Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 59-minute teaching, Ven Thubten Gyatso weaves together Buddhist practice on altruism and karma with contemporary questions about morality and spiritual authority. Drawing on his experience establishing monasteries and working in psychiatric hospitals, he guides listeners through the seven cause-and-effect techniques for cultivating equanimity, recognizing all beings as former mothers, and generating bodhicitta—the commitment to achieve enlightenment in order to free others from suffering. He explores the practical tension between moral vows and compassion through vivid examples: protecting crops from rats without killing them, medicating parasitic worms in sick monks, managing mosquitoes wisely rather than reactively. He also addresses whether Jesus Christ exemplified bodhisattva qualities, shares his encounter with his late teacher Lama Yeshe’s recognized reincarnation, and reflects on the challenges of establishing Tibetan monasticism in the West. The talk balances intellectual rigor with storytelling, inviting both newcomers and serious practitioners to consider how altruism transforms not just spiritual life but everyday ethical choices.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 2010 02 11 P o A.mp3
UUID: da9f20a7-39b3-4c99-a43f-75c58427cd68
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Misc teachings (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010-02-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 58.9 minutes
Words: ~7,142
Exactly, Without anger. Yeah. Of course, we must defend ourselves out of love, protecting others from creating a strong negative karma and protecting our life. But we don’t have to do it with aggression. Parents restrain their children to the point of the children getting upset and crying, but they do it out of love.
They have to be strong because they can see that what the kids want to do is dangerous for them and for others. So, restraint, of course. It would be silly to become totally a doormat and allow people to do whatever they want. That’s a lack of wisdom. This is why wisdom has to be united with compassion.
Somebody who you know is heavily addicted to alcohol or drugs, even they plead, you don’t have to give them the alcohol and drugs because, you know, it’s more harmful. So, you do what is wise, whatever you can do. So, what we’re talking about is generating a state of equanimity or equilibrium which is the foundation of universal love and compassion. Each of us has to reflect upon the way we react to situations in life and are we discriminating? Am I seeing this person in an exaggerated, negative, hateful way and wanting them to hurt?
Or, you know, am I seeing people in strong attachment and clinging and just not having that attachment and clinging, being balanced. Don’t reject them. Don’t reject friends and open up to strangers. See all beings equally. And also, part of the meditation is to reflect on previous lives that we’ve had every relationship with each other time and time again.
Each of us has been each other’s mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister countless times. So, we are one big family. And just as we tolerate, well, to a degree, we can tolerate harmful things from our family and friends. Recognizing everybody as our family, even the animals as our family, we can tolerate the harm and react in a skillful way, and we won’t be so attached. So now, the seven techniques of cause and effect.
The next point to meditate on is the fact, you know, explained by Buddha that as you know, life is beginningless. There was no time when our mind stream first began taking life and dying and taking life. Life is beginningless which means that there is no I, you know, there’s no true, real, concrete me that’s been existed since beginningless time. But the mind that is associated with this body, this stream of consciousness, this continuity of awareness, is something which survives death. It is supported by very subtle physical support, but the continuity of consciousness is what goes from life to life.
And, of course, as it’s the consciousness connected with this body, which will, according to its karma, will be connected with the future body, that future mind is very similar. It has all of the good and bad qualities that exist here and now. They’re carried on the mind. So, this stream of consciousness came from a previous life. So, when we were born, we were born with the inherited mental qualities of whoever it was who died in the previous life.
And so we inherited their mind. We? Who’s the we? Who’s the real me? There’s no real me.
Just the baby has an inherited mind just as it’s got an inherited body from its parents. But the mind didn’t come from the parents, it came from previous life. Mind can’t it’s not a physical thing. It can’t be broken up and multiply. So, are countless streams of consciousness which have been existing since beginningless time in the wheel of life, death and rebirth, which means that each mind stream has countless mothers in past lives and fathers, etc.
