Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 89-minute introductory talk delivered in 1986, Ven Thubten Gyatso walks through the Buddhist analysis of suffering and the path to liberation. He begins with breathing meditation, then systematically examines misery across the six realms of rebirth—hell, hungry ghost, animal, demigod, human, and god realms—arguing that lasting happiness cannot be found in any of them. He then turns to the heart of Mahāyāna Buddhism: developing bodhicitta, an altruistic mind dedicated to liberating all sentient beings from suffering. Thubten Gyatso teaches three meditative steps toward bodhicitta: first, cultivating equanimity by dropping rigid categorizations of friend, enemy, and stranger; second, recognizing all beings as mothers from past lives and contemplating their infinite kindness; and third, developing genuine love and compassion for all without discrimination. He emphasizes that this transformation requires understanding emptiness, dropping self-cherishing, and ultimately committing to attain enlightenment solely to benefit others. The talk includes responses to audience questions about animals, plants, and the nature of maternal love.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 IB 1986 03 19.mp3
UUID: b11d5fbb-de72-495c-ba7c-e66e85be8fc9
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 1986-03-19
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 89.0 minutes
Words: ~8,635
Begin to get our minds together. And so we’re going to just meditate by concentrating on our breathing. And the way to do that is to sit as comfortably as you can, and with your back straight, with the head resting slightly forward, not sort of invertible, but a little bit forward. You don’t close your eyes completely, but almost close your eyes. And you rest your hands on your lap like that, right in the left.
And you breathe through your nose, and the object is to just try and completely relax the mind and not get involved with thinking, but follow the sensation of the breath that comes and goes from the nostrils. You can feel a faint sensation over the upper lip as you breathe in and and then you breathe out. So try to follow that, and if any thoughts interrupt and don’t sort of get distracted, just bring your mind back and follow the breath, the sensation of breath as you breathe in and out. So we’ll do that together for just a few minutes. Your mind.
Imagine that as you breathe out, you breathe that tension away from you, it goes out of your body in the form like black smoke. And then as you breathe in, imagine that you breathe in clear, white light, which fills your body with peace and happiness. In order to make the teaching and discussion tonight, the positive karma, develop the intention in your minds to listen and think about and talk about the Dharma tonight in order to be able to gain the knowledge and the understanding so that you can progress along the path to become a Buddha and also benefit all other beings. So so far in these talks, I’ve talked about the various realms of possible rebirth, and and last night, I gave a fairly extensive talk about karma, karma, which is the the the force lying behind the taking of rebirth after rebirth. So And I’ve mentioned that these since beginningless time, we’ve been living being born and living a certain time in in one of the six realms, and then we’ve been dying and then again taking rebirth without control.
It’s been happening time after time after time. Now if we look within these six realms of existence, there’s nowhere in any of them that we can ever obtain happiness which is lasting, happiness which is, you know, without an end. Certainly, in in the the realms which we would call hell realms of constant misery, and there’s not a a minute’s happiness that we could ever experience in in such a rebirth. It’s one of, like, complete insanity that the minds of the beings are totally chaotic and confused and terrifying. Environment is terrifying because environment is related to this state of mind, which we talked about last night.
So there’s utter confusion. There’s nothing there’s happening. And most sentient beings are down there, unfortunately, because ignorance prevails over our minds and over the universe. Out of ignorance, most things create karma for very suffering rebirths. So there’s no happiness there.
In the next of lowest realm, the hungry ghost realm, again, there’s tremendous amount of deprivation and hunger and thirst and inability to gain find protection, comfort, shelter, and food and water and so on. So for those beings, there’s almost no happiness. In the animal realm, again, the animals have their minds are characterized by some very deep dullness and ignorance. They exist to find food, to seek shelter, and they don’t really have a great amount of intelligence to to know what’s happening to them or to control the environment. The animals have a lot of fear and they’re being caught and eaten alive by other animals and being subjected to cruelty from humans and things like that.
They have some sensations of pleasure, certain more certainly at the lower realms. But still, in general, in in the animal realm, there’s not much happiness. Then in the god realms, there are two levels of god realms. In the lower god realms, there’s a lot of jealousy and fighting and continually at war. They suffer being wounded at war.
These gods one characteristic is that they can’t die unless their heads are cut off. So they even they get wounds on their limbs, I think. I think that’s a characteristic that their arm will grow back again because it’s cut off or something like that. It is here. I may have I know that they you can’t kill them unless you cut their hair.
Anyway, then the higher gods, some of them who are fighting their life, have more pleasure to kind of be bothersome or demigods come up and fight to fight them. And then higher than them, the gods who aren’t even involved in wars, whole life is continual sort of blissful experience until the the karma for their life wears out. And then in the last week or so, they they they they have these terrifying dreams and premonitions of death, and, they realize what’s happening, that they’re going to lose all of this tremendous pleasure that they’ve lived with constantly. And they’ve believed themselves to be immortal because their life has been so long. So then they realize that they’re not immortal, but they’re mortal and the end is very close.
