Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute introductory session, Jampa Kaldan frames Buddhist philosophy and practice as fundamentally unified and relevant to contemporary life. He opens by acknowledging the significance of the audience’s choice to investigate spirituality, then establishes the course structure: mindfulness of motivation, breathing meditation, a teaching on messages from the Buddha’s life and a brief history of Buddhism, and an optional discussion session afterward. Kaldan explains meditation not as mystical bliss but as deliberate familiarization—a skill we already use daily—and introduces three foundational types: stabilizing meditation, analytical meditation, and visualization, all aimed at greater skillfulness in living. He grounds the practice in the human capacity for wisdom and compassion that lies beneath confusion, drawing on Lama Yeshe’s teaching on the clarity and potential of consciousness. The talk concludes with practical posture instructions before a ten-minute breathing meditation, setting the ground for the six messages he will draw from the Buddha’s life story.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2002 01 21 07 Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation 21-1-02.mp3
UUID: 19aad28f-a418-46a1-bde7-982a83a43977
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Intro to Buddhist Philosophy (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2002-01-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,659
Introduction an introduction to Buddhist thought and practice. The two are very closely interrelated in in the Buddhist the Buddhist approach to life. Buddhist an introduction to Buddhist thought and practice. My name is Jampa Kaldean, and I became involved in Buddha House about nearly ten years ago when I met the teacher who was here then and is still living in Adelaide, Geshe Kensur Pema Lhundup. And I became ordained with him about seven and a half years ago.
And then soon after that, I went to live at Sera Monastery in South India. And I’ve been living there and studying for most of the time since then and come back from time to time. And it’s always lovely to come back to Buddha House. And, I feel very honored to be able to be here with you all tonight to be able to share something of my growing understanding of what the Buddha Dharma is all about. And it’s very wonderful.
It makes me very happy. I think it’s wonderful that so many of you have made a decision and a choice to take some time from out of your busy lives to investigate a little bit about what spiritual path is all about. Perhaps for the first time for some of you, perhaps to extend your understanding for others. I think that’s a very wonderful, positive, constructive, and skillful thing that you’re choosing to do. In the program tonight, we’ll what we’ll do is as follows.
We’ll start the session with spending a few minutes in what I’ll call readjusting our motivation. And this will be a pattern that we follow each week. So first, we’ll bring our minds back to the present from the busyness of our lives and try and get them to focus a little bit about the business of being here in in the session. And then we’ll spend some time on meditation, sitting meditation. And before we do that tonight, I’ll give an introduction some introductory comments about what exactly meditation is for those of you who who may be not so familiar with it.
And then we’ll do some breathing meditation tonight. And then we’ll have a a sort of a one minute break to stand up and ease the painful knees. And then we’ll have the talk on the theme of tonight, which will be it was advertised as the life of the Buddha. I’ve now tidying it a little bit more specifically than that, and I’m calling it some messages from the Buddha’s life, some messages from the Buddha’s life. And I’ll also give a very brief history of Buddhism to connect us from there to now.
How do we come to be sitting here now talking about this? So we’ll have a brief history of Buddhism squeezed in there as well. And then after that, we’ll I’ll give a little talk a little bit about some details to to do with the course and how it will work and some suggestions and so on towards the end. Then it should finish around about nine. But my guess is it’s about ten minutes late now, so it may be a touch late.
I know perhaps some people have to leave at nine. If you’re pressing, you need to leave. Please feel free if you may have to leave a bit before we finish. The that’s the the stated time of finishing. However, at nine o’clock or at the time of finishing this formal session, everyone is invited for those who wish to have a cup of tea at the back.
And and then there will be a session continuing until ten where we will have an opportunity for discussion, for more questions and for discussion. This wasn’t advertised, so it may be a little difficult if you weren’t thinking in terms of staying that late. I’d encourage you to stay if you’re able because I think the opportunity to have discussion is, in my experience, a really useful and integral part of of the investigation of the topic that we’re looking at. But that’s up to you. If you wish to stay to bring the cup of tea, we’ll sit in a circle and and have a discussion group if we can fit a circle in for all of you.
