Monday, October 27th, we welcomed Gen Chogyop from Menlha Kedampa!
Gen Chogyop has dedicated more than two decades to studying and teaching Kadampa Buddhism. She brings a wealth of experience and is known for her sincere practice and ability to offer clear, practical teachings. She provides an inspiring example of a modern Buddhist practitioner.
Gen Chogyop offered insights on the material we’ve been covering lately, focusing specifically on the practice of right speech and framing it within karma and practical ethical practice for modern practitioners
We started our session with a short meditation before moving into her insightful talk which you can listen or read below.
Meditation
Part 1 of the dharma talk
Part 2 of the dharma talk
Core teaching: the four non‑virtuous types of speech
- Lying — knowingly communicating falsehoods (verbal or nonverbal); action completes only when the listener understands and believes the falsehood
- Divisive speech — words or acts intended to damage relationships or harmony; includes true-but-harmful statements and slander; it completes when a relationship is damaged or made worse
- Hurtful speech — speech aimed to wound another sentient being (often produced by anger, attachment, or ignorance); completes when the target understands, believes the intent, and is disturbed
- Idle chatter — meaningless, mindless talk or consumption of frivolous content that wastes time and obstructs practice; completes when others have heard it
All four arise under delusion and require four conditions to plant a karmic seed: a correct object, an intention, preparation, and execution
Emphasis on intention and nuance
- Intention is central: the same words can be karmically different depending on whether they arise from compassion or desire to deceive or harm (e.g., comforting a dying person may not be karmically lying if motivated by cherishing)
- Actions aren’t mechanically one-to-one; karmic results can ripen in varied, sometimes unexpected ways (stories illustrated nonliteral ripening of past actions)
Practical guidance and methods
- Check intentions before speaking; prefer silence or careful rehearsal for difficult conversations (recording/rehearsing to detect aversion)
- Cultivate bodhisattva speech: say only what’s meaningful, helpful, and free from malice; aim so that “everything I say today helps others” as a daily intention
- When faced with others’ speech (gossip, divisiveness, idle talk), choose responses according to intent and harm — sometimes excuse yourself rather than escalate; intervene only when motivated by genuine compassion, not anger
Q&A and worldview context
- The talk addressed karma, rebirth, and mind: karma is stored on the subtle/root mind and ripens across moment-to-moment continuity rather than via a permanent self; animals and beings can be affected by past actions and blessings at death
- Practical takeaway: understanding the mechanics of karmic cause-and-effect helps one take responsibility for speech and reduces blaming others when effects arise
Bottom line
Right Speech matters because speech is a powerful karmic cause. By training attention to object and—especially—intention, reducing lying, divisiveness, hurtful words, and idle chatter, a practitioner cultivates harmony, reduces obstacles to practice, and aligns speech with compassionate motivation
Part 1 Transcript
So, I’ll tell you something else that caught my attention as we were reading, if you don’t mind, before we get into the talk tonight, was the four dharmas of Gompopa. So, do you all know the story of Gompompa when he was a young man? Anybody know that story, the story of him? So, when Gompompa was, when he was young, he had married, he was married, and he loved his wife so dearly. I mean, it was the love of his life.
It was young love. And it was his whole life was this love that he felt for his wife. She became ill and quickly died.
And he was grief-stricken, I mean, such though that you can imagine, you know, could hardly get out of bed. And so, he sought answers as to why, why was this happening? And how could he, like, find meaning in this kind of grief? Because this is the opportunity that we have with understanding dharma and really studying what Buddha taught, is that we can take our profound grief and the worst possible things that can happen to us in our life, and instead of them just being suffering, we can transform them into our spiritual path. And so, if we don’t learn how to do that, then it’s simply suffering, and it has no meaning.
And what Buddha taught is that, you know, this in the six realms, there’s the animal realm, and then there are the god realms. The animal realm and the god realms, they don’t know what to do with suffering. The god realms don’t ever have much.
So, you know, they don’t really care about getting out of samsara. Nothing hurts. The animal realm, when they experience suffering, they don’t know what to do with it, except fight it, try to escape it.
But humans, you see, this is why, one of the reasons it’s called fortunate human rebirth, fortunate human life, because humans know what to do, or can learn what to do with their suffering. And they can use suffering to propel them out of the grips of samsara. So, it’s, you know, it’s said that we’re in this fortunate realm, in a fortunate eon, because we have enough suffering.
And so, Gampampa, learning this, he decided he would spend the rest of his life writing Dharma scriptures, and realizing the meaning of what Buddha taught. And, and so, you know, today his work, he benefited like countless living beings from that suffering that happened earlier in his life, because he knew what to do, or he learned what to do with it. So anyway, I’ve never seen this, these four Dharmas of Gampampa.
I mean, I know about him, I’ve just shared the story, I know of him in earlier life, but anyway. So, we’re here tonight to talk about our speech. And what I’m going to share with you is from a Gampampa text, the Jason, it’s Jason Kappa, it’s a translation of Jason Kappa’s text, it’s called Joyful Path of Good Fortune.
And for Gampampas, this is like our, I don’t know, I’m going to say the word Bible, it’s like our Bible, it’s like our encyclopedia, Buddhist encyclopedia. And so in here is the section on karma, which is where I’m going to, you know, be reading from with respect to speech. Because we, I mean, I know we all know about karma here, right? We all know universal law of the mind.
