Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 79-minute session, Ven Thubten Gyatso explores karma as the foundation of the Wheel of Life, drawing heavily on Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa and teachings from Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. He establishes that karma—understood as intention—shapes not just individual actions but the entire cosmos: our birth as humans, our bodies, our personalities, and the happiness or suffering we encounter. Rather than a fixed destiny, karma is workable; through recognising our destructive impulses (attachment, anger, ignorance) via introspection and moral discipline, we can redirect our minds toward virtue and wisdom. He introduces the five ever-present mental factors (feeling, discrimination, intention, contact, mental engagement) that accompany every moment of consciousness, and emphasises that intention—the mental impulse connecting us to an object—is karma itself. The talk weaves personal anecdotes (his initial skepticism of Buddhist practice, a Western monk in retreat) with practical guidance on vows, precepts, and the importance of watching the mind rather than passively following impulse. Pitched at practitioners new to or developing their understanding of karma and dependent origination.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 W o L 2010.mp3
UUID: 389d5c58-a0a2-4ad9-98a4-363391668324
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: 79.5 minutes
Words: ~7,944
So, good morning. Thank you for coming today and I hope also tomorrow. This weekend I hope to talk in detail about the subject of karma, of which the presentation of the twelve interdependent links is just one aspect of the presentation. But I’m going to go into more. Before we come to that topic, we’ll go into more detail about, you know, what karma is, how it’s explained in relationship to our mind and our behavior in life.
Also, the way in which the whole world evolves in dependence upon karma. The great Indian scholar, Vasubandhu, who was the younger brother of Asaṇga, who did many years’ meditation retreat trying to see Maitreya Buddha and eventually gave up after twelve years and met the red dog on the road with a wound infected by maggots and generating great compassion for both dog and the maggots, Asaṇga, his karma created the cause for him to see Maitreya and the red dog appeared as Maitreya Buddha, who took him to the Pure Land where he received many teachings which he brought back and extensively taught Dharma, in particular the Cittamatran view, the mind only school. Vasubandhu was his younger brother, and Vasubandhu attained great eminence as a scholar of the Abhidharma. This is the Buddhist presentation of the way things are: the physical world, the mental world, and so on, and karma. And in his book, The Abhidharmakośa, on the chapter on karma, Vasubandhu begins with the statement that this world, that the entire universe, both the environment and the sentient beings contained within the environment are all derived from karma, all manifestations of the karma of the sentient beings who exist in the world.
So, it’s a most important subject to understand karma because we have in our own hands our future. It’s completely in our hands, it’s in nobody else’s hands. But until we hear about karma we don’t know that. We don’t know the deeper implications of our behaviour and how what we do not only has immediate effects but long term effects in this life and in future lives. It’s all dependent upon ourselves.
So, living in ignorance of karma is one of the greatest tragedies of the wheel of life, that we’re all equally trying trying to establish happiness and trying to be free from suffering, but unwittingly we are actually pushing happiness away and we’re creating a cause for more and more suffering blindly. One of the essential teachings of Buddha is to explain the reality of karma, which will give us a choice to Even we hear the teachings, still intellectually we can either accept or reject. And it’s very dangerous to intellectually reject the teachings. It’s alright to say, Well, I’ll think about it and put it on hold till I can really understand it. But to consciously reject karma by declaring there is no such thing as future lives.
There are no long term effects of my behavior here and now. To assert that and to believe that is incredibly dangerous because there is no of having there’s no real foundation for morality. And without a foundation for morality, we will act upon our habitual self centered ignorance, our selfish attachment, our selfish hatred and anger, and so on. Only will we hurt ourselves and create causes for miserable rebirths, we will hurt others in the process. Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche once said that, If you really understand karma you won’t be able to sleep at night.
We are completely trapped by our own karma. We’re caught, we are thrown Well, as the title of my book implies, we’re like leaves in the wind. The wind is karma and we are a helpless leaf being blown ever our karma blows us. But it’s not necessary to be a helpless leaf in the wind. Through knowledge, through understanding, recognition of the reality of karma, we can then we’re still caught up in karma but the knowledge gives us like a sail or a rudder where we can actually choose the direction of our future, our future rebirths.
And that direction will be to maintain close proximity to receiving the teachings and practicing the teachings. And actual practice of the teachings leads us to the wisdom seeing reality which extinguishes karma. So, that is something that we should aspire to and to never be separated from the wisdom teachings explaining the reality of cause and effect and the ultimate reality of emptiness, which is the actual wisdom that destroys karma. Because it’s the wrong conception of self, the self grasping ignorance which is the root of karma. Also, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, I was once discussing with him about meditation retreat and gaining concentration.
