Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 74-minute introduction to Buddhist thought, Ven Thubten Gyatso explores what Buddhism identifies as the root cause of all suffering: misconceptions about self. He begins by contextualizing Buddhism cosmologically—realms of rebirth, karma spanning universes, the Buddha’s teaching across worlds—then narrows focus to the central puzzle: what is a person? Drawing on philosophical analysis, he explains why neither body nor mind alone can constitute the self, and why Buddhism instead treats persons as conventionally designated labels upon a changing body-mind continuum. This understanding matters because clinging to an imagined, independent “me” fuels attachment, anger, and every disturbing emotion. He then guides the audience through the antidote: cultivating wisdom that sees through this misunderstanding, paired with universal compassion toward all beings—who have been our parents, siblings, and enemies across countless lives. The talk concludes with guided meditation on breath, self-image, anger, and resolve. Suitable for newcomers with no prior Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2004 06 05 tape 2.mp3
UUID: f9c91d5e-c0f5-40ab-a97b-0d6f2b0b7c22
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Introduction to Buddhism (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2004-06-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 74.7 minutes
Words: ~7,559
Well, it’s like when this earth does end up, it’s to burn up from a Buddhist point of view, scientific point of view as well. So what’s described is what happens is that those like the lower realms, so the whole realm of rebirth stops and the beings are born higher and higher. This is like a karmic thing. But if you still have hell karma, like Adolf Hitler is still there, then he’ll go to a hell realm on another world. If it’s not exhausted, they’ll go there.
Then the animals, hungry ghost animals, humans, we all get higher and higher. Collectively we go to this very high divine realm of Brahma, which is still a realm of life birth. And the earth totally burns up, it disappears, supernova. But when the sun supernovas everything goes. But that’s just our tiny little corner of the universe.
There’s other suns and other planets at different stages of evolution throughout the universe. So if we still have karma, human karma for example, we’ll be born humans in other places. So the implication here is that throughout the universe there are similar life forms. Like there are probably planets still at the stage of dinosaurs and others more beyond our present level. But still, there’s humans, there’s animals, there’s hungry ghosts, there’s hell beings, there’s divine beings, similar.
In fact, the Sanskrit language is the universal language. Even languages in other planets will be based upon Sanskrit. So we should teach our astronauts. Or maybe they yeah. Well, inferred this because it says that Buddhas, Śākyamūni Buddha, the historic Buddha, there are countless Buddhas throughout the universe doing things like that, either at a big time like the historic Buddha or small time like the Dalai Lama who look like they don’t teach the whole path.
We make this sort of distinctly distinguish. So it’s said in the scriptures that whenever the Buddhas teach the whole path like the historic Buddha did, they always teach a language based on Sans Sanskrit throughout the universe. So this is my assumption, Sanskrit must be the universal language. I don’t know. I mean, unfortunately most of the scriptures were lost, the Sanskrit scriptures because they were written on palm leaves which decayed in India.
Unfortunately, the Tibetan translations which have survived were done in such a rigorous fashion of making no mistakes that it is possible to recreate the original Sanskrit from the Tibetan. And there are big groups of Tibetan lamas who are employed by the Indian government to do that in India. Because that’s how they did them into Tibetan — one person would translate from Sanskrit into Tibetan and then an independent group of other translators would translate it back into Sanskrit from the Tibetan. And if the two didn’t match perfectly, like the retranslated and the original Sanskrit, the story goes that they would tie the text to the tail of the dog and chase it through the town shouting insults at the translator.
I don’t know if that was true or not but that shows the rigorous way in which the texts were translated. So I don’t know. Actually Sanskrit is very it comes a lot in our language as well. There are many Sanskrit roots as well as Greek and Latin. Think even some of the Latin roots are originally Sanskrit.
I’m not a linguist. Yes, but it’s based on Sanskrit. A language founded on Sanskrit and Pali is very close to Sanskrit. But yes, that’s right. Well the teachings say that wisdom, which opposes the root ignorance, and universal love and compassion, which embraces all living beings, are the only way to enlighten them.
Because saṃsāra, which they have heard, saṃsāra means wheel of life, state of suffering in all those realms of rebirth. The cause of that is fundamentally confusion, ignorance, not knowing reality. And so the wisdom opposes that. And then the self centeredness, the self importance, which is focused upon the wrong concept of self, which hurts others through one’s own indulgence. The opposite of that is complete love and compassion for others without any discrimination, not excluding a single person.
