Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 45-minute talk with a personal story from a discouraging solo retreat on the Thai island of Koh Samui, where two monks who spoke little English offered quiet, repeated wisdom: “Let’s begin again.” That phrase becomes the organizing theme as he launches a new term and a new text, inviting students to set aside the past and start fresh. He announces a reordered session format for the series — motivation first, then breathing meditation, then a different contemplative practice each week. He reframes “going for refuge” as reprioritizing values, using a vivid lost-key analogy to argue that solutions lie within the mind rather than in external fixes like relationships or money. The session closes with a brief guided introduction to mindfulness of breathing. Accessible to newcomers and those returning to practice after a gap.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 OtE 1991 08 14.mp3
UUID: 13b28adf-2e71-4ca1-a060-11f5d78128c5
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-08-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~2,209
J. There were many instances where in the course of my meditation, in the course of my sleeping, which constituted my meditation. I became very discouraged and got down, got down on myself and I lived in a small island called Koh Samui which is quite a tourist resort but I didn’t go swimming once. I knew that’s why I was down. Didn’t know.
This is beautiful blue sea. Anyway, I went to the monastery. And it’s a small monastery with two Thai monks and they spoke very little English and we would meet together in the morning to eat our meal, go for alms round, and then in the afternoon we’d have a cup of hot chocolate together And I would go on about how difficult things were, how my meditation was going, how crazy my mind was, on and on like this. And they would just say, I don’t know monks and nuns, the practitioners. Let’s begin again.
Whatever has gone in the past, we can set aside. We can begin again. So I don’t know. This part just came up. It came to me when I sat down thinking that we’re beginning a new term and not only a new term but a new text.
So we can all begin again, begin afresh and new whatever may have the past, there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t change it. We can change our attitude about it, toward it, become a little more skillful in dealing with our memories and our feelings about it. But the fact necessarily will remain the fact. So, we can begin again and there’s an old, there’s a line from an old dharma rock and roll song which goes what I am now, what who you are now is what you have done and what you do now is what you will become.
So you know we can always begin again and it’s like the phoenix rising up out of the ashes. And this is to whether the other monks understood me on this island or not. As I said, it probably doesn’t matter but they used to shake their head knowingly. And it used to give me a, maybe I didn’t mean much but it gave me a little bit of uplift, a little bit of encouragement which was this life at this particular moment. So I began again.
So a new term, a new text, we can all begin again. Just a little pep talk. I began, that’s mostly what I do up here. I don’t think so. I think many of the older students know me by now.
I know much. There’s no understanding but sometimes I’m pretty good at stringing together a few words like coach at halftime. Get out there and do it for the, what was that, the famous John Wayne? Do it for the Gipper. That’s before your time.
You know we can change. We can become anything that we want to be. We all have the basic sanity, Buddha nature, whatever you want to call it. We’re going to talk about it hopefully. Hopefully it can become a source of encouragement and you can become your own living ongoing inspiration.
We structured the evening in such a way that we begin with the, I think I’ll change the structure. Proceeding tonight we used to I thought, so we began with mindfulness of breathing and then we did a particular contemplative meditation, analytic meditation where we do some thinking and I lead you through that particular meditation and then we would go on to adjust our motivation which in terms of traditional terms we’ve spoken of as going to refuge or as I would say reprioritizing or reorienting ourselves in terms of our primary goals of life. I thought it might be better and I think it’s more useful if we work on our motivation first and then having developed some real sense of openness, aspiration and direction in terms of our mind and where we want to go. Then to proceed to first the breathing meditation and then leading a different meditation each week. Like Buddhism has like a supermarket for meditation.
And depending upon what your need the mind. The Buddha. Of the sayings of the Buddha. And like Blake also said, the mind is in its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. With that with this very stuff that we what Buddhism is about, integrating some of the teachings, becoming aware of some of the the methods of reorientation away from seeing one’s solutions and problems outside of oneself in terms of the problems and solutions within oneself.
And I often use the analogy of having lost one’s key and not having the key to your front door for example. And you moved, you just mowed the grass in the backyard but the grass in the front yard is quite long and that’s where you lost your key in the front yard. So you think, well it’s going to be hard for me to look in the front yard. The grass is really deep. I’m going to look in the backyard.
The grass is much shorter. It’s easier to look. But the thing is it may be easier to look, but if you ever hope to find the key, you’re going to have to look no matter how difficult that looking may whatever difficulties, what problems that looking may entail, you’re going to have to look for that key where you lost it, if you ever hope to find it. So we have to look for the key to the solutions to our problems where we lost it, where it actually can be found, and then it’s within within our own mind. So the time the day, the attitudes of our lives, may go on about it, our various relations, our economic problems.
