Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute introductory session, Ven Jampa Gendun opens by tracing the Greek word for truth — alethia, meaning “a clearing” — to argue that Buddhism removes misconceptions rather than constructing a belief system, like taking off sunglasses to see a snow mountain as it actually is. He works through the three types of suffering identified in the First Noble Truth: the suffering of suffering (everyday mental and physical pain), the suffering of change (illustrated by the image of a man hitting himself with a hammer — the relief of stopping is what we mistake for pleasure), and all-pervasive suffering, the metaphysical vulnerability of a life governed by karma and forces beyond our control. Impermanence and selflessness round out the session, with a William Blake verse on the futility of clinging to joy. Suited to newcomers with no prior Buddhist background assumed.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 ItB 1996 10 13.mp3
UUID: cc5c13cd-97dd-4283-a22e-19f1971d830b
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1996-10-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~7,046
The first teaching that the Buddha gave after his enlightenment in Bodh Gaya about twenty five hundred years ago was the teaching on the four noble truths. And to talk about the four noble truths is to talk about the heart of Buddhism. And these four principles lie very much at the heart of Buddhism. So though might be entitled an introduction to Buddhism, it introduces ourselves to the essence of Buddhism, you know, the the scope of Buddhism. The the Buddha within the four noble truths, his very first teaching sort of outlined or gave a presentation of the entirety of his doctrine of which he spent the remaining forty five years of his life presenting, you know, the the four noble truths.
You know, by truth is meant that gives us a sense of that which is in accordance with the way things are, the true nature of things. So the idea of truth in the Greek language, I think the word truth is alethia. And alethia, it means to a clearing. So you come to a place where there’s a clearing. And this idea of clearing is has the sense that once we clear away our our misconceptions, our erroneous ideas, our mistaken beliefs, our wrong views about something, then we see the truth of it.
You know, it’s not as if by truth we’re constructing or fabricating some kind kind of idea or some kind of belief system or dogma. You know, the the idea within Buddhism is that the truth is always before us, but we are are hindered by our various misconceptions, by our our mistaken views, our wrong ideals from actually seeing it. Just like, for example, you know, seeing a snow mountain, which is in fact white, seeing it is green because we’re wearing sunglasses. And then we take off the sunglasses, and we see the way things actually are in their true nature. And therefore, we begin to relate with them in accordance with their within what within accordance with what in fact they are.
We we cease relating with them in terms of some dysfunctional or confused manner. And therefore, you know, we can begin to relate with them in terms of their actual capacity and what they’re able to to bring us and not to have false expectations or unfounded hopes or neurotic fears about the world, but to be able to live in it in harmony and act appropriately in keeping with the reality of the true nature of things about us and our relationships and in terms of our self. So these are truths. That is they’re trying to to remove our misconceptions, the sunglasses, which which prevent us from from seeing things the way they actually are. And they’re said to be noble because Is everybody comfortable?
And because I think if we see these truths, they I said to ennoble us, to to help us go beyond some of our dysfunctional thinking and behaving. We’re there. So we’re gonna be talking about these four truths, which are the essence of Buddhism. These four truths, the four noble truths, are presented in terms of two sets of two groups. There are true sufferings or the truth of suffering, then there are true causes of suffering or true origins.
So these are presented in terms of an effect that is the result, and then what is the cause of that result? Two origins. And then these describe the dysfunctional patterns. What you know, we talk about the word cyclic existence, but the reoccurring dysfunctional patterns of our life and our lives. But we can just think of it in terms of a dysfunctional approach to life, a way of living our lives which are which by its very nature predisposes us to experience some kind of dissatisfaction, some kind of disharmony, some kind of tension, anxiety.
You know, what and again, I have to emphasize that when when I talk about the nature of life as it’s seen from out of the eyes of Buddhism, what and as we are presently experiencing it in terms of its of its its dysfunctional nature, We’re not talking about life per se. You know, life is what we make of it, and and life for Buddha is something which is fulfilling, meaningful experience, completely full of bliss and completely full of the ability to be of greatest benefit to others. So we’re not talking about when we talk about the nature of life, we’re not talking we’re not degrading or negating the possibility of real happiness in life. That potential is always there. But we were talking about a particular approach to the living of life, a problematic approach, a way of approaching life, the way of our living of life, how we go about thinking about the world and behaving within it, which predisposes us to feelings of dissatisfaction, basically suffering.
