Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 76-minute talk recorded in April 2015, Venerable Thubten Dondrub guides students through the second session of a course on relying on a spiritual teacher. Opening with the Mahāyāna motivation to achieve enlightenment for all beings, he explains why a qualified guru is essential and how sincere spiritual aspiration creates the karma to meet one. He outlines the ten key qualities of a Mahāyāna master from the classical Buddhist text attributed to Maitreya: a disciplined mind, mental calm, wisdom realization, knowledge exceeding the student’s, authoritative understanding of scripture, realization of emptiness, skillful teaching methods, enthusiasm for teaching, compassion, and patience. Dondrub emphasizes that in degenerate times, finding a teacher with all ten qualities is rare, so the wise seeker looks for someone with most of them. He stresses two essential modern safeguards often omitted in classical texts: the guru must teach authentic Dharma in lineage tradition, not personal invention, and must maintain genuine devotion to their own teacher. He concludes with qualities of a good disciple and the defining characteristic of a root guru—someone who makes the Dharma come alive through their embodiment of it. The talk includes personal anecdotes about meeting his own teachers, Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and closes with Q&A.
File metadata (for organising)
File: DB The Spiritual Teacher Week 2 2015 04 07.mp3
UUID: 8856e6f4-7842-4748-85f0-a561f0025db2
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: The Spiritual Teacher (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2015-04-07
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 76.2 minutes
Words: ~7,851
Thanks. So welcome to everyone to our second class on the spiritual teacher. So I hope everyone have been had a jolly Easter, a meaningful one. So right. So subject of the importance of the spiritual master is particularly taught in the context of Mahāyāna teachings that emphasizes achieving, encouraging us to achieve our Buddha potential and realize enlightenment for the sake of others.
So in that context, relying on a qualified spiritual master is very important. Underlying that is that wish to achieve enlightenment. Since this is what the teachings are all really about, then from our side, it’s good to try and cultivate the motivation that fits with the purpose of the teaching. Trying to generate as much as possible that wish to realise our full potential, not only for our own sake, but to put ourselves in a position where we can be of perfect and lasting benefit to all beings. Why should we do that?
Two main reasons, as you already know. We have to remind ourselves again and again. The first one is basically because sentient beings have been so kind to us every sentient being has been kind to us in every conceivable possible way, life after life, and not just one time but an infinite number of times. And especially we’ve received from every sentient being the kindness of a mother, and not just once but many, many times, because of beginningless saṃsāra. So that’s one reason to achieve enlightenment, to repay that kindness, and because those beings are helpless right now in saṃsāra, suffering in saṃsāra, creating the causes of saṃsāra unknowingly over and over again.
Now that we understand that we’re in saṃsāra and we are understanding hopefully what the causes of suffering are and we are now learning how to stop creating those causes and instead create the causes to get out of saṃsāra and to create the causes that lead to peerless, everlasting happiness, in that situation, then we have to help others. We have to help them know the causes of suffering, help them free themselves of those causes and help them understand that they have the potential to achieve enlightenment, and we have to help them create those causes to achieve enlightenment, or the conditions for enlightenment. But first, we have to achieve enlightenment, and that depends on relying on a qualified guru, so it’s really important to understand this subject therefore, for the sake of all beings, we’re going to study this subject. So this is the type of thing that we can try and think of as we say the traditional prayer, if you want to join in with the traditional prayer, which is on page eleven, and as we recite this prayer, we try to visualize Śākyamūni Buddha in front of us as the source of these teachings, someone who has realized their Buddha potential and is encouraging us or is inspiring, wanting us to achieve it, is trying to inspire us to realize it, so we can think of all sentient beings surrounding us as a way to encourage ourselves to seek enlightenment and work for it.
Starting with our parents on either side. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create through listening to the Dharma may I become a Buddha sentient beings. So then we can think the Buddha is very pleased with our motivation and shows this by coming to the crown of our head and then dissolving into light so that that blissful light can pour down into us, blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings on the spiritual master, blessing our mind to be able to generate correct devotion to the qualified spiritual master. Then briefly, we can do the nine round breathing exercise to help our mind become a little bit more calmer, clearer, more concentrated so that we can use that state of mind to listen to and think about the Buddha’s teachings tonight.
