Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 85-minute introductory talk, Venerable Thubten Gyatso provides a foundational overview of Buddhist philosophy and practice, continuing from the previous week’s discussion of mind and consciousness. He explains the six realms of existence, the nature of individual and beginningless mind, and the doctrine of karma—understood as intentional mental action that shapes experience across lifetimes. He walks through four types of karmic results: the throwing result (rebirth itself), effects similar to the cause (both habitual tendencies and life experiences), and the environmental result (the shared world shaped by collective karma). The core teaching concerns how to gain control over karma through three approaches: changing internal conditions by cultivating loving-kindness and compassion while abandoning anger and greed; purifying negative karmas through the Four Opponent Powers (regret, determination not to repeat, generation of altruistic aspiration, and performing opposing actions); and developing wisdom that sees the illusory nature of self. He addresses practical questions about free will, vegetarianism, taking vows, and the possibility of enlightenment in one lifetime, while emphasizing that sincere practice requires intellectual conviction combined with meditation experience. The talk is pitched at beginners to Buddhism with some engagement from a small sangha audience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 IB 1986 03 18.mp3
UUID: dedffc39-e9fe-4f1c-9088-221bd22f9217
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 1986-03-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 85.4 minutes
Words: ~9,504
From last week, where I left off, giving a general introduction to clear up any questions you may have during the talk, and let’s hope that the picture becomes clearer as I go through. So last week I talked a little bit about the about ourselves, really. Just looking at the what we are and we looked at our bodies and we talked a bit about our minds. And I defined mind for you as being that which is well, synonyms with mind are consciousness and awareness, sort of knowing. Mind is the quality of just simply being aware.
And the awareness that we have, this consciousness, is of course dependent upon our bodies. We have five senses which give us awareness and we have our sixth sense, if you like, the mental consciousness. So there are the six main types mind or of awareness. And those six main types are accompanied by all the other mental qualities that we have like emotions, knowledge, the qualities of love and compassion, the qualities of anger and aggression, and negative minds, and feelings, pleasure, pain. And there’s quite a few different little qualities of these six main consciousnesses.
Then towards the end of the talk we we were talking about the process of where the mind comes from. And I think I explained that there were six main realms of existence where beings with mind exist. And the human realm and the animal realm are two of the realms which we are aware of, and there are others which are not immediately ascertainable by our present consciousness. Except some people, through predispositions that they’ve inherited, that they’ve been born with from previous lives, are able to see some different realms, they may call them ghosts and things like that. And others who are yogis, who are meditators, are able through developing the power of their awareness, are able to perceive other realms.
So we mentioned that. And I also mentioned that each of our minds is individual in as much as we don’t all belong to a universal consciousness. Our minds don’t sort of plug in, which actually is quite a commonly held idea, particularly those who have been interested in studying Jungian psychology. He talks about this universal consciousness and all parts of it. Actually there’s a lot of good reasons to think like that because there are similarities in all of our minds.
We do have very similar ways of thinking and sort of the way our minds function are quite similar. But the reality is that we all do have like an individual consciousness and the consciousness that we have in this life is the continuity of like a single consciousness from a being in our previous life. And that consciousness came from the as a continuity of the consciousness of a being and a life before that and back and back and back. There’s no no one has ever seen a beginning to when our minds came into existence. It’s said to be beginningless.
So there aren’t new minds being created as the human population increases. Now people think, oh, there’s quite a lot of new minds being created. Where are they coming from? But these minds are the continuity of beings who have been existing in other realms and so there’s no problem about numbers. I don’t know where they’re coming from, but there is certainly no new creation of minds.
If we want to look for numbers, I mean we can simply say that the human population is increasing but the animal population is disastrously declining. And so there’s plenty of minds hanging around who are capable of filling out the the numbers of increasing things. So that’s where they come from. And also, our minds will continue as they’ve been beginningless in the past. They will continue on forever.
Now it’s not necessary that, our minds need to continue on taking rebirth after rebirth forever in the future. It’s possible. And because the energy which which causes our mind to continue on and continually take rebirth within these six realms is continually being recreated. We we create new energy or, karmic impressions almost continually throughout the day and continually creating new things for new future life. So it’s possible that we can get round and round and round.
But this state of cyclic existence, it’s called cyclic because cycles from very pleasurable existences down to very unhappy existences. And then when the energy for that unhappy existence is finished, they will cycle up again into more happy existences. So this state is called cyclic existence. And it’s possible, as Buddha demonstrated, to break this circle, to break the energy of karma which causes us uncontrollably to take rebirth. And to attain a a state of mind, you’ve heard the word nirvana, which very simply means cessation of all, confusion, of all ignorance, all mental disturbance.
And sort of corresponding with that cessation of mental disturbance is tremendous bliss and happiness. So, through his own efforts, then Buddha was an ordinary person like us, but through his own efforts, he attained this cessation of confusion and this state of Nirvāṇa, which was which is infinitely preferable to the cyclic existence that we’ve always experienced. And so he taught the path which led to that attainment of liberation. And that’s what Buddhism is all about. First of all, there’s the necessary explanation of where we are, and we have to understand where we are.
