Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A vivid image anchors this 45-minute talk: Ven Jampa Gendun describes a day at the beach — sunburned, stuffed with junk food, still empty — to show how we instinctively seek refuge in mundane pleasures with the same desperate conviction Buddhism reserves for the Triple Gem. He then maps the eight worldly concerns (pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and infamy, praise and criticism) as the engine of habitual, self-centered life, arguing that real growth requires willingly tolerating legitimate discomfort. The session culminates in a guided perspective-exchange meditation where participants imaginatively inhabit four different people — a coworker, a stranger in need, someone they’re in conflict with — and look back at their former self from the outside. A short survey of the two truths and the three scriptural collections closes the talk.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 OtE 1991 09 25.mp3
UUID: 1bda1807-1e69-40a0-9cef-81f922225bea
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-09-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~1,847
And this is the continual process of readjusting our motivation going for refuge. The phrase taking refuge is borrowed from its traditional context, the often repeated Buddhist declaration of faith in the teachers, teachings and spiritual community. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.
To make the point that taking refuge in military transitory pleasures is something we are doing all the time with almost a religious fervor and conviction. For example, one day we may think, oh, I’m so depressed. I think I’ll go to the beach. So we drive to the ocean, jump in the water, play around like fish, and then lie down to fry in the sun. When this becomes worrying, we think, now I’m hungry.
Where’s the refresh stand? Then we stuff ourselves with as much junk food as possible, hoping to find some satisfaction in the ice cream, popcorn, Coke, and chocolate we are devouring. We take refuge in these things as a way out of our depression and boredom, only to end up fat and sunburned. When Buddhism speaks of taking refuge it is emphasizing the importance of breaking out of this desperate, unfulfilling search for satisfaction. Taking refuge involves a changing of our attitude.
We cease to be tossed this way and that by the changing fortunes of our lives and gain the space to begin tapping into our inner potential. As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, this realigning of our allegiance from the ordinary criteria based upon which we generally lead our lives. The criteria of hopes and fears, hope for pleasure, fear of pain. Anything that we see is going to become painful and automatically turn away from it. And therefore we miss the opportunity for growth, the legitimate suffering that growth may entail.
So, you know, this gaining some perspective on our problems and going beyond being tossed by these waves of hopes and fears, hopes of pleasure, fear of pain, hope of gain, fear of loss, hope of fame, fear of infamy, hope of praise, fear of criticism. And in the business of freedom, there’s no growth. And life based on such criteria as a mode of thinking, mode of way of thinking, as a way of acting. So I guess more than anything you’d say, trying to create some space, trying to between our habitual reflex action of avoiding pain the moment it arises. Determine all our actions, verbal, physical and mental in terms of what I hope or what my expectation the pleasure, my fear, the pain.
That we are we are willing to perhaps forgo some expectations. We are perhaps willing to experience some difficulties voluntarily because we see it as a combination of anxiety and faith. Anxiety in terms of if I don’t change, these same compulsive neurotic patterns which have constituted my life up to now are going to perpetuate. They’re just going to keep rolling on. My life is going to react very much as it has in the past and developing some some sense of anxiety about that and having faith in growth amongst all the various components, methods that you implement in the course of your everyday life that you make use of.
Taking time to maintain our awareness on how to relate with people and ourselves, maintaining awareness of what is important, values, ethical values, maintaining awareness of the necessity to to take some time and some space for yourself to carry on some sort of practice. So in this process, the internal aim of our life becomes awakening growth. And this is personified in the paradigm of sanity of the Buddha. And it is achieved by means of and in the supportive context by the spiritual community, the Sangha. And highest assembly.. And the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving any other perfection, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
And it’s a commitment to communication in an open way as much as able we’re able to open our heart to leaving open as best as we can. It doesn’t come major techniques is awakening our heart, opening our heart to others, the exchange and equalizing self to others. And we began it a few weeks ago in developing on the basis of developing a sense of equality of self and others. Essentially, the feeling that one wants to get is to quit objectifying others. In a sense, we quit looking upon others as things out there almost as if they are mere objects which are there for our use, for our pleasure as it were.
But they have feelings. Everyone in this room has feelings just like myself. They all want to be happy. They don’t want to suffer just like myself. No difference.
