Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute commentary, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a contrast between direct perception and conceptual thinking before turning to the session’s main theme: what selflessness actually means. Along the way he argues for “misknowledge” over “ignorance” — the root problem is active distortion, not passive not-knowing. Two images carry the argument: green snow visible through tinted goggles (the fabricated self exists only for a distorted mind) and a road map whose lines are not roads (not every symbol corresponds to reality). He distinguishes the conventional, functioning self from the fantasized, reified self that has never existed, maps Buddhism’s four tenet schools as rungs of a graduated ladder, and announces he will work at the accessible “hearer stage,” where the fabricated self is defined as singular, unchanging, and independent. The session closes with a probing Q&A on where the conventional I stands in relation to body and mind.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 OtE 1992 02 26.mp3
UUID: 546a6352-09a1-407b-a6cc-af50cb4e762f
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: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~4,939
Symbol, language, model of the things about us. And we can think about things. We can know things that we can’t know directly. I can think about what Moscow might be like. I have all these various images, symbols, concepts in my mind, and I can put them all together and have some understanding of what Red Square might be like.
But I’ve never been there. It’s not directly accessible to me. Generic entities. Generic means general, in the sense that I’m not knowing a particular. I think about children.
And I can use that symbol, that image, and I can do a lot of it’s quite useful. Are three children next door. There are thirty children at this particular school. But it’s no particular child. It is a generality of a child.
It’s quite interesting how we come up with these generality. That would be another thought process. Whereas direct perception knows the detail, the richness, the specific characteristics. Whereas conceptual thinking knows the general characteristics. So there’s a difference.
Each way of the mind, the direct perception, that means the mind knows directly without the medium of concept, and then thinking process. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. In general, in thinking, we can know things which aren’t directly accessible, which we cannot see, which aren’t present physically before. I can think about things on the other side of the world and understand them. But I can’t know them in their full, rich, vividness, their specific characteristics.
Whereas direct perception, I can know things in their specific characteristics, their actual vividness and reality. But they have to be definitely in my physical presence. They have to be accessible to my senses. The wisdom realizes ultimate reality by way of meaning generalities, by way of mental images is one type of wisdom. Then there’s the wisdom realizing conventionality.
There’s the wisdom and skills in the five sciences. So we live in these five types of sciences linguistics, logic, and epistemology. Epistemology being the way we know things. The third is art. Fourth is medicine.
And the fifth is inner sciences, the way in which our minds are operating. So these are called the five sciences. So there’s this wisdom of the scholastics, the body of knowledge. Then there’s the wisdom realizing how to bring about the welfare of sentient beings, which refers to knowing how to achieve the present and future welfare of sentient beings without impropriety. So there are these three types of wisdom.
And His Holiness goes on to say that amongst these three types of wisdom, we must achieve the most important of them unless the wisdom realizes selflessness. The wisdom realizes selflessness. So all our problems, all our neurotic patterns have as their source, their foundation, misknowledge. I like the word misknowledge. Generally, it’s used in English the term ignorance.
Ignorance has some other connotations, I think. Actually, it’s more in keeping with the Tibetan means knowledge. Means it’s a negating particle. It’s a misknowledge. It’s more active.
It’s an active misdistorting, not simply a passive not knowing. It’s an active distorting process. So misknowledge, wrong knowing. It’s just simply not a passive not knowing. So this misknowledge is a misconception, in particular as to the nature of the self And the two types of self which His Holiness is presenting, the self of person and the self of phenomena.
The self of person and the self of phenomena. And it sounds rather strange to talk about the self of phenomena. But it won’t take a perhaps when we come to an understanding of what this self means. By phenomena, why do we make this division? Why is this division made?
All things whatsoever are included in these two categories, person and phenomena. Like a phenomenon, it simply means everything, every object which is not a person. Actually we should say sentient beings, but it’s easier to say, or living beings. It’s easier to say person. It’s more meaningful for us to say person.
But when we say person, it should be understood we mean living beings. So there is the category of living beings, and then there’s the category of phenomena which are non living beings. And this simply we call phenomena. So there’s the self of living beings, the self of persons, and the self of phenomena. And there’s misconceptions with respect to these two categories, which is the source of all our difficulties and problems, all our very compulsive patterns which govern our lives.
