Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 57-minute talk, Ven Thubten Gyatso (Adrian Feldman), a Buddhist monk ordained by Lama Yeshe in 1975, addresses an audience at Buddha House in Adelaide and explains how to transform everyday experiences—both problems and joy—into fuel for spiritual development. He opens by reflecting on his own journey from medicine into monasticism, tracing how the psychological insights of Buddhism answered questions he encountered as a physician about mental suffering. He then introduces a teaching by the Nyingma master Dodrupchen Rinpoche on converting hardship into compassion. The core message: habitually dwelling on misery and aversion strengthens negative thought patterns, but Buddhist practice offers an alternative—recognizing our deep past-life relationships with all beings, cultivating universal compassion (embodied by Avalokiteśvara or Chenrezig), and reframing each experience as an opportunity to grow wisdom and develop concern for others’ freedom from suffering. He emphasizes neuroplasticity, karma across lifetimes, and the responsibility to keep the Dharma alive in an age of decline, while inviting critical engagement and debate rather than mere acceptance. Suitable for newcomers curious about Buddhist psychology and for practitioners ready to work with adversity as a spiritual path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 2010 01 31 MLM.mp3
UUID: 95c1eaea-4b28-4ac1-a00b-44cdb2184987
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Misc teachings (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010-01-31
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 57.7 minutes
Words: ~6,704
Like to welcome with great pleasure, Welcome to Buddha House. And in Adelaide. So it makes it very special. Now, just a few words about Gyatso. He’s been a pioneer in Australian Buddhism.
He was ordained thirty four years ago and was ordained by Lama Yeshe, which makes it very special. Gyatso was the first director of Nālānda Monastery in France. He was the first spiritual program director of Tārā Institute, which is now huge. Gyatso is not only very learned and very studious, but he’s also a doer. So he’s built a rammed earth monastery in Eaglehawk alongside the Great Stūpa that’s going up.
It’s a beautiful monastery, and there will be probably full house there this year. He’s probably paved several kilometres of land around the monastery. He has just recently finished a three hundred metre path that is a metre wide as well. So he is an incredible doer. He built a stupa in front of the monastery.
He’s designed and helped to build an octagonal house that’s in the shape of a Mongolian ghair on Kangaroo Island as his retreat house for three years. He’s recently extended the vegetarian cafe in Mongolia where he’s helped to bring back Buddhism. So a pioneer all around. And he helped design a soup kitchen in Mongolia for extremely poor people. Gyatso is more exceptional because he gave up an amazing job.
He had been training to be a tropical diseases medical specialist. And he’s now a very humble and very special Buddhist monk. He’s done many, many teachings all over the world. So he’s an international teacher, and he’s called the Lam Rim Wallah, and you’ll see why. So welcome Gyatso to Adelaide.
Thank you. Well, thank you Helen for that introduction. I’m not sure whether I’m any more special than anybody else. I’m just probably more fortunate than a lot of people in having been able to meet Lama Thubten Yeshe, Lama Zopa Rinpoche back in the mid-70s in Kathmandu in Nepal. And there, having received their instruction, I spent eighteen months reflecting upon the teachings and doing many things, travelling, doing meditation retreats and so on and I came to the conclusion that the teachings were given by a valid person, that the Buddha Śākyamūni himself was a valid teacher, what he taught, the Dharma was a valid path to a valid goal.
The attainment of enlightenment is something which we all have the potential to achieve and it’s whether we actualise our potential or not is up to each one of us. So indeed, I reflected on what was more important: to pursue a direct medical career or to invest the rest of my life in studying and meditating and trying to incorporate the wisdom of the Buddha into my own way of life, my own understanding of life and to see how far I could be able to progress along the spiritual path. Actually, didn’t see it as abandoning a medical career at all. I just have seen it as being postgraduate study in medicine. And that’s exactly what it is.
Buddhism really is psychology. It presents so many aspects of the mind, including explaining what mind is, which are still not clearly understood in scientific terms. Although the two disciplines are very much approaching each other, not least because of the great effort that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has put into gathering each year or every two years gathering a group of scientists, especially those interested in the mind and in psychology and having sort of an open forum of discussion on where they’re at, what they think and the results of these meetings are being published every couple of years. It’s always very interesting to read those books and to catch up on what’s going on. So, I see my life really as being coming to understand my own mind and gain control over the uncontrolled emotions of my own mind through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion and in that way being able to help others by giving talks, by leading meditation teachings, even just being an example which people can look to, is very important in this day and age for men and women to those who are capable to live a monastic life, live within vows and be sources of inspiration for others to follow the spiritual path.
