment. And we take our place our trust in the qualities of the great practitioners of the Buddhist path, which we call the Sangha, the Ārya Sangha. So, in order to prepare our mind for listening to the talk, we can, if one wishes to join in, say the prayer of taking refuge and generating the thought of bodhicitta, the wish to achieve enlightenment. So this is on page one. Can say the So I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about compassion in action.
So I’m not quite sure what was meant by this topic, the person who thought it up, what they actually wanted me to talk on. But especially at the present time, there is a view that many religions, particularly contemplative religions like Buddhism, are very self centered and always just thinking about oneself and gazing at the navel, and it’s all very impractical and so on. People talk a lot about compassion and so on, but don’t put it into action. And the important thing, real compassion, is where you get out on the street and really knuckle down to it and do all sorts of physical things to help people. So, of course, to some extent this is true, that compassion is about helping people.
But what most people see as compassion, of going out, helping the poor, helping the sick, the starving, and so on. That these are the main objects of compassion and the main ways to be compassionate, helping homeless people on the street, people with serious drug problems and so on all these terrible, obvious kinds of suffering and doing something about that that’s real compassion and that’s it. And people who aren’t doing those things aren’t being compassionate. So people doing those things are being compassionate, but there’s more to compassion than that. Much more.
And this is the normal view of compassion. So I’d like to talk about something else than that. So because I’m sorry if some of you have heard me talk before, always say the same things again and again and again, so I’m going to say the same things again and again and again. But one of the things I normally say at the beginning of every talk, because it has a great deal of meaning, think, is that myself and every living being, we want to experience happiness, and at the same time we don’t want to experience suffering of any kind. Everything we do is to achieve some kind of happiness and to be free of suffering.
But suffering in the Buddhist context has a very great, extensive and profound meaning, much more than the obvious suffering that we normally think of. And of course, it is wonderful to try and stop the obvious suffering in the world of poverty and disease and homelessness and injustice and obvious injustice and all these kinds of things. Of course, this has to be done. But from a Buddhist perspective, one can try as much as one can to stop disease, poverty, and so on. But one, at the most, one can only modify these things.
You can cure someone, you can spend endless years sorry, many years helping someone with a disease and they get cured. You can help people to get out of poverty and find a job and this and that, but still, in the case of disease, people are going to die. And endless amounts of money are spent in helping the poor, and yet it doesn’t stop poverty. People are still going to die, take birth, and suffering is going to continue. So the suffering of this life is one suffering, but it’s not the only suffering.
So Buddhism tries to have this much broader perspective. And sometimes, in just working to try and alleviate the suffering of this life, one forgets that there are there’s more to it than that. And Buddhism is trying to encourage us to develop a mind that is working to alleviate all suffering, not just the obvious suffering, not to just stop obvious suffering and the suffering of this life. There’s the suffering of future lives to consider and much more subtle levels of suffering to consider. So this is what I’d like to talk a little bit about.
Again, I’d like to make the emphasis that I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned and work to stop the suffering of this life, the obvious suffering of this life, but there’s more to it than that. Again, maybe to go back a bit, what is compassion? There’s many ways that we could answer that question, what we think compassion is. In Buddhism, there is a very simple definition of what compassion is, and it’s defined simply as it is a thought. Actually, it is a thought.
It’s not a feeling. It’s a thought or a way of thinking or a way of conceiving that wishes suffering to stop, wanting suffering to stop. So this includes one’s own suffering and the suffering of others. And, of course, a basic point is that in order to develop compassion but in order to have genuine compassion for others, That is a mind wanting really to stop the suffering of others. We have to first be able to feel our own suffering and develop a mind that wants to be free of our own suffering.
You can’t do it the other way around. Think of the suffering of others and then develop compassion for yourself, or just completely forget compassion for oneself and only have compassion for others. That’s impossible. One has to have, firstly, a genuine compassion for oneself, and having that, one is able to then have a valid basis for developing and practicing real compassion for others. So the beginning of all compassion is allowing ourselves to feel our own suffering, to recognize, firstly, to admit that we are suffering, that we are dissatisfied, incomplete, not perfectly happy, that this is our state always, And to really feel that most worldly life, ordinary life, of the vast majority of all beings at all times, in all cultures, is to deny that fact.
At the beginning of the Buddha’s teachings, the very first thing that the Buddha taught was that life is suffering, that everyone is experiencing this, not just oneself, but ordinary life, while we have a confused mind, there is only suffering. The more we deny that, the more we are practicing a lack of compassion towards ourselves. Worldly life is a lack of compassion to oneself. Worldly life is much of it involves denying suffering. I am not suffering.
I am happy. I am successful. I am this. I am that. There are no problems, I am okay.
And if there are little ones, one chases for distractions to deny facing the situation. This situation of denying our suffering is not being compassionate to ourselves. And while we do that, we can’t be compassionate to others. We can be a little bit compassionate, but not genuinely and deeply. The Buddha’s teachings think most of you have heard some of these teachings.
