Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 88-minute session from a longer teaching series on the Wheel of Life, Ven Thubten Gyatso traces the Buddhist path from its worldly foundations through enlightenment, focusing on how compassion and altruism arise in our minds. He begins with a striking premise: every sentient being has been our mother in past lives, which alone justifies universal love and responsibility. He then walks through the core teachings—the two vehicles (the individual path to personal liberation and the Mahāyāna path to Buddhahood), the five directions in life (worldly happiness, heaven-rebirth, nihilism, and the two Buddhist paths), and the foundational practices: recognising rebirth and lower realms; appreciating the human birth; taking refuge in the Buddha, teachings, and realised community; establishing ethical discipline based on karma; and cultivating renunciation through seeing the suffering even in higher realms. The heart of the teaching is that altruism—the spontaneous wish to free all beings from suffering—is the only antidote to anger and the engine driving the Bodhisattva path to full enlightenment. Pitched at serious practitioners seeking both doctrinal structure and practical method.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 W o L 2010.mp3
UUID: 9530e14b-964c-4d6a-bbf5-cfa6471860a7
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: 88.4 minutes
Words: ~10,201
We remember the good times in the path, maybe we were at school together or university or you know, when we were younger, were very close and we enjoyed so many good times together. And so there’s this feeling of recognition, identification and warmth immediately arises, even we haven’t seen them for twenty or thirty years or more even. Interesting, tomorrow I’m going to meet a cousin of mine I haven’t seen for forty years. Ah, who saw my picture in the newspapers? Amazing how things happen.
I thought he was somewhere else. So, is it valid? It certainly is valid to have such a feeling towards friends, but what about all the strangers, even the people we hate, some of whom may well have been good friends in the past? Well, yes, there is a valid reason. And the valid reason is that we are indeed closely connected to every single living being, not just the humans, the animals, etc, all the living beings.
We have had every close relationship with them in past lives. They’ve been our mothers, they’ve been our fathers, they’ve been our spouse, they’ve been our children, we’ve been their children, you know, they’ve been our friends, our uncles, our aunties. We’ve had so many close relationships with every living being, with each other. Now, we can’t remember past lives. So, for this we have to rely upon the Buddha’s word and the word of those meditators who through the power of single pointed concentration have gained the clairvoyant power to remember past lives and not only of themselves but to see the past lives of others.
So that power is achievable well before enlightenment. You don’t even have to be a Buddhist to achieve that clairvoyant power. It is achieved in dependence upon the power of concentration, single point of concentration. Anyway, we’re going to talk more about this later, probably on Thursday night, about really meditating upon these realities. But the point is that there is just in this introduction, there are logical reasons why we should relate to each other just as we would relate to an old friend who we haven’t seen each other for a long time and we’re really interested in their welfare.
Our love is wanting them to have had a happy time, and our compassion is wanting them not to have suffered, or if they have suffered, feeling empathy and compassion for the troubles they’ve experienced. So, the mind of a Buddha is simply that. When I say the unification of wisdom and compassion, it sees reality, ultimate and conventional reality, and it sees living beings with a warm heart of great love and great compassion and has the not just the wish to stop the suffering of others but the intention to guide others out of suffering by indicating, teaching, demonstrating, showing the Four Noble Truths. The truth of suffering, the truth cause of suffering, the truth cessation of suffering and the true path which leads to cessation of suffering. So, our minds do have that potential to manifest or to achieve the unification of wisdom and compassion.
In these talks, I’m going to talk about the compassionate side. And so, I’ve generally call the talks about altruism and the notes that I’ve handed out, the path to altruism, so I just use the word altruism as a synonym for the Sanskrit word of bodhicitta. So, I don’t like to use words where it sounds like Buddhist jargon, but bodhicitta is a pretty important jargon. So, need to understand what it means. Bodhi literally means enlightenment and citta means mind.
So, it’s the mind of enlightenment. That’s all. Buddha’s mind, the Buddha mind. And as I’ve mentioned, there are two aspects to the Buddha’s mind. There is wisdom and compassion.
So, in the texts you will read about ultimate bodhicitta, the ultimate enlightened mind, that refers to the wisdom seeing reality, conventional and ultimate. Then there is conventional or relative bodhicitta, that refers to the altruistic mind and when I use bodhicitta during these talks I will be talking about the relative or the conventional bodhicitta or altruism, which is not merely love, not merely compassion. It is a state of mind which is born out of love and compassion. And it is an attitude of universal responsibility, that it’s my responsibility to guide all beings out of suffering. So why is it my responsibility?
Because in the training we reflect very deeply on the fact that every being has been my mother, my father and so on in past lives. That we actually have this close relationship with every living being. And in those past lives, my past mothers and fathers have been incredibly kind towards me. And just as it’s sort of socially acceptable and natural that if our present mothers and fathers, just talk about the mothers, are in trouble, then we their children are sort of morally responsible to look after them, to help them. Now, we wouldn’t just stand aside, you know, if we come home and the house is in flames and our mother’s trapped, we wouldn’t say, oh look, will you go in there and help?
We would just automatically feel that we have to do something. We have to put our own lives at risk to rescue our dear mother, who is in danger of being burnt alive. So the reality is that we are surrounded by our dear mothers, and the reality is when we think about the great danger of the ignorant mind that leads us into uncontrolled attachment and anger, then it’s as if our past mothers all around us are caught up in flames. Flames of suffering, real and potential because of the karma etc. That creating through confusion.
So, when the meditator reflects deeply and deeply upon this reality, the meditator then generates a sense of universal responsibility. It’s my responsibility to rescue all my past mothers. We don’t even say, Oh look, there are hundreds, thousands, countless Buddhas. Can’t they help? If we thought that, we would never achieve Buddhahood.
We would never achieve the unification of wisdom and compassion. We would never achieve Mahāyāna path. We would never generate bodhicitta in our mind. So, bodhicitta, this urgency to rescue others from suffering, that is the power, the energy that drives us to work on our minds to eradicate the saṃsāra confused miserable ignorant mind, you know, the ignorance within our mind, you can’t destroy the mind. I mean, that’s non physical, that’s indestructible.