This is necessary because the spiritual path is internal. In each one of us and in our own mind the meaning of the spiritual path is the progressive cultivation of the positive qualities, the constructive qualities of our mind with the progressive elimination of destructive, harmful mental qualities, which is possible. And working towards the two, within Buddhism, two main goals at a simple level the attainment of nirvana, the liberation from the uncontrolled death and rebirth in the wheel of life. When I say uncontrolled, it’s uncontrolled by ourselves, but it’s under the control of karma and our disturbing emotions. So by destroying karma and disturbing emotions, eliminating them from our mind, then we gain control with wisdom and compassion.
We can determine our future. So if our wish is to attain liberation from the wheel of life, from the suffering induced by those disturbing emotions, then we can achieve that goal. Or we can enter the great path of which leads towards full enlightenment to become a Buddha in one’s own right. And the only purpose or the reason for doing that is the recognition that we are all completely equal in that we are there is no reason why any one of us is more important than anybody else and we’re all equally just trying to establish happiness and peace in our minds and just trying to be free from pain and unhappiness and suffering in our minds. So, recognising our equality from that point of view diminishes self importance which is our great handicap, which is the disturbing motivator of so much of our lives where we consider my happiness, the happiness of me and my circle of friends as being more important than others and sort of only working for that but still not working, not necessarily working in the right direction but that is our belief.
So by seeing our equality we diminish our pride and our self importance and then by seeing our relationship that we have with each other. Even we look around the room we see a whole lot of strangers, we are in fact not strangers. Some of us may see friends, some of us may see enemies in the room. But those discriminations into grouping people into friend, enemy and stranger actually are, they’re not accurate because of the continuity of consciousness which survives death and then takes rebirth again and again and has been doing so since time without beginning. Because of that we are in fact all related to each other.
In past lives we’ve been extremely closely related. Each one of us has been each other’s mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister and so on. We can’t remember it but the memories are retained in the stream of consciousness and the Buddha himself and so many great Yogis and Yoginis who have gained the power of single pointed concentration and have been able through that power to bring to the surface the memories, recognize their relationship with all others, not just the humans but the animals, all the sentient beings that we may come across. That we are indeed one big family and this is not a metaphor or some sort of ideal, it’s just simple reality. If we open the borders of time and go back into history.
So, recognising our close relationship with each other from past lives, seeing that completely as reality, then almost naturally the thought of compassion arises when we see that all living beings are so close are not happy. They’re not achieving the peace and happiness that they seek and they’re in fact they’re experiencing so many forms of unwanted suffering. So the thought of great compassion arises and that compassion is put into action by recognising that the reason sentient beings suffer in the wheel of life of death and rebirth is that the fundamental reason is in their own minds, is confusion about reality. Ultimate reality, the way in which the self exists and relative reality, the cause and effect of karma. So karma means actions done out of confusion, of ignorance of reality, out of self centeredness, attachment, anger and so on.
So those types of actions are the cause, the fundamental cause that connect us in life with unpleasant situations, with suffering, with pain. So, as the best physician doesn’t just treat the symptoms of illness but eradicates and knows how to eradicate the cause of the illness and has the medicine to eliminate the cause of suffering. So the Buddha is seen as the greatest physician because firstly the Buddha was able to diagnose the cause of all of our symptomatic sufferings and the cause self centered ignorance, anger and attachment and the medicine, the cure is wisdom. The wisdom seeing reality which opposes that ignorance. Great compassion, great love, embracing all beings and not discriminating them as friends, enemies and strangers and so on.
So, what I wanted to talk about today was how we in our general lives, how we can make everything that we experience constructive. How we can direct it towards the inner growth, our own personal inner growth which is the spiritual path of wisdom, of compassion, understanding and enthusiasm to achieve goals which go beyond the mundane everyday goals which we’ve grown up to accept as being the norm, the normal values of society. Everybody else is pursuing happiness and trying to avoid pain in a certain way. And so we think this is the way. But when we look, it doesn’t take very much to look beneath the surface of the apparent happiness and peace that we may be experiencing to recognize that each one of us does have an underlying sense of incompletion in their lives, lack of fulfillment which can lead to a sense of desperation and a sense of meaninglessness in our lives.
