The essence of the buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha, is practice.

When we say practice, we mean the practice of meditation, which can consist of either the meditation known as tranquillity or that known as insight.

But in either case, it must be implemented in actual practice.

The reason we practice meditation is to attain happiness.

And this means states of happiness in both the short term and the long term.

With regard to short-term happiness, when we speak of happiness, we usually mean either or both of two things, one of which is physical pleasure and the other of which is mental pleasure. But if you look at either of these pleasant experiences, the root of either one has to be a mind that is at peace, a mind that is free of suffering.

As long as your mind is unhappy and without any kind of tranquillity or peace, then no matter how much physical pleasure you experience, it will not take the form of happiness per se.

On the other hand, even if you lack the utmost ideal physical circumstances of wealth and so on, if your mind is at peace, you will be happy anyway.

We practice meditation, therefore, in part in order to obtain the short-term benefit of a state of mental happiness and peace.

The reason why meditation helps with this is that, normally, we have a great deal of thought, or many different kinds of thoughts running through our minds.

Some of these thoughts are pleasant, even delightful.

Some of them however, are unpleasant, agitating, and worrisome.

If you examine the thoughts that are present in your mind from time to time, you will see that the pleasant thoughts are comparatively few, and the unpleasant thoughts are many.

This means that as long as your mind is ruled or controlled by the thoughts that pass through it, you will be quite unhappy.

In order to gain control over this process, therefore, we begin with the meditation practice of tranquillity, which produces a basic state of contentment and peace within the mind of the practitioner.

An example of this is the great Tibetan yogi Jetsun Milarepa, who lived in conditions of the utmost austerity.

He lived it utter solitude, in caves and isolated mountains.

His clothes were very poor; he had no nice clothes.

His food was neither rich nor tasty.
In fact, [for a number of years] he lived on nettle soup alone, as a result of which he became physically very thin, almost emaciated.
Now, if you consider his external circumstances alone, the isolation and poverty in which he lived, you would think he must have been miserable.

And yet, as we can tell from the many songs he composed, because his mind was fundamentally at peace, his experience was one of constant unfolding delight.

His songs are songs that express the utmost state of delight or rapture.

He saw every place he went to, no matter how isolated and austere an environment it was, as beautiful, and he experienced his life of utmost austerity as extremely pleasant.

In fact, the short-term benefits of meditation are more than merely peace of mind, because our physical health as well depends, to a great extent, upon our state of mind.

And therefore, if you cultivate this state of mental contentment and peace, then you will tend not to become ill, and you will as well tend to heal easily if and when you do become ill.

The reason for this is that one of the primary conditions which brings about states of illness is mental agitation, which produces a corresponding agitation or disturbance of the channels and the energies within your body.

These generate new sicknesses, ones you have not yet experienced, and also prevent the healing of old sicknesses.

This agitation of the channels and energies also obstructs the benefit that could be derived from medical treatment.

If you practice meditation, then as your mind settles down, the energies moving through the channels return to their rightful functioning, as a result of which you tend not to become ill and you are able to heal any illnesses you already have.

We can see an illustration of this also in the life of Jetsun Milarepa, who engaged in the utmost austerities with regard to where he lived, the clothes he wore, the food he ate, and so on throughout the early part of his life.

And yet this did not harm his health, because he managed to have a very long life, was extremely vigorous and youthful to the end of his life.

This indicates the fact that through the proper practice of meditation, the mental peace and contentment that is generated calms down or corrects the functioning of the channels and energies, allowing for the healing of sickness and the prevention of sickness.

The ultimate or long-term benefit of the practice of meditation is becoming free of all suffering, which means no longer having to experience the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death.

Now, this attainment of freedom is called, in the common language of all the Buddhist traditions, buddhahood.

The root or basic cause of this attainment is the practice of meditation.

The reason for this, again, is that generally we have a lot of thoughts running through our minds.

Some are beneficial - thoughts of love, compassion, rejoicing in the happiness of others, and many of which are negative - thoughts of attachment, jealousy, competitiveness, aversion, and so on.

There are comparatively few of the former type of thought and comparatively many of the latter type of thought, because we have such strong habits that have been accumulating within us over a period of time without beginning.

It's only by removing these habits of negativity that we can free ourselves from suffering.

You cannot simply remove these mental afflictions, by saying to yourself, "I will not generate any more mental affliction," because you do not have the necessary freedom of mind or control to do so.

In order to relinquish these, you need to actually attain this freedom, which begins, according to the common path, with the cultivation of tranquillity.

When you begin to practice basic tranquillity meditation, you may find that your mind won't stay still for a moment.

But this is not permanent.

This will change as you practice, and you will eventually be able to place your mind at rest at will, at which point you have successfully alleviated the manifest disturbance of these mental afflictions.

On the basis of that, then you can apply the second technique, which is called insight meditation, which consists of learning to recognize and directly experience the nature of your own mind.

This nature is referred to as emptiness.

When you recognize this nature and rest in it, then all of the mental afflictions that arise, dissolve into this emptiness, and are no longer afflictions.

Therefore, the freedom, or result, which is called buddhahood, depends upon the eradication of these mental afflictions, and that depends upon the practice of meditation.

The only real meaning that we can give to our being born on this planet (and in particular being born as human beings on this planet), and the only really meaningful result that we can show for our lives, is to have helped the world: to have helped our friends, to have helped all the beings on this planet as much as we can.

If we devote our lives or any significant part of our lives to destroying others and harming others, then to the extent that we actually do so, our lives have been meaningless.

