Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 81-minute teaching on the Wheel of Life, Ven Thubten Gyatso begins with the power of intention and karma in shaping our lived experience, then moves into a detailed cosmological framework drawn from Buddhist Abhidharma texts. He explains how galaxies arise and pass through four equal phases—emptiness, formation, abiding, and destruction—each driven by the collective karma of sentient beings inhabiting them. During the abiding phase, human lifespan declines from eighty thousand years through five progressive degenerations: shortened lifespan, scarce food, violence, wrong views, and physical deterioration. He charts this decline and shows where Śākyamūni Buddha appeared, notes that a thousand wheel-turning Buddhas will teach on Earth during this intermediate eon, and describes how Maitreya, the future Buddha now in Tuśita Pure Land, will appear to restore morality after catastrophic war reduces human lifespan to ten years. He then touches on parallels between scientific cosmology and Buddhist teaching, addresses the apparent purpose of existence and what happens when all beings achieve enlightenment, and emphasizes that the immediate practical path—cultivating virtue, compassion, and wisdom now—is what matters most. Open to experienced Buddhist practitioners familiar with Abhidharma cosmology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 W o L 2010.mp3
UUID: 834894b4-34a3-4c31-a706-8518b4399bf8
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Wheel of LIfe (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 81.6 minutes
Words: ~8,982
Hi, sir. Good morning. Thank you for coming after not scared away after yesterday’s very detailed talking. What I hope that you comprehended from yesterday’s talks is that our thoughts are so powerful, in particular the intentions that are behind our actions. So, as we mentioned, intention is equivalent to karma and it is the intentions or the intended behavior of sentient beings which is the force that has created the universe.
It’s the intended actions that we’ve done in this life. We are whatever we’re experiencing, if we’re experiencing situation in our life or with another person, then if we go back, it is definite that the intention that connected us with that situation or with that person was selfish, was self centered, manifesting as attachment or as anger or pride or jealousy and so on. If situation life is pleasant, or associated with pleasant people and enjoyable situations, enjoyable relationships, then the intention that established that connection was a virtuous intention of kindness, compassion, love, wisdom one of the virtuous mental factors. So, the law of cause and effect of karma is a natural law. It’s not something invented by anybody.
It is just something described by the Buddhas and the great realized beings who have observed the relationship between our thoughts and our deeds and our life experience. So, it’s critical that we begin very quickly to constantly check up our mind. Why am I doing this? Normally we tend to just pay not much attention to the reason why we’re doing things. Just develop habits, habit patterns within our life of doing this, doing that, and we’re not even really quite sure why we do it.
There are things we like, things we dislike. When we come in the proximity of the things we dislike, we feel normal to feel agitation and aversion and even anger and hatred to abide. We feel justified and so on. There’s never any question whether we should perhaps change our attitude to the situation. As long as we maintain that aversion, we will always experience trouble, always experience problems with the person or the situation because of our very attitude.
The non virtuous attitude of aggression or aversion nurtures the ripening of negative karma so there will be ongoing problems. If we decide to take responsibility for our lives, instead of criticizing other people, getting them to change their lifestyle, if we change our internal life, our own mind, then having virtuous attitude towards the situation or the people, then that virtuous mind will nurture positive karmic imprints and the whole experience with another person will be radically transformed from our side. We can gain some peace and happiness and we won’t be experiencing the ripening of our negative karma, which is germinated by the emotion of anger and aversion. So, we should cultivate the habit of always looking at our mind and just asking ourselves the question: Why am I doing this? Is this a skillful purpose or is it an old, habituated, unskillful purpose that is going to just perpetuate my ongoing misery and unhappiness in life?
So it all comes down to that we’re desperately seeking happiness and avoiding suffering. Change our mind. We don’t have to change our car or change the house or change our job or change our partner. That won’t bring the happiness we’re seeking. If we change our mind, whatever situation we’re in, even there’s great adversity, still, it’s not going to stop stop the pain.
It’s not going to stop problems coming from the outside. But what it will stop is our mind being disturbed, mind being made continually unhappy, and our mind creating even more negative karma through our wisdom understanding the situation that through my past deeds and my past actions I have created the cause for these conditions to arise. And so we don’t feel guilty. There’s no point in feeling guilty. It’s just knowledge.
It’s just I did something stupid. And to have that knowledge of recognizing we made a mistake and admitting we made a mistake is even that’s difficult because our self-cherishing, our self centered attitude is so proud, thinking that we’re beyond mistakes, that mistakes are always somebody else. So, that starts up a whole cycle of inner turmoil, is clinging to one’s self image and self justification and criticism of others, and blaming others rather than blaming the ignorance that exists in our mind. And as I said in the talk on attachment, we should not it’s not necessary to identify with our own failings, own selfishness, own anger and attachment as being me. They’re not me, they’re not self.
So there’s no point in feeling guilty. It is the selfishness, the anger of the attachment. So we separate that in our mind as being not me and then there’s no way we can feel guilty. Guilty I’m bad, I’m terrible is just a sort of reverse type of self-cherishing that’s still clinging to the strong self image of me, I am, and I am great. When we say, you know, I did this wrong and I’m bad, I’m terrible’, there’s strong self centered thought there.
