Tonight's talk is titled Buddhist.
What is it? Buddhist outlook, Buddhist
values. And the idea behind this is that
our outlook, how we please come in here.
Yeah. How we relate to the world, how
we look at the world, how we look at people around us, how we
relate to pretty much everything actually has a massive impact on
how we live our life. Yeah, once you have an outlook,
then your values tend to fall into place in accordance with
that outlook. And once you have certain
values, that is what informs you how you live your life, what are
your priorities, what is important to you, what actually
matters. It all starts with outlook,
outlook, values, and then your priorities all comes from that.
And just to show you very simply what I mean by this as a very
simple kind of similarly for how this works is imagine yourself
if you have, you know, people, there are people in your life,
some people you consider friends, some people you
consider as enemies. Do anyone you have enemies?
Are you all just friends everywhere here?
So, but my point is not so much whether you have friends at my
point is just that if you look at a person as a friend or if
you look at a person as an enemy, that is what I mean by
different outlook. It's a particular way of viewing
a person. Yeah.
It's not that saying that our friend is right or that an enemy
is wrong or whatever, not really saying anything about that.
And they're saying this is a different outlook.
Yeah. And of course, once you have
that outlook, yeah, there is a value.
You value that person in a certain way.
If they are a friend, yeah, you value them highly.
If you consider them an enemy here, you don't really want to
have too much to do with them there.
Yeah. So this is kind of what I mean
by your outlook then relates directly to your values.
And once you have those values, then that actually directs your
life. You hang out with your friend,
you kind of avoid your enemy. Yeah.
Or if you're wise, maybe you change your attitude a little
bit. That's another, another way of
doing things. That's obviously the right way
of dealing with these things. But your entire life isn't
guided by these values. What you prioritise and what is
important to you actually comes from that.
So the idea of to understand what outlook, how important it
actually is on the Buddhist path, it is very useful to tie
it in with some of the Buddhist teachings.
Yeah, I always like to tie things in, of course, to the
Buddhist teachings. And of course one of the
fundamental of the Buddhist teachings is the Noble Eightfold
Path. Yeah, Noble Eightfold Path.
What does it start out with? Right viewer, which is very
similar to right outlook. Yes, it starts with the right
outlook. That's the very beginning of the
Noble Eightfold Path. One of the significant things to
understand about the Noble Eightfold Path is that it's not
just eight factors kind of randomly put together.
Yeah. The Buddha doesn't work in
random ways. Yeah, the Buddha's kind of
systematic. Everything is kind of organised
according to sequences, according to causes and
conditions and effects that come from those causes and
conditions. Everything is very systematic.
So when you hear like the five kundas, don't just think that
five kundas is a random sequence of five aspects of personality.
These have a particular sequence and that sequence matters.
Yeah, you can see the five hindrances.
You think, yeah, look at this, 5 bad things for meditation
practice. And of course there are 5 bad
things for meditation practice. But again, there is a particular
sequence in those five hindrances.
It is not random. It starts off with sensual
desire for a particular reason. It ends up with doubt for a
particular reason. These things are not random.
So everything in the Buddhist teachings hangs together.
There's a system to it. And that's why when you see the
five hundreds, they always come in the same sequence.
Yeah. If you read them in the Pal, if
you read them in Sanskrit, you read them in Chinese or Tibetan
or whatever ancient language you can find is always the same
across the border. So the noble air flow path
always starts with right view. Yeah, right outlook always at
the beginning here. And that matters enormously
because actually what it does, it shows you that this is the
foundation on which the entire noble air flow path is
practised. Yeah, it is based on right view
from right view. What happens from right view,
right outlook, you get right intention.
Yeah, that is in a sense, right values.
You have the value of loving kindness.
You have the value of compassion, Karuna, You have the
value of of letting go or of giving up things.
Yeah, the they come out which are giving up of sensual
desires. All of that actually comes.
So outlook leads to values and that then gives direction to
your life. The direction to the life is in
the rest of the Noble Eightfold Path.
The remaining six factors. We show you how you're supposed
to live your life. Yeah.
So the foundation there is actually what makes the noble FL
path possible. Without the foundation of right
view, the noble FL path doesn't really even start.
Yeah. So make sure you get some right
outlook at the beginning here. Another way of looking at right,
the idea of right outlook is to look at dependent origination.
I'm going to be talking about dependent origination on the
retreat that is coming up. Are you coming on the retreat,
Leaving here? Yes.
Yeah. OK, good.
If you're not coming on the retreat, you're missing out on
dependent origination. Right.
Well, that is pretty, pretty sad, isn't when you think about
it. So we're going to talk about
dependent origination, not in a kind of theoretical way.
We're going to kind of, you know, look at it from the
abidama point of view or anything like that.
But I'm going to look at dependent origination from a
practical point of view. All the teachings of the Buddha
are ultimately practical. They have one purpose, to move
us away from suffering and to move us towards happiness.
That is all as the purpose of the Buddhist teachings.
So it is for dependent origination.
And you know, dependent origination starts off with
Avija. Avija sometimes translate into
English as ignorance, which I don't like.
Yeah, I must admit I don't really like ignorance.
Ignorance means that you haven't you haven't gone to
universities, you don't know, know about kind of law or, or
medicine or something. That's what ignorance is really
means in English. But Avija actually has more to
do with delusion, the fact that you don't see things according
to reality. Yeah, so it is, again, it's very
similar to the idea of outlook, lack of lack of right outlook,
lack of seeing things according to according to reality.
That is what stands at the beginning of dependent
origination. You don't see things in the
right way. That is when this whole thing
starts out. Independent origination.
For those of you who are new to the Buddhist teachings, is
anyone here new to the Buddhist teachings?
Yes. OK over there.
Wow. OK, So you must be scared
already. I'm sure you are so many strange
words. Yeah, Poly words, all this kind
of stuff. So I apologise.
I after at the end of the talk, I promise I will there will be a
few minutes to ask questions afterwards.
So if you have any kind of serious doubts, take a pen,
note, paper, write it all down, and then you can ask afterwards.
