Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Gyatso offers a foundational 46-minute teaching on karma and dependent arising, introducing Buddhist philosophical categories of existing things and how misunderstanding selflessness creates suffering. He begins by clarifying that karma simply means action performed by conscious beings through mind, speech, and body, with mental intention as the prime mover. He systematically explains Buddhist classifications: physical form, mental consciousness (broken into six primary and fifty-one secondary types), imputed phenomena like birth and personhood, and permanent things like emptiness and space. The talk emphasizes that all conditioned phenomena are impermanent, changing moment by moment. Thubten Gyatso then traces how our fundamental ignorance—seeing ourselves and objects as inherently existing rather than as dependent arisings—drives attachment to pleasure and aversion to pain, creating unhappiness. He illustrates this with concrete examples: how infants grasp at pleasure and reject discomfort, and how adults unconsciously project happiness onto external objects. The teaching culminates in showing that karma and the wheel of life reveal the dependent arising of our existence and how ordinary unskillful actions generate suffering rather than lasting contentment. Suitable for newcomers to Buddhist philosophy.
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File: 01 1986 03 15 Karma.mp3
UUID: 6b528cda-4032-46c6-998c-9a432cca0db4
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Karma and the Wheel of Life (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 1986-03-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.0 minutes
Words: ~4,914
So this weekend that I’m going to discuss with you the the teachings of the Buddha on karma, the law of cause and effect. Also included in that is an explanation of the so called wheel of life, which is a diagrammatic way of presenting things as they are within the whole sphere of of sentient existence within the universe. Right? Sentient really means feeling or thinking. That refers to those beings who who are thinking with minds, minds which are capable of perceiving the environment.
So most people have some sort of previous teaching and and what is it? Do you have any nothing? Nothing. It doesn’t matter because it’ll be I hope I can progressively go stepwise into it. It’ll become probably a little bit mind boggling later on.
But it is logical and it is sort of each point depends upon the previous point. But if you get any sort of point which you can’t understand or you want to explain, then don’t hesitate to ask and I’ll try and clarify. First of all, just the word karma itself is a Sanskrit word. It doesn’t mean anything to us and it sort of has all of these implications of something very mysterious and unknowable. It’s better, I think, to just use the meaning of the word, which is simply action.
Karma means action. It refers to the actions performed by beings with mind, those living things with consciousness as opposed to the living things without consciousness such as plants, trees and so on. karma then is actions of living beings. There are three ways in which we can act. We can act in the beginning from our mind, the mind itself functions and it can act.
Then with our speech we can perform an action. Can influence others and influence our environment by the power of our speech, by actions of speech. Thirdly, we can act and influence others and influence our environment through our body, actions of the body. And clearly at the very beginning, the mind is the prime mover because we know that we don’t make any sort of deliberate actions with our body or with our speech without the first being some mental action. Some mental energy initiates the actions of body and speech.
So the mind is very important in karma. The mind is centrally important in karma. In Buddhism, of course, there’s a lot of stress that’s placed upon karma. Because it says it in one text, karma or action is the cause which gave rise to the whole universe, entire universe, the environment, and all the living beings who are in it, they all arose out of karma. So you might think, if you want to compare it with Christianity, there’s one being, God who has created the universe.
You might compare it in Buddhism, it’s karma that created the universe. Now, there are other interesting parallels that we might draw, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go into that talking about karma and particularly in the role of cause and effect. Understanding, we know that the things which happen to us, good things and bad things, are the result of karma. Then in Christianity, in many other religions, one is rewarded or one is punished by some external being or God or something like that. Again, there are similarities there, but I won’t go into that in too much detail.
karma then is very strongly related to the mind. Now, let’s look at the situation of the mind. Just just what is the mind and and the body. Just all the things that are involved in this world. So in the in the background of all things, of all things that exist, whether the body and mind, then there’s there’s sort of a background reality that they that covers them all.
And this is the the reality of of selflessness. Whatever it is, whether it’s a mental thing or whether it’s a person or whether it’s, you know, a mountain or a tree or a thought, anything that exists is said to be selfless. Now, that means that all things do not have a self which exists from its own side. There is no sort of inherently existing self of of the table or of the person, the sky, birds, flowers, whatever we want to think of. There’s this underlying reality or truth that pervades all things.
We’ll come back to selflessness and we’ll go into that in more detail later on. In Buddhism, there’s a lot of emphasis on classifying. From this background reality of selfless, there are two types of phenomena to talk about. One is those phenomena which exist, which seems a pretty reasonable thing to talk about, things which exist. This is opposed to those things which don’t exist.