And Lama Zopa just sort of told me that there was a a long time ago there was a monk, a Western monk, who had received a lot of study. He spoke Tibetan fluently and really had received lot of teachings on the whole aspect of Buddha’s teachings, and he knew a lot. So, he was doing a three year retreat attempting to achieve single-pointed concentration. And for any meditator, one of the greatest obstacles that arises in retreat is attachment. It’s called excitement, where the mind can’t focus on the object because it keeps going into fantasies of attachment and desire.
And about eighteen months into the retreat, Lama Zopa told me that this monk came to the conclusion that his monk’s vows were an obstacle to achieving concentration because he kept having these fantasies of desire. So, being a monk, gave up his ordination and he stopped the retreat. And Lama Zopa shook his head and he said: It’s amazing how someone so intelligent could have such an idea which is totally contradictory to the basic teachings of Buddha that living within pure morality is the foundation of the whole path, especially the attainment of concentration. So, it wasn’t his vows which were the problem, it was his attachment which was the problem. So, Lama Zopa shook his head and said, Sometimes I think it’s not intelligence that determines our life, it’s karma.
And so he said this was a karmic ripening that happened in this person’s mind that just obscured all that he learned, all that Buddha taught, which is so obvious. And so we’re in danger of that. We shouldn’t ever, ever become complacent and think we’re in control of our life because we’re not. karma is in control of our life. Our responsibility is to control our mind to subdue attachment, selfishness, anger, jealousy, pride.
These emotions are so ingrained into our consciousness that they just can burst out at any time. We can even get angry at our teacher, our guru. People can do the most horrific things just impulsively, spontaneously, explosively, especially anger, but also attachment and pride and so on. So, what we have to do is repetitively re establish our mind with a sense of purpose. Purpose to work away, you know, to work away from Samsāra and to work towards attainment of liberation and enlightenment for Buddhahood.
And then, gradually, gradually, the disturbing emotions will become less and less, and gradually, gradually our wisdom, our self control, our purpose in life will become spontaneous, more and more ingrained into our consciousness as opposed to the disturbing emotions. And then, life after life, we will progress and eventually be able to achieve the wisdom realizing emptiness which depends upon single point of concentration. And single point of concentration depends upon pure morality living in pure morality. So, the vows that we take as a lay person, the five vows of not killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, taking intoxicants these are the essential foundation morality for the lay person. Also, lay people can take the eight precepts anytime.
You don’t have to wait for the Full Moon or the New Moon or a special day. Every day is an auspicious day to take the Eight Mahāyāna Precepts. Auspicious day to take the Eight Mahāyāna Precepts. It’s funny that people Sure, they say New Moon and Full Moon times, it’s particularly powerful, but don’t wait. There’s no guarantee you’re going to live until the next Full Moon.
Better to take the Eight Mahāyāna Precepts tomorrow. Then, as monks and nuns, there are the various levels of ordination which are the foundation of morality, mostly directed towards physical and verbal morality. Then there are the Bodhisattva vows, and then there are the Tantric vows, which become more and more directed towards the morality of keeping one’s mind straight. Not only one’s physical actions and one’s verbal actions, but one’s mental actions. The Bodhisattva and tantric vows are more related towards even keeping our thoughts in pure morality.
And that’s not easy at all because our thought behaviour is so quick. But those vows, it’s not expected. If one takes those vows, one is going to be one hundred percent pure. From then on, the purpose of taking the vows is to train one’s mind, one’s thinking process in pure morality. And so, when one’s ready, one can take those higher levels of morality as well.
Alright, so now we’ve got plenty of time today and tomorrow to discuss the subject of karma. Again, it’s not necessary for this to be lectures but I prefer to have discussion and if you have questions to ask, please do. And then we’ll progress through the subjects. There are some notes that I’ve handed out. These are just a few things that I’ve points that I’ve gathered from different sources and from my own teachings and put together a little story to lead us up to the subject of the twelve links.
We may not even get onto the twelve links today, I’m not sure, today or tomorrow, anyway. This will lead us towards the study of the twelve links. Just one other anecdote is that at a public talk at Melbourne University in nineteen public talk at Melbourne University in nineteen seventy nine, Lama Yeshe was giving a general talk on dharma and somebody asked the question, you know, what is karma? Lama Yeshe sort of immediately said to this lady sitting at the front, he said, You are karma. And there was silence.
