Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 145-minute session, Venerable Thubten Gyatso reflects on his completed three-year retreat at Kangaroo Island and offers practical guidance on meditation and daily practice. He frames the session as a discussion rather than a lecture, beginning with nine-round breathing meditation to calm the mind before exploring why we meditate—moving from seeking peace in this life to understanding rebirth, karma, and the ultimate goal of enlightenment. Gyatso walks through the real obstacles practitioners face: laziness, drowsiness, and a scattered mind, offering concrete techniques like keeping sessions short and strong, meditating on an empty stomach, and practicing daily mindfulness from the moment you wake. He discusses purification practices such as Vajrasattva and the two essential prerequisites for retreat: clearing negative karma and accumulating positive potential. Woven throughout are stories from his thirty years as a monk, his experiences with teachers Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and his own discoveries about gardening, motivation, and faith. The talk emphasizes that every human carries deep compassion and capacity for enlightenment, and that even modest daily meditation—combined with right motivation and continuity—can transform the mind. Pitched at both newcomers seeking peace and serious practitioners considering retreat.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 The Value of Retreat.mp3
UUID: fe945da7-03b3-4ebc-8beb-313497e2312e
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Misc teachings (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 145.3 minutes
Words: ~14,858
Welcome everybody and especially welcome to here who’s given us his time. This is the start of Buddha House. I think I heard him say at lunch, he mentioned the hippie times. And if you talk to some of those people who were at the start of Buddha House, it was around those hippie times that seem like they’re they’re well in the past, but seem to have stories which are very inspiring to us these days as well. Venerable Gyatso has just completed a three year retreat at Kangaroo Island at Dai Tong Ling after thirty years in France. Yeah, thirty years, yeah.
So from three years, but from thirty years experience, we’re in a great position here to gain an enormous amount of wisdom that can help us as young practitioners, young students in looking at where we may go and how we may live our lives. So I don’t wish to say any more than that except to say thank you so much for being here. We do appreciate it greatly and we look forward to our interchange with you Thank you, thank you you also for coming, giving up your Sunday afternoon. I guess many of you would be out celebrating St Kilda’s victory last night over over Collingwood. It’s a funny thing about being a follower of St Kilda, it’s a bit like a person who’s addicted to playing lotto.
You always think next week I’ll win, you know. This week I didn’t win, but next week for sure. Following St Kilda for more than thirty years, all my life I think, it’s always been next year, next year, they’ll win, and so having been out of touch with the world, and that’s what gives you your high, you know, thinking wow, if they win the grand final is so great, and so with three years not getting any news, my mind would play with the fact maybe they’ve won three premierships in a row. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, but it was good thinking about it, like winning lotto. Those are the things that we do that I did during my retreat, so I’m not sure if I have any wisdom to share with you on what you should do in retreat, but I think I’ve learned a lot to tell you what you shouldn’t do in retreat from my own experience.
Yeah, so and also I only finished a couple of weeks ago, so I haven’t seen so many people for a long time, and we’ll see how it goes, but I seem to have found my voice again. When you only talk to kangaroos and wallabies and the birds, and it’s a one way conversation, and it’s nice. Well, think actually that the kangaroos could understand. They’re quite interesting animals. I’ve become a watcher of the wildlife and an observer of their behavior.
Very interesting. But it’s great to be able to really communicate and you’re most welcome to ask, you know, at any time. Some questions have come up, I have a general idea, general outline, but it’s not a lecture, it’s more of a discussion. So, I would like to begin with us meditating together to try and let our minds calm down from the busyness of our daily lives, and so I’m sure you’ve all had instruction on breathing breathing meditation of one form or another, so if you have your own meditation of watching the breath, I would do that for maybe five minutes, or if you haven’t, simply focus your mind on the coming and going of the breath. The nine round breathing meditation is imagine that as you breathe in you just concentrate on your left nostril, on the air, imagine it coming in the left nostril going down to your lungs and then going imagine it’s going out through your right nostril, and you do this three times breathing in through left nostril, out through the right nostril three times, then switch over to breathing in through the right nostril and out through the left nostril three times, so you’re concentrating on the flow of the breath, the sensation or if you’ve learned a visualization you can do that, but generally just the sensation, the air coming in the right nostril out through the left three times, and then then the third section or the third group is the air coming in imagine focus on the air coming in both nostrils and then going out through both nostrils three times and then go back again to the beginning in through the left and out through the right.
Okay, so that’s the simple breathing meditation that is taught in our tradition to begin most meditation practices to initially subdue the mind to do the breathing meditation for a few minutes, so we’ll do that. So sit So comfortably but as much as you can with your back straight and then when you when you feel ready then you know consciously begin to say now I’m starting in through the left and out through the right and continue on with the nine rounds. Now remain in the meditation posture and turn your mind towards the purpose for being here, the purpose for participating in this Dharma discussion. Participating in this Dharma discussion by thinking that I’ve lived most of my life seeking happiness, trying to avoid unhappiness and pain, by trying to organize the world, the people around me, my career, my possessions, my my holidays, and so on. I’ve been like everybody else in the world, I’ve been convinced that this is the path to happiness and freedom from suffering by organizing the external world.
But the reality is that no matter how good the circumstances are in the outside world, if the inner mind is not at peace, then I cannot be happy. Even if I’m surrounded by a circle of loving friends giving the the love and kindness that I’ve always wanted, if there is inner agitation, if my mind is disturbed by self pity, preoccupation with me, my problems, or if we’re disturbed by anger, or longing desire for the objects of pleasure that we cannot obtain, then the love of others has no effect. It cannot ease my inner torment. No matter how much I resort to alcohol, antidepressants, anti anxieties or other drugs, the relief is very temporary, not lasting, and does not get at the root of the problem. The only method to cut the root of problems experience, and myself being a problem to others, is for me to gain control of my mind.
I must subdue and eventually eliminate disturbing emotions of anger, attachment, pride, jealousy, greed, and so on. That all arise from the self-grasping ignorance that I was born with, that I inherited from past lives, and which has been my principal enemy since beginningless time, and will continue to cause me harm forever into the future unless it is destroyed by the wisdom seeing reality. The only achievement that is worthwhile in life is internal. It’s not measured by my bank balance, by the pretty possessions that I decorate my own house with or my own body with, by the circle of influential friends, by a high reputation, even by kind words from others, were loved, liked, those external sources of pleasure are not the real measure of a successful life. The measure is how much I’m able to subdue my selfishness, my anger, my attachment and so on.
And replace the self centered or the self oriented way of life to a way of life directed to the happiness and welfare of others, to replace self-cherishing with other cherishing, to see others’ needs as more important than my own, and this inner method is what the Buddha taught, especially in the teachings which show the path, the Bodhisattva’s path to full enlightenment, the very rare teachings of bodhicitta, and to acquire the the great compassion and the wisdom that sees reality, I must gain perfect single pointed concentration, and to achieve perfect concentration, I must live within the morality of abstaining from harm from harming others. Therefore I’m going to participate in this Dharma discussion to learn more, to gain inspiration, to transform my mind into the mind of a Buddha. No matter if it takes one, two, three, a thousand, ten thousand lifetimes, lifetimes. This is the only sensible thing to do in the entire universe, not to mention our own society, our own group of friends so in your heart as much as you can, feel the equality of yourself and all others, all humans, all animals, all birds, all living beings, like ourselves, are desperately seeking freedom from suffering, and happiness, seeking happiness, relief from the turmoil of the world and of their own minds.
So feel very much in your heart how we’re all equal in this way. Everybody is a mother, or a father, or a husband, or a wife, or everybody relates to other people with kindness, helping, supporting, even when their worlds fall apart, and they are overwhelmed by anger, and they hurt others, They are like children, out of control and objects of compassion rather than our own anger. We must always see that, that the harmful beings in the world, and there are many, are objects of compassion, not of anger. So try as much as you can to generate the thought of bodhicitta. I must achieve Buddhahood in order to gain perfect qualification to guide all mother sentient beings out of suffering, and therefore I’m going to participate in the Dharma discussion.
