Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of green-tinted sunglasses distorting a snow mountain, Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 40-minute introductory session by redefining “realization” as stripping away misconceptions rather than accumulating knowledge. He traces the Lamrim’s lineage from Buddha Śākyamūni through Atisha to Tsongkhapa, explaining why Atisha systematized the Buddha’s vast teachings into a staged practical manual and why that lineage gives students confidence to commit to study. The bulk of the session walks through the three scopes of practitioners — small, middling, and great — using a high-school dropout analogy to show how spiritual maturity means progressively widening one’s horizon: from securing a good rebirth, to liberation from cyclic existence, to the bodhisattva vow to attain Buddhahood for all beings. The session closes with practical homework: a meditation journal, a breath-meditation exercise, and a reading list. Suited to newcomers beginning a structured Lamrim course.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 LR 2008 03 06.mp3
UUID: 881838e8-52f7-4097-ae50-a6bd9721905e
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Lam Rim (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2008-03-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 39.6 minutes
Words: ~5,587
Clear up any misunderstandings and so forth. So tonight we, you know, we was in it was very much an introduction. We’re spending a long time trying to establish authenticity, know, that the text that we’re studying wasn’t invented last year in Southern California and isn’t going to be superseded next year by somebody else that has a very authoritative lineage dating, you know, going all the way back to Buddha Śākyamūni himself. So it seems as if this is extremely important to give us some confidence. If we’re going to put the time and energy in studying it and putting it into practice, we need to develop some confidence that it’s authentic and it’s a tried and trued method and it comes from the Buddha himself.
So we’re studying the Lam Rim. We’re going to be using this word quite a lot. Lam is a Tibetan word. Lam in both words are Tibetan. Lam means path, means road, but we shouldn’t think of it just simply as something you walk on or you drive your car car down.
The one part of the definition actually a lam is a path. A path is a realization. It’s a state of consciousness. So we’re talking about states of consciousness, states of realization. But again, you know, what does a realization mean?
It’s sometimes talked about and the word is bantered about and it probably doesn’t mean for us much anymore. In the Tibetan context, realization has the idea of it’s not simply a matter of building up more information. It’s a matter of working through our present misconceptions. We are operating under a whole hierarchy of misperceptions, misconceptions, and wrong understandings, or mistaken ideas. When we talk about realization, it’s like an easy analogy would be, for example, if you were looking at a white snow mountain and you were wearing sunglasses.
So you see snow as green. That is you’re projecting on the object something which isn’t there and you relate with it in terms of your projection. In some way it’s inappropriate to the reality of the object. So a realization is simply taking off those green set of sunglasses and seeing the object for what it really is and its true nature and thereby relating with it in a more appropriate manner. So we are working through a lot of misconceptions, a lot of wrong understandings, wrong ideas, and a realization is able to act as an antidote or is an antidote to misconceptions, those wrong ideas.
We have a path. We have a system of stages of working through our various misconceptions. This is a path of realizations. And it’s arranged in a very systematic fashion. Know, what Atisha did, you know, Buddha gained enlightenment at the age of approximately thirty five years old.
He lived till he was about eighty. He probably taught six or seven hours each day for forty five years. So there was he taught a lot, in other words. And he taught to and he wasn’t he was a real teacher in the sense that he didn’t just teach the subject, he taught the student. And He tailored his teaching.
I mean, that’s why he became a Buddha. So he had the capacity to be able to tailor his teaching for the unique disposition, capacity, and interest of each of his students. You know exactly what this particular student needed at this particular time to help them, you know, move that little much more along the path. He simply just didn’t teach subjects and if you got it, you got it. If you didn’t, well, sorry about that.
So he he went this went on for forty five years. And so there are these the the volumes and volumes of the of the discourses of the Buddha. And to actually to to study those would be, you know, quite an undertaking which would be beyond beyond the probably the interest, but beyond even beyond the capacity of most of us. So Atisha went through this process studying all these teachings of the Buddha, the discourse of the Buddha. And he he drew out the essence of all the Buddhist teachings, and he arranged them in a very in a practical manual.