We see examples of this everywhere within society. I mean, in the years when I did practice medicine, it was clearly obvious to me that the majority of problems that people were coming to me with originated in the mind. Either they were direct mental problems, anxiety, depression, sort of sensitive alienation and so on. Although indirect eating problems, over drinking, over smoking, drug taking, etc. Problems associated with which physical problems but with a mental basis.
So, this set me thinking very much before I met Buddhism. What is the mind? Why are so many of us involved in actions of self, almost self destructive behaviour? Not necessarily physically destructive but mentally we destroy our happiness. Mentally we have uncontrolled emotions of anger, attachment, pride, jealousy and it was clear that these uncontrolled emotions were really the, a great source of pain and misery in the world.
But at this stage I hadn’t met Buddhism. But I didn’t find the answers. We would treat such problems with tranquilizers and anti anxiety drugs, a whole spectrum of drugs and then shock therapy and all these physical treatments, I was never satisfied that this was really helping. It was maybe subduing the symptoms, but it wasn’t getting at the problem, but I didn’t know what the problem was until I met Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche and that aspect, the psychological aspect of Buddhism was self evident to me from my own experience. And that allowed that recognition kept me there because in my scientific view of the world, the concepts of karma and reincarnation were well they were totally alien, especially rebirth in other realms beyond animals and humans, but hungry ghosts, hells, heavens, even the concept of enlightenment, enlightenment, liberation from the wheel of life were something I had to go away and think about.
But based upon my recognition of that the psychological aspect of the teachings which I could accept which was my own experience, I did stick around and I did receive more teachings as meditation retreats. And I remember saying to myself that, well, if I ever come to accept karma and reincarnation, I’m going to have to become a monk because it’s the only logical thing to do with one’s life, to invest one’s entire life in the study and practice of the teachings and that totally frightened me. Frightened, but it was the last thing that I ever thought I would want to do. To become a monk and give up all the things that I had aspired to. But as a combination of my research into Buddhism, I having received more teachings, I did a three month retreat in Northern New South Wales where I built a small shack in the bush and saw nobody for three months and meditated according to the instructions of the teachers.
And at the end of that retreat it was the idea, the picture of cause and effect, karmic cause and effect and rebirth just sort of crystallized out very clearly in my mind and became logical. I can’t tell you like A, B, C, D why I accepted these concepts, these Eastern concepts as valid. It wasn’t really a matter of building up an intellectual argument. It was more a matter of dismantling my intellectual opposition to those phenomena of karma reincarnation. Anyway, this is the result of that retreat that I gained the courage to make the decision to ask Lama Yeshe to give me ordination as a monk.
And so from the time I was ordained towards the end of nineteen seventy five, I’ve continually received more teachings done more meditation retreats. They call me a teacher but really I am not qualified as a Dharma teacher at all. To be qualified as a Dharma teacher one has to have real actual insights gained through a lot of perseverance and work and meditation. So really, can’t accept the label teacher. I will accept perhaps the label tutor like in the university of the professors and you have the tutors who help to understand what the professors are teaching.
So I’m a tutor helping, trying to, from my small gleaning of knowledge, from what I’ve, the teachings I’ve received, I can perhaps share with you some understanding and help point you in the direction of the path, which is very clearly elaborated by the teachers. Have great teachers in Australia and visiting teachers come who are indeed the professors of Buddhism. So during this talk, I don’t really want it to be regarded as a lecture but I hope we can engage in some discussion and as I go through the points you’re very welcome to put your hand up and we can discuss anything that you wish to clarify or repeat or debate. Debate is seen in Buddhism as being one of the greatest ways of learning and it certainly is. Need to, we can’t just like a parrot repeat the formulae and the phrases that we’ve heard.
We have to know what they mean and if it may well be that I will be a parrot and say something which I don’t understand and that would be terrible for me and terrible for you. So indeed don’t hesitate to debate and let’s see if we can collectively make this afternoon really beneficial for each one of us. So to begin with, if we’re looking at our lives then we wake up each morning and we get dressed, we have breakfast, we go to work, we plan our day, we are all trying to do something with the day. What? Collectively I’m fairly sure we’re all just trying to make our life happy and peaceful and experience as little pain as possible.
And this is quite valid direction. Is in fact it’s not even different to the animals. The animals when they wake up they do the same thing. They think where can I find some food? What can I do to be comfortable and happy and peaceful and not be hurt by other animals or by humans?
