(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - What my talk is called tonight is a solid foundation, or subtitle might be having gained stability reveal the mystery. I really love that. Having gained stability reveal the mystery. Just give a brief recap of the theme. So some point in mind training is a set of pithy practices with slogans that are designed to go in, they're designed to make us go like that. And remember and joltles, the slogans are meant to make us remember in the midst of our difficulty that there is a possibility to think the way a Bodhisattva would think and to respond in a way a Bodhisattva would respond. And the idea is that we take all our negative emotions, negative emotions that come from greed, hatred and delusion and are painful and difficult situations as our path, as our spiritual path, rather than thinking, "Oh, I need to get those over there out of the way, make it all nice over here so I can practice." The slogan we've had so far came from the text, "When evil fills the world and its inhabitants," and the slogan was "turn adverse conditions into the path to enlightenment." So the mind training is a challenging practice, no doubt about it. And it assumes a certain level of practice and commitment already. So before we even get to train, before we even get to step foot onto the first training point, the text tells us first, train in the preliminaries. And that's the card you've got in front of you then. First on one side of it says, first train in the preliminaries. So a solid foundation from the stability of the preliminaries, we can venture into the mystery of the seven-point mind training practice. The text doesn't tell us exactly what the preliminaries are, but there's a lot of commentary on the seven-point mind training. And all the commentaries agree that the preliminaries involve what's on the back of that card. So you'll find four points, sometimes called the four reminders, sometimes called the four thoughts that turn the mind, the four mind-turning reflections, a set of four concentrations that we're asked to do over and over again, until they just become part of our thinking. They become a solid foundation for our life. They become part of the stability that we need so that we can reveal the mystery available to us in the seven-point mind training. So it's not like we do them and then move up them like a ladder. It's not like that. The preliminaries are a baseline for approaching life. This stability is a steady and reliable basis for venturing into the challenging territory of the seven points. So they are the preciousness of human life, impermanence and death, karma and its fruits, or you might see them phrased in slightly different ways. So you might see the reality of the law of karma instead of that, and the defects of samsara, or you might see something like no happiness in samsara. But the four points are that might be rephrased a little bit, as they're written on the card. That's good. So I'm just going to read you this poem that is written that people who've been around a while will recognise instantly, and it's the poem by Tsangkapa. And it is kind of a summing up of the four points. It does lean more heavily towards the first two, but you can read all of the points in the poem. The human body, at peace with itself, is more precious than the rarest gem. Cherish your body. It is yours this time only. The human form is one with difficulty. It is easy to lose. All worldly things are brief, like lightning in the sky. This life you must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop, a finger of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being. Therefore, set your goal. Make use of every day and night to achieve it. So, what I'm going to do is I love learning things by heart. I think it's a really good practice, so knowing chunks of dharma off by heart is very helpful, I think. And that's going to be my challenge for the seven-point mind training, is to learn this poem by heart. And I would suggest it would be a nice thing to do, to be able to have that in your being so you can just, in moments of challenge, just bring that to mind. It's a very beautiful reminder. So, they come in pairs, the four reminders come in pairs, the first two go together, and the second two go together. And you can kind of think of them like that interchangeably, they're not in order of priority, but they go together like that. So, I'm going to start off with this precious human life, the preciousness of human life. So, somewhere in the training, I listened to a beautiful talk by Damodinid, Damodinidin is one of the order members who've been around the longest, and she was ordained quite a long time ago, and she's done a series of talks from the LBC on mind training. And in the one on this, she quotes this thing, and I don't know where it's from, maybe some more, more, more. This very place, meaning the body. This very place, the lotus paradise. This very body, this very body, the Buddha. If not here, where? If not us, who? And it kind of points to the, that to be a human being and to have a human life, that's our opportunity to become enlightened, that this is our opportunity to become a Buddha, which is our potential, all of us can become a Buddha. So, the preciousness of human life, there's this, I'm going to tell the story of the turtle, okay? So, you know the story that lots of people will know the story of the turtle, but it's such a good one. And you might not know it, so I'm going to tell it again. My