Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A parable from Ven Jampa Gendun’s time at a remote Thai monastery opens this 26-minute talk: watching coconut-tree branches crash in pre-monsoon winds, he pictures a priest inventing a mantra to ward them off rather than simply sawing them down — an image for applying the wrong kind of remedy to a problem. The talk argues that most suffering comes from inner emptiness we mask by chasing “bigger, better, more,” and maps the eight worldly pulls (gain and loss, praise and criticism, and the rest) as an explanation for why changing partners, jobs, or cities never removes the underlying difficulty. Dharma, Gendun insists, is not another mantra but a practical method for transforming the mind that generates these cycles. He closes with Thoreau on “castles in the air” and a Dalai Lama line on simple daily goodness. Accessible to newcomers with no Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 1988 04 10 The Path to Enlightenment 2.mp3
UUID: b68d7487-4f7d-4270-9802-2b1199a5f98c
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Public talks 1988-2010 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-04-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 26.3 minutes
Words: ~3,022
I was in nineteen eighty six. I spent in Thailand. I spent one year an island, not one year in time, but spent seven months on an island called Koh Samui, which is a big tourist island. But unluckily or luckily, I was inland at a little monastery where there were about two or three monks, two Thai monks, and I lived in a little cave. And above me was this temple, and I was very much isolated during that period.
I just I would sit on this balcony of this temple, and I would look out, and there would be the ocean and the coconut trees. Millions and millions and millions of coconut trees. That’s all I could see. The ocean about two kilometers away and millions of coconut trees. I think literally, perhaps a million coconut trees.
And after a while, gets very boring to look at the ocean and millions of coconut trees, they don’t change very much. And I was around me, it was very tropical. It used to rain a great deal, and the trees would grow up very quickly. But strangely, they would also die very quickly. You know, parts of the tree would be growing while another part would actually die and many of the branches were dead and decaying, rotting.
So once just before the monsoon was coming in, the strong winds would begin to blow. Up to that point, there weren’t particularly any strong winds. And due to these strong winds, these rotting branches would fall. Lasted for a few weeks. So during this period, you had to become very aware of where you were standing because for no reason or there were reasons that all of a sudden, a branch would just fall and it would come crashing down to the ground.
So you couldn’t you couldn’t stand underneath the tree. It was quite dangerous during this period. And I began to, you know, having only the ocean and the coconut trees to look at during my break from my meditation session. I used to think about these falling branches and make up stories about the various falling branches. And one idea that came to me was using that we’re mixing material methods and spiritual methods, inappropriate methods, inappropriate applications of methods.
It occurred to me that these falling tree branches, that someone could easily come along and say, perhaps we have a dangerous situation here. These falling branches present a real problem. We have to find some way to prevent this danger. And if he dreams up a mantra, some mystical symbols, syllables, mystical words in order to placate get rid of the danger of these branches falling down. So he comes up with something like, oh, tree, tree, don’t let the branch fall on me.
And he begins to repeat this over and over to himself, oh, tree, tree, don’t let the branch fall on me. Om tree, tree, and the syllables become rather jumbled together. And they no longer have the same meaning, but they have the same effect because it seems that people begin to circle around this person who’s sitting underneath this tree, and he’s repeating his mystical mantra, Om tree, Om tree, tree, you’ll let a branch fall on me. And the branches don’t seem to be falling on this particular tree, at least when he’s around during this period of time that these people are there. So they they begin to think, well, he’s onto something, and maybe we should get in on this.
You know? Obviously, he has some some advanced being, and he’s able to manipulate the forces of nature and they develop a priesthood. He becomes the head priest. And they have their regular sessions together. Once in a while, a branch falls and kills somebody.
And, of course, this is now attributed to the fact that this person didn’t have enough faith. You know? He was saying the mantra wrong, or maybe he wasn’t making enough offerings to the now established priesthood. They have all kinds of excuses why the branches are still falling. Now what might happen during this process is someone comes along and they see that he sees this group of people sitting under this tree, and he thinks, well, there’s a branch up there which could easily fall on them.
I I should do something about that. Of course, these people are saying that mantra very devotedly. Oh, tree tree. Don’t let that branch fall on me. So he goes and gets a ladder a handsaw.
And the priest looks at him and wonders what was doing. And he walks up to the tree, puts the ladder up against the tree. He motions to him. And he starts climbing the ladder and starts sawing off the branch. You know, he’s very direct.
He sees the problem. This is the solution. There’s no need for any manipulations of any forces or whatsoever. There’s a very simple direct solution to that particular problem. Of course, what would probably happen is the priest having some has some insight into what, you know, this revelation could bring to his now smart growing group.