So the dependent origination is 12 factors or 12 items if you
like, one leading to the next one, one linked to the one after
it, starting off with delusion or avidya ending up where with
suffering. Yeah.
So what dependent origination actually shows us, it shows us
how suffering is ultimately the outcome of delusion.
The reason why we suffer is because we are deluded.
Yeah. And that is kind of the root
cause, the root problem, our outlook is wrong.
We don't see things in accordance with reality.
That is the essential problem that we are dealing with.
And then that cascades through this 12 lengths and ends up in
suffering on the other side. It's actually quite intuitive.
We know that that's true. If you are deluded, you tend to
suffer. Yeah, because you make mistakes.
It cannot make sense. But this is actually a formal
way of showing us how delusion transforms into suffering.
And there's no way how to avoid that.
So again, fundamental and third way of thinking about outlook is
to think about it in terms of meditation practice.
Yeah, I'm sure many of you who have been around for a while,
you will know about the Sati Patana Suta.
That banana suta is often regarded as the most probably
the most well known suitor about meditation practice in Buddhist
teachings. Yeah.
And one of the things that you may not know about, most people
tend to read the Sati Patana Suta, but Sati Patana is much
more than the Sati Patana Suta. There is a whole Satyipatana
Sangyuta in the Sangyuta Nikaya which collects about how many.
Now 5060 discourse is all about Satyipatana practice.
And one of the things that these suitors show you is that
Satyipatana is always based on two things.
In other words, meditation practice is based on 2
fundamental things that have to be in place before you can do
your meditation practice. Yeah, this is very interesting,
isn't it? If you know these two things,
then you know either why your meditation is not going so well
or why it is going really, really well, why it's going
gangbusters. So you now you have the two.
This is kind of the kind of clue.
This is the foundation for meditation practice.
What are these two things? And these are things that you
see again and again in the suitors.
And these two things, on the one hand is sealer.
Yeah, Cela being morality, not just morality, but the way you
live your life. If you live your life with
kindness, with compassion, with care, and all of these kind of
things, that is what CELA is, is the habits of our lives.
So this is one of the foundations that makes
meditation possible. And that's always, I recommend
you, if you find that if you're one of those people who's
interested in meditation practice, you'd like to develop
it further, you really go back to your sealer.
Ask yourself if there's any way you can lead your life in a
better way. What can you do better here?
How can you be more kind? Yeah, how can you kind of
increase the quality, the good qualities in your heart?
And as you do that, your meditation will gradually come
together, if you think about it in the right way here.
But the other aspect, which perhaps is less well known about
meditation practice, one of the sources of Satya patana practice
is something called Ujjukaditi in the Palli language.
So how many of you have heard about Ujukaditi before Here?
Let's have a look. No, I cannot even Frank.
OK. OK, so.
OK, so that's that shows you. Yeah, that shows you that
actually there is a there's a need to kind of look at
Ujukaditi. I would be very surprised if you
heard about Ujukaditi. It's a pretty kind of obscure
term, but Uju in Parliament straight.
Yeah. And it means view.
So this is again very closely rated to the idea of outlook.
Having the right outlook is the same as having straight view.
You're seeing things in accordance with reality
according to how the Buddha taught things.
So this also is the foundation of meditation practice.
So if your meditation isn't going all that well, go back to
your viewer. Can your view be improved?
What can you do to see things more in the right way?
What maybe maybe your, your view isn't strong enough or clear
enough, not enough accordance in accordance with the Buddha's
teachings. So what do I mean by that?
To actually have the straight view in this way?
What does it actually, what does it really refer to?
And what it. One of the main things that it
refers to is that you prioritise your meditation practice.
Yeah. If you sit down and you kind of,
you know, you start thinking about things.
Yeah, this is very common. Everybody does this.
And if you have never had any kind of stray thoughts in the
meditation practice, then I congratulate you for probably
being an Arrowhead, if that's the case.
But usually most people have little bit of thinking.
Yeah, some people, a lot of thinking.
Some people just think for hours.
There's no stop in the thinking. There's hardly a gap in there at
all. So why isn't it that we think so
much? And what are the things that we
think about? Yeah.
And the reason why we think so much is because those things
that we think about, they are the things we tend to value in
our life. Yeah, value, again, outlook and
value. You can see how these things are
so closely related to each, to each other here.
So what are the things you you value in your life?
Look at what you're thinking about during your meditation
practice. And what you will see is that
you think about your family. Yeah.
You think about your work. You think about things, problems
that you may have in life. Even beyond that, you think
perhaps about pleasures in life. Yeah.
Or this. This meditation really sucks.
It was terrible. So much pain everywhere.
I wish I could eat this and I could do that and kind of watch
the movie or whatever. This is just too much.
And so you see in your meditation, you understand what
your you see in your mind. What are the real values in your
life? What are the things that are
important to you? So part of right outlook is to
shift our values, that we actually value the meditation
much more. Yeah, we prioritise the
spiritual life. We understand that ultimately it
is a spiritual life that really matters.
This is what is going to make us happy at the end of the day.
And all this other stuff. Actually, it doesn't have the
same power to make us happy. We have to do this other things
as well, but we'd start doing them in a different way.
And once you shift your priorities, once you place your
spiritual life higher than the rest of your ordinary life, then
there's a shift happening in your meditation practice.
You don't think about those other things anymore because
they are secondary. Yeah.
What's the point when you finally have come to the thing
that really matters? You finally doing your
meditation by the practice? This is what is important in
life. Yeah.
You're not going to think about the other stuff.
If that's your view, you already have found the thing that really
matters. So you stick with that and you
don't go so much to all of these other things.
And this is the problem. You know, you look around the
world and you see people, you ask people, why do you meditate?
And people say, oh, I meditate so I can become a better mother,
a better father, a better son, a better daughter, a better
worker. Yeah.
Or a better kind of bomber. If you're in the military, you
want to have more precision guided bombing.
Yes. You have more mindfulness.
You meditate for that. That's kind of getting your
priorities wrong. Yeah, it's just just slightly
wrong on the case of the last one.
The priority should be the exact opposite.
You don't actually do your meditation.
So you can do all of these things other things better.