So when Buddhism, you know, talks about that life is suffering, they’re not talking about life in general, but just our way of approaching how we’re going about living our life. We’re making some mistakes, and the purpose of, you know, looking at the four noble truths is to help us to begin to spot our mistakes, to actually arouse some motivation, to inspire us to work through our neurotic patterns, our dysfunctional ways of behaving, and begin to live in accordance with the way the world, in fact, is, to to take our sunglasses off, our misconceptions and wrong ideas and begin to see things as they actually are, to live live in the reality of things and thereby thereby find some peace. But moreover, and especially within the universal vehicle tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, to do this not only for ourselves but for the sake of others as well, to be able to help others to be of maximum benefit, not only to ourselves but to the others, to be of greater use to ourselves and to others. So, you know, we have to begin at the beginning, you know, where we’re actually at, the actual true nature of our lived experience.
You know, I think it’s quite difficult to to look at what it is that we’re actually feeling because quite often we mistake our beliefs about what we should be feeling or what we might like to be feeling or what what we might like others to see us as feeling and experiencing or actual feelings themselves. We’re very much out of touch with our actual, you know, everyday lived experience of how we actually experience our life. You know, we have to look at what we’re actually feeling in terms of its overall experience of our particular push to life if we’re ever going to be motivated to go beyond, you know, these these patterns of thinking and behaving which very much govern our present way of life. You know, I mean, that’s why Buddhism begins with suffering. And Most people, they don’t want to talk about suffering.
They’d rather, you know, turn the channel to something else a little more entertaining, some kind of distraction. And in doing so, they never have to confront their problems. They never have never confronting their problems they never work through them. And to see in the reality of their situation, though we probably rather not, we have to look at the nature of our existence in terms of its dissatisfactory quality, in terms of suffering, in other words. Now how many of us how many of us ever throw our arms wide open and looking up to the sky, pleading, you know, why, god, why am I so happy?
Why does everything always have to go right for me? You know, I can’t I can’t go on like this. I have to understand it. You know, none of us do. We don’t question happiness.
We take it for granted. It’s suffering, or perhaps better said, our awareness of suffering which makes us stop, which makes us think, reflect upon our life and our lot in life, you know, which perhaps can help us to to refocus, to more meaningful, more profound subjects, ideas and ways of being which perhaps have gone unnoticed, that we’ve been diverted from for one reason or another. So we have to begin by looking at suffering, and this is known as the truth of suffering, in fact, the nature of our actual lived experience and try to see it in a dispassionate way. It’s not denying the happiness of life. This is but it is or the importance of happiness or not to finding some kind of peace and meaning in our life.
It’s not a perversion. It’s a means of helping us to go beyond our problems, to solve them at a more basic fundamental level than perhaps we normally work with, to go beyond the superficial and look at the profound difficulties of our life. So the truth of suffering is a recognition of the quality of our life. And maybe you can identify with what’s being said. You have to at least listen open mindedly and to see if what’s being said is appropriate applies to your own experience, what you’ve found in your own life.
You know, the life as it’s currently being lived is fundamentally unsatisfactory. You know, we’d rather not hear that. We’d rather have, you know, I’m okay attitude towards our experience. But in fact, we’re not okay, I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, maybe if we can be honest with each other. But that’s okay not to be okay.
You know, the situation is workable. It’s that not okayness which perhaps will help us to to inspire us, to motivate ourselves, to to get unstuck from these compulsive patterns which very much govern our lives, in which we’re going to do something, which we’re going to seek out alternatives, which we’re going to start to make some choices and take responsibility for our lives and our suffering rather than remaining in these cycles of existence, these cycles of the satisfactory ways of being in the world and our approach to life. We have to you know, at some point in our life, we have to get sick and tired of being sick and tired and say it’s time to get well and to begin to look around for alternatives, ways of approaching our life. And this comes through contemplation of the quality of our life, and this is termed the truth of suffering, the truth of suffering in our lives. This quality of the truth of suffering is characterized by three marks, suffering, impermanence, impermanence, and These our attempts to cover up the acknowledgment of these very simple facts of life have led to a lifelong struggle and to one form of psychopathology or another over the course of our lives.