So that we have to free ourselves from. And sincere regret for what we’ve done is not guilt. It’s just honesty. It’s just seeing reality. It comes from wisdom.
And we should, you know, make a joke of it, laugh at it, just It’s like in I think in sport, in team competitions, if you find you hate the other side, that very hatred, that antagonism, I think will impair your performance. But if you see the sport truly as just a game, and if you don’t take it so seriously, and sure, you’re out competing to defeat the opposing team, but if you see the opposing players as your, you know, friends and just in a mutual game, then there’s so much happiness, it’s so much easier, so much better, so enjoyable. But when you fill your mind with hatred toward the opposing team, it’s ugly, it looks bad, and I think the performance goes down. This is just my theory of a sports psychologist. But motivation, intention is all important in sports and also, you know, we know there’s a big industry in business people people who demand vast amounts of money to give weekend workshops on motivation how to make more money, how to sell the goods, etc, etc.
They recognize that it’s that motivation is so important in terms of bringing about results. I’m not sure whether these business meetings they talk about love and compassion and wanting to help the customers who buy your goods. Perhaps if they did, they might even be more successful. But motivation itself is so important. So, all this is leading up to the meditation that we begin with, and one of the, you know, the purposes of the meditation is to establish a clear motivation for today, for engaging in the discussion today of the Dharma, the subject of the twelve interdependent links.
And within our motivation we should think that, you know, I want to engage in this, not just for my own benefit, but in order to improve the qualities of my own wisdom and compassion, so that I will become capable of taking my place in society as a guide, as a support, as a refuge for those who don’t have such a good opportunity to understand the reality of their minds, then may I gain the inner peace and love and compassion whereby I can help them. And may this inner peace and wisdom grow to the point of my eventual attainment of Buddhahood, my full potential of Buddhahood. So, we start, as we did yesterday, with the nine round breathing meditation which and purifying our mind. I’m sure we all have checked up our own past behavior and recognize that there is attachment, is self grasping ignorance, there is anger and aversion. So, now and the mind is a real phenomenon.
It’s not physical, but it’s real and because of karma it is more powerful, more powerful than the material world. Nuclear energy seems to feed the universe, like from the sun and so on, but the mind is even more powerful than that because the very sun itself arose from the mind, from the karma of the sentient beings who experience the sun. So, treat your mind with respect. It is a very powerful force that is influencing both yourself and others. And it can influence negative way causing misery or in a positive way causing happiness.
So, with great respect for your mind, determine now to purify the disturbing emotions through the nine round breathing. So as you breathe in, you imagine or you focus on the air coming in the left nostril, focus on the sensation of the air and imagine that you’re breathing in the blissful white light of wisdom and compassion that’s radiating from the hearts of all the Universal Buddhas. And this goes down into your body and becomes oneness with your mind and flushes out the black light of, first of all, attachment. So as you breathe out, focus on the air going out the right nostril and you feel that you’re purifying your mind of attachment. So you do that three times: in through the left, out through the right three times.
Then you change over and you think of your anger and your aggression. So you breathe in the blissful white light through your right nostril and out the black light of anger through your left nostril three times. And then finally you purify your mind of the self centered ignorance and wrong views. So you breathe in, you focus on breathing in white light through both nostrils and then the black light of ignorance and wrong views going out through both nostrils. And then three times and then continue with the nine rounds progressively feeling very clearly and strongly that you are actually cleansing your mind of not only the disturbing emotions but all the negative karma created by them as well.
So when you’re ready, think, Now I’ll start the nine round breathing, and breathe in through the left, out through the right, and so on. And oneness with a bliss or white light. As you do this, focus less upon the breathing and just turn your mind inwards and be aware of its own nature of peace and stillness. Keep it very clear and try to experience the natural state of peace and stillness of the mind undisturbed by thought patterns. Very clear and alert.
Okay, so in our everyday life we should try to make this actualization of the natural stillness and peace of our minds our home base. And in the confusion and turmoil and there’s so much happening, we should have a method of just stopping it all, maybe going very quiet and going back to home base and then starting out again from there, particularly if we find that we’re getting very worked up emotionally, you know, through anger or attachment to something, and we should cut it as if, you know, a wild animal escaped from the zoo, a lion enters your front garden, or a tiger, you know, you’re going to be instantly do something about it. You’re going to avoid it, whatever you can to stop the danger. So we’ve got to have the same instant reaction when we realize that there’s anger or attachment manifesting in our mind. It is even more dangerous than an escaped lion from the zoo.
And the lion can just kill us, but our anger or attachment can send us to the hell realms. And no external enemy can do that. So the greatest enemies in the world are internal, in our own minds, and we’ve recognize them, and instead of doing what we normally do, inviting them into the mind, allowing them to stay, you know, justifying our anger and aggression, believing that this is the solution to shout or hurt somebody or feed our attachment, encourage attachment, that is a great mistake. We’re harboring our worst enemy. So some method carry around a mala and say, are really important help keep the mind quiet and still.