So one of the fundamental points is that we all have every living being, every sentient being. A sentient being is someone who has a consciousness, a living being with consciousness. So every consciousness, every mind has Buddha nature, Buddha potential. So every mind, whether it s a human mind or, to put it accurately, a mind in a human body or a mind in an animal body or a mind in any other kind of body, has this Buddha nature, therefore has the potential for incredible, great compassion. We have this potential within our mind for unbelievable compassion for others, the compassion that can feel the suffering of every living being, understand it and feel it completely.
But that compassion isn’t operating at the moment. It’s repressed. It’s suppressed in countless ways. But we do have some compassion that most of us, fortunately, have some compassion right now. So we have some compassion for our family, our friends, the people we directly know.
But, in a sense, this is not enough. This amount of compassion is nothing special. It’s inhuman if we don’t feel compassion for the suffering of the people directly around us. So it’s no big deal to think, Oh, I’m quite a compassionate person because I care for my family and my friends. So what?
Everyone does that. Even dogs do that. Even cats like their family and friends. They don’t want their family and friends to suffer. There’s nothing special to feel compassion for one’s family and friends.
We have this ability to feel compassion beyond our family and friends. In fact, we have capacity, the potential to feel compassion for every living being, absolutely every living being, without exception. We have this potential. And the Buddha argues that when develop that compassion and the love that goes with it, and all the other good qualities that go with it, that brings about the state of perfect happiness that we’ve always been seeking. Strangely enough.
So, as you probably all know, but I’ll just mention this a bit again because it’s an important point of developing compassion and putting compassion into action. As I said at the beginning, we tend to think of compassion sorry, compassion is the mind relating to suffering, and we tend to think of suffering as just obvious pain, physical pain and mental pain that comes from, for example, poverty and disease and social repression, political repression, things like this. Know, various kinds of physical pains and so on. But this is only one kind of suffering, the most obvious kind of suffering which in Buddhist jargon is called the suffering of suffering. But it’s not what is really meant by suffering in the Buddhist context.
It’s just the first level of suffering. A much more subtle level of suffering Also, as it’s taught in the teachings, don’t have to be a human being to be able to recognize the suffering of suffering. Even dogs and other animals can recognize that. They don’t want obvious suffering of hunger, pain, cold, being beaten, being denied their freedom. Even an animal can recognize that those situations are suffering.
But there’s much more suffering in existence than that. So a more subtle kind of suffering. And the point is, if we think that suffering is just this obvious pain, then our compassion can only grow to that extent. We see other people who are obviously suffering, and we can try and generate compassion for those people that are obviously suffering. For the people who are very poor, very depressed, very oppressed, very unhealthy, etcetera, etcetera.
But we have no compassion for the rest of living beings, the vast mass of other living beings. But the Buddha said that this vast other mass of living beings who aren’t in obvious suffering are suffering and deserve compassion, need compassion. We tend to think only the ugly are suffering, only the poor are suffering, only the unhealthy are suffering, only the mentally disturbed are suffering, only the oppressed are suffering. But everyone is suffering in some way or another. Suffering not in the sense of experiencing gross pain, but suffering in the sense of experiencing some kind of dissatisfaction, discontent, anxiety, lack of fulfillment, a sense of emptiness within them.
Every living being experiences that, either very powerfully or subtly, but it’s there all the time. As you probably have all heard at least once before, there is another level of suffering called the suffering of change. Which we, as ordinary people, call happiness. Every good experience that we can think of, pleasurable experience of body or mind, or combination thereof, is what the Buddha called the suffering of change. It is not real happiness.
There are many ways to explain that. The obvious one, the simplest way to understand why what we call happiness is not happiness is because it simply doesn’t last. We all have many wonderful memories of good times, but that’s exactly what they are. They are memories. And right now, maybe it’s not such a nice thing to say, but right now, for us, our life may be going along fantastically well, but it’s quite possible that one day this will be a memory, just like all the other good times were a memory.
Because all the good experiences we have depend external things, our body, which is an external thing, other people, possessions, wealth, fame and fortune, fame, reputation, and so on, all external things that themselves are changing all the time. So this happiness fizzles out sooner or later. And certainly, whatever happiness we have in this life, any kind of happiness we have in this life, comes to an end at the time of death. It’s finished. So this situation is unsatisfying.
Who wants happiness that comes to an end? Just to experience happiness that comes to an end, to work so hard in countless ways, to have experiences that just fizzle out. We don’t want that. When In the statement that everyone wants to be happy and to be free of suffering, we want happiness that lasts forever. We want perfect happiness that lasts forever.
And we want to be free of all suffering always. It is impossible to have any other wish. This wish is an expression of our Buddha nature. The wish for happiness will never go away until we are happy. The wish to be free of suffering will never stop until we are free of suffering.
