Buddhist Hour
Script No. 418
Broadcast live on Hillside 88.0 FM
11.00 am till 12 midday.
On
Sunday 5 February 2006 CE 2549 Buddhist Era

This script is entitled:
"Lifetimes of Learning"
Class 1

Tonight we begin our course, entitled ‘Lifetimes of Learning - A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness.’

May be we should have called this series of classes ‘A Buddhist Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness’ because in some ways we have already got a ‘do it yourself approach to happiness’; it's called our life. The life we are living now is our personal ‘do it yourself approach to happiness’. We have assembled our life over however many years we have been living through the countless choices we have made and not made and the decisions we have implemented. We have always wanted to be happy, and through our life pursued things which we believed would create happiness for us - so that sounds just like a do it yourself approach to happiness.

How is the Buddhist Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness different from our version? Many of you may know about the history of Buddhism. The Buddhist Path comes from the life the Buddha led and his quest to find the way out of suffering. As you may know, the goal or end result of practicing Buddhism is not expressed using the word "happiness" because, in Buddhism, happiness is not the final goal. Through correct Buddhist practice you definitely become happy, even happier than what we conventionally mean when we use the word "happiness", but happiness is only a by product of Buddhist practice, something you get on the way to the real goal of Buddhism. You go past happiness to something else, from a Buddhist point of view, something better.

Of course you can practice Buddhism and achieve happiness for yourself and just stop there; happy to be happy, if you like. There is nothing wrong about that. Most people want to experience a happy life, and we will teach how to achieve that in this course, but as we hear about Buddha's teachings and begin to learn how to practice Buddhism, we may start to appreciate what the Buddha knew. What the Buddha found out, and then taught to others for about 40 years is the real goal of Buddhist practice. It is called Nibbana in the Pali language or Nirvana in Sanskrit. Nibbana is sometimes translated as perfect peace. In English it is translated as Enlightenment.

In the previous course we ran here at the DRCCC ending last week, we introduced Buddhism by explaining what each of the eight parts of the Buddhist Path involve. In this course we will go further into understanding Buddhism by explaining how to practice Buddhism and how this practice can lead to our future wellbeing and happiness. The idea is that we get to the understanding of Buddhism by doing it.

You may have seen the handout for tonight's course. In it we mention some of the topics we will cover in the course. We mentioned for example; practicing Buddhism in the garden, The Way of the Kitchen, and creating a Whole Life Plan as practical aspects of creating personal happiness. Perhaps these topics do not sound typical of the things you may read if you study Buddhist books or look up Buddhism on the Internet.

The reason for this is we will be explaining how to practice Buddhism in our everyday life, at home, in the kitchen, in the garden, at work, at play. This is the way we were taught by our Teacher Master John D. Hughes, who founded our Buddhist Temple, called the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., in 1978. We were taught how to practice Buddhism in our real worlds. We didn't have to leave our world, like Harry Potter and Hogwarts, and go into some other world to learn how to develop our minds and happiness. Buddhist teachings are practical. They can be applied in our everyday lives.

One of the other things we said in our course handout is that students will learn about the great spiritual treasure of the Buddhist Ten Perfections. These ‘Perfections’ are the different aspects of Buddhist practice that a person must master as the basis for their enlightenment. The Ten Perfections are ‘training packages’. They have been called ‘Perfecters’ by one Buddhist Teacher, Geshe Michael Roach, in that by practicing them as instructions we can become perfectly enlightened.

One analogy of this process of becoming enlightened is that of a diamond. When a diamond is dug out of the ground it is pretty much like any other rock or mineral in appearance. It is dirty, it has an irregular shape, and is not clear or highly polished in appearance. We know that in the hands of a skilful diamond cutter the stone can be transformed into a beautiful sparkling, clear gem with perfectly balanced facets and can be internally flawless.

From a Buddhist point of view, we start practicing Buddhism looking like that stone which has just been dug out of the ground. Within us is the possibility of a perfect jewel with perfect qualities, but, just like the stone, in order for our potential flawless nature to be developed, we need to go through a process of cleaning, removing or cutting off the material which is not part of our brilliant ultimate nature, and then of immaculate polishing to reveal the final perfection.

