Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute commentary on Śāntideva’s Bodhicharyavatara, Ven Jampa Gendun opens by reframing tolerance not as a pain threshold but as a trainable mental skill — illustrated by the weightlifter who builds capacity gradually without injuring himself. He then examines compassion toward those who harm us, drawing on a Thich Nhat Hanh story about a sea pirate and a newspaper account of a father who killed his baby: we can correct without hating. Śāntideva’s verses then dismantle anger’s justifications: harmfulness in a person is no more blameworthy than fire burning or smoke filling space — the person is not the anger any more than space is the smoke. A wartime psychiatrist’s story about post-hypnotic suggestion leads into a lively audience exchange on free will and whether any intention is truly chosen.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Bod 1997 03 30.mp3
UUID: 8fbb35d1-b8af-4eb8-ab45-4429a3da83f8
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Bodicaryavatara (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-03-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.3 minutes
Words: ~5,063
So I think, you know, tolerant person is someone who has has developed the coping skills where they don’t become upset when they don’t get what they want or things don’t go as they expected. Or things don’t go their way. I think that’s some common sense workable notion of what might be meant by tolerance here. Someone who has developed this skill of mind where it’s not to say that not going to later on work toward getting what they want. But their mind doesn’t get stressed out when they don’t get what they want or things don’t their way.
And I mean, we all have some tolerance. It’s something particularly Buddhist. It happens to us every day of our lives. And quite often we don’t think something doesn’t go our way. It’s simply we don’t get stressed out about it.
We don’t get upset. We don’t get irritated. And we get on with it. We either say it wasn’t important or we say I’m going to have to try another means to get it or I’m going to do it again or whatever. So developing and so learning how to simply take something, a skill that we’ve already developed quite naturally in our life out of maybe necessity and extend it to its perhaps upper limit.
Without limit. Such that our mind no longer becomes distressed around the meeting of the unwanted or when our desires are frustrated. We don’t get upset. We don’t get irritated. It’s not to say that we put up with abuse or we become passive and we become fatalistic, that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that we’re talking about.
Those are further strategies down the line. But our initial reaction to frustrated desire, What is that? Simply knows, hatred or anger, aversion, aggression is not a productive response, reaction from many points of view both temporally and ultimately. So a tolerant person has found some point of view. Maybe it’s unconscious.
Probably is for most of us. Some perspective. They have certain beliefs around what just happened such that They can say, I might like things to have been otherwise, but that’s the way they are. And now I’m going to make them the I want them or it wasn’t important in setting aside. But in some way the mind isn’t over rocked, isn’t irritated, annoyed, frustrated due to basis of some irrational belief.
Somehow having a perspective with that kind of point of view or those kinds of sets of beliefs which can allow one to look at frustrated desires in that way. You know, we Okay. So the question came up in this discussion. You know, the the notion of tolerance in it’s like I think we automatically come to is like a threshold of pain. How much pain can you stand before you can no longer tolerate it?
Some people, they go to the dentist and some people say, don’t touch me without Novocaine. Some people say go ahead and do what you want. They have different thresholds of pain. You might say they have different tolerances of pain. But anyway, there’s pain.
Some people are willing to bear with it. They have this capacity for one reason or another. Maybe they strict potty training or something for one reason or another. So how much pain are we going to endure? I think that’s the notion around tolerance isn’t it?
And I don’t think that’s what’s being gotten at here. Think, for example, in the Lama Zopa’s book, is it, The Door to Satisfaction, Śāntideva himself mentioned that and I think this is the notion and here we can begin to use that notion of enduring. You know the image which is usually used is the idea of a weight lifter. Okay? Somebody who strengthens their body by doing this work, by working out.
And usually, you know, that can be very healthy. Build up a strong body. But a weight lifter knows that if they try to lift too much beyond their present capacity, they’re not only going to not help themselves develop their body, they’re going to hurt themselves. They’re going to do damage to themselves. Or if they haven’t properly trained, if they’ve been out of training for some time, even though they may have been able to lift that weight previously, they know they can’t go directly to that.
They have to work up to it. So there is the notion, there is the notion of unless we can, unless to purposely and consciously begin to develop one’s capacity to tolerate in the sense of being able to abide with certain discomforts. You know, beginning with very minor ones. Otherwise our life will be a constant source of pain. Mean, the Lama Zopa mentioned this in his door to satisfaction.
