Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The image of a ping-pong ball “bounced around by hopes and fears” opens Ven Jampa Gendun’s 46-minute walk through the three levels of Buddhist ethics and vows. He argues that vows are not rules for their own sake but a practical method for embedding principles into daily life — the difference between finding non-harm worthwhile in theory and actually vowing not to kill. He then covers the vows of individual liberation (from 24-hour lay precepts up to 364 lifelong vows for a fully ordained nun), the eighteen root Bodhisattva vows aimed at benefiting others, and tantric vows, where the task is shedding a “poor me” self-concept and recognizing one’s awakened nature. He closes with the Dalai Lama’s five methods for keeping vows, four causes for breaking them, and a Q&A on the cultural context of monastic rules and the link between ethical practice and mental health.
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File: 08 OtE 1991 11 13.mp3
UUID: 1dbd75e7-cf58-4ca1-8cde-4f77512f3376
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-11-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.3 minutes
Words: ~4,946
vows are taken as a means to aid us in the observance of a particular principle in our life so that these principles simply don’t remain abstract ideas, noble concepts with no bearing upon the way we live, think, act in our everyday life. It is a way of helping us to integrate our life around principles which we find worthwhile, which in our more sane, healthy moments we find of use or value. The practical way to apply principles to the mundane activities of our everyday life is through vows. For example, you may think not to harm life is a worthwhile principle to respect all living life, all living beings. And the way that one could begin to implement this in a very practical way would be by vowing not to kill.
This would have a certain force on one’s mind that this principle would begin to be integrated and would find expression. Integrated in one’s mind, integrated in one’s actions, thereby it wouldn’t simply remain an abstract ideal. Isn’t it wonderful that I really think living beings should be respected? But it would be translated into action through the observance of the vow. The vow helps us to remind us, it helps us to maintain awareness, to take spontaneous care.
Even if you couldn’t take a vow not to kill, you could take a vow not to kill for sport. Whatever. If you felt it worthwhile not to cloud the mind, maintain mindfulness and awareness. Then you might take in a vow not to take intoxicants or not to drink more than three beers a day or just drink on the weekend. But the point is, as with all the vows, the main point is that they are a means to the end of greater awareness and greater spontaneous care and expressing healthy principles in our lives.
They are not rules to obey for their own sake. They are a means, a method, a skillful method to raise our level of our consciousness, our awareness, to make healthy principles an integrated part of our life and our mind. They’re not ends in themselves. The function of the vows is to get you to look at what you’re doing, to see if it’s actually working, to make us inquire into our activities. In terms of these three levels of ethics.
The basic principle behind the ethics of individual liberation is determination to free oneself from one’s neurotic compulsive pattern. And the principle is that one determines to be free. I’m fed up by being I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a ping pong ball, getting bounced around by my hopes and fears and by the waves of my ego, all these reoccurring compulsive patterns, my neurosis, this ups and downs, this roller coaster I’ve been on my whole life. I’d like to get off, I want to be free from it. How am I going to begin to implement that in my everyday life?
I have this determination but I need some practical meaning, something to remind me. As I mentioned about this consistent decision making occurring through all the petty and insignificant events of our life. It is vows which help us, which keep us mindful of these significant principles around which we’re trying to base our lives. So here I want to be free. And how am I going to implement it in my everyday life?
In some practical, tangible means. So we can take, in order to help us, to help ourselves, to decide to quit harming ourselves, which is the basis of ethics, to quit harm, harming both ourselves and others, to start helping ourselves and others. In terms of freeing ourselves, in terms of individual liberation, there are eight sets of vows. So there are eight types of vows of individual liberation. There are what’s called the twenty four hour vows.
These are eight vows which are taken for twenty four hours, just for twenty four hours, so people don’t have to freak out. Actually it’s very good. The ego does freak out and it’s kind of a good thing to contradict our neurosis. The best way to give up addiction is to stop. It’s a very painful experience.
And this is what I say: without this determination, without this willingness to undergo voluntary, legitimate suffering, you never will because it’s painful to change. So the eight vows of twenty four hour vow: not to kill, not to steal, not to have any sexual relationship just for twenty four hours not to lie, not to take any intoxicants, not to eat after the noonday meal, not to sit on high thrones and expensive beds where you might develop pride, and not to dance and sing and wear jewelry. So these are the eight vows which are observed for twenty four hours. And there are the remaining seven vows. There is, for example, the vows of the male and female lay practitioners.
And here they take five vows and they take them for life. There is firstly the vow not to kill. And you know, the not to kill, We can think of the benefit in terms of they’re there to aid us, to help us to be mindful of the value of life and to respect it. I vow not to kill in order to help us to value and respect life. I vow not to steal.