And our intentions lead to our actions. And our actions, if they are virtuous actions, they will lead to good fortune and happiness. What happens if they are non-virtuous actions? When we’re under the influence of negative states of mind, delusions, we engage in actions under that influence, what happens? Negative karma, negative karma.
And so it’s so important to know about these 10 non-virtuous actions, we’re going to focus on the four of speech. I find that, you know, interesting, there’s three of body and there’s three of mind, but four of speech. So our speech gets, can cause us a lot of trouble, can’t it? A lot of trouble.
And so what I thought it would be fun to do is to really go through this in a way where we understand these four and understand it with sort of the lane over it, you know, how karma, what kind of karma, like what we want to understand about karma with these. So the speech, first one’s lying, you all may, I don’t know if you know, I’m just going to read them. First is lying, and then it’s divisive speech, then hurtful speech, and then this one almost tickles me, idle chatter.
How in the world, let me get this right. How in the world, am I, is this in the right place? Seemed like it was too close and then it seemed like it was too far. Idle chatter is one of these ones that seems like, how, what’s wrong with that? I’m just chit-chatting, right? And so what we’ll, what we’ll understand is what it can end up doing, you know, with how our speech can be used in these non-virtuous ways with idle chatter.
It also isn’t, idle chatter actually has more than just some speech in it. Actually, all of them do, but we’ll just focus on the speech part. So, you know, the thing about karma is, there’s these four things, you know, if we are going to have a moment of negative karma ripen or positive karma, there are four things that have to be in place.
First is we have to have an object. Then we have to have, it says the intention, what we’re going to do with that object, good or bad. First, the object and the intention.
Then we have to make preparation. And then we have to execute on our plan. We have to actually engage in it.
So when we go through all four of those, let’s say with negative karma. And once that, once that execution of that action has happened fully, fully ripened seed of karma now is planted on our mental continuum, on our root mind. And so that’s the causes, that would be the cause for us to experience the effect.
And the effect will be sometime down the road, we’ll get to feel, we’ll get to experience the ripened effect of that action that happened long ago. And so what my spiritual guide Venerable Geshe-la says is that the karma we’re creating in this life moment by moment is actually for our future. The karma that we created in our previous lives is what’s ripening for us right, right now.
Right. And so with, with speech, let’s, let’s see how it, let’s see how it plays out. Lying.
So there are many objects of lying, but most are included within these eight. What is seen, what is heard, what is experienced, what is known, and what is not seen, not heard, what is not experienced, and what is not known. So it’s basically anything, any, anything can be an object where we’re going to not tell the truth.
Some instances of lying are not verbal actions. For example, a person may lie by making physical gestures, by writing, or even by remaining silent. For the action of lying to be complete, there must, we must correctly identify the object.
If we mistake the object saying, for instance, my offering bowls are made of gold. When in fact, they’re made of some other material, brass or something. The action is not complete.
We must also be determined to lie. And we must be influenced by delusions. So this thing, okay, so we’re going to like be, we’re going to brag about our offering bowls.
We’re going to say, look at my bowls, they’re gold. And we really mean to, we really mean, we want people to be impressed with our offering bowls. So we’re saying that they’re made of gold.
And we’re under the influence of, let’s say, I don’t know, attachment to status and reputation. All right, so we got the object, the bowls. We’ve got the negative state of mind under the influence of, of some type of delusion.
Like, you know, wanting people to like us, wanting to be, wanting people to, to think that we have money or something like this. In the case of lying, any root delusion can be involved. There are many ways of engaging in a lie.
But the action is complete only when the person to whom the lie is directed has understood our meaning and believes what we have said or indicated. If the other person does not understand us, our action’s not complete. For example, if we whisper a lie in the ear of our dog, there is no way that he will believe us.
And so we cannot incur the full negative result. All right, so once we have told this untruth and the person believes us, now we’ve, now we’ve sown that one seed, that negative seed, that negative karmic seed of having told a lie. So then sometime down the road, what we’ll find is that someone will tell us a lie.
You know, because this is how karma works, right? I know you all know about karma, right? I’m not really saying anything. I have to go back and explain more about, sometimes I don’t know. But you all, you all understand.
I know you, you must. So, so now you’ve, now you’ve incurred the, the act of lying. So the question I have about this one, or actually all of them, is why when we feel like someone has told us a lie, we find out later they told us a lie, why are we upset with them? Why aren’t we thinking, oh, I created the causes through my own negative speech of lying.
I created the causes and now I’m just experiencing the effect. Wouldn’t that be more productive than being upset with them? It’s almost like if they hadn’t have appeared and lied to us, we, we created the causes. If they hadn’t have appeared and lied to, to me, somebody else would.
You know, because I created the causes for this to be the experience of a reality for me down the road with speech, with something of speech, but what we do, what we can find ourselves doing all the time, ordinary people all the time, is that when they feel like, you know, someone has done something to them wrong like this, they get upset with the person. They don’t like the person. And so nowhere in there, unless they’re really thinking about Dharma things like this, nowhere in there, are they coming back and around and thinking, may I never tell a lie? May I never tell any lies to anyone? So when I ordained, and so remember, you need to have all these, these four things for it to actually be a negative karmic seed.