You know, we because we go to refuge. We we’ve been whether we know it or not we’ve been going to refuge our entire lives in one way or another. You know we some people go for refuge to money, to sex, to drugs, to politics, to their job, relationships. Some things, some methods which we invest with the value that is going to be able to help us change our problem, change our situation. It’s going to help us solve our problems.
We have a sense, it’s a method to find happiness. And quite often we’re so busy implementing these methods that we forget to look whether they’re actually working or not, whether we’re actually happy or not. Possibilities. A method entails changing one’s mind. And we, so this reorientation, reprioritizing our values in the sense that we get you know during the course of our busy days, our activities over the course of having to deal with people, having to deal with the kids, having to deal with the job, having to deal with whatever, whoever it is.
But we get distracted. We forget what what values are important to us as unique self actualizing individuals. What works for you? The orientation and the dedication to begin to go beyond. All the conditioning factors which are leading us astray.
In this reorientation process, we make use of a paradigm, a model. The mind is dynamic in nature. It’s it’s in constant flux. It’s not static. But we give it a model of what we call it as a healthy, loving, sane human being.
We call this a Buddha, someone who’s woken up from the fantasy of ego, someone who’s awake. This is like our paradigm of sanity, and we take refuge in this paradigm. This represents the solution to my problem no matter what their nature, no matter what their nature. In the sense that the Buddha within ourselves. In the sense that by becoming, by making one of my most primary priorities to become a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being, I’m going to solve the problems of my life.
People may die. I may go bankrupt, but I can deal with them. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to land on my feet at the end of any disruption with some confidence and sense of balance and equanimity. Goal of Buddhism, our orientation, our mental orientation.
And, you know, it’s it’s not something which is out there in the sky. The Buddha is not floating around somewhere in space. Over and over again, it’s coming back down to within your own mind. The Buddha within your own mind, and what does it mean to become enlightened? Any child.
You know, there’s a child that’s fallen down a well and there’s many people gathered around the well. They’re very concerned, very genuine, sincerely concerned about the welfare of their child. And they they’re they’re wondering what to do. That’s the feeling tone of an enlightened mind, of a healthy mind. You know what enlightenment is? When we do have feelings with you.
As simply as a healthy, loving, sane human being, someone who is able to forget about themselves, who isn’t completely wrapped up in their own self concern, their self centeredness, their exaggerated constant I, I, I, I, want. And it’s also imbued with the quality of energy. Healthy person. And just a So this has become, you know, this becomes our orientation. You know, we we become distracted over the course of our day.
We think if I don’t close this business deal, my world is gonna end. Or if I don’t get those kids to bed, I’m gonna go crazy. And this and if we become convinced with the various complications which go on in the course of our life. But what is the theme behind us? You know, we you you break up with a spouse.
You break up with a boyfriend. You break up with a girlfriend. It hurts. It’s painful. There’s two possibilities of how we have to deal with that pain.
The mind doesn’t want that pain. It’s in pain. It doesn’t want that pain. It’s natural. It’s almost what we need to be alive, to avoid pain, to approach what is considered as pleasure.
The mind is in pain. It’s going to employ some method. What does it know? How does it going to work with that situation? We can immediately latch onto another partner and the pain seems to be gone.
But have we really dealt with the problem? Perhaps we could have dealt with the problem on a deeper, more fundamental level of why there was pain to begin with. And have we actually solved any problem or have we simply administered morphine? Maybe we should look at reorientation such that we’re going to develop ourselves for the sake of others. I have to change.
I have to grow. And developing the motivation to grow to change for the benefit of others. And this becomes a method of operation, the ongoing theme of our life. The beginning of meditation. And which it points out that I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Buddha within oneself, one’s own love, compassion, one’s own wisdom, one’s own creative energy.
And I go for refuge to the Dharma. You know anything which has the capacity to raise the level of our consciousness. Anything which has the capacity to take us from hatred to love, from miserliness to generosity, from self centeredness to other sentient beings, from ignorance to knowledge. That is Dharma. That’s all we need by Dharma.
That has the key to change the mind, to direct it. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly, and the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, Begin with mindfulness of breathing. Now I can explain a little bit of mindfulness of breathing during the course of each talk And then additionally we can come along on Monday nights to learn to meditate. But essentially we’re going to focus our mind on the breath.
And by breath So all of these various sensations taken together become the focus of our awareness, of our attention. You know, Buddhism is very much concerned with reality, whatever that might be. It’s it’s very much concerned with truth. Truth is therapeutic. It’s the way that we can heal our mind, heal the problem.
And so if we can we want to know the way things are. And once if we can begin to know it in a very simplistic fashion in the course of mindfulness of breathing, then this can carry over into our everyday life, our various other activities. I know that I’m breathing in. It’s going. And going is something we have to get used to.
You know, it’s we’re not looking for a mystical revelation, you know, rainbow light, cosmic sound. So first you can get in contact with your body. Become aware perhaps of any tension, any knots, tightness, And bring your awareness to those areas especially