Transforming the mind

• Short introduction to Venerable Khadro’s book and to Buddhism
• The Four Noble Truths
• The Four Immeasurable Thoughts: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity
• The Buddhist understanding of mind
• Transforming our mind as the essence of Buddhism
• Decreasing negative states of mind
• Developing positive states of mind
• Learning not to identify with our states of mind
• Learning not to be judgmental about our states of mind
• Mindfulness in meditation and everyday life

Motivation is key

It’s customary at the beginning of a teaching or meditation session in Buddhism that we recite some prayers to get us into a positive frame of mind. Some of the people attending this retreat online may be new to Buddhism and unfamiliar with the various prayers that we say, so you may have been puzzled by what some of the words mean. So, let’s just take a few more minutes now to use words and expressions that we are familiar with to bring up in our minds a positive frame of mind. We do this because Buddhism, in particular Tibetan Buddhism, says our motivation for the things that we do is very, very important. It’s one of the main factors that determines the kind of results or outcomes we will experience as a result of our actions. It’s even more important than the action itself.

Why we do an action is very, very important. We’re advised to always try to have a positive motivation for the actions that we do, in particular when it comes to spiritual activities such as meditation or studying spiritual teachings. We really want to make sure our motivation is a positive one. And the most positive motivation we could have is altruism, which means wanting to benefit others and not harm them. And there are many different ways we can benefit others by providing what they need in terms of basic necessities like food, clothes, medicine, and so on. So, it’s excellent to do those kinds of activities.

But Buddhism says it’s also very important to help people’s minds to develop, to transform, so that they become free of negative or disturbing states of mind like anger, hatred, greed, jealousy, and so on. It’s important to help them cultivate positive states of mind, such as kindness and compassion, wisdom—understanding the true nature of things. That’s really the best way we can help others, because then they can help themselves. They can engage in doing the things that will really bring benefit to themselves and to others, and will stop doing the things that just bring suffering and problems to themselves and others. But to be able to help others transform their minds, we need to transform our own minds. We need to practice what we preach, walk the talk.

To do that, we need to learn spiritual teachings and put them into practice. And the Buddha’s teachings are excellent guides for how to transform our minds, make them less negative and more positive, so that we then can help others to do the same. So, if that makes sense to you, then you can bring into your mind the thought that you’re listening to these teachings and participating in this retreat this weekend with the wish to benefit not only yourself, but to help others as well, as many other people and beings as you can, and to bring more positive energy into the world to reduce suffering, increase peace and happiness.

Background on the text

I feel very fortunate to have this opportunity to lead this retreat and talk about this wonderful subject. The title of the retreat is Awakening a Kind Heart. And so Buddhism is full of methods for how we can increase kindness, compassion, various positive states of mind. This topic is one of my favorite subjects. It’s also been really helpful in my own life. And I’m basing this retreat on a book that I feel funny saying I wrote, because it’s more like I compiled things that I’ve learned from my teachers over the years and just put them together in a book. And so, here’s just a little story behind the book. It started in Singapore when I was living there in the 90s. I was asked by one student group at one of the colleges to write an article for their magazine, a Buddhist group magazine.

So, I wrote an article about the Four Immeasurable Thoughts. And then the idea came about from some of the students to make it into a little booklet. Because in Singapore and many Asian countries, they have this tradition of making little Dharma books that are distributed for free. You find them in temples and health food restaurants and health food stores and so on—vegetarian restaurants. It’s a good way of kind of getting the Dharma out there to reach many people. And so, we worked on the material.

I think it was in 1995 that it was first published or maybe in 1996. It was this little book called Awakening a Kind Heart. It was published many times and distributed all over Singapore. And there was even a Chinese translation that reached even more people. There are two parts to the book. One part is about the four immeasurable thoughts, which are very important in all Buddhist traditions: love or loving-kindness, compassion, joy—it could also be called empathic joy; that’s another term for that. And then equanimity.

And the second part of the book is about the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation, based on some talks that I gave at the Buddhist Library in Singapore. So then sometime in the 2000s, I got an email from one of the editors at Wisdom Publications, who had seen a copy of this book and asked if Wisdom Publications could publish it. And I thought that would be great, because then it would be able to go even further to many other people. But I wanted to make some changes to it because for one thing, this book was made more for an Asian audience, people who are kind of familiar with a lot of Buddhist ideas. I didn’t need to explain so many things.

I thought if it’s going to a Western audience, I need to kind of consider that and make it more suitable for a Western audience. I wanted also to add some meditations, because the original booklet doesn’t have any meditations, any guidance for how to cultivate these four thoughts. So, I worked on it. I remember being in Ustaling, Spain. This is a retreat center in the mountains in the south of Spain, and one really hot summer I was doing a retreat there. In the morning I would meditate. And in the afternoon, after lunch, I would work on this book.

And I was so happy. I really enjoyed doing this work. And I was really into it. Being in retreat is a great time to write, because you don’t have so many distractions and other things. And you can really focus on what you’re doing. So then a new book was born. And this was published in 2010, so ten years ago. It’s basically the same book, but revised and expanded. I added a chapter at the beginning, a kind of introductory chapter. And then I added meditations for each of the four immeasurable thoughts. That’s mainly what I’ll focus on in this retreat. We won’t have time to go into the second part of the book, which is about the eight verses.

The life of the Buddha

We’ll focus on the four immeasurable thoughts. But I heard that some people who are attending this retreat online are somewhat new to Buddhism, or at least new to Sravasti Abbey. So, I thought to just start with some basic information about Buddhism in case this is your very first Buddhist retreat. Buddhism began with the Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha. And I won’t go into the details of his story, but he was born in India somewhere around 563 BCE. And he was born into a family that sometimes called a royal family.