The Ten Perfections are what we practice to remove the dirt, the delusion, the dullness and the imperfections from our minds. The imperfections are identified in Buddhism as those mental states that come from greed, hate and ignorance. They are called unwholesome mental states because they are the root cause of unhappiness, they can never be cleaned or purified, they are like mud on our mind or like mental sicknesses. These are mental states, such as for example, anger, laziness, jealousy, restlessness, doubt, and stinginess; all of which are unpleasant to experience and all produce causes for us to be unhappy. Those unwholesome mental states are what we need to remove in order to produce the brilliant pure diamond within us.

The Ten Perfections are:

1) Perfection of Generosity (dana parami in pali language)

2) Perfection of Morality (sila parami)

3) Perfection of Renunciation (nekkhama parami)

4) Perfection of Wisdom (panna parami)

5) Perfection of Energy (viriya parami)

6) Perfection of Patience (khanti parami )

7) Perfection of Truthfulness (sacca parami)

8) Perfection of Determination (adhitthana parami)

9) Perfection of Loving-Kindness (metta parami)

10) Perfection of Equanimity (Uphekka parami)

During the course we will explain each of the Ten Perfections and how practicing them develops many good qualities in our minds and produces the causes needed for our long term well being and happiness. The main focus of the course however, will be to show you how to practice these ‘perfecters’; what we can do in our everyday lives, whether at work, with our families, friends, or by ourselves, to practice these Ten Perfections. You can wake up in your own world. You don't have to go to Hogwarts to learn how to get to true happiness.

The Pali word the Buddha used to describe the methods he taught was parami, which has been translated as ‘perfection’ or ‘transcendental virtue’. When literally translated it means ‘crossed over’ or ‘gone over to the other shore’.

The second of these two literal translations has a very beautiful and subtle meaning. In certain sutras (teachings of the Buddha) and sastras (commentaries on the sutras by qualified Buddhist masters) the cycle of birth and death, or samsara in Pali, is referred to as the ‘ocean of life’. The practice of the parami's then ‘leads one to the other shore’ of the ocean of life, which is a metaphor for attaining liberation or enlightenment. It is as though the parami's, the Perfections, are rafts that take us across the ocean of life to the shore of enlightenment.

We will now provide a short explanation of the first three of the Ten Perfections giving examples of some of their practical applications we will talk about during the duration of this course.

The first of the Ten Perfections is The Perfection of Generosity, or dana-parami in Pali. Generally, generosity is defined as ‘liberality in giving or willingness to give’, and most people have this quality to some extent.

Everybody can give. We do it everyday, often many times a day, so it is easy to find opportunities to practice generosity. Often, however, we are willing to give to others when certain conditions are met, such as the person is someone we like or know well, maybe we don't particularly want the thing we are giving or we have enough for ourself too, and the person thanks us afterwards, which we normally would expect. We may start out practising generosity like that, but the problem is, that style of giving is not really pure generosity. It has mud or stains on it which are the effect of our unwholesome mental states such as, for example, stinginess.

When we give in this way we are not really giving freely. If the receiver of our gift did not express thanks for the gift or if they did something with the gift we did not like, we may feel disappointed or resentful of their behaviour. The Perfection of Generosity is not like that at all.

The Perfection of Generosity is unconditional, and instead makes us willing to give according to the opportunity of giving being there and the need of the other person, even at the apparent expense of our own enjoyment, and without any kind of recognition or expectation.

You don't have to go anywhere specific, meet anyone special, or get something that's really expensive to practice the Perfection of Generosity. The way that one turns normal generosity into the Perfection of Generosity is by contemplating in specific ways at the time when the gift is being given; recollecting cause and effect which is the way the law of karma works, giving the gift with a virtuous motive, and so forth. This is very wonderful because we already have everything we need to practice Perfect Generosity: the people around us!

It may sound simple to say ‘practice generosity’ as an instruction, but there is a lot to find out about how to give which can make the act of giving a powerful base for your current and future happiness. Buddhism teaches that what comes to us in our world, be it physical objects or be it our minds and feelings, comes to us from causes we made in the past. This is the law of cause and effect. However, by understanding how this law works, we can increase the power of the causes we make manifold, so that one act of giving done with understanding can produce a result many times greater than a similar act done without understanding.

In the course we will find out how we can build our future happiness brick by brick if you like, and one of the key methods to do this is by learning in this area of giving. We can learn and practice this method in the simple act of just giving someone a cup of tea, for example. We will learn which type of gift brings which type of results. For example, giving flowers produces the following ten blessings.