So when I ordained Venerable Geshe-la during the ordination talk, he, he taught on lying and he said, is it lying? Let’s say you have someone in your life and they’ve just been a horrible person and now they are really sick and dying and, and you go and you, you sit with them and they say, you know, I think I’ve really been a horrible person. What do you think? Have I been? And he said, what do you, would you lie? Would you be lying if you said, oh no, you’ve not been horrible. Is that a lie? What do you all think? Geshe-la said no.
And the reason is because if you think about the four pieces, the main one is intention. Is your intention under the influence of cherishing that person or is it under the influence of wanting to deceive that person? And so if it’s under the influence of cherishing others, it’s a virtuous state of mind. And so it would be, you would not incur the fault or the karmic negative karma of lying if you said you did your best, you tried like this.
And so I found that so extraordinarily useful because we can get real black and white about these things sometimes, can’t we? And you know, to be compassionate. I mean, imagine someone’s dying and they’ve been horrible and you go, yes, you’ve really been horrible. You did some horrible things throughout your life.
You know, I will not tell a lie. And then this person dies with that kind of like state of mind. You know, what we of course want to do is we want to help them.
We want to help them. So karmically, I mean, if they weren’t in that sort of state and they said, you know, I think I’m horrible. You could go, well, sometimes you are, you know, like this and you try to help them, right? But there are certain times where certain actions are called for.
And so I found it really useful to understand that it depends on what our intention is. So like the act of killing, that’s one of the actions of body. You know, so if I go out and I step on a bug, did I incur the act of killing? Well, it wasn’t my intention to do that.
I, you know, didn’t see it. I mean, I could say I have a responsibility to be careful and look, try to see what little creatures are around me and try not to harm them or kill them like this. Of course, we can do these things.
But if totally had no idea, then karmically, I did not incur the act of negative karma of killing because my intention was not like this. All right, so the next one, divisive speech. This one’s a doozy.
This one we have, I mean, you can turn on, you know, you can turn on the TV and find channels that are devoted to divisive speech. Can’t we? It’s everywhere, everywhere. So social media is, seems like it’s devoted to certain posts or devoted to divisive speech.
So the object of divisive speech is two or more people who have a relationship with one another. If their relationship is good, our divisive speech causes it to deteriorate or destroys it completely. If their relationship is bad, our divisive speech makes it worse.
We must correctly identify the object and we must be determined to damage a relationship between people by using divisive speech. Our mind must be influenced by negative states of mind delusions. Any of the three root delusions may be involved.
There are two types of divisive speech, that which is true but harmful to utter and that which is false, such as slander or propaganda. Divisive speech does not have to be a verbal action. We can destroy harmony and goodwill among people, amongst people by using means other than our speech, such as by writing or by silence.
There are many ways of engaging in divisive speech but the action is complete only when, as a result of our action, a good relationship is damaged or a bad reputation or a bad relationship is made worse. Okay, so let’s say, you know, we have me and my friend and my friend now gets a new friend and I have jealousy over this new friend and I decide I’m going to, I’m going to say, you know, I don’t think they’re really your friend and maybe we’ve seen some indication that they’re, I don’t know, that they’re not the best friend but our motivation is why we have to check our intention. My intention is to cause them to no longer be friends and I think if we, I don’t think this one is a hard one for us to, I don’t think any of them are really hard for checking.
I think if we’re looking and we just peel it back a little bit and we go, what is my intention here when I’m going to say what I’m going to say? Because my friend might really be having a good relationship with this new person in their life, right? And my intention is I don’t want them to have this friend in their life because now they’re not going to, you know, hang around with me, you know, lose, I’m going to, I feel like I’m going to be threatened, I’m going to lose my friend and so now I’m going to, like, look for little faults. You know, if we look for faults, I’ll just speak for myself, I’m a professional at finding faults in other people. I’m really good at it.
I can sometimes find I spend a lot of time just observing and then concluding things and then if I’ve decided that I’m going to engage in this kind of activity, I’ll have a whole lot of things to say and I’ll be very convincing about it and then if that relationship is then destroyed and our friend says, you know, I think you’re right, I don’t really think they’re a good friend and I have a sense of, like, I’m, like, happy about it, I’m rejoicing a little bit, now I’ve, like, sown that karmic seed of divisive speech and if I engage in this a lot, you see, what I’ll end up finding, sometimes it’s in this life and sometimes what we can find ourselves in situations in this life and you go, well, that nun said that it was all coming from my previous life, but sometimes we can find that in our previous lives, we bring our tendencies into this life and so if we’re finding ourself always having the same sort of situation with some type of suffering with others, people aren’t telling us the truth and people are trying to destroy our relationship with others out of whatever their reasons are, like this, if we find ourselves in that situation, then we can just think, it’s the ripening of my divisive speech in the past, so if we didn’t engage in any of these negative actions under the influence of delusions, if we didn’t, if we just stop it, stopped it, always checked our intention, and always thought, do no harm, I’ll do no harm, and I would find and always look for, because you have to have a delusion at play for there to be negative karma, there’s no delusion influencing your actions, then it won’t be the same as a fully matured negative action of divisive speech, or any other kind of negative action. All right, so I’m happy for questions along, as I’m going through these things too, if anyone wants to comment, something they’d like to share, or any questions, you’re happy, happy, happy to do this. Yeah.
