Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun opens by reframing “going for refuge” not as petitioning an external power but as turning toward clarity already present in one’s own mind — Buddha as inner wisdom, Dharma as seeing things as they are, Sangha as anyone who embodies that clarity. He traces Prince Siddhartha’s story as a mirror for any listener’s own restlessness before laying out the Four Noble Truths. The second half works through karma as cause and effect, then details four counteracting powers for purifying negative karmic seeds: regret (sharply distinguished from guilt), reliance (recommitting to the Three Jewels and the awakening heart), antidote (directing positive action against specific wrongs), and determination (realistic short-term commitments to disrupt habitual patterns). The talk closes by identifying afflicted emotions — desire, hatred, ignorance — as the deeper root beneath all karma.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 1987 08 25 4 NT.mp3
UUID: 95f6995c-9299-4bd7-b90c-a842a36483b7
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Four Noble Truths (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1987-08-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.3 minutes
Words: ~5,507
The reason for going for refuge Every day of our lives our mind is going up and down, up and down. It’s struggle. And we are constantly trying to avoid the pain of our mind going up and down. And, we think, know, before I lost my job, I was happy. Or, you know, if it wasn’t for her, I think everything would be okay.
Okay. Maybe if I got a promotion, you know, if I only earn more money. So, we’re always going for refuge. These various types of temporal pains that we’re going through every day of our life we solve with temporal problems, or at least we try to seek some solutions. But the refuge, the protection that we’re seeking when we go for refuge, is from the pain, the suffering that we have been undergoing continuously up to this point in our lives.
And we go for refuge to the refuge to the clarity within our own mind. That’s Buddha. The clarity within our own mind. By going there, begin to solve our problems. Your last girlfriend, did she solve your problems once and for all for you?
Did your last promotion, your last pay raise, did that new car, how about your ex husband, did he solve your problems once and for all for you? What is it that’s really going to solve our problems? So we go for refuge which is going to be some type of final solution. So we have to look at our problems, the nature of our suffering, what are the sources of our suffering, what are the causes of our suffering. In order to do that, we have to develop clarity of mind.
In order to do that, we have to exercise the wisdom which we all have. This is going for refuge to Buddha. We aren’t asking, Oh, help me, Buddha. Help me, Buddha. Going for refuge to the Buddha is going for refuge to the clarity in your own mind.
Trying to liberate your mind from confusion, from your own self created confusion. We go for refuge to the Dharma, you know, the way things are. If you like the truth. If we don’t try to imagine how things we would like them to be, how it would be nice if things weren’t like that. We finally give up our fantasies, our projections, and we want to know how things really are for once in our life.
You know, what is the actual nature of my situation? This is going for refuge to the Dharma. In other words, truth is a very big word, I think. It’s a big word. Maybe it’s used by missionaries in Africa.
Don’t know. How are things? Am I in pain or am I not? If I’m in pain, what are the causes of my pain? Is there a cause?
How can I go beyond that cause? Have my solutions up to this point been working? Just the analysis. We go for refuge to the Sangha or the spiritual community. Someone who has clarity, who has developed clarity.
It doesn’t matter what kind of clothes he’s wearing, what kind of job, where he lives. If there’s clarity in that person’s mind and they’re on a right path, then that person is worthy of refuge. Refuge. That person can help you. That person can inspire you.
That person can guide you and is worthy of taking refuge. This is a very realistic way to begin to solve our problems. You know, we have to begin to cut through our confusion. Otherwise, we’re not going to be happy. We’re not going to find happiness.
And we have to you know, if we have if there’s confusion, there must be clarity. If there’s ignorance, there must be wisdom. It’s like two sides of the same coin. The only way we can know confusion is because we have moments of clarity. The only way we can understand ignorance is because we have wisdom which understands intelligence of your life, some basic sanity.
So we begin to identify with it more and more in our lives. You know, we have these various deities. Tibetan Buddhism has got a whole pantheon of deities. For example, Chenrezig. The four arms.
Very strange looking fellow. He is the embodiment of compassion. So, we we take refuge in Chenrezig, in Avalokiteśvara. What does that mean? It means we begin to take refuge in compassion as a way of going beyond ego.