And if we focus upon the mother, because the mother gives so much to the child when it’s still in her womb, when it’s being born and when it’s growing up. We rely much more upon our mother for her kindness and support in order to grow properly, to be educated, to be protected from all the dangers. Mean, if our mother, even many of us bit fed up with our mothers, but look, if she had abandoned us for just two or three hours when we were little babies, we could have died so many times. She saved our life and at great cost in terms of her own happiness. She gave up her own happiness for her children or her child, for you.
Time over and over and over again, her sleep, even her food. She would save the best food for you and so on. And always worry, even before we were born, our mother was planning our life, our education. Why? So that we could be happy.
You know, that fundamental wish was for her child to be happy and free from suffering. And so, just as our present mother has mostly I know that some people have a difficult situation when we are talking in general. It might be grandma who gave us all this kindness or father, you know, it could be some other body, someone else in our family, but in general mother gives so much and our present mother has done this not just once, but many times, innumerable times in past lives, even as animals. We hear lots of stories like cats and dogs and birds which sort of sacrifice themselves for their chicks. It is not limited to the human realm, the mother’s kindness in protecting the young.
So, this is reality. It’s not just an invention and it gives us a whole new perspective to look at mother, our own present mother, think of her, recognize the kindness and then expand the concept to seeing all other beings as having been my mother and remembering the kindness. So, we’ve talked about the preliminary practice of equilibrium. Then, the first next step is to reflect upon all beings and to see beings as one’s mother. The next step is to have the strong memory and cognition of the great kindness, the unfathomable kindness that we’ve received from every living being as our mother.
And this is reality. The next step is a change in our mental attitude, right? Total different way of looking at it. Now you can see the mosquito in an entirely different light. An entirely different Mother is in this body of a mosquito.
We change our bodies every time we die and there’s no guarantee that we won’t be mosquitoes in our next life. We’ve been mosquitoes in previous lives. We’ve been to heaven in past lives. We’ve been to hell in past lives. We’ve been everywhere.
So, because the mind’s not physical, it’s not impossible for consciousness to abide within the tiny brain of a mosquito because that brain is its support. And mosquitoes do have feelings. They have happiness, they have unhappiness, they’re very happy when they’re drinking your blood. They breathe and they live a short life, they feel pain. They may not be too intellectual and too intelligent, but that’s only because their brain is not capable of allowing their innate intelligence to manifest.
But when they die and the continuity of their mind inhabits a human body, then the potential for intelligence is able to manifest. So, on being aware of the kindness of all beings, the next step almost spontaneously occurs the wish to repay the kindness. How wonderful if I can repay the kindness of all living beings. It is all living beings but we’re sort of more focusing upon human beings because they’re the ones we interrelate with so much in life. So, now we have have a valid reason to be kind to others.
Just as we like to give gifts to mother and look after mother, because we know how kind mother has been to us, how kind our mother has been to us in this life, it’s not incorrect to have the same attitude towards all beings. So here is a valid reason for being kind and looking after all living beings equally, no matter how harmful they may be towards us how friendly equally, we want to help as best we can because it’s difficult. We all know when people come to us with problems we can see the problem and we can see the answer. But it’s so hard to get them to understand the answer. So we need wisdom and love and patience to gradually get to know and help those who are in need as best we can.
Having reached this step of seeing beings as mother and remembering the kindness and wishing to repay the kindness, the next step is called heartwarming love. Now, in general, when we see somebody very dear to us in this life, our mother, our father, whoever it is, we feel heartwarming love. We hear their voice, Ah, they’re coming! Or we just hear their name and we feel this warmth radiating from our heart joy and like and love wanting to be with this person, wanting them to be happy. So, now, instead of having the discrimination friend, enemy, stranger we’re judging.
Somebody comes in, we’re suspicious, are they good or bad? We listen to their accent or look at the color of their skin. We judge them and if we hear Oxford accent or a Cambridge accent and we’re from Oxford or Cambridge, instantly, Oh, Cambridge, I went to Cambridge. Friend. No matter how good or bad they are, they’ve got the right accent.
The type of clothes they wear or we’re judging people by the clothes they’re wearing. And so, are categorizing. Before they even speak, we’re categorizing their physical appearance. Their hair is messy or not too keen on that one. Anyway, I just remembered my headmaster at high school sort of impressing upon us how our appearance is all important.