So if you understand that the only real point of a human life is to help others, then you must understand that the basis for not harming others but benefiting others is having the intention not to harm others and the intention to benefit others.

The main cause of having such a stable intention or stable motivation is the actual cultivation of love and compassion for others.

This means, when you find yourself full of spite and viciousness - and it is not abnormal to be so - then you have to recognize it, and be aware of it as what it is, and let go of it.

Then, even though you may be free of spite or viciousness, and although you may have the wish to improve things, you may be thinking only of yourself.

You may be thinking only of helping or benefiting yourself.

When that's the case, then you have to recollect that the root of that type of mentality, which is quite petty and limited and tight, is desiring victory for yourself even at the expense of the suffering and loss experienced by others.

In that case, you have to gradually expand your sympathy for others, and therefore this cultivation of bodhicitta or altruism in general as a motivation is an essential way of making your life meaningful.

The importance of love and compassion is not an idea that is particular to Buddhism. Everyone throughout the world talks about the importance of love and compassion.

There's no one who says love and compassion are bad and we should try and get rid of them.

However, there is an uncommon element in the method or approach that is taken to these by Buddhism.

In general, when we think of compassion, we think of a natural or spontaneous sympathy or empathy that we experience when we perceive the suffering of someone else.

And we generally think of compassion as being a state of pain,
of sadness,
because you see the suffering of someone else
and you see what's causing that suffering
and you know you can't do anything to remove the cause of that suffering
and therefore the suffering itself.

So, whereas before you generated compassion, one person was miserable,
and after you generate compassion, two people are miserable.

And this actually happens.

However, the Buddhist approach to compassion is a little bit different, because it's founded on the recognition that, whether or not you can benefit that being or that person in their immediate situation and circumstances, you can generate the basis for their ultimate benefit.

And the confidence in that removes the frustration or the misery which otherwise somehow afflicts ordinary compassion.

So, when compassion is cultivated in that way, it is experienced as delightful rather than miserable.

The way that we cultivate compassion is called immeasurable compassion.

To be precise, there are four aspects of what we would, in general, call compassion, called, therefore, the four immeasurables.

Normally, when we think of something that's called immeasurable, we mean immeasurably vast.

Here, the primary connotation of the term is not vastness but impartiality.

And the point of saying immeasurable compassion is compassion that is not going to help one person at the expense of hurting another.

It is a compassion that is felt equally for all beings.

The basis of the generation of such an impartial compassion is the recognition of the fact that all beings without exception really want and don't want the same things.

All beings, without exception, want to be happy and want to avoid suffering.

There is no being anywhere who really wants to suffer.

And to the extent that you understand that, you will have the intense wish that all beings be free from suffering.

There is no being anywhere who does not want to be happy;
and to the extent that you understand that, you will have the intense wish that all beings will actually achieve the happiness that they wish to achieve.

Because the experience of happiness and freedom from suffering depend upon the generation of the causes of these, then the actual form your aspiration takes is that all beings possess not only happiness but the causes of happiness, that they not only be free of suffering but of the causes of suffering.

The causes of suffering are fundamentally the presence in our minds of mental afflictions - ignorance, attachment, aversion, jealousy, arrogance, and so on - and it is through the existence of these that we come to suffer.

Through recognizing that there is a way to transcend these causes of suffering - fundamentally, through the eradication of these causes through practicing meditation, which may or may not happen immediately but is a definite and workable process - through this confidence, then this love - wishing beings to be happy - and the compassion of wishing beings to be free from suffering, is not hopeless or frustrated at all.

Therefore, the boundless love and boundless compassion generate a boundless joy that is based on the confidence that you can actually help beings free themselves.

So boundless love is the aspiration that beings possess happiness and the causes of happiness. Boundless compassion or immeasurable compassion is the aspiration that beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.

And the actual confidence and the delight you take in the confidence that you can actually bring these about is boundless joy. Because all of these are boundless or immeasurable or impartial, then they all have a quality, which is equanimity.

If these are cultivated properly,
you don't have compassion for one being
but none for another , and so on.

Now, normally, when we experience these qualities, of course, they are partial; they are anything but impartial.

In order to eradicate the fixation that causes us to experience compassion only for some and not for others, then you can actually train yourself in cultivating equanimity for beings.

Through recognizing that they all wish for the same thing and wish to avoid the same thing, you can greatly increase or enhance your loving-kindness and compassion.

Question:
Rinpoche, can you say a little more about the practice of letting go when the mind is agitated?

Rinpoche:
In general, the main approach is applied when you are looking at the nature of your mind.

Now, mental afflictions are thoughts, and thoughts are the natural display of the mind.

Thoughts may be pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant, they may be positive or negative, but in any case, whatever type of thought arises, you deal with it in exactly the same way.

You simply look directly at it.

Now, looking at the thought, or looking into the thought, or looking at the nature of the thought, is quite different from analyzing it.

You don't attempt to analyze the contents of the thought, nor do you attempt to think about the thought.

You just simply look directly at it.

When you look directly at a thought, you don't find anything.

Now, you may think that you don't find anything because you don't know how to look or you don't know where to look, but in fact, that's not the reason.

The reason, according to Buddha, is that thoughts are empty.

Now, to use anger as an example of this, if you become angry, and then you look directly at the anger - which doesn't mean analyze the contents of the thoughts of anger, but you look directly at that specific thought of anger - then you won't find anything.

And, in that moment of not finding anything,
the poisonous quality of the anger
will somehow vanish or dissolve.

Your mind will relax,
and you will,
at least to some extent,
be free of anger.