Due to ignorance, due to this misknowledge, we superimpose an attribute upon ourselves and upon things about it which they do not possess. So due to the factor of the influence of this knowledge, this distorting quality, it is a particular mental factor within our mind. There are fifty one secondary mental factors. Misknowledge is one of those. Due to this distorting factor of our awareness, we attribute characteristics, attributes to phenomena and ourselves which they do not possess in reality.
We imbue them with a sense of, as Grant mentioned, some sort of solidity or concreteness which they don’t possess. This is a reifying tendency. Reifying, I think, maybe a good word. It means to make something solid which is in fact insubstantial, to give something more substantial to look at than it actually has in fact. This reifying tendency of misknowledge.
We project what getting at the word we mean by self. We project a fantasized way of existing. We project. We superimpose means to attribute. Like for example, saw somebody with a frown on their face.
And they said, oh, you aren’t happy with me. What did I do wrong? And oh, that’s just a projection. I have a headache. There was a basis, a frowning face.
And we projected something, a motivation, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual situation. We superimposed, for one reason or another, an attribute upon that which didn’t correspond with the actual situation. This person wasn’t angry at us but we projected on them as if we supposed that they did. So we are projecting upon objects something that they don’t have, something which isn’t in the actual situation. And this is a fantasized way of existing.
This fantasized way of existing is what we mean by self. Fantasized way it is an imaginary way of existing. Things exist and they have a way of existing. And we impose, due to the symptoms of misknowledge, a type of way of existing which in fact they don’t have. And this is what we mean by self.
So in the text it talks about selflessness. So we have to know what is less something. Less means a lack of, an absence of. And it is absence of a self, a type of self. You have to begin to distinguish it.
In the term selflessness, that self refers to fantasized way of existing. There is an absence of a fantasized way of existing. There is an emptiness, if you like, of a fantasized way of existing that objects do not have, That objects are selfless. They do not have this fantasized way of existing. They are empty of that fantasized way of existing.
They lack that imaginary way of existing. So when we use the term selflessness, we don’t mean there’s no self. I, me, persons, that objects do not have their own identity, that I don’t have my own identity. In fact, they do. This self specifically refers to a fantasized way of existence which we call self, a type of self, a very concrete and reified self.
And objects do not possess that. They lack that. They are empty of that. So when we use this term selflessness, it’s especially important to keep this in mind when we’re referring to the selflessness of a person. It does not mean that the term selflessness does not have anything to do with morality.
You should be more selfless. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that we have a self, we don’t have a self. I can’t deny that I have a self. I have a self. Self, I, and person are synonymous terms.
They’re interchangeable. Self, I, and person. In general when we’re talking about people, animals have a self. They have an I. All living beings have a self.
Buddhas have a self. So when we talk about selfless, that doesn’t mean that we say we’re denying that you have a self. We’re saying that you lack a way of, a fantasized way of existence. And I exist. I eat, I talk, I drink water.
I’m happy, I’m sad. I have a self which each talks. The self is happy. The self is sad. The self exists, but exists in a particular way.
And we have to begin to understand the way it doesn’t exist. Therefore, I come to understand the way it does exist. So what is being referred to in the term selflessness is not the conventionally existent self, which is able to carry out all of the various functions. There is a conventionally existent self which wakes up in the morning, brushes his teeth, eats breakfast, goes to work, lays around the house like I do. And then in the evening, lunch, eats lunch, etcetera, comes home, plays with the kids, whatever, and goes to bed.
That self is a functional being It’s able to carry out a particular function. And this is what we mean by conventionally existent self. It’s able to carry out all the functions which we attribute to people, to self, to an eye. And this is the conventional existence. What is being referred to in the term selflessness is a totally fabricated self, a type of self which has never existed, does not exist now, and never will exist.
It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It’s very tricky because we talk about egoism. And I think this is not so good because ego exists. I mean, then we can’t talk about egoism.
We’re saying that we’re trying to get rid of something that once existed or we should get rid of it because it does exist. It’s never existed. There’s nothing to get rid of. It’s completely imaginary fabricated self. It has never existed.
If something exists, it cannot be refuted. All we can refute is the false belief that something exists. And this is what we’re doing. And we have the misconception. This fabricated self only exists for misconception.
It only exists for misconception. For a valid conception, for a valid mind it doesn’t exist. It only exists like when wear sunglasses and you go out in the snow mountain. You see green snow. There’s no such thing as green snow.
But it appears. That snow appears. For a person who’s wearing sunglasses, green snow exists for that particular person. For a nondistorted awareness that has seen the actual fact of the color of the snow, green snow doesn’t exist. So the self appears to exist for a particular awareness.