Trouble is, we don’t do the right things to bring that about unless we’re very good Buddhists practicing. So the Buddha said I don’t know if he said this directly, but anyway, all the teachings of the Buddha imply that what we call happiness doesn’t deserve the title happiness. It’s a misnomer. It’s misleading advertising. It’s just, at the best, an illusion of happiness.
And it’s just temporary. It’s temporary pleasure, just the illusion of happiness. And when it comes to an end, it can only be replaced by something less pleasant, something that we don t want. So this situation itself is frustrating, disappointing, depressing, confusing. And there is this old expression we have that the higher you go, the harder you fall.
Right? The more happiness, the more built in suffering. Because the higher that happiness is, and even the longer it lasts, the more terrible when it comes to an end. Terrible when it comes to an end. Because it will if our happiness is based on external things.
So this kind of happiness This happiness is a type of suffering, so everyone experiences this. When we see happy people, these happy people are objects of compassion, because this happiness is not happiness, and it will turn into obvious suffering sooner or later. So, for example, there is the obvious suffering of being poor, but there is the suffering of being rich. This is definitely a suffering state to be rich. It’s a state that most people want to experience thinking this is happiness, but it is not happiness.
It just brings the illusion of happiness. All it can bring is a temporary experience of happiness. So this situation is suffering. It is unfulfilling, ultimately frustrating, confusion, full of anxiety. And the more one is attached to it, the more suffering there is.
No one is attached to being poor. The rich are attached to being rich. This is suffering. There can be the suffering of being ugly, conventionally ugly, but there s also the suffering of being rich. Oh, sorry, beautiful.
Yeah, this is also suffering. Everyone wants to look good, look beautiful, and sexy, and desirable, and all these things, but this is suffering. It s not gross suffering or being in agony, but it is suffering. Because the people who have this situation cling to it, believing it s permanent. I m always going to be beautiful, handsome, desirable, attractive, wanted, admired.
But it doesn t last like that. This is frustrating, full of anxiety, because even at one level because we have a very crazy mind, so at one level we believe all our good things will never come to an end, but at another level we’re always anxious that they will. Something will get in the way. Someone is more beautiful, more desirable. There’s jealousy, pride, anxiety built into that, and attachment to it.
The more attachment, the more suffering. So there’s a meditation you can do, I think I well, anyway, of going through all these dualities to try and develop some more compassion, extend one’s compassion by seeing how everyone is in this kind of suffering. There’s the suffering of being very unintelligent, retarded. Such people are taken advantage of at the bottom of the economic pile and so on. Think that these people are objects of compassion, but also the very intelligent are objects of compassion.
Again, there is attachment to this state, pride and so on, connected with it. This is something. The thought that somehow being intelligent or more intelligent than others makes one inherently better than others. This is pride. And if one checks on the delusions, all the delusions are suffering.
They are painful every moment they’re operating. There is the obvious suffering of being in poor health, but there’s also the suffering of being in good health. Because when we’re in good health, we cling to that so much, again, thinking it’s permanent, lasting, so dependent on that, so anxious to lose it, so attached to it, but it can’t last. There’s the suffering of being a victim, but there’s also the suffering of being the victimizer. Actually, the victimizer possibly, one could argue, has more suffering than the victim.
Any kind of victim, victimizer you can think of is actually, in one way, a greater object of compassion than the victim. Because a victimizer, in order to to victimize somebody, must be in an incredible confused state of mind. And then the karma they are creating by harming others is going to produce incredible suffering for them in the future. And the point is, what is compassion? It is the only response to suffering.
Real compassion is not suffering for just in response to the suffering of nice people. Compassion is the response to suffering. But, just suffering. If you feel compassion for beautiful people but not for ugly people, this is not compassion. If you feel compassion for white people but not for black people, this is not compassion.
Love and compassion, which go together, always has to extend to anyone, to everyone. The real thing. Another way of looking at this changeable suffering, which we think of happiness as why it s suffering, is because it s only relative. Compared to something worse, what we experience looks like happiness. It’s just the gap between two periods of unhappiness.
Relatively, that gap looks like happiness, feels like happiness. From the perspective of a Buddha, what we’re experiencing now would be unbearable. It would never change it. The Buddha would never exchange what they re experiencing for the highest pleasures of a human being. Just wouldn t touch it with a ten foot pole.
It s suffering. But to us, it looks okay because we don’t really know what we can experience. We haven’t really experimented with our mind, the levels of our mind, and what we can really achieve in our mind. And then there is the most subtle level of suffering that everyone has, every living being has, all the time, and this basic this has a very complicated technical name called compounded pervasive suffering, which refers to the fact that just because we have this body and this mind, there is always the potential for suffering. We have a body and mind right now that is produced by delusions and karma.