But he was up against it. But now he wasn’t so wrong when I think about it. It’s true that we judge each other and we pigeonhole each other even before we open our mouths and so that’s gone out the window. Stop judging others through your prejudice, your preconceptions. Go your preconceptions.
See other beings as your mother, your dear kind mother and have this outgoing heartwarming love. So that’s this step and this is something to practice. Go down the street and look at the people in the shops and the strangers on the street and just see them as being kind. And not just you, watch mothers looking after their children, fathers looking after their kids. Look at the kindness that’s happening out there and rejoice in your universal family.
How there is so much goodness especially manifest in human society. And this is something and this is there and it’s something that can make you so happy, much more happy than going and getting a Big Mac or Coca Cola or something or going to the latest movie. Temporary and then it’s finished. But there are always people and animals and you can take so much joy in others looking after each other. The sources of happiness in our society are unlimited.
Each other! We are kind. We wouldn’t be human. To be born human we have to ripen an incredibly positive karma, virtuous karma, born out of love, created out of love and compassion. Which means that because we’re human, very close to the surface of our mind is that great state of virtue in which we died in our previous life.
If we had died in an angry or very attached or self-pitying, miserable state in our previous life, we would be an animal or we’d be a hungry ghost or we’d be in hell. But we’re not! We’re human, which means that there is so much innate goodness in human beings. Animals have got the innate goodness too, but they can’t express it so much. But every human baby is indeed precious treasure and its mind is primed with love and compassion.
Why do some people grow up very differently and agree? Because social conditions, karmic conditions, will also bring with us the seeds of hatred, the seeds of discrimination, seeds of attachment, the seeds of jealousy and pride. And so, if our environment, the nurture that we experience, it can suppress our innate love and compassion and bring up our innate selfishness, our innate anger attachment. And as I said on Tuesday, we don’t have to teach our babies to be attached to my toy. Be strongly attached to my toy and defend my toy with strong anger children who dare encroach upon their sphere of mine.
Know, it can be quite embarrassing sometimes when we see the temper tantrums and just the selfishness. Mother and father look at each other, it didn’t come from me, it didn’t come from you, it came from the previous life. Okay? And if mother and father are not in control of their emotions, if they have anger, they have attachment, jealousy, pride, baby will naturally follow their example because baby has those seeds of anger. Baby’s behavior will be influenced so much by parental behavior, by behavior of peers and others in life and it goes on throughout life.
So, what I’m saying is, I’m going back, that, look, there are so many apart from that, there is so much love and compassion that we’re born with and this is something to rejoice to each other all the time. And we don’t have to buy anything, possess anything, we don’t have to be told we’re beautiful, told we’re loved. We just have to walk down the down the street look at the beauty of humanity. Mostly we’re looking after each other. We really are.
And that’s something to be so happy about because my mothers are looking after my mothers, you know? And so, with this, now, then, the next step is great compassion because when we look in the street, it’s not all as beautiful, happily ever after as we would like to be. There is so much suffering. There is so much misery and unhappiness in human society. Even in our society, incredibly blessed society.
Every time I come back to Australia after travelling overseas I say how lucky we are, how fortunate and how ridiculous that we whinge about what we’re getting from the government and what’s going on. We are just so fortunate compared to the place I’ve lived for four years in Mongolia, a country just emerging from seventy years of totalitarian, totalitarian, harsh communist rule and the stories that I heard so terrible are now incredibly poor. Right now they’re experiencing minus forty degrees and this winter goes on and on and most of them live in felt tents. Many don’t even have that. They live in tunnels under the roads where there are central heating ducts and keeps their lives children, babies, adults, alcoholics.
It’s a terrible society. Anyway, they’ve got a lot of problems, but they’re cheerful and they get on with life. But there’s big problems. But I come back to Australia and they don’t have Social Security. The medical system is horrific.
It is so antiquated, Dangerous to go to a hospital in Mongolia. So, we’ve got everything. We’ve got it all laid out for us. So, still we have our type of suffering. Relationships can’t stay together and I don’t have to list the problems, you know the problems and the pain and the misery that exists.