And somebody at the back said, I didn’t understand the answer to that question. Lama Yeshe said, No. Because the answer was for her, not for you. And he said, You understood, didn’t you, dear? The lady said, Yes.
I didn’t quite understand myself. But, you know, on reflecting: We are karma. Our life as a human being is a result of karmic ripening when we died in our immediately previous life to this one. We must have died very skillfully to have ripened the virtuous karma to be born human, but we can’t remember. So, our very existence as human being is karma.
The very fact that we’re male or female is karma. The shape and appearance of our body is primarily dependent upon the, you know, our genetic makeup, but secondarily it’s dependent upon the karmic connection that we have with our parents. There is an underlying karmic relationship why we’re with our particular present parents. And then everything that we’re doing and the mode of expression of our personality. Are definitely environmental conditions which shape our personality and there are learned behaviour and etc.
Which shape our personality. Perhaps we would say even genetically there is the structure of our nervous system may have influence upon our personality, but the underlying underlying predominant force is the karma that we inherited from past lives, which gives rise to certain psychological expressions and even thoughts and ideas, as well as the inherited intelligence, the inherited stupidity, the inherited love, the inherited anger all of the different positive and negative emotions have been inherited from past lives. So, underlying that there different conditions which establish ourselves as a human, and our body, and our personality, and so on. But there is an underlying structure karma. Whether we experience happiness in life is dependent primarily upon karma.
Without the ripening of a karmic cause, it’s impossible to experience any level of pleasure. Without the ripening of a karmic cause, it’s impossible to experience any type of suffering. So, pleasure and suffering also, of course, there are outer conditions which are not karma, which are associated with pleasure and suffering. But whether we meet with those conditions or not, that is where karma plays its part. So, as much as we think we’re in control of our life, we’re not.
Through our intelligence, through our capacity, we can organize the conditions certain degree but really we’re that leaf in the wind. As much as we try to establish the conditions for happiness, there’s no guarantee that we will meet happiness through our wealth, through our partner, through our children, through our possessions, through our career. There are other factors involved. And often people become so frustrated that they recognize that they’ve done all they could do to be happy and they’re not happy. So, want to blame someone and they blame society.
They blame the politicians. They blame the weather. They blame their parents, they blame everything out there, but they don’t recognize that the real source of frustration in life is one’s own karma. That’s what blocks happiness and attracts suffering in our lives. Therefore, weekend is extremely important for all of us to gain a complete appreciation of karma, what it is.
And through this understanding we will realise that we can change our karma. karma is not a fixed, unchanging destiny that we were born with. Not at all. karma is totally changeable. We can eradicate negative karma.
We can enhance positive karma. Eventually, can destroy all karma. Only we can do it because we created continuum of this mind in previous lives created it and it exists in our mind, in nobody else’s mind, it’s not in a big book up in the sky. It’s in our mind. And therefore, we have access to our mind and we’re the only ones who have access to our mind.
And knowing how karma is created, we will know how to destroy it. And so, these teachings are what we’ve been looking for all our lives. They really are. I mean, we’ve been looking for happiness. We’ve been looking for means to avoid suffering.
This is it by working with our minds. So, it’s not just this weekend should not be regarded as just a diversion from real life. This is the way to comprehend the reality of life and to make life this will give us the means by which we can make our life meaningful. So, I want to begin with some meditation because working with karma involves working with our mind. And so, to work with our mind we have to be familiar with introspection.
Letting go our fixation with the outside world and outside sense objects and bringing our awareness inside to observe our mind. Because simply observing our mind is the beginning of learning about the non virtuous states, what they’re like, how they manifest, and then when we recognize the enemy we know what to shoot down. If we can’t see the enemy, we can’t stop shooting down or her down or it down, you know, we’ve got to be able to recognise and anger is easy to recognise, attachment isn’t. Attachment we regard as a friend. Even though it causes us so much misery, we still cling to longing desire as friend and we feed it, we enhance it.
And also pride, we may tend to regard it as a friend rather than an enemy, a root enemy. And even our fixed views, our intellectual view of the world, we regard as a friend, but we’ve got to be a little bit humble and admit that perhaps we don’t know everything. Perhaps Buddha knew a bit more than what we know. It took rebirth about two weeks of the Lam Rim meditation course at Copan to come to that conclusion. My first course that I attended in nineteen seventy four in Kathmandu, Lama Zopa Rinpoche was teaching the Lam Rim and Lama Yeshe was coming giving talks and I was completely, somehow I was thrown into a strong state of skepticism and there was no way that I would do a prostration to a statue.