Lama Yeshe once said that to me in the very early days. Kachen, an English monk who was one of Lama Yeshe’s first attendants, were having some sort of meeting and Lama Yeshe was coming down pretty heavy on Peter and criticizing him and Peter had his rosary and he was saying Om Mani Padme Hum And Lama actually grabbed me and said, look, he’s doing the right thing. He’s not getting upset at me, he’s saying, om mani padme hum, very good. Yeah, we can do that. I mean, you don’t carry around a rosary saying, oh look, I’m a Buddhist, I’m saying mantras, I’m very clever.
But use it, use it skillfully to go back to the natural state of peace and stillness in your mind. Know, Om Mani Padme Hum is wisdom and compassion. So, the unification of wisdom and compassion that’s what it means. So, you should be not just saying the words, but unifying your mind with wisdom and compassion, going back to home base, and then start communication with somebody or whatever it is in our daily life, do it skillfully. And the more and more you become familiar with doing that, you won’t even need the same mantras, you will be able to spontaneously maintain the peace and stillness.
And even whilst you’re having a conversation, there are the words, there’s a communication happening, but there’s also the inner knowledge of watching your own mind. So often, when somebody’s saying something, we just can’t wait for them to stop so that we can then say what we think. We even stop hearing what they’re trying to say to us. We’re only concentrating on what we’re going to say, what we think, the way we see it. I, I, I.
So, even whilst having communication, can be subjectively holding our mind in a state of peace and stillness, and then hear what people have to say, and respond not with self defense, self justification, but respond with love, with wisdom and compassion. So often, as you see, like His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his talks and when he’s answering questions, he’s just so simple and so straightforward, cuts through all the garbage and just gives such obvious, clear, straightforward answers. And that’s because he’s not emotionally involved with whatever people are saying to him, tragedy or whatever it is. He hears them and the answer comes straight back very clearly and simply. You know, life is not as complicated as we think it is.
We’re the ones who make life complicated. We’re the ones who make relationships all twisted and knotted and so difficult. Maybe the other person doesn’t have the good fortune that we have to know this and to be able to control his or her mind. But at least from our side, we do. From our side, there will be less confusion, less knots.
Of course, we are subjected to others’ attachment, to others’ anger, to others’ jealousy and so on. And this will always be coming, but we’ve got to not respond with putting them down, seeing them as stupid or bad, but seeing them with pure love and compassion as you would your own mother. So with the notes, yesterday we reached the point coming and going of the world or the universe. There are some notes there that you can read. And this information is taught in various teachings information is taught in various teachings of the Buddha and I received explanation from Geshe Jampa Tegchok, who was to be the future abbot of the Seraje Monastery when he was the abbot of Nālānda Monastery in France.
And the way the coming and going of the universe is taught in Buddhism or by Buddha is that the universe is vast, you know, virtually limitless, and within the universe there are they call threefold world systems. So this is think it’s probably equivalent to what we recognize as galaxies. There’s a thousand times a thousand times a thousand stars or suns and these are surrounded by planets and there is life existing on some of the planets, just like our own solar system, where we have the earth is a planet where the conditions are suitable for life as we know it to manifest, to appear. There could well be life even on other planets, life different to what we recognize as, you know, humans and animals who need this earthly environment. I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible that some of the deva realms may be associated with other planets or the hungry ghosts, even the hells, maybe the hells in the middle of the sun, I don’t know.
But there is sentient existence associated in each of these galaxies, if you like. And there are obviously a large, huge number, uncountable number of sentient beings in each galaxy, in the different planets and different life forms. So, So, each galaxy then comes and goes in a particular sequence and the sequence is directly associated with the karma of the living beings who inhabit that galaxy. And there are four periods of equal duration that we can attribute to the life of a galaxy. Like, if you look at our own Milky Way, there was a time when there was no Milky Way and there was just vast region of space with matter, you know, in what we call atomic dust or matter in its finest state.
In the Kālacakra Tantra, His Holiness Dalai Lama says that matter in its finest state is they give it the name space particles. So it’s more subtle than atoms and molecules. And this endures for a long time just this vast space with not a vacuum but matter in its tiniest form space particles. And that’s called the period of emptiness. Not emptiness in terms of Śūnyatā, and not emptiness in terms of nothingness, but emptiness in terms of gross form, gross celestial objects, you know, stars and planets and so on.
So, during that period of emptiness there is obviously no rebirth of the sentient beings in the gross forms such as ourselves. But there are sentient beings associated with that region of the universe and they are all abiding in the form and formless realms. We mentioned yesterday that there are three main realms of rebirth: the desire realm, the form realm, and the formless realm. So the karma for rebirth in the form and formless realm is created during meditative absorption, when one enters progressively finer levels of concentration and one becomes attached to that experience, that mental experience. They’ve gone beyond the sensory experience.
When you achieve Samādhi, your sense consciousness has stopped functioning. It’s only the mental consciousness, the sixth consciousness, that is experiencing these absorption states. So there are many levels and one can be reborn as a form god with a very subtle, ethereal body or a formless god with only the most subtle wind supporting the mind and just experiencing that type of meditative absorption for a vast amount of time until eventually the karma is exhausted and then the mind and its associated wind energies will become more coarse and the divine beings will be reborn at lower levels and even back into the desire realm. So the picture is that in the region of the space of the universe which is going to become, for example, you know, the Milky Way galaxy, there are these finest particles of matter and there are sentient there is sentient existence in sentient beings but only in the form and formless realms. So this tremendous long period of time comes to an end when the collective karma of those beings in the form Formless Realms begins to deteriorate.