This is our our our Middle Length Lam Rim is like a a manual for gaining realizations. It’s it’s a it’s an organized system designed to lead a practitioner from the very beginning of his spiritual life through the middle phase and, ultimately, all the way to Buddhahood. That’s the way that’s that was the the genius of Atisha and what and what he has done for us, and it’s developing this system of organizing this voluminous teachings of the Buddha in a systematic fashion, is easy to follow. And we can begin to get a handle on the situation, how we can work with our own minds. This particular Atisha was an Indian master, but he’s held as being one of the three most important figures in all of Tibetan Buddhism.
There was a time in about about the the eleventh century when the for various reasons, the the Buddhism that would had been introduced many years earlier by Padmasambhava had degenerated, and it was, you know, it was almost becoming nonexistent and so forth. And he was invited to reinvigorate, to reestablish the authentic teachings of the Buddha. And he went there and he, I don’t know, maybe the Tibetans have a unique cultural characteristic or something. He said, Well, obviously, they need something very simple and systematic. And so for them, he devised this, a genre of teachings or a category of teachings, which later became called the Lam Rim stages of the path.
He made use of the teachings of, especially of Nāgārjuna, as was mentioned, in Asaṇga. Textual sources, I mean, all going back to the Buddha, but the main textual source, as was mentioned by Geshe la in his teaching, is a text by Maitreya called Ornament for Clear Realizations. So this is one of the in the monastic institutions of, in Tibet and now in India, this is one of the main, one of the five main subjects that they would study. They would study it for about three years, this one text. And it sets out all the various stages of the path.
So he took that as his source material. He also— So when we talk about There’s a lot of new vocabulary that perhaps you’re you’re picking up. There’s the vast what is called the vast conduct or the method. So these are all the various, practices that we we necessarily involve the bodhisattva involves themselves in in in progressing along his path. So it is, these practices motivated by the awakened heart or bodhicitta, like practice of generosity, practice of ethics, practice of of patience, and so forth.
This is called the vast conduct of the bodhisattva. They’re called method. But, you know, it was mentioned that we need two wings to fly. So not only do we need the method, but we also need the view. And the view means simply means the wisdom aspect.
No matter how good we are and no matter how much how much how loving we are, how compassionate we are, how much we might work at all our various practice, how generous we are, without the wisdom understanding the deeper nature of reality, there’s no way to liberate the mind from its deepest problem. That is to say, there’s no way to remove ignorance from the mind. So this wisdom understanding the deepest nature of reality, we call emptiness or selflessness, has the same meaning. We call that the view or we call it sometimes the profound view. So these are the two wings of a bird.
The profound view is wisdom and the method are the various practices of conduct motivated out of compassion and love and by means of a conjoining of these two wings that we’re able to progress along the path ultimately to Buddhahood. So he took the wisdom from the as was mentioned by the two trailblazers. Sounds like a strange, kind of like a cowboy movie, but anyway. Asaṇga and Nāgārjuna. And, you know, there’s a lot we could go into why, you know, we said, you know, the Buddha taught for forty five years.
Later scholars, they systematized his teachings in to what are called tenets. Tenets are are, you know, he taught differently for each student, but they but they were they were able to organize his teachings in terms of the philosophic content in four tenets, four philosophic systems. There are the two that were mentioned in this evening’s teaching were the tenet system called the Mind Only School, which was developed by Asaṇga. And the other tenet system was that called the Middle Way School, which was developed by Nāgārjuna. So these have a particular level, a particular interpretation of the nature of reality, the wisdom aspect, the view.
So he took those as his sources for view, and he took the Ornament for Clear Realization, realization, which sets out the stage of the path, which was composed by Maitreya as a source for the vast conduct of the Bodhisattva, the actual stages. So these are the true sources which Atisha was drawing on. And these, of course, in turn had their ultimate source in the Buddha himself. Atisha, having gone to Tibet, using these true sources, wrote a particular type of text. It was he was he was a this is like the prototype, the Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment or the lamp on the path to awakening.
So what he did is, this vast array of teachings that the Buddha gave, he systematized them, organized them into an easily understandable and methodical means by which one could follow one realization after the next. Understandings build one upon the other, one upon the other. You know, it’s like rungs of a ladder. It would be nice to get to the top without having to go through the bottom rungs, but it seems as if it’s not in the nature of things. It doesn’t quite work like that.
So he really did us a great kindness in the way that he organized these vast, these voluminous teachings of the Buddha along these, extremely well ordered means of achieving the ultimate goal, that is, say, Buddhahood. So he wrote the text, The Path to the Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment or awakening. This became extremely popular in Tibet, and many, many great commentaries were written by various masters in Tibet. Eventually, in about the fourteenth century, the great Yogi scholar, scholar Tsongkhapa, he himself who is, by the way, I shouldn’t say by the way, he is all of these pictures on the side wall and the back wall, he is the founder founder of the particular tradition which is mainly followed here at Buddha House. It’s called the Gelug tradition and he was the there are four main traditions or sects within Tibetan Buddhism.
There is Kagyu, Sakya, Nyingma, and Gelug. The as the they they simply developed due to a a particular prominent individual who was so original in his method of presenting the materials of the teachings of the Buddha that he he gathered a particular way of interpreting and practicing the teachings. And so, you know, the principles are all the same. There’s no question about that. But the different means of practice were developed.
In the case of Tsongkhapa, he developed what became known as the the Gelug tradition. He took Atisha’s Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment as his model. And he wrote three commentaries of a voluminous encyclopedic called the Extensive Exposition of the Stage of the Path. It’s a it this is this is a commentary by a modern day master, Geshe Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who who now lives in the United States. He gave a oral commentary on this extensive exposition of the stage of the path.
This is one of five volumes. It’s huge. But by all means, we have a reading list. Maybe we’ll give it to you next week. Suggest a read list.
Maybe you don’t need it tonight. I won’t run home and Anyway, this is the finest thing in the English language. This is one volume. To date, three volumes of this have been published, and the other two volumes will be published in the future in due course. Anyway, I just wanted to give you an idea of how extensive that text is.
He also wrote another commentary, which is Middle Length Lam Rim. And this was more practiced orientated. This was more scholastically orientated, the extensive exposition. The Middle middling length, which is the text that we are studying, is more in terms of actual practice. And then finally, he did write an abbreviated text called the lines of experience, which is very short text.
Many monks and nuns in the monasteries and nuns, they would memorize this and they might recite it every day as part of their practice just to keep refreshing themselves at all the points of the path. So all of the teachings of the Buddha are steps on the same path leading to the same direction. Know, I mean, is one of the fundamental we’re already out of time, aren’t we? One of the fundamental, principles or notions of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular is that every living being will eventually achieve Buddhahood. It’s just a matter of when.
And that’s very much up to ourselves. So all of these teachings are all steps in one way another. Sometimes there’s kind of, okay, I have to restrain myself. We’re all on this journey. It’s, you know, and we’re all every step on that journey is taking us ultimately to Buddhahood.
We can begin to systematize the spiritual vision, you might say, the type of priority which we’re able to set for ourselves in terms of how we’re to make best use of our life, how we’re going to expend our energy, how we’re going to use our time, what kind of capacity do we have in those terms? And so this was so, you know, it’s not we’re all quite unique. We’re all somewhere along this this continuum from from where we’re now to where we want to get to. That’s you know, path has that notion of, you know, it takes us from where we’re at now to our goal. The ultimate goal is awakening, complete complete perfect awakening.
It’s it’s the fundamental doctrine of Buddhism that our Buddhahood, each each and every person in this room, our eventual enlightenment will be exactly the same as the historical Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha’s enlightenment. Exactly the same as the historical Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha’s enlightenment. There will be no difference. There’s no qualitative difference between Śākyamūni Buddha and ourselves. There’s no unbridgeable gap.
We will achieve his same exact state with no difference. Okay, so but we can begin so that we each are somewhere along this continuum, but we can begin to make rough categorizations, you know, overall attributes of particular types of individuals. And so what Atisha did, he said, well, let’s call these the being of small scope, middling scope, and great scope. You know, the type, their ability, the strength of mind, their ability to set priorities in terms of their spiritual vision, perspective. As Geshe-la was trying to emphasize tonight, you know, well, what is our perspective?
I mean, some people, they can’t even you know, this no big deal in a way. It’s not something we’re not familiar with. You know, take high school students who drop out and they say, Well, want to get a big car. I want my car now. I want to get a flat.
I’ve got to get out of the house. I can’t stand it. And you say to them, Well, you just finished high school, your income capacity over the rest of your life would be so much greater, and you’d be able to buy such a you know, you’d be able to buy two or three cars, and you’d that you’d be able to buy a house for yourself. So just hang in there, you know. You know, it’s it’s the ability to postpone immediate goal gratification.
And some people are so immature, I have to have it now. So they drop out of high school. And maybe when they’re thirty or forty, they regret it. Okay, so maybe you can talk them into finishing high school, know, all the inducements around. But then they graduate high school.
You know, if you went into trade school or if you went to university, not only would your income be all that much greater, but you’d be probably doing something which is much more interesting, which you might even like. So you try to induce them to go a bit further in their studies and their schooling and so forth. So, you know, you’re just simply showing them the benefits of postponing the need to gratify these immediate desires that they have for whatever it might be, material desires, power and status or whatever. And in the end, they are that much better. They do experience that much more successful of a life.
And the criteria which they might be using measure what a successful life is all about, it might be material prosperity, a bigger house, more cars. But also, you know, maybe they’re able to have a job which they enjoy, which they find interesting. They’re able to contribute to their community all that much more, their society a lot much more. All the various measures of a successful life. If we’re willing to work with this idea of progressively realizing more and more of our capacity and beginning to shift our goals, what a successful look, you know, getting some kind of perspective, a greater and more distant overall perspective on what a successful life might look like.
And here we’re simply expanding that still a bit further, aren’t we? Even going beyond the boundaries of this life. And so the person of small scope is able to put some kind of priority, put some kind of effort, some energy, some time into creating the causes to ensure that their next life is going to go well. You know, it’s like we do this, you know, superannuation, right? You forgo certain immediate pleasures that you could have gotten out of that money.
You put it in a superannuation. You’re preparing yourself for your retirement. It makes sense. It’s kind of a more mature way of looking at your life in a greater perspective. Well, being of a small scope, which maybe we are having achieved that level, and say, Okay, I’m going to put some energy and some time into creating the cause to ensure, not just for retirement of this life, but even for my next life, that I have all the goodies that I want out of my future life.
Creating kind of, you know, they want a good physical form. They want sufficient wealth. They want a long life. They want favorable surrounding conditions about them. It makes makes sense.
I mean, that’s what we want when we retire, all these kinds of good qualities. And we prepare for that. So we’re trying to develop this we’re trying to step back from the need to have these, what amounts to certain immature goals, immediately gratified to gaining some kind of greater and greater perspective. We’re willing to forego certain immediate pleasures for longer term prosperity. That’s why Geshe la used that term, we act very childishly, I think.
So out of this motivation, you know, but it’s not simply enough to have certain goals. We actually have to implement the means, the practices, which will bring about those particular goals. I’m sorry, it’s getting pretty late isn’t it? I don’t want to keep you, maybe I’ll just talk a little bit, I’ll just finish off small scope okay. Are you okay?
So we have, so this being is developing the maturity of mind, the spiritual maturity, the perspective of able to see, have a temporary goal of attaining what the term was higher status, let’s say, a good rebirth. And this includes so what they have to do is implement the various practices, and this is where the stages of the path comes in. It’s going to set out, Well, if that’s your goal, here’s what you have to do to begin to cultivate the means of actually achieving that. And moreover, not even it is even the study that will help you to aspire to that goal. So we need to cultivate, we need to educate ourselves into gaining a greater perspective on what a successful might look like so that we go beyond our present aspirations, which are at best very limited to this life.
You know, it might even be limiting in terms of what we could achieve in this life, let alone what we could achieve in some kind of cosmic perspective, over lifetimes. So we have to look at all our great riches and fortunes. We’re going through the stages and path. We have all these freedoms and richnesses, that I have everything that I need to carry on a successful practice, beginning to appreciate that. And we talk that the being of small scope would then go on to cultivate impermanence in terms of death.
You know, this life isn’t going to last forever. And as Geshe la said tonight, at most it’s going to last a hundred years, but future lives are infinite in length. So we begin to gain, you know, begin to step back and gain some greater perspective, a wider vision. And then we, you know, what is it that brings about a better life in the future? What is, so the being begins, you know, I don’t want to suffer in the future, especially the lower realms.
So I what does create what creates the lower realms? The negative actions which I which I create, which I accumulate. So this person begins to study karma, that is the law of cause and effect, and begins to act in accordance with that, begins to abandon more and more as best he or she is able to do, the creating negative actions which act as a cause for this suffering in the future, and moreover, by means of abandoning that, is actually accumulating the causes for a higher rebirth in the future, bringing about what they want. So, but that’s a particular person with a particular perspective and a particular vision about what they can do with their life, what would be worthwhile, a priority they’ve set for themselves. But we, you know, with that, we can actually step back a little bit further and gain perhaps a deeper perspective on the nature of the human condition in itself, not just having, you know, all the goodies of life even into the future, but even that that type of life, any type of life which is bound by karma and afflictive emotions is dissatisfactory by its very nature.
And we’re really trying to see deeply into the human condition of what it means to be an ordinary human being as we are. That it is in the nature of dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration. You know, this isn’t a pessimistic view. It I think it’s realistic, but it’s optimistic in the sense that something can be done about it. You know, it’s not like life is a bitch and then you die.
We just have to make the best of what we do, what we have. So this begins to understand, well, what is the nature of my problem? And even however many times I take this fortunate rebirth in the future, it never goes beyond dissatisfaction, some level of suffering. And why is that? And so this individual is going to develop a determination to be free of all of these perpetual cycles of dissatisfaction that we’ve been experiencing from lifetime to lifetime to lifetime.
He’s really developing an ability to step back and get some perspective on the nature of what it means to be an ordinary human being. And, you know, they what so what do they do? I want to be free of all this. I want to find some kind of true and lasting happiness. You know, and, you know, even now, it’s hard for us even to imagine that’s to conceive of what that might look like, let alone to think it’s actually possible for each of ourselves.
So the key for reaching that goal is to destroy the causes of cyclic existence. What are the causes of cyclic existence? And are these perpetual cycles of dissatisfaction that we are continually bound in, bound up in? These are the afflictive emotions. Attachment, hatred, miserliness, spite, jealousy, said to be eighty four thousand, most basically ignorance.
So we have this factor of ignorance. Their main practice begins in terms of how are they going to work with their problem, achieving their goal of complete freedom from cyclic existence. They would look at the Four Noble Truths, very first teaching that the Buddha gave, looking at true sufferings, true sources of suffering, true cessation of the source of the suffering, and finally the path leading to the true cessation of suffering. And they would look at, they would begin to understand the actual nature of the existence, how it’s coming about. They would look at what is called the twelve links of dependent origination.
How our particular dysfunctional way of life evolves out of ignorance. Understanding that, they understand that they have to remove ignorance from the root, and therefore their their goal would be to develop the wisdom understanding emptiness, which acts as a complete antidote to ignorance. In order to achieve that wisdom, they would have to rely upon meditative concentration, being able to focus single pointedly and being able to penetrate into the deeper nature of reality. In order to develop that penetrative concentration, they life would be led on an ethical basis. So they practice what is called the Three Higher Trainings of ethics, concentration, and wisdom.
But, okay, so we’ve come through that, all that. We see that we’ve come through the levels of understanding the perspective of being of small scope. We’ve looked beyond the limited vision of this life. We’ve seen that future lives are infinite in length, and therefore we want to ensure that we experience the happiness in the future and avoid any of the really horrible types of suffering that could occur. But we go beyond that, we say, well, any situation which is involved in this continual process of what we call cyclic existence, you know, is by its very nature dissatisfactory and developing a determination to be free of all of this.
But that’s the being of middling scope. But the being of great scope even steps back a little bit further, has an even greater vision of what they might be able to achieve. You know, what is a really successful life all about? They turn their attention toward others. Whatever has been true about myself is equally true of all sentient beings.
All the various types of suffering, dissatisfaction, you know, the quality of life that I want to be free of, they exactly and no different want to they’re experiencing the same, and they too they too want to find freedom from that as well as myself. So, you know, this is where the bodhisattva idea arises. All that understanding that, you know, we begin to pay attention not only to ourselves problems, but equally to others. And therefore, you know, if I could own what would be the most successful life I could ever imagine about myself? The best possible way I could make use of this life of mine would be to develop I can’t even help myself.
Like, want to help others, I can’t even help myself. Like two people trying to help each other out of quicksand. That’s the nature of our situation. Only when we develop in our own abilities, our own skills, can we really be practical benefit? We call that a Buddha, someone who has optimized their potential in terms of the abilities to to help themselves and others.
For the sake of all these beings, I must become a Buddha. And that becomes the motivation behind their practice. Their practices that they would involve themselves in, in order to implement that, they would meditate on love and compassion, they would awaken in their heart, and they would practice the six perfections of a Bodhisattva, the perfection of ethics, generosity, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and finally wisdom. And then finally they say, well, I’m doing all I can to become the best possible person I can become for the sake of myself and all others, but it’s taking so much time. And in the meanwhile, there’s suffering in the world.
What can I do to speed up the process? And as a means of achieving that end, they would enter into the path of Tantra. So with all its specialized methods whereby one can achieve enlightenment in an extremely short period of time for the proper individual who is able to work with that method successfully. So, you know, we’re talking about educational process which we’re cultivating a higher aspiration and developing the means of implementing it in practice. And all these stages are being set out by Atisha and by now by Tsongkhapa and his middling Lam Rim to help us to get some overview to know where we’re going and what we can aspire to and how best we can make use of this precious life that we all have.
I’m sorry it’s very late. But anyway, that’s what we’re going to be talking about. You’re all going to get your first homework quiz, so some of the material we’ve covered thus far. So please work with it as well as you can. And we’ll be We haven’t completed it, so it won’t be due next week.
Haven’t, some of the questions go further than what Geshe la has taught, but please work with it so that if doubts come up and questions come up, we can work with those in the first part of the next Thursday evening. There’s a you’re all going to get a meditation journal. And if you could, maybe you want to stick this in your journal. It’s a better check your meditation on the following points, write down your experiences. So this is a way that you can best make use of this journal.
What is the subject matter of my meditation? What are the points that you have covered in your meditation? What feelings or understandings arose during the meditation? What questions or doubts arose? What obstacles arose?
So, this will help you to examine your meditation in kind of a, in a systematic fashion, and this will be of use to clarifying yourself how your meditation is working, but also we can have interviews with regard to how your meditation is going, and this will help us to work with you all the better because it will be clearer maybe where you’re going right and where you’re going wrong. And this, I think this will help help you as a method for ensuring that your meditation is going in the proper direction. And we don’t have much to meditate on right now in terms of the text. This is more of the introductory material trying to develop some confidence confidence in the text itself, its authenticity and so forth. So we’re just handing you out a little exercise that you can work with just on contemplating the breath or mindfulness of the breath that you might like to try to use as an exercise.
I think it’s quite useful. And on the back there’s it talks something about the meditative posture. So, you know, for your first meditative homework assignment, you might just work with this exercise on contemplating the breath. If you can, you know, I know you each have, unlike myself, you have busy lives. You’ve got lots of work in the home and outside the home to take care of.
You can dedicate perhaps twenty minutes a day, I think that would be very useful. Consistency is very important in meditation. But the quality is important as well. It’s more important than quantity, is the quality. So even if it’s only ten minutes, try to make it a quality time.
If you can, the morning time is usually best when your mind is clearest and it’s not so wound up over the course of the day. And also in your handout is just a brief outline of the stages of the path so this will help you to, so you won’t get lost in the trees. You know, it’ll give you some kind of overview of the forest that we’re going to be traveling through. Okay, and then there’s a suggested reading list that you might want to supplement your studies with and take a look at that. Sorry we kept you so late tonight.
Thank you very much.