You do all of these other things in such a way as to enhance your
meditation practice. Yeah.
So you live your life, you go to work and you go to work with a
Buddhist attitude, with a sense of kindness, with a sense of
caring for your Co workers, for your clients, for whoever it is.
And when you go to work and you lead your life in a way that is
spiritual, that is done like from a Buddhist kind of from a
Buddhist perspective, then that is going to enhance your
meditation practice. You got your priorities right.
You no longer, you don't have the idea that I'm meditating to
be a family member. You are being a good family
member so that we can meditate better afterwards.
Meditation is where you touch the real meaning of life.
Yeah, in a way you can never find outside a meditation
practice. So this is the idea of getting
your priorities right. Outlook and values work directly
into your meditation practice in this way here.
So that is how these things work.
So what kind of things, what kind of things do we mean when
we talk about outlook? There's many different ways that
the Buddha talks about outlook in the suitors, and one of the
ways it talks about it talks about the vijas.
Yeah, with avija and vija. Avija meaning delusion, vija
being the exact opposite, meaning things like insight.
Essentially. I like to translate vija as
insight. The usual way, the usual word
that is translated as insight in Buddhism is vipassana.
And I don't really think that is quite correct, to be honest with
you. I think we pass on, I mean,
something like clear seeing. Yeah, inside real insight is
like wisdom. And inside, I think the vijas
are actually a great place to start with insider.
And of course, these are things like, you know, the three things
like remembering your past lives, understanding the laws of
karma. Yeah.
And then the final insight, which is the arahanship, the
awakening experience itself. So these are kind of the three
supreme insights in Buddhism. Yeah.
And this is a good way of thinking about right view in a
sense, or right outlook. Yeah.
You think, yeah.
Is there rebirth or is there not rebirth?
That is kind of a right, right outlook.
Yeah. But be careful about this
because for many people you ask them, you know, have you got
right view or not? And it's like yes or no answer.
Yes, I believe in rebirth. No, I don't believe.
OK, I believe. OK, I've got right view.
You know, first factor of the noble level path has been put
into place. Now I can move on to the second
one. Yes.
No, Maybe, maybe not. Yeah, maybe.
It's not that. It's not that simple, because
right view is not a static thing that either you got it or you
haven't. Yes, I believe in rebirth,
therefore I have right view. I don't believe in the rebirth
that therefore I have wrong view.
It's not as simple as that. The idea of view in Buddhism or
outlook in Buddhism or values in Buddhism is something that you
gradually develop. It is something that comes over
time. Yeah, it's like an outlook that
matures over time, time. And you need to reflect on it
again and again and again. And as you do that, these things
become powerful. What does it mean that there is
a rebirth? Not only that you believe it,
but what does it actually mean? Does the idea of rebirth, does
it touch you emotionally? Do you, does it make you feel
anything in particular? If it doesn't touch you
emotionally, it's not going to have much power on the Buddhist
path. If it touches you emotional and
you feel a sense of urgency, you feel like, wow, this is actually
really important. It may be even make you feel
joyful in the practice of the Buddhist teachings.
Yeah. If it does that, then it becomes
very powerful. So it's not a yes and no thing
in Christianity. You know, you have the idea of
the Christian creed. You believe in the Father, the
Son and the Holy Ghost or whatever.
And so there it's kind of black and white.
How do you believe or not, or maybe even there maybe I don't
actually know much about Christianity.
I should be very careful what I say, but it's not.
It's not like that. Yeah, you either believe.
I don't believe in Buddhism. Belief, view, outlook, values is
something that you develop over time and it changes over time.
And this is what happens also with idea of rebirth and coma
until it becomes a powerful force in your spiritual life and
in your meditation practice in particular.
That is one that becomes very useful.
But I for most people it is a little bit theoretical.
Yeah. Rebirth, OK, we can relate to it
in the UK. Maybe you believe it or not, but
it's not, it's kind of hard sometimes to really kind of get
tangible with rebirth. You can't really feel it
properly. Often it's quite harder.
But the reality is that rebirth, once you understand it, is that
it is incredibly powerful. And just to give you some idea
of how powerful it is, this is how the Buddha talks about
rebirth or the insight into past life in the sutas.
You know, please remind me. If I don't say sutas often
enough, it's because I'm not teaching correctly.
So please remind me if I haven't said sutas in the next 5
minutes, raise a hand and say, OK, sutas split Suta means
discourse of the Buddha. Yeah, I'd like to always refer
back to the Buddha. And the Buddha had some very
powerful similes for the idea of the inside into past lives and
the inside into Khamma and also into awakening experience
itself. And the first thing that would I
say is it's like someone turning on the light.
You are in darkness. Yeah.
And you know what it's like to be in the darkness.
You're walking around trying to feel your way.
You hit your head here. Yeah.
And you can't really find the path you could supposed to go to
the toilet. And usually, if you want to go
to the toilet, it's pretty desperate.
Yeah. But you can't find your way
here. You know, you don't have what
that can be like if you can't find your way to the toilet.
Very, very bad situation. So this is darkness.
Darkness is bad. Darkness makes you blind.
Darkness, you cannot see what you're supposed to do.
So what I say is that seeing things like rebirth is like
turning on the light. Suddenly you don't bump your
head anymore. You don't stub your toes into
kind of little, you know, things on the ground.
You can find the toilet or you can find even open the noble at
full path because the light has been turned on.
And most of us, we are walking around in darkness until one day
we have these insights. We see them for the first time.
Bang. Wow.
This is what it's like. And that is only one of the
similes. There is another one which is
even more powerful. Yeah.
This is the simile of the little chick, the chick in its egg.
Yeah. I, I love this simile.
I think it's so it's so powerful.
And it really gives an idea of what insight really is about and
how powerful it actually is. So imagine yourself for this for
a minute. Yeah.
Or not even maybe just 20 seconds.
Imagine yourself being a chick inside an egg shell.
What is it like? It's pretty.
You don't see very much. Yeah.
The. The world is very limited in
scope. Inside an egg.
Yeah. You can see the egg shell there.
Egg shell here, egg shell there. And that's about it.
