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There are two kinds of activity: worldly and spiritual. Both are very important. Everybody agrees that worldly activities benefit our life. It provides us with food and clothes and everything else we need. When we engage in this type of activity, it is very important to analyse before doing anything. Will this or that action be beneficial for me, my family or for other sentient beings? Some worldly activity is beneficial for us all, and there is no doubt that it is necessary.

Concerning the spiritual path however, some will say, ‘We don’t need any kind of spiritual path’ while some others will say, ‘Yes, we do need it.’ From my own point of view, we certainly need it; it is not enough to engage in worldly activity alone. If I am just looking after my worldly activity, even though I am clearly a human being, I am a little bit like an animal. Animals are not really intelligent, even though they have their own intelligence to try and get their own kind of happiness and looking after themselves. Most animals sort of marry, create families and look after each other. They protect their children like human beings. However, in reality they are animals.

If I am healthy and wealthy, I can probably say that I don’t need any kind of spiritual path; my life is fine and I have whatever I need. But when something bad happens in life, my mind is, at that time, somehow ‘empty’; mind is like ‘hanging in the sky’, without any support. In this case, I need a spiritual path.

How did the Buddha become Buddha, how did he find his teaching, why did he tell us something about the spiritual path? In the beginning, before taking his own path, he had a few different experiences. He saw the four sufferings of the human beings – birth, old age, sickness and death, and thought, ‘This kind of suffering might in the future befall me, so what can I do to avoid them?’ He wondered if he could avoid them but his friends, his attendants, his father all said, ‘You cannot avoid them; you will get old, become sick and for sure die.’ He was very sad. He thought, ‘Life is very short, what is the use of this life in this palace?’ He decided to find the solution to be free from all these sufferings. He analysed many different spiritual paths and the way of being and nature of all phenomena. He also analysed mind and its nature. He then realised the nature of all phenomena and the nature of mind. The crucial finding of his path is that from all phenomena mind has true nature. We call it Buddha nature or the natural condition. If we realize the nature of the mind, our mind becomes completely free from any suffering. Therefore we can say that his path is unmistaken, beneficial, and useful for all beings because it essentially focuses on how to achieve the true nature of the mind. We call Buddha the one who has achieved the nature of the mind. Buddha is completely free from any suffering. This is why we say that we need faith in the unmistaken path: we need to rely on it, we need faith and trust in this path; otherwise if we don’t have any faith or trust in the path that we have already entered, I think that path will not be useful for us. We will all the time be doubting it. ‘Maybe it is good, maybe it is not.’ If we have doubts, it will be difficult to understand any spiritual path.

When we want to invest faith in the Buddha’s path, the first important element is the Buddha nature. Why do we practice the Buddha’s path, why do we follow it? Because we have already realized that we have a Buddha nature. From a relative point of view, Buddha and sentient beings are different: we call someone a Buddha when they have realized his or her own nature; a sentient being has not yet realized his or her own Buddha nature and until they have realized it, their mind is somewhat confused and suffering due to the darkness in their mind. Buddha nature means pure mind, free from negative emotions – bad ideas and disturbing emotions. An impure mind is full of negative emotions; mind is disturbed and filled with suffering. It is as if our mind is in darkness. This is what we call an ignorant mind. In this case, we need to make our mind pure. For example, water in this glass is a phenomenon; hence this water has a nature. If we say that this water doesn’t have a nature, it would mean that it could never have been cleaned. It was perhaps dirty at first, but because it has a nature, someone was able to clean it; it can now be called mineral water; we can drink it, it is very good for our health, it is very beneficial. In exactly the same way, at present, our mind is perhaps shrouded in darkness: we almost forgot what happened in the past few years, and we won’t remember what will happen in one minute, one hour or one day later. All of it will be completely lost in this very dense darkness. In this case, I think I really would like to clean up my mind. I think it is possible to clean it, because its true nature is the Buddha nature. Therefore, my mind can become pure. It will then be very easy for me to remember what happened in the past, not only in this life but in many past lives. And maybe we will understand what will happen in the future.

Emptiness is a very important element to realize Buddha nature. Buddha nature is completely free from any kind of elaboration, i.e. we do not say ‘it is like this or like that.’ It is pure, difficult to explain, difficult to express. The nature of phenomena or the nature of the mind is natural; it is not fabricated, it is uncontrived, uncontaminated. Therefore we call it emptiness. Note that emptiness is not like nothingness. In order to realize our true nature we also need natural, uncontrived motivation, we need natural activities and we must also practice natural meditation. Through all these natural activities we then can realize the nature of all these natural things.