So now, we’re seeing everybody as our family is so kind. This heartwarming love just becomes great compassion. How unbearable. What can I I must relieve beings of suffering the pain? So, great compassion is something to cultivate.
We consciously cultivate great compassion and become more aware of the pain and misery that is existing, not just in human life but in the hungry Ghosts or in the Hells. I mean, the Hells are real. It’s not a place where you go. You create Hell with your own mind. Just as in your nightmare, you create a fearsome, terrifying environment and experience.
Hell is created by your mind the same way. When you die, if your karma is ripening a hell type experience, when the mind separates from this body, it creates a living nightmare called hell. Just as we wake up from a nightmare, we will eventually our self created hell will cease and our personal experience, all our hallucinated demons like the demons in hell aren’t waiting there with their pitchforks ready to get. They’re hallucinations. But to the experience that they’re real.
And this is how I came to accept the possibility of other lives. When I first met the Lamas and heard about other lives, I’d just been working for about six months prior to that in a psychiatric hospital in Melbourne. The Lama describes some of the hallucinations experienced in the hungry Ghosts and the Hell Realms. I was astonished! These were identical to what some of my schizophrenic told me they were experiencing.
Identical! Even in great detail, like giant birds with iron beaks who would peck out your brains. I had a young eighteen year old boy describing had been describing this to me and he was terrified. For him, he was pursued by these demonic birds who were accusing him of all sorts of sexual misdemeanors and wanting to attack him. He eventually committed suicide.
He was so terrified. And then I heard Lama Zopa Rinpoche talking about giant birds with iron beaks who peck out your brains as one of the hell type experiences. Wow! Maybe there is such a thing. And where does it come from?
It comes from our mind. We should, if we’re going to be afraid of anything in this life, should be afraid of our mind. That’s the source of both pleasure and pain, the real source. Alright, so great compassion. So, now, when we see the reality of suffering supported by the heartwarming love and we see it in animals and we investigate, we meditate on animals whilst we’re training our mind in developing altruism.
It doesn’t happen overnight. We look, we watch animals and observe their behavior, observe their feelings and what happens. The way that even animals can be so kind to each other and look after each other, especially parent animals. So, then the next step is called very unusual special attitude. It’s the thought that because all beings have been so kind to me, it’s my responsibility to rescue them from suffering.
Just as we would have the same attitude towards our present family when they’re in trouble, we don’t just sit back and ask somebody else to help out. We automatically, naturally we do whatever we can, even put our own life at risk to help them. And so, equally, that attitude should we train our mind to have that attitude towards everybody because they are our family. So, thought, this is the thought of universal responsibility. This is the thought that goes against all that we have been habitually conditioned to do which is to cherish one, to look after number one first.
That has been based upon that wrong conception of self that I talked about in the beginning. We cherish this self image as being supreme and we really look after number one first. Even with our family, it’s number one first. And so, now this special attitude reverses that and we cherish others. You know, our problem is we cherish self more than others and we neglect others.
So now we neglect that self-cherishing thought, we abandon that self-cherishing thought and cherish others. What valid reason can we put out to say that my happiness, my freedom of suffering is more important than everybody else’s in the world? There is no reason why we are more important than anyone else or everybody else. We are all equally important. This goes back to our basis of this meditation, this equality.
So, with this sense of universal responsibility, it’s my responsibility to guide all beings out of suffering, with that the next final point is the generation of the bodhicitta, is the thought that at the moment I can’t stop my own suffering. I am still dominated by self centeredness, by anger, by attachment, by pride and jealousy. So I must become a Buddha. I must eliminate these disturbing emotions from my mind and achieve all of Buddhahood which can take months to describe the qualities of Buddha’s body and mind and their capacity to work for others is vast. So, if I really want to repay the kindness of all my other sentient beings, I’ve got to become a Buddha.
One reason is to have all of those qualities, the ability to do things for others, and secondly is to remove the obstacles in my mind which will make me an inferior guide. I have to be a perfect guide. And how do Buddhas help? By guiding. Because the problems are in our minds, the Buddhas don’t have access to our minds, but we do.