But we can certainly bring to an end the confusion is based upon ignorance and wisdom opposes ignorance and extinguishes ignorance. But wisdom has to be supported by strong determination and strong courage, it’s not easy to get into our own minds, to start opening up the layers of self centeredness, of anger, of attachment, of pride and jealousy, they have been ingrained into our consciousness over countless past lifetimes. They’re very powerful. And to try to free our mind from self centeredness is something which is extremely difficult and takes so much effort and will take such a long time, many lifetimes. I don’t know how many people ask me, Are you a Buddha?
Are you enlightened? Say, Give me a break, come on. It’s not something that can possibly occur overnight, especially in this day and age when there’s so much distorted views, so many wrong views in the world, strong attachment, strong anger, strong selfishness. It takes lifetimes to follow the path and to get into the mind. And so, to do that we need to have the perseverance and the courage and determination, as I’ve mentioned.
This requires a sense of urgency born through love and compassion towards all other beings. I must carry on and break through the veils of ignorance in dedicate my life to giving material help food, shelter, education, medicine, you know, whatever is needed at a physical or material level. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, that’s great. But unless I can teach and explain and guide others on the path of entering into their own minds to eradicate the garbage from their minds, I can’t be of great help.
I might ease their physical situation, but they’re still going to hate each other. They’re still going to become attached. They’re still gonna be jealous and proud. And they’re going to compete. And they’re gonna fight.
And they’re going to create the cause for even worse rebirth than this human rebirth. So, the best way, the proper way, the only final way is to help them to remove their ignorance and help them cultivate universal love and compassion altruism. I cannot do that as long as wisdom and altruism remain intellectual ideals for me. I have to actualize wisdom and compassion. Only then can I become a proper guide, a trustworthy guide, who knows exactly what to say and how to guide others?
So, when we see the reality of that and understand the meaning of that, then we think, I’ve got to become a Buddha. This is the unification of wisdom and compassion. So, I must become in order to rescue my past mothers. So, therefore, with this strong determination and seeing the suffering, the continual suffering that’s happening all around, just in the human society, one is energized again and again just by seeing other sentient beings to persevere in one’s own practice. Compassion and without that determination to help others, we won’t do it properly.
We will slacken off. We just won’t have the energy that’s required to accumulate what’s necessary in the mind to become a Buddha. And there are many stories illustrating the historic Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha himself in his life as a bodhisattva where in various rebirths he sacrificed his life in many different ways out of love and compassion and in doing so created the cause to achieve Buddhahood. Because it’s not enough just to have the wisdom and compassion. One has to have the means through which one can communicate can with sentient beings.
So the path to Buddhahood, we hear, requires the gathering of the two great collections: the collection of wisdom and the collection of merit. Merit is the positive energy which begins with acts benefiting others through karma and as one grows and matures on the path and realizes emptiness, it is the sort of uncontaminated karma or the pure actions directed towards attaining Buddhahood. And through this collection of merit positive energy, attaining Buddhahood, just through the power of one’s mind, supported by this accumulation of merit, one manifests what’s called a pure land. So, a pure land is a place where high practitioners who have realized emptiness and are on the path to Buddhahood can be born and where as Buddha, we call it the Sambhogakāya, the Complete Enjoyment Body, one gives the teachings and the practitioners are able to complete the path to enlightenment in the best circumstances. So, the Pure Lands are not within the wheel of life.
And the bodhisattvas who are born there don’t even necessarily have achieved nirvana, but what they have achieved is the direct realization of emptiness. So they’re called ārya bodhisattvas, ārya noble. Their mind has been ennobled by the direct realization of emptiness which means they have actually destroyed karma but they haven’t yet eliminated all of the obscurations from their minds. So they can be born there. But if one doesn’t have that realization, one can’t be born there.
So, from this pure land state, a Buddha has the power again as a result of great compassion, as a result of altruism and the vast accumulation of merit on the path. The Bodhisattva has the capacity to send emanation bodies or Nirmānakāya that they can emanate in many different forms in other planets simultaneously, either as Śākyamūni Buddha, turning the wheel of Dharma, teaching the whole path, or simply as ordinary beings or as animals, or in any way, wherever their past mothers’ minds are ripe, ready to comprehend any facet of teachings or the whole path, as in the case of Śākyamūni Buddha who turned the wheel of Dharma, then Buddhas in the aspect of this Nirmānakāya or emanation body are able to manifest and guide those beings in the right direction. So, that’s the only way they can help. By teaching, by showing, look, this is your mistake. This is the correct way.
Learn from your mistake. Follow the path. And they can show the path and help people practice the path but they can’t grab us by the scruff of the neck and drag us along the path. Because the path is internal. The path is in our own mind.
It’s nowhere else. We are the only ones who can reach maturity in our own minds. And I’ve been using the spiritual path is really a path of mental maturation. Physically, our bodies grow up and mature quite rapidly, but mentally we remain immature, particularly when we’re under the control of self centered ignorance, uncontrolled anger, attachment, pride, jealousy. And in many times in the sūtra teachings of Buddha there is reference to the childlike sentient beings.
Why are we childlike? Because we’re just like children mentally. We have not matured to go beyond our wrong conceptions, ideas. We’re still slaves to our uncontrolled disturbing emotions. We still cry and make others cry stupidly, selfishly, in competition with each other, and this goes on and on until we die unless we have the great fortune to meet somebody who indicates to us that our root problem is not husband, our wife, Mr.
Rudd or Mr. Abbott or the weather. The root or not even our body, our root problem is in our own mind, it’s selfishness. And that selfishness comes from ignorance of the reality of the self. So, learning that.
