Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun uses the image of “pouring water into water” to describe the pivotal moment known as the path of seeing — where rational inquiry falls silent and direct, non-conceptual perception of emptiness begins. In this brief 2-minute talk, he explains why this threshold matters: only from this point can a practitioner actually remove the potentials of afflictive emotions such as desire and hatred, rather than merely reducing their force. He describes the resulting state as a mystical union with reality — mind and its object becoming completely indistinguishable — and notes that no memory of it remains, since no thought process was occurring at the time. He closes by situating the experience comparatively: what a Christian might call union with God, Buddhism reframes as union with the ultimate nature of how things exist.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 BM 1987 09 13.mp3
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Buddhist Mysticism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1987-09-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~394
In the practice of there’s one point that’s reached called the path of insight, the path of seeing, where you have direct perception, direct insight into the intellect, the actual nature of reality. This is what actually we talked about the sensations, the elimination of the afflictive emotions along with the potentials. Up to this point, you can’t actually relate to any of the afflictive emotions. You can only lessen their strength and you cannot remove any of their potentials. It’s due to this direct perception of the nature of reality, the intuitive understanding of emptiness, reality, that you actually begin to remove the potentials.
What are the afflictive emotions, such as desire, hatred, etcetera? No, I don’t know. The only thing I can think of is the improvement. It’s a state beyond words that You enter into it through a rational process, but then there’s a point where the rational process leaves off and you enter into a direct perception where have no thought consciousness is left behind and you are said to be object emptiness and the mind is said to be like pouring water into water and undifferentiablable. This is the object of the mind and this is the mind.
It’s completely become one. You might say you have oneness with reality, the actual ultimate nature of reality. At that point, it’s during this period that all the potentials, the negative emotions are eliminated from the mind. And this could be what mystical aspect, the mystical union with reality at this point. Then you come out of it, you only know that there’s no remembrance of it because there was no thought process occurring at that time, but you had some union.
Now probably if you were a Christian you may think that you had union with God, in the Buddhist context you have union with reality, in the ultimate nature of way things exist.