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 session with a personal story: retreating to the California mountains in the early 1970s to escape society’s imposed values, only to find jealousy, anger, and attachment following him there. The anecdote anchors a core argument — true freedom is not freedom from social norms but from one’s own compulsive mental patterns. The session then turns to wisdom, the third of the three higher trainings, introduced through Socratic inquiry before any doctrine: students are guided to probe phrases like “I changed my mind” and “I’m sitting on the floor” — what exactly is this “I”? — so they can approach selflessness and emptiness with a beginner’s mind rather than borrowed answers. The Dalai Lama’s text Opening the Eye of New Awareness provides the formal framework, defining wisdom as a discriminating awareness that investigates phenomena by breaking them into parts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 OtE 1992 02 26.mp3
UUID: 88f17f52-4397-47a5-ac36-7b006877e188
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-02-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~3,170
We had a busy day, or at least you did. I’m pretty lazy. And we become externalized, become caught up in various activities of necessity. They’re quite important, practical necessities of life, dealing with them in a very skillful way, effective way, hopefully. But there’s a part of our life which we have to consciously create space for, create the time, put forth the energy.
And that’s in our internal life in terms of our own growth. We can’t neglect that at the expense of external activities. It has to be a consistent attention paid to our inner well-being and the development of our skillful states of mind, productive constructive states of mind. And then in this context then things will go well. We have a certain degree perhaps of control over the external world.
But if we can control this one factor of the mind, it is as if we control the world. With our thoughts we make the world. This is the central message of Buddhism perhaps, that the determinant of the quality of our life is the quality of our mind. Whatever the vicissitudes of life may bring us, if we have the poise and the balance and the skillful means to deal with them, And they are not necessarily an obstacle or obstacles or pain, both sources of pain, but they can become sources of growth. They can become, in fact, ultimately the means where we can achieve our greatest joy.
This involves the process of transforming the mind. Mental training. The mind is in its place and its way. It can make a heaven of hell the hell of heaven. So we have to deal with our problems in practical everyday life.
But also that we cannot neglect the source of our mental health and our well-being, which is our own mind. Before I left the States, I think in nineteen seventy two, I went through a very painful process of divorce. It was very difficult, extremely difficult period in my life. And I left my hometown, which was Ohio, which is a great place to be from. And I went to California.
California was like a real eye opener I guess you’d say. They had a different ethos than we had back in Ohio. People in California were asking, what is it that makes you happy? We never thought about this back in Ohio. It was kind of a revolutionary idea.
We never stopped to think, am I happy? Are my plans, are they my plans? Are my attitude my attitude? Are my beliefs and my ideas and my views, are they mine? Have I autonomously created them?
My values, my principles, which I’m planning to live my life by. When I first went to California, it was back in the Vietnam protest days. People were talking about freedom from our oppressive society. I remember back in Ohio I never thought about our society being particularly oppressive. We have to revolt against our society.
This kind of talk that was being generated on the two coasts, the West Coast and the East Coast of the United States, not much came from Ohio except for corn and military bases. And then I began to notice when I went out to California that I wasn’t creating my own values. I wasn’t determining what I wanted out of life. I wasn’t trying to see what worked for me as a very unique individual. We all are very unique individuals.
We all have a unique karmic history. We have commonalities. We have shared experiences. But the way we interpret them, the way they fit into the context of who we are, it can be quite different. So what works for you may not work for me, even within a Buddhist context.
A practice that works for your neighbor may not work for you at that particular time. It may not be your particular need. Not to say it’s better or worse, but it’s just different. So back in California, becoming aware that I was living a type of life and had a mentality which was not my own, which didn’t have its source within myself. There were, there was this unbeknownst unaware the values and ethos were being foisted upon me.
And it’s probably a better judgment perhaps if I were to think about it, which I hadn’t up to that point. So like any hippy person, I grew a long beard, long hair, and dropped out. Went up in the mountains and I thought, this is great. I’m free at last from all the pressures and the values that society was trying to force down my throat, as it were. But then I began to notice that I wasn’t free, even in the mountains of California, in the quite beautiful mountains.
There were times when I became attached and I didn’t want to become attached because it was painful. And there were times when I was jealous and I didn’t want to become jealous because it was painful. And there were times when I had anger and I didn’t want to become angry because it was painful. And I wasn’t free. I couldn’t choose not to be angry.
I couldn’t choose not to be jealous. I couldn’t choose not to be attached. So I wasn’t free. So it began to dawn on me that freedom is not something which is to be viewed in terms of how different, how uninfluenced you are by the social norms, but by how free you are from your own compulsively occurring neurotic patterns within your own mind. You can wear a tie and be a banker, a stockbroker, you can teach, can run a pharmacy, you can be an engineer, and you can be a free and healthy, loving, beautiful person within that context.