And particularly, this mind is controlled by all sorts of negative thoughts. They may not be operating right now, but there is the potential within us for them to manifest at any moment. Because of our fundamental confusion, fundamental delusion in our mind of ignorance, not knowing our true nature, not knowing the true nature of all phenomena, There is this fundamental confusion in our consciousness. Moment by moment we misread reality. We see reality as something slightly different.
Because of that, attachment arises, anger arises, jealousy, pride, fears and doubts arise. That fundamental misunderstanding is always there. So even if a particular negative mind like desire or anger isn’t there, because ignorance is always there, sooner or later the delusions arise. The delusions produce suffering while they’re operating, and they create karma, negative karma, that produces more suffering in the future. So even in our most wonderful times, during our most wonderful moments of life, there is this most subtle level of suffering going on, just the mere fact that we have the potential for suffering, which can arise at any moment.
We may find this very hard to believe that we feel so secure in our situation now. This couldn’t possibly happen to me, but it could. If you read I mean, right now where I’m living, the newspaper gets delivered. I don’t always get a chance to read and watch television, right now the paper gets delivered every day and every page is just a nightmare of killing and lying and corruption and horrible things happening to people. And you think, oh, this couldn’t happen to me.
But it could, because the people that it happens to, they never think it’s going to happen to them. But it does. It happens the most bizarre, things happen to very ordinary people day after day after day. I think we’re too much influenced by movies where we know that this guy, this one, is going to have some weird thing happen to them. We know before it’s happened to them.
So we tend to think that life is like that. You can tell by the music what’s going to happen, right? So when we wake up in the morning, the music’s not playing, so we think everything’s okay. But the most bizarre things can happen, the most awful things. The people of Tibet lost their entire country just almost overnight.
You wake up, you know, as a monk in your monastery, and that day suddenly it s bombed. You ve never even seen a cannon in your life. But then the whole place gets bombed by an invading army. Couldn possibly happen. You couldn’t explain to the Tibetans before it happened that this was going to happen.
Totally impossible for that to happen. Totally impossible for someone to invade Australia and take over. It could never happen. You may think this is a very weird neurotic, psychotic way of thinking. Why think like that?
What a weird way to think. But the point is, it is a reality. It could happen. We have the potential within us for anything to happen. And to deny that is to deny reality, and to deny the truth is suffering.
Every time we deny what is true, we suffer, sooner or later. I mean, is the fundamental teaching of the Buddha, that the denial of reality is suffering. It is the source of all suffering. So this is the truth of our situation. If we recognize that, really, and feel that, allow ourselves to really feel what that means, to know what that means, then we can develop compassion for ourselves.
To deny that, reject it, and distract ourselves, and have a good time, have a wonderful time, have a wonderful, wonderful time, is to be totally uncompassionate to ourselves. When you look at other people rushing around, having spending a fortune on themselves, you think, Wow, they really take care of themselves. They re really concerned with themselves. From a Buddhist perspective, these people don t care about themselves at all. They have no real care for themselves because those things don’t bring about what we deeply need and want.
You know, we work so hard to get lots of money for immediate pleasure, but also for security, that a billion dollars, fifty billion dollars will never buy security from anything, from anything. Not one thing will fifty billion dollars protect you from. It will protect you from poverty, the abstract concept of poverty, but it won’t protect you from any of the things that poor people experience. But looking meaningful about it, that is working with one’s mind, really caring for what happens to one’s mind, not one’s reputation, one’s house, one’s hairdo, and so on. That is being really compassionate.
Taking care of the mind is where compassion taking care of our own mind is where compassion begins. So when we open our own suffering, acknowledge it, the first noble truth is in us all the time. Then the more we see it in ourselves, we can see it in others. There is not one living being anywhere that is not experiencing suffering. Either obvious suffering, the suffering of suffering, if not that, then the suffering of change if not that, the most subtle level.
That everyone has the potential for suffering, because we are all deluded. Whenever you see a living being who has even a little bit of desire attachment, a little bit of anger, a little bit of jealousy, doubt, pride, you can see they actually have the potential for vast amounts of these things. Therefore, they have suffering. So no external things are going to stop that. All we can do in giving money to the poor curing diseases is it brings about some temporary relief.
But while the mind is confused, there will always be suffering. So I’d just like to put in an advertisement for the Buddhist idea that the highest form of compassion for others is not to go around not only to go around doing external things to stop the suffering of others, but the highest form of compassion is to practice the Dharma, to achieve not just liberation, but complete enlightenment, so that one has all the qualities of great compassion and wisdom, skillful means and so on, to be able to guide others, not out of just temporary suffering, but to guide them out of the causes of suffering, to lead them beyond the causes of suffering. And those causes lie within each being’s mind. That is the highest compassion in action possible. Most of us aren’t capable of that right now, but that can be our goal.
