Nature of Mind | Buddhism & The Big Questions - Sangharakshita's Birthday Celebration

so yes um just sit comfortably for a minute [Music] so i don't know whether or not we're online but i think we probably are so welcome there's a camera if you want to turn around and wave you're welcome wave at the camera so uh well welcome everyone don't say hello to your mother um what you can do actually it's just a lot of mothers um so welcome to everyone online uh very very good that you can join us you've just joined us in the middle of our first evening on our nature of mind retreat called buddhism and the big questions and uh something weird is it's like a studio audience and we have a studio audience of 120 people uh we don't we're so this is the beginning of our retreat and we've just been introducing ourselves uh to each other and introducing the team so yes welcome if you're just this moment tuning in from all over the world do uh let us know in the chat this is very odd doing this when there's no computer around me but anyway do let us know in the chat where you're from um do say hello to people on the retreat they won't be looking because they've turned their phones off but they'll get back to you at the end of the retreat i'm sure so what we're going to be doing now is slightly unusual sort of change we're going to uh well we always finish these evenings with a a special ritual um to dedicate ourselves to retreat it's not just enough to talk about a retreat and to even you know extol the value of engaging and relaxing and serving we need to do something that really marks that and you know in a while i'll be asking about vadrashira to lead us in a ritual that we dedicate ourselves to this retreat and in the context of that ritual those of you on the retreat will be taking um one of these books that we've made especially of excerpts from banti sangreshi's thoughts about the nature of mind and you'll be taking them from the shrine as the as the moment of the retreat really starts so you'll be taking from the shrine um the buddhist wisdom of the nature of mind the whole real the whole tradition of the nature of mind from a buddhist point of view but it's also an auspicious evening for those of us particularly in the order of those of us who have been involved with the tree around the buddhist order and movement perhaps for some time i've been i was ordained in 1990 sana was the day when you were ordained 1974 she's history isn't it i was he still looks very young yeah so one of the things so you know it's for us it's an important moment because today is bantay sangrachtha's birthday um i remember celebrating many birthdays with banter when he was alive i did a comedy routine laughter it was actually quite funny uh thank you johanna watches nodding sagely um i did a comedy i think for his 75th which he thought was very funny and he liked my facial expressions anyway um you don't need to know that um but for us you know bente's birthday is very important but of course to some of you here that that wrote won't really mean anything obviously but so i want to just mention how it does mean something and it means this whole great question of learning and growing and having a teacher if we are to grow in this life and surely this life is for that one thing only to grow as people to grow in our mind we need a teacher in fact we've always had teachers in the buddhist tradition your first teachers are your parents they taught you to walk they taught you to speak so much of what you've learned has been given to you by your parents um people are often keen to say that their parents are imperfect but banty was also keen to say that children are imperfect as well which is a good point to make i thought yeah um but if we are to grow and learn we need to learn from teachers that that is how we learn otherwise all we ever do in life if we're not careful and it's quite easy to do it and all of us will do it to some degree and i include myself is to repeat ourselves if you're not careful we just repeat our own habits we get into the same kind of messes we get into the same kind of scrapes really what we need is to learn how to live better and better and we need to learn that from people who have lived more deeply more richly more wisely so for all of us in this room whether you have ever heard of bante sangratsu the founder of the tree retina buddhist order or not you it teachers are very important to your life they're actually much more important to your life than you probably realize so much of what you now think of you is you is things that have been taught you not just by words not just by exaltations but by someone's example by a father's kindness by a a teacher's wisdom by a you know a mentor's empathy towards ourselves that perhaps we couldn't have for ourselves yeah so much of the qualities that we now think of as ours were actually given to us so it seems very very important to keep on remembering our teachers secular and divine as it were that we remember the people who have given to us i was talking recently about my math teacher mrs beasley she said i was mathematically ineducable which is true but she was very very kind to me and very encouraging of me she seemed to like me i was in in my early teens it sort of brought something out in me it made me feel more or someone yeah and then i've had that personally very very much from bantay sangretch to the founder of my of our order and movement i've i've got a teacher with a capital t in my life not