He’s now a smart growing group of disciples, and he decides, and this this man is desecrating our holy tree, and they stone him or something like that. Anyway, he’s not able to I he would have been seen as an iconoclast. He would have been going against the forces of nature, against the spiritual hierarchy. Anyway, this this the fantasy that I just went through was in some way associated with this idea that, you know, if there’s a if we can solve a particular problem very directly with some particular materialistic method to solve or whatever, then this is the way to go about it. This is intelligent.
This is using appropriate method. But so we have to begin distinguish between these material problems, psychological problems, spiritual problems. Know which types of method are appropriate to which types of problems. We have to get in touch, as I said, with our problems, where they’re coming from, and what types of problems are they actually. Take away the house, the husband, the children, the possessions.
What is a man if all these things are removed? In himself he is insufficient, empty, lost. So out of this emptiness of which he is afraid, he depends upon property, on people, and beliefs. Fear arises out of his inner insufficiency, poverty, and emptiness. Fear is the awareness of our inner emptiness, loneliness, and poverty, and of not being able to do anything about it.
So our question now is, how is one to go beyond this emptiness, this loneliness? Not how is one to be self sufficient, not how is one to camouflage this emptiness permanently. Camouflage this emptiness permanently. It’s not a very pleasant experience to confront your own emptiness. I think it’s very necessary step in the process of growth.
You know, as I said at the very beginning, in order to deny this emptiness, deny these feelings of inauthenticity, of insufficiency, we run. We run very fast. And this is the way we are actually able to camouflage to some degree these feelings of loneliness, confusion. But we can’t run forever. And even within this running, it’s a feeling of dissatisfaction.
And also the quality of being becoming insensitive and numb and not being able to feel and not really being alive. So that we’re very much lonely suffering beings, afraid and very much confused. And we seek to numb this pain by any means we can, by drowning ourselves in the material world. Maybe constantly running after bigger, better, more. This is the mantra of the world.
Bigger, better, more. And bigger, better, more. Bigger, better, more. Bigger, better, more. Bigger, house.
More money. Better car. There’s always something to be had to find the happiness and satisfaction which is just slightly out of our grasp. Something which is just waiting for us. So we we recite the mantra of the world, bigger, better, bigger, better, more, but it doesn’t quite work.
There’s an imbalance. And where there’s an imbalance, there’s going to be suffering. So in order to regain balance, we have to begin to reorientate ourselves. Begin to see that the root of our problems, the root of our suffering is within ourselves, within our own mind. And quit blaming it upon others and other people and other things.
To take responsibility for your life and your own mind, your own happiness and your own suffering, and quit thinking of yourself as a victim of whatever, of sexism, society, your spouse. But understand that by changing your own mind, you change your world. And this is what we do when we practice Dharma. We get to change our mind. That is we begin to seek to develop more skillful states of mind, more skillful attitudes, ways of relating the world and ourselves.
Gain and loss, praise and criticism, fame and disrespect, disrepute, happiness and unhappiness. This is the world. The person who is lost in the world has no path of escape. The world overwhelms him. This world follows the law of Dharma, so we call it worldly Dharma.
He who lives within the worldly Dharma is called a worldly being. He lives surrounded by confusion. Attachment to gain, aversion to loss, attachment to praise, aversion to criticism, attachment to fame, aversion to disrepute, attachment to happiness, aversion to unhappiness. These are the laws of the world. Those who followed his rule are lost in in this world of confusion.
The world overwhelms them. And the spice of confusion is pain. It’s not that there’s anyone out to get it. It’s not that somehow nature is perverse. It simply follows a law of cause and effect.
If we create negative action actions which are born out of confusion, then there will arise an experience from that, which we call suffering. If we create positive actions, actions arising out of positive state, out of wisdom, out of love, faith, generosity, patience, then we can also arise those experiences. These experiences we call happiness. And the world follows the law of cause and effect. We can make use of that that very fact and go beyond our suffering.
Go beyond creating unskillful causes. And unskillful causes of gain and loss, praise, and dis disrepute, attachment to happiness, aversion to unhappiness. Change our minds to find the happiness that we really are looking for. There is the personal sorrow and the sorrow of the world. There is the sorrow of ignorance and the sorrow of time.
This ignorance is the lack of knowing oneself. And the sorrow of time is the deception that time can cure and heal and change. Most people are caught in that deception, we either worship sorrow or explain it away. But in either case, it continues, and one never asks oneself if it can come to an end. We have a feeling whenever a problem arises, whenever we have some difficult difficulties, it’s going to go away.