And their bodies start to smell and their clothes become wrinkled. Their bodies have never smelled smelled before, and their clothes always float on their body. So in this week, it’s said that they experience more misery than a human being experiences in his entire life because of being just a gross change, a little bit like what’s happened to Mr. Ivan Boesky or some of those, I think, from their position of great wealth and indulgence suddenly being cast out. They can’t believe. They just can’t mentally accept that it happened, that it is happening, and they’re forced to accept it.
So so that’s in any of those realms that I’ve mentioned, there’s no happiness that lasts. It always changes and comes to an end and is followed up by suffering. In the human realm, the human existence is sort of in the middle. We have happy and we have unhappy experiences. But right from the very beginning, even inside the mother’s womb, the baby feels conscious and feels painful and a lot of discomfort.
It’s it is said in Buddhism, what initiates birth is just the baby can’t bear it anymore. I mean, not to mention the mother. It’s the baby’s decision, I’ve gotta get out, which and it doesn’t know its situation. That is simply one of the factors which induces labor at birth. And then the birth process itself, of course, is very painful.
We know mother, but we don’t know how painful it is for the baby because we can’t remember. But it is said by those yogis who can remember that, the birth experience, particularly the pressure on the hip, is just enormously painful. After birth, as one’s skin is first contact contacting all these rough objects and cold and then the light the light in the eye, it’s extremely painful for the baby. So there’s a lot of for humans, it’s pain at birth. Then growing up, you know, we we face sickness.
Because of our very body, we’re always having accidents and illness, and it’s a one painful experience after another. We have it’s it’s sort of the human existence is mentally miserable because there are things that we want. We we suffer because we can’t get what we want. Be it material objects or somebody, a person that we want to to live our life with, and we sort of eat our heart out, isn’t it? It’s the term.
But we just strive and strive and strive to get these things that we can’t. Or we do get them if we get material possessions together or we do establish relationship with someone, but then separate. Person goes away voluntarily or they die or and somebody steals our our new car or burns our house down. And so there’s suffering of being separated from things that we’ve already managed to acquire. Then in the human existence, there’s suffering of continue of being in situations we don’t like.
And this happens Like, a lot of people are born they’re they’re living with people who they really don’t like. They have to go to work and work with these people they don’t like, but they don’t have any choice. They can’t change jobs, and it’s sort of just very difficult. The whole complex situation of their life, they have to live in this sort of miserable situation. Others with great poverty have to experience tremendous, you know, deprivation and and social discomfort.
It’s not that they like it. It’s just that they can’t there’s no way they can change it. Yeah. You’re lucky. Well, superior, it’s it’s supposed to be better because it’s happening.
Like, see, there’s many levels of the god realm. There’s the demigods and then there’s the all gods, if you like. And then within it, there’s many levels. And the demigods they are to humans but still have tremendous feelings. Although they are fighting like people, their family life is fantastic.
And they they have a lot of wealth and riches, and the general environment is much more convenient. Then the higher gods could just continue to have a continual sense of indulgence in all the sense of music and taste. So it’s moving to bother about taste. But, yeah, it’s like the whole life is is been just completely relaxing and enjoying sensation until the moment Yeah. It’s happy.
Yeah. In terms of happiness, most of you. So they can’t. You see, it’s so happy. It’s so good.
They can never really practice that. The Buddha comes myself. Look. Life is suffering. I just laugh.
And misery to practice. And it’s too late anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, of course, I’m talking in generalities.
Within human life, there is a whole spectrum of existence, isn’t it? There’s some constant pain from birth onwards, and there are others who have born into really good condition. But they still have the pain of birth. They still have the pain of sickness. They still fall over and break the leg.
It’s the gods’ thing. They sort of under the cabbage. They spontaneously arise. As I said, they’re they’re not born, like, from the womb. There are four ways of being born, and one of them is, like, spontaneous birth.
Yeah. What I’m doing now is pointing out the what the Buddha taught that whoever one is in those six realms if we one doesn’t believe in the other realms, doesn’t matter. We do believe in the animal realm and the human believe and that’s why I’m putting more time into the human realm. Because what he was saying is that nowhere within the sphere of either is there any permanent happiness that is that that will last somewhere that is change, not replaced by suffering. Even if you’re in the highest goddess and you do die, then you’re reborn in the lower realms because you’ve used up your good karma for these high rebirth.
It takes a tremendous amount of good karma to receive a whole life happy. So you’ve used a lot in your life. So then I was explaining more about the unsatisfactoriness of the human existence. So there is suffering at birth, suffering at suffering about not getting what we want. I mean, really, that’s tremendously pervasive in in in human society.
But, you know, it’s mental misery, not being able to get the things that we want, what we’re thinking. Then and then being separated from things that we love and things that we make. Well, they probably can’t remember it. Well, they could be. They could be.
