Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores the nature of mind as the foundation of lasting happiness. He opens by inviting listeners to choose between fleeting pleasure, pain, or perfect bliss, then argues that the deepest wish of every conscious being is for permanent, perfect happiness—a wish that arises naturally and continuously from the mind itself. Dondrub explains why we fail to achieve this happiness: our confused mind distorts this innate wish into chasing external, temporary pleasures, creating endless cycles of disappointment. He walks through the Buddhist solution: understanding that true happiness depends not on external objects but on the mind’s own nature, which is fundamentally pure, clear, and capable of perfect knowing. Using the metaphor of a mirror obscured by dust, he describes how meditation and familiarisation with our subtle mind gradually reveal this potential. The talk includes discussion of mind’s continuity across lives, the limits of materialism, and how enlightenment represents the realisation of what the mind has always been capable of becoming.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02.mp3
UUID: c5e10fe1-bd52-45ad-aaa5-5f506f69b39d
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: z done but no sheet no info (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~4,855
One moment of worry, pain, fear. Not at all. Just bliss. Perfect bliss. Yeah.
So which one would you like? Because I’m a great magician, I’m also clearly blind. You want the third one. Right? No one, if if if it was possible, would want the first or second.
Some people say, oh, I’d like the second one because the third one sounds boring. But the point is the third one isn’t boring because it’s it’s perfect, and boredom is imperfection. Right? So this is perfect. It doesn’t have any boredom in it.
It is perfectly enjoyable all the time Yeah. Continuously. So this is what you can have. Right? So you want that one, this perfect happiness.
Right? So then the next question is, how long do you want it for? So again, you know, you can have it for one day, a week, a month, year, ten years, a lifetime. If you believe in future lives for two, three, five times, ten lifetimes. If you believe in forever, you can have it forever.
Or for however long you can conceive that you can see that you exist, you can have this blissful happiness. Okay. How long do you want it for? Anybody for one day? Ten years?
Alright. The answer is that if we could have it, we would like it for however long we can see that we exist. Right? Forever. However long forever is for us.
We want perfect lasting happiness. Who wants that? What wants that? It’s our mind. It is the innermost wish of our mind.
And that wish, every living even if you’ve never thought about that before, you have that. Each of us has that within our mind because it’s the nature of our mind to want that. The mind cannot want anything less. This wish is perfectly, completely natural. It has always been there, and it never goes away, and it never will go away because the mind just naturally wishes that.
We were born with this wish. In the foetal womb, we had this wish, this thoughtless, instinctive wish. Sometimes it operates in, you know, as a gross thought, but there is this instinctive desire, wish for this happiness all the time. And the question arises then, is this perfect lasting happiness that we wish possible, or is it just a fantasy? And the Buddhist answer, the answer of the Buddha is that it is perfectly possible.
It is definitely possible because of the nature of the mind. It is the mind which wishes this happiness, and it is the mind that can achieve it. Because the mind has that inner potential, because mind is what knows. And if we just allowed our mind to know things perfectly, we would have this perfect happiness. Once this mind is indestructible, once that happiness is established, it could last forever.
So it is crucial to understand our mind because our mind, the Buddha said, is the key to our happiness. It is the key to everything. So how come we don’t have this happiness if it’s the mind that wants it and the mind has this potential? Potential, and the Buddha says our mind has always existed, how come we don’t have it? We don’t have it basically because we don’t allow our mind to function properly.
We obscure our mind again and again with all our disturbing thoughts. Because although we have a wish for this perfect happiness, which is always there and motivates all of our actions twenty four hours a day, every day of all existence, of all time, That wish for perfect happiness gets distorted by our ignorance, our not knowing our true nature. It gets distorted into just chasing after external happiness, External Temporary. Pleasure. Sorry.
Because at the moment, although our mind has this nature to know things perfectly, the potential to know things perfectly, Our mind, that potential isn’t allowed to function because our mind at the moment, that pure nature of mind is obscured by ignorance, by another mind, another level of mind, a more confused level of mind that doesn’t know things perfectly. And because there is this mind not knowing things perfectly, completely, that innate wish for happiness gets distorted into chasing for things for happiness in the external world because that’s where it appears to exist, to our confused mind, the mind that doesn’t know things correctly, completely. Our mind has a wish for real happiness, but but it out of confusion, it gets attached to something which is limited and imperfect. Believing happiness is an external world and chasing after that again and again. Because that’s what our culture, our society tells us we should do, and that is what appears to our confused mind to be the situation.