Okay. Thank you. So I’d just like to finish what I I was supposed to talk about last week and then we’ll continue on. So last week I tried to talk a little bit about what the spiritual master is, why we need one, and then what I didn’t manage to cover was how do we meet the spiritual teacher, the qualified teacher, and how do we know qualified teacher is our teacher. I’ve never actually received any specific teachings on how to meet the teacher.
I just bumped into my mistake, fortunately. Thinking about what we need to do to meet a qualified spiritual master is In this case we’re talking about someone who can not only teach us the Dharma correctly, but also guide us in the practice, really be a mentor in our practice. So to meet such a person who is really qualified to help us follow the spiritual path, What we need to do from our side is to have a sincere wish to practise. And the stronger that wish is, that is creating the cause to meet the qualified spiritual master. And the reason is that, what is the reason?
Because the enlightened mind is acting for the benefit of all sentient beings all the time. So it’s really only, well, it’s particularly when a sentient being takes rebirth as a human being and especially when they’ve achieved the precious human rebirth, which means they have the karma to meet the Dharma and have faith in it, it’s particularly then that the enlightened mind can manifest as a teacher and directly teach the Dharma. There’s many ways the enlightened mind can help sentient beings, but when one is in one of the lower rebirths as an animal or as a hungry ghost or a hell being, there’s no way we can practice the Dharma. There’s no way we can understand it. There’s no way we can hear it and understand it and put it into practice.
So there’s very little that the Buddhas can do for a sentient being in those realms. So it’s only when we’re in the human realm and in the god realms, the gods are having too much fun to take any notice. They’re not interested. So it’s only beings where the Buddha can really be a very direct, powerful way to benefit sentient beings and the most powerful direct way is to teach the Dharma. So when there is someone who really wants to practice, wherever that person is, the Buddha will manifest as the qualified teacher.
That’s what they say. Or one at least has the karma to meet someone who may not well, this starts to get very complicated who may not be a Buddha, but the Buddha can work through that being. Sort of channel through in a sense. That’s the reason to have a pure view of the teacher, because the more pure have, the more the Buddha can influence you. Something like that.
Anyway, I think that’s one of the main causes, ways to meet the Guru is the qualified Guru, not the phony ones, the limited ones, but to have this very sincere wish to practice the Dharma. So the stronger that is, maybe also built up of course from past lives. So really one has to have the karma to meet the guru, the qualified guru. One has to it doesn’t happen by accident. It may look like in this life an accident, but that accident isn’t an accident.
In a sense, I could say I met Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe by accident. I wasn’t planning this to well, did plan to go to this course, but didn’t have, to be quite honest, I didn’t have a very strong motivation to do so. It just kind of happened in a sense. Seemed like an interesting thing to do at the time. Which was, yeah.
I was hoping something, yeah, but I wasn’t sort of putting too much what’s the word? I wasn’t expecting too much from it. Looking back, I don’t think I was expecting anything from it, or maybe I was. I’m not really sure. But anyway, I just happened to have I think I created the karma.
I I must have created the karma in past lives. Definitely, I created the karma to meet these amazing teachers. I certainly didn’t do anything in this life to meet them, you know, Other than pay the money to do the cause, but that’s not the actual cause to meet the guru and connect with them. Also somehow, I met the guru through a friend, and this friend also gave this very good piece of advice, is about, you know, Lama Zopa Rinpoche is a very difficult person to understand, and it it behaves in a very strange way, so you should really be patient. You know?
And it’s only because of that advice that I stayed, because I was prepared to, you know, leave because I thought it was this is really too weird and strange. You know? But then I I remembered that advice, you know, be patient. You know? You have to persevere.
So somehow those things together, you know, I created the cause to have a friend who met the Dharma and gave me that advice. So that was yeah. Anyway, so we really need somehow to have created the cause to meet the spiritual master and by having practiced the Dharma in past lives, because like I mentioned before, it seems to me many people connect with all sorts of really strange teachers, really false ones. They may be very impressive in many ways, but what they are teaching or even what they’re teaching may even be the Dharma, but there’s something really fundamentally flawed about what they are doing and the way they’re doing it, which may not be obvious to the ordinary person. There are some who are just teaching really weird things with very creepy, weird motivations, and yet those people attract lots of disciples who are very can be very, very devoted to them and end up, you know, being really harmed in various ways by it.
