Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 5-minute introductory session, Ven Jampa Gendun — who spent eighteen years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk before disrobing and still goes by the name Champa, which means “love” — opens a Buddhism course by insisting that nothing he says needs to be accepted on faith. He frames Buddhism as a practical method for solving personal problems, using the image of oil floating on water to describe teachings that are heard but never absorbed. The central point he returns to: our frustrations arise from our own attitudes and beliefs, not from external people or circumstances, so changing the mind is the real work. He closes by inviting students to examine their own motivation for attending. Suited to complete newcomers with no prior exposure to Buddhist ideas.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 IB 2007 03 03.mp3
UUID: 194e824c-c799-46cb-89ab-11c3c342bedb
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2007-03-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 5.2 minutes
Words: ~629
Okay. Can can you hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. Welcome.
My name is Champa. That’s pretty Tibetan. That’s a Tibetan name. I was a a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for about a long time, maybe eighteen years, something like that, until I ran out of good karma and it was finished. So I haven’t been a monk for about eight years, about nine years.
And everyone called me Champa. Champa, by the way, means love. So it’s kind of nice to be called love all the time. And even after I gave up being a monk, kind of the name kind of stuck. So I have a hard time when people ask me my name.
They give me a strange look. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’m pretty strange anyway. Okay. We’re gonna talk about Buddhism.
And in the course of talking about Buddhism, in the course of everything that we discuss, by all means I hope you’ll question everything that’s said. There’s no dogma. There’s nothing that you have to accept on pure faith or belief and so forth. It’s simply a you know, we’re trying to essentially help ourselves to solve our problems in perhaps a more skillful fashion than we normally deal with them. So it has to be relevant to yourself.
It has to be something which you can verify within your own reasoning, within your own experience. Otherwise, it’s going to be something like pouring oil on the surface of water. You know, it kind of just floats there. It doesn’t mix in. It doesn’t integrate.
And above all, I think maybe the bottom line about Buddhism is that we have to change our mind. I think hopefully maybe that’s the one message you can come away with is that the basis of our continual cycles of dissatisfaction and disappointment and frustration and whatever is fundamentally in terms of our own attitudes, our own opinions, our ideals, our systems of belief and so forth. So in other words, it’s not so much the people or the things or the situations around us which cause us problems, but our attitudes, our ideals, opinions, beliefs about those people, things, and situations which are problematic. So very fundamental to Buddhism is the necessity to change our mind. And it’s not something that we can fake.
You know, it’s not something we can simply show me where to sign and I’ll go along with the program. Or I want to join up. It’s not a matter of any of that. It’s a matter of actually seeing for ourself where what are the sources of our difficulties and beginning to skillfully apply some kinds of antidotes, beginning to work through our problems. Are you a new student?
She’s an old student. Okay. You know, generally, I guess one of the axioms of Buddhism is it’s not so much what we do, but why we do what we do, which is going to determine outcome, our activity, whether it appears from the outside to be something wholesome, something positive, is going to help us to solve our problems or simply be another complicating factor in our lives, and just another activity amongst our whole range of activities that we’re busy in our lives with trying to find some kind of happiness for ourselves. And attending Introduction to Buddhism courses is in no way different. You know, we all have our particular motivations.
You each have your particular motivations why you’re here. Maybe you’re curious. Maybe you’re a Christian fundamentalist and you want to see what the other side’s about. Maybe you want to help solve your problems. Maybe you want to become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings.
I don’t know. But it’s before we