So they’re all at the level of the second Form Realm and above. There are four main Form Realms and four formless realms. So, they’re all at the second form realm and above. The first so, as the karma begins to degenerate, they start to be reborn in the first form realm. You know, this is the simplest.
And that’s called the realm of Brahma, the divine, and one is in the aspect of Brahma. So Brahma is a celestial being who abides within the form realm. So, they can be the chief of the gods in that realm, which is Brahma, but we’re all of the Brahma type at that level. So, when this starts to happen, it’s said gentle wind begins to move the space particles. And as a result of this movement of course, you know, we’ve already discussed yesterday how aware of this movement of wind, there is movement of mind.
And karma, intentional, deluded action, is movement of the mind. So, there’s movement there is some effect upon these external form particles. Dalai Lama said unfortunately the texts don’t explain in detail how the internal elements affect the external elements, but he believes it happens. This is an area for further research. There’s coarsening of the wind and as of the external space particles.
So I read recently that scientists say that because the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate and there is no sign that it’s ever going to stop expanding, in fact it’s going to the rate of expansion is going to become so rapid that all matter, even the atoms, will be torn apart and they will reach their most subtle state. So I thought, I’m not sure even the gross atomic particles may even be taught because of the spirit. This is what the scientists say, but I thought, that’s interesting, because that’s what Buddhism says as well, that matter will be in its finest state. But that won’t be the end of the universe. The sentient beings will be in the form and formless realms, then the karma will change, and then it will aggregate together again.
The particles will become more and more gross, atoms molecules will be formed, and with this coarsening of the wind, which becomes more and progressively more and more fierce, you get the formation of the condensation, as we understand it scientifically, condensation of the gas into suns and planets orbiting around the suns and so you get the progressive formation of the physical environment suitable to support life as we know it. So, this long period of emptiness stops when the wind starts to blow and the karma for the beings in the Form Realm starts to degenerate. And so then we begin the aeon of formation, formation of the new gross world system, this galaxy. So the universe is full of galaxies. They’re not all coming and going at the same you know, in in harmony with each other.
While some are being formed, others are being destroyed. And while some are just in a state of abiding, others are in a state of emptiness. So, they’re not all in phase, they’re all operating at different periods of the duration. So, we’re talking about our corner of the universe, which will become the Milky Way Galaxy, during the period of formation, which is equally long as long as the the period of emptiness then during that time the beings’ karma will continue to coarsen and as the gross environments evolve and condense out of the dust, the beings will be reborn in the divine realms of the desire realm. Remember, the desire realm has just about everything from the hells up to the desire realm gods.
So their environments will start so first you get the desire realm beings who live sort of in the sky or the celestial beings, desire realm gods or devas. And then as worlds develop, you’ll get the other realms as well: the hell realms, the hungry ghost realms, the animal realms, the human realms, so on. And until, eventually, you’ll have during this period of development, you’ll have all the environments for all the possible types of rebirth will be established. So, that’s the second great period the universe, this period of formation. And so, at the end of that there will be humans and there will be animals and, you know, there will be rebirth in all the levels.
But the humans will be nothing like ourselves. The humans so, at the end of this period of formation we enter the period of abiding, so abiding, so the world abides as it is, also for an equally long period of time. So, during the period of abiding, at the very beginning, the humans are godlike beings their bodies are made of light, they’re born spontaneously, you know, there’s no sexual reproduction. They don’t eat, they survive on the nourishment of Samādhi, of mental absorption. But they’re not always in mental absorption because the main diversion is enjoyment of sensory pleasures.
And for most of them it’s just seeing, just looking, the pleasures of the eye and so on. Pleasures of taste and touch are more gross, these come later. In that galaxy, we humans today wouldn’t — no, no, we haven’t started. We’re talking about the beginning. So, what we call humans are nothing like ourselves.
As I said, they are bodies of light, they are born spontaneously, radiate light, they don’t even live on the ground, so it’s very different they’re called human beings, and their lifespan is extremely long, eighty thousand years. So, it’s nothing like we would recognize as humans, we would say they’re gods or whatever. Parallel with the existence of these, what we call humans, there is the progressive evolution of animal life and plant life as recognize it in the world. So, you do get I don’t see any real difference with the scientific view that originally there was no life, but there were oceans and there were mountains and rivers and so on, and gradually there was the so called primordial soup of atoms and molecules from which there evolved organisms, some which sort of had plant like nutrition, others had animal like nutrition, and these very, very primitive organisms like viruses and maybe simple single celled beings, organisms, they gradually appeared. Then there would have been a time when one of those types of evolving organism became a suitable support for consciousness.
