Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens with Suzuki Roshi’s idea that each person must find their own way, then spends 40 minutes examining what that means in practice. He uses the knife analogy — things are inherently neutral; Buddhist ethics simply asks what reduces suffering — before offering a practical self-diagnostic: if years of practice haven’t made you kinder or happier, you’ve either learned the Dharma wrongly or are misapplying it. He then argues that most people patch inner emptiness with possessions and relationships, drawing on Tibetan medicine’s three-humor model to make the point: morphine masks symptoms without correcting the underlying imbalance. Ajahn Chah on the eight worldly dharmas, Krishnamurti on the sorrow of time, and Thoreau on building foundations beneath your castles each make appearances. Conversational and wide-ranging, suitable for practitioners at any level.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 1987 07 17 A M of B.mp3
UUID: a5c16135-9962-4658-be75-36e7f02ee6f5
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: A matter of balance (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1987-07-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 39.7 minutes
Words: ~4,349
Why we’re practicing Dharma and how to practice. This is by a fine book by Suzuki Roshi called Beginner’s Mind, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. There is no certain way that exists permanently. There is no way set up for us. Moment after moment, we have to find our own way.
Some idea or perfection, some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us. Each of us must make his own true way. And when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
When you when you when you understand everything, when you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. Buddhism, Dharma, the Buddhadharma. To study Buddhism is to study yourself. To practice Buddhism is to apply what you have learned by studying yourself to your everyday life to solve the problems of existence.
You know, we’re just trying to learn about ourselves. We sit here, you know, in these difficult postures with our mind trying to bring our mind back over and over again as a way to learn about ourselves. And as we learn about ourselves, we can apply what we learn, you know, as methods to solve our problems. This learning process, you know, has to take place within ourselves. You know, studying, gaining intellectual knowledge is extremely important.
Our intellect is a is a very vital aspect of our personality. You know, the the intellect itself has extremely vast potentials to aid us. But we must be able to integrate this intellectual knowledge into our own intuitive understandings, into direct insight. It is, you know, the Buddha points. Quite often, there’s a wheel of life, you know, and there’s the Buddha standing there pointing.
So he’s saying, look at this, you know. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. You know, take a look.
And he shows you the methods, the means, how you can take the best look. But you’ve got to look. And in that looking, you’re going to discover. And this discovering is the way to find the same wisdom, the same love and compassion that the that the Buddha himself discovered. So again, we’re talking about why practice?
You know, suffering is pushing us, is longing to fulfill our innermost desire, is pulling us. And the way to practice is by looking within ourselves, trying to understand ourselves. And the way to practice is taking what we have learned about ourselves and applying it from moment to moment in our everyday life to solve our everyday problems of our existence. Know, enlightenment is somewhere out there somewhere. We really don’t quite understand what it is.
I don’t quite understand what it is. But if every day we try to gain a little more wisdom, try to grow every day a little kinder, a little more understanding, considerate, then we don’t have to worry about enlightenment. It will come. I I I was talking about creating a balance. You know, there’s nothing evil inherently wrong with the materialistic with the world of material world.
There’s nothing wrong with money. You know, nice cars, comfortable home, stereo sets, video tape recorders. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. Know, it’s like things are like a knife. You know, they’re they’re quite neutral.
A knife in the hand of a surgeon can bring it’s extremely beneficial. It can save lives. That same knife in the hand of a thief is extremely harmful. It can destroy life. It’s what we make of these things, that determine whether they’re going to benefit us or harm us.
You know, again, we cannot say this is wrong and this is right. This is bad and this is good. There is nothing which is absolutely bad, nothing which is absolutely good. The Buddha did not say, this is good or this bad. This is bad.
He did that. You know, in Buddhism, we haven’t been handed down some tablets which say, thou shalt do this. Thou shalt do that. This is bad. This is good.
This is absolutely bad. This is absolutely good. What is what benefits yourself and benefits others is good. What hurts yourself and hurts others is bad. That’s that’s the standard.
