Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 38-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun maps the two truths — conventional and ultimate reality — onto the three higher trainings, then dwells at length on shila, the Sanskrit word for ethics whose literal meaning is “to cool.” That image of coolness becomes the talk’s guiding thread: ethical behaviour as a refreshing inner stream rather than imposed rule-following. He explains how the Eightfold Noble Path fits within the three trainings, walks through the ten unskillful actions (physical, verbal, and mental), and invokes Atisha’s paradox that the highest ethic is simply a peaceful mind. The session closes with a candid Q&A on euthanasia, sparked by a student who stepped on an injured snail. Suited to practitioners following a structured introductory series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 OtE 1991 10 23.mp3
UUID: abcedc55-43d3-4d7a-9aee-0c18c9d5045e
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-10-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 38.5 minutes
Words: ~4,242
The Buddhist teachings of the Dharma relies on two realities, the social, superficial reality and the reality of ultimate import. There are such persons as Buddhas. They do teach and they do not teach only one reality or one unreality. They teach two realities, a relative one that is superficial, lying on the surface, and social, conventionally structured by culture, which shapes consciousness through language, and an ultimate absolute that is profound, transcendent, yet real, noble, and hence of its supreme import, being ultimately liberative and transformative. So in dependence upon the conventional level, we become well adjusted, relatively happy people.
in dependence upon becoming that, taking that as a foundation and in conjunction with the creative potential that we build up, we are able to integrate the insights of the ultimate level of reality by means of which we become liberated individuals experiencing absolute happiness. So the second chapter points out the fact that all of the teachings are based within these two truths, these two levels of reality. And then the third chapter describes how Buddhism how Buddhist teachings based upon which are based upon these two truths are included in three categories: collections, each of which takes up one of the three higher trainings or special trainings. So the verbal teachings of the Buddha, these are usually referred to as the Dharma. Upon his death they were collected together and they were categorized, and they were what are called baskets or scriptural collections.
The first collection is called discourses or sutras, and this mainly sets forth the means to cultivate the higher training in meditative stabilization. The second scriptural collection is called discipline or vinaya, and this mainly sets forth the means of cultivating the higher training in ethics. And the third scriptural collection is that of manifest knowledge or abhidharma, And this mainly sets forth the means of cultivating the higher training in wisdom. So these three higher trainings which we are going to be looking at are contained within them the more expanded practices of what are usually called the Eightfold Noble Path, which some of you might be familiar with. Now the Eightfold Noble Path is contained within these three higher trainings.
For example, correct actions, correct speech, and correct livelihood are contained within the higher training of ethics. Correct mindfulness, concentration, and effort are contained within the higher training of meditative stabilization. And the final two of the eightfold noble path of correct thought and correct view are contained within the higher training in wisdom. So this is the the general presentation within the Tibetan tradition of what is an expanded version is the Eightfold Noble Path, which is very important teaching within the Theravadan tradition. So we’re going to begin with the first of these three higher trainings.
Right here it’s called special trainings. The higher training in ethics. And at this level, by ethics, we simply must mean refraining from harming others, oneself. Refraining from harming others or oneself. This is the basis of all ethics.
That, you know, to to refrain from such harming and all of the conflict which which ensues from such ways of acting. So it it represents the initial the initial method whereby to create an atmosphere of harmony both between oneself and others and importantly within oneself. And this, I hope, will become apparent that the quality of harmony or integration, wholeness, unity, which ethics is meant to induce, not only between oneself and others, but internally within oneself. You know, training, There’s a there’s a harmony between one’s between one’s attitudes and one’s actions. There’s no split.
There’s no rupture in one’s being. One is the way one one feels, thinks, intends, and the way one expressions expresses oneself in the world is in harmony. There’s a there’s a there’s a concordance. There’s there’s no split. This is generally, there’s a split for most of us, for almost all of us.