To our confused mind, happiness does seem to be out there to some extent. Happiness does seem to come from having meeting the right people, the people that one can love and who loves us. In possessing beautiful objects, living in beautiful places, being in nice situations, in beautiful, comfortable situations. Some happiness arises, so we get attached to that. We get dependent on that, and our confused mind tells us this is happiness or this is the most happiness that is possible.
So one settles for that and gets attached to that and dependent on that. So in that process, all we ever experience is just momentary pleasure that comes and goes. And when it goes, what replaces it is something far less, dissatisfaction. When some temporary pleasure comes to an end, there can only be dissatisfaction that replaces it again and again. And because of that dissatisfaction, which is an experience of our mind, a particular way of knowing things, Dissatisfaction is a way of knowing things, of feeling incomplete.
One has something, but it’s not. It doesn’t bring real satisfaction. So one is dissatisfied. One feels incomplete. So because of this experience of being incomplete, one has to chase out there for something to complete this inner experience of being incomplete.
So this cycle just goes around and around and around and never allows us to discover that our That sense of completeness is the potential for that? That sense potential for completeness, for complete happiness, for complete satisfaction is actually within our mind all the time. We don’t have to make ourselves happy. We just have to stop making ourselves unhappy. Basically, we don’t have to do anything really new when you become a Buddhist, actually.
It looks very new and strange and peculiar, but it’s a process of stopping and doing all the things that we do. Or we have to undo things. We don’t have to do new things. We have to undo all our old patterns to take our mind out there and allow ourselves, allow our mind to experience its own nature. And experiencing our own the own our our own true nature, the true nature of our mind.
When we allow ourselves to do that, we begin to experience some more genuine happiness, and we are on the path to experiencing this lasting perfect happiness. So when we sat down at the beginning of this talk and did a little bit of breathing meditation, probably none of us here, just speaking generally, were perfectly successful in this meditation. Hope someone was, but I wasn’t. But by trying to do it, even if one that some of you may have didn’t know what you one was supposed to do properly because it maybe never tried it before, But just by trying to do this, some something happens in the mind immediately. In some the mind becomes a little bit calmer and clearer just naturally.
That that calmness and clarity that one experienced or started to experience, even if it was just a tiny bit, wasn’t something you created that wasn’t there before. It was always there. We just didn’t allow ourselves to experience it before, to know it it before. We hid it. We created all the causes in our ordinary life to obscure that.
And it’s actually always there. So what we experienced when when we meditated was just just a tiny, tiny, tiny itty bitty bit of the potential of our mind to be perfectly calm, clear, content, happy, free of confusion. We didn’t do anything spectacular, but something happened. We just allowed our mind to know something in a calm, clear way. And that’s what the mind does best.
Yeah. But because we’re not familiar with that process, process, it’s very difficult at the moment. And the old all the old habitual patterns of following our limited ways of knowing till all our thoughts sensations gets in the way. And we’re so habituated to wanting to know our thoughts and to know sounds and smells and shapes and colors, because they’re the things we’re familiar with knowing. So we like to keep on knowing those things, the same old boring things we’ve always known, but we’re so fascinated with them, so attached to them, so dependent on them.
It becomes very difficult to to allow ourselves to know our mind, but we can. This is the process of meditation. This is what meditation is, getting to know one’s mind. First, when we get to know our mind, what happens is we just seem to know this very strange thing that produces all sorts of thoughts and physical pains and agitations and this and that and worries and whatever. And we think, oh, I don’t wanna know this.
This is really a disaster. So we give up. And and we think, now I know my mind. My mind is a disaster. I don’t wanna know this anymore.
Finished. Back to the wonderful external world. But the point is we have to it is not easy to know the deep nature of our mind. It it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of skillful work because our mind is a very subtle and tricky thing. But one of the great beauties of the mind and one of its qualities, one of the the natures of our mind is is that by the power of familiarity, we can know anything.
And as I was saying at the beginning of the talk, when you first know something newly, you only know it in a very little in a small way. One’s not familiar with it, so you only know a little bit. It is very confusing. The experience is very unclear, not very satisfying, or fulfilling. But through the power of familiarity, the mind can know more and more and more.
