Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using a two-room mountain cabin as his central illustration, Ven Jampa Gendun traces how objects — and the self — arise only through the convergence of causes, parts, and conceptual labeling. In this 43-minute talk, he explains why no kitchen or bedroom exists before you designate them as such: nothing from the side of the object forces any particular label. A parallel example — the swearing-in ceremony that creates a president — grounds the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka analysis in everyday life before he applies the same logic to personal identity, distinguishing the conventionally existent I from the fabricated self that underlies attachment and anger, and showing why searching for the latter yields nothing. The Q&A covers Buddha nature, why mind rather than body carries karmic history, and whether faith alone can substitute for direct realization of emptiness, drawing on Vipassana practice and a Dalai Lama remark about Milarepa.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 OtE 1992 03 11.mp3
UUID: 85b849cc-a781-41fd-ae00-d72469908a69
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: 43.5 minutes
Words: ~4,996
Things arise dependent upon causes and conditions, their parts and upon terms and concepts. Since they arise dependent they cannot exist independently. Because they arise dependent they do not exist independently. They are empty of being independent, they exist, because they are dependently existent. The other side of the coin of the of dependence arising is emptiness.
So at the Autonomy Middle Way school is not, this is the final thought of the Buddha, The Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka school. There’s nothing whatsoever coming from the side of the object. If we illustrate this, we can if you have a cabin, in India houses and rooms are pretty simple. They just have four walls and a roof more or less and a floor. If you were to build a cabin the same in the mountains, would make it quite simple.
And you simply build one room here and next to it you build another room. It’s a two room cabin. And you haven’t, And you know you want two rooms, and you put two doors, and you put a window in each room. You haven’t worked out what you’re going to use the rooms for. You simply have built two rooms.
But then you start thinking, Well, what should I use that room for? And you think, Well, know, there’s a nice view over here. That would be nice to wake up to in the morning. And this room over here, it’s near the water. I can put plumbing into that room.
So in dependence upon various causes and conditions, building the house, the causes, the wood, labor, conditions. There’s nice sunrise over here. There’s not as much plumbing, there is a pipe, running water is more readily connected up over here. Then we the parts, the walls, the roof, the floor, we label. I’m going to make this the kitchen.
I’m going to make this my bedroom. It’s a very simple house. Before you made those labeling before that labeling process there was no kitchen. There was no bedroom. There was just two rooms.
Now through the labeling process you call this the kitchen, it becomes the kitchen. You call this the bedroom, it becomes the bedroom. There was nothing which forced us, anything from the side of the object which determined that this had to be the kitchen. You could have made that the kitchen. You could have made that the bedroom.
But there was nothing coming from the side of the object which forced us, demanded that this must be the kitchen, this must be the bedroom. Simply on the in dependence upon our conception, we made that the bedroom. We made that the kitchen. Nothing from the side of the object. Just simply on the basis of designation.
There was nothing inherent, no self defining quality. No one could have said, Well you can’t make that a bedroom. That’s just not a bedroom. No one could have made that statement. There was something bedroomish about this, kitchenish about that.
As if it demanded to be that. in dependence upon causes, the building, the work, materials, conditions, a nice view, the availability of water, and dependence upon the parts, the floor, the wall, ceiling, and dependence upon the process of being designated. Kitchen came into existence. Bedroom came into existence. They arose in dependence upon those.
Therefore kitchen and bedroom are empty of independent existence. They appear to be that way. They appeared to be objectively existing, self sufficient as if existing from their own side, as if they didn’t depend upon anything else. They had always been there, some kind of entity. Something about them which makes them what they are.
But this is not in fact not the case. Now every existent object is a product of something to be given a name and something else to give it a name. There is not a single atom of anything in the universe which does not rely on this process. There is nothing which exists from its own side. I too then am a product.
Someone has taken two things together, my body and my mind, and called it me. I am nothing more than that. There is no me which exists from its own side. There is no me which does not rely upon someone taking my body and mind together and granting it the name. Neither in fact do my body or my mind themselves exist from their own side.
So we have in dependence upon our body and mind. These parts which arose in dependence upon causes and conditions, we’ve labeled I, Self. So this is the conventionally existent I. This is the I which wakes up in the morning, washes, makes breakfast, goes to work, like me, home all day, Whatever you do, take care of the kids.
Comes home at night, tired, cooks something and goes to bed. That I, that’s the conventionally existing I, the I which has been labeled in dependence upon the parts and causes and conditions. But we conceive of an I which exists independent of this labeling process. As if there was an I which had always been there without our having to conceive of I. We learned the name I.