Having as much love for your own mother as you have for your murderer or whatever. For a red backed spider, you love as much as you love your husband or wife. The spiritual path. Certainly. Buddha said we’re all insane.
We are laboring under such strong misconceptions, delusions, true delusions which we believe to be true. But we’re so mistaken in the way we see ourselves, the way we see others. And that root mistake causes all our pain. And so it’s wisdom which opposes that. So your question, is Buddhism the only way?
Well, wisdom and compassion are. But wisdom compassion are not exclusively Buddhist teachings. There’s wisdom and compassion throughout human culture. But is there complete wisdom? Complete compassion?
Like a lot of cultures might teach compassion for humans but animals are not included. Or certain animals, Hindus worship the cows and so on, but others are not. And even we’re not even know about beings in hell or hungry ghosts to have compassion for them. But that’s stressed so much that compassion has to be totally without exception. And when you look at in the world today, you look at any one religion, there are different sects who are killing each other.
And one religion killing other religions. It’s awful. I’m not saying that is the fault of the religion, in most cases that’s the fault of humans, the followers of the religion. And that will happen in Buddhism too. They’re human which means that they are fallible and their ignorance the Buddha predicted.
He said, my teachings will last a long time, said, they’ll last five thousand years. But from now on, this is as he was dying, he said they’re going to deteriorate and they’re going to be destroyed from within. You people are going to lose understanding of the meaning, your selfishness. This is in general again but it doesn’t mean that individuals are going to lose the plot. Individuals still, even today, can recognize the plot and destroy ignorance and selfishness and achieve enlightenment.
Fewer and fewer are being capable because we are living in a degenerate time where we so often you read what they call this the age of enlightenment. Actually it’s the opposite. We’re entering the age of darkness. You look at the newspapers, look at the world. It’s so dangerous.
It’s a group karmic thing. It’s a reflection of our group karma. But still, each one of us as an individual does not have to get caught up in it. karma is malleable. We can work with karma.
We can purify the accumulation of negative karma. We can accumulate positive karma. We can set a direction in our life. We can go beyond karma because it’s in our mind. It’s not out there.
Nobody else is in control of our future, only ourselves. And this is really important. May not be in control of our lives at the moment, and definitely we’re not, but we can get control. And if we don’t do it this life, what guarantee is there for the next life we’ll even learn how to do it? As we can’t determine what sort of dream we’re going to have at night, We might really want to have last night’s great dream or we may not want to have last night’s nightmare.
We have no choice when we go to sleep. We don’t know how. But there is a reason why we have a good or bad dream and that’s in our own mind. Anyway, the potential is there to gradually, gradually work on our mind and we’ll go from better to better. And also the more we work on our mind the more insight we will gain about how our mind functions.
Instantaneous in what? Like a flash. Well I guess there will be a day when it’s gonna happen. No, it’s progressive and it’s cumulative. It takes a long time.
And the ignorance, the anger and the attachment are at many levels in our mind. We can get rid of gross things quite easily, they’re more and more subtle and unbelievably subtle as you meditate and you get to know your mind and the things that come up in your mind. So no, it’s progressive and takes a long time. The Zen masters talk about satori, this sort of flash and they call it enlightenment. But it’s not the term enlightenment which Satori is not what I’m talking about, enlightenment of Buddha.
Can get a flash of insight. That can happen. But it does come only after a whole lot of premeditated work. Like, what was it, Archimedes. Been sinking for ages and ages and ages about this principle.
And then he relaxed, sat in the bath, Eureka! I understand! And there are a lot of stories about that in science. With someone who has been working on a problem for maybe years and then they sort of relax and boom, they see it. So that can happen, that sort of thing.
Sure. But it requires the preliminary work. It’s not going to come out of nowhere. You have to create the condition. Sure.
Sure. Well, from the Buddhist point of view, animals have mind. They have thoughts. They have emotions. They have anger.
They have desire. Whether they have unconditional love or something else. Even dolphins. I have a little bit of a thing against the new age. Dolphin worshippers.
Anyway, they have mind and the only difference is their nervous system. So I often say that if you a thought experiment, literally a thought experiment like Einstein used to do, if you take a rabbit’s mind and put it in a human brain, you’ll get a human mind. And if you took a human mind and put it in a rabbit’s brain, you will get a rabbit’s mind. The only limitation of an animal’s mind is its nervous system. But it has all the potential for human intelligence, human emotions, altruism, whatever.
