Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using a comic strip about a boy resigned to his “C-grade” nature and a rope mistaken for a snake at dusk, Ven Jampa Gendun makes the concept of emptiness concrete in this 45-minute closing session of an introductory series. He opens with the wish-granting tree as a metaphor for Buddha’s effortless compassion, then works through the ethics of motivation — including a striking case of a bodhisattva who kills one person to prevent others from accumulating the karma of mass murder. The talk traces the three fundamentals of the path: ethics as the foundation for inner peace, meditative stabilisation, and the wisdom that removes suffering at its root. The final section introduces emptiness: the solid “I” that blazes when we say “I hate you” cannot be located on analysis, just as the snake disappears once we examine the rope. Suitable for newcomers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 1993 10 25 ItB.mp3
UUID: 2440256e-cff7-4fb9-a332-b330a8ac292d
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-10-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~4,905
It’s a a Buddha’s action has become completely spontaneous. They’re effortless. And the the the the metaphor that’s used, which is quite quite useful to think about, is like a a wish granting tree. You know, like a tree grows fruit. A tree has no intention to to produce fruit.
And people come along, and they can they can pick it or they cannot pick it. They can pick it and enjoy it, be nourished by it. But they can also leave it on the tree. They can you know? So that’s that’s that’s all Buddha does.
Spontaneously out of the force of the like, the compassion is like the sap rising up and causing this growth. And there’s this fruit which is being grown, you know, grown, ripening every moment. And people can come along and pick it or not according to their karma. But the Buddha has no intention of growing that fruit nor of helping anyone as it as it were. But still the fruit appears, and the people can take it and be nourished by it.
But so it’s from there. So the the Buddha is as if doing everything he or she can from their side, but then the people have to come and pick and eat. If they don’t come pick and eat, there’s nothing a Buddha can do. Why doesn’t that happen? Because we have certain habits of you know, we have habits of hatred and attachment and miserliness jealousy and What is that on point?
There’s no force to be here. Is that I mean, well, as far as you know, we’ve it comes from the notion of rebirth that we have acted in the same fashion in previous lives. These habits have continued on to this life, and they will continue on to the next life unless we interrupt them, unless we begin to change them. Yeah. That’s That’s it.
Good question. I mean, the the notion that ignorance is beginningless. It never had a first moment. It has an end, but it had it never had a first moment. It is that we have, from beginningless time, had a distorting factor in our mind, which has distorted our perceptions of ourselves in the world and causes and has caused us to develop these dysfunctional patterns, inappropriate patterns of hatred and jealousy and spite and menace and all these really ways of thinking and acting and speaking, which only brings suffering.
It’s yeah. This but it it’s not because there’s no there’s no punishment. There’s no it’s not because we’re evil. It is just the way things are. I mean, that’s the given.
That’s the way it is and working with that. Yeah, think that’s a very good point because it brings out, and when we talked about appreciating what we in fact take for granted, our human life and all the options and privileges which are open to us, that it’s very unique. It’s very special that most other types of beings simply don’t have these options open to them. Know, that a dog doesn’t have an option of choosing to grow, to work on its attachments and hatreds. It’s not open to it in that present type of embodiment, in that that circumstance.
But we have that option. So it’s not taking that that that but the potential to choose for granted. So this the bodhisattva who who was training to be Śākyamūni eventually he became Śākyamūni Buddha, prevented that person from killing. Killing hadn’t taken place yet. So out of his compassion, not wanting this person to collect the negative karma of killing all these people and therefore and was willing to take on that negative karma of killing himself.
So he motivated out of compassion for this person and for the passengers Killed this person. It’s complex in a way, isn’t it? Seems pretty complicated. Oh, yeah. There’s no easy formula.
It’s actually taken a life, hasn’t it? Yeah. No doubt. No. He took a life.
That’s right. He’s taken the Buddha’s taken on the karma. Of killing. Of killing. That’s right.
That Buddha Vajrasattva did. Yeah. But it is said that by the force of his compassion, it was a positive action. But as far I mean, the the the people there’s there’s millions of people, I think one million people, have been killed in Tibet. They’re dead.
They’re gone. Yes. So it’s it’s a that’s a circumstance. Right. But yeah.
It is I mean, whether that antidote is true or not, it’s it does point up the importance of motivation that and it also points to the fact that there’s no easy formula for ethics. Has to really search within oneself, you know, what is my motivation? Why am I doing why do I want to put this animal out of its misery? Right. You know, things like that.