His father was a ruler of a certain area of India. So, he had quite a comfortable life; he was even sort of pampered with a lot of luxuries, a lot of enjoyments. And he also showed a lot of good qualities like kindness and intelligence and so forth. He kind of grew up in a normal way and was married in the traditional Indian way of having an arranged marriage. And then when he was still a young man, he had this interest to know more about his kingdom. So, he made these four journeys, and traveled around the area where he lived.

And he had these four encounters that really had a profound effect on him. I don’t remember the exact order, but one encounter was seeing somebody who was very ill—a person who was suffering from some illness and was obviously very weak and frail and experiencing a lot of pain. And this was a new experience because his family lived in a somewhat isolated situation. He didn’t see much in the way of suffering in his home, his palace. So, this really affected him. And he came to realize that sickness was something that happened to people.

And on the second journey, he saw a person who was very old and was walking with great difficulty, leaning on a cane, and the person was very wrinkled and again, quite frail looking. So, through this, he came to understand the situation of aging and the problems that come from that. And again, this was a new experience because he’d been surrounded by youthful people, full of energy and very healthy. And then on a third journey he encountered a funeral procession, which in India involves carrying the body wrapped in cloth through the streets to the place where they are cremated, usually by the side of a river. There is a kind of procession with all the family and friends following behind, weeping and wailing and so on. So, he encountered this situation of death, dying.

And again, this was a new experience for him. He’d been sheltered from that. So, these really affected him. He thought about how these are things that happen to human beings as we go through life. We get sick; we get old; and eventually we die. And so, it aroused compassion in him and the wish to find a solution—a way to end these kinds of sufferings. And a fourth encounter he had was with a spiritual practitioner. There were many of these practitioners at that time and still today in India—people who leave their homes and just dedicate themselves to meditation, to a spiritual path. And so he saw this person and the person’s clothes were kind of raggedy and not very nice, and he probably slept outside and begged for food. But he noticed this person’s eyes were very joyful and clear and his whole expression showed a lot of peace and joy that he didn’t see in other people.

So, he came to know about that way of life. And that aroused in him the wish to follow such a path himself. And when he presented this idea to his father, his father was completely opposed because I think he was the only son. And the father hoped that his son would inherit the kingdom in his place. So, he had to sneak out. He had to run away from home basically in the middle of the night when everybody was asleep. He went into the forest and joined other religious practitioners, and he studied with a number of teachers to learn meditation and other kinds of practices. He spent six years in very intense and very harsh conditions, just sleeping outdoors and eating almost nothing and almost dying. There’s a famous statue of the Buddha in Lahore, Pakistan, showing him with basically just skin and bones.

He was just so dedicated to his practice of meditation and not at all wanting to pamper himself. But then he realized that was not helping him. He was on the verge of dying and he still hadn’t attained what he was looking for. So then he found what he called later “the middle way.” He started eating more healthy food and gaining greater strength and energy. And that enabled him to finally break through to what he was seeking, which was the state of cessation of suffering—freedom from suffering. And this is what we call enlightenment. The term “buddha” means awakened one or enlightened one: someone who has attained the state of awakening. And it’s not really easy to understand enlightenment because you have to be there.

Qualities of a buddha’s mind

You have to attain it to really understand it. But one way of understanding it is my name—Sangye, the first part of my name. Sangye is the Tibetan term for Buddha. And it has two syllables. “Sang” means clear or pure. And it refers to the Buddha’s enlightened mind—being totally free, totally pure, of all that is negative, all that is mistaken, all that is disturbing and harmful. So, this refers to all the afflictive emotions like anger and greed and jealousy and pride and also ignorance.

Ignorance is said to be the root of all disturbances and all suffering. Buddha’s mind is totally free of all those negative or harmful or disturbing aspects. And that’s the meaning of Sang. And then “Gyé” means expanded or increased. And that refers to a Buddha’s mind being totally developed in the positive aspects of the mind, the positive qualities of the mind, such as compassion and loving kindness and joy and equanimity—like these four measurable thoughts—and also wisdom and generosity and patience. There are many positive qualities of the mind.

And in the mind of a Buddha, these have been totally developed to their highest degree, the highest point, like perfect love, perfect compassion. And they are present all the time, not coming and going like in our minds. Sometimes we are clear and sometimes we are cloudy; sometimes we feel love and sometimes we feel hatred. But in the mind of a Buddha, these positive qualities are always there in the most fully developed form. So that gives you some idea of what it means to be enlightened or awakened, what a Buddha’s mind is like. It’s totally free of everything negative and totally developed in everything positive.

And the wonderful thing is that in Buddhism, it’s said that it’s not just special people who can do this. It’s not like Buddha is one of a kind. But rather, everyone has the ability and the potential to bring their mind to that state. And this is what we call buddha nature. Buddha nature refers to the potential that lies within our own mind to transform our mind totally, to free our mind from everything negative—everything that causes suffering—and to develop everything that is positive and brings happiness and peace. We all have the ability and the potential to reach enlightenment as well.

That’s what we call buddha nature. So, after attaining enlightenment, the Buddha spent the remaining years of his life teaching others. And he didn’t push people. That’s very much not the Buddhist way to sort of stand on street corners or ring doorbells and try to get them to convert. He would just walk around and meet people. And many people felt like, “Wow, there’s something special about this guy” and would ask him for teachings. So, that’s how he began to teach. And then people became his followers. And some people became his followers just because they were very attracted by what he said.

