The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives
Buddhist
Hour
Script No. 371
Radio Broadcast live on Hillside 88.0
FM
for Sunday 6 March 2005CE
2547 Buddhist Era
‘Traits
and Abilities’, continued.
We continue now with the next part in our series of
transcribed Buddha Dhamma talks by John D. Hughes during a five-day
Bhavana course in June 1988 at the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
This excerpt is taken from a teaching entitled ‘Traits
and Abilities.’
The authors of today's script apologise
for any errors or misunderstandings that may have occurred in the
process of transcribing and editing the talks from the original audio
tape recording.
If you tuned in to the Buddhist Hour last
week, Sunday 27 February, you may recall the talk ended in the
following way:
[It's] like saying as a function of time your
traits fade off. Normally they will just stop at your death, won't
they ... to a great extent. But the abilities, the oomph you put into
creation of value through your ability through working to make it, to
create a new ability in you, that will carry over into your next
life.
We now proceed with the next part of the talk entitled,
"Traits and Abilities", continued.
Dhamma Student
Leanne Eames contributed to the teaching as follows:
So you've
got abilities and you've got traits. Traits are your predispositions
to different pursuits. Abilities are what you actively build. Usually
initially they are predetermined by your traits but abilities are
what you actively build in this life. Those abilities in your next
life will become your traits or your predispositions. So in building
your abilities you are building your traits for your next life.
In
building your abilities you do so because of a kammic disposition
which provides you with an energy of pursuit. So that, for example,
my resolve has been to pursue Japanese studies to an extremely high
level. Until I get to that point I have resolved just to persist and
to pursue. Because on one level it’s a worldly pursuit it means
that that pursuit is subject to a saturation point or a satisfaction
point at which time the interest, the energy of that pursuit will die
down, maybe re-flicker a few times and fade away over a period. This
can be over a period of one life or several lives, probably two or
three.
What this means in developing your ability in the
Dhamma is that you develop, you must develop this ability on top of
every worldly pursuit, across every band so that whatever traits come
to you in your next life from former lives have got a Buddha Dhamma
Refuge trait on top of them.
You still have to build, you
still have to develop your ability but by putting a, developing your
Buddha Dhamma Sangha Refuge across all your worldly pursuits means
that you are giving yourself your best bet of ensuring you come to
Buddha Dhamma Sangha Refuge again. So when one, one worldly pursuit
dies and fades you put your Buddha Dhamma Sangha, your Buddha Dhamma
practice pervades your next kammic worldly pursuit.
So that,
so that your Buddha Dhamma Sangha Refuge is a trait and an ability
and in that way you build your future practice and you expand your
practice to cross every band because that's your best bet of ensuring
that you have Buddha Dhamma Sangha traits in your next
birth.
Knowing that whatever kammic worldly pursuits you
follow are subject to reaching that saturation point and then
flickering and fading off you mustn’t attach your Buddhist
practice to one area. You mustn’t make it dependent on one
worldly pursuit otherwise when by a natural process that pursuit
reaches the point of decay your Dhamma practice will decay as well
because you made it dependent on something worldly.
Because
you're in the world it has to be worldly, but you put it across every
possible pursuit, every area, every event in your life. You, you
safeguard or you prepare or you plant the seeds and you build, you
build your Dhamma practice in every area so that there's no gaps
left.
John D. Hughes continued:
So you see in the
words, you know you hear like, you know Buddham Saranam Gacchami,
Dhammam Saranam Gacchami, Sangham Saranam Gacchami, Dutiyampi, that's
your hearing consciousness catered for but where is the equivalent on
your seeing consciousness? All you do is hear, and so on. See if you
know anything about quick learning techniques, if you want to learn
something quickly, you engage several of the sense consciousness[es].
For example, it's quicker to see something and write it and hear it.
The learning rate is faster under those conditions.
So the
method of, you know, of the teacher writing on the blackboard,
talking as she writes or he writes and you writing down as you hear
is a very efficient way of teaching. Talking and chalking is a very
highly efficient way of teaching, whereas putting things on a
overhead projector without, and just looking at them and just seeing
only. So you know one of the good things is to become an incessant
note taker and things like that.
The more senses you engage,
the more sense bases ... sense consciousnesses you engage when you're
learning something, the better. So for example bowing, which means
you move your body, involves you touching and so on. And the physical
offering of flowers to Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha or offering of light
engages many senses and so on. So there is, if you understand how
learning takes place, it takes place obviously through the sense
bases plus the mind.
So gearing the sense bases, see it was
easy in Buddha's day because you could see a living Buddha, you could
see all these Arahants, it was a very intense place to be when the
Buddha was alive. And you know many, many Suttas say, you know, so
and so saw the Buddha and was so amazed just immediately bowed down
and paid respect. When you get near the Buddha.