So to the the business of motivation. Motivation is a key issue in Buddhist practice. One’s motivation in whatever you do is seen as a critical determining factor in judging whether what you’re doing is worthwhile or good or not. So there’s a great deal of emphasis in Buddhist practice on setting a skillful type of motivation before engaging in any activity, especially any deliberately spiritual activity such as meditation might be used as. And so that’s the reason why we will spend some time at the beginning of each night considering our motivation.
And also more deliberately at the beginning of each meditation session, we will, from next week on, we will spend some time very deliberately generating a particular type of positive motivation. So for these introductory readjusting the motivation chats at the beginning, each week, I’m going to ask two questions and try and answer them as a structure for this. The first one is, how is it possible that we come to be gathered here? And each week, I’ll try and answer that. How is it possible that we come to be gathered here?
I’ll try each week and answer that in a different way. And then the second question is, what might be the significance of for us of our being here? What’s the significance that that might have? And I’ll also try and answer that in a different way each week. So tonight, let’s ask the two questions and and see what answers we get.
How is it possible that we come to be gathered here? It was about two and a half thousand years ago that it was traditionally accepted that Siddhartha Gautama sat under a Bodhi tree near present day Bodh Gaya and attained a state of enlightenment in the state of Bihar as it’s called now. Some of you have perhaps been there. He was thirty five years old, and he’d spent the previous seven years in intense meditation practice wandering in the forests of the Ganges Plain. And this half this having just before that left a very privileged life as the son of a king and abandoned that to take up the spiritual quest.
And we’re gonna look at that story in some more detail later in the session tonight. And after his death, his leading disciples began a process of handing on to the students of the next generation what had been discovered both in terms of verbal teach teachings and in terms, perhaps more importantly, of the actual inner realizations of the spiritual path. So this process, a lineage of master disciple relationship has continued throughout a very rich and complex history and comes to us through a large one thousand year diversion into Tibet to us here tonight. And we’ll look at that in a little bit more detail later as well. So in answer to the question about how it is possible that we come to be gathered here, it’s only due to the kindness of the Buddha that he chose to devote his life to teaching in the way that we’ll discuss more later and to the subsequent hard work of that lineage of masters and disciples throughout the ages that leads right here tonight.
And that’s why we’re able to gather here to have this course tonight. If it wasn’t for those two factors of the Buddha’s decision to share in a very kindly way what he discovered and all the hard work that went on between then and now, then we definitely wouldn’t be here tonight. So the second question, what might be the significance for us of our being here? Every action we take grows out of some sort of motivation. And each of us tonight has come here based on some motive.
We’ve all come here with some reason for why, some motive behind it. Buddhism talks about three main types of positive motivation. And it’s quite possible that some of you have had one or other or more than one of these three as your reason for coming tonight. And the three are, firstly, seeking some more skillful ways of dealing with our habitual problems. I’d like to find some more skillful ways to deal with my habitual problems that I get stuck in.
Or secondly, maybe longing for some deeper and more radical solution to the seemingly never ending difficulties of life? Is there a more radical solution? And thirdly, perhaps hoping to find some ways to be of more benefit to others. Now all of those three, the wish to be more skillful, the wish to be free of our human predicament, and the wish to be benefit to others. All three of those are very positive and wonderful motivations.
And all of them in the Buddhist understanding, all of them are integral to the process of our realizing our full potential as human beings. I’d like to read a quote from Lama Yeshe. Lama Yeshe is the founder of the organization of which Buddha House is a part, and he visited Adelaide in nineteen eighty one. And Buddha House was established subsequent to that visit. And a brief quote from Lama Yeshe’s book Introduction to Tantra, where he talks about our human potential.
According to the Buddhist teachings, no matter how confused or deluded we may be at the moment, the underlying and essential nature of our being is clear and pure. In the same way that clouds can temporarily obscure but cannot damage the light giving power of the sun, so too the temporary afflictions of body and mind. Our confusion, anxiety, and the suffering they cause can temporarily obscure but cannot destroy or even touch the fundamentally clear nature of our consciousness, Dwelling deep within our heart and within the hearts of all beings without exception is an inexhaustible source of love and wisdom. And the ultimate purpose of all spiritual practice, whether they’re called Buddhist or not, is to uncover and make contact with this essentially pure nature. When we’ve developed our inner purity, inner compassion, and inner love, we can then see the reflection of this purity and loving kindness in others.