I, Jampa, this name we’ve given to this body and mind. I had to learn. I differentiate myself. For a while there I couldn’t I didn’t differentiate myself between my mother and I. There wasn’t this differentiate.
But slowly, I began to have sensations which my mother didn’t have or I began to have a sense that she had sensations which I didn’t have. So they began to sense that, Well, we aren’t the same nervous system. We aren’t the same body. We aren’t the same person. And we began to separate.
Frightening thought. And I began to call this I over here and that you over there. That’s my mother over there. And anyway, this learned process of differentiation of I is over here somewhere. And that’s fine, but we have this conception that there’s another I which didn’t depend upon this learning process, this labeling process, which doesn’t depend upon these parts, the body and mind, which doesn’t depend upon causes, the sperm and ovum of my mother in order to produce this body, the previous moment of mind, produced this present moment of mind, conditions, my culture, my education.
All of this coming together I call I, and that’s who I am. But there’s an I which we can see though, doesn’t have anything, none of this has any bearing on at all. Which we assign it qualities, but they’re purely qualities which are being attributed to a fabricated I. And these qualities in themselves are fabricated I. Whether we call those qualities singular, unchanging, independent, or whether we call these qualities substantially existent, whether we call it truly existent I, whether we call it a naturally existent I, objectively existent I, these are all attributes which no I possesses.
There’s nothing there, but we conceive of it to exist. This process of in order for something to come into existence it must satisfy all of these criteria. If someone were running for office, let’s say the presidency of the United States, he needs a body and a mind. You know, his body arose in dependence upon the sperm of his parents, his mind arose from his previous moment of mind in that same continuum. But that in itself is not enough to be a President of the United States.
Well maybe you don’t even need a mind perhaps. There’s the body and mind, okay? We also need there’s the causes. We also need the condition. He has to satisfy certain criteria.
He has to be nominated by the party, has to run for office, and has to win, get the most votes. But even that is not enough. Then he has to there has to be a ceremony when he’s given the title, We now make you president of the United States. Then and only then does the president of the United States exist. Dependence upon causes and conditions, parts, and finally the giving of the name, the labeling, giving of the title, the swearing in ceremony.
The President of the United States arises and dependence upon that. We have a sense that all of these objects exist without dependence, without arising in this manner. And especially with respect to self, but in fact with every object that we ever see. They all appear this way. Every object in the universe comes into existence in dependence upon this process.
The process of labeling occurs like this. The basis to be given the name exists out there. From our side, the concept that applies the name and the name itself, we come up with something labeled and it’s nothing more than that. There’s something out there which is going to be given a name. From our side we have a concept and we give it a name and the object arises.
There’s nothing more than that. But we can’t give know this can lead to the question, well we can call anything anything, then can’t we? Well that’s not correct because in order for something to exist it must meet a criteria of three factors. The first is the object must be renowned in the world. It must be known conventionally, you know, by conventional perception.
I can’t you know, four legged animal wags its tail and barks, I can’t call it a cat. I can call it a cat but it’s not meaningful. It’s misuse of convention. I’m using the wrong label. People would say, No, that’s not a cat, that’s a dog.
So in order for a dog to exist it must be an object which is known, which is popularly known in the world as that. It must not be contradicted by a valid conventional cognition. It cannot be contradicted by a valid conventional cognition. For example, if I were out in a field with a friend of mine and I said, Oh look, there’s a man over there. Who’s that man?
And he says, No, no, that’s not a man. That’s a scarecrow. You know, and we got up close, Oh you’re right. My eyes are going bad on me. His valid conventional cognition would contradict my of a man would contradict my cognition of a scare my his valid cognition of a scarecrow would contradict my valid cognition of a man.
I was, ah you’re right. I couldn’t hold that, couldn’t maintain that belief in the face of his contradiction. So for my being able to say there’s a man, it must be a correct valid cognition. Or you know it cannot be contradicted by a correct valid cognition. I simply I can be wrong.
My senses can be mistaken. So for me to call that object a man, must be based upon a correct perception. If it’s contradicted by correct perception then it doesn’t exist. And then the third criteria for an existent is that it cannot be contradicted by a valid cognition which is searching for the ultimate. That is to say, you know, my conception of this truly existent table is contradicted by a valid cognition which is searching for the ultimate nature of that table.
