Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 32-minute discussion, Ven Jampa Gendun opens by noting what struck him on arriving in the West from India’s Buddhist School of Dialectics: students rarely questioned the teachings, and when they did, they struggled to formulate their questions. He argues that doubt is not a problem to avoid but a necessary transition — the only route from wrong to correct understanding runs through doubt. He then traces the threefold process of listening, reflecting, and meditating, explaining that the Tibetan gom (meditation) simply means familiarisation: accustoming the mind to a new understanding until it becomes second nature. A student contribution connects faith and conviction to personal experience. The session closes with a caution for newcomers — enthusiasm can tip into self-righteousness, and the most lasting influence on others is becoming a visibly happier, more caring person.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 LR 2008 04 10.mp3
UUID: 9c7aa08a-9def-4463-8a8e-c98427cb20b3
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Lam Rim (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2008-04-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 32.3 minutes
Words: ~2,974
So how to how to take the essence? How to How to how to know who you are. How to know who are. To to break down. I see.
That’s it. A lot in words. I just found that quite curious. So Well, I I guess it could I I mean, initially, at least, it would be a matter of your motivation. I mean, if you came in if you came in to it, to the activity of listening with the idea that you were, you know, as it says in texts, a sick person, that you that you actually, you know, that you didn’t have you didn’t have these three faults of the vessel and that you recognize that you had some problems and that there might be something here that would be worth listening to to help you to solve your problems.
So I think that would be the first step if you brought some kind of sincerity and openness to your actual listening. And then I guess and then, you know what? Then we then it’s then it goes through this threefold process of listening, reflecting, and then meditating. Know, listening, you know, getting the overall structure of the teaching in mind, you know, learning the overall structure of the teaching, the various terms, categories, and so forth. And then, I guess, you begin the process of making it your own.
This involves, think, a large degree of questioning. So checking out the teachings. Do they, are they logical? Are they internally consistent? Do they accord with my experience?
And really checking them out. Question, I think it’s difficult. Westerners, I think in general, one of the first, you know, I went, as I mentioned previously, I went to the Buddhist School of Dialectics for a number of years, and there we debated every day. And when I and having when I came from the East, from India to the West, I came to Buddha House, And one of the first things I was struck with is how little the students questioned and how difficulty, what great difficulty they had in asking questions. I mean, formulating their questions.
Sometimes they had some kind of there was something there which, especially as a translator, it drives you crazy. They want you to figure out what their question is for them more than that. So I was struck by how difficult how little students questioned and moreover how difficult, how great a difficulty they had in formulating questions. I think this is, so this is the second step, the reflection or contemplating. You really have to create doubts in your mind.
Doubts are, there’s two types of doubt. One is afflicted doubt, one is a non afflicted doubt. One is very healthy, you know, because we have some wrong understandings at present. And the only way that you move from wrong understanding to a correct understanding is by way of doubt. There’s a transition where you’re no longer quite sure about your old ideas that you held so tightly to.
You begin to question them. There’s a kind of a flux. Maybe what I thought was right, maybe it wasn’t right. So it’s necessary to we go from incorrect understanding to correct understanding by way of doubt. And so most people don’t like doubt.
It’s not a very comfortable feeling. They try to avoid doubt. Just give me the answer. Life’s not like that, is it? It doesn’t do any good for somebody else to give you their answer.
It’s not your answer. You have to come up with everything that the Buddha discovered for yourself. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So we have the teachings. But in order to make them their own, in a way, we have to discover them for ourselves.
And this requires a great deal of examination and investigation and questioning, which I think to a large extent we’re not used to doing. In our schooling, maybe I’m going on a little bit, going on a bit here. In our schooling, more than not, we are not taught to think. We are taught how to pass exams and so forth. They just want you to give the correct answer on the test.
And so you’re not really taught to think very So it’s a great challenge for us to really take these teachings and put them to the test and to really examine them, investigating them. We’re not used to really doing this in a very methodical fashion. And then, once you so then you create doubts, and then you try to clarify your doubts, and you come to some certainty. And I know it accords with my experience. The teachings are internally logical, consistent, and therefore, then you then you come to some certainty.
And meditation is simply we use the word meditation in the Tibetan word is gom. And it simply means to accustom, to familiarize. You come to some new understanding and you begin to process a familiarizing. That is to say, you actually put it into practice. You no longer are thinking about, for example, compassion.