If we can’t, if the moment any sort of frustration is met with, any sort of the undesirable, any sort of pain, there’s an immediate giving over to being overwhelmed by aversion, then we will never be happy. There seems to be some necessity to begin to develop the capacity to endure even endure some uncomfortable situations, people, if we’re going to be happy. But again, there is a point when it’s no longer constructive. It becomes harmful if we try to do this in a way beyond our present capacity. An example, and it’s a good example which was being brought up, know, when enduring a destructive relationship of some sort, you know.
How do you know when to get out? How long do you stick out for something that doesn’t seem to be working? And I think it’s a good question, isn’t it? And there’s no, I can’t think of a ready answer for it. My comment was there’s no formula that we can apply to every situation.
When do we know that we’re hurting ourselves? And when do we know that this is useful for ourselves? Maybe we have to learn to know ourselves which is quite a challenge in itself, isn’t it? I don’t know. So when we’re talking about It’s really necessary to use intelligence.
We were talking about the area of developing tolerance in, for example, in practicing the Dharma. If we can and trying to frame the situation such that even though the immediate situation is difficult, you know, even getting out of a warm bed on a cold morning to meditate is not easy. But if we can’t tolerate that, we have to find how can we tolerate that. So we have to develop some kind of perspective on that. Some kind of wisdom around that.
Even though it’s not very pleasant, even though my immediate reaction is to stay in bed and pull the covers over, I know in my long term, having I have that sort of maturity of mind, discrimination, that it’s going to be beneficial in the long run. It’s going to far outweigh the the small difficulty of getting out of the warm bed in terms of my long term happiness. And we do that all the time. People forego an immediate income and all that might get for them in order to go to a university for example. And they, you know, it’s but they have sort of a perspective.
They’re willing to abide with foregoing pleasures and material comforts and having to put up with exams and teachers they don’t like and whatever because they see it in their long term interest or self interest. So having that particular perspective is a skill of tolerance and they’re willing to tolerate to put up with. But it’s not to say it’s not pleasurable. I mean it is displeasurable. But they don’t develop the aversion for it to the extent where they just they they can’t do it or they won’t do it.
That due to that perspective, that that whatever beliefs or whatever you want to call it, that they’re able take with regard to that viewpoint, they’re able to put up with it. Having some kind of wisdom around it. So I think that’s what we’re trying to do here. And, you know, we’re not it’s not a matter of willpower. We’re trying to look at our beliefs and see if if, you know, working at that level, trying to uncover our beliefs, our hidden agendas.
We’re not trying to force ourselves into some straight jacket. Trying to put our minds through some kind of mental gymnastics and do further violence to ourselves, but trying to use our intelligence to change our minds. And then there’s no asceticism involved. I don’t think it’s And the point was brought up in quite justifiably that many of these ideas which were being presented, especially ideas of karma and this idea of tolerance, they can be misconstrued quite easily. They can be misinterpreted and they can become another means of self oppression, means of abusing ourselves and other people, simply reinforcing a lot of destructive habits.
But I have to agree. So we have to kind of be aware of that fact and use our critical judgment about what we hear and how we apply it to our life. There just doesn’t seem to be any way of getting around each of ourselves using our own you know, we are the authorities on our life or we should be and making use of knowing ourselves as best we can. I I have a sense that the struggle is all is also part of the path. And perhaps there’s no way, you know, maybe if we just have a a different type struggle than perhaps a Tibetan, they would have a different they would be going through different areas of struggle nonetheless.
And we as westerners in this particular period of time with this transition of these ideas moving to the west have our unique struggle but there will always be some struggle probably at any time even three hundred years from now when there is a western Buddhism and most of these doctrines have been interpreted and acculturated. And then what people will be struggling with just as they do in Christianity to make it a living faith and to make to find out what is the essence of it and to how to live it. So I thank you for being patient with me. So we’re looking at the various areas in which we are trying to develop tolerance. So what we’re saying when we say that is there are various areas around which we have deep seated beliefs.
And if we didn’t have these particular types of beliefs, then the question of tolerance never arises. Don’t have irrational beliefs about many things and we just slide through life in those areas. There’s no need for tolerance. There’s no distress of mind. But there are many areas which we do have deeply seated beliefs which are dysfunctional from the point of view of our goals, which are preventing us from which have the immediate consequence anger and all that that entails, but also ultimately prevents us from developing an awakened heart, universal love and compassion, and therefore prevents us from realizing our ultimate potential due to this area of irrational, deep deep sea, you know, irrational beliefs, this functional beliefs that we have.