But some, just by hearing his words—even the very first time they heard his teachings—gained realizations. So, they too gained at least some initial insight into the truth of the Buddha’s teachings. I don’t know if there’s really a number documenting how many followers he gained—thousands probably, maybe millions at that time. And then, of course, after he passed away, but his followers continued to teach. So, that’s how Buddhism came about.

The first Noble Truth

And he taught for 45 years. That’s a long time if you compare it to Jesus, who taught for three years. Even in the Bible, only part of it is the New Testament containing the teachings of Jesus. The Buddha’s words fill many, many, books. In the Tibetan tradition, we have 108 volumes of the Buddha’s words—big, fat ones, not skinny ones. So, there are a lot of teachings that the Buddha gave. But the very first teaching he gave kind of summarizes the main message of his whole career of teaching. And in that teaching, he taught the Four Noble Truths. So, the Four Noble Truths is a really good formula.

It’s only four things. It’s easy to remember. And it sort of contains the essence of his whole message, his whole teachings. I’m sure many of you have heard these or read these, but I’ll just repeat them again. And in a way, they’re simple, because there are just four things. And they’re not that difficult to understand. But in another way, they’re really profound. We could spend our entire lives continuing to learn about, read about, think about, and meditate on the Four Noble Truths to really understand them.

The first one is the truth of suffering, or true suffering, it’s sometimes called. And this simply means that as ordinary beings like us and other people in the world—and other kinds of beings as well, like animals—those of us who are not yet enlightened, who haven’t yet manifested our buddha nature, fulfilled our buddha potential, we experience suffering. And the term “suffering” is a little problematic because for many people, it connotes really heavy, horrible experiences, like war and cancer and losing a loved one and so on. But a better translation might be unsatisfactoriness or dissatisfaction.

The term duhkha—that’s the Sanskrit and Pali term: duhkha—really has more of that connotation of just anything that’s not fully satisfying and pleasant. There’s a whole range of different experiences that come under this category of duhkha. Of course, it includes the really heavy-duty ones like war and losing a loved one and depression, deep depression. But it can also include just little ones, like getting a thorn in your finger, having a little bit of a tummy ache, being a little bit cold or a little bit hot, feeling some discomfort in your body when you’re sitting or standing. So, any kind of physical experience that’s unpleasant, that’s something we don’t want or we want to get away from, can be included in this term duhkha. And also on the mental or emotional level, we often feel not quite happy, not quite comfortable, not quite safe.

So, any kind of even minor unpleasant feeling, uncomfortable feeling, unhappy feeling, or even boredom, restlessness, that’s also included in duhkha. There are many different kinds of experiences. We don’t go a day without experiencing some kind of duhkha. In fact, we don’t even go an hour or even a minute without it. For example, I think most of us are sitting down. And when we sit down, usually it feels comfortable, especially if we’ve been on our feet for a while.

It feels good to sit down, to rest your legs. But how long does it feel good before it starts feeling uncomfortable? You have some kind of cramp or just a little unpleasant feeling somewhere. And often, we don’t even notice this, but if you pay attention, you’ll see that your body is moving quite a lot. Because we’re trying to find a more comfortable position. Whatever position we started with starts to get uncomfortable somewhere—in the back or legs or neck. So, we move to get away from that uncomfortable feeling and find one that’s more comfortable.

And especially when you’re trying to meditate and trying to sit still, you can see how difficult it is to sit still for very long because of some kind of unpleasantness, some kind of restlessness, that comes up in the body. And we want to move to get away from that and get into a more comfortable state. And it’s true for any other posture we put our body in—standing, walking, lying down. Even lying down, even if we have a wonderful, comfortable mattress, still we move a lot all through the night.

This just shows how pervasive duhkha is. And it’s the same with our mind. This becomes very clear when we try to meditate. We try to focus our mind on even a simple object like the breath coming in and going out. That seems relatively simple. But it’s very difficult to keep our mind focused on that because we want to think about something else. After two seconds, or one second even, the mind gets bored with the breath and wants something else. And it’s constantly doing that. Every few seconds it’s jumping from one thing to another.

Whatever you are looking at at one point in time becomes boring, and you want to look at something else; you want to pay attention to something else. So, that shows a subtle kind of duhkha, a subtle kind of unsatisfactoriness. This really becomes apparent the more we pay attention to our experiences, both on the physical level and on the mental level. One thing we need to understand is that this is true for everybody. I am not the only one who has duhkha, who has suffering, who has problems—it’s the same for everybody except those who have attained awakening, enlightenment. The rest of us all have some kind of duhkha.

So, we don’t need to feel ashamed or like a loser or like there’s something wrong with us. We don’t need to think, “Everybody else is doing fine, and I am the only one who is not doing okay.” Throw away those ideas. That’s just rubbish. That’s not true at all. Everybody has it. It might seem based on their social media that they are doing really well and they are not having any problems at all, but that’s not true. That’s fake news. Everybody has got problems, even if they are hiding them. So, that’s the first truth.

The second Noble Truth

And the second one is the cause or origin of suffering. Suffering is something that isn’t permanent, something that’s always there. It comes and goes. It’s occasional, transitory. Why does it sometimes come and sometimes not? Why is it sometimes there, sometimes not? There are causes and conditions that give rise to suffering, to duhkha. There are many causes and conditions.