There’s no reason why one can’t. It’s not society which is, which determines the quality of our lives, but our own minds. And so in order to gain that freedomthis is always something that I wanted to achieve in the course of my life, sort of a crazy wisdom in the context of compassion. And to be nobody else but yourself in a world which is night and day trying to make you everybody else is a very difficult battle. It’s the type of battle we have to fight all the time.
But again, to be nobody but yourself, what does that mean? Who are they? And to be nobody but yourself in a world, in a context of a mind driven by this compulsive pattern is not freedom. And we have to fight that battle every day of our life. If we ever hope to be free, if we ever hope to express the beauty and the joy that I think is within all of it.
That life is a wonderful and beautiful experience. It may not always be pleasurable, but even the pain, if we can gain a perspective on it, can be a fulfilling experience. And the sadness is like when the heart is overflowing from being full. So whatever we do in our practical everyday life, which is out of necessity, we have to keep reminding ourselves to consistently cultivate the means to be free and cultivate the means to find beauty and meaning in our lives. The intellect works on the basis of proof and demonstration.
But the soul, and I don’t mean particularly the Christian soul, but perhaps maybe what Maslow means by soul. I’m not quite sure, but it has some meaning for me, that word. It operates on the basis of belief and meaning. What has meaning for me? What brings me fulfillment?
What makes me feel as an authentic, self actualizing individual? And creating that space and that time and putting forth that energy to keep re imbuing ourselves, reaffirming ourselves, recommitting ourselves. Then life is meaningful, and we can believe in ourselves, in the beauty of life. And then perhaps the difficulties of life aren’t quite so difficult. And the pain isn’t quite so overwhelming.
And we find our way and keep redirecting ourselves to that way. So the inner focus of our life becomes finding ourselves, finding the Buddha within ourselves, that loving, healthy, healthy, sane being that we know we can become in our finest moments, how special we actually are. And we achieve that by means of the Dharma, whatever we want to call it, the truth, beauty, the goodness of life, whatever helps us to actualize Buddha. And in the social context of the spiritual community, we need other people. We are dependent upon other people.
Our sanity is very much bound up in the way we relate with other people and the way we relate with us. So this becomes the direction in our life, a practical, pragmatic means to make this experience, what we call life, meaningful and transcendental. And we sit and try to raise the level of our motivation, such that we are living, not just for the sake of our own experience, but the potential beauty of life. But that we are able to help others to experience that same beauty which life affords us, is able to bring us. And then our life is fulfilled.
Our life is whole. It’s integrated. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. And the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving and other perfection, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. Can you hear me in the back? I’ve been told a number of times that people oftentimes can’t hear me in the back.
So we’re going to meditate on mindfulness of breathing as we normally do, as we usually do. But additionally, we’re going to be looking at the third of the three higher trainings, the special trainings, the higher training or the training in special wisdom. And I thought before you become sophisticated in the view of selflessness and emptiness that it might be worthwhile to approach it with a beginner’s mind before we learn other people’s views and we repeat them as parrots. If you might have to confront the issue of confusion, figuring out something for yourself. It becomes quite easy when you gather some information to think that it’s your information but it’s not.
And it becomes almost an obstacle and a hindrance. It’s difficult to distinguish, to differentiate between what you know and what you’ve been told, between what you’ve figured out for yourself and what has been passed down to you. And there’s a huge difference, isn’t there, in this understanding. It can be a real obstacle. We can say all the right words, give all the right answers, But sometimes somebody who says, ‘I don’t know’ is in a better position.
There’s a real possibility of openness to finding out what is the truth for them. Confusion is a very creative state. The person who has all the answers, who has a difficult time learning. The questions are more important than the answers. So I’m going to just go through a very simple minded question about the nature of the self.
After we’re going to do some mindfulness abiding then I’ll just ask you a few questions, common sense questions about the nature of the self. And then later on in the actual discussion we’ll go into the view of the self, selflessness, and emptiness. But before we do that, thought it would be good just to ask some common sense basic questions and have you sit there and try to figure them out. It would be worthwhile. Maybe we can discuss our answers before we learn the correct answers.
Maybe that would be the plan. So if you take a comfortable but firm posture, we’ll begin with mindfulness of breathing. Then we’ll examine the self a little bit. Look quietly to yourself mentally. Say I, I, I.
What comes up in the mind? What image, what thought comes up when you say I? Or repeat your name to yourself mentally. When you say, I’m sitting on the floor, I’m sitting on the floor, what do we mean? What is that’s sitting on the floor?