As one can make a big list of things which don’t exist as long as we like, the classical things which are talked about in Buddhist philosophy which don’t exist are things like like the horns of a rabbit or the the fur of a turtle, you know, or garment made from the hairs of a turtle. A truly existent self is just a non existent phenomenon. Alright? So, there’s no need to go into those things. These are things which don’t exist.
They also don’t inherently exist because they don’t exist at all. In a lot of the philosophical texts they go into great detail and from my point of view it seems to make things much more confusing by talking about non existence than about existing things. But just for the sake of completeness, I’ll leave it at that. I’ll mention other side that we’re interested in is existent things, things which exist. The classification that’s given, really, it covers everything.
So they slowly build on that. We’re looking then at existing things. Things can be broken up into four main categories, and everything that exists fits into one of these four categories. So, the first category is physical things, forms and material things, All all, like, our bodies and things of the environment, things like light and heat, you know, heat energy, these sort of things. All physical things is one great big category there.
Then, the next big classification is mental things, mental phenomena. And mental phenomena can be mind, as I mentioned, well, most of you weren’t here, but the previous night mind is synonymous synonymous with with consciousness, with knowing, and with awareness. So where there is awareness, there is mind. These are synonyms. Now, awareness or mind can be, again, subdivided and broken down.
And I’ll just very briefly, there are six types of consciousness, consciousness, which are main consciousness, primary consciousness you can call, which are related to the to the five senses. And five of those five senses seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. And the sixth is what is called the mental consciousness which is a direct mental awareness of things which is not directly dependent upon the sense organs, the physical sense organs. So, these are the six primary types of mind and then there are, what we say, mental factors or secondary states of mind which are related to these primary mental consciousnesses. There are fifty one of them, so I won’t go into those.
So that’s mind. That covers the second category. First category is physical things, then there’s mental things. And mental has primary and secondary minds. Alright?
Then the third category is is those things which are neither mind nor form. And this this refers to to things which are sort of imputed upon other things, so such as, for example, the phenomenon of birth. So we’ll talk about birth. We know that birth is a phenomenon that exists. If birth didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t exist.
But if we try and like we can identify a cup very easily, we can point it out. But the phenomenon of birth is really a whole sequence of events, isn’t it? A whole sequence of events leading up to a particular moment in time of one’s life. It’s not physical and it’s not mental. The body is born and the mind is there also, but the body isn’t birth, is it?
It’s just a fetus becoming a baby. Birth is one of these things which is neither form nor mind. Other things are like words and phrases, sentences. Even included There’s a whole bunch of things included in this category. Another one that’s included here is the person.
We’ll talk more about the person later on. Person is sort of something which is imputed upon the body and mind. But, when we look in body and mind, there’s nothing really standing out to be the person. Person can also be included in this category. So, that’s three: form, mind, neither mind nor form.
Those three are things which they have one characteristic which covers them all, and that’s a characteristic of impermanence. All those those things are subject to change, which means moment by moment change. They come into existence in one moment, and then the next moment they go out of existence, followed by something very similar which comes into existence again. Like the cup is impermanent in a subtle way, a very subtle way. We don’t normally think of it as being changing all the time.
We think of it, of course, it’s the same cup that I put here this morning, but it’s still there. But we know scientifically that if we want to look into that cup, we know that the atoms and molecules are completely in a state of constant change. There’s some little electrons jumping off and going back. There’s a continual sort of movement. There’s decay, there’s sort of radioactive decay of any unstable atoms.
In fact, from science we know that all atoms are in fact unstable, but radioactivity we only refer to the heavy metals, which are really unstable, but even simple ones like oxygen and carbon are unstable. What I learned in school anyway was that eventually all atoms are going to break down. Whatever atoms the point I’m making is that the atoms here in the cup are constantly changing each moment. So, the cup is never the same. It’s never exactly the same.
It’s a changing thing each moment. The previous cup gives rise to a very similar cup. Can’t see on a gross level, we can’t see any difference, but it is changing, and that’s important. Of course, there’s gross impermanence as well when we smash the cup and then it no longer exists at all. So it’s subjected to subtle and and to gross impermanence.
The mind also is impermanent. Consciousness, in the same way, changes moment by moment. Each moment in time that we have our awareness is changing, which is a reason why if we’re watching a film or something, you know, there’s constant action. And if we’re talking to people and then there’s constant interaction and there’s our awareness, our consciousness of what’s happening. It’s really changing, changing.
