One of the greatest things that we find when we first learn about the Buddhist teaching, I think, is the sense of empowerment that it brings.
The sense of being in control, in a sense.
We always talk about how everything is anatta, uncontrollable.
But anatta has to do with our experience of things.
On a conventional level, Buddhism puts us very much in control.
the saying you only live once the saying that you only live once is a license of course to do whatever you want and to not take life seriously to just make it a good time but it's actually also quite scary I think you've only got one chance to
to live Buddhism is quite empowering or the idea of rebirth for example is quite empowering because it says you have another chance and another and another and another there is no you never hit the bottom
And you can just keep falling and falling until you find your wings.
There's no dead end.
There's no full stop at the end.
It's quite encouraging for people to hear this sort of thing.
Especially if they've been taught to believe that you only have one chance.
And it's empowering in another way.
The teaching on karma is of course very empowering because it says you're in charge of your destiny.
People always think of karma as relating to why I have to suffer so much in this life.
So instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you can feel guilty.
But karma isn't either.
The law of karma is a teaching to help us to see how much power we have.
How much power our actions have.
And in fact not to feel guilty or sorry for ourselves.
But to take it.
to be invigorated by it.
Why sit there wallowing in self-pity when you can do something about it?
That you're never helpless.
These two teachings combined are
incredibly empowering the fact that you have the time to do something about it and you have the ability to do something to change your life to change who you are we should never feel useless or hopeless we never have reason to feel hopeless if the path is going to take us a million lifetimes to reach the goal
Well, we have millions and millions and millions of lifetimes ahead of us.
We have uncountable lifetimes ahead of us.
So a million doesn't seem so bad anymore.
It's impossible to be hopeless.
Because you always have more time.
More time to learn, more time to
develop for someone who hasn't begun to develop themselves or hasn't set themselves on the idea of developing themselves and making themselves a better person then of course it's possible to spend an eternity just running around in circles
But rather than feeling discouraged by slow progress or minimum results, pitifully small realizations and seemingly poor practice, we should be invigorated by how
How possible it is for us.
How doable this is.
We have to think of the long term.
Maybe it will take a long time for us to become enlightened.
but by putting one foot in front of the other by working continuously we can make it there this is something that should be invigorating that should give us encouragement and keep us moving on the path it's only when we feel like it's hopeless that we stop but if you know that you can't go wrong you can't run out of time you can't fail
The only way you can fail in meditation is by stopping.
If you stop meditating, if you stop developing yourself, if you stop straightening your mind, if you stop learning about yourself, learning about experience, then you go back to running around in circles.
or staying put.
If you never move, you'll never get to the goal.
But here we have the time, we have the power to reach the goal.
Everyone does.
So with this power and with this potential, our first task as human beings is to reflect on how we best spend our time.
And you find this is a large part of the
question that we have as a human being.
What is the meaning of life?
What should I do with my life?
What should I make of my life?
Here I've been I've found myself in this state of being a human.
How should I live my life?
I think what's exciting or encouraging or heartwarming is how we found a way to live our life.
We've somehow managed to come to this way of life that is
quite meaningful and special and is taking the taking the bull by the horns taking life to task taking life seriously and here we have this time we have this life we have this strength and this this energy inside
and putting it to good use this was the Buddha's understanding or the Buddha's knowledge of what it means to live a blessed life or to have your life be a blessing and so one way of understanding our practice and our
Our goal or our way of finding meaning in life is that we should make our life a blessing.
That our life should be a blessing both to ourselves and to others.
It should be something special.
Once you see that you have the power, the time and the power
the ability to affect your life, then it seems obvious, really, that you should make your life a blessing.
And I think this is important to say is because without this feeling of empowerment and this feeling of the potential, this is what leads people to
these people to lose their dreams and to lose the give up the idea that they might be special to feel like they're all they're capable of is an ordinary life
How many people just live an ordinary life because they feel that's all they're capable of?
Because they don't see that they too are capable of a life of blessing, a special life, a life that is a blessing to the world, a life that is a blessing to themselves, to other people.
