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Good morning and welcome from Jewel Heart Netherlands. First of all I would like to give the greetings of the people here to all of you who are listening to me and watching me. So this is Tibetan Buddhism with Gelek Rimpoche and the subject we need to talk about today is one of the essence points of Tibetan Buddhism. I always emphasize that Tibetan Buddhism is very much Buddhism and there is not so much difference. However, it has its own unique qualities. Today I would like to emphasize one of these: morality. Many people may think or even say that this is vajrayana, or the mahasiddha path and you may not need to emphasize the morality aspects to much. They say that when you reach a certain level you have gone beyond the discipline. Sometimes even we remember very well in the west that “Crazy Wisdom” has been misunderstood or rather, has been misused. Many difficulties have occurred. The misunderstanding is that when you reach higher levels morality is not an issue. Perhaps that is one of the biggest misunderstandings. Without morality there is no fundamental basis of individual practitioners. Buddha emphasizes so much three things: morality, concentration and wisdom. These are known as the Three Higher Trainings. Whether it is Buddhism that went to the South and South-East of India or the Buddhism that travelled to the north and north-west parts of India. For all Buddhists these three points are so important that without them the practitioner cannot make it.

Morality is very important. Sometimes people may have the misunderstanding, thinking that morality is only about sexual orientation or that type of category. That is not true. Buddha’s morality is based on three important things:

1. Restraining from wrong doing

That refers to creating negative actions and negative karma and building negativities. That becomes negative karma. Negative karma gives you negative consequences. People do not build negative karma if they don’t have negative emotions. If you are able to manage your emotions in general and in particular the negative emotions then chances are that you may not create so many negativities. When you don’t do that, as a result your suffering is not only reduced but even will be eliminated completely, throughout your life and lives. One of the principles is honoring the morality. Wrong and right in one way is very questionable. Certain “right” things become wrong for some. Some wrong things become right for others. So it is difficult to say what is really right and wrong, but in general I would like to emphasize that any activities that we engage that create pain and suffering, including ourselves, are wrong and are negative.

That’s one of the reasons why Buddha is so much for non-violence. Compassion, love and non-violence. Violence creates pain and more violence. Non-violence does give good results, whether it is the individual or the collective, i.e society. Look at the actions of Mahatma Gandhi. He based his actions on Indian philosophy, also the Buddha’s philosophy and adopted non-violence to challenge the huge British empire. That British empire was so big that “the sun never sets on the crown of England”. The British empire occupied a huge part of the world at that time. It was the biggest nation in the world. Gandhi, almost just one person, wearing a sarong, with a little stick in hand and maybe a little goat with him, challenged that empire and finally India became independent. So did many other nations, as we know today.

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Buddha emphasized non-violence because violence is immoral and non-violence is immoral. That’s one reason. Another reason is that if you believe in reincarnation and activities of life after life, you want to bring good future lives as beings like us human beings, with intelligence, stable life, and a reasonably good mind. That is the result of perfect morality. The question was asked to Buddha, “What is the way to gain a respectable life like this?” The reply that Buddha gave was: morality.

If you ignore morality you are ignoring our fundamental principle or cause to be able to have a good life. So it is important to pay attention. So much about restraining from wrong doing.

2. Accumulating or collecting virtues.

This is also morality. Those of us who claim to be following the spiritual path and the path that Buddha shared, if we do not collect virtues and pay no attention to virtue and non-virtue our claim of being spiritual practitioners is perhaps simply just words, without meaning. To me, spirituality really means not so much mysticism, but a simply grounded level of spirituality, meaning building positive deeds, building virtuous deeds as much as possible. If you are able to build virtues and avoid negativities and non-virtues then we are on the right track. That begins to build a basic, proper strong principle of a fundamental, perfect life.

3. Helping living beings

I am using the word “living beings”, not just human beings. The Buddha’s point of view is that every creature that has life is important. Most important are of course the human beings. But every other creature that has life is very, very important. There is the need to serve and help. Itg is rare in the sense of being the truth, not in the sense of being difficult to find.

How do you help? Not by overly bothering and pushing them around. When I first got to the United States, I had very interesting visitors, the Jehova’s Witnesses. They are nice and kind and great people. They would visit you very often. Maybe they would take a lot of your time. If you are not busy, then that’s fine. So when I talk about help it is not in that way. There are mental, physical and emotional ways of helping and serving. I would like to emphasize one thing: the way we make ourselves better and help ourselves, is by helping others.

