[A teaching from A Reply to Two Nephews given by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche in Chicago, Illinois in 2011. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso. Edited by Matt Willis. All rights reserved. The complete teaching is available as an MP3 download from the KPL Bookstore.]
Thoughts are the natural display of the mind. They are natural events within the mind. Whether they are good thoughts or bad thoughts, they are equally impermanent, equally empty.
Because thoughts are nothing more than the mind’s natural display, thoughts do not actually do anything by themselves. The mere appearance of a thought does not harm you. The mere appearance of a thought does not accumulate karma.
When we accumulate karma, it is because we are captured by a thought. We become involved with, or invested in, the aspect or appearance that thought presents. For example, we have a negative thought. In reaction to that negative thought we become angry. That anger in turn causes us to act out. We may continue to think negatively and deepen our anger, accumulating karma with mind. We may speak abusively, accumulating karma with speech. Or, we may physically hit somebody, accumulating karma with body. But this wasn’t necessitated by the thought. The thought which began it all is the condition to which we reacted with anger.
So the thoughts themselves don’t do anything. In fact, we could say that they don’t even truly exist; they merely appear. Because of that, when amidst the appearance of thoughts you remain in a recognition of what your mind really is, of your mind’s nature, then the thoughts are flattened, utterly flattened, like waves subsiding back into the ocean from which they sprang.