just teachers with a perhaps a lowercase t so tonight we're going to celebrate the teacher of tree ratna because it's valuable to do that because that's why we're all here that's why i'm ordained it's into his vision of ordination that i'm ordained and any member of the tree right in the buddhist order is ordained it's why this retreat center exists bantay's burial mound is just up the path there in the in the memorial garden we all nearly always call him bente when i first heard that i thought it was a nickname uh i thought it was like a sweet nickname it actually means reverent teacher but in my ear it always sounds more affectionate than that it has a sort of an intimacy to it that word bente that the word sanger actually doesn't say when people say sanger actually it's like people saying mother rather than mom or father you know you bounty has something more of that sort of intimacy um it doesn't just it it's not a sort of doesn't feel highly reverential although it includes that it's a it's an acknowledgement of a relationship so we'll probably be calling him ante this evening so we're just going to hear three very short anecdotes about him people's experience of him um for those of us here in the room on retreat and for those of you online it's particularly valuable for those of you tuning in hopefully from all over the world because here i am in the main shrine room additional really just a few feet away from where banty's body is lying in this ground that he so wanted to come to he had the last three years of his life here at addison which he said was some of the happiest in his life i remember very well coming to talk to bente here he met many many many people here um yeah so it's very it's lovely that anyone tuning in just now can as it would be tuning in to uh bantay's place yeah the place he lived and the place he died so i want to first of all hand over to super dramatic [Music] thank you michael bander so yeah hello to all the new people who've joined us from me as well so i just want to talk about one quality of banter which um might be slightly surprising quality um i'm not sure but it's his modesty and why i wanted to talk about that was well i don't know if you think of a a teacher or even not that he would have used the word guru but you know people do use that word sometimes you think of i don't know like rolls royces and like a sort of line of gold watches that go right off you know someone's arm and banty so wasn't like that um i didn't know him very very well personally um just a few individual meetings but i did meet him um where he lived here um he lived in what we used to call the annex here at addistana and you can still go and visit where he lived and it's just so modest it's just so modest his bedroom is tiny really um and just with a little bed that just looks like the exact same beds as we've all got here on retreater additional just a little single bed a little sitting room he was surrounded by things but there would be like gifts people had given him and he was very very keen not to amass a mass possessions on property he once said that if he died owning property he would feel that he'd failed in life i don't think he ever did own property in the first place but he really didn't want to own anything towards the end of his life he was giving more and more away to people who came to visit him and then my personal experience of this um much earlier so when i very first got involved in my 20s banty at that time lived at the london buddha center and again he lived in very modest quarters he lives he lived and what are now some of the officers at the lbc and he used to um yeah people could visit him there and i we used to have at this restroom and i worked at the restroom and one of our jobs was to take bounty his lunch every day and it's hard to describe what a sort of treat that was to take the lunch because nothing really happened when you took the lunch you'd go up and again if you just you know be a bowl of soup maybe a like bread roll in a sense nothing happened but what did happen was the way banty received that lunch it was so gracious it was as if you'd given him i don't know some huge prize or some huge feast you know it's just like but not enough sort of flamboyant way of grace it's just something about the way he said thank you this is what i'm trying to say something about the way he said thank you he really meant her which was kind of strange from the other side because you thought like you're bounty like of course we're going to give you a bowl of soup but he didn't take that for granted he said thank you with such courtesy and respect every single time and if ever he was going to be away for a few days he always remembered to write a little note to us to say that he was going away he almost sounded bh for banty the note that he was going to be away and just um it stayed on my mind i had a very big effect on me that somebody who could have in a way commanded um a lot didn't just wasn't into that at all you know just i received his lunch so graciously so simply and lived so modestly so that's what i wanted to share with you thank you very much reminds me of a time i went to see banter here he was talking me through all his furniture he said that that chair was my mother's chair that chair was given to me by david mitra you know you could totally you know knew all the history the province of all his furniture none of it was bought yeah so now videomile is going to share a story of bantu [Music] hello everybody out there is this the right tech people okay oh you're right there good okay um uh i'm not going to share an anecdote as such but i'm just going to say what banter means to me um i've came across buddhism and this particular tradition the true ratna tradition in auckland in new zealand in 1987 and we used to have quite a lot of retreats nice to go on all the retreats and we used to listen to these taped lectures um from banter so he very much the teacher and the way we received the dharma was through these you know probably cassette tapes i mean this is ancient history now and um it was such a kind of interesting effect because i didn't really understand i didn't understand the words conceptually that i quite often went to sleep because they're quite long some of these and he's got a particular sort of a way of talking that could mean that one drifts and yet something was coming through it's so interesting you know it was it was a recording gun on a reel-to-reel or something put onto cassette shipped to the other side of the world played on probably not very good speakers and something came through and that captivated me so it was this very weird sort of thing where i didn't understand the words i didn't understand the kind of concept but something was coming through that i knew was true i just knew you know viscerally this is the truth and that's why he's my teacher you know because i i received something i suppose it was a kind of transmission so what what bante is for me if i if this word what does he mean to you i always say he's a portal so bente for me essentially is a portal it's a bit like if i was to if i was described that more symbolically or mythically he's opened a door in the sky that's what i feel for banter he's opened this door in the sky for me to glimpse a completely different way of being and it's all the things we're going to be looking at this this week you know expanded vast boundless consciousness and pure love and we don't need to be these tight constricted little creatures there's this the truth of the dharma is that we can be free and we can be free and i think that's what i got through these you know crackly cassette recordings that i slept through um amazing you know he i i love this this sort of image of the doorway in the sky or i'm just thinking now of those books the line the witch and the wardrobe you know we're back of the wardrobe and this whole world opens up it's a bit like he [Music] he's opened this he's opened this world for me in a way that i have been able to receive as a as a sort of 20 i was a 20th century woman i'm a 21st century woman western born in fact that he was he was a westerner he was of my era that was all important and and there were there weren't a lot of sort of cultural trappings of uh other cultures so he kind of distilled it all down in a way that i could receive it and then the um the the kind of the point where i feel he really really became my teacher was when he died because he did i mean he had a sort of unusual personality in a way so you know i didn't quite know how to relate to him as a person you know as a as a character um even i saw him a few times and it was always a lot of good will but when he died there and it was here it's quite amazing that we're all here now and it's his birthday um you know he died in the hospital we had a very very sort of pure death by all accounts um maybe i'll say more about this in a few days when i talk about death so i'll just touch on it briefly now um a pure death there was a lot of joy it was all very strange there wasn't that much grief there was joy and there was this palpable sense of an unbounded consciousness or it's not a consciousness but unbounded consciousness that was completely tangible it's the sort of stuff you hear about in legends and over the centuries these stories get kind of elaborated and the story will be and you know lotus petals the size of cartwheels fell from the sky you know that's the kind of thing that will get talked about and i was there my god i was there i was here so now i absolutely i'm completely and utterly convinced that it's possible for human consciousness to be at death when the body falls away as possible for the consciousness to be free and full of love and that was for me that's his greatest gift that was his greatest gift to me and that was when i i could get over my you know here's him there and here's me here and i don't quite know how to connect it was like all that was just completely sort of blown away and his greatest gift was video milo is possible for consciousness to be free and this is what it's like what a blessing yeah [Music] thank you very much that's really very beautiful yeah really really beautiful i haven't got anything to say about it it's really beautiful thank you so let's hand over to your launcher [Music] yeah so hello from me if you're watching at home very nice to see you here if you're here uh so bandai for me i think he what else vidyamala's just said he um i think he represents is in a way the unbounded consciousness the archetype of enlightenment that i was privileged to meet actually in human form and in human form as sabadramati said he was very modest i think he was sort of fiercely uncharismatic in human form sort of determinedly stubbornly wouldn't play the guru the teacher because you can do that can't you i mean as somebody who teaches myself i know that it's easy to start to pretend to be profound he was fiercely ordinary but i