Imagine you can save somebody’s life by one of our acts. How happy we would be. We would be very happy that we could save somebody’s life. That shows that helping others is actually helping yourself. Helping others is actually building our own positive deeds. It is actually helping yourself and uplifting yourself in your spiritual path. The Buddha calls that reaching to enlightenment. The way to reach to total enlightenment is through helping and serving others, particularly, the precious human mind called “bodhimind” is the unlimited, unconditional, ultimate compassion and love.

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That compels the individual to do nothing but help, because it is fulfilling your own purposes and that of others. That’s why morality of service becomes extremely important.

The second point I would like to raise out of the Three Higher Trainings is concentration and focusing. We normally call that meditation. Sometimes, when you use the word “meditation” it may be a little juicy and people may enjoy that. For some others it may be a word they don’t want to hear. To me, meditation is focusing and concentrating. Actually, I should tell you, otherwise I will be a failure in my work, that when you talk about meditation, in Tibetan Buddhism and within that, Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa’s tradition, meditation really refers to two types of mind: focusing and concentrating is a fundamental basis of meditation and on top of that one has to be able to do a critical analysis of the subject that you are focusing on – along with the focusing. If you lose the focus and try to do critical analysis it will not be critical analysis. It will be just analyzing and traveling in your mind on and on where it will lead you. It will not have that much effect. When you have the focus plus critical analysis that will give you the true facts.

These two, concentration and analysis have to be combined together. If there is no analysis there is no wisdom. Without wisdom ignorance takes over. When that happens the consequences are not preferable. But wisdom is the one that gives you the light, that clears the darkness of ignorance. Without wisdom, whatever we do is not necessarily great, particularly on the spiritual path. This is an unknown path, even though meditation is common and the spiritual path has been with humanity for thousands of years, but even then, it is uncommon. We are travelling in uncharted territories. So it is very important not to be flying around. I call that being grounded. In order to be grounded you have to understand the points you are focusing on. Without analyzing the understanding will be superficial. Particularly in Buddha’s wisdom, analysis is important. Buddha’s wisdom is normally known as emptiness. Many people think that the moment we use the word “empty” that this means it is totally empty. But it is not. It is not the emptiness of nothingness. It is the emptiness that is the lack of inherent existence. Truly speaking, bare bones, bottom line, emptiness is nothing but interdependence. That is actually the nature of all our existence. It is dependent origination. It is the true nature of our life. To be able to understand that we need focusing and analyzing. Both are necessary. Otherwise we don’t get it.

To a certain extent people can get it – even today, for example by scientific ways. But it is limited and only works up to a certain extent. One of the principles is focusing, or if you want me to say it more mystically: meditation. I am just briefly mentioning them. I am not giving you the details of meditation and analysis. But in order to make the individual feel and be grounded in Tibetan Buddhism, these points are needed. Just like morality is important, likewise here the wisdom of understanding as well as the focusing is needed. Together these three are called the Higher Trainings within Tibetan Buddhism.

People who are doing studies and are practicing and contemplating, should be doing it within these three points. When you have morality, that itself will bring you very good results. Each of these principle points will bring you good results.

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On the other hand I would also like to emphasize that we are not talking about morality in the sense of sexual orientation. Ethics is important in every work we do, even in non-spiritual, ordinary work. We have to have ethics, otherwise you have no idea what you are achieving. We need discipline. Otherwise we try to achieve something on one level, but are pushing back to another level and go backwards. If that happens we are not really helping ourselves much. Many people who are engaged in the spiritual practices throughout the world think that they are doing spiritual work because they are doing something other than the usual, “normal” things. But anything abnormal is not necessarily perfect spiritually. To me the measurement of spiritual development is the measurement of whether the individual person is getting better or worse or is making no progress. That’s what we look for. If you have no progress, no matter whatever you are doing for years, it’s a problem. We have a saying in Tibetan: you are taken over by the current, but you still keep on thinking you are swimming and in control. But it is a mistake and you are the loser.