The Buddha
left the Bodhi tree, see what happened was the Buddha traveled a lot,
he walked around a lot to different places. But he had sort of one
main temple and then people used to come for hundreds of miles to
visit him and they'd say, "Oh, the Buddha's gone for a
walkabout. You know he'll be back in a couple of weeks". Now he
had no Buddha images of course, he had no photographs or any
memorabilia in the Buddha's day. So the monks came to the Buddha and
said, "What, what can we do if someone comes and they want to
pay respect to you and you're not at the temple? What can we do?"
And there was a lot of discussion. You can read it in the Suttas.
But the outcome was they went to where the Buddha became
enlightened and they took a cutting of the Bodhi tree under which the
Buddha became enlightened. The Buddha planted it in front of the
temple and it just went whoosh, it just shot into the air, grew very
quickly. That’s the power of the Buddha. And then the Buddha
said, "When I'm not here you can pay respect to the Bodhi tree
as the symbol of the Buddha".
Because the Buddha became
enlightened under the Bodhi tree, that's the history of why Bodhi
trees are placed in temples. You can read a lot of things about the
Bodhi tree. So one of the things of respect is to, to the Bodhi tree
which I’ve done in Sri Lanka and Hong Kong and Bangladesh and
I've seen many, many Bodhi trees in many countries and in Australia
I've paid respect to the Bodhi trees here.
So they're devices
for establishing sound refuge in Buddha Dhamma Sangha.
They're
learning experiences that have a significance on the mind. They're
much more powerful. When I paid respect to the Bodhi tree in Sri
Lanka which was brought over by Sanghamitta, oh, about 1600 years
ago, a very beautiful, it's got solid gold bars around the top of it,
like national treasure. And the minute I bowed I knew the Buddha was
there. I knew the Buddha's Mind. I'm used to the Buddha's Mind, I
know the Buddha's mind, I can feel. And Buddha was there. Buddha Mind
was definitely in the Bodhi tree in Sri Lanka.
So I was just
so knocked out, to use your jargon, I thought, “Ah,
marvellous”. There was just a monk standing there. I just paid
respect to the monk three times because I thought, "That's
Buddha". And the first monk I saw, I don't know who he was, he
might have been a novice, or he might have been a chief monk, I don't
know, it doesn't really matter, so I established powerful refuge as a
absolute knowledge on my mind and of course where the Buddha is,
there's Dhamma.
Now that is a very powerful, that's my good
kamma you see, that I could get to the Bodhi tree and pay respect and
also be under the perfect conditions. Now of course we've got Bodhi
leaves here, I don't know there's some in there, I've got Bodhi
leaves here from about 14 different countries and I suppose I've got
them from cuttings from the Bodhi trees from about, oh maybe 30, 35
different Bodhi trees. So the Bodhi tree is very close here, the
Bodhi leaves they're above the Buddha’s head on those images,
you see a mark on them. So I can pay respect to the Bodhi tree.
Now
of course the British, in their indubitable way, said, “Buddhists
worship trees.” Now of course that's not true. We don't worship
trees at all. Maybe Melba does worship tree Devas. So there are
devices of getting powerful. As your Refuge grows stronger your mind
automatically knows, like a wisdom insight knowledge of how to
intensify. And of course that’s why, you know I don't have to
wake up in the morning and think "Now who am I, oh what am I
doing here?" "Oh I'm Buddhist, now what do I do now? What's
a Buddhist do?" I don't have to think like that, I just
know.
Here the students were instructed to take rest before
John D. Hughes proceeded with teaching as follows.
So because
of past lives, you've been, you've practiced every religion. There's
54 religions, there's a Sutta that the Buddha analyses. A few years
ago we did an analysis of that Sutta to show you what's the positive
things of religions and what's the misconceptions and what the base
is. But you see because of that you ritualise everything. You
ritualise boiling an egg. You ritual, like the phantom spoon taper
ritualises making a cup of coffee.
One of the characteristics
of human beings is they ritualise things. So they never do anything
fresh. And one of the things, if you've ever been to a mental
hospital, I went out, there's a woman I know I went to visit her. And
you see these old senile ladies out there and they're doing these
elaborate things and I watched and I thought, "What are they
doing?", and they were folding nappies, you know they were
pining to be ... looking, they were going through a set of hand
motions, and I watched and I realised what they were doing was
folding nappies.
And another woman was going through
imaginary ironing motions because you see the symbolism of ironing
say your husband’s shirts or whatever is a sort of love
substitute and its symbolic of the fact that you married because
presumably other people don't wash your husband’s shirts. So
this woman was a bit whacko and she was trying to recapture love.
Perhaps her husband had died or something. Maybe that's the shock of
what put her in the place. So she was going back to a ritual that
would give her some contact with whoever she loved.