The table in fact is not truly existent. So the table which is the cognition which is searching for the ultimate nature of that table would contradict my conception of it as being truly existent. So we, you know, even from the point of view of the Prāsaṇgika Middle Way school, which says that nothing is coming from the side of the object, you know, is it has profound ramifications that things don’t define themselves. They don’t have any particular markers forcing us to call them what we do. But we can’t call anything anything because we are bound by a convention.
And this convention is continually shifting, changing over time. And so our reality is continually shifting, changing over time. There’s no objective world out there. With our thoughts we are making the world. As our view, as the universal view, commonly held view of the beings changes, our reality changes.
It’s in flux, there’s nothing fixed. Any questions? Previous moment of mind, same continuum. So can I bring the mind back to something? I can no.
That I can only bring it back to a previous moment of mine, and a a mind a mind moment previous to that and back and back and back and back and back. I mean, of course, know, it’s and we identify with the mind. We identify the I with the mind because it is the mere I. It is the I which is labeled onto this the subtle most wind and the subtle most consciousness which goes on to future life. And it is the mind which carries the evolutionary history of the individual, that is to say is karma.
And therefore the eye is identified with the mind, not with the sperm and ovum, with all the elements of the father’s body which may produce that sperm and the mother’s which produce that ovum. Because they have no have no common consequences. They no information about who we are carrying with them. They do act as a condition which condition our mind. So I don’t know if I’m not It’s because the mind contains our evolutionary history that we label on that this is the I and that we’re most concerned with the mind.
And tracing it back, we can only trace it back to a previous moment of mind in this process of this continuum, this beginning. Whereas the continuum of our body I mean we may have used every element in the universe in the course of taking infinite bodies, I don’t know. But it would just be a recycling process of material elements. And because it doesn’t carry our history on it, it doesn’t make much difference. I don’t know if I answered your question or not.
So there are two types of Buddha natures. One is called the natural naturally abiding Buddha nature and the other is evolutionary Buddha nature. Naturally abiding Buddha nature is the emptiness of the mind. That is to say the natural purity of the mind. The natural purity of the mind, that these afflictive emotions, these neuroses, are not intrinsic to the mind.
They are adventitious, accidental to the mind. Therefore they can be removed. They’re not the same entity as the mind. If our neuroses were like the heat of fire, then in order to get rid of the heat we would have to destroy the fire. There would be no way that and if it were in fact that was the situation, then we would just have to live with our neuroses.
We would never be able to extricate them from the mind because they are in the very nature of the mind. So the nature of the mind is pure. afflictive emotions are not within the nature of the mind itself. Mind is empty. It doesn’t have any inherent characteristic.
It’s like space. But then there’s evolutionary Buddha nature which represents the dynamic quality of the mind that it’s able to evolve, that it’s able to develop, that it’s able to change. Like the stuff of mind is like clay. And out of this clay, depending upon our skill and our motivation, we can create sculpture of Michelangelo or Rodin or we can create an ashtray. It’s open ended.
So it can be molded into any shape in any way that we can, that we have the ability. So we don’t have any abiding personality characteristics. It’s like everything is possible. This potentiality of the mind. We can create whatever it is we wish depending upon how we shape it, depending upon our skill.
So it’s open ended, it’s dynamic, and by its very nature pure. And this is what we mean by Buddha nature. No, you make a lot of sense. So I think we touched upon this last week a little bit, that there is the I which wakes up in the morning brushes his teeth and eats breakfast etc. The conventionally existent I which is labeled, is a name given to the body and mind.
And whatever happens to the body we say happens to I. I’m sitting, I’m thinking, I’m talking. And this I is a conventionally existing I, empirical I. It exists. It’s hard to understand what it is, but we can find it.
We can locate it, we can come to an understanding of what it is. But there’s another I which we believe to exist, which in fact doesn’t exist at all. And this is the I which is the basis of all these emotional experiences such as hatred and spite and jealousy, attachment. This I, and it has certain characteristics such as, for example being it appears to be singular and unchanging independent, independent of the body and mind. There’s something there which needs to be protected.
I hate you. There’s something there. When we feel it’s under threat then we act with aversion. When something enhances it, we act with attachment, want to draw that object into this eye and make it a permanent part of its territory. But when we search for that eye, though we have a belief it exists and we operate on the basis of it, when we actually search is there anything which corresponds to that belief.
You you can have beliefs in things that don’t exist. Know, belief in flying saucers or whatever. When we look we can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. So that begins to undermine, we begin to create something, maybe it really doesn’t exist. Maybe I might believe, maybe I’m wrong.