Training training in meditative stabilization relies upon training in ethics because through ethics, the gross internal conflicts are pacified. And sometimes there’s an expression, virtue is its own reward, and non virtue is its own punishment. This is the very set of of what we call skillful action. It’s a state of harmony. It’s a state of wholeness involved in that that being at that very moment.
In dependence upon the pacifying of gross conflicts through ethics, then by means of meditative stabilization, more and more subtle disturbing factors within the mind can be pacified. And it’s it’s a it’s a gradual you know, the mind is in distress. And there there are and we cannot gain access to the most disturbing factors within the mind directly. We we simply aren’t subtle enough in our awareness to be able to even know that the mind is in distress, except there’s an undercurrent. You know, the way this undercurrent is sometimes termed all pervasive suffering.
That for in our to use an analogy, you know, that a person who is aware of this undercurrent of conflict, of distress, which is pervasive, which is concomitant with ego. The analogy is that it is like a hair in in our hand. A hair in our hand doesn’t disturb us in the least. We’re not even aware of it. But for someone who has gained insight into this undercurrent of dissatisfactory of this of this disturbing factors within the mind, this distress, this disease.
It’s as if they took that same hair and put it in their eye. It’s that severe to a person who is that sensitive. Through the pacification of these gross conflicts within the mind through ethics, we can then go on to practice meditative stabilization, which pacifies more disturbing factors, more subtle disturbing factors within the mind. in dependence upon this, upon, you know, through meditative stabilization, we can bring about there’s a movement toward integration, a movement toward wholeness, a movement toward unity. All our energies become centered.
All our being is centred around a single inner principle, inner factors. There’s no there’s no longer schizophrenia, fragmentation. There’s a sense of we begin to gain a sense of wholeness, of centeredness. And it is upon this, then we can begin to practice the higher training in wisdom. By which, the most subtle dis ease of the mind can be completely eliminated.
It can be pacified. And this brings complete harmony to the mind, returns it back to its own natural peace, its own natural state of beyond sorrow, which is the natural quality in the mind. Because it brings it in tune with the laws of reality, with the way things actually are. There is no longer any conflict whatsoever. The mind is in complete attunement with the way things are.
So there’s always this sense of bringing to harmony, whether it’s through the gross means of ethics, or the more subtle means of meditative stabilization, concentration, or finally to the most far reaching, the insight of wisdom. There’s this sense of bringing to wholeness, of harmonizing, of easing of conflict, of removing disturbing factor from the mind, more and more subtle levels. And then we can attain absolute peace. So the higher training in wisdom depends upon the higher training in meditate meditative stabilization. The higher training in meditative stabilization in turn depends upon the higher training in ethics.
It’s a gradual unfoldment. And the Dalai Lama takes each of these three higher trainings in turn in the next three chapters of his book. One of the one of the greatest masters, ancient Indian masters who is extremely important within the Tibetan tradition is Atisha. And he said that the highest ethic is a peaceful mind. The highest ethic is a peaceful mind.
If our mind is abiding in peace, then we are abiding in ethics, in perfect ethics. There’s no conflict. Somehow I I have to get across the idea that we are are very much out of touch with what is going on in our inner inner world, how very much at dis ease we actually are, even in the best of moments, even when we feel those few moments when we do feel quite relaxed, at ease. There is a high degree, relatively speaking, of disturbance, of conflict. It’s not that we’re looking for it, but it’s there, and it’s best to become aware of it.
And the way we can begin to approach it, pragmatically speaking, if we can do nothing else, the way we can help ourselves, if we can do nothing else, the way we can begin to solve our problems of suffering, if we can do nothing else, is to begin to practice ethics. No one cannot practice ethics at some level, at some gross level, even if it just means to give up hunting, whatever. I don’t know. There’s some level that we can do something for ourselves, that we can carry on this practice, that we can begin to ease the conflict, the disease in our mind. You know, I was looking I read a I couldn’t find a an article that I was looking for.