So mind, from that point of view, it is is impermanent. Also, the mind is very subtle, not like, say, when we’re sleeping. And dreaming, sure, is continual sequence of events. But even when not dreaming, the mind is very dark and very subtle. There’s this sort of it’s like flowing.
It’s like a flowing stream. It’s not it doesn’t sort of arrest itself at any one point and unchangeably hold that point. It’s changing moment by moment. So, all forms are impermanent. Mind is impermanent, changes moment by moment.
And the other group of of imputations upon things are impermanent from their side as well. Now, the fourth category is things which don’t change moment by moment. They’re said to be permanent things. And that includes phenomena such as as empty space. Empty space really is this sort of all pervasive characteristic of non obstruction.
Space is said to be the absence of obstruction, so, you know, the space which allows the movement of things. If there were no space, there’d be no absence of obstruction, and movement would be impossible. Now, this characteristic of non obstructiveness is a permanent phenomenon. It doesn’t change moment by moment. Even if there is obstruction, like my hand can’t go through the cup, that’s not due to any change in the space.
It’s due to the presence of an obstructive object, the cup. The very fact that the cup can move from here to here shows that there is space there. Space doesn’t change well. It’s permanent. There are other types of permanent things such as when one practices the path, the spiritual path, then one reaches a point where the confusion that’s present in our mind is abandoned.
Confusions such as longing desire and anger and aversion, ignorance, many different subtle types of mental confusion. These come to an end, a cessation, by following the path. And, this is the whole aim of following the spiritual path, to is to abandon confusion and attain a very blissful, a very peaceful, very happy state of mind. So, when we can reach that point of cessation of confusion and it doesn’t all happen at once, it happens progressively. Then the cessation is permanent, which means that the confusion that has been abandoned can never There isn’t any moment by moment change of the cessation.
It’s an unchanging phenomenon. Also, the phenomenon of emptiness itself is permanent. Emptiness, which is this, you know, this reality, this pervading reality that covers all things, that things do not exist from their own side, do not inherently exist, therefore they are empty, then this is permanent. This doesn’t change, this fact of emptiness. Like the cup is empty of inherently existence.
There is no cup that exists from its own side. Now, as long as the physical cup is there, it remains empty of inherent existence, even though the cup itself is changing moment by moment, its emptiness remains unchanged. It is continually empty. Plus, there will be a point if we smash the cup when its particular emptiness stops because the cup no longer exists. But that doesn’t the main point about being permanent is not changing moment by moment.
So, in Buddhism they say The emptiness of the cup is temporarily permanent. Because while the cup’s in existence, it doesn’t change. The emptiness of that cup doesn’t change moment by moment. Of course, the emptiness, but it will stop when the cup is smashed because the cup no longer exists. Doesn’t have any more emptiness.
There’s fragments that it breaks into, of course, to my garden. Those then are the four categories of things, of existing things. There’s form, mind, and things which are neither form nor mind, and permanent things. Now, what we’re interested in, then, is ourselves. What are we composed of?
Well, we have a body and mind, don’t we? That’s very In the most simple way, there’s our body and there is our mind. Before we go into the body and mind, a very important way of describing these four types of existing things is to call them they are all arising in dependence upon something else. They all arise in reliance upon something or in dependence upon something else, or from causes and conditions which give rise to these things. Therefore, because they all arise in dependence upon other things, they’re called in general, you can call any of these four things, these four groups and the things which belong to them dependent arisings.
It’s like a name that is sort of a generality, also it relates to each specific member of those four groups, dependent arisings. The Dalai Lama once said Buddhism like most sort of political systems seem to have slogans. They develop their slogan of whatever it is, whatever particular cause that they’re they’re fighting for. To make it as concise as possible, then they develop a slogan. And that becomes the center of their activity.
Dalai Lama said, If Buddhism had a slogan, if Buddha wanted a slogan, then it would be dependent arising. That these four groups of things are all dependent arising, that they arise dependent upon their parts or upon causes and conditions. Why is it so important? Why should people go around shouting dependent arising? Well, it’s because all unhappiness, all suffering, misery and confusion in the world are brought about by not recognizing that we are all dependent arising, by not understanding that the external world and ourselves, the people who we relate to, are all dependent our arisings.
We do not recognize this. We’re ignorant of this reality, that things are all dependent upon their parts, including ourselves. And instead, we have a very fixed, concrete, very strong conception in our minds that we that we truly exist. We exist from our own side, and that our friends exist from their own side. And the things in the environment all exist from their own side.
That they’re not dependent arisings, but they are there, standing there in their own reality sort of thing. So we have a very concrete, fixed relationship, very tight idea of ourselves and our world. This makes us act in very strange ways, very unskillful ways. Because we tightly cling to this me, to this self existent me, and it’s very strongly there, even from birth, it’s really in our minds. There’s this powerful, overpowering feeling of me.
And then anything which is pleasurable, anything that the senses make which is pleasurable, then there is sort of a feeling of grasping at that pleasure for me. And we project upon the pleasing thing as sort of strongly existing from its own side. Like once we experience a pleasure, then I’ve got to have it again. It’s, you know, it sort of becomes very concrete. We have this sort of craving to experience this pleasure again.
We strongly identify pleasurable feeling, say it’s a type of food, with the particular fruit or whatever it was that gave us that taste. We’re unhappy. We’re really we become happy when we’re eating it. We’re We’re immediately unhappy when we’re finished it because we want more. If we can’t get it, if we’re babies, then we start screaming at our mother or whoever’s around provide us more of that happiness, whatever it was, that happy sensation.
In the same way, if there’s anything sort of unpleasurable that we experience, any painful experience or hunger or thirst or anything which is uncomfortable, then there’s still this strong grasping of me and there’s this sort of incredible feeling of indignation, like, How dare this painful thing happen to me? And as babies, we get very angry and we scream and we cry until the painful thing is removed. We strongly sort of identify that painful object or that unpleasant object, it might be our brother or sister, anything that’s interfering in our own pleasure as being sort of an enemy. We reject and we have you know, we have aggression towards that thing. With babies it’s very gross, this sort of grasping aggression.
They’re very honest about what they want and what they don’t want. Completely honest, don’t cover it up and they let everybody know what want and what they don’t want. They’re strongly because they’re strongly identifying with me and this and that as being really existing from their own side, not changing. But the pleasurable thing is always pleasurable, and it’s incredibly desirable, and the displeasurable thing or person is always bad and always unpleasant. It’s a very strong mental conception like that.
That’s all a mistake. That’s completely wrong. But we don’t know it’s wrong. We don’t can’t see it, but definitely as babies, you know, we don’t have the ability to to look at the reality of the self. It’s just being a dependent arising.
Something which changes moment by moment and which arises in dependence upon its parts, causes and conditions. There’s nothing more to the self than that. This sort of a temporary phenomenon dependent upon causes and conditions. And the same with all the pleasurable things and the unpleasurable things we discriminate. There’s nothing more to their existence than being dependent arising.
As we grow up, we’ve started off with this gross discrimination and this gross attachment and aversion as babies, then our behavior becomes more refined because it’s socially unacceptable to act like a baby. As we go up, we soon get beaten, and, you know, our behavior becomes modified according to the dictates of our parents and our teachers and society. But the original mistake is carried through. It’s still there. Even though as adults we’re much more subdued in grasping at our desires and avoiding our enemies, We still have this original mistake of seeing ourselves and the things around us as existing from their own side.
We still mistakenly project or classify pleasurable things into completely desirable. They’re inherently in these foods or sounds, smells, physical sensations, all of these things that we’re conscious of, which are pleasurable. We see that the pleasure pleasure is somehow existing inherently within the object, and so even as adults we still really upset ourselves inside. Had a lot of confusion, a lot of unhappiness in feeling I’m not happy, I can’t be happy because I don’t have that which happiness comes from outside, from this external thing. This is the embodiment of happiness, this food or this person which I need to have in my life, this house, this clothes.
We see it as inherently existing from its own side, not as a dependent arising. We see the happiness that we want in our mind as being completely connected with that. There’s a very tight view. And with it, you know, enemies, people, politicians of the other party, or, the neighbor, somebody who’s competing with us for a job, at work, or for our mate. We strongly project enemy sort of inherently existing negative qualities upon upon those sort of things.
And our mind is really confused in a state of aversion, not wanting to have any connection with those things and not being able to prevent a connection with those things. So, that leads us to the state of everybody’s mind in society. We all have this tremendous confusion because of this tight grasping of ourselves as inherently existing and other things around us as inherently existing. We can’t see them as dependent arising. We don’t know, really, the real causes for happiness and the real causes for suffering.
We don’t know that happiness is a dependent arising. We think that our happiness is really dependent upon this object. But our unhappiness results from thinking that we can only be happy by having that. By seeing happiness as externally existing in the object, then if we really feel that we’re unhappy. We’re unhappy.