But if we have not contacted these qualities within ourselves, we will see everyone as ugly and limited. For whatever we see every day in outer reality is nothing more than a projection of our own reality, inner reality. The existence of this deep, essentially pure nature of mind is not a matter of belief or of blind acceptance or dogma. It is a matter of experience. Countless people throughout history have discovered this great treasure of peace, love, and wisdom within themselves.
And countless great teachers and guides have skillfully shown others how they too can discover their own deepest nature and experience the unsurpassed happiness this discovery automatically brings. Among these exceptionally kind spiritual guides is Śākyamūni Buddha. I’ll explain that name in a minute. And the aim of all his teachings and methods is the fulfillment of our highest human potential potential. According to Buddhist terminology, the ultimate goal of our individual human evolution is enlightenment or Buddhahood.
This stage, which can be achieved by anyone, is attained when all the delusions such as greed and hatred, ignorance, and the like presently which obscure our mind have been completely removed and when all our positive qualities have been fully developed. This state of complete fulfillment or full awakening is characterized by unlimited wisdom, unlimited compassion, and unlimited skill. So Buddhism contains an extraordinarily rich and diverse collection of means to go about the work of realizing this potential that Lama Yeshe talked about. And the significance, I think then in conclusion of our being here is that we have here an opportunity to explore the relevance of this ancient tradition with its enormous diversity of approaches to spiritual practice, which we’ll explore over the next six weeks, and to explore it within our particular circumstance here as twenty first century Westerners. So that brings us to meditation.
And we will do some breathing meditation tonight. But before before we we do that, I’d just like to make some comments for a few minutes about what meditation is to set the background for what we’re going to do in this activity. Meditation has become quite widely talked about and almost a part of Western life now in the last thirty years. Perhaps initially very much popularized by the TM or transcendental meditation movement in perhaps some of you may remember the late 60s or 70s when that was quite strong. And since then, it has moved out to become an aspect of our culture and life that we sort of know about.
And become an established part of things like sports psychology and business psychology increasingly over the last perhaps fifteen years. In fact, my introduction, my first introduction to meditation eleven years ago was by a sports psychologist at a business conference. And I remember at the time him saying after he’d spent five minutes instructing us how to calm our minds by looking at a candle, I remember him saying making a comment something like, and you can go on to learn a lot more about meditation if you want. I didn’t realize that the writing was on the wall for me. So at that time, I didn’t even know anything about Buddhism.
So what’s the Buddhist view of what meditation is? The Tibetan word for meditation is a little word called gom, and it means literally to familiarize. It’s a verb to familiarize. It’s used in everyday life in Tibetan. To familiarize.
Now we are constantly familiarizing ourselves with things in everyday life. Sometimes we do it very intensively even if we don’t realize we are. So if we’re checking a street directory before we go to a new part of the city, we are familiarizing or meditating on how to get where we want to go. If we have a difficult situation to handle with someone at work and we’re rehearsing how we’re going talk with them, we are familiarizing or meditating on how we are going to handle that situation. We’re very good at this.
We’re very good at familiarizing. But the trouble is at times it’s not very directed the way we use it. And unfortunately, the way we use it may be rather counterproductive. So if I’m constantly meditating on the chocolate cake by familiarizing myself about it when I’ve decided I definitely want to be on a diet for the next month, then my familiarization is being counterproductive to the goal I’ve set myself. But we can’t help ourselves.
So meditation is not just sitting in a corner being somehow mindlessly blissed out, or at least perhaps in certain circumstances, that’s one small aspect of it. Buddhist meditation is deliberately using and enhancing our existing familiarization skills so that we can live more skillfully. Or another way of putting it is to work and experiment with our lived experience or our mind using mental techniques that we already employ every day. Another quote from Lama Yeshe, what he thinks meditation is. This is from a teaching I think he gave in New Zealand in about nineteen seventy five.
Meditation does not imply only the development of single pointed concentration or being blissed out sitting in the corner, as I said before. Meditation is an alert state of mind, the opposite of sluggishness. Meditation is wisdom. You should remain aware every moment of your daily life, fully conscious of what you’re doing and why and how you’re doing it. We do almost everything unconsciously.