You’re not taking that which is not freely given to us. This vow, it sort of invites us to notice another of the major sources of our bad feelings that we have about ourselves, of our ethical ignorance in our life. And it invites us to refrain whenever we can catch ourselves in time from adding to the pile of selfishness, of deceit, evasiveness that we carry around with us. A vow not to lie. Or not to engage in sexual misconduct, sexual impropriety. On one level, this means becoming aware of our tendency to use people for our own ends, for our own sensations, for our own pleasure, as objects for our own pleasure, in search for excitement, in search for sensation.
It is a way we can begin to cut through the neurotic use of sex in our lives. Manipulation, the objectification of others into simply sexual objects for our own pleasure. The way we can begin to do that. Not to lie. This invites us to experiment in being more open, being more straightforward with others.
We can begin to see how our basic honesty and our simplicity have been perverted and adulterated by our neurotic hopes and fears. Helps us perhaps to be more real, more authentic. Our hopes and fears prevent us from being real, authentic. And finally, the fifth vow, not to take intoxicants. Intoxicants have a tendency to cloud the mind, cloud our judgment.
And in clouding our judgment or discriminative ability, there’s a danger of doing actions which we may regret, which would bring harm both to ourselves and others. So these five vows are taken for life, both by male and female practitioners. And the fourth type of vow is the novice nun, in which twelve vows are taken for life. The fifth type of vow and the sixth are the novice monk and nun, in which thirty-six vows are taken for life. Then the seventhly is the fully ordained monk, in which two hundred fifty three vows are taken for life.
There’s finally, but last but not least, the fully ordained nun who takes, and this really freaks out the ego, three hundred sixty-four vows for life. It’s interesting to think of If things were comfortable, we’re always comfortable, we always try to make ourselves comfortable, then there will never be any change. I think we find our neurosis quite comfortable to live with perhaps, or love our neuroses. To begin to contradict them, to act in opposition to them is quite difficult. That’s not easy.
So that’s the vows of individual liberation. The next level of vows is the vows of the bodhisattva. So the basic principle behind the vows of individual liberation is determining to free oneself from compulsive patterns, neurotic patterns. The basic principle behind the vows of the bodhisattva is determining to commit oneself to work with others in helping them to be free of their neurotic compulsive pattern. Committing ourselves to working with others is the principle behind the vows of the bodhisattva, the ethics of the bodhisattva.
This commitment, it is a real commitment based upon the realization of the suffering and confusion of ourselves and others. The only way to break the chain reaction of confusion and pain is to work our way outward into the awakened state of mind, is to take responsibility ourselves. If we do not deal with the situation of confusion, if we do not do something about it ourselves, nothing will ever happen. We cannot count on others to do it for us. It is our responsibility.
And we have the tremendous power to change the course of the world’s karma. So in taking the bodhisattva vow, we are acknowledging that we are not going to be instigators of further chaos and misery in the world but are going to be liberators, bodhisattvas, inspired to work on ourselves as well as working with other people. So committing ourselves to this working with other people in the training of the bodhisattva, we vow to observe eighteen root vows and forty six secondary vows. And just to give you some examples of what a Bodhisattva vow sounds like, so there are eighteen main vows or root vows and forty six secondary auxiliary vows. And the first three of these root vows, I thought I’d read them just to give you an idea.
So the first of these is the root vow to abandon praising yourself and belittling others because of your attachment to receiving offerings, being respected and venerated as a teacher, and gaining profit in general. The second is the root vow to abandon not giving material aid or teaching the Dharma to those who are pained with suffering and without a protector because of your being under the influence of miserliness and wanting to amass knowledge just for yourself. The third, the root vow to abandon not listening to a disciple who has previously offended you but who declares their offense and begs forgiveness in holding a grudge against that disciple. So we’re trying to form a a more or less self centered way of relating with others, a more helpful way of relating with others and seeking to benefit them. And these are training rules, ways we can practically guide ourselves, channel our activities toward the actual attainment of becoming a bodhisattva, of awakening our heart, of becoming open to others.
This is a practical means of directing a context to put all our various activities in so that they supplement our formal activities of trying to open our heart, formal meditation, our formal thinking. The way that our whole life can be integrated around our spiritual practice, by developing wisdom, opening our hearts to others. And then finally, the ethics of secret mantras. Secret mantras are sometimes called tantra. They’re the same thing, just different names.