I thought you’d find very interesting, and I can’t remember it very well. I read it some a few years ago. It was on the the what is becoming very much a world in cognitive therapy, the place of ethics in solving people’s problems. And this took up a case history of a boy who had a stutter. And it was the the first of this article was that it was out of a sense of it was due to lying that this boy developed a sense of a stutter.
That there is some that this it it is if and this is in accordance with some psychotherapist, for example Rogers, but it is very much in accordance with Buddhism, that we have a sense, as it were, of what is right. We have a conscience. And in in acting that and if we are in any way sensitive, if that in any way has not been completely Mhmm. Colored over, dulled, numbed, then there’s going to be in in acting in in conflict with our own inner truth, there’s always going to be some sense of conflict. There’s always going to be some sense of dis ease.
So this idea of harmony, of coming into harmony harmonizing ourselves with our own inner inner truth is the basis of ethics, is one of the main thrusts of ethics in terms of of developing oneself and in practical terms of finding happiness. And the the word for the word for ethics in Sanskrit is shila. And so shila is often translated as ethics or morality. But literally, it means coolness, to cool. You know, somebody says cool it.
It means act they say act ethically. You know, it means to to be refreshed, to be cool, to be soothed. That’s what Śīla is about. When a being is unaware, many of their actions are to their detriment and cause suffering. These unwholesome actions create a burning division within your being.
Śīla is a description of how you should feel within, a cool stream of consciousness which is refreshing. Unfortunately, many think they are being refreshed when in actuality their innate being is burning in conflict. Look into your interior interior state to judge the wholesomeness of your actions. Do they unfold and refresh you, or do they produce states of turmoil? Your actions are known by their fruit.
A truly moral being is in flow with the cool stream. We are not concerned with making moral judgments about an action, but what we are concerned with is the resulting state. Are you refreshed? Is there a rushing, a washing of your being with a greater feeling of life, or does it produce a conflict, a blockage, and suffering? Wholesomeness is not defined by the act but by the result.
How much do you really know about the results of your actions? The result refers to the future. It’s mere conjecture. You really can’t know very much about it. The past has already happened.
It has produced the present, but you really can’t change it. You are then left with the present. Your task is to be more and more immediate, to see instantaneously the fruit of your action. Does the action feel refreshing? You can’t live by the voices of the world.
You have to look into the action itself, beyond the voices of mommy, daddy, and society. What are you directly observing? What are you experiencing? You cannot come to certainty until you reach the core of your being and read the messages without the taint of conditioning. So ethics ethics is a description of the way a healthy being acts, the way a healthy being lives.
The Buddha did not keep he did not have to take any precepts, vows. He did not have to observe any ethics. His life was an expression of ethics because it was an expression of peace, and that’s the highest ethic. You know, someone who is acting out of their basic goodness, to get in touch with that basic goodness and begin to express it in our thinking, behavior, in our being. You know, I get all by this, it has to be unconditioned by all our our habitual neurotic patterns, all our compulsive patterns.
There’s a you know, there’s again, to bring up some of the statements from Zen, which are always involving themselves in a very with the absolute, with the beyond convention. Laozi, a great Taoist master, said he said paradoxically, when the way, that is to say the way, you know, when we can say spiritual path, when the way was not followed, arose goodness and virtue. And when the way was not followed arose goodness and virtue. And then he went on to say, get rid of goodness, dispense with virtue, and people will behave as they should, feel as they should. So this is pretty radical thinking.
And it it can be easily taken wrongly. But until we, you know, till we until we are back in touch with our intelligence, our basic sanity, the conscience, our own truth, until we are able to experience what it is we’re actually feeling at the most subtle level, which most of us can’t even feel very well, at the gross level, let alone the most subtle level, then it’s extremely, what, extremely skillful wise to temporarily, medially adopt some kind of artificial way of acting, which is an expression of an enlightened way of being. We copy until we come in contact with our own sanity and our own expression of peace in our in our thinking and ways of acting. It is wise, it is useful, it is utilitarian to copy the imitate those ways of being which are expressions of other beings’ enlightened ways of acting. Buddhism, to quote, Buddhism does not talk in terms of right and wrong, but uses the different concepts of skillfulness and unskillfulness, which are which are very definitely not synonymous with the former concepts.