Hi, Annette. This set of beliefs, and this set of beliefs, and this set of beliefs, and maybe your beliefs are even, you know, outside of somebody’s norms. And, you know, I just really believe that, let’s say your friend, you know, just so believes in what you know to be propaganda, Yeah.
over their beliefs, did you assess, based on your knowledge and believing, to be untruthful? But, it’s beholden, very real. This is true. So, you know, do you avoid those conversations? Do you try? You know, to see, you know, listen a lot? So your intention is to have a connection to the camaraderie that you think is based on facts, truth-telling, awareness, understanding? Mm-hmm.
Well, I think it depends, it’s situational, and I think it depends on what my intentions are. I think it depends on if I, like, say, if I, like, am going to call it out to my friend, like, look, that’s not right. Is my intention to divide them, or is my intention to bring us all together? Is my intention for there to be common ground and respect, or is it simply, I don’t believe and I don’t like what they believe in, and so I want my person over here to believe what I believe, because I’m right.
And am I trying to divide, you know, so if I’ve got, if there are groups, I believe we’re talking about some political things, right? I think we probably are, right? So at Menlo Center, I’m not allowed, we’re not allowed to get involved in any kind of political things whatsoever, right? But these questions are coming up all the time, right? Because we’re in the midst of things appearing in our life right now. And so for there to be peace and harmony and more understanding, which right now seems like there is absolutely, if I say black, another will say it’s white. And it is like we just don’t see the world the same way.
And karmically it’s because we do not see the world the same way. We think there is one truth like in this thing, but you know, I read on social media recently that, or I heard or something that they said that it was like conflict resolution and it had to do, it said, you know, both both groups, they actually believe they’re doing what they’re doing for the good of for the good of things. They actually are believing that, even though you might be going, absolutely, how can you believe? How in the world can you say what that is? That makes no, yeah.
But they believe, they’re believing in it, they’re believing in it. And so if, if I can have respect for all points of view, and be coming at it, have my heart open to what would be the best outcome for everyone involved, and I’ve got a mind that’s compassionate for others, then I can speak a truth and I won’t have to worry about, my speech is now divisive. But if I’m trying under the influence of, let’s say, anger and aversion, if I’m now trying to influence my friend or others to not believe that or not go, not do, not do any of that, if I’m trying to do that, then it could be divisive speech.
You see what I’m saying? Because at the root of it, I’ve got anger in my heart. And this world will never appear to us as peaceful if we have anger in our heart. Anger in our heart will project out negativity, negative situations.
conflict and war. And for, if we want this to stop, then I believe, and I believe what Buddha taught, I believe he’s telling the truth. He says the atomic bomb is love.
And it’s not just loving these ones and hating these ones, it’s loving all of them equally. I mean, that’s our life’s work, is to do, is to do these kinds of things. Yeah, this is, be the acts of a bodhisattva.
Bodhisattvas, they stop harm, and they love, but they still maintain a mind of pure love toward, toward that person. All right, we have to, we have to think, if I’m, if I’m out demonstrating, if I’m out doing my, my things, am I doing it with any kind of hatred in my mind? Because if I am, it won’t work. I won’t have a good result.
I mean, I feel like I can boldly say this, you will not have a good result. Okay? So, are we ready to do anything else before we move on to hurtful? Yeah. So that idea that you have a negative, something negative comes to you, is because of something, it’s coming to you now that someone is treating you as a negative.
Because in the past you treated them. You did. Okay.
So, if it’s all happening within this, this life. It’s not all happening. But, when it happens, you’re saying it happens so many times, how can, I can’t really relate to that.
Right. That’s fine. That’s fine.
I mean, we, we just go, okay, well, this is what, this is what Buddha, this is, these, this is like the cornerstone of, of what Buddha taught about what karma means. Cause, it’s cause and effect. It’s, it’s cause and effect.
And we, if we believe, so do we believe we have, so we can think about, do I, do I think I’ll have a future life? Well, maybe. Well, then logically, would that mean that, oh, I probably had a previous life? Well, what did I do in that previous life? What kind of actions did I get up to in that previous life? I don’t know. Well, then how do you know in this life, if you aren’t sure whether you had a previous life, then you’re, you’re thinking, well, if I did have a previous life, I engaged in previous actions, I just don’t remember what they were.
You know, if we think about the six realms, the beings in all the six realms, you know, we, we weren’t always human. If we look at the animal world and we see the savage nature of that, and we go, if it’s possible that I had a previous life, then it could be possible that I had that kind of reality. And in that kind of reality, I could have done all kinds of things.
And so those things, karma will function in all of those realms. And so here I am, precious human life. And now I’m having, you know, these activities happen to me.
You know, the things with the speech are always going to be, we were humans before, and our speech under the influence of delusions, we said hurtful things to other people, we lied. And so now we get to experience what that, what that felt like, or what that like experience was, because that’s the cause. That’s the, the actions we engage in is the cause.