And then, if we’re extremely fortunate, we meet a practitioner will explain to us an emanation of Buddha or a teacher who will explain to us the Mahāyāna path, the universal vehicle path towards Buddhahood. Alright, so, in the notes there is a mention here that the Buddha’s teachings are divided two parts: the individual vehicle and the universal vehicle. The individual vehicle is called the Hīnayāna and the universal vehicle is called the Mahāyāna. So, what this refers to is we have a whole spectrum of mental aptitudes and interests and aspirations and so on. And for most of us we’ve lived our life trying to be happy, trying to avoid suffering.
It’s been fairly self centered in our behavior. Me and my family, we’ve worked towards personal happiness for me and mine. And it’s very, very difficult for our minds to embrace the concept of every single living being. To see the ants in our garden, not only equally to the way we see our mother, but seeing both our mother and the ants equally as having been our mother countless times in the past, like a huge amount of love and compassion and respect and wishing them to not suffer and wanting to help them. So, is altruistic attitude, which goes totally beyond any form of self preservation or self desire for my happiness and my freedom from suffering, is very difficult to entertain.
So, Buddha taught those who found that a very difficult concept to embrace. The Buddha taught the path to nirvana. nirvana is the cessation cessation of one’s personal suffering and its cause. It is the complete cessation and liberation from the wheel of life by generating the wisdom seeing reality. And that’s the main goal.
There is, of course, on this path that wisdom needs to be supported by great love and great compassion. And these have to be cultivated. But there’s not the sense of universal responsibility. There is simply the goal to achieve nirvana, my personal liberation. That’s why it’s called the individual vehicle.
And so most of Buddha’s teachings were given explaining that path because that’s what most people could tolerate. But there were a few amongst the Buddhist disciples whose minds were capable of embracing the bodhisattva ideal, the altruistic, the thought of cultivating altruism, this attitude of universal responsibility. For those, Buddha taught the universal vehicle or the Mahāyāna, which is the teachings ings on how to cultivate the bodhicitta, the altruistic mind, and how to put it into practice. It includes all the teachings of the individual vehicle and on top of that, and all the practices of the individual vehicle, and on top of that, the specific practices designed towards gathering the two great collections of wisdom and merit which are required to achieve Buddhahood. So the path to Buddhahood is very difficult, but it’s possible.
So, Śākyamūni Buddha showed that path. There are times, there will be in this world when future Buddhas come, who will only teach the individual vehicle because the people around at that time will not be capable of comprehending the Mahāyāna. Now I think, think Maitreya Buddha will just teach the individual vehicle. Have you heard that? I think I’ve heard that.
I’m not totally sure. I have to check that out. It doesn’t mean that Maitreya Buddha is not a Buddha and doesn’t know the universal vehicle. It just means that the people who will be around when Maitreya, the next Buddha comes, will not have the seed or the thought to practice the Mahāyāna. But I’m not totally sure, I just think of Anyway, if not Maitreya, certainly many of the other thousand Buddhas who appear in this world, some will teach both the individual and the universal vehicles, others will teach just the individual vehicle.
There are other times when Buddhas appear and they look around and they shake their heads and disappear. No hope. And you see, for us to receive the teachings we have to have the cause. Nothing happens by chance in this world. For us, us, I think as I mentioned last week, if we want to win lotto, six numbers are not enough.
We also have to have the karma. We have to have the cause. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche told me when I asked him for six numbers and he very readily gave me the six numbers. As I was leaving the room, he carefully reminded me, looked up and said, Oh, you also have to have the karma, which I didn’t have. So, within the Mahāyāna or the universal teachings, Buddha also taught at two levels.
One level we call the perfection vehicle or the Pāramitāyāna or sometimes called the Sūtrayāna. So, is the Bodhisattva’s practice of training in the ten perfections founded on the six perfections of generosity, patience and so on, the various six perfections. So, those students who were capable of practicing the universal vehicle, the vast majority could only embrace the perfection vehicle, the progressive path towards enlightenment which takes three, minimum time, is three countless great eons of time, which is a vast duration of time. It’s longer than of this earth. So one has to be reborn again and again on different planets.
Even when this earth ceases, one won’t have finished one’s part on the perfection vehicle, one have to go to another planet which is more conducive to continue its practice. Amongst those followers of the universal vehicle who Buddha there were very few who were capable of the profound practice of tantra. So, for those who taught in the aspect of Kālacakra, the Buddha taught the tantric vehicle or the vajrayana. So this is not different. This is not a third vehicle.
This is part of the universal vehicle. To practice the vajrayana, one has to complete all the practices of the perfection vehicle. We at least have solid realization of renunciation, bodhicitta, the wisdom realizing emptiness as the foundation for tantric practice. So, for a very few students, Buddha taught the tantric practices and these have been maintained. Have the great fortune that they were not just maintained in terms of the verbal transmission, but they’ve been maintained in terms of the practical actualization of yogis and yoginis in Tibet and India through the centuries.
The lamas of today are qualified teachers of the whole universal vehicle. We’re extremely fortunate to be able to meet such teachers. By the way, you can ask questions at any time if there’s something that’s not too clear. So now, in the notes, this is coming partly from me but also from the teachings. We all have a direction in life and if we don’t have a direction we’re looking for a direction.
But even if we think, oh, life is meaningless, we still go day to day doing things. We still have our direction. And it’s a bit of wisdom to recognize that the ordinary direction in life is sort of a bit circular. It’s not going anywhere. Nowhere constructive anywhere.
We wonder what is it all about? What’s the meaning of life? But still within that intellectual wondering we have a direction. And so, we can talk about directions in life and the meaning of life in terms of worldly sense and non worldly sense. So, a worldly direction in life is the simple pursuit of happiness in this life, know, here and now happiness, and avoiding unhappiness and suffering and pain, again, in this life.
Know, this is just what we’re our thoughts are just embracing this life. We’re not really thinking beyond this life. We’re just thinking about what we’re going to do today and tomorrow and next week and next year. What I’m going to do to be happy and to avoid unhappiness and suffering. So, this is in the worldly category because it’s worldly.
