Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute 1989 encounter interview, Buddhist nun Ven Wendy Finster and monk Ken Horter, both former Anglican schoolchildren who went on to complete postgraduate degrees, reflect on their paths into Tibetan Buddhism. Finster, trained as a psychologist, explains the Buddhist understanding of mind—formless, luminous, and fundamentally pure beneath delusions—and describes analytical and single-pointed meditation as tools to reveal this nature. She explores how Buddhism approaches dreams, the relationship between consciousness during waking and sleeping, and how her clinical training now coexists with monastic practice. Both teachers address questions on celibacy, the role of women in Buddhism (emphasizing complete gender equality in potential for enlightenment), and Buddhism’s compatibility with Christianity. They discuss karma as personal responsibility, social ethics grounded in compassion and wisdom working together, and the possibility of extraordinary results arising from mental development—all framed for listeners unfamiliar with Buddhist basics.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1989 11 29 Interview.mp3
UUID: 74a818d4-c84e-4a51-99d6-07e1f39dc1c7
Teacher: Ven Wendy Finster
Collection: Encounter Interview (Ven Wendy Finster)
Date: 1989-11-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.7 minutes
Words: ~6,987
The system of Buddhism that I’ve been trained in, which is the Tibetan system, has very many different avenues of study philosophically, psychologically, and in terms of investigation and practices which one can do to develop oneself and understand oneself totally. So in fact, if one practices well, one should be able to develop an awareness of oneself from thought moment to thought moment, from from second to second, split second to split second, how one is functioning, what’s happening internally with one’s mind, what’s happening internally with one’s own body, one’s own internal environment, and also what’s happening externally in whatever situation one might be in so that one can start to become one’s own psychologist, one’s one can start to understand oneself on a momentary basis and respond accordingly to whatever’s happening internally and externally, and hopefully with wisdom and compassion without making difficulties for others. Hello. I’m Frank Sheehan. And in this encounter, a Buddhist nun and monk reflect upon aspects of their religious faith.
Both were born into middle class Australian families. Both attended Anglican grammar schools. Both went on to complete postgraduate studies at universities, and both embraced Buddhism within the Tibetan tradition. Ken Horter has been a monk for six years. He was born in Perth and attended Guildford Grammar School.
In nineteen seventy seven, he graduated as a physiotherapist from the University of Western Australia. Three years later he completed a master’s degree and began working at Royal Perth Hospital. In nineteen eighty five Ken set up the Karunā Hospice Centre in Brisbane. This multidisciplinary clinic offers physiotherapy, massage, acupuncture, relaxation classes, and emotional support groups. For the past three years, Ken has been a voluntary worker with the dying at Mount Olivet Hospital.
He has been closely involved with people who have contracted the AIDS virus, the venerable Ken Horter. I became interested in meditation some years ago when I was attending college, And then some years later, when I went trekking in the Himalayas, I found out about a meditation course that was being held in a monastery just outside of Kathmandu. And so I did that one month introductory course in Tibetan Buddhism. And what did that lead to? What happened when you did that course?
Well, it just gave me a feeling of having found what I’d spent my life looking for in terms of the meaning of life and how to live life, and, it was a real feeling of coming home. And since then, that feeling has just, become stronger, and and now I feel very comfortable with the Buddhist path. Wendy Finster was born in Melbourne and educated at Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School. She went on to study psychology at Melbourne University and completed a master’s degree. She then began working with people suffering major mental disturbances and, like Ken Horter, became involved with men and women facing terminal illness.
She was ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition thirteen years ago. Her home monastery is in Nepal. She has trained in formal sitting meditation practice and in the giving of retreats. At the request of her teacher, Wendy set up Buddha House in nineteen eighty one, the city meditation center in Adelaide, where she taught for four years. Since then, she has spent two years in the United States with her teacher, Geshe Lhundup Sopa, the renowned Buddhist monk and scholar.
As a PhD student at the Wisconsin State University, Wendy has studied the philosophical treatises of the Madhyamaka system. She has recently spent four months learning about the Chinese Buddhist system in Taiwan and has taken ordination in that lineage. The venerable Wendy Finster. I came to be interested in Buddhism through working as a psychologist and being interested in the nature of the mind, how it functions. I initially became interested in the Buddhist tradition because of the system of Buddhist psychology and the understanding of the nature of the mind in relationship to the body.