We’re not aware because of the confusion in our minds, can’t remember previous lives, and so we don’t even we’re not even aware of reincarnation. And we’re certainly not aware of karma, the energy which propels one from life to life. And so by not being aware, then we make no effort to change the situation. And, so briefly, we have this relatively pleasant rebirth as humans. But we use our time, which is running around doing everyday things, and not really understanding our minds and not gaining control of our minds.
And that’s the most important thing is to to understand and then gain control of our own mental energies, and it’s possible as demonstrated by the Buddha. Now, it’s not only the Buddha who demonstrated it two and a half thousand years ago in India. The path that he taught has been followed by practitioners ever since. So there has been a continuity of practice that he set up. And in the history books, in Eastern history books, not in Western history books, because we had a great big blank towards what was Europeans had very little idea of what was happening in the East, particularly on the philosophical sphere.
And we used to trade. Europeans used to trade, of course. But, really until the beginning of the century, there’s complete ignorance of the the teachings of Buddhism in the West. It’s it’s re only this century that we’ve been sort of opening up this tremendous psychology and philosophy to Western ideas. So our history books contain no records of yogis who have attained nirvana and enlightenment over the last two and a half thousand years.
But there are Tibetan records, there are Sanskrit texts and Chinese texts, are many stories of great meditators who have completed the path and who actualized what Buddha explained they would. And so through their experience they have confirmed what we’re not what is not immediately aware what we are not aware of, that is, the continuity of the mind from life to life and the karmic energy which propels us. And so right up until today there are still practitioners who are following the path. And those of us who have been fortunate enough to have communication and meetings with the Dalai Lama and with many of the high lamas who have come out of Tibet following the Chinese takeover of Tibet about twenty years ago, twenty five years ago, of course I can’t say that this person is an enlightened being or I can’t see the realizations in other people’s minds, but for me and I know for many other Westerners who have gone past the subjective phase of just sort of seeing somebody great and thinking, oh, wow, fantastic, he’s a Buddha, you know. I mean, some do that, but many of us have taken a very cold analytical look at the at the lamas and the Dalai Lama.
And for many of us, it’s been, very powerful, very powerful experience to to be able to communicate and to have personal relationship with, yogis and practitioners who are following the path towards that Buddha. And, so for us, there is strong confidence in in the reality of the possibility to subdue the crazy mind, the confused mind, and to actually attain levels of peace, levels of wisdom, compassion, and love, which are way beyond just about anything that we can experience now every day. So you have to take my word for it until you have the luck to to meet someone. Now so I I’ve mentioned the word karma, and I want to just briefly say a little more about that so that it doesn’t sound it is not completely an unknown concept. Now let’s look at the individual again.
At each of us, our mind is like a stream, a stream of consciousness, a stream of awareness that flows throughout this life and came from a previous life and will flow into a future life. And this the mind stream carries with it, what I’m gonna say, little energy potential, the energy potential from previous actions. And karma means action. Simply, it just means action. And it’s referring specifically to action of the mind.
When when there’s a mental impulse, this is like a mental action. We have an impulse to do something. There is, like, a mental motivation, an intention to to either say something or to do something with our hands, our body. So and always the actions of our hands and our body and our speech, these are always secondary to a mental impulse or mental energy. And so in a very concise point of view, karma is referring to this action, this mental action, or the intention to develop lies behind the things we do.
For example, let let’s say there’s there’s somebody or, let’s say, an animal. Right? And, this animal, maybe it’s an alligator or crocodile, which is threatening us or threatening somebody else. And then we go out to to kill it, to to remove the threat. So with the action of shooting the the animal, there’s very strong intention to hurt that animal, to kill it.
Very powerful intention is in the mind, and and this is accompanied with aggression and aversion. Even if we we think what we’re trying to prevent other people being, being hurt, still, to actually kill the animal, there is aggression in our minds. And so this energy of the intention and mental energy behind the act is karma. This is a very fine part of karma. And once we’ve done the action, the the energy of that intention has left an impression upon the mind stream.
Mind stream. The mind is very capable of carrying a lot of different potentials. So it’s as if a seed is implanted out of aggression upon this consciousness. Once the act is done and finished, then we sort of forget about We get involved with other acts. But still, there is something that is carried in our mind.
There is some very, you know, distinct energy which is carried on our mind, and it’s not doing anything. It’s very quiet, but it’s there. We’ve done the act. And then at some time in the future, when the mind is again in the state of aggression and anger, then it’s possible for that seed to to ripen and and to bring about an experience of pain sort of upon us. And if it’s at the moment of death, then which is very important because as we’re about to die, the the state of our mind is going to determine the state of our next life.
Always, even throughout life, the state of the mind in this moment is going to determine the state of the mind in the next moment. And so, if at the moment of death our mind is sort of aggressive and out of control and angry, which is not impossible, because death is quite a frightening experience and we become very confused, then this energy, instead of killing the crocodile, it can ripen, which means the mind suddenly is colored or, let’s say, it’s it’s shaped. But the mind’s not physical, but let’s say, it’s colored or shaped by that energy. And then so we’re dying. The next moment, we’re into intermediate existence, which is well on the way to the next life.
So the next life will be shaped or colored by whatever energy ripened at that time. And this was an energy associated with suffering and unhappiness, and so the life will be associated with suffering and unhappiness. If at the moment of death, our mind had been very peaceful and loving, then there’s no way that that karmic seed could have ripened, because the karmic seed can only ripen in the same sort of type of mind that it was created in. So as it was created in an aggressive, hating mind, then it can only ripen it. So if the mind’s loving, it can’t.