At the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., we have many projects that have been designed using this know-how of generosity. Next weekend, for example we have between 250 - 300 Vietnamese visitors attending our Temple to celebrate Chinese New Year. In a one-hour period we offer 300 persons drinks and refreshments. We offer them incense which they will use on our altars, and we offer them our friendliness. We offer them a beautiful garden to sit in, we offer them our Buddhist environment to practice in, and we will help them make many good causes for their future wellbeing and happiness.

From this one-day event, we create many wonderfully good causes to help us be well and happy in the future, and because it is our wish, we can also use these causes to help us on the Buddha Path to our own enlightenment. These good causes we make are called ‘merit’ in Buddhism, so those good acts we have done are called meritorious acts.

The second training package is the Perfection of Morality. We all have some kind of moral compass, some faculty for judging right and wrong. The difficulty is that, as beings capable of thought, we can unknowingly fool ourselves into doing something bad while thinking it is good. We see it all around us. We tell little lies, or take small things from others and dismiss it because it seems minor at the time or because we have never fully considered what morality is all about.

The Perfection of Morality is just this: the Buddha understood the law of cause and effect by directly seeing the way the world really works. He saw which actions bring happiness and which bring suffering. The Perfection of Morality trains us to live in perfect accordance with these natural principles, to avoid those actions that will cause harm to ourselves and others.

Geshe Loden writes is his Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism:

"The sign of realisation of the Perfection of (Morality) is that one has no thought of harming others and no longer generates any thought or deed that is a natural non-virtue, or a non-virtue by decree, even while dreaming." (Loden)

The way to train in Perfect Morality is by keeping precepts. The Buddha taught that, as laypersons we need to keep Five Precepts as a minimum. This is the minimum practice of morality to protect ourselves from experiencing the bad results which arise from committing those wrong actions. These five precepts are to refrain from killing, to refrain from stealing, to refrain from lying, to refrain from sexual misconduct and to refrain from taking intoxicants which cloud our minds. Throughout the day we monitor ourselves to make sure our actions of body, speech and mind do not break these precepts. "How well did I keep my precepts? What was the closest thing I did to breaking a precept?" If we catch ourselves about to lie, for example, we should stop right there. It is through everyday encounters, when we do the right thing, that we develop Perfect Morality.

During the course we will talk about how precepts are the most important natural protection from experiencing suffering in our lives. We will talk about how we can use morality to clean our mind, to make our mind and feelings peaceful, how we can brighten our mind and be more focused and attentive to our everyday activities.

A restless and disturbed mind cannot experience happiness, so we find out how morality helps us to have minds that can experience happiness.

The third training package, or Perfection, is the Perfection of Renunciation. Renunciation deals with our deep attachment to people, things, experiences, thoughts, feelings and so forth. Normally, we think that happiness is caused by having the things we want, and unhappiness is caused by not having the things we want. Basically, this is not the case.

It sounds very straightforward to say that following greed and choosing to accumulate every material thing that we think we want, and focusing our life on accumulating wealth and status, is not a certain way of being happy. Sure, as a layperson, to have is much better than to not have, but it's not something that is sure to make us happy, otherwise all the wealthy people would be happy and this isn't the case, even in Australia, which has one of the world's wealthiest societies. Our youth suicide rate is one of the highest in the world, so that measure of unhappiness indicates causes other than material wealth create real happiness.

Renunciation is about letting go. It is about not trying to grab hold of everything we want in order to absorb happiness from those things. You can't grab your way to happiness, it will never be truly satisfying. The pleasure of hearing a great new song fades off, the new clothes become old fashioned, your new car becomes outdated, your cutting-edge computer is soon too slow, and maybe even a past friend becomes a new enemy. The person you loved now seems to irritate you. These scenarios we all know too well. Getting what you want doesn't make you really happy. It looks like it will make you happy, but it is an illusion.

Our real problem comes from our craving for these things, wanting, not wanting; this is the source of our suffering. The mind wanting or craving is running after things, the mind not wanting is rejecting and hating things. It just never stops. The method we are using to get happy is causing us to be unhappy.

The Perfection of Renunciation brings us to this view, that our unhappiness is caused by our craving for this and that, and to become happy we must learn to let go of this craving. The mind can only come to true peace through letting go.