Not just to be content, to modify the suffering of others, to be nice to a few, to modify the suffering of a few, but have, in the process of doing that, having this goal and really working for this goal to be able to benefit others in the most profound way possible, because we all have the potential to do that. And the more we work towards that goal, the more we can also be directly compassionate, effectively compassionate, for others right now. And, of course, basically, the way one becomes more compassionate is thinking about it, contemplating it, contemplating the suffering of oneself and others, just allowing oneself to think about it so that one can actually feel it, one can actually recognize it and feel it. And somehow, I can never explain this properly, but we as ordinary people, in order in order to be happy, we don’t want to know. View is that to be happy, we have to avoid knowing about suffering.
As soon as I feel suffering, I have to do something external to excite myself to make me happy, and that’s it. And if I see suffering of others, then if don’t see it, I’ll be okay. Because if I see it, if I see the suffering of others, I can’t bear it, it’ll destroy my happiness, so I don’t want to know about it. But in fact, in that process, for example, in many places of the world where the very rich live, they have to put up big walls around so they don’t see the suffering of others. Right next door there are all these shanties outside the walls.
You go around in huge limousines so you don’t see anything. Or even tourists who go to India, you make sure you stay in the most expensive, comfortable hotels and you’re driven to the nice parts so you don’t see all the really gruesome suffering of India. You just have this nice tourist brochure experience of India because if I see the real thing, it’ll destroy my holiday. But in order not to see suffering, which we think is a protection that will make us happy, what we actually have to do is make our mind cold. We have to suppress our potential for compassion because it’s there all the time.
It is a natural urge within us. I mean you’ve all come here today. Why did you come to here and talk about being prepared? Why do you want why do not you, me. Why do we want to become compassionate?
Why do we want to be compassionate? I don’t know if there’s a really logical answer. It’s just actually a drive, which actually comes from our Buddha nature, Because it’s the only thing we can be, really, finally. We are forced to be compassionate sooner or later. We’ve got to become compassionate.
If we obscure our mind often enough and get reborn in really suffering bodies and suffering situations and suffering states, we don’t act very compassionately to others. But that drive for compassion is still there. It can never be suppressed. Suppressing our compassion, that drive to compassion, is suffering. So somehow it seems kind of contrary, but the more we open to feeling the suffering of ourselves and others, that is the way to liberation from suffering.
Being afraid of suffering is suffering. Not being afraid of suffering is the beginning of the end of suffering. So one of the points I was trying to make, I think I got a little distracted, is that the way to be compassionate is to feel it, to open up to this by contemplating it, by meditating on these points, these things that I’m trying to say which are much better expressed in the sutras, in the teachings that you can read and from other great masters, but to contemplate these points, not just as abstract ideas but to see if these points are true and if they apply to oneself and if you can see them in others. This is actually true for others. To open up to this.
And the more we do this contemplation so that we become more aware of our own situation and therefore the situation of others, we can start to act compassionately, spontaneously. Because another quality that we have in our mind, also a reflection of our Buddha nature, is that we do have some wisdom or intelligence. And this is also something that we need to develop and waken up. Because as well as developing our compassion, we do need to develop our wisdom because without some wisdom our compassion can go wrong. We may want to stop the suffering of others and we want to feel the suffering of others and stop it, but if we don’t have wisdom we don’t act in the right way and we maybe cause ourselves suffering and other people more suffering.
So developing compassion involves being also a little bit wise, having a clear mind, an intelligent mind, an intelligent approach to things. But if develop these two qualities together, then and the more we allow ourselves to feel the suffering of others, we can act in the appropriate way. And compassion is is again, doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to stop the suffering of others. It’s the wish to do so. The Buddhas have great compassion, but they haven’t stopped the suffering of living beings.
But they certainly have this perfect, all encompassing wish to bring about the end of suffering for every living being, good and bad living being, every living Maybe I stop there. If you have some questions, I can try try and make things more direct, meaningful, or clear up some confusion. No, fortunately no. Yeah, yeah. Right.
Well, this is an often asked question, not necessarily in this context, but the question of what is a sentient being? I can only say what all the Buddhist teachers say, which is that vegetation is not sentient. It has a life force for sure, but it is not a sentient life force. There’s not consciousness connected with it. So trees and all kinds of vegetation and so on are not conscious and therefore they have no feeling, they have no suffering.
So they are not objects of compassion. Which doesn’t mean that you can still be concerned about them. There. No, not the wrong thing. You can still have concern for these things because they are also necessary for our life and this planet.
And like we all, not just human beings but countless other living beings depend on them because we’re all interconnected. But they are not suffering. I know there are experiments that demonstrate that vegetation responds to different kinds of emotions. If you talk to plants they grow better, which is taken as a proof that they have consciousness but I think it just shows that mind, virtuous thoughts, have all sorts of good effects. Negative thoughts can also, you know, can affect things, even non life living non conscious things in a negative way.