The principle behind secret mantra, the ethics of secret mantras, is one’s heightened intention. There is an intention to benefit others in the bodhisattva ethics. Here there is even a greater emphasis, is a heightened intention to benefit others. This heightened intention is to work with the Buddha nature of others in terms of from one’s own awakened state of being, in terms of one’s own sanity and one’s own compassion, one begins to focus upon the Buddha nature of others, the basic sanity, the basic intelligence of others, that these patterns are adventitious. One doesn’t get hum up with the patterns, with the conditioning factors, but is continually focusing upon the expressions of awakenness that people are always manifesting.
And one works with those, trying to increase them, to help them become aware of their own awakened nature as an expression of one’s own sanity and compassion. In terms of main point, what tantra is trying to do is go beyond ordinary appearance and ordinary grasping, the main functions of tantra. We have this self pitying, poor me, insufficient conception about ourselves. And everything appears to be ordinary instead of enchanted, instead of a divine, full of openness, full of miracle. We ourselves are deity.
We, poor me, poor me. This is our biggest obstacle, this poor me attitude. And as I mentioned previously, our only limitations are those we acknowledge, and our limitations are very limited. The acknowledgment of our limitations are very minimal. Life becomes a self fulfilling, self defeating prophecy by how we conceive of ourselves.
So in tantra we begin to re identify from this sense of insufficiency, poor me, victim, not having quite what it takes to run off a deity, that I am an awakened being. And we begin to try to become aware of the sparks of awakeness, sparks of enlightenment, which we are expressing every day of our lives. When we act with the wisdom of all the Buddha, when we act with tremendous compassion, when our actions are spontaneous and right on, spot on, perfect, we try to become aware of those, begin to notice those, and we begin to identify with that way of being. Not everything that we do wrong, not everything that we screw up, not our guilt trips and not being what we think we should be. And we begin to re identify, reshape our conception of ourselves.
And we go beyond ordinary appearances. And we begin to fulfill. Sometimes it’s called the diamond vehicle, the indestructible vehicle. We hold to that position of enlightenment through all the vicissitudes of life. That becomes an indestructible point or basis upon which we conduct ourselves, that we are enlightened beings and those around us are all deities.
And the world becomes refashioned in that way. With our thoughts we make with the world. It’s not a matter of hallucination or psychosis. But it’s working with the way we are perceiving the world and changing the perception. And with the change of perception, the world will change.
All our perceptions are belief laden. There’s no objective world out there in dependence upon our ideas about it and ideas about ourselves. So we’re trying to redo those, recreate an alternative reality to the dissatisfactory one we now grasp so tightly. If we were to give examples of secret mantra vows, there are fourteen root vows and eight secondary vows of secret mantras. So these are training rules, the context in which one puts one’s mind to begin to express these principles in a tangible way and even in significant activities over the course of one’s everyday life.
These are examples of vows of secret mantra: Abandoning, despising, or belittling one’s teacher. Abandoning disregarding any practice. Abandoning getting angry at one’s vajra brother or sister, those who are also your fellow practitioner. Abandoning giving up love for any being, never to give up working for any being whatsoever. You can’t say, I’m going to attain Buddhahood for everybody in the universe except you.
You’re out. That would be breaking your root vow of secret mantra. Even those people we get fed up with, we still have to work for their liberation in spite of it. And then the Dalai Lama sets out five ways to help us to be able to keep our vows once one has taken them. Just briefly, there are five ways to help us to not act in contradiction to our vows, to keep our vows, to maintain our vows.
Firstly, relying upon the advice of someone who has an understanding of the teachings and who acts as a model. Someone who inspires you, can advise you, are on their way to act. Secondly, making effort observing our vows with diligence. This essentially means being enthusiastic about what is to be adopted and what is to be rejected. Included in this is conscientiousness.
One takes care, one simply doesn’t think it doesn’t matter whether I observe this vow or not. Then there’s mindfulness and awareness, which one investigates, analyzes, What is the nature? How is my mind doing? Atisha, one of the great masters of Indian Buddhism who reintroduced Buddhism into Tibet, said, When you’re with others, watch your speech. When you’re by yourself, watch your mind.
So mindfulness and introspection, watching what we’re doing, what we’re saying, whether it’s in line and keeping with training rules. Then there’s to help us, again, embarrassment with respect to others and conscience in terms of ourselves. And oftentimes, I think they have here embarrassment in traditional Tibetan Buddhist terms is seen as a positive state of mind. In that to be embarrassed about doing something wrong in front of others. In terms of oneself, one has conscience, to be embarrassed in front of yourself.
Then the third way of helping to keep our vows is understanding the vows, all the various details of the vows, and what would constitute contradicting the vows or acting as a cause of not keeping the vows. So understanding the vows in detail, what they’re about, so we don’t have any doubts about whether we’re keeping the vow or not. And fourthly, making effort in purifying. If you do act in contradiction to the vow, I mentioned these four opponent powers that we can apply. Making effort in applying these four opponent powers to purify the vow and renewing the vow, taking them again.