So that’s why it’s so easy to create the causes to meet false teachings, but more difficult to create the cause to meet the real thing, something that is really very beneficial. As well as wanting to practise the Dharma and having created the causes, also in this life, the more we practise sincerely, the more we’re creating the cause to meet teachers. Maybe we’ve met some because one could meet the Dharma through a particular teacher or group of teachers or whatever, but not and be benefited by that teacher and those teachings, but one doesn’t necessarily have a strong connection with that teacher. But by practicing sincerely, one is creating the cause more and more to meet the teacher’s teacher or teachers whom one feels a really strong connection to, who really sort of inspire one. So another way to create the cause to meet the guru is to make heartfelt prayers.
To to yes. To make prayers, to create that that to develop that strong wish, because prayer is about from a Buddhist point of view, about developing this strong the Tibetan word that is translated as prayer is which means a wishing path. So by making a sincere wish over and over again, one is creating this path in your mind, so to speak, that is taking you in a particular direction. So the more we make these prayers, the more our mind will go in that direction. So if one isn’t a very patient person, we can make prayers to be a patient person.
We’re putting the imprint in our mind, directing our mind in that way. So if we want to meet the guru, then it’s important to make prayers to do so, and also related to that, dedicating one’s merit to meet the qualified Guru, and if one feels that one has met the qualified teacher or teachers, to make prayers never to be separated from them, because that’s also extremely important. Because sadly, throughout history, the situation has arisen where people have met a great teacher who they feel connected to and develop devotion towards, but at some point, for various reasons, they fall out with that teacher. They lose their faith, their devotion in that teacher. So that is a pretty disastrous thing to happen really.
So one wants to pray we should pray that having met the teacher, like having met the Dharma, never to be separated from it. Having met the qualified teacher, never to be separated from the perfect teacher. Life after life. Not just in this life, but in all our future lives, never to be separated from perfect teachers. And and then at at a very basic level, very, very practical level, from one’s own side, we have to put in the effort of going to meet teachers, like going to teachings where you just don’t sit in your bedroom and wait for the guru to knock on the door.
One has to go to where gurus are qualified or possible qualified teachers are and receive teachings from them and then check these teachers. karma to meet the qualified teacher, that still doesn’t mean we will, because karma, for it to ripen, requires the conditions. It has to be the conditions so that we have to create those conditions a lot by going to teachings. You know? You know, if his holiness comes to his holiness of Dalai Lama comes to Australia, you can’t expect he’s gonna rock up at your doorstep at some point.
We have to go to him. Right? Or some other great teacher comes. Or but we could also not even wait for these great masters to come to Australia. We go to where they are because one could read about a particular teacher or even just see a photo of teacher and think, oh, wow.
This this person, you know, looks impressive, you know, something. Or you read something and and it really you you it it really strikes a a chord. So then maybe we should go and try and find this person, see see what it’s, you know yeah. Like that. Whether we really have that connection with that person because, you know, the the sorry.
Oh, dear. If one really under if if we really understood our situation that we are in saṃsāra, yeah, which is actually a really horrible situation to be, it is really terrible. I mean, our situation right now is not too bad, but this is about the best it gets in Samsāra. One could say the god realms are better, but from a bliss point of view and a longer lasting bliss, but those beings can’t practice the Dharma. There’s very little opportunity for those beings to be able to practice, to meet and practice the Dharma.
Whereas although we have nothing like the enjoyments of those beings and we have suffering, we have intelligence. We don’t have too much suffering, so that suffering can motivate us and know happiness is possible. We’ve had some of it. We can see examples of it so that can motivate us in that direction and how suffering can motivate us away from that and so on. And the dharma exists in our world, in our realm.
And our suffering is nothing like what we could experience and have experienced. So our situation in saṃsāra momentarily is very good, but it’s only momentarily. This life is nothing in time, you know, like that. And it’s gone. Yeah.
So if we yeah. Just about to lose my point. So my point is we are in saṃsāra if we really understood how bad that is, and then we would understand we’ve got to get out of cyclic existence. Apart from enlightenment to benefit others, we have to get out of cyclic existence. That is something extremely difficult to do by oneself, to know how to do that by oneself.
No idea how to do it. So we need a qualified teacher. So the point I’m trying to make is what we really need to understand is finding the guru, qualified teacher who we really connect with and feel that close connection with. That person is is the most important person in the universe in our life. There is no one who can compare to that person.
Right? Because they are going to free us of all suffering, and they are going to lead us to perfect happiness. And no ordinary person has anything remotely like the ability to do that. Everyone’s looking for a boyfriend, girlfriend, both, whatever, three or four of each or something, you know. All of that is not gonna do much at all.