And these there are various areas in which we around which we have them. And we looked at this morning, looked at in the area of we’re looking at the terms of non retaliation. Areas we have deep seated beliefs which cause us to perceive the objects the identified objects of frustrated desire as being enemies, as being worthy objects of our hatred, our hostility. Of our aggression. So within those objects, you know, we’re looking at ways to how can we transform these beliefs.
We can transform them in one way by looking at these same people as objects of our compassion. And we talked about that in, I think, a fairly dramatic fashion this morning You know, the about the sea pirate. And normally, we would think that person is despicable. We would we would spit in his face. Justifiably, maybe.
But if we were to to pause and consider what the viewpoint that Thich Nhat Hanh tries to show us, but for the grace of God, but for the workings of karma, there go I. And you may not approve and I’m sure you don’t approve. If he were not to change his course of action, you’d say, let’s put him in prison to protect other twelve year old girls. And we would all agree. Sadly enough, that might be the first course of redress that we have to take.
Can’t allow the situation to go on. But it doesn’t mean that we have to hate him. It doesn’t mean we have to take revenge upon him. We have to correct the situation, but we don’t have to have hostility in doing it. That’s maybe the point.
And so we try to understand understand what he might have been experiencing, what he’s going through. And he might understanding that in all his suffering that he may in fact be experiencing, that we’re all experiencing, and that maybe we could love him. But, you know, the you know, when Christ admonished us to love our enemies, he didn’t say we had to like them. This is my own idea. I didn’t meet the person.
I wasn’t fortunate enough to have met him. I’m supposing. You know, we don’t have to invite our enemy over for dinner. But we don’t have to dislike him. We don’t have to seek revenge.
We can still respect him and wish him well, but not approve of what he’s doing and not wish to associate him or hurt. So from the point of view of as a method for developing compassion. Then I I I once there was this article in the paper that I once that struck me. His father who killed his baby. You know, he was he had he had a hard day at work, and the mother was out.
And the baby just wouldn’t stop crying. Just wouldn’t stop crying. And he was really he really needed to get some sleep. He had a hard day. And the baby wouldn’t stop crying.
Just wouldn’t stop crying. And he didn’t mean to to slam it down. Just a split second of loss of control. You know? And how many of us have fortunately we’ve never had a baby in our hand when we lost that split second of control.
But we’ve all been pushed to some limit in that way, in some manner. Perhaps we had the skill not to take it out as he did. We took it out in some other manner. But we can understand. We can extrapolate from our own experience and what he was going through afterwards, and the remorse that he felt.
And have, you know, rather than a bit when you hear child killer, you know, that’s pretty nasty thing to be thought of. But if we could put our place put ourselves in this place, we could understand how maybe something that could how that could happen. There’s some kind of what we call vicarious introspection. So and maybe we could actually develop compassion and thereby deal with this person, have him sit across from us, and perhaps feel some sort of kindliness toward him. And maybe a real compassion.
But, you know, try to ensure that he’s never allowed to be in that kind of situation again where it could be repeated. And so the second area is in terms of the causes of anger. And I have to I mean, some of these I think we’d really we’re gonna have to work as Westerners. I mean, I think the text is really worthwhile. This this penetrative analysis of these these deep what we call the these these the deconstruction of a lot of our unacknowledged beliefs which provoke these behaviors, the anger, etcetera, that we’re going to have to we’re going to have to interpret them.
We’re going to have to bring them into our culture in more meaningful ways, more relevant ways for sure. Some of these these these analysis aren’t aren’t particularly applicable. Some are very foreign to our our our thinking. But nonetheless, I think they will be relevant. So from the point of view of overcoming the causes of anger.
So Śāntideva goes on to say, if it were in the nature of the immature to cause harm to others, it would still be absurd to get angry with them. That would be like getting annoyed at fire for having the nature to burn. So I think this is this is I think these are all useful to help us to to break down this monolithic you know, the cause of our anger isn’t just one solid thing. It’s it’s a myriad of many beliefs, and we can begin to dismantle them one at a time through this penetrative analysis. If somebody were if somebody had a a harmful was harmful by nature, that was in the very fabric of their being, the nature of their mind, that it was their very nature that they were a harmful person, how could you get angry at them?
In the sense that you you could get angry at fire for burning. You know, that How could the fire be otherwise? It is in the nature of fire to burn. If it didn’t burn, it wouldn’t be fire. So it would be it would be absurd to begrudge the fire for its nature of burning.