Some of them are external, like when the temperature is very, very cold, we naturally we feel cold. We shiver. It’s uncomfortable. But the Buddha looked deeper into his own mind and discovered that the deepest causes of suffering lie within our own mind. And there are two main causes of suffering. One is what are sometimes called delusions or afflictive emotions or disturbing emotions—the term in Sanskrit in Pali is klesa. These are states of mind that just have the nature of producing suffering.

They’re like toxins. They’re like poisons. When poison gets into the body, it makes us sick and may even cause us to die. It’s just the nature of poison. We have these mental toxins, these mental poisons, which when they arise in our mind, make our mind disturbed, unpeaceful, unhappy, and therefore they produce suffering. They produce suffering in an immediate sense. As soon as they are there in the mind, they make the mind agitated, not peaceful. So, there’s that subtle kind of suffering. But they also produce suffering in a more long-term sense, because when these states of mind arise, if we don’t know how to deal with them or how to manage them then our mind gets caught up in them, and they can motivate us to do certain actions.

And the actions we do when we are under the influence of these mental toxins are usually harmful, like killing, for example. The Buddha mentioned a number of actions or behaviors that are particularly problematic and bring suffering, like killing and stealing and lying. It’s quite similar to what’s taught other religions, other spiritual traditions. So, when a person does one of those unwise or unskillful actions, it’s usually motivated by delusions in the mind. Killing is kind of extreme, so let’s focus on one that’s more common, like lying.

When we tell a lie, a falsehood, it’s motivated by disturbing states of mind, usually attachment or anger or deceitfulness—wanting to hide something that we did that we don’t want people to know about. These are some examples of disturbing states of mind. And then we tell this falsehood, this lie, and we probably don’t feel good about it. I think we all know it’s not right to tell lies, because our parents tell us when we’re little kids. But it’s also, I think, just instinctive. It just doesn’t feel right when we’re not telling the truth. We don’t feel good about it. And then the person we lie to, whether they believe it or not, it’s probably disturbing for them. It can lead to problems in our relationship with them.

And it can lead to further problems down the line. Because often we tell one lie, and then we have to tell another lie to cover up the first one, and then another one to cover up that one. And pretty soon there’s a whole web of lies and falsehoods. And eventually, somebody will find out, and they’ll accuse us. And it just leads to a lot of problems, a lot of difficulties. And that’s just in the short-term sense.

According to Buddhism, there’s also a long-term sense in that when we do something non virtuous, this is what we call karma. In other words, karma just means action. So, when we do an action that is non virtuous or unwise, unskillful, it leaves a subtle imprint in our mind that if we don’t do something to purify then later on—maybe in this life, maybe in a future life—it will lead to other problems as well. There can be a whole chain, a whole continuation of problems arising from just one single action, one lie, that was brought about because of our mind being caught up in disturbing emotions, delusions. This is the Buddhist explanation of the real origin of suffering—where suffering comes from. So, the main causes of suffering are these two things.

One is the disturbing emotions, delusions—klesa. And then the other is the actions or karma we do under the influence of disturbing emotions. This is something the Buddha saw in his own experience when he was meditating. And this was an important part of his teachings because the reason he taught was because he was concerned about people and living beings. He wanted them to be free of suffering.

And he could see that they are the creators of their own suffering. If they get caught up in greed and hatred and ignorance, and then they act under the motivation of those disturbing states of mind, they create karma. And then they create this whole cycle of suffering that affects them in this life, but also in future lives as well. So, these are the things that keep them in a situation of suffering and keep them from attaining their real nature of enlightenment or awakening. This was an important part of his teaching, explaining to people that if you want to be free of suffering, you have to work on these two things: disturbing emotions and karma. Now, the easier one is karma. It is harder to stop disturbing emotions from coming up in our mind, but we can at least stop ourselves from acting on them.

We might have the thought of killing somebody or lying about something or speaking some harsh word to somebody. That thought might come up, that impulse might come up, and it is hard to stop that from happening. But we can at least stop our mouth and stop our body from acting out those disturbing emotions. So anyway, that is a little bit about the second noble truth.

The third Noble Truth

And the third noble truth is called true cessation, and this means it is possible to bring about a cessation or an elimination of suffering and its causes—the first two noble truths. Suffering and the causes of suffering exist, but they are not permanent. They are not going to exist forever and ever and ever. It is possible to overcome them and be free from them. That is the meaning of the third Noble Truth. There is a state one can attain where one has no more suffering and no more causes of suffering—no more disturbing emotions, no more actions, negative karma, that cause suffering.

That is the state of cessation. Nirvana is the term for that—nirvana or liberation. It means a state of peace, freedom from suffering and the causes of suffering. That is the meaning of the third Noble Truth. Such a state exists, and it can be attained by anybody. You have to work for it, of course. You can’t buy it. You can’t pass it from one person to another. The Buddha would love to transfer his realizations into the minds of others if he could, but it is not possible. Each person is responsible for their own mind. Each person is responsible for their own attainment of liberation, of cessation.

The fourth Noble Truth

And then the fourth noble truth is the true path. “Path” here means mental states, realizations—states of mind that bring about true cessation, liberation, nirvana, enlightenment. There are a number of different states of mind we need to develop that will enable us to kind of go step-by-step to nirvana or enlightenment. The main true path is wisdom—wisdom that understands the true nature of things, the reality of things.

Because our deepest cause of suffering, the deepest delusion or afflictive state of mind is ignorance that doesn’t see things as they are, that doesn’t see the true nature of things. That is said to be the root of all suffering and the root of all other causes of suffering. So, that is the main thing that needs to be eliminated. It’s similar to what they say about a tree: if you have some kind of toxic tree, poisonous tree then you can chop off the top, the branches and the leaves and the flowers and so on. But as long as the root is still there, it will keep growing year after year after year.

