Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Thubten Gyatso unpacks the twelve links of dependent origination, tracing a single act of charity across three lifetimes to show how karma determines rebirth and experience. Beginning with ignorance and karmic formation in a past life, he explains how a virtuous intention plants a seed in consciousness that ripens at the moment of death, determining which rebirth realm we enter. The talk follows the consciousness through the bardo intermediate state, then into the present life as name and form develop into the six sense sources—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mental consciousness. As contact with sense objects produces feeling, craving and grasping naturally arise from ignorance, spiralling into existence and eventually death and rebirth. Gyatso uses the Wheel of Life diagram symbols—a monkey in a house, a pregnant woman, a man drinking wine, an arrow through the eye—to make each link concrete and memorable. The teaching assumes some familiarity with Buddhist cosmology but is accessible to those new to the doctrine of karma.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 1986 03 15 Karma.mp3
UUID: 2da3a76e-0149-4877-9195-5ba79c166254
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: 27.9 minutes
Words: ~3,143
Experience is the continual ripening of other karmas, which are called completing karmas. The karma which puts us into a rebirth state is called throwing karma. And the other karmas, bring about the continual day to day experience of that life, are called completing karma. They can be different. Some can be virtuous, some can be non virtuous.
So unhappy experiences are usually non virtuous, completing karmas. It’s not only karma that we inherit from our previous life. We inherit ignorance, we inherit confusion. And we inherit greed and attachment and pride and hatred and aversion. And we can even inherit knowledge and wisdom.
Wisdom. So there’s a whole lot of mental qualities that we inherit from our previous life. If there’s a lot of confusion in our proceeding life and we sort of don’t do anything about it, then this confusion is going to be a dominating factor in the next life as well. And there’s a lot of clarity and peace and love in our previous life. Then we’re gonna be reborn, you know, like the baby.
We’ll be a loving, peaceful baby. We know how how babies differ so much from their personality. Really very young. They have tremendous variation in the personality of the baby. Now this is because they inherit mental characteristics from their previous life.
It’s not just their environment. Of course, environment is important. I don’t, you know, deny the parental influence and social things are important. There are other things as well. Okay.
So more about that later. So ignorance and then karmic formation, which refers to the intention in the minds in our mind when we create certain actions. The third link is called the link of consciousness, and that’s illustrated in in this diagram by a monkey sitting over a house. Often it’s also illustrated by a monkey who’s swinging from tree to tree. And the house or the tree symbolizes the mind, the consciousness itself, the mind’s stream.
The mind is often referred to something like a river flowing. And the monkey is supported by the tree or or supported on the house. And the monkey represents the karmic seed, the karmic impression. So with previous link which was the mental intention or the mental impulse which is a real energy of the mind itself which led to the act, let’s say, an act of generosity to a beggar, at the moment we gave that food or money to the beggar, we felt real love, real there was really positive intention in our mind towards that person. May they be happy by experiencing this.
So that intention was the second link of karmic formation. And that created that energy of may they be happy, created an impression upon the consciousness, upon our mind, which is symbolized by the house or the tree that the monkey is sitting. The monkey is now this energy seed which has been planted on the mind. And this seed is going to carry be carried on the stream of consciousness, a little bit like a a piece of wood floating on a river. It’s carried in support until it does something, until it like all a seed has a potential to ripen, doesn’t it?
So it’s an energy potential which has ability to ripen into something in the future. So that’s the third link, is consciousness. Now these first three, we can say occur in the past life. We let’s we’re going to look at these twelve links as occurring over the succession of three lives. So in in the previous life or the past life, out of ignorance, there was a karmic action done which was to give charity to a beggar, and that created an impression upon the the mind stream.
Now this is let’s say that it when that person died, his his mind continued right right through until death. Now just before the moment of death, is the most critical period of our whole life. The last moment before we die, the most important period of our life. Sounds like the worst moment of our life, but it’s most important because the state of our mind just before death is going to determine which karmic seed and there are many karmic seeds that we carry. Countless karmic seeds in our mind stream.
Which of those is going to ripen is determined by the state of mind of death. So let’s say that this specific karmic seed by the act of charity is gonna ripen. So it’s a virtuous seed. It’s positive. So for a positive seed to ripen, the mind has to be positive.
It’s like the two help each other. So then this person in the previous life is dying with a positive state of mind. There’s not no anger, no sort of unhappiness, no grasping, but there is sort of loving kindness, an attitude of of loving kindness towards others. And that is mental attitude in which the seed was created. And therefore, that provides the right soil for the seed to germinate.
And so this karmic energy manifests. Now that then we die. Right? The seed is ripened as an energy sort of blossoming. And we die, and that after we die, we immediately arise again.