We’re talking really about learning to understand the actual nature of consciousness itself, not the products of consciousness such as perception, memory, feeling, expectations, and so forth, which are regarded as mental events or secondary functioning aspects of the mind. So when we’re talking about learning about the nature of the mind, we’re talking about actually having an experience of the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness, from a Buddhist point of view, the definition of consciousness, the mind on the relative level is that which is formless, is not made of atoms. It’s formless, phenomenon, and it is clear. It has luminosity.
Buddhists believe that we have a stream of consciousness that goes on from life to life, and that the basic nature of our mind is clear and lucid, and the, on top of that clear lucid nature of the mind are the delusions or defilements, the mental, delusions or defilements like anger, jealousy, attachment. And that through spiritual practice or through meditation practice that we can gradually remove those mental defilements or delusions and then come to reveal the clean, clear, compassionate nature of the mind. So the process of meditation or spiritual practice is to gradually get through to that basic enlightened nature of mind. How do you do that in meditation? Well, there are different types of meditation.
The two main types of meditation, if you like, are the the what you would call the analytical meditation, and then the the other form is the single pointed meditation, just, meditating single pointedly on a particular object or conclusion that you’ve reached through the analytical meditation. So the idea of the analytical meditation is that you meditate on the different aspects of the philosophy such as how to develop love, how to develop compassion, how to get rid of the negative states of mind, how to get a better understanding of the true nature of reality. And then by systematically meditating on these different topics, then one gains a deeper understanding of the nature of the mind, of the problems that confront the mind, and one can gradually then get in touch with this true nature of the mind, this this clear, lucid knowing aspect of the mind. Where does the notion of awakening come in? I’ve not heard it spoken of traditionally in any other sense than as a synonym for enlightenment, which would be that one has attained a state of being, a state of complete perfection of all qualities and complete elimination of all negative aspects of mind, and along with that, attaining perfect power, compassion, abilities, love, and wisdom.
So that these are the qualities which someone who attains what we call a state of Buddhahood has attained. And the word awakening sometimes can be likened to when we sleep at night, we have various dreams. Those dreams, we can feel as though they are real at the time. We can respond to them even physiologically. We can have a a racing heart.
We can wake up with tears if we’ve had some kind of nightmare. So at the time, it seems like it’s very, very real, and we respond that way. Similarly, for somebody who has become enlightened, they have awakened out of the stupor or the ignorance of believing that their current state of affairs, the current world that we live in, our experiences are real in the way that we respond to them. So it’s like waking up from a a a dark sleep. So the word awakening in a traditionally Buddhist sense would be from the point of view of enlightenment.
We have wakened up from the ignorance and stupidity and dullness of our ordinary consciousness, ordinary state of affairs, and believing that what we experience and what we do in the world is is very, very real in the same way as a person who’s dreaming believes that their dreams are real at the time. After they wake up, they say, oh, it wasn’t real at all. Nothing to worry about. It was just a dream. I just it was just created by my own mind.
It came from my own mental consciousness that that experience in my dream was nothing more than my own mental creation. Awakening really is just to get in touch with the clarity of the mind. So it’s awakening to our true nature by cutting through the negative states of mind, by cutting through the the delusions, the deluded states of mind, the what’s often called in Buddhism the the three poisonous minds of ignorance, attachment, and anger. And by cutting through those delusions, then then the mind slowly awakens and becomes totally developed, totally clear and open. The aim is not to feel guilty about our state of mind, but just to become aware of the nature of our mind and of the problems confronting our mind, and then through awareness just to systematically work on those negative states of mind to get rid of them.
The Dalai Lama, for instance, talks makes the analogy of our mind is like a set of scales, the positive and the negative. And the more positive you put into the mind, then the less room there is for the negative. So by filling our mind up with positive thoughts, positive impressions, then the mind gradually develops and and awakens, and there’s no room for the negative. So at times, it’s a matter of filling the mind up with things and at times emptying the mind. Is that right?
Yes. There’s two aspects really to spiritual practice in Tibetan Buddhism or in or in Buddhism. One is well, the two aspects can be regarded as creating merit or positive energy, and the other one is is regarded as purification or cleansing of the mind. So on the one hand, we have to cleanse the mind or get rid from the mind of the negative negative states of mind that have been accumulated there in the past, And at the same time, we have to to fill the mind with positive thoughts, positive energy to create the conditions for the mind to grow. So the analogy is often made to, like, if you want to plant a crop, first of all, have to get rid of the rocks and the weeds from the ground.