So, you really have to get out the root and make sure there is nothing left of that and then it will be stopped altogether. In a similar way, as long as we still have the root of suffering in our mind, which is ignorance—not seeing things correctly, seeing things incorrectly—as long as that is still in our mind then we will continue to have suffering. That is the main thing that needs to be eliminated: ignorance.

And the antidote to ignorance is wisdom. Wisdom is the opposite because wisdom sees things correctly as they are. So, that is the main true path. But other paths are love and compassion and the other positive qualities. That is just a brief overall summary of Buddha’s teachings. Everything the Buddha taught actually can fit into these Four Noble Truths in some way or another. If we have some understanding of the Four Noble Truths, then we have a framework in which we can understand the whole of Buddha’s teachings, the whole Buddhist path. Historically, as Buddhism spread throughout India and then to other countries, many different traditions developed. I mean, Buddhism has been around for more than 2,500 years.

There were plenty of chances to go to other countries and different Buddhist masters came up with different ways of explaining things and emphasized certain things and so on. So, we find many different traditions within Buddhism, but they all agree about certain things, like these Four Noble Truths and the importance of refraining from bad karma, creating good karma, and so on. And the four immeasurable thoughts that we’re looking at in this retreat are common to all Buddhist traditions as well.

The importance of the four immeasurable thoughts

This is another thing that they all have in common. In the context of Buddhism, these four immeasurable thoughts are developed as part of one’s spiritual practice towards higher goals like nirvana, Buddhahood. I think that they can be practiced by anybody, whether one is a Buddhist or not. A lot of the material on these four immeasurable thoughts and how they can be cultivated can be used by anybody—people following other religions and spiritual traditions, or people who don’t want to follow any particular spiritual tradition but who just want to have more love and kindness in their lives. I think they can learn a lot from the Buddha’s teachings on how to cultivate these four.

And they will experience benefits in their life: more happiness, health, longer life, and being able to get along better with others, relationships going better. And even in one’s work, probably your work will go better, your ability to focus on your work and to get your work done and get along with your colleagues and so on. So, in all the areas of our life, these four immeasurable thoughts will bring benefit.

That’s why I was really happy that Wisdom Publications wanted to publish this book because then it could get out to more people. And I did try to explain the topics in ways that could be accessible by anybody. And also, at the time when I was working on the book, I didn’t have so much access to materials. Like within Tibetan Buddhism, we have the Prayer of the Four Immeasurable Thoughts. There are a few different versions of that, a shorter one and a longer one. But I didn’t find it easy to find actual materials about the four immeasurable thoughts—what they mean and so on.

There’s more material in the Theravada tradition. There might be material that just hasn’t been translated into English. But there’s much more in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. And also, just recently, the series of books that Venerable Chodron is working on—The Library of Wisdom and Compassion—volume five is called In Praise of Great Compassion. And the very first chapter of that book is about the four immeasurables. So, that’s a really wonderful source. But most of it is from the Pali tradition, from the Pali canon. And then there’s a little bit from the Mahayana and the Vajrayana.

In the revised and expanded version of the book, the first chapter which isn’t found in the smaller version of the book, is more introductory to the whole topic. And the title of the chapter is “It’s Time to Change Your Mind.” And it’s basically talking about how mind is understood in Buddhism. Because Buddhism has a way of explaining the mind that’s quite different than what we find in Western science and psychology and so on. So, since the four immeasurables are all about transforming the mind, it’s important to know something about the mind as it’s explained in Buddhism. And for me personally, this was enormously helpful when I started to learn Buddhism—learning about the mind and what the mind is and how it works and so on.

Evolving views on love

I’ll just tell you a little background comment. Before I started learning Buddhism, I was relatively young. I was twenty-one when I started studying Buddhism. And prior to that—growing up in a Catholic family in Sacramento, California, and my education and life experiences and so on—for me, the topic of love was really problematic. And it’s probably true for many people as well, because there’s so much talk about love in all the songs and the movies and the romantic novels and so forth. And it’s especially true when you become a teenager and everyone’s starting to date and so on. So, this thing about love was really troubling for me. And looking back, I don’t know where I got this idea, but I had this idea that if one person loves another person, it should be consistent.

You should always be kind and nice and never angry or hurtful, right? And so what I saw in my relationships with others—including my family and friends and so on, and also in myself—was that there are moments when one person is kind and friendly and nice to another person. But then there are other times when that person gets angry and does things and says things that are hurtful. That seems to happen pretty universally. And in my mind, I thought that means there’s no love. Because if you really love somebody, you should always be nice to them. You should always be loving to them. And if you’re not, that means you don’t really love them.

So, I got really cynical. My mind just got really, really cynical about love and all this talk about love—blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought, “It’s all fake. It’s all pretense. People are just saying that in order to get the other people to like them and to look good, but they don’t really mean it. It’s not genuine.” I became super cynical, and I thought, there’s no such thing as love in the world. It’s all just pretense.

That’s kind of where I was at when I started studying Buddhism. And over the years, I was just really impressed with the teachers, the Tibetan lamas that I met and studied with. They seemed to be incredible, especially Lama Yeshe, I have to say. He’s the one that really blew my mind, Lama Yeshe. He was really loving consistently. And so he’s the one who really melted my mind and that cynicism and enabled me to get in touch with love. But it took time. I was very skeptical for a long time. But it was also just really helpful to learn about the mind and how the mind works.