And lastly, fifthly, trying to find contentment with one’s possession. Trying to find contentment with what one has. There is less likelihood that one will break one’s vows if one is content. Dalai Lama mentions four main causes for breaking our vows. One of them is lack of knowledge, simply not understanding what our vows are about.
The second one is disrespect. It doesn’t matter to you that I made this commitment in front of my teacher or in front of whatever. Not having the respect for having committed oneself, made promises in front of these individuals. Non conscientiousness: it doesn’t matter, I don’t care. Not being careful.
And finally, having many afflictive emotions: having lots of attachment, desire, hatred, whatever. Those are the four main causes for breaking vows. And then finally, a quotation about the vows in general, these three levels ethics, are in terms of the three levels or three vehicles. Sometimes Buddhism is divided into three vehicles: the lesser vehicle, sometimes called the individual vehicle the greater vehicle, sometimes called the universal vehicle and then the vehicle of secret mantra or tantra. Discipline in Sanskrit is sila.
We talked about what that word meant. Śīla means a sense of coolness, a sense of refreshing. That which is positive has a sense of refreshing, one invigorating, one feels better simply by involving oneself in those types of actions. And in Tibetan, it is tsultrim. tsultrim means proper or appropriate.
Trim means regulation, law or norm. So tsultrim is practicing proper conduct or proper discipline according to the example of the Buddha. During his lifetime, the Buddha established disciplinary rules of conduct that are strictly applied in monastic life. These are called the Vinaya in Sanskrit or Dulwa in Tibetan. Both Vinaya and Dulwa literally mean taming.
So in general, Vinaya can be understood as any discipline that we practice in order to tame our being. In the Hīnayāna, Hīnayāna means lesser vehicle. The only way to conduct ourselves is according to the message of the message of discipline. Through practicing the proper conduct of sultrym, our body, speech and mind are thoroughly tamed and we are able to quell or cool off the heat of neurosis. Because of that, we are able to practice the greater Mahāyāna discipline of not causing harm to ourselves and others.
And finally, based upon practicing such total discipline, we are able to achieve what is called individual liberation. Individual liberation is a tremendous accomplishment which enables us to express our basic goodness as human beings. Then the Mahāyāna, Mahāyāna or the great vehicle, is like the wide open highway in contrast to the narrow path of the Hīnayāna discipline. The Mahāyāna goes beyond the Hīnayāna idea of individual liberation alone. Its aim is the liberation of all sentient beings, which means that everyone, everything is included in the vast vision of Mahāyāna.
All the chaos and confusion and suffering of ourselves and others is part of the path. The primary discipline of the Mahāyāna is helping others, putting others before ourselves. The training of the Mahāyāna practitioner is to exchange himself for others. As a well known Mahāyāna slogan puts it, gain and victory to others, loss and defeat to oneself. However, it should be clear that this attitude is not based upon self denial or martyrdom, but rather springs from the development of a genuine warmth and compassion.
Thus, the Mahāyāna is expansive and embracing. The third yana or vehicle, the vajrayana, tantric vehicle, secret mantra vehicle, they are all the same, Literally means the diamond or indestructible vehicle. The idea of indestructibility here is the discovery of indestructible wakefulness, the discovery of our own innate awakened state of mind or vajra nature. vajrayana is a continuation of the previous two yanas, vehicles, and that without proper training in the Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna discipline, is impossible to step into the tantric path. So these levels of prescribed ethics build one upon the other.
In terms of the vows of individual liberation, basically we stop hurting ourselves. We’re trying to stop continually harming ourselves. We begin to help ourselves. We begin to find a way to help in a real sense of solving our problems in a very profound manner until we finally achieve liberation from all our problems altogether. In that context, Once we become sincere with our own problems, seeing our own difficulty, our own suffering and becoming inspired that there is a way out of our suffering, we then extend the same understanding to others.
And we see that they’re just like ourselves. They’re in the same position with very much the same problem, going through the same difficulties, the same suffering. And they want to be happy just like myself, no difference whatsoever. And how would I feel if I were in their position? So as an extension, first we become compassionate with ourselves and this takes the form of developing a determination to be free.
In order to express that in our everyday life, we guide ourselves by these training rules of the ethics of individual liberation. But we go on from there and extend the same understanding that we have toward ourselves, our own problems, to others. And we call this compassion. Or another way to express it is determination to free others. First we have this you know, if we can’t develop this determination for ourselves to change when we know our own difficulties so intimately and directly, how can we ever develop a genuine, sincere commitment and desire to help others to change when we only know their difficulties, their problems, second handedly, vicariously.