You are compassion. Your mind becomes the entity of compassion. It becomes the entity of wisdom. It becomes all these various understandings that we’re trying to create. You’re no longer thinking about, you know, the idea of the words or even the idea of the wisdom realizing selflessness, you actually generate the wisdom realizing selflessness.
You experience what the teachings are talking about. So there’s this threefold process of listening, and that’s what we’re doing now, getting the category straight, getting overall structure of the teaching in mind, and then we begin to make it our own through a process of reflection, questioning, examining, investigating, and then we come to some creating and resolving doubts, coming to knowledge for ourselves, and then we accustom ourselves to that newfound understanding until it becomes our second nature. So, don’t know if that helps. I think you have you know, we, yeah, so I mean, like Geshe-la mentioned tonight, you know, we don’t see the faults of attachment. So, you know, I mean, we see there’s a certain pleasure.
Pleasure is a very pleasant attachment’s a very difficult feeling to, difficult to work with because there’s certain pleasure involved. When our pleasures when our attachments are obstructed, then it’s not very pleasurable. But while they’re being satisfied, it’s very pleasurable. So we don’t recognize it. So that would be, oh, so is that true or not?
And beginning to investigate, know, when you do experience, is pleasure really a problem? Beginning to investigate and you create something, well maybe this pleasure isn’t all that I thought it was. Anyway, you really have to check up, investigate for yourself. There’s not much good in becoming an expert on Dharma, an expert on Buddhist philosophy. There is in a sense, isn’t it?
It’s a good thing to do. But as far as personal practice in one’s own growth, one’s own development, there are lots of university professors who know a lot about Buddhist philosophy, but some of them aren’t very nice people. It’s an area of study just like physics or chemistry or whatever. It’s not there to change their mind. Actually, in some areas of academia, it would be inappropriate to approach a subject in that way.
You have to remain objective about it. But here we’re not trying to remain objective. We’re trying to change our minds. So it’s a different approach. I don’t know.
So I think over time there should be some kinds of changes. I don’t think they’re often not the kinds of changes that you might be looking for. You’re still going to have problems. Maybe, you know, they’re still going to have afflictions, but maybe they won’t, be as strong. They won’t last as long.
You have still moments of depression, but you’ll come out of them, quicker. Your mind will be much more resilient, more flexible. You’ll you’ll get along with people a little bit better than you used to. Life becomes your mind isn’t quite as rough as it used to. You know, with this Velcro mind I talk about, you don’t things go a little bit smoother, but you still have problems.
You still have to deal with your problems. You still fall in the same holes once from time to time. I remember on this retreat, I did a retreat with an Australian teacher in January, and made an interesting comment. He said, One way you can tell about your development or your advancing along the path is what it is that you’re currently desiring as compared to five years ago or ten years ago. What do you think is important at the moment?
What are you desiring? And I think there’s something you could check up on that. Now you desire, majority of your mind is filled with maybe desiring material things or a job. These are good things for sure. But maybe ten years from now, won’t play as significant a role in what it is that you’re looking for.
Maybe it’s in terms of being a better person or being more authentic or being more useful to other people. So your begin to shift what it is that you’re currently expending your time and energies, occupying your time with and so forth. Anyway, don’t know if I had of that helped. So I think it really is investigating questioning. That’s a key, I think.
I mean, as they say in the dialectic school, he said, in terms of your learning, twenty five percent comes from studying the text, twenty five percent comes from studying the text, twenty five percent comes from the teaching, and fifty percent comes from debating, questioning. Many teachers said this, Good answers are easy. It’s the good questions that are difficult. These teachers really appreciate a good question. Somebody that’s obviously been thinking and they come from that place.
So the questions are more important than the answers from our point of view. Sometimes I feel that you answer the questions with another question. I used to do that a lot to get out of it as a skillful way of showing my ignorance. Actually, we turn our mind off once we get an answer quite often. And like this last week, asked a question like, how can you establish that you’re sitting on that cushion or that chair?
And the people wanted the answer. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Me. And once they get the answer, they stop thinking. More than most of them.
Actually, question, the question, living, kind of sitting with the question is much more useful. I don’t think I gave it, I didn’t give it out. I told them to stay with the question. That’s what it’s all about. I mean, it’s important what we ponder.
There were certain things which were more meaningful, as Geshe la was saying, ponder than not have a point to pondering. Other things, you know, whether the crows are going to be poor, you know, maybe that’s not worth all the pondering, all the energy we could put into it. But, you know, whether we truly exist or not would be something worthy of our pondering. Yeah. No.