So, they guide us, teach us how we can work with our own minds. So, that’s the fundamental method for generating altruism. There are others which use this as the basis, but maybe there’s some discussion that you might have about what we’ve talked about so far. Yeah. Good question.
We can do it both ways. We can spend not just a week but maybe months generating equanimity, equilibrium, not discriminating for an enemy and stranger. And when we feel something is happening in our mind, then we start just focusing on all beings having been my mother. Not yet remembering the kindness, but just seeing this mother. Different.
Amazing how just that changes the way we relate to others by seeing others as mother. And when we start to feel that’s real This is actually the best way to do it. After weeks or months of doing that, then we really concentrate on the kindness of mothers. We use our own mother as an example and we think of the dedication she’s given towards me and we think of others also being like this. So, when we start to see others in that way, then we meditate on the thought to repay the kindness.
So we go, that’s the best way to do it, over a period of time watching our mind and to be consciously meditating on it. We can also do all seven steps in one meditation session. It’s up to the individual how we wish to practice and how we’re instructed to practice by our teachers. Now, mentioned that this is what we call bodhicitta. Bodhi means enlightenment, citta means mind.
So, this is the mind of enlightenment and we’re talking about the relative bodhicitta, this universal responsibility to rescue all beings from suffering and bring them every happiness. That attitude is the very fuel which will give us the energy to persevere on the path. It will give us the courage and the enthusiasm to go through the very difficult path of abandoning selfishness, of generating wisdom, of reaching the point where we can give our life to a starving tigress and her cubs, or even feed a few mosquitoes on our back. We can’t do that now and we shouldn’t do it now. The Buddha explicitly said, he said, Look, I did that but I was highly developed on the path.
Your human life is so precious because with this body and with this brain you have the ability to really practice strongly on the path. And you should not give up your body if you will regret it. Now, we don’t know we’re going to regret it, but we can understand what is meant by that teaching. If we generate, Oh, I shouldn’t have done that or regret it, we were not ready to sacrifice our body. So, the teaching very clearly says, slowly, slowly train your mind.
And those two examples of the mosquitoes and the tigers were real examples, true examples, but we train towards that. So, in the beginning we just stop killing mosquitoes and, you know, we use whatever methods we can to put them out the window, catch them in a glass. Unfortunately, so many times you can catch them on the edge of the glass and squash them. Job done! Trying to rescue them and let them go outside but, no, try to avoid that.
Eventually you can be compatible and maybe invite a few in and let them. That’s great! And you see their little belly filling up and it becomes red and quite big. Great practice! Give them a drink.
I mean, how much milk have you drunk from that sentient being in past lives? Tiny drop of blood. In Australia there’s not much malaria. In Queensland you might be worried about dengue fever or something, but mostly we’re okay. Well, you just have this is where we have to bring wisdom into our practice.
So we do all we can to stop mosquitoes coming into the house. Apply screens, repellents, We do what we can to avoid the harmful possible diseases according to our wisdom and we act accordingly. I had the big problem when I started this clinic in Nepal that a lot of young monks in the monastery, probably all of them, were infested with roundworms, tapeworms, you name it, all these intestinal worms. I had the medication which kills the worms. And so I went to Lama Yeshe, my teacher, and I said, Lama, what do I do?
Do I give them the medicine or not? Vow not to kill. Lama Yeshe, he explained, he said, First of all, these monks get very sick, extremely sick actually, these worm infestations. And they are very sick, they can’t study, they can’t practice, they can’t meditate. Their human life is sort of shortened and made very difficult.
So he said, It’s very important to give them, especially as they become monks, to give them every opportunity to make the best use of this life. So he said, The worms are sentient beings and they should be looked after. So he said, Give the medicine, but in your mind you must have no sense of aversion dislike towards the worms. He said he wanted me to, beforehand, to meditate as strongly as I could on compassion and love for the worms. Say mantras and so on, as strong a state of mind as I could have of kindness and compassion, and then in the light of the health of the monks, give the medicine.
