Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a striking analogy: house slaves comfortable enough to mistake their captivity for freedom — a way of asking whether practitioners are genuinely seeking liberation or merely coping with saṃsāra. He argues that a subtle underlying anxiety is the normal texture of ego-based life, and that this very dissatisfaction is a sign of Buddha nature rather than pessimism. After addressing realistic timelines for practice and the three higher trainings of ethics, concentration, and wisdom, he leads a guided meditation: practitioners first induce an emotional memory to catch the “I” at work, then search methodically through body elements and consciousnesses for it — and find it unfindable. He closes by situating this exercise within the four philosophical schools that form a ladder toward the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka understanding of emptiness.
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File: 13 OtE 1992 03 11.mp3
UUID: 05b0b7d6-2106-4a17-af0c-7671c6823c73
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-03-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.1 minutes
Words: ~3,868
We’ll begin by adjusting our motivation. Setting the context for talking about the subject and about listening to the subject such that it becomes something more than a mechanical process, becomes something more than perhaps an object of our curiosity, something more than academic pursuit, gathering more information, that it becomes hopefully a method that we can use to help us to solve our problems. All our eighty four thousand problems, all our pervasive feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustrations, which we experience every day of our lives. This quality of distress, which permeates ego based existence. Whether we are aware of it or not, there’s always some underlying degree of distress.
There’s always an underlying degree of tension within our mind. And we’ve been looking at different methods whereby to relieve this tension, this distress, each there varies conflicts between both ourselves and others and within ourselves. And on one level through the practice of ethics we can begin to resolve the conflict and bring to harmony our thinking and our behavior. And based upon this dissolution of gross, distress, conflict, then we can move on to the higher training in concentration where we begin to create a harmony amongst the various elements within our own mind. There are feelings of elation, discrimination, where you become integrated around a focused focal object.
And then based upon that, we can begin to practice a higher training in wisdom in which we again bring into harmony. In this time, we bring into harmony our views, our concepts, our beliefs, our premises upon which we base our lives into accordance with the laws of reality. Both conventional and ultimate. So it’s a worthwhile process and we can it has some relevance for us in dealing with our problems. It’s simply not an abstraction.
So it might be hard to relate the emptiness of inherent existence to what’s happening out on the street when you get angry and things like this. But there is a connection, there is a relevance to what is being said. Buddha said that all of my teachings have only one taste, and that is the taste of freedom. That he only taught in order to help people to resolve their problems. He didn’t teach simply because he liked to hear the sound of his voice or that he wanted to impress people, but because he was trying his best out of compassion to, in some way, bring them along to a certain discovery which he had made, a reality which he had perceived, which was experienced as peace.
So, we all use our various methods to find the peace that we’re looking for to resolve our problems and our difficulties. And this is quite justifiable. Have every right to implement methods and whatever means we are scope enough to make use of in setting goals and achieving those goals as long as our methods don’t infringe upon others’ rights to achieve their goal. And amongst all our array of methods, we have spiritual methods, which are aimed at, as we’ve discussed in terms of the very first chapter in opening the eye of new awareness, at working with our problems on its deepest most level. So I think a lot of people come and go to Buddha House and to spiritual practice in general because they’re looking for a quick fix.
They’re looking for some easy easy way out of their difficulty, and it’s not easy way. There is no easy way. If there would have been, we would have discovered it by now. We would all be blissed out, but we aren’t. And if there would have been then the Buddha would have taught it, but he did not.
He tried to he didn’t try to make it difficult, but he did explain it as effectively and as skillfully as he could. And then it’s very much up to us according to our intelligence, according to our motivation, and according to the various conditions that we find ourselves in to implement as best we can in the course of our everyday life. But it’s I think if you look at if you look only at the short term then you could experience a lot of frustrations. You could think well, you know, either the Dharma doesn’t work or there’s something wrong with me or I’m applying it wrongly or maybe it takes time. Maybe I’m being a little too ambitious about my expectations aren’t being fulfilled.
Perhaps I have unrealistic expectations, perhaps some kind of disillusionment is necessary in the course of becoming a little bit humble and a little bit relaxed about relaxed in the sense about having realistic expectations. So I guess everyone has to check up for that whether this Dharma works, whether you have heard it correctly, whether you’re applying it correctly, or perhaps everything is going well in accordance with the laws of our reality in which we’re bound by the law of cause and effect. But it’s simply not living up to our expectations, perhaps we have to readjust our expectations and understand it may take a little bit longer than we had hoped or we would like. But that’s our reality, and we become a little more. And even that becomes a little bit of solace.