Yeah? But the guru is gonna free us from suffering. The the real guru, the true the genuine qualified guru is going to do that. But they’re gonna do it magically. We’re gonna have to do it, but they will help us, and they’re the only one who can help us.
No one else. So the final point is, therefore, we should make the effort to meet that person or person’s, you know, teachers. It’s, you know, it’s it’s the greatest investment we can possibly make. Because if we can meet that person, even one of those beings in this life that we really connect to, and then we devote to that person properly, then we are creating the cause to meet the perfect Guru again in our next life. And if we devote to the Guru perfectly or correctly in the next life, we’re creating the cause to meet again and again, to never be separated from someone who will guide us to enlightenment, because the enlightened mind is guiding us to enlightenment.
Right? That’s the only thing that the enlightened mind wants, is for each of us to achieve enlightenment. So one could say the enlightenment mind is doing billions of things to get us to do that, but the most direct way to do that is to appear as the guru, the qualified guru that we feel connected to. So it’s worthwhile making the effort to attend teachings and, yes, to check out check out these beings. So okay.
So yeah. Okay. Right. So then, what are the qualities of a spiritual master? So different kinds of teachers have different qualities, but in one of the sorry, don’t remember which one one of the texts of Maitreya Buddha, Maitreya that came down to us from the great Indian master Asaṇga, Maitreya outlines the ten essential qualities of a Mahāyāna master, someone who can guide us into and along the path to enlightenment, the Sūtra path.
For someone to guide us in the Tantric path, then the Tantric Guru needs extra qualities on top of that, which I won’t go into in this course. And the qualities of a Tantric Master who can teach the the two lower levels of tantra, and then on top so there are ten qualities of such a tantric master, but then on top of that so there are the ten qualities of a Mahāyāna master. On top of that, a tantric master of the lower tantras has to have ten extra qualities, and a tantric master of the highest yoga tantra has to have ten extra qualities. But let’s just look at the ten qualities of a Mahāyāna master that we should look for, because we have to check out the Guru. We have to sort of try to work out, you know, is is the teacher qualified?
This is not as easy as it looks because, anyway, let’s just look at the qualities first that we should be looking for. So the first of these that Maitreya mentions is the quality of having a disciplined mind. So what that means is that the guru should be living in the higher training of morality, protecting him or herself from negative karma. So this applies to whether the teacher is a lay person or an ordained person. In the Gelugpa tradition, which we follow that this center follows, And his Holiness, the Dalai Lama is mostly associated with the Gelug tradition.
You know, first Dalai Lama was a direct disciple of Lama Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelugpa tradition. So anyway, in the Gelugpa tradition, there is a great emphasis on relying on a guru who is ordained, and it doesn’t have to be, but that’s the emphasis, and certainly His Holiness, the Dalai Lama says, it is much, much better to connect with a spiritual master who is ordained rather than a lay person. I mean, there are some exceptions, of course, for all sorts of reasons, but ideally, it is best to have a monk or a nun as the guru because hopefully, because that person is hopefully correctly living in their ordination, so they are observing morality probably. This is not necessarily the case, but hopefully it would be the case. So anyway, the first quality that one should look for a teacher is that they have a disciplined mind, they are observing the law of cause and effect, sincerely practising the higher training of morality.
So the second quality is that they should have a calm mind or a pacified mind. And this is through the higher training of concentration. So Lama Zopa Rinpoche says in the commentary on this point by Maitreya Buddha that the guru should be able to control his delusions by having the realization of śamatha or calm abiding. With achievement of this, it’s very easy to continuously keep the mind in virtue and then very easy to develop any realization. So as I was trying to explain in our little retreat at Khandrosa at Daitong Ling retreat center, in achieving single point of concentration and calm abiding, what that involves is subduing, pacifying the disturbing thought.
So someone who has achieved calm abiding has actually subdued, is able to control, not repress, because anyone can repress their delusions for a while, especially if one is highly motivated to do so, either for a good reason or a bad reason. If you’re going to win a million dollars, you can probably repress your anger for a while, you know, and impress people. Someone who has achieved śamatha can only do that by having developed the ability to pacify all of their delusions. They haven’t eliminated them, they’ve pacified them. The only thing that eliminates them is the complete realization of emptiness.