You can't see where. Maybe you can see some light
coming through the egg shell if there's bright sun outside.
World is very, very limited. And one day you kind of your
claws have grown out, your beak has become stronger, and you
decide this is not good enough. I want to get out of this egg
shell. So you start clawing the the
egg. Yeah.
You start kind of using your little beak to break out.
And then eventually you break out of the egg shell and you see
the world for the first time. Imagine coming out of the egg
shell and seeing the world for the first time.
Wow. This is what it's like, yeah.
Jeepers. So many interesting things in
this world. Yeah.
Wow. That's that's and this is what
Insight is like. It's like moving, like being,
going from being inside the eggshell to coming out and
seeing the world in all its colours, in all its shapes, in
all the perceptions and all the various things you can see in
the world. The difference is massive.
This is how the Buddha explains the insight into things like
past lives, into the laws of Khamma, into the awakening
experience itself. And so these things are
powerful. They are very important.
And that gives you some idea of the potential change that
actually can occur as your outlook moves from being in the
darkness to actually seeing things correctly for the first
time. So that is, but still I the
problem I think with past lives, with come and all these things,
it often tends to be a little bit theoretical.
So there are other ways of thinking about outlook.
Another way, of course is the 4 Noble truths.
This is what you see in the suit as again and again right view
being equated to seeing the four noble truths.
Yeah. And that of course is very
interesting. I'm not going to talk about the
four noble truths tonight, but the first noble truth is all
about suffering here. And when we talk about suffering
here, then of course that is one of the three characteristics of
existence, dukkha. Now the characteristics of
existence, they always come together as 3 here 3
characteristics of existence, impermanence, suffering and non
self. And these are very closely
related to each other because where there is impermanence,
where there is anicha, where there is this unreliability in
the world, suffering comes just behind.
There's a very close connection between the two.
And where there is impermanence, unreliability and suffering, non
self also is very closely related to that.
So these three characteristics of existence, these are
characteristics of the world. This is how the world actually
is. This is one way of thinking
about outlook. Are you able to see the world in
this way, to see in terms of anicha dukkha anata in
permanence, suffering and non self?
And the more you're able to see the world in that way, the more
ability, the more correct is your outlook from the
perspective of the Buddha, from the perspective of the early
suitors, you're seeing reality as it actually is.
Yeah. So This is why this is so
important. And one of the, you know, one of
the things that is always kind of, you know, interesting about
this. I've, you know, these things
like the three characteristics, there are a way of looking at
the world. And once you start looking at
the world in this way, they become a kind of a refuge for
you, huh? Yeah.
The more you see the world in this way, the more you accept
that, the more you are able to kind of live your life in
accordance with that, it becomes a refuge for you.
Huh. Why is that?
I don't know. You know, sometimes I read
newspapers. Sometimes I wish I hadn't read
the newspaper. You know, I, you go online and
see, you see all these stories and things, but you really look
at the world today and sometimes people despair a little bit.
Yeah. The world always kind of, you
know, the politics are going funny, the kind of the powers of
the world doing strange things. The climate is kind of going to
the dogs. Actually, poor dogs shouldn't
involve the dogs in this. But anyway, it's kind of going
the wrong way. You have all these refugees
everywhere. You have all these things going
on in the world. It doesn't kind of look very
nice. Yeah.
And for this reason, when you see these things happening in
the world, actually we shouldn't really be very surprised because
this is Anisha One O 1. Yeah, but we all need, and it's
a 101 occasionally here because we need to go back to the basics
again here. And it's impermanence 101, the
basic fact about the world, it is always changing.
It is always impermanent. It is always unreliable.
So just by contemplating impermanence in your life,
contemplating it regularly, reminding you what it actually
is, when you see all these things happening in the world,
you should say, OK, what do I expect?
Of course these things are happening in the world.
OK, let's see what we can do about it for sure.
I don't mean that we shouldn't do anything about it.
I just mean we shouldn't be too concerned about it.
We shouldn't be kind of allow ourselves to get depressed about
these things because this actually is the nature of
reality. When you take these things on
board and you accept these things, actually it becomes less
of a shock when the world goes wrong.
Yeah, we have this idea that the world should go in a certain way
and it doesn't go in a certain way.
Then we get upset, but the world shouldn't go in a certain way.
That's kind of the that's the delusion.
Yeah. It's like an illusion of a self,
as if something should be permanent, should always be the
way it is. No, it isn't like that.
The more you take that on board, the more you are able to deal
with the problems, the vicissitudes, all the things in
the world that go wrong because you know this is what to be
expected. And you start to seek for refuge
somewhere else. You start to seek for happiness,
for sense of meaning, a purpose somewhere else, rather than
seeking it in all this external phenomena that are by
definition, by from your own personal experience, are
impermanent and reliable, not really to be trusted at all.
So this is one of the first things about the idea of anicha.
And you will have noticed when I talked about anicha, right now
I'm talking about impermanence in the outside world.
Yeah, the world around us. And this I think is an important
point because very often for those of you who have been
Buddhist for a long time, maybe you've been sitting coming to
many retreats and all these kind of things.
Very often we talk about impermanence and it's
unreliability as something we see in our meditation practice.
Yeah, you sit down, you see things kind of rising and
falling. Actually not arising and passing
away is much better translation of those words.
These are words are would they are via, would they via which
one means to arise, not just kind of rising and falling, but
arising from nothing, passing away into nothing here.
That's what these words actually mean, ending, arising and ending
here. So the idea is often with
Buddhist meditation is to focus on this, you have to see things
arising and falling and that then getting an insight into
meditation as a consequence. But when you read the sutas, ha,
I said suta again. When you read the suta is the
word of the Buddha. Yeah, he, you forgot to remind
me by the web because I think it's more than 5 minutes.
As I said it, when you read the word of the Buddha, he doesn't
talk so much about impermanence in that way, in the idea of
looking into your mind, seeing things coming and going and all
these kind of things. The way he very often talks
about impermanence is big picture impermanence, macro
impermanence. He talks about impermanence in
the sense that we're all going to die here.
He talks about impermanence in the sense that all the things
that are beloved and pleasing to us must become otherwise.