No, the mind has the potential. But it’s the brain which is the limitation. So if you take the rabbit’s mind out, not the rabbit’s brain, the rabbit’s mind, because they’re different, put it in a human brain, that mind will be able to function as a human mind. Because it has the hardware. The software is the same but it’s limited by the hardware, to use modern terms.
Well, what do we mean when we say I’ve got a broken heart? What do we mean? Yeah. There are certain, there are levels of emotion, the levels of thoughts. Sure.
In Buddhism or Buddha taught, not only the gross nervous system, but the subtle nervous system, which is associated very much with the mind and this wind energy is prana. And he talked about chakras, crown chakra, throat chakra, heart chakra, navel chakra and lower chakra at the base of the spine. So these are locations of particular mental activity and very at a much deeper level. But the very center of it is the heart chakra. When we die, all of the wind energies associated with consciousness all absorb towards the heart chakra.
And that’s the seed of consciousness, if you like. Even at the moment, our most subtle mind can be said to be related to the heart chakra. And so in joy, you can use the word in Tibetan Buddhism using heart in reference to mind, but what they’re referring to is the most subtle seat of consciousness. So what I wanted to talk about is the self, the person, because I because this we have to the root of the problem is not understanding what we are as an individual. So what are we?
I mentioned the dualistic philosophy, in particular of Descartes in France. You’ve all heard the quote, think, therefore I am. So what in his philosophy, not only do we have to have body, we have to talk about body and we have to talk about mind, we have to talk about what’s going to survive death. Mind, Descartes equated the mind with I, with self. So if I go to heaven, if I go to hell, it’s the mind which goes to heaven or hell.
So he equated consciousness or mind with self as the person. And that seems not such a bad idea because there are persons, aren’t there? There’s so many persons in this room. So what is person? If all things are either, well Buddhism didn’t say they are all either body or mind.
They can be abstract phenomena. But what is the person? Is it body or is it mind? Descartes had no choice because he said whatever exists is either body or mind. So he had to say the person is mind.
Now, Buddha talked, gave a further elaboration of phenomena. He said there are phenomena which we can call designations to particular states. Things which exist, but which are neither body nor mind. For example, well, numbers, mathematics, one, two, three, four. Does four exist?
The phenomenon four? Well, it does. But what is it? Is it body? Is physical?
It’s not physical. It’s not the ink on the paper. Even if you put four objects, you can’t say the collection is four, where four is a number. Anyway, but four is a designation, isn’t it? We designate four to a collection of things which is less than five and more than three.
Okay. So we call that four. And four exists. The same with letters, a b c. They exist.
But they’re really just designations. I will call that a b c. The same even other things like death. Does death exist? Well, it does.
That’s what we’re all scared of. But what is death? You know, there’s no thing in itself which is death. Only thing of the grim reaper up there, you know, with his side. But, death definitely exists.
So it’s just a designation. We we designate death. Well, it depends, in Buddhist terms, it it they say that this there is death when there is no longer the basis for consciousness and warmth. And a doctor might look at the pupils and see if they will open and contract or stick, you know, electrodes and see if there’s any brain activity or whatever. Anyway, it’s still, I would say, is this dead or not?
It’s just a designation according to what we’ve decided really means death. There’s no thing which is dead. Even time. Right? This is two thousand and four, two thousand and five, you know, the years.
Like they seem so big like in New Year’s Eve, oh, you know, The the change of the millennium is such a big thing. But what’s the big deal? There is no two thousand or year two thousand or year nineteen ninety nine. They’re totally just made up by humans. They’re just designations to the experience of the passage of time.
We experience the passage of the past to the present to the future, and we label that second minute hour day year. Well, I don’t know. I I I don’t know. But but still they would to start because we’re stuck in a few blocks. Everybody wants to blame something out there.
Troubles start over when we think, I am. That was our trouble. That’s what we’re trying to get to actually. You know, what am I? So our fundamental question is what am I?
What is the person? So is it body? Is it mind? Buddha said neither. But if we say how many persons are in this room?
We look at the bodies. Count the bodies. What is the essential person in their body? Well we can’t really say, Well they look different, sure. Is that knows the person?