We even meditate unconsciously. We familiarize ourselves with many things, but we don’t know we’re doing it. We do almost everything unconsciously. We eat unconsciously. We drink unconsciously.
We talk unconsciously. Although we claim to be conscious, we’re completely unaware of the afflictions raging around through our minds, influencing everything we do. Check out for yourselves. Experiment. I’m not being judgmental or putting you down.
This is how Buddhism works. It gives you ideas that you can check out in your own experience to see if they’re true or not. It’s very down to earth. I’m not talking about something way up there in the sky. It’s actually a very simple thing.
Things are usually simple when you know how. Lama Yeshe said, it’s a very simple thing, and they are simple when you know how. And perhaps the reason Lameyoshi says that this is a very simple thing is that it means doing something which we already do. We have a great capacity, however, to enhance and focus the skills that we already have. And this will be a theme that I come back to repeatedly during this course.
That many times what spiritual practice is about is simply doing what we already do, but doing it better or in a different way. So what could we say are the benefits of meditation? Bringing greater calmness and peace to our lives is an obvious potential benefit. Training our minds in more skillful ways of being and living. And eventually, allowing us to make contact with our deepest nature, perhaps to be liberated from our current way of dealing with our lives and our world.
So those three, calmness. And this is what the stress management use of meditation, which is so popular, is hooking into. It can bring some calmness and peace and centeredness whether you’re indulging in spiritual practice or not. That works. That can work for anyone to a degree.
And then I will use the word training our minds to be more skillful. And this is used no doubt in sports psychology and in the business world to train people to, handle particular situations more successfully. And then the fourth, the third one is unique to the spiritual path, seeking some more profound use of, meditation than those fairly superficial ones. As wonderful and valuable as they are in the spiritual path as well, each of the three of those have an integral role to play as will become clear over the next six weeks. Each of those three are integral to the long term goal of Buddhist practice.
So some comments about different types of meditation. Are there different types? And a very simple classification into one type called stabilizing meditation, one type called analytical meditation where you combine the two and something called visualization. So these four things, let me make a comment about each of them. Stabilising meditation.
This is where you bring your attention or awareness to focus on one particular object. And you try and train your mind to hold it there. It brings and when you do this, it brings great stability and power to your mind. And your lived experience when you’re in this state tends to be smooth. You’re in a sweet spot.
You’re in your zone as they used to say some years ago for the sports people. So you know what this is like. You’re reading a book and you’re just totally with it. Or you have one of those amazingly rare days when you’re doing some sport and you just disappear into the activity. And it’s beautiful.
You don’t even realize. And so this is stabilizing where you are highly stabilized and focused on a particular object. Unfortunately, we do have rather little control over this capacity. It just seems to come upon us in certain situations. And what we’ll be doing to practice stabilizing meditation tonight and then a little bit at the beginning of each meditation for the rest of the course is, we’ll be using the object of our breathing, which is very widely used, to practice stabilizing meditation because it’s cheap and readily available.
Second one is analytical meditation. This is a completely different style of meditation. This is where we use our creativity and our intellect as an integral part of the motive of the meditation. The spiritual path requires us to see and to respond to things in new and more skillful ways. And so we use our reason and our clear thinking and our imagination to cut through some of the unthinking and dysfunctional beliefs and concepts that we carry around with us and that we live our lives by.
And then having used our intellect and creativity and imagination in that way and having come to some different conclusion, we then think about what it is we’ve done with that process. It’s like contemplating or studying or mulling over a topic. That’s what analytical meditation is. But it’s a little bit more powerful. A little bit usually can be experienced as a little bit deeper than just studying at your desk because of the deliberate focus that you’re bringing to bear in a way that you don’t often do.
And this tradition, this particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, puts a great deal of importance on the use of analytical meditation. And we’ll be using that regularly in the meditations as the course goes on. And then stabilising can be combined with analytical. Once we come to some conclusion using our intellect, we then hold that conclusion and try and stabilise on it. And try and familiarise ourself with the conclusion we’ve come to.
To integrate it with who we are by getting our minds used to it, the new idea. Then thirdly, visualisation. What’s visualisation? We’re constantly visualizing things in our everyday lives again. When plan a trip to go somewhere, we extensively visualize what’s going to happen, how we’re going to do it, where we’ll go.
If we’re designing a new extension for our house, we can spend vast amounts of time and energy visualizing what we want to create. And then we set about the task of realizing the image, of bringing into reality what was just an imagination and visualization. So this same technique that we use all the time is actually a very powerful tool to enhance our meditation or to enhance our spiritual path, to enhance our analytical meditation. And it can be fostered. For example, we could use it to foster a positive state of mind.
If we say, well, a sense of loving kindness, that’s a positive state of mind. How could I foster it and bring it strongly in me? Well, I’ll visualize in front of me someone that I love dearly. And what automatically comes into one’s consciousness is a sense of loving kindness and affection. So you use it as a tool.
And we’ll start doing just that little technique from next week onwards at the beginning of our meditations. So visualization, rather than being sort of different to stabilizing and analytical, is really it includes both of them. They’re not radically distinct things. Different ways of looking at the process. So tonight, we’ll be doing breathing meditation.
And we’re going to use the breath as an object for enhancing our mental stability. The breath is always with us, and it doesn’t require any special understanding or technique. We’re simply going to follow the natural flow of the breath. And we’re going to watch the breath as it comes in and watch the breath as it goes out as it tends to do. It comes in and it goes out.
And we go we’ll bring our attention to wherever you find it easiest to hold your attention on this process of our being alive. Now you might want to focus around your nostrils and feeling the air moving in and out. If that’s a little bit vague and hard and it doesn’t bring any sensations to mind, you can’t feel anything there, then concentrate maybe on your chest or diaphragm and just feel the movement there. Wherever it’s easy to be aware of this process of breathing that it’s coming in, and then it’s going out, and then it comes in again over and over and over. So we’re not going to try and modify the breathing or do anything different to what is exactly happening for the last fifteen minutes that we’ve just been sitting here.
We’ve all just been quietly breathing away. The only difference is is that we just want to bring our awareness to watch it without changing it. So a comment or two before we actually start that in about our posture. There’s these traditional instructions about taking a posture involving various things. And I’ll just make a couple of comments for those of you who haven’t perhaps done much meditation.
Regarding the legs, sitting cross legged. Most of us are sitting cross legged on the floor. I’ll talk about sitting in chairs in a minute. So it’s really good if you’re sitting cross legged to sort of our natural western ways to sit as some of you are with your legs and your knees up. And then the stage beyond that is to sit with your legs one in front of the other with your knees on the ground.
And getting your backside lifted up off the floor is a great advantage to that. And then, of course, there’s all the comp all the of high-tech stuff of half lotus and full lotus and that for the great yogis. But the main thing here is try and get comfortable, which is not so easy if you’re a bit crowded, I guess. But that’s in legs. For the chair, sitting on the chair there and if some of you here are without a chair, I don’t know if next time we might be able to have a few more chairs.
If someone’s finding it really hard without a chair, don’t know whether we’ll better get any more or not. But if you’re sitting on a chair, it’s actually you can actually very easily get an outstanding meditation posture. And the key to it is sitting forward on your chair and not leaning back and having your feet flat on the floor. So that brings us to the back. And having your back nice and straight like a stack of coins or imagine the thread running down through the back and coming out the top of your head and someone’s just gently pulling you up.
Not stretching you up, but just gently keeping the back straight as if it’s hanging on a string. And that same applies on the chair. If you can sit forward on the chair and feet on the floor, not slouch back into it because then you just go to sleep, and hold your back straight exactly like the person sitting on the floor. In fact, it’s a lot easier to get a good meditation position in a chair than on the floor because our bodies are used to it. When doing this, it’s hard for us.
Then your shoulders are just loosened, falling down and relaxed. And hands, again, relaxed. And there’s all different things with hands. You know, there’s a traditional mudra, put them like that, a hand shape. Or there’s another one where you want in the lap and one hanging over your knee.
Or some people like putting it on their knees this way or that way. Just don’t be too fast. Just have your hands relaxed, just sitting crossed in your lap or wherever you feel comfortable. And your head slightly tilted down. Remember, it’s hanging off the string, but your head slightly tilted and eyes a little downcast.
And your mouth, the jaw apart, just relaxed, lips loosely together. Everything loose. But even though this is a nice loose, relaxed, there’s something very extraordinarily determined about sitting like this. It a natural energy of being incredibly determined about what am I doing here. The fact that one is sitting with a straight back.