He talks about impermanence in the sense that the world
eventually will burn up. Yeah, he talks about
impermanence in the sense of the cosmos kind of expanding and
contracting and these kind of things.
It is very much big picture impermanence and not the kind of
micro impermanence that you see perhaps in your meditation
practice. And because this is such an
important part of the Buddhist teachings, and because it is
very easy to relate to, we can all relate to death.
Yeah, we may not like to think about death, but it is a
reality. Any serious spiritual practice
is about death in part. If you can't think about death,
then you're not really taking your spiritual practice all that
seriously here. So I would recommend you, if you
find it scary to think about death, just move towards very
slowly here. But it's a very important
reminder to kind of clarify for us what really matters in life,
what is important and what is not.
So this is how the Buddha looks, looks on the idea of
impermanence, big scale, large scale impermanence, how it
affects our lives in a big way. And because it is easy to relate
to her, I would recommend you also to think about impermanence
in this particular way. Yeah.
And as you do that, it actually has a very real impact in your
life. The micro scale impermanence
that you see in your meditation practice only really becomes
powerful once your meditation becomes quite deeper.
Just sitting there watching things arising and falling and
all this kind of stuff often doesn't have that much, much
effect on your lives. Yeah, Why?
Because it isn't deep enough. It doesn't really touch you in a
deep way here. Once the meditation becomes
deep, that is where it really starts to take off and it has an
effect in your life. One of the reasons why we focus
so much on the micro scale impermanence in our lives is
largely because I think of the Sati Pattana Suta.
Yeah, for those of you who know your Satya Batana Suta, it says
in there that you do all of these various things.
You watch the breath, you watch the four elements, the feelings,
the mind states, all this kind of stuff.
And you watch them in the arising and in the passing away
here. And this has had a tremendous
influence in the world through all the famous meditation
methods that come out of different countries, come from
various masters. Yes.
And this has had a tremendous influence on how we tend to look
at impermanence, anicha, but one of the very interesting things
about the Satya Bhatana suit. And this has been shown by some
of the best scholars in the Buddhist world.
And actually the Sati Pattana suitor is very likely to be a
compilation of many things that kind of all this accretion of of
things that can be added to it over time.
The original Sati Pattana suitor was probably far simpler than
the one we have today. How do we know this?
Well, we know this because there are many versions of the Satya
Patana Suta existing in different languages.
Yeah. And then when you compare them,
you actually realise that there is large variations in these
things. And I think from reading about
what this well known scholars have to say about this, it seems
to me fairly likely that that little refrain about watching
the arising and passing away of phenomena in Satyipatana
actually looks like it does not actually come from the Buddha
himself. It seems to be a later addition
to that suitor. I'm not saying it is wrong.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be doing this.
I'm saying I'm just saying that it may not have been originally
part of the Satyapatana Sutra. That takes a little bit of you
like the wind out of the sails of this kind of idea of watching
the arising and passing away in your meditation practice.
The way the Buddha talks about meditation, the way the Buddha
talks about seeing Anisha is actually quite different.
The way he talks about you have to go to places like the
Annapana Satisurta, the Discourse on on mindfulness of
breathing. Yeah.
And what he says there is that you take the mindfulness of
breathing as deep as you possibly can, ideally to include
deep samadhi, jaanas and all of this.
Then you look at impermanence afterwards.
That's when it becomes very profound.
I'm not going to go there tonight because it gets too far,
but this is to give you some idea of how this actually works.
So big scale impermanence is what the Buddha's talking about.
Yeah, the impermanence of the world around us.
Not, not need to look so much inside, but look at the world
around you. And once you start look at the
world around you, what you see is actually how unreliable
everything tends to be here. Yeah, that's what I was talking
about before. The politics, the climate, the
refugees everywhere. But also in your personal life.
What about in our relationships? Yeah, in our work, in kind of in
the even the Buddhist teachings. Yeah.
You come here, you're probably all Buddhists.
Or maybe at least you're interested in Buddhism if you
are here. And sometimes, you know, you
become a Buddhist and then you kind of attach a little bit to
Buddhist teachings. Is that good to attach to
Buddhist teachings? OK, different opinions.
OK. Yeah, it's have to attach a
little bit. Yeah.
If you're not attached at all, you stop coming here.
So a little bit of attachment is good.
But once you attach a little bit, you also see that, you
know, there's a danger there. The downside is you feel, oh,
maybe Buddhism is disappearing here.
Maybe Buddhism is going down the drain.
Yeah, it's becoming worse and worse.
Are there any arrow Hands left in the world?
Are there maybe no arrow hands left in the world?
What are we going to do? We're going to wait for my tray.
Unsure. Yeah.
What's going to happen? And you start to have concern as
soon as you attach to something. Even when you attach to the
Buddhist teachings, which I think it's good, at least a
little bit is good. Yeah.
Not kind of. If you don't attach at all, you
stop being the president of the BSV, and that would be really
bad. So.
But you can see the danger there straight away.
There is a danger that you actually feel.
Oh, no, it's all going to. It's all going to disappear,
which of course it is eventually.
That is the truth of things. So this is the problem of the
world. Outsiders.
You see the danger in attachment.
And the way I like to look at it, I like to look at it as if
you are, you know, you're standing on the ground.
Yeah, you're taking your stand somewhere.
OK, I'm going to stand here. This is like a safe piece of
ground. And as you're standing there,
you're standing on the carpet. Say this carpet here, this is
kind of a loose carpet. And as soon as you stand on that
carpet, Shane comes and grabs one end and it pulls the end
out. And I stumble because I hit the
Shane grab shed would never do that, of course.
And this is just this is just kind of a simile.
Yeah. And somebody comes straight away
and they kind of pull the carpet from under your feet.
And as you do that, you stumble, you fall over and you hurt
yourself as soon as you take your stand somewhere.
Taking a stand is like relying on something.
Yeah. You rely on this piece of
carpet. It looks pretty reliable.
But actually, if Shane grabs that and it's not so reliable
anymore, it loses its reliability.
And this is the nature of all phenomena in the world around
us. They are unreliable.
As soon as you take your standard, as soon as you attach.