And the experience that we have right now is the effect. And like I said, in the beginning, what we’re often doing is when the effect is arising, we’re, we’re blaming that we’re upset with that. We’re not really, you know, going back and thinking, oh, I might have created the causes for this, like that.
All right, so now, hurtful speech. So the object of hurtful speech is any person who can be hurt by what we say. If we get angry with the weather and abuse it, our action of hurtful speech is not complete, because the weather cannot be wounded by our words.
So it needs to be another sentient being. We must correctly identify the object. If we mistake the object, for example, if we want to insult Peter, but we insult John instead, thinking that he is Peter, our actions not complete.
We must also be determined to speak hurtfully, and we must be influenced by delusion. Usually when we speak hurtfully, we do so in anger. And there is also some degree, there is always some degree of anger involved in that action.
But we may also utter hurtful words out of desirous attachment. For example, we may tell someone that they’re fat, in the hope that they will feel miserable enough to leave their chocolate cake for us. Sometimes we may speak hurtfully out of ignorance, not considering that others could be hurt by what we say.
We may even be deliberately offensive in the belief that it benefits others to receive harsh words. There are many ways of engaging in hurtful speech, such as by sarcasm. With sarcasm, we can speak gently with a smile on our face, and yet shoot words like arrows into someone else’s mind.
So you can probably tell by my accent, I’m from the South. We’ve mastered this. Very sweet, very sweet words.
Are you sure you’re going to wear that dress? It’s really beautiful. But I don’t know if you have the figure for it, like that. Or, I don’t know, some of the other sweet, sweetnesses that, you know, Southerns will say, bless your heart, bless your heart.
There are many, yeah, I think I read all that. The purpose of hurtful speech is to inflict pain upon others. As an arrow pierces the body of their enemy, hurtful speech pierces another person’s sensibility.
Hurtful speech is not necessarily a verbal action. We can inflict this pain without using words. For example, we can humiliate or mock someone with a gesture.
Whenever we are with other people, we must guard our speech and consider whether or not words will hurt them. You know, sometimes we don’t know, sometimes we’re just saying, you know, like we’re just talking and people are offended by what we say. But again, we don’t have to worry about whether we’ve engaged in hurtful speech because they walked away feeling insulted.
And why is that? Why is that? It’s not our intention. It’s not our intention. And consider whether or not our words will hurt them.
Of course, the bodhisattva is always sort of thinking a little bit before they say something. Should I speak now? And in Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Shantideva’s famous guide to becoming a bodhisattva, there’s a whole chapter on the bodhisattva and the way they sort of show up in the world with their speech. And they don’t talk much.
They only say things that are meaningful, really. You know, when they’re really, they’re not this next one, idle chatter. They don’t engage in any idle chatter.
And from the depths of their heart, they don’t want to ever say anything that would hurt another person’s feelings. You know, wouldn’t any, would never want to do that. So we check inwardly.
Could these words be disturbing? Could they create unhappiness? Atisha said that when we are on our own, we should be especially watchful of our mind. And when we are with others, we should be especially watchful of our speech. The action of hurtful speech is complete when the person to whom our action is directed understands our words, believes that they have been uttered in earnest and is disturbed.
If this person does not understand our words, thinks that we are joking or remains untroubled by what we said, the action is not complete. This one’s quite useful. All right.
So the last one, did you have a question or a comment? If I am, my intention is to hurt somebody with my words and I speak the words that they think is a joke and they’re not hurt, I still have heat in my heart. So it does hurt me. Yeah, there’s a little bit of negativity in there, but the actual act, all four parts aren’t complete.
So you didn’t create that negative karmic seed to later have others utter words that hurt you. But you have incurred some negativity because your intention was harmful. Is the karma that you create, is it always one-to-one? The way that you’re speaking, it sounds like, okay, I hurt somebody with my words and sometime later I will get hurt by somebody else’s words.
Yeah. It’s not always like that. On Sunday, we had a special event at Menla called Ghost Stories and I was talking about tales of rebirth and karma because it’s Halloween and all like this.
And so I was giving various stories and we were talking afterwards. And it’s not actually, to explain it, I’m explaining it one for one. But in one of the stories I was reading on Sunday, there was a story of a man who, he was so ugly that people didn’t want to be, they just were repulsed by him.
And yet when he spoke, his voice was so melodious that people just wanted to draw close to him. And so the karma that had ripened for him was, there was a king who had commissioned the building of this huge stupa. And this work took a long time.
And one of the workers at one point during doing this work, he got angry. And he said, what is the point of building such a huge thing? And he was just angry. You can just imagine, it’s probably been on for a while, his anger.
Later, after the stupa was finished, he regretted his anger because he understood the meaning of that stupa in the world and everyone that saw that stupa would receive powerful blessings and the good that this would bring to the world. So he regretted him being angry about it. And as part of his regret, he bought this bell or got this bell and he gave this as an offering to that stupa.
And so what had, what would ripened in that life for him was his anger ripened as his ugliness. Because anger has got a quality about it of when you’re around, you know, when you’re around someone who’s angry, you don’t feel safe and you sort of pull back, don’t you? This is the karmic effect of anger, is that you appear, you don’t, people don’t feel safe around you and they don’t really want to be around you. It sort of like pushes them away, your anger.
