This month on the LYWA podcast, Lama Zopa Rinpoche encourages us to examine whether our attempts to help others are in fact motivated by cherishing ourselves. Rinpoche assures us that even if our capacity to cherish others is small right now, even our smallest attempts to cherish others should fill our hearts with joy. Rinpoche then illustrates the power of cherishing others by telling the story of Asanga and Maitreya. These teachings were given by Rinpoche in Sydney, Australia, in 1993. You can read along with the transcript on our website.

The LYWA podcast contains hundreds of hours of audio, each with links to the accompanying lightly edited transcripts. See the LYWA podcast page to search or browse the entire collection by topic or date, and for easy instructions on how to subscribe.

WHAT'S NEW ON OUR WEBSITE

This month in our featured short video from FPMT's Essential Extracts series, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains that basic Buddhism is about discovering the self and that we live our whole life with the hallucination that the "I" exists from its own side. Rinpoche points out that Buddhism is not just about chanting rituals but for discovering what is true and what is false in your life. This is discovering your self. You can find links to the video here, or visit FPMT’s Essential Extracts webpage to browse the entire collection.

This month we have posted an Errata sheet to the Resources chapter of Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe. Compiled with thanks to the astute readers who reported errors in the text.

Every month we share new advices for Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book, adding more than 100 new entries every year on a variety of topics. There are now more than 2,200 of Rinpoche’s precious advices online. Read on to learn what Rinpoche wrote to students at a Dharma center who asked what they could do for the current humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan:

• Prayers for Afghanistan: Students at a Dharma center asked Rinpoche what they could do for the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, when hundreds of thousands of Afghans were displaced by Taliban militants.

• The Best Time to Practice Dharma: Rinpoche outlined the entire path to enlightenment for a student who asked for direction on their spiritual path. The student had several tattoos of deities and mantras on their body, and Rinpoche also advised what to do about these.

• Excluded from the Center: A student had been asked not to attend a Dharma center, even though they had offered service as a volunteer there. The student felt left out.
   
• There Are Numberless Buddhas Around Us: Rinpoche sent this letter to a student who wrote that her daughter had become a heroin addict and her son had recently committed suicide. They had both experienced childhood trauma many years ago.

You can always find a list of all the newly posted advices from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on our website.

Please enjoy this month’s teaching, an excerpt from a public talk on the four noble truths given by Lama Yeshe in Melbourne, Australia, 1977. And we hope you’ll make a contribution to support the work we do at LYWA on this meritorious day. Thank you so much!

Big love,

Nick Ribush
Director

THIS MONTH'S TEACHING: Lama Yeshe on True Suffering and Its Cause

For the most part, we all understand the superficial kinds of suffering such as when someone has a headache or is crying. We say, “Oh, he is suffering so much.” But we are not aware of the true suffering—the disturbances, conflict and dissatisfaction that pervade the mind. It is hard to understand the nature of true suffering.

Suffering is much more than having a headache or bleeding when one is injured. That kind of suffering is easy to comprehend. The most fundamental kind of suffering is the pervasive dissatisfaction we all experience in our lives. You may be wealthy, beautiful or powerful, it doesn’t matter. Dissatisfaction is still there, all the time, day and night. This is true suffering. It doesn’t matter if you are walking, dancing, laughing or even if you are totally embracing life. As far as suffering is concerned, there are no distinctions among human beings.

The cause of dissatisfaction is a lack of wisdom, not knowing the reality of true suffering. This is the basic human problem. We should reflect on the nature of dissatisfaction and examine what creates the causes of suffering. Many Western people think, “I’m happy! Why should I think about suffering? I don’t want to talk about suffering, dissatisfaction and confusion. I have everything.”

But if you really check up carefully, every one of us is connected with another person, another sentient being. We share this planet with millions of other living beings. And in those relationships with others, we experience confusion and dissatisfaction. We want to be happy, but it is difficult.

It doesn’t matter if you are in a specific relationship with another person or not. Every human being wishes to be happy and not to suffer. This exists equally in all of us. Whether you are a religious person or not, you have some kind of concept, some idealistic idea in your mind of what will make you happy and what will make you unhappy. We all have this idea. Even children have such ideas, even before they can put them into words. These likes and dislikes are intuitive. All human beings are busy trying to solve their problems in order to be satisfied and happy, motivated by an intuitive sense of “I want, I want, I want.”

So the question becomes, what is the solution to this? How to bring about human satisfaction? This is the question. And we really don’t know the answer to this. Instead, we hypnotize ourselves into thinking that no problem exists. But this is totally unrealistic. It is just a mistaken opinion. If you are realistic and thoroughly examine your life—how much satisfaction you actually have in your life—you will come to understand, rather than hypnotizing yourself into believing a mistaken hallucination. If we really check up, we will come to understand that the desire to be happy and to avoid suffering is a basic characteristic of all human beings.

In addition, by not understanding that the root of our confusion and dissatisfaction is not outside of us but is within, that it is a part of our mind, we then make wrong judgments and come to mistaken conclusions. Even if you are not a philosopher, you still have this instinctive philosophy within you. It is important to examine your thinking carefully to detect this kind of mistaken philosophy so that you can correct it, eliminate it; so that you can cut the wrong conception that is the main cause of suffering.

This teaching is excerpted from a public talk on the four noble truths given to more than 300 people at Kew Town Hall, in Melbourne, Australia, July 19, 1977. Edited by Nicholas Ribush from archive #110. Read more about Lama’s 1977 trip to Melbourne in Big Love, pp. 586–90.