Yeah. Not even the initial even the initial realization of emptiness doesn’t unfortunately destroy our delusions. It’s the complete realization of emptiness that does that, which takes a very long time. This is the ideal guru, you know, who’s got these things. Unfortunately, in these degenerate times, it is possibly very difficult to meet someone who has all of these ten qualities.
I better quickly do it anyway. So third quality is having a mind thoroughly calmed by the sorry. Let’s see. Actually, I’m gonna give you a handout about this. So it’s Here I’ve said a mind thoroughly calmed by the realization of the higher training and wisdom, so maybe to say the realization is not correct, but a mind that’s thoroughly calmed by insight into wisdom has achieved the higher training of wisdom.
So here, refers to having any of the the the correct Buddhist views about the nature of reality, but not necessarily the highest view. Even if so one so it’s okay if the guru doesn’t have the complete understanding of Prāsaṇgika view of emptiness, but as long as they have a correct understanding experience of one of the lower schools, that’s okay. The fourth quality characteristic of the ideal guru is to have greater knowledge than the student. The fifth quality is that the guru should have authoritative learning of the scriptures, that the teacher has a real grasp of the teachings, an authoritative, which means that that understanding is not something that’s made up by themselves, but is coming from the authentic lineage. So they have a real mastery of the teachings.
They really not not just some kind of superficial learning, but a deep a deep understanding of the stages of the path to enlightenment. So this is why in the Gelugpa tradition, there is this very thorough academic study of the teachings that is done in the monastic universities of Sera, Drepung and Ganden. And the monks who have gone through that very thorough study are are given this degree called the Geshe degree. So Geshe the word Geshe means so it means someone who is virtuous and has great wisdom. So such a person has the knowledge to be a guru, to guide someone.
So the sixth quality is having a genuine realization of emptiness. So this refers to having a realization of the highest view. So someone who has that is like really the perfect guru, because they’ve got the actually correct view of emptiness, the same view as the Buddha. So as Holiness says in relation to that, ideally one should follow the guru who has the complete realization of emptiness, the Prāsaṇgika view of emptiness, or at least has a strong commitment to the practice of emptiness on the basis of deep admiration for the teachings on it. Okay, so okay if one has a guru who has a deep admiration of the Prāsaṇgika view of emptiness and has a strong commitment to practicing those teachings as much as possible.
So if one connects with such a person and devotes to such a person, you’ll be okay because that person has a very genuine commitment to those teachings and practice. And since they already know more than you, They’ll be able to guide us. So then a very important quality that we should look for is that because there are people, of course, who have incredible realizations of the path, but some of these people have very little ability to be able to explain, to teach. So the seventh quality is one needs a teacher who is skillful in teaching and employing suitable methods for generating progress in the disciple, in this case it’s our self. So different teachers have different ways of teachings and one way of teaching suits some people, but it doesn’t suit us.
So we have to find a teacher or teachers whose way of teaching suits us, fits our mind. And then another quality is that because there are realized beings who may have the ability to teach, but they don’t for all sorts of mysterious reasons. So one needs to find a teacher who has a lot of enthusiasm for teaching the student, that is oneself, has the energy and enthusiasm to teach. Connected with that, the ninth quality is that the teacher, the guru, what we should look for is a teacher, a guru who has deep compassion and concern for the student. They really need to be concerned about ourselves, not themselves teaching for other reasons, but they are teaching to benefit oneself.
And then finally, the tenth quality to look for is we need to find a teacher who is very patient with us, who doesn’t lose patience and doesn’t become discouraged in teaching and in guiding us. Which one is it? Nine? The ninth one was deep compassion and concern for the student, and the tenth was teacher who doesn’t get discouraged and lose patience in teaching the disciple, that is oneself. Since oneself is a bad student who doesn’t practice very well, doesn’t, you know, gets easily discouraged and so on, then we need a teacher who will put up with us, who will continue to teach us no matter how hopeless we are.
Yeah. So in the teachings it does say that in these times, it is difficult to find someone who has all of these qualities. So it says the advice is the wise person looks for someone who has most of these qualities or as many of these qualities as possible. And my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, says that the ideal guru is someone, is the teacher who in their own life and teaching, is genuinely seeking enlightenment and encouraging the student to achieve enlightenment. That is the best teacher to find, to connect with, to someone who is really themselves genuinely seeking enlightenment, but also encouraging the disciple to do that.