And then when the ground has been prepared, then you put in the the the seed. And then with moisture and sunlight and fertilizer, then the crop can grow. So the mind is a little bit the same. And until you cleanse the mind of the problems, the delusions that are in the mind, then positive qualities can’t grow in the mind. So you you need this balance between purifying or cleansing the mind and then putting the positive energy into the mind.
For many religions, dreams are an important source of revelation. How was it, I wondered, with Buddhism? Dream has no reality in the sense it is just a creation of the mental consciousness. It can, however, give us some indication of what’s happening on deeper levels of of our own mind. How is this?
Can you describe this? For when we sleep, we have a more subtle state of consciousness. Our usual state of consciousness is very gross. We deal with seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and thinking. In Buddhism, we talk about six senses, and the mind or thinking is is the sixth.
And we understand ourselves and we understand the world through these six senses, and they tend to be quite gross and tend to distortion. And we I think we’re all aware of times when we’ve been mistaken by our senses, and we believe them to give us accurate information about the world when in actual fact they are tending to distortion, and they also can’t give us a clear indication of exactly what’s going on in the external world, the phenomenal world, in the same way as scientists will find that our perceptions are are quite opposite to, in fact, how phenomena exist. So from that point of view, our usual kind of view of what’s going on can be mistaken. When we sleep, what we’re doing is we withdraw the gross sense consciousness into a more subtle level. So from the point of view of somebody walking in to someone who’s asleep into the room, it looks like there’s a dead body on the bed.
There’s no reaction to the sense world. The consciousness which is usually operating in our waking life has a what we call absorbed to a deeper level of mind, and that deeper level of mind is a more subtle level. So when we have sleep and also when we have dream time during our sleep, it’s a more subtle level of consciousness that is operating. That can also be distorted. If we have an ignorant mind, if we have a mind that is quite disturbed, then also also our dreams and and so on will be contaminated and disturbed.
But if we have a clear mind, if we have developed clarity, wisdom, compassion, many of the qualities that one would would try to develop if one’s on a spiritual path, then also the nature of one’s sleep, the nature of one’s dreams will be different. So that when we’re talking about dreams, we’re talking about a more subtle level of mind. Dreams I I think here with dreams that one has to be fairly careful because, again, the the main teaching is that dreams, they can be important. Negative and positive dreams can be important, but you really need somebody skilled in dream interpretation to tell you the meaning of those dreams. And here, one has to recognize that the dreams are just a product of the deluded mind and aren’t in themselves some sort of clear message or some sort of truth manifesting in the mind.
They just as we have thoughts in the daytime, so dreams are also just a product of the deluded or unenlightened mind. So to interpret those those dreams, one one has to do it fairly carefully. You are trained as a clinical psychologist, and now you work as a teacher. Have you found it useful to incorporate your training in your Buddhist teachings? I guess I have.
It’s very difficult to put my finger on it. There was a period of time that I spent training in Nepal and in the Himalayan mountains in India, Northern India, where I really completely forgot my Western training and just immersed myself in my Buddhist training and meditative retreats and so forth, study. And at at those times, I think that I was just getting in touch with myself as a person. And, of course, what we do in our life, in our education, does have its impact on us as a person. So it’s sometimes difficult to say where something starts and leaves off.
When I came back, I started teaching again in the West in nineteen eighty one. I I went to Adelaide, and I was helping to establish a sitting meditation center there. I also worked professionally. And that time, I found myself integrating by by necessity, integrating the side of me that was a psychologist and Western person and the side of me that was a a Buddhist nun who’d been spending quite a period of time in the East and trying to understand Eastern philosophy and psychology and meditative practices. So to some extent, think that it’s difficult to say whether one starts and the other finishes.
Although from time to time, do find myself saying, oh, well, this has come from my understanding in psychology and something else I might say on this is completely what I’ve learned from Buddhist point of view. The work I do as a physiotherapist is in effect my meditation practice put into action. So the the concept of meditation here I think is is relevant. People often think of meditation as sitting down and closing your eyes and having a a clear mind or meditating on a particular topic. But perhaps more importantly is to develop an awareness of the spiritual path in our day to day actions.