It begins at home, understanding our own problems, developing the determination to be free, to be free of our own compulsive neurotic patterns, then extending our understanding of our own situation to others and thereby developing compassion and developing the determination to help them to be free from their problems, from their neurotic compulsive patterns. Then we have entered into the great vehicle in which we not only cease harming others, but we actually try to help them. Then based upon that, we take the quickest means and heighten our intention such that we have to practice the most skillful and quickest means to develop the abilities to benefit others. And this is said to be the vehicle of secret mantra. And based upon that, this heightened intention to benefit others, to help others.
We then take the vows of engaging the training and the ethics of secret mantra. So there’s a building of our motivation and with that motivation seeing the usefulness of the training principles involved in each of the levels of ethics. But fundamental to all of ethics, as was mentioned previously, is observing the ten abandonments of the ten unskillful actions. This we can all do to some respect at some level, whatever we’re doing. And we can all do this, and this is the way we can begin to substantially help ourselves.
People often ask, I have this problem or I have this problem. How can I solve this difficulty or this difficulty? And they can’t in many respects, because their entire life is something of a chaos. Life is full of confusion and conflict. So it’s like trying to pull in Tibetan we have an expression, pulling hair out of butter.
Nothing clings to it. It’s sort of independent of the butter around it. And people have a sense that this problem independent of the way they’re living their life, of their overall quality of their existence, their attitudes and all their activities in which they engage in. Our problems are enmeshed. They’re mutually interdependent with everything that we’re doing.
And so we can begin to clean up our act. And then perhaps we’re going to still have problems, but they won’t be as frequent, they won’t be as forceful, they won’t cause us to throw us off balance as they might have. And rather than seeing situations in isolation, seeing them as part of our life. And as I mentioned previously, we are not separate from our life. We don’t stand apart from our flow of our life.
And ethics helps us to integrate principles into our life. Anybody have any comments, questions? Think many of these monastic vows were culturally male of that time and they have to be seen in that regard. Some of the vows have to deal with, for example, a nun is not to live by herself, set off at a certain distance from anyone else because it was dangerous, safety. So many of the vows are that they weren’t supposed to walk on a road at night by themselves.
They had to be accompanied by another nun. So in that situation, in that society, in that culture, these were very practical training rules to observe. And today they would probably be useful. They would have to be interpreted and they might not be applicable to today’s society. But there were more.
Was thought, and maybe this is male chauvinism, a man, a monk, could live in isolation in less danger than a woman. And however you might think about that, that was thought in those days. So there are many more vows with respect to that. Yeah. It’s interesting.
You’re not supposed to read them before you take the vows. You don’t know what the vows are before you take them. That’s right, except the Bodhisattva vows. The other vows, for example, the monks or nuns vows, it is said that if you were to read them before you took them, you might become so discouraged you might not take them. One has the sense of driving force, They’re so highly motivated, I don’t care what they say.
I’ve got to free myself. I don’t care what they say. I know they’re going to help me. I’m going to try my best to observe them. And so you take them without even knowing what they are.
Interesting. The bodhisattva vows can be studied previous to taking them. But the vows of the monk and the nun, the renunciate vows, pervasionary nun, novice and fully ordained, and the vows of secret mantra are not known before you take them. What do they promise? As I mentioned, on the basis of ethics, go into develop meditative concentration.
And on that basis, we develop wisdom. So they an integral part of the method for finding happiness. I think we will begin to recognize ethics. I think psychology is beginning to see ethics as a necessary component to mental health. I think it’s beginning to become recognized more and more.
I talked at length about ethics, actually. I thought we’d finish it in one session, but it’s taken four weeks. That word ‘sila’ in Sanskrit, the sense of refreshing, cooling. I think that does not necessarily contain modern man or modern persons, we’re so perhaps out of touch with how we feel that we don’t notice the subtle destructive influence of acting in contradiction to our conscience has on ourselves. Perhaps we are meant to lie, to steal.
I think it has a subtle destructive influence on our peace of mind, on the way we feel about ourselves, on the quality of our lives. But we’re so orientated to materialism that we mistakenly think by having gotten this, by whatever means, I’m happy. We never question as to whether we’re experiencing happiness or not. But in fact I think we would see that we’re really experiencing a low level of suffering, agitation. There’s no ease, there’s no peace.
There’s no feeling of, there’s only a sense of paranoia. There’s a sense of internal conflict between you have to split with yourself and you have to deny a part of yourself. And lot of mental illness is a component of mental illness because we’re not whole any longer. I mentioned, I think