Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Jampa Kaldan opens this 43-minute introduction to Buddhist philosophy with a direct question about motivation: why did you come tonight? He moves from there into a guided meditation on the breath—a foundational practice for familiarizing the mind with a single object—before turning to core Buddhist concepts through the famous story of the Buddha’s enlightenment from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path White Clouds. The narrative traces Siddhartha’s deep meditative insight into the interdependence of all beings and the nature of ignorance. Kaldan then frames the Buddha’s first teaching, the four noble truths: that suffering and discontent pervade ordinary experience; that this state has a cause rooted in confused mental patterns of attachment and aversion; that liberation from this state is possible; and that a path exists to achieve it. Suitable for newcomers exploring Buddhist philosophy and meditation practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2000 01 17 01 Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy 17-1-00.mp3
UUID: 240b9aa2-7cb5-41a6-9745-4b2f12909c18
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Intro to Buddhist Philosophy (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2000-01-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,528
Quite welcome to it’ll be about nine o’clock for those who would like to stay and participate in a discussion group we’ll be able to get a cup of tea or some iced water and then we’ll sit around circle until for about thirty to forty minutes or so and there’ll be an opportunity just to have a more informal discussion question time and that’s open to anyone who wishes to stay but but if people wish to leave at nine then that you’re quite welcome to do that as well So if you stayed for the full thing we would expect to end at ten o’clock. So we’ve each chosen to come here tonight for many and different reasons we’ve decided to step away from our busy lives for a time and to come to this this place that if you have not been here before maybe a little bit strange in some ways and you’ve perhaps got all sorts of queries about strange things that you haven’t seen before but you’ve made a decision to come away from your everyday life to be here and you’ve made that on the basis of some sort of motivation in your life.
Some sort of motivation. Well why am I going to go to Buddha house tonight? Perhaps perhaps there was some sense of looking for some peace and tranquility maybe some sense of I’d like to investigate if there are some ways I can be a bit more skillful about how I go about things in my life so I don’t get in some of the tangles I get myself into. Maybe you’ve got in the back of the mind I’d like to find ways to have more deeper and engaged relationships with the people around me and how can I do go about that? Maybe you are looking for some answers to things that have been bothering you for a long or a short time and quite likely there are many and various other reasons that each of us will uniquely be bringing here tonight.
But the idea that we all have some motivation is an an interesting point because it’s it’s something that Buddhism tends to put quite a lot of emphasis on the looking at and the working with our motivations as human beings. And any or all of those motivations that I mentioned are very useful ones and and very beneficial ones, and they’re all to varying degrees discussed in Buddhist practice. So perhaps we should ask, well, what exactly is Buddhism? And perhaps the most obvious and immediate answer that that per a person would give as well, it’s it’s one of the great world religions. One of the oldest great world religions.
It’s been going for two and a half thousand years and there are other people who would say even some Buddhist teachers these days who would say well Buddhism is not really a religion it’s it’s more a philosophy or it’s more a way of life or a set of disciplines and practices for one’s life or it’s a mystical spiritual path. And in one sense any or all these are perhaps legitimate as descriptions of Buddhism in one way or another. Probably at essence what Buddhism is is a a means for working with our everyday lived experience as a human being. It’s about the ongoing investigation and practice related to our growing up as people about becoming more aware, more skillful, more compassionate, and perhaps a little wiser. Buddhism is actually very positive in its fundamental approach.
In fact, perhaps it’s so positive that sometimes on the surface or initially, it looks like it’s negative. As thinking and experiencing living beings, Buddhism says that we are fundamentally pure and good. That’s our fundamental nature and that in fact we radically underestimate ourselves and our potential as human beings. We look outside. We tend to look outside for our solutions rather than building our lives around our inner resources and capabilities.
And this tradition seeks to draw us to consider looking at those inner capacities and abilities. These inner resources compared to what normally in much of our lives perhaps we tend to look out would for resources to deal with the things we have to face in our lives. So within our lived experience we we have these refuge points or anchor points in our life Things we depend on. Things we tend to build our lives around. Our relationships, our work, our government, perhaps science and technology, our good looks perhaps, our employability, and any number of things that we that tend to be the the anchor points, the refuge points, the things we shelter under to get us through.
Perhaps you might pause for a moment just to consider what it is that are your refuge points within the world of your lived experience with the things that you have to grapple with day to day. What are the things that you tend to seek refuge in from. So these outer refuges as distinct from our inner resources are not bad things. They’re all very necessary and useful. All of the things I mentioned in their various ways.
But perhaps it’s worthwhile our considering how powerful they really are for us to achieve what we want to achieve with our lives. And when it really comes to the crunch in our lives, what potency do they have to help us through? So we’re we’re going to spend a little time in doing some meditation And meditation is working with our inner resources. It’s working with our mind in a in a particular way. And and perhaps for for us Westerners in some ways it’s a bit of a it can be a bit of a strange new discovery that we actually have in mind.
Our lives are so outwardly directed that we can can almost be at a point that we don’t even realize that there’s this inner there’s this inner reality there’s this inner life going on that we are as a person a lived experience that we’re this continuum of thoughts and feelings and emotions and it’s all it’s all forging ahead moment by moment never stopping and it just sort of carries us along with it somehow. Meditation is basically speaking, meditation is is familiarizing our minds with a particular object. And in that sense, meditation is not some strange new technique that Westerners have learned from Asia in the last fifty or thirty years. Meditation is what we do every day. Our minds do it all the time.
We’re always familiarizing with something. When I fall in love, I do nothing but familiarize myself with my loved one all the time day and night and I can’t think about anything else. When I’m going for a job interview I familiarize myself so much with context that I’m going to have to face the questions I’ll have to answer and how to do it. I practice it over and over. So our minds are naturally very good at familiarizing familiarizing but the problem is that it tends to be very haphazard and undirected.
Sometimes it helps us through really well and other times it leads to complete disasters and we familiarize about something over and over that we know is bad for us and we just can’t stop. So maybe learning to meditate is not learning to meditate. It’s learning how to use meditation. Maybe learning to meditate is learning how to use the facility that we have in our mind in a more focused and directed way and for very clearly chosen purposes rather than the haphazard way it tends to work at the moment. And why should we bother doing that?
Perhaps it’s so that we can learn to investigate the nature of this inner world more. Perhaps we can learn perhaps we might be able to find some more peace and tranquility in our life. Perhaps we might be able to find more skillful ways of behaving and acting. There’s different types of these meditation and and from now on, I’ll use meditation in a sense of what we’re going to do as in a more formal thing on deciding to meditate now rather than the everyday thing. So one of the types of meditation is called calming meditation where we simply bring our mind to focus on one object to settle it down and focus it.
And a very common way of doing that is to focus on our natural breathing. And in fact, what we’ll do for the next fifteen or twenty minutes or so is that we will focus on our breathing. And we’re we’re simply going to breathe as naturally and freely as we can, but we’re going to seek to bring our attention to focus on our breath wherever it’s easy to follow the sensation of our breathing. So we’re not trying to think about the idea of breathing. We’re trying to be aware of the sensations in our body of breathing.
Maybe the air passing through our nostrils and around our nostrils maybe the expansion and rising and falling of our chest the feeling of the clothes moving against our body. Pick one of those that you think you’ll be able to work with most easily and then try and continue to focus on that. So this calming meditation. This simple meditation is in fact extremely difficult. We will we will normally find that it’s almost impossible to keep our attention on our breath.
If anyone’s tried it before you you perhaps have had this experience already and so this is entirely normal and natural. Unless it’s extremely exciting and a very potent object our mind doesn’t like staying on any particular thing for very long. And that’s actually got many uses in our everyday life to constantly jump around from one thing to the other whatever grabs our attention the most. But now we suddenly discover when we’re trying to work with ourselves in our minds in this context suddenly what is useful for surviving out out there in the world becomes a bit of a liability and it’s something we have to practice slowly at training our mind to do it differently. And because because our mind is trainable and can learn to do things differently and because it’s not something bad about us we’re trying to change because it is useful in its right context then we should we need to be very gentle with ourselves and not become frustrated that that Jampa has said to focus on my breath and I can’t even focus on my breath for one breath and I’m already thinking about what I was doing at home or what I’ll do when I get home.
So when we’ll start off focusing on our breath bring your mind gently to your breathing and then when you find that your mind’s wandered away to wherever it is going to wander away to when you notice that maybe after ten minutes then say, oh well, you know, I wandered away for ten minutes and now Jampas ringing the bell but I’ll just for one breath bring my mind back to the breath and that’s fine. So our natural flow of breathing. So perhaps if if you’re not already sitting in a position that you’re feeling as comfortable as you can be in the circumstances and if you’re able to straighten your back then that’s often seen as being useful for this sort of practice. If you’re sitting in a chair then it’s actually really easy to get an excellent position for meditating because if you sit if you just sit forward a little in the chair away from the back and then put your back straight with your feet flat on the floor it actually gives you excellent posture for very little effort. And if if if it’s just too uncomfortable to to be away from the back of the chair, then please relax back into it.
But if you could think you can manage for ten ten minutes or twenty minutes to sit forward on the chair and just have your back straight in a relaxed way, then do that. If you feel after five minutes that that your knee is becoming unbearably sore for those brave ones who are sitting on the floor, then just adjust it. Don’t try and have a battle with it or think you have to last the time or something. So we’ll We’ll spend about fifteen minutes. And just before we start bringing our mind to our breath, let’s think about our motivation.
When we undertake these sort of activities in Buddhist practice, we always try and say before we undertake the practice, let me just recall what am I doing here? Why is it that I’m doing this anyway? And I’ll I’ll develop this idea more next week and and in following weeks. But tonight, just think for yourself what was my reason for being here tonight? Why am I sitting here in this appeared strangely new about to enter into fifteen minutes of meditating on my breathing.
And and perhaps think if if there is something that you feel is positive about what you’re doing, then say good. I’m doing it for this positive reason. And that sort of sets the tone of your meditation then. So I’ll just let let each of you do that for a minute or so, and then I’ll draw your attention to your breathing. And I’ll finish the session by ringing the little bell.
So why am I undertaking this activity now? Consider to yourself. And now bring your mind to focus on your breathing, the natural flow of your breath in and out wherever it seems obvious to you that you can be aware of that. And when your mind wanders, acknowledge that you’ve wandered and gently come back to try and focus on the breathing again. So please relax for a minute or two.
If you’d like to stand and stretch, feel free. Change your position. If anyone needs another drink, there might be some more ice water sitting out the door. In this course, we’ll be looking at some new story lines, some new ways of thinking, some different models of the world and ourselves. Normally in our everyday life, have all sorts of belief systems and ways of sort of habitual models for how we go about our thinking processes and often they’re fairly inconsistent and we’re not really sure why we hold them or half the time we may be aren’t even really aware of to what degree they’re operating.
That’s the way our conceptual minds work is to have these various systems and to try and fit why am I doing this and what’s in it for me and to try and have some sort of conceptual sense of why we’re going about what we do. We’re going to look at some variations on those habitual everyday themes, some new stories to tell ourselves. And I would like to start off by reading you a story. And the story I’d like to read is is from a book called Old Path White Clouds by a Vietnamese Buddhist master called Thich Nhat Hanh who’s now living in France for many years and in this book he tells in a very beautiful and poetic way the life story of the Buddha and I want to read several pages where he talks about the night when Śākyamūni Buddha decided I’m going to sit under this tree and I’m not going to move until I found the answer to life, the universe, and everything, which is what he apparently did. And I’d like you to just relax and see what sort of reactions come up and some of the things you maybe won’t understand or in some parts maybe is talking about ideas that we we haven’t talked about that’s for sure and maybe you haven’t come across before and other ideas might think well I find that a bit hard to accept.
That’s okay. It’s like think of it like a sort of a bit of a provocative fairy tale or something. Through mindfulness, Siddhartha. Siddhartha was one of the names of Śākyamūni Buddha along with Gautama. So through mindfulness, Siddhartha’s mind, body, and breath were perfectly at one.
His practice of mindfulness had enabled him to build great powers of concentration which he could now use to shine awareness on his mind and body. After deeply entering meditation, he began to discern the presence of countless other beings in his own body right in the present moment. Organic and inorganic beings, minerals, mosses and grasses, insects, animals, and people all within him. He saw that other beings were himself right in the present moment. He saw his own past lives, all his births and deaths.
He saw the creation and destruction of thousands of worlds and thousands of stars. He felt all the joys and sorrows of every living being, those born of mothers, those born of eggs, those born of fission who divided themselves into new creatures. He saw that every cell of his body contained all of the heaven and earth and spanned the three times past, present, and future. It was the hour of the first watch of the night. Gautama even entered even more deeply into meditation.
He saw how countless worlds arose and fell were created and destroyed. He saw how countless beings passed through countless births and deaths. He saw that these were but outward appearances and not true reality just as millions of waves rise and fall incessantly on the surface of the sea. While the sea itself is beyond birth and death. If the waves understood what they themselves were water, they would transcend birth and death and arrive at true inner peace overcoming all fear.
This realization enabled Gautama to transcend the net of birth and death and he smiled. His smile was like a flower blossoming in the deep night which radiated a halo of light. In the smile, it was the smile of a wondrous understanding the insight into the destruction of all the defilements. He had he attained this level of understanding by the second watch of the night. At just that moment, thunder crashed and great bolts of lightning flashed across the sky as if to rip the heavens in two.
Black clouds concealed the moon and stars. Rain poured down. Gautama was soaking wet, but he did not budge. He continued his meditation. Without wavering, he shined his awareness on his mind.
He saw that living beings suffer because they don’t understand that they share one common ground with all beings. Ignorance gives rise to a multitude of sorrows confusions and troubles. Greed, ignorance, arrogance, doubt, jealousy and fear all have their roots in ignorance. When we learn to calm our minds in order to look deeply at the true nature of things, we can arrive at full understanding which dissolves every sorrow and anxiety and gives rise to acceptance and love. Gautama now saw that understanding and love are one.
Without understanding, there can’t be love. Each person’s disposition is a result of physical, emotional, and social conditions. When we understand this, we cannot hate even a person who behaves cruelly, but we can strive to help transform his physical emotional and social conditions. Understanding gives rise to compassion and love which in turn gives rise to correct action. In order to love, it is first necessary to understand.
So understanding is the key to liberation. In order to attain clear understanding, it is necessary to live mindfully making direct contact with life in the present moment truly seeking what is taking place within and outside of oneself. Practicing mindfulness strengthens the ability to look deeply. And when we look deeply into the heart of anything, it will reveal itself. Looking deeply into the heart of all beings Siddhartha attained insight into everyone’s minds no matter where they were and he was able to hear everyone’s quiet cries of both suffering and joy.
He attained to the states of divine sight, divine hearing, and the ability to travel across vast distances without moving. It was now the end of the third watch and there was no more thunder. The clouds rolled back to reveal the bright moon and stars. Gautama felt as though a prison which had confined him for thousands of lifetimes had broken open. Ignorance had been the jail keeper.
Because of ignorance, his mind had been obscured just like the moon and stars hidden by the storm clouds. Clouded by endless waves of deluded thoughts, the mind had falsely divided reality into subject and object self and others existence and non existence birth and death and from these discriminations arose wrong views. The prisons of feelings, craving, grasping, and becoming. The suffering of birth, old age, sickness, and death only made the prison walls thicker. The only thing to do was seize the jail keeper and see his true face.
The jail keeper was ignorance and the means to overcome ignorance was the noble eightfold path. Once the jail keeper was gone, the jail would disappear and never be rebuilt again. The hermit Gautama smiled and whispered to himself, oh, jailer, I see you now. How many lifetimes have you confined me in the prisons of birth and death? But now I see your face clearly and from now on, you can build no more prisons around me.
Looking up, Siddhartha saw the morning star appear on the horizon twinkling like a huge diamond. He had seen the star so many times before while sitting beneath the papala tree, but this morning was like seeing it for the first time. It was as dazzling as a jubilant smile of enlightenment. Siddhartha gazed at the star and exclaimed out of deep compassion, all beings contain within themselves the seeds of enlightenment. And yet, we drown in the ocean of birth and death.
Siddhartha knew he had found the great vehicle. He’d attained his goal and now his heart experienced perfect peace and ease. He thought about his years of searching filled with disappointments and hardships. He thought of his father, mother, aunt, his wife, and his child, and all his friends. Thought of the palace capital of Kapilavastu, his people, and a boy called Svasti.
The boy came to his senses and answered, teacher. Swasti joined his palms and bowed. He took a few steps forward and then stopped and gazed at Siddhartha in awe. Embarrassed by his own behavior, he spoke hulking haltingly, teacher, you look so different today. Siddhartha motioned for the boy to approach.
He took him into his arms and asked, how do I look different today? Gazing up at Siddhartha’s face, Svasti answered, it’s hard to say. It’s just you look so different. It’s like like you were a star. Siddhartha patted the boy on the head and said, is that so?
What else do I look like? You look like a lotus that’s just blossomed and like like the moon over the Gaya forest at night. Siddhartha looked in his eyes and said, you are a poet, Svasti? Now tell me, why are you here so early today, and where are your buffalos? He was a buffalo boy.
Śākyamūni Buddha was apparently born into a a smaller sized kingdom in the southern part of what’s now Nepal called the Shakya clan, and he was the prince and had a pretty good life by all accounts. Because at his birth, a wandering mendicant had prophesied that either he was going to become a great spiritual teacher or a great king his father said, in no way I want him to become a king so I’ll keep him very no way I want him to become a spiritual teacher so I’ll protect him from life out there and give him all the good things of life in the court and try and make a good king out of him which he did for many years and the story goes that Śākyamūni brought us to a very little of outside world until on later on in when he was a bit older. He contrived after he’d in fact been married. He went out and began to explore what it was like out in the real world for everyday people and he saw all the difficult and terrible things that people have to go through. Terrible sufferings of sickness and old age and death and these very powerfully moved him and he was eventually moved to the point to make a decision I’ve got to find some answer for all this stuff that makes me feel very unhappy when I see people like this and out of compassion he wanted to find some answer.
So he went He gave up his life in the court abandoned it and basically went out to live in the forest which was in those days very common and he went and studied and meditating with the then leading teachers in North India who were well known for their meditation skills and even though he was very skillful and each teacher he dealt with was extremely impressed with his progress and on more than one occasion offered to go into partnership with you in leading the group that they were heads of but he was dissatisfied and continued to search on his own going through several years a very intense asceticism and refusing to eat except the minimal amounts and drink. And then he had an insight into perhaps he was doing it the wrong way by pushing himself so hard. Maybe there was a middle way and that realization came just before the story I read where he decided to have a wash and eat some good food and relax a little bit and then he made the decision to sit and meditate. And it would seem that he had a very profound insight into the nature of himself and reality as was it was as was discussed in what I read in the story.
What happened, he then decided after a number of weeks of just being by himself, he decided to go back and meet up with five friends that he used to meditate with in the bush in the old days and who he’d abandoned who’d abandoned him because when he started eating food again and having washes and unacceptable things like that they rejected him. They thought he’d given up the true path. And so he went back and he met them again and that they had a reaction very similar to Svasti’s in this story. They were very deeply and profoundly impressed by who he was now, what he was. And on that occasion, in the deer park at what is now Sarnath near Varanasi in Northern India, this event here is generally believed to have occurred at Bodh Gaya.
Not far from there, about four hours on the train is Varanasi, Sarnath where this first teaching was given. And in this first teaching, he taught a quite simple but profound message and the message is called the four noble truths. And the four noble truths go something like this. When we look at our lived experience, they there is a there is suffering within our lived experience. There is discontent.
There is unhappiness. Then the second noble truth is this state what we find there on investigation that has a cause. Something about the way our mind works that leads to this state of our lived experience. That that cause can be changed or undone. In other words, the third noble truth is that there is cessation of suffering and that there is another way of being out other with without suffering in the way we know it.
And that the fourth noble truth is that there is a path or a way of attaining that state of cessation which removes the cause of our suffering. So let me briefly make a couple of comments, little bit more comment about each of them. And I suppose what we’ll be doing tonight and for the rest of the time is in various ways and different angles exploring different implications of these four or what they mean. So first, this business of dissatisfaction And perhaps this is one reason why people on first looking at Buddhism think, oh, it’s a bit pessimistic, isn’t it? All they talk is about suffering.
And then we just get over that and I’ll probably start talking about death, isn’t it? And Buddhism is certainly very realistic. It really is at heart, it’s not about making us feel nice and warm fuzzies for the rest of our life and that everything’s gonna be okay if we just accept this or whatever. That can take a little bit of getting used to but there’s also perhaps something very honest about it in that it’s it’s saying let let us let us look within our lived experience and what’s it actually like there? We’re born.
And as soon as we’re born, we start having face difficulties and and in the cold hard world and things are not so pleasant. Unfortunately, we do get enough cuddles and good stuff to get us through. And then we go through all the hassles of growing up and the confusion of childhood and the fun of teenagers and having our own children and having our lives taken asunder by that and then suddenly we get sick and everything comes apart at the seams. And then we’re getting older and then things don’t work properly anymore, and then suddenly, we’re dying. It’s pretty grim, isn’t it?
But even even you say, okay. That’s all a bit grim. There’s good things happening. Life’s not so bad, but let’s think a bit more. Why is it that I never seem to be able to completely get my act together here?
They all do. What’s wrong with me? I never seem to be able get my act together. We we just fix up one thing and something else goes wrong in our life. And it and it seems like we just forever have to face things we really don’t want to face And we run away from them and then a year later or five years later it comes back and bites us again the same thing.
Why is that? Why is it like that? We just get something really nice worked out and it either ends again too quickly or we get sick of it. Why is it like that? So this state of dissatisfaction or discontent.
And then, well, this presumably has some cause. I mean, things just don’t happen for no reason. And the cause that Śākyamūni Buddha elucidates in this first teaching of his is that there it is rooted this is what all these things that we’ve just been talking about. The reason they’re like that is because our mind operates in a certain way because it starts from a certain point. So our minds tend to unfold themselves in confusion and misunderstanding and ignorance at a feel at quite a profound level.
Not at a fundamental level but at a fairly deep level. Our minds tend to unfold in a confused and ignorant way. There’s a sort of a general state of bewilderment And in that state of bewilderment, it grasps onto itself. This this this psychophysical conglomeration that we call ourselves, our body, and our minds, all the stuff around here that we call me, it grabs onto that as as somehow really existing as something that’s really there, this me. And then it sees all the other things around.
And because this is me, well, they’re all mine. Yeah. I’ll have that. I don’t want that. And so our mind generates as the next step.
It generates these emotional responses to everything around us. And they these these disruptive, deluded states of of being attached and chasing after certain things and having aversion and running away from other things. And we and we put everything. So there’s this creating of a me because of this ignorant bewildered state. Not to say there isn’t a me, but it makes it something that it is more than what it really is and we’ll talk about that later.
And then it makes everything else mine and then relates to it appropriately. And so suddenly, we are living our lives functioning by means of all these constant stream of of of disruptive mental states of of attachment to certain things that we judge is what we want and aversion to other things that we judge we don’t want. And if it’s not one or the other, we don’t care. We’re just digging we just don’t worry about it. We’re neutral about it.
And then we act on those disruptive emotional deluded state.