And it it it didn’t if it if it didn’t burn, it wouldn’t be fire. It it it would have to be something else other than what it is. So if it’s in the nature of the object, the only reasonable response is acceptance. If the person, you know, if if that person had a nature of harmfulness, then how can we begrudge his own nature? He He couldn’t exist in any other way.
We have to accept, just as in the case of nature of fire as being burning, that this person’s nature is harmfulness. But, you know, But people aren’t in fact have such a nature. But we do at times have an irrational belief that they do. And if we were to have such an irrational belief, then even on that basis that they have an inherent nature, anger is not justified to become distressed that fire being burning by nature. So Śāntideva goes on, even if this unfortunate characteristic of theirs was accidental and adventitious, just came occasionally, and by nature they were sympathetic, anger still is unjustified.
It would be like resenting space for allowing smoke to fill it. So, you know, this again, Śāntideva is introducing, and this seems to be a very important notion in Śāntideva’s analysis, the idea of other poweredness. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the beliefs that we is necessary amongst many for for anger to rise is the belief that this person is in complete control, in full awareness, and has freely chosen to be doing what they’re doing. On that basis, and we we go on to become distressed and angry. So he’s saying people people aren’t in full control just as we know that we aren’t in full control, that we we aren’t in full awareness of our action.
We don’t always know what we’re doing. We we we don’t freely choose. You know, there’s a lot of determinism involved. The the notion of other power in some way. So when specific causes and conditions, when they come together, a particular result arises.
So, you know, when there is fire, there is smoke. So though this so he’s going to present an analogy between the arising of this harmful intention in this other individual and smoke arising in space. When when when when there’s fire, there’s smoke. Now even when that smoke arises, even if it were to irritate our eyes, for example, it’s not reasonable to get angry at the space for allowing the smoke to fill it. You know, the space went there, the smoke wouldn’t arise and wouldn’t irritate our eyes.
So the person now this is back to the notion that the person is not the pattern. The person is not the harmful intention within their mind. The person is not the the anger, that mental factor of anger which is manifested in their mind. The person is like the space in which this harmful intention is rising. We don’t get just as we don’t get angry at the space, you might get irritated at the smoke.
Likewise, we don’t get angry at the person. We might get irritated at the harmful intention in their mind. So just in the same way that space can be temporarily filled with smoke, a person can be temporarily filled with anger. It’s the same kind of notion, this analogy that he’s presenting here. And this is not smoke is not in the nature of space.
Space is not in the nature of smoke. But is temporarily there. Just as the space is not in the nature of smoke, the smoke is temporarily there simply due to the coming together of causes and conditions. So likewise, the person is not in the nature of anger. The anger is there simply due to the coming together of causes and conditions.
I don’t know. Maybe that sounds over clinical. Maybe that doesn’t sound very relevant. Maybe we have to play with that idea and work with that idea. So it is anger which wishes to harm us and not the person.
You know, we don’t differentiate between the two. You know, one of as we were causes the I I read you this is might be useful. The notion of Lack of awareness, you might say. It has to do particularly with the nature of the notion of a self but I think it can be applied in other ways. You know, one of our most fundamental beliefs as was mentioned in the meditation, one of the ideas that was being gotten at is is belief in a self, an autonomous self, a self completely independent of causes and conditions.
So, you know, our experiences are laden in the theory of a self. Our experiences are conditioned by our belief. They contain our beliefs in a self. You know, one experiences and our experiences and reactions are constructed on the basis of them. You know, we have this this hierarchy of many, many irrational beliefs.
Several years ago when I was moderating a seminar for psychiatrists and clinicians, the real dimension of this affirmation process were brought home in a very simple and powerful way. We were discussing the use of hypnotherapy, the use of hypnotists in therapy. At some point during the discussion, one of the participants began to speak in a manner that riveted everyone’s attention. He was a psychoanalyst, the oldest and most respected member present. Only once in my life, he said, did I ever use hypnotists with a patient.
Patient. It was in the second World War when I was in the Swiss Army. There was this poor soldier in front of me and for some reason I decided to test whether or not he was susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion. I easily brought him into a trance and simply by way of experiment, I suggested to him that after he awoke, he would stamp his foot three times whenever I snapped my fingers. All perfectly standard procedure.
After I brought him out of the trance state and we spoke for a while, I dismissed him. And just as he was leaving the room, I snapped my fingers. He immediately responded and stamped his foot according to my suggestion. Wait a minute, I shouted. Tell me, why did you stamp your foot?