It doesn’t go beyond this life. And the vast majority of humans in the world simply have that direction in their daily activities. Certainly all the animals are just sleep, they wake up and they wonder where they can get the next meal from and they just want to experience pain and not experience suffering. It’s not different. Actually, the human endeavor of pursuing our happiness, although we may intellectualize and glorify our arts, our music, our painting, our films, etc.
It’s really, in general, it’s just superficial, sensual gratification. Especially the food and going to the beach, the clothes we wear, a lot of it is extremely superficial gratification in a sense. It’s trying to be pleasure and not have suffering. So, we work very hard to make money, to have a house to protect us and able to buy food and medicine when needed. But there is nothing deeply meaningful in this life other than survival really.
Survival in a happy way. In the process we all meet frustrations, disappointments, we lose all that we work so hard to accumulate, things often don’t turn out the way we expect them to, we have incredible disappointment, the people we invest all our hopes in let us down. It could be our spouse or our children or our friends. There’s no guarantee that hard work will bring definite results of good happiness and security. Especially for all our hopes in the stock market, as so many found out.
So, as a result, we get frustrated, we get angry, we become competitive, we hurt each other. We tend to pursue happiness and avoid suffering at the expense of others. And, you know, so we hear the metaphor of rat race of human life. Well, it’s not just cynics who see human life as a rat race. And we know it a rat race, like rats definitely, what is a rat race?
I’ve always presumed a rat race is, like rats are pretty nasty and they’ll go for whatever they want at the expense of other rats, is that right? Is that what you mean by a rat rat? A circular wheel. Maybe. Right.
Well, Yeah. Okay, so I learned something. Somehow I’ve always had the picture of a rat race of being this real free for all fight, which if we look at human society, hey, it’s there. You don’t have to drive a Victorian car through Adelaide during the football Sorry, I was just joking, but I did have my car bashed. Alright, so, it’s not that pleasing, you know, we take an honest look at what we’re doing to each other, the way we do fight each other and the things that do go on.
We just read the news, the headlines headlines day in, day out. Scary. So much of it is domestic violence or racist violence or road rage, the ridiculous things that we do do out of uncontrolled emotions. That is one of the worldly directions. Another way of living and a meaningful life and a direction in life is those who have a belief in future lives, either from the Buddhist point of view of reincarnation in different realms, or the Judeo Christian Muslim belief in a future life either in heaven or in hell.
And so, one adopts these beliefs as a basis for ethical conduct. And I think this is extremely laudable because it is. We do need a reason for ethical conduct. Morality ethics are not well, they can be innate. Definitely we can from previous lives, from a Buddhist point of view, from previous lives, if by living in pure morality of not harming others, killing, stealing, lying and so on, that leaves powerful imprints to have the innate tendency in this life whether we receive more teachings or not, we just have an innate tendency to behave ethically, to not kill, not steal, not lie, to have compassion and kindness.
So this is a wonderful thing. But unless it’s reinforced by again meeting teachers who get caught up with the wrong crowd very easily be talked out of their innate goodness and become like their friends without sort moral restraint in their lives. Especially so in our society which is growing more and more secular all the time. And the law is not enough. Our legal legal system says don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie and so on.
Well, of course we obey the law but not necessarily willingly and not through some understanding and compassion. There’s no compassionate reason why we should obey the law. Certainly, I mean even in my youth, the law was something to flout, something to reject. The police were pigs and whatever they stood for, we were against. It was just the culture of my friends and sometimes we got away with it, other times we didn’t.
Alright. So, the pursuit of heaven or a happy rebirth is valid and it comes from some wisdom, some compassion, some teaching of the path. And the Buddha taught, at least for the simplest spiritual goal is to let go of the clinging, the obsession with pursuing happiness and avoiding suffering in this life and to aim to think about the future life and start behaving in a moral way, in a non harmful way, with the thought of guaranteeing a happy rebirth and avoiding rebirth in a terrible suffering state. Alright. But still worldly, because even if we go to hell, we’ll go to heaven, definitely hell, but even if we do go to heaven, and we can do that without the wisdom realizing the ultimate reality of emptiness, then we will still be ignorant, we will still become attached, we will still have pride and jealousy, etc, etc.
And so, there is danger that we will fall from Heaven, heaven. From the Buddhist point of view, we will fall into lower rebirth states because life is so good in heaven that there will be no power, no initiative to really do something about our mind. The human birth is best for understanding the reality of suffering and the cause of suffering. If we’re born in one of these heavenly states, it just goes on and on so beautifully. At the very end there’s great suffering and great misery as the inevitable death comes and we start to realize that all our pleasures are stopping and we become rejected, abandoned by our good friends who are not dying, but then it’s too late.
It’s too late to train one’s mind. One only has a week or so before death comes and so there’s great misery. So, I’ve included working to go to heaven and to not go to hell as a worldly direction in life. Not an invalid direction, better than the first one, but not a final goal because there’s no there’s not only just no guarantee, one will definitely fall from heaven. We’ve been there.
We’ve been to heaven countless times in past lives. We’re back as humans. How long will be human, we don’t know. We could be animals in the next life. The third one, I just added this nihilistic self destruction because there are people who are very cynical about life and they think beyond this life there is absolutely nothing.
And even within this life it’s all meaningless. And I know some young friends, like children of friends of mine. Some who are into, I mean one in particular I’m thinking of, she is doing a PhD in philosophy. She’s also a cocaine addict and is in an extreme dangerous nihilistic mental state of just seeing meaninglessness in life and in trouble. And I’ve been talking around and there are a lot of, especially young people, in a similar state of seeing no real meaning in what their parents are doing, what society is doing.
And so they engage in self destructive behavior. Excessive drugs, alcohol, driving cars ridiculously, just kicks with little regard for their lives or the lives of others. And I feel this is coming from this sort of nihilistic vacuum. It’s horrible actually. It’s really sad.
And it sort of, it seems to be a direction in life that’s becoming more and more common. So, added it here. So, non worldly directions of life. Non worldly means I didn’t know what to put here. transworldly or super Anyway, I ended up just putting non worldly as meaning the opposite.