So I tried to do that. It is a moral dilemma, but why do we establish morality? Because we’re conscious of karma. The essential point about karma is motivation behind the act. Now, karma means action.
What type of action? Mental action. So, if the mental action is attachment, selfishness, or anger, hatred. That’s negative karma. That is a naturally negative karma.
So, this is why Lama Yeshe said to me: What you can do is you do have the moral code of not killing, but if you genuinely generate great compassion and love the worms, you won’t be creating the negative karma of killing because you won’t have that branch in terms of a complete karma of killing. So, we need to understand karma and the intricacies of karma and the real meaning of karma. So, morality what would we say, bodhicitta and great love and compassion override the fundamental teachings of morality, which are meant to stop killing out of unskillful mind. I’ve got a story to tell you. I have a fruit tree full of yellow peaches, but I found that the fruit rats were getting at those peaches.
So I threw some rat rat sack down with my partner and then got rid of the rats and saved the peaches for myself, but feel felt in the chest awfully guilty when I saw a dead rat and a and a little baby rat. Yeah. Now in my western world, we’ve been raised to kill things that Mhmm. Are harmful. Now how do I look at that?
Because I felt very guilty about that rat and the little rat, but I still ate my peaches. Well I’m just curious as to how my mind should look at that next year. Offer the peaches to the rats. Yes. I thought you’d say that.
And rejoice that they’re having a good Or dig up the peach trees. Yeah, I mean, that’s it. We can kill out of just selfishness because we don’t want them to have it and We really have to change it. This is just in terms of not to do with altruism, in terms of karma. Now we’re under the subject of karma.
We’ve got to really look at our behavior, why we do follow what society says. You must kill these terrible flies and mosquitoes and so on. Killing isn’t necessarily the only option. I cover the tree with a net and put it at the bottom on the stem and I’m not hurting any rat. Right.
But he can’t get at the peaches. Yeah, that’s okay. Okay. Protect the tree on the back. Then little children can come over the back fence.
I was a notorious peach pincher when I was a kid. That’s what backyard peach trees are for, for little boys. Sorry, do I? Could Jesus Christ have been a Bodhisattva? Myself?
One becomes a bodhisattva when, in dependence upon this meditation, one’s total mind, one’s whole mind is completely possessed by compassion and great love and the intention to rescue all beings from suffering by becoming a Buddha. That is the definition of the entry point into the Bodhisattva’s path. And that’s when one becomes a Bodhisattva. I’m not there. Oh, Jesus Christ?
I thought it was in me! Sigmund Freud might have had something to think about. Do. I mean, Lama Yeshe, my teacher, in the early days we were the first big groups of Westerners to ever get involved with Tibetan Buddhism. And there were like thirty five or thirty six monks and nuns at Kopan.
Many lay people, Westerners would come. It was like the real meeting point of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. Every Christmas Eve we would have carols by candlelight, actually. And all the little monks from the age of six upwards had memorized the carols. Carols by candlelight.
And we do a special Chenrezig practice, the Buddha of Compassion. And then Lama Yeshe would give a talk. And he said many times that the story of Christ is a real illustration of the story of a bodhisattva, a person who had actualized this altruism. You know, he sacrificed his life for others, showing us self sacrifice is not giving up your body, your life. Self sacrifice is the destruction of the wrong conception of self, which is the root of all trouble.
That’s the profound teaching that I interpret that Christ taught. We can’t I believe that he died for my sins. Uh-uh. He died in order to show us how we can purify how we must purify our sins through generating wisdom seeing reality of self and not being angry and generating great love and compassion. So I interpret self sacrifice in that way, destroying the wrong conception of self.
Yeah, when you read, of course, there’s so many parallels between his teachings and his behaviour and the bodhisattvas’ path. So, I think so. Buddhas appear or bodhisattvas A bodhisattva can be a Buddha or can be a person with this bodhicitta who has the power to be reborn in any situation where he can help his mothers. And so, any society, he can only help according to their belief system. Buddhism says there’s no created God, but if Christ had said that he would have been crucified a lot quicker.