Quite often, we don’t even recognize the compassion that we have in ourselves. We don’t recognize the wisdom that we have in ourselves. We have a very limited, usually a very extremely negative view of ourselves. We overlook those very positive states of mind which are arising in our lives, every day of our lives. So, begin to look for them.
Begin to cultivate them. We go for refuge to our own compassion. A little bit of compassion. You go for refuge to that little bit of compassion, that compassion is going to grow into great compassion. A little bit of wisdom.
Go for refuge to that little bit of wisdom. Then a little bit of wisdom is going to grow into great wisdom. A little bit of clarity. Go for refuge in that bit of clarity. And someday, you’re going to be completely clear.
So, going for refuge is the way we liberate our minds from confusion. Going for refuge is the way we liberate ourselves from suffering. We become Buddha. We become Dharma. We become Sangha.
Ourselves. As we progress, we reach a point where we can begin to forget all about ourselves. We can begin to forget all about liberation, our own happiness, enlightenment of your life, Buddhahood, and we become a refuge for others. So by taking refuge in oneself, it becomes the beginning of the path to transform yourself into a refuge for others. And, we go for refuge until I’m enlightened.
Becoming a refuge for others is becoming enlightened. Going for refuge to yourself is the way we’re liberated from all our problems. So, we’ve been talking about problems. The Buddha had a problem before he was a Buddha about two thousand five hundred years ago in Lumbini as Prince Siddhartha. Problem.
He had a crisis in his life. He was well off. He had everything he needed materially. So, can see that our situation is not new, is not unique to Western materialism. It’s happened before.
It’s just the Eastern. It’s happened in the East. People have questioning whether pure material methods can satisfy, can bring us to contentment, to peace. And this was the crisis that Prince Siddhartha experienced. So you have two possibilities, don’t you?
You can drown out the sound of your own whispering of your heart, which is saying there’s something wrong. You can drown it out in the speed of running as fast as you can. Or you can have the courage to stop and confront yourself. Confront the values, where you’re at, you know, what is important for you. You know, we talked about the reactive mind and the creative mind.
The reactive mind is the mind of a zombie, of a machine. It takes on the values of the others around it, unthinkingly. It repeats the truth, the ideas, the opinions, the philosophies of everyone around it. But there’s nobody home. There’s nobody really knowing what’s being said.
The creative mind, it’s very humble. It really doesn’t know what it’s doing, but it wants to find out. It tries to develop its own understanding, no matter how small, how simple. But it generates its own truth, if you like. It knows where it’s going.
So this is what Prince Siddhartha decided he had to do. So he left his palace and he searched for truth. He wanted to find out. So he went through many spiritual trips to many different Hindu gurus, various gurus that were in that area. And he became very skillful at all their techniques.
And of course, was very seductive too. He could have developed his own following amongst pupils who were studying with the various teachers at that time. So there were many possibilities to become sidetracked in his search. But he decided that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. And finally, after six years of ascetic practices and with the determination never to rise again from his seat, he said, I want to know the truth.
I want to know if it’s possible to go beyond pain. So he sat down and in the morning when the star rose, he discovered the truth. He discovered his truth. We can’t use his truth. There’s no way if he could have, he would have.
But there’s no way he can transplant what he found, found, his discovery, into another. So likewise, we all have to make our journey. We all have to follow the little voice which is telling us something inside that this isn’t our home, that this discontentment, that the peace we haven’t found yet, and that we’re going to have to carry on our own search. But we’re very fortunate that we have a Buddha, a Dharma, a Sangha to help show us the way. So he discovered what he called the Four Noble Truths.
And this was the very first teaching that the Buddha gave about two thousand five hundred years ago in Deer Park in Sarnath. And this has been the subject. The four noble truths truths of suffering, truths of sources of suffering, truths of cessation of suffering, and the true path which lead to cessation of suffering. We are to recognize sufferings. We are to abandon sources.
We are to actualize cessation, and we are to cultivate paths along this course. They are leading us from confusion to clarity, suffering to peace. So we talked about the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. We talked about the various types of suffering. It was a way of not making us depressed, but help us to get in touch to which way things actually are.