So a good action can be result in something bad, and a bad action can result in something good? A good action only results in good. It might appear to be good. Yeah. You know, I mean, some people mean, it’s it it you know, they they have an injured dog or a dog.
You know, what is it? They, you know, they’re good people, good people. But do they want to think, well, I’ll probably have the dog put down or something like that. Sometimes if they really search, maybe because they don’t want to go through the expense of the veterinary bills of having to make it well or the trouble, the nuisance of having to put a lot of care into it. It’s their suffering they’re more concerned about than the animal.
It’s not just so it’s our our motivations are very complicated. We very seldom have very, you know, single one single motivation that we can clearly say this is why I’m doing what I’m doing. Maybe. But you don’t I don’t maybe perhaps yeah. No.
It may be. I mean, it would be if you put it down. Maybe I don’t know if I can find it. There’s a I’m trying to think where this quotation is. Looks like it’s about to put a pit down.
I wouldn’t like to take the dog to the pit myself. I get the one to do. I mean, I I’m sure. We are we I mean, we’re mean, we’re concerned with you know, perhaps the the the survival of the of the dog or not is is not a major significant incident in the universe. But it is how are we going to relate with that situation?
What kind of choices are we going to make in terms of saving life and respecting life and putting ourselves out to preserve life and to eliminate suffering? For us, in terms of the life of that kangaroo or that dog, maybe but for us, it is a very powerful expression about who we are and what we stand for and where we want to go. You’re saying we are suffering more than the dog is suffering? I mean, the dog the dog is gonna die. Everyone’s every every everybody’s gonna Whether and but but somehow, we have we have come into relationship with that.
And therefore, it it becomes a a statement about what we’re about. Whether the dog dies or not, what are we gonna do about it? What is our life about? What is good? I mean, quite the most simplest form is that that which brings happiness.
That’s that’s the way Buddhism is. There’s no moral judgment made. It’s just that that which brings happiness is good. That which brings suffering is bad. That which harms oneself or another being is good or is bad.
That which promotes the well-being of oneself or others is good. And to be able to see that is quite another thing. For example? I’m sure that his material rewards, he interpreted as bringing happiness. He did?
He did. Did he but did he experience happiness? You know, I really. I I I understand what you’re saying. But, also, did that make him happy?
I mean, he’s fantastic. Yeah. That’s that’s fine. An experiential goodness in Buddhism. But that’s what I say.
Virtue virtue virtue is its own reward. That there is a certain one experiences a certain peace. I don’t know this when one is being virtuous, being good. And if one can attune oneself, then one can easily begin to make choices in life of what will bring happiness in the future because one feels at peace with oneself with the decisions. But we’re quite out of tune with that.
And what we we we and that we were talking about before. We we we act on our conception about what will make us happy, in fact, what makes us happy. Out of tune with our own experience, I think that’s That’s the answer to the malaise, I think. I think so. And and, again, I think I think so.
Alright. As far as we’re we’re almost in a continual state of suffering or ill-ease. Anyway, talking about basic goodness. So if No. It’s not.
And to to to act in such a way that one feels at peace with oneself is the basis of ethics. And it’s also, I think, ethics is the way that we attune ourselves to our own basic goodness. Ethics is the way that in the coming to peace, we begin the initial level, on the gross level, is through ethics. Beginning In a way what we’re saying is when we act unethically we say, I’m more important than you. My happiness is more important than your happiness.
My having my taking your possession. I feel this is this my pleasure is more important than your pleasure or my having having a sexual affair with your your partner. And we and this is And these are all greater, grosser expressions of ego, I think, in that we begin to, through ethics, begin to curtail these more gross expressions of ego in our lives through ethics. And we begin to find some kind of peace in our relationship with others and within ourselves in terms of this constant battle, conflict within our own mind between our rational and emotional lives. And I know I shouldn’t do that, but it feels good.
I can’t help it. And it’s constant struggle that we’re involved in. And ethics helps us to begin to resolve the struggle, the conflict between ourselves and others, and within ourselves in terms of our emotions and our rational mind. Then based upon that, we find a certain level of peace. Then we can begin on that.
We begin to move on to meditative stabilizations. And we begin to resolve all the various conflicting factors in our mind become integrated around a whole, like around one object. We become more and more unified. And then finally, independently from a meditative concentration, go on to develop wisdom, in which the most subtle types of conflict in the mind are eliminated, which we were going to talk about tonight, but in developing the conflict of self versus not self. Are going to resolve that basic conflict, that duality?
And that’s resolved through wisdom. So there’s gradual this is gradual movement toward more and more subtle levels of peace and beginning with ethics. And it seems that this is in the natural order of things in a way, not that if it’s yeah. If if if peace is the natural inherent nature of the mind, then the more that we attune ourselves with that, then is Simply like ethics, simply a mean to help us to begin to attune ourselves with what is in fact our basic nature. Peace or within our mind, the nature of mind.
Can I ask an easy question? Buddhism is spreading to the west. Is it likely that in the future, there could be a female Dalai Lama? Oh, I I I think the Dalai Lama has been asked that question, and he said, well, you know, if it’s of a use, then there will be. Yeah.
If the institution of the Dalai Lama is no longer useful, there won’t be any Dalai Lama. You know, it’s not like he has his own agenda. It’s just whatever is of most use. So he sees no reason. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be a a female Pänchen Lama.
Has there ever been female llamas? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, Yeah.
The high caliber. Yeah. The teachers? Yeah. Yeah.
Alright. There are today. There have been. Did Judy talk about that? Yeah.
We had a talk on women in Buddhism. She did. I remember. Yeah. You relate.
They they like lamas. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No question. They actually call them a nama, do they?
Yeah. They could. Yeah. Yeah. They could very well.
They could call them. Yeah. I imagine some of the students call them up. Yeah. They’re stirring up Buddhism a bit, really.
Some of the women. Yeah. That’s good. I think that’s good. I think Buddha is amazing.
I mean, that’s good that things don’t become fossilized and dogma, you know, fall into some kind of dogma. It was presented very compassionately. And that their emotions or everything about them, their situation. And we always need to place the best of the the evil that comes into our own lives somewhere out there. Where is that?
I didn’t get that feeling at all from that. That everyone in the in the what I understand is the Buddha said was said was in charge of their own destiny given that there were these horrific things that had to happen because of the situation and all these people? Do know what I mean? Yeah. I can begin to I think in some way.
I mean, what we were discussing today, I this week, I’m doing intensive one week intensive with Michael White. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of He’s a psych family therapist. And he specialized in particular called narrative therapy. And talking about things like the I mean, he’s very much concerned with the dominant culture, how it and can be very pathologizing. And, for example, in terms of psychotherapy, many many mothers are get blamed for a hell of a lot.
And this is simply a a dominant theme in our culture and especially in terms of sight a lot of psychotherapy beginning with Freud. And it’s just one metaphor. It’s it’s very subjugating. It’s very press, But it’s not it’s it’s but it’s just one way of explaining what’s happening. But there are other ways of explaining it, which aren’t that is which aren’t oppressive.
And, you know, you explain the same situation, but using other metaphors. But I can understand what you mean. Yes. It’s they’re yeah. He would would call it the politics of experience.
Using different metaphors, we can explain the same thing many from from many different many different ways. And some of them are much more, what he calls, promote preferred outcomes. They don’t have to be pathologizing, blaming, things like that. Like the mother yeah. I mean, he gave back to a case history.
You know? For example, a mother of a a young girl with anorexia. You know? Quite often, they get blamed. It was my fault.
I was over involved in my daughter’s life. And that becomes part of the problem. So how do we how do we go about explaining things in such a way that no one gets blamed? We didn’t we had some we had some guests. High school.
How have you found our discussion? Interesting. Yeah? Yes. Yes.
Good. Have you learned anything about Buddhism? Pardon? Yeah. As a class, What?
Year twelve? Yeah. You’re studying yeah. You’re studying were you studying religious studies in general? Yeah.
I’m glad you had the opportunity to come along. I was gonna talk you know, we were talking about the three fundamentals of the path, right? determination to be free, or the awakening heart, and the awakening mind. And the awakening mind is well, you know, we have you’re waking your mind in five minutes. We’ve developed a determination to awaken.
We’ve developed a determination to be free, to solve our problems at a very fundamental level. We’ve developed compassion. But unless we develop wisdom, then our compassion and our determination simply become even though a noble idea, they can never be translated into any reality. That we have to develop the wisdom understanding emptiness, wisdom understanding selflessness. If we’re ever going to I mean, as far as Buddhism is concerned, the the the fundamental problem or the cause of our fundamental problems is ignorance.