Skillfulness is an ethical psychological concept. Actions are seen as skillful if they are expressions of or conducive to skillful mental states. That is, mental states characterized by compassion, tranquility, joyfulness, and clarity. They are unskillful if they are expression expresses of greed, hatred, and delusion. Skillful actions are those which are conducive to human development, and particularly to the development of samadhi, that is meditative stabilization, and prajna, that is to say wisdom.
It is axiomatic in Buddhism that skillfulness is beneficial to both self and others, while unskillfulness brings suffering eventually to both. To a certain extent, we are all responsible for causing our own neuroses, you know, by acting unskillfully in the first place. Know, skillful actions in body, skillful actions in speech, and skillful actions in our thoughts are important in bringing about healthy mental states. In other words, ethical behavior is a prerequisite to mental health. We can do this.
We may not be able to have high degrees of concentration or develop profound wisdoms, understanding emptiness, but we can begin to approach ethical behavior. And to that same degree we are helping ourselves to become healthy. So in this regard, the Dalai Lama in this chapter on the higher training ethics begins with a quotation from Nāgārjuna. The Buddha said that ethics is the foundation of all good qualities, just as the earth is the basis of the moving and unmoving. So within Buddhist ethics, there are three levels of ethics which may be observed depending upon one’s motivation and capacity.
So there are the ethics of individual liberation, the ethics of the bodhisattva, and the ethics of secret mantra or tantra. These are three levels of ethics which one can make use of, which one can seek to abide in. You know, the the basic to all all of these ethics Is the of these ethical systems is the ethics of abandoning of abandoning the ten unskillful actions. Basic to all of the the various systems, complicated as they are, is the abandoning of the ten unskillful actions. And if we look at these, we’re going to do briefly.
If we posit and if we say that the basis of ego, the basis of cyclic existence is conflict and all of the distress which follows from that, then we can begin to how are we going to go about transcending ego? That is through wisdom. That through meditative stabilization. But how can we begin at even our at our ordinary level, on a gross level, of going beyond our self centeredness, our exaggerated self concern, the expressions, the grossest expressions of ego in our life. When I say I’m more important than you, I can kill you.
That my happiness is more important, I can take what you have. That it doesn’t matter what what you what may painful situations may ensue. I want my pleasure through sex. You know, these tremendously gross expressions of egotistical states in our thinking, in our speaking, and in our acting. We can begin to approach some in some small way, ego transcendence, and that is, say, peace, by beginning in some small way to curb these gross expressions of egotistical behavior in our life.
And these are the ten abandoning the ten unskillful actions. There are three physical unskillful actions of killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. Four verbal, lying, divisive speech, harmful speech, idle gossip or idle chatter, senseless speech. And three mental unskillful actions of covetousness, harmful intention, and wrong view. So these these represent negative actions.
How how do we want to look at it? We ethics is extremely profound and and karma is extremely profound. And we can look at it on on various levels. And we can and it should be looked at on various levels through different avenues of approach because it becomes to make more sense and it becomes to have more impact on the way we act. Whether we see it in terms of the three ethical behavior as necessary in terms of three higher trainings or whether we see ethical behavior as necessary to avoid unskillful actions which have a result in suffering.
Both of them are quite useful in our practice. So, all of these ten unskillful actions have a degree of negativity. And to that same degree, they are going to produce a higher degree of suffering. So the degree of negativity involved in the case of these three categories is that the heaviest of these is killing in terms of physical and physical actions. First is killing is the heaviest, and then stealing, then sexual misconduct.