If you can’t find that kind of guru, then next best is to find someone who is at least encouraging us to get out of saṃsāra and themselves is working to do so. If you can’t find someone who’s doing that, at least, at the very least, you have to find a teacher and connect with a teacher who is at least encouraging us to get a good rebirth, and themselves is at the very least doing that themselves. If they’re just teaching about how to be happy in this life and that’s all the teacher themselves is concerned about, this is not good enough because that’s not actually Dharma. Just seeking the happiness of this life is a worldly concern. It’s actually an obstacle to Dharma.
And the sad thing is that a lot of Christianity has turned into stuff just about this life, you know, hallelujah and you’ll become rich. The sign that God loves you is you’ll have lots of money. And this is unfortunately happening in Buddhism. You have Buddhist teachers who really only teach about using the Dharma for this life. There is an incredibly famous Buddhist master, who I won’t name, who said who who came to Nālānda monastery in France and spoke to the abbot there and said he didn’t believe in future lives.
Well, he’s a very good person. He’s a wonderful person, very inspiring person. I better not say who it is. He’s very famous. Oh, I don’t know.
I wasn’t there, but he said he didn’t believe in future lives. And if you read some of his stuff or most of his stuff, it’s really just about this life, and that actually is not Dharma. It’s very nice to make you a nice person in this life, but it’s not Dharma. Some people may get confused because if you practice this Dharma, you will have a good life. You will have a meaningful, happy, pleasant life.
But if if the motivation is just that, it doesn’t work. Because to practice stharma, you have to be seeking a good rebirth, and to seek a good rebirth, one has to be motivated to stop engaging in negative actions. And so the more we do that, the more we stop engaging in negative actions in this life in order to get a good rebirth, we will naturally have this life will be okay. And to get a good rebirth, we have to engage in virtuous actions in this life. During this life, we have to engage in virtuous actions.
That’s the only way to get a good rebirth. You don’t get a good rebirth by engaging in negative actions. That’s utterly impossible. One has to accumulate lots of virtuous actions to get a good rebirth. So if one does a lot of good things in this life, then this means this life will basically be okay because one’s doing good things.
But if one is just chasing after the happiness of this life, the way to chase after the happiness of this life is it means one is following one’s afflicted desire, which is a disturbing thought. And with one disturbing thought, as soon as one disturbing thought arises in the mind I’ve got off on another track, haven’t I? That’s a good track. Any disturbing thought that takes over the mind is like a train engine, and with that train engine comes all these other carriages, and in each carriage is the other delusions. Seeking the happiness of this life just guarantees our disturbing thoughts.
We’ll just pop up one after the other, and we’ll act on them. And that’s Samsa you know, that’s that’s that. That’s Samsāra. Endless. Right?
So that was illustrating something. Oh, the the guru. So the guru the guru should at least be emphasizing that to practise the Dharma for the reason the Buddha taught it, which was to get at least to get a good rebirth. Why are we trying to get a good rebirth? Because it takes more than one rebirth to get out of saṃsāra.
Yeah. And we’ve gotta get out of saṃsāra, and we’ve gotta get out of saṃsāra, not just to, you know, hang out in in the experience of nirvana, but in order to keep going to enlightenment. So at least the guru should be emphasising that and practising it themselves because if they’re not, it means they’re just really living an ordinary life, following the delusions. Oh, that was the bell, wasn’t it? Right.
What what have I got more to do? Oh, just very quickly. The diff so the these are the the what else do I need to say? Oh, yes. This I have to say.
This is really, really important. So Maitreya Buddha gave these ten points, ten qualities, but there are two other things that I think are really, really vital to understand. Maitreya didn’t mention them because in those days it wasn’t necessary. In these degenerate times it is. One absolutely essential thing is when we’re talking about looking for the qualities of the guru, underlying that is that of course the Guru is actually teaching the Dharma.
We want to find someone who has these qualities who is actually teaching the Buddha Dharma according to the tradition, not making it up themselves, giving their own personal interpretation. Someone who is actually yeah, passing on as as well as they can, sincerely as they can, the the the the essential meaning of the Buddha’s teachings. And and his Holiness says, if no matter how great a teacher is, if they’re not teaching and this happens, you know, if they’re not teaching the tradition, then this is not wise to follow them. And the other thing that is so so so important is that the qualified teacher, the the the person you follow, that person should have very, very good connection with their teacher. They should be practicing correct Guru devotion.
