Buddhist Hour
Script No. 448
Broadcast live on 3MDR 97.1FM
9 PM to 10 PM
On Friday 6 October 2006 CE 2550 Buddhist Era

This script is entitled:

"Lifetimes of Learning " Class 15 - Review Part 2

Tonight we are doing the second week of review, or overview, of this course titled "Lifetimes of Learning, A Do-It-Yourself Approach to Happiness." We will cover the essential aspects that have been presented so far.

Last week we began our review by looking at what virtue is and how the cultivation of virtue establishes our practice of the Buddhist path.

To improve our life circumstances and our minds from a Buddhist point of view does not mean we are looking for a quick fix; something that will make us merely feel better. Heavenly beings already feel better. According to Buddhist teachings they feel better for a long, long time. However, lost in the midst of their good feeling is the truth of impermanence. It is said that devas experience greater suffering towards the end of their lives than human beings experience in a whole lifetime.

So Buddhism does not target pleasant feeling as a goal because a time will come when the good kamma that causes the pleasant feeling to arise is finished, like an empty bank account.

This does not mean that practising Buddhism does not help you to have pleasant feelings - of course it does; but pleasant feeling comes only as a by-product of the real goal of Buddhist practice, which is wisdom. It all comes back to our motive.

If our motive, when we think of being well and happy, is to use Buddhist practice to make us feel better, then the virtue we develop by accumulating good causes and keeping precepts will make the kamma for us to be born as a deva in a heaven world.

According to Buddhism we have already done this many times in our past lives and now, we have nothing to show for it.

So it's a bit of a paradox.

On one hand it comes naturally to us to seek pleasant feelings, it's like our default position or a refuge that our minds seek. When we say we want to be well and happy, maybe what we are thinking is that we want to experience strong pleasant feelings.

But Buddhist teachings say that if we practise Buddhism with this motive it's a dead end. The outcome is that the merit we make and precepts we keep cause us to be born in heaven, and it would not be a Buddhist heaven. It's a dead-end because after that heaven birth has finally finished the merit we worked so hard to make has been burnt up and we have squandered our precious opportunity to understand and practise the path towards being entirely free from suffering.

We can avoid outcomes like this through the development of renunciation, which is part of the Buddhist path. Renunciation means we can find right motive for our practice because we no longer follow craving for pleasant feeling as our default position or our refuge.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary (1991) to renounce means "to give up or put aside voluntarily." 1.

Without some renunciation you can't practice Buddhism. How can we promote wholesome minds if we won't give up unwholesome minds and unwholesome behaviour? How can we create sufficient free time to develop bright minds with wisdom and compassion if we won't give up doing something else of much less importance? How can we overcome greed and selfish desire if we won't give up our habits and old way of living?

So renunciation means we no longer expect the world to give us what it cannot. We don't expect we can absorb happiness from what we acquire in the world. These pleasures are fleeting and will never be truly satisfying. There is no permanent gain without loss, no permanent praise without blame, no permanent honour without dishonour and no permanent happiness without unhappiness.

The world cannot deliver you gain beyond the kammic causes you have made in the past to receive gain, and then you are also subject to the kammic results you have made in the past for loss. The world cannot deliver you praise beyond the kammic causes you made in the past for praise and, then you are also subject to the kammic result you made in the past for blame. This is the full extent to which the world can deliver you anything.

And renunciation means we no longer believe we can build true happiness for ourselves using minds of greed, hate or ignorance.

Happiness in Buddhism comes from simply having developed a pure heart. A pure heart is a heart with generosity, morality, kindness and wisdom amongst other things. These wholesome mental states are accompanied by pleasant feeling much stronger than ordinary worldly pleasant feeling, however, Buddhist practitioners with pure hearts are not intoxicated by it.

With wholesome minds and precepts as a base there is much less attachment to the pleasant feeling which arises. We do not use our merit or good kamma to gain more pleasant feeling, we use our merit to help ourselves and others learn and practise the Buddhist path to full enlightenment.

The best conditions of all to develop a pure heart are here and now, in the birth we already have. The Buddha taught that human birth is a very special birth because if we cultivate wisdom, we can make rapid progress towards our eventual enlightenment. However, if we do not cultivate wisdom, it can be like a launching platform for a very long journey in Samsara.

If we examine briefly each plane of existence beings can be reborn in, we can recognise that only human birth offers us the possibility to make enough causes to come to a future of secure happiness and wellbeing.

In animal birth beings cannot learn much because they have minds conditioned by very low morality - in other words their minds do not have enough intelligence or wholesomeness to learn much. Certainly they cannot learn how to keep five precepts and make merit. They may make a small amount of merit by helping humans for example, but they do not have knowledge concerning morality or merit.

Beings in hungry ghost and hell births experience too much mental and physical suffering to be able to learn. Beings in the lower heaven worlds are addicted to their experience of sensual pleasure and, similar to being on a wonderful and enjoyable holiday, they have no will to learn and practise a way out of suffering.

Most beings born in many of the higher heaven worlds do experience great peace and mental purity however again they do not have the wisdom or discernment to recognise the three marks of existence the Buddha found which are impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and anatta (not-self). Without understanding the true nature of existence those beings live with undisturbed minds attached to their existence for vast lengths of time.

In human birth, however, it is quite easy to observe and verify many of the fundamentals of existence that Buddha taught. Human birth is characterised by a mixture of gain and loss, happiness and unhappiness; change and the unreliability of life are undeniable as is the existence of suffering and the existence of kindness and good. It is therefore relatively much easier to recognise the wisdom of the Buddha when he taught that we are all subject to suffering, old age and death and the nature of the Path he found which could overcome the suffering.

Also in human birth the conditions are ideal to develop many causes for our future well being and happiness. The immensity of the good causes which can be made in human birth may not be immediately apparent but consider this: all religions teach that human beings can be born into heaven birth based on how they lived whilst they were humans.

What this tells us is that it is possible to make such good causes in one human life that the result is many millions of years of birth in a heavenly existence. Through understanding the law of cause and effect we can see clearly how this is possible.

In ‘Being Good’, Master Hsing Yun writes:

This is one of the reasons we practice making offerings to the Buddhist Sangha at any opportunity. Offerings done with a good heart to the Venerable Buddhist Monks or nuns create this type of vast good kamma which is needed to continue to improve our minds and develop wisdom.

Again from ‘Being Good’ by Master Hsing Yun:

So if you feel a sense of urgency or determination to develop great wisdom in your own mind this life then this evening's radio program has been very successful. To live your life with good heart and to develop wisdom is a most compassionate, beneficial and wonderful thing.

Our Teacher Master John D. Hughes taught us many things to help us increase our wisdom. One method we can suggest that can be done at any time is to chant the Triple Gem Refuge in the Pali or English language. We chant it at the start of every Buddhist hour radio program as a way to clarify our minds and to generate some space for the Dhamma in our minds.

Over the next week try this out as an experiment. Learn to chant the three refuges off by heart and chant it gently up to ten times per day. Then follow this chanting by taking five precepts, again either in Pali or English. Actually Pali is better if you can remember it as it is the language which has been used since the Buddha's time and brings its own pure energy with it.

This practice done over time, supported by other Buddhist practices, can enable you to develop the jewel we call a pure heart.

1. Master Hsing Yun. 1998. Being Good. Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life. Published by Weatherhill Inc., 568 Broadway, Suite 705, New York, NY 10012.

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