I mean, some people can have flashes somewhere in the past. I know if you know I can’t it’s true. I think it can come in even in dreams or in drugs. Not usually. So so I mean, a lot of babies have been reported to talk about previously.
Usually, it’s humans. humans. And then babies tend it’s a little shorter and talk about it, knocking the parents that loose and, know, Shahab, Johnny, you can’t play. They don’t talk rubbish. And then Johnny soon gets very much involved in the here and now business growing up, so they just started to begin.
Well, it’s different. You see, we’re human. We can only conceive in a human turn, and a lot of the realms are explained from the human point of view. So in the depictions of hungry ghost bodies and human bodies and hell beings bodies, human bodies. But, obviously, they’re not human bodies.
To me, they’re not human bodies. I think they’re explaining this, right, because the only thing is that I can only think of human or animal bodies because that’s that’s our experience. Yeah. It is possible to, through meditation, to get to experience this, to think, to to see and communicate, and well before you become a Buddha. So and many other yogis who have done so, recall.
So for us, of course, we have to take it as well. Yeah. That’s what they say. Obviously, we we don’t have to believe it a hundred percent. Acceptance, that’s the way it is.
I was talking about the the of human existence and I’m talking about the various suffering. Also, I I did mention that humans experience the suffering of old age, which if we live long enough, we’ll experience, you you know, the deterioration of our of our physique and muscles and joints start to wear out and our sense organs wear out. We lose our taste. We lose our sight. We lose touch and smell.
And, you know, the whole body goes to pieces, the mind goes to pieces. And old age is incredibly, in general, miserable experience. We we get, you know, ignored. It’s incredibly lonely. The family goes away.
We lose control of our, you know, of our our excretory organs, and so people have to clean us and we’re helpless in bed. And it’s really a very miserable experience, and you’ve only got to go to an old people’s home to check up and see how miserable it is. Then there’s the suffering of death, which is something we all have to face, and and it’s a very frightening in general, it’s a frightening, terrifying experience. And on top of all that, having gone through it all, still after death, we have to be reborn again, out of control. karma is in charge.
And so I have go through it all again and again and again and again. And we’ve existed since the beginning of time for an infinite number of previous rebirths, we’ve never been satisfied. We’ve never died thinking that’s okay. I’ve done enough in this life. There’s always unfinished jobs, prostrations, attachment.
So the point is that existence as within the will of life is very miserable and it’s caused by karma and the delusions in our mind. And the Buddha demonstrated that by progressively removing the delusions and the ignorance, the confusion from our mind, we can bring this to an end and attain liberation and attain enlightenment where there is happiness, there is unceasing bliss and happiness, and and this is an infinitely preferable state of existence compared to any other place within the six realms of life. So he taught many methods to attain that. And the most important method is what I want to really talk about tonight, is the method of developing the completely altruistic state state of mind, which is totally concerned with the welfare of others. The mental attitude dedicating one’s entire body, speech, and mind to the welfare of others, which means and in order to achieve the welfare of others, it means directing one’s sort of whole energy in the direction of attaining of liberation and enlightenment of oneself so that one has the capacity of a Buddha and the power of a Buddha to actually benefit others.
So this is sort of the primary cause of Buddhism, and it’s the the most the most wonderful state of mind that we could aspire to to develop. And when when if we can succeed in doing so, well, there’s gonna be a party all around the universe that says that we can if a human being in heaven develops an altruistic state of mind completely without any self-cherishing, without any self concern and sort of need for for one’s personal happiness. One develops this altruistic attitude concerned for the benefit of others and determined to attain enlightenment in order to be able to benefit others. To be able to benefit others, then all the Buddhas around the universe will rejoice and and will shake their land or something. So in Sanskrit, this term the term is is called bodhicitta, and bodhi means enlightenment and chitta means mind.
So it is the mind which is directed towards attaining enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. And this is is what distinguishes the Mahāyāna part from the work of Buddhism, Mahāyāna school of Buddhism, from, which means great vehicle, from the Hīnayāna school of of Buddhism, which means lesser vehicle. And lesser vehicle is doesn’t mean it’s sort of there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s again, it’s the mental intention of the practitioner. From that point of view, it’s to attain liberation. One recognizes the miserable state of rebirth and one wants to attain liberation, to attain nirvana, and one works towards the attainment.
One can do. One can work towards one’s own escape from the Wheel of Life. So it’s called the the lesser vehicle of the Hīnayāna because it only the concern is for oneself only. The Mahāyāna, the the motivation in the Mahāyāna, this bodhicitta, this altruistic mind, is the greater vehicle because because the motivation is concerned for all beings without exception throughout the universe, without any discrimination, friends, strangers, enemies, which is totally a concern for the welfare of all. That state of mind is a great thing in my heart.