If they have broken their Guru devotion, and you follow that person who’s broken their devotion, you will never get any benefit. Someone who has criticized their guru and never regretted it, who has, like, stopped following their guru and has gone off to do their own thing, this person is a, like, utter like what? Like to be avoided like the plague. This person will lead you to hell. According to the teachings.
Yeah. And there are some people, gurus like that, unfortunately. So just very quickly, the qualities of a disciple. So from our side, we should should look for the good guru, but we should also try to be a good student by having a spirit of sincere inquiry, a critical intelligence I’ll just quickly mention those, get a list of them. A critical intelligence able to discriminate between skillful and unskillful.
In other words, we should really use our intelligence in practising the dharma, but also relating to the guru. We should check up. So it’s a bit of a catch twenty two. In order to really check the qualities of the guru, we need to have a good understanding of the Dharma. But in order to have a good understanding of the Dharma, we need teachers.
But by connecting with somebody, receiving teachings from good teachers, then we will develop a good understanding and that in turn will enable us to we may not be correct, but we’ve more chance of somehow telling whether this person is genuine or not. And of course, with great spiritual masters, a great spiritual master in a sense is like an iceberg because what is it? An iceberg, one tenth, is it one tenth of an iceberg is above the surface and nine tenths is below the surface. So with great spiritual masters, they don’t show their qualities. They’re not interested in showing their qualities because one of their qualities is they have humility.
They’re getting rid of their ego. They have no need to, say, look how terrific I am. So they hide their qualities or even they act out bad qualities for various reasons. So that’s why it’s important to one has to be really careful, and if person is teaching well and they seem to have more good qualities than bad qualities, and those bad qualities aren’t really bad, bad qualities, then it’s okay. So also we need an intense longing to gain spiritual understanding and experience.
We need to have a real appreciation of the Dharma and Dharma teachers, and we need to possess faith, ideally the three kinds of faith. Firstly, there’s pure hearted faith. This leads to aspirational faith, where we really want to achieve the qualities that we have faith in more and more, and that leads to logical faith, which is the strongest form of faith that is based on strong reasoning. We have very strong logical reasonings for having faith the teachings and so on. Sorry.
Questions? Apart from apart from can I can I go now? If we if we were were in a had a teacher who wasn’t bruised, like, And we’d followed them for a period of time and then left that teacher. Mhmm. And then we came to the Dharma, and we then started to have a teacher who was teaching us the Dharma.
Would we still have to owe allegiance to that other teacher if they were the first teacher you’d ever had? No. I don’t think so. No. I mean, because this is talking about finding a Buddhist spiritual master who will who will be able to teach, you know, the Dharma, the Buddha Dharma, so that we can practice that.
But I think it’s valid to say that correct to say that even if one was following a different religion before and one decides that that wasn’t suitable and one starts following Buddhism, it’s still very important to appreciate the people who taught you and not completely reject. Because the Buddhadharma says we should respect all religions because they all have their good qualities and etcetera, etcetera. And in one way, one could see all religions as skillful methods of the Buddha to though they exist for a particular group of people, it helps them and it helped us. You know, I followed that religion for some time and it benefited me. And and maybe because of that, that I was able to meet the the Buddhadharma.
So the people there, it’s it’s, you know, they were doing their best as, you know, one should respect. Yeah. But it’s not that you would see them as one of your gurus in the sense that someone who’s leading you to enlightenment, I don’t think. No. Okay.
Thank you thank you very much. Tea break. So after after the tea break, there’ll be a discussion group. So Any quest any questions? Final questions?
We just wanted to clarify how we know the root, you know, or what Right. Yes. I was I meant to talk about that. I don’t I don’t think there are any sort of hard and fast rules about this. I I I was just trying to find the quote from Lama Yeshe, but he said something which somewhere which is but it’s it’s something along the lines that well, Firstly, during the teaching lama year she made the point that when he lived at Sera Monastery, Sera Je Monastery in Tibet, there were many, many great lamas there, very highly qualified, highly realized beings living there.
For example, just, oh sorry, Small sidetrack. I lived at Sera Je Monastery in South India when it was reestablished. You the monks who escaped, they eventually reestablished the monasteries in India and Sera Je was reestablished in Karnataka state near outside of Mysore. So I was very fortunate. I lived as the disciple of the abbot at the time of Sera Monastery.
