Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens by pressing on why attachment causes suffering — not philosophically but viscerally: the pain of a breakup, the grief of bereavement. In this 24-minute talk, he walks through three practical antidotes: recognizing attachment’s dissatisfactory quality, applying the direct counter (generosity counters desire), and transforming craving’s energy into inner bliss. The generosity antidote gets a memorable illustration — mentally offering an alluring shop-window jacket to one’s teacher until the grasping dissolves into joy. A discussion follows about illness, prompted by the story of a woman who refused her cancer prognosis and thrived five years later; participants explore how embracing illness mirrors the Buddhist approach to attachment. Gendun closes by situating all this in Tibetan medicine’s view that karma — rooted in mind — is the primary cause of both suffering and happiness. Accessible to general audiences with no prior Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 1988 03 16 Lade Hall 2.mp3
UUID: 04eb4c4d-f0d9-48ae-9d66-06bba434f4c8
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Public talks 1988-2010 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-03-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 23.8 minutes
Words: ~2,448
The quality of not cultivating attachment. Therefore, because they’re not aware of its dissatisfactory quality. So with attachment or any of the afflictive emotions, first we have to become aware that it is in fact dissatisfactory. It’s in some way bringing you suffering. Most obvious when you break up with a girlfriend.
It’s a very painful experience. When somebody dies, one of the most painful experiences that we can go through. So we can see on a very, the grossest types of attachment, the potential that they have to bring us suffering. And we can begin looking at those very gross possibilities of suffering, see what the other attachments in our daily life on a much more, on various more subtle levels. And see how in fact they are also bringing us dissatisfaction.
The lack of freedom, the lack of openness, the lack of ability to communicate what you actually are feeling for example. I’m talking very much in connection with the relationships. I mean, with other people. Attachment to objects, having to be on guard, having to And expend energy, time, worry, thought against losing these objects, maintaining these objects, all the various all that is entailed by having an object which you want to hold on to as opposed to being willing to let go of this object. It’s not to say that we couldn’t have this particular object, that we can’t have a beautiful relationship with another person, for example, that we can enjoy each other, you know, that we can communicate.
But this extra added something which we call attachment, trying to hold on to this other person, what that entails, how it actually detracts from the possibilities and enjoyment of the relationship. And so we have to become, we have to actually cultivate this awareness of what attachment is actually costing us in way of dissatisfaction with respect to objects, with respect to people. So in general we start with that. Dissatisfactory quality of attachment or any the afflictive emotions. So once we begin to understand that we can begin to use methods to lessen our attachment.
Just becoming aware in itself will lessen our dissatisfaction or lessen our attachment. The mind naturally wants to go towards happiness, whatever it conceives of happiness. Our conception of happiness is at present mistaken in general. We can see the suffering state as being pleasure. Therefore, we keep getting burnt by putting our hand in the flame over and over again.
We keep cultivating situations which we project them to bring us happiness. In fact, they don’t bring us the happiness that they thought we would. So our conception of what is going to bring happiness has to become more and more in tune, in line with the actual reality of happiness, peace. So we cultivate an awareness of the dissatisfactory quality of attachment in general. If you’re attached to let’s say you’re attached to, we’re talking about desire, greed, you’re walking down the street, you see a dress in the window or you see some nice clothing in the window.
There are all these suits, right, in the window, all the mannequins wearing suits. And if all of those, one kind of pops out at you, just take me, you know, kind of alluring. It almost appears visually to be brighter than the other one. It’s something that’s, can’t wonder why that hasn’t been sold already. People must be out of their mind.
Everybody walking by here, no one’s bought that jacket yet. Look at it. And it’s a very alluring quality. Okay, so at this very moment, or this can be what sexual, any type of desire, attachment that may arise, we can apply an antidote. And the antidote to attachment is generosity or letting go.
So I don’t know. For example, in a Buddhist practitioner, was, that’s such a beautiful sport jacket. I wish my I wish my I wish the Buddha had that. I wish my teacher had that. I can just see my teacher having it and now you give it to him mentally.
You imagine in your mind the teacher putting on this fantastic jacket and you’re gonna get joy out of it. Wow. You’d be really happy and I would be really happy seeing him happy. There’s no attachment left because an attachment and generosity cannot exist at the same time in the same mind. So we can generate the antidote to attachment which is generosity.
You can give it away. Give it to a friend. Oh, bet you my brother would like to have it. He’s going to a party next week. He he looked great in that.
And imagine just giving it to know, him being happy makes you happy and you cultivate a very positive state of mind. It becomes a very skillful means to begin to cut through attachment. Every time attachment, desire, greed, arises, you somehow transform it into generosity. Okay. We can begin to understand what it is that attachment is about.
Basically we’re talking about some energy within our own mind where it’s being directed. There’s feeling that this object attachment is going to bring you pleasure. So if you can, especially in the case of sexual attachment, sexual desire, to understand that this pleasure that you’re seeking, that you see this object as being able to give you, in fact is already existing within your own nervous system. It’s in there right now. And so this energy of attachment, you really try to induce a blissful state of mind using that object as a condition.
This bright beautiful object which is so, which is actually can bring you bliss. Just think about just make your mind happy at that moment. Think of this energy, this this this desire of attachment which is arising at that moment. Think that this is in the nature of bliss. Happiness.
Just happiness. You know, I don’t know, bliss. Happiness. You keep looking at that sport jacket or that pretty girl, whatever, pretty man. Just because this energy will keep coming up but you can you don’t have to, you no longer have to be grasping at that out there as bringing you that bliss.
In fact, you find that bliss happens. I think those are some possibilities. Just in general, recognizing the dissatisfactory quality of that particular negative state of mind, applying the specific antidote to that negative state of mind, and trying to transform the energy of that particular state of mind. Possibilities. There are more possibilities.