How can you prove that you’re sitting on the floor? What do you mean when you say, I’m sitting on the floor? I’m meditating. What do you mean when you say I’m meditating? How can you prove, demonstrate that you’re meditating?
I’m meditating. What do you mean by that? What is it that’s meditating? What do you mean when you say, I changed my mind? I was going to the shop, but I changed my mind and didn’t go.
What does that mean? I changed my mind. What do you mean when you say, I’m sick because I have a stomachache? I’m sick because I have a stomachache. What is it that’s sick?
What is it that owns this thing? So maybe we could Have a little bit of discussion when you say I. Some people could volunteer to say what comes up for them when you say I. Anything? Blank?
Anybody out there? Maybe nothing comes. Maybe something comes up. Anybody? When we say I am sitting on the floor, anybody?
How could you? What is the meaning of that? How do you establish that? So if your bottom is sitting on the floor, you are sitting on the floor. Whatever your bottom is, you are.
How about when we said I’m meditating? So you can’t prove that you’re meditating. You may not be. You might be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin or something. You might be in Melbourne.
I interrupted you. But I changed my mind. I was going to go to the shop, but I changed my mind. I didn’t go. What does that mean?
Did someone change that thought? Or did it just happen by itself? Did you change the thought purposely, consciously? Unconsciously. So a different thought popped up and you said, I changed my thought.
I changed my So you didn’t control. You didn’t really change your mind, or did you? So you’re lying. You really didn’t change your mind. They didn’t change your mind.
But it doesn’t have any correspondence to reality. There’s no one changing your mind. I revised my decision. Who decided to revise the decision? So you had made a decision to go to the shop.
And then for some reason you said, let’s revise that decision. Why did that come up, the decision? So there was Something standing outside of all this. Do you ever make a decision and then follow through? How many of your actions do you think that you decide to do?
How many are involuntary? How many are voluntary? I put my hands together, scratch my head. Am I deciding to do that? Or is it I’m not?
So there’s no decision. There’s no I which is controlling me. So there has to be a sense of some kind of voluntary control. There has to be a sense of control for the eye to be in charge. And if there’s no one controlling it, is there no eye at that particular moment?
Or the eye come and go? You beat your heart. So it’s a matter of degrees. There’s an involuntary, like a physical process. You don’t beat your heart.
How about if you control your breath? Sometimes it’s voluntary, sometimes it’s involuntary. So what is it that so that when there’s an I when you control your breath and there’s no I when it’s uncontrolled? It’s just going natural? Is an I just a sense?
Is it just a mental concept in the mind, a model, or is it something more than that? Is Bruce a model concept in the mind or something more than that? When Bruce is not thinking of Bruce, does Bruce go out of existence? Are you more than a concept? How you feel. Grant is just a name, a sound.
He’s not a person. So is Grant a sentient thing? The I is associated with the mind, sometimes with the body. Sometimes neither. How about in terms of the actual empirical, conventional existent I, self, being?
Can we talk about that? Is it the body and the mind combination? It’s definitely related in some form or fashion to the body and mind. But it’s not the body and mind? It’s quite difficult, isn’t it?
So we’re talking about the third of the three higher trainings, as referred to in this book, special trainings. in dependence upon the higher training or special training in ethics, we go on to practice the higher training in meditative stabilization. And then, in dependence upon that, we go on to practice the third of three higher trainings, the higher training or the training in special insight, wisdom. So as the Dalai Lama explains in his text, Opening the Eye of New Awareness, what he means by wisdom, defining wisdom. Wisdom is the discrimination of phenomena through investigation and analysis.
Wisdom is the discrimination of phenomena through investigation and analysis. So it’s a discriminating awareness is what we mean by wisdom. And it acts to investigate and analyze. Said that meditative stabilization simply takes an object as a whole and simply focuses upon it, whereas wisdom seeks to break up the object into parts in order to determine its nature, whatever it might be. It tries to penetrate rather than simply focus upon the object as a whole.
It seeks to penetrate and break up by means of investigation in order to understand nature. If we want to understand an object, we break it up into its components and then we have some idea of how it came into being, its various levels of composition, its structure. We can know something more about it. This is what we mean by wisdom. And in terms of this, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, it says there are three types of wisdom.
And I’ll just read this paragraph in which it talks about the three types of wisdom. The wisdom realizing the ultimate reality. The wisdom realizing the ultimate realizes the suchness of selflessness either by way of meaning generality a meaning generality, a mental image. We use a symbol, a mental symbol, so that when we think about things, we can know there are objects.