Are two directions talked about them. The one is working, using one’s life to attain liberate, personal liberation from suffering and the causes of suffering to achieve nirvana. nirvana, which is the cessation of suffering and causes. And the second is the aspiration and working or living to attain full Buddhahood for the purpose not just to become a Buddha and to live in a pure land, etc, but the sole purpose behind the wish to actualize the full potential of our mind is the determination to achieve, to become a perfectly qualified guide to show others the way out of suffering by understanding the cause in their own mind. And one is perfected when one does oneself.
If one hasn’t done it oneself, one cannot be a perfect guide. One has to have done it oneself and in the process one accumulates vast powers and capacities to work for others in so many different ways, which is the state of the Buddha. So, if we move on, I’ve just listed six of the outline of the meditations that we need to follow. Like for the vast majority of us, we’re all starting off equally in a state of a lot of confusion. And so we need to train our mind gradually on the path toward Buddhahood.
As I’ve said, it takes countless eons of rebirth after rebirth to achieve. So, to begin, for us, in particular, in a Western society where rebirth and karma are sort of alien concepts, we need to reflect very deeply upon the teachings of rebirth and reincarnation and karma, the actions that we do under the motivation of confused minds, and start to gain some sort of appreciation that these are not just Eastern concepts, but they’re living realities in my life. They’re living realities in the lives of all of those around me. And this is actually a really exciting time to hear the explanation of karma and rebirth, to think about it, and really think about the meaning, and then to look at our life if it were true. We should not just accept it as being true because Buddha was a famous person.
He himself said that. Don’t do that. You’ve got to think about it and check up, check up in your own experience and see if your own experience can be explained by karma and rebirth. Is there anything which contradicts karma and rebirth? Look at it.
Ask yourself. Question it. And so it’s a process of thinking which can take years, but it’s very important because it becomes the foundation of our decision to enter one of the non worldly paths, to gain a direction in life that is more than meaningful. We will be convinced that there is an attainable goal, either nirvana or full enlightenment. It’s clear that the two non worldly directions are both Buddhist.
Which is not criticizing other religions. It’s not putting it down. It’s just that other religions don’t talk about nirvana. They don’t talk about liberation from self centered ignorance, anger and attachment. They don’t present a path towards the cessation of these confusing emotions.
They do present paths of morality, like Commandments, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which give individuals a solid foundation of morality through which they can achieve their goal, which is heaven and it’s not going to hell. But they don’t, as far as I’m aware, there’s no other philosophical system or religion in the whole world other than Buddhism which presents the meaning of nirvana and the meaning of Buddhahood, which are defined. It’s not as if there’s some unspeakable ideals. They’re very clearly described and defined. And so we can check up is it possible for this mind to experience nirvana, to experience Buddhahood?
And only then will we actually decide to follow that path. So, to reach that decision we have to begin with karma reincarnation or rebirth. So, the first step is recognizing the reality of rebirth and then in consequent upon that, that there are lower realms, that I could be reborn in lower realms, and those beings in the animal realm, in the hungry ghost realm, in the hell realms are indeed suffering. And I’ve been there. And I could go there again in the future.
So having strong recognition of the terror, the incredible misery that is experienced in those three realms of great suffering. The next point is to look at oneself. I’m not there. I’ve got a human life. And to realize that the potential of a human life is so much greater than catching the next movie, than going to the next rock concert, eating at the best restaurant, the finest foods, wearing the most expensive clothes, buying the best car, living in the best house in the best neighborhood, having the best job.
All of the things that people are just pursuing so strongly, having the most beautiful partner, the most wonderful children, all of the ideals of society. All right. Not putting them down, but I hope, I don’t know if you agree with me or thought, but there’s a lot of dissatisfaction and there’s a lot of problems associated with the pursuit of those ideals. But our human potential is that we’re not in the hells. We can train our mind in wisdom and compassion.
We have the intelligence. Animals have much less suffering than the hells and hungry ghosts, but their brains are not sufficiently developed to allow their mental intelligence to manifest. But our human brain is. It’s the best. The human life is the best life in which to generate altruism, bodhicitta, because not only do we experience suffering, others are experiencing We can have empathy through our own suffering, we can have strong empathy for the suffering of others and just through our own intelligence, even if we don’t experience the suffering of others, and we can just see the news, we can see the starving children in Africa and the people all around the world caught up in war, in earthquakes, floods and so on.
So much suffering. We can identify with them. We can feel true empathy because we understand what they’re going through. You know, if animals see other animals suffering, well elephants, we read of elephants who always stay with a wounded or dying elephant and have strong family connections. So there’s a degree, definitely a degree of compassion, degree of empathy.
But most animals, if we go down the scale of evolution, they’re less and less concerned with the welfare of others. In fact, in many types of animals, if there is a wounded member of their own species, they will kill it and eat it. This is reality. Maybe there’s survival value there or whatever, but this is the reality. Mostly humans don’t do that.
We don’t kill off the sick and injured, although we’re starting to think about it in terms of the aged and the terminally ill. Anyway, that’s another story. So, with our human life, which is no guarantee how long it’s going to be, we have such potential to mature. Most human adults are mentally immature, they’re but if we have access to the teachings, we can mature. We can actually grow in wisdom and compassion.
We can diminish our selfishness, our anger and attachment. Is such a rare opportunity, so wonderful. But we don’t know how long we’ve got it. Death is imminent. So, in this first step, the purpose of these meditations are to generate intelligent fear of being reborn in the lower realms, of being an animal, being in hell, being a hungry ghost, which sounds familiar.
Christianity. Yes. Be afraid of hell. This fear is not something irrational. It’s totally totally rational because hell is reality.
Therefore, just as we teach our children, don’t touch careful of the stove, you’ll get burnt. It’s intelligent. Don’t do this. There’s great danger if you do that. Children need to be told because they sort of ignorantly put themselves into dangerous situations running across the road without looking right and left.
