Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores the Buddhist law of cause and effect in this 45-minute teaching, beginning by clarifying why we listen to dharma: first to check whether the teachings apply to our own desire for happiness, then, if trusted, to understand and practice them deeply. He stresses that motivation matters profoundly—whether we listen to transform our mind for our own benefit or to develop the wisdom and compassion to help all beings. After guiding the audience through a simple breathing meditation to settle the mind, he addresses karma directly, contrasting the Buddhist view of causality with alternative explanations: arbitrary causation (things happening without reason), which leads to logical absurdity, and theistic creation (a permanent creator-god), which Buddhist logic shows to be impossible since anything permanent cannot act or change. The core teaching: all experience is mental, all effects arise from causes within the mind, and we alone are responsible for our happiness and suffering. No external condition—money, possessions, or other people—can create lasting happiness unless we first create the inner causes. Suitable for mixed audiences from new to long-term practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03.mp3
UUID: 07b6604b-d336-4854-971d-ee129dc03629
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: z done but no sheet no info (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,308
So maybe there there is a mixture here of people who maybe haven’t heard very much at all about the Buddhadharma and some older students. So so if the older people, hope I don’t bore you too much by repeating the same things, but I can’t say anything new anyway. I can just repeat what the Buddha said. So as I mentioned two nights ago when I gave a talk here about the nature of the mind, When we first listened to the Buddha’s teachings, one reason for doing this, or the main reason, is to check the teachings whether they have some applicability in our life since we all want happiness and we don’t want suffering. Then we need to find a way to achieve that.
We’re always trying to do that. So especially Buddha’s teachings offer a method of bringing about happiness and freedom from suffering. That’s the claim. That’s the advertising claim of the Buddhadharma. So so firstly, one has to check it out whether it seems to contain some truth and something that one can practice for oneself in daily life.
So if after some time, by listening to the teachings, one feels that they are something that one can trust, that they have some real benefit for oneself and others, then the reason for listening to the teachings from that point on is to understand them more and more in order to practice them, to put them into practice in our daily life because just listening to the teachings isn’t of much benefit, one has to practice them. In fact if we get into this habit of listening to teachings again and again but not practicing what we understand to be true and worthwhile, then in some ways this can be more harmful than than not hearing the teachings. One starts to build up a habit of listening to something worthwhile and and ignoring it. So one needs to listen with the wish to to really want to practice having developed this trust. So, also, as I always mention, because this is something all my teachers have taught me, is that and this is especially applicable to tonight’s talk which is about karma, the law of cause and effectwhatever effects that come about in our life depend on the nature of the cause.
So if we haveand in this case we can talk about the motivation that we put into something that determines the nature of the effect that comes from whatever we do. So if our motivation is very strong and very clear, then the result of whatever we do in our life tends to be stronger and clearer, something complete. But and if our motivation is something positive or virtuous, then the result is something positive or virtuous. If our motivation is something ordinary, the result is ordinary. If our motivation is something extraordinary, then the result will be eventually extraordinary.
It’s not so much the action that counts, but the way we do the action, the motivation behind our action. So in listening to the Buddha’s teachings, for them to have greatest effect on our mind, then we should have a strong and positive motivation for listening. The motivation that we try to develop is a wish to transform our mind, not just temporarily, just to listen to the teachings to gain some information that we can entertain ourselves with and to impress other people with for some time, but to listen to the teachings in order to transform our mind, but in a very profound and lasting way so that we can overcome all the disturbing qualities of our mind, the negative qualities of our mind, and develop all the positive qualities. And we can so this is the basic motivation. And on top of that, one can have the awareness that one can develop one’s mind and one’s qualities either for one’s own sake, just having concern for oneself.
Because if one develops one’s mind, then one will oneself will have happiness and be free of suffering and confusion. Alright? So one can listen and with that kind of motivation, or one can try and develop an even greater motivation that comes from understanding that by developing the mind, all the positive qualities of the mind more and more, then eventually one can achieve a state where not only oneself is experiencing real happiness and freedom from suffering and worry and confusion and so on, but one has developed a state of mind that is so pure and powerful that it just naturally and spontaneously and effortlessly benefits others, not just temporarily, but in a very long lasting profound way. And in fact, this is why the Buddha taught, came to this earth and taught, was for us to to encourage us to develop our minds not just for our own benefit, but so that we can benefit everyone. This is our our potential.