Is that I the person? There may be individual physical characteristics but none of those characteristics is the actual person. The one who’s experiencing happiness, unhappiness, the one who’s dying, going to the future life and so on. But there is a person who experiences happiness, unhappiness, who dies, wakes, sleeps, eats. What is this person?
Important question. We cannot identify anything upon the physical body that is uniquely the individual. Oh, the chromosomes are unique. But are they the person? My chromosomes are being spread all around as flakes of skin drop off and hair drops out.
It’s full of me. That’s not me. That hair is not me. So that’s not the person. And that’s about as unique as you can get physically.
Our chromosomal make up, but that’s not the person. I remember before I even became a monk, I was working in a hospital in Melbourne And there’s this young doctor, he was a skydiver and he’d broken his leg. And so he’s back at work still with his leg in plaster and he’d been to the for a check up x-ray and he was going to see the orthopedic surgeon. And I saw him and he was holding the x-ray here. I said, oh, give us a look.
No. I said, it’s a broken leg. How many broken legs have you seen on an x-ray? He could not look at the X-ray of his broken leg. He he just had this embarrassed block that this is me and couldn’t tolerate the thought of looking at his leg broken.
Wow. Where are you coming from? So we do identify what my point is. We do identify with our body as me on occasions. Now we wake up in the morning and we look at something and we go, Oh!
I look terrible. Or there’s a group photograph. Who do we look for first? Me. How I look, you know?
Me. So there are times when we strongly identify with the body as me, but it’s not me. Same with the mind. I said before, you know, there must be a person who experiences happiness, unhappiness. Well, is happiness the person?
Is unhappiness the person? Is anger the person? Or love? When we look at those emotions, they come and go. The feelings come and go.
We might say, Oh, this is an angry person. But we don’t say, This person is anger. Because we know that they’re not always angry. If we were anger, we would always be anger, but we’re not. So we can analyse all the mental qualities and we can’t hold up something which is I.
But nevertheless, how many persons in this room will we? We point, we say, Yeah, they’re persons. There’s so many people. When we look closely upon the body and mind, we can’t find a person. So the person is more subtle, isn’t it?
Buddha said, anyway, the person belongs to that same category of being merely designated like time, numbers, letters, death. We give a name to a particular body and mind. We we label, like subjectively, we label I upon this body and mind. And then our parents give us our name and everybody learns our name and they start calling us by our name. And that name identifies us as an individual.
So in this activity, there is this social activity of labeling a name upon a particular body and mind. And that is sufficient to establish a person who eats, sleeps, cries, laughs, you know, does everything. So you see, the person is just conventionally established, just conventionally through the act of labeling. There is no person existing in his own right, separate from that activity of just labeling, just designating. Which means we’re, alright.
Can you get a feeling for that? Is it scary? Yeah. Well, it was a thought experiment. The thing that’s moving between eyes.
That was a thought experiment. I say it would take a rabbit’s mind. I didn’t say the rabbit. I said the rabbit’s mind. Put it in a human brain.
So I just say, just imagine if we could move the Well, I’ve described that. I’ve described that, haven’t I? Didn’t I say what happens when we die? I’ve said that the mind riding upon its most subtle wind energy or prana, with all of its memories, all of its karma, all of its mental dispositions, good and bad, separates, instantly takes this subtle bardo or intermediate form. But this is self.
No, it’s not. That’s right. You asked me for what is it that takes this thing from life to life. I’ve explained it. It’s the mind.
But the mind is not self. However, in dreams, do you think I? Of course. In dreams, we have a dream body and we think it’s me. We have pleasure or we have pain, we’re frightened or we’re not frightened.
We emote as if the dream body is really me, don’t we? We think I. So we label I upon our dream body. And we believe it to be truly me. So the same thing in the intermediate state, we’re conscious and we have this is me.
There is a sense of self. So we label I upon our intermediate body. Animals have a sense of self, same thing. They may not have language like we have, but they have their self conscious. They’re conscious of themselves.
It’s something that gets hungry and wants this, doesn’t want that and so on. So they have a sense of self. That establishes their individuality. But it’s just the conventional act of labeling I upon a suitable basis, the body and mind, but neither the body nor the mind nor the collection is self. The self is just very, very an abstract phenomenon almost.
Now, the reason that I’m talking about the way in which the self exists according to Buddhism is because since the beginningless time, every one of us has had the wrong conception that there is a real, concrete, true me, independent here that controls the body and mind. Sometimes it seems to be more the mind. I am happy. I am unhappy. I am dumb.
I am intelligent. Sometimes it’s more the body. I am beautiful. I am ugly. I’m fat.
I’m skinny. The self image. But in general, we have an idea that there’s an I behind it all. There’s a me who’s at the back of it all, experiencing, controlling, being loved, being hated, needing love, strongly needing recognition, reputation. Know?
This is a sense of a strong, concrete I here. And that is mistaken. That is completely an error. That there is no independently, self existing I here in control. There is just an ever changing body and mind, which is just conventionally labelled as I.
So when insults come, we hear people gossiping about us. Oh, said that about me. Where does the anger come from? It’s because of our tight grasping at our self image which we crave as good, of course. I am good.
I am beautiful. I am excellent. How dare you insult me? We exaggerate our our sense of self. We we admire our self.
We we feel very hurt. Anything wrong is society’s fault, not mine. And so on and so on. Mother’s fault, father’s fault. I’m basically truly good me.
That we labor under that strong sense and that the cause of all of our disturbing emotions. This is called the self grasping ignorance. And that’s the very root of all of our anger, attachment, jealousy and pride. And so the wisdom, if we can generate the wisdom seeing that the body and mind are empty of the self that we’ve always believed in, to believe to be truly me, There’s nothing to be hurt. Insults just go right through.
How can an insult they can’t stick on anything. They just go straight through. Even physical pain is not me. I am hurting. It gets so much worse when we’re I am hurting.
And we know how anxiety can sort of which really is self centred poor me, anxiety is real worry me me me. Our pain threshold goes down. But when we don’t have anxiety, our pain threshold goes up. Anxiety is essentially worry concern about me and what’s happening to me, what people are thinking about me. Psychosis is very much me.
Paranoia. They’re talking about me. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, the definition of paranoia is when the football players go into a huddle in the middle of the ground and you think they’re talking about you. Yeah. Well, just I’ll come to that.
There’s exaggerated thoughts about me too. Yeah. Megalomania, arrogance, pride, I am superior, you know, also. And that that’s all focused on this, this misconception of self. But there is a self.
I I said there is a self. There is a self which meditates, which loves, which hates, you know, and that’s the merely labeled self, right? The mere I, just this abstract entity. So there’s no fault in saying I’m meditating on loving kindness and really trying to generate loving kindness. But we know it’s the mind.
Loving kindness that we’re trying to generate, a mental quality that we’re trying to radiate that in the world. It doesn’t have to be I. There’s no fault in thinking that I am meditating on loving kindness. Buddha said I have achieved nirvana. We’re not saying there is no self.
There is a self but it’s extremely subtle. And it’s a mere self. It has no existence from its own side. There’s no entity in its own right. But our wrong conception clings to a real concrete I here behind it all.
And that’s what gets us into all that trouble. Protecting the self and feeding the self with as much pleasure as possible, with reputation, with possessions. You know? That’s our problem. That’s what causes us to hurt others.
Obsession with the self image which doesn’t exist. And in terms of pleasure, this is our experience. Our experience, I’m sure, is that when we do love others, when we have no conditions, we don’t want anything, but we give presence, We give a smile. We go out of our way to help others because we like them. We want them to be happy.
We want them to not have suffering and we help them. The joy, the peace that exists in our mind in doing that is so much greater than winning an argument. If we get into an angry argument and we win it even, there’s no satisfaction because in our anger we’ve hurt someone. Even getting lots of money, lots of food or whatever, if there’s no sense of sharing with others, at least sharing or enjoying with others, there’s this sort of dissatisfaction. There’s this empty, hollow emotion.
So selfish pursuits, even if we through our karma, we get what we want, it doesn’t bring the pleasure that we had anticipated. And many times in our pursuit of wealth, friends, where we we do so at the expense of others, the result is opposite. The result is misery. So meditating on loving kindness is so strongly. That’s one of the principal aspects of the path.
The other one is the wisdom, understanding, emptiness. So we can let go of this strong self centered attitude. And that’s what Buddhism is about. We’re talking about the the basis or the foundation. This body and mind and and the wheel of life and and it’s going nowhere.
We’ve talked about potential of nirvana and enlightenment which having achieved that is not lost because the path which leads to that totally destroys the ignorance and the self centered emotions which cause all our suffering. So therein is the medicine. In my role as physician, people say, Oh, do you still practice medicine? I say, Of course. I talk about the mind and I talk about what really causes unhappiness and what really causes happiness.
And I think this medicine is infinitely superior to anything you buy at the chemist or at the drug dealers down the back alley. But we have to put it into action. It’s just the knowledge is not enough. We have to have the courage to begin the process of transforming our mind from self centeredness into cherishing others, loving others, really, without discriminating. And there are many methods taught to do that, many methods taught to, as valid foundations for altruism, for loving others.
One, the very fundamental method, we might say, why should I love others? Why should I love Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? Look what they’re doing. The point is that we have to not be so narrow minded. Don’t just look at now, look at the broader picture.
We’ve been Osama bin Laden’s in past lives. We’ve done horrific things. Everybody’s changing. Everybody has the potential for great love and great compassion. Why are they doing these horrific things?
Because they’ve got wrong views. They’ve got wrong ideas. Kill the infidel and you go to heaven. It’s a mistaken idea. It’s not Islam, it’s humanity.
It’s our fallible mind always having wrong conceptions. In past lives, Osama bin Laden has been our mother many, many, many times. Who have been our mothers in all of our billions and countless past lives? Where are they? It’s not the same mother as this life, it’s everybody.
We’ve all been each other’s mother, each other’s father, brother, sister, husband, wife. We’re related, like universal what was the family of life, family of being we are a big family. And that’s true if you broaden the picture. Now, okay, we’ve killed each other. We’ve stolen from each other.
We’ve we’ve hurt each other. But we’ve also looked after each other. And there are so many kind things in this life with people who’ve really gone out of the way to help us. Mostly our parents, especially our mother who gave us her body, her energy, her time, etcetera, etcetera, when were young. And we might say, don’t talk to me about my mother.
I can’t bear her. But even if our mother made mistakes and hurt us, it wasn’t deliberately a malignant attitude. She thought she was doing the right thing. And we we’ve got to admit that even though it may have been the wrong thing. She thought it was the right thing to help us to be happy.
Her mind’s suffering from weakness as is our mind. So so the point is that we’re everybody. We’re all our minds function along similar lines. And we’ve all been related to each other in past life. When we find ourselves getting angry towards a person or hating an insect or spiders or whatever, we should reflect that that being or that person that’s been our mother in past lives and through karma has now got eight legs and scary appearance.
But in the future I could have eight legs and a scary appearance and that could be a human. There’s no guarantee that we won’t have scales or long tails, etcetera, in our next life, even worse. So there is a foundation, a logical foundation for meditating on equal love and compassion to all living beings that are all connected to each other. So using that as a logical foundation, we then look at our own life and what do I want, what don’t I want, what makes me happy, unhappy, and reflect upon our own life and then put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. And it’s that we know what they want, what they don’t want.
And why can’t we be kind? Why can’t we put their interest before our own? Because I’m selfish, because I want, I’ll miss out. But it doesn’t work that way. If you find that you sincerely have the attitude of looking for others, looking after others, you may not get like they’re not gonna turn around and love you and we know, like, they might even hate us.
But you’re not gonna be disturbed. They can’t touch they can’t hurt you, because your love and compassion are supported by wisdom. You know that this body is nothing other than the transformed food and drink I’ve had for the last seven years. This is just fish and chips or pizza. It is.
There’s no me here. It’s just Changed a little bit, but has no essence of me. And the mind is something changing all the time. There’s no essence which is me. So it doesn’t matter what people say about this, due to this.
It’s only a transient abode for my mind. Nothing physical can hurt my mind. The only thing that can hurt my mind is my anger, my selfishness, my pride, and my jealousy, my longing desire, my ignorance. That can hurt my mind, but nothing else. And that’s my responsibility.
I’m gonna work on that. I’m gonna change my mind. So now our life is so meaningful. There’s so much. There’s no time to waste.
There’s so much we can do in transforming our mind into wisdom and compassion. And in the process, become much far better human beings. People can live with us, you know? Up until now, with our selfishness, people can’t live with us. Our kids get out as soon as they can.
A husband, wife, mother, father, and we can’t live with them. All this conflict, all this personality conflict is mental conflict. We can’t change them. We can’t change mom and dad Or our kids, to a degree. A little bit we can help, but we can change ourselves.
Alright. It’s the only logical thing to do in our life, is to work on our mind. Instead of going to the gym, going to the hairdresser, going to buy expensive clothes, decorating the body, putting so much energy into our external appearance, which is so temporary anyway, and nothing’s gonna stop the wrinkles in anyway, in the old age, but putting so little energy into working on our mind. Like, no matter how beautiful a person appears, if they indicate selfishness, anger, pride, we don’t like them. We we we just put them down.
We don’t wanna know them. But on the other hand, no matter how ugly a person is, how many wrinkles and warts and white hair, whatever, when their heart has love, we don’t want to be separated from them. We want to be with that person. It doesn’t matter what they look like. So it’s not chance.
When we wake up in the morning, we look at our mood. It’s not like the weather. You know, we can’t control the weather. Good good weather, bad weather. If our mind is is bad mood, the day doesn’t have to be colored by that.
We can change it. We can check out why, you know, what’s going on. And we’re irritated. We’re upset about something. Why am I and work on it.
There’s lots of it. And work on loving kindness. The mind is the mind can be so much more beautiful than the body. Body has so many limitations, we spend all day looking after the body, and we can’t even meditate for ten minutes in the morning. We don’t have time.
That’s our priority. I know it’s difficult, but we should reorder our list of priorities and realize that our mind is not going to just turn beautiful by itself. We all feel that we have a good heart, we have beauty, and we do. Actually, we do. We wouldn’t be I mean, to be human is unbelievably good karma, to be born human.
We are experiencing just as humans, we’re experiencing the result of unbelievable work in past lives to go against our selfishness and to really love others, to have such strong attitude of caring for others, which is the cause of being human. So this is the result. There’s much work in the past life. If we use this result to increase our prejudice, to increase our hatred, to increase our ignorance, such a waste, such an incredible waste of this rare opportunity. Our destiny can only be going back to the lower realms.
Look, I keep trying to stop to do some meditation. I’ve talked too much. I’m sorry. But let’s take the last few minutes. I want you to try and sit comfortably.
I know your legs are hurting, but try to put your body in a situation where you can keep still just for a few minutes and look at your mind and do what we call analytical meditation. Think about the constructive emotions, the destructive emotions in your life, how how you can can think of examples in your own experience which may support, you know, the sort of things we’ve been talking about today. And begin this by just concentrating on your breath. Focus your mind on the coming and going of the breath at your nostrils. Try to stay with the movement of the air coming and going, and don’t allow any thoughts to interrupt.
And then when I say so, you can can start thinking selectively. So try to hold your mind on the coming and going of the prayer. Keep your mind on the breathing. Don’t let it think about anything else. Now just try to bring up your self image, how you see yourself to exist.
And then think of your relationships and the things that happened to you in your life and check up the role of your self image in your mind in the happy and the unhappy events of your life. Now think of those that make you angry, who have upset you recently or in the past. And put yourself in their shoes. Imagine what it feels like for them to be always angry at you and at others. Imagine how lonely and unhappy they feel.
I think that they’ve only harmed you because of their uncontrolled mind, following upon the energy of anger and ignorance and selfishness. But all they want is happiness like you. And in past lives, even in the earlier part of this life, there are times when they’ve been incredibly kind to you. Try to see them in the positive light of love and compassion. And think of the folly, of you responding to their harm with your own anger and wanting to harm them back.
It’s just like two school children hitting each other again and again, each time getting harder and harder. I hit you because you hit me. Think it’s time to grow up. I do not know how long I have had this mind. I don’t know how much longer I will stay healthy.
Death can happen at any moment. I must cleanse my mind of all the disturbing emotions of ignorance, anger, attachment, and so on. For the benefit of myself and others, I must transform my mind into wisdom and compassion. So then you can relax. So I I I’m sorry.
I didn’t you know, we didn’t do a lot of meditating, but the essence is in what we’ve just done. Just spend a few minutes making your mind still and peaceful, focusing on the breath, coming and going. And then, you analyze your you know, what you’re doing in your life, the mistakes you made yesterday or today, how you’ve hurt others through selfishness, ness and generate the thought that, alright, I blew it. Today, I’ll try and do better. And especially those who upset you.
I mean, anger is the most destructive. I think today I must avoid getting angry. The way to avoid getting angry is to not get irritated. Irritation or just unhappiness is where anger comes from. Once anger explodes, it’s like a.
Nuclear explosion. But unhappiness, irritability, that we can work on. Don’t let this gnawing dislike live in your mind. As soon as you spot it, put it out. Change your mind in a positive thought, realizing the danger that your anger has for you and for everybody else.
Now, we’ve been angry and attached since beginning of this time. Don’t be disheartened when you try and try and you keep blowing and blowing. Of course, it’s going to take a long time to transform your mind into wisdom and compassion and patience, but there is nothing else worthwhile. Nothing more better to do with your life. And you take it with you.
No matter how much money you’ve got, beautiful house, beautiful house, beautiful reputation, you leave it behind when you die. But all of your beautiful mental qualities, will take into your next life, and you’ll be one of those cute little babies. You know, some babies aren’t so cute. So you’ll have a good start. Good start for the next life.
You also take all your bad qualities in the next life, so get rid of And you can get rid of them. They can be gone forever. Wisdom, particularly the wisdom of realizing emptiness of self just destroys the very root of the disturbed mind. Again, I have to apologize for just blah blah blah, but I’ve tried to give you an overall picture of the Buddhist view and what to do about it. I hope that, you know, some of you maybe felt some benefit.
Of course, the people at Buddha House, they’ve all felt a lot of benefit. The only reason this place exists is for you, for anybody who’s interested. So they they try it. We have a wonderful Tibetan lama who’s who’s got wisdom and compassion. I just talk about it.
He’s got it. Big difference. And so there’s an opportunity There are plenty of opportunities for you to learn more. All of these weird looking pictures and stuff and the old Don’t worry about that. It’s all method.
It’s purely method to help us train our minds. There’s a lot behind it, a lot of fascinating things behind it, but you can’t learn it all at once. It does have profound meaning. Anyway, good luck. I wish you every happiness.
Thank you very much. Well, in general, the way to grow is through three practices of listening, thinking, and meditating. So listening means reading, study, hearing, hearing people. So you’ve got to get some information. And then thinking about it means really and discussing.
thinking includes discussing with others. It’s great to discuss with others. And meditating, well, that’s when you really get to the profound meaning and also you try to identify yourself. How whether do you have to be back to the retreat? It’s difficult to say.
There are many types of retreat. Do you have a specific one in mind? We would have to put a nine day foundation of meditation and it’s a five day retreat in February. But Well, I I don’t know exactly the schedule, but I I think it sounds pretty good. Right.
Right. I I I recommend it. It’ll be okay for everybody. Yeah. Because we I mean, there’s nothing actually more than what I’ve said today.
It’s all that again and again. Yeah? My retreat? Yeah. This theoretical retreat.
Well, I mean, since I became a monk, one of the Meditation all the teachings lead to meditation because meditation is working on your mind. It’s putting the theory into practice. And it’s part of the Buddhist tradition to get to do long retreats, and three years is actually quite short. So since I became a monk in seventy-five, I’ve had this awareness that I would, at some stage, be doing a three year retreat. Everything I’ve done since then has been preparing for it.
I’ll just try and subdue my mind. Mean, I’ve built a cabin Kangaroo Island and completely cut off from the world, food will be delivered, I won’t see anybody, I won’t communicate with anybody as much as I can. Food will be I’ll cook it. And I have a I have a big job. And I’ve had instruction from my teacher.
You can’t do that without a teacher. So my teacher is Lama Zopa and he says, Just give me instruction. That’s it. Silence. Well, obviously, we won’t be talking to anybody except myself.
Well, it depends. Different types of retreat. This one is really more focused and just trying to get good concentration. Read Certainly read books related to the subject, but nothing distracting. And I won’t be writing because that’s distracting because you’d be meditating and you’d be composing the next chapter.
And and I won’t think of what I’m gonna do after the retreat. I’ll just I don’t even be thinking about what Saint Kilda is doing. I won’t. I won’t be thinking about what’s in films or anything like that, all good leading meditations.
Yeah. Alright. Well, that’s it. Our time is up. Thanks very much for your attention.
See you again. Excuse me. On behalf of everybody here today, yes, I would like to say thank you for coming to teach us today, and we’d like to ask to please Thank you very much. Come teach us again. Oh, thank you.
I’ll try. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Just help yourself through