His face suddenly turned beet red. Damn it all, he said. I’ve got something in my shoe. The speaker slowly puffed on his pipe and his face became extremely serious. The rest of us couldn’t couldn’t understand why he seemed to be making so much of this well known phenomena of post-hypnotic fabrication.
But he maintained his silence, staring somberly down the length of his pipe. No one else said a word. It was obvious that he was trying to formulate something that he took to be quite important. Then with his face suddenly open as a child, he looked up at me and said, do you think the whole of our psychic life is like that? A strange and rather awkward silence followed.
Some of the company obviously felt that this man, whom everyone acknowledged as a great practitioner, was suddenly having a temporary intellectual lapse. But the others, myself included, were struck by the extraordinary feeling he had put into the simple question as though he were, at that very moment, internally revising everything that he’d ever understood about the mind. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to reply. And in fact, what was and in fact, what he was driving at had already dawned on me. But before I could speak, he went on in exactly the same way except that his face now registered only amazement.
But some not only amazement, but something akin to horror. Do you think, he said, that every moment every movement we make, every word we say, every thought we have is like that? Could it be that we are always fabricating in a sort of low grade post hypnotic haze? Because there’s one thing I am sure of, though only now do I see its importance. The moment I asked that soldier why he had stamped his foot, there was a split second when he realized that he had not done anything at all.
A moment when he realized the fact was simply that his foot stamped the ground all by itself. By asking him why he had stamped his foot, I was in effect suggesting to his mind that he had done something. In short, I was still hypnotizing him. Or rather, I was playing into the general process of hypnosis that is going on all the time with all of us from the cradle to grave. The contradiction made him blush and the true fact about the foot stamping was blotted out of awareness.
I was totally fascinated with what the thought of the speaker was taking. He went on for quite a while weaving his speculations around the possibility that the whole of a man’s psychic life is a product of suggestions coming from different sources, some immediately external and others stored in mechanisms of memory. And while this whole process, he concluded, is constantly screened from our awareness by the belief also conditioned into us that we are acting individual selves, our so called freedom of the will is only ex post facto identification with the processes that are taking place all by themselves. So the notion that when certain causes and conditions come together, a result arises. And in this case, we’re talking about the cause condition which provoke anger or harmful intention in this other person’s mind.
And we can’t be gudge the person, the space where the smoke is arising. That person is not, the space, just as the space is not the smoke, the person is not this harmful intention which simply arose due to causes and conditions. Yeah. The will. But I have a will to do this.
Whereas Wait. What what All of what he said, including that very word that there is no will involved that these things happen outside of our conscious control. Our so called freedom of the will. So, yeah, so called freedom of the will. Yeah.
So, I mean, so its causes and conditions aggregate and a certain will arises. There’s no freedom. We haven’t chosen. No. So but There’s no one there’s no eyes who is the agent in control?
Semantic, but the the word intention seems to suggest there is a freedom of the will. I don’t know why the intention, like intention the intention to lift the pin, the pencil. I have an intention to lift to pick up the pencil. We have a notion that we I said one of our premises is that we have complete freedom of choice, that somehow I chose to pick up the pencil. But there’s simply a coming together, certain causes and conditions, and an intention to pick up the pencil arises and that’s fall out and there’s a picking up of the pencil.
And because it’s happening over here, we call it I did it. But it’s then there wasn’t an I first who then who who made a decision to pick up the pencil. Yeah. I I understand all that. I’m I’m just I I feel that this it it can be a cause of someone’s use by using that word.
What intention? Yeah? What would it be better to use? Say this anger. Anger arises.
Anger Like smoking rising in the room, the space. Okay. There’s no freedom of the will of the space. Smoke is derived. Yeah.
So the space did not choose to have the smoke arise within it. Yeah. So did you did you you choose to have anger arise in you? It’s difficult, isn’t it? Yeah.
I think not. That’s a good point. What, Will? Joe, okay. You’re not satisfied.
Well, we’ve been talking a lot. No. It was harmful intent. The word was harmful. Right?
Do you mean in his passage or in my in my general one? I just think that I I I don’t know. I mean, the the harm the word harmful intent in Śāntideva was Harmful intent. Thing. The word harmful intent in Śāntideva is a translation from another language into ours.
Not in note not not unless I’m aware. And I don’t think that when we were aware, you if you’re if you’re mindful, which most of the time, let’s face it, I’m not. If if I’m mindful, then anger can arise.