You know, it’s like someone who refuses to admit that, you know, summer is over and it’s fall, and dress inappropriately and they fall ill. They refuse to acknowledge the actuality of their experience, and they act inappropriately and they suffer. There’s always you know, looking at the quality of our life, and again, we’re not talking about life itself, but our particular dysfunctional approach to the living of our life and how it’s being lived. There’s always something missing, something not quite right about our life, something there’s some kind of feeling of inadequacy about it all or, you know, ourselves to the world or the world to ourselves in one way or another. You know, we constantly experience, even if only subtly, and and at the at the edges of our awareness, some abrasive kind of interface between ourselves and the world.
In other words, we experience what is called dukkha. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that word. It’s a Sanskrit word dukkha. It broadly refers to suffering, but in its original meaning it meant a wheel that grinds on its axle. That’s that’s the Buddhist description of the quality of our experience of our particular approach to life, a wheel that grinds on its axle.
So it covers a lot of area, doesn’t it? You know, the quality of dissatisfactoriness and suffering and anxiety. Our life grinds upon us in a way. It grates upon us in jars. It hurts us.
It wounds us in some way or another. The fact of suffering and I think this is not only important for ourselves in our own individual traveling of a path and trying to solve our problems, but it’s also necessary in terms of appreciating the fact that everyone’s in the same situation as ourselves. The fact of our suffering is universal. It’s not particularly unique to each of ourselves. It’s not idiosyncratic to our particular history as if I were singled out by the universe to suffer in the way I am.
You know, because I didn’t have the right parents or I didn’t have the right come from the right side of the track or I didn’t come didn’t go to the right school or I had some physical difficulties or I was abused. We have a sense that I’ve been singled out, that my suffering is unique. Your suffering may be unique to yourself, but the very mere fact of suffering is in no way unique to yourself, pervades all of us in one way or another. It’s just difference in manner and degree, nothing less than that, nothing more than that. You know, it applies equally to us all without exception.
You know, we all suffer without exception. You know, we we there is the suffering of not meeting with the happiness that we’re seeking, you know, not finding objects, not finding the goals, achieving what we want in life. There’s being separated, the suffering of being separated from that which we which we want to hold on to. You know, we finally get what we want. And by one means or another, by for one reason or another, we have to lose it.
It it is taken away from ourselves. There’s the you know, it’s not finding simply the happiness that we all seek. For all of us, without exception, there’s the suffering of being born. There’s the suffering of sickness and disease, of accidents and illness. There’s the suffering of growing old.
You know, the the the conception of ourselves as as separate entities makes us feel unbearably alone, you know, lost, powerless, impotent, imprisoned. And if we perpetually have to have to struggle to find union with ourselves, to find union with others, to find, you know, some kind of union with the world, this feeling of isolation and separateness. We’re always straining to maintain some kind of self image. We have to reestablish our credentials. We have to guard our territory, we have to protect ourselves from all the various contingencies of life.
You know, we are haunted by feelings of inauthenticity, of guilt, of shame. We all share in the burden of self consciousness, having to watch ourselves, having to be on guard, the fall from innocence, and never ending pain of having to to be somebody. There there is for all of us the suffering of, you know, hatred and attachment and pride and jealousy in themselves, you know, of death, the the suffering of desperately wanting to be loved. And then once finding perhaps that love, the fear of losing it once found. You know, there is the, you know, the dull ache of of our life being slowly eaten away by a sense of impotency, a sense of boredom, of apathy, you know, a sense of emptiness in our lives.
I don’t know. Maybe this is pretty heavy sounding, but maybe you can identify it to some degree with it. I think it’s liberating in a sense to know that you are not unique, that though your problem might be very peculiar to you, the mere fact of suffering is universal, that we all share in it. It’s like a secret that we’ve kept from one another for one reason or another. You know, this our okay generation doesn’t allow us to make it public.
But it’s quite necessary if we are going to go beyond our own suffering but also as a means of developing compassion, which is perhaps the essence of all religious practice, of all spiritual practices. I’ll read you a quote. I think it’s quite nice. It kind of captures the atmosphere of suffering, perhaps for me but maybe for you also. It takes place, it’s a dialogue between two people.
Many of you are familiar with Carlos Castaneda’s works, and this comes from one of his books. It’s about Don Juan who was a Yaqui man of knowledge, perhaps lived in northern Mexico. But anyway, it’s in a desert region, and they’re standing on a high plateau and it is coming toward evening, the sun is setting and it is quiet except for the sound of the hissing of the wind. He paused. The silence around us was frightening.