That was just the pits of superstition and very demeaning for Westerners to do this. It was alright for the Tibetans because that was their trip. I thought it wasn’t on. Anyway, after about two weeks of staying there under duress listening to the teaching and asking many questions, Lama Yeshe comes over. There was one meditation session where I can’t remember what happened during that meditation The main meditation we used to do was visualizing Śākyamūni Buddha and meditating on the image of Śākyamūni Buddha.
Even I wouldn’t do that. I would visualize Charles Darwin and meditate on Charles Darwin. But during this meditation something happened where I came to the conclusion that the Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha, you see, I was seeing myself as holding the banner of scientific reason, you know, I was the one fighting this Himalayan superstition. And but I came to the conclusion in that meditation that Śākyamūni Buddha knew a lot more than I did. Very much more.
And so at the end of the meditation I waited until most people had left the tent because my pride was still operating and I did my first prostration only just one, not three, you know, and sort of floated out of the tent. So, we do cling very strongly to our opinions. I mean, you only have to have a dinner party and you recognize as the discussion becomes more and more heated how opinionated we are and how vigorously and even with anger we defend our opinions. So, loosen up. I’m not saying you must believe karma, that is wrong, but think about Get the picture and go away and think about karma and observe yourself, observe others, become an observer.
Our opinions color everything that we observe and experience in life. The opinions, if they’re wrong, they can completely block reality. So, they’re very dangerous. In terms of this totally new subject of karma and reincarnation, we may well have opinions or even just doubts. Doubt thinking, don’t think it’s I’m not sure if it’s right or not, but I think it’s probably not that doubt is what we call deluded doubt.
That doubt is an obstacle. Buddha said, You must doubt! But he was talking about the doubt See, doubt is a wavering mind, swinging between the correct conclusion and the incorrect conclusion. deluded doubt is a doubt thinking I’m not sure if this is right or wrong but I think it’s not right. That’s the deluded doubt.
Middling doubt is the doubt which I just don’t know whether it’s right or wrong. I don’t know. That’s sort of in the middle. Then the doubt that we need to cultivate is I don’t know whether karma and reincarnation are valid or not, but they might be. And so I’m going to check up.
So, that is the doubt that we need to cultivate. It’s not acceptingdefinitely we should doubt because the reality is quite subtle and words are quite limited in their ability to convey the profound meaning of karma. But we can comprehend that profound meaning in dependence upon words. So, that’s the doubt that we need to cultivate. Deluded doubt and fixed mistaken opinions are very dangerous because they block investigation and they lead us if they’re wrong, they become obstacles to cultivating morality.
Morality, pure ethical conduct behavior, is the fundamental essence of the Power. I had the opinion, I didn’t have any religious training, but I had the opinion that the Christian morality that I had heard about growing up in Australia, you can’t avoid it, was invented by the church to control people. It just an artificial imposition upon society to subdue humans, to make people conform to somebody else’s opinion of how life should be lived like sex before marriage, the banning of sex before marriage seemed so utterly absurd. Particularly in the sixties, these sort of things came up. So, when I heard the teaching karma I thought this is the same story, it’s just the same story.
Thinking more and more about karma, then there is a logical foundation for ethical conduct. It is not something just invented by certain people to make people conform to an idea of how humans should live is reality. If we don’t establish in our own mind a clear system of ethical conduct I’ve already talked about the vows not killing, not stealing, not lying and so on not harming others. The essence of morality in Buddhist terms is consciously avoiding harming others through any action of body, speech and mind and cultivating the opposites benefit others through body, speech and mind. And this goes completely hand in hand with the teachings of karma.
So, it’s like we don’t need a system of morality to tell us not to jump off a cliff. Most of us don’t do it. Some do it in order to kill themselves but most of us avoid going near a precipice somewhere where there’s a great danger of falling because we know that gravity will kill us. Gravity is not a law invented by anybody to punish us from stepping over a cliff. It’s just the way it is.
And we accept that. karma is the same. The teachings of karma are not invented by anybody to make us conform. It’s just the way it is. You hurt somebody deliberately in any way, you create an imprint in your mind which will eventually connect you with a similar, even worse, painful experience in the future.
And this is all, every pain, every unhappiness has an underlying cause. We’re with that because of past behavior. And every pleasure, every happiness is a result of a previous cause of goodness where we’ve been consciously, deliberately helped others with kind heart. Experience the result. All right.