There was not consciousness in the beginning in terms of the evolving life forms, but they’ve evolved to the point where they’re able to support consciousness. So, at that point, the beings who are in the desire realm gods, etc, their karma was coarsening and coarsening and coarsening, so then their their minds would have died and their minds would have inhabited some of these primitive life forms. Thereby we had the first sentient, you know, gross sentient existence. There was sentience, of course, in the desire realm gods, but now in a gross body, this gross form. So, those organisms which became suitable supports for consciousness would then have continued to evolve into the animal world.
The others which didn’t become supports of consciousness would have continued to evolve under the biological forces of chemistry and physics would have evolved into the plant world. But still not purely from those forces, there is a relationship between plants and the karma of the sentient beings who experience those plants. So, I’m not saying that plants don’t have karma, but they’re not independent of karma. Evolution, as we are still piecing it together through the fossil history is quite acceptable from the Buddhist point of view up to the point of, you know, humanoid animals and their minds were coming from the divine beings who were dying and being, you know, reborn in this grosser shape. So there would have, you know, I’ll just say there would have, from my point of view, would have been a period when there were humanoid animals.
To distinguish them between them as being apes or humans is sort of a matter of choice really. But amongst them there are those who evolved into, you know, our species, Homo sapiens, which we distinguish, which we label as human beings. We just label them because of our more evolved brain, greater sized brain, which is, you know, the support for our consciousness, which enables our mind to manifest particularly its intelligence in the best way possible. Whereas, it’s not that the minds of other animals are less capable, it’s just that their brains are less capable of allowing their innate intelligence to manifest. They’re far more capable of allowing their sensory consciousnesses to manifest.
You know, like, our sense of smell is is, like, virtually nonexistent compared to a dog’s or even a moth’s sense of they’d be able to whether it’s taste or smell, but where it can pick up chemicals in the air is incredibly, unbelievably sensitive. So, the animals tend to evolve more towards sensory with the eye sense or hearing sense or smell or taste are far more developed than humans because we just don’t have the sense organs that they have to be able to experience sensory sense objects as well as many animals can do. But what we have, which they don’t have, is we have the neuronal support for intelligence, the ability to learn and to distinguish between what’s right and what’s wrong, particularly in terms of what causes pain and what causes pleasure, and we can develop a recognition of the need for ethics and morality, we can modify our behavior, we are not saying animals are bereft of love and compassion, but we have great capacity to develop love and compassion to the supreme level of altruism because of our nervous system. So, humans of our type appeared not just suddenly boom but over a long period of time.
So, there is a chart showing this period of abiding. Maybe I can use the board. So in the chart I’ve put a graph. The vertical axis is a human lifespan and the horizontal axis is like time. So what I’ve shown there is actually the period of abiding.
Remember, there are four periods of equal duration, so that’s preceded by So, by the period of formation, the life forms of all the rebirth states from the hells, all the desire realm, still the form and formless realms are happening are all in operation. And so in terms of humans, the first humans are those celestial ones and their lifespan is eighty thousand years, something beyond our imagination but they’re not gross bodies like ours. Now the period of abiding is divided up into twenty equal duration periods of time called the intermediate eons. So the first one, the human lifespan begins at eighty thousand and then it progressively declines and it will go down, this isn’t zero, this is ten. It will gradually decrease so that the average human lifespan will be ten.
So when the Buddha taught it said that the average lifespan was roughly one hundred, so that’s way down here. So that’s when Śākyamūni Buddha appeared. This is the period of decline or period of degeneration. I think in the notes there are four periods of five periods of degeneration. Did I include it there?
I can’t remember. Is it there? Where is it? Oh yeah, okay at the top. So, these are called the five degenerations and what’s happening is that the karma is continuing to become coarser and coarser.
And so the first is the degeneration or decline of lifespan. Then there is decline of the times. Food becomes scarce and poor quality. There is progressively more and more violence and disharmony the world, not just between nations but in families. Families can’t stay together between different groups there will be division of society into opposition groups and so on.
During this period of decline the emotions grow much hatred, desire, and in particular the fourth is that people hold strong wrong views, you know, mistaken wrong views about reality. You know, I think classic examples are terrorists of today who believe in God, who believe that they’re doing God’s work by killing the infidels and as a reward they’ll go to heaven. And that’s the motivation for what they’re doing. It is misguided altruism. I think they’re doing the best thing for the world by killing innocent people.
I truly believe it and they’re going be rewarded in heaven as a result. So they just mistaken idea. This is a classic wrong view and you can see what it leads to. So these are becoming stronger and they’re not going to get easier, they’re going to get worse. And even the wrong view that the solution is to kill and murder all the terrorists is an equally bad wrong view because that also comes from the fundamental thought that you are helping the world by killing, that you are doing God’s work by killing the bad ones.
You know, the solution is not to kill each other, it is to kill ignorance through wisdom and love and compassion. That’s the only solution, but unfortunately it’s not going to happen. Not yet. Finally, the fifth type of degeneration is that the humans’ bodies are becoming more gross, more susceptible to disease, more ugly, more weak and very short in stature. There was at some time, I don’t know when it is, as the lifespan decreased, there were the humans would have been more gross like ourselves and they would have been giants, or they were giants, very tall and it’s interesting that many cultures talk about races of giants in the past.