can remember times having conversations with him meeting with him i was here once and i was on a meeting a sort of work meeting uh and he asked to see me he wanted to discuss something about the meeting it was a group of chairs of centers that we were meeting you wanted to discuss something with me and uh so it was quite prosaic what we were talking about structures organizational stuff uh for about 20 minutes and i left actually you know just during that meeting i um on the one hand was trying my best to sort of just respond to his questions and and and so forth on the other hand i had this distinct i can remember the moment i had this distinct sense where my my mind felt uh brighter and more expanded not exactly boundless but it was filled with light and i can remember the quality of the light and it was it was it was there was a warmth to it and it was a white light a very very tangible experience and i knew that it wasn't my consciousness that i was experiencing uh maybe a reflection a reflection of a reflection of his mind and as in vidyamala said when he died when the physical body fell away it felt like that consciousness was everywhere and for me it's still accessible it's not as perhaps um powerful as it was on the day of his funeral but when i meditate it's still accessible and i've met people who have never met him in the flesh for whom it is accessible who have had visions of him and and so for me he exists on different levels but the most important level is as it were all i can say is it's an archetypal level it's it's that portal and i think that portal is open uh if you if you if you want him to be that uh um yeah that's the most important as a man he was one of the most unusual men that i think i'll ever meet in my life i mean he was a genius he was uh an eccentric he had a very idiosyncratic personality he he was very kind um an incredible memory as michael bandu was saying and i think that was something to do with the clarity and purity of his mind uh one of the most unusual men that i think i'll ever meet but that's not for me the most important level it is this archetypal level and just a little anecdote so i've recently returned from a three-month retreat i was um co-leading this ordination retreat and um i'm not prone to visionary experiences in meditation or well out of meditation i don't have that sort of mind or don't think i do anyway and um but on this retreat during one of the meditations i was sort of just sitting receptive i do bring him to mind but i don't think i was particularly had him in mind and this figure appeared from the buddhist tradition uh padma sambhava padmasambhavu is a semi-historical semi-mythical figure the historical part of padmasambhava seems to date from the 8th century and he was an indian guru magician mystic meditator enlightened being who introduced buddhism to tibet but as a as a mythical figure padma sambhava is the archetypal guru the archetypal guru uh the the guru principle the principle of having a teacher and we've lost in our secular western culture many of us have lost that sense of uh archetypal guru i i come from an indian culture and it's normal for everybody to have a guru it's normal in india if you travel in india for if you're on an indian train somebody might say who is your guru who is your teacher they'll ask you your name and then they'll say who is your teacher and they mean this spiritual teacher padma sambavo is that principle of uh a teacher with a capital t and he appeared he appeared in meditation and he was visually he was there but it was more a sense of presence it was very vivid it wasn't like i was imagining him he i hadn't been thinking about him it was as if something entered my consciousness he appeared and i took the opportunity of asking him for a teaching so i thought this was the right thing to do uh i said great guru please give me a teaching please give me a teaching and then waited and padma sambar is is um uh uh quite a stern figure uh i mean he has this semi-wrathful smile he's he's a figure of compassion but it's like he doesn't take prisoners yeah uh he you you don't sort of mess with padmasantha anyway i i sort of sensed he was just looking at me uh silently so i said great guru please give me a teaching and there was no response he was just looking and so i waited and then i said again great guru please give me a teaching and there was silence traditionally the buddha didn't always answer your questions at least the first two times if you asked a third time he would always answer and the answer might not be what you wanted to hear but if you asked three times then the responsibility was yours he would he would give you the answer so i felt a slight tensing having asked twice uh to padma sambava and i i can remember thinking is he am i imagining this but he was there uh that's how it felt anyway i asked a third time i said great guru please give me a teaching and i got an immediate response and it was very clear and it was four words and there was no hesitation there was no nonsense the words that he i heard them heard isn't quite the right word it's like they were they were in my mind but they didn't come from me and they surprised me they took me aback they weren't what i could have expected or imagined he said i gave you bante that wasn't what i expected uh i gave you bantee and the tone was a little i mean it it's difficult to say because i didn't hear them but it was like the feeling tone was like what more do you want what more