So now in the meditation, just a short meditation, I’d like to get you to concentrate on your breath. Most of you, I think, have been around for a while, so you’ve done some meditation before. So you understand the importance of purifying the mind of karma and the disturbing emotions which cause karma. So, with the nine round breathing meditation we focus our mind on the breath coming and going and the purpose is to cleanse the mind of the fundamental, the root poisons of ignorance, anger attachment. So, what I want you to do is to imagine that as you’re breathing in, you just focus on the sensation of the air coming in the left nostril.
So, you can even imagine that all the air is coming in the left nostril and it goes down into your chest and as you breathe out imagine that all the air goes out through the right nostril. So, you have this flow in through the left, out through the right. And you do that three times. And then you change over. As you breathe in, you imagine the air all comes in through the right nostril and goes through the left nostril three times.
Then thirdly, you focus on the air coming in both nostrils and down to the lungs and out again three times. So, there’s nine breaths altogether and you go back to the beginning. Now, the purification is that you imagine first of all we purify attachment. So, as you’re breathing in through the left nostril, imagine that the air that you’re breathing is not just air but it’s the blissful energy of wisdom and compassion in the form of white light. And you can even imagine that it’s radiating from the hearts of all the countless Buddhas throughout the universe.
So, breathing in blissful white light of wisdom and compassion and you feel that it goes down into your body and mind and it flushes out all of the disturbing emotions associated with attachment, longing, desire and the negative karmas created by them. And that becomes in the aspect of black light. So, as you breathe out, the white light has become oneness with your mind and the black light as you breathe out is the disturbing emotions and the negative karma associated with attachment. So that goes out the right nostril and is completely lost in space. Then for the next three breaths, do three breaths purifying attachment.
The next three breaths you’re going to purify anger and hatred and all of the negative karmas associated with aversion. So again, you breathe in blissful white light, wisdom and compassion through the right nostril and out the black light of anger and all the negative karmas associated with anger through the left nostril. It goes out into space. Then after three breaths, you breathe in the blissful white light of wisdom and compassion through both nostrils, and as you breathe out through both nostrils, the black light of ignorance and all of the negative karma associated with ignorance and wrong views goes out into space. So, is the nine round purification meditation.
And really feel that progressively your mind is becoming more and more oneness with the white light of wisdom and compassion. And really filled, totally cleansed of all of the impurities. And we all know we have particular problem with anger or attachment or with selfishness. So, even specific harmful actions we’ve done to others you can imagine purifying those specific especially those specific karmas. And strongly feel that it’s happening.
Don’t think you’re pretending. The more clearly we imagine this to be happening, it happens. Alright. Especially if we have a sincere regret for having hurt others through our selfish behavior in the past. So, when you’re ready, sitting comfortably with your back straight, begin the nine round purification meditation.
With the blissful light of wisdom and compassion. The breathing is still happening, but mainly concentrate now on the mind itself and try to experience its natural state of peace and stillness and happiness happiness when the disturbing emotions have gone. And just abide within that natural state of peace and stillness of your mind. Gradually relax and stop the meditation. Okay, so now, those who are here on Tuesday night, you know that we talked about the mind.
Each person’s mind will have individual minds. There’s no such thing as a universal consciousness or anything like that. We all have individual minds, but our minds are similar in as much as they act and they function in the way, similar ways. But we all have different levels of manifest emotions, either disturbing or constructive emotions. We have different memories, we have different experiences, have different capacities, you know, and we fluctuate within all of these mental qualities.
But mind itself is non physical. It is simply the mere continuum of awareness, the continuity of mere clarity and awareness. And awareness means knowing. Knowing is a unique quality of mind which knows, is aware of the object and the features of whatever object our mind is turned towards. And so, mind can be turned towards visual objects and at that time visual consciousness is dominant.
When we’re truly engaged in looking at something we’re not even thinking with the mental consciousness, we’re actually observing with the eyes. It’s only later that we start to think about what we saw. And then, if we start listening, the visual consciousness subsides and the intense alertness is happening with ear consciousness and we even notice other sensory input. And similarly when we focus upon smells, tastes and touch other senses diminish as if they don’t function. Like as every mother knows if the children are watching television, their eyes are focused upon the action on the screen and mother says dinner’s ready or something dinner’s ready has to be shouted that the children don’t hear because their whole attention is focused upon the action on the screen.
So, at that time, they’re not listening, they’re not focusing upon what they’re hearing, the noises coming from anywhere other than the television set. So, at any one moment, only one of the six types of consciousness is actually fully manifest. We might think, well, watch and we hear television at the same time, but actually what’s happening is that the mind is rapidly alternating between seeing the action and listening to the conversation or listening. And so it seems that it’s simultaneous, but if we analyze closely when we’re watching, the ear input is diminished. It’s there but it’s not noticeable until we pay attention to.