We have that potential.
This is the exciting thing.
We all have the potential.
But if we don't know it, if we don't realize it, if we don't have the encouragement and the confidence in ourselves, we'll never realize this potential.
We have the potential at all times.
Yet how many people never realize their potential?
Here we've come together out of some knowledge, maybe not perfect knowledge, but understanding that we have this potential.
That we have
the power to shape our own destiny.
That this is possible.
That it's possible to become free from suffering.
It's possible to become enlightened.
It's possible to reach the goal of existence, the pinnacle of existence.
This is possible for all beings.
It's just a matter of time, of how long it will take.
and whether they actually begin, whether they actually strive and utilize or see their potential to fruition.
So it's quite encouraging and something that I'd again like to
express my appreciation to see what we're doing what is happening in here and in this world among Buddhist circles that people are trying trying in a way that most people never try to become special to become blessed
to make something of their life beyond just money and possessions and sensual pleasures and beyond old age sickness and death, beyond just living your life to have a good death, but living your life to become eternal, to become immortal.
Living your life to see through death.
To see through old age.
To see through sickness.
To see through life.
Life.
Life lives.
To see through birth.
So we should never feel discouraged or unworthy or useless or poor meditators.
We should never feel like we're incapable or substandard.
We should never be afraid that we're not as good as other meditators or not as quick or not as
not as apt or capable as them.
We should feel confident, we should feel proud of ourselves, encouraged.
From my own point of view, it's quite exciting, it's quite
encouraging for myself to see and to feel great joy arising inside, rejoicing in seeing people really working to make themselves better, kinder, wiser.
It's something we shouldn't be afraid to be, in a sense, proud of or confident in.
Because this is what we're aiming for.
We're not aiming to hate ourselves.
We're not aiming to be angry or to deny ourselves.
We're aiming to be enlightened, to be noble.
something special.
We all have this potential.
We have to encourage it in ourselves and in others.
The Buddha had much to say on what it means to live a blessed life, what it means to live a special life.
He gave this talk, a very famous discourse on the blessing.
And if you look at it, you can see really how to live your life in a blessed way.
It's the perfect outline for how to live your life.
How to live a life of blessing.
Live your life as a blessing.
Live a special life.
Live a noble life.
So it's important for us to remember these things, first of all for guidance of course, first and foremost to guide us away from improper or deleterious practices that make us become base and impure, and to encourage us, to guide us towards those practices that
are beneficial both to ourselves and others and really improve both our own lives and the world around us.
But the other useful thing is to give us encouragement when we see that our lives are special because of this, that our lives do have blessings in them.
This is called counting your blessings.
So if we talk about counting your blessings in Buddhism, we have 37 blessings that we can count in the Mahamangala Sutta, a very popular sutta that most Buddhists who were raised Buddhist have heard and oftentimes memorized at some point in their lives.
one that we chant quite often at ceremonies, at blessings and so on, because it is a story about blessings.
In the time of the Buddha, everyone was asking, what is a blessing?
What are blessings?
So some people said when you hear this bird or that bird, it's a blessing.
Some people said when you see this or see that, it's a blessing.
These omens.
Or some people said a horseshoe is a blessing or a rabbit's foot is a blessing.
Lucky, you know.
These are things that are able to have some magical power to them.
Everyone had a different idea about what was lucky, or what had the ability to ward off evil.
Because the word is manga.
Manga means evil.
La means to destroy or to kill, to vanquish the evil.
So, for example, when you say something unlucky, you knock on wood.
And that's a mangala, because it's able to destroy.
People say it's able to get rid of the jinx.
They say when you put a horseshoe over your door, it's able to ward off evil.
When you wear a cross or something around your neck, it's able to ward off evil.
Vampires and so on.
and so everyone was asking this and this was a philosophical question that got to the angels and the angels took it up as a topic of conversation and they went all the way to the king of the angels to Sakka, the king of the angels who we learned about in the Dhammapada and he told them to go to see the Buddha and the Buddha is the one who will know and so one angel went to see the Buddha and asked him why
said that everyone's wondering what are the blessings.