But his regret and his offering of that beautiful bell, that created the causes for him to have such a melodious voice. And that, and so that was, and so when he spoke, people wanted to be near him. So everything isn’t exactly like one for one like that.
They can, there’s another story of a, of a, of a nun. Well, before she was a nun, her name as a nun was Upala. I mean, she had an absolutely horrific life.
She, her first husband died shortly after they married. I think he was an okay guy. But then her second husband was a drunk and he was so abusive.
And they had a child and in a fit of anger, drunk and rage, he killed the child and he forced Upala to eat its flesh. And then he died, something happened to him. And then she got caught by like, like a gang.
And now she was, had to be the girlfriend of the gang member. And then he got caught, the gang member. And then what was the custom of that time was you were buried alive.
The wife was buried alive with the, you know, with the gang leader. But the gang, fellow gang members, they were so attached to her beauty. They dug her up and they forced her to live with them.
And he, and she was like, she, it was a time of Buddha. And she went to Buddha and she said, why is this happening to me? Why have I gone through all of this? And Buddha said, in your previous life, you were the wife of a, of a king who had many wives and you were jealous. And your jealousy sat in your heart and you wished them ill and you looked for every opportunity out of jealousy to harm them and to, you know, cause them to no longer be the wife of the king because you wanted them all to yourself.
And so that act of jealousy sat in your heart. It must have been quite severe jealousy. And, and it just sort of swelled up.
And so now in this life, all of these, this ripening has happened for you. So again, not everything is this one for one kind of, kind of thing like that. I’m proud of you.
Earlier, you said you had a situation where somebody came up and, and got mad at, let’s say, Jim. And it turned out that that wasn’t Jim. But in my mind, it does cause karmic issue.
And tell me, help me figure this out. Because the person they were talking to was injured in a way, all right? His, his ideas were squashed or whatever. So he was hurt in a way.
And so to me, even though he didn’t believe it was that person, or he found out it wasn’t that person, he still performed that action. Yeah, but he had the wrong object, had the wrong object. So in that particular situation, you know, we have, we have moment by moment, by moment, by moment, we are creating this karma, aren’t we? But in that, for that particular example, he had the wrong object.
So in that case, he didn’t incur the total effect of, of, of, of, of, of doing that negative thing. Because he had the wrong object. And he’ll probably go and have the right object tomorrow, you know? So it isn’t that it won’t.
It’s just that in that one, that one moment, that one situation, he had the wrong object. Probably once he figured it out, he now got the object back, the one that he wanted, and then completed the deed. But, you know, so, yeah, I mean, it’s like a, it’s like a, if we break karma down in this kind of way, I find it quite helpful, because it’s like a formula.
It’s not random. And there’s nobody punishing me. And it’s all basically based on my intentions.
The head of the New Kadampa tradition, Genla Dekyan, one time I met with her, and I had some plan cooked up about something I wanted to do. And I thought it was very virtuous. And she looked at me and she said, delusions will disguise themselves as virtue all the time.
We need the wisdom to know the difference. So I think that when we’re checking in our heart with our intentions, before we’re about to take some action, I mean, I know personally in my own life, I used to act pretty, like, quickly, taking care of stuff. I thought I was pretty good at it.
And nowadays, if I think I have to, like, say something or do something that I think, you know, sometimes you just feel like, I need to take, I need to think about this a little bit more. I take a lot of time and think about it a little bit more and a little bit more. Because I want to make sure my actions, I mean, and we’re not going to always get it right until we, till we, till we perfect it.
But I want to always be at least asking. I’ve told this story before. Some of you here that go to Menlo, you may have heard it.
I have this nun friend in California, and her and I were traveling together and she was, I thought she was on the phone, but she kept saying the same thing, like, again, and then she’d say it again. And I’m like, going, who are you talking to? And she said, oh, I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was recording myself.
When I get back, I need to have a difficult conversation with a student. I need to tell them some things I don’t think they’re going to want to hear. And so she said, what I like to do is I’ll record what I’m going to say, and then listen to my voice, listen to what I’m going to say.
And then if I sense any negativity in my speech, I won’t, I’ll go back, I’ll rehearse it again. I’ll think it, I’ll go back and I’ll check because what she says I’m hearing is some aversion I’ve got that has popped up in my mind. And I don’t want to go back and do that because this will be a difficult enough situation.
And so I just need to make sure my heart is in the right place. With my speech.
Part 2 Transcript
Okay, so that ten minutes, it goes really fast, doesn’t it? But you do feel more refreshed, so we have just one more. Idle chatter. So the object of idle chatter is any object that is meaningless.
Again, we must correctly identify the object and we must be determined to engage in the action and we must be influenced by delusion. There are many ways of engaging in idle chatter. For example, we can just utter everything that comes into our head.
You know, let’s say we’re on a car ride, you know, we might think, you know, how in the world could idle chatter be worse than hurtful speech, but, you know, if we’re on a long distance car ride with someone who engages in a lot of meaningless speech, just everything that comes into their head, I mean, you have now, at the end of that journey, developed some very negative states of mind, you know, like, I just want to kill them. So, anyway, we can talk without purpose or without any sense of responsibility. Any talking that is mindless or of no real benefit is idle chatter.
So you know, what we do first thing in the morning is when we wake up we think, may everything that I say to others today help them. You just hold that in our heart all day long, may everything I say today help them. The simple way like this and then there’s no fear of this.
