Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The “transfer hot dog” analogy — a fresh, steaming ballpark hot dog passed hand-to-hand through the bleachers that you must resist biting into — is the most memorable moment in this 15-minute session by Ven Jampa Gendun, and it makes a precise point: thoughts, however tempting, don’t have to be grasped. Working through practical antidotes to the five hindrances in meditation, Gendun covers reflecting on the cost of indulging distraction (including the bad habits formed by sitting through unfocused sessions), passive resistance through non-identification — illustrated by the clouds-in-sky image and a Trungpa Rinpoche quotation on disowning thoughts — and suppression as a deliberate last resort. He closes by stressing purposefulness: knowing what you want from meditation and whether you are actually achieving it.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 OtE 1991 12 04.mp3
UUID: 00ca3644-1b43-4806-92c3-f7f443217e09
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-12-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 14.7 minutes
Words: ~1,791
Is reflecting upon the consequences of allowing this hindrance to continue. If I simply remain seated on my cushion in this state, if I allow this restlessness to continue, I allow this desire, these fantasies, this hatred, this churning of my mind, if I allow this laziness, whatever it might be, I simply allow it to continue or simply overwhelm me, then what have I done? What am I doing with my time? It would be better for me to get up and do something productive, useful, than to sit here and waste my time. More than just wasting your time, you’re forming bad meditative habits.
And if you ever want to meditate someday, you’re not only going to have to learn how to meditate but you’re going to have to learn how to overcome the bad habits that you picked up in the past. So it would be better to quit meditating and do something worthwhile than to sit there indulging in your fantasies, indulging in these hindrances, indulging in these entertaining yourself. If you want entertainment, would better to go watch a good movie. You might learn something from that. Not just wasting your time cultivating negative states of mind.
Third antidote, considering, Wow, if I just sit here and let this continue, what are the consequences? Just wasting my time, wasting my energy, I should be doing something more productive and moreover I’m developing bad habits of allowing myself to wander, be distracted, allowing negative states of mind to continue reflecting in that way. Fourth method is called passive resistance and we’ve been doing a lot of this. We’ve been practicing this. We haven’t called it passive resistance.
This is simply not identifying with or grasping at these states of mind, these thoughts, these feelings, whatever that might arise. You know, like like watching clouds drifting across the sky and allowing them to pass. The the the clouds come and they go, the clouds come and they go, but the clear, brilliant, blue sky remains throughout it all. The sky remains, not identifying, not grasping at these states. And we’ve been doing this by noting, feeling, feeling, thinking, thinking, sleep, sleeping, sleeping.
It’s a state which has arisen in your mind. It is impermanent. It will pass. It will not always be like that if you don’t identify with it, neither indulge it nor try to suppress it. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, one analogy that I use is called the transfer hot dog analogy.
In American baseball, when people go to watch a baseball game, have the bleachers, they have these long rows of seats. And there’s these men and women who walk down the aisles with these metal boxes and a strap, carrying these metal boxes on a strap, which have hot dogs in them. Someone wants a hot dog, rather than walking down the aisle, which would disrupt everyone’s watching the game. It would be very inconvenient for everybody. You just kind of wave and the hot dog person sees you and they wave back and you indicate what you want on your hot dog.
Mustard and relish and onion and pickle, lettuce, tomato, whatever. And rather than coming down the aisle and again making everybody uncomfortable and disrupting their attention on the game, they give the hot dog wrapped up in this nice paper to the first person. And the first person gives it to the second person the second person gives it to the third person. And it’s passed on the way down the line, gets to you. So, you know, the situation might be such that you’re watching, you’re intently watching the baseball game.
And someone taps you on your shoulder and you look over and they put this hot, fresh steaming bun with this huge hot dog with relish and mustard in your hand. And there’s this huge desire just to take you know, just to take a huge bite out of this thing may arise. Know? But this isn’t your hot dog. You didn’t order order this hot dog.
Your your job with this hot dog is simply to pass it on to the next person. If you want a hot dog, you can order one up. Just wave your hand. So like one, all of these various thoughts, these feelings, these states that are arising, you don’t have to bite into them. They might very tempting and juicy, but it’s not necessary to identify with them.
It’s tempting. But we can can simply pass it, I pass. If you want to think about something, that’s fine. Can order up your thoughts. What am I going to do tomorrow?