So, have this fundamental equality. But when we look at our lives as I’ve already mentioned, beneath the surface there is a lot of dissatisfaction, a lot of incompletion and lack of fulfilment that we’re not actualising the peace and happiness that we feel. We all have a sense that there is something better, something to be attained and this is valid. It’s true that we have so much potential. We’ve had glimpses of happiness and peace in the past which we try to recreate or bring back or discover again, but somehow they tend to get further and further from our grasp and life becomes more of a a routine.
Sometimes we may even forget why we’re getting up and getting dressed and going to work and we may question, I’ve been doing this for so many years, why? Where’s it leading me? And for most of us the obvious answer is it’s leading us to the grave. Even as His Holiness of Dalai Lama said in Melbourne recently in December, I’ve been around a long time. I’m a twentieth century person, my next destination is the cemetery and he asked the audience how many people here are under thirty years old?
There weren’t many, probably not that many here too. And he said, I’ve done my bit. The Dharma is now in your hands. You’re the ones who have to take up the so much the struggle, but take up the path and maintain these teachings, actualize these teachings and try to keep the very spirit of the teachings alive within society at least for another generation. We are in fact experiencing a time when Buddhism is rapidly disappearing from the world as predicted by Śākyamūni Buddha himself.
He said towards the end of his time on the world, he said that my teachings will last for a period of five thousand years but from the moment I’ve gone they’ll progressively progressively degenerate in the minds of the practitioners. In the last five hundred years they will just be present as books, but nobody will understand the meaning of the books. In the five hundred years before that there will be the books and a small understanding of the superficial meaning. In the five hundred years before that there will be books and a greater understanding. So, you know, we’re coming from the end backwards from the time of peak understanding was at the time when Buddha entered Parinirvana, but they’ve been declining ever since and so we’re more than halfway through those five thousand years.
The last fifteen hundred years pretty useless. So really the living spirit of the Buddhadharma is only going to be sort of actively and creatively practiced for a very short time. Maybe a thousand years in this world at this time. That, I mean there will be cycles. There will be a future Buddha and Maitreya Buddha will come well off the future and will turn the wheel of Dharma again and again the practice will be at a peak in the world but then it will progressively decline.
Why do the teachings decline? The Buddha said because it will be degenerated from within. You, the practitioners, will become confused. You won’t practice as strongly as you could and you will gradually degenerate the Dharma. So it’s very clear.
The responsibility is on our shoulders to maintain this living tradition for as long as we can. And one reason why I’m a little hesitant to, in fact I’m totally reluctant to put myself up as a teacher because I know that in my mind the understanding is only at a certain level. It’s not the profound grasp of reality that the Lamas, wonderful Lamas who have done so much study and practice in Tibet and in India and who are in Australia now are able to share with us. So, with this degeneration of the teachings then we shouldn’t regard that as being, oh, we’ll give it up. It’s no good.
That should in fact be a source of inspiration to really recognise what’s going on and to be very discerning when we hear Buddhist teachings. To travel the spiritual path we have to have the inner courage and determination to do it ourselves and that courage and determination is going to come from our own understanding, own comprehension of the meaning of the teachings. So it’s it is imperative that we begin building this base in a discriminating way. We’ll hear something, we say, alright, I can accept that, that I can’t yet accept but I’ll put it on hold. Well rejected outright but I’ll put it on hold and then try and see the picture and as I said before, in my experience with continual listening to the teachings, reflecting upon the meaning and meditating on the meaning, there is a time when the picture sort of comes out of the fog and crystallizes out very clear and that’s a very wonderful experience because it is generated by oneself.
in dependence upon what we’ve heard, but it’s actualized within our own mind. That is the spiritual power. And so we should not rely upon Lama to be the one who’s going to hold me by the hand and save me from suffering. Even the Buddhas can’t save us from suffering. They have universal compassion but they can’t rescue beings from being reborn in hell as an animal or in terribly suffering states.
The only one who can rescue us is our self and as the Buddhas show us how to actualize this inner wisdom. So as human beings, we should never put ourselves down. Within the spectrum of rebirth states to be one human is a result of great virtuous karma. To be born human, we have this, we’re sort of, we have this balance of suffering and pleasure. We’re in the middle.
We can recognize great bliss. We can recognize great suffering. We have intelligence, the human brain, which is not the mind, but which is the support of the mind. The human brain is the most conducive physical support to allow our intellect, our intellectual faculties to manifest or to be supreme so we can discriminate. That is worthwhile.