A karmic seed that we committed when our mind was loving and peaceful and friendly will ripen in such a mind. And so, going through the intermediate stage into the next life, we will sort of flow out like an opening flower. Our new body and the people around us will be peaceful and friendly and loving, and our mind will be peaceful and free. Even the mind of a baby will be sort of instinctive, peaceful and loving and friendly. So that’s called the karmic result.
karma is action, but if we want to look at it more broadly, it it also means cause and effect. So the cause is the action that’s done in a previous life. The effect is the result which arises in the future life. And one big effect is the realm of rebirth. Like, to be born as an animal or as a human is sort of one one effect of one karma.
It’s called the throwing result, which means the mind at death of the previous life has been thrown into the next rebirth. So that’s a karmic result. That’s the effect part of the cause and effect of karma. That’s not the only result of karma. There can be other results as well.
One of the one of these is the mental tendency to continue doing that type of action. So if we killed a lot in a previous life, then in this life, we can just have a we can enjoy killing. We can our mind can be sort of predisposed to causing pain and suffering upon others, animals, or even humans. So this also is a karmic result. It’s similar to the cause, which was killing and enjoying killing in previous Of course, on the other hand, if if it’s a positive, if we were very always kind and generous in previous lives, then in this life, it seems innately we’re kind and generous, then that’s also a kind of.
There’s another karmic effect also due to this sort of one type of action, and that is that our experience during life is similar to the to the cause that we’re creating in the previous life. So going back to killing, if we if we killed very strongly or very frequently, then it’s possible that in the future life, we’re going to die very young. We might die by being killed ourselves by being murdered or in in any way sickness or whatever. We can die quite young or be murdered ourselves. And this also is a karmic ripening effect, and it’s sort of similar to the cause.
The effect is in terms of our experience. In fact, every single experience that we have in life is one of these karmic ripening results in terms of our experience. Every instinctive, feeling that comes up in our mind is a karmic ripening result in terms of our habitual action. So there’s three karmic effects that I’ve mentioned. There’s the throwing result, which is the rebirth, the actual rebirth itself.
Then there’s this effect similar to the cause in terms of our habitual activity and effect similar to the cause in terms of our experience. Then there’s a fourth one, all which all these all four can come from any one action. And the fourth one is called the environmental result. And even the whole environment that we’re born in is a result of karma. It’s a result of the karma of the the beings who who inhabit the world.
So so we have, like, a common we we share karma because we all experience this room and this situation together. So we have a, like, this is a this is our shared karma that we have. And in fact, somehow in previous lives, even this group of people here, we think we’ve become completely different, no connection before, but we have a karmic affinity with each other to be here in this room together. It’s not accident that we’re here. There is kind of growth in itself, what we’re experiencing.
So it’s nice to meet you again. I can’t remember. But with the environmental result, like this refers to the to the world, the physical world and and the universe. So so the earth is is is the result of the collective karma of all the beings who inhabit the earth. And that includes all the humans on the earth and all the animals on the earth, as well as the other beings in realms which are not immediately perceptible to our minds, the hungry ghost realm, the, what is called, the hell realm, and then the different god realms.
So they all have a a relationship with this world, but it’s not exactly the same. Like, humans have human karma. And even within the human realm, there’s a whole variation of of ways in which we relate to our environment, and that’s very interesting. But each of us has a different comprehension of the environment, very similar because we are humans. But, say, humans of different races, they have because of sort of quite different karma, then they have just a different appreciation for their environment.
Some some humans have a much more sort of intuitive association with their environment. We say, like, say, the Aborigines might have a more I I I just I don’t know if that I’m just it may be a possibility that they might have a more sort of intuitive connection with the subtle forces of the environment. And they do of course, in the corroborees, they do have, from their side, a form of communication with all the local spirits who inhabit the water holes and the trees and the rocks and the mountains. Now these are realities. But for us, rational, thinking, people of European descent, and our heritage is sort of very rational European thinking, we we don’t really know.
Tune into spirits of water, holes and shelters, and we even deny the present. So in general, we have sort of a common block to see more subtle relationships between ourselves and the environment. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Right. Sure. Yeah. It’s a good question. Many people ask that too.
Alright. The unfolding of our experience is due to the continual ripening of these karmic seeds, which are contained in our stream of consciousness. And at this present stage we have no idea what is going to happen next. We don’t even know if we’re going get home safely tonight. It’s a scary thought.
But we don’t know. These karmic energies contained in our mind stream can be the way I see it is that they’re affinities, affinities which can connect us with a certain experience. And I was mentioning karma this afternoon, we may well have the karmic seed which is going to cause us to have tuberculosis. It’s there waiting to ripen. But if we never come in contact with a tuberculosis germ, then we can’t get tuberculosis, so that seed can’t manifest.
So if the conditions are not right, the karmic seeds can’t ripen, so there’s not an exact blueprint of our life. It’s not determined that we’re going to live so long, this is going to happen to us, and then this and then this and then this. It’s not like that. It’s not completely determined, because it’s dependent. The ripening of karma is dependent upon conditions, external conditions like proximity of germs or, you know, meeting up with the person we killed in a previous life who’s haunting the world, waiting to kill us.
If we don’t meet up with him, we can’t do it. So, it dependent upon changing conditions. That’s external conditions. It’s also the ripening of karmic seeds is also dependent upon changing internal conditions. And, as I said, if the mind is in a state of a positive state of loving kindness and compassion and sort of outwardly being kind to others, In that state, the only karmic seeds which can manifest are the karmic seeds which were created in a positive, loving, kind situation.
So the negative, angry ones, the seeds which were created in negative states of mind, can’t ripen. They’re waiting to, but they just can’t do it. So this and this gives us an idea of how we can get control, how there can be free will. Free will is very much dependent upon knowledge, upon understanding. If we understand karma, that’s the first step to getting control, having free will.
And it’s so important because because at present we’re out of control. We don’t understand karma. We don’t you know, we sometimes think anger is justified. Many people, that they sort of point to evolution and say, you know, if we didn’t have anger we wouldn’t be here today. Well, they’re probably right when we’d be in nirvana or somewhere.
They justify anger and they say, oh, if you suppress anger then you’re going to become neurotic and, you know, you’re go crazy, which again there is some truth in that but not the complete truth. And so So while our emotions are uncontrolled, while we justify our anger, we’re opening the doors to negative karmas to write them. And that’s how it is. That’s how we have free will. Free will coming by understanding that and then progress so we understand the situation, and then we can make some decisions, just how to how do we get control of karma.
And one is to to prevent the conditions where bad experiences can ripen. So we try to meditate on loving kindness and compassion in order to continually have this state of mind, not for one second losing this positive attitude in the mind, you know, twenty four hours a day. That’s really hard. Alright? Really, really hard.
And we can but, nevertheless, it is an attainable goal as demonstrated by Buddha and by many yogis who have followed the path after him. And when you look at the teachings of the path of how to develop loving kindness and compassion, which is going to be my main talk tomorrow night, I’m going to really go into the different ways of how to exactly how to do that, then you can see, oh, yeah, it’s logical that if I can do this, then I can have a continual positive attitude towards others. So this is the first way to to start getting control over the ripening of karma by changing the internal conditions, which means to cultivate cultivate a positive mental attitude towards others. A non basically, it means to cultivate the mental attitude of non harmfulness to others. Having no intention.
Remember, intention means karma. No intention to be harmful to others no matter what. So that’s on the positive side, we’re going to cultivate that. And also to change the internal conditions, we can eliminate the negative, eliminate anger and greed, attachment, aversion. All of these negative states of mind which cause us to not only have a negative state of mind in which a harmful karma can ripen, but in order to prevent creating more karmic seeds, so that we don’t create even more causes for suffering effects in future life.
And on the positive side, it’s not just having a mental attitude of loving kindness, but it’s acting, making positive karmas, acting to help others in whatever way we can so that our life becomes tremendously meaningful In that we’re avoiding creating negative karmas, we’re accumulating positive karmas, and and at death, if we can live like that, then there’s almost no way that we can be upset and angry and aggressive. We can look back at what we’ve done and we can rejoice and our mind will be peaceful. And so if we haven’t attained liberation from cyclic existence, then for sure we can have enough control to ensure that a positive karma will ripen and that in our next life we’re going to be reborn in very good conditions where we can continue the path, continue our spiritual practice until eventually we can reach that point of complete liberation, escape from the cyclic existence, the wheel of life. So changing the inner conditions is one way to overcome karma. Then another way to work on the insight, on the mind, inner sort of refers to mind, another thing we can do is that we can purify negative karmas.
We don’t have to sort of carry the great load with us. We do carry a huge load of negative karmas accumulated in this load and in previous ones. And there are ways of purifying those. And this is like, it’s it’s mental. It’s a mental practice because karma is mental, isn’t it?
It’s mental intention. It’s a it’s an energy carried on the mind as a result of mental intention. So and it’s not outside. There’s not a great big book in the sky with, you know, some guy with wings writing it all down and sending down his messages to hurt us is all coming from within our own mind. And so because we created the karma, we also have the ability to remove the karma.
And we can do that, like but we we do it we can do it with both positive karmas and negative karmas. And, unfortunately, we can sort of spontaneously remove positive karmas by by getting angry. Anger is a very, very destructive state of mind, very disturbing. Really causes a lot of inner mental confusion and disturbance and pain. So if we’ve developed sort of this positive energy through loving acts of loving kindness, but then we get very angry, that can sort of negate the positive energy we’ve carried along.
So we just eliminate it so we can lose those positive karmas. So we have to be very careful about anger, not only because it causes to create more negative karmas, because it even destroys positive karmas we’ve created in the past. So just as anger can destroy positive karmas, then loving kindness and compassion and wisdom, particularly wisdom, can destroy negative karmas. And so there are four mental powers, they’re called the four opponent powers, which we can utilize in order to destroy the negative energy of negative karmas. Not only the negative karmas of this life, but negative karmas carried forward from previous lives.
The first is to have a very, strong mental attitude of regret. Regret for having done that negative action. And this doesn’t mean guilt. We don’t have to feel bad and sort of heavy and depressed and completely, oh, commit suicide. That’s wrong.
That’s not regret that I’m talking about. That’s really silly. That’s unskillful. That doesn’t get us anywhere to saying I’m bad. I’m bad.
It’s really it’s just it’s foolish because it’s based on an ignorant conception of me. And it’s really this sort of guilty feeling is a type of self-cherishing. It’s it’s just indulgence in one’s self image. It’s hard not to do. It’s really hard.
But we shouldn’t feel guilty about negative actions. We should just strongly regret. It was a mistake. You know? Think about cause and effect.
Yeah. I really wish I strongly wish I hadn’t done it. Strong remorse, which can be it can be positive it is a positive state of mind. And it it can even be happy. Regret can be, you know, it’s a happy because you know that by regretting you can eliminate the negative energy that was created.
So that’s the first power, clear, uncomplicated regret. And that gives us energy to put the next three powers into action. It’s very important to have it, to sincerely. Of course, we’ve got to be sincere. We can’t fool ourselves.
We can’t say to somebody, Oh, I’m really sorry I did that. But deep in our mind we think, But I’m going to do it again next week. That’s not sincere regret, is it? That’s sort of, you know, it’s very superficial, so it’s not very strong and it’s not gonna do much in removing negative karma. So the second opponent power, sort of together with regret, is to have the firm intention not to do it again.
I’m not gonna do it again. And we don’t have to be a hundred percent, I’m not ever gonna do it again until I die. I mean, it’s very hard. There’s a lot of actions in life, which is really hard to repeat. And we’re just we’re only human, aren’t we?
Our negative energies are very strong and we know that we can determine not to do something one day and then it’s pretty easy to lose the energy of that determination not to repeat it. So, let’s be practical. This second power of determining not to do it again should be for as long a time as we think we can do it. So if we can say, if we don’t think we can do it I mean, avoid doing that action for twenty four hours, but after twenty four hours, we’re gonna have to do it again. Well, that’s long enough.
At least at least in the next twenty four hours, I’m not gonna repeat that action. And then at the end of that time, if we haven’t done it, we can again, oh, I’ve survived a whole day without doing that. I’ll try it again. So you might extend it for a week. So I’m gonna avoid it for a whole week.
And then if you’ve survived by the end of the week, you try and extend the time. So what’s practical for you? If you really think you can avoid doing it for the rest of your life, then that’s terrific. You’re determined in your mind not to do it again. So this is mental intention, mental power, working with mental energy energies itself.
We this is gaining control over our karma, our personal karma, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what the path is about. So that’s two of these opponent powers to purify the negative energies. Then the the next one is to like, we can create negative karma. There are two broad objects upon which we create negative karma.
One is sentient beings, other beings with mind. By harming them, causing them to have an unhappy feeling, suffering feeling, we create negative karmas. So that’s one field upon which we can create negative karma. The other field is really the field of the Buddha himself, the Buddha, the Buddha’s teachings, and the practitioners who are who are following the path that he taught. Those beings who are striving to to purify negative karmas, to cultivate wisdom and compassion, and to eliminate ignorance and greed and attachment.
Alright? So we can harm them. Buddha statues, statues of Buddha are made in order to help people maintain faith and strength in their practice, to give them a very strong vibration to to meditate before. The many purposes for statues, even temples, are meant to be places where people can come, can listen to teachings, and can meditate in peace, and sort of please get out of the outside world. So if we destroy those things out of an aggressive mind, that creates negative karma.
Negative karma Also, it feels a positive karma. So with this third opponent power, then if our negative action has been against living beings, we develop try as strong as possible to develop an altruistic aspiration to benefit all living beings, to personally become a Buddha in order to give to have the power and the wisdom and the ability to benefit all others by showing them the teachings. So if we meditate on developing this altruistic aspiration to benefit others, then that is an opponent power to negative karmas created against living beings. And if we have created a negative karma against the Buddha or his teachings or the followers, then we can purify that by having the power of strongly meditating upon the the qualities of the Buddha and the the Dharma of the teachings and and the followers, of their good qualities, and strongly determining to align one’s own mind with the teachings, which which are the teachings are teachings are only given to benefit others. They’re not harmful.
There’s no harm contained in in the teachings of the Buddha. They’re harmless. So by determining to align align one’s mind with with that, this is the third opponent power. Then the fourth, again, is to do an action. karma is action.
We’ve done a negative action before. So with this regret, regret, with this loving kindness that we’ve developed as an opponent power, then is to do an action sort of which is opposed to the previous action. If we’ve, say, if we’ve created a lot of negative karma, we we used to be fishermen like me in my early my early life and killing so many fish and rejoicing in killing and creating, you know, just ignorantly, completely ignorantly accumulating a lot of negative karma by killing fish because that was what everybody else did and not well, actually having some compassion, but still wanting to kill and having that negative mind to kill, then an action which can be opposed to that is to release creatures which are going to be killed. Say, know, this fisherman has a whole bag of fish and the fish are still alive and then you sort of buy them off him and while they’re still alive, you put them back in the ocean. So you can release them.
Or any any living being that is being taken to the slaughterhouse, you can, you can release. You can buy. Well, we have to be practical. I mean, if we’re talking about food, we we can be vegetarian. I mean, killing plants and trees is not killing sentient beings because plants and trees and wheat and stuff don’t have consciousness.