And so we can’t do two things at the same time, not properly. We can only do one thing properly at the same time. When we think we’re doing two at the same time we’re alternating from one to the other. And thinking is, you know, the realms of our thoughts and ideas. You know, often, it happens to me, maybe to you too if you’re reading a book, your mind can go off thinking about something else.
The eyes will follow the words even down to the bottom of the page. Because your mind has been thinking about something else, you’ll suddenly realize that although the eyes have followed the Word, nothing has come in. You completely took nothing in from what you read. You have to go back to the beginning. So, that’s because the feedback between eye consciousness and thinking has been broken by you going off onto a little fantasy, you’re next month’s holiday already or last month’s holiday, your mind was elsewhere to the visual consciousness.
So, at any one moment only one of the six major types of consciousness is fully alert, fully functioning. And within that moment, if we analyse, are five mental faculty or mental factors which are always present, always occurring. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a there are five ever present factors of mind associated with the experience of that object. So these are the order in which they’re usually taught is first of all there’s the factor of feeling. Feeling specifically Buddhist terms refers to the feelings of happiness, unhappiness or neutral feeling.
It’s not in general we tend to use the word feeling to cover a whole range of emotions. But in this context, when I use the word feeling, specifically it’s referring to happy feeling or unhappy feelings or pleasant or unpleasant or neutral feeling neither happy feeling. And so these can be physical and mental, obviously. When we have sensory contact with a pleasant object, we have pleasant feeling. When we have sensory contact with an unpleasant object, we have painful or unpleasant feeling.
And just with mental consciousness, consciousness, if we’re thinking about a pleasant object, we have pleasant feeling, is manifest with that thought. Or if we’re thinking about an unpleasant object, then unhappy feeling is manifest with that thought consciousness. Or it can be neutral feeling, neither pleasure or pain, just indifferent neutral feeling. So, that’s the three types of feeling. So, every moment of consciousness has one of those three feelings.
There’s no fourth feeling and we’re always experiencing one of those three feelings, so they’re ever present. The next ever present mental factor is discrimination. Discrimination is that when we’re alert, when we’re observing something, we discriminate. If we see a human we know whether it’s a man or a woman or an adult or a child. It doesn’t label man, woman but it knows, discriminates clearly that this person is not that person and so on.
Is always there in awareness, this discriminating aspect of consciousness, knowing the features of the object. The next is intention. Now, intention, again, is a type of experience where there is perhaps sometimes I use the term interest where there is some interest, connection that has brought us to focus upon the particular object whether it’s a sensory object or some object of thought. You know, it’s not just totally accidental that we are focused upon that object. There has been some attraction, some movement in the mind has connected us with the object.
Intention, so this is like an active faculty of mind. But it’s also a type of awareness. So it’s the awareness that is associated with the connection with that object. Often think of the example. In France, I went there in the early eighties to establish Nālānda Monastery and very first within a year anyway of going to this two hundred year old house in the south of France which was in a state of great disrepair, a beautiful big mansion in the countryside.
We hosted His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. And amongst the flowers that we’d offered the Dalai Lama, there were some roses and I I’d cut the head off after it finished, I’d cut the head off the rose and stuck it in the garden and it grew. And the following springtime, coming out of the European winter, in the spring, then the first flower to appear was this beautiful red rose the intensity of the green of the garden. And I mean I could be one hundred, two hundred meters away but always this would stand out so vividly, this red rose, know, was always conscious of it. And I remember, can’t remember how the conversation got around, I was talking to some of the other monks and I mentioned as an example the rose in the front garden and they said, what rose?
And I couldn’t believe it because to me for weeks it had stood out so vividly. Their karma hadn’t connected with the rose, somehow they hadn’t, obviously it had appeared to their eyes but they had paid no real attention to it to say that this is the one major flower in the gut. So, intention is that which really has connected us with a specific object. Now, this is karma. When we talk about karma, we’re talking about the mental factor of intention that which connects us with the object.
Connects us with the object so that the object is vividly noticed, vividly experienced. We’re always vividly experiencing things. Maybe that karma was connecting with some other object, obviously it was. You know, in the general environment there’s things there but we tend to focus only upon what our karma connects us with. When we take interest, there is movement, attraction of the mind to the object.
This is karma. It’s also a mental factor The fourth general ever present mental factor is contact. Contact is the direct experience of the object. The mind, sense faculty or the mental consciousness has been connected with the object and so contact refers to the first direct experience of the object. And obviously feeling comes as a result of contact.