Yes. Having everything. Right. Yes. Yes.
Great, great. They have consciousness. Yeah. Yes, if you’re doing it with the right motivation because if you’re doing it with the right motivation, with a genuine powerful motivation, that’s what I was trying to argue, that is the highest form of compassion. Like for example, Milarepa, if you’ve heard of Milarepa, he’s like the extreme example of someone who spent his whole life in very remote places having very little contact with other human beings, some contact.
Especially in the early part later when he was believed to be enlightened he went around singing his songs and stuff and helping. But before that he completely, you know, just lived this very austere life far from everyone. But as a result of doing that, and he wasn’t going around helping people in a direct way at that time, but as a result of his practices he became an enlightened being and his example has benefited others ever since. So this is true, the highest form. But as His Holiness says, very few people can do that at any point in time.
Most of us can’t do that. So like His Holiness says, one can’t do that, then the next best thing is to teach the Dharma, to practice, because that directly shows the path away from suffering. But most people also can’t do that. I mean, I’m blabbing the Dharma but I’m not a true spiritual guide, I can maybe say something. Then His Holiness says if one can’t do those things then one should put one’s energy into really physically helping, putting that as the emphasis.
But again, what I’ve been trying to say is, in order to do that we have to work on our mind. Going out into the field, so to speak, trying to do whatever one can with this compassionate wish tends to go wrong sooner or later because like we get burnt out. Cause anyway, there’s a whole area I didn’t cover which I’ll now cover in five seconds, which is we all have this, we all have some compassion and the wish to be compassionate, but the trouble is what gets in the way is our own self-cherishing, which we all have. That self-cherishing is like how all our delusions work together, our desire, attachment, anger, everything comes together in this great thick tangle of stuff which is our self-cherishing. And if we don’t work on that, then our compassion doesn’t develop.
We go out and be kind and everything, but still that self-cherishing is there. And if we push ourselves too much, then the self-cherishing eventually reacts. So in order to be completely compassionate to others, we have to work on ourselves first, see our own suffering and recognizing that our self-cherishing, you know, is suffering to have compassion for the fact that I am controlled by self-cherishing, that I have to get rid of that. And the more one does that, the more one is being really compassionate to oneself and freeing one’s innate compassion towards others. And we have to do this like everything in the Buddha Dharma, step by step, not believing that I’m going to say that you meet the Dharma that has these wonderful bodhicitta and compassionate teachings and therefore I’m gonna be bodhisattva next week and stop all the suffering of the world, you know.
But this is not possible and we have to do it very very, you know, step by step gradually, very gently. We have to also be gentle with ourselves. Because we have all the delusions. So we shouldn’t hate ourselves for having the delusions. We need compassion for ourselves, towards ourselves for having the delusions.
Then if we can be compassionate towards ourselves for being angry people, jealous people, proud people, then we can feel compassion for other people who are also angry, nasty, proud, jealous and so on. But somehow we have to develop this practice where we work on ourselves and give to others to combine these two things. What we experience in our practice, in our spiritual practice, then we need to really test that on others and put it into practice. No, no, because the more we take our own pain away we can feel the pain of others and that causes us to grow, makes us grow. Who’s?
Ours? Yes, well it’s there, it’s there. Yeah. You can’t grow, we cannot grow while we deny firstly our own suffering when we admit that, we grow from that. But if we deny the suffering of others we can’t grow, so the more we open to that the more we develop.
And Yes, yes, it can. But in that beautiful place we somehow also feel the suffering of others. We have this strange conundrum that in this beautiful place we are totally open to the suffering of violence. Yeah, but that’s how you do. You open to that like, there are many levels like, the minimum fundamental definition of compassion is this a mind wanting others or wanting suffering to stop.
Right? But also that has the connotation of also taking responsibility for that. Because I am a disciplined way of thinking, you see, ask yourself, do you want your suffering to stop? There are two very definite mind states, different mind states. Do you want your suffering to stop?
Or do you want to stop your suffering? So the second one is compassion, the first one is just an ordinary childish mind, waiting for big deity, mommy, deity, God, the guru, the Buddha to take on suffering away. So everyone has that kind of selfish one, just please take my suffering away. But when we generate the mind, I’m going to stop my suffering, that is compassion for oneself. So anyway, there’s this basic thought, wanting to stop suffering.
So that is compassion, but the more we allow that feeling to really become strong in our mind and feel the suffering of others, then it becomes more and more unbearable and we have to do something about it. And first we just do a little bit with a few, but then if we allow ourselves to grow from that because something I said last night or the night before anyway, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama equates compassion and courage a great deal. Are very much I mean technically you can say they’re different things but when it comes down to it, they come back to be pretty much the same thing. The more you open to suffering, the more it makes you courageous. The more courageous you are, the more you can open to suffering and have this confidence of being able to deal with it.
