Creating positive experiences for ourselves and others

Actions and outcomes

• The Buddhist approach to spiritual practice
• Creating our experience through afflictions and karma
• Benefiting others by developing our virtuous qualities and abilities

Dharma practice in Buddhism (download)

Questions and answers

• Actions that we are responsible for
• Individual versus collective karma
• Generating positive karma while being harmed

Dharma practice in Buddhism Q&A (download)

We say that dharma, the word dharma, has many, many different meanings. One meaning is “the path,” meaning the consciousnesses that realize reality and also the cessations of suffering. Another meaning of dharma is the teachings that the Buddha gave. Another meaning of dharma is just phenomena. It means different things in different situations. When we say “practice the Dharma,” we’re talking about practicing the Buddha’s teachings in order to transform our own mind and actualize the path to enlightenment and the cessations of dukkha or suffering.

Practicing the Dharma is something that we do as an individual in a community. It’s done individually in the sense that nobody else can do it for us. You can hire somebody to clean your house, you can hire somebody to fix your car, but you can’t hire somebody to transform your own mind. You can’t hire somebody to sleep for you, or somebody to eat for you. It doesn’t work. You don’t get the same result. So Dharma practice has to be done by oneself, nobody else can do it for us. So in that way, we’re really the creators of our own experience. We create our happiness. We create our suffering. We’re the ones who are responsible for it.

When the Buddha taught the Dharma, he gave it as a suggestion. He didn’t give it as, “You have to do this, or else!” The Buddha didn’t create anything. He just described. He described the evolution of misery, and he described the path to stop that, and he described the path to develop our good qualities. The Buddha didn’t create the path, he didn’t create cyclic existence, or what we call samsara. He simply described, and he described from his own experience. It wasn’t something intellectual. It was something that he had actually realized and done for himself, so it makes it quite a valuable path in that way, because it’s something that’s tried and true, that the Buddha himself experienced, and then he taught it to his disciples, and they experienced it. The teachings have come down through the ages with many people having actually actualized them. It’s not intellectual and it’s not about learning a lot of stuff, it’s not about knowing big words and concepts. It’s about really changing our own heart and mind.

Now to change our heart and mind involves some learning first. We have to learn what the Buddha described. If we try and make up our own path to enlightenment, then we’ll just get more of what we’ve been experiencing since beginningless time. We’ve been trying to be happy, and find a way to be happy, since beginningless time, and we’re still here, aren’t we? We have tried this, and we’ve tried that, and we’ve done all sorts of things. Just trusting our own preferences and opinions on what to practice is not so reliable, because if we don’t know anything, then we just do this and that under the influence of our ignorant opinions.

So learning the Dharma is really important. That’s the first step. We call it learning or it’s often translated as listening, I think, because the tradition was very oral in the past. Listening, reading, learning, studying, something so that you get the tools and then you have to think about them, so that you don’t just get them and say, “I believe, I got it.” Because a lot of times we think we understood, but we don’t, and it’s only when we think about it some more or we talk about it with friends, or any number of things like this, that we realize, well, I got something, but it’s kind of still like mush in my mind. That whole process of thinking about the teachings is very important.

The third step is when we’ve thought about them and we understand them correctly, then putting them into practice, practicing them in our daily life, doing a meditation practice, really integrating our mind with the teachings, or the teachings with our mind, whichever way you want to put it. You often hear about these three things: the wisdom from hearing, from thinking, and from meditating. That’s what we’re talking about. Actually, you do all three together in your practice. You do some learning, you do some thinking, you do some meditating. They all go together, although at one time or another you may emphasize one facet more than the other.

That’s a little bit of an approach. Another important thing to mention about the approach is you are free to think about everything, and in fact you should think about everything that’s said. Don’t just say, “Oh, Buddha said it, or my teacher said it, therefore I believe.” You should take it and think about it. Not so much thinking about it with a skeptical mind that’s trying to poke holes in it, because that’s not a useful state of mind, but to think about it in the sense of really taking it to heart. Does this make sense logically, and does it describe my life, and if I practice it, how does it change me? Really working with it yourself. Because I think if we just hear something and say “I believe,” then it hasn’t really gone in, and I think that’s why often people whose beliefs are based on faith, it’s very difficult for them to have conversations with other people who have different opinions, because they haven’t thought about what their beliefs are, so it’s not clear in their own mind and they get shaken when people put another opinion in there, or another view in there. This whole process of thinking about it helps us to gain some clarity. And again, it’s not intellectual thinking, it’s applying it to our own experience. Although sometimes we do do some intellectual thinking.