The Buddha took suffering as a standard. You know? I guess we could take other standards. I don’t know. But the Buddha chose suffering since we all don’t want to suffer, that we want happiness.
So the way out of suffering, the way which leads away from suffering, he said this is good. Doesn’t mean it’s absolutely good. But if you don’t want to suffer, then it’s good. If you don’t care, then it doesn’t matter what you do. But we do care.
We don’t want to suffer. Then it makes a great deal of difference what we do. This is a controversial quotation by, again, by Suzuki Roshi. Even to have a good thing in your mind is not so good. Buddhists sometimes said, you should be like this.
You ought not to be like that. But to have what he says your mind is not so good. It is kind of a burden for you, and you may not actually feel so good. In fact, to harbor some ill will may be even better than to have some idea in your mind of what is good or of what is you ought to do. To have some mischievous idea in your mind is sometimes very agreeable.
That is true. Actually, good or bad is not the point. Whether Whether or not you make yourself peaceful is the point and whether you stick to it. You know, we can become very idealistic, become very imbalanced in our approach to dharma. We can take we can lose touch with with our own wisdom.
And rather than going to the extreme of materialistic methods, we misuse the dharma, and it becomes a burden for us. It’s something which becomes heavy. You’ll always see our thou shalt do this, thou shalt do that, thou shalt not do that. And it becomes a heavy burden. And sooner or later, if you have any sanity at all, you’re gonna quit the whole thing and walk away.
That wouldn’t be a sign of wisdom if you did that because you would realize that you were misusing Dharma. Either, you know, you have to check up if you have been practicing Dharma. Has it been benefiting you? Are you happier? Has it been solving your problems?
Now, if you aren’t over a number of years, then there are three possibilities. The Dharma doesn’t work. It’s nonsense. Possibility one, that you have learned it wrongly. Possibility two, or you’ve been mis applying it, possibility three.
So if you’ve been practicing for a number of years and you don’t feel any change, I’m not talking about in a short term, over a number of years, there should be a change for the better. Otherwise, you know, we’re all wasting our time. If there’s no change, then it’s either that the fact that the dharma doesn’t work, you’ve learned it wrongly, or you’re misapplying the methods. So reevaluate from time to time. Check up to say, am I a better person?
Am I happier? Am I a more loving person?’ Don’t go on idealistic trips about what the dharma is. It’s only there to make us happy. It’s not there as any abstract idea which we’re trying to live up to. It’s only there to function as a means to make us happy.
So we use internal methods to find inner peace, and we use external methods. You know, together, with by balancing these two methods, we can lead a comfortable, sane, wholesome life. You know, it’s like if you’re if you’re cold, you know, you put on clothing. Clothing. If you’re hungry, you eat food.
You know, it’s very straightforward. We have this wisdom, don’t we? We don’t call it wisdom, perhaps. But it is, isn’t it? It’s the way of solving the problem.
Problem. And we saw it very directly and very without any confusion. When we when we’re hungry, we don’t say don’t have to say a mantra. If you didn’t have any food, perhaps a mantra would be beneficial. You know, sometimes they take these pills when they’re meditators.
They would go for food for six months or nine months because simply because they didn’t have any food. And they would live on pills. Some of them lived on water. They took what is called the essence of water, and they solved their problem that way. But we have food.
It’s most direct and sane manner is to simply eat food when you’re hungry. You know, we don’t have to say any mantras. If we don’t create a balance in our lives between the external methods and some internal refuge which we create for ourselves. Take away the house, the husband, the children, the possessions. What is a person if all these things are removed?
In himself, he is insufficient, empty, lost. So out of this emptiness of which he is afraid, he depends on property, on people, and beliefs. Fear arises out of the inner insufficiency, poverty, and emptiness. Fear is the awareness of our own inner emptiness, loneliness, and poverty, and of not being able to do anything about it. So our question is, how is one to go beyond the emptiness, the loneliness?