We begin to work with them. So, any type of state of mind is quite workable. The Buddhist perspective is the ultimate antidote to all our suffering is the wisdom understanding of selflessness or emptiness. This understanding of selflessness. We aren’t bound by our history.
We don’t have to be victims of our history. I think, I guess, it’s very much the area of psychology. You have to have a tremendous determination to change. You know, stuck in compulsive reoccurring patterns just going through over and over again. We’re just programmed.
Right? So we’re very much stuck. So it takes a tremendous amount of energy to get ourselves out of these ruts. Why? Which we’re stuck in.
And this is, as far as the Buddhist perspective is concerned, we develop the determination to be free. Sometimes called renunciation. And we just get so fed up. You have to cultivate an awareness of the dissatisfactory quality of these patterns that you’re going through. If you look at it consistently and dispassionately, your mind will begin to move away from it because it’s not happening.
In your mind what’s happening. It will go towards what it can say is simply happiness. So if we can get an understanding of what actually is happiness, which actually accords with reality and begin to see our actual, our present situation realistically, dispassionately, then our mind is naturally going to move away. Now I heard something in connection with, I think it was yesterday, about someone who had cancer. At Buddha House we had a speaker who spoke on new methods of treating cancer.
And someone mentioned that one, just as you mentioned, when things become labeled, as we said, things don’t have to be a problem unless we label them a problem. Once we label them a problem, become problematic and everything arises from that. And this woman had cancer and she went to the doctor and the doctor says, you have cancer. Maybe six months to live. And she told the doctor to get fucked.
Was five years later, she was quite well. So she wasn’t going to label. She had cancer okay. But she wasn’t going to accept all that went along with that label, all the association, she wasn’t going to give up. In other words, even unconsciously which we probably all are doing one way or another.
She had the determination and self motivation to not let herself be sucked in to that way of thinking. It’s simply the art of positive thinking, isn’t it? I’m not going to allow my past history to control my life because I don’t have to. That’s the maybe I don’t know. Maybe some of the more knowledgeable people could answer that much better than myself.
Doctor Jim Birch and Kevin Barrett, these are all people working in the caring profession. All have a lot of experience and talent. Don’t know if you’d like to make a comment. One of the things that was occurring to me as you were talking about illness was that It’s difficult to talk about these things without, you know, difficult to talk about them technically.
I find it easier to to talk about them a bit more figuratively. It seems to me that when I’m meeting with people who have a problem with an illness that in some kind of terms they they have become attached to that illness and that to reclaim their life from the illness somehow they need to find a path to embracing it. And once they’ve embraced their illness it seems then that they seem to be able to find a way of no longer being attached to it. Almost in the same way that you were talking about Maslow’s notion of the ego that somehow for a person or a western person that someone has to really successfully reclaim their ego before they can then go on to become egoless. I guess there’s a nice parallel.
Maybe an ego is a kind of illness. But I think within illness, my sense is that to begin with people have problems with their illness until they’ve embraced it and once they’ve embraced it somehow that’s the point at which they can start to become unattached from it. Right. I I guess you have to get to know it first. You can’t embrace something that’s that’s unknown.
I guess getting to know it and and embracing it are are all part of the same thing. Recognizing recognizing what the what the illness can can mean in your life is part of embracing it. I think I I guess a lot of a lot of the problems that people have with illness don’t come from germs or tumours or whatever. I think a lot of the problems people have with illness come from the professionals who instruct them about how to be ill. And I think people get really unhelpful instructions about how to be ill, which means that it’s really difficult for them to meet their illness and examine it and get to know it the road towards giving it away.
This is sounding very figurative, you want to pin me down to specifics, I’ll be happy to have a go at that as well. I mean, there are lots of other people here who can address these issues too. I’m just saying you have to understand something before you can destruct it. Right. But having someone say you oh, well, this you’ve got this with all that that implies.
The whole construction comes down a point. Yeah. Can you expand on that a bit? Not really. I thought that you’d done really well.
And I was wondering if that was in line with what you were saying. Yeah. I I I’d got a bit coaxed around the notion of disrupting the illness. I think Recovering. Right.
Yeah. Yes. Recovering and somehow recovery seems to have something to do with making friends with the illness or something like that, which was why I was gagging a bit at the idea of destructing. I think a lot of Western medicine is really closely bound up with the the whole ethos of healing as being some kind of form of warfare And the whole language that practitioners use around around healing has to do with, you know, you fight disease. You you have various therapeutic tools in your armamentarium.
The whole language is the language of warfare and destruction. And I think that’s one of the reasons why people who discover that they have an illness tend to get instructed initially in problematic ways of thinking about it. I’d like somebody else to talk. Traditionally, we would say that the various bacteria, whatever viruses are conditions for activating predispositions to illness. That all our various illnesses, whatever the conditions may be as you might say, predisposed in the sense of various imbalances in the body.
In Tibetan medicine they use the theory of the balance of humors. There’s bile, phlegm and wind. That all illnesses stems from an imbalance, some sort of imbalance between these three humors. But these three humors only act as conditions to activate predispositional latencies, karma, which we’ve collected through our various actions, body, speech and mind. So we have cooperative causes which are viruses, germs or the humors, and we have the main cause which is our own actions of body, speech and mind.
Now the actions of body and speech arise and motivated through the mind. If we act with positive states of mind, happiness will ensue just like the Buddha uses the metaphor of the wagon following along the heels of the ox. It’s going to follow right along. If we are motivated by negative states of mind, the suffering is going to arise. So in that way, various diseases and various happinesses, all that we experience, both positive and negative, are coming from the mind.
The mind is the creator of all things. Therefore, if we just control our mind, we’re going to control the world and we’re going to control what happens and our suffering.