Ignorance which misconceives the distorting factor within the mind, which causes us to misconceive the nature of the self, the I, and the nature of the things about us. And out of that, all of these various dysfunctional patterns, things like hatred and anger, jealousy and spite, attachment arise on the basis of ignorance. If we can remove ignorance, it’s like cutting the roots of the tree. The leaves and the branches, they die of themselves. Otherwise, we spend our time pruning the tree, and it keeps growing back.
We can make use of remedial measures, developing tolerance, developing meditating, cultivating love in order to reduce our hatred and anger. We can reduce our attachment. We can reduce our jealousy, but we can never remove them from their very root. And therefore, the root of suffering can never be removed. The root of all our problems, all our suffering is ignorance, misconception with the nature of the self or the I and the things about us.
Well, I don’t want to leave you there. Maybe I’ll just tell you what I mean by that word emptiness. So I think it would be good to have some information and more than just to clear up misinformation that you may have about what emptiness means. You may have you may you may hear the word here and there. So what I say is more just a way to clear away some misconceptions you may have about emptiness than than actually give you some understanding of emptiness because I don’t understand it.
The emptiness you know, when we hear the word emptiness, it sounds like nothingness or a vacuum or some sort. So emptiness does not mean nothing. It mean it does not mean nothingness. Emptiness has the idea of of an absence, a lack of. There’s something there that we think is there.
Yeah? It’s like and we say this room is empty of pink elephants. There’s a lack of pink elephants in this room. You know, that that’s no big deal. You know?
To to to understand that the empty the room is empty of pink elephants is not gonna change our life. You know? But there but we’re so when we talk about emptiness, we’re talking about a lack of fantasized way of existing, an imaginary way of existing, which we are instinctively projecting onto everything at all times, people, books, tables. It’s not something only Buddhists have. Have I think I have a comic.
Did I ever show you this this comic? This is a I’m yeah. I’m gonna explain it in you know, I just have five minutes. Okay? Emptiness in five easy lessons.
Five minutes. No. This is wow. In that case, I’ve got there’s a little comic here. And there are many levels to this.
I’m teaching this on Wednesday night, and we’re we’re going through these different stages. And I’ve been teaching it for about eight sessions. We’ll we’ll have about we’ll go to the end of the year. So maybe twenty sessions altogether, maybe more than that. So it’s a very profound subject.
Two two boys are walking along walking home from school. You know, this one boy is just he’s just had he took a test, and he has his results. And the first boy who’s gotten his results is talking to the second boy. He says, that new teacher really did a number on me. In the second box, he says, I thought I’d get a B on that test, and he gave me a C.
And the third box, he says, how did he know I was a C student? So what is he saying? That is that, you know, he it was a new teacher, and he thought he could pull one off on his teacher. He could pretend to be a b student. But the teacher saw through his his act.
You know, there was some kind you know, there’s some kind of C-ness kind of oozing out of his skin. You know, there’s something I mean, his inherent nature is C-ness. There’s nothing he could do about it. He could pretend for a little while, eventually, everybody would know who he who he really is, his real quality, his inherent nature, you might say. And he’s going to go on to grow you know, to get a to marry a c grade wife, lead a c grade job, have c grade children, and he’ll he’ll lead a c grade life.
And life if life will become a self fulfilling C grade prophecy, and teaches children how to be C grade people. So we have a sense of an inherent self, a concrete, solid self. This is instinctive. And we’re not talking about an intellectual, rationally thought out self, the self that sits and the self that talks. There is an I that talks, that listens, that studies Buddhism, that coughs, that walks down the street, that goes to work and has kids and yells at the kids sometimes.
There is that self. There is that I. But the so the type of self that we’re talking about, I which appears to us is most pronounced with an emotional experience. When we so when we say, I hate you. I can’t stand you.
We poke here somewhere. Like, maybe it’s about right there somewhere. You know? A sense of a very solid concrete self, the I which does the hating, which can’t stand, which does the hating. We and then we can explain it in an independent, unchanging self, a type of self which we didn’t we were gonna meditate on this, it doesn’t matter.
A type of self which is independent of the body, independent of the mind. This we have a sense that it’s there. We have a feeling that it’s there. But when but when we analyze, when we look for it, when we look within, you know, where does this self appear? When I say, I hate your guts.
Will you get away from me? I am the most beautiful thing that ever happened to Adelaide, you know, something like that. When we look for that self, we where does it appear? It appears somewhere over here in this area. And so, you know, if we’re looking for that eye, that’s all.
