04. Week 1 - Teaching 2

2025.07.28

Commentary to Teaching 1

I’d like to encourage you to pay attention to how Ven Geshe-la presents Buddhadharma. We are guided step by step. The presentation helps us to understand how to improve our mind. We repay our Guru’s kindness by putting his teachings into practice, by following the path he’s showing us, and attaining enlightenment, even in this one short life.

“Yet due to the strength to our worldly concerns” - we are holding ourself back. This morning’s teachings oppose the strength of our worldly concerns.

In every teaching, there’s a little voice that says, “I know this”. We need to hit this voice on the head and say, “I do not know this.” Because there’s a difference between knowledge and experience. Our job is to put what we’re being told into practice so it is transformed from knowledge to spiritual experience. Because spiritual knowledge doesn’t protect us, it does not make us happy all the time. That comes from spiritual experience. We carefully think, contemplating again and again until the meaning touches our heart. When this happens, something changes in our hearts if we familiarise ourself with that experience, one day it becomes spontaneous.

Geshe-la said:

Ven Geshe-la’a teachings from Portugal he edited and they became Mirror of Dharma.

Buddha teaches us that we are thinking ‘me me me, I I I’ all the time. Except when we are contemplating Dharma. We need to make it personal.

Why do we need Dharma? Because we want to be happy all the time. Not being happy can remind us that if we want to be happy all the time we need to practise Buddhadharma all the time. If it’s something other than Dharma that we’re seeking happiness from, then we have attachment. It’s created by the self-grasping mind, and it will cause suffering. Our mind reaches out, thinking it needs something to be happy. Don’t be like the thief searching for gold in Milarepa’s cave. The cave is the cave of samsara, the night time is the darkness of our delusions, and the day is Buddha’s omniscient wisdom.

Geshe-la said, “I am a logician.” We don’t believe things without a valid logical reason. We’re following Geshe-la.

Happiness can be found. If we seek it from correct objects. We need to develop our own inner guide from our own observation and experience. Over time we will gain more and more conviction of this teaching. When it touches your heart it gives good results. Dharma teachers, managers, communities need to show a good example publicly - to show the value of Dharma. We have to show it works.

What tells you what you really believe and think? Your behaviour. Like Atisha says, be honest and check.

Revise the 4 questions, the answers, and the determinations from the teaching this morning.

Why do I need to be concerned for my future lives? We need to remember death. Through understanding the nature and function of the mind correctly, we will understand that our body and mind are completely different. The more we focus on the happiness and freedom of future lives the happier we will become. Because it’s our obsessive concern with the happiness and freedom of this life that makes us miserable.

Why do we need permanent liberation from suffering? The answers need to touch our heart.

Determinations

These determinations are coming from wisdom. There are many determinations. We should not ignore determinations. We need to make determinations every day. We need to push ourself, otherwise results aren’t coming. To change ourself from ordinary view to correct view of emptiness. Making determinations and holding them. We really need to use Dharma so it mixes with our mind. Most of the objects of our meditations are determinations. If these determinations come from the depths of our heart, they will be effective. If it’s genuine and authentic, we will do it in the meditation break.

When we’re meditating on a determination, our mind transforms into the determination. We never separate them. There should be no gap. Our mind transforms into a special mind that is the determination. The mind meditating and the determination become one. We make them inseparable. Meditate single-pointedly at the heart. Determination is not outside of mind. Make them the same, inseparable, and hold the union of the mind and the determination. This a makes it touch the heart. This is very special.

“I must become my own Protector. I myself will lead myself to the correct paths. I will not allow myself to follow incorrect paths. I myself will make myself happy.”

Then we can give to others.

In How to Understand The Mind in the section on yogic direct perceivers, Geshe-la says:

JT said that the son of a childless woman does not exist, so its suffering and problems cannot exist. Because the self we normally see does not exist, its suffering and problems do not exist. Our self, our body and all other phenomena that we see or perceive do not exist. We experience suffering and problems as hallucinations. So we must stop grasping (believing) at the self we normally see. With this determination we should learn to develop on our consciousness the cessation of grasping at the self we normally see.

How do we communicate with others? We do this by following the mere name of ourself and all other phenomena without grasping at them.