All right, so within the motivation then comes the reason for why we want to meditate. Why should we meditate? Why do I want to meditate? And There’s no fault in thinking I want to meditate in order to be happy in this life as a beginning, because we are not really deeply aware of the reality of reincarnation. We have lived our lives just thinking about this life, even if we have a religious background where we’ve been taught about possibility of going to heaven or hell according to our actions, we may acknowledge that and think about it but we don’t really believe in it.
It does not really influence the way we relate to others in this life and we can’t even in many ways we can’t see the significance of preparing for life after death, mean I’m assuming you’re similar to me, I didn’t have any religious background, but I was aware of what people thought or think about what happens after death, and my attitude was what? Well, I’ll deal with it when it comes, when it happens. At the moment I’m too busy to think about death, and anyway I’m not going to die for a long time, and it’s way off there in the future, and I’ll deal about, I’ll deal with it later. So of course we know from the Buddhist teachings that this belief in that I’m not going to die yet, others might die but not me, I’ve got too much to do, is a big mistake. People die at every age and without warning very often, suddenly it comes and it’s too late to prepare when we are faced with death, even if it’s not sudden death, then if it’s a death through a painful debilitating illness, the physical discomfort makes it very very difficult to subdue our minds, to train our mind in loving kindness and compassion and wisdom.
It’s not a very wise thing to put off thinking about death and to put off doing something about our own death until later, but we do, is my point, that we do do that, and we get swept up in the everyday life, and we still have also the other belief we have is that we can be happy, that happiness is derived from possessions, from partners, your people in our life, from families, from a good job and from reputation and so on and so on, career, it comes at us from every direction, this insistence that we must be happy here and now, and so if we hear about meditation, we don’t initially, we don’t think beyond this life, we think of this life, oh I need to meditate, I’ve got to do something. I have tried all those things, the alcohol, the drugs, the countless distractions that we distract ourselves with, and it’s not working, it’s not working, my husband or my wife or children are turning against me, you know, that sort of people and even the objects that we spend so much money for end up in the attic and are not providing me with the happiness that I thought I would extract from them and so on.
So I don’t know how many people have come here today with that thought that I just want peace and happiness. Give me a break, I need a break. I’ll try to see what the Buddhists have got. You know, we’ve been to the Hare Krishnas and we’ve been here and there. Anyway, that is is that’s okay.
We won’t throw you out. Even though the emphasis within the Buddha’s teachings is beyond this life, I mean, there are three purposes which are considered really valid purposes for meditating, and you know the minimal validity is to avoid being reborn in a terrible place and to be reborn somewhere pleasant. And then the middling valid purpose for meditating is if we are so for that first one we have to be convinced of reincarnation and we might say, oh yeah, I believe in reincarnation, sure, but that’s not enough really to to have a deep inner feeling to know the real impact of rebirth that this is just one life in beginning of stream of lives and potentially endless streams of lives within the wheel of life, to be able to have the full impact impact of what rebirth is, that’s not easy, that’s difficult. Actually it takes a lot of reflecting about the meaning of that, and you see that the lie that comes out when we think oh I believe in reincarnation, reincarnation, the lie is that our belief is so superficial, because the way we live is stupid. It is not preparing for the future life, it’s just worrying about this life.
So with deep understanding of future lives, then we can gain the recognition of how important it is. Sure, there’s a chance that we can become and we can achieve nirvana or liberation in this life, or we can achieve Buddhahood in this life, but the odds are against us. It’s it’s not so easy. I say it’s possible, but there’s a reasonable chance that we’re going to have to be reborn again and again. So, we’ve got to ensure that in our next life we gain the best opportunity to continue our practice.
So we begin our meditation practice, our Dharma practice, with that thought that it can take so many lifetimes, it will take so many lifetimes to achieve my goals and so then for the start I’ve got to have it, I’ve got to ensure that I’m not reborn as a kangaroo on Kangaroo Island, know, or even worse a possum, okay. Yeah, I travel with possums. The possum that inhabited my garden, I called him Osama bin possum the garden terrorist. So that’s the first thing that you don’t do when you do a meditation retreat. You don’t start a garden.
At least if you’re in Australia, you know, or New Zealand because we’ve exported possums to New Zealand, haven’t we? I thought during retreat that was one of Australia’s greatest mistakes was to send possums to New Zealand. Instead of sending a few we should have sent the whole lot, but then I thought that’s not very kind, especially if there are any Kiwis in the audience. So, we don’t want to be reborn as a possum or a kangaroo. We can’t do much in terms of training our minds.
So that is from the Buddhist point of view that’s the first really valid purpose for meditating is to to ensure that or try to ensure that one has a better rebirth where one can continue one’s practice, or one can achieve liberation, nirvana, or the best goal is to achieve Buddhahood. So these are the three purposes, but coming back to what I began with, seeking some relief, some peace in this life is still worthwhile, still worthwhile, can do, can do through meditation. And in fact, by doing this, you know, one can doubt, one must doubt reincarnation, reincarnation, but you know that the two types of doubt, can doubt can be a great obstacle if we sort of think something might be true but unimportant, I don’t want to investigate it anymore, or the other doubt is that the more positive one is I’m not sure about reincarnation but I’ll check out. So, if we meditate in order to at least make the mind peaceful in this life, then that will give us the opportunity, it will open up our mind to be aware of, to think about reincarnation and to gain more clarity as to whether it’s true or not, and this really is a big, I think it’s for us coming from a Western background, to be completely sure about not only about reincarnation but about karma, this thing that’s in our minds, you know, echoes of our past actions, good and bad actions, reflecting upon us each moment in life as good or bad experiences, you know, which is karma, we need to meditate and make the mind peaceful and to reflect upon that too, also is the means by which we can gain strong understanding of both karma and reincarnation which in turn will infuse our minds to meditate more and to study more, to receive more teachings, to read and to discuss and so on.
So, just the mere thought to try and make my mind peaceful through meditation opens up the potential, our possibility to venture into the more distantly related motivations that come in the Buddha’s teachings. So, this discussion is why meditate? And also coming up in the motivation, the answer to that question is that our real problems arise internally, not only from our disturbing emotions of selfishness, anger, attachment and so on, but from these very karmic ripenings themselves which we’re not aware of, and that’s and that becomes even more scary when we reflect on the possibility of past lives that we’re not born with a clean slate, you know, our mind is not innocent. Babes are not born innocent. We bring with us this inheritance from past lives, not from our mother or father, but from our own past lives, our own actions in the past, and some of these karmic imprints are beneficial, can bring happy experiences, some are not so beneficial and they can bring unhappy experiences, and we’ve all seen or we’ve experienced ourselves, you know, people or young children whose lives are apparently good, and then terrible things unexpectedly happen.
From Buddhist point of view there’s no such thing as pure chance in the things we experience, the happiness, the unhappiness we experience. There is always a distant cause for the experience of pleasure or pain, happiness or unhappiness, and that is karma. So we have this vast accumulation of unripened karmic impressions from past lives and we don’t know when the axe is going to fall on our head, and so there is an urgency, there is a great urgency to use our lives skillfully and not to create more karma, more negative karma through, you know, to waste this life through self indulgence. My teacher Lama Thubten Yeshe used to say self pity mind, which becomes so overwhelming that we cannot see what’s happening to others. We’re so taken up with our own problems, our own unhappiness, that we lose the capacity to be compassionate and to see the suffering and to have the intention to help ease the suffering of others.
I’m talking in a general way. I’m not saying that we’re always always like this, in fact, I mean to be human, to be born as a human being requires the ripening. In our previous life we must have died with a very virtuous positive constructive state of mind, which nurtured the karmic impressions to be born human. So the very fact that we are human indicates that we have unimaginably powerful positive constructive karmic ripening, not only for this birth to happen. So karma doesn’t only ripen in terms of the rebirth, but also the second aspect of karma we call, you know, completing karma, the karmic impressions continually ripened throughout life.