Yeah. As soon as you rely on
something, nature, not shame, but nature comes and pulls out
the carpet from under your feet and says, ha, you're going to
suffer. You fall over.
Yeah, actually, nature doesn't say that.
Nature is kind of neutral, but that's kind of the effect of
what's going on. That's how how it works.
It's almost like the world is almost perpetually shaking a
little bit. Yeah.
And then the shaking becomes greater and it becomes smaller,
and the shaking is like impermanence.
And then the shaking becomes really big.
Sometimes in our lives, impermanence become larger.
And then, of course, we fall over because the earthquake is
there, so we can't stand up anymore.
Or maybe we fall into one of those cracks.
Yeah. Whoa.
That'd be scary here. So this is this is really what
it's about that is impermanence for you.
As soon as you take a stand, as soon as you attach a little bit,
you're opening yourself up for suffering as a consequence.
So remember that this is how the world works and there's one very
beautiful Similarly and this similarly, I teach it on every
retreat I go to and I promise you if you come on many of my
retreats, you will be hearing it again in the future as well.
So if you and I do this because these symbolies of the Buddha
are so beautiful and so profound and so meaningful, and every
time you hear it, at least for me it does that, it has an
effect every time I hear it. So please don't think.
Oh, no, we're going to talk about the same old simile.
Please don't think like that. Have this Zen mind, beginner
mind. Yeah.
Where you actually listen to things afresh every time.
That is really the right attitude.
And this simile is a simile for basically for the sensual world.
Now, the sensual world is the world around us.
Yeah. Sensuality is not just about our
cravings and desires. Sensuality has to do with the
objects of the sensual world. And these objects of the sensual
world are inherently unreliable. And this is how the Buddha makes
this beautiful simile to make this point.
And he says it's just as if a man or a woman or whatever.
Someone. Yeah.
They borrow goods. And in those days, borrowing
goods meant he borrowed a carriage.
Yeah. And some jewellery.
Yeah. That was kind of what they
borrowed, I guess in those days. Yes, we had a carriage and a
jewellery. And then he paraded around town
in his carriage wearing all this fancy jewellery, gold or
diamonds or whatever it was. They had that in those days as
well. Nothing has changed in terms of
gold and diamonds always been very popular.
So he parades around town, but he has borrowed this stuff.
Yeah. And as he parades around town,
people say, wow, look at this person.
They are wealthy. This is how the rich enjoy their
wealth. Yeah.
And once somebody kind of says, yeah, look at this person, he's
rich, yeah, you start to take a bit of pride in that.
Yeah, I'm wealthy. Yeah.
I'm important because I'm wealthy.
This what happens when you're wealthy.
You start to think you're important.
Of course, that's a delusion, but still, that's how you often
think because people start to kind of, you know, suck up to
you a little bit if you're wealthy, you know what it's
like. And then kind of you start to
feel more important as a consequence.
And then, of course, because all of that wealth has been
borrowed, then those people who actually own those things, they
come and take it away. Yeah, the carrier is taken away.
All that nice jewellery is taken away.
And how do you feel if you have attached to that, if you have
identified with those things, if you not identify as a rich man
but it's taken away from you, or a rich woman for that matter,
and it's taken away from you, suddenly you feel naked.
Yeah. It's like something has been
ripped away from your personality.
You have attached to that and you suffer as a consequence.
So this is the Buddha's simile of the borrowed goods.
And the power of the simile of the borrowed goods is that
everything in our life, Not everything here, but a large
part of the things in our life are borrowed goods.
Yeah. And if you think about it, so
many other things in our life there, we have them now, but
suddenly they disappear things, especially things like the
material things that we have in our world.
Yeah. Suddenly you kind of lose money
on the stock market or a thief breaks into your house or a Bush
fire burns down your house. A couple of years ago, we had a
whole town close to our Bodhinada Monastery park.
The whole town burnt down. It was a tiny little town, but
the whole town was burnt down. Nobody died because they were
able to evacuate. Yeah.
And so everything is so impermanent in that external
world in the in terms of the things that we own.
And of course, the real impermanence comes when we die.
When you die, you can be absolutely sure that these
things are going to going to have to go.
Yeah. So what is it?
It is all borrowed goods. We have it for a while.
And then when you pass away, you're going to have to give it
up. All these things that we have in
our life, all the material things, all the wealth that we
have. But much more than that, the
relationships that we have, the people around us, our friends
and acquaintances, our family members, they also are borrowed
in a sense. We have them for a while, and
then they're going to have to go, Yeah, our physical body.
Our physical body is a borrowed goods.
Borrowed goods, Yeah. This is because this too is
going to have to go when you die, it's all going to have to
go. And lastly, the final thing that
is also borrowed goods actually could probably come up with much
more, is actually so much of our identity, who we take ourselves
to be, is also tied up with this world, tied up with this life
right now. Your position in your family,
whether you are male or female, what kind of education you have,
your social status, all of these things also are essentially
borrowed goods that are tied to this life right here and right
now. And once you understand that
these things are borrowed goods, you start to relate to them in a
very different way. Yeah.
And I'd like to make a kind of extend the simile a little bit.
So imagine that you are renting an apartment somewhere.
You're renting it for two or three months.
After two or three months, you're going to have to go and
go somewhere else. How much of your own effort, of
your own energy, of your own money, of all these things are
you going to put into that apartment if you know you're
going to have to leave in two months?
It is when we own things, when it's my house, my apartment,
that's usually when we put in extra effort to make it nice and
because it's mine. Yeah.
But that mine is a delusion that real.
The reality is that all of these things in our life are actually
like that rented apartment. We have it for a while, then
it's going to have to go. So what this does to us, once we
understand that so many of the things in our life are temporary
here, are there for a while, they are borrowed goods, it
changes our investment strategy here.
Yeah. Instead of investing in things
that you have borrowed, instead of investing in that apartment
that you're going to have only for two months, you start
investing in things that you have for the long term instead.
Now, what is it? According to the Buddhist
teaching, what is the one thing that goes beyond this life?
And the one thing that goes beyond this life is your mind.