And no matter what philosophy one, you know, speaks about, words, one is not a Mahāyāna unless one has actually developed that mental attitude in the heart. And then then one enters the Mahāyāna path, the actual Mahāyāna. So we’re going to talk about how to develop. So it’s a means of mind training. Mind training because at present, our mind is concerned with our own welfare very strongly.
Since birth, we’ve been we’ve had this this overpowering sense of self and and self image, and we’ve been needing and desperately trying to confirm our own existence and to increase our image in the eyes of those close to us and the eyes of those around us. And in our own eyes, we are always worried that we’re not good enough, that we’re not, you know, we’re not making within within society and within our own circle of friends. There’s this always this overpowering concern, and it’s not only coming from our own side, it comes from our parents. You’ve gotta be good. You’ve gotta do this.
You’ve gotta succeed. You’ve gotta get a good job. You’ve you know? And then from our friends and from our teachers, tremendous pressure, and it’s a great burden of self image that we carry with us and always, you know, being compared, comparing ourselves. And it’s really miserable, but it’s dominating, and it’s it’s hard to escape.
Well, if we do have accumulated a whole string of successes, you know, the more confident we become. And we really cherish our self image, and, yeah, we get in all sorts of trouble with pride and jealousy and, you know, that’s the whole it’s really to me, this is when we talk about the rat rat. It’s all ego competition between individuals, and that’s the human life also. So bodhicitta is the altruistic mind. It’s something entirely opposite to the rat race.
It’s by having some understanding of wisdom, you know, of the reality itself, by being able to loosen the self-cherishing, by seeing the emptiness the emptiness of itself, how the how the the self image is not as we think it is. It’s not as concrete and real and, you know, existing right there from its own side as we think it existing right there from its own side as we think of it. Empty of that. Completely, there’s a misinterpretation of ourselves, and there’s a whole lot of ideas and conceptions that we hang on to our self image, we think are very real and unchanging, you know, good ones and bad ones, feelings of inadequacy, feelings of too adequate, pride. So there’s all of these mental emotions and feelings connected to the self which drag us down, drag us always drag us down to confusion.
So it’s empty. The self that we project to be is empty of that self existence. So by meditating on on the emptiness, we can loosen loosen our self-cherishing, and we can start to open up our hearts to have concern for others. And so bodhicitta then, to develop that, we need also the wisdom of understanding emptiness. Not only the emptiness of self, but the emptiness of of all the beings around us and all the things that we’re attached to and all the things we have aversion to.
They’re also empty resisting from their own self. And they’re empty of all the projections and the superimpositions that we put upon them. And there’s actually a tremendous amount of freedom of movement and action within life if we could only drop our preconceptions about ourself and others. The greatest hang ups that we have are all our preconceptions. If we could by understanding reality and we can drop them, and then we’re really just that gives a tremendous amount of freedom to interreact.
And so we can’t have it all at once, so we can do it slowly, slowly. Now with some freedom as a basis, the first step in developing the altruistic mind is to have feelings of equanimity towards others. So see, we make many mistakes by pigeonholing our friends. As soon as we see somebody, we categorize them as friends because they some way, they’re helping me. You know?
They’re they’re a benefit to me. They give me happiness, pleasure. Or we categorize them as enemy broadly. Enemy. Somebody I don’t really mean enemy like, you know, somebody who’s going with a gun, but some competition, some somebody who who is a threat to my happiness.
It may just be the, you know, the neighbor next door who who bought something new, which is better than our thing, you know, and sort of a threat to our self image. So we sort of, you know, very lightly categorize them in the enemy situation until we get out of car and then we’ll live with you. But we can very strongly have a version, and we we do just, you know, the clothes people wear. We we categorize them as friend, enemy. You know, if somebody comes on wearing leather jacket with all the studs and their hearer’s got all pointy things in them, colored purple, and the eyes are black, and then, you know, we we just instantly have know, aversion.
And not always, some of us make it very gentle, sort of identify. But just on people’s external appearances we do categorize them. We don’t even talk to them, we don’t hear what’s going on in their mind. Then the third category is just strangers. All those who we don’t either feel very much for or very much again, we put him in the big pigeonhole of stranger and we ignore them.
We don’t concern ourselves with him. So we habitually do that. Now we need to break that habitual categorization down. It it leads us into trouble. It’s too discriminating.
It leads to bigotry. It leads to conflict, and it’s wrong, isn’t it? Because it’s our preconception. But still we do it all the time. We’re judging judging.
So we’ve gotta just drop this habitual judgment. And so we can meditate then by imagining. So we close our eyes and we meditate and we imagine that there’s there’s a person. Put up somebody who you really do have attachment to and you regard as a friend. And think of somebody who you do have aversion to and you regard as an enemy who’s giving you some sort of problem.
And then somebody who’s completely a stranger. And then think about them. Think about those people who have been friendly to you in this life. Many of our friends have become our enemies, haven’t they? I mean, constantly you’re reading in in the papers of of wives killing husbands and husbands killing wives, which must have been originally a very loving relationship, the closest they could have had.