And Buddha told what are the 37 blessings in life.
And so it became quite a famous, well-remembered discourse.
We can start, we can go through some of these here, maybe tonight we'll go through some, and then the next days we can go through some and try to finish them all.
just to give us an idea of how our practice should progress, talk about wholesome qualities.
One of the greatest
assistance for the development and the cultivation of mind of course is the discussion or the talk listening to talk or even discussing wholesome and unwholesome qualities profitable talk talking about good things encouraging each other in good things so the first blessings are asevana jabalanam
not associating with fools, with unwise people, with foolish people.
Associating with wise people.
Paying homage to those worthy of homage.
This is the first stanza.
So thinking about these ones, first off, that should really give us confidence in what we're doing and how lucky we are to have found a community where we don't want to brag or not to say that we're special, but that the people here are not fools.
If you look around this monastery, you don't see fools.
You don't see foolish people.
Some people might say, well, Tarindu can be foolish at times.
But we know, from a Buddhist point of view, we know what it means to be a fool.
It doesn't mean to joke or to laugh or to be simple or to be unintelligent and unlearned in math or science or so on.
To be a fool means someone who's engaged in evil deeds, drinking and
killing and stealing and lying and cheating and so on, drugs and alcohol, gambling, engaged in debauchery and partying and all of these things.
We're able to avoid so many unwholesome relationships just by being here, no?
In this world we depend on the people around us.
We rely on them.
We rely on community, we rely on society.
And so often it's the society, the community itself becomes a danger to us.
With thieves, with cheats,
liars, murderers, rapists, all kinds of evils in the world.
And look what we found.
We found a small group of people who share a like interest, and that interest happens to be the development of purity, the development of goodness.
Where will you find a group of people
who are actively working day in and day out to remove the anger from their mind, remove the greed from their mind, to remove conceit and views and so on, who might have all of these things.
But what are they doing?
What is their activity day in and day out?
It's to become better people, to make their life a blessing for themselves and for others.
we have that, we have a community not to feel complacent or brag about it or so on but to feel good about ourselves to feel confident that we can do this we have blessings already paying homage to those worthy of homage
In Buddhism, in a religious sense, this is something that occurs in all religions.
Paying respect to God or paying respect to your religious leader, if it's a cult or so on, you pay respect to the cult leader.
And even in Buddhism we talk a lot about paying respect to the Buddha, how great it is to bow down to the Buddha and to recite the Buddha's qualities and so on.
But this is an ordinary way of paying homage that you see in all religions.
It's worth discussing, and respect in general is worth discussing, because
It's a very common thing nowadays to find that people don't want to respect their teachers or don't want to respect their elders, don't want to respect anyone in terms of putting anyone higher than themselves.
Puja really means putting something higher than yourself.
On an ultimate reality level, there's a good point there, but the problem is people are unable to separate ultimate reality from convention.
And we can't live just on the ultimate reality level.
We can't function.
It's lying to yourself.
We can't even talk without using conventions.
So when you try to talk in terms of ultimate reality, like we're all equal because everything is equal, you're conflating two levels of reality.
You're talking about beings, and yet you're talking about them as if they were ultimate reality.
So you're just lying to yourself.
The only way to exist on a conventional level is to have respect for those people who have given you support and who have been a guide for you, and so on.
So this is one important reason why this is a blessing in all religions, not even just in religion, in all facets of life, all aspects of life.
This is why paying respect to your parents is a blessing.
Because on a conventional level that is the truth.
They are your God.
They are the God for the children.
they are the ones who provide for us they are the ones who created us it's all conventional level but we don't discard the conventional level all of our lives is conventional even the lives of arahants it's all conventional even though they see ultimate reality they don't go around saying I'm not your husband that's not my you call them by their name they say I'm not that name I'm just Rupa and Nama they don't say that
When someone calls them by their name they accept that that's their name.
When they talk about people they talk about them as people.