So through it, one can know the nature of our confused thoughts more and more and more. See their illusory nature more and more and more, understand that they’re not the true nature of our mind more and more and more, that below this ordinary mind that we’re experiencing now, we can know if we allow ourselves to know that there is something much more subtle, pure, powerful, and incredible, and amazing. And that itself is the process of knowing, allowing the mind to do its thing, creating the conditions, sitting down quietly, and allowing the mind to do it, perform its function. So traditionally, as you’ve probably heard a million times, again, I’ll repeat it, is that it is said in the teachings that our mind is like a mirror. The potential of our mind is like a mirror.
The true nature of our mind is like a mirror, a pure mirror, a clean, straight, perfect mirror that can know everything. So we make the mistake of thinking our mind is like a mirror now, but our mind as it’s functioning now is not like a mirror, or at least it’s not a clean, straight mirror. Our our mind now is like a very wobbly, dirty mirror that completely distorts things and and therefore doesn’t know things clearly and correctly. But the true nature of our mind is more subtle level of our mind. That has the potential to know things perfectly, exactly as they are.
All we have to do is kind of wipe the dust from the mirror. And in this case, that dust is our ordinary thoughts, our disturbed thoughts that come from our confusion, our ignorance of not knowing who we are. If we just go beyond all those thoughts, then one can go and begin to reach this these more subtle levels of mind that have this potential for perfect wisdom, perfect understanding, perfect experience. And it is that mind that has the potential, because it is able to know things perfectly, to experience perfect lasting happiness. So this is what all the Buddha’s teachings are about.
When we take refuge in the Buddha, we take refuge in the Buddha’s teachings. When we take refuge in the Buddha’s teachings, they are leading us to experience our own true nature, to take inner refuge, refuge within ourselves, to trust in ourselves, not as we are now, but in our inner potential. The term for Buddhist for Buddhist in Tibetan is nangpa, which means an inner being, which I like this term much better than Buddhist because Buddhist sounds something very limited and kind of sectarian. But an inner being is someone who is looking for happiness inside because that’s where it is metaphorically. Happiness is within our mind.
It’s always there. The potential for it is always there. And when you’re an inner being, you know where to look and you’re following the path that leads inside. One is taking responsibility for one’s own happiness, realizing it’s not out there but within one’s mind, that suffering isn’t out there. The causes of suffering and dissatisfaction aren’t out there.
They’re within one’s own mind. So I think I’ve this is something about the nature of mind, some points about the nature of mind, some of the basic points that are very helpful to know and to to think about. Is it true or not? I can’t prove any of this at all. Very difficult to prove.
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, says that there is, within the Buddha’s teachings, proof of the existence of mind and the nature of mind, but the number of people who can understand it at any one point in time is maybe a handful because the logic is so incredibly complicated. But I think there are some signs that I try to point out that we can trust in, you know, the nature of mind. Because also going back to this the question of the brain, if if the mind is just the brain, then there’s just this life. Then this denies the experience of all the cultures that have worked with the mind in the past. People who have experienced past lives remember them and have some clairvoyance into future lives or or future, you know, the dis even the the immediate future.
Many people have these experiences. Many people, particularly as children, not just children, in cultures that believe in past lives, have memories of past lives. Many, many children, even in this country, have this experience. Because when you’re young, the mind is sometimes a little less confused. There’s some a little bit of clarity there, and the past life is very close.
It’s just a few few years ago. And all the strong imprints and memories and involvement of this life hasn’t built up so strongly. So the the the potential of the mind to know things clearly is functioning better in some ways. So some children have the ability when they’re very young to remember some some points of their past their previous past life. So there is a huge amount of evidence of this among very, very ordinary people.
But the view that the mind is just the brain completely rejects all this because it doesn’t fit in. It just doesn’t fit in. But there is enormous amount of evidence for it. And then if we consider how the mind works, which I’ll be talking about a bit, as some of you have been considered, maybe have been considering about the law of cause and effect of karma, then the actions of this life don’t really explain all the things that happen in this life. To some extent, they do, but if one investigates more and more, just an explanation that the things of this life produce this life don’t really seem to work.
Indicating that there is mind and there is a continuity of mind. And this continuity has always existed and always will exist. So I’ll stop there. If you have any questions, I’m happy to try and answer. Yes.
This is an extremely difficult question. Think aren’t we talking about mainly, in this case, as ordinary people? One knows in this way, in dependence on on labels, on concepts. It’s a kind of mean, the kind of knowing that you’re talking about is beyond these sorts of things. Yeah.