Look right and left and right again. Okay, so that’s rational fear. So we need to have strong rational fear of rebirth in the three lower realms. And if we look at our behavior and if we’re honest in how we’ve acted in our life up until now. And if we understand the teachings on karma, we will understand that we have created far more causes for a lower rebirth than we have for a happy rebirth.
So, we need rational fear of rebirth in the lower realms. And through this fear we make the decision, I must practice Dharma. Now, Dharma is the teachings. I must practice the teachings. I must train my mind in wisdom and compassion.
The next step is to reflect upon the qualities of the Three Jewels. The Three Jewels refers to the Buddha himself, the Dhamma, the teachings that he taught, and the Sangha who are the practitioners who have actualized the teachings in their minds, not just intellectually understand them, but have the inner realization, especially in particular the inner realization of emptiness. Such a practitioner matter whether they’re monk or nun, or lay person they have realized emptiness, are true Sangha. Sangha means the community, like the special community practitioners. So, one needs to the second level, one reflects upon the qualities, what it means to be a Buddha, and what the qualities of a Buddha are, what the qualities of the Dharma, the teachings, are and what the qualities of such practitioners are.
And in those we generate the faith, the confidence, that the direction they indicate is a safe direction to follow and to decide to follow that direction. So here we’re going back worldly directions, non worldly directions. So the direction indicated by the Buddha and his teachings and the practitioners who have realized the teachings of it, and in realizing it they verified what the Buddha taught. And there are vast amounts of scriptures written not just by the Buddhists but by the great meditators and practitioners of India, Tibet and other countries which verify the original teachings and which completely can be relied upon as showing us what we can do, what we need to do. So, we make the strong decision to follow the direction indicated by the Buddha.
In technical term, Buddha’s jargon, we’re talking about taking refuge. Refuge means the individual making the decision to align his or her life according to their understanding of the teachings. That’s all. And to strongly accept the Buddha as being a valid valid guide, the teachings valid path to follow. And to try and live as much as one can in accordance to one’s understanding and to continue to train.
So, this is a very important step. To assist us with following the path of safe direction, then we need to examine karmic cause and effect, understand the teaching of karma, and develop, establish a code of morality. And that code of morality is based upon recognition of the reality of karma. And it follows very closely upon other moral codes. It’s very wide in that the non harmfulness, which is the essence of morality, embraces living beings, not just human beings.
And not just Buddhists. Every living being equally, no matter their race, their religion, their philosophy, no matter their criminal background, their terrorist background, embracing them equally as we do the animals. So this, again, I think is a unique tenet of Buddhism to regard all living beings equally and for one’s moral standards to embrace all living beings. The foundation of morality is taking vows. vows can be at the level of lay people or ordained people.
vows of not killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, taking intoxicants. These are voluntary. As much as one understands the meaning of the teachings, one can take any of those vows. Or if one wants to go further, they’re within the restraint of being a monk or a nun, then Buddha gave different levels of ordination as the foundation of morality. Okay, then the next step is reflecting on the suffering of the upper realms because so far we’ve just talked about generating rational fear of the lower realms.
But we might think, well, I want to be human, I want to go to heaven. But that’s not enough because as I’ve mentioned, if we go to heaven, if we haven’t eliminated ignorance, can fall again. So, the next step is to reflect deeply on the sufferings of human life, of the divine beings’ lives, and generate renunciation. Renunciation of the entire will of life. Not just the three lower suffering realms, but even of the so called three happy realms, because it’s not perfect happiness.
So renunciation renunciation means the state of mind which really turns against the whole tide of society. Society is flowing strongly like you know what it’s like to be caught in a rip in the surf. Surf. You have no choice but to go with the flow. Otherwise you’ll drown if you try to fight the flow.
Right? And this is the way to survive is you go out and then you go down the beach, you come back again where the rip doesn’t exist. So we are caught in the rip of society, the pursuit of pleasure here and now, sensory indulgence, very little thought of future lives and certainly very little thought of achieving nirvana or enlightenment. So renunciation is the decision to go against the tide. Will we drown?
Well, we won’t drown if our determination is strong. And the very act of facing up, not just to external society, of course, but facing up to our social conditioning. Our whole psychology since we were born has been trained to do what everybody else is doing. And it’s very difficult. It’s actually very easy to go against social norms.
In the sixties it was dead easy. It was fun. And they copied us. Everybody started having long hair and beards and torn jeans became expensive fashion items, you know. So, it’s easy to go against thrust or the riptide of external society.
It’s very difficult to go against the internal momentum of what we’re being conditioned with as we’re growing up. But it’s essential, we have to do it. And because it’s only our own mind, we’ve got space, we’ve got time. In some ways we should be afraid of our own mind when it’s uncontrolled. But in other ways we shouldn’t be afraid of our own mind because it’s just our own mind.
So many of our worries and fears and problems are just our own mind. Not saying they’re not real. We tend to say, look, it’s just in your mind. Meaning it’s not real. You’re just inventing it.
Well, yeah, give me a break. I’m suffering, don’t tell me it’s in my own mind. Miserable. That’s real. And in many cases, but it is self created.
And because it’s self created, we can self destroy it. We don’t have to follow our conditioning. The Buddhist path really is brainwashing. It is self brainwashing. It is eliminating the confusion, the stupidity, the selfishness, the anger and attachment with the soap or replacing it with the beauty, the peace and happiness of love, wisdom and compassion.
Is the beginning of doing that. And renunciation is not something that occurs overnight. It just grows as a sense, wow, things are not what they cracked up to be. That alone is fabulous. That’s like an earthquake shaking our entire saṃsāra, you know, our entire state of being under the control of confusion and karma.
And so gradually, gradually each one of us can grow in the path of renunciation. As I say, you don’t have to be a monk or a nun. In any way most people practice the Dharma in lay situation without being ordained. So, the next step is the actual trainings on the individual vehicle. Training morality as the basis because without living in pure morality one cannot gain perfect concentration.