What we call I, we always talk about I, don’t we? I. “I want this, I don’t want that. I like this, I don’t like that. I want to be happy. I don’t want to suffer. I am this and such a person. I’m doing this and that.” Most of our thoughts center around me, right? Me. We’re always having this thought, I, all the time. But what is this I that we’re thinking about? When we investigate, when we look for what I is, we see there’s a body. We feel the body, we see there’s a body. There’s a mind, mind being just the clear ability to reflect objects, to engage in them. There is a body and there’s a mind, but it’s very difficult to find a person that’s separate from the body and mind. Something that is really us in there. There is a person, but it’s a person that’s merely labelled in dependence upon the body and mind. So there is a body and a mind and they have some relationship. That’s what we label being alive. When the body and mind have that relationship, then we say there’s a person there. And if it’s us, we label it I. If it’s somebody else we label you or he or she or it or they, or something like that.

The actual person exists by being labelled in dependence upon the body and mind, but it’s not the same as the body and mind, and it’s not different from the body and mind. Inherently the same or inherently different. It’s dependent on the body and mind. We’ve studied a lot about our body in school, and we study a lot about our body in our extracurricular activities too, so much of our life is revolving around our body. The body is made of atoms and molecules, you can touch it and see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, hear it when it does different things.

We have some awareness of our body, and you can get lots of grants from the government and private foundations to study the body. The body includes the brain. The brain is a physical organ. But the mind is something that’s different, and we don’t quite understand what the mind is. The mind’s not the same as the brain. You can have an anatomy class and take the brain out and put the brain on the table and dissect it, measure it and weigh it, and do all these experiments on it. The mind isn’t the brain. The brain is just the lump of stuff made of atoms and molecules, not the mind.

The mind is, like I said before, the ability to clear, the ability to reflect objects and to be aware or engage with objects. It’s the thing that makes a body into a living being. If there’s just the body, we don’t say there’s a person. We don’t say I. We say it’s a body. And if you’ve seen dead bodies—have any of you seen dead bodies? Then you know there’s something different between a dead body and a live body. What’s the difference? The dead body’s not moving, but did you get some feeling like there’s something there with a live human being that’s not there with a dead one? What is there with a live one is the mind. When the mind and the body are linked together, we call that being alive and we say there’s a person there. I’m there, or you’re there. When the body and mind separate, that’s just what we call death, that’s all death is, just the body and mind separating, and we no longer say the person is there.

Of those two things that compose the person, the body has its own continuum. It becomes a corpse, it gets recycled in nature. Yesterday we went up and we started our pet cemetery, and we buried Tracy’s cat and we buried Yeshe’s ashes, and we buried a little mouse. The bodies are there, and the bodies are going to get recycled in nature. But the mind, because it isn’t physical, doesn’t get buried. The mind stream continues on, this clear and cognitive thing. Depending upon our actions or our karma, depending on our thoughts and our intentions, the mind gets influenced to take one body or another body in a future life.

This whole process of the mind taking another body is under the influence of our own thoughts. Not thoughts in the sense that I choose to take this body, it’s not that there’s a disembodied mind somewhere up there in the sky that looks down and says, “Who shall I choose to be mom and dad this lifetime?” It’s not that kind of process at all for us confused beings, but it’s more that, like I was saying, we are conditioned beings, so our mind is conditioned by previous events, and by itself and its own previous way of thinking.