But then they become a complete complete enemy. They just wanna kill each other. And, of course, not as gross as that, but we kinda have friends in our suit, very close friends. And it’s something usually some misunderstandings, some miscommunication, something incredibly minor. And then we don’t wanna talk to each other, completely cut them off.
Somebody who’s we’re completely you know, she’s welcomed into a home for years and years, then something tiny can happen. And if we see them coming down the street, we’ll cross to the other side. We just don’t wanna know about it. And this is our own mind doing. It’s our own mind.
So friends, it’s not valid to to have this very strong grasping of friends and categorization of friends because it can change. And the same with the enemy. A lot of people who who really hated, given us a hard time, suddenly turned and you become our friend without feeling the truth. And so it doesn’t remain the same situation. Situation.
And they’re they and also the the other ones in the other category of friends, they’re they’re just people like ourselves caught up with their own projections. They they might have cut themselves off from us because of their own confused mind. But they just want friends. They want to be happy like we do. But they’re caught up in this categorizing mind and have no chance of escape.
So try to reduce this judging and this discrimination between enemy and stranger. And stranger well, we we ignore a lot of strangers, but we don’t know their state of mind. We don’t know how what what they are. We we certainly can’t remember the relationship we had with them in previous lives, and it’s very possible that they’ve been our relative friends in previous life who’ve been enormously helpful to us. And so but we still we ignore them now.
We have no who would have no connection. But is it right to just completely ignore those who we don’t know, who have no connection with? So think about that. Think about the discriminating mind that we have, transcending the strange. How how kind it is or how wonderful it is for us if a complete stranger comes up and, yeah, we might be in a in a flat tire or, you have some sort of problem.
They just, from their own side, offer help. We know how we react and are. It’s helping me. And we really feel so grateful, so happy. And so it’s tremendous to cultivate the mind of wanting to do little things for strangers, and it makes us happy because we make them happy.
And it’s the beginning it’s the beginning of developing the mind of altruism. Everybody has to do a good deed to a stranger’s mind. And you can try it. I mean, as you’re going down the street, just check up on your mind how you are judging people when you’re making see if it happens and see. If you do judge them, then on what ground you judge.
So this is a basis then. This e sort of equanimity meditation. Meditation to develop the mind of equilibrium, have equilibrium feeling for all. The next step then building upon that is a very important step. Now this is we’re training our mind, right, to be able to have a completely altruistic and loving attitude towards all being.
So we contemplate that in previous existences, we’ve had every relationship with every single thing, every living thing, every relationship possible. And that means that every single being in previous life has been our mother. And they haven’t been our mother just once. But as there’s no beginning to previous lives as mother, each living being has been our mother time after time after time, countless times. Throughout the universe and the universe is we’ve had there’s also been our father and our brother and sister and husband and wife and everything.
But specifically, we’re concentrating on the fact that they’ve been our mother from previous lives. Even the mosquito that you’re about to spot has been your mother from previous life. But it it sentient beings feeling, having feelings, and it refers to mind consciousness, conscious feeling. And so the oak tree hasn’t been your mother. Sort of clear and doesn’t have the sophisticated emotions and intellectual concepts that humans have.
It well, it’s a mosquito, but in a previous life, it was a human, and it was your mother. Well, it’s it’s not my personal experience. Well, I’ve never heard a tree. I have have no personal experience of communication with plants. I’ve never witnessed any plant evidence of thinking or feeling.
I know that there was a popular book by some guy who who experimented with plants and shouted at them and talked sweet nothing into other plants’ leaves. And the one he talked sweet, nothing’s into grew like this, and the one he shouted at withered up and died. He wrote a popular book and made a lot of money. But his books, they were checked up by other people and other scientists. Nobody ever was able to reproduce his findings.
So the secret life of plants, unfortunately, fortunately, was inaccurate, and it was a wrong projection that he he projected plants to have minds to be contained. His base of his statements was invalid. Yeah. Well, that’s what I say. They have they have had people have tried to reproduce these experiments, and they haven’t worked.
Now it’s not exactly like plants themselves. And also, it’s not the object of plants having consciousness is not an object of understanding or awareness of all the Buddhas and all of the yogis who attain clairvoyance and are able to perceive everything. And I always say, plants don’t have own. Well, that no. You’ve also got your own experience.
You’ve never talked to a plan. Time’s always too beautiful. That’s their nature. Alright. But how do you know those?
Doesn’t mine. Yeah. Now this is the thing. There can be a response. Now well, look, I wouldn’t even go so far as they do respond to our to our uncontrolled mind.