Enough talk. Just before we start, let’s take a thirty second break here as well. If anyone wants to just stretch their legs a little bit before they get into meditation posture, do that. Unfortunately, it’s a cool day today. Okay.
So let’s bring our thoughts to establishing a our posture, recalling the comments about one’s legs and back. The string gently pulling up, sitting forward on the chair if you’re in a chair, if you’re able to do that. And your hands loosely relaxed shoulders falling down and not tensed up around your neck with a whole day’s worth of burdens planted sitting on them. Shoulders loose and falling down. Head slightly tilted forward.
And the mouth, the jaw relaxed and lips lightly together. The eyes slightly downcast. And you can have your eyes either open or closed depending on what you feel comfortable with at this stage. And so we’re going to bring our mind to focus on the breathing, following the natural flow of our breath of our breathing as it comes in and as it goes out. Not changing or modifying it, but just watching and being aware of this process.
So watch the breath as it comes in and watch it as it goes out. We’ll do this for about ten minutes, and I’ll ring the bell at the end to indicate the finish of the session. So please relax. And if you’d like, again, take thirty seconds to stretch your legs too, sir. So talk tonight is about some messages from the Buddha’s life, and then a quick look at the history of Buddhism.
And firstly, we’ll look at some of the key events in the Buddha’s life and consider what might be the implications of this for us here and now as people living two and a half thousand years later. No doubt there are many, many messages that could be taken about spiritual practice from looking at the Buddha’s life. And I’d simply like to share with you six things that jumped out at me, jumped out from reading about the life of the Buddha that I’d like to share with you. And the six of these. Firstly, the requirement for a shift in values from outer to inner things, from the outer owning and possession to inner values of being.
And secondly, taking responsibility for one’s own development. Thirdly, having compassion for ourselves. Fourthly, our extraordinary human potential. And fifthly, the importance of compassion for others. And finally, the sixth one, the importance of having a spiritual goal of wholeness rather than perfection.
So the first one of these six, the shift from outer to inner values. The story begins with the birth of the Buddha in probably five sixty three BCE. But historians argue about whether that’s exactly right, but sometime around then. And he was born in what’s now southern Nepal at a place called Lumbini. His mother, who was called Maya, died soon after he was born.
And he was actually raised by his auntie. I think Prajapati was his auntie. And he was the son of the head of a minor republic in that area of Nepal and Northern India. What’s Northern India now? And Nepal.
And it was a minor republic of a clan called the Sakyas or the Shakyas. And his family name was Gautama, and the name he was given at birth was Siddhartha. When he was given the name at this ceremony, a wise old local teacher made the prediction, the tradition goes, that he was either going to become a great spiritual master or a great emperor. And this had some impact on his father in subsequent years who, of course, had a clear idea of what he wanted his son to do and what he didn’t want his son to do. So he was raised with a rather special treatment as would be given to the son of a king and trained in the warrior class, the Indian warrior class, of which he was a member.
And he led a rather somewhat sheltered, I guess, and a privileged life. His father, of course, wanted him to take over and become a great worldly emperor rather than the alternative unthinkable path of becoming a dropout and a spiritual master. And the traditional account says how his father cloistered him away from the world inside the palace and gave him all the luxuries of kingly life to keep him distracted from spiritual things. The reality was is it probably wasn’t a very large palace. It was quite a small clan up there in the pretty wild part of the north.
But probably compared to the everyday peasants, his life probably was quite well off. And to further ensure that he would definitely keep away from this silliness of becoming a great spiritual master, his father organised for them to get married to a beautiful young woman called Yasodhara when he was only sixteen. So that was surely going to clinch it. But then, the traditional account, which has come down to us, goes on how he he managed to get away from this cloistered life and visit outside the palace. And when he went out beside the palace, he encountered four things which had a tremendous impact on him.
He saw the story, the traditional story goes. He saw for the first time a sick person. Whatever is this? Do people get sick? And he saw an old person wrinkled and haggard after all the beautiful, wealthy jet setters that he’d been mixing with up until that point.
And he saw a dead body that we actually die. And the fourth thing he saw that had impact on him in this traditional account is he saw a wandering