That is not worthwhile. That’s right. That’s wrong. We have this power. We must exercise that power.
We must grow our inner wisdom and act upon that wisdom and Sure in reliance upon teachers right in reliance upon the Buddha and the Lama, but it comes in most episodes in the life it comes back to ourselves. We have to make the decision how to act and action is the literal meaning of karma. So, all actions come stem from the mind and karmic actions are those actions which stem from an ignorant mind, a confused mind, a mind not understanding reality, a mind overwhelmed by selfishness, by anger, by attachment, by pride and jealousy. Actions coming through those emotions are karmic actions. They, such actions bind us to the wheel of life.
They give no freedom, no avenue of escape from the wheel of life. With actions coming from wisdom, selfless love and compassion directed towards others are still mental actions but they’re not karma. They don’t create the cause for rebirth in the wheel of life. They create the cause for being born in situations where one can continue one’s spiritual path by meeting qualified teachers and having the suitable conditions to practice, to continue our practice. Because the spiritual path takes many lifetimes.
Although in the highest, the highest practice of tantra, we say, oh, enlightenment can be achieved within one lifetime. That’s true if one practices tantra purely. But if you have any idea of the meaning of tantric practice and the difficulty in practicing it purely, as his Holiness Dalai Lama said, this was true many generations ago, but this day and age, there aren’t too many who can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime. So we have to have the courage to accept that my spiritual path is going to go beyond this life. I have to start preparing for my future lives to ensure that I’m able to continue developing this mind on the path of wisdom and compassion.
And then we set about what we’re waking up in the morning. So it’s not now our thoughts should be not what can I do today to be happy to be free from suffering, but what can I do today to enhance my inner growth on the spiritual path to ensure my wisdom and compassion don’t diminish but increase and how I can ensure that the continuity of this mind in future lives with whatever body it takes will again have the opportunity to continue this growth? So the whole, you know, the whole, what’s the word? Perspective, the whole direction of our life should change to be not just this life, what I want now, here and now, but to be happy and comfortable with a recognition of many future lives and preparing now for those future lives. It’s not good enough to wait until we die to start thinking about the future life.
If we live our life obsessed with the pursuit of happiness and freedom from suffering in this life, when death suddenly confronts us, we don’t know when that’ll be, then we will be too shocked, too upset that we’re leaving this body behind. We’re leaving our dear friends behind, our possessions, our whole experience that we’re leaving and we’re going off into the unknown. Then it’s too late to train the mind in wisdom and compassion. But if we begin now, death will just be nothing. It will be like almost when I say welcome, for some people maybe welcome event an exciting opportunity to ensure or to put our Dharma into practice and to ensure that the continuity of this mind has a rebirth where the practice can continually increase.
So I’m talking about what is it that goes from life to life? I’m talking about the mind, the continuity of mind. And where did our present mind come from? It is the continuity of a mind in past lives. Now we have no memory, we cannot gain access to the memories of our previous lives.
But we have been experiencing in this life all of the karmic results of our past actions in previous lives. We unknowingly, we’ve been thinking that well what we’re experiencing is not coming from past lives, it’s from the causes and conditions within this life but there is the other factor of karmic ripening. The person of this life is me, I, who, you know, we identify with our name given to us by our parents and we have the self image and there’s, you know, the me of this life or a male or a female and we have these experiences. We have this education. We have, you know, various things associated with the thought I and mine.
That I, the I, the person of this life ceases at death. Naturally, I mean, physical shape vanishes. So the person of this life ceases. We do, we are extinguished at death. But what is the continuity?
The continuity is the stream of consciousness, the mind with all of the imprints, the karmic imprints, also the seeds of our whatever wisdom and compassion we have generated, the seeds of whatever anger, attachment, selfishness, ignorance, we have manifested in this life, all the good and bad qualities of the mind continue on become the mind. If we’re going to be reborn human of the next baby, and it may not even be the same sex, you know, we can be reborn as male or female according to our karma. So that future child will grow up with a sense of self again, not having any memory of past lives and we’ll just think, oh, it’s just here and now this life and we’ll just look for the happiness and the freedom from suffering of that life. And if there’s no meeting with the teacher explaining the continuity lives, then the whole life will be lived just for the sake of that life without any sense of cultivation of these positive mental attitudes for future lives. So in a way, such a life is meaningless in the context of making use of a human opportunity with its intelligence, with its relative freedom to listen, to study and to meditate without taking advantage of those potentials.