So for me as a physiotherapist, I have the opportunity throughout the day in my work interacting with other people to try and put the Buddhist teachings into practice. So always trying to to be aware of the needs of the other person, to try and help the other person, to be aware of any feelings of impatience or attachment or negative thoughts of mind arising. So I think very importantly for me is to working in the world is to to try and have some awareness of what’s happening in my mind all the time and in the way that I’m relating to other people. So that that is how really I relate my my Buddhist training to my work in the world. You embrace a life of dedicated celibacy.
What what sustained you in this? I made a very strong commitment at the time I made a decision and request to be ordained. My wish was to be able to try as much as possible to be an example, practice the Buddha’s teachings. I benefited and still continue to benefit very much from my own understanding of the Buddha’s teachings and my practices. And I felt that if what I’ve understood and what I’ve benefited from also has a similar effect on others who may be similar to me, then I thought that would be a very good way to assist others.
I feel that it’s a more long term benefit than psychological practice, which I could have continued because as Buddhists, we believe in past lives and future lives. And so that if somebody is able to work well with themself and their mind and develop a spiritual practice, it will have benefit in the future life, not just for this life. So that, I guess, my own commitment has come about through my own experience and my own wishes that if there are any others who are similar to me, would find some benefit in the same way as I have found benefit, then I’m very happy to share it. Celibacy is providing good example. Oh, no.
Celibacy is part of the career, if you like, of a monk or nun. It’s like you make certain choices in your life as to how you’re going to spend your time. If you’re not celibate, then you’re going to be involved in relationships and possibly have a family and so forth, which which would mean that your energies would be split. What I’m talking about really is more like a career that you make a decision how you want to spend your time, how you want to spend your energies, and try and do that in the most effective way possible. So that celibacy, I think, whether in the Christian tradition or Buddhist tradition, I think gives one the opportunity to devote one’s own energies and times more wholeheartedly and completely to what one’s aiming to do.
I think also being a monk or nun, a celibate, also gives the possibility for people to recognize that a person who is teaching about spiritual development is making efforts themselves to engage in those very actions themselves, that there’s as much possible no hypocrisy, that one is trying to incorporate those same values in one’s own life. And, you know, you wear a uniform or a particular style of dress, is different from laypeople. You have vows which separate you away from those those sort of activities, and you try to keep them as purely as possible. Of course, sometimes leading a celibate lifestyle can be difficult, perhaps especially in my situation where I’m working in the world and I’m working closely physically with people all the time. I think what sustains me is the constant thought of what I’m trying to achieve.
And in particular, the main sustaining thing is to think of the incredible kindness and compassion of my meditation teachers to see how much benefit they bring to other people and just to constantly think that if I keep my practice strong, then perhaps one day I can develop the level of mind that they have and that I’ll be able to help people as much as they can. So I think for me to constantly have the end result, the the wish to develop my mind and to be of of real service to others is the thing that sustains me. I’ve been a monk now for six years, and that has been of enormous benefit to me, although at times it’s quite difficult. But I think if I felt that I could be of more benefit to people as a layperson, then I would certainly consider giving up the vows and living as a layperson. But, of course, the future is is not known, and it’s hard to tell what will happen.
But I can see that for me, it’s been enormously beneficial to be a monk, and I feel that I will probably stay a monk the rest of my life in order to develop my mind and help others. Are you interested in talking with people from other religions? Yes. Very much so. Especially if they have a real genuine interest in developing the qualities of peace and love and compassion, then I’m certainly interested in talking to people of all different religions and philosophies of life.
Sometimes I find when I meet people from other religions that they can be, have a narrow viewpoint about, Buddhism. They might see it as a heathen religion or the work of the devil or something like that. And then in those situations, I see that there’s no there’s no real area or room for dialogue because their viewpoint is so fixed. But where people have an open open viewpoint where they want to find out about the inner life, the religious life, then certainly I find it very stimulating to talk to them. I think it’s a very healthy thing for those of us who are embarked or engaged in a religious life to be able to share our experiences and to learn from each other.