They don’t have mind. But, of course, we can’t cultivate plants without killing worms insects and, you know, the whole is that right. There’s one thing. Yeah? Well, it’s it’s true.
I mean, we can’t even walk across the lawn without squashing bugs and things. That’s our but that’s our human situation. Now, we can’t completely abstain. We can’t lock ourselves up in a, you know, in a room and just starve ourselves to death. I mean, that’s silly, but that wouldn’t achieve any any positive ends.
But there are ways to if we have to walk across grass, there are mantras that one can learn and there are meditations one can do in order to try and avoid as much as possible hurting others. And these mantras have a specific energy or power which can influence the minds of beings around you. Mantra is very profound. Very, very profound. Mantra is words, you know, that they’re special words, and they contained within those words is a certain vibration which can, energize latent qualities of of minds.
Now, I don’t understand the real profundity of mantras, but it is possible through this power to benefit other beings. So if you are forced to grow food, you have to dig the soil, you can say mantras and this positive energy can, depending upon your degree of development, if you’re a very strong meditator, even though they’re being squashed and dying, because of your vibration, their mind is peaceful. And so a karmic a positive karma that they’ve accumulated when they were human in the previous life can ripen in that peaceful mind and they can gain a better rebirth. So that’s one way of overcoming that problem. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Good question. Right. Right.
John. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Right. Right. Good question. It’s true. Positive karma just leads to rebirth in happy realms, in these higher realms of happiness.
And we want to get out of that altogether. And we want to, as you say, we need to overcome desire. Now okay. Just first of all, from that situation now, we’re pretty uncontrolled. And and it although it’s possible to attain enlightenment in one lifetime, it is possible if one can receive the instructions from the teachers and in particular the tantric initiations and if one can succeed in one’s tantric practice one can attain enlightenment even if within this lifetime destroy karma, completely destroy and attain liberation, enlightenment.
But that’s not so easy. So it’s probable that we’re going to need a few more lives as a human to continue our practice. We shouldn’t really think of that. We should really think that we’re going do it in this life, but being practical is probably we’re going need at least a few more lives as a human. So then we need positive karma and strong intention to meet these conditions again to continue our practice.
So then we will meet a few more lives as human. Now, in order to practice, and when we have desire for a better rebirth to practice Dharma, this desire is not although it’s contaminated because we still have a self image of me it’s not you know, a desire to be thrown out. Because it’s got a positive aim. The positive aim is to follow the path in order to reach the point where we can overcome karma and we can reach this desireless state. Because after all, desire is just a positive energy, isn’t it?
If we really just break it down to its simplest form, it’s it’s an energy which takes us in a certain direction. Now, according to Buddhism, desire for, just sense pleasure is is a desire to be abandoned because it it brings attachment and grasping and craving, and it binds us tightly to the Wheel of Life, even stronger and stronger. Desire for sense pleasure binds us to the Wheel of Life. But desire for liberation is the opposite thing. That’s completely the opposite direction.
As you say, it is desire for the desireless state. Now it’s not contradictory because with that which to practice the path, one then cultivates wisdom. And, you see, the root of all of our karmas, the karmas of desire and the karmas of aggression, are rooted in ignorance, in not knowing reality, not knowing the reality of ourselves or of our environment. And if we can cut through ignorance, the root ignorance, the wisdom, then that that that happens before we attain the. And at that point, we we destroy the power of karma.
The karmic seeds can no longer throw us uncontrollably into rebirth states. So I was some time ago, I was talking about how we can overcome, how we can control karma. Okay? And I mentioned changing the internal states, didn’t I? By firstly cultivating loving kindness and compassion and wisdom, and by abandoning ignorance, greed and aggression.
And that was one way. A second way I mentioned to gain control over karma was to purify negative karmas by the Four Opponent Powers. Now, the, well, an external way I’ll come back to your question. An external way to overcome to help gain control over karma is to change, like, the external environment, the situation that we we put ourselves in. And do have control over the situations we put ourselves in.
So if we never go fishing, we’re not likely to kill fish, are we? We can sort of avoid such situations. If we don’t go into even, you know, situations within society where we know we’ve got very close friends, that they’re all we go to their place for the weekend, they’re completely attached to hunting and shooting. And they’re gonna take me out hunting if I go and spend the weekend with my friends. Because we’re good friends, I’m gonna find it very hard not to go hunting with them.
And they’re gonna call me a sissy and an idiot if I don’t go hunting with them because they don’t believe in it. So we could at least avoid putting ourselves in dangerous situations where we’re gonna create negative karmas. And one extreme of doing that is to become a monk or a nun, like can’t be myself at that, where we we take certain vows to avoid situations and in order to be able to live in protected way, to try and continue this internal work on controlling karma. So we try to control our environment by vowing to live in a certain way, to live under certain conditions. And that’s the reason for taking vows this month.
It’s a step in the path. And people can also one can take vows as a delay person. One can vow not to kill, avoid killing, to avoid stealing, to avoid lying, to avoid sexual misconduct, which sexual misconduct means to cause basically it means to inflict pain or unhappiness upon another person through one’s sexual activity. So obviously rape and those sort of things are included. There’s also, you split up mainly it refers to splitting up a couple through your own personal sexual desires.