But there are sentient beings, gods and and pretas in the god realm, pretas in the lower god realm, have connections with plants and in particular trees. It’s not just the insects who live in the bark, but they are ethereal beings who are connected with plants, and the life of that pliancy is connected with the activity of those beings. And so if you cut down a tree, then the spirit can get, you know, very angry, and he can actually harm you, the one who inhabits the tree. But it’s not the tree itself. It’s just a spirit who possesses that tree, the owner, if you like.
So there is a connection from that point of The tree itself, the grass plant itself, has no consciousness. It’s not reborn. We’re not dying. We’ve never been reborn as a tulip. No.
Mariana. Yes. Will you set your goal on the weekend at night in order to be able to benefit from that? Well, you’re a sentient being too. Right?
You’re doing you’re doing your ten enlightenment, benefit of all sentient things, and you’re And you are an individual. You are an individual, but you’re not you don’t exist individually the way you think to be. And that’s the problem. It’s it’s not that the self we we have to have completely no self. It’s just that we have to look at the emptiness of itself the way we misconceive ourselves.
Okay. So we’re talking about developing loving kindness and the altruistic attitude. And the first step is the equanimity. Right? Check up when you discriminate in mind.
Then contemplate how all beings in previous times have been a mother. Yeah. Throughout all the previous existence, we’ve always had mothers unless we were born spontaneously in the god realm or in the hell realm. And there are many many of the greatest teachers in the past that have made sort of statements and their quotes, teachings from what they’ve written in their text about this point, they said that the amount of milk that we’ve drunk from each sentient being when that sentient being was our mother is enough to fill all the oceans of the earth. And they also talk about the amount of feces and pee pee that they’ve cleaned up from our bottom as being equal in weight to the earth or fill the universe or something.
So there’s been tremendous amount of previous occasions when all things have been our mother. And then the next point is to contemplate on the kindness of the mother. Like, if we just look at the the mother of of this life, then how incredibly kind our mother has been, even when we’re just a fetus in her womb. Then she’s already planning for our life. She’s already undergoing personal sacrifices for our benefit.
She changes her diet. She completely takes tremendous care and effort to ensure that her that her baby is not gonna be harmed, is going to be born well, and and, you know, will will live a happy life. So she’s completely thinking about our happiness even before we’re born. And then during the process of giving birth, she experiences unbelievable pain and going on and on, incredible pain, the worst pain she’s ever experienced. But when we’re born, she doesn’t sort of, you know, little devil, you know, blame us for doing it.
We we were the cause of her pain, but she didn’t blame us. She just holds us to her breath with complete love and total affection. And from that moment on, devoting all of her time, all of her thoughts, sleeps beside her. She wakes, they instantly wake and and looks after whatever comfort that we need, feeds, clothes, and cleans us. They’re totally helpless in her arms.
She teaches us to walk, to talk. She teaches us how to experience happiness and pleasure with our senses. So enormous devotion. And it doesn’t stop. You know, we’re out with going to school.
There’s this continual concern for our happiness and continual just completely neglecting her own happiness. And so we go out, we finish school, and we sort of go a job, we get married, and mother’s still worried about it. Sometimes we start to get a bit worried about it. We think, that’s enough, mom. You know?
We’ve grown up now. But she can’t help it. She can’t help it. She still loves it, and she’s still in her way. We might see it at this time as an experience, but it’s love.
It’s it’s her concern for our welfare, and it and it doesn’t stop until even we’re really old, and she’s incredibly old, we’re still her baby. And so imagine, we’ve all given that amount of kindness to each other. Not just once, but over and over and over again, we’ve all treated each other with this unbelievable self denial and kindness that a mother gives to her child. So that’s something to meditate on. Then the third step, having meditated in that way, is to develop a very strong feeling.
How wonderful it would be to repay the kindness of all mother sentient beings. Just as in this life, the person who we really don’t want to see our happiness, who we have great pleasure in pleasing is our mother. And we we do anything, whatever we can, whatever’s in her power to make her happy, and we really makes us feel so good inside. Then in the same way, we we should have a feeling towards all being without exception. How wonderful it would be to make them happy, to to repay the infinite kindness that they’ve given to me in previous life.
So this is a subject for us to meditate on, to do breathing meditation, quieten the mind, and then go through it step by of kindness. Can go over I mean, you can think of all the examples of how kind mothers are. Even animals. You know, a mother animal will give her life to save the babies. You can see it all the time.
And, you know, when we were babies, it was not just humans that that all beings were our mother. All beings were our mother when we were kittens and puppies and horses. Like, there’s a there’s a story about this famous robber and this terrible man in Tibet who he used to always rob big caravan, caravans, and he was really a drag in that countryside. And feared and a real bad man. His name would bend somebody.
Like, there was Ben. Anyway, one day he was robbing a a caravan, and in the fighting, he had a sword. Wounded a pregnant mare and he cut her belly open. The horse, the mare, was dying and the foal came out the womb and sort of stood up and, you know, there. And this the dying mare tried to stand up and lick her foal dry to clean it.