He looked after me and his main disciple was a young tulku called Tenge Rinpoche. So Tenge Rinpoche, his attendants, his students, the old monks who looked after him were the disciples of Tenge Rinpoche’s previous life in Tibet. And they showed me a photograph of the previous Tenge Toukou who looked exactly like the present one, the young boy. The one I knew, was he was about sixteen when I lived in his lab room. So the previous Tenge tulku was much bigger, fatter one, but the face was exactly the same exactly the same.
Anyway, what was my point? Oh, yes. So when he hit his attendance, the attendance of the incarnation who had been the disciples of the previous one, said that when previous Tenge Rinpoche in Tibet, when he was captured by the communist Chinese, put him to jail, and he was, I think, basically left there to die. They say when he died, his body shrank to the size of a a bird and then disappeared. So there were lamas like that in the Sera Monastery.
There are many stories like that of Llamas who when Seera was bombarded, they just practiced phowa and left their body consciously. So anyway, Lama Yeshe said, that when I was there, him speaking, when I was there, when Lama Yeshe said, when I lived at Sera, there were these highly realized beings, but here’s the point, here’s the point, which I’ve mentioned before, is that I didn’t feel any connection to them. So he didn’t take them as his gurus, because he recognised that they were great beings and had many disciples, but he didn’t feel a connection. So the important thing, there are two important things, you have to find teachers who have real qualities, that’s one thing, but then you have to feel a connection with those people. You have to feel a human connection that this person understands me, this person can guide me, and you like them.
Of course, you’ve gotta like them. You’ve gotta like them. But more than like them, have what feels this great devotion to them, so But then for the root guru, Lama Yeshe said something along the lines of the root guru is the one who makes the Dharma come alive for you and makes it suppose many of your teachers could do that, but the one who really does that, who really makes you feel that this was one hundred percent the case, the true, and it’s possible. And particularly, not just by their teaching, but they themselves embody the teachings. And for me, this is what Lama Yeshe and Lama Sopa Rinpoche do.
When I first met them, I just thought that they’re just two people. When Lama Zopa I I really find this very difficult to say because I’d probably burn in hell just by saying it, but when for the first three days, I I really thought Lama Zopa Rinpoche was just, you know, just, let’s just say it, I wasn’t impressed. I was not impressed at all. And then after three days, I was impressed. My mind completely changed.
But even though it changed and I just kind of assumed that Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche were your standard Tibetan Lama, that all Tibetan Lama’s were like Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. And then from my own experience, I met other lamas who were very famous and this and that, but they just weren’t, for me, anything like Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. So I had that connection and Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche for me, they are the dharma. When I met them, for me there was no doubt that the dharma was true because of who they were. You know?
You know, they were just such what Lama Zopa Rinpoche is such an amazing being. Just amazing. No no one like him. You know, just nothing no one like Rinpoche. For me, you know, that doesn’t mean for anyone else.
I mean, there are other people who think the same, but other people can think, well, that doesn’t do it for me. So it’s the one who really makes the dharma alive and something super special for you, you know? So it doesn’t matter if they’re famous and they have millions of disciples and they have huge titles and blah blah blah. That’s not important at all. It’s the being who makes the dharma something really special and alive and possible because they are living it in a hundred percent authentic way.
So something like that is who the root guru is because you think this person, this is the person who can completely guide me, that I can completely trust this person, that they won’t betray me. They really know what they’re doing, you know, in the deepest way of knowing, not, you know, just, you know, excuse me, I’ll just read the book and tell you what to do. Not like that, You know? So Heruka or something like that. Yeah.
That’s, you know, some very, very special being for for oneself. They may not be even, even objectively somehow, I don’t know what objective is anyway from the Dharma point of view, but it’s for oneself. But on the basis that they are teaching the Dharma, they genuine good relations with their gurus and they have qualities, Yeah. They have, yeah, some of those qualities, if not all of them. And in the teaching oh, sorry.
Yeah. We better stop. But it says, you know, one one should check the gurus very carefully for some time, but don’t take too much time because you could die before you decide. You know? Okay.
So we can dedicate the merit of this time. Due to the merits of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of a Guru Buddha and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the precious body mind not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore. When I lived at Sera Je in South India, there was a monk, a great lama who passed away, and his body apparently shrunk to about that size, but I missed it.
I didn’t get to see the body. All the mystical things that have happened around me, I’ve missed them. When yeah. Anyway, thick as a brick. Okay.
Thank you very much. So we can finish with three prostrations for