And that awareness is this knowledge, misconception, wrong, invalid awareness. For that type of awareness, the self exists. But by refuting, by contradicting that misbelief, that misconception, we refute its object. It’s not as if we’re trying to get rid of something that actually exists. That object of misconception, that green snow doesn’t exist.
It never has existed. It doesn’t exist. So we’re not trying to get rid of something. We’re not trying to do that. Like a growth, a cancer, which is bad to have.
Let’s get rid of it. It’s never been there. So there’s a conventional self. Upon this conventional self, which is quite difficult to understand, it’s actually more difficult to understand the nature of the conventional self than this fabricated self as we are finding out just by thinking about The nature of the convention itself is very subtle. It’s easier to come to an understanding of ultimate truth than conventional truth, even though all of these things about us are conventional truth.
But anyway, so upon this conventional self we impose a fantasized way of existence. We reify, we solidify, concretize the self into a type of self which in fact doesn’t exist. We impose misconceptions upon it. So the description of this fantasized way of existing that we project on objects becomes more and more subtle as we move up through the philosophic system. And within Buddhism, there are the Buddha gave innumerable eighty four thousand bundles of Dharma.
He didn’t teach one truth. And he didn’t teach in one way. And he didn’t teach at one level. Because this is what is meant by his skill in being able to lead a particular disciple at that particular time that he taught in keeping with that particular person’s disposition, capacity, where that person was at that particular moment. So he would teach A to this person, B to that person, or not A to that person, and not B to this person.
If he thought it would be a benefit to that person in leading them along the spiritual path at that particular time in their life. He even talked to some students that there existed a complete thought, which is totally the opposite, totally the opposite of his final view. But this was necessary at this particular time, for this particular disciple, this student. So all this huge body of system of teaching, they began to categorize, they formed he didn’t do this. These various students later on began to systematize his teaching.
And they began to see that there was a graduated subtlety in moving up with respect to reality, the ultimate reality. First he presented here different coarse presentations on the nature of reality. And he presented more subtle presentations, more subtle, more subtle. And finally he presented his final view, which he said this is definitive. This is it.
I have nothing more to say. This is my final view. The others were skillful means to get you to this state, like moving up the rungs of a ladder. Unless you step on the first rung, it’s hard as hell to get on the second rung. And it’s impossible to get on the third.
So he wanted to bring his students gradually to his final view. The final view would have freaked him out. There’s no way. There’s no way they could have arrived at him. I know this is the case.
No, we would freak out, as I make sense. If we began to get a glimpse of the ultimate view of emptiness as presented by the middle way school, Our minds wouldn’t be prepared. Would just be too short. We have to sort of, what have we got in there? What would be good analogy?
So we have to be of led along like children through the various levels so we can be accustomed to, and our mind expands, our ability to think more deeper and have the personal power to be able to tolerate the possible fears and insecurity which arise when reality begins to look shaky. Things aren’t so hard and solid as they appear. And we start with the view of naughty realism. Things are out there solid and hard and don’t bug me. I want some kind of security in my life.
I want something to hold on to. That’s where most people are at. So even in modern contemporary particle physics, things aren’t quite solid. Table which appears to our consciousness to be so very solid, it’s just a mass of whirling energy, electrons and atoms. It’s just not all that solid.
It’s a little shaky even at that level. But we’re quite sophisticated. We can kind of accept that. Can you imagine a peasant in an Indian village two thousand five hundred years ago? He starts talking about this isn’t so solid.
After all, it’s made up of elements. They don’t sleep as well at night. It makes the world feel insecure. You want the world to be in its proper place and solid. That’s why we invent ego.
That’s why we invent ourselves, because we’re afraid of an open, fluid way of relating. Want to secure itself in space and time. We want something to hold on to. So there’s this graduated system of what we call tenets. And there’s four main tenets, four main philosophical categorizations of the teaching, one being rung to the next one being more subtle than the next until you come to the final view of the Buddha, which is called the middle way view.
For the middle way view, and specifically within the middle way view, there’s the Autonomy Middle Way view and the consequence of middle way view. So even this middle way view, there’s a coarser and a more subtle presentation of the nature of reality. There’s some degree of difference within even this particular final school, the highest school. There is no difference with respect to I’m bringing this up because his holiness points it out. There is no difference between the subtlety of the selflessness of phenomena, glasses this is the phenomena, glass, books, tables, houses and the subtlety of the selflessness of the person, people, dogs, cats.