I don’t think there are too many fossil remains. Remains. There certainly wouldn’t be any fossil remains of these ones because they were bodies were made of light. Anyway, our statue is it’s said that our these five degenerations are getting heavier and heavier as you can see we’re way down here and there will be a time it will bottom out when the average human lifespan will be about ten years, which means we will be born, we will mature, we will reproduce, we’ll grow old and die within average of ten years. At that time, human society will be in a very bad state.
There will be a lot of disease, famine, war and at this particular time we’re going to there’s going to be a great war and the survivors will those who escaped to the mountains will come down and they’ll look at the devastation and they’ll just realize the state of their folly and the future Buddha, Maitreya, will appear at that time not as a wheel turning Buddha but with a very tall, very beautiful appearing body and will teach teach morality. You’re not killing, not stealing, not lying. And so the humans will start to practice observing ethical conduct and as a result the collective karma of the whole world will change and things will get better. And the lifespan will go up again to a peak of eighty thousand in the middle and then it will decline again. Maitreya will appear, they say roughly about here when I think twenty thousand, the lifespan will be twenty thousand.
So prior to Śākyamūni Buddha there were three other Buddhas who appeared at different times during the declining lifespan. Śākyamūni Buddha is the fourth wheel turning Buddha. What we mean by a wheel turning Buddha is a Buddha who will appear always during a time of degeneration because that’s when we will listen to the Buddha’s teachings and pay heed. If the Buddha’s appeared when the times are getting better and better, nobody would pay any attention because it’s so good. It’s getting better all the time.
So wheel turning Buddhas always appear during this declining time. Alright? karma of the sentient beings who met Śākyamūni Buddha was clearly better now. We’re down, you know, we’re down here now, eighty or something. So we we don’t have the karma to to see a a wheel turning Buddha.
So our karma at the present time is definitely weaker than the karma of those who are fortunate enough to meet Śākyamūni Buddha. But throughout the world, there were plenty of people who who didn’t have the karma to meet Śākyamūni Buddha. But we may have been amongst those who met Śākyamūni Buddha. We were the mice who were on his altar eating his rice, like the little guys here. Alright, what else?
Yes, there were three wheel turning Buddhas, right, who appeared when the Dharma was not existent in the human world and they taught the Dharma and it faded away and was disappeared, then the next one appeared, and then the next one, and his Dharma will disappear, it’s disappearing rapidly, it’s nearly gone. Because it won’t teach the whole Dharma, it would just teach morality. Wheel turning Buddha teaches the whole path to nirvana, not necessarily the Mahāyāna Hīnayāna path, but at least the path to nirvana. Very few Buddhas appear to teach the Mahāyāna path because there are very few humans capable of entertaining the thought of attaining Buddhahood. And during this period of abiding of our present world, remember I said this is the first intermediary eon the second, so there’s a gap, there’s going to be twenty altogether.
So during the periods of decline in these twenty lesser eons or intermediate eons, there’s going to be a thousand wheel turning Buddhas who will appear on this earth and turn the wheel of Dharma. So Maitreya will be the fifth. Recorded, the names of the first three Buddhas are recorded, I mean, they are understood, Buddha taught about them. I’ve got their names here. Don’t call this a path, this isn’t a path.
The period of degeneration. So what do say? The five degenerations occur, yeah. So that look a similar kind of degeneration occurring the Yeah, the five times. That’s right, that’s right.
So I’m just wondering what makes us think we were in the first Well it’s not us thinking it, Buddha taught this. Oh. And he explained the names of the three prior Buddhas. The previous Buddha was Kāśyapa Buddha and then before Kāśyapa Buddha, I forget the names, the long Sanskrit names. I mean it’s in the oral history, alright?
And this is what Buddha taught and when he said here this is how it, this is where we’re at, we’re at the first, we’re only in the first period. So the earth is gonna be around a long time. Alright, so there’s gonna be a thousand wheel turning Buddhas. Now this doesn’t happen in every world. There can be worlds or planets like our own which support life like our own where no wheel turning Buddhas will appear.
There will be the cycles and Buddhas will appear like Maitreya and just teach basic morality but not the whole path to nirvana. And it’s not but no wheel turning Buddha will appear at all because the sentient beings won’t have the karma to receive the teachings of a wheel turning Buddha. karma is extreme. Buddhas have no control over karma. We do.
We have the potential to control our karma, so that’s something that we can do that Buddhas can’t do. We can change our karma. Buddhas can’t do that. So if sentient beings don’t have the karma to see that they cannot appear, as magical, as clever as they are, like they may appear as a red dog, like Maitreya appeared to Asaṇga. But because Asaṇga did not have the merit, the karmic merit to see Maitreya as a Buddha, as his real aspect, he could only see him as a red dog.
And Asaṇga was an incredibly advanced practitioner. So what hope have we got of seeing a Buddha as a Buddha? We’re very fortunate if we can see the Buddha as an ordinary human being like His Holiness Dalai Lama. That’s about the best we can hope for. When you talk about other other spiritual figures like Muhammad or Christ or Well he preceded Christ and Muhammad.