daughter went to, to a Greek island last week, and she was telling me she could see turtles kind of coming up, taking a breath, and coming down. And I thought, oh, that's what I'm going to be talking about next week. So, so there's this story around this theme. And it's imagining, the story imagines that the whole world is covered in water, it's covered in ocean. And in the ocean is a turtle swimming around. And he only, on the surface of the water, is a coit, like a ring, a wooden ring floating on the surface of the water. And so, she's swimming around in the water, you're having a nice time. And once every hundred years, she comes up and she pops her head out of the water. And the traditional story says that it's as rare and as fortuitous for a human being to be born, for us to take human form, as it is for that turtle, to pop its head about the water in the ring. So, you can imagine how unlikely that would be, how rare that would be, to be swimming in the ocean for 100 years, who pops its head out of the water, and just happens to pop up with the ring around its neck. And that's how precious and rare a human life is, is described in some Buddhist traditions. But it's not just a human life. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you, I'm going to give three lists, but I don't want you, please, please, please, my favour to Sangha Gita, please don't think about writing the lists down. Don't want you to write them down. I would really like for you to just listen and let them wash over you. And for you to think, ooh, that one, or ooh, that one, as it applies to you, where it comes up. And if you really want to know the list, just go to the talk and rewind it and pause it as we go along. And then you can have the list that way. But I'd really like you not to write it down, it's just like to listen. So, the list, it's about being a human being, but the preciousness applies to having eight freedoms, ten endowments, and three kinds of faith, okay? So, these, to have these eight freedoms, ten endowments, and three kinds of faith, that is the preciousness of a human life. So, the first four freedoms of the eight freedoms are freedoms from four particular mental states. And those of you who know the Wheel of Life will recognize these mental states. A mental state of craving, hatred, not being interested in anything spiritual and a lack of empathy. If you are free from them, then you have a precious human life. If you're free from those who are craving, hatred, not interested in anything spiritual or lacking empathy, and you're a human being, wow, you've really got something. If you were born, if you weren't born into a place that had no rule of law, or was it war, it's described as being in a border tribe, or living amongst barbarians. If you're free from that, and you've been born a human being, wow, that's an amazing precious human life. If you're free from being born in a place where it's illegal to practice the Dharma, or where it's impossible to practice, because people, you know, it's just not, it can't happen because people just cannot see it being a way to have another religion other than the one that's normal. If you're born free from that, then you've really got freedom, you're free, precious human birth. If you're able to reflect on your actions because you're not physically or mentally impaired so that you can't reflect on your actions, if you're free from that, then that's a precious human life. And if you're free from a period where there's no border, then that's the freedom. So these are the eight freedoms. And so the ten endowments mirror that. So in a way, it's saying they're the things that you're free from. And now these are the things that you have. If you have these things, it's a precious human life that you're born a human being, that you're born in a country where you can practice, that you have physical and mental health so that you can reflect on your actions. You haven't done terrible things in your past that weigh you down so you can't move on. You have the capacity for faith. You're born in the time of a Buddha. You're born when the Dharma is taught. The Dharma is still alive. The Dharma is followed and practiced. And you have a teacher, you have a sangha and spiritual friends. They are the ten endowments that are so rare and precious that this is the preciousness of human life. So Bante says, "Sangha or Achter, our teacher," says, "If you've got them, you're two-thirds of the way there." You know, if you've got those things that so many people in the world don't have, you're two-thirds of the way there. And that should give us real confidence. Somehow we've managed to be born a human being with these eight freedoms, these ten endowments. And that can really cultivate gratitude and generosity because we have so much. I remember when just a few years ago, I was sitting on maybe a sangha night or something, but I was with a group. I might have been my Mitra group in the library. And we were talking about being free to come to the Buddhist center. And I just happened to say, well, you know, we just take it for granted that we can come to the Buddhist center. We take it for granted that we can come and meet and talk and, you know, and practice the Dharma. And then about a month later, COVID hit when we couldn't. And we could no longer come to the center. And everybody was like, "Oh my God, you said that." (audience laughing) And it just was like, "Yeah, that's it." The three types of faith, in realities, qualities, capacities, that