Lama Thubten Yeshe (1935–1984), who founded the FPMT organization with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, was able to translate Tibetan Buddhist teachings into clear ideas that resonated with the Western students he met and taught in the 1970s and ’80s. These teachings by Lama Yeshe continue to profoundly connect with students today. Here Lama Yeshe discusses some aspects of the Western mind he had observed since teaching Western students. 

Lama Yeshe at Chenrezig Institute, 1979. Photo courtesy LYWA.

It is very good to see the reality of Western life, or the Western way of living life, to check up historically. If you do, you will really get a bit of a hard shock, I tell you. It is not happy, Western life is definitely not a happy life, I can say. I’m sorry. Even though you think your life is happy, it’s not true. I’m not saying that I have investigated each individual and discovered that each one is unhappy. I am not saying that. But I am just looking at it sort of generally. It is a very difficult life. And also, people in Western samsara have some kind of instinctive attitude. I don’t know, perhaps I can say instinctive—there is no checking, no observation. They just do things, just spinning, just doing things instinctively, instinctively, spinning themselves. This makes me so afraid. No observation, no checking what’s going on. That’s dangerous.

I can see when Western people start to meditate, when they begin to observe their attitude, then they can see, “What has been happening to me?” At some point they really become crazy. Why? Because before they were just going round and round like this, then suddenly [Lama circles his finger round and round in the air and suddenly brings it up to his eyes indicating that people first circle around until they suddenly see themselves for the first time], pam! So their nervous system is shocked. Then, instead meditation making them better, they get worse. But it is much better to question for a minute and then rest, rather than just spinning around. That way you do not become worse.

Therefore, it is good to learn how to change one’s instinctive behavior in order to transform the Western life. It is the instinctive attitude that leads to certain actions; any movements of the body and speech result from attitudes of the mind. And in order to transform that, you need quite a lot of effort, observation and penetration on the motivation.

What I’m saying is, my point is, that it is important that each of us has the attitude or aim of looking beyond sense pleasures. Even philosophically, we can think, “Well, yeah, today I’m not getting any chocolate. Yeah, OK. I’m not getting chocolate. Well, I’m not going to die. I can have other pleasures. I can eat muesli!” Or you can think, “My boyfriend has disappeared. Well, he is one man. OK. He has disappeared, but there are so many of them. So, if I wait, maybe another one will appear.” Instead of being so concrete, which makes you kill yourself, which is so dangerous, relax. But that doesn’t mean, I’m not saying that you should not be concerned with this life’s pleasures at all. You can have pleasure, but you should know that this pleasure is not the only one and that you should not grasp at it in such a neurotic way. It is not worth it. This pleasure is temporal: it comes, it goes, it comes, it goes.

Let me give you an example. I was a Tibetan refugee. I had a samsaric nest, my parents, my siblings—I had four or five sisters and three or four brothers. My pleasure did not depend on my sisters or brothers; it did not depend on the Tibetan environment. I still have pleasure in Australia, don’t I? However, many refugees were very sad and sometimes they even killed themselves, thinking, “Now I have lost my country. I have lost my wife, my husband, my children. I have lost everything. There is no more point in living.” So they killed themselves. Attitude is so extremely important. The only thing that makes me happy is that I think, “Hmm, not too bad.” That is profound; from the Buddhist point of view, that is profound. With this, you are almost Buddha. You can see that another condition can make you just as happy as the previous one. And understand that relative conditions change from time to time; they cannot last permanently. That gives you room; you have room.

So actually, attitude is the essence of life. Just like a pillar keeps a house from falling down, attitude is the source of life. A good life and good relationships come from a good attitude. A bad attitude causes human beings to fight each other and have disastrous relationships. A good attitude is, “We have the same potential, we live together, we help each other and we can grow and be helpful for each other.” If we humans have that kind of attitude, human relationships can be good and worthwhile. But if we have a low attitude, our lives become very shaky. Western life in particular is so shaky, unbelievably shaky.

The greatest suffering in the West is the incredible changing of life; the fickle mind changing, changing, changing. This creates most of the suffering of the Western life. This is my observation. Because fundamentally, there is no stability in our relationship. We human beings live with each other. Whatever you do affects me, whatever I do affects you. So if you are shaking, if you are spinning, it makes me go like that as well. I cannot cope. In fact, I cannot cope with Western students’ attitude and life—it would be much better if I went back to Nepal! [Lama pretends to get off the throne.] I’m joking!

Excerpted from “The Enlightenment Attitude,” a teaching Lama Yeshe gave at Chenrezig Institute, Australia, 1979, which is included in a forthcoming collection of teachings from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Knowledge-Wisdom, the Peaceful Path to Liberation, due to be released in early 2023. 

Through timely advice, news stories, and updates, FPMT.org shares the wisdom culture inspired and guided by the teachings of FPMT founders, Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche.