Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Thubten Gyatso draws on his background as a psychiatrist to make the Wheel of Life teachings vividly relevant to contemporary experience. He walks through all six realms of rebirth—hell, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demigods, and gods across three domains—showing how each maps onto specific psychological states: the psychosis of hell realms mirrors schizophrenia and hallucination; the compulsive longing of hungry ghosts parallels obsessive hoarding and addiction; the jealous militarism of the demigods reflects Asura mentality in human society. He explains the three poisons—ignorance, anger, and greed—that power the wheel, then begins unpacking the twelve links of dependent origination, focusing on ignorance as fundamental blindness to the true nature of self and karma. Rather than treating rebirth as literal metaphysics, Gyatso shows how these teachings describe both literal future rebirths and present psychological patterns, anchoring the dharma in observable human suffering and the mechanics of karmic cause and effect. He stresses that understanding this framework is not academic but liberating: knowledge of karma gives practitioners real power to purify negative impressions and cultivate positive ones. Suited to those new to Buddhism and practitioners seeking psychological depth in traditional doctrine.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 1986 03 15 Karma.mp3
UUID: 14c8f8a1-4d28-4d2b-8332-949021b7ee0f
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: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~4,897
Anyway, so these hungry ghosts share our environment and they live lives of great suffering and unhappiness, incredible misery, being unable to find food and water, shelter and wandering here and there. Even if they do find food, they hallucinate demons. Like you can see, there’s this sort of weird looking demon with a sword in his hand and an animal head. And he’s pulling one by the hair and chasing somebody away from who’s found some food or something. Well, that’s like a hallucination.
So, it’s sort of insanity. This really is a realm of approaching insanity where one is terrified by one’s own hallucinations. Then, at the very bottom is what is called the Naraka realm in Sanskrit. We would call it the hell realms. Here it’s the lowest of the three lower realms and intense suffering where one is reborn in an environment of flames or freezing ice and snow and subjected to the most horrific sufferings.
Very much like a nightmare, very much like a person whose mind is totally psychotic and just intense misery. The depiction here is like you can see the beings are reborn sort of in human aspect. I don’t think one need necessarily say that, you know, it is exactly as shown that there are these like humanoid beings. It’s just easy for us to understand because we’re humans. And the sufferings are described from the point of view as if it were happening to a human.
And the purpose is because it’s for us to understand what this misery must be like. We can relate to physical torture, physical suffering, And if we can imagine the mental experience that those beings are suffering, then we can get closer to the reality of those realms. We haven’t finished yet. But this is reality. I mean, this it’s Yeah.
I’m just thinking it’s that big circle of this kind of Yeah. He’s sort of, what we say, the lower realms of suffering realm. According to Buddhism, even our happiness is a form of suffering. Well, you see there’s somebody outside the circle up here. That’s the point, is that we’ll anyway, we’ll come to it.
Okay, alright, so let’s move up a bit. Then up on the left between ten and twelve these are the God Realms. Here there’s a whole there are many strata, many levels within these god realms. They are realms of great happiness. At the very highest the happiness is continual, complete bliss and for an incredibly long period of time until eventually the karma runs out.
The very high ones who live in long happiness are called the asuras, gods. Sort of the sura realm is gods with really long lives, long happy lives in the upper part of that segment. Then in the lower part there’s all this sort of fighting going on. You see there’s people with weapons and spears and arrows. Now the lowest ones are called the demigods or the Asuras and that’s another realm, that’s the sixth realms.
So there are two god realms, two broadly grouped god realms are shown there. And they can relate to each other. The Asuras can see the the pleasures of the lower gods in the Sura realm, in the lower levels of the Sura realm. They’re very jealous. They get incredibly jealous and they’re really martial and warlike.
A lot of their joy is in fighting. They’re very proud. There’s a continual battle going on between the gods and the demigods. Sometimes the demigods can win the battle and gain some of the pleasurable things of the god realm. Other times the upper gods can squash the lower gods.
There’s this continual battle going on. Right. But not all of the purists, not all of the long lived gods, only those who are karmically closer to the Asuras. Is this where the Indra, Brahma, and Shiva, the Lord? Well, they are in the God realms, but within these six there are three general realms of existence.
They’re called the desire realm, the form realm and the formless realm. Now, the humans, the animals, the hungry ghosts and the hells and the asuras are all in the desire realm. Within the Suras there are six levels of God who are in the desire realm. It’s called desire because it’s a realm dominated by attachment to sense pleasures. Now, so that’s one realm.