There’s no degree in the subtlety between the selflessness of a person and the selflessness of phenomena. But it is said it is easier to come to an understanding of the selflessness of a person than it is to come to an understanding of the selflessness phenomena. Why? Because we’re more familiar with the self of a person. It’s a very immediate experience.
It’s difficult enough to get an understanding of what we mean by the self of person in the term selflessness. It would be even more difficult to come to an understanding of what we mean by the self of a table in the term selflessness. What do we mean by the self of a table? In His Holiness presentation, his explanation of selflessness is primarily based upon the presentation of the Consequentialist Middle Way school. The Consequentialist Middle Way school represents the final thought of the Buddha on the nature of reality.
There was no more subtle. There was no more profound. There was nothing further to go. There was nowhere to go. This was the end point of his realization, his final point.
But I think it would be much more useful for the present if we were to discuss in selflessness in terms not of the Consequentialist Middle Way school but on a selflessness of what is called the hearer stage and supplement that whenever appropriate with the differences in accordance with the consequence of Middle Way school. So we’re going to be proceeding with the same analysis his Holiness uses, but we’re going to use slightly different coarser description of the fantasize way of existing. There are four discernible stages in coming to an understanding of the nature of reality. There’s what’s called the hero stage, the Mind Only stage, the autonomy middle way stage, and the Consequentialist Middle Way stage. As I said, these are like rungs of a ladder.
We can supplement with the higher, but I thought it might be most useful and I think it’s much more accessible and relevant initially to work at this hearer level, this first stage. And then once we know the method of procedure of analysis, in further teaching, it will be quite useful. And you can kind of plug that in. But also I can’t go into it very deeply, but we also have a discover it roughly. And that’s an important point.
Hopefully, relevantly, that it will be some point of reference, but I can’t go into it in detail. I don’t think that’s good understanding. I think that Khensur Rinpoche is going to teach you a particular text, a short, what’s called a sūtra, a discourse of the Buddha called the Heart of Wisdom, which is probably the most important sūtra, even though it’s only one page long, in terms of describing the ultimate nature of reality. You won’t be Well, I’m sure the school could explain it in terms of themselves. But it will be explained in terms of the Consequentialist school.
Each school thinks they’ve caught the challenge. And they think they’ve got it all. They think they have their final And they can put up very forceful arguments of why they think they are. It’s not easy. I mean these people aren’t stupid.
They’re quite brilliant, even at the lower tenets. Some of the greatest minds of Buddhism help the views of the lower tenets. So people want to jump to the best, the highest, immediately. And then you may gather information but you probably haven’t, as was mentioned at the very onset of tonight, you haven’t figured it out for yourself. And it doesn’t.
It’s not something that we’re our culture and society doesn’t put too much emphasis or weight or importance in our examinations in universities and etc. As long as you’re able to regurgitate the right answers at the right time, you are said to be competent. Shucks. We didn’t get very far, didn’t we? So one thing I guess we could think about over the week.
The type of self we’re going to be describing in terms of the hearer stage is a singular, unchanging, independent self. Singular, Another word for singular is homogeneous, unitary, unchanging, independent self. That’s the self we’re going to be looking at. And this is seen. This is the fantasized way of existing that we’re going to be looking at.
We have a belief due to this, which is unconscious at present, we have a model of a self, a symbol. And if the mind is using languages in terms of symbols to represent something. Now the thing about symbols, just like on a road map, the little lines, the red lines and the black lines, the little circles. Those little circles aren’t cities. There’s a little circle.
But they stand for the city. They represent cities, but they are not cities. The map is not the territory. And these little lines, you can’t drive on those little lines. They never fit.
They aren’t made of bitumen. But they stand for it. They represent something. They correspond to a reality, something which exists physically. So language, words, are just like the lines on a map, these circles.
They stand for something. We often mistake the word. We often mistake the map for the territory. We mistake the word for the reality. So when we say I, that I stands for something.
It has what we call a referent. When I say the glass is on the table, it makes sense. Glass has a referent. Table has a referent. And I can juxtapose those symbols in my mind and I can come up with some meaning, which is valid.
If you tell me the glass, I know you say, go get my book which is on the table in the next room. I can go in there and lo and behold, I bring back a book. It’s very mysterious, but I do. These symbols that you communicate to me have some meaning from me and they have some correspondence to reality. But not all symbols correspond to reality.