A tool to help us confront our problems realistically. We talked about the dissatisfactoriness of pain, our everyday problems of physical pain, mental pain. And we also have to question the pleasures that we take for pleasure. Are they actually pleasure? Or are these really lesser types of pain, lesser types of suffering?
Are they completely satisfactory? We talked about the second type of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is change. There’s no constant way to relate with anything. There’s only this constant change.
If we try to maintain a constant way of relating to anything, we’re going to suffer. We talked about the suffering of compositional pervasiveness. The very fact of having to carry the burden of ego constantly around with it like a bundle of thorns. Continually, having to reestablish our identity, reaffirm our existence, reestablish our image in front of others, constantly securing territory, providing our credentials. It’s a constant battle to prop up this ego.
And it’s painful. It’s suffering. It’s somewhat subtle, but it’s constantly there. The fear, if we don’t keep up this speed, this aggression, maybe we’ll go out of existence. Maybe the ego is actually an illusion.
So we have to keep reaffirming, making it solid again and again and again. And we talked about true sufferings from the point of view of impermanence, that things are in their very nature, they arise and abide for a while and will pass away. If we try to hold on to these things, we’re going to suffer. It’s It’s all to be thought of from the point of view, from the orientation of our mind. It’s not that the world is full of suffering.
It’s just that if we base our relationship on mistaken ways of relating, we’re going to suffer. That’s all. So we have to make just a simple readjustment of our way of relating with the world, with the people, with ourselves. If we do that, we’re not going to suffer. We talked about the suffering of based upon always maintaining that things have a self, that objects have a self, that they’re inherently pleasurable.
By manipulating people, by manipulating things, we can achieve complete happiness. Constantly having to remanipulate over and over again, not finding the satisfaction and the happiness that we think these objects should be bringing us. This is just simply trying to get us in touch with the way things are and the fact that the possibility is there a cause for all this? You know, the natural mind, which is analyzing the situation, first it looks at suffering and it will be naturally led to the question, what is the cause of it? Does it have a cause?
Is it God who’s doing all this? Have I offended God? Maybe it arises from no reason at all. Maybe this is happening. Or maybe there’s some logical pattern involved why I’m suffering, the types of suffering that I undergo.
So that the mind naturally flows to the next level truth, true sources or true causes of suffering. Why am I suffering? So among the two types of sources, have karmic sources and sources which are the afflicted emotions. So we began discussing the various aspects of karma. karma is just law of cause and effect.
karma just simply means actions. Just as we expect any cause to give rise to a specific effect in the external world. When you turn the key in the car, hopefully the engine will turn over and you can drive to work. If you put baking powder, flour, eggs, water, salt into a bowl, mix it together, pour it into a pan, put it in the oven, turn off the heat, you get some kind of cake. We rely on this every day of our lives.
This process that from specific causes we’re going to have specific effects. Every effect has a cause. It’s very specific. Likewise, happiness is an effect. It’s a product.
It has a specific cause. And the cause of these effects, the cause of our suffering are our actions. Our actions have an ethical quality about them. What we call virtue, we give this name virtue, is simply actions which produce a happy effect. That’s all they are.
There’s nothing absolute about them, nothing holy about them. There’s just types of actions which produce positive, happy effects. Negative actions produce suffering. There’s a relationship between cause and effect. We talked about the different types of causes.
And we talked about the ten non virtuous actions. Each of them have a very specific effect, which are they will create. We talked about the factors which make up a complete type of action. When you identify the object correctly, when you have the intention to commit the action, the various factors. What determines the heaviness of the karma?
What determines what is the strength of the effect we’re going to experience? We talked about the four different types of karma. For example, karma which arises in this life, the next life, indefinite, in some future point. And we talked about the type of karma, modes of karma, the karma is infallible. There’s always a relationship between cause and effect.
Specific happiness only arises from positive actions. It never arises from negative actions. This is simply to get you to develop a feeling that there’s some rationale behind what we call the law of karma, the law of cause and effect. That the universe is following the rules. If you throw a brick up in the air, it’s going to come down.