So that’s called misconduct and that’s negative karma to cause a third person to suffer by breaking a relationship through your own greed. So as a lay person, one can vow to avoid those those situations. So that’s another way of overcoming the power of karma. It’s step on the way. Now, the best way to overcome karma is cultivating wisdom, cultivating the wisdom understanding the reality of oneself, the real way in which one exists, the wisdom seeing through the mistaken self image that we carry with us everywhere we go.
Everywhere we go, we carry with us this powerful self image, which is unfortunate. It’s it’s root it’s based upon a misconception about ourself, the way we exist. And and we act all of our karmic actions are rooted in this wrong conception of me. So if we cultivate cultivate the wisdom seeing the emptiness of this, you know, this phantom or this illusory self that we carry with us, if we can break the tight grasping at our self image, then that state of mind is incredibly powerful, incredibly strong, and destroys karma. We’re free.
We’re not yet out of cyclic existence. We still have to remove all of the the impressions in our mind of ignorance, of grievance, of aggression, but they’re weakened incredibly. And from that point on, from that point of seeing the reality of self, it’s like it’s a it’s a progressive and steady path to enlightenment. We can never fall back. We can never lose our spiritual attainment up until that point, after that point.
Up until that point, we can always blow it. And we probably have in previous life. We probably reached very close to that point in previous life, but we’ve always blown it. We haven’t really penetrated the reality of self. And so we’ve fallen back and round and round and round.
So that’s very and in that way, there’s no more of this contaminated desire for pleasure that it doesn’t come. There’s just the intention to become enlightened, the intention to become liberated from samsaric existence for the benefit of others, and that’s called a pure uncontaminated intention. And so it’s not the mundane desire for the desireless state. Is that okay? Sure.
I mean, it’s it comes across very intellectual, very theory. It is for us. It’s theory. I mean, we haven’t experienced it yet. But it’s a picture that fits in.
I mean, it’s not contradictory from my from my point of view. I know there’s probably a lot of contradictions from your side that you’re worried about. And that’s fair enough, you’ve got to check up this teaching because if you’re not convinced that the whole picture is sort of a whole, is not self contradictory, then you’re not going to do anything about it. You’re not going to change your mind. And we, those of us who have adopted Buddhism as our personal philosophy and as our personal, way of life, then we’ve been through incredibly deep searching, questioning, checking up.
And from my side I’ve been unable to contradict it. The more I’ve learned, the more these spaces have been filled out. And it’s been terrific, it really has. I mean, I’ve been a monk for ten years now and I met Buddhism about eighteen months before, two years before I became a monk. And I tell you, those two years were intensely checking out.
And it’s great because continuing, it just becomes clearer and the contradictions, and questions. You always have a lot of questions, but always answers keep coming. Of course, more questions come up. I don’t know. I don’t still get questions, but the general part, I can accept very strong from my meditation experience.
And, yeah, the more I learn, the clearer it becomes. That’s. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Yeah. It is hard. For sure it’s hard. And I can’t say that I know exactly how. Of course, our awareness, our consciousness of this life, like here and now, is very much dependent upon our brain and our nervous system.
And we know that. We know that, if certain parts of the brain are damaged then we lose memory. We just can’t remember certain things. And, you know, are many different examples of where of how our consciousness is dependent upon functioning of the brain. That’s, that’s sort of a reality.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.
Right. Yeah. What is yeah. It’s true. Pure awareness.
Uh-huh. Well, in Buddhism it says that the mind basically is pure in as much as it’s like a mirror, which purely its nature is like a mirror which reflects the environment without distortion. But our mind is like a mirror covered in dirt. So there’s all this obscuring dirt upon the mirror of our mind. And the dirt is ignorance, coming from ignorance, greed and aversion.
And all of the different mental states, disturbing mental states which arise from ignorance, greed and aversion. But still the purity of the mind is there. This this capacity, this inherent, pristine capacity of the mind to to purely, clearly reflect the environment is still there and just the ignorance and confusion is like covering. And that also indicates the potential that we have to attain liberation because liberation is the state of mind where the impurity has been removed. And the mind’s natural potential is realized to purely reflect or be aware of the environment and ourselves and all things without distortion.
And that’s that’s the mind of a Buddha. There’s no suffering because suffering is mental disturbance. So pure, clear mind understanding all phenomena without distortion. That’s the Buddha mind. So we have a Buddha potential.
Maybe this is your inner purity that you’re mentioning. We all have a what’s called this Buddha potential. This is innate purity of consciousness. And that’s what we want to actualize. That’s that’s what Buddhism is all about.
It’s actualizing the this Buddha potential, the inner clarity of the mind. To attain liberation. Well, it can be both. We we can progressively work towards and attain liberation in this life. And if we can’t succeed in our practice, we can still go a long way towards that.
Well, that’s true. That does happen. That in the beginning of our practice there is continually karmas ripening to prevent our practice. And there’s one you may have read in the newspaper, heard in the news that this guy escaped from Delhi jail, Charles Subraj. Subraj.
Right. Well, there’s a friend of Kathy’s who was going to become a nun, and this was a long time ago. And she went back to America, Lama Yeshe. She told her to go back to America and get her things together. And then she was going to Kathmandu and she’s going to become a nun with us, with with a group of monks and nuns living there in this monastery near Kathmandu.