And in fact, it will. All these various phenomena are impermanent. But the underlying cause for that type of suffering to reoccur is still present within us. So we don’t use dharma to remove a specific suffering. We use dharma to transform our mind so that the cause of all types of suffering have been removed.
You know, we begin we’re always beginning again new scenarios, put you know, always fresh new beginnings. A new wife, a new spouse, moving to a new place, beginning to new new job. And somehow, we always bring the same attitude to the new situation. And for some reason, we experience the same problems again, again, and again. We move on again.
We experience the same problems again, and it never ends this reoccurring cycle. The source of the difficulty, the source of the problem is still there, even though we may be able to go beyond a specific instance, but not from the present problem. Getting away from this particular husband, this particular wife may solve that problem of the suffering that this particular person is causing you. So you get a new wife, a new boyfriend, a new husband. For some reason, the same difficulty that you had with this former spouse arises again.
And you can get rid of that one. That’s going to go away. It’s impermanent. You can move on again. But the basic cause, the source, is always there within your mind.
It was something which you can never run away, something which time is never going to heal, something which change is never going to heal, which you’re never going to make quite go away. You have to get at the source of the problem, the source of the difficulty, which is in our own mind. If the mind is developed, people aren’t going to be a problem. You know, the Buddha, for example, he can live with anybody and enjoy that person, see that person as positive, could find always could see something very outstanding, could always see that person in a positive light because his mind is trained. That that person could never become a source of difficulty for him, a source of suffering.
So it’s not the people. It’s not the job. It’s not the place. It’s our own mind. I used to think as we grew older, as we grew wiser.
I don’t think this is necessarily so. I think there are many people who are sixty five, seventy years old who have the same basic attitudes, make the same basic mistakes and thinking as they did when they were fifteen years old. That is they haven’t grown. Their whole life is simply a process of changing, changing the external world, people, jobs, environment in some way trying to manipulate it in order to find the happiness that some sort of they were looking for. They never sought to change their own attitudes, their own minds.
Now, T. S. Eliot said that we’ve all had the experience, but we missed the lesson. It’s dharma which helps us not to miss the lesson. We don’t need any more experiences.
We’ve had enough suffering. What we need to do now is find a method to help us learn from our past sufferings and from our present situation. So we’re just making the same mistakes again so we begin a method to change our attitude. So we make use of the world, make the material, things of the world. There’s nothing wrong with anything in the world, like money.
They all have their place. They all can be sources of happiness. If they use correctly, like fire, they can bring us comfort, enjoyment. But we also have to balance this with using an internal method. We call this in Buddhism Dharma, a way to go beyond our mistakes, reorientate our thinking, to develop more skillful attitudes and more skillful methods to deal with the difficulties and problems that we’re always being confronted with.
So we make use of material methods and we make use of the dharma. We use it wisely. We use both wisely. I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, He will meet with the success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary.
New and universal and more liberal laws will begin to be established themselves around him and within him, or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense. And he will live with the license of a higher order of being, In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work may not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundation under them.
We all have our dreams. We all have our most noble moments when we aspire to something very high. So we have to begin to express these dreams, these noble aspirations in reality. We have to actually begin to build a foundation beneath our castles. You know, each of us aspires to something from time to time, something very noble, something very lofty.
If we simply go on remembering these aspirations, remembering these lofty thoughts, these noble ideas, then they will slowly rot in our hearts. They will turn bad. They become the territory, the possession of ego. They simply become narcissism. They simply become mental masturbation.
Over and over again, we think our lofty thoughts, but we never even begin to enact them out in reality. And pretty soon, they go bad, and they’re dead, and they’re lost. So while we’re still alive, while we still have these noble aspirations, these lofty ideas, people should consider ourselves very fortunate, very blessed, that we’re still in touch with the very best within us. And we have to begin to express these ideas, these noble, lofty thoughts in reality. Or they’re going to go bad, and someday they’ll be dead, and we’ll be just unfeeling beings.
So we have to walk a path of heart, get in touch with our own basic sanity. I always say to Buddhists that the question of obtaining enlightenment will come later, there is not much hurry. But in day to day life, if you lead a good life, honest, with good love, good compassion, less selfishness, then automatically it will lead to enlightenment. Whether you believe in God or not, it doesn’t matter. Whether you believe in Buddha or not, it doesn’t matter.
You must lead a good life. Good food, good clothes, good shelter is not sufficient. A good motivation is needed. It’s all a matter of balance.