All this conditioning comes from inside and outside, then we act under the influence of our conditioning, and our actions constitute more conditioning. We do actions, and the actions bring results. The results don’t come immediately right after we do them. Some results do, but not all the results. You go to school a long time before the result of graduation comes. Some results don’t come immediately; they come after a while. So similarly with karma, not that karmic results don’t necessarily come immediately—they can also come after a while. We act, and it leaves some energy trace in our mind stream, and then that conditions us. It influences us, what we’re attracted to, how we think, the kind of person we are, what our mental habits are, what kind of life we’re attracted to as a rebirth. All of that is very much influenced by what is going on in our mind, because our mind is influencing our actions, and our actions leave these karmic latencies, or karmic seeds.

The point here is that it all comes down to the mind. It comes down to how we’re thinking, how we’re feeling, what our intentions and motivations are. In society, our regular educational system and our upbringing doesn’t focus very much on our mind or our heart. It’s the same word for mind and heart in the Buddhist way of speaking. In Western life, there’s the mind up here in the head and the heart here in the chest, and there’s a brick wall separating them. But from a Buddhist viewpoint, the mind and the heart are the same thing, the part of us that cognizes and feels and experiences. In our society, in our educational system, in our families, people don’t talk about the mind very much. They talk a lot about the body, and we talk a lot about the external world, and from the time we’re kids, we’re trained in examining the external world, aren’t we? We learn about colors and shapes and sizes and atoms and molecules, and how they fit together, and how electricity works, and how chemistry works, and biological functioning, and mechanical engineering. And we learn about how other people act. We study how people act, and we study how they speak, and we’re always studying the external world outside of ourself. Nothing in our educational system really teaches us how to understand ourselves. We get a lot of education about things outside of ourself, but very little education about what’s happening inside here. And yet, what’s happening inside here is the chief thing that’s conditioning us, that’s making things happen the way they happen.

So it’s important that we begin to understand what’s going on inside of our own heart and mind. What are they? How do they operate? What kind of habitual patterns exist in our heart and mind that we operate under the influence of without even being aware. Because Dharma practice is all about changing our own heart and mind. It’s not about examining the world, because the view very much is that we are interdependent and we do influence each other, and what we do does influence, and can affect, other people.

Given that, if we want to have a good influence on the external world and the beings in it, we have to take care of our internal world first. Because if our internal world is in disarray, and our thoughts and our intentions and our emotions are just all over the place, then that’s how we’re going to influence the environment and everybody else with our thoughts and our intentions and our motivations winging off the wall all the time. When we care about other living beings, then we have to care about ourself, because we care about how we influence them.

We want to learn about ourselves and figure out our own heart and mind and purify the things that are not conducive for happiness, develop the qualities and the abilities and the seeds in our own minds that are conducive for happiness, and then share that with others through just who we are and how we are in the world.If we really want to be altruistic and to benefit others, which is really the way to go, we want to increase our own abilities. Otherwise, it’s like someone who cannot see leading others who are also visually impaired, isn’t it?

What we come to here is that we want to benefit others. To benefit others we have to benefit ourselves. And if we want to benefit ourselves and live in a happy place, we have to take care of others. Self-benefit and other-benefit are not dichotomies. We often feel that way in the world. If I have it they won’t. If they have it, then I don’t. But actually if you look at it from the spiritual viewpoint, we influence each other, so others’ happiness or misery influences me. My happiness and misery influence others, so I want to get myself together so I can contribute to the welfare of others. By caring about the welfare of others, that’s one of the ways in which I get myself together.

Caring about the welfare of others does not mean that we are responsible for everything they feel. So we influence people, but we are not responsible for everything they feel. In the same way that other people are not responsible for everything we feel: we’re responsible for what we feel. We often say, “Oh, this person made me mad.” As if my anger was due to them and my anger is due to what they did. They did x, y and z, and they made me mad. That way of speaking makes us into a victim. They made me mad. In other words, I have no power over what I feel, because they have the power to make me mad or make me happy. Do you see how that way of talking just makes us into a victim? That is actually quite inaccurate because other people don’t make us feel one way or another. People may say different words or do different actions, but the question always is, why do I get angry because they said those words or did those actions? Because somebody else will hear the same words and see the same actions, and they won’t get mad. In fact, somebody else could be really happy. Somebody over here does this and that, one person’s happy, one person’s miserable. Can you say your behavior made me happy, your behavior made me miserable?