We can and we should be able to look over a period of time and think I’m a little bit kinder, I’m a little more caring, a little more patient. I have a little greater perspective on what’s happening to me and able to help others a little more effectively in dealing with what’s happening to them. And then I think we can feel good about that. And we can, you know, our practice is there’s some kind of taste on the end of our tongue where you have some kind of experience, something is happening, there’s some kind of change in our mind. And we can use this method amongst a variety of array of methods, and then our life becomes purposeful.
Something good is happening. We’re moving in a direction in this process of continually making our life, redirecting ourselves, reprioritizing, so that ten years from now we simply aren’t stuck in the same patterns that we are at present. There’s been some movement, some progress, some we’ve moved along the path, and we can feel good about that. We still might be experiencing confusion, but maybe it’s a higher order of confusion. Maybe it’s I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago how confused I am.
Sometimes, it took To get to my higher order of confusion, maybe it took eighteen years of practice, which is nice to think. It kind of gets you solid. It took me hard work to get to this level of confusion, which I think there’s something to that. I don’t know. I remember last week in the introduction of Buddhism class, when we were talking about distress and coping and suffering.
And there’s always one there’s someone who’s I think I appreciate their degree of honesty in speaking up and saying, I’m not suffering. You must be pretty bad off. Out of self defense, say things like, well, I think I don’t know if I mentioned this last week, but I was trying to think about this. And the fact is I try to think in images. My mind works easier in that way when I can come up with an analogy.
And I was thinking about in the southern United States during the slave period. Know, when there were the field slaves and there was the house slaves. And the house slaves had it very good. They had nice clothing. They got to eat the crumbs off the master’s table.
They probably slept better. And they would think how terrible it is to be a field slave, how difficult it was, and how wonderful it is to be a house slave. They’re getting all the time that they’re not free. That no matter how comfortable a prison cell might be, it’s not freedom and not being satisfied with merely coping. And also, I was interested in I read something in an article in Family Therapy about a man comes to a therapist and said, I’m always depressed.
I’m always depressed. And during the course of the conversation, it became apparent that what he calls normal, what therapist calls normal, this person calls depression. It’s a matter of meanings of the words that we use. When I say we’re always distressed, I can’t quite know what you I have an idea what I mean by that, but I can’t quite know what you And you you know, so we it’s difficult because we have to come together on our meanings perhaps. But I think I was just talking today with someone, and I know there’s a sense of I can experience when I get in touch with my feelings, I stop and quit acting, quit speeding around, quit distracting myself, there’s an underlying sense of anxiety.
And it’s very subtle, but it’s there. That’s not peace. That’s not fulfillment. That’s not where I like to be. So I guess it’s just a matter of whether you’re satisfied in being a house slave, what you call freedom, what you call happiness.
And the Buddha had an experience. And he said, Anything but freedom is dissatisfactory. That’s all. Anything but freedom is dissatisfactory. Anything but liberation is dissatisfactory.
Therefore, everything that we’re experiencing from the point of view of the Buddha is dissatisfactory. It’s not a pessimistic viewpoint, but that’s the terminology, that’s the meanings that we put on words. Anything that’s short of freedom, short liberation, short of ego transcending is not satisfactory. There’s something wrong. It’s not quite it.
It’s not what we can be, what we could experience. Unless if we become complacent and we will seek to maintain the status quo by default. It’s not to say that we always have to be continually bitching all the time. But if once we think, Oh, this is it, then you’re finished. Aachan Buddhadasa, a great Theravadan master, who is now living in Thailand, Every time your mind becomes you experience pleasure, it becomes superficial.
It’s only when it’s experiencing dissatisfaction that it begins to question. We never question why we’re happy. What is the cause of my happiness? We just kind of enjoy it. We go along with it.
We go with the flow. But it’s only when we suffer. Then we go, Why is this coming? Why am I experiencing it? And our mind begins to penetrate beneath the surface and tries to come up with some answers to these deep pressing questions.