It’s not that we’ve imposed any rules upon it, but you know, we observe a law taking place, some sort of pattern. We call this the law of gravity. Just because we made up the word law of gravity doesn’t mean bricks fall down because when we throw them up. Before we talked about whether we know about the law of gravity or not, these objects are still conforming to physical laws. If we get in touch when tuned with these physical laws, then when we throw a brick up, we’re going to move out of the way when it comes to, know, because it’s going to come back down.
We have some understanding about how these physical laws operate, and we adjust our behavior accordingly. That’s a very reasonable way to act. Likewise, our actions have an ethical quality about them. You know, there’s a harmony, if you like, in the universe. Ego disrupts harmony.
If you look at the ten non virtuous acts, killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, etc, all of the ten non virtuous acts, there are simply ways in which ego reinforces itself. It reconfirms its existence. I am more important than you. I kill you. I don’t care whether your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend suffered, I want my sexual pleasure.
It’s the way ego is stepping outside of the law, is harmony. This disharmony that we create has the effect of suffering. Disharmony has the effect of suffering. Harmony produces peace. So merely by trying to express, get in tune with, adjust your behavior, get in accord with the law of cause and effect, karma, harmony with the law of nature if you like, and we find peace. There’s nothing mystical about it, holy about it. It’s just getting in touch with the laws of the universe the way things actually are. So I was talking when I ended the talk last week about the fact is that we’ve created many negative karmas, many negative actions. And one of the four certainties of karma was that karmas are never wasted. They’re never dissipated, that they’re never lost in the shuffle of taking rebirths or they never rot and get stale.
You know, used the example of a seed. You know, they found some wheat seeds in the pyramids in Egypt, which had been there for five thousand years. Had just been sitting in the pyramids for five thousand years. And they took the seeds and they put them in some moist earth and they sprouted. So there was always this potential there for life to give some effect.
Even after five thousand years they hadn’t lost this capacity, this potential. When they met the correct conditions, the seeds sprouted and produced the sprout and produced the wheat. Likewise, we have karmic seeds implanted on our mind stream. Many, mostly negative seeds, negative karmas implanted on our mind stream. When they meet the correct conditions, they are going to ripen.
The ripening effect will be suffering. We don’t want to suffer. Therefore, it’s wise to take some preventative measure. And this we do by what I call the four counteracting agents. The way we can eliminate these negative actions, these seeds which are planted on our mind stream.
It’s like burning a seed. The seed is no longer viable. It no longer can produce an effect. It’s sterilized. So, we talked about the first of these four counter acting agents.
You know, we have to purify. Our ideal purification has many levels. Most of the Dharma, you know the Dharma is as deep as you can go. We can talk I cannot. Some teachers can’t.
They can talk on you know we take a simple subject of refuge And we can talk on a very superficial level, a little deeper level, a very deep level, extremely profound level. Want to begin to appreciate the teachers who are able to do this. They can go as deep as you are able to follow them. Likewise, we talk about purification. At first it may sound very Sunday school ish to you.
Purification, purity, Mother Mary. These ideas perhaps come through your mind. Actually, it’s a very profound subject. We can talk about purification just from the point of view of guilt. We committed some negative actions.
We hurt someone perhaps. We make mistakes and we feel some guilt. We feel some heaviness, some darkness in our mind and we walk around with this heaviness, with this darkness thinking what allows the person I am, these mistakes that I made and now they are done and there is nothing I can do about it. So that is one level of purification we can talk about. Simply applying these four counteracting agents, these four powers, simply in order to get rid of these feelings of guilt that we carry around with us.
That’s one level we can talk about. Another level is, as we have been talking here, that these negative actions have implanted a potency, a seed on our mind stream, which when they meet the correct conditions are going to ripen in the suffering. Another level, right? Another level. These negative actions represent obstructions, hindrances to understanding, to go beyond.
If you don’t purify You know, it’s very interesting. Westerners think they should be able understand anything if it’s presented properly. They don’t see the necessity that at their present stage, that their mind simply cannot understand what is being presented to them. That what is being presented to them may be the most profound piece of wisdom. May be presented as clearly as possible by a highly evolved teacher.