If it was due just to the person’s behavior, then everybody should have the same reaction. But we clearly know from our lives not everybody has the same reaction. Other people don’t make us feel this, they don’t make us feel that. We’re the ones who feel something in response to what they do, but we always have a choice in terms of what we feel. It’s just that we usually don’t realize that we have a choice. And so why don’t we realize that we have a choice? Because we’re conditioned to respond in the same way again and again and again. Somebody calls me a name, I get angry—it’s like a push button. Somebody criticizes me, I get upset. Again, push button. As if I have no choice about what I feel. As if other people are operating me by strings. But that’s not it. That’s not it. Why do I get angry? Because of the way I’m seeing the situation. Because of my own habitual way of interpreting things. Because of my own habitual emotional pattern. It’s not the other person who makes me happy, and it’s not the other person who makes me miserable. The origins, the deep origins, are within myself, in my own mind.

Similarly, when it comes to other people, we are not responsible for what they feel. We are responsible for what we do and what we say. We’re responsible for our motivations, but how they interpret what we said or did, we cannot control. Have you ever had that experience where you act with a really kind intention, and somebody completely misinterprets it and gets upset with you? Yes? Did we make them upset? No, we didn’t make them upset. We had a kind intention. It was their mind that misinterpreted what we were doing. That’s why I say that we are not responsible for what they feel. We’re responsible for what we do. If I was pretending to be kind, but actually, in the back of my mind, I knew I was saying something that was painful to them, I’m responsible for that. If I’m rationalizing, saying, “Oh, I’m just doing this to be kind,” but inside it’s like… I have some other little motivation in there, I’m responsible for my motivations, and if I speak harshly or do something unkind due to those motivations, I’m responsible for that. Those are my actions, and I have to correct them. But if I do something with a kind heart and somebody misinterprets it, I’m responsible for the action I did with a kind heart. I accumulate that karma, but how they feel in response, I didn’t make them feel that way.

Similarly, when other people are happy with what we did, did we make them happy? As little kids, this is the conditioning we get, “You made me so happy when you did this.” Isn’t that what we learned? If you do good in school, whatever, our parents each had a different agenda. One parent wants you to do good in school, another wants you to be good in sports, another wants you to be good-looking, and another wants you learn how to paint, and another one wants you to learn to do music, and so as kids, we just do things, and then people are happy because of them. They say, “Oh, you made me so happy.” And then we think, “Oh, I made them so happy.”

Our actions may influence them, but we don’t control what they think, do we? Because we also know very well—we’ve learned by this age how to make people happy in order to get something for ourselves. Right? We know how to do that, don’t we? We can admit it, we’re good friends! We know how to manipulate situations. I know how to make somebody happy so that they will give me what I want. Am I really making them happy? They may say, “Oh, you’re making me happy.” But am I really making them happy? What’s going on in my mind? What’s my motivation? Am I really caring about their happiness? Not much! I just want them to be happy because then I can get something out of it. It’s called manipulation. We do it all the time.

We’ve learned that sometimes we can have a really rotten motivation, a terribly self-centered motivation, but we can look good on the outside. We know how to do that, don’t we? We know how to please people and do what they want on the outside, even though our heart’s not in it, even though maybe there’s a very selfish motivation. We think, “I’m making them happy,” or they think, “You’re making me happy.” But actually, we’re not.

I think it’s really important in this whole thing to differentiate what is our responsibility and what are other people’s responsibilities. Because when we confuse these two, then things get really complicated. My responsibility is my body, speech, and mind. My responsibility is my motivation. My responsibility is how I’m interpreting other people’s actions. Their responsibility is their body, speech, and mind. Their responsibility is how they’re interpreting other people’s actions. It takes some thinking about this, to really make some examples in your life about how this works.

We are interdependent and so we do influence each other, though sometimes at the beginning it’s hard to figure out what is whose responsibility. When there’s a happy situation, everybody’s responsible. When there’s an unhappy situation, usually everybody’s contributing something to it. And so it takes some thinking. You might spend some time and think about different situations in your life—what’s mine and what’s somebody else’s.