This is what is called our Buddha nature that we all possess even though we’re not aware of it. So this is what we to develop at the beginning of listening to any Dharma talk as much as we can try and develop this motivation. So in order to help develop that motivation now what we can do just for a short time is to spend a couple of minutes of doing a basic breathing meditation which I’ll just explain very simply and quickly. I won’t go into the details for the new people, just some basic points. So what we do is, in this case, in order to make the mind more calm and clear, and when the mind is more calm and clear, is kind of a neutral state of mind, and from that neutral state of mind we can generate a very positive virtuous motivation.
So what we try to do is just take a simple object such as our breathing and just try and focus our mind, our attention, our awareness on that. So we don’t try to change breathing. We just observe that the body is breathing naturally. That’s its favorite occupation of the of the body is just to breathe. And so one just observes the breath coming in and going out.
Just try to place the body in a comfortable position with the the back straight and relaxed, and place the right hand on top of the left with the thumbs lightly touching. Just keep your eyes just a little bit open, and just be aware of the body breathing, the breath coming in and going out. And particularly be aware of the breath, the sensation that the breath causes nostrils and as it goes out the nostrils. Just try to be aware of any sensation at the nostrils. Just try to take interest in that, to tame the mind, to control the mind, not in a forceful way, but in a relaxed way, just being aware of that sensation.
And any other experience such as thoughts, other sensations in the body, external sounds, and whatever, just let go of all those things. Don’t take any interest in them. Don’t repress them, suppress them. Just don’t take interest in them, and just try to be aware of the breath. Just allow the mind to be filled with the experience of the breath coming in and going out.
That’s all. And and in this way, just allow the mind to become more calm and clear. So within that more basically calmer and clearer mind, just be aware right now that there is a wish to be happy, to be free of any kind of disturbance, unhappiness, dissatisfaction. That wish is naturally within the mind all the time. But because of our own ignorance, our own confusion, we don’t know how to develop this perfect happiness and become completely free of suffering.
But that wish is always there so we can generate the thought that may this wish become a reality, that may I develop perfect happiness, complete freedom of confusion and pain and suffering by following a a perfect method, a method that will not betray me in any way, a method that won’t cause me to bring harm to others in any way, but in fact, method that will not only be able to bring perfect happiness into my own life, into my own mind, but enable me to also bring others lasting happiness and contentment. And with that thought in mind, to have an open mind mind to listening to the Buddha’s teachings as a possible way, a possible method that one can rely on to achieve this goal that every living being wishes. So with that thought, those people here who have some faith in the Buddha’s teachings, have taken refuge in the Buddha’s teachings, can try to think of or visualize Śākyamūni Buddha in front of them as our source of refuge and our source of guidance and inspiration. Think of all living beings surrounding oneself who are our objects of practice, and we can generate the thought of refuge and the mind of bodhicitta wishing to achieve complete enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings.
So the topic of tonight’s talk is the law of cause and effect, the teachings on karma. So, actually, this is a very, very difficult subject. It’s within the Buddhist the Buddha always suggested to all those people who came to listen to him that they shouldn’t accept just what he said out of some blind faith in him, but to always check up his teachings, using logic to analyze what he said to see if it really made sense and could be applied in one’s life for the benefit of one’s life, for the benefit of others. So this is definitely what we should do. But in the case of the teachings on the law of cause and effect, to a large extent, they require quite a lot of faith and trust because it’s not easy to prove how the law of cause and effect works.
It’s a very difficult thing to prove. It’s it’s extremely subtle subject, but it is something very fundamental to the Buddhist teachings. So as as I was saying a couple of nights ago, the fundamental assumption of of of Buddhist teachings is that there is mind. We all have mind. Right?
We all talk about having a mind, but none of us really know what this is. And in our culture, the main assumption is that the mind is the brain or some function of the brain. And as I said a couple of nights ago, if this is true, then since the brain is something physical part of this body, then since this body decays and there is death, then if the mind is just the brain or a function of the brain, then there is only this life. And there’s that’s all. Nothing to worry about and no nothing to be really responsible for.
We can do anything we like, and if we’re clever, we can escape all the consequences of this life that could happen in this life. If we’re clever, we can rob banks, murder people, and if we’re very clever, we can get away with it. Right? There’s no reason to be concerned about other people if there’s just this life. No reason to be moral or anything.
But this is an extremely very depressing view of life. But the assumption of the Buddhist teachings, again, something I can’t prove, is that there is this mysterious thing called the mind, which is not the brain. It is something formless, but it does exist. It always has existed, and it’s something that cannot be destroyed. Because it’s something formless, it cannot be destroyed.
So the the mind is has existed before this life. In fact it’s the actual cause of this life, and when this life comes to an end, the mind, the consciousness goes on moment by moment. And how the mind works is explained by the law of cause and effect. How the experiences that we have in this life, in all previous lives and past lives are determined by the way the mind works, which is what is called the law of cause and effect, which in the traditional Buddhist language of India, the Sanskrit language, the word for this is karma, which simply means activity, action. And this word action is referring to the activity of the mind, the actions of the mind.
This is karma. But in fact, everything we do, our physical actions, our speech actions, are motivated by the mind. Everything comes down to the mind. So, within the teachings on the law of cause and effect, on karma, the fundamental aspect of these teachings is that every effect, every experience we have is an effect. And every effect has to have a cause.
There are effects cannot come about without having a cause. And this cause has to precede the effect. The cause doesn’t happen at the same time as the effect, but the cause has to precede the effect. This is a fundamental assumption or perception within the Buddha’s teachings. So there are other explanations of why effects come about or possible explanations which we should think about and check up.
So one explanation that has been suggested by some Indian philosophers in the past, and some people still have argued this in some ways, is that, in fact, effects don’t have causes. Things just happen arbitrarily. There’s no real cause for things. There’s no real cause for this earth. There’s no real cause for me being here.
Things just happen arbitrarily, basically. But the the Buddhist view doesn’t accept this. They say, if this is true, then there are many logical, what’s the word, logical discrepancies in this point of view. Because if things didn’t really, if effects, didn’t have causes, then it would mean that anything could happen at any time because it doesn’t need a cause. So it could mean that suddenly, like a tree would start growing in the middle of the would appear in this room right now.
If things didn’t depend on a cause, thing effects just came about without any real reason, without any logical causes, then a tree could just suddenly appear in this room. Right. Or we would start floating around in this room. Or you’d turn up, you know, a pot of tea and and the tea wouldn’t come out. There’s no reason why it should pour out.
There’s no cause. Just things would happen in all sorts of arbitrary ways. You could argue that some things have causes and some things don’t. Some some effects come about by causes but some things don’t have causes. But I so you can think about that but if you think about it carefully, it’s kind of illogical.
That some things should have causes but some things don’t. Because if one starts to really look into reality, how things exist, our world, everything, if you really start to look, is interconnected in all sorts of ways. All sorts of ways. So either everything has a cause or nothing has a cause. And if nothing has a cause, then all sorts of strange things could happen because they don’t need causes.
You could put a pot of water on the stove, light the stove, turn up the gas or the electricity, full blast, and you get a pot of frozen water. Or or the water would turn into cement. Cement tea, because there’s no cause for anything. No no logical connection between effects and what you do. What you do and effects.
There’s no real logical connection. But this just doesn’t make sense. And another explanation, of course, that is offered is that there is a creator, an original cause, a creating God that produces all effects. So within the Buddhist teachings, a creator God is not accepted. This is also considered a logical impossibility.
Buddhism doesn’t propound this just to be sectarian and kind of dispute other religions because this is not the Buddhist way. All religions have their value and benefit, and certainly in our world now, there’s a great need for all kinds of religions for people. Because people don’t have any religious views, so many people are really lost these days. But what is emphasized in in in the Buddha’s teachings is that is to understand reality, that understanding the real nature of things is the key to everything, is the key to happiness, is the key to the end of suffering. Why we suffer, why we are dissatisfied, discontent, have worry, fear, boredom, depression, all these things is because we don’t really know ourselves.
We don’t know other people, really. We don’t know the world we live in. We don’t really understand it. We have many ideas, many concepts, many opinions, and some of these are relatively true. Sometimes, some of our ideas and opinions are true, but we don’t have any real knowing, real knowledge that we’re completely confident about because our mind is basically confused.
But when we really know things completely as they are, then we can be free of suffering and experience real happiness. So it’s important from the Buddhist point of view to know reality as it is, how the whole world really works. And the Buddhist view is that the world doesn’t work because there is a god that created it and is controlling it. So this is a very profound subject. I don’t want to disprove God exists for people who believe in God, but if maybe if you’ve come here because you don’t feel connection with that view, maybe I can just say a couple of points, which is that if you think about the idea of a creator God, what it comes down to, a creator god means a first cause.
Yeah. The first cause of everything. A creator god means a first cause. The first cause. Because if there is a if there is a if there is a cause before god, a creator, then that’s the creator.
Yeah. So god has to be the first course that does something that doesn’t depend on anything else, that doesn’t have any other causes for its existence. Right? That’s what if god does exist as a creator, then that’s what the creator is. It’s the very first cause of everything, something not depending on any causes and conditions in any way whatsoever.
So if such a thing did exist, this this phenomena, this creator, would be an independent phenomena. It would not depend on anything else. It would be independent, quite separate, isolated. Right? That’s what a first cause is.
But if you study Buddhist logic, it it points out that anything that depends on causes and conditions is impermanent. It’s changing all the time. Whereas, something that doesn’t depend on causes and conditions is permanent. It doesn’t change. Because there’s no cause for it, no condition for it to change.
So if there was a first cause, it would have to be permanent. It wouldn’t change because there’s no reason, nothing there wouldn’t be any cause for it to change, nothing before that would make it change. It would be something permanent. And if it was permanent, it couldn’t create. Because in order to create, it would have to change.
So a first cause, from a Buddhist point of view, is a logical absurdity. A first cause would have to be permanent, and something permanent doesn’t change. And if it doesn’t change, it couldn’t do anything. It couldn’t create anything. So a first cause is an impossibility.
What the law of cause and effect says is that every effect has a cause and that cause has a cause but before that and that cause has a cause, and that cause has a cause, and that cause has a cause going back into beginningless time without any first cause. Something interesting to think about. Because each cause you can think of as being an effect, And that effect can act as a cause to produce another effect. But then going back, that that cause was caused by something else, and that cause was caused by something else. That’s the only way things can exist from a Buddhist point of view.
Everything else doesn’t make sense if one really analyzes it deeply. I I can’t prove that. There’s lots of Buddhist logic, very, very complicated Buddhist logic about that. That’s just kind of like a summary of that logic, which one can think about. But the conclusion of that means that we are responsible for our for our life, for our existence, not something controlling us in any way.
It it’s it’s us that is responsible for all our our experiences. All our experiences were caused by ourselves going back and back and back into beginningless time. And all all our future experiences, good and bad, small and big, are caused by ourselves. The principal cause comes from ourself. Of course, it’s it’s undeniable that there are secondary conditions in the external world that affect us, that produce produce effects, But the real effects come from ourselves.
The real cause lies with us. So if we want happiness, we have to create the cause completely ourselves. So and if we want perfect lasting happiness, which is what we want, we don’t want just some temporary pleasure, some temporary entertainment. Right? No one really wants that.
As as of course, we want these things, but we want much more than that. We want perfect lasting happiness. If we want that, we have to create the cause for it. And if we don’t want to suffer in any way at any time, then we have to stop creating the causes ourselves. This is the basic conclusion of understanding the law of cause and effect, and it’s all within our hands.
It’s completely up to us. We are completely responsible. No one else is going to make us happy. Nothing else is ever going to make us happy. Or no combination of people, things, events, situations, piles of money, living in beautiful houses, and all these things.
None of these things will make us happy. We have to create the cause ourselves. Not by relying on these external conditions. We have to create the inner causes ourselves and we have to stop creating the inner causes for our own dissatisfaction and confusion, pain, and worry. So to try and make that a little bit clearer is if if we for example, if I drink a glass of water, if you just look at me drinking a glass of water, this this appears to be totally a physical thing.
This this this physical body here is holding this physical thing, a glass, which is filled with this physical stuff called water. And I do this physical action and I drink it. And the water goes inside this physical body. It all looks very physical. So if I want to have this the happiness of not being thirsty, I have to do all these physical things, and then I won’t suffer from being thirsty anymore.
And I’ll have the happiness of being, what, non thirsty. I don’t know what the word is. Right? It looks very easy and this is actually how we operate in the world. We see the world as everything as being physical and by the manipulation of physical things one gets some happiness.
And if you manipulate the physical world, you control suffering and confusion. It’s like that. Right. Simple. And that’s what we do in our life, thinking that’s how one gets happiness and how we get how we avoid suffering.
But even in this simple action, if you really check and this is not just Buddhist theory, but countless philosophers in the West and all over the world have tried to investigate this, and it’s a very profound subject. So I can only talk about it in a very simple, superficial way. Maybe some of you here know this much more profoundly than I anyway. But so obviously, there are these physical things here. There’s this physical body and this glass and the water and all these things.
But how does one know them? How does one experience them? There is you can say there is a physical glass here and and water, which is a physical substance. But when I drink it, that experience what is that experience? That experience, in fact, from a Buddhist point of view, and not just from a Buddhist point of view, but from from many Western philosophers’ point of view, that is an experience of your mind.
Yeah. If you if you don’t have a mind, you can’t know this glass exists. If you don’t have a mind, you can’t know and experience this water. As I was saying, what was it, Tuesday night? When we talk about mind, mind means experience.