The form realm is a God realm so one would include it amongst the Suras, but it’s a it’s a realm of rebirth of incredibly positive karma and karma created control of one’s mind through mental quiescence, mental concentration. And there are seventeen levels of rebirth within the form realm. And Brahma and Vishnu and Īśvara, they’re all in this realm. But they’re still contained within the yeah, they’re still within the wheel of life. Yeah.
Yeah. And, the formless realm, it’s called form realm because it’s sort of pure form. The form is really subtle and there’s no suffering whatsoever like of a gross aspect within those realms. It’s very completely peaceful. Then above that, the third is the formless realm, which again is a type of Sura.
And that there’s just no body at all, just consciousness. There are four levels of that, but they’re right out of it. They’re completely spaced out. They’re still within the wheel of life. We’ve been there for eons.
We’ve just lived in this mental peace and concentration upon limitless space. Well, maybe. I think it’s sure. I think it’s possible that in certain experiences we can get a sort of quick flash which is a memory of previous existences. Oh, yeah.
Mean, the memory is there. If we train our minds, we can remember all of our previous lives. So it is there somewhere. So, yeah, think it’s possible that we can Exactly. Yeah.
I think exactly. Yeah. That’s right. What’s the point of anything good on earth? The point is that although we have always been caught up in this, remember at the beginning I said the pig and the rooster and the snake are the driving force of the wheel of life.
That’s ignorance, greed, and anger. If we can remove ignorance, greed and anger from our minds, we stop the energy of the Wheel of Life. And that’s what Buddha did. He removed these these three and he escaped from the Wheel of Life and attained this mental state of nirvana. Right, so he’s not reborn.
He’s not reborn. Those who become enlightened, who follow the path to liberation escape the Wheel of yeah. Well that’s the whole point. This is the whole point of teaching the Wheel of Life. It’s to show the reality of existence and then to show why it happens and because it has a cause, it’s a dependent arising.
This cause is mental. It’s not external. It’s within our own mind. We, individuals, can we can remove ignorance. We can develop wisdom.
And we can instead of having anger, we can develop loving kindness and altruism and compassion. And instead of greed, we can develop generosity and complete non grasping. And then we can escape. So it’s it’s important to know about these other realms, or we mightn’t have much inclination to to work on our minds to escape. Particularly, like the gods.
You you can tell the gods all you like about the Wheel of Life, but they just don’t believe you. They don’t believe that there’s suffering, not even suffering on a human level because they don’t experience it. So they have no inclination to practice. But as humans, it’s really a unique opportunity because we’re in the middle and we can experience incredible heights of bliss and happiness. And we can also experience incredible troughs and suffering and misery.
Like psychosis is really hell. It’s a hell of disease. From when I first heard this, like I couldn’t really didn’t believe in reincarnation. So, compared these realms to levels of human experience. It really fitted in.
I think it was so clear. Because I’d worked as a psychiatrist in a psychiatric hospital in Melbourne and I’d been very interested in following it up. But I felt that I didn’t know anything about the mind and I didn’t think the psychiatrist knew much about the mind. It was after that that I got into Buddhism. And so, I was really attracted because I could see that, like in this hell realm, where one has hallucinations of great demons who are chasing you and attacking you, that’s exactly what psychotic people experience.
Not only that, some of the visions which my patients told me that they were having were identical to what were explained here. Like, I had one patient who he was eighteen yeah, he was about eighteen. Schizophrenic, really. Incredibly miserable. His big problem was that he could see these giant birds chasing him wherever he went, like they were talking about threatening him.
He was telling me this, actually, once. I remember I was sitting at a desk and he was telling me there was a window behind me. He was telling me about these giant birds with huge beaks. He said the beaks were made of iron and they were joined with iron bolts and things. As he was telling me about these horrific things, he sort of looked past my shoulder out the window and I was looking in his eyes and I just saw this horror appear on his face and he said, There’s one of them now.
Looked around, was a bit scared to look around. Like I said, there’s a horror in his face. Now, I mean, it’s sad that he committed suicide very shortly after that interview. My fault. But, when I heard the lamas talking about this, said, Oh yeah.
They’re now talking about one of the hell realms where there are these giant birds with iron beaks who chase you, who are hallucinations. In Buddhism, says they are your own karmic projection. They’re hallucinations of your own mind. Just as, know, western psychiatrists say it’s hallucination. The beings don’t exist in their from their own side.
So I thought, oh, wow. This is incredible. Know? So the whole realms are like human human psychosis. And then the hungry ghost realms are realms dominated by longing desire, like these beings always just desperately driven out of this sort of need for physical comfort and food and miserliness is the cause for such an existence.
And and within humans, can see a lot of humans. Their their life is totally miserable because of this longing desire for different things which just dominates their existence. And they’re really unhappy. Even if they get something, they can’t use it. Like, the the classical example is Howard Hughes, you know, who was the richest man in the world.
And and he was like an Uncle Scrooge, you know, Donald Duck Uncle Scrooge. He was he just lived in poverty and in terror of infection. He had this total mental obsession about disease, about dying, cancer. He was the richest man in the world and he was the most miserable man. He really was.
And this isn’t just He invested in armaments. I think armaments in America are a big thing. Think he had all sorts of companies. Of things. Aircraft.
He had huge aircraft. Yeah. Anyway, I’m sure there’s lots of examples but these hungry ghosts do that. They find food so wisely that they hoard it. They can’t even eat it.
It’s dying of starvation. If they won’t eat this food they hang on to it. There’s human parallels, aren’t they? Oh, there’s all different things. There’s all different things.
If they do eat it, it turns into fire, but I can’t swallow it. There’s incredible obscurations they have. Yeah. In. So, yeah, I mean, that’s true.
I was gonna come around that some of the experiences of ecstasy people do have with drugs and hallucinogenic drugs and just in orgasm and in different blissful experiences of life, sort of which come as a flash and they’re very intangible and and sort of they’re gone very quickly. And, I mean, this sort of gives us some insight into the potential potential bliss that the mind can experience. And it’s described, you know, that these gods experience it not as births and not in an uncontrolled way but their whole existence is life. The body, the mind is continually blissful and karmas are in at that level. And then there’s those asuras who are incredibly proud and jealous of others and continually warring.
We do have within society the right wing element, we might say. It’s even on the extreme left of politics. There’s this militarism and the the lust for war and enjoyment of for war itself, for battle, for competition. And so there’s We have this Asura mentality. Also, I’m not saying it only exists in certain aspects of society, but each individual has the potential for the whole spectrum, each one of us.
Exactly, that’s the point I was getting across. This is how I first accepted it I thought, Wow, what an incredible way to describe psychology. And it does, it covers the whole spectrum of psychological experience. That was how I was able to accept it in the beginning. Then, as I became to understand more, I realized that it is valid from the point of human psychology point of view of human psychology, but it’s also valid from the point of view of the next life.
That there are whole rebirth states where you can be reborn in these different situations. So, it’s really interesting. In the text there’s quite detailed explanations of life in each of these realms. The more you study it superficially there’s the interesting thing if it’s a rebirth state, and profoundly it’s talking about psychology. I really find it very helpful and fascinating.
I won’t start the twelve links now because we need a bit of a break, I think. I think it’s good if we have a rest for five or ten minutes, stretch our legs, and then we’ll do a little ten minute meditation after that. And most of you could have one of these prints. So very briefly to go over the points that I mentioned yesterday, this sort of diagrammatic representation of the realms of existence shows in the very center three animals. There’s a pig and a snake and a rooster.
And these animals symbolize the the very energy which is the cause of rebirth and death within the Wheel of Life. And that’s ignorance, which is the pig hatred, or anger, is the snake and greed and attachment is the rooster thing. So with those three states of mind, we create the actions or the karma which causes rebirth within the sixth realm. The next ring outside shows something some things are being naked and they’re being dragged down into the three lower realms. So that those who have created non virtuous or negative karma, they’re in the intermediate state between death and rebirth.
And because of their negative karma, they’re being dragged down to a rebirth within one of the three lower realms of of much suffering, which is animal realm on the left, hungry ghost on the right, and the hell realm down below. Then to our left of this ring, this sort of second ring, shows beings going upwards. Those are beings that created positive karma or virtuous karma. And they’re going towards a rebirth within one of the three happy realms, the human realm or one of the two god realms. So that’s what that next ring is.
Then the third ring, which is all these segments, shows the six possible realms of rebirth within the wheel of life. And we’ve been taking rebirth in those six since beginning this time. Going up to the happy ones and down to the unhappy ones. Cycling again and again. And we as far back as we go, we can never find a beginning point to when we started wandering through the realms of existence.
Now this morning, we’re going to discuss the outer circle around the rim of the wheel of life. And in this rim of the wheel of life, you can see there are twelve small diagrams or pictures. So this is called the twelve links of dependent origination, and they’re a very skillful way of explaining karma, just how karma works. And We always talk about karma, but we don’t really have much idea of what it means. If we can understand these, it can give us a good idea of the mechanism of taking these rebirths and how it works.