One needs to achieve single point of concentration. And if the mind is not trained in morality, when goes to meditate, the lid will be taken off the garbage bin and we will just indulge in fantasies which we’ve been doing most of our life and desire will come up and the perfect partner and the perfect job, it all will come back. I know from my personal experience the garbage just floats and we just get trapped. We’re sitting looking very cool. But the physical appearance is a lie, the mental might weigh off.
Without renunciation, without social conditioning for total sensory indulgence, will never gain single pointed concentration. If we don’t gain single pointed concentration, Samādhi, we will never gain the direct realization of emptiness, of ultimate reality. Because that direct realization is necessarily supported by a mind of perfect single-pointed concentration. Could you tell me the difference, please, between noticing the understanding of emptiness and the realization Well, yeah, look, there are three levels of growing wisdom or knowledge. The first is called generating the wisdom of listening.
So that means receiving the instructions and reading also not just verbal teachings but also reading information from books. Through that we gain a lot of knowledge, intellectual knowledge. Then the next thing to do is to cultivate the wisdom of reflection or analysis of the meaning of what we’ve heard. Because words are just signposts pointing to a more profound meaning. So we need to really analyze intellectually intellectually the profound meaning.
And we gain, so we’re talking about emptiness. Alright, so we gain the intellectual or inferential understanding of the meaning of emptiness. So emptiness is a real phenomenon. It’s the ultimate nature of everything that exists. So everything has its emptiness.
The inferential is not just knowledge. An inference is knowledge based upon perfect logical reasoning. But it’s still an idea. It’s still a conception of emptiness. And when we have a conception of emptiness that means that what’s appearing to our mind is our mental image of what we think emptiness is.
Right? But that mental image is not emptiness. It’s what we think emptiness is. And even our inferential understanding is correct, there is an element of confusion in that we mistake the phenomenon of emptiness with our idea of emptiness. We can’t distinguish between the two.
So it’s a correct inferential understanding but it has an element of mistake. So we can call that realization as the intellectual realization or the inferential realization. Then, the third level of wisdom is wisdom of meditation. And what we do is that we have to meditate. We have to go through the nine stages of developing śamatha, calm abiding, or mental quiescence, which means that the mind is totally undisturbed by any distracting thoughts and it is effortlessly focused upon the object.
So that is much more powerful than the previous level of wisdom because the power is the concentration. Now, initially the wisdom of meditation is still intellectual and what we’re focused upon is our intellectual understanding of emptiness. But it’s much more powerful because it’s the foundation of Shamatha, single-pointed concentration. Now we have to meditate again and again on emptiness. And as the power of concentration goes even stronger, we are able to break through the idea the mental image of emptiness dissolves away.
And we have what’s called experience of emptiness. The mind directly observes emptiness. That’s the direct realization. That has the power to destroy the root ignorance, not knowing reality which invents inherent existence self, inherent existence other and believes in that to be true. The correct inferential understanding of emptiness does not have the power to extinguish the innate ignorance.
But this power of concentration and directly relating it, that has the power. And it doesn’t immediately remove all ignorance. Ignorance has many levels. Attachment has many levels. Anger has many levels.
Initially, the initial realization only extinguishes intellectual wrong ideas. The innate ignorance is still happy, it’s still strong and the innate attachment, the innate anger are still there. But when we come out of meditation, even though because of the imprints of ignorance things still appear wrongly to exist from their own side, we know it’s false and we’re not fooled by it. And so, with further accumulation of merit and wisdom, we eventually extinguish the grosser and more and more subtle levels of afflictions through the realization of emptiness. So, does that answer the question?
Any other questions? I have to go through this. You say, Why isn’t he talking about altruism? He is. We’re getting there.
We have to go through this to talk about altruism. So I know time’s rapidly going but I just wanna finish, finish. Well, no I can’t possibly finish. I’m going to talk mostly tonight about anger. Because altruism, a sense of universal responsibility, obviously its greatest opponent is hatred and anger.
And we talked about attachment last week so I thought tonight I’d talk a bit about anger. But somehow the time’s rapidly going. Well, quickly skip through. We’re on the fifth point of the individual vehicle where one cultivates the higher trainings of morality, concentration and wisdom. Alright, so you can understand from what we said why we need the wisdom.
That’s what will establish us in nirvana because it destroys ignorance. And so that’s the sixth point. We attain the result self liberation or nirvana when the final, most subtle ignorance is extinguished, the mind appears. The mind achieves achieves the state of nirvana. The universal vehicle, the first step is to do all of that.
All of the individual vehicle practices. Not you can’t jump over. It’s a ladder and you can’t jump to the highest rungs. You’ve got to go through the first rungs. So, if one enters the bodhisattva’s vehicle, or one wants to enter bodhisattva’s vehicle, one has to do all of that.
It doesn’t mean one has to achieve nirvana. But it means one needs to study and practice those meditations not with a thought to achieve nirvana but with a thought to achieve Buddhahood. So, you’re not going to go all the way to achieve nirvana, that’s not your goal. Your goal is Buddhahood because you want to have the capacity to help others. On the path, by the way, a Bodhisattva will achieve nirvana.
Mean whether they want it or not, they can’t help but to achieve it. But that’s achieved well before Buddhahood. So they’ve still got even they extinguish the most subtle affliction from their mind and achieve nirvana. Still the bodhisattva has to have an even greater accumulation of merit and the bodhisattva has to extinguish these subtle obscurations to omniscience which are sort smell of the onions. You know, if you cook onions and if you wash the pot, get rid of all the particles, the smell is still there.
And so even if we remove all ignorance, anger and attachment totally, the smell is still contaminating our mind. So even you’re in nirvana, still things appear to exist inherently or wrongly. And this appearance is an obscuration to the unification of wisdom and compassion. The wisdom seeing ultimate and relative reality simultaneously simultaneously and supported by compassion. So, to achieve that, the bodhisattva has to, there’s another countless great eon after achieving nirvana, another countless great eon before Buddhahood.