Not how is one to be self sufficient. Not how one is to camouflage this emptiness permanently. You know, most people are trying to camouflage this feeling of emptiness, this discontent. You know, if you have a big enough car that’s shiny enough, it kinda camouflages this feeling within you momentarily. If you have a big enough job with a big enough desk, it kinda camouflages this feeling temporarily.
If we can use enough people, manipulate them, we can camouflage this feeling temporarily. But if you take away all these things, we’re lost because we have no inner refuge. We have no inner method to deal with the problems that we’re hiding from. And all the time, we know it. And all the time, we’re afraid.
And we have to hold on to these things. And because they’re impermanent, because it is their nature that they’re going slip away from us eventually, we’re going to suffer. There’s no doubt about that. We’re going to suffer. So we’re lonely, you know, suffering human beings.
We’re trying to numb our pain using any means we can. And up to now, we have to ask ourselves, you know, has the methods we’ve been employing working? You know? When you’re sick, sickness indicates some imbalance. Imbalance.
You know, in the Tibetan system of medicine, they work on this theory of three humors: bile, phlegm, and wind. And they consider sickness to be an imbalance between these three humors. So the method of, curing an illness is to bring these three humors into balance. Sickness, a physical sickness, indicates an imbalance. And we have a choice in how we treat this imbalance.
There’s a pain. There’s some hurt. We can use, morphine. When you give an injection of morphine, the pain goes away. And the patient can walk out of the office back into his, he can function again, probably as he was before.
So we get we relieve the symptoms, but we haven’t cured the illness. The imbalance is still there. So we have to create a balance, even within our own body. Even physical illness, physical health is a matter of balance. It’s not a matter of merely eliminating the symptoms.
Within our own psychological lives, merely eliminating the symptoms, merely trying to cover over, mask, camouflage, anesthetize, the symptoms is not the way to mental health. You may be able to function adequately, you know, at your job, in your family, but it doesn’t mean that you’re leading a sane, healthy whole life. In order to do that, we have to go beyond really eliminating the symptoms of pain. We have to seek some sort of balance in our lives. We have to rely on some internal method.
I’m just I hope you don’t mind. I’m reading quite a lot. But I’m just kind of sharing, you know, some of the the wisdom that come across, you know, in the last few years. Just I consider what I my talk as a matter of sharing, you know, my feelings and what my teachers have told me and some of the what I’ve read of other great masters. There’s one Theravadin master in Thailand.
His name is Ajahn Chah. Ajahn Chah. Sadly enough, he’s now a vegetable. About five years ago, he was a he had a brain a brain tumor. And so they decided to operate, and the operation was not successful.
And he’s been like a vegetable ever since. He was a great master. He was probably one of the most successful Theravadin abbots in training Westerners. He has a monastery of Westerners in Thailand now. This is Ajahn Chah.
Gain and loss, praise and criticism, fame and disrespect and disrepute, happiness and unhappiness. This is the world. Gain and loss, praise and criticism, fame and disrepute, happiness and unhappiness. This is the world. The person who is lost in the world has no path of escape.
The world overwhelms him. This world follows the law of Dharma, so we call it the worldly Dharma. He who lives in the worldly Dharma is called a worldly person. A person. He lives in confusion.
He is surrounded by confusion. You know, with there’s the teaching on the what’s called the eight worldly dharmas. You know, such things as gain and loss, having aversion to suffering, attachment to happiness. You know, it’s not as though we shouldn’t seek happiness. This would be stupid to say that.
No one’s trying to say that. It’s just that we have to begin to realize the nature of happiness is dependent upon suffering. The only way we can know happiness is to know suffering. The only way we can know long is to know short. The only way we can know far is to know near.
These things are dependent upon each other. The more aware of suffering we become, the more aware of happiness. But also, we cannot continue to be attached to happiness. It doesn’t mean that we don’t strive for happiness. But by not being attached, we don’t have to face the disappointment of not finding the happiness, nor do we have to face the suffering or the frustration when happiness, you know, because impermanent when it finally ends.