Hope I can condense the information in a clear enough way for you to follow it. And if there’s any questions you have during the talk, then please don’t hesitate to interrupt and make it clear to your mind. Don’t don’t feel embarrassed. You might appear dumb or something. It’s not that easy to comprehend for anyone.
And if it’s a little bit unclear in the beginning, then it will be unclear all through. So try to follow explanation. So you can see on the blackboard, I’ve just written the the names of each of these twelve links. And at the top, I’ve written ignorance. And ignorance is refers to a state state of mind.
It’s a state of mind which we all possess. Of course, a lot of us have a lot of knowledge and we’ve got a lot of degrees from universities and things to prove that we’re not completely ignorant. Actually, some people, like my father, have been very sort of when first hearing the Buddha’s teaching, I sort of get upset and say, he says I’m I’ve got all of these degrees to prove I’m not ignorant. Ignorance really isn’t referring to knowledge of, you know, like, how things work, scientific knowledge, knowledge of history, knowledge of politics, and what’s happening in the world today. That’s not exactly what this ignorance is referring to.
Basically, it’s referring to the a sort of a darkness which pervades our consciousness, which is not knowing the reality of ourselves, not knowing the reality of of phenomena, the way phenomena really exist. And in a very well, we can come back to the way phenomena really exist, but by not understanding sort of the nature of the self, we have a conception of the way the self exists. We we often think of me and we we begin to develop a self image. Now, the self image that we all carry with us is mistaken from the beginning to have a a wrong conception of our self. And we grasp at our wrong conception of ourself, which is a a conception that that we exist from our own side.
That we exist that there is a person existing in his his or her own right, a focus of of all the events that happened during life. But this is called the wrong conception of self existence. And with this image of of a state of mind which cherishes the self. That’s called a self-cherishing conception. And this is a type of ignorance.
We also we’re ignorant of the the law of cause and effect. We’re ignorant of karma. Now karma is not like it’s not a theory or sort of a rule invented by Buddha or by any being in enlightenment. karma is an explanation of cause and effect, of what brings about existence. It is a reality that lies behind us.
And by not knowing the the real causes of happiness and the real causes of unhappiness, we unskillfully act, and usually because of ignorance. We think we’re creating a cause for happiness, but we create a cause for unhappy. For example, we think that happiness is, some people think that happiness is eating a wild duck. So they go out hunting and they shoot a wild duck. And they experience sort of a transitory pleasure.
Some have pleasure just in killing. They’re killing itself. And some have pleasure in the taste of them eating a wild duck. It is a very transitory pleasure. Every hunting season there’s always one or two hunters that kill each other and a huge amount of unhappiness.
But that’s just one unskillful thing. But the ignorance of cause and effect in this action is that we don’t know to kill another being that causes great suffering and pain for another being. The action creates an impression upon our mind, and this impression stays with our mind, and it can ripen in a future time, in this life or in the next life. And it will ripen in the form of unhappiness, really suffering experience. So we’re ignorant of that.
We don’t know. We don’t know that all of the unhappy and painful experiences we have in this life are the ripened results of karmic actions we’ve created in previous lives. We’re unaware. We think that it comes by chance. We’re a car accident and destroy our beautiful new car purely, you know, either by chance or by the bad driving of somebody else.
But we don’t realize that although there are causes, superficial causes in this life, which bring about unhappiness, there’s an underlying underlying cause coming from previous life, which without that underlying karmic cause, if that wasn’t there, there would be no way that we could experience such an unhappy event in this life. If there isn’t a karmic cause to, you know, have a car accident, then it’s impossible, completely impossible for us to experience a car accident. You don’t the the energy is not So these twelve links then are a very clear way of explaining the how this works. This under underlying energy which brings about both our unhappy and our happy experience is awesome. Every every experience of happiness that we have in this life has superficial causes and has this underlying coming coming from previous life.
And we’ll most of our life is spent in manipulating the superficial cause of the pain, accumulating wealth, material possessions, friends, family, like, there is a superficial cause of happiness. And we do as much as we can to gather what we can. And but we don’t know that underlying it all, there’s a lot of chance, a lot of not not chance, but there’s a lot of unknown energies working, current energies. So we have to learn about that and by understanding the nature of karmic energies. This like, understanding is knowledge, isn’t it?
And that’s not ignorance. That’s the opposite to ignorance. And with understanding, we have power. We have the ability to control our karma. We have the ability to manipulate the karmic energies, to purify any negative ones which may have been accumulated, and to stop unskillfully creating more negative ones, and to begin to cultivate positive karma.