I I got it. Yeah. I can appreciate what you’re saying. Yeah. I guess I I know what yeah.
Yeah. You don’t want to fall into judgment. But I think it could be, I mean, could be a source of developing one’s own compassion. That people, I mean, I know that when our teachers look at us, we look like little children playing with matches and we keep burning ourselves. It must be terribly saddening for them to see us continually hurting ourselves the way that we do.
We just keep carrying on. It’s not that I don’t think they would ever judge us, but they do have a way to have compassion. Then in terms of in the end, I mean, not in the end, I think we if we’re going to be of any use to others, move like that compassion, we have to there are some things that we can do, but we’re fairly limited in what we can do for others. But that should serve not as a source of discouragement, but should act as a motivating force to become more. The more skills I have, better I understand my own mind.
The more I develop my own mind, the greater I can be of help to others. I mean, know, unless you’re it’s only a even our teachers would say it’s only a Buddha who can really help others in the best of possible ways and bring about the best possible outcomes. So they’re in an analogous kind of situation. You know, it’s all relative. We do what we can, understanding our present limitations and developing the the motivation to become more so that we can have we can do more in the future.
But it’s, you know, I don’t yeah. The the judgment. Yeah. That has nothing to do with the Dharma. How do you mean to how would this judgment look?
You know, you saw a friend or or whatever acting in in a way, a behavior that that sort of Yeah. Attachment, you know, and they’re doing something We do this all the time. I mean, you you you somebody’s marrying this guy and you know this guy’s a a rat bag. What can you do? Judgmental.
You might be being too hard on yourself. You might be more discerning, more discriminating. There might be some wisdom operating. But yeah, I don’t think you have to make any value judgments around it. Does anybody have anything to add to that?
Yeah. I have a view that, you know, the reason why we don’t know we are not sure what we are doing with this right or wrong is just simply because of lack of faith. Faith is arising dependent on our conviction, and conviction is a result of our experience. If we don’t experience, we don’t know anything. For example, you know, you what we you know, your practice is doing in the right way or, you know, like, until you try.
So you have to try by yourself many ways. For example, you know, if you go to if you intended to go to Sydney from Adelaide, how many ways are are they? You know? Maybe four or five ways to get there. Which is the best way, quicker, and the and the best long road?
And, you know, to try. Then after, you know, experience each way to get to Sydney, then you’ll know which is the best way. You know? You can cancel cancel it each thing, then you can recognize what’s the best way. Then that became your conviction.
Mhmm. So that’s what we need is What’s alert? Alert. Alert. Alert.
Alert. Means what? To be watchful. To to be awake. Aware.
Then after you experience each way, after you calculate all the things and choose which is the best way, then you become a condition, then you know what you are doing is right or wrong. Until then, you know, nobody knows. When you say judgment, what does that mean for you? No, ma’am. It’s good that you’re questioning.
For sure. Yeah, there was one point that Geshe la made tonight was, you know, when we hear about attachment and so forth, we should, on the whole, be applying these ideals to ourselves. Sometimes when you hear the faults of jealousy of attachment, yeah, know this guy, he’s really attached to his wife. We think about it in other people’s terms. In what Geshe-la was saying, the vast majority of what we hear is meant to see how it applies to ourselves.
But I think we can learn by watching. For sure, can learn by what other even the mistakes other people are making, but also what they do right. I just if you’re thinking about that, please. So No. No.
I I would I would add maybe just a final note that there is a danger when people first come in contact with the dharma. They become very enthusiastic about it. Two things, I guess. In their enthusiasm, they want to tell their family. Sometimes their family isn’t interested.
So you have to be sensitive to the fact that, you know, that they have their own time and space and that, you know, their own path that they’re following. And and that the other is is not to, it’s easy to to develop a sense of self righteousness. Look what I’m doing and look what I’m learning. Why don’t you get your act together like I am? And look what you’re doing.
You’re making all these you’re causing yourself suffering. That’s not very much used to either oneself or the people about you. So, you have to be pretty discriminating, you know, and how even with the best of intentions. You have to be sensitive to the effects of what what it is that you’re doing and thinking on other people. It’s a bit of a danger involved in that.
It’s a cool saying on that for you, don’t don’t I think there’s a line in the bible. Best thing, as far as your family and so forth, in the end, they will be most affected by your example. If they see that you’re becoming a happier person, a more caring person, they’ll say, Oh, there must be something here over and above anything that you might say. So become a good example. Shall we call it quits for the night?
Have a good week. Thank you.