Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, simply means “to get used to” — and in this 21-minute introductory session, Ven Jampa Gendun builds his whole case around that mundane fact. He distinguishes analytical meditation (thinking a subject through until understanding clicks) from stabilizing meditation (holding the mind on that conclusion), and argues that lasting change comes from systematically habituating the mind to skillful states like love and compassion. He then addresses faith — not as a religious artifact but as the willingness to step onto unfamiliar ground — and frames the threefold process of listening, reflecting, and meditating as the necessary groundwork before genuine change is possible. The session ends with hands-on instruction in mindfulness of breathing: counting breaths in cycles of one to five, why this coarser technique steadies a mind not yet able to hold a subtle object, and how to return without self-judgment each time attention wanders. Pitched squarely at complete beginners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 ItB 1997 10 06.mp3
UUID: 592bba84-5f9e-4e57-bb86-5ecabb57adad
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-10-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 21.3 minutes
Words: ~3,202
Intellectual acceptance of that fact, but feeling that fact amongst ourselves and everyone outside of this room are exactly the same in that way, and actually developing a sense of equality which is like a penny drops, and one gains a sense that is the case. That is that and you feel that. Or it could be in terms of death, the fact that death is definite, that the time of death is indefinite. It could be on terms of appreciating our humanity, this this which we’re going to talk about, this this life of leisure and fortune that we all possess that we take very much for granted. It could be in the very profound subject of self selflessness and emptiness, the the ultimate nature of reality.
So there’s many, many, many subjects that we can take which we we analyze, we try to we think, we we use our our imagination, and we and we try to come to some kind of firm conclusion. Once you’ve come to that conclusion, then you stabilize the mind. You fix your mind upon that. So there’s two these two type of types of meditation, they work together. thinking about a subject, coming to some kind of conclusion when the penny drops, you stop thinking about the subject, and you simply hold the mind to that particular subject.
Now the idea of changing our mind is that there will be that we for most of us, you know, I think and this is my my experience, and maybe I’m just a bit slower than most. That’s a good possibility. Very few dramatic changes, lots of little changes. You know? In a way, we are our habits, and we have to begin to make a habit of the person we want to be, and we will become that person.
So if you want to become a loving person, we have to systematically habituate ourselves to love more and more often, and strangely enough to become a loving person. And so that’s what we do in meditation, for example. We it’s like taking a recipe book, and we follow a certain methodical procedure to evoke a very skillful state of mind, in this case, love or compassion. And we habituate our mind to that loving compassion. We arouse it more and more.
We it comes it comes with it comes more easily as we become accustomed to it. It becomes stronger and becomes we make a habit of it, and strangely enough, we become loving people, compassionate people. And it seems all is true for these other subjects. We actually the word meditation in the Tibetan language is gom, and it’s not a very mystical word. It’s a very mundane word.
It simply means to get used to, to familiarize, to accustom, to habituate. That’s all it means. Habituating habituating our mind to skillful states such that they become a part of ourselves. They become our nature. They become who we are and we change.
We grow. Finally, we wake and we become a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being, the goal of our path. So there’s this three step process. First, you know, it’s necessary to gather together information so that we do it correctly. We have the correct information and we apply it in a proper manner.
Then we can have we can we can gain some kind of a surety. And a surety, you know, we can talk about faith, you know, and if we if we have time over the next four weeks, I’d like I’d like to talk about faith. But we all operate on faith. Faith isn’t simply something particularly religious. You know, what is it that you that you invest with energy and and of of value and worth in your life?
We put we place faith in people and things and situations. Unless we have and it we there’s a certain resistance to change, and we have to acknowledge this. There’s a certain fear to to the to the unfamiliar, the unknown. So unless we have faith in what we’re doing, then the mind you know, I was talking about developing this inner ecology of mind whereby to create the inner condition whereby to bring about change. In this we create faith will only occur I mean, change will only occur when there’s a sense that there’s nothing to be afraid of, when we’ve overcome the resistance of to the unfamiliar, the unknown.
That’s the value of faith. It’s not simply a religious artifact having no meaning. It allows it it it overcomes our sense of resistance to what is presently unknown, to to to to a risk, to being being on unfamiliar ground. Unless there is that context of faith, the mind will resist, will be hesitant, will will hold back. There will be no change.
So the reason I I say all of this is because meditation is done within the context of developing faith through getting proper information, thinking about it through for yourself. You know, you can’t no one else can do this process for you. No one else can can can validate. Otherwise, it’s simply pouring oil and water. It hasn’t you haven’t seen it for yourself.
We have to question. And then when we when we see that, you know, even even in the own limited way, it agrees with my own experience. It seems legitimate. True. I I I have a sense I can trust what’s being said, and I and the mind will begin to will allow itself to move in a new direction.