Paying homage is, on a conventional level, it's how we have to live our lives.
If you want harmony, if you want peace, if you want to really and truly develop and cultivate this blessed life, you have to be respectful and humble.
How it creates humility to put someone above you.
In the Buddha's time, there's a good example of this.
The Buddha's relatives all decided to go forth.
There was Ananda and Devadatta and Anuruddha and Baddhya and Upali.
There were a couple of others and then there was Upali.
Upali wasn't one of his relatives.
Upali was their barber.
And
They asked Upali to go with them, to escort them, to be their bodyguard sort of as they left.
Not exactly bodyguard, but their messenger.
Because what they did is then they took off all of their ornaments and so on and gave them to Upali and said, take these back and tell everyone that we've gone forth.
And you be the messenger to let them know that we've gone forth.
And Upali, as they were walking away, Upali looked at the ornaments and he said, if I go back with these, people are going to think I killed them or something.
People are going to think that maybe I...
something bad happened to them he said I'm not going to go back I can't go back and he said I want to go and be a monk as well so he decided that he would join them and he asked permission and they gave him permission to join them but then they had a problem because they said amongst themselves that if they went forth and Upali went forth as well they'd still always be thinking about him as a servant
As their barber And he said this would be Something that gave them conceit And would be difficult for their practice So what they did is They went to the Buddha And they asked the Buddha permission To allow Upali to ordain before them
And the Buddha gave this permission and Upali ordained first of all of them.
And this means that Upali was senior to all of them.
And they all had to bow down to Upali.
And this was their idea, this was their plan to help them to become free from conceit.
You see how important and how seriously they took this one.
Some people are unable, unable to respect others, unable to put others above them, their teachers.
I know how it is in high school.
We always thought that our teachers were just people as well.
What need should we have to respect them?
We think they're getting paid and they're doing it because they get the money or so on.
It's just such a horrible way to think.
It's certainly not the truth.
But we treat them poorly and with no respect.
And they have to use rules and discipline to keep us in line.
It's quite horrible, really.
So this is one way of understanding this one.
But of course in a Buddhist sense nothing can ever be left on the conventional level.
So the Buddha himself didn't rest at that.
Of course he didn't ever deny it and he was very clear that on a conventional level this is important.
This seniority and paying respect to those who have helped you before.
and parents and teachers and even just anyone who supported you.
Sariputta, for example.
Sariputta was the best example, I think, of gratitude.
Because his first teacher, Asaji, every day he would bow down.
If he knew that Asaji was in this direction or that direction, he would bow down in that direction out of respect for Asaji.
But it wasn't only his teachers.
One time there was this one man who nobody would ordain him.
I think probably because he was old.
He was even older than Palanyani, I think.
And so they didn't want to ordain him.
No, he must have been quite old.
and I think there were other reasons, maybe he had some kind of conceit or so on, so they didn't want to ordain him.
And I think there were other reasons, like he was serving them, so they were happy that he was a layman, that's what it was.
He was so useful to them, and they needed a steward, so they didn't want to ordain him.
This you find in monasteries, even nowadays.
You have the steward who wants to ordain, but they think, well, if you ordain, then we've got no steward, so they push them not to ordain.
It wasn't that he was old.
And so he went to the Buddha and he asked, when am I going to ordain?
And the Buddha said, well, is there no one here who will ordain you?
And everyone was quiet.
And he said, is there anyone here who can think of a reason to ordain him?
And Sariputta spoke up.
He said, one time, he said, I'll ordain him.
And this Brahmin, one time he gave me a spoonful of rice.
And this is a story that we tell even nowadays, that over a spoonful of rice, Sariputta was willing to do what nobody else would do and ordain this guy.
This is the reason why Sariputta spoke up and said he would ordain him, because he said, this Brahmin has given us something, a single spoonful of rice, probably not even, not enough to eat, not enough for a meal, just that.
And he had this kind of respect.
So anyone who's helped us, anyone who's given us things, people who have supported the monastery or supported the meditation center,
There should be a certain sense of puja there as well, where we respect and pay homage to these people.