Mind in Buddhism

Buddhism says that our mind is something non-material, non-physical. It’s not our brain. It’s not any part of our body. It’s a completely different phenomenon. It’s connected with our body. But it’s not the body. It’s something separate from the body, a different kind of phenomena. And it’s constantly changing. They use the analogy of a stream or a river, which is always moving, always flowing.

And also, when you examine it carefully, a river is made up of all these little particles of—what is it—hydrogen? I’m not a science student. But anyway, there are chemical particles that make up water. And there’s also other stuff in the water as well. There’s bits of dust and so on. But anyway, there are all these particles moving along and changing every minute, every second. That’s a river or a stream. And our mind is similar to that in that it’s always changing; it’s made up of different parts; and it’s never the same from one moment to the next. Buddhism has a vast amount of material about the mind and the different parts of the mind and the nature of the mind.

This is a big part of Buddhist education: learning about the mind and all the different aspects of the mind, some of which are destructive, disturbing, like the afflictive emotions—greed, hatred, ignorance. And other aspects of the mind are positive, beneficial—like love and kindness, compassion and so on. And then there are others that are neutral; they’re not really helpful, not really harmful. But they are still helpful in some cases because they can help us in our spiritual journey.

So, there are all these different aspects of our mind. And then it’s changing all the time. For me, that was so helpful to learn. At certain moments, love can be there. You can feel loving, kind, caring thoughts towards another person and be kind to them, treat them with kindness. But at another point in time, anger can come up in the mind. And you may say something or do something or just look at the person in a kind of nasty way. And that doesn’t cancel out the fact that there was love at another point in time or the fact that there can be love again at a later point in time. All these different facets or factors of the mind come and go.

They don’t cancel each other out. They don’t contradict each other. For me, that was like, “Wow, that means you can love somebody and still get angry at them sometimes.” That was a revelation that really helped me to start to overcome my cynicism about love. Not only that, but Buddhism contains all these methods or tools for bringing about changes in our mind so that we can have more love and kindness, compassion, generosity, positive thoughts and feelings—so we can have them more often.

And we can work on decreasing the negative ones—the anger and the irritation and the nastiness and so on. Those can be decreased. It takes time and it takes effort, but it’s definitely possible. For me, this was life-saving because I was so unhappy. That very cynical idea that I had was certainly not conducive for happiness or for relationships with other people. I think that’s one reason I love this subject so much because it’s really been so helpful in my life and my experiences.

So anyway, mind is always changing, full of different and sometimes contradictory experiences. Sometimes we can be loving, sometimes angry, sometimes clear, sometimes confused, and that’s normal. That’s just normal for everybody. Everyone is like that. But there is something we can do about this. We can do something about our mind. And in fact, that’s the whole point of Buddhism. I’ve heard the Dalai Lama mention that—that the essence of Buddhism is changing our mind, transforming our mind, bringing about this transformation so that we have fewer of the harmful, toxic states of mind and more of the positive, constructive, beneficial, beautiful states of mind.

And that’s really what the whole of Buddhism is all about. So, we’re going to be looking at some of these methods for how we can decrease the negative, painful, disturbing states of mind and increase the beautiful ones, the positive ones. We’re going to discuss some general approaches to working with our mind, working with our emotions, before going into specifics, like how to have less anger and how to have more love.

But just in general, something that is helpful for working with our mind is mindfulness, self-awareness. This involves just being more attentive to what is happening in our mind. And we can do that through the practice of meditation but also in our daily life. Most of the time we’re not meditating formally. So, when we’re doing other things—working and talking to people, you know, walking around and so on—at those times, there’s still a lot going on in our mind: different thoughts, different emotions. So, mindfulness is just developing this ability to notice what’s going on in our mind—paying attention. And it’s also learning to identify different states of mind, learning to distinguish, for example, what’s genuine loving kindness and compassion and so forth.

And this is something we’ll get into later. Because with each of the four immeasurable thoughts, there’s mention of a near enemy and a far enemy. The far enemy is kind of the opposite state of mind. So, the opposite to love is hatred. But then a near enemy is something that kind of looks like love but isn’t. It’s something that’s kind of disguising itself as love, but it’s not.

We need to be able to recognize what’s genuine love, what’s genuine compassion, and what’s something that’s kind of fake, not genuine. So, the more we learn in our study of Buddhism, the more we learn about the Buddhist teachings and about the mind and so forth, the more we’ll be able to notice these things in our mind. Study is very, very important and also putting it into practice in formal meditation and also in our daily life. It’s important that we’re practicing being more aware, more mindful, of what’s happening in our mind. And another thing that’s helpful in a general way is to have some understanding of the nature of the mind.

Another analogy for the mind

Like I was just saying, the mind is not a physical thing. It’s not hard and solid. It’s not permanent, always the same. It’s more like a river: flowing and changing all the time. Another analogy that’s often used for the mind in Buddhism, and I like this one very much, is the clear sky. That’s not quite what we have today, but maybe in some parts of the world the sky is completely clear—especially when you fly in an airplane. When you go up really high, you’re above all the clouds. Way up there, there are no clouds, no pollution, no birds flying around. The sky is just really clear, pristine, clear and pure. So, they say the real nature of our mind is similar to that—to a pure, clear, unpolluted sky—in the sense that our mind is basically clear and pure. It’s also very vast.

