Buddhist Hour
Script No. 433
Broadcast live on Mountain District Radio 3MDR 97.1 FM
9.00 pm till 10 pm
On Friday 23 June 2006 CE 2550 Buddhist Era

This script is entitled:
"Lifetimes of Learning - A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness"

Class 1

Tonight on the Buddhist Hour we begin a new series of programs entitled "Lifetimes of Learning - A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness"

Maybe we should have called this series "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 own 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 or Buddha Dhamma, 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 45 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.

Over the past few weeks we introduced Buddhism and the Noble Eightfold Path by explaining what each of the eight parts of the Path involves. Tonight in the coming weeks 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 understand Buddhism by doing it.

Some of the topics we will cover are such things as practicing Buddhism in the garden, The Way of the Kitchen, and creating a Whole Life Plan, each 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 you will hear and learn about through this program is 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." One Buddhist Teacher, Geshe Michael Roach has called them "Perfecters", 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 gem with perfectly balanced facets and a flawless interior.

From a Buddhist point of view we start practicing Buddhism looking like that stone, freshly 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 and finally polishing our rough nature to reveal our final brilliant perfection within.

We practice the Ten Perfections 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. Examples of these states are anger, laziness, jealousy, restlessness, doubt, and stinginess. These unwholesome mental states are all unpleasant to experience and all produce causes for us to be unhappy. We need to remove these mental states 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 (Upekkha parami)

During this series of Buddhist Hour programs 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. However, the main focus of the course 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 get to true happiness.

Parami: What does it mean?

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 two of the Ten Perfections giving examples of some of their practical applications we will talk about during the duration of this course.

The Perfection of Generosity.

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 that 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 do not 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 wonderful news 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.

What we want to do is help you find out how to build your future happiness, brick by brick if you like. One of the key methods to doing this is by learning in this area of giving. We can learn and practice this method just in simple acts like that of giving someone a cup of tea. To truly succeed we want to learn what types of gifts bring what type of results. For example, giving flowers produces the following ten blessings.

1. Long Life.
2. Good Health.
3. Strength.
4. Beauty.
5. Wisdom.
6. Ease along the Buddha Dhamma Path.
7. Being born in beautiful environments.
8. Born with good skin, hair and beautiful to look at.
9. Always having a sweet smelling body.
10. Pleasant relationships with friends.

At our Centre in Upwey we have many projects designed using this know-how of generosity. For example, we had between 250 - 300 Vietnamese visitors attending our Temple to celebrate Chinese New Year. In a one-hour period we offer all these guests drinks and refreshments. We also offered them incense that they 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 helped them make many good causes for their future well-being and happiness.

From this one-day event, we created many wonderful 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 Dhamma Path to our own enlightenment. These good causes are called merit in Buddhism, so the good acts we undertake 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 others and ourselves.

Geshe Loden writes is his book 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 1993)

The way to train in Perfect Morality is by keeping precepts. The Buddha taught that, as laypersons we need to keep a minimum of Five Precepts. This is the minimum practice of morality to protect us from experiencing the bad results that 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 that 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 next few programs 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, and how we can brighten our mind so as to 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, which can experience happiness.

Next week on the Buddhist Hour 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 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 others and ourselves.

There is a teaching given by our Teacher John D. Hughes some years ago that you may like to try over the coming 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 whine 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, or 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, and 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 wel."

Even when things do go "wrong", often 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, and 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 - a precious 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."

If you like make this your homework for the coming week! Make your "normal" life happier.

May you create the causes to attain the Perfection of Generosity.

May your life go extremely well.

May you be well and happy.

May all beings be well and happy.

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

1. Carter A, Carter F, Sloman A. "Lifetimes of Learning - A do it Yourself Approach to Happiness" Class No.1 Presented at the Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre, Upwey Vic 3158. 29 Jan 2006.

2. Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden. Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism. Published by Tushita Publications. 1425 Mickleham Road, Yuroke Victoria 3063 Australia. p684, p700. 1993.

Word count: 3384

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