The wind hissed softly, and then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog. Listen to that barking, Don Juan went on. This is the way my beloved earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. We were quiet for a moment.
The barking of that lone dog was so sad and the stillness around us so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish. It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my knowing not what to do or where to go. That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man, Don Juan said. That comes from a house in the valley towards the south. A man is shouting through his dog since their companions still are alive.
Don Juan’s words had cut a most disturbing line in me. I felt as if he was speaking directly to me. That barking and the loneliness it creates speaks of the feelings of men, he went on. Men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not altogether miserable but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal.
They didn’t know where to go or what to do. That afternoon left them with only the memory of petty annoyances and tedium. And then suddenly it was over. It was already night. There is the suffering of an unlived life and of a life lived in a kind of quiet desperation, and then at the end of all there is the suffering of death.
So what we’ve talked about, what I’ve just described, this term the suffering of suffering, our actual experience in terms of mental and physical pain that we experience every day in one form or another over the course of our lives. But there’s another way in which suffering can be described, characterized by in terms of its psychological quality, and this is called the suffering of change. Suffering of change describes our happy experiences in life, that even these don’t go beyond the quality of dissatisfaction. Would you like to come up here? Because I saved you a seat.
You’re welcome to sit here. Okay. Yeah. So the suffering so you know, talking about the various physical and mental experiences of suffering, the suffering of suffering, but then there’s alternation, which is the psychological characteristic of this dysfunctional approach to life. I guess I have to keep coming back to that because we’re not talking about life in general, because Buddhism is quite optimistic about the possibilities of life.
In fact, every one of us should be experiencing total bliss. You know, that’s the way we everyone in this room should be blissed out. It’s just a matter of time. So, you know, in terms of the the psychology, you know, the suffering of change, you know, if you look at your at your ring finger and and you question, is it long or short? You know, compared to the to the middle finger, the ring finger is long.
Compared to the middle finger, the ring finger is short. But, you know, it it is only in itself, it is neither long nor short. It is only relatively so. It is only comparatively so. It only is long or short in contrast to something other than itself.
So the implication is that we can in terms of the psychology of our experience of pleasure, of life is that we can never know happiness without knowing suffering. You know, we can never know success without knowing failure. We can never know harmony without knowing conflict. We can never know the warmth of a friend without knowing the coldness of an enemy. You know, we can never know the joy of union without knowing the pain of separation.
Separation. You know, the the each of these two dualistic experiences, these dichotomies, are inextricably bound to one another. They necessarily arise alternating with one another. They only have meaning with respect to their opposites, just like long and short, hot and cold. And suppose, for example, there’s an idiot sitting in the corner.
You know? He’s hitting himself over the head with a hammer. Hammer. And he said, now why are you hitting yourself over the head with a hammer? And he said, because it feels so good when I stop.
And it does feel good. You know, when he’s when the idiot stops hitting himself over the head with a hammer, he experiences pleasure, a type of pleasure. You know, the all similarly, and this is hard to, I think, appreciate. All our experiences, all our usual feelings of pleasure can be seen in a like manner as the cessation of of or the lessening of pain. Relief, for example, the relief that we feel when a headache goes away or the refreshing feeling when we’re very hot and thirsty and we drink a cool, cold glass of water or the warm feelings that arise when people fight.
Some people, actually I think some couples actually get into a fight because it feels so good when they make up. It’s the contrast which is experienced as pleasure to the pain before. When there’s release or reduction from tension, for example, the relief felt when a parent finds their lost child, the almost bliss, or getting a successful result on your test results, or even the orgasm as a release from tension, or just simply the temporary quiescence of the tension of desire. The greater our desire and the more sudden the release from that desire, that is to say the tension which is associated with that desire, the greater the pleasure and the achievement, and finding what it is that we want. So it’s for this reason that Buddhism says that all our usual feelings of pleasure are termed contaminated.
You know, this is not to again, let me emphasize. It’s not to say that we aren’t to experience bliss, happiness, the goodies of life. By all means, we should. You know, it is one of the the fundamental doctrines of Buddhism that someday we’re all going to be Buddhists. It’s just a matter of when.
And a Buddha experiences unremitting peace, unremitting bliss. So it’s not a matter of self denial or asceticism or or or some old, you know, perverted cave dwellers and hermits trying to take away our pleasures in life. In fact, they’re trying to help us define what is in fact real happiness, real pleasure. They are saying that all of what we take as being pleasure is in some way dissatisfactory. Why?
Because it is inextricably bound up with pain. All of the pleasure, all of the happiness, all of the good feelings that we experience necessarily arise in contrast to pain. In order to experience the various pleasures, the happinesses that we want in our lives, we necessarily have to experience their opposites in order to contrast, to be able to discriminate them, to distinguish them, to recognize them as pleasure. We have to experience pain if we’re going to experience pleasure. We have to experience loneliness if we’re going to experience the good feelings associated with companionship.
This is the nature of what is called contaminated pleasure. It’s not real happiness in itself. Real happiness is you know, what is it that we really want? If you were to wake someone would wake us in the middle of the night and before we had a chance to think about things, you know, we would what do you and they said, what do you really want? Tell me what you really want.
Don’t stop and think about it. Just spit it out. I I want unchanging internal bliss. That’s that’s the bottom line of our what it is we want most in our lives. And this, you know, without any experience of dissatisfaction, without any pain, you know, that would be a quality of experience that we could most want for ourselves.
And Buddhism says we can have that, but the quality of our experience right now is therefore dissatisfactory. The suffering of change, the psychological characteristic of our experience of pleasure. But even when we’re experiencing neutral feelings, these in themselves are dissatisfactory. And this described in terms of the psychology of what is called all-pervasive suffering, all-pervasive suffering. You know, this is just a big word, but maybe we can come to understand what they’re trying to get at by that word.
It is the metaphysical quality of our experience, of our feelings. You know, the the even those times when we’re not experiencing pain, is obviously you know, even animals would describe that, if they could, as suffering. Even when we’re not experiencing pleasure, which is said to be the suffering of alternation since it’s unsatisfactory by its nature, even when we’re experiencing neither of those, we still are still our life is flawed. It’s still problematic. That’s the nature of who we are.
We are vulnerable creatures. We’re subject to forces beyond our control. That’s the nature of our present situation. No matter what we may be experiencing in terms of feelings, You know, we’re like you know, if you think about it, we’re like an infant who’s is in an abused situation, has an is living in an abused home life. They have nowhere to go.
They know they know no other way of life. Though they are experiencing difficulty and pain and being scarred, they don’t realize that there’s a possibility of an alternative. And even if there were an alternative, even if they were aware of it, there’s no there’s no way that they could they don’t have the maturity or the means to be able to exercise their freedom of other possibilities. You know, no one asks us if we want to die. No one asks us if we wanted to be born.
No one asks us if we want our our parents to die, our our loved ones to die, our children to die. You know, nobody asks us. No no one asks us if we want to be in an accident or get sick or, you know, if we want to have AIDS or if we want to develop cancer or if we want to watch all our possessions burn in a fire. No one asks us if we want our lover to stop loving us one day. You know, no one asks us if we want to lose our job or not.
No one asks us if we want it to rain on the day we’re going to have we’ve been planning this picnic for so long. You know, no one asks us if we want to be angry or if we want to be attached or if we want to be jealous. I would simply mean, you know, no one asks us if we just want to be tired of it all. You know, we’re not asked about these things. It is if we’re these are experience in ways which are beyond our control, as if they are forced upon ourselves in one way or another.
We are vulnerable. We are susceptible. That is to say, you know, karma and afflictive emotions simply don’t ask of us what it is that we want and what what it is that we don’t want. You know, very much like a leaf being blown around in the wind by our karma and tossed by waves of our very afflictive emotions. By afflictive emotions, I mean emotions such as attachment, hatred, anger, spite, miserliness, pride, jealousy.
We are as if powerlessly swept along by these emotions and blown about by the winds of our karma. They don’t they never ask us what we want, where it is that we want to go, what it is that we want to do. You know, we’re not asked, you know. Even but even in those few moments of of respite, you know, when when we when there’s a when we found a corner out of the wind to hide away, you know, there’s some kind of lull in the dramas of our life. It’s only that.
It’s only a moment’s lull. It’s only eventually, the wind will pick up again and carry us off again. We know we know not where. We don’t have any say. It’s not under our control.
You know, none none none of us chooses to suffer, but we do. None of us chooses to be born, but we do. We are. We have been. None of us chooses to grow old.
None of us chooses to become sick and to die. You know, how many of us have chosen actively to be who we are and what doing what we’re doing? You know, it’s like very much like a like an exposed raw wound, you know, which perhaps doesn’t hurt in itself, but it’s it’s vulnerable to to you know, it’s like being in a crowd where other people are are brushing up against this life. It’s always bruising us, brushing up against our exposed wound in some way or another. And there’s always the possibility of some kind of infection from within.
We’re going to talk about this in terms of the causes of our situation. But, you know, ignorance governs existence, you know, our particular way in which our life is manifested in terms of our body and mind. And it was said to be like like carrying a bundle of thorns on our back. No matter where we go, what we do, we’re always being stuck in some way or another. You know, like just carrying around the burden of ego.
So, you know, this is is universal to us all, what we’re trying to get at, what we’re trying to describe, the suffering of suffering, all our mental and physical difficulties, the suffering of alternation, psychological nature of the way our mind is processing our feelings. And then the very, you know, more subtle, the very nature of our existence in terms of universal conditionality. It’s universal because it applies to everywhere everyone and everywhere we go. As long as we carry the bundle of thorns of the ego, we’re always going to be stuck. And as long as we’re conditioned by karma and the afflictive emotion, we’re always going to experience dissatisfaction in one form or another.
So, you know, this is the situation that we’re trying to appreciate. I’ve heard all that you’ve had to say to me on your problems. You ask me what to do about them. It is my view that your real problem is that you are a member of the human race. Face that one first.
The fact of our suffering is shared by us all. Now whether we recognize it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we accept it or not as a natural part of life or not, suffering remains a very basic truth about our lives. We’d rather have it some other way. We’d rather refuse and we struggle against its recognition in our lives. But that recognition has always kept us stuck.
We’ve never been able to solve our problems. You know, I think if we look at our lives, all the blood, sweat, tears that we’ve expended over the course of our lives trying to solve our problems, trying to find the happiness that we’ve always been seeking, Has it worked? Has our approach to finding the good life really brought us what we want all these years down the track? Or are we still struggling? Are we still trying to solve our problems?
Are we still trying to find happiness? Why hasn’t it worked? Why hasn’t it why hasn’t all this energy, all this worry, all this concern, why hasn’t it given us what it is that we want by now? Maybe our method, maybe our approach is somehow flawed. Maybe we’ve been working at the problem in from the wrong way, in from the wrong directions.
You know? But still we struggle. You know? We struggle against the recognition of suffering in our lives. But, you know, we we demand that the world be other than the way it is, that it conform to our our hopes, that it accommodate our fears in one way or another, and all the while denying our own truth, our own consciousness.
You know, it’s it’s as if, you know, we would like we have this notion that if only I could arrange the world in some kind of preconceived desirable fashion. You know, I could I could have all the goodies that I want in in in some kind of constellation which I could continually snack from. You know, I could continually just make use of them and finding bringing the happiness that I know they can bring me. Then we could be you know, it’s like we could be the masters of our of our of our destiny, you know, the captain of our ship. And then then if I can only bring the things about me and the people and the situations, get the right job, the right the right car, the right house, the right the right everything, that right perfect structure about us in terms of relationships, in terms of material goods, in terms of power, I would be happy.
And then I would have it all. That’s that’s kind of like the basic assumption that we’re working from. But in reality, all things are impermanent. You know, even if we could, which I didn’t think we can, arrive at that state and this perfect arrangement to the things and relationships about us, still they’re going to change. That’s in their very nature.
Whatever it is, act two, is going to pass. Now this is the second mark of this quality of existence, the mark of impermanence. Impermanence refers to the fact that there are no permanent things to be found anywhere in the universe, no permanent material object, no permanent thought, idea, perception, no permanent laws of nature, and no permanent belief or system of beliefs. All without exception is changing. We see this wherever we look around us or inside of ourselves.
The weather changes, the trees, the flowers change and decay. Our loved ones are constantly changing. Our own bodies are changing, growing, and decaying. One day we may be happy with good family, a group of friends, sensible political religious views, and a job. The next day, one of our children becomes seriously ill.
Our political views are shaken by revelations of corruption. One of our friends turns out to be suing us. We discover that we have suddenly lost heart in the artistic activity that has brought us joy for twenty years. We develop a fear of flying that means we have to keep we cannot keep our jobs. These are the vagaries of life, we say.
Yes. But the mark of impermanence points out that there is nothing other than the vagaries of life. The idea of changes changing is not even the best way of talking of impermanence because this implies that there are things and those things change. The mark of impermanence says that the universe should not even be thought of as composed of things, that change rather the universe and all the parts should be thought of as processes of continual becoming and decaying. At a very deep level, we do not accept the mark of imperments.
We surround ourselves with objects that we feel are permanent, and we become attached to them. We hold to certain beliefs that we regard with certainty as true and unchanging. We seek permanent laws of nature and for a final theory of matter or human personality. All this is an attempt to fix an ever changing universe as if we could take a snapshot of it at this very moment, and it will always be like that. And everything changes.
It’s constantly coming into being and going out of being. It’s constantly we ourselves and all the things about us are constantly becoming something other than what they were. And there is simply nothing that we can hold on to, nothing that remains fixed, that remains unchanging. Everything that we love, everything that that that we hold dear, that we value, everything that we work so hard to to obtain, to attain, to to gather around us is, you know, like sand. You know, continually like slipping through our fingers.
You know, it is our our all of it’s going to be eventually lost and never to return again, whether it’s something as simple as a beautiful sunset or something as very much a part of the fabric of our life as as our relationships with our, you know, our parents or our partners or our children or even our own bodies, it’s all going to be lost. You know, we can’t hold on to it. It’s all going to come into an end. In in itself, impermanence is not a problem. Things remain impermanent even for a Buddha, but they are no longer problematic, the notion, the concept, the idea of impermanence.
The problem in terms of the mark of impermanence arises through evasion, our denial, our struggle against recognizing its basic fact. You know, the fact expecting that which is doomed to decay to last forever, you know, that it that demanding of the impermanent, that it bring us permanent happiness. The simply most, you know, trying to grasp and cling to that which is impermanent as permanent. You know, this is what this is what turns pleasure into pain. You know, This is what marks our present dysfunctional approach to life as suffering as dissatisfactory, as in some way pathological.
There is a verse by William Blake where he says, in talking about impermanence and the possibility of accepting it, he who bends to himself a joy, thus the wing life destroyer. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity sunrise. You know? But then we have to ask, you know, this what is it that’s continually trying to cling? What is it that that struggles as as in this case to bend to himself a joy?
You know? Who or what is it is, you know, of that is doing the grasping, who’s doing the expecting, who demands? This is the notion of selflessness, the nature of the eye, the nature of who we are as a person. There there is there is no substantial self which is which is doing the trying, which is doing the struggling, which is doing the grasping, expecting, demanding. There is only trying.
There is only expecting. There is only demanding. There’s no substantial person or thing or self or I behind it all. You know, we are this is the mark of selflessness. We are constantly trying to synthesize, you know, this flow of of physical and mental events into something which is solid, something which which which is unchanging, which is independently existing, some kind of self or I.
You know, we have you know, like when you get angry, for example, it becomes very apparent. You know, somebody does something, you say, you know, I can’t I can’t stand you or I hate you. We we cling to something which is at the depth of our being, which is which is which is being threatened with harm, and we seek to defend it by by all means. Or, you know, I’m the most beautiful thing that ever came to Adelaide. You know, that that notion that there’s something here which is exaggerated, puffed up sense of self or I, of who I in fact I am.
The effort to secure happiness, to maintain ourselves in relation to something else, is the process of ego. But this effort is futile because there is a continual gap in our seemingly solid world, continual cycles of death and rebirth, constant change, the sense of continuity and solidity, of self is an illusion. There is really no such thing as soul or ātman. It is the succession of confusions that create ego, a process which is ego actually consists of a flicker of confusion, a flicker of aggression, a flicker of grasping, all of which exist only in the moment. Since this cannot hold on to the present moment, we cannot hold on to me and mine and make them solid things.
Nothing within the whole stream of mental and physical phenomena that constitute our experience of body and mind has the quality of being an independent, fixed, permanent self. And nothing within our experience of body and mind has the quality of being a fixed, independent, permanent self. It is it is a constant grasping to the existence of such a type of self which makes the body and mind a constant stream of suffering. You know, in