So each of us, each human being has close to the surface fundamentally morality, you know, not harming others, which is one of the main karmic causes to be born as a human being, positive energy which comes through not harming others, and not harming others means compassion. I mean, in order to not harm but help others, we have been compassionate and loving, which is why we’re here. Therefore, and this is I haven’t heard a Lama say this, this is just something that came to me during retreat, that every single human being must have very close to the surface of their mind a great deal of love and compassion and it does come out, I really, mostly as His Holiness the Dalai Lama says many times, mostly humans do good things to each other. You don’t read about in the newspapers, you only read about the bad things, but His Holiness has said that this is because the good things are so common that they’re not news. It’s the bad things which are news because they’re quite rare, but when we read a newspaper we think, what an awful world, you know, I’m so depressed.
Newspapers after three years is an interesting experience, but it’s not as bad as I thought actually. I’ve I’ve missed maybe the the very bad things that may have happened in the last three years. And of course St Kilda didn’t win a premiership, was the worst news. Anyway, So when we hear the teaching, there’s all these Buddhists that are so pessimistic and so dark, they always talk about how bad we are and doing awful things to each other’. It’s not like that, but for each of us we have to become aware of our own minds.
Mean, if I want to meditate, the real reason, we’ve got to have courage. We’ve got to give courage to face up to our own minds and that’s not easy. When start meditating, it’s taking the lid off the garbage bin and it all comes up. Again, the lamas didn’t really prepare me for this. I mean, I’ve done other retreats but only three months, which may sound long to you, but to me it’s nothing, three months and then that happens too, that you relive your lives and you have the, you remember the good times and you remember the bad times, but in retreat you can’t suppress the bad memories, you’ve got to be honest and you’ve got to face up to it and we have to admit that we have not been as skillful as we could have been in our lives.
I mean there are so many times I felt I’ve got to write a letter of apology to people I’ve hurt out of my selfishness. But, well, not an excuse, but letter writing was not allowed, I didn’t allow it myself, but we can meditate. Meditation is not just concentrating, you know, on one thing blocking everything out. I mean, gaining good concentration is just one aspect of meditation, but really meditation is mindfulness and mindfulness is watching our mind, keeping awareness of what’s coming up, what am I thinking, why am I doing this, why am I saying this? These words and really Is it judgmental?
Yeah, I think it’s judgmental. Can judge it as good or bad in terms of is it going to hurt the other person or deprive another person of happiness, you know, we may not be motivated to hurt them, but we may be motivated to deprive them of happiness. And or it may just be self indulgence, but every action we do there is an inner purpose, an inner motivation which we tend to ignore, we’re just either a knee jerk reaction to events in life or we just pay no attention, we’re so totally out there, we have no space to be in here and sometimes we’re even afraid to look in here, but we have to change that attitude and so mindfulness in all actions, this is meditation. Mean mindfulness is cultivated during, you know, formal sitting as well, so mindfulness, awareness, about, you know, focusing, holding our mind, but in particular on a positive purpose. Like the Lamas teach, the first thing we should do every day, not when we sit down formally, not only when we sit down formally, but when we wake up.
It’s so important to cultivate the motivation for the day. What am I going to do today? I’m going to try as much as I can to be a loving, compassionate, wise person. Good. You know, how many is how many of us thought that this morning when we woke up?
I’m gonna I know how lucky am I? Didn’t die last night. Today I’m going to train myself in loving kindness and compassion and in wisdom. See, I didn’t think of it this morning. I just thought of the cup of tea or something or today great, I’m going to have a nice lunch at Buddha House, you know, I think I probably thought about St Kilda beating Collingwood.
I confess I did watch most of it. Anyway, it shows how quickly one slips back. So, that becomes the object of our motivation. That’s what we’re thinking about. Our positive attitude first thing of the day, and then to retain that all day.
I’m going be loving, I’m to be kind, I’m not going be selfish, I’m not going to get angry for sure. I’m going to meet uncle so and so or auntie so and so who I’ve got trouble with, but I’m not going to let them under my skin so that the old arguments explode again, you know, those horrible situations we have with either relatives or with the people at work, now we’ve all got people we would rather avoid than meet, so we well, if it’s impossible for for us to restrain our irritation, then maybe it’s quite good to avoid meeting them, but we prepare ourselves, this morning motivation prepares ourselves for expected and the unexpected events that are going to happen during the day, and so mindfulness keeps that flame of positive energy alive throughout the day, and this is meditation. This is real living acting meditation for sure, watching your mind, and then in every little situation, driving you know, so easy to slip into road rage, maybe not as violent as the things we we read about, but it happens. A dear friend of my family who who lived in Sydney and Sydney is the the drivers on Sydney roads are notorious for their bad manners.
Well, just their way of driving. We we were driving somewhere. He was driving his little Volkswagen and somebody cut him off and he wasn’t Buddhist, he’s a really good Roman Catholic, one who all of his jokes were always against Catholics, but he and his wife were the best real, I had so much admiration for him. So he didn’t get beep the horn at this person who cut him off and he sort of looked at me and said, I have to express my protest. But he wasn’t angry.
So, you know, we can maybe express our protest but not get angry, and that’s through mindfulness. You know, when the sudden unexpected thing happens where we would have a habitual negative action through being mindful, watching our mind, I’ve got to avoid that, I’ve got to retain positive, So throughout the day, so we reflect again and again on the motivation that we woke up with, and then in the evening before we go to sleep, again we reflect on how we did during the day, where we blew it, where we did well, we congratulate ourselves for where we did well, and we we criticize ourselves for where we blew it and went did badly, and we think right tomorrow I’ll try and avoid repeating mistakes and do it right and then over time. So that’s that is meditation in daily life and that is enhanced, the power of mindfulness is enhanced if we do formal meditation sitting concentrating on the breath beginning, or if you’ve we really need a teacher, you know, we need somebody to instruct, to give us instructions on how to meditate, especially the visualization meditations where we we try to train our mind in patience, train our mind in loving kindness, train our mind in compassion, so you know that often we receive so many teachings from the lamas on the graduated path to enlightenment, how to train our mind, the purpose of those teachings is not intellectual, it’s not just to have have the knowledge, the intellectual knowledge, the purpose is to give us something to meditate on formally sitting.
It’s not to reflect on somebody else’s anger. You know, we come here and the Lama teaches great teaching on anger and how to overcome it and so on, and we immediately go home and we tell some family member, you’ve got a problem with anger, why don’t you do this and that? It’s the path is internal, you know, it’s personal. The lamas cannot get into our mind and transplant their wisdom into ours, they can’t lift us out of the wheel of life. No matter how much faith we’ve got, that’s not enough.
The Buddhas themselves cannot rescue us from suffering. The Buddhas don’t have that capacity to get into our minds and change our minds from destructive negative emotions to constructive positive emotions. The only person who can do it is our self. We have to take that responsibility. And so when we come here and we hear the lamas teaching, we’ve got to think right now I have to internalize these teachings in my meditation, so important, not get it down on the book or the computer and see how pretty it is out there or just intellectualize but to internalize it and so there we have the deeper purpose and method of meditation.
And then the concentration meditation, well, I mean this helps everything, but to really cut the root of our sufferings, we have to eradicate the self-cherishing ignorance or the self grasping ignorance, this innate mental habit of strongly imagining me as being an independent authority who is behind the experiences of life, you know, who is guiding the body to do things, guiding the mouth to say things, who is experiencing, you know, when people talk about me, there’s, you know, we all have this innate sense of this me who exists in my own right as the one who’s being spoken about. Either pleasant or unpleasant words coming, they’re saying nice things about me and we flush with or bad things about me, and we flush with anger, or self pity, you know, this self centeredness. So, that Buddha explained, that idea, that conception of this conception of this I who’s in control is is mistaken, that there is no concrete self existing I at all who’s running the show. Running the show? Well, who is running the show?
Is God running my show? Is Buddha running my show? No. Am I totally out of control? Am I a random phenomenon experiencing the ups and downs of life?
No. We’re not randomly operating phenomena. There is something something which decides what to do. What is it? What is it?
Actually, I think this is right. It’s knowledge. In the mind. Our bodies are so clever. Mean, you know, doctors take a lot of credit for healing people, but actually I know it’s the bodies which heal themselves, the doctors are just temporary conditions.