So the bodhisattva does that, practices the individual vehicle meditations, and recognizing that one’s mind has the Buddha nature or the potential to become enlightened, this becomes a strong reasoning factor behind decision to enter the bodhisattva’s path. So, to do that, one has to work on renunciation, but not the same renunciation as before on the individual vehicle. The renunciation there was, I don’t want to experience suffering anymore, I want out. The renunciation of the Bodhisattva’s vehicle is I don’t want others to suffer. There is so much pain and misery out there.
How terrible. It’s got to come to an end. I’ve got to bring it to an end. So the renunciation you’re actually renouncing the suffering of all other living beings And one’s own as well because one is a sentient being still. Renunciation is so much vast.
And there’s not one sentient being that we hope stays in hell. Equal determination to rescue the most evil Hitler or Stalin or Mao who’s suffering in hell. Equal determination to rescue them from suffering as one of her own personal mother in this life. So, in order to actually enter the Mahāyāna vehicle, one has to generate bodhicitta. Next sorry next week, on Thursday we’re to talk about the meditations and actualizing on how to actually generate bodhicitta, universal responsibility in our own mind.
You see I’ve put down a lot of anger comes from irritation. We’re unhappy. Something’s going wrong, we’re feeling irritated. And through this irritability we’re impatient. We start to, our fuse is getting shorter and through impatience we are ready to explode in anger.
Anger is an aggressive impulse to hurt physically or verbally the object that’s irritating us. To eliminate it from our sphere of life. Don’t want to be near it. And through anger we can have hatred. Through hatred hatred, we can have resentment, grudge bearing, the thought of revenge and hostility.
Through hostility, we can have belligerence. Belligerence is where we’re really angry about someone or something and when we’re confronted with it, with the explosion, we want to hurt. You! I hate you! Even if there’s no gun, there’s belligerence.
Aggression that explodes when the object see, if the object is not there we have resentment and grudge bearing, but that just sets us up for this belligerent explosion when we meet the object which we resent so much. Spitefulness is more specifically saying something. Deliberate to hurt. Jealousy, even jealousy comes from both anger and attachment, but often it it comes from anger not liking somebody having something that we haven’t got. Cruelty and this harmful attitude is a total lack of compassion and non caring and even rejoicing.
We hear our enemy has been hurt. Great! That’s cruelty. And just not caring what effects our actions have on others whether they’re animals or people. It’s real fundamentally a lack of compassion.
So these anger and irritability and lack of patience are clearly the opposite of love. And heartwarming love is the beginning, is the necessary support for great compassion. And great compassion is the necessary precursor of the sense of universal responsibility. It’s my responsibility to rescue all beings from suffering because they’ve been my mother. So, because they’ve been my mother, this is the underlying cause for altruism.
Seeing all beings, not just as one’s mother, but as having been one’s mother countless times and remembering the kindness that mothers give towards their children and just spontaneously wishing to repay the kindness. Therein is the foundation for altruism. And that’s the only reason for altruism, actually. Our close relationship with each other. As far as I’m aware, there’s no other teaching that the Buddha gave of why we should have this sense of universal responsibility and love and compassion for all living beings.
So next Thursday I want to talk in detail how to meditate and grow this sense of universal responsibility in your mind. And we’re so lucky that we’ve had the transmission of these teachings. They are not only unique in the world, they’re even unique in Buddhism. Even Mahāyāna countries like Korea, I was in Korea last year for three weeks and I visited many monasteries. And also I was in Taipei, in Taiwan for two years.
And when I was in Taiwan, Lama Zopa Rinpoche came to visit and we visited many great monasteries there. And they take Bodhisattva vows and the Mahāyāna, they talk about the path. And Lama Zopa Rinpoche asked each abbot that we met what methods do you have to generate bodhicitta altruism? And they didn’t have methods. They said, Oh, we take Bodhisattva vows.
But Bodhisattva vows are very important. But they’re taken in order not to generate Bodhisattva but to practice Bodhisattva. One needs to have bodhicitta to take those vows and they had just lost these methods that we’ve received the transmission of from Tibet, have been preserved in Tibet. And so last October, I toured many nunneries and monasteries in Korea and they’re wonderful. Mean, so inspiring.
And the meditation harmony between the Sangha was just so inspiring. And the support they received from the lay people. I asked the same question, what methods do you have to generate? I was copying those over. But I sincerely interested because it’s the same Buddhism as Zen Buddhism.
It came from China. Korean Buddhism came from China. Also there was direct contact with India. But the same answer just, well, we don’t have. And I gave teachings like for three weeks, nearly every day, two or three hundred people, different audiences.
So I taught how to develop bodhicitta and it knocked them over. Mean, there was very sincere and I’m not saying I’m a practitioner, I’m not a bodhisattva, but I aspired to be. So I taught what I’d been taught and it was recognized and appreciated. Even within Buddhism, the living lineage and tradition of these teachings is extremely rare. And we’re very fortunate through the auspices of His Holiness and our Lama to have been exposed to them.
And the great Lamas who have taken up the struggle of teaching Dharma to the childlike Westerners. My own teacher, Lama Thubten Yeshe, he was one of the first Tibetan lamas to take up the challenge. And his colleagues, the great Geshes, they said, they’ll never understand, you can’t give up. But he persevered and look, Buddha House resulted in so many centers. I mean, I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.
We’ve still got a long way to go to justify Lama Yeshe’s trust in us. But I think it’s happening. Alright, are there any more questions? Tell me when one becomes a bodhisattva? One becomes a bodhisattva when one generates bodhicitta.
The spontaneous twenty four hours a day intention, one’s whole mind is in the aspect of intending to achieve Buddhahood in order to rescue all beings from suffering. Twenty four hours a day. That’s when you become a Bodhisattva. That’s the beginning of the Bodhisattva’s path. Alright, so I think probably it’s a hot night.
Talked a lot tonight. Thank you for your attention. It’s been very inspiring for me and I hope to see you on Thursday when we will go into the Bodhisattva’s path in detail. Good night.