The person who is bound up in trying to avoid suffering and attached to happiness lives in a world of confusion. He cannot direct his mind to what he knows to be right. He cannot direct his mind within the context of his own wisdom. He cannot direct his mind under the influence of his own compassion and love. He is completely bound under the influence of his attachment and aversion.
He has no freedom. He has no choice. He has no spontaneity spontaneity in his actions. So in the course of our practice, we must begin to, you know, adjust our attitude. If we think following a path, a spiritual path is merely the avoidance of pain, we’re going to make a big mistake.
It’s it’s, might seem paradoxical. But to practice the Dharma, we must accept some pain. But by voluntarily accepting some suffering, we can finally end our suffering. If you do not voluntarily accept suffering, you’re going to suffer anyway, at which your suffering is never going to end. It will be endless.
It’s going to continue. You know, sitting there in meditation is probably not a blissful experience for most of you. It’s difficult. You would probably rather be listening to music, you know, having some good food, laughing with some friends. That would be much more enjoyable.
But we voluntarily accept this difficulty because it is a method we can use to finally bring an end to our suffering, a real and effective means. People who do not have a practice, who do not have a Dharma, a method, you know, they have no handle on life. They know they want happiness, and they’re floundering here and there trying to find a way toward that happiness they seek. But they simply don’t have a method, and they’re lost. The difference between someone who practices and someone who doesn’t is that a person who practices has a method.
They’re both trying to achieve their same ends. They both want to be happy. They don’t want to suffer. But the person who practices has a method, a real viable, effective method to bring about the happiness that he’s seeking. If we, you know, if we’re bound up by the eight worldly dharmas, we’re confused.
We live in a world of confusion. The price of confusion is pain. You know? It’s not as if nature is out to get us. It’s not as if the universe is hostile towards us.
You know? The nature, you know, universe, nature is quite willing to support us if we can find a way to live in harmony with nature, with with the universe. By living in confusion, we make mistakes. And there’s nothing wrong with mistakes. You know, we can learn from our mistakes.
The only, thing wrong is if we consistently make the same mistakes. To make the same mistakes over and over again is stupid. And the price of stupidity is suffering. It’s not that anyone’s causing us to suffer outside of ourselves. You know?
No one’s making us suffer. No one’s because we’re bad that we’re suffering. It’s because we’re making mistakes, you know, in the way we relate with the world, the way we relate with ourselves. And there’s some error in our actions of body, speech, and mind. This error, results in suffering.
It’s just a matter of cause and effect. If we simply correct these errors, we will not suffer anymore. Nothing outside of ourselves is causing this suffering. It’s simply a mistake that we’re making. We all have had the experiences, but we miss the lesson.
Buddhism helps us not to miss the lessons of life, not to miss our mistakes, not to miss our errors so we don’t keep repeating them again and again and again again. That’s what we’ve been doing up to now, making the same mistakes because we weren’t aware that they were mistakes because we aren’t aware at all. So Buddha said, look here. Check that out. Is that a mistake?
I said, yeah. I have to watch that next time. Because we do that, we don’t suffer anymore from that mistake. You know, I used to think that as people grew older, they grew wiser. That’s not true.
You know? I know people sixty, seventy who act the same way they do they they do they did they were eighteen. The same attitudes, the same habit patterns, the same mentality is there. So they haven’t learned. We have to learn.
We can, you know, experience as a great teacher if we know if we can draw lessons from our experience, if we can see the lessons. Dharma is a method to help us see the lessons which are coming at us every day of our lives. Krishnamurti. There is the personal sorrow and the sorrow of the world. There is the sorrow of ignorance and the sorrow of time.
This ignorance is the lack of knowing oneself, and the sorrow of time is the deception that time can cure, heal, and change. Most people are caught in that deception and either worship sorrow or explain it away. But in either case, it continues, and one never asks oneself if it can come to an end. You know? Things are gonna be better.