Bodies are so clever. Now there is no I or person of the body which decides to get better, bodies are marvelously exist in a self healing capacity. Now our minds also without a person in charge, mind itself has a self healing capacity, and this capacity from my understanding, this is again this is not something I’ve heard from lamas, well maybe indirectly, but it’s based upon the positive attitudes of knowledge or wisdom and compassion. Compassion, the best compassion is spontaneous. It’s like, you know, if the well, this interaction of body and mind, if the foot’s cut, the hand looks after the foot without automatically the hand will stop the bleeding, put on a bandage or whatever, whatever is needed, just spontaneously.
Mentally, if we have the wisdom, if we have the knowledge, if we have the compassion, then without thinking I am helping this person, spontaneity of love and compassion born from wisdom, this is what is either in control or not in control of our lives. So, anger and jealousy and attachments on the destructive emotions are also in charge at times, but they’re not the person. So this organism of body and mind, particularly we’re interested in the mind that we call me, has a degree of control or uncontroll depending upon what’s stronger: wisdom, compassion, love or anger selfishness, attachment and so on. And this organism moves towards pleasure pleasure or towards pain according to which of the mental attitudes is manifest and directing the behavior of our human organism. Organism.
Right? So there’s no controller. Our conviction that I’m in charge, I will decide to be happy or unhappy, actually there is no I back there doing it. It’s ‘s whatever wisdom we have in terms of positive actions or it’s whatever anger and so on in terms of negative actions which is in charge. So it’s our choice.
Whose choice? It’s wisdom’s choice whether we want to follow the destructive path or the constructive path. Comprehend if you’re with it? So how do we do that? My mind is so scattered, I get irritated so easily, you know, or I get attached so easily, but I know what you’re saying but this person is so beautiful, I’ve got to live with this person, I can’t be happy without this person.
You know, we’ve built up that belief through desire and attachment. And that rules our life. And if this person rejects us, we commit suicide. What are we trying to kill? We’re trying to kill our mind.
We’re trying to block off this poor me, this poor me and it’s so sad, you know, as Buddha said, this poor me that we’re trying to kill because it’s hurting so much doesn’t even exist. It is just a figment of our imagination and Suicide is not going to help because we take our confusion with us, as it’s the mind that goes from life to life, so we’re born with that garbage again. That’s why we must meditate. We must use our wisdom as the motivating force to undergo in a transformation. Now, from the very beginning actually in the Tibetan tradition, see Dharma has been in Tibet for such a long time, and the system of practice has become very, well, became very systematized and mostly the practice happened in monastic institutions, not so much the lay people.
The lay people were given more to devotional actions which were valid, but they just sort of, I mean, and they also have strong belief in rebirth and so on, and so tended to orient their lives towards future life, but still being mostly being herdsmen like in Mongolia, mostly herders. I spent nearly four years in Mongolia where despite seventy years of communist rule where the Mongolians, can say the Mongolians suffered more than the Tibetans in terms of both personal pain and destruction of their culture, but still despite those seventy years of, you know, communist suppression, now Mongolia is an independent, well it has always been an independent country, but initially like a puppet state under the control of Stalin who was insane, but still the herders and their faith in Dharma, in Buddhism has not been lost. In fact, I said many times when I was in Mongolia that the Mongolians know nothing about Buddhism, whereas Western Western Buddhists have learned a lot intellectually, but the Mongolians faith is so much more strong, so much stronger than the faith of Westerners, Western Buddhists. Western Buddhists. When I traveled in the countryside and people saw the robes, it didn’t matter that I was an Australian, they didn’t inquire about my background, I could have been anyway, but just the robes, so much devotion was manifest, but the point of this story in Tibet and Mongolia is being a herdsman, they still live by killing animals, and they have to.
Know, seven months of the year there’s snow and everywhere and anyway, the Mongolians are not into growing vegetables or grains. That’s something that the people in the south do, Chinese, they grow vegetables and so the Mongolians import their vegetables if they can afford them. So unfortunately the animals, they eat the animals and they have methods of killing the animals which are said to be, you know, I’m sure there’s some kindness, but they still do it. Actually I’ve forgotten why I started this, but I’m talking about our personal lives. There are so many things that we have to do in relation to others, to other sentient beings, to other family members and so on.
So, we cannot change radically, most of us anyway, we have to gradually incorporate this wisdom into our behavior and our lifestyle, again to the degree which wisdom sees fit. So it always comes back upon personal responsibility, personal understanding of how others are relating to me, how what I do can be beneficial or not beneficial for their minds and we can’t just always go to the Lamas, Oh Lama, I’ve got this problem, what do I do? You know. I think Lama Yeshe’s most common thing we would say to people was, Use your own wisdom dear. Called everybody dear.
So we have to have the courage to take the responsibility to change our mind and there again is meditation. Alright. Oh yeah, I remember. So I was saying that to start meditation, we’ve got lots of obstacles in our mind, we have emotions, disturbing emotions ripening, and you know when you sit down the lid comes off the garbage bin, everything comes out, and and then there are the unknown energies of karma ripening. So in order to do something constructive we have to the first two things to do are to purify obstacles to training the mind and to accumulate the positive potential, as my friend Alex Berzin calls it, just call it merit, accumulate merit, the positive energy to be able to meditate, to be able to study, to be able to hear the teachings.
We need the cause and that cause is is the positive karmic potential in our minds. So karma, I mean it’s not all bad, we need karma in the beginning, we need positive karma in order to be able to create the conditions where we can listen and study and meditate and gradually emerge from the wheel of life. Eventually we want to cut karma, we want to destroy karma, but we need it in the beginning, like if you’re in the middle of a lake and you’re drowning or there’s a danger of drowning, the water can kill you, you need the water to be able to swim to the shore, right? So if you don’t, you use the water’s supportive capacity to swim to the shore, so actually the water which is threatening to kill you saves your life, and then when you reach the shore you say bye bye lake, I’m not coming back here ever again. So you get out.
So it’s the same. If we want to get out of this terrible wheel of life, we need to use karma to create the conditions to be able to do so. So we accumulate merit. So the two things that we need at the beginning of meditation are purification of negative karma and the accumulation of positive karma and positive emotions or positive mental attitudes to get to the shore from saṃsāra or the lake of the wheel of life and then to get out. Okay.
So there are many practices. So in the beginning when Lama Thubten Yeshe was teaching the hippies, Lindsay mentioned the hippies, and we were, and at that time, our Lama very early on he got people to do purification retreats and accumulation of merit Vajrasattva. Vajrasattva is a particular aspect of Buddha which one visualizes and one recites the mantra in order to do this to purify the obstacles and to accumulate the positive energy to be able to do longer retreats. So even though I’d my situation, I mean my preparation for the three year retreat still took three years of preparation to do many which my current teacher, Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche told me, you know, to make tsa-tsas, the images of Buddhas and water bowls and prostrations. Another Vajrasattva retreat which I’d already done a long time ago, so I needed more purification.
So I had to do many preparations to do the three year retreat. In fact, the whole thirty years of being a monk have been preparing for a three years retreat. So, you know, we don’t expect people to just slip into a three year retreat like that. It’s and most people think, oh I could never that’s what the most common response I get, oh I could never do that. And people immediately say, of course not.
One needs a lot of preparation and my own teachers, actually very few of their students, have done a three year retreat. Not that they haven’t really wanted to but I think it’s because Lama considered they weren’t ready for it. They still have to purify and cure, and maybe I wasn’t ready either, I’m not sure, but I did it under the advice of my teacher. Have to say I didn’t achieve the potential that can be achieved and I didn’t expect that either. There many levels of meditative concentration to be achieved and there are nine stages towards perfect concentration.
Well, I didn’t get off the first stage, you know, but that, from my mind, that’s no problem because what came out very strongly was so much deeper confidence in the teachers and in the teachings, so much stronger faith in the things which I have not yet experienced, but which I can see are possible, each one of us, we can do, we can do, we can transform our lives in the very beginning, we can be happy. I mean, just that gives people hope. I mean, so many people fall into the thought, I can’t be happy. I am miserable. Life is awful.