And when they come to the monastery, we always think of how helpful they've been to us.
And as a result, we always make a wish in our hearts that somehow we can give something to them, and teaching them, and so on.
At least being hospitable.
So this is on a conventional level, but on an ultimate level, the puja that we're
exhorted to undertake by the Buddha, the paramaya puja, the highest puja, the highest form of homage.
It's called patipati puja.
It's like that saying, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
It's along the same lines, really.
Imitation is the most sincere form of homage.
Practicing someone's teachings, practicing the teacher's teachings, following the teacher's advice is the most sincere form of homage.
When we practice the Buddha's teaching, when we follow the Buddha's teaching, this is what it means to pay homage to the Buddha.
So in that sense, on an ultimate level, it's not even a matter of thinking of the Buddha as higher than us.
But it's this acceptance and agreement in our minds, this bringing our minds in line with what the Buddha taught.
That is, in and of itself, an homage or obviously a respect.
The highest respect is emulating the life of the Buddha.
emulating the mind of the Buddha to our best ability so this the Buddha said these three the Buddha said these are three of life's greatest blessings and here of course you can see quite clearly we have all three of them this is something that made me think of this tonight
that here we have a we have set ourselves we've made this wish and this intention and we have set ourselves in a place and in a community
We have made a determination in our minds that we're not going to live amongst the foolish people who spend their lives drinking and gambling and carrying on like there's no consequences of action.
People who don't understand karma don't see that life is not static.
The mind is not fixed and all of our actions affect our mind.
These people who corrupt their minds and corrupt the people around them and create stress and addiction and friction and conflict in the society and the community around them.
We've decided we want to leave that behind.
The Buddha gives this story about that's supposed to happen sometime in the future when the majority of society will decide, will get so based that they will
lose all sense of morality and they will copulate like animals and treat each other like animals raping and taking and stealing and taking advantage of each other like animals and killing each other like animals hunting each other like animals there will be a constant state of war
But he says there will be a certain faction of society, of the world, that decides this is not for them.
Decides that they don't want to take life.
They don't want to engage in such a horrific act.
And goes off and lives in the forest.
And it's these people, he says, that will begin the new society, will begin to change the world.
It's always something to think about that we're a part of that society.
We're a part of that tradition that will be carried on and who knows if none of us then maybe the people we the people we inspire will be those people.
The reason why those people will exist is because we're carrying on this tradition now.
People like us are carrying on this tradition where we have
broken through, broken free from the feelings of helplessness, from the addictions and the hopelessness that people come to, thinking that the best they can ever hope for is a life of sensuality and a life free from physical discomfort.
They have nothing higher in their minds than these base desires and base addictions.
Don't ever think to practice meditation.
Don't ever think to make themselves better.
Don't ever think to respect the truth.
When we talk about respecting for the Buddha, we talk about respecting his, we have to think of respecting the truth.
So this word respect has another meaning, like when you respect the law, or when you respect the laws of physics.
Everything has to respect the laws of physics, it can't break them.
So if we try to break them, we only meet with failure.
Try to break the laws of physics, disrespect the laws of physics, and it only comes back to bring frustration.
The same goes with the extension, which is the laws of the mind.
If you try to break these laws, if you don't respect the truth, which is what we mean by paying homage, really on an ultimate level, what we mean by paying respect to those things worthy of respect, it's not just a being, it's the truth.
The truth is immutable.
It's unbreakable.
So it's true that when we have impurity in our mind, it will lead to suffering in the future.
When we develop purity in our minds, it will lead to happiness, it will lead to peace.
So this is on an ultimate level what we mean by the respect, by paying respect.
This is why the Buddha said it is practice, because our minds should be set on becoming harmonious and in harmony with reality.
On an ultimate level, that's the highest form of respect that exists.
It's the respect for the laws of nature, respect for the laws of the mind and the laws of karma and action, the laws of existence.
And so it actually really just means wisdom to understand reality.
Because when we understand reality, we act according to it.