And he saw this and and he just became clearly overwhelmed by the recognition of the kindness to mother for his baby. And he’d probably heard a little bit of what it’s teaching because he’s a little bit of the teaching. Anyway, that changed him so much that he completely abandoned his the bad life of robbing and stealing and killing. And he entered the monastery and became a yogi and he attained very high levels of realization. As vigorous as he’d been a robber, applied all of that vigor and energy to his Dharma practice, and he really did very well.
But it was this recognition of the kindness of the mother. So so up until this stage then, we are now meditating on how wonderful it would be to repay the kindness of all all sentient beings. We’re really determined to repay the kindness of all things within our mind. So the next step is to meditate on love, on cultivating loving kindness towards others. So just we we don’t really have have loving kindness towards others.
We we’ve gotta cultivate that state of mind. And love is is not what we what we normally talk about love. It’s it’s, you know, the love between a couple is a very selfish love. It’s it’s when we say, oh, I love you. I don’t think we do forever.
It’s incredibly selfish because there’s it’s there’s this grasping almost that we put around the other person, and we strongly identify, you know, our self image with them. Them. You know, our self can’t exist without that other being. So it’s a powerful emotion, but it’s it’s sort of it’s driven by need, and and there is tremendous happiness in that person, but it’s because we identify too much with them, and because it’s sort of this this mistake, this wrong identification of them and me. Our ordinary love very easily turns into aversion.
Like, the other person can come completely spoil because we put chains around them in our love. I love you, but you better not go away. I won’t kill you. It’s it’s real it’s like that. And and these chains that we put around another person, they feel it, and they and they sort of bounce time and time again with our relationships that we don’t know how to love.
Now from a Buddhist point of view, love is not this binding emotion between people, but it’s just a pure wish for somebody to be happy. We wish they experience happiness. That’s real love. It’s very difficult because we have you weren’t gonna ask me more questions. I’ll come back to it.
It’s very difficult. We have this self-cherishing and this wrong perception projecting. We might think we we might think that, sure, I love that person. I just want that person to be happy. But if that person goes off with another girl, then we check up and truly love them.
If if if we’re unhappy, if they just come to us and say, well, I don’t wanna stay with you anymore. I’m really happy with another person. See you later. We can totally rejoice and say, fantastic. Enjoy your life.
And that’s the sort of Buddhist life we’re talking about. It’s no selfishness. No grasping. And the real wish that they have happens, it’s not just on a relationship, though. It’s all beings and all animals, all living beings.
May they be happy. And not just may they be happy, how wonderful they be, but turning to make them happy. Do whatever you can to make them happy. Rejoicing in other people’s happiness. Not a not a trace of jealousy or spite, but just real identification of happiness for others and striving to do what one can to increase the happiness.
So that’s love. And we can do it based upon the previous meditations of seeing others. The next state of mind that we have to cultivate is is is the mind of of compassion. And compassion is not pity. It’s not a poor thing.
But it’s a real sort of open state of mind, sort of seeing people in suffering situations and having the wish that they be released from suffering, whatever suffering it is. And I’ve mentioned the eight types of sufferings that humans have and the sufferings of animals and gods and things. So there’s a tremendous amount of of suffering and misery. And even poor old mister and missus Marcus, who I’ve sort of put down before, have been sort of so heavy. We still can recognize that in their minds, there’s enormous misery and suffering.
So compassion then is the wish that may their suffering situation come to an end, may they have happiness. And there’s no discrimination in anybody, even poor or adult people, whatever he is at this moment in time. May his suffering come to an end. So compassion, again, it’s not an easy state of mind to start. It’s got to be worked on.
And we can do this by recognizing what what is arising in our mind. So then having thought about being a young mother and the brief idea of kindness and wanting to repair, cultivate loving kindness and compassion, then we need to develop what’s called the unusual attitude. And this is the mental attitude of personally taking responsibility. I’m going to be the one who’s going to release all of these mother sentient beings from unhappiness. I’m going to bring them, you know, from sorrow and suffering.
I’m gonna bring them happiness. I’m gonna take responsibility myself. It’s not thinking we’ll leave it to mother Teresa in Calcutta or, you know, to somebody else over there. I’ll just do it. I’m gonna work for everybody.
I’m gonna completely take the responsibility for all beings. And so having strongly determined to take upon oneself the responsibility, then then one turns one’s direction in life towards enlightenment. Because it’s clear that now we can’t even stop our own suffering. Can we we we can’t prevent suffering situations from happening. Our mind is out of control.
Our mind is dominated by karma and delusion. And the only real happiness, the only real cessation of suffering is freedom from the wheel of death and rebirth, the Wheel of Life. So in order for me to fulfill my responsibility, my promise to release mother sentient beings from suffering, I have to follow the path, and I have to attain liberation. I have to become a Buddha. And as a Buddha, I will have omniscient mind, incredible clairvoyant powers can manifest in any way possible to help mother sentient beings and guide them on the path, guide them towards their own liberation, liberation, their own enlightenment, their own cessation of of ignorance and karma so that they gain control, they gain the wisdom understanding of reality and emptiness.