You can be happy. You can be so happy. We all have the potential for just in this life peace and happiness beyond our imagination. I know and it’s not too far away. It’s just gaining some wisdom, some compassion, some love.
As don’t know where I’m going after Buddha house, mean I’m waiting to hear from my teacher Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche, but I discussed with Roger, assistant, and Roger said that we were discussing the organization centers all around the world which Buddha House is one of them, and I was discussing with Roger, you know, what’s best, how best can we function, we’re the older monks and nuns, how best can we function in the centers, and Roger said that Lama Zopa Rinpoche had said to him many times, we just want to make our purpose is to make people more compassionate, more aware of their daily daily lives, and more loving and less angry. This is, you know, the fundamental purpose of Buddha House of all the centers, and more wise, did I include wisdom? Of course, because wisdom comes with compassion, you know, we have to use the two together. So that is the medicine for suffering, that is that path will enable each of us to actualize peace and happiness in our minds which we wouldn’t have thought possible. So it’s right there, it’s right just below the surface, never give up, never feel depressed and think it is too much.
It’s not too much, it’s definitely not too much. Every one of us can do it. So from meditation there there’s hope for just this life, right? Then there’s hope, there’s I was talking about what I got out of the retreat, there’s complete confidence that it’s possible to achieve total liberation from the wheel of life, to achieve nirvana. Again, it’s, you know, you don’t have to be in the top one percent of people, like if you want to get into a popular university course, medicine or something, you’ve to be top two percent.
In my days it was different, anybody could get into medicine, look at me! Nowadays you have to be genius. Well, nirvana is a lot easier than getting into medicine. You can all do it. You don’t have to be in the top two percent.
Even Buddhahood. You can become a Buddha. Attain you can attain single point of concentration. All those levels that we think only yogis can do this, we can all do that. I don’t know if St Kilda can ever win a premiership, it’s probably easier to get enlightened than it is to St Kilda to win a premiership, but that’s life isn’t it?
So that’s in preparing for meditation the first step is purification purification and accumulating merit. So Vajrasattva retreat can be three months, yeah, full time, or it can be just one session a day, even ten minutes of saying, you know, the Vajrasattva mantra, you learn it from the Lamas, and you learn the visualization, you can do, and you are beginning. This is your wisdom taken care You’re not doing it because Lama told you to. If you feel that and many people do, oh, the Lord has told me to this, I’ve got to do it, your wisdom has to tell you to do it, and that’s what you’ve got to realize that your future is up to you to your own wisdom. So, you decide, you check up what you can do and then seek advice, and I was thought there are other practices like the Nyung Nä practice, which only takes two days or two and a half days, a very powerful fasting retreat with many prostrations, so that’s extremely beneficial and powerful and quick purification and accumulation of merit.
Many different practices can be done as a start. Then slowly slowly the more opportunities you get to do more formal meditation retreats, take them, take them, don’t make excuses. So many people say oh I must do a retreat, even a weekend or a week or two weeks, know, don’t try and do too much at first, but definitely make a plan and see how important it is. If you feel that your family responsibilities are too great, the best thing you can do for your family is to do a meditation retreat. So after my before I became a monk, I did three months retreat in Australia and it was that, I mean that was in some ways that was more powerful than the three year retreat because it was, I mean, it was my first real strong experience of the Buddhist teachings, and it was after that, shortly after that that I decided to become a monk, and so I was working in a hospital Melbourne getting some money together to be able to go to Nepal and become a monk, and I was telling a young doctor who I was working with in the hospital of my taking three months off and doing meditation and he just shook his head in disbelief and he said three months how could you?
What about your career? And I thought at the time, I thought, even if I’m not going to become a monk and if I decided to remain as a doctor, those three months were the best thing I could have done for my career in medicine. If only if we could all our doctors to do a three month retreat, I tell you, it’d be so good. But he, so the point of the story is that he could not even conceive of taking three days off let alone three months. He was into his career, I mean he’s only two years out of medical school and already his whole life was dominated by his career, and all these doors had closed for him.
Even though he may have been in the top two percent, he’d put himself in jail. He’d closed off the doors to his potential. All this went through my mind. I felt so sorry for him. He felt so sorry for me.
So, we or you should not close your doors. Don’t put yourself in jail by thinking, oh I couldn’t do that, this this really think of the need to do meditation under guidance and I’m sure, I hope, you know, Buddha House works out lots of retreats for you to do and Kangaroo Island, I was really I mean Kimbal who runs the center down there has done a fantastic fantastic job and has been was so good to me. Really conscious of the retreaters, not just me, were several people who doing retreat there at different times and his only concern was no noise, how to make conditions as good as possible for the meditators. So I couldn’t have done it, really. Kimbal’s support, Helen support, sending me incredible hampers of food from Adelaide, and other people who sent food, we rely upon each other and actually supporting somebody who’s in retreat is one way of gaining the benefit without putting the effort into it.
It’s true. Even just you don’t have to physically help, but just rejoicing that somebody is able to be in that situation and do meditation is fantastic. That is because it’s in the mind and it is very beneficial. So, we’ll have to look at ourselves whether we can support others doing retreat or doing it ourselves, and it’s really worthwhile and I strongly recommend that that you do receive teachings from your teachers wherever they are or whoever they are, and have this thought of how am I going to meditate on it, but not leave the meditation for when I go to Kangaroo Island, but remember each day if you receive teachings, you must give yourself the chance to reflect upon them. Don’t leave it at the intellectual level, otherwise it’ll evaporate, it’ll be gone, but if you spend even a short time to meditate on it, then it will hit home.
In our organization, has a magazine which we put out of various stories, the Mandala magazine. I think it was in Mandala, I read the story of Lama Yeshe and Geshe Wangdü, And so Lama Yeshe and Geshe-la, they were two very close buddies who had studied together in Tibet, and they met up again in Dharmasala in India and whenever they met they would discuss the teachings and so on and there was one time when His Holiness was giving teachings in Dharmasala, and this is in the story that and both Lama Yeshe and Geshe-la, they had warned us that they they would go straight back to their rooms after the teachings and meditate on the teachings. Meditate on the teachings. And we think, I mean these are two highly qualified Dharma teachers, Lama’s, I mean, but their practice was exactly what we should be doing. We can do that too, we should be we should go home after hearing meditate on it, reflect on it, let it sink in.
When reading a Dharma book, stop after a while and reflect upon what you’ve just read. It’s so, I mean, so important to internalize the teachings because internalize the teachings because the teachings are just the signposts. The real meaning is our own minds. I’m sure you’ve those who have been around Buddhism for any length of time, know Buddhism is psychology. That’s what it is.
It’s a and it’s not just intellectual psychology, it’s applied psychology. It’s how you apply the meaning of these teachings into your own minds and and you practice, you act accordingly to how much the flame of wisdom is nurtured in your own minds. Alright. Actually, I’ve got a whole lot of stuff I was going to talk about, but anyway, it’s from the Lamrim, the teachings on meditation, on what’s important to meditate and the obstacles. Maybe we should talk a little bit about the obstacles.
Are there any questions up until now? The first big obstacle is laziness, which one faces at all times, and in general laziness is where we have no enthusiasm for positive actions. You know, we’re not we just don’t feel like meditating. We’re not keen about it. Procrastinate and we put it off, we do other things.
So that’s the general idea of laziness. More specifically, manifests as attraction to actions which meditation but are considered more neutral as opposed to harmful. And that is like sleep, you know, I’ve done enough. I’ve got to have my sleep. So we go, make excuse to not finish this session but to go to bed, or we sleep during the day, so that’s a form of laziness.
Or doing something with great energy, like I had barely finished building my cabin before I started retreat, so I gave myself the excuse that I had to complete building the house. So, there were certain small jobs which could have left, but which I thought I had to do, and then a little bit of gardening, and because I had a garden, then I had to keep the animals out, so I had to put a wall around, and it sort of went for three months, and then I mean I knew beforehand that I had a problem with gardening. When I was first a monk I was living in Nepal at Kopan monastery near Kathmandu and I was here during one monsoon when everything just grows like crazy and I immediately established a garden and one day I was working away in the garden and suddenly I noticed Lama Yeshe was standing behind me, my teacher, and and I stood up and he said, what are you doing? I’m growing flowers. And anyway, he banned me from the garden.
He said, you should not do gardening. You must study and meditate. So I had to give up gardening. Actually, quite the next day, Lama Yeshe had his own garden and he used to grow these beautiful Camellias and I just happened to be walking past his garden and there he was working on the Camellias and I was watching, I wasn’t even thinking about what he said to me, but I was quietly watching from a distance and again, Lama Yeshe slowly turned around after about five minutes and he said, I grow flowers because it makes other people’s minds happy. So that struck me.
I was gardening because it makes my mind happy. That the wrong motivation. The right motivation is to grow for the house to make others minds happy. So that that lesson came through so strongly. Still though I’m attached to gardening.
That’s how I have my confrontation with Osama bin possum. So, and the lovers are very skillful in the way they teach like this, and it’s a good question, why am I doing this? Am I doing this to make me happy or am I doing this to make others happy? So, it doesn’t just refer to gardening, it refers to everything we do in our life. We should ask ourselves a question, why am I doing this?
Is it for me or for others? And we should know what to do when it’s for number one and not for others. It doesn’t mean we neglect our happiness. We neglect comfort. We have to maintain stability of our body and mind, you know.
We’ve got to look after this body body and mind, but by seeing this as being the possession of others. Others Lama Yeshe would say this, other people don’t want to see you scruffy hippies with dirty faces and acting terribly and smoking drugs and so on. They and he would make people or the lay people not the monks and nuns, wear good clothes, to wear the women to wear makeup, to really do themselves up, not for them pride or their, but in order to please others. He emphasizes so strongly, how we are the possessions of others, we are the objects of pleasure of others, so we should look after this body and mind with that motivation, not with self centeredness. And so strongly encouraged, it’s said many times, how we should eat properly, and the monks and nuns in those early days in the mid-70s, well they were very enthusiastic and they would sleep on just like grass mats, not thick grass, just thin cane mats on concrete floors and these tiny little cubicles where you couldn’t even sleep along the length of the wall, you had to sleep, well, if you’re as tall as me, you had to sleep diagonally, so you couldn’t fit in the room, and Lama Yeshe came very wrathful, and he ordered the monks and nuns to get comfortable mattresses and to eat properly.
He once asked one of the English monks, Peter Kedge, he asked Peter, he said, what do Ingies? I call westerners Ingies, know, English. So we’re all English. What do Ingies have for breakfast? See, the monks and nuns had their own kitchen and we did our own cooking, we used to just eat Nepali food, this churra, this dried rice, it was pretty awful, and yeah, we were so called renunciates, renouncing the life.
So Lama Yeshe asked Peter Kedge who was English, what do Indies have for breakfast? So he gave them the English breakfast, it wasn’t continental at all. And then one we used to do three hours of chanting each morning starting at five and then somebody would deliver breakfast and one of the monks or nuns they would take turns in making breakfast and so we’d eat in silence during those three hours. We’d have breakfast. And so one morning we didn’t know that Lama Yeshe must have appeared in the kitchen and he prepared himself fried eggs, toast, and jam, and tea.
Real English breakfast. And he served the monks and nuns. You eat western food. Food. You eat what your body is used to and your mind, you know.
So, again, the story is because we have to We mustn’t abandon our body and mind, we’ve got to look after ourselves, but with the attitude that this is the possession of others, therefore I’m going to make it pretty, I know give it good clothes, I won’t go overboard, but I will make it an object of pleasure for others and then great, you know, really look after it and you can be happy at the same time. Don’t be afraid of the happiness that you feel. This is essential. Nobody, if we’re sad, nobody’s going to listen to it, but if somebody is confident and happy and just peaceful, we all want to know what they’re taking, you know. What are they on?
Where’s it come from? So it’s essential to do that, to look after our bodies and minds and that’s in fact that’s all we have to do for our families. Don’t have to be the psychologist with all of the highfalutin answers to their problems, we just have to be peaceful and loving and compassionate and that’s the best thing that we can do when others have problems and they come to us seeking help. And again, we can all do that. What about laziness?
That’s right. Laziness of attachment to neutral activities is one thing like gardening and sleeping or laziness of attachment to to to bad activities. Now, this happens in meditation. You start thinking about those who have upset you or hurt you, now your enemies. And it’s incredible what the mind does, you even create a little play where you imagine them doing things which they haven’t even done, but you get angry at something that you have imagined them to be doing.
They may be at home thinking really good thoughts of you, you know, rejoicing that you’re doing retreat, but you’re just sitting there wallowing in anger which has come up from the past. You’re not asleep, you’re not dreaming and we do this in dreams, but you’re awake. No, I’m awake. I’m talking about me. This is my experience and I found myself imagining people doing awful things and then me getting out, this is crazy.
So, and we do it with such concentration, you know, we forget our aching legs and sore back and we have clear concentration. The best concentration of the day, but it’s totally wrong. That’s a form of laziness. We indulge in thinking these negative thoughts. Also we indulge in thinking of positive thoughts, you know, another one of my distractions is I’ve built a couple of monasteries and so I’m always designing monasteries and gompas and stupas and you know, which are virtuous or positive things to do but not when you’re in a retreat.
But the mind does that’s distraction, it’s a form of laziness. Or there’s the laziness, they talk about laziness of inadequacy. I can’t do that. Others can achieve that but I can’t and that’s really bad one because again it’s closing the door to what we can do. So we all have these problems.
This is the first big obstacle that arises in actually getting down to proper meditation. Now we overcome it as sort of a wheel of actions that the we need confidence in what we’re doing, you know, faith that we can do it, that single pointed concentration or whatever our meditation goal is that we can actually achieve it. So you know, we cultivate that through hearing teachings, thinking about the teachings, reflecting upon the teachings, and recognizing it is indeed within our capacity to achieve that goal. So this faith that it can be achieved then leads to the wish or the aspiration to achieve the goal of meditation. So the foundation is faith and confidence that it can be done.
It’s not blind faith, I mean there’s very descriptions of the mind, the psychology and how meditation can enhance positive qualities, can minimize negative qualities, how we can gain perfect concentration and so on. It’s very clear and so it’s not blind faith at all, it’s studying that and saying yes, it’s possible, I can do it. So, being convinced that it’s possible, then we have aspiration, I will do it. So this aspiration or intention to achieve meditative realization dependent upon faith. So, strong desire to gain concentration, then that leads to energy, to joyful effort or enthusiasm to hang in there and meditate.
So often in a long retreat, you know, oh I’ve done enough, got to give myself a break. We’ve got to hang in there. Set up a timetable and stick to it. Do not miss a session. I don’t think I didn’t miss any sessions in my retreat except once after two years when six policemen came to the door and said you got ten minutes to get out.
It was the bushfires in Kangaroo Island, you know, ashes and smoke. What do you do? I mean, suddenly after not talking for two years, mean I had to I felt safe, but I mean we’re surrounded by fire. It was difficult to assess danger, and if they sit up at ten minutes, I wanted to stay because I felt safe, but I thought then they’re gonna get really angry, and they’ve just created really good karma because they’ve just seen a Buddhist monk for the first time in their lives, these poor policemen, and if they get rid it, and they would have got angry if I’d refused, you know, putting people’s lives at danger who might come to rescue me, even though we had, I had built it with bushfires in mind and I think it would have been safe, I left. So I missed a couple of sessions, a couple of days of sessions, but apart from that, really get up at the same time every morning and you can do, and I mean I slept long I thought, was five hours a night which I think was a lot.
I could have made it shorter, but I was probably a bit lazy. I did. I tried for a while at four and a half, but I was tending to get a bit sleepy, and you can’t sleep during the day. You mustn’t sleep like during the lunch break. Have to stay awake during the day.
Yeah, I stuck at five hours and no problem. Of course, I didn’t have the mentally exhausting daily life that most people have and so you need less sleep in retreat if you along. So enthusiasm and certainly, you know, we’ve got to be joyful. We’ve got to not think that I’m meditating under duress, you know, because I’ve got to and I’ve got to complete this. You have chosen to meditate and and take joy in it that you’re able to do it.
Even the garbage comes up and there are times when the tears come, you know, you remember the sad things in life, just it’s just my mind. Garbage, it has to come up. Know, it’s a good thing that I might be sad for a day or two because this is the manifesting of what needs to be purified. So, and again it is not a problem. I mean overall your mood is so peaceful, so happy.
I know if anybody can take delight out of talking to kangaroos, you must be so joyful. No, but They’re good fun, the kangaroos. Next thing, we’re talking about antidotes to laziness, the Tibetan translation of the word is called mental suppleness, mental and physical ease or pliant, what happens is that as you continue to meditate, your body and mind start to go with you instead against you. Yeah. You’re not constantly fighting your body to stay there or your mind to stay focused.
They become supple and this is said to be it’s not my experience, it’s said to be a very blissful experience. I think like athletes feel when lots and lots and lots of training and they reach a point where suddenly the running becomes blissful, like they’re getting incredible high. Maybe joggers probably experience this, where the physical pain goes and their body feels so easy as you go for a long time. Well, this happens in meditation. Now, in the beginning, it only really happens towards the end when you’ve got proper concentration, but flashes, you get flashes of it even when you first start to meditate, and these increase your faith that you can actually achieve something, and then that faith increases your aspiration to do it and that increases your enthusiasm and then that increases more of this blissful suppleness.
So you see this is cycle of this mutually supporting actions which takes you through to the end, to the completion of single point of concentration. That’s how you overcome laziness, alright? So I won’t talk about the other obstacles. There are many, but you can read them in the books and maybe you must have some questions. Is it difficult to start speaking after so long Or did you actually talk to the kangaroos and talk aloud?
Or were you quite silent for most of the time? I confess I did talk to the kangaroos a little bit and I swore at the possum. Not a lot, but actually I changed my routine from just concentration. For the last three months, I actually I’ve read the Sūtra of Golden Light every day I recited the it’s one of Buddha’s sutras. According to instructions I received from Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche, my teacher.
So the last three months were actually coming out and more using the voice, and it’s a long text and so I did a lot of talking in reciting aloud in English this sūtra and when it actually happened a little bit of difficulty but nowhere near the what I noticed when I finished my very first three month retreat, when I didn’t talk at all, not even to the kangaroos, then then talking was a real novelty and I was conscious, totally conscious of actually having to put my tongue to formulate words and and it was so odd to actually have a communication. I strongly noticed that in my very first retreat a long time ago. This one not so much problem. I think because I did all the Sūtra recitation. How one with drowsiness?
Get enough sleep for a start, you know, especially in the beginning we should not think we’re a great yogi or yogini straight away and get enough sleep, begin the session clearly like wash the face with cold water and sit down comfortably, make the room not too hot, not too cold, definitely definitely don’t meditate on a full stomach, that will guarantee drowsiness. So, you know, meditate on an empty stomach, don’t make the session too long. Much much better to have a short strong session, even ten minutes, than a long drowsy session. And drowsiness is actually more subtle than we think. You know, there’s a degree of what they call laxity where we think we’re doing so well, but the lamas say, you’re actually creating the karma to be a cow because there’s this subtle dullness which we don’t even recognize.
We think we’re clear, but the gross drowsiness, things like I’ve mentioned, if you find There are meditative techniques where you visualize like sending your mind out into space. These are described in the Lamrim teachings. There are actual visualizations you can try, and if everything doesn’t work then and your session is not over, it’s perfectly valid to quietly go outside, get fresh air, wash your face with cold water, don’t communicate with anyone and then come back and start again, and if the other methods don’t work. So that sort of covers most things I think for How beneficial was it to be in a natural setting like Kangaroo Island as compared to the Sydney or an artificial environment? It was essential.
You can’t do strong meditation where there’s the rush and busyness of cars and traffic and people coming and going and police sirens. I mean even the birds were a nuisance, you know, down there and the rain on the roof is a nuisance. What I decided was at my next cavern, I’m going underground. Oh really? So maybe in the city if you go under in a cellar somewhere, noise is a big distraction.
Even birds and the sound of water. This is in the text too. They say dogs barking, that sort of stuff. You’ve got to. For the beginner, and that’s all of us, as much freedom for noise as possible.
Later, you know, like the advanced yogis, they go to busy places in order to test themselves and they can actually use that to enhance their meditation, but we’re not at that level, and of course we have to. I mean, whenever interruptions do arise, we shouldn’t drop our bundle, but we should try to use it to train our mind and in fact, you can even there’s a distant chainsaw or something. If you don’t become involved with it, you know, if you don’t let your mind get upset by it, but you focus on your meditation, it actually recedes into the background and you don’t even hear it as you gain skill. So don’t get upset about noise. It’s going to be there where ever you’ve decided to retreat, just accept you’ve got to live with it and get back to your concentration.
But really underground I think is the way, or in a cave, you know, something. You were talking earlier on about doing the Vajrasattva practice for purification and all that. I’ve seen the big issues in the version with basically practicing on any day. Like, one half of you seen the the necessary potential of it and the benefits of it. But the other side is, I don’t know, fear and aversion to anything that’s not actually Śākyamūni Buddha himself.
Oh, yeah. I think even the Dalai Lama’s thing in Sydney, the Shugden practitioners, the whole situation over the ban that was practiced and then realised that even enforced my fear and aversion of other Right. Well, mean, fair enough that when I first went to Nepal to Kopan to do a meditation course, this is my first meeting with Buddhism, and we’re all taught to concentrate on the image of Śākyamūni Buddha, I had your fear and aversion and I meditated on Charles Darwin. He was my hero and I was carrying the banner of scientific rationality and reason. I didn’t go with that intention, but I within a day I found myself doing that.
I could couldn’t visualize Buddha. So, thought, these Lamas are controlling my mind, you know. So, it’s a natural response. And I think it’s just listening to more teachings and gaining more confidence. Listening to more teachings and gaining more confidence that this is a valid meditation and certainly with Vajrasattva.
You know Vajrasattva is nothing to be scared of. Oh, you know that, but you know, it’s again it’s finding out more about what it means and those feelings can subside. Up and down did you find that at the beginning of faith and then non faith? Was it very fluctuating? Oh yeah.
Well from my own experience in that first course it was only after two weeks like Westerners doing prostrations to the statue I thought was terrible, and the lamas coming and throwing rice everywhere, which they do, know, I thought all these starving people in Kathmandu Valley, I got quite upset. I mean your mind picks up on these little things and you become really hypercritical. I can’t remember what it was, but during one meditation after about two weeks, I realized having heard Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Thubten Yeshe, came to the realization that Śākyamūni Buddha knew more than me. This is how we go into it. I mean we westerners think we know it all.
Well this is how I went into it. Not only did Śākyamūni Buddha know more than me, but a hell of a lot more than me. And after that meditation, I actually did one prostration, my first prostration. I remember it vividly. And I floated out of the tent.
That was the beginning. No way did I become a Buddhist, but then my girlfriend did. She took refuge immediately after the course against my advice, but I mean I knew the importance of what the the Lamas were saying, my faith, my confidence grew in the psychology. I couldn’t deny it that the Buddhist psychology was so clear and precise and simple and valid. I’d worked in a psychiatric hospital as a doctor before that, just six months before, and so it was strongly in my mind.
The mind, and I knew very well that Western psychology and psychiatry knew very little about the human mind, but I didn’t know what was wrong with our Western approach. I just had this inner feeling that it was way off track, and when I heard particularly Lama Thubten Yeshe, who moved my mind so much in talking about this, so I gained great confidence in the psychological aspect of the dharma, but karma and reincarnation, I could not accommodate. I had to go away and think about that and it took well, it was another nine months of deep checking up, real checking up in India, Nepal, and I went overland to England, and in England read some more Buddhist books and really checking up, thinking about what I’d learned at that course and coming back to India doing two courses with S.N. Goenka who was very famous, a very good meditation teacher, very simple technique, and then after that I went to Bodh Gaya after those like twenty days of this intense Vipassana meditation with Goenka, and I’d never been to Bodh Gaya before, my first sight of the stupa just blew my mind and after a week or so of meditating under the Bodhi tree, in those days Bodh Gaya was quiet, quiet little country town and you were virtually alone under the Bodhi tree most of the time.