Eventually takes us beyond this. Yeah. Mind is a direct Yeah. Awareness. You know con I mean, this you know conventional truth.
The conventional truth is known to in dependence on is it yeah. The conventional truth is dependent arising, depending on causes and conditions, parts, and the labeling mind. This is the conventional truth, but the ultimate truth how can I say this? But the ultimate truth is not something No. Sorry.
I can’t really answer answer your question. But, anyway, when you old when you know the ultimate truth, you’re you’re knowing that directly with completely free of concepts. Have I. But this is the teaching say that the the ultimate truth is known directly because this is what this is the potential of the mental consciousness itself is that we know things now through concepts. We don’t know things directly.
Our our eye consciousness can know things directly without con without concepts. In that first moment, there is a direct knowing of shape and color with the eye consciousness. But then our mental consciousness, you know, then knows that that shape and color that’s been experienced by the eye consciousness. It knows it through through concepts, not directly at at at our at our level now, but we have the potential to know with our mental conscious consciousness to know everything directly, completely free of concepts. Ultimate truth is just knowing the nature of things.
So that Can an ordinary being No. But you don’t have to be enlightened to know the ultimate truth. You you have you develop the wisdom of emptiness. See yeah. Then you see the ultimate truth, the final truth of all phenomena directly with your mental consciousness unhindered.
So it’s like a yogic direct Yeah. Awareness of such and such. Yeah. But it didn’t really answer your question. Sorry.
I think his Holiness once said that if they made sophisticated computers sophisticated enough, maybe it would act as a basis for a mind to enter into it. But it is not I’m not sure if you how serious he was. He may have been joking. And but, anyway, his holiness wasn’t saying that the computer would generate a mind, would create a mind, or would become a mind. His Holiness was saying that just what I understood was that just as our mind, because it’s something our brain is something very complex, it acts as a basis for a mind to work through it.
Then if one generated computers that became as subtle, as complex as the brain, the physical brain, then a mind could work through it perhaps. But it’s still something completely different and it wouldn’t be created by the computer or even ultimately dependent on the computer. Vehicle. While it’s confused, it needs a vehicle from a Buddhist point of view. While the mind is confused and ignorant, it our mind has has through habit, through beginningless time, it has identified with a physical body.
So it has this confusion and attachment to solid substance. But it doesn’t need solid substance. The the most subtle level of mind doesn’t depend on anything else other than a previous moment of its own continuum. Our our ordinary mind now, it definitely works through this body. It knows things through this eye.
You you need an eye to have an eye consciousness. The eye consciousness works through this physical eye. Our ear consciousness works through this ear structure and the body consciousness works through this body. So it the ordinary level of mind functioning now does work through this brain and nervous system, but it’s not not created by it. It’s dependent on it.
But it’s not the main dependence because this gross mind that is working through this brain and this this nervous system and this body is it it is fundamentally based and dependent on the most subtle level of mind, which came from a previous life. I mean, this the mind that we are experiencing now, this gross mind, because it’s dependent on this physical body and brain and nervous system, that this body is gonna come to an end with death. It will die. So the mind that is arising in dependence on that will also cease completely. But that doesn’t mean that everything stops because the mind that is dependent on that body will shut down.
But then when that stops, then a more subtle level of mind will arise, which has always been there. We and which is the actual basis for, this gross mind. It was not space, but it’s this space-like mind that had that came from a previous life that that caused this this body to arise and that will continue moment by moment into a next life, into a next life, which is what is a life? It is an experience. It is a knowing when you get down to it.
What is my life? It’s knowing many things. So you have different lives. So and depending on the body you’ve got, you know things in certain ways. If you’ve got a male body, then you you experience things in a male way.
You can’t you can’t help it. And if you have a female body, then you experience things in a female way. There’s some difference. Not a big difference, but some difference. Just because of having a body, the mind operates through that.
So this life, our life, if you think of it, it’s just experiences. Many different big, small, good, bad, wise, stupid, all sorts of experiences. Even this physical body is an experience. This is something this is another whole area we didn’t get into, but the the western view is that matter came first. There was the big bang.
There was the matter, bonk. And then maybe mind come came afterwards. If mind does exist, it came a long time after matter. It’s a byproduct of matter. This is not the the Buddhist view.