And it begins to undermine that. And all of the various ways of thinking, emotions which arise in dependence upon those types of beliefs in such a type of I begin to fade away. The mind is no longer afflicted by that. Yeah. I mean, there’s there there are just there are people who are predisposed to traveling the path by faith and those who are predisposed to traveling by reason.
But they still have to realize something. And Is that your question? You’re thinking about it and doing the same thing, simultaneous. You can’t yeah. Some people do have experiences of it.
But you you need I mean, you know, you need a context to to put it in or it’s simply it’s dismissed. The mind will dismiss it. It doesn’t it’s not able to be integrated into your worldview, and has no ramifications. You have an experience that’s lost because it doesn’t fit. I mean it’d be quite frightening to have some kind of spontaneous experience of selflessness.
I mean people in LSD they freak out and then they forget it. I don’t want to think about that anymore. But if they have some kind of context which they’ve built up, then these experiences can be developed. It can be quite forceful in their lives. And we do have experiences, but they go unnoticed or they’re dismissed or they’re repressed.
I think so. Yeah. Well, especially in Tibetan Buddhism, they say that intellectual understanding is very close to experience. The more sophisticated your intellectual understanding, it’s coming very it’s not the same thing. There’s no question about the actual experience.
But it is coming very close, it’s almost like a jump. You can make a slight jump to the actual experience. And for example in Theravadin Buddhism when they do Vipassana, and then you sit down, you just observe the body in the mind, the five aggregates, and you never see the You just see, you just note mental and physical events. That’s all there is, arising, abiding, ceasing. That’s all you see day after day after day after day.
And you begin to wonder whether maybe there’s no I. And hopefully there’s some insight. Hopefully there’s some kind of insight. The Tibetans especially emphasized intellectual development as a support to experience. It will facilitate experience.
Brings you closer to that point where you can actually I mean we want to experience. I mean that’s all of what this study is about. But the study, I mean it does affect your mind. It cannot remove the ignorance, but it can begin to reduce the consequences of your ignorance. You know that you understanding a really deep intellectual understanding of selflessness may help you to overcome lessen your anger, lessen your attachment.
It can’t remove the ignorance, only the direct experience can. Yeah. No doubt faith can move mountains. Sometimes I think maybe you’re going to have to have realization of emptiness at some point. I mean the Buddha’s do not wash away sins with water, nor do they remove suffering by their hand, do they transfer their realizations to others.
But by the showing of the truth all will be made free is through the teachings, the conversation with the Buddha, that people actually are liberated. And though one can have great faith and it would make a great difference in one’s life, one has to rid oneself of, one’s own ignorance and one’s own mind. And how you go about that It might different methods, but I don’t But everybody’s got to become a Buddha, and these capacities aren’t inherent. We have Buddha nature. Our only limitations are those we acknowledge.
We aren’t stuck with our particular present capacity. The more you use wisdom, the more wisdom that you develop. The more you use your intelligence, the more intelligent you become. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I would I would also. So you could be wise and not be a proponent. Yeah. Oh I mean, the great master is Milarepa. Milarepa, he had great experiences.
I once asked the Dalai Lama, he’s about studying, whether it was all that necessary. He said you can have great realizations like meditating on the lamrim. But unless you’re able to put them in some kind of intellectual framework your ability to help others is limited. Yeah, for oneself. And it’s yeah.
Oh, just on faith. Yeah. You have to you have to yeah. Faith is this tremendous force, powerful force motivating your practice and would rid yourself of hindrances and obstacles and help you to create the conducive conditions to have realization. But I think You have to come to a reason because you’ve been forced to once you come out of your meditation, you come back into the conventional world.
You’ve got this experience and all of sudden everything is different. Even if you have faith, you’re be forced to come to an intellectual understanding of some form. That need not be disconcerting. Yeah. Mean, I mentioned last week, some teachers just say there’s no I.
They don’t talk about conventional I and etcetera. There’s no I. Yeah, if you were talking to children, you would speak that way, wouldn’t you? I don’t think it can be said. Think different people have different predispositions, capacities.
Some people are just mean the Huineng, Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism, was a wood chopper and just by hearing someone recite the Diamond Cutter Sūtra he enlightened. So he had all these predispositions. He had done all his work in previous lives and just by hearing some words it was enough. So who’s to say what it takes and doesn’t take? We’re all very very much different.