Having been brought up in a Christian environment, although I didn’t really study or understand very much about the Christian doctrine or practices, since I’ve become deeply involved in one particular tradition, which is Buddhist, I’ve started to understand a lot about the deeper aspects of the Christian faith. And I respect very much the practices which I’m finding that quite a number of the orders, particularly in the Catholic tradition, are engaged in. In fact, I recently spent some time in discussion with some Carmelite nuns and looking into their particular practices of contemplation and so forth. Find that the words are different and the way of expressing a doctrine is different. But some of the experiences in deep levels of of meditation must be must be very, very similar, I think.
Just talking about the different levels of experience when one tries to develop a a deep level of contemplation or meditation going within, how one has to, first of all, try to cut off the grosser level of sense perception of the material world, the phenomenal world. So gradually having methods to cut off that, drawing the the mind inward, and then using processes of recollection, awareness, and how to make the mind then very silent and quiet beyond thought, and then looking to to what what would develop when one gets to a deeper point of that. Her journey into Buddhism has led Wendy Finster back to investigate aspects of the Christianity she once found so empty of meaning. So too with Ken Horter, who says that having become a Buddhist, he is now a better Christian. What did he mean?
Yes. It’s something that I often say to people, and I think the main reason that I say that is, firstly, to break down the concept that Buddhism is something completely different or opposite to Christianity. And so since becoming a Buddhist, I feel that now I have a much better understanding of what Christianity is all about. And and since becoming a Buddhist, I’ve really become interested and read a fair bit about the lives of the Christian saints and mystics and seen that they are really practicing the the true essence of the Christian life, that they they have found the essence of the teachings, which basically is just to practice love, compassion, and be of service to others and to become selfless in their service to others. So in that regard, I see Buddhism and Christianity as being very much the same and feel that if if just as they are values espoused in Buddhism, also are they espoused in Christianity.
And so I feel very comfortable when I’m with Christian people who have those same values that I do. Did the Buddha regard women as somehow dangerous? There’s no doubt that he was reluctant to allow women to be admitted to the order of ascetics. His aunt, who was also his foster mother, came and pleaded to be admitted as a nun. Eventually, he gave way, but he is reported to have said to his helper, Ānanda, that with this step, pure doctrine was now under threat.
Few women joined the order. Was it true that he held deep suspicions towards women? I think in the early days, there was a reluctance on the Buddhist Buddhist part to ordain women, and he finally agreed to ordain women. My own thinking on this matter is very much a cultural one, that in those days, there was not sort of an equal kind of opportunity for education and for development of men and women. To some extent, I believe that that there may have been some cultural factors there.
But also, he spoke about different subjects differently to different people at different times. So you may have the same subject being discussed from almost an opposite point of view if there was a different time or a different situation or a person that required that kind of view to be put to them in order to benefit their way of thinking. So that my guess would be that it would not be helpful for a person, a male who has become a monk, who is celibate, to be thinking about women from the point of view of sexuality, for instance. So I I’ve I’m not sure. I’ve never heard that term of dangerous used at all, but there there is definitely a necessity for a person who has embarked upon a celibate life, whether they be male or female, to ensure that they understand themselves and their own energies well and that they don’t place themselves in a situation, in a way of thinking that is going to place those vows of celibacy in jeopardy so that one has to work well with one’s own understanding of oneself and one’s own understanding of one’s own gender.
So that’s the way I think about this. Did the Buddha regard women as somehow dangerous? No. Not at all. I think this is a, perhaps a common misinterpretation.
In Buddhist terms, men, women equally have the Buddha nature, have the seed of enlightenment in their mind, and this Buddha nature is formless, shapeless, sexless. So the the physical body that we have actually bears no resemblance to the potential of our mind. So men and women are completely equal in terms of their potential for developing their minds and becoming enlightened. My understanding is that, particularly through the Tibetan tradition, women are regarded in a very highly revered manner because women in the highest aspect represent wisdom and are regarded as emanations of wisdom energy, if you like. And from that point of view, they are placed very high and, generally speaking in the Tibetan tradition anyway, looked at in a very high manner.
From the another point of view, we in the Tibetan tradition, we talk about how each being, each person has we are of one gender, you know, male or female. But each person has within them the opposite energy so that one person who is male will be predominantly male energy, but within them, they have also female energy and and vice versa. And one of the practices which is very important to do psychologically is for each of us to get in touch with our own opposite energy, you like, awaken that, and become unified with it so that we become a totally whole person, that we can recognize aspects and our female aspects, and that we don’t have a sense of lack or lack of fulfillment as a whole or a total person, that we are able to to totally awaken within ourselves all our potential energies and accept them and work with them. So this aspect, I guess, would be fairly similar to the kind of things that Jung talked about to some extent in terms of each of us having various aspects of masculine and feminine energy. And each of us will have a different proportion of masculine and feminine feminine energy.