We believe in they do. So if there is an I, I say I wake up in the morning and I weep in that. I prepare a talk and I give a talk. That I has a correspondence in reality. There is an I, a person.
But there’s another I which I use in the same way. I hate your guts. I feel I’m afraid of dying. I’m sad. I’m afraid of dying.
There’s an I which arises in response to emotional experiences, which is a symbol, just like the I that I make use of in terms of I’m going to the store. But the deceiving part of it is this I has no correspondence in reality. It’s the same word. An unconscious symbol that we’re processing or making use of. But one of these eyes is symbols for who I am, the model I have of myself, has a corresponding reality.
The other doesn’t. But I hold that they both do. I don’t even distinguish between them. This is where we go wrong. Not all symbols, not all language has a reference in reality.
No. I can say things which are horns on a rabbit’s head. That’s something which is used in debating quite a lot. Horns on a rabbit. I can say anything.
It doesn’t mean it actually exists. It has any correspondence in reality. And he said, so I said you could think about something over the next week. Think about the different uses of the word I. Especially the I which arises.
We have models, very complex symbols that the mind is using to process, to find ourselves in the world, to find our place in the world. And begin to think whenever you use the word I in your normal rational thinking state, and also but especially in your emotional state, when you’re jealous, when you’re angry. You say, I hate your guts. I’m afraid. That I, does that have any correspondence with reality?
What is the nature of that symbol? Anybody have any questions? Yeah. I just want to see if I can. Now, the conventional Yeah.
So, how many eyes do you have? When you say I’m walking to the store, do you feel like there’s a crowd walking to the store? Or just one person walking to the store? One. So is there an I which corresponds to the mind and an I which corresponds to the body?
The mind is not physical. The I is physical and non physical. Both physical and non physical. One tends to mutually exclusive. Can something be both matter and not matter?
Sometimes you say, you associate the I with the body. I stub my toe. I’m hurt. I’m hurt. If the body is hurt, we say I’m hurt.
Sometimes we associate with the mind. Happy thoughts are going on in the mind, we say I’m happy. So sometimes the I is associated with the body and sometimes with the mind. Which one is it? Is it both?
How about when there’s no awareness? Do I go out of existence? When I’m asleep, do I go out of existence when I’m asleep, deep sleep? Am I my body? I’m not my body.
I’m not my body. Are we talking about the physical body? No, it’s conventional. Empirical, actual.. The real thing.
Real thing. So is the I the body and the mind? The conventional functioning of the The and the mind that the string makes sense and the other. So does the eye have, the eye doesn’t have a body. Body.
I always say I have an arm. Is a legitimate statement? So I am not the No, no, no, no. About it. The conventional self doesn’t exist?.
We’re just talking about the conventional one. What do mean by it? You say I am the body. I am my body. I am the body.
I don’t have a body. In order to possess it has to be distinguished between that which possesses and the possessed. There has to be that distinguishment. So either if I am the body then I cannot have a body. So I don’t have a body.
I do have a body. So I am not the body. I have a mind. I am not the mind. I am the body and I am the mind??
Would you answer that question? It’s easier to come up with a question. That’s the trick. You keep asking questions. Oh, time’s out.
I cut this into parts. There’s the whole and there’s the parts. Are any of the parts the whole? None of the parts are the whole. How about the aggregation of the part?
Is that the whole? Simply the aggregation of part. Can we have why? In the right pattern. Can we have a whole with that part?
So are you brain processes and body function? You don’t have a sense that you’re more than that. But you don’t have a sense that your two eyes do. There’s one eye with physical processes and one with mental processes. There’s not two eyes on There’s one I which subsumes mental and physical processes.
Well, guess my only point was that the eye is designated, is imputed to, labeled to the body and mind. It is not the body and mind. And that’s the basis of imputation. That is the thing.
Get the case with time, it’s conventional. No, wait, wait, wait. In the entire conversation, we haven’t been talking about the fantasized I. This is all empirical, conventional eye. The eye which actually exists is merely imputed to the basis of the body and mind.
And dependence upon body and mind, we impute, grant, I, person, farmer, man. That is the valid existent I. What’s the fantasized I? That which is not dependent upon the body and mind. That which has no relationship to body and mind.
It has no correspondence in reality. There’s nothing which stands for it, which we can find. If I say where’s Leslie? There’s something I can find. Stands for something.
Leslie stands for something. I say the fantasize, there’s nothing that stands for it in reality. It’s simply a model I have, which I’m holding within my mind. It has no correspondence in reality.