So he couldn’t. So there’s no fault in believing. The system, a created God and the Ten Commandments is a valid basis for morality. And this is the key: morality and ethical conduct is the foundation of the entire path. Without an ethical basis for your ethical behavior, you won’t get anywhere.
You will be selfish. You will fall victim to your uncontrolled anger, attachment, jealousy, pride and so on. So, indeed, I think that Jesus Christ was a bodhisattva and teaching according to the capacity and had such a big influence in the world. I wasn’t brought up with any religion and you hear the stories of the Crusades and the terrible inquisitions and like the terrible history of religion in our culture. But that’s not Christianity.
That is individuals misinterpreting or using the basic fundamental teachings for their own selfishness, own greed, their own hatred just as the Muslim terrorists are totally distorting the reality of the teachings for their completely misconceived ideas. I’ve become much more tolerant. I was very anti Christianity because it was the way to be in the sixties, anti religion. It certainly nearly bounced off Buddhism before I could get into it. Anyway.
I was wondering whether you’ve had any heroes in your life or have now or do you have to Heroes? Yeah, get rid of those Oh, Daryl Baldock. Those who don’t know, he was the captain of St Kilda when they won only one Premiership. Their happiness, their joy, their lack of anger, their lack of selfishness, their wisdom. I sat through a whole month of the teachings of meditation, I didn’t become a Buddhist. But I think it was their personal demeanor that kept me there.
I travelled afterwards and did a lot of thinking and eventually came back to them. So they’re indeed heroes. His Holiness the Dalai Lama I’ve met several times, he too. And the Lama’s teachers. So, really there are beings who demonstrate bodhicitta.
There really are. And if you have a great fortune to meet them here in Adelaide, you’ve got Geshe Kelsang Rinpoche, you’ve got Geshe la here in Buddha house. These are special beings and it’s so rare to meet them. Sogyal Rinpoche visits occasion. There’s certainly many Now, I’m always mentioning Lamas.
Well, I am because I have great respect for not just the theory but the practice that I’ve witnessed. My father, he was Jewish and he had trained in a synagogue in St Kilda, that’s why we all barrack for St Kilda of course. In my family you have to barrack for St Kilda. He had done the rabbinical training and could have become a rabbi but he married out, so he’s ostracized. But he met Lama Yeshe and he said the two greatest heroes in his life the most impressive, shouldn’t say hero, but he said the greatest men were the rabbi who was his teacher in the synagogue and Lama Yeshe.
He never became a Buddhist and he never really accepted me becoming a monk, but he still saw Lama Yeshe as phenomenal person, outstanding person. That was nice for him to say that. Will you be able to share with us any sort of, I will call as, in our terms, supernatural supernatural experience in terms of, say, incarnation that or any of those things that you have written or Right. I haven’t personally experienced anything beyond what I can rationalize as a scientist. You know, I’m still very much a scientist.
And this isn’t reincarnation, but my older brother who went to Nepal before me and became a Buddhist and met the Lamas, he once offered his country house to Lama Zopa Rinpoche to do a meditation retreat. Every day his wife would take flowers and food to Lama Zopa, doing a lot of good. My brother, very keen on the horses, racing. And so he was staying in Melbourne, their house in Melbourne, during the time that Lama Zopa was in retreat, my brother had started to dream on a Friday night of a horse race being called and he heard the place getters in the race. He woke up Saturday morning and said, Maggie, his wife, Quick, get the age and check out this race!
He heard the number of the race, although he’d never heard the names of those horses before. So he looked at think it was the eighth race that the horses weren’t running and they sort of forgot about it. But about lunchtime his wife looked at the races in Sydney and in the eighth race the three dream horses were running, the names which he’d never heard before. So he ran down to the TAB and the two place getters in the dream had been scratched. They weren’t running.
But the dream winner was still running, so he backed it and it won. And the same thing happened the next Saturday morning and the dream winner won again. My brother was a bit freaked out. Anyway, the story got up to Lama Zopa and Lama Zopa said, Yes, yes. Now how much did he win?