And with every moment of experience, in every moment, there is a feeling. Alright. Sorry if I repeat something because some of you were here that that that but I’ll just repeat these things again. Like, this this table is physical matter and like this body. There’s no fundamental difference between this table and this body.
It’s just organic stuff. Just organic stuff. No real difference. But if I hit this table, this table doesn’t know it’s being hit. It doesn’t experience anything, and it doesn’t feel anything.
But if I hit this body, I know it, I experience it, and I feel things. How come if this is physical matter and this is physical matter? What is the difference? The difference is this physical matter, this physical body has a mind connected with it, associated with it. This table doesn’t have a mind that works through it, but this body does.
And it’s the body the mind, sorry, that knows and experiences and feels things. So even just so even one’s own physical body, you can say one has a physical body, but how do we know it? How do we experience it? Our experience of this physical body is a mental event. It is a mental process.
There may be external physical things, but the only way we experience them is with our mind. So, actually, everything comes down to being an experience of the mind. We we are all sitting in this room here, which appears to be a completely independent physical object, something quite separate from my me and my mind. Right? I’m just a mirror reflecting just like a mirror reflects this room.
I just know this room. It’s an independent phenomenon just there. But this is not true. This is not actually true. There is a physical room here.
But how do we know it? How do we experience it? We experience it with our own unique mind. So we can all agree that this room has these stained glass windows and there are two fans turning around and there are certain lights different things here. We all agree with that.
So we all tend to think we’re experiencing the same thing, but we’re not. Each of us is experiencing our own room. We’re all in our own Buddha house room here. We’re all experiencing our own mind’s version of this room. And because we all have minds operating at a human level, we can all agree that this room has certain characteristics.
But we’re all experiencing this room in our own way, our own unique way, from our own mind. This room is something physical, but it’s also, at the same time, roughly speaking, a mental event going on, the mental event of experiencing this room. I mean, even if if you close your eyes, you can’t see the room anymore. The eye consciousness, the eye knowing of this room stops. There’s no way you can know this room without using your eye consciousness at the moment.
One’s eye consciousness. You need your eyeball, which is physical thing, but the eyeball doesn’t know this room because dead bodies have eyeballs, but dead bodies don’t see rooms. What sees rooms is consciousness. Knowing, experiencing is a function of mind, and mind isn’t matter. Mind creates matter, not matter creates mind.
Mind creates the illusion of matter, creates the experience of matter. Even but you say, but this is solid. I can feel it. It’s really solid. That’s not mind.
But mind creates that illusion of something solid. How else do you know that this is solid other than your mind knowing it? It’s something to think about. Everything we’re experiencing is coming within our own mind. It’s not something in dependence upon us, which is how we tend to view the world, that everything is something independent, external, out there that impinges on me in some way.
It just happens, but it’s not like that. We’re experiencing the inner workings of our mind. Everything that we that goes on is a mental experience, and so it’s an effect. So it has to have a cause. So what is the cause?
The cause has to if since the experience, the effect is actually one’s own mind, the real cause has to lie within one’s own mind. Because even if you check-in the way the ordinary world, the physical world works, there is usually, one can see, a cause that produces produces an effect. For example, if you want the effect of hot water, there is a specific cause for that. And the cause has to be of the same nature as the effect and there has to be some direct continuity between the cause and the effect. So if you want hot water, the cause for hot water has to be something hot and you have to have a direct connection between the cause and the effect.
So if you want to turn some cold water into hot water, you don’t light the stove and put the pot of water on the kitchen table. Right? The cause has to be related to the effect. Yeah. You have to put the water on the fire, on the stove.
Right? Very simple. And then you have a a cause that is directly and continuously related that produces an effect, hot water. So similarly, everything we’re experiencing has a particular feeling going on with it. And there are and the main feelings there are three feelings, but the two main ones, the important ones, are there a pleasant feeling or happiness and there are unpleasant feelings or unhappiness.
Yeah. These are the feelings that we experience moment by moment. These are our own mind. These are effects coming from within our own mind. And so the cause, the principal cause, also lies within our own mind.
This is what the Buddha taught. This is karma. So although there’s this drinking of water, which is a physical event, but the experience is one’s mind and the feeling that goes with it, some pleasant feeling, that is an effect that has to have a cause of the same nature. There’s these outer conditions, but to have that pleasant sensation inside the body, the cause has to rely within the mind because the experience is is the mind. So if you haven’t created the cause within the mind, you can’t experience the effect within the mind, even if you’ve got all the external conditions together.
Within conditions together. In the case of many people work very hard all their lives to make money, They have all the physical things. They do all the try to do all the right things, but the effect never comes. The real effect never comes.