The mind has contracted, contracted with a very, very, very subtle consciousness, very clear, very subtle, and it leaves the body. It it is carried on a wind energy material, like a wind energy. And this wind energy gathers at the heart, and the consciousness is extremely subtle, and it leaves the body and instantaneously manifests in this Bardo realm, which is the the neck, you know, this the second realm. The Bardo realm is the intermediate state between this life and the next life. And what determines the type of Bardo being is the energy of this karmic seed, which ripen just before death.
And it will mold the Bardo body according to the characteristics of that seed. And it’s a virtuous seed, so let’s say it will throw us into the rebirth of a human being, so the intermediate state body will like a small human being because of the energy of that karma. Now that we’re conscious in that period, and we can we go here and there, and there are different experience within the intermediate state. But eventually, we’re going to come to a situation where we’re going to be reborn, the karmic energy with our future parents draws us to that state. And we can even it’s possible for the Bardo being to see its future parents and it engaging in copulation.
And if it’s going to be it said that it’s gonna be a male, then it feels desire for the mother and anger towards the future father. If it’s gonna be female, it feels desire for the father and repulsion or anger towards the mother. But because of this feeling that it experiences, it then the Bardo being contracts, it dies, and Bardo’s death. And this very subtle consciousness then enters the mother’s womb and becomes oneness with the fertilized body. And so the new life has begun.
And the whole energy which caused the Bardo state, caused this taking of the next life was the karmic the ripening of that karmic seed at the end of the previous life. So we now have the next link, which is the link of name and form. So we’re into the present life. We’re we’re finished the past life. We’re now into present life.
This is the first thing, name and form. Name refers to mind, which is the consciousness which has come from the body of being into the fertilized egg in another’s womb. And the form is is the body. Well, at that stage, it’s a single cell which begins to rapidly divide and form an embryo, and then the embryo develops into the into the fetus, and then the fetus is born. So then that’s the first thing.
The next part, name and form. Now it’s a human. Right? Because it was a positive karma. So it’s a human.
Now the embryo the mind is there right at the beginning. And as the embryo develops, the limbs are formed and the head and and all of the organs and the sense organs develop. And, eventually, the sense organs are completely developed. They have eyes, they have ears, have nose, they have nose, they have smell, taste, and they have touch. The five physical sense organs develop.
And the sixth sense is the actual sense of consciousness, mental consciousness itself. So there are really six ways with which we can perceive our environment. There are six main consciousnesses of the mind. Or put it another way, the mind can be divided into six types of consciousness. Eye consciousness, the ear consciousness, nose, smell, taste, touch, mental consciousness, doesn’t depend upon any of the five sense organs.
So this state of having the all of the sense organs complete the link of the six sources, the next link. They’re in the present life. We have the the sources refers to the to the sense organs, which are the source for the sense. This comes as a sort of inevitable result of taking rebirth. We we we have sort of no deliberate control.
We’re we’re a human, and we’re going to develop the six senses. Now then we take birth. The baby is born. Its sense organs are all there. They’re all ready to go.
Now the sense organs come in contact with their environment. The eyes come in contact with visual objects. The ears hear sounds. The nose smells smells, the taste, the tongue tastes things, and the body experiences a sense of touch. So the baby then is experiencing its outside environment through this contact, this coming together of the sense organ, the physical sense organ, the object, the sense object, and the sense consciousness.
Those three come together. And this happens. We have it happens without choice. We experience contact with the sense object. And that’s the the link after the six sources.
And then for those who were here yesterday, remember that contact is one of these states of mind. It’s it’s not a physical thing. It’s a mental thing. The mind there is contact between the mind and its object. And because we have contact between the mind and the mind object and this object, there’s feeling.
And very simply, feeling is a feeling can be divided into three, a feeling of pleasure, a feeling of displeasure, or an indifferent feeling. And that’s what feeling means. And so with each of the senses, with our eyes, we can we can see things which give us a pleasant feeling to look at, or they give us an unpleasant feeling to look at, or an indifferent feeling, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And we can hear sounds which are pleasant sounds, unpleasant sounds, or indifferent sounds, and so on for each of the five senses. And we have these feelings.
They come. Now because our mind is still clouded by ignorance, there hasn’t been any change. In our previous life, ignorance was the first link, and we made no there was no opportunity to remove ignorance, and so ignorance remained in this life. And because we have this simple ignorance of not knowing reality, we we also have the results of that ignorance which are to create a mistaken image of oneself. We conceptualize mistakenly, an image of our self or our environment.
And this manifests in the form of craving. Now craving is the next link which comes after feeling, and craving can be positive or negative. Normally, think craving is bad, desire, attachment, but in this context, craving can mean that state of mind which grasps a pleasurable feeling. So whenever our senses experience pleasure, we have craving at that pleasure. We want it.
We we have this embracing sort of mental attitude towards all pleasurable things. Actually, I haven’t been telling you that. I’m not quite representing these things. We can get back to that. The important thing is to understand the description of each link.