In terms of the verbal unskillful actions, the heaviest is lying, then progressing downward until you come to senseless speech. In terms of the three mentally unskillful actions, the heaviest is wrong view going down until you come to, you know, through harmful intention to covetousness. So looking at the heaviness of these categories of unskillful actions. But even within each of these actions, there is a varying degree of heaviness dependent upon whether there are present what are called the five branches which make a complete action. So, we didn’t get very far.
We did get quite far. Okay. Yeah. I think that’s the word on it. So, anyway, next week we can we can take a look at the ten unskillful actions and how the five branches of each of these so that the more that we understand you know, it’s said there’s expression in the Vinaya or discipline.
A heavy Even heavy karma for the wise is very light. But for those who are foolish, even light karma is very heavy. So if we become skillful, then at least even if we have to, for some reason or another, engage in some negativity, we can know how to go about at least making it as light as possible so we don’t compound our ignorance and our suffering. So if anybody has any questions about anything or comments you may like to share. Any state which arises out of ignorance is dissatisfactory, no matter how pleasurable it might appear to our gross mind.
Any state which is based upon misconception is dissatisfactory. There is some conflict, even though how subtle it might be, is some disturbance of the mind. The mind is in some kind of distress. You might call that that level of distress, the best thing that ever happened to you. Everyone is in that state as long as we have ignorance.
As long as we possess misknowledge, ignorance, we are suffering as far as Buddhism is concerned. We are not at peace. I don’t know. I mean, it’s relative, isn’t it? I mean, by that is I mean, what if you could what we call pleasure is the is the temporary cessation of suffering.
And that’s what we call pleasure. That’s what we call happiness. The the cessation of prior deprivation. Know, the cessation you know, there’s the, you know, someone walks up to a fool who’s sitting in the corner hitting himself over the head with a hammer, and they say, why are you doing that? Why are you hitting yourself over the head with a hammer?
And he said, because it feels so good when I stop. To a large extent, that’s what we call happiness. That is what we call happiness. That’s not that’s called, from the point of view of Buddhism, contaminated happiness. It’s not real happiness.
Relatively speaking to the pain, it’s okay. It’s a more desirable state, obviously. But it’s not real happiness. But this is becoming theoretical now. We’re just trying to ease some of our grosser problems at the moment.
When it comes to moral ethics and say something like killing and we take the situation where you have a dog and it’s in a whole lot of distress you take to the vet and the vet says the most compassionate thing to do is to put it down. It’s going through so much suffering. And you decide, well, I agree, I understand the situation. I’ll put it down. Is that killing by a Buddhist standard or Yeah.
It’s killing, but there’s no absolutes it it’s not that we killing brings harm, but we have to the the final premise is that which brings the most benefit and the least harm. And and such questions as euthanasia, abortion, involve the involve the use of our intelligence and compassion, and there’s no easy answer. But you but you really have to understand your own motivation. A lot of the consequences of what you’re doing, even with the proper motivation, can’t see. So it’s not an easy issue.
I just asked that because I stepped on a snail. Mhmm. And it was half dead, but it wasn’t dead. And I just couldn’t believe it like that. Had to had to finish it off, basically.
And I felt really guilty about that, but I thought that my motivation was was correct because I just couldn’t stand it’s been in that sort of suffering. Don’t know. It’s not easy, is it? Yeah. I mean, I some of my teachers would say you know, put it out with misery.
And others would say that it’s that you deprived every chance to work out its negative karma. So It’s difficult, Patricia. There’s no absolute answers. Well, I felt like I didn’t it didn’t matter what I did what was wrong. I was like, you know, if I left it.
Was sort of like a no win situation. I mean, I still think I’d do the same thing again, considering what happened. Yeah. As I said, I mean, don’t know if it’s right or not. And I said, often, you’d come up with a say with a dog or cat in your life with a vet.
Sure. That would be the last common instance of someone that had me. Sure. Dedicate the positive energy that we create. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to the enlightened realm through these skillful actions.
May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart has not arisen, arise, and grow. And may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more.