10/07/2024
The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind is one of the most beloved free books from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive. The six teachings contained in this volume come from Lama Yeshe’s 1975 visit to Australia. They are all filled with love, insight, wisdom and compassion, and accessible question-and-answer sessions.
🪷Today we share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind, “Buddhism: Something For Everybody” from a talk given by Lama Yeshe at Prince Phillip Theatre, Melbourne University, April 4, 1975. Edited by Nicholas Ribush:
🙏Some people think they know all about Buddhism and Buddhists just because they’ve read a couple of books. They pick one up, “Hmm. Let’s see what this book says. Well, according to this it seems that Buddhists are really extreme. They believe in all sorts of strange stuff.” They pick up another: “My goodness, Buddhists are completely nihilistic.” They draw all sorts of wrong conclusions based on extremely limited information; they don’t see anything like the whole picture. This is very dangerous.
Perhaps they read something from the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, which is known for its rigorous intellectual approach to the subject of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, and can be very difficult to understand. This can lead them to think, “Oh, Buddhists aren’t religious; they’re atheists. They don’t believe anything; they think that nothing exists. How can they consider themselves religious?” This too can be very dangerous.
Other people might conclude, “Wow! Buddhists believe in three Gods. They say Buddha is one God; Dharma is another; Sangha a third. They must be super-believers. That’s too much. In the West, we’ve never heard of such a thing as three Gods; only one. We’re religious, but we only have one God. We can’t even agree with the Buddhists on how many Gods there are.”
If you look at just one tiny aspect of Buddhism, of course it might appear too much for you. But Buddhism is not just about one or two small things; it is not some tiny philosophy. Lord Buddha explained the nature of every single phenomenon in the universe.
At this stage, I have had about nine or ten years’ experience teaching Buddhist philosophy to Westerners and experimenting with how it fits their minds, mainly in the one-month meditation courses we hold each year at Kopan Monastery in Nepal. In these courses we try to explain everything, but I have found that if we talk too much about the negative side of things, students completely freak out. Not all of them, but many do. They say, “These lamas emphasize the negative too much. Why don’t they talk more about the positive? Buddhism isn’t only about delusion and suffering. Why do they teach us this negative stuff day after day?”
But the thing about Buddhism is that before you can put yourself into the positive path to liberation, enlightenment or God—whatever you want to call it, the name doesn’t matter—you have to know how your negative mind works.
If you don’t understand how the two extreme negative views of overestimation and underestimation function within you, how can you correct your actions and put yourself into the right path? Therefore, it is crucial to know the negative aspects of your nature. Actually, if you comprehend the evolution of your negative mind from beginning to end, you’ll feel very comfortable. Conversely, if you don’t know how it works, you’ll finish up thinking that negative actions are positive.
🌷Photo: Lama Yeshe At Chenrezig Institute, Australia, 1975. Photo courtesy of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.
https://fpmt.org/lama-yeshes-wisdom/lama-yeshes-wisdom-buddhism-has-something-for-everybody/