There’s an amazing potential in our mind that we haven’t even begun to tap into. So, our mind is like that; it’s like the sky. And then, just like today at Sravasti Abbey, there are clouds in the sky that sort of obscure it. In a similar way, in our mind, there are often clouds—clouds of thoughts, clouds of emotions—and they obscure. Sometimes they’re really thick and heavy and dark, like when we’re going through some emotional crisis: depression, anger, anxiety, or whatever. Then it’s like our mind is just covered with all these dark clouds, and we can’t see anything clear and bright.

But sometimes they’re just light, fluffy clouds that come and go pretty quickly. But anyway, the fact is that clouds are impermanent; they come and go. And in a similar way, the thoughts, the emotions, the memories, the images in our mind are also like clouds—they’re not permanent; they’re not always there; they come and go. And we can see that for ourselves. At one point in time, you might be feeling really miserable, or angry, or depressed. But later that same day, or the next day, or a few days later, those kind of thoughts and feelings are gone; they’re not there anymore. You’re back into bright, clear, happy state of mind. So, they are impermanent.

And there’s this wonderful Zen story that I put in the book, and I’ll tell it again, because I’ve kind of forgotten about it until I was looking at this book again. I heard this Zen story. A man went to see a Zen master, and the man was very upset. And he told the master about some big crisis happening in his life, and he went on and on and on about this problem. And the Zen master is just sitting there calmly. Finally, he said, “It will go away.” Later, after some time, the same man went back to see the Zen master, and this time he’s really happy, really excited. And he said, “Do you remember that problem I told you about last time? Well, now it’s gone.” And the Zen master just sat there calmly and said, “It will come back.”

Doesn’t that sound like the story of our life: up and down, up and down? Yeah, it does. Eventually, the ups and downs get less extreme. We kind of become just little waves, and eventually we’re able to be calm like the Zen master, just watching these waves coming and going in our mind, or the clouds coming and going in our mind, and not taking them so seriously, knowing that they are transitory. They are impermanent; they’re not going to last. That itself is so helpful—just to remind ourselves about the nature of our mind.

It’s like the sky and the different thoughts and emotions and memories are like clouds, or like waves. That’s another analogy: waves on the surface of the ocean. Sometimes they can be really big and violent, and other times they’re just calm little bumps. So, after some time, you don’t get so caught up in the clouds or the waves, and you can just keep your cool, keep your calm. But it takes time. One thing we need to remember, understanding these things intellectually isn’t so difficult, but putting them into practice, actually living them, that takes time.

How to work with our mind

But it does work, I can tell you, I can assure you. I’ve had plenty of huge crises—ups and downs, and buckets of tears. I’m sitting on my meditation cushion and it’s boring. And yeah, it gets better. You may even go a couple of years without so many tears and then—poof—again. So, another thing that’s really helpful when dealing with the thoughts and emotions is to learn to de-identify with them. Because our tendency is often to identify with the contents of our mind. And I don’t think we do this deliberately, consciously—it’s just a habit we have. When anger comes up in our mind, it’s just this automatic “I am angry.”

When happiness comes up, I am happy. So, whatever state of mind, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, positive or negative, we just tend to identify with that. That’s me, that’s who I am. It’s just an automatic process. So again, the more we contemplate and get used to the nature of our mind and the thoughts and emotions being like clouds, like waves coming and going, we can learn to de-identify, not identify. We learn to just see them as transitory states of mind that come and go and do not last. So, that’s really helpful too.

And one way we can do that to really make it strong is when we do notice a state of mind, especially one of the negative, disturbing ones like anger, we can just to say to ourselves, “Anger is in my mind” rather than “I am angry.” Or we can say, “Sadness is in my mind” rather than “I am sad”; or “Joy is in my mind” rather than “I am joyful.” Even the positive states of mind are transitory unfortunately, which can be a problem because when we have some really happy state of mind and we may think, “Oh, finally, I’ve got it. I’ve got this happiness I’ve been looking for all my life. Now it’s there. It’s going to last. It’s going to be there forever and ever and ever.” But the next day—boom—it changes, like the Zen master said.

Or we have what we call a good meditation. We really want a meditation session in which our mind is calm and clear and focused and we feel really happy to be sitting there and meditating. And then we think, “Finally, I’ve gotten somewhere. It’s going to be like this from now on. Every session is going to be like this.” Is that true? No. Sorry, but that’s up and down, too. So, we can train ourselves to see that these states of mind, whether positive or painful and disturbing, are just temporary transitory states of mind that come and go.

They are not me. They are not who I am. So, try to get the I out of the way. The ego—the I that wants the good ones and doesn’t want the bad ones—just put that one aside and just understand how the mind works and not identify with its contents. Another important thing is try to not be judgmental about the contents of your mind.

Now this is particularly important for us Westerners. Tibetans don’t seem to have this problem as far as I can see, but we Westerners tend to be very self-critical, self-judgmental. So, when unpleasant, negative states of mind come up, we often judge ourselves. We get into being critical. And again, this is not something we do deliberately or consciously. I think it’s just a habit we get into because of conditioning, because of life experiences or whatever. It’s important to understand that judging ourselves, criticizing ourselves, beating ourselves up, hating ourselves even, feeling ashamed, feeling guilty, feeling bad—this is not helpful.

If you notice that kind of stuff going on, just recognize that is not the right way. That is not going to help. It’s just going to make things worse. For example, say we’ve already got a problem there—anger or depression or selfishness or whatever. That’s there. But then on top of it, if we start beating ourselves up—”I’m bad. I’m hopeless. I’m a bad Buddhist. I’m a bad nun. I’m a bad monk,” or whatever—then all that kind of stuff is just adding more layers to the problem, not making it better. It’s making our problem worse, our suffering worse.