could you need i gave you fanta for me uh there was a thrill and a slight shock i do believe that bente was from another dimension i mean maybe we're all from another dimension i believe that he was associated with this figure this consciousness this archetype that is padmasambhava he has a close connection in his life with padmasambhava i believe that he was somehow here to help human beings develop their consciousness and i think that he in that sense um he even transcends the teachings of buddhism that he's taught us i think he was something more mysterious something bigger in that archetypal sense than i can fathom and i believe that that portal that mind that he was in touch with the unbounded mind is still open and i hope that it's on this retreat particularly because it's here because addistana has something still of this consciousness if you tune into it particularly around the burial mound particularly where he lived i hope that you will encounter him this week thank you okay thank you very much thank you all three of you um those are just three kind of visions really of banter three glimpses of banting um what we're going to do now well what we need to do now because all three of them really have already started to touch onto this great matter of the nature of mind that perhaps mind as i said isn't locked in your brain somehow perhaps perhaps mind isn't created by brain perhaps mind precedes con you know precedes the world as buddhism says perhaps mind is in some way that we don't understand all around us um consciousness is all around us perhaps we're editing consciousness streams within consciousness and that if that's true if that's even half true all kinds of potentials arise so what we need to do now is to open up to those potentials in ritual and we're going to do two things in the ritual and sure i'm going to ask to come and leave the ritual in just a moment we're going to dedicate ourselves to this retreat dedicate ourselves to relaxing on it to engaging with it and to serving it we're going to dedicate ourselves to that but not just in our our mind we're going to actually act out that dedication by by doing a ritual and by taking a book from the shrine that's we're going to be reading and deepening into our exploration of the nature of mind and we're going to celebrate and we're going to open up to a mind beyond our mind or at least beyond our mind as we tend to habitually think of it so i'll hand over to you quietly [Music] [Music] [Laughter] why don't we get ourselves set up for meditation just while we're [Music] so [Music] great so uh hello to everyone and everyone at home my name is vader shira and uh thank you for those three lovely talks evoking bantai and thanks for the wonderful introduction macho bandi um so yeah michael bandu has said what we're going to do in broad brush strokes i just wanted to say one or two things um one is just that just to draw your attention to the shrine so we have this beautiful shrine put together by the nottingham shrine team so thank you to them um in the on the wall in the alcoves all of these buddhas have come from different centers around shiratna so addistana is very much at the center of chiron that's kind of the coming together of all the different centers right throughout the world and it's lovely being here with people from so many different centers um you know quite a crowd have come from dublin and many other places around the place as well and in many of these centers tonight they too will be doing a special puja for bantai so uh 20 years ago tonight we started a series of yearly poojas 108 pujas so a puja every year for 108 years to bring bounty to mind so i i i'm always really excited about this the idea of doing something for that long um i'm 45 so i'll be well dead by the time they're finished 108 in all likelihood unless science saves me somehow but i love the idea of every year coming back and just bringing to mind our teacher in this way and um on the shrine then we have this wooden box and lots of centers received this wooden box and uh in the box there is a special candle with 108 hours in it and 108 sticks of incense and a few other little things as well there's a book which i'll come back to in a few moments so um yeah we're going to celebrate what's called 108 year pooja as well as the dedication ceremony tonight and as i said i know in many centres around the world they're doing this as well tonight i know for example they're doing it right this moment in dublin for example so um how we're going to start the night is that this special candle which is only lit for an hour each year is going to be lit by james who's sitting in front of me so james has the honor of being the person who has most recently asked for ordination into our community into our order uh he i think was just today wasn't it james kind of today close enough publicly today okay great and um so he's in a few moments i'm gonna when i finish speaking he's gonna come up and light the candle and light the stick of incense to begin the evening's ritual to begin fully the retreat actually really and um then what we're going to do is uh we'll chant the dedication ceremony just to emotionally uh engage deepen the engagement with the route 3 with the retreat and really dedicate our energies to being here in the ways that microbandic has said we'll do the threefold puja which is a wonderful celebration of the three jewels and after the threefold puja oscar so where's oscar there you are so oscar