means we see what these three types of faiths, we can see this truth in the Dharma. We can admire people who are further along than us. And we can aspire towards enlightenment, bit like what Variananda was saying then, you know, from now onwards until the attainment of enlightenment. You know, he had that aspiration. So he had one of these three types of faith. This is extremely positive. If we have these, if we have the eight, even some of the eight freedoms, some of the ten endowments, and some of this type of faith, then this is incredibly positive. And that is, so it's a very positive reflection, the being of having a human precious life on all of these freedoms and opportunities that we have. So the second one, impermanence and death. Sangarachta Bante says that the Dharma in one word is impermanence. That's the Dharma. Sum it all up in one word is impermanence. And so the reflection is to appreciate that then, what happens is we reflect even more how precious our human birth is because it won't last because it's short. You know, Sangarachta said he looked at, he, you know, looked down any tube train, and there might be one or two other people on that train who've found the Dharma. You know, that's so precious. This human, the human body at peace with itself is more precious than the rarest gen. Cherish your body, it is yours this time only. The human form is one with difficulty. It is easy to lose. So there are some traditional reflections on impermanence and death. Death is certain, but the time and the means are uncertain. The only thing of any use of the moments of our death is how much of the Dharma we have integrated into our being. So those three are the traditional reflections. The death is certain, but we don't know when it will be. And the only thing of any use of our death is how much Dharma we have practiced and we know. So in our groups tonight or in our reflections this week, it might be good to think about what aspect of the Dharma would actually be most helpful to me in the moments of my death. And the Buddha said that this was a very strong reflection. So there is a tradition of monks, the monastic Sanga, who when they go to bed at night, they turn their bowls upside down and they fold away their robes really neatly and they clean everything around because they might not need them in the morning because they might not be awake. It might not be alive in the morning when they... So it's like a reflection. They don't assume, they don't take for granted that they will. In the Dharma Pada, this fantastic book, which is the Buddha's pithy sayings, fantastic reflections. It says, "Those who know we are all heading for death will resolve their quarrels." You know, if we do, we really know we're headed for death. If we have quarrels in our lives, that's something to reflect. Can we really live as if we really knew we were heading for death? 'Cause of course we are. Have we made a will? Do we accumulate stuff that might be, have to be there for people who we leave behind? You know, this is a very strong reflection and we're Buddhists, so we don't shy away from this. This is part of our reflection as Buddhist practitioners that we take seriously, that we will die and make it as easy as possible for people who are going to follow us. These reflections also include of course that the world is so beautiful. It's an incredibly positive reflection. You know, this is where all the people that I love hang out. This is where they all are in this world. And to treat everything with that knowledge, to treat everything as fragile and precious as a rare gem to be cherished. It's a very positive reflection. And I heard this quotation over 20 years ago, I think. And it's really stayed with me for years and years and years, some of you will know it. You might have heard of a playwright called Dennis Potter. And when he was dying, he died quite young. He did an interview. And in that interview, he talked about how his relationship with the world had changed since he knew he was dying. And I'm just gonna read what he said. He said it was spring. And he said, at this season, the blossom is out in full now. There in the West early, it's a plum tree. It looks like apple blossom, but it's white. Looking at it, instead of saying, oh, that's nice blossom. Last week, looking at it through the window and I'm writing, I see it as the whitest, frothiest, blossamest blossom that there ever could be. And I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were. And the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter, but the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. And if people could see that, you know, there's no way of telling it. You have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comforts of it, the reassurance, not that I'm interested in reassuring people, bugger that, said Dennis Potter. (audience laughing) The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see us? And boy can you celebrate us. So that in a way is the mind-turning reflections of impermanence and death and the preciousness of human life. So those two go together. The second two, no happiness in Samsara, the defects of Samsara. I'll just explain a bit about that. Samsara isn't a place, it's an approach to life. So approaching life in this way is where we make our happiness depend on getting what we want. We make our happiness depend on not getting what we don't want, organizing the outside world to our light king. And this isn't gonna last, it's just not