With Perfect Renunciation you can really enjoy life. The difference is, although you can enjoy many aspects of the world, you understand the real nature of the world as being unsatisfactory and unreliable. With this knowledge, you strive for something greater than a new car or prettier girlfriend; you strive for the true peace of enlightenment.

In this course we will find out how to give away things we like, not just things we don't like, give up some of our old habitual views of the world which cause us to be unhappy, give up things which cause us to suffer and give up our old bad habits.

The fourth training package, or Perfection, is the Perfection or Wisdom, or panna-parami in Pali. There are many types of wisdom in the world. One, having studied natural laws, is wise in science. Others, who have perhaps lived in difficult circumstances, are ‘streetwise’. In the world, there are many, many things to learn about, and many things to have knowledge of.

The Perfection of Wisdom is very unique. It goes beyond explaining how things happen and instead looks at why things happen.

The Perfection of Wisdom trains us to use our minds and see why anything happens in the first place and the way that things really work, ie. all things are a result of kamma, our actions in the past.

The reason we cultivate the Perfection of Wisdom is because through wisdom we can cut the root of suffering, ignorance, and attain the total bliss of matchless enlightenment.

Over the coming weeks we will talk about how to live using the guidance of wisdom, rather than our habits, beliefs and value systems that we built years, or even lifetimes ago.

We will provide many examples of things we could do in our lives which come from having a plan based on wisdom. In fact, we will explain how to write a plan for your life based on Buddhist wisdom. It is called a Whole Life Plan.

This is where we will talk about how we set our priorities in life based on a wisdom view, what sort of things we can do to make causes for wisdom to come to us in the future. We will investigate how we can practice with wisdom in the kitchen and in the garden, how we can make abundant merit, how we direct the merit we have made to bringing us the things we really need, how we can develop minds which can learn new skills and understand things realistically and not just superficially.

Next week we will talk in brief about some of the other Perfections. From a Buddhist viewpoint, becoming happy is a process that has many aspects and comes from many causes. The great thing is that it's not a mysterious process that is out of our reach. We can learn how happiness is created, and we can live our life starting today in ways that promote happiness for ourselves and the other people we know.

There is a teaching given by our Teacher John D. Hughes some years ago which you may like to try this week as a step towards becoming truly happy. You adopt the position of the following statement: "My life is going extremely well."

You say this to yourself many times a day. "My life is going extremely well."

Usually our minds pick up every little thing that is not going perfectly for us. We seem to let our attention focus on disagreeable things. We tend to complain about this thing and whinge a bit about that. There may be 100 things going fine, but still our mind gets caught up in the little things which maybe only last five minutes. For example, someone cuts us off when we are driving, we burnt the toast, it's raining when we want it to be sunny, it's sunny when we wanted rain, or someone says something unkind to us. We need to get used to being happy when things are just going along normally, imperfectly. Normally the world is imperfect; that is ‘normal’ if you like.

We don't need some special event or great thing to happen to us before we think we can be happy. Some people in the world haven't got enough food to eat today, some are in war zones, some are in hospital with life threatening illnesses. Why should we be worried about the guy that cuts us off in traffic. "My life is going extremely well".

Even when things do go ‘wrong’, our minds tend to exaggerate the problem making it seem much bigger than it really is. Get things back in proportion by saying "My life is going extremely well." OK, something went wrong - life's like that, it's always going to be like that. Cut off the worrying mind, the frustrated mind, the annoyed mind - all of them are unpleasant to experience anyway. Just say, "My life is going extremely well."

Finally there is another meaning. From a Buddhist point of view we are in a wonderful life. Above all, we have a life where we can learn how to overcome suffering forever, which is the purpose of Buddhist teachings. We have a healthy human body, which is the best birth of all to practice Buddhism, we have sufficient leisure time and the teachings we need are in our world, available to us now. There is a clear path of practice and there is nothing to stop us from achieving the goal if we are determined enough to do it. So the real view is:

"My life is going extremely well".

This can be your homework for the coming week! Make your ‘normal’ life happier.

May you be well and happy.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was prepared and edited by Anita Carter, Frank Carter, David Ley, and Alec Sloman.

1. Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden. 1993. Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism. Published by Tushita Publications. 1425 Mickleham Road, Yuroke 3063, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. p.684, p.700

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