So that in our practices, we also work with developing the opposite energy and working with it to bring it to the surface and use it. In terms of potential in terms of potential, there is no difference between men and women. Here, another important point that often allays the fear that people have or the feeling that there may be discrimination against women in Buddhism is the fact that when looking at the concept of reincarnation, that we can be a man in one life and a woman in the next and vice versa. So, you know, just because I’m a man now, in my last life, I could have been a woman. In my next life, I could be a woman.
And one of my teachers, a very great lama, in his previous life, she was the abbess of a monastery, a very highly regarded practitioner, the nun in charge of a monastery. And then he was a male in the next life and became a sort of a famous teacher as a male in that life. So really, it’s it’s a very little significance, it seems to me, whether you have a male or a female body because the mind has the same potential either way. Does each person have the opposite gender energy? Do do do men have female energy and women have male energy?
Yes. Indeed. And certainly one of the aims of Buddhist practice is to develop that male female energy within us. And this is especially so in the esoteric school of Buddhism, what you could call the Tantrayāna or the tantric vehicle of Buddhism, where the male female energy is very much stressed. And so we’re aiming here for totality within ourselves to recognize that we do have this totality of male female energy within ourselves.
And it’s interesting here, perhaps especially for monks and nuns, that that when we develop that totality of energy, then there is no longer any wish or need to have a partner because we’re completely total within ourselves. We’re totally developed within ourselves. And we often see actually with our say, the male lamas that they seem to very much have this mixture of male female energy. They can be masculine and strong and powerful, but they can also be incredibly gentle and soft and loving at the same time. Many religions accept the notion of the miraculous.
How was it, I wondered, with Buddhism? I would say that there can be extraordinary changes in natural events. In terms of another power, from a Buddhist point of view, we talk about karma. It’s a law of cause and effect, and given certain actions, then certain results will arise from those actions so that there would be a number of various factors which may all come together at a certain point in time, which which will then produce a certain result, miraculous or extraordinary as it might seem. It still has been brought about by a number of various factors arising together at a certain time.
But, yes, I do think that those sorts of results can happen. You don’t believe in miracles as, for example, in the gospel stories? Could you give me an example? Well, changing the water into wine, that sort of thing. Oh, I think that’s possible.
You think that’s possible? Yeah. I do. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that within matter, within phenomena, there are many potentialities. And with the power of the mind, the pure power of the mind is possible to have control or to transform matter. So that if one is able to have that purity of mind and have that ability, first of all, it has to come from within oneself. The the human organism is actually a microcosm. We have a mind.
We have a body. Our body is comprised of various kind of combination of the elements that is also exist in the external world. So once we are able to completely have awareness, knowledge of our own mind and our own body, and we have control over those elements within our own mind and our own body, then we also would be able to exert control over the external elements. In Buddhism, there are not really any miracles. There is only cause and effect or karma.
So some things can appear as miraculous, but it all comes from the from the causes that have been created. It seems to me in in Buddhism that that miracles don’t they they can appear as miracles, but they only come from previous causes. What’s karma? karma is is literally, it means action, and it’s usually sort of translated as the law of cause and effect. And here it means that for every action of body, speech, and mind that we create, it leaves an imprint on the mind, a mental imprint on the mind.
And those imprints on the mind are never lost. So it means that every action of body, speech, and mind that we create will at some future stage, if the conditions are right, those previous actions will ripen. So Buddhists believe that there is no such thing as fate or luck or chance, that everything happens as a result of previous causes. So everything that is happening to us now in this life, even the color of our hair, the shape of our bodies, our family situation, everything has been what we ourselves have created. And what’s going to happen to us in the future is what we’re creating now through our through our actions of body, speech, and mind.
So Buddhism Buddhism is very much a philosophy of personal responsibility. There is no external creator dictating our life, controlling our life, that our life is totally in our own hands. And I think this is a very important point to mention that Buddhism very much is a is a philosophy of total personal responsibility, that we create create our own world. This leads on then to the notion of social responsibility. How do Buddhists see that?