gonna work. It's not gonna, even if it did for a little bit, it's not gonna last for long. There's no lasting happiness in seeing the world that way. And so this is what it means, no happiness in Samsara. And it's highlighting the defects of seeing the world like that. That's what this is about. So that approach to life can't bring happiness. And you know, we say on the intro course, don't we, that happiness comes from inside. And we can't help seeing the world like this. We're wired like that, we can't help it. We don't have much of a choice in seeing the world like that because there's, I think, I make the big mistake of thinking there's a separate me in here and a separate you out there and I can organize you all so that I can be happy. Of course that can't work. But with practice, we can start to be more aware of the choice we have to step into the gaps in those moments and make choices that will lead to lasting happiness, not just a temporary fix. That does not mean that we don't enjoy this beautiful world. But if our happiness depends on having what we want from the world when we want it, then we're destined to have a really miserable time. And even imagining if we got everything we want, the perfect place, the perfect weather, the perfect possessions, the perfect people, we're not necessarily gonna have a nice time. It's not a given, is it? 'Cause we all know that's true. And even if it was brilliant and lovely, it wouldn't last. And we're spiritual beings. We need more than that kind of worldly fix. We need something meaningful and connecting that's concerned with about the needs of others and about the wellbeing of others, not just on our own. Everybody needs that to a certain extent. And if we didn't have some of the freedoms and endowments of the precious human birth, then we might never be able to escape thinking that happiness can be found in some sort, in material world, a worldly success and pleasure. This life you must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop, a thing that disappears even as it comes into being, therefore set your goal. And I suppose we have to decide on what we think setting our own goal is. And that's another thing to reflect on. What is it that we actually want from the world? What is it that we want? Do we want to get ourselves arranged so that we can be happy getting what we want all the time? Because if we do really seriously want that, then we can reflect on how that might not always work. And that's the defects, sometimes what it means. But be honest. And we can see how they fit together. We can see how even if you could arrange the world to fit your own desires. Before you know it, like lightning in the sky, it's over. But there is also a great deal of suffering in samsara, in seeing the world in this way. And we try so hard to avoid the suffering by trying to arrange everything so that we avoid suffering, but it doesn't work. As somebody once said, the spiritual life is easy if we don't mind what happens. I think that's really true. So by reflecting on this, the defects of samsara, we start to understand that there is another way. We start to turn away from samsara and begin to reflect my intentional actions matter. What I do matters because that will create how I am in the future, how I can benefit myself and benefit others through my actions of body, speech and mind. And if I can really see that I'm going to die, I have this precious life with its freedoms and opportunities. Then I can set my goal and grow to my full potential. Which, you know, for lots of us might not be enlightenment, might not be what our goal is, but whatever that goal is, be honest and set that goal and grow to hopefully our full potential. Therefore set your goal and make use of every day and night to achieve. So the last one, karma and its fruits or the reality of the law of karma. So again, fantastic book, fantastic text, the dharma pada. The first lines of the dharma pada are, experiences are preceded by mind, produced by mind, led by mind, led by my produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows even as the cartwheel follows the hoof of the ox during the cart. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs. And, you know, that really is summing up karma. How we choose to act in any given moment will either strengthen or weaken that particular habit of action, of body speech and mind, of generosity or meanness or friendliness or irritation. If we act from skillful, say generous intentions, then that generous habit will become strengthened and we will become more generous and happy in the future. If we act from unskillful, say dishonest intentions and the dishonest habit will be strengthened and will become more dishonest, unhappy in the future, just examples. So how we act now creates the person we'll be in the future. And that's karma. And we know this from our experience, don't we? You know, we can look back and see how the choices we made in the past shaped to an extent the person that we are now. So what we do now will shape to an extent the person that we are in the future. If we really believed in the law of karma, then we wouldn't behave in lots of the ways that we do. We somehow think we're gonna get away with this one. You know, it's not like there's no one watching over us, is there? There's no God, there's no punishing God or rewarding God, it's down to us. So we think, you know, no one's looking, I'll get away with it, but we never really do. Because the karma, you know, we can't escape