And a plane went through Bangkok and I think she stopped off for some days in Bangkok and she became one of his victims. She was drugged and murdered and found floating in the gulf of Siam. So I’m very sad that this is like a karmic obstruction, a very powerful karmic obstruction that prevented her from becoming a nun and following the path. So it’s a gross example, but it’s a real example that happened. And this is the trouble: we don’t know.
We don’t know which, when, you know, who’s going to be his next victim. We just don’t know what’s around the corner. And so until we reach this point of wisdom, realizing the reality of self, the emptiness of the self, we’re always There’s this danger of karma that can intervene and bring our practice to an end. So actually it makes one incredibly stimulating to practice very fast, not to waste a second. In practicing, which means abandoning ignorance and greed and aggression and cultivating wisdom and love and kindness.
Well, all karma is determined by the state of mind of, you know, the actor. And as I said before, if your mind is pure, then the karmic seed can’t rise. Well, it depends upon the state of one’s mind. Of course, you try to avoid conditions where we’re supposed to be kind of queue. And the main condition which is going to enable someone to kill you is that you have anger and aggression in your mind.
Because anger and aggression then it’s very easy to kill you. So for a start, you try to avoid killing or harming. Now so well, it’s pretty hypothetical that if there’s no other solution, then if your mind is pretty uncontrolled, if you don’t have clairvoyance, or if you don’t have any psychic power, then really it’s better to die than to kill. If it’s a choice between you and that person, it’s better for you to die than to kill out of some anger. Well, again, it’s very hypothetical.
If it’s just a one on one situation. On the other hand, if you are yogi, if you develop clairvoyance and you can see this whole situation, you see that this person is going kill others. And if you really have loving kindness and compassion as a reality in your mind, then out of loving kindness and compassion it’s possible to kill that person, to stop him from killing these people and yourself and creating really negative karma as an act of compassion. But it’s got to be compassion. You know?
You’ve got to actually have complete loving kindness and no aggression, no hatred towards that person. And if that’s a reality in your mind, then you can kill him to stop it. And as a result of your action, the power of your mind, it’s possible that that person can be reborn in a much more favorable situation. You can actually transfer their consciousness through your meditation or power to a better existence. Right.
No. No. It’s you’ve got to have incredibly high realization to to do that. And so you can’t if you and it’s gotta be real. You can’t pretend.
Otherwise, you’re creating negative karma. Well, couldn’t have experienced what happened if they hadn’t created the karma. It was the Tibetans’ own karma ripening which resulted in the in the overtaking and all the suffering, all the incredible misery. The loss of the country was because they created the karma to experience that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m not separating politics from karma. Buddhists are very practical. The Dalai Lama is both political leader and a spiritual leader today. And that’s just the way it is.
He’s able to perform both functions. Now, A lot of the Chinese captured many monks and put them in concentration camps and there’s a whole spectrum of what happened with them. Some just sort of left their bodies and died and were able to do that. There are practices where one can choose to die and transfer one’s own consciousness to a better state. Others just turn into rainbows and disappear, which confused the Chinese quite a lot.
So you’re able to do that also through your Yogic power to just completely make your body like life and just disappear, you you leave your clothes behind. And apparently that did happen, which mystifies the communist. Or you can, you still have the power to do that but one can see that it’s still beneficial to remain in jail and to be subjected to pain but to cultivate loving kindness and compassion towards your captors. And that’s possible. If one really sincerely has no aggression towards the jailers, because a lot of them are in concentration camps, then they can influence their minds and so do they.
It can help. It can be beneficial to the other prisoners who have less control. And then I guess there’s those farmers who were captured who didn’t have these psychic powers. And, well, I they could do anything to do anything to become more liberated. Mean yeah.
Sure. We’re wavering on the path all the time. Up until this point where you see emptiness, the reality of self, you’re always wavering. You can always justify your actions as being Dharma actions, but in fact they’re not. And this is a trap that we all have to.
This is a continual series of traps which are one after another along the path. But is one’s practice egotism or is it opposed to egotism? Is it a practice of compassion or is it cultivating attachment? And, like, yeah, there’s continual traps and we’re facing it all the way around the path. And so it’s hard to judge, isn’t it?
It’s hard to judge another person’s actions, like if we hear of a lama who kills somebody who’s doing a negative act, then how can we judge whether his mind had pure compassion, pure realization of reality, or was his mind angry? Very difficult to judge from our side. And the traps are they? And I’m not saying that there I mean, I’m sure there are, you know, monks who there were many monks who gave up their robes and took up guns. They fight the Chinese.
So it’s not an easy path. And it’s only effective if we’re true, if we’re honest inside. We can’t fool, you know, there’s no external watcher that we can fool. We can’t even fool our guru, our teacher, who’s the most important being in the past because karma is an internal action of the mind. It’s a mental intention.
If it’s negative, it’s a negative result. So been very patient. If you like or for a break, have a cup of tea. Maybe it’s good to stretch your legs, I think, a cup of tea. And I’ll just turn around and then I’ll talk to you.
Is there anyone with a burning question? Tomorrow I want to talk about the how to develop loving kindness and compassion, meditate, how we can really start developing this positive state of mind. And so that’ll be the the main subject to talk to my night. And, also, if you’ve got any more questions, then we’ll continue that tomorrow night. But thanks very much.