We don’t look in the kitchen because that’s not where it’s appearing. But, you know, it’s like, you know, if we when we see a snake, we’re walking along a path, and we see a snake in in the grass. And we we want to is that really a snake? So where do we check up? We we look where the where the appearance is.
So likewise, with this saw. We begin to analyze everything that’s here, the body and the mind. We look and we look and we examine. We go through a very detailed analysis of the body and mind, and we don’t find it. It appears just like in the case where, in fact, there’s a rope, a coil of striped colored rope in the grass.
And the the light is getting dim. You know, it’s it’s almost night, and and we see a snake. And we we get a a great deal of fear and aversion. We wanna run away. But, you know, uh-uh.
I’m a real man. I’m not gonna run away from that snake. And we we look at it, it’s not moving. Why doesn’t it move? We wait, and we we get we get a little bit braver, and we we get up a little bit closer.
Strange looking snake. It doesn’t head and its tail are the same thickness. We get a stick and start poking around us. Maybe it’s a dead snake. Poke around there.
That’s a rope. And we were all of the fear, all of the aversion which arose in our mind was completely dependent upon a misconception. There was nothing in out there which was with snake, which had the slightest potential to bring us harm. Every all that aversion, all that fear that arose was completely dependent upon a mental attachment to something which was never there, a misconception about something which was never there. Likewise, we have a sense of a concrete, solid, unchanging, independent I self.
This self is the basis for all our negative emotions. It is and but upon analysis, we can never find this thing. And therefore, all of the fear, all of the suffering that we experience is based only upon mental attachment to something which, in fact, doesn’t exist. It appears to us when we become emotionally upset, when when when we’re very afraid, when we’re very upset, when we’re very depressed, when we worry about death. You know, we have to actually look.
Now who is it that’s so worried about what’s going to happen tomorrow or about one’s eventual death? Who is it that feels so guilty about what happened last week? I’m beginning to question. And we’re going to begin to see that there’s nothing which corresponds to our conception of self, which is so concerned about what who is going to die and what happened yesterday, that it’s merely a misconception within our own mind. That misconception is ignorance, a distorted awareness.
When we begin to see through that, when we begin to cut away and remove ignorance, it’s like the snake no longer appears. We we see the reality of what is there, And we were able to settle the basic cause of all our suffering, which is ignorance — and we’re out of time. So that wasn’t very fair of me, was it, to introduce a profound subject in five minutes. So we’ve covered, I think, quite a lot. This is together through this extra introduction to Buddhism.
I probably have confused you more than really helped you. And for that, I I apologize. But I think if I want to get over any kind of idea over this introduction of Buddhism, it was the idea that our situation is workable, that we don’t have to remain victims. We can take agency in our life and begin to direct our lives along more preferred lines and beginning to impart some kind of information about how we can go about performing our preferred story of life, solving our problems, cheering up and becoming more useful to ourselves and to other people. And the development of these three fundamentals of the path, developing the determination to change and to grow, developing the going beyond that in terms of the awakened heart, the wish to be able to help others to do the same, to determine to help others to awake and grow, and developing the wisdom, the awakening mind, which can facilitate this process and bring it to some kind of consummation.
And this is, I think, what essentially Buddhism is about, helping ourselves to solve our problems at the most basic level and widening our scope of concern, our vision about our being in the world. Taking our rightful place in the world and developing a social consciousness, social awareness, so that motivation for solving our problems. There’s other concern and self concern that become unified, and it becomes a way of life. So thank you very much for your patience. You are quite welcome to come on to talk to me anytime or if you want to get together sometime.
Also, maybe I should mention, I’ll just take a minute, that Geshe-la teaches on Tuesday and Friday evenings. And Tuesday evenings he’s teaching the three fundamentals of the path, exactly what we’ve been talking about. You’re welcome to join that course at any time. And you shouldn’t feel as if somehow it’s more advanced than what might be appropriate for you. It’s not the case.
There’s always something just there’s you can gain a lot even though the course has been going for one term. It’s it’s no problem. And also just to be you know, have the opportunity to to meet with an individual who is very much an expression of what Buddhism is about, I think, is is very transforming at some level beyond beyond these words that we try to that we deal with. Just just the the types of communication which go on on nonverbal level, I think, are life enhancing. So, by all means, if you feel so inclined, you’re more all of you are more than welcome to come on on Tuesday nights.
Yeah. Thank you.