Jampa, where does interbeing fit in with conventional existence? Interbeing. Interbeing. The right term. I was listening to a there’s an intake, and it said that our bodies, I say, the production of the ovum, the sperm, and the ancestors of that, and also the food we intake, and that’s related to the crops, and that’s related to the clouds, and everything is related to everything.
Does that fit in with cause and condition? Is that dependent arising? Yeah, that would be one way of viewing dependent arising. That things are arising dependent upon a vast web of causality coming from the past and extending outward in the present moment. Everything is like systemic theory, systems perspective.
The things are an isolated entity, exist within the context of a vast array of conditions and causes. Well, in that case everyone has causes and conditions. Well, the substantial cause, I mean we have very distinct evolutionary history. And so even in this room, we were quite different. Thing that we confused in is we can eventually exist in dependence upon parts.
Now if you examine each part, you come to more parts, and you you get down to this microscopic atoms, and you still have more parts. So how far do you go, and what do you get to when you reach there? You never you never reach there. Never reach there. No.
Like, I I imagine that atoms are converted to energy and energy or mass to energy and energy back to mass at that stage. Don’t know. I get a bit confused when I reach that stage. I just love to see this mass being converted to energy and all of sudden there’s no mass. Whatever energy is there.
But you can always come down to directional parts, that part of whatever it is, the northern part, southern part, eastern part, upper part, lower part, part near to me, part nearest to you. So the mind can always conceive that there’s something, a way to it’s a composite of something other than what it is. It’s built up as something else. Well, as you’re going down further in parts, and you’re getting smaller and smaller and smaller, is that like approaching zero as in approaching emptiness? Seems like all these millions of parts that’s scattered in your body now getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
And it reminds me of, like, the period as you approach zero, never actually reach it. It just gets smaller, smaller, smaller. Yeah. To zero that it’s emptiness. Is is that a complete distortion of my ignorance or is it?
I think you might you may be trying to get at something which isn’t there. Because I have to see you split up. So divine that you reach mean Maybe there’s nothing. I mean, lowest tenet system is like the Yeah, the lower tenet system, the Great Exposition school, believe in finite particles, irreducible particles which the world is elements, which the things are built up out of. And these truly exist.
So there are these partless particles, like ping pong balls floating around, things are built up and they didn’t proceed any further than that in their analysis. I think maybe they were afraid of what they’d find. So there are schools which say things aren’t irreducibly, infinitely reducible. So we just basically keep infinitely reducing them and it just keeps going. Yeah, there’s always some part.
Everything is still part of that part. There is only the conventional line. Why? What were you getting Conventional I exists? Conventional I, that I which will go on to Buddhahood.
The Buddha has an I, that’s the one continuing with the I for present moment which will go on to achieve Buddha. I will become a Buddha. It’s the conventional I, to continue on with that conventional I. Or I will become a dog or something. How do you get different personalities of Buddhas if they all reach the same final state?
I think it depends on what kind of day they had. You know, like Tārā is this one, Mañjuśrī is this one, and etcetera, etcetera. I don’t I I think I think that’s it’s hard to say. I mean, that’s very difficult. I can’t I don’t think Buddha’s are robot or automatons, you know, kind of blank slate.
But I think a lot has to do with how we conceive of them, how we perceive them, and that is determined by our own karma. So Buddhas are kind of they don’t have their own agenda. They don’t, you know so they’re kind of they’ll become whatever is going to be helpful to us. If we want a jolly Buddha, they’ll be jolly. If a wrathful Buddha is going to be helpful to us, they’ll be wrathful.
You know, they don’t have any investment in some particular personality their up on their own side. So I think whatever is going to be helpful to us, that’s what they’ll be. Well then, are we talking about that if there’s just like one Buddha Buddha and I would we just like with all these different types of Buddhism? Yes. I think now they’re different beings.
They’re different beings. But we have different karmic affinities with different Buddhas, from our past experiences. Some aren’t able to be of much use to it, some are able to be more sometimes someone who’s not even a Buddha can be of more use to you than the Buddha himself. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, mean, don’t know.
I think gets confusing, doesn’t I think they specialize. Some Buddhists specialize in different areas. Oh, I was just wondering if it was just the one person in different roads. Or The one Buddha in different guises. So one Buddha will not serve all your needs.
What is it they say? A bronze Buddha cannot float across water, a wooden Buddha cannot pass through fire. So we need different Buddhas for different occasions. So great. Dedicate the creative potential of all that we have done.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to enlightenment through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more.