They may not see any profundity, see any point even to what’s being said. And they think this is purely from the side of the subject that is being talked about, purely from the side of the teacher. They don’t perceive it possibly with their own inner obstructions, their own inner defilements, if you like, which are preventing them from coming to an understanding of even the profundity, let alone understanding the profundity of what’s being talked about. So, we’ll go on with it looks like I’m giving the budget speech to parliament or something. We’re going to go on talking about the four counteracting agents.
Ways of purifying, if you like. Purifying. Removing these negative potentials which are existing in our mind stream there. In the beginning, our practice of Dharma should be centered around purification and what is called creating merit, creating positive energy. Here we’re talking about purification.
So the first was the power of regret. We’re going to talk about ways to purify negative karma, these potentials that exist within your mind stream now, that we all have in our mind stream now, and are simply waiting for the correct conditions, internal and external, in order to ripen. The first is the power of regret. We remember, we recollect, and various negative actions that we’ve actually committed in this life. All the very lousy things that we did, unskillful actions that we’ve committed.
Don’t feel guilty about them. Guilty is just another ego trip. It’s not intelligent. We regret it. I gave the example of three people who had just walked out of a restaurant and they had eaten the exact same meal.
They shared a meal together. And the first one, he falls down on the ground and dies. The second one is rolling around the ground in agony, holding his stomach. The third fellow is not in any pain in the least, but he knows that the reason the first fellow died and the second fellow is rolling on the ground in agony is because of this food they just ate. And though he is not in any pain, he is not suffering any of the consequences at that moment.
He knows his time is coming and he feels a hell of a lot of regret for him eating that food. So, regret knowing that the consequences which are going to come, though you are not experiencing those consequences at the moment, is just a matter of time. So, it takes some trust in the law of cause and effect to actually generate sincere regret. So you have to think about it in your own experience. Experience.
See how it is operating in your own experience in order to develop some real trust that these negative actions are going to bring me suffering. I don’t want to suffer. I wish I hadn’t done that. That was very unskillful. You develop regret.
It’s the most important of these four powers. The stronger the regret for having done it. This is intelligent regret, isn’t it? Nothing to do with guilt. Nothing whatsoever.
We regret, It was an unskillful action. It’s going to bring me suffering. I wish I hadn’t done it. I wish I hadn’t done second is called the power of reliance. So it’s said there are two objects against which we create negative actions.
The first is the Three Jewels and the second is sentient beings. Three Jewels, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. We can create negative actions against the Three Jewels. We can take this in many levels of understanding again. You commit a negative action, a non virtuous action if you like, stealing, killing.
What have you done? You you’ve turned your back on your own wisdom, haven’t you? On your own understanding. You’ve committed a negative action to put it within you, if you like, to put it to being. Turns your back on it for a moment when you committed that unskillful action.
So, this is one object against which we can commit negative actions against our own wisdom. Also, Buddha who, for example, we take a vow, you know, I’m not going to kill anymore. A monk has two fifty three vows. Some people take five vows. Some people take eight vows.
Ten, thirty six, and many different types of vows. Take them, imagine that you’re in the presence of the Buddhist and Bodhisattvas, you imagine you take them before holy being, if you like. Someone whom you respect, who you would feel ashamed of if you knew what you were doing. If you go against that, a if you break that down, it’s said that you have committed they become the objects against which you have committed a negative action against. And then, you vowed not to kill and you went ahead and killed.
You committed a negative action against your own wisdom, against your own clarity, understanding, against your own truth, your own dharma, against your own Sangha. We have to help others as a Sangha, as a spiritual community. Killing others is not the way to help others. Having sexual misconduct is not the way to help others. You commit a negative action against your own Sangha if you lie.
So that’s one object, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha that we can commit negative actions against, towards. The other is sentient beings. This is quite obvious. Killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, etcetera. If we commit, at the beginning we recited this refuge and the generation of bodhicitta, the generation of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment, awakening heart, trying to wake up, trying to awaken our heart, trying to see that up to this point I have been completely absorbed in my own ego trip, my own self-cherishing, my own exaggerated self concern, my own selfishness, and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere.