We’re unhappy. As long as we don’t have the object we want or the situation in life that we want. We’ll always be unhappy because we really feel that happiness is sort of completely dependent upon that. It exists in that situation. So, happiness is something to be discovered outside the mind because we think, wrongly, that it exists in the objects that give us happiness.
But that’s the mistake. Happiness is inside. It’s a state of mind. Peace and contentment. Yep.
You’re states of mind. So so that’s our our situation. Now, the teaching on karma and and the wheel of life then is a teaching which will show the the dependent arising of ourselves, of our body, of human existence. And it shows just how how we act. And again, remember action is karma.
karma is action. How we act in our ordinary everyday life in skillful ways and generally in unskillful ways. Normally our actions are very unskillful and we create the sort of actions or karma that bring unhappiness. And, we’re not normally aware and we don’t bother to cultivate the karma or the actions which bring happiness, bring inner happiness, and lasting happiness. Okay.
So that’s dependent arising. And now, if I guess I’ll try not to be too involved in classifications and things. I know it’s hard to hold it all, but a little bit more about the mind. Remember there the four groups of things, physical, mental, neither physical nor mental, and permanent things. Then, for us, we have body and we have mind.
And the body is fairly clear. It’s all the physical aspects of our of our organism, the internal organs and the outside skin and muscles and bones, you know, there’s body. The most important thing about our body is the sense organs themselves: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and the touch, touch senses all over. These five senses are the means by which we communicate with our environment. And these are the doors, you might say, the doors to consciousness, to the sense consciousness.
The eyes are the doors to eye consciousness, which is one title. There are six primary types of mind and fifty one secondary types of mind. So, the sense organs, the five sense organs are five doors to five of the six primary minds, primary types of consciousness. And the mental consciousness itself depends upon the nervous system, the central nervous system, the thinking, conceptualizing mind. So, the mind is very dependent upon the body.
They have a dependent interdependent relationship. Now, with each type of consciousness that we have, there are five very important of these fifty one mental factors, the first five are very important. And we can think about those. So the first one is the mental factor of intention. So that these are just five.
And these are present and they occur with every state of mind, every state of consciousness. There are these five qualities. Fact, it’s good to call them qualities of that consciousness. They occur at the same time. So the first one is is intention.
Right? And intention is this mental quality which connects us with with with connects the consciousness with an object. It sort of moves the consciousness towards an object, the object of that consciousness. Then there is let’s say we have a feeling, we have an idea which arises in our mind to go to a garden. It would be nice to to visit a garden.
It’s like an impulse, this mental impulse arises to go and visit a garden. Okay? So, this impulse then is this mental factor of intention. It arises and we’re going to go to a garden. Then, the second one is engagement.
And this is a mental factor which is a little bit more it’s very similar to the impulse to go to a garden, but it’s more precise. It is to go to a particular garden. So, you engage, so yes, it’s nice to go to a garden, I’m going go to the one down the road. So, this engagement is more precise. It takes us the mind or we go to a particular place.
And this connects the mind with a particular object. Then, the next one of these five is called contact. This is contact really is the contact with object that the mind has been led to. There is a meeting of the consciousness itself and the sense organ, if it’s eyes, if it’s something we’re going to look at, and the object itself, so the object which the eyes look at. So this contact.
And then, you know, object say if it’s an object of the eye, then the object can be a pleasant object or it can be an unpleasant object or it can be indifferent. So, contact sort of brings us into one of these three. Pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent. And, because of this contact of the consciousness with its object, there’s a feeling. There’s a feeling of pleasure if it’s a pleasant object, or a feeling of displeasure if it’s an unpleasant object, or a feeling of indifference if the object is indifference.
Is the next of these five. So, to go through it again, first of all, there’s intention, which is like an impulse to do something. And then there’s engagement, which is sort of engaging in a specific object arising from the impulse. And there’s contact with the object itself, and there’s that feeling arising from that contact. Then finally, there’s the mental energy of discrimination.
And, with discrimination, we sort of discriminate the actual thing. We think about its qualities and we name it and we do all sorts of things. So, with the analogy of going to a garden, the intention is the idea to go to a garden, and engagement is choosing a particular garden. Contact is arriving at the garden. Feeling is the feeling that you get from looking at the flowers and the trees, using a pleasant feeling.
Discrimination is sort of like naming the different types of flowers, seeing their different characteristics and their different shades and colors, so on and know, discriminating between them. The species of flowers and trees that are all growing. So these five activities or five mental qualities are very important. And they come along with every state of mind. Now the first one, intention, there is impulse to do something.
This