And this comes through the knowledge understanding karma. So that’s why it’s important for us to really understand these twelve things. To remove the ignorance, which is sort of at the beginning, and replace it with knowledge and wisdom. And so gain control, progressively gain control. In the beginning, a little bit control because our minds are heavily dominated by ignorance and the effect of it really very strongly.
It’s not easy to to break up of the the bondage of karma and ignorance. And this it’s very difficult, and this is demonstrated by this demon, this sort of demonic looking person who’s holding the wheel of life in his teeth and by his hands and feet. You see this this very horrifying looking character. Now, it’s all symbolic, and this demonic frightening character symbolizes death. And the very frightening aspect shows that wherever we’re reborn within the wheel of life, within these six realms, there is always death.
We’re always subject to death. None of these lives goes on forever. Death coming to bring any of those rebirths to an end. And this demon holding the wheel of life by his hands and by his feet strongly shows that beings are kept within the wheel of life by karma and by delusion. Delusion is that confused state of mind brought about by ignorance.
So we’re tightly held by the Lord of Death within the Wheel of Life. Now outside, up on the top right, on your right side right hand corner is the Buddha. And the Buddha, as you can see, is outside of the wheel of life. And he’s pointing to the other side of the page where there’s a full moon. And the full moon symbolizes the mind of the liberated mind, the mind experiencing dharma, complete cessation of suffering, a mind which is a state out of the call of time.
There is no darkness in the full moon. No darkness of ignorance. And he’s saying, this is to be attained. Abandoned attachment to the temporal happiness of worldly existence and set your sight, your energy upon liberation. Okay.
So ignorance then is the first thing. And that’s symbolized by the just a little bit to to the right at the top is blind person walking with a stick. Right? That you know, it’s the white stick that blind people. This symbolizes ignorance.
Ignorance is a blindness that we have to reality. Then the next link is called the link of karmic formation. Now karmic formation is is really very important. And this what is karmic formation? Well, it’s the intention that we have in our minds when we perform any action.
Yesterday, for those of you who were here yesterday, we talked about five factors of mind which always come with every consciousness. And one of those was this impulse, a mental impulse, which is in the mind when we perform an action. Our actions can be varied and that’s shown by the diagram on a wheel, different shapes of clay pots. All the pots that he’s making are different shapes. And that shows that with intention we can make different types of actions.
Some can be virtuous positive actions, some can be non virtuous or harmful actions towards others. So, there can be three types of intention or karmic formation: that which is meritorious, positive side that which is non meritorious or negative and leading to a suffering result And that which is the third type is called the karmic formation which is unwavering. And that is the impulse which is in a mind, which is attained complete clearness, complete tranquility and concentration without it is what a yogi meditates. A yogi can meditate until his mind is completely peaceful and tranquil and quiet. And when we when a yogi attains that, it becomes he likes me.
It’s an enjoyable state. So he he creates what is called an unwavering karma. And it means that the karma created by this sort of attachment to this tranquil state of concentration leads to rebirth in the two highest God realms, which are called the form realm and the formless realm. And when he dies, this karma will lead to rebirth either in one of the levels of the form realm or the formless realm. or the formless realm.
And it’s unwavering in as much as it won’t change from that result. So by saying that that’s unwavering then we are implying that the other two types of karmic formation, virtuous and non virtuous, are wavering, wavering or fluctuating, or they can alter. Okay? So that means that it’s possible for a virtuous or non virtuous karma to give a different result according to changing circumstances. One example that that I can give is that we may create a karmic action by, say, we do an act of generosity, we give charity to somebody who’s in need, that creates a virtuous action of generosity and the result would normally be to when we’re reborn as a human, it will be to have a lot of wealth, to to be wealthy.
Is the normal result of such an action, you know, as we know. Now, it might so happen that we create a non virtuous karma which will lead us to be reborn as an an animal. And in particular, are certain types of animals called nagas. We’re not normally aware of these nagas, they’re said to live within lakes and oceans. And some of them can accumulate a lot of wealth in the form of jewel.
So this karma, which was going to ripen by being wealthy in the human realm, can now, in the human realm, can change the sort of realm of ripening, and it can ripen in the animal realm as the wealth of of, like, a naga. Or if we don’t want the naga that stretches your mind too much, there you know, there are many examples of an old lady who died, and they’re very attached to their dog. And it happened in England. There’s a dog which is one of the richest people in London. He’s got millions bequeathed and was living in luxury.
So that dog created a very good karma in previous human life to receive such well. Yeah. Yeah.