Like that, many people doing spiritual practice keep on thinking, “I am fine”, without making any progress. The check and balance is extremely important in spiritual practice. It is also important in Tibetan Buddhism. You need that. If not, you have no idea what’s going on. You pretend and hope, but that’s not right. So you need morality, concentration and wisdom. That will provide the check and balance. Particularly, what you are doing is helping or harming. Helping others or helping yourself. Even helping one person is better than not helping. What Buddha wanted is helping every living being. This is something very important and also very common in Buddhism. I don’t know if people are paying attention to that or not. Every praise we say, every meditation we do includes saying “for the benefit of all beings”. We say that and we act that way, but I don’t know if we are really doing it for the benefit of all beings or not. Sometimes unfortunately, it is just words, not any actions. People may say the words and there is nothing to follow with words and actions. That is not right. Saying the words is unique to Tibetan Buddhism. We have a lot of words to say. But each one of those words those earlier master have provided, gives us a perfect practice, a complete path, from A to Z, to be able to fit within a reasonable timing and the words have been provided for that. They are also like a basic framework to follow the ideas and thought processes. If the basis of the words is not there, there is no principle to follow. It almost looks like my talk! Without basis – I am going all over the place, as you can see. But Tibetan Buddhism has the unique quality of not doing that, because the words that are provided keep you together.

Sometimes I see a play or entertainment performance of all kinds of unrelated things put together, but there is some theme – either the music or an idea that keeps things together. Like that, sometimes the music in an opera provides different performances coming together, although they are completely separate. That’s also what the words do. So the words are very important in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. We had millions of great teachers in the past 2000 years. These great masters, on the basis of their experiences, kept the sequences of the practices properly together and they did that with the words. Meditation is lined up. Prayer is lined up and the words keep the sequence. So words are more important in Tibetan Buddhism than elsewhere. In old Tibet, when I was still there, the society was not that educated. There was huge illiteracy. The number of people who could read and write was very limited. Maybe a few percent, not even 10 per cent. But although most were illiterate, more or less all were practitioners. 90 per cent were practitioners. The way their practices were kept alive is by those words.

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They memorized the words and thus kept a comprehensive practice. I am saying “comprehensive” because sometimes there is a basic difference I noted. Sometimes in the west prayer means just one thing: simply wishing. You call that prayer. Another thing is praising the object of refuge. But the Tibetan Buddhist prayer is different. It gives you all different ways in as comprehensive form from A to Z. You must be wandering what I am talking about. Let’s say a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner wants to have a good human life, just like what we have today, for his next life. For that they pick up a certain prayer and that prayer will tell you about the fundamental cause that provides for a human life and what is the requirement to mature that cause. What conditions do you need? Remember, the Buddhist principle is that of dependent origination. It depends on causes and conditions. Both are provided by the individual. This prayer gives you morality as the cause of a good life. This prayer gives you the 6 perfect activities as the conditions you need for a good future life. These are generosity, morality (you see there is morality again), patience, enthusiasm, concentration and wisdom. So when you say a prayer, it is worded in such a way that the individual, by saying the words, is already working for perfect morality and not only in thoughts and deeds, but also the motivation is moving. The words you say make you adopt that action. You are not just praying to a Buddha to grant your wishes. But you are repeatedly saying that and the resulting thoughts are reminding you. Thoughts are built by ourselves, because the idea pops up. The prayers will give you the ideas, which bring the thoughts, which bring actions. The actions will bring the results. That’s how the individual can improve, even by simply praying or attending a service.

I am not from the Judeo-Christian background. I presume in a service you are praising the Lord and so forth. Maybe I am wrong, but the Tibetan Buddhist service doesn’t commonly use the words “service”, but there are prayers. They provide the individual with guidelines not only to please the buddhas, but to engage in actions yourself, such as purifying wrong doings, admiring the qualities of the objects we worship, admiring good deeds of anyone, which we call rejoicing.

When we say “purify”, simply saying “I purify” does not become purification. Sometimes we say a lot of “sorry, sorry”, which does not mean anything. In that manner it does not work. Purifying here really means regretting the negative things we have done and also committing not to repeat them. It also includes compensating those we have hurt. Then also doing the right thing – not to balance, but to replace the wrong deeds. Can that be done? That’s another question. But from the point of view of effort we want to make all of them available. When you talk about prayer and service in Tibetan Buddhism it includes all of that. That becomes a complete practice. What are you practicing? You purify negativities, build positive deeds and help others. Thus you fulfill the three points of morality.

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These again are the morality of restraining from wrong doing, accumulating virtues and helping others. Things that already have been done are done, but how can we change that? That is part of the morality of restraint. The morality of building merit and positive deeds is done by rejoicing. That’s one of the keys to double and triple your good karma. So accumulating merit and acting virtuously is done. That is also the way how to help all beings. So the combination of these three is the morality that is so much emphasized in Buddha’s teachings. That has been followed by Tibetan Buddhists for over 1000 years. That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Morality is very important. Without that we get nowhere, according to Buddha.

I would like to say thank you. Since I am in Europe today I can’t take your questions. Next week I will also be talking with you from here. Thank you so much.

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