Yeah. You take your mind with you as
you pass away, so investment strategy changes a little bit.
Instead of thinking about how I can invest in the things that
belong to this world and have to remain in this world, you start
instead. You start to invest in things
that are there for the long term.
Yeah, the mind. You start thinking about the
mind instead, and that becomes your new investment strategy.
How do we invest in the mind? What does it mean to invest in
the mind, first of all, and what it means?
It means that we build up a mind that is more bright, more
beautiful, more light, more happy, that has less suffering.
And as we do that consistently with commitment and
perseverance, gradually, gradually, gradually, your mind
changes from what it was like earlier on from year to year to
year. Your mind actually does become
lighter, more happy, more beautiful.
Yeah, That is what it means to invest in your mind.
How do we do that? And it's very simple, the idea
of investing in things that belong to this world.
That is measuring everything in terms of the successes we have
in this world, status, how much, you know, how much we have in
this particular life. But the alternative investment
is not so much about looking at what we have, how we, how we
succeed with the worldly phenomena.
Rather we look at the process that gets us to the to those
goals. How do we live is what matters.
Yeah. The goal is themselves, OK.
They may come, they may not come.
We don't focus so much on the goals anymore.
We start to focus on the process instead.
How do we actually live it, actually, what starts to matter
in our lives? And instead of just forgetting
about the process and looking at the goals, that's what many
people do. If you forget about the process
and all the focus on the goals, often you do things that are
bad. You do things that are immoral
because the goal is what matter. The process is insignificant.
Yeah, the the means kind of the goal.
The goal justifies the means. There is kind of ancient
principle which is really dodgy, doesn't really work in Buddhism
because you think like that anything is acceptable.
But if you focus instead on the actual process, on the how of
getting there, and you forget about the goal for a while, then
you can start to live morally here.
Then you can start to live with kindness because you understand
that living with kindness, that is what really matters, is the
process. That is important.
And very often what you find is that if you focus on the process
and you forget about the goal, the goal kind of happens anyway.
Yeah, good people very often have good results.
That is my experience anyway. I hear people sometimes say
that, oh, bad people, they get good results.
Well, maybe, maybe not, but anyway, it's superficial.
Good results anyway. It doesn't really matter.
But if you focus on the process, even if the goal doesn't turn
out, yeah, even if you don't get to the goal that you're kind of
looking for, it doesn't matter so much because you have done
the process in the right way. And by doing in the process in
the right way, there is another goal that you reach.
And that is an inner goal. The inner goal of purifying
yourself, of brightening up your mind, making yourself more happy
here, making your your life a more light, beautiful, kind
life. And you feel another kind of
goal, which actually has much more to do with the real meaning
of life, that is what is being fulfilled instead.
So make sure you get your investment strategy right.
Yeah. If you want to have investment
advice, always come to Buddhist monks.
We give the best investment advice long term.
You're not short term, really, really long term.
Investment advice is what this is what it's all about.
So remember that. It's such a powerful simile.
Almost everything in life is borrowed goods.
Look at those things where you have a degree of control, where
you have a degree what where do you have control?
Your inner life, you can choose whether you're going to be kind.
You can choose whether you're going to be generous.
You can choose whether you're going to have meta kindness and
whether you're going to have compassion or whether you're
going to be mean. Yeah, there we have some degree
of choice. External things we can't really
control at all. Your inner life, that is where
you have a measure of control. So go for where you have a
measure of control. Then you're living the spiritual
life in the right way here. So this is the Buddha's
beautiful simile of the borrowed goods, and I'm soon talking on
borrowed times. I've got to be careful here.
So. So what does that mean?
So how So what? What else does that mean?
Does it have any other consequences?
And one of the consequences it has for me, one of the nice
things I also learnt from Ajambram, is to learn to be more
of a passenger in the world, to be more of a visitor to the
world rather than an owner in the world there.
The more your own thing is in the world, the more you are the
owner of your relationships, of your House, of the things around
you. The more you try to control, but
the more you are a visitor in the world.
You've come to this planet, you're visiting here for a
while, yeah, you're enjoying the sites, you're enjoying the good
company of people around you. But if you are visiting somebody
elses house, you don't try to control that house.
You don't try to kind of sort things out.
You just wander around in the house and you have a good time
and you enjoy yourself. So you become more like a
visitor in this life. And when you are a visitor in in
this life, you start this less attachment there and then this
attachment, you're able to live that spiritual life in a far
better way as a consequence. So this is how then you deal
with the impermanence in the skilful way in the world.
Ultimately, you have to go even beyond that.
You have to go beyond even the idea of making a beautiful mind
and all these things. And that is where the deep
meditation comes into place, where you have real insight into
all of these things. And that is certainly really,
really worthwhile. But it's much further down the
track. Yeah, yeah.
They're not going to go there tonight because I think it's
probably going a bit too far here.
But that is where things like the mindfulness of breathing and
all the meditation practices come into their own when you
want to see impermanence in a really deep and profound way
here. So what about, I said I was
going to talk about the three characteristics.
Cheapest. That's only one.
OK, very briefly about the two other characteristics.
Second one is the idea of dukkha, of suffering here.
How can we understand the idea of suffering in a way that is
useful? One of the, of course, one of
the things that we have to do is just to understand the suffering
of ordinary life, not to be kind of blind to the fact that there
are problems in life. Sometimes you hear people say,
Oh yeah, I don't have any suffering in my life.
And of course, to me that is just a delusion.
Everybody has suffering in their life.
Why? Because everybody attaches.
When you attach to something, there's bound to be suffering
coming along with that. It's impossible to have a life
without suffering unless again, you're on Arrowhead, you're
fully enlightened. That is really be the only
possible case. So that's the first thing, just
to be honest about what life is about.
But the second thing to do is remember that understanding
suffering fully is actually part of the insight onto the Buddhist
path. Yeah.
So understanding suffering fully really starts when you start to
practice these teachings and you start to kind of go deeper into
your meditation practice. And one of the beautiful similes
that is found in the suit as used by the Buddha is where the
Buddha says there's two similar the two friends that come to a
mountain here. Here, they come to this
mountain. And then one friend kind of
stays at the base of the mountain.