Yeah, but he he he taught about the future Buddha Maitreya, so he didn’t mention the other spiritual figures. Well not by name. There are bodhisattvas, I mean it’s not that there are countless bodhisattvas on the path who have the power to appear at any time in the world to teach Dharma. But they can only teach according to the capacity of their listeners to comprehend and to practice. So they will appear within the cultural milieu of those people and they will teach according to their cultural understanding.
But they will teach fundamental morality. In general, we’re talking about collective karma. Individuals may be better, but we’re slow learners, sure, just we don’t have the accumulation of mental power to really comprehend the full path to enlightenment. So they appear as bodhisattvas. So I think there’s every possibility that Christ was a bodhisattva.
May have been a Buddha who did, you know, he overturned the tables of the money changers. He pointed out the degeneration of the Jewish practice established by Moses, which was very pure morality following the Ten Commandments, that declined, that degenerated. So Christ came, come on, smarten up your act. But he could only teach according to the cultural vision. Like if he had said there is no God up in the sky who’s directing the show, he would have been crucified a lot quicker, you know.
He couldn’t say that. But from the Buddhist point of view in India, Buddha could say it. Or even he got into trouble because they the pervading belief was that Brahma created the world, which is very interesting because the first form realm the realm of Brahma. And we all did come from Brahma. We were Brahma.
But that’s a state of rebirth, that is we were Brahma is a sentient being within the wheel of life. So there’s a close similarity between the general Hindu presentation of everybody coming from Brahma and this presentation that we came from the Brahma realm, the Brahma realm of rebirth. And we’re going to go back there too eventually, but that’s not the end of the story and I think similarly the Judeo Christian heaven and the Muslim heaven is a samsaric rebirth state, probably almost definitely a desire realm heaven and And so it’s temporary. If you manage to get to heaven then it’s not the end of the line and you may die and you may be reborn back down again. Alright, so during the following intermediate eons there’ll be the similar cycles, period of increasing fortune due to the fact of morality and then the five degenerations, up and down until the last one will bottom out, the nineteenth lesser eon, it will bottom out here and then there’s what we call the long ascent.
Instead of going up and down, like this is a long descent, there will be a long ascent going up to eighty thousand. And that will mark the end of the period of abiding and the beginning of the period of destruction, whatever you call it. So this is also an equal length of time to the entire period period of abiding. And during this time there will be progressive destruction of the habitats of the beings in the desire realm beginning with the hell realms. The hell realms will cease and the beings will be reborn higher and higher in terms of, you know, pleasant realms of rebirth.
Those who still have hell karma to experience can be born in other world systems, in other planets where the hells are still thriving. So we’re not all Milky Way inhabitants, you know, we could have been in Andromeda or in other galaxies. It’s possible to migrate all around the universe to different galaxies so they were not necessarily all together all the time. So this is a long period, it’s described how the earth will gradually dry up, the sun will grow hotter and hotter and expand and everything will burn up again as we predict from the scientific understanding. And eventually the whole gross environment that supports desire realm existence will come to an end and the sentient beings will be born once again back in the form realm, back in the realm of Brahma and then above the realm of Brahma.
So at the end of the period of destruction our galaxy will have self destructed, all the matter will be once again in its most tiniest particles and the period of emptiness will begin at the next cycle of the galaxy. And so it goes on. Anyway, that’s the way it’s presented in the Abhidharma. There are lots of interesting parallels in what we understand and observe and I just present it to something to think about and contemplate. Contemplate.
Hope you enjoy it. Any questions on that? A thousand wheel turning Buddhas. Yeah, here’s the fifth. He’s number five.
Here’s the next one. No. He will appear here, he exists now, he’s living in Tuśita heaven where he’s teaching Dharma to those fortunate enough to be born in that Pure Land. He’s in the Pure Land. And from Tuśita heaven he will send an emanation.
The Buddha’s body is the Sambhogakāya which abides in the Pure Lands and the Nirmānakāya. So the Nirmānakāya is emanation body. So Śākyamūni Buddha’s body was emanation body. Whilst he was appearing in the form of Prince Siddhartha, in India two and a half thousand years ago his Sambhogakāya was abiding in the Pure Land and that was just an emanation that he sent. At the same time as he was emanating here he was also emanating all around the universe in different aspects.
So Nirmanakayas, the emanation bodies can be wheel turning Buddhists or they can appear as ordinary humans or as animals like the red dog or as inanimate objects like a tree or a bridge, whatever. So Maitreya will appear as a Nirmānakāya, ordinary Nirmānakāya, ordinary human and will just teach morality, not killing, not stealing, won’t teach the whole path to nirvana. When the merit goes up and at this point he will appear as a wheel turning Buddha, again a Nirmānakāya, but in this aspect teaching the whole path. That’s right, it will go from ten, roughly ten up to eighty thousand, down ten, eighty thousand, yep. Śākyamūni Buddha said that his Dharma would last for five thousand years.
During the last in five hundred year segments, the last five hundred years will just be books, nobody understands the meaning. Five hundred years before that there will be books and a few will have a superficial understanding and prior to that a deeper understanding but not very good. So two and a half thousand years are gone, the last fifteen hundred years useless, not useless but not so good. So Śākyamūni Buddha’s Dharma is rapidly disappearing. The sun is setting.