Just following selfishness anger and attachment then that life is meaningless in terms that nothing is established for future spiritual growth and many karmic imprints are laid down out of selfishness anger and attachment for suffering results in the future. So very unlikely that such a meaningless life will result in a further human life. We shouldn’t think it’s guaranteed that we will be born human again. Don’t think it’s impossible for your mind to become the mind of a mosquito, right? Mind is not physical.
Mind has, it’s not something that can be measured or something that has to fit into a certain space. If you observe a mosquito, it is buzzing around looking for pleasure, looking for a nice drink of blood and laying its eggs and so on, reproducing. It’s living not that much differently to myself, maybe a shorter life, but it’s simply looking for pleasure. It has feelings. Mosquitoes have sense of self.
Like if you hunt them wanting to swat them, they will escape. I mean, they don’t want to be squashed. They have a sense of self preservation. They experience pain, they experience pleasure. They don’t think too much Their brains, if they’ve got any, aren’t capable of allowing their potential intelligence to manifest.
As I often say, if we do a thought experiment, literally a thought experiment, if we transplant a human mind into say a rabbit’s mind, a rabbit’s brain, then that human mind will only be able to function at the level of a rabbit’s mind because its support, the rabbit’s brain, cannot give it the opportunity to manifest the intelligence, etc, of a human mind. If you transplant the rabbit’s mind into a human brain, that rabbit’s mind will now be able to function as a human mind because it will have the physical support allowing it to gain intelligence, discriminating wisdom and so on. All right. That’s a bit of a sidetrack reincarnation. So the main teaching that I want to follow today now is a short text written by a great Nyingma Lama called Dodrupchen Rinpoche, who he wrote this text in a previous incarnation.
The present reincarnation is actually living in Boston. I nearly had the chance to meet him last year, but I just missed out. But he lived in the previous life between eighteen sixty five and nineteen twenty six. And this short text gives an explanation of how we can make each experience in life, each problem, each unhappy experience, and each happy experience useful in terms of developing our mind on the spiritual path, transforming instead of making the experience a cause of misery and unhappiness and negative karma, making the experience creative, constructive, which will benefit future lives. It begins by paying homage to Avalokiteśvara or Chenrezig who is the Buddha of compassion compassionate Buddha.
It is personification of universal compassion is personified in the aspect of Avalokiteśvara as in Sanskrit or Chenrezig in Tibetan. And this is sometimes depicted in two arm or four armed or thousand armed aspect. There are different aspects through which one does meditation in trying to generate great compassion in one’s own mind by identifying with the hero, the hero of great compassion. If you want to see it less godlike or less like an Indian deity, then you can regard Chenrezig as being his role as the Dalai Lama himself and make him your hero, your role model. And this is what most Tibetans do.
They see the Dalai Lama as being an embodiment Avalokiteśvara, the compassionate Buddha. So he says, he pays homage by recalling the qualities of great universal compassion, always happy at the happiness of others. That’s love. That’s universal love. And deeply saddened when they suffer.
That’s universal compassion. One who has fully realized the qualities and understanding of great compassion and who renounces both his own happiness, both his own happiness and his own suffering. So this means that great compassion renounces the pursuit of one’s own happiness, renounces the pursuit of one’s own freedom from suffering, and embraces the pursuit of happiness and freedom from suffering of others. That is the meaning of great universal compassion. So it is combined with love.
Necessarily arises out of great love. And specifically the great love, which is called heartwarming love which recognizes every living being not just the humans but every animal every creature as sees them as dearly as one sees one’s own mother. By remembering the kindness one’s own mother has given to oneself or one’s father or anybody in life who has been so kind to us. Every being has been equally kind in fact more so because every being has been our mother countless times in past lives. So this love sees other living beings in that aspect.
And so there is spontaneously great love wishing them to be happy and there’s also the recognition that because they’re under the control of karma and ignorance, disturbing emotions, they’re not completely happy. In fact, they’re experiencing so much suffering and pain. So great compassion intending to rescue them from that pain arises. So that is great compassion. That is Avalokiteśvara.
That is what His Holiness Dalai Lama is a personification of. And that’s our role. That is the purpose of entering into this practice to cultivate such an attitude, which you can see is the opposite of selfishness, completely separated from self centered thoughts and actions. So this is a very advanced text. This, you know, it’s not a text for beginners.
It’s a text for those who recognize the reality of how important it is to cultivate such a mind and to intend to cultivate such a mind. So this text tells us how to transform both problems and happiness into the cause for such a state of mind. So that’s why he begins with paying homage to Avalokiteśvara, reminding us of our goal, why we’re looking at this teaching. So I know many of you may be very new to Buddhism and to the concept of karma reincarnation. So I’m not saying you must believe or if you don’t believe, get out, you know.
Just be patient and see that begin to see the picture of this very profound text. Anyway, so he begins by explaining how we can make our life meaningful by transforming problems and suffering experiences into the path of great compassion, great wisdom. He says, whenever you are harmed by sentient beings or anything, living beings or environmental problems, If you make a habit out of only feeling sorrow, self pity, oh, bad, awful, then when even the smallest problems occur, it will cause you enormous mental anguish. He said, this is because the nature of any type of mind or any level of consciousness, happiness or sorrow, which are both levels of consciousness, The nature of that mood or that state of mind is to gradually grow stronger by being experienced repetitively. So the more we dwell upon, let’s say, you know, spiders, you know, we don’t like spiders.
There was a time when we were very young when we didn’t know about spiders, but maybe we began to see spiders and we started to develop an aversion. The more we allow the thought spiders are bad, spiders are threatening you, they’re gonna hurt me, the stronger and stronger the antagonism towards spiders will grow in our mind because of the very repetitive placing our thoughts in that pattern. That pattern of spiders are bad, I’m afraid of spiders, danger and fear. Fear will arise just by thinking about spiders. There’s terrible fear can arise.
This is coming from the mind and it’s coming from, we lay the imprint of the thought down again and again, even in the brain that the neural pathway is established stronger and stronger and stronger. And in recent times at the talks with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and scientists, they’ve talked about this phenomenon called neuroplasticity where they realize that the brain is not like when I went to medical school, the brain was a fixed organ. It was unchangeable. It was established at a very early age and it would only degenerate for the rest of our lives. And if you’re a medical student in the 60s like me, your brain would have degenerated much more quickly with all the alcohol and the various substances which you assaulted your brains with, your nervous system.
But they’ve discovered now that the brain is much more malleable. It’s continually changing. And it’s true. If we stop thought patterns, repetitive thought patterns, they will become weaker and weaker and weaker. The neural pathways will begin to dissipate and if we replace them with other thought patterns like constructive positive thought patterns, our whole thinking machinery can be readjusted.
We can adjust our thought patterns consciously, deliberately. This is so important that this is the very point that Dodrupchen Rinpoche is making that if you’re going to allow yourself to be in a state of aversion, I mentioned spiders, but it’s aversion to any type of suffering, any type of unpleasantness. Oh, I don’t like that. How often? We know people’s patterns of thoughts.
We know what they like and what they don’t like. We try to avoid, if we’re kind, we try to avoid placing them in situations they don’t like because they know there’ll be a miserable response. So we ask, we wonder who’s being invited for dinner at the weekend and we have to set up not just the music and, but the conversation has to be skillfully directed towards avoiding the problematic areas where we know there’ll be anger or some extent and use constructive happy areas. So that’s the way we are. That can be changed by ourself.
Of course, nobody else can change it. We can do it ourselves. So if we do have a neurosis, a phobia, maybe a phobia is just extreme aversion of maybe spiders or snakes or whatever, but we all have our pet likes and pet dislikes, which we tend to identify with. This is me, this is, I am like this, I can’t change. As my father said, my father was, he met Lama Yeshe and he had grown up within the Jewish community and had studied.
He taught Hebrew at the synagogue Melbourne and St Kilda. And so he knew a great deal of the philosophy in Judaism, although he’d married out and so he wasn’t an overtly practicing Jew, he was still Jewish by fundamental belief. And when he met Lama Yeshe, he listened and he actually said, Lama Yeshe is one of the three wisest men, one of greatest men that he’d ever met in his life. But when I started and sort of at the same time, I’m going through the process of deciding to become a monk and so on then I suggest to my father, he might start, he appreciated Buddhist philosophy. He said it’s the same in Judaism.
And this when actually when I was talking about becoming a monk, so my reply was, well, all right, I’ll become a rabbi because he didn’t want me to become a monk nor did he want me to become a rabbi. But anyway, accepted very much