So, at least try not to feed that tendency. Try not to let those kinds of thoughts proliferate. And instead, be kind to yourself. Be compassionate with yourself. We’ll be learning more about that as we go through this retreat. These positive qualities—the four immeasurable thoughts of kindness and compassion and so on—we have to feel them for ourselves as well, not just for others. It doesn’t work if we’re hating ourselves and beating ourselves up and trying to be kind and loving to everybody else. It’s not going to work. So, it’s important to know that those kinds of thoughts are not helpful.

And it’s also helpful just to remember that I’m not alone. I’m not the only one in the world that has these states of mind. Other people have them too, even if they’re hiding them, pretending they don’t have them. Don’t be fooled by that. They probably do. And so it’s just normal. It’s just part of our unenlightened existence, as the Buddha explained. Other people have anger; other people have anxiety; other people have depression—other people have all the stuff that we have. And so, if we use that idea well, that can increase compassion: compassion for others, compassion for ourselves.

We’ll talk more later about how we can do that. And then finally, there are remedies for these negative states of mind. There are lots of remedies, lots of tools. That was another thing that I really loved when I started learning Buddhism, because I was raised Catholic and we are taught we should be good; we should be virtuous. We should be obedient and respect and love our parents, and our friends, and our teachers, and da-da-da-da-da—”Be a good girl; don’t be a bad girl.” But there’s no method for how to do that. Yeah, I wanted to be a good girl, but it didn’t work. How do I do it? Anyway, I didn’t learn. Maybe the methods are there, but I didn’t have access to them. So, that was wonderful when I started learning Buddhism.

And here’s the how-to manual: how to not be so angry and selfish and how to be more loving and generous. Oh, there are methods, tools. So, we’ll be learning some of those in this retreat. There are plenty of other tools as well—books full of antidotes to anger, for example. Like Venerable Chodron’s book, for example. It’s called Working With Anger. The Dalai Lama also has a book called Healing Anger. Thich Nhat Hanh has a book about anger as well. There are tons of methods for dealing with anger. So, we can learn those and then start working with them.

Again, it takes time and energy. There’s no instant solution, no instant pill you can pop and all your anger goes away. But slowly, over time, anger can decrease and more positive qualities can increase.

Q & A

Audience: Can you speak about the relationship of loving yourself and being able to love others and self-confidence?

Venerable Sangye Khadro (VSK): The relationship?

Audience: You mentioned three things.

VSK: So all three?

Audience: Yeah, so basically being able to love yourself and how that increases self-confidence. And then how you are basically when the love for yourself breaks down and then you’re scrambling actually to hold yourself up, to have confidence.

VSK: Yeah, I think there’s a clear relationship between loving oneself and self-confidence because if we don’t have love for ourselves, then that means we’re probably being very self-deprecating, self-critical, self-hating, and just seeing all these negative qualities. I mean, sometimes that can be so extreme. It’s like you feel that you’re just totally 100% negative and don’t have anything good at all. So, how can you feel confident if you have that kind of view of yourself? It’s helpful if you gradually work on that and start to acknowledge you do have good qualities, and that even your faults and negative qualities are not who you really are—they’re not permanent; they’re transitory. Slowly, by being more loving and compassionate to yourself, then naturally you feel better about yourself. You feel you do have good qualities; you can do things.

I think the whole process of practicing and cultivating love for oneself naturally brings about self-confidence. So, I think you just need to go back to working on that when you lose that sense of love for yourself, like you said. Because we use the word “cultivating.” And that’s actually the term for meditation, if I remember correctly; in Sanskrit it’s bhavana—I think Pali as well. And that word actually means “cultivate.” What we’re doing in meditation is we are cultivating our positive states of mind and decultivating, defamiliarizing with the negative states of mind. So, just like with a garden, you have to cultivate. You can’t just put a seed one day and expect immediately the next day it’s going to be a full plant full of tomatoes and whatever.

It takes time. You have to work patiently day-by-day, over time. You have to plant the seeds, take care of them, water them. And gradually over time, these positive states of mind like love—loving yourself, loving others—they grow. And eventually, they get to the point where they are just happening by themselves. I mean, you still have obstacles, of course, sometimes. But I haven’t seen that in myself. After a while, these thoughts and feelings just pop up by themselves without having to make effort. That’s what Dharmakirti says as well. He talks about that in the Pramanavarttika, talking about compassion. You keep working at it, and after a while, it just becomes spontaneous. Compassion just arises by itself.

But you do have to make effort. You can’t expect to get to that point where it’s spontaneous if you don’t put in a lot of effort over time. So, if you find your self-love is decreasing, it just means you need to take more care about that, put more effort into that, go back to what you were doing previously to feel love for yourself, and just put effort into that again. And then I think naturally, that will increase the self-confidence as well. And also, maybe look at what’s stopping you from having love for yourself and confidence in yourself. It could be negative thoughts. “I’m so bad. I’m so useless. I’m comparing myself with somebody else, and they are much better than me.” There may be thoughts that are like weeds, like in the garden. If our plants are not doing well, there are weeds that are choking them.

So, we need to look for the weeds and pull out the weeds. Thich Nhat Hanh uses that analogy of gardening, I think, doesn’t he? It’s quite lovely. Anyone familiar with his works? We’re cultivating a garden of beautiful qualities in our mind. And just like with a normal garden, we have to put in a lot of time and energy and care and look out for the weeds and other things—bugs, birds, turkeys, rabbits. We have to protect against the things that might interfere with our garden.