Right? We don’t have to do anything. It’s an error, isn’t it? That’s a mistake. But we all make it.
We all have this feeling things are gonna be better. We just have to wait. Maybe next month, maybe next year, maybe we’ll have to wait till next year. Things are gonna be better. Everything’s gonna be okay, and we go back to sleep.
But they aren’t, are they? If we don’t change now, they’re never going to be any better. We’re going to make the same mistakes again, and we’re gonna suffer the same suffering again. Time does not heal any wounds. You know, we have to heal our own wounds by our own effort.
So we have to make a beginning. You know, if we don’t make an effort, we’re not going to change. If we don’t change, we’re going to suffer, and we don’t want to suffer. Yeah. I went to logic school for many years.
That’s about all I learned. That’s the sum total. I know a little bit about suffering because I’ve experienced it, and I tried to learn about it. And I didn’t want to make the same mistakes again because I don’t want to suffer. So I’ve changed a little bit, and I’m happier.
And we have to make effort. And we make effort by trying to implement, trying to understand ourselves and applying this in our everyday life. And the methods of learning ourselves by the Dharma, they are methods of a real refuge. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are wisdom, the means to attain that wisdom in the context of a spiritual community. This is by Henry David Thoreau.
It’s from Walden Pond. I learned this at least by my experiment that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams imagined. He will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary. New universal universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him, or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense.
And he will live with license of a higher order of being. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complicate complex. In Solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, poverty, nor weakness, weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be.
Now put the foundation under them. So within our hearts, we’ve each built castles. You know, in our finest moments, our most noble moments, we’ve been creating castles. For some, it might be the idea of the perhaps the idea of Christ. But in our waking consciousness, full awareness, we have to begin to build a foundation beneath these castles to express them in reality.
It says in the Lankavatara Sūtra, in the beginning, the Buddhists only ask that you offer flowers and fruit, but in the end, they demand your very flesh. So each of us has to offer what we can to the Buddha within each of us ourselves. Even if if it’s only a flower petal, a few moments a day, a thought of caring for others. We can make that offering. We don’t have to worry about offering our flesh at this time.
It’s not our practice. But if each day we make effort, someday we’ll become Buddhas. Okay. Make your own. Okay.
Do we read the dedication prayers together? No. By by by dedicating, you know, we’ve we’ve all created some positive energy together, you know, positive potentials and, you know, what we call merit. Perhaps I’ve created a little by what I’ve said and you have created by listening. And so we can achieve as, you we’ve created causes.
Causes. And hopefully, because we had some positive motivation, there’s some beneficial results that we can There’s expect from these causes that we’ve created. We can direct these causes in a direction that we wish them to ripen. You know, it’s not quite definite. There’s one classification of karma which is called indefinite karma.
That is, the time and the way of its ripening is indefinite. We can direct it through the force of our intention, through the force of motivation. It creates a condition, an added condition, whereby we can redirect redirect the way in which this karma is going to ripen. If we’re serious about mental health, about growth, then we should try to direct it toward that direction. You know, if you want a new television, you could direct it toward that.
That’s okay. You know, it’s a possibility. But is that the best way you can use this positive potential that you’ve created? Is that going to bring you the final happiness that you’re seeking? Or maybe you could split it up fifty fifty.
It’s reasonable. Why not? So each of us has to determine where we’re trying to go, the happiness that we seek. Happiness as the model within Buddhism is said to be the Buddha. And the Buddha has, they say, abandoned all the defilements, impurities, obstructions, obstacles, and he has collected all the qualities or achieved all positive potentials of what it means to be a human being.
In other words, he’s a happy, healthy, whole human being, loving and wise. I think we’d all like to be like that. And this in Buddhahood is only achieved in the in the context of other human beings, of other sentient beings. So in these ways, the dedication prayers become meaningful. Through these merits, may I attain the enlightened state of Guru, Buddha, and may I lead every migrating being without exception to that state.
May the precious Bodhimind not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore.