Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The Velcro mind versus the Teflon mind — Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 40-minute Lamrim session by clearing up a confusion common among Western students: non-attachment is not detachment; passionate engagement with life is fully compatible with a mind that is simply not fixated. He draws the same sharp distinction around anger, which in Buddhist usage means specifically the intention to harm — not asserting boundaries, not protesting injustice. From there the session moves through three interconnected areas: the three-stage learning process of listening, reflecting, and meditating (neither alone works — eyes without legs, or legs without eyes); three types of faith progressing from initial admiration through longing to hard-won trusting certainty; and the three pot-metaphors for how pride, preconception, and inattention block us from receiving teaching. The talk ends with a frank reflection on why intellectual understanding rarely touches emotional behavior, and why faith is the condition that makes genuine inner transformation possible.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 LR 2008 04 03.mp3
UUID: 388c19bc-cff6-48dd-b4dc-8b01e7c03752
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Lam Rim (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2008-04-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 40.3 minutes
Words: ~5,268
Tonight, which would have could have elicited an interesting question. Well, what about if you’re attached to the dharma? What if you’re attached to your lama? Is is that attachment? Is that and is that is that is that Am I taking something which is not good and superimposing good on it?
Something like that. You might ask that next week. Okay. Maybe we’ll get an interesting answer. So attachment is motivated by wrong improper mental intention or application.
You exaggerate the attractive quality of the object and you want to not be separated from it. Now we have to make a distinction. What is the opposite of attachment? It non attachment. It is not detachment.
I don’t know this is kind of a western idea. I’m getting into an area which with detachment you may not feel anything about anything. You may not be able to engage in an object at all. And sometimes when students hear a teacher say that you should be non attached, they can reinforce their inability engaged in anything at all, to be to not have any feelings about things. You know, some people, they lack feelings about things and they have an inability to engage or commit.
That’s that’s not non attachment. With non attachment one can be tremendously engaged in the world. One can feel very deeply about things but one is not non attachment has the idea of attachment has the idea of getting stuck fixated upon an object or an idea. It could be an ideology. And that’s like a Velcro mind as opposed to a Teflon mind which things can, you know, things can you’re not attached to one’s ideas.
Let us say, there’s a flexibility and openness of mind as to the outcomes. And there is but one still can be patiently engaged in the world but not fixated upon your particular agenda, having your particular outcomes necessarily as a result. So some people are detached. Don’t have the ability to engage themselves at all. That is not non attachment.
Also there’s some ambiguity around what we mean by anger and hatred. The word anger and hatred cover a great deal more area in the English term and in Western sense than they do in the traditional Buddhist sense. Like anger is the most simply is the intention to harm. So that does not cover setting boundaries, asserting yourself, protesting injustices. These, these, you can do those all quite well and not be angry, not have aversion.
So a non hatred, you you could practice non hatred and, you know, be on a peace march quite easily. Or say, you know, please knock on my door when you before you come into my room, setting boundaries. Or, you know, I don’t like that. Stop doing that. It doesn’t involve hatred at all.
It’s only when it’s mixed with the intention to harm. So sometimes Westerners who are rather, yeah, they can justify a lot of perhaps some their own dysfunctions by misinterpreting the teachings. And they say, know, a person who has an inability to assert themselves, think, oh, I must be highly realized. I’m practicing non hatred. It’s a misinterpretation of what they’re talking about.
Anyway, I’ve got off the point. Don’t know if you we were talking about attachment originally. Yeah. So there’s always this exaggeration. It’s always a matter of exaggerating the quality either depreciating or appreciating.
And in the case of hatred and attachment you’re not seeing the object for what it actual true nature, what it is really like. Oh yeah. Yeah. So attachment, doesn’t mean that you are without preference. Even in the Tibetan there’s different words.
One can have a desire to achieve liberation, a desire to help other sentient beings and that’s not it. That’s not there’s there’s there’s this doesn’t necessarily mean there is exaggeration in the positive qualities or that there is an inability to let go. So one can have one can have desires, you can have once without it being an afflictive emotion. Yeah. That’s an interesting area I think.
So yeah. Because I mean Bodhisattva wants to achieve enlightenment has a great a tremendous desire you know it’s very passionate about it. So you know ridding ourselves of the afflictive emotions doesn’t mean that we become robots. We still have emotions necessarily negative emotions. So you have to, so you want to bring your mind to a balanced state that sees, you know, there’s exaggeration of its positive or attractive qualities.
So you purposely and specifically as a means of bringing your mind to a balanced state, look at what’s the negative aspects of the object, its repulsive qualities, what’s wrong with it. So you to focus on those and bringing the mind to a balanced state which sees, well, this object in fact has both positive and negative qualities. So your mind returns, it’s no longer exaggerating. You know, it filters out the negative and sees only the positive and exaggerates those. So you have to accentuate and focus upon the negative qualities of the object.
You know, like if you’re attached to bodies, then you look at do the meditation, the repulsion. Look at cut open the body and you look at all the pus and blood and all that. Yeah. Anyway, you get the idea. So yeah, that’s, that would be the first, that would be one step.
That would be the different with regard to the afflictive emotions there are various levels of antidotes we can make use of. The ultimate atomic bomb is wisdom, understanding, emptiness. And that removes all the afflictive emotions completely. But that’s it. That’s the, you know, but maybe you have to learn how to work with hand grenades and guns and things like that before you can work with the atomic bomb.
There are different levels of antidotes. Is Anything else that people would like to bring up? Know, it’s interesting isn’t how much in working with these texts, what we’re studying, the authors, they don’t leave any stone unturned. They actually explain to you how to study the text, how many western texts would go into that kind of detail. So you know it suggested that we involve ourselves in a three stage process listening, reflecting and meditating.
Quite often meditation is presented as something all to itself. In the traditional Buddhist context, especially in the Tibetan tradition, meditation is seen within the context of listening, a three stage process of listening, reflecting and meditating. It said that listening and reflecting with, that meditating without listening and reflecting is like having eyes but no legs. On the other hand, have listening and reflecting without meditating is like having legs but no eyes. So in either case do we get very far.
You know, essentially we want to bring about changes of the mind and to change the mind is I think a subtle process. So it has to be done within We have to create the proper ecological environment within our mind. This, you know, listening to the teachings, you know, studying the teachings with an open mind, a mind that doesn’t unthinkingly reject or distort what’s being taught. So in listening, we’re gathering together the information, understanding all the terms, the categories, the basic structure of the teaching. You know, this is the stage where we learn about new and different ideas, alternatives, possible options for ourselves that we might consider.
Then we, having taken that, it’s necessary that we reflect upon it. We carefully examine what we’ve been taught, clarifying whatever its true significance for ourselves. We examine it both in the light of our own reasoning but also within terms of own experience. It’s really tremendously important to question. I attended Dharmasala, I think I mentioned this on the first night, the Buddhist School of Dialectics.
There we debate every day for maybe about three hours each day. And this is in the Geshe la, I mean in becoming a Geshe, the degree of Geshe or whatever, however you want to call it, Doctor philosophy. This is an integral part of their process, this debate, questioning in a very methodical and critical manner all of what they hear. In other words, questioning, we create doubts. Doubt is the precursor to true understanding.
It’s not your knowledge until you work through the process of doubt. You know, there’s transition between wrong understanding and coming to right understanding. And that transition is doubt. You know, when your mind actually maybe, you know, we hold to a particular position when we might not even be aware that we’re holding a particular idea or position in our mind. And then we open up to, Well, maybe, ah, I never realized I thought that before.
Maybe I’m not maybe that’s not right. So the mind is in a state of fluctuation. It doesn’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s not a comfortable state to be in. That’s why people try to avoid doubt.
Just tell me what I need to know. Don’t want to think about it. But there’s no getting around the necessity of working through doubt. There are two types of doubt, afflicted doubt and non afflicted doubt. Here we’re talking about non afflicted doubt.
Questioning through the resolution of our doubts, it becomes our knowledge. There’s a saying, They do not wash away sins with water nor do they remove suffering by their hands nor do they transfer their realization to the minds of others but by showing the truth, all were made free. So the Buddha had a discovery and he keeps but we have to, in a way, discover for ourselves everything that the Buddha discovered for himself. But, you know, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. He was kind enough to show us, give us some methods to work with.
But nonetheless, we have discover. Yeah, for ourselves, all that he discovered for himself, the truth of things. So the stage of reflecting is the stage of forming new ideas of our own. We come to some understandings for ourselves. And then finally at the third stage, meditation, is a process integrating this newly acquired knowledge into our being, into our character.
It’s like putting into practice what we’ve come to know. Practice in the sense of actually being it rather thinking about it. And rather than thinking about compassion, we are compassion. Rather than thinking about wisdom of emptiness and so forth, we are that wisdom. You know, have manifested that in our minds.
The stage of experiencing new and different ideas for ourselves. So working through this process, and this is what we’re doing now. We’re learning about new ideas and different ideas, other options, ways of thinking, ways of looking at things. We’re getting the overall structure of the teachings, learning new terms, the meanings of these terms. So we’re like filling up our computer banks, know, storage comp and then we’re going to we can begin to work with that.
So seeing at the listening stage, seeing how all this information fits together, then reflecting upon it, using our reasoning, using our experience, creating and clarifying our doubts, we gain knowledge, we gain some kind of certainty. And then finally, with this confidence, we can actually experience directly the true meaning of what’s being talked about. Then it becomes our second nature. Some kind of change comes about. So the importance of listening.
And then, I don’t know, some of the things that Geshe Geshe la went through this evening. We’ve talked about does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. Geshe la mentioned in passing the three trainings so I think we’ve kind of talked about the three trainings.
These are the higher training in ethics, training in meditative concentration, the higher training in wisdom. And on page thirteen, we begin on page thirteen, this verse, He who listens fills his mind with faith. And it’s interesting that the idea of faith in Buddhism is quite unusual, maybe it’s different than we normally in terms of the way that we usually think about faith in the Christian sense. There are various types of faith within Buddhism, but all of these faiths are developed by coming to see for yourself. So in a way, by faith we mean more confidence or trust, certainty.
You know, there’s essentially three types of faith. The first is called pure faith. You know, this is or yeah, it’s like an admiration. It’s like, you know, you’re like, you know, you’re first falling in love. You know, you meet the teacher or you hear the Dharma and you say, Wow, this is something I’ve been looking for all my life.
You know, there’s really something here and it’s really wonderful and it resonates with you, a deep part of your being. This is kind of what we call pure faith but that’s sufficient. Rather than looking at the teacher we begin to listen to what they say and trying to understand what it is that they’re actually you know how did he get like that or how did she get like that. I remember my first teacher. Know, really it’s like this golden sun rising in the east, you know, and they just kind of admire that person and you say, Well, I would like to be like that.
And you begin to question how, you know, like you might admire the Dalai Lama. You have like a love affair with the Dalai Lama. That’s like pure faith. But then you begin to, you know, that kind of first romantic illusion begins to lessen. And you begins to lessen and you say, Well, I wonder how they got like that.
Would like to be that. So you develop a longing faith. You know, longing faith is the idea here of longing faith that you actually want to become like the Dalai Lama. You want to become that object like that person that you admire or you want to embody these teachings and so, you know, that’s what I’m going to do. Longing your faith is, I’m going to put this into practice.
And then finally, having worked with the teachings, worked with these ideas, tested them, examined them, do they accord with my experience? Are they logical? Are they reasonable? Are they internally consistent? And so forth.
And you develop a trusting faith. And you develop some kind of deep seated certainty with regard to the teachings. And you actually gain some taste and say, now I’ve actually experienced. And it’s not just something out there, some idea. I’ve actually translated into some kind of experience of my own and that’s trusting faith.
So there is this development from pure faith, some kind of admiration for the individual and what they’re saying, to a longing faith, I want to embody that, what they’re saying, I want to be that myself, and then to finally a trusting faith where you actually come to some experience for yourself. You’ve made that teaching or those qualities your own. So, you know, this is more like the faith of what Buddhism promote or advises when it talks about the different types of faith. Then we talked about the three types of pots. Yeah, three types of pots.
A pot with so the first pot was you know, know, this is they’re just trying to help us to create the best mindset to come to the teaching so that we’ll be benefited. So what are some kinds of mindsets which might act as an obstacle for ourselves? Well, one would be what they call a pot with a lid on it. You this is, you you can’t put anything in it. It’s full of itself.
Sometimes with a lid on it can be either, as Geshe la mentioned tonight, that we’re constantly being distracted or we’re constantly allowing our mind to wander. We’re not listening or we’re not even open to listening. It could be simply closed mindedness or we’re full of pride, we’re full of ourselves. There’s no room in someone who’s full of themselves for any new knowledge. Pride is a tremendous obstacle.
That’s why we prostrate at the beginning of the teaching in order to overcome pride. You know what you’re saying is you temporarily set aside your skepticism, your cynicism, your sense that I know it all and you say, well however much this person may know I’m going to listen and if I hear something of use I’m going to take it home with me and make use of it. Maybe I won’t, maybe I will. We’re trying to open us to the possibility, receptive to what’s being said. So that’s one of the reasons we do, we make a prostration prior to the teaching to overcome any sense of pride.
And that’s why the teacher sits higher. You know, we’re empowering that individual temporarily at least and opening ourselves up to maybe some new way of looking at things. So, to take the lid off our pot. And there is the pot which was dirty. Whatever is poured into it is immediately polluted in some way.
And this involves listening with some type of wrong wrong motivation. You know, maybe, maybe I don’t know if this applies to any of us, you know, wanting to be highly thought of or wanting to list. But you can listen with lots of preconceptions. Many people do that. They just looking for what validates their preconceptions and they kind of I remember there’s this line from Simon and Garfunkel song, it just came to me.
A man hears what he wants and disregards the rest. Remember that old song? Before your time. Anyway. They just had this preconception ideas, you know, and sometimes they’re pretty strange and they just listen for anything which will reinforce their preconceived ideals.
They don’t want hear the rest or especially anything which might contradict what they already believe in. So they’re coming with these preconceptions. They’re coming with what we call a dirty pot or maybe they’re just listening in order to find fault with the teacher. You know, they’re listening very carefully. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Or the teachings themselves, Ah, this is foolishness. So they’re coming with their own agenda and they can’t set their agenda aside temporarily and everything that they hear simply becomes polluted with their preconceptions or their own agenda and so forth. It’s filtered through their own preconceptions and so forth. So look at it that way. Then the third pot was a pot with a hole in it.
You know, whatever is poured in it immediately runs out. There’s no, you know, after the teachings you’re unsure what was said, you retain anything. There’s no mindfulness or memory of what was actually said. So those three pots, the faults of the three pots. Then we got into what are called the six recognitions, and maybe we’ll just go through.
The first three seem to be, the first three of these discriminate. You know, this is a, you know, I guess this has to be thought of in a healthy light, in a proper light, you know, these three recognitions to see oneself as a sick person, you know, as There’s a great difference between being sick and being helpless. Without acknowledging the high degree of dissatisfaction in our life, there’s no opening for the need for change. You know, there will always be the maintenance of the status quo. Were talking about in our discussion group this evening.
There’s a resistance to change and, and, you know, what is it that necessity is the mother of invention. When we have to change, we will. If we don’t, we probably won’t. So, you know, part of that necessity is by acknowledging the high degree of dissatisfaction and the frustration and disappointment in our life, the sense of passingness in our life. We could go on and on.
We each have our particular way in which manifest our various illnesses. But, you know, we have to be honest and open with ourselves in that regard. And so, you know, but we’re not helpless. We’re healthy enough to be sick. Weren’t healthy enough to be sick, you’d die.
You were too sick to be sick and therefore you would die of the illness. So we’re healthy enough to be aware of our illness and more than that, we’re probably tremendously healthy individuals in the sense that we’re actually taking responsibility for our illness and trying to do something, work it with our problems at a deeper level than the vast majority of our society. Rather than seeing our difficulties at a superficial level, acknowledging the degree of difficulty that we’re in and trying to work with perhaps some more profound methods than the ones that we’ve been making use of up until now because they haven’t worked for ourselves. To acknowledge everything is not okay. You know, guy who, what was it, Burns, Burns?
The guy who wrote, I’m okay, you’re okay. Remember that? This is before your time back in the sixties, the hippie days. Yeah. He wrote, I’m okay, you’re okay.
And he committed suicide. Did you know that? He wasn’t okay. But, it was not okay not to be okay back then. Now it’s okay.
It’s okay to admit you’re not okay. But you’re amongst friends, so it’s okay. The situation is workable. Then the second recognition was the second recognition was the teacher, one expounding the Dharma as a doctor. So, you know, it’s interesting that most people would, they readily put their physical well-being in the hand of somebody who has a certificate on their wall.
It doesn’t take much and it’s okay, you do what you want. And they’re almost unquestionably, here’s my body, dude. And they take, you know, the treatment, take the medicine but many people they find it difficult to admit that somebody else may in fact be more skilled in the ways of the mind and they might have more insight into actual means of finding happiness in life than them. Know, we just take it for it’s almost taken for granted we should know what we’re doing and if you don’t then why you’re causing all this trouble? We should know how to find a happy life, how to lead a successful life.
They don’t teach that in school. You know, it’s strange that they don’t. It’s like a taken for granted that we should know, but we don’t. And at some point in our life we have to admit it’s not working all that well. And maybe there are others who are more insightful in terms of how the mind works and that way to best work with these illnesses within my mind.
You know, we all have our various methods of finding happiness and solving our problems. And though our experience again and again invalidates many the methods that we’ve been using up to now, we pig-headedly — pig is a symbol for ignorance — we pig-headedly persist in holding onto them as if we knew best. But we wouldn’t do that with our physical body, but we do that with our mind, with our psychology as if we knew best. So we find it difficult to admit that somebody’s diagnosis of our problems you know, it’s hard to listen to this sometimes, isn’t it?
Then when Geshe la keeps saying, what is our illness? Attachment, hatred, ignorance. And we have a different way of form ulating our illness, even our mental illnesses. You know, I’m a neurotic, I’m a psychotic or whatever. I have, you know, this personality disorder.
You know, we have a we have a different way of of looking at the mind and looking at what our problems are. So we have to be open to maybe their prescription for our illness. Mean we have to translate it into our terms and maybe some cultural hindrances here and it sounds a bit alien to ourselves at times but you know try to understand what the teachings are actually getting at and seeing if you can identify that within your own experience as maybe there is maybe they’re more valid and skilled than our own prescriptions, the ones that we’ve been making use up to now. And then third recognition is that the Dharma is like a medicine, the medicine of the mind to cure our mental illnesses. Obviously without taking the medicine, that is that is, without actually practicing the path, we’re not going to get better.
As is mentioned here a number of times, no matter how potent or how effective and how appropriately diagnosed and how our illness may be, We’ve been given the appropriate medicine, if we don’t actually swallow it, ingest it, it’s not going to serve us to solve our problems. We actually have to put into practice before they can solve our problems. And this is, this is, this is not, this is something even old students of Buddhism have to keep reminding themselves. It’s not something that’s especially for newer students. You know, this idea of our illnesses, you know, the idea of meditation is the real challenge, I think, and I was talking about this this morning in meditation, is to you know, we can hold different positions, different beliefs at different levels levels of awareness.
And we can reasonably believe that this morning in the talk I was giving, I’m just going talk a minute more now. Stop. That all beings equally want to be happy. They don’t want to suffer. Know, this is essential and universal.
This is a deeper truth about us all. And no matter who the person might be, whether black, white, Vietnamese, or Chinese, or American, or woman, or man, most essential to sentient life is that we’re feeling beings. Beings who want happy feelings, don’t want suffering feelings. This is almost by definition of what we mean by sentient life. And we can reasonably believe that we can rationally, we can think, oh yes, I agree with that.
All of us want to be happy. None of us want to suffer equally so. But that’s not the way we emotionally relate with others. So we have to begin to recognize that there’s a great discrepancy between the way that we rationally think about things in the clear light of day and the way that we emotionally react. If we so when we the challenge of meditation is integrating these ideas beyond the level of reason such that they’re that they’re beginning to act as an antidote or beginning to that to begin to act as an antidote to our emotional systems of belief, ways that we’re actually acting out.
You know, if when you when you when you you know, if I the mind of hatred cannot arise if you if you have integrated understanding that all beings want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer just like yourself. You can’t want to harm somebody and have that mindfulness manifest in your mind, you know. It’s like we have these intellectual understandings and the moment we become emotional, all that’s set aside. And it’s as if it doesn’t almost exist. And the challenge in meditation is to find out what it is we actually emotionally are holding, the various positions, and begin to because you have to find you have to find the right spot.
You have to be able to apply these antidotes at the right place. Otherwise, it’s like pouring oil and water. It just kind of floats on the mind. So finding out what you actually feel and opposing that, you know, working with what you are actually holding in terms of the heart or emotional life. And working this is where this is what it said about in meditation, you actually be wisdom or you be compassion.
You’re no longer thinking about compassion. So, you know, that’s when it actually is touching the right spot where where where the dysfunctions of our of our mind are actually occurring, not in terms of our reason or our intellect and so forth, our rational thinking. I don’t know. Sorry for that. I get a bit of a of, yeah, philosophizing.
Yeah. Yeah. So you can say it’s a safe spot to practice. A safe spot? Not quite.
So so you’re not actually out there practicing? Prior to actually acting and doing. Oh, Yeah. The process? Oh yeah, yeah.
I mean meditation is very much that. I mean that’s part of contemplation and meditation, yeah. So we’re working, it’s like in some ways, in some of the types of meditation it’s like, you know, soldiers, they do military exercises. You know, the colored smoke bombs are going off and making loud blank gun shots. And they’re accustoming themselves themselves to this kind of chaos.
So when the actual situation arises, they’ll be able to keep their composure and get on with their job. So I think a great forerunner of what we become originates in imagination. And if we can’t imagine it, we will never be it. So we begin to imagine, using our imagination as a and working at that level. But I think one point that you made, and this is the necessity of faith, is and this is is we have faith is important because in order to to to give oneself over at a deeper level of one’s being, one has to have some real trust that because that things will be better for you.
You know, we can’t know all the outcomes of change, all the details, but we can have trust in the method and for example, the teacher who is presenting that method and the outcomes, in the overall outcomes such that we know that we have a sense that we’re going to land on our feet on the other side of change. We don’t know all that how it’s going to quite look. Otherwise, you you I don’t think you you would it’s not something that we can will to happen. We have to create the conditions where our mind will allow itself, you know, that there’s a trust in what we’re doing to the degree that there’s no defensiveness, there’s no that we’ve overcome any resistance, and we can bring about the kinds of changes. But with we have a sense we believe at a very deep level of our being this is for the best of my welfare.
I’m going to be a better person living in a better world for having done this, for making this kind of change, creating the inner ecology of mind which facilitates that kind of change. So this is where faith is really important. If you don’t have faith in what you’re doing, there will be resistance and quite wisely so. It would be stupid to give yourself over to everything, every new California therapy that came down the line, you know, just because somebody else said this is the great new method. Let me show, let me help you.
Know, so we have to use some skepticism, some discrimination. I think I, but, so you were talking about safe. So, I so you have to feel safe with what you’re doing you have to trust what you’re doing and yeah okay sorry if I bantered on okay? Have a good night.