Other possibilities will open up to it. Without that, it would never will. It’ll keep going in the same tracks. You know, this kind of senseless circular motion of our mind that we keep going over the same ground again and again even though it hasn’t really gotten us anywhere. So we so there’s necessary this process.
So listening, reflecting, and then meditating, where hesitation has been set aside, and we give over ourselves to the possibility of change. We give over our minds to what it might be feel like to be a loving person. I know you might that might sound simple minded, but to become a loving person necessitates will will change your life, and do you want to make that change? Maybe you don’t. You should check up before because your mind won’t allow you to become a loving person if you haven’t.
I don’t know if that’s making myself very clear. The way you the type of work that you do, the way that the type of friends, the type of ways that you spend your leisure time will change, and are you willing to make that change? If you aren’t, then you’re not gonna be then, you know, why bother? And it’s not something that you really want. So, you know, that’s it’s just I guess to look at it, this process in in a in an intelligent fashion and to to to see that the point here is to simply to meditate, to talk about love is not sufficient to become a loving person.
Something more is needed. And in in this threefold activity, what is what the more that is needed is worked through in terms of listening and reflecting. And then the meditation is actually the being of love. And once we’ve laid the groundwork, prepared the soil, then we can plant the seed and it will definitely grow. We’ve created the causes and the result will arise.
But with just having the seed and not having soil and water, the seeds can remain there for eternity and never germinate, and it will never sprout. It will never grow. So I talk I’m gonna talk about a particular type of meditation. We’re going to meditate together. One a very useful meditation is called mindfulness of breathing.
Okay? So I’m gonna talk about mindfulness of breathing, and this will be one of our basic meditations. Then we’ll we’ll do other meditations in conjunction with this. Mindfulness of breathing. Mindfulness of breathing.
Uh-huh. Mindfulness of breathing or mindfulness of breath. The breath is not something we can see. You know, it’s kind of invisible. But we can but what we can direct our attention to, what we can focus upon are the physical sensations, the bodily feelings associated with the natural breathing.
So in the course of naturally breathing in, naturally breathing out, maybe your abdomen rises and falls, maybe your chest lifts and drops, and you feel the cloth rubbing against your skin, maybe you feel a sensation of air rushing in and out on your upper lip inside your nostril. So all of those various physical sensations taken together are what we’re going to focus upon. And we’re going to in in Buddhist psychology, there are different ways of organizing the mind or different classifications, divisions of mind. One way of dividing the mind up is what is called six primary and fifty one secondary factors of the mind. Okay.
Six primary. These are the simple ones. Okay? Eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mental consciousness. You know, eye consciousness sees colors and shapes, ear consciousness, hear sounds.
So the six primary consciousness. And there are what are called fifty one mental factors or secondary functions of mind. And there’s lots of this like anger, love, faith, mindfulness, awareness. These are all just functions of mind, discrete functions of mind. So amongst those fifty one, as I just mentioned, two of them are mindfulness and awareness, and these are these are good we make a great deal of use of in in meditation practice.
And we can mindfulness is simply memory, recollection. You know, that like, you know, like I can remember what the house that I grew up when I, you know, when I was that I lived in when I was four years old, for example. It’s an old log cabin. No. Not really.
Anyway, I can remember that. That that that function of mind which is doing that memory memory remembering, recollecting is mindfulness. So mindfulness is something that we all have. It’s not something particularly Buddhist. It’s not something particularly technical.
We all have mindfulness. It holds objects. It holds mental objects. If you want to like, you hold a telephone number in your mind, then there’s the factor of awareness or introspection. In other words, for introspection, like an alertness of the mind, a watchfulness of mind.
So these are two mental factors that we’re going to develop in the course of our of our meditation. And to help us develop in these two factors, we’re going to use some kind of techniques. And they’re only techniques. They’re they’re just something like a crutch. At some point, maybe we won’t we won’t need them any longer.
In in the course of a single meditation session, maybe you’ll set them aside. In in the course of your progress in meditation in general, there’ll come a time when you won’t make use of it. You know, it’s just like when you’ve if you broke your leg and then it was healed, there’s no sense in carrying your crutch around on your your back once you you don’t need it any longer. Likewise with these meditative techniques, we’re going to use to develop our mindfulness and awareness, and perhaps our mindfulness and our awareness for introspection, they aren’t very well developed. And this simply helps us to develop these factors of mind.
So in the in the practice of mindfulness and breathing, we’re going to become mindful of the breath. And the the technique that we’re going to make use of is counting the breaths. You know, what we want to do is focus, hold the mind to the breath. So breathing in, breathing out naturally, not not adjusting the breath in any way, not making it any longer or shorter, but whatever just whatever breath is there, making use of that. Breathing in, breathing out.
The technique we’re gonna use is counting, counting one. Okay. I’m I’m going to say this verbally, okay, with my mouth, but you would you would say this mentally. Breathing in, breathing out, counting one. There are various ways to count.
This is just I’m just suggesting one possible method that you can work with, one way you can try it. But if you have a particular method that works for you, by all means, make use of that. Breathing in, breathing out, counting mentally. One, in out, two, in out, three, in out, four, in out, five. If you’ve gotten a five, then come back down to one.
And out one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So, you know, it’s like, you know, may perhaps at present, our mindfulness isn’t well developed. So it’s like, you know, a baby a baby has five fingers, and it has the it has the potential to pick up an object, but it doesn’t have the coordination or the the physical dexterity to pick up a very fine object like a needle, a pin. If but if you give it a a block, it can pick up a block. If you give it a gross object, it has the ability that it has enough coordination to be able to pick up a a coarse object or a gross object.
So likewise with our mind, we’re gonna give our mind a grosser object, something maybe the the mind is too subtle. If the object is too subtle, then the mind our minds will continually wander, continually continually be distracted. So we’ll give it a grosser object. And the way that we give it a grosser object at present is by counting the breaths, having to remember what number one, having to remember to count in out one, in out two. If, you know and it’s for sure that during the course of your meditation that your mind is going to wander.
It’s going to be distracted. It might be be an external object. Might a car might come along the street. It might be someone making you know, moving around next to you. It might be internal object.
It might be a pain, pain in your knees, pain in your your bum. But it could be also thoughts, you know. In meditation, we’re we’re we’re we are restricting the scope of our awareness. Generally, we’re constantly caught up in seeing things, smelling things, hearing things, and it’s constantly distracted with external objects. Here we’re cutting all of this out.
And, you know, at first, quite often the ego will think, well, this is fantastic, you know, waiting to hear, you know, waiting for some kind of mystical experience to come up to overcome you. There’s some kind of cosmic hum or colored lights. You know, it’s really not suspecting you’re waiting for that that mystical moment to happen. And then after a while, it’s just the breath, you know, just in and out, one, in and out. Then ego gets it starts getting a bit boring.
And what we’ll probably do is then is we kinda go back to our archives of old films in our mind. We can start rerunning some old, you know, old memories, you know, and we we kinda play those to ourselves, of, you know, seeking in a kind of entertainment for ourselves. Or we start playing we take images and ideas and we we create future possibilities, fantasies, and that we could that could come about in the future. Anyway, we’ll we’ll kind of set up our own entertainment theater for ourselves in in our own mind. So that is to you become you become distracted by thinking, and it’s only thinking.
Okay? So having been distracted, you were counting one through five either by an external object or any internal object, thinking or pain or emotion or sound or whatever. Simply bring your mind back to the breath and beginning that particular sequence and counting again, one through five or one through one through six. So I think it’s important your attitude that we bring to this activity. And I mean, meditation, as I said, is not inherently beneficial.
It’s very much dependent upon whether you have correct information, you apply it correctly, and part of that applying it correctly is dependent upon your attitude. Now how we treat ourselves, we we how we you know, meditation is to help us to solve our problems. So we can’t allow our meditation to become part of the problem or become another activity in which we can find ourselves wanting or inefficient. That we you know, just another way that we can beat ourselves up. No.
I can’t do this. And everybody else in the room is blissed out, and I only me is having a problem. And that we have to we need some kind of discipline and this and meditation and the discipline of bringing the mind back to the breath, the object of our meditation, is the discipline. But we need a discipline discipline, a gentle discipline. You know, we all have some wounds and we’re trying to heal those wounds, we’re trying to make ourselves better, And we don’t need to replicate many ways, self oppressive ways that we are that we relate with ourselves in the outer world.
So Okay. With a great sense of equanimity and gentleness and patience with yourself without judgment upon yourself that you are somehow not a very good person or insufficient person or whatever all the trips that you may have about yourself. Simply, without any judgment, bringing the mind back to the breath. The mind will be distracted. It will run off either to an internal object, thinking, or an external object, a car or a sound or whatever.
Simply, the moment you become aware that your mind’s been distracted and that it’s wandered, bring the mind back to the breath again and again with great gentleness, with great patience, without any judgment, without any getting uptight with yourself. It doesn’t matter. Well, anyway, we’re going to talk more about this. Would you like to stand up for a moment and stretch your legs, and then we’ll we’ll we’ll practice mindfulness of breathing. So there shouldn’t be any tension.
So let’s first bring our our minds to our bodies. Okay? By bringing your awareness to those areas where you feel a sense of tension and tightness, especially in the shoulders, neck, upper back. Consciously relax and soften until you’ve had a hard day. It’s a to simply relax and let go, Feeling the tension moving down and out of your body into the ground.
Body becoming relaxed and comfortable It is. And then bringing your mind to the breath. Just an easy, gentle, in and out flow of the natural breath. If you wish, make use of the technique of counting the breaths. In and out one, in and out two, in and out three.
Continually bringing your mind back to the breath again and again.