Sometimes things that may look like idle chatter, I mean, I’ve given this one a lot of thought, actually isn’t idle chatter. It can’t. But sometimes people, when you’re around people who are a little bit lonely or feeling awkward in a social situation and you’re just doing like chit chat.
I don’t think that is, because from your place what you’re doing is trying to make them feel welcome and trying to make them feel included in things, right? So that couldn’t possibly be idle chatter, even if we’re just talking about our shoes and where do you get your hair done. You know, it really depends on what our intentions are with our speech, doesn’t it? Any talking that is mindless or of no real benefit, idle chatter, unless it having, unless what I just said. This action can be nonverbal.
For example, if we spend a lot, this one’s interesting, if we spend a lot of time reading frivolous books full of romance and fantasy, this is the type of idle chatter. Now I think there is a time and a place for these things too, right? But let’s say, you know, it’s all I’m going to do all weekend long is I’m just going to Netflix out, I’m going to look for something that’s got six seasons, I’m going to just start it on Friday and go until Monday morning, and I like that. So that could be this.
That’s the question of how much might your question, yes, which is not to end to be interested in what is a valuable workshop. Right. Yeah, so only we know whether or not we are, you know, looking at others and deciding that they’re doing, that they’re up to idle chatter.
We could, we absolutely have no idea what their intentions are, do we? And it says more about us than it does about, you know, our judgments. Says really more about the reflection of our own thoughts. All right, but let’s say that you, because I have some Buddhist friends that they’ll have a, they’ll have a like a rough day or rough situation, and then they’ll just want to go and do some crossword puzzle on their phone.
And they’re doing it because they want their mind to disconnect from the hard situations that they were just in and the negative states that were arising. And so I think with this, we have to, we have to like check it because just having these, having our phones, they’re not evil, it just depends on what we’re using them for and what kind of negative states of mind or positive states of mind or neutral states of mind are coming from their use. All right, although this action is not by nature, although idle chatter is not by nature of severely non-virtuous action, if we indulge in this frequently, it will fill our life with trivialities and it will become a serious obstacle to our Dharma practice.
This is the main thing about idle chatter is that we just waste air. We just waste time, don’t we? We’re just wasting time not doing anything meaningful or not doing it, not training our mind. The action of idle chatter is complete when others have heard our words.
All right, so those are the four from the 10 non-virtuous actions, the four of speech. So, now I guess what we can do is comments and questions and anything else you’d like to bring up. Yes, yes, yeah, yep, yep, but what do you do? Well, I would, I mean, yeah, well, yeah.
I mean, personally, I would say, I’ve had a rough day today, you know, I think I’m just going to sit here and shut my eyes. And then I put earplugs in. I always carry earplugs with me.
That’s what I do. I wouldn’t try to tamp, personally, I wouldn’t try to tamp down their talking or anything like that. I would just excuse myself from the listening of it with a happy mind, try to have a happy mind.
Yeah, I mean, you know, even though we might want to point out other people’s, you know, what you’re doing right now is idle chatter, you know, what you’re doing right now is lying, you know, what you’re doing right now is hurtful speech. You know, even though we would, if someone’s lying, it’s probably not a bad idea to say, you know, I don’t think you’re telling the truth, to try to help them, right? And this is, but calling it out for, calling it out, little, we won’t have many friends, but that would be divisive speech. What to say, to say something to them, say something.
It would depend on what their motivation was. It would really depend on whether I’m trying to help them or not. I don’t know, I just try to let people be, you know, I don’t, unless they’re really harming others, then I might say something, but, yeah.
It depends. So what is gossip exactly? Gossiping is talking about others to others, isn’t it? So I think if, I think it crosses the line into gossip, like when, when we’re talking about these four, it might be, it could be lying. Gossip could involve some lying.
It could involve some divisive speech. If the people we were talking about hurt us, then it could be hurtful speech, and just idly chit-chatting about other people. People watching might be idle chatter, could be all of them, could have all of them, yeah, yeah.
Right. Yeah. Right.
Right. Were you going to, someone, I thought I saw a hand up. I had a question.
It’s sort of related. The thing that doesn’t compute in my mind is the, the idea that, like, if I, if I’m here now, and I have a past life, I have a future life, well, isn’t, like, this whole idea of self is like an empty… We have a subtle mind. We have a gross mind.
We have a subtle mind. And we have a very subtle mind, our root mind. It’s our root mind, very subtle mind, that’s what moves into the next life.
What’s appearing to us right now is a gross reality, gross mind. When we go to sleep tonight and we dream, our mind becomes more subtle. And so now we have a dream reality that’s appearing.
And so that’s our subtle mind dream world, and that’s a whole different world. Our very subtle mind manifests actually right before deep sleep and at the time of death. And for meditators that are meditating on ultimate truth emptiness, they can cause their very subtle mind to manifest.
They haven’t died and they’re not sleeping. That mind, its nature, that’s what we call in Kadampa Buddhism, our Buddha nature. That is the formless continuum.
It’s the root consciousness. And at the time of death, and this body no longer works, our gross minds all dissolve, they get subtler, subtler, subtler, they dissolve down into our root mind, and then our root mind then leaves and goes into the bardo, or intermediate state, and then it rebirths, it’s looking for that. So sentient beings, they have minds and they have bodies.