If it’s a pleasant object, then there is a feeling of pleasure. If it’s an unpleasant object, then after the initial contact there is a feeling of displeasure or pain. So, if we’re talking about the sequence of experience, obviously contact precedes its particular feeling. Now, the experience of contact precedes the experience of feeling. But now we’re talking in general.
At any one moment we will always our mind, whichever of the six consciousnesses is active, is experiencing contact and is also experiencing feeling. But the feeling at this one moment is the result of the previous moment of contact. Because you can’t have a cause and effect simultaneously. The effect necessarily occurs after the cause. Is that alright?
The final mental factor is called mental engagement and this is where the mind focuses upon specific details of the object. Intention focuses the mind upon the general object. Engagement focuses upon the specific details of the object. So, an illustration that Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey once gave to illustrate these five present mental factors was that we wake up in the morning and we see it’s a nice sunny day and we generate the thought to go for a walk in the park. So that intention is like the mental factor that leads us towards the object, the park, the park in general.
So, then we get dressed, etc, and we have breakfast and then we go outside and then we decide we go to the park and we enter the park and then there’s different paths, one going this way, this way, this way we see them and so discrimination comes in where we see the park and we decide to choose the left path rather than the right path. So, through discrimination we follow that particular path in the path. Then our main purpose was to look at the flowers so we come to the flower bed and we have contact. The eyes experience contact with the flowers in the flower bed. So there is contact and then there is feeling of pleasure arising associated with that contact with pleasant objects.
And with mental engagement, we look at the specific qualities of the flowers, like, you know, we can see whether they’re fresh or old or whether they’re tulips or roses or whatever type of flower they are and so on, engagement just looks in more detail at the specific flowers within the garden bed. So, this is just like a flow chart as a general idea of how to think about these five ever present mental factors. Now, in the Dharma teachings some of you may well have had explanation of the six main minds and the fifty one mental factors. These are the first five of the fifty one mental factors, the ever present mental factors, then there’s a group of five mental factors associated with concentration focusing upon a particular object. And there’s a presentation of eleven virtuous mental factors, virtuous from their own side.
And a presentation of six non virtuous or root non virtues. And there’s a presentation of twenty secondary non virtues. And finally the four changeable mental factors. So, within that subject we’re just bringing up the first five, these five ever present mental factors. And I talk about them now because actually three of them are intimately they come up again, they’re intimately associated with the presentation of the twelve links of dependent origination.
So, you’re going to hear about them again. Come in there, particularly the mental factor of intention, which is equivalent to karma itself. So, you know, it’s really important to understand how we experience things rather than and it can be known. Through introspection we get to know our mind and you see, the more and more we’re familiar with this presentation, we can recognize karmic intentions arising. And if we can do that, we can select whether to follow that intention or not.
Normally, we tend to be totally passive. We just allow our life to unfold. As the impulse arises, do it. There’s no sort of sense of restraint or there’s not even any sense of responsibility in one’s mental impulses. Or I have the urge to do this, I want to do it.
That’s what children do. But maturity is the gaining of wisdom, understanding of minds and choosing which impulse to follow and which to ignore and not to follow. And in that way we gradually will gain control of our lives. This life and all future lives. There is no other way of ensuring that we go from happiness to happiness and avoid suffering.
We must, it’s imperative that we gain the power of introspection, of watching our mind and not trusting our mind to follow the impulse because the impulse can well be a negative karma ripening. We have to be suspicious of our mind and use wisdom and compassion to determine which impulses are worthwhile to follow-up and which are to be left behind. So this is our responsibility. Okay. Any questions?
Don’t forget you’re free to ask questions. Go. Well, once the impulse arises to go in a particular direction, if we’re quick enough, we have to be quick, if we’re able to resist that tendency and to channel the thoughts, the intention in a positive direction, that karma has manifested actually. It’s ripened. We haven’t suppressed it.
What we haven’t done is we haven’t enhanced it. We haven’t made it more complicated by creating another negative karma or experiencing a suffering result. So we’ve short circuited the explosion. And no, it’s not. One karma can have many ripenings.
One karmic imprint can give rise to many, many, many intentions which lead us in either a constructive or a destructive direction. So there’s no guarantee that we’ve destroyed the karmic imprint but we have evaded that particular momentary ripening. We’ve done it through intelligence and through a personal code of morality. I’m not going to pinch that thing which looks so easy to steal. I won’t follow the impulse to just take it and consider it mine.