So you
see, you see these phenomena. Now it’s natural to ritualise
things. As you realise, the pop culture depends on a lot of body
language. The pop stars have got unified body language and the fans
recognise the coding so certain body languages you whoop or you
applaud or you stamp your feet. Others you're quiet. So the whole
thing is orchestrated like the 1936 Berlin games that the Nazis
organised.
It was one of the, they had a great man who was an
expert in propaganda. So for example they, they had psychologists as
I was telling you in the German army, they said [to] the very bright
nimble intelligent people, we'll make staff officers, you know the
higher officers. The lazy officers we'll put in ordinary base wallah
jobs where they can be relied upon to do dull repetitious work. Like
in an army there's some work where the work's just repetitive.
But
they said if someone is both bright and lazy kick him out of the army
because he's dangerous. So the combination of being very bright and
very lazy is a dangerous combination as a trait. Do you follow what I
mean? Because normally if you've met a lot of criminals as I have,
criminals are often very bright and very lazy. So they look for the
fastest way of getting some money, or whatever they want, they're
ingenious and they're lazy. So instead of working systematically
which means a lot of sustained effort, a lot of persistence, being
persistent, they devise the quick quid. The criminal track.
So
you can predict, you can actually predict fairly well because of the
masses of data that’s been amassed. Personal predictions are,
you can fairly, fairly well predict the outcome of someone. If you
see a potential criminal kid, I used to see a lot of potential
criminals, some of them actually ended up in jail as I
predicted.
But some I'd spend hundreds of hours on [them] to
give them an ability to override their natural combinations which
would turn them to criminality. So like every society has criminals
and a combination of bad traits predisposes, or almost automatically
is the career path to criminality. Now criminality, Buddhism is the
opposite of criminality, if you can see it that way.
Whatever
traits you've got to make you into a criminal, you have to write on
abilities more powerful to override those traits. The main abilities
you write on is precepts. It’s not natural, you know if we talk
on averages, it’s not normal for human beings to keep five
precepts because their culture in every country in the world isn't a
culture of five precepts. In some Buddhist countries to some extent
in patches, you might find a whole village.
There is one
Buddhist Sutra where he went and he spoke to the people in the
village, 50,000 people, they all attained Sottapan during the
Buddha’s talk. And then later on there's another Sutra where
one of the monks said, "Why did that happen?" and the
Buddha, the Buddha explained the kammic causes going back many
generations of why that particular village.
Many generations
back there was a great organiser who generated a lot of wealth for
the village. The wealth was available to everybody. Everybody worked
diligently. Their culture was to get rid of laziness. In other words,
they didn't let people laze around. That was perpetuated for a few
generations and then people with their good kamma who were not
indolent, not lazy, were born in that village. And it was a very
prosperous village.
So it didn't have any beggars. Remember
beggars have been around for ages. It didn't have any criminals. It
was a most exceptional village. The children were respectful of
elders. That was part of the culture that had been built into the
village. There was no killing over land. There was some sort of an
elder agreed on arbitration system for settling disputes. And
disputes were settled in a manner that didn't breed hate, and so on.
And if you read the Buddhist Sutras someday you'll see.
Because
of this it happened that the 50,000 people in the village, the whole
village was predisposed by traits and built-in abilities to have a
respect for superiors and of course the Buddha was a superior.
Therefore they were easy to teach, therefore under the power of the
Buddha's Mind they became Sottapan.
So you see there are
places, which hardly exist anymore, where a whole community of 50,000
people were basically keeping five precepts and leading orderly
lives. Now in this Dhamma ending age, I think I'm right in saying,
that probably there doesn't exist such a place in the whole world any
more where a village of 50,000 people have no criminals. Perhaps four
precepts, but not five. So, so those events depend on conditions.
In other words, the Buddha's ability to teach people depended
on the attention of the people to developing their good traits,
abandoning their bad traits and increasing good abilities. Well, the
same applies to you.
May you always have respect for
superiors.
May you be teachable.
May you develop your
good traits, abandon your bad traits and increase your good
abilities.
May you be well and happy.
This script
was transcribed, prepared and edited by Julian Bamford, Frank Carter,
Leanne Eames, Celestina Giuliano, Evelin Halls, Anita Hughes, Alec
Sloman, Lainie Smallwood, Julie O'Donnell and Amber
Svensson.
References:
Recording Title: Traits and
Abilities (con't)
Tape 8, Side 2
Teacher: John D. Hughes
Date
of recording: 28 June 1988
Transcribed by: Frank Carter
Checked
by : Frank Carter
CD Reference 28_06_88T8S2A
File Name:
28_06_88T8S2A_JDHtranscribe.rtf
Words: 3,350
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