And I want to go beyond this. I want to go beyond into the states where I can actually begin to relate with others beyond ego in states of love and compassion. We may find out that love and compassion may be altruism in general may be the most effective method of gaining mental health that we have available to us. By hurting others, killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, whatever. We’ve turned our back on this understanding perhaps that we’ve generated.
We’ve turned our back on helping others, on love and compassion. Compassion. We were lost. We were just lost in the confusion of ego. So understanding this, we use the power of reliance.
By relying, we mean, you know, the very same ground. When you fall down on the ground, use that very same ground to pick yourself up again, to push yourself up again, to stand up again. And likewise, when fall down within ourselves to our own Buddha, own Dharma, our Sangha, again we go for refuge to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. We recommit ourselves to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. We commit ourselves to our wisdom, to our own truth, to the Sangha, the spiritual community within So, this power of reliance, we recommit ourselves.
We go for refuge to Buddha, Dharma, and the Sangha, the Three Jewels. Again, we rely on sentient beings to pick ourselves back up again. We generate the awakening heart, bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment. We recommit ourselves to helping others by generating love and concern. In this way, we use sentient beings to pick ourselves back up again.
It’s simply a way of reestablishing your sanity. We use the very objects against whom we became confused and we use them to gain clarity again. That’s the power of reliance. That’s the power of reliance. The third is called the power of antidote. This merely is specifically directing some sort of positive action against the negative action that you commit.
Now there are lists of different types of positive actions which are traditionally used. You know reciting scriptures, doing prostrations, making things, reciting special mantras like Vajrasattva mantra, a special mantra which is concerned with purification. It said one of the most powerful methods for purification negative actions is the meditation on emptiness, selflessness. But it can be any type of positive action. But in our mind, we should think, I’ve created this negative action and I m purposely intending that this positive action I’m committing act as an antidote to this previously created negative action.
That’s the power of antidote. The fourth is called the power of determination. You know, why do we find it so difficult to act in skillful manners. It’s simply through the force of habit. The more you express hatred, the easier it’s going to come next time.
The more you kill, the easier it is to kill. The more you steal, the easier it is to steal. So somehow we have to begin to disrupt these unskillful behavior patterns. And we do this through the power of determination. And you do this honestly.
You say, for the next, let’s say you killed something purposely. And you say, for the next twenty four hours, I’m not going to kill anything. Tremendous mindfulness and awareness, you make sure that you don’t kill anything for twenty four hours. And we begin to disrupt this habitual patterns that we have, these behavior patterns, unskillful behavior patterns. Maybe we tell lies.
You say, the next five minutes, I’m not going to lie. You you have to be honest. Knowing not to say, I’m not going to lie for the rest of my life, that would be rather insincere, dishonest. It would be worthless to even think such a thing. Know, for the next ten minutes, and you go hide under your bed or something.
I’m not going to lie. So, you you try to be realistic, and you try to make some determination, and you try to stick with it. And it becomes a power to cut through these unskillful behavior patterns. So these are the four counteracting powers, counteracting agents. Is within the great vehicle that said that any negative action, no matter how horrible you might think it is, can be purified through this process.
That we will not have to experience any effect of that action. Mainly dependent upon the power of regret. We use all four of these and we use them again and again and again. So those are the four counteracting powers. So of true sources there two types.
There were karmic true sources and true sources, which are the afflicted emotions. Among afflicted emotions and karma, it is said afflicted emotions are the main root of our suffering. Why is that? It is because of our afflicted emotions such as desire, hatred, jealousy, spite, miserliness, ignorance that all our karma arise in the first place. Therefore, the root of our problem, the root of true sources of suffering are the afflicted emotions.
These unskillful patterns of thought, un skillful emotions. So that’s where our real source of a problem lies. If we’re ever going to find peace, if we’re ever going to lessen our suffering, this is where we have to really begin to examine our own mind and see how it’s operating. The three main afflictive emotions. By afflictive emotions, the word afflictive, afflictive emotions.
The word afflictive. The mind is naturally at peace. The nature of the mind is at peace. We all experience some moments of peace once in a while. When all this mental turmoil for one reason or another seems to come down.
Speed stops. We’re not rushing. We’re no longer experiencing any aggression and aversion. The mind simply is at peace. By removing the afflicted emotions afflicted emotions.