No, I’ll leave it. So there’s no danger whatsoever in suppression and it coming up. But still we haven’t necessarily purified that karmic imprint. The karmic tendency to steal is still there and it will come again and again. Is that right?
Okay. Yeah? With the karmic tendency to steal, what was the question? The impulse to steal is a karmic ripening. You see the intentions and the destructive or the emotions come together.
They are differentiated because there is constructive and destructive emotions. In this context we are talking about the thought of stealing which usually can come from attachment or anger, usually comes from desire. So, desire is not karma but the intention to steal out of desire, that intention is karma. And so they sort of come together. Now, if we the ripening of a karma so we won’t repeat that negative karma.
Does that cover your question? I think this will become clearer as we talk about the way in which we create karma. I want to establish now is that karma is referring to the mental factor of intention. Now there’s such a thing as a karmic power and that’s not the same as karma. You see, overall in general karma refers to a law of cause and effect where there’s the causal side where we do an action, there’s the intervening intervening time when the imprint or the karmic potential or potency is established upon the mind stream and then there’s the resultant side when that potency gives rise to its result.
So, karma, that’s cause and effect, that’s law of cause and effect, but specifically karma just refers to mental intention. Anyway, I’ll talk about this in more detail. It’s coming up. Was just wondering when you experience illness due to karma and you take medicine and you get better, does it mean you eliminate that negative karma, or does it just The illness is the result of the ripening of karma. The suffering illness is a ripening result of karma.
Now, that’s ripened. Once karma ripens it is finished. So, by taking the medicine, the karma still hasn’t finished though because you are actually Well, having medicine is good karma. That’s the ripening of positive karma. There are a lot of people who are dying of, like, pneumonia, dehydration and etc, because they have no access to treatment.
They don’t have the karma to be in a situation where the cure is there. So that’s like a double whammy negative karma. The first aspect of the negative karma is the sickness, second aspect of another negative karma is no medicine available. And even other people may have a triple whammy where the medicine kills them because they’re allergic to it or something, you know, so that’s also a negative, that’s three different negative karmas collectively creating a horrible result. So, when a karmic seed ripens, it ripens, there’s no talking about purifying.
It’s ripened in the form of an illness. Then if we have positive karma, we get the right medicine and we cure the illness. So that is the result of positive karma. The karma no longer exists. That specific karma for that illness, the illness is the result of karma.
The karma has ceased to exist when it gave rise to its result, the illness. That particular karma is finished. But, but one karma can have potency to cause illness over and over and over again. Or one karma may have the potency to cause just one episode of illness. So we don’t know.
So if it has the potency to cause illness over and over and over again, just one aspect, just one part of that karma has ripened. But the underlying negative karmic tendency to get ill is still there. Or, somebody else, it is totally you’ll never get that illness again because that karma is finished. See, one karma can have many results or one result. Many karmas can have one result or many results.
It’s very detailed and I can’t say. Mean only a Buddha can really see the subtlety of any individual’s karma To say you don’t have to worry about that one anymore, it’s gone. We don’t know. You want to have a short break here? Oh, ten thirty already?
Yeah, at ten thirty we can stop and have a cup of tea. Well, just in the second paragraph of the notes mentioned that the law of karma is whatever ignorant beings do say or think with benevolent or malevolent intention. Alright, so there’s intention Ignorant beings refers to those whose minds are contaminated by the self grasping ignorance. So, this is the born out of not knowing what we are, how we exist as an individual. Through the inheritance of mistaken ideas about self in past lives, as soon as we become conscious in this life there’s immediately a sense of self and this is a wrong conception or a wrong projection of the self.
We, you know, we conceive ourselves to exist in a way which is not true, which is false. And so this is called the self and we grasp at this mistaken conception of self to be true. So that’s called the self grasping conception. When it says the law of karma is whatever ignorant beings do we’re not saying ignorant of maths or physics or, you know, we’re saying ignorance reality of the self. So, if we have the wisdom directly seeing reality, we will never create karma because we’re no longer influenced by ignorance.
Not saying we’ve abandoned that ignorance but it won’t influence our mind to create karma. So, the law of karma is that whatever ignorant beings do, say or think so there’s the three actions: physical actions, verbal actions or mental actions with a benevolent or a malevolent intention leaves a propensity or a seed or a karmic imprint upon their mind stream that is maintained through time without wearing out, even from life to life, and which has the potential to give rise to a pleasant or unpleasant experience similar to the original action. So that’s more or less in a nutshell the law of karma. There’s a lot involved in it and that’s really all that we are going to be talking about this weekend. Okay, so our karma has ripened for a cup of tea.