Tomorrow I have to do that. In which I told I was telling a story just the other day. I think it was yesterday. In which oh yes, it was in a private interview. Anyway, can tell it.
It’s a common story. There was this business person, a Tibetan business person who did meditation and he would always work out his inventory during his meditation session. Many Tibetans have many commitments which they have to recite every day. They have many pages of prayers that they have to read every day. And during the course of reading his prayers, he would be working out his inventory of his business.
And one day he finished his prayers and he was doing his business and someone said, Well, what about this? And he said, Oh, do we need that or don’t we need that? I said, I can’t remember. Wait a minute. And he got out his prayer book and he went back to his prayer book and he said, Ah yes, here.
And he got habituated to only doing inventories while he was saying his prayers and he had to be saying his prayers in order to remember what it was. Maybe she tells that much better than I do. Anyway, so all of these thoughts, all, you know, really juicy ones come by. And what we do is we bite into them. This we identify with them.
This is me. And we become lost in them. And we start spinning out this story. But what we have been doing is simply acknowledging them. They are simply thoughts, objects of the mental consciousness, nothing more.
We can simply thinking, thinking. And they arise and they abide for a while and you’ll see some of them fade. A feeling, you know, feeling, pleasant, uncomfortable, pain, pleasure, feeling, feeling, it arises, it abides for a while, it will cease of itself. Anxiety, anxiety, anxious, anxious. Pain, pain, discomfort, discomfort, distraction, distraction, sleepy, sleepy, sleepy, sleepy.
These will arise, abide and cease themselves. They are simply impermanent objects of the mind. If we don’t abide in them, we neither want to indulge nor repress them, simply observe them. This is called passive resistance. A quotation by Trungpa Rinpoche, In the practice of meditation, the way to be daring, the way to leap is to disown your thoughts, to step beyond your hopes and fears, the ups and downs of your thinking process.
You can just be, just let yourself be without holding on to the constant reference point that mind manufactures. We simply note the thoughts, feelings, states and return to the determined object of meditation without either indulging or suppressing. We don’t want to get into a battle with ourselves by suppressing nor do we want to be lost in indulging. Then the fifth method of dealing with these hindrances, and this is the absolute last resort, before you just give up and do something else. When we’re about to be completely overcome by either our desires or hatred or restlessness or our laziness or indulgence, our dullness is repression.
Repression. We simply force the hindrance out of our mind. You keep shifting your attention away from the hindrance, away from desire. Keep shifting it away from hatred. Again and again and again, they are only states of mind, and therefore they are impermanent.
So you just keep shifting away. And this is what we mean by impermanent, by suppression. We use an object or a thought of our focus in order not to allow this object to disrupt our present focus of attention. It’s as if somebody is knocking at the door, we I don’t want hear you. You keep trying to concentrate on the television set.
Wait, wait, it’s almost finished. Something like that. We don’t want to hear. We keep going back and forth. There but we don’t need to it is in for suppressing.
This is what we mean by suppression. We don’t want to hear that person at the door so we keep focusing on the tower. It’s almost over. Just wait a minute. Just keep doing it again.
This is the last resort, but it’s something we can do. You know, willpower alone is not enough to get us to enlightenment. We have to learn about our mind, how they operate. And we have to develop the ability to cultivate these uninterrupted, skillful states in mind. In meditation, in general, we always be looking for looking all the time to see whether we are really meditating or not.
Has to be some kind of an element of purposefulness in what we’re doing. Knowing why we’re doing what we’re doing. Knowing what we want from our meditation and whether or not we’re actually achieving it. That’s kind of this is what I mean by purposefulness. Knowing why we are doing what we’re doing, knowing what we want from our meditation, and therefore we can say, am I achieving it?
Is it working? There is some directive quality to the mind. There will be some change. It’s not like a river that just comes to a plain and just spreads out on a mudflat or something like that. It knows where it’s going, and it knows whether it’s getting there or not.
So anyway, that’s some of the things you can think about to get in terms of working with these five hindrances. I’m sorry. Maybe so I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. All your your noble aspirations are realized. All good things happen to you, but if they don’t happen to you and bad things happen to you, that you use them as an opportunity to learn, to grow.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to the enlightened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more. Okay.