So Buddhism is not pessimistic, but it does like to keep reminding us that until we have peace, let’s not be complacent. Let’s not get absorbed in what is less than we could be. Let’s not simply reinforce our existing patterns and maintain the status quo. Let’s find freedom and transcendence and realize the potential in becoming a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being. The fact that we experience dissatisfaction is an indication of our own Buddha nature.
It is a sign. That we want to be happy people. Our mind will naturally begin to move toward that happiness, whatever it might conceive of it to be, as long as it conceives that what at present is dissatisfactory. Once you begin to see the present situation as satisfactory, then you’re going to stop growing. But again, it’s not a matter I guess, what is it, a balance?
I don’t know. I guess it’s keeping that feeling of dissatisfaction in perspective, enjoying life as it comes along, but knowing part of your mind that there’s always something more to be experienced, more richer experiences and deeper experiences. So the central focus of our life becomes Buddha and the Buddha within ourselves. We actualize that Buddha by means of the Dharma, the techniques, the methods, the teachings, the truth, that whatever is able to motivate us, inspire us and open ourselves to our potential and help us to realize it, to fulfill it. And this is done in social context of a spiritual community.
Other individuals who choose, who take place as a central focus of their life, the qualities of growth of love and compassion and wisdom, and important values amongst all our other pursuits. These have become central to the focus of their lives, their internal lives, and supporting one another and helping one another. In every way we can, I think we need each other, we’re dependent upon each other? As I say quite often over and over again that mental health is a social phenomenon. It’s something that occurs within relationship.
That’s how we can know that we’re healthy, by our relationship. So others are dependent upon us and we are dependent upon them. And we seek to raise the level of this relationship, the level of the motivating force of our practice, such that we’re not doing it solely for ourselves, which would be self defeating since we’re not isolated individuals though it might appear that we are, but we exist in interdependence with others. And so recognizing this and beginning to act upon what this entails, that it is in helping others that we help ourselves. To the degree that we take responsibility, we will have to be able to respond.
And in trying to be able to respond, we will have to grow. And to the degree that we have to grow, it becomes a psychological necessity, we will grow. So altruism, as Dalai Lama has said, is the way that we can be wisely selfish. Out of altruism, out of a sense of caring for others, we will find more happiness, find more of everything that we want than we could have imagined simply seeking our own exaggerated self concerns, seeking our own purpose, seeking our own welfare alone. 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 in 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. 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.
So I thought we’d do the same meditation that we did last week. We would do mindfulness of breathing and then we try to identify the object of negation. The first of the four essentials ascertaining the object of negation. Trying to, in our own experience, try to have a feeling, try to identify. You know, we have a model of a type of self which arises, becomes most apparent in emotional situations.
Just as we have an I, a model of a type of self which has a correspondence to reality, we have a model of a type of self which does not correspond to anything which has ever existed. And this model becomes most apparent when we’re in emotional situations. When we’re angry, I hate you. When we’re full of pride, I think I’m beautiful. When we’re experiencing great joy, when we’re embarrassed.
That’s a good one, embarrassment. They’re cringing. I want to hide my face. There’s something to haunt you with. Don’t look at me.
Don’t look at me. All of the various afflictive emotions arise independently. The afflictive emotions are a sign that we are operating on the basis of this particular type of model of the nature of the self, of the I. It’s a sign, just like smoke is a sign of fire. The afflictive emotions are a sign that this type of I is at it.
We’re operating on the basis of this conception, this belief in a particular type of self. And here is the type of self that we can begin to look for. It is something which is singular. It doesn’t have any parts. It’s amorphous.
It’s unity. It is unchanging. It’s always been I’ve always been this way since I was a little boy. I remember my mom told me, I’ve always been this way. And I’ve always been going, I’m always going to be this way, unchanging, something about it.
Independent, you It’s not dependent upon my social context, not dependent upon whether I’m sick or not, not dependent upon my culture, not dependent upon my history, not dependent upon my body and mind. And see if you can identify with your own experience. And then we’re going to look for it, and we’re going to look for it in the same way that we did last week in terms of the elements. We’re going to go through where that eye appears. It appears somewhere over here.