A person who knows the truth will never act in a way to harm themselves.
If we know that something is going to cause us suffering, we'll never do it.
The only reason why we cause ourselves suffering
It's because we don't see clearly that it's causing us suffering.
It can't be that if we knew it was the cause of suffering that we would perform it.
If we knew that it was something bad, we could never, logically, we could never perform it.
So our practice is what is meant here.
These are great blessings, to have the
as came up today, the idea of having a teacher.
That's not even just having a teacher, it's being associated with good people.
To have these reminders, even just to have a group to practice meditation with.
But of course to hear the Dhamma, to hear anyone speaking the Dhamma,
It's really a much easier thing than to actually practice the Dhamma.
So encouraging people to become teachers, I think, is a very important thing.
People always think they're not qualified to teach.
Oh, I'm not a very good practitioner.
How could I possibly teach?
Teaching is much easier than practicing.
All meditators should engage in it.
Not because they want to be teachers.
but because of the importance it plays in living a blessed life.
we're going to surround ourselves with good people.
The only way we can do this is to be a good person ourselves.
If we want to be surrounded by people who are kind and generous and helpful, and of course kind and generous and helpful, of course, on an ultimate level means, in terms of the Dhamma, people who are kind enough to support our practice, people who are helpful enough,
to be able to guide our practice if we want to be surrounded by such people we have to be such a person ourselves we can't just take and expect never to have to give it's part of the law of karma part of reality you must be like the people you wish to be around so if you want to be around people who are
good teachers you have to be a good teacher yourself this is I think one of the great karmas that must come from teaching people is that you'll never be without a teacher yourself you'll never have to meet you'll never have to want for a teacher I always feel how blessed I was to have such a wonderful teacher who I consider to be such a wonderful teacher
And so I'm very happy to be teaching other people because I know that if all it means is that I get to meet people like him in the future, then that's enough reason for me to make it part of my life.
And in the future I will always have those people who can guide me.
So these are three of life's greatest blessings.
We kind of overlook them sometimes and think how simple they are.
But the Buddha was very clear that this is the whole of the holy life.
The whole of the spiritual life is associating with people who are spiritual.
and dissociating from people who are unspiritual, because we guide each other, we help each other.
We can't see our own eyes.
Without a mirror, we can't see our own face.
And without wisdom, we can't see our own minds.
So for us to develop wisdom is something that requires assistance, requires guidance, requires support.
That's what we have here.
So these are the first three blessings.
We're going to try to get through the sutta eventually.
We have 34 left to go.
Isn't that exciting?
Here we have three of life's greatest blessings and that's not it.
There's 34 more that we can be happy about and feel good about and feel confident about.
Here we are developing all of these wonderful things.
And if we're not, if we're lacking in some of them,
Now we'll know what they are.
Now we'll realize and adjust ourselves appropriately.
So I think that's a good start on the Mangala Sutta.
We can finish as we go, day by day.
So now on with our practice.
We listen to the Dhamma is like reading the roadmap.
Now we have to walk the path.
Now we have to actually follow the path.
Listening to the Dhamma is useful.
Listening to the Dhamma is helpful.
But we have to put it into practice.
And our practice shouldn't be intellectual and shouldn't be...
It shouldn't be just based on suttas or what we've read or what we've heard.
We have to be careful sometimes that it can be just an intellectual thing.
But I don't think we have really that problem.
It's just a standard warning that I think is worth giving and worth us keeping in mind.
That we're here to find the wisdom within ourselves, to find the truth inside of ourselves.
But I know that this is what we're doing and this is what is so inspiring about being in this type of community and it's something that
gives one encouragement in working to maintain and working to support this kind of a community, working to cultivate and to protect this kind of a place.
at the very least to express appreciation for it.
And we should be clear in our minds that this is a blessing that we have here, something that's not easy to find in the world.
and to make the best of it and to use our time here wisely not let the moment pass us by don't let the moment pass you by so here we have the time let's make the most of it so now as a group if you want to practice we'll do mindful prostration and then walking in and sitting