our cup, we can't escape that our intentional actions will shape our future experience. Of course, not everything that happens to us is because of karma. There are other natural forces at work. You know, the viruses, accidents. We're talking about intentional actions of body, speech, and mind. And it maybe happens so fast that we don't even notice it, but it's still intentional. The Buddha said, I am the owner of my karma, heir to my karma, born of my karma, related to my karma, abide, supported by my karma, whatever karma I shall do for good or ill, of that I shall be heir. So we really need to see that we can shape the course of our life. So in 10 years time, hopefully I will be the heir of some really good karma that will to an extent shape my life the way I am in 10 years. I keep saying to an extent because karma isn't all of the forces at work in our life. There are other forces too. But it's a powerful, it's a powerful law of the universe. So this is extremely positive and empowering. And it's really good to remember the teaching of karma, the parka. And that's what it means by karma and its fruits. So the fruits of our karmic action. So once we've made a decision to start following the precepts and to change and turn away from unskillful actions, the stream of our influence from the past is still flowing. It's still flowing. So those karmic actions will still bear fruit, even if we've stopped doing all that stuff, it still needs to bear fruit in the future. So and that can be quite difficult to bear. That can be quite hard. We'll keep coming up against the fruits of our actions, of our past actions, which can be quite hard. So for example, we might have always at work, we might have had really had a lovely, delicious gossip around in the cough when we're making our coffee. It might have been something that we used to really enjoy in the past, gossiping. And we suddenly think, God, actually, I wanna stop doing that 'cause it's really unskillful. So you make that decision to stop gossiping. And then the person who usually does it with you kind of falls out with you a bit. And it's quite painful to say, I don't wanna do that anymore. And it's kind of all of that. So this can be quite painful to experience, but it's extremely positive when we just have to let that happen. We have to, I've written on my arm, I've had this for a few weeks now. And it's a reminder that sometimes things happen to me that are the results of things I've done in the past. And the way to work with that is to notice it, notice that it's painful, notice that it's got something to do with the way I used to be and just go, oh, bear it, just let it be. Bring lots of love, bring lots of kindness, lots of encouragement to yourself that you're doing really well and not to worry too much about these things that we might rub up against in our life. We will come up against these fruits of our past actions. We do our best to be, to be kind in the thoughts of hatred, thoughts of jealousy, thoughts of all kinds of horrible thoughts will arise in our mind. And at that point, it's conically neutral. We can't help thoughts arising. It does not mean we're a bad person. It does not mean we are wrong. They're thought to rising in our mind from past actions. And at that point, we can just go, there's that thought of hate again, I know that one. Yeah, just let that be there, okay, right? It's arisen, okay, it's there for a minute. It will pass, it will pass, okay, it's gone. And so we don't give ourselves a hard time because it's comically neutral at that point. If we don't feed it, it will pass. Bring lots of kindness to that. It doesn't make us a horrible person. We have to take responsibility for it and make a decision not to add to that, not to add to the thought or fuel it or to go with it in any way, but if we bring lots of kindness and understanding to it, it will pass. And we will change and they will eventually stop. So don't act on them. Don't dig the groove even deeper. Bring meta to them, these thoughts that arise. Be truthful, be honest, be real about what's happening. Take responsibility, but don't feed them. They will happen. Set your goal and make use of everyday and light to achieve it. So these four, we reflect how precious and rare on human life is with its freedoms and opportunities. We reflect that life is short, which makes even more precious. We have the benefits of faith and meaning, the benefits of confidence in where we're going. Faith as in confidence makes us realise that Samsara is not all it's cracked up to be and there is another way to live, which is to recognise and take responsibility for our actions and practice to become enlightened for the benefit of all beings. And these alone, these four preliminaries would be alone as a practising themselves. But of course, they're the solid foundation for the mind training, which we're going to continue to explore over the coming weeks. So for our homework this week, reflecting on the reminders, reflect on which them seems to be at the fore for you this week. See where they fit into your life. Can you think of examples for each one and perhaps learn the poem? Or maybe you learned just a couple of lines out of the poem. Yeah, if you Google a couple of lines, say, for example, the human body at peace with itself, if you Google that, it'll come up and you'll be able to find it online. Yeah, so that's my talk. [APPLAUSE] We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. 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