So it’s quite natural that’s where we’re going to look for it. And we’re going to go through the body, looking at the various elements, and then we’ll look through the mind and see if it’s either within the body or the mind. So if you’ll take a comfortable but firm posture and begin with mindfulness of breathing. Using your imagination and your memory, try to induce an emotional experience, Embarrassment, fear, someone calling you stupid, sometime when you’re angry. But we want to watch the central figure that’s involved in that experience, the I, which is afraid, the I which is ashamed, the I which is angry.
With a part of your mind, try to identify what does that I look like, what does it feel like. Try to get a sense of it. Very subtly try to watch. So let’s examine, let’s analyze the body and mind to see if we can locate that I. Beginning with the body, with the earth element, all the very sense, solid dense parts of the body, moving down from the top of your head to the tip of your toe, all the organs and muscles and teeth and bones, all the solid bits.
Take them one by one and look at them, examine. Is this the I which appeared that felt humiliated, that felt ashamed, that felt afraid? Examining one by one the hard parts, the solid parts. And we’re going to look at the water element, all the fluids in the body, the blood, lymph, saliva, urine, moving down from the top of your head to the tip of your toe, analyzing, looking at all the fluids in your body, seeing whether any are the I. And then the fire element, the warmth of the body, the heat of the body is at the eye which appeared in this emotional situation.
And the wind energy element, the respiration, the flow of the breath, the various energies flowing throughout our body. And the space element, all the cavities in the body, the hollow parts, the spaces in the body, are those spaces, are they the I? And we’re going look at the consciousnesses. First, the eye consciousness, that which sees colors and shapes. That which sees colors and shapes, is that the I which was afraid, which felt ashamed?
Ear consciousness, that which hears sound. Nose consciousness, that which smells odors. Tongue consciousness, that which tastes flavor. In the body consciousness that which experiences objects of touch. And we’ll look at the mental consciousness.
We’ll look at first at feelings, pleasurable feelings, unpleasurable feelings, neutral feelings. Are they any of them the I? The perception, the patterns of discriminating thought. This is good. This is bad.
This is John. This is long. This is green. This is blue. This type of thinking.
Discrimination. And this mental constructions, all of his emotions, love, anger, faith, pride, jealousy, wisdom. Are any of these emotions? All the various emotions? The I.
And finally the mental consciousness itself, that which is doing the looking, that which knows, knows pictures, knows thoughts, knows mental images. Is that the eye which was afraid, which was ashamed, which was full of pride? Is there any place else? Has there been something left out that needs to be looked at? Just mental and physical events, Mental and physical events.
When you look, you couldn’t find it. You thought it was there. You believed it was there. But when you looked, you couldn’t find it. Try to get a sense of you thought it was there, but you couldn’t find it.
This sense of unfindability, a lack. It’s not there. I thought it was there, but it’s not there. Just mental and physical events. I can’t find that I.
It’s not there. So we’re looking at the higher training wisdom. Trying to understand emptiness, selflessness has the same meaning. Selflessness and emptiness. Meaning the same, has the same synonyms, same meaning, selflessness and emptiness.
And we said there are two types of selflessnesses, Selflessness of persons, and by persons I mean all sentient life. Not just persons, I usually use the term persons because it seems to be more relevant to us. Then there’s a selflessness of phenomena, that is to say everything which is not sentient life. Tables, chairs, roads, buildings, space, emptiness. They’re all phenomena.
They’re all empty. And we said that at the beginning that there is no difference from the point of view of the Consequentialist Middle Way school as to the subtlety of the emptiness of persons and the subtlety of emptiness of phenomena. There’s no difference in the subtlety. There are in other schools, maybe we’ll talk about that briefly, but from the point of view of the final thought of the Buddha, which was contained within the system known as the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka school. There’s no difference in the degree of subtlety of the emptiness of persons and the emptiness of phenomena, non persons.
But because we are more familiar with our self a person, take that as our initial object. We work on that first. If we’re more familiar with it, it’s easier for us to get at than to talk about the self of a table, the emptiness of a table. So in describing and talking about emptiness and selflessness, there are four progressive stages in coming to an understanding of emptiness. There’s the Hearer school stage, the Mind Only stage, the Autonomy Middle Way stage, and the Consequentialist Middle Way stage.
These are like rungs on a ladder. As the Dalai Lama points out, these are the tenet systems or philosophic systems which the Buddha set forth in order to educate people to his final thought as to the nature of reality. So it’s progression. Step on one rung, then you are able to step on the next, and then the next, and then the next.