is going to lead the shaky muni mantra the mantra of the buddha and when the mantra is going please do come up and you can make a candle offering to the shrine so light the candle and offer it to the shrine and this can represent our aspirations our intentions to really give ourselves to this retreat and offering that to the buddha who represents our fullest potential what's possible on this retreat what's possible in life and then at the same time take one of the books as well and bring them back with you and just to say this it's usual for dharma books not to leave them on the ground so if you can just not leave them directly on the ground you can help them on your meditation matter or whatever or on a cushion and take them with you afterwards and um and then i want you to sign if you could two books okay so i find whenever i give out books like these on courses and stuff it's really good to write your name on them because otherwise there's 20 books with no names you're not sure if you can take one or not lying around the place so write your name that's quite good but also um over here in the corner on this yellow coverage yellow clothed chair there's the other part of this box which is the book recording names of people who have done the 108-year puja and this is another thing i love that in 108 years time they'll they'll read this book and they'll see john and claire and mary and all these people who are probably dead now who've done the puja you know 100 years ago or something like this you know so it's a lovely way of recording as well uh 108 years of celebrating our teacher so there's only one book and one pen so there won't really might not be time for everyone to do that tonight at the end afterwards but i'll leave it out for the next day or two and you can just sign your name if you're here tonight okay just to save just so we can get to bed before midnight you know um yeah and as michael bandu said um after the puja then um so once we take our books and we'll come back and everyone has taken a book we'll just let the mantra die out uh and after a few moments i'll ring three bells and that'll be it for the evening then and we're back here again at 7am tomorrow for meditation and we'll see more about that tomorrow and just to remind you that we'll be in silence tonight until the start of lunch tomorrow okay i haven't forgotten anything have i good okay so let's just settle in for a moment or two and maybe in two minutes or so when people have settled you can come up and begin the ritual james you i should just say um if we're when we're making the candle offerings if we could put them on the black part of the shrine rather than the woods that would be great and do come up in droves don't don't don't uh don't hang around as well [Music] so the dedication ceremony for the nature of mind retreat and the hundred and eight year puja for ergin sangarakshita so we'll begin with the dedication ceremony we dedicate this place to the three jewels [Applause] [Music] to the buddha the ideal of enlightenment to which we aspire [Music] the spiritual fellowship with one another which we enjoy here may no idle word be spoken here may no unquiet thought disturb our minds to the observance of the five precepts we dedicate this place to the practice of meditation we dedicate this place to the development of wisdom though in the world outside there is strife here may there be peace though in the world outside there is hate though in the world outside there is grief here may there be joy not by the chanting of the sacred scriptures not by the chanting of the sacred scriptures not by the sprinkling of holy water but this sacred spot may the lotus petals of purity open around this mandala this sacred spot may the vajra wall of determination extends around this mandala this sacred spot is here practicing may our mind become better may our thought become dharma may our communication with one another with body speech and we dedicate this place [Music] the threefold pooja opening reverence [Music] we reverence the buddha the teaching of the buddha which leads from darkness to light we reverence the sangha the fellowship of the buddha's disciples that inspires and guides to the three jewels we reverence the buddha and aspire to follow him the buddha was born as we are born [Music] what the buddha overcame we too can overcome we see what the buddha attained with body speech and mind [Music] until the end the truth in all its aspects the path in all its stages [Music] we we make our own commitment an ever-widening circle the sangha grows [Music] offerings to the buddha reverencing the buddha we offer flowers flowers that today are fresh and sweetly blooming [Music] our bodies too like flowers will pass away we offer light we from his greater lamp a lesser lamp we light within us the lamp of bodhi shining within our hearts reverencing the buddha we offer incense incense whose fragrance pervades the air the fragrance of the perfect life sweeter than incense spreads in all in all directions throughout the world [Music] [Music] oh [Music] ah oh [Music] oh oh [Music] oh oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] oh oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] um ah you you [Music] yes so feeling free to sit on or leaving as quietly as we can in our own time [Music] you

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 332

Keywords:

Id: 2_Z82UkvC74

Length: 68min 50sec (4130 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022