Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Two parables give this 83-minute public talk its spine: a man hunting for his lost key under a streetlight — looking in the wrong place — and a king who wants to cover his kingdom in leather rather than simply wear sandals. Ven Jampa Gendun uses both to argue that mastering the mind is necessary and sufficient: the world won’t bend to our demands, but the mind is workable clay. He then defines Buddha as a happy, sane person acting with wisdom and compassion, introduces dependent arising, and outlines the threefold path of listening, reflecting, and meditating. A Q&A covers how to begin practice and why spiritual community matters. Gendun’s tone is candid and non-evangelical — he opens by saying he has no interest in converting anyone. Suitable for newcomers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 2008 02 17 Why Buddhism.mp3
UUID: eb4e6378-1f62-4185-ab22-dede8644b3f7
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Public talks 1988-2010 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2008-02-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 82.8 minutes
Words: ~10,490
You’re welcome. Can you hear me okay? You’re welcome to use same place to the front if you like. We can it’s like a nice cozy group here. Okay, get it working here.
So can everyone hear me okay? Yeah? If you can’t during the course of my talk, let me know, okay? Sometimes when I lose my confidence, my voice goes way down. And I start whispering so no one will hear me.
So so by all means, let me know. Okay? Some of you I know. Some of you I haven’t met before. My name is Champa.
It’s a name that was given to me. I was a monk for a number of years in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I think I was a monk for about perhaps seventeen years, long time. But for various reasons, which I won’t go into, I stopped being a monk. And I haven’t been a monk for about I guess it’s been about ten years now.
Anyway, the upshot of what this explanation is about is it’s rather a strange name. And why do I call myself that? People got to know me by that name, and it became a bit awkward. It became easier just to let it go with that and people because people had known me by that. So Champa, it means love, by the way, which is kind of a nice thing to have people calling you all the time love.
So we’re going to talk talk about why Buddhism. In a way it’s kind of a it’s a bit of a strange title for a talk, I think, in a way. I was starting to think of what would be a clever thing to say, well, Buddha, why not, or something like that. But that’s not very clever. Why shop at David Jones rather than Myers or Harris Scarfe?
I couldn’t care less in the sense that as long as you get what you want out of your life, that’s what’s important to me, whether it means Buddhism or Christianity or some secular methods of finding happiness and solving your problems. That would be a fulfillment of a part of what I would like for you. So but, you know, we’re here to talk about Buddhism, but I don’t think the Buddha was a a Buddhist. You know, you can make use of, what you hear here, and, it might some of it you might find, applicable. It might be relevant to, you know, what’s happening to you in your everyday life, and you can sort of make use of it.
If you need any help in that way, I’d be happy to assist you. But whatever else which is perhaps relevant to yourself or applicable to yourself or sounds foreign, sounds alien, which isn’t of any use to you, you can sort of set it on a shelf. You don’t in talking about Buddhism or practicing Buddhism, you know, like going into a supermarket, you don’t have to buy the entire shop. You can just select from what’s available and what your immediate needs are, what might be of use to yourself, and make use of that. So, you know, I guess what I’m getting at is Buddhism is a pragmatic religion, if we can call it a religion.
It is said that the Buddha taught only two things. His teaching career spanned forty five years, but if we bring it all down to its essence, he taught only two things: suffering and how to go beyond suffering. And so that’s what it’s all about. It’s utilitarian. It’s very much founded in our lived experience.
We’re not trying to please anyone else or some supreme deity in the sky or whatever, or our parents or whatever, but trying to solve some of our basic problems, some of our problems that are perhaps a more fundamental level than we normally address them. And we’re trying to develop some tools of life, some life skills. Beginning to understand the nature of our difficulties perhaps in more fundamental and profound way. And perhaps offering some methods that we can or some tools that we can work with to deal with the human condition as we all find it, that we all share in. And, you know, we do have a goal, particularly to Buddhism, that is to be a Buddha.
And we’re going to talk a little bit more about what that might mean, what Buddha is all about. You know, how many of us have ever looked to the sky, our arms flung open wide and pleadingly cried out, Why me, God? Why does everything always have to go so well for me? Why am I so happy? Why am I so fortunate?