It will disappear from the world and this is associated with the increase of hatred. It’s like Christ’s Dharma and Moses’s Dharma has disappeared. It’s natural because we’re contaminated. We are the ones who contaminate the teachings. We misinterpret Moses’ teachings, Christ’s teachings, Buddha’s teachings, we inject our own beliefs, our own distorted ideas degenerate the pure Dharma.
And this is natural. Buddha said it’s going to happen. But it’s still during that, especially the first thousand or two years, people will still be able to understand and improve greatly their karmic lot. So it will be very difficult for Bodhisattvas to appear because of our collective karma. Bodhisattvas can’t appear.
Wherever an individual’s mind is ripe, is open to receiving the Dharma, a bodhisattva will appear. They have to, they promised. They generate a bodhicitta to rescue every mother sentient being from suffering. We’re the mother sentient beings who they promised to otherwise they wouldn’t have become enlightened if they hadn’t made that sincere promise. So it’s up to us.
If we can cut through our self centeredness, our ignorance, our grasping, our pride, our arrogance and open our heart, we can receive the teaching. And it can be in an unusual form, can be a leaf falling, it can be some different event. We can’t say how the Buddha will communicate, even it can happen in a dream, but if you dream about Buddhas don’t think you’re special. It can just be your mind, right? Oh, I dreamt about the Dalai Lama last night, he told me this, that.
Ninety nine point nine percent it’s our own mind, alright, wishful thinking. So, you know, don’t trust everything, be very skeptical, but keep an open mind because there is some hope. But anyway, Maitreya will appear. It’s because after this final devastating war there’d be so much devastating war there’ll be so much destruction and the sentient beings, the the refugees who escaped to the mountains will come down into the cities and see the death and destruction. They’ll be well, what happened?
What did we do wrong? That will be the cure for Maitreya to appear. Will be over. They will want to know. They will realize that they’ve made a big mistake.
And so we’ll be able to teach morality of not killing, not stealing, not lying. And as a result the whole collective karma of the world will get better and better and better, the environment will get better and so on. But then because ignorance is so powerful, will start to decline again. Right. Oh look it’s just ten thirty.
This is nothing. We’ve been experiencing this since beginningless time. Well, that question implies that there is a purpose behind the universe, implies a superior being who decided, well, let’s make it this way. But Buddhism says there is no superior being, that we create the universe. Our purpose in creating the universe is to indulge in pleasure.
We want physical pleasure, you know, sensory pleasure, we want mental pleasure. That’s our purpose of ignorant sentient beings. That’s why we have this body. This body is just an instrument to indulge in sensory pleasure and mental pleasure. A few individuals have the capacity to choose a human rebirth to train their mind on the path as the human body is the best support for training the mind and the spiritual power, wisdom and compassion.
And so that can be their purpose. But there’s no overall design, it’s just the way it is. Lama Yeshe said, I can’t tell you why virtue, virtuous behavior brings happy results and why non virtuous behavior brings unhappy results. That’s just the way it is. Like what’s the purpose of gravity?
There’s no purpose of gravity. It’s just the way it is. Mass attracts masses. It’s just a natural law and karma is just a natural law of the mind. So there is no supreme purpose in life.
I read somewhere where life, I don’t The Buddha didn’t answer that question. It’s possible that everybody can become enlightened because we all have the potential. And that’s what we should aspire to, make that happen. That’s the bodhisattva’s intention, to remain forever until every sentient being is rescued from saṃsāra. What would be the scenario in that case?
The biggest party in the universe. The biggest party in the universe. That’s right. I mean, they’re already infinite Buddhas. It’s said that the number of sentient beings is finite but it’s immeasurable. Yeah, it’s a lot.
You look at all the ants in your kitchen and there’s a long way to go. So if every sentient being was enlightened then all world systems were ceased to be? Be. This would all come to an end. This is the result of the karma, says the Abhidharma, the entire universe as we know it and the inhabitants are all derived from karma.
The path to enlightenment involves destruction of karma. So the gross, you know, this universe will cease. Buddhas abide in pure lands which are not derived from karma, they derive from their accumulation of merit on the path. But this is why Buddha didn’t go into this question because it just leads to total speculation and it’s unimaginable. But you and I, because our life is the reflection of our karma, you and I can work on our karma, we can achieve enlightenment.
And this is the point that Buddha was trying to say, don’t go off into this speculation of what it’s going be like at the end or even where it came from. This is the here and now is reality of existence. He said, in a field of knowledge, if it were a forest, I’ve given you a branch. Now this branch is enough for you to get enlightened, then you’ll know. And humans, because of our intellectual gamesmanship, well we want to play games, we want to have it all nutted out before we even decide to do something about our lives.
Don’t have time, you know. We’ve got to start living within morality right now. We’ve got to start we’ve got to stop hating each other, competing against each other, disliking, having attachment and anger and jealousy, we’ve got to start loving each other now. And then we’re not, if we do that, you know, break off, we’re not obliged to go up and down. nirvana is liberation from all of this.
Alright. Time for a cup of tea. Maybe twenty minutes and