So we have craving and pleasurable feeling. We we have this mental grasping. A pleasure any pleasurable experience we want. We don’t reject pleasure feeling. We like it more.
And any unpleasurable feeling, you know, displeasure, we have aversion, which is part of craving. There is a mental attitude of rejecting, rejecting the unpleasurable feeling. We sort of have indifference towards indifferent feeling. There’s no strong attraction or repulsion. So that’s the link of craving.
You can see how these arise spontaneously. Right? They’re there because of the overpowering ignorance which wrongly conceives the nature of our self and wrongly conceives the nature of sense objects. Because of that wrong conception in our mind that the sense objects exist from their own side, that we exist from our own side, then we project sort of self existing pleasure belonging to the sense object, and we crave that pleasure. The next link is the link of grasping, and grasping is just even stronger craving.
It becomes very powerful. The simple craving is sort of grows into very powerful grasping. That’s symbolized by a monkey within a tree, which is covered in fruit. So it’s grasping with both hands, pieces of fruit. And in other pictures you can see there’s a person who’s picking fruit from the tree has about two or three full baskets of fruit, but still picking more fruit, which means that we have baskets of happiness, but we we grasp that even more happiness, we’re never satisfied, more and more happiness.
So there’s this very powerful state of mind grasping at pleasure. So this is all happening in the present life. Then we come to the next link which is called existence. That’s shown in the diagram by a pregnant woman, a woman who’s about to give birth, which is symbolizes the time just before death of the present life. So we’ve been through this life.
We developed craving and grasping. And now this existence is a mental state, and and it’s it’s the same mental state as karmic formation. It is mental intention. And what it represents then is the ripening of another karmic seed. We have lots of karmic seeds contained within our mind.
And this present life, the seed or another karmic seed which is going to throw us into the future life, that might be positive or negative, is nourished by the links of craving and grasping. So that means it’s going to it’s going to sprout and form the next life. And this is the very moment before we die there is this ripening seed. There’s a mental and it’s a mental factor of intention. And it ripens because it’s been nourished by craving and grasping.
And once again, because of this energy, this ripening intention, we are thrown into a future life. So we go through the Bardo and and again we’re thrown into a future life and they’re demonstrated by the last two links of rebirth and aging and death. So the three lives are all included. Ignorance, karmic formation, and consciousness are the links of the past life. Name and form, body and mind.
The six sense sources, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, and existence are all links of this life, and then rebirth, aging, and death are links in a future life. You can see that rebirth, aging and death are really a condensation of the links which appear in this life. But of course, in the future life you’re going to have name and form, you’re going to have six sources, contact, feeling, craving, grasping. And so it goes round and round. It’s a circle.
Ignorance remains. It’s still in the mind. It hasn’t been removed. So ignorance is also a link that’s going to be in the future life. And there’s going to be continual karmic formation.
We talked about the creation of one seed of giving charity to a beggar. But during our life, we’re continually creating more and more karmic seeds. And when we die, there’s only one that’s gonna ripen and throw us into the next life. But we still carry with us all the other seeds which haven’t ripened. And so we’re reborn with this tremendous burden of karmic seeds waiting for their chance to ripen.
And they’re in our mind. They’re not coming from outside. There’s no external agency involved. Each individual carries his or her personal karmic energy with them from life to life. So just to complete the description of this the diagram.
Remember the the consciousness is demonstrated by this third symbol around the perimeter. The monkey swing swinging over a house. The monkey swinging over the house as the consciousness. The next is show the man in a boat, and this is indicating the link of of name name and form. There are different ways to interpret it.
One way is that the boat can indicate the form, which is the body and the man and the passengers is the mind which is carried in the boat. Another interpretation of this is that the next diagram shows a house which is similar in a six sense base. It’s like a full house, where the floor of the windows are very sense organs by which the body the mind communicate with the environment through the sense organs. So the the boat is the senses, the mind itself being taken to the house of the body, which is the sixth source of the sixth sense base, and the consciousness is coming to reside in that body. So that’s what those two symbolize.
The next one is a man and a woman together embracing, symbolizing the the link of contact. The coming together of the sense consciousness and the sense object. Very graphically, you can see the second side. Then there’s the the next one shows a man with an arrow in his eyes. And this is very clearly symbolizes feeling, unpleasant feeling.
And then the next one is a man who’s drinking wine, symbolizes the craving. He craves. Then, grasping with the monkey in the tree, which holds the fruit. And existence is a pregnant woman. Existence.
Birth is imminent. There is a very strong grasping of existence at the end of life and the mental intention which arises at that point, strays into the next existence, Bardo existence, Bardo existence and then the Rebirth existence. So before we break for lunch, then does anybody want to ask any questions about the symbolism here? We can discuss more after that if anything that you wanted to know before. Okay.
I’m sure you can think of some