The other one goes to the top. Yeah.
And then the one who goes to the top, he kind of looks out.
He's like, wow, I can see so much from up here.
And he shouts down to his friend.
Yeah, Listen, friend, I can see fields and villages and houses
and forests and kind of everything from this top of this
mountain here. And then this friend at the
bottom of the mountain, he says no way.
I don't believe it is no way that you can see all that stuff
from the top of the mountain here.
And then this kind of friend on the top of the mountain, he gets
a bit kind of exasperated. Yeah.
And here I can actually see it. So he goes down to the bottom,
grabs him by the arm, pulls him up to the top.
Yeah. And says, OK, look, what do you
see? Oh, yeah, He's a bit.
He's a bit sheepish now. Yeah.
I can see villages, fields and
all these kind of things. And the idea of the simile, and
this is the idea of how to understand suffering here, is
that once you climb this mountain here, climbing the
mountain here is a similarly for meditation practice.
Yeah, you got deeper and deeper in your meditation.
It's like climbing the summit of samadhi, getting out of the
world, climbing to a higher realm if you like it.
And once you go to the higher realm, only then can you see the
landscape underneath properly. Only then can you understand how
the world actually works. So you practice your meditation
Practice. Yeah, until one day you are so
above your ordinary life. You have the bird's eye view of
the eagle's eye. You look out of the world and
you see the sensual world especially for what it actually
is like. And when you see it for what it
actually is like, because you have the view above the world,
you've given up the world in a sense, then you can start to
understand what suffering is about.
Only when you come up to that high kind of level there, that
is where you start to understand these things properly here.
So there is a degree, there has to be a degree also of faith
sometimes, or confidence if you like, in the teachings of the
Buddha here. And this is what this is about.
When the Buddha says there is a higher happiness, there's a
higher vantage point from which you can see and look at the
world. And this is what is happening in
this particular case. Then you can start to understand
these things in a deeper way here very briefly towards the
end. The idea of non self.
Yeah. That's one of the most profound
aspects of the Buddhist teachings.
And very often when you talk about non self, people get
scared. Yeah.
What do you mean non self? That sounds really scary,
especially if you come to the Buddhist teachings, you know,
for the beginning you think non self is really kind of worrying
and A and a problem. After a while you get used to
the idea it's not a problem anymore.
But that's also a danger to getting used to things because
then it doesn't really impact on you anymore.
So how can we understand non self in a way that it isn't so
frightening here? Why do we get frightened by the
way by non self? And the reason is because when
we say that things are non self, it actually challenges our very
existence. Yeah.
If, if, if someone tells you that your perceptions of the
world or your, your, your will, Yeah.
Your, your, your, your sense of agency doesn't really come from
you. It's kind of scary.
Yeah. Because this is these are things
that are very deeply rooted in us as our sense of identity.
And that's why it is scary here. So how can we avoid that
scariness? And actually, it's very easy.
It's very, it's not that hard to do.
Any of you who have been here for come here for a long time,
in practising Buddhism for a long time and done some
meditation practice, you will know that when your mind becomes
more peaceful. Yeah, when there is less
thinking going on your in your mind, the more peaceful you are,
the more happy you tend to be here, the better things tend to
be here. And as you become very, very
peaceful, you get all kinds of joy and happiness is so many
wonderful things arising inside of you.
But one of the things that you notice as you become more
peaceful is that your sense of self starts to diminish.
Yeah, the sense of self expresses itself through your
thinking mind, through all the doing, through all the activity
inside of us. But as you let go of that, as
the sense of self goes down, you actually feel happier and
happier and happier here. So once you get that, once you
start to see the connection between the lack of sense of
self inside and happiness, on the other hand, you start to
understand that this non self business actually is pretty
cool. Yeah, it's good stuff.
And then of course, it starts to inspire you and you start to
imagine how far can I go on this path of non self.
And you start to extrapolate how where meditation is going to
take you in the future. And once you start to
extrapolate, you can start to get some idea where this is
heading. The less sense of self there is,
the more powerful the stillness, the more powerful the happiness.
This is what this magical path that Buddhism actually promises
you that suddenly non self is not scary anymore.
It's bloomin marvellous. No, sorry.
It is really good. Yeah.
And this is kind of the point of this.
So instead of trying to think about it, instead of trying to
rationalise the idea of non self, try instead to experience
it as a felt reality. And when you do that, you
actually start to see this is really good stuff.
It's very beautiful. And that is how we can get the
handle on the Buddhist idea of even of non self and all the
three characteristics of existence.
So these are, in brief, how to think about the three
characteristics. This is the outlook.
Yeah. The way of looking at the world.
The more you look at this in the right way, the more you
understand, especially in permanence.
The reason why I focus so much on impermanence was because this
is perhaps the easiest one of the three characteristics to
relate to. The more you understand that,
the more your values change. Instead of values being worldly
values, how to kind of, you know, get this right status, how
to get, you know, the right possessions, the right
relationships, all of that. Instead of that being the
values, you start to look for the inner values instead.
Yet a rich inner life, an inner life of compassion, kindness,
matter, peace, all of these positive things, that is where
your value starts to lie. Why?
Because, you know, that is something which is there for the
long term. How can we ensure that this
happens? How can we ensure that this we
are moving continuously towards a great more and more better and
better Buddhist outlook in our lives?
That we understand impermanence better and better over time so
that it informs our values, which in turn inform our
priorities in life. How can we do that?
And the way to do that is to come back to the Buddhist
teachings. Read the Buddhist word.
Yeah. Come to damatogs that actually
talk about the word of the Buddha.
Come back to this beautiful teachings again and again and
again. And as you do so, gradually your
outlook will shift, your valid will shift accordingly.
And eventually also your priorities in life will also
alter her. It's a gradual thing, but it's a
very beautiful path. And as you see this path moving,
as you see see things changing inside of you, you're gradually
moving away from suffering, moving away from problems,
towards greater and greater satisfaction, contentment,
completion, and all of these positive, positive things in
life. You're moving towards
discovering the very meaning of life itself, because this is
ultimately what the Buddhist teaching is all about.