First, there was mind, then came matter. And in fact, it is very difficult to distinguish mind from matter. Even the great, you know, atomic physicists of the nineteen twenties discovered that, and only modern science is only starting popular science and popular awareness of science is only starting to realize this, that, you know, this body seems like something very concrete and solid and real. But when you get down to it, the only way this body exists and and all solid matter exists, this whole world exists, this whole universe exists, is an experience. It’s just an experience.
It’s just mind. It’s just knowing. No experience, if you don’t know something, doesn’t really exist for you. Sorry? No.
No. This is the mysterious thing. It just it’s just like that. Mind knows, and it has this it has this ability to know. This hasn’t been created.
It just simply exists. So this mind is still wonderful. No. Not exactly. You can’t say that.
There are discrete separate minds. When I experience something, when I yeah. But when I experience something, you don’t experience it. But but a Buddha a Buddha has a correct view, has got rid of this wrong sense of I. So there are Buddhas existing.
They are existing in a state of pure bliss, compassion, wisdom. Right? Or maybe because that’s the potential of our mind. So when that’s developed, these beings exist. Yeah.
There are these Buddha minds existing. I’m not experiencing that. I’m not Buddha. I’m not experiencing Buddhahood now, but I’ve got mind. I have the potential to experience that, but I’m not experiencing it now, whereas other beings are experiencing their Buddha potential as Buddhas right now.
This indicates that there is some difference. There are discrete entities. Difference. There are discrete entities. There are Buddha minds.
There are different minds. They have the same potential, same nature. Yeah. Eventually, they can. That’s what enlightenment is.
But through ignorance, one has identified with this solid matter. If that happens, then could you have sentient beings just going around gross minds and no subtle mind? Could they No. No. The the the two go together.
You can’t have a gross mind without a subtle mind. The subtle mind your very subtle mind is the basis for the gross mind. But at the moment, the gross mind works through this physical body. But why this physical body arose in the first place is because of the subtle mind. It’s a very complicated subject.
It’s not something you can just kinda put together in the but the important thing to think about is, do I have a brain or do I have a mind? This is an incredibly important thing because I would like to make make this little point is that many people say Buddhism is an extremely negative pessimistic religion. This actually Buddhism is the most wonderful optimistic view of all because Buddhism says there is mind, and therefore there is everything and meaning exists. And because of mind, one can experience enlightenment, bliss, perfection, and you can give that to others. This is the most optimistic, wonderful view existing in the universe.
But so instead of that, what we have is suffering. What a shame. How ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be. At a certain level, we can.
When the mind gets more becomes more clear, it is able to draw on those experiences. Consciously, obviously, in fact, we are already, but we don’t know it. The reason in this life we learn certain things easily is because we’re drawing on imprints from a past life. Life. The reason it’s difficult to know other learn other things is there’s nothing to draw on from a previous life or very little to draw on.
So we do that actually although we’re not aware of it. But as we develop our awareness, the clarity of mind, we are able to consciously become know our previous experience and and develop it more and more. And do you don’t feel that suffering? Yes. Yes.
Just like, you know, ordinary memory is a function of a clear mind. If if the mind becomes more and more clear now and you already have a clear if you experience things with a clear mind, the memory of it is very clear so you can remember it’s also easier to remember it because the imprint, the ordinary just talking at an ordinary level, you experience things with a lot of awareness so the memory is very strong. If we go through life in a very kind of obscured way, then our memories of what we did are very obscure like most of mine. You know, it’s difficult to remember things. And the more we obscure our mind, the the more difficult it is to remember things even in this life.
But then if you start to make your mind more clear again, then you can remember things more and more. If that continuum goes into the next life, you’ve gotta start all over again. Not all over again because there’s there there there just like we have memories of this life that we can build on, then we have karmic imprints and knowledge to build on, especially as we develop our mind more and more in the right way. Not developing the mind in the in the sense what we do in in as ordinary people now, we develop our minds with inter intellectual information. But this doesn’t really develop the mind.
It does it isn’t transformative. You know, you can you can read the Encyclopedia Britannica and whatever and and and memorize it back the front, but this will not transform the mind. Whereas real knowledge, real knowing, real experience transforms the mind. No. I think with within mind itself, there is the quality of itself of directing of direction.
And at the moment, our the direction of our mind is, generally speaking, towards old habits, negative habits through our attachment. And our mind is directed towards that more