Roger, his intention, said, Oh, so many hundred but not a lot! Because my brother was freaked out. He just couldn’t believe it, but he still did back it. When Lama Zopa overheard it was only a few hundred dollars, he shook his head and said, He hasn’t got much faith. And when I heard the story, I mean, I was in Sydney at Vajrayāna Institute in Sydney at that time and I said, I’ve got faith!
I would have put more money on it. But I didn’t hear the story until after the dream stopped. That’s the closest metaphysical experience I’ve had. Lama Yeshe died, he had cardiac disease and rheumatic cardiac disease, and he died quite young, you know, in his fifties. And his reincarnation was recognized by Lama Zopa and His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a young Spanish boy.
And I didn’t get to meet him until he was about six years old. I was at our center in Taiwan, in Taipei, he came to visit. And so I was skeptical as my normal approach. And this young lad came off the plane, came straight up to me and was very close and during the two or three weeks he was with us in Taipei, I became convinced that this was Lama Yeshe’s mind in this body. What he said, his mannerisms, were not an ordinary six year old boy.
And it was so much like Lama Yeshe, was just incredible. And the way he related to other people took total command of the center and visitors came to see him. It was wonderful. And I had and still have no doubt that indeed this is my teacher’s mind in this little boy then. Now he’s an adult.
So, that’s my mental experience. What’s he doing now? You said he was doing interesting things. Yeah, he never became a full monk. He received sort of novice vows and he went to the monastery in South India, learned fluent Tibetan.
He speaks four languages, so Spanish, English, Tibetan and Hindi and had, I don’t know how many years, maybe ten, twelve years of education in the monastery. Then he decided to go back to Spain. He had some pretty hard times. At the monastery in South India, there are five thousand young monks and they’re young boys, and they give each other a hard time. He had a hard time.
So, he went back to Spain and he wrote this really nice letter to us all and he said, I’m not going to be a great lama sitting on the throne and teaching. I want to teach Dharma through audiovisual methods and be a layperson. He studied Before that he went to Switzerland where gained a degree in philosophy and psychology Western philosophy and psychology. Then he went back down to Spain and he did a course in filmmaking, and he’s now a graduate film director. He’s made a film and this is his way he wants to communicate the Dharma through documentary film and through artistic film and music.
Fascinating. Being monks and nuns, it’s hard. I mean, I’ve dedicated my life to try and help establish Western monasticism in the Tibetan tradition. But we’re up against it. Most monks and nuns have disrobed and it’s very hard in our society to But, you know, we’ll keep trying.
Keep trying. I’ll keep trying anyway and see what happens. I can’t tell the future but we certainly receive encouragement from the Lamas to hang in there, but it’s up to us. In the early days I used to ask every high lama I met including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Will monasticism ever be established in the West? Will the monks and nuns get it together?
And the universal answer I received from them all was, We’ll see. And I understood from that that it’s up to us. It’s up to us Westerners to maintain the tradition of monasticism. You don’t need to be a monk or nun to practice the path and become a Buddha. But we do need monks and nuns to live the life of uninterrupted study and meditation and teaching to preserve the teachings in society.
So it’s up to us. Alright, so look, thank you very much for your attention tonight. Sorry we’ve run out of time but it’s been a great pleasure to accept the invitation of George and Helen Muñoz, the director and the office manager of Buddha House, and all the people of Buddha House who have been so kind and helpful in inviting me here. I’m heading back to Victoria tomorrow, back to the monastery that I’m trying to get off the ground. It’s been a great pleasure to meet you all, and I’m sure I’ll meet you again sometime, somewhere.
And thanks for being my mother in past lives. I would just like to give a special thanks to Karla for being our wise nurturing mother tonight and, you know, passing on on the teaching for clarity. And he’s been teaching for the past fortnight here, and we’ll have a copy of the recordings of people that wanna leave their their their details. As he just mentioned, he is actually trying to establish a monastery, which is the first under FPMT. And these recordings, you know, we’re hoping people might The worst one!
So we’ve been very fortunate to have him. Thank you very much. Thanks George. Oh no, not necessary. That’s only for high lamas.
No, just Tibetan culture, not Australian culture.