And in that way, and only by in that way, can I be a perfect benefit to all my mother sentient beings? And so our mind then just as if from our heart, there’s this sort of total altruistic attitude of directing the actions of one’s body, speech, mind towards enlightenment for the benefit of all others. This is the motivation. This is the intention, the the developing this are just they’re listed in the text of enormous benefits. So one is one develops the state of mind when it’s called a son of the Buddha or daughter of the Buddha.
And as I said before, the whole universe shakes because it’s such a a rare, such a wonderful mental attitude to develop. But it it can be done, and it it gives it’s the real cause of attaining liberation, and it does benefit others. It benefits others tremendously. I think an example of bodhicitta is is the very fact that Buddha House exists now, that you have the opportunity to to to listen to the teachings on on bodhicitta itself. And there was one one lama called Lama Yeshe whose whose energy, whose bodhicitta has just a single person.
They set up similar places to Buddha House in in all the capital cities in Australia, in England, France, Spain, Italy, throughout Europe, America, New Zealand, throughout the world. And the only purpose then of these sentence is to give people the opportunity. In the beginning, Lama Lama Yeshe named all of his centres the house for wisdom culture, Buddha House for wisdom culture, which we always rejected with for wisdom culture. We didn’t like that because it sort of sounded pretty weird. But bodhicitta is wisdom.
It’s based on wisdom, and the understanding of emptiness is wisdom. And so it means that these places were established for the cultivation of wisdom and compassion in the minds of the sentient beings as you and me. And so from from my understanding, this is an example of how bodhicitta works, and those who are fortunate enough to work with the patience and diligence and have received the various teachings. And we’re all striving to develop bodhicitta. We haven’t.
I mean, it’s very hard to develop, and make mistakes and where that anger comes up again. But, slowly, slowly, we’re getting there. And I think if if you can genuinely see the worth of this meditation, you can see how how beneficial it can be for yourself for others, then I hope that what I’ve said tonight acts as a as a seed. And the other night, the seeds of of wisdom, seeds of compassion that you can grow, you can fertilize and grow. Listen to more teaching.
Meditate and check up. I think Anna’s question is great because it really shows a checking mind. And and it’s got to be checked. Because if you don’t check, you’ll probably just discard it, and you won’t think any more about it. But it but to discard teaching from bodhicitta would be, you know, in this life, a beggar who finds Alright.
Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s many people have exactly that problem. This teaching like, the purpose is to train our minds.
We we embark upon this meditation to develop the mind of altruism. Yeah. This is sort of why we’re going to meditate. Now it’s true that, a lot of mothers don’t come up with scratch. But in general, I think And also it’s true that a lot of our neurosis, not all of our neurosis, but many of our neurosis, we can trace back to our parents.
But to me that doesn’t invalidate meditation because I’m distancing myself a little bit from this real personal experience and looking at it as a generality. So concentrate on the positive. There is definitely a lot of positive energy between mother and the child, and that’s what we should concentrate on. The negative energy just should be compassionate, but we should think of that with compassion. A mother doesn’t want to hurt her child.
I’m sure no mother wants to instill a neurosis in her child that’s gonna give him a hang up get to wake him at all. It happens because she doesn’t know how to express her love. Because she puts just as much strings on her affection as we we all put up. When we have affection, we put so we’ve got strings attached, and that’s the problem. That’s the problem with ordinary love, worldly love.
So if we could teach each other to love each other without strings, then then we would be able to love it successfully and not get ourselves caught up. Is that alright? To be more general about it. Yeah. Yeah.
And that’s the best way. And, actually, I mean, we we want them to be happy in every way, even every sense even if they’re attached to it. But if it makes them happy, are, let them happy. On the other hand, of course, the best way is to leave them on the path, to show them the the problems with the discriminating mind, the problems with attachment, can make that because that leads me to happiness which is without an end. So we need to be skillful.
One example. A very same wonderful kind love of Lama Yeshe who established all of these places. I was when I was living in monastery in Nepal, I ran a medical clinic, and so the people from the village would come. And also the young monks would be to the monastery. I also treated.
And I remember one boy, he had a boil on his bottom, and I was treating him. I don’t think it was no. I won’t go into the details. But, I mean, that’s a guru at his side. One needs to be very skilled in order to understand what people need.
And sometimes, there’s people may need a little bit of So that’s up to our ourselves and how much wisdom we can cultivate in helping others to make sure that whatever we do for others, there’s always this pure wish that they experience happiness, that whatever we do for them is to their best benefit. karma that we’ve created with a virtuous attitude by discussing Dharma tonight. May this ripen so that we attain Buddhahood in order to be able to benefit all sentient beings.