So then one allows oneself to feel more and not just to open just to nice people and the most terrible, most obvious sufferings, but to more and more people. So we train our mind that way. And then ultimately one tries to develop compassion for what we think of as being terrible people because we also think that some people deserve to suffer. Some people deserve to suffer. While we have this thought, we don’t have real compassion.
From a Buddhist perspective, from the perspective of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, nobody deserves to suffer. Nobody, including Hitler, Mao, child rapists, everybody, none of these beings deserve to suffer. Because all terrible things are done out of confusion and ignorance, controlled by disturbing minds. If one person deserves to suffer, we deserve to suffer. No one deserves to suffer.
There is no inherent evil in the world, there is only delusion, confusion. So one way to try and develop compassion is just generating, you know, just contemplating this simple sentence of how wonderful it would be if everything being was free of suffering and its causes. Just to contemplate that, would it be wonderful or not? Would it be wonderful if every living being was completely free of all the levels of suffering and all the causes of suffering? So then you might come to the point where it would be wonderful if most people, but there are certain people who deserve to suffer, and I want them to suffer, and it’s necessary for them to suffer.
So while we have that thought, we ourselves are suffering and can never be happy. Because that is we look at it, it is a very hard mind wanting someone to suffer. And the point is actually, I think from Buddhist logic, the most evil what we think of as the most evil, terrible people in the world, actually, if they could be really happy now, if they were the first to get happy, to be perfectly happy, then all happiness in the world would very quickly take place. If all the good people got happy first, it couldn’t happen because all the bad people would make them miserable. But if all the terrible people got happy first, then then the other people would become happy because all the oppression, the terrible things would stop.
So definitely, what we call the enemy, our own personal enemy, the enemies of society, the enemies of the universe, whatever, these people are definitely, definitely the best objects of compassion. So it would be wonderful if every living being without exception was free of suffering and the causes of suffering. And to be able to do that in just that simple contemplation really well, one has to know what suffering is, it’s not just pain, but all these levels, permeating, how wonderful if everyone was free of all of it and all the causes. If we do that contemplation, then that can motivate us, give us the courage to do something. Because if we do it skillfully, step by step, a little bit at a time, then our mind does open because that is the nature of our mind.
Through the power of familiarity our mind gets bigger, more strong, more courageous, is able to bear more and more. The more we follow the self-cherishing thought, the more we suffer because the self-cherishing thought says, I can’t do this, and I’m afraid of this. So of course then we do it and we are afraid of it and it is unbearable. But if we challenge the self-cherishing thought, we undermine it just a little bit, it means we’re able to bear just a little bit more. We have that little less fear, little less confusion, a little less of all those barriers between ourselves and others operating.
So this can the self-cherishing can be eventually eroded away completely, and the mind cherishing others completely developed. And this begins by with compassion, compassion for oneself. I’m a suffering being, I’m controlled by self-cherishing, this great burden on my mind, always trapped by thinking about me. And it’s not even the me that is the real me. That’s the trouble.
It’s not the real me. It’s an illusory me that we’re worried about all the time. If I do this, what will people think of me? Any questions? Suggestions?
One simple way, I mean, just to start, which is a fundamental dakini that you can use for many things in practice, is just to simply try to contemplate the disadvantages of one’s own self-cherishing, see how it produces suffering and problems. My teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, once said that one of the best things we could do is to keep a diary of all the terrible effects that come from the self-cherishing thought. Dear diary, today this happened because of the self-cherishing thought. Dear diary, today this disaster happened because of the self-cherishing thought. So to really see, to really feel, to acknowledge how one’s own self-cherishing is a disaster.
And then on the other hand, to contemplate the advantages of being free of that thought, to imagine what it would be like to be free of that, all the things one can do, be able to do. So that gives so that acts as a count another thought, another energy in the mind that is able to counteract self-cherishing when it arises. And, of course, with everything, we have to be able to recognize our self-cherishing in order to counteract it. Because none of our delusions, unfortunately, when they manifest, manifest with a banner, here I am, I am a delusion, I am self-cherishing, I am anger, I am desire. All the delusions manifest to our confused mind as something wonderful happening.
This is me. Isn’t this nice? But with one wise part of the mind we have to be able to see this is self-cherishing. And then if one’s done that kind of contemplation, then one can try and oppose him. But again, we have to do this gently because we can’t oppose every single aspect of our self-cherishing straight away because we’ll all just freak out, flip out, have a nervous breakdown because we’re so habituated, we just have to be able to, you know, try to modify it step by step.
And also have the courage to try and do things that do cherish others, that are the opposite, that are practicing generosity and patience and so on, particularly practicing generosity, being generous in countless ways, countless small ways. This the first way to break the self-cherishing thought. Because if if we try it and it works, if we do little generous things and they bring pleasure, then it makes this good imprint in the mind that what one wants to do it some more and have the confidence that one could maybe extend this more and more, to be generous with one’s possessions, with one’s time, one’s energy, one’s knowledge, one’s skills, to be generous with one’s heart, just to be with people. Because compassion doesn’t, like I said, doesn’t mean you have to stop the suffering of others. It’s basically when we are suffering, what we need most is just some empathy, some support.