Now it’s chaos, but in those days it was fantastic. Then I decided to take refuge. I became my inner conviction in karma and reincarnation became strong enough to become a Buddhist, not to become a monk. Oh yeah, that was still to come. So time and don’t rush it.
I think it’s it’s good to really investigate. Then it comes. If it’s not true, your investigation will reveal that and as Buddha said, doubt what I say you must check up, don’t just accept my words out of faith in me, check out what I say and only then accept them if it’s true in your experience and I think that was for me. What I learned from the alarms was true in my experience, not just my personal experience but, you know, especially being a doctor you see so many people in trouble and you know their experience and it fitted throughout. Yeah.
Physical During a retreat situation? There are certain yogic exercises that you can do, which are mainly the goal is to make the body more supple for meditation, they’re not really exercises in terms physical fitness, and for me, yes, my exercise was prostrations. I did not walk, well apart from the initial building activity, I didn’t walk beyond fifty meters for three years and my skinny legs proved that. I lost a lot of muscle bulk and the reason I didn’t walk was because it’s distracting even in Australian bush. It’s distracting, so I kept a perimeter not more than fifty meters and I stayed there and so I didn’t do much exercise and prostrations, doing many prostrations in the morning and evening was my exercise.
That’s not the purpose for prostrating, it’s just a side effect, it’s a benefit. In your thirty years as a monk or in your three and a half years in retreat, did you ever experience a feeling of sort of exile? Exile from the Dharma or exile from where you started. The reason why I ask is there’s a labyrinth at Chartres, the cathedral at Chartres, and it’s called the Pilgrim’s Path. And you enter and you start walking walking it and you move very quickly almost to your goal.
And then suddenly the path takes you way away from And it’s like you’re in this outer darkness for a long time and then it takes you back and you finally get there. There’s a kind of a feeling of exile. Have you ever experienced that feeling? Or once you checked up, you just really strongly convinced and just went forward? No, think this metaphor of the labyrinth is quite accurate for spiritual followers, people on the spiritual path.
I think it definitely can and does happen that people suddenly find themselves out somewhere lonely, doubting and I this definitely does happen and is part of the spiritual path. Personally, probably because I haven’t pushed myself hard enough, I haven’t really gone out on a limb, and I think it is because before I became a monk I made absolutely sure, I mean, that this is what I intended to do. I knew when I did my first course that if I ever accepted Buddhism, would become a monk because it was the only logical thing. Now for me, but not for everybody, but for me, because I didn’t have family, I had a girlfriend, but you know, we all come and go in relationships, and she became Buddhist anyway before me, and she’s still doing great jobs as one of Goenka’s main teachers so that’s very good. So, but I checked up, I went back to the West, I worked in hospitals in a medical situation, I had other girlfriends living and so I put myself in the situation of living with a really wonderful woman, having a job in the hospital, and then I asked her the question, is this going to work for me?
And actually this is before I even became a Buddhist. They said, no, I’ve got to look in a Buddhism because I’ve got anger, and the only people that I’ve met in my life who as far as I could see had no anger were the Lamas, and not only did they never express anger or even irritation, they only expressed joy and happiness, and this was not some infatuated, infatuated convert, I was totally skeptical as I think I’ve hinted. I was really skeptical but they convinced me and anyway I knew that I took myself back to the top which I consider to be the top of our society, doctor etc. I thought no, this is not going to resolve my anger and all the other confusion and attachment and so on. So, and then I really checked out the Lamas, did a three month retreat, so I’ve really prepared the ground to be a monk, and I have So I think that has enabled me to not go out on a limb and doubt.
Surely there’s still desire and attachment still arise, but you see them for what they are, and you way out which is the best path to lead your life, and there’s no question, you get support from the Lamas. I mean, we’re not alone, although it is a personal journey, the spiritual path, we’re not alone. The Lama is our teacher, or our teachers are walking right there beside us, and this is an essential ingredient to the spiritual path, this reliance upon the teacher, and that is what is the great protection I think comes out very strongly in Buddhism. This mutual relationship between oneself and one’s teacher, and I was unbelievably fortunate to have such wonderful teachers, not just my, you know, my basic teachers of Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, but their teachers, His Holiness’s two tutors, Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche, I mean, we were so lucky in those days when we had access, we could go and knock on the door and we’re right with these great lamas. So I was very very lucky and I think through their support, I haven’t had the experience you talk about and I hope not to.
Could you just drop Gyatso home? Thank you very much. And could I just add that Gyatso’s written a book in the library, and if you want to find out more gossip about him and all the things that he elaborates on, it’s in his book called A Leaf in the Wind, and also the previous book called A Perfect Mirror, which was translated into Mongolian, started Mongolian, I can’t remember. It’s been translated into Mongolian. Yeah.
Is in English also. Yeah, thanks. But they’re out of print. They’re out of print, but So you can’t get the money going. It should be in the library, and I’ve got copies.
I’m really sorry about that. That’s alright. Based on Pamela’s question, I just wanna know that what was the most difficulty that you faced in the last three years in the past three years? And have you ever thought about giving it up and what actually make made you to hang there to finish the whole three years? Made the biggest difficulty in the last three years?
Well my mind is very troublesome think it’s the wandering mind, like when you’re meditating what you’re first trying to do is is to have a stable mind that’s stable holding the object and clear, not foggy. So stability and clarity are what you try and establish, but what opposes this are what’s literally called excitement or it’s distraction. So there’s distraction towards objects of attachment and even general distraction towards objects of aversion and even towards virtuous objects, so distracting thoughts, and then what opposes clarity, even even if you get some concentration, then the drowsiness or the dimness comes in so you lose clarity. So that’s that’s called lethargy or laxity of mind. So this is what I was fighting with, my mind, all the time and bring it back, constantly having to bring it back to the object of concentration, back and back and back.
Yeah, sure, the thoughts come out of me, can I ever ever achieve sixty seconds of concentration, yeah, but yes you can and just have to persevere? What made you actually to remain that stable mind and can you I mean I just hum in there, just said this is what I’ve worked for for thirty years, my teacher said it worthwhile to do, so when the doubt comes up, sure the doubt comes up, the teacher said I can do it, and they didn’t actually say I can do it, he said it’s worthwhile. Now he threw his dice, he says it comes out beneficial, so I hung in there and also the knowledge that so many people were supporting me and not to want to disappoint them and what else would I do, you know, if I cop out now, I’ve got to do it at some stage in the future. Now I’ve got all of these perfect conditions. When will it ever happen again?
So, alright, it wasn’t difficult actually for me. I’ve been preparing for it for thirty years. Okay, well we’ve gone a bit over time. I talk a lot, sorry about that. I’d just like to summarize by stressing, well by saying that we’ve talked a lot about meditation and I haven’t been trying to convince you to do a three year retreat, but I feel it’s so worthwhile to remember to maintain the daily mindfulness that we talked about in the beginning and that is meditation, and then if you can support that mindfulness through a formal meditation maybe once a day, get up a bit earlier when it’s more or less quiet and never, you know, try as much as you can to maintain the continuity, very important continuity, daily meditation, If you don’t feel sometimes even if you do not feel like meditating, but if you go in there anyway, sometimes those sessions can be the best.
So don’t preempt the session by thinking it won’t work. You can surprise yourself and I just wish you luck. Luck. You can do it. So thank you very much.
Can I say thank you on behalf of all of us? I’m sure anybody would be happy to get one and say thank you. I want to break a promise I made to you and just say here’s a little something Thank you. For you to deal with in whatever way you wish because we wish to benefit from giving. Thank you.
We have a retreat planned after Christmas, Christmas and New Year. Another one on which will be probably be a Buddha house, a day of retreat, a series of days. Then at Easter Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you.