Death is the separation of this fleshy body and the root mind. But there is a body, it’s wind. It’s the very subtle wind and the very subtle mind, never separates, it’s deathless, and that’s what moves into next life.
And so in the intermediate state, then new body is, got new samsaric body, if you’re going to be reborn into samsara, into one of the realms, it will be in that state that you’ll get your next contaminated body, fleshy kind of body, or maybe not so fleshy, and then you have that life, and then you die and then you do it again. Well you’re imputing, since you’re imputing your sense of self on it, then it functions. And so of course what we’re trying to do with removing self-grasping, is that what we’re trying to realize is that this body that we normally see, it’s not our real body.
We stop grasping at it as being, this is me. Because what’s me, what’s self? The self is an imputation by mind on a body and a mind. This is not my body, it’s not you anymore, it’s not me.
Right, yeah. When we impute our sense of I onto ultimate truth, emptiness, now we’re, because now there is no self. But we’re impute, but mind will impute, mind’s, the definition of a mind is to cognize, to be aware, to impute, to appear.
And so minds impute on, impute things. Minds impute things. And so while I’m imputing my sense of self on wrong aggregates, and they suffer, and they die, and then I’m reborn, and then I’m, but it’s all the time I’m imputing.
Even in the bardo we’re imputing, we’re always imputing. We mean from one life to the next? What? What is being trans… There’s no… Yeah. So kadampas don’t believe that there is anything existing out there, which I believe is part of your question.
It’s like where is it, where is it going? But there is a moment that leads to the next moment, leads to the next moment, leads to the next moment. And within that moment there is this, there is a mind that’s cognizing, cognizing, cognizing, cognizing. And it doesn’t actually need to come from anywhere for it to go.
It’s just, it’s a momentary arising, like that. And so the root mind is simply leaving this life, going to get its next life. It doesn’t, doesn’t come from anywhere, it doesn’t go anywhere.
It’s no different than like the dream you had last night, like that person that was in that dream last night, or you in the dream last night. You were imputing your sense of I on a dream body, but where did it go when you woke up? Didn’t go anywhere, because it never was really there. It was just a projection, a mere appearance to the mind.
Everything is very subtle. We, what we believe is that everything is just very, very subtle, there isn’t anything that is like solid, inherently existent from its own side. So in one sense it makes no sense to talk about what’s going to the next life.
It’s just a subtle moment by moment by moment by moment mind that’s appearing a reality. I know, it’s crazy. Yeah, yes, all your karma is, all of the karma is, is, is, is planted on your, on your, on your root mind.
And that’s what we’re taking with us, that’s the only thing we take with us when we die, is all of the actions from this life, along with all of the karma we created from our previous lives, into our next life. But I mean, yeah, we can think of it like energy, I don’t think that’s, that’s, yeah. In this way of looking at it, how can we create positive karma that would move it into a… Yeah, that’s a, yeah, that’s a good question.
So what, with animals, they are in, they’re actually in a state of where they have, don’t have the mental capacity to be able to do any of this, or even understand these types of things, right? But they have from their previous lives, they have created, they have been, they’ve been human before, and they have created virtuous actions in the past. And so what will happen is that their opportunity to get out of that realm happens for them at the time of their death. And some, so for our pets and things, it’s important that we, we can help our pets die and have a human, human rebirth, because everyone has the karma to have any other realms, right? But so if you die with a peaceful mind, you’ll have a fortunate rebirth.
And so animals, wild animals, they, their opportunity is if, sometimes animals can die with a mind of, of, of like, like a type of peaceful love mind. And enlightened beings can bless their minds at that time. And when their minds are blessed, and they’re more peaceful, then what will ripen is the karma for them to have a human rebirth.
Yeah, so Buddhas do that. And then sometimes there’s a story of, of a, of a, he was really evil. And he met Buddha, and he wanted to ordain, and to be granted ordination, you have to have at least one virtuous seed on your mental continuum.
And everyone around Buddha said he doesn’t have any. And so Buddha said, that’s not true, he has one. In a previous life, he was a fly.
And as a fly, he landed on some dung. And that dung was, ended up in a river. And that river, it circumambulated a stupa.
And with his eye consciousness, he had some awareness of that holy object. And so he had that one, he had that one thing. He had that one thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That’s true. Yes. And these realms, they become resembling realms in the, because we can’t perceive of hungry ghosts and we can’t perceive of the God realm and the hell being realm.
But we can see peoples whose lives are resembling those, in those realms. And of course, these realms aren’t like destinations, they don’t have coordinates. They are appearances to the mind, aren’t they? They’re just a reality that’s appearing.
And we can perceive in the human realm, we can perceive of the animal realm. Some people can perceive of the ghost realm, the spirit realm. But gods can perceive of the human realm.
And I don’t know what hell beings can perceive of. I’m not, I don’t know. I don’t, I’ve never, never heard what they can perceive of.
They’re just experiencing such extreme suffering. I don’t think they’re really doing anything but trying to be free from that. Anything else? Well, I hope some of this was helpful, gave you some things to think about.
It’s been lovely to spend this evening with you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