Which means in a way you have to alter the way you relate with people. You have to alter the way you you deal you lead your life. But it’s not to say that, you know, the idea of growing or And then we begin to look at the nature of the way we relate to others in terms of habitual, egocentric approach to life. And we begin to see that in in terms of analyzing the disadvantages of self-centeredness And then tonight, the actual exchange of self to others. And we’re going to play a role.
We’re going to take the position of another person. We’re trying to go beyond our usual singular, self-centered perspective and try to become a little more gain a more multifaceted perspective, universal perspective. Be able to see situations out of other people’s eyes rather than just our own. To develop the flexibility of mind to see the same situation in other points of view. So this involves actually setting aside your your habitual ways of reacting and try as best you can to feel what the other person may be feeling.
We can’t feel that person’s feeling but we can estimate how they might be feeling and we can try to as best we can induce that quality as we might think they might be feeling. So try to feel how that person feels and then we’re going to look back at our former self. So we’re going to change our perspective for a moment. We’re going to play a role with different people. So we’re going to begin with mindfulness of breathing. So if you’ll take a comfortable firm posture making use of the two techniques if it’s useful, if it’s helpful.
Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you can hear me breathing.
Take a firm comfortable posture. First, getting you know, using if it’s helpful, the techniques of counting and noting. First, get in touch with the body. Become aware of any, you know, tightness or tension within the body, especially around the shoulders and neck. There’s nowhere to go for the next few minutes.
Nothing to think And look back at your former I think of someone that you you see every day, someone perhaps you work with or that you an acquaintance. You put yourself in their place. Try to feel their feelings. Take their thoughts. See the world out of their own.
I think of a derelict, a beggar in the park. And then you see your former self walking down the street. And you walk up to your former self and you hold out your hand. What do you see in your eyes of your former self? Think of someone you’re having some problems with, a disagreement.
Put yourself in their place. Try to see the situation from out of their own. Try to see how your former self is presenting their side of the argument. And what do you see? What do you feel towards your former self?
Do you for these four individuals. It’s that they’re distinct needs and wants. Their longings. A different feeling for each one of them. Just be aware of how they are distinct and how relating to them is helping us.
Then within the context of the Buddhist teachings and methods set out to help us solve our problems, the teachings are in terms of the two truths, conventional truth and and the ultimate truth. Conventional truth helping us to become well adjusted individuals. The ultimate truth helping us to become liberated individuals. That the Buddha didn’t teach one level of reality, but taught two levels, the mundane and the transmundane. And the third chapter, it a grouping of the actual teachings of the Buddha in the way they’re categorized.
You know, it’s said that the Buddha taught two things. He taught suffering and the way to go beyond suffering. The rest he left to university philosophy teachers I think. Anyway, he left to a theologist. He was very pragmatically orientated.
He wanted to deal with the actual problems that we experienced and how to solve them. You know by understanding all the various conventionalities, the things about it, you know we talked in terms of for example the aggregates, body and mind essentially, the various constituent elements, the various categorizations of form of the truth, etcetera. By understanding all of this we can begin to find a predominance of happiness within these conventional patterns. As I just mentioned, we can become well adjusted neurotic. We can can become, we can start to get along with the ache.
We can become well adjusted to our fear. But we can’t simply based upon that go beyond our fears altogether. And therefore he went on to as a basis of teaching the ultimate truth, taking the conventional truth. Understanding the conventional truth as a basis and then seeing these in terms of their ultimate nature. The way to become liberated, to liberate the mind from the afflicted emotions, from these disturbing patterns, these neurotic compulsive patterns and thereby to go beyond our suffering.
So teaching the nature that in fact we are suffering, acknowledging that fact very deeply, beginning to discern the causes of that suffering, the possibility of going beyond that suffering, and the means which takes us beyond our present dissatisfaction. The Buddha taught eighty-four thousand bundles of Dharma or eighty four thousand doctrines to help us to simply to work with our afflictive emotions to work with our problems. These oral teachings, these verbal teachings are strictly speaking what we call the Dharma. After his death, these various verbal teachings were categorized, were collected and included into what are called the three scriptural collections or traditionally the three baskets. This collection of teaching, three categories.
The scriptural collection of sets of discourses. Anyway, you probably may have heard the the Sanskrit is the three collections, scriptural collections of and then the set of discourses, the Abhidharma or manifest knowledge. So there are these three collections. Scriptural collections sometimes referred to as baskets. There’s sūtra or discourses, the Vinaya or discipline, and then there’s Abhidharma or manifest knowledge, sometimes called the higher teachings.