Well, here, I think the is to have the recognition that that we are not alone or independent in the world, that our actions influence those around us, and that, you know, we are we are really responsible for the for the suffering of others or that we should feel some responsibility for the for the suffering of others. In the broader context here, one of the Buddhist teachings is to think that because we have had countless previous lifetimes, then at some level we must have been related to every other being on the planet. And here we can even say that, you can even consider that every being that we come across has at some stage, in the past been our own mother. So in that way, we we reflect upon a mother’s love and we think, well, if everybody has been our mother, then I must try and respect and help everybody else in the world just as if they were my own mother. So this is a very powerful way of developing compassion and this feeling of social responsibility or universal responsibility.
But also, at the simpler level, to recognize that just as I don’t want to suffer, just as I want to be happy, so every other being in the world and even animals have exactly the same feeling. They don’t want to suffer and they want to be happy. So they are all exactly the same as I am. We can all also consider that that I am only one person and that other people are are many. So it would be quite selfish of me just to look after my own needs when there are so many other people who also have needs.
Buddhist training or teaching with regard to social responsibility is twofold. Firstly, that we need each of us to accept individual responsibility, to work with our own negativity, to try to eliminate as much as possible our own negative predispositions, for instance anger, hatred, jealousy, anything which is going to produce that kind of negative result for others and for oneself. And we need to do that personally. Nobody else can do it for us. And we should do that before we point outside to somebody else or some other situation or environmental problem as being the cause of difficulties.
So we first of all need to gradually, what we could say, purify our own negative mind and make our mind more positive, more open, and more aware and responsive to others’ needs, then we also need to work with developing what we call wisdom, that there we can have a warm heart, we can have wish to benefit others, a wish to to make the world a better place. But if we don’t have wisdom, we can make many errors, mistakes in the way in which we act, and it doesn’t produce the result that we are wishing for. So that if we have compassion to to benefit our neighbor, somebody who’s upset, that’s that’s very good motivation. But if we don’t have wisdom knowing how to skillfully help them instead of putting our foot in it and making it worse for them, or how to actually skillfully benefit so that they will go on to develop themselves and and and not create further problems for themselves. We need that wisdom.
We need to to have both compassion and wisdom together. And the Buddhist analogy is like two wings of a bird, that we need to have wisdom and compassion like the two wings, otherwise really our actions are not necessarily going to be all that productive. So from a Buddhist point of view, we need first of all to work on ourselves. There’s no way that we can really benefit others if we are doing it with a negative motivation for our own ego, for our own reputation or power or whatever. So that when we actually do act in the world and we do try to benefit others, we do it with a pure motivation for them, more of an altruistic motivation, and that we don’t have that sense of contamination that the ego, something in it for myself.
Plus, we have an element of wisdom, understanding what the results of that action will bring, whether those results ultimately, if I act in this way, what what kind of result will that bring? Will that be of benefit, or will it create more problems down the line for that person or that situation? I guess there are many levels of wisdom, but wisdom in the usual sense in Buddhist philosophy is the is to have the understanding of the true nature of reality. And Buddhism says that the way we perceive the world, the way we perceive ourselves is actually incorrect and is the cause of all of our problems. So the ultimate aim of Buddhist meditation practice is to gain an understanding of the true nature of reality, to really come to understand things as they really are.
And when we eventually do this, then we can be free of all of our suffering, all of our negative states of mind, and we can then become totally selfless and most able to be of benefit to others. Firstly, we need to do our own personal work. But on the other hand, we also by getting in touch with our own problems, own sufferings, we become much more sympathetic, more open and aware of others’ problems. So it does give us an openness and a sense of being able to respond to others’ problems in a warm manner. So it’s not as as though we say, oh, well, first of all, we’ve got to take care of our own our own situation, and later we will benefit others.
To some extent, we can say that philosophically, but in our day to day life, of course, we are actually starting to become more aware, more open to others, and trying to to think about their situations and not just our own response, where we’re coming from. When we become less egoistic, less self centered, we have more space for others. Production assistance in Encounter this week from Prudence Petford, John Farkas, and Ken Brand. I’m Frank Sheehan. Next week on Encounter, you can hear soul friends and spiritual guides.
This is a program produced by Kay McLennan for Encounter.