We ourselves, when we’re suffering, know if we’re wise or maybe this can’t stop, we don’t expect someone to stop it for us, but it’s nice if someone it’s helpful if someone just simply empathizes with our situation. So if we can do that for others, that’s incredibly helpful. But all of them, one has to put some time into contemplating these things because hopefully you’re still here, you haven’t left yet, so this I’m assuming that you agree with some of the things I’m saying, or maybe you’re just too polite to leave. But anyway, so I’m assuming that you tend to agree with what’s being said in nodding wisely and yes, yes, it was all very good. But what we need to do so this lecture, this talk is not going to make us compassionate.
What we need to do is hammer this into the mind, these points into the mind more and more, and this is what meditation is, becoming familiar with what is virtuous and meaningful and true. We’re we’re familiar with a self-cherishing thought that doesn’t allow us to be compassionate even to ourselves. We’re not very familiar with the thought of cherishing others, of being really all encompassingly compassionate or trying to be. So the only way to do that or the main way to do it is to contemplate these points, to meditate on them, and not just one time, twice, three times, four times, ten times, hundred times, but just continuously. Regularly, continuously.
That’s the job, and that itself is being compassionate. That is compassionate in action. I think that’s the point I was trying to make at the very beginning. What compassion is putting some effort into meditating on it. That is also compassionate in action.
Just rushing around being compassionate out in the streets without sitting down and working on one’s mind is not so wise. And one runs out of steam sooner or later. Sitting on the cushion contemplating how wonderful it would be, that is also compassionate in action, especially if after you get off the cushion you don’t forget what you thought about and try to respond, to see suffering, to allow oneself to see it, feel it, and when one does that, somehow something can take place. I mean there’s no manual that says what to do in any particular suffering situation. One just has to follow the compassionate feeling and hopefully the correct response comes, especially if we allow our wisdom to arise, to have a clear mind so that we can judge, you know, not just have some vague feeling of helping, but having that feeling of helping that combined with a clear mind that knows, can I help or not?
Am I really able to do something and should I get involved or not? Because it’s not compassionate to get involved with some suffering situation if you can’t help or to get involved for a little while. So we need the wisdom that goes with it as well. Right. And our own limitations.
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sure.
Sure. Right. Yeah. Well, he maybe have read something on it. He may have read something on it and put it in a disguise form.
Mhmm. Yeah. Sure. We we do have to these two things have to be balanced. Definitely.
And I think if we follow the Buddhist path, if we understand that, it it teaches how to do that. Maybe just one more question when we finish. Mhmm. Right. Right.
It would is. Well, the only way I think is not just it may sound like a very unsatisfying answer, but if you are trying to develop your own mind in order to respond this feeling comes from knowing I can’t do anything, there’s this huge problem and I’m not stopping it. So we have to recognize that now there’s no way we can do that And even the Buddhas have not been able to alleviate suffering just like that. It’s an ongoing process. So if we we can’t just leave it as feeling the suffering of others, we have to do something about it.
So if we are at our level doing something about it by trying to make ourselves more compassionate, wise, generous and so on, then knowing that we are doing that helps to counteract that feeling of hopelessness. Because there is hope, you know, every little thing that we do can help. And we should have confidence in that and build on that. Right, but then one has to also just remember that, you know, that to use that to motivate oneself to to do things more and more. Yes.
Yes. It’s the best one. Maybe we can just conclude with a couple of minutes of just thinking how wonderful it would be. So just sitting in a comfortable position, just allow the mind to to think of the situation and start with this world, all the different kinds of people that there are in this world, all the situations going on, the different kinds of suffering, individual personal suffering, suffering of communities, races, countries. Think how wonderful it would be if all living beings on this earth throughout the universe could be free of every kind of suffering and also all the causes of that suffering, not just the superficial causes for the deep causes lying within the mind of every living being.
Ask yourself, would this be wonderful or no? And then combine this with thinking that a state where every living being is free of suffering and all the causes of suffering, it is actually possible. It can happen because of the nature of our mind. All the causes of suffering, the delusions can be removed from my own mind, the mind of all living things. So the suffering can stop.
It must stop. I myself can stop this suffering. I myself can take on the responsibility to lead all living beings out of suffering. I can do this because I have the Buddha nature. I have this precious human rebirth with all the conditions necessary to develop my Buddha.
You make a strong request from the depths of one’s heart to to the guru buddhas to bless one’s mind, always have the courage to open up to one’s own suffering and suffering of others, and have the courage to work for the liberation, for enlightenment of one’s self and all living being. Not just in this life, but continuously.