I can’t go on like this any longer. I have to understand just what it is that I’m doing so right. I think none of us would. Don’t question happiness. It is only at moments of suffering or more precisely our awareness of suffering that we begin to question, that we reflect on the nature of our situation and what it is that life is all about and what we’re doing and why it is that we find it so difficult.
In other words, sadly enough, it’s only suffering that makes us stop and think. It’s at moments of suffering or difficulty in our life that we are momentarily, at least, distracted from usual ways of numbing, insensitizing, absorbing ourselves into all the various means that consume our lives in various ways and the finding of happiness. In this sense, the Buddhism is not concerned. Or we can say that the goal of Buddhism as it’s set out and the means of achieving that goal can be implemented and can be achieved without having taken recourse to a force, however supreme and all powerful and so forth as it might be, we can rely on our own means to achieve the goal of Buddhism. We can solve our basic problems of suffering, in other words.
Whenever one of our erroneous ideas, our mistaken views, our misbeliefs, our wrong conceptions comes up against the world in the way it is, our minds experience experience a dis ease. We experience a dissonance of mind, a tension within the mind, a conflict within the mind. There are two paths which our minds can take. They can either try to deny, evade what is actually happening, the reality of the situation. They can try to, you know, overlook the fact rather than beginning to correct their own inaccurate inner pictures of the world.
They begin to try to manipulate the world in accordance with some preconceived idea, the outcomes, the agenda that we’re working toward. So, you know, okay, we experience some kind of conflict, tension within the mind. The mind is a self correcting system. It will seek to alleviate any tension, any conflict, any dissonance within the mind, any dis ease in the mind. Now, we can take two courses in this process.
One, we deny the reality of the situation, and we try to manipulate the situation in accordance with our preconceived mistaken picture of the kinds of outcomes that we want. The other way is we explore. Explore. We try to gain insight. We try to identify the inaccurate ideas, the maps that we’re using to traverse the terrain of our life within our own minds in order to bring our minds into accordance with the nature of the way things actually are.
And there’s a certain dishonesty in demanding that the world be any other than the way it actually is. To the degree that our ideas, belief systems, our worldview, how we go about finding what it is that we want in our life and getting rid of what it is that we don’t want from our life is not in accordance with the way things actually exist. We will always experience a degree of dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment. It is inevitable. So in a way, we have no choice than to begin to orientate the process of relieving ourselves from tension, of finding happiness, of going beyond our suffering, than to begin to work with our own mind in terms of our ideas, our belief systems, the way we’re looking at the world.
In a real way, it’s not so much the people and the situations and the events about us which cause us problems, but our our opinions of them, our attitudes toward them, which are problematic. You know, the the the orientation of Buddhism is in terms of changing our minds. You know, we you know, if you want to know what Buddhism is about, it is about change. And the orientation of that change, the the the place in which that change is to take place, is within our own minds in terms of our worldview, our ideas, our beliefs. Many of them simply are dysfunctional.
They don’t work. And out of that, we experience all the difficulties that we normally, you know, part of the human condition, what it means to be an ordinary human being. There’s a story which, know, is like all kinds of tales which try to illustrate something to us. Takes place, you know, trying to illustrate this basic orientation of Buddhism in terms of the necessity of beginning to address the root of our problems, in terms where it is actually to be found within our own mind. To some degree, I think in a very real way, we’re like the man who lost his key along a dark street, the key to his house.
And he goes searching for that key at the corner beneath the streetlight. Why? Because there’s more light there. And the search goes that much easier. But in reality, he has no hope of ever finding what it is exactly that he’s looking for, if for no other reason than he’s looking in the wrong place.
We simply cannot avoid the necessity of dealing with our problems where the solution can be found, and that is within our own minds. If you lost the key along a dark street, even though the search may be difficult and challenging, we have to look for it to where we actually lost it, if we have any realistic hope of ever finding where it can be factually found. We’re talking about Buddhism talks about a path. A path is that which takes you up from where you’re at now to where you want to get to. It is, you know, It is the path which endows us with a competency and empowers us to be able to understand what is the root of our problems and to identify these dysfunctional patterns and beginning to work with them in some realistic way and bring about the changes that are necessary to be made.
The path begins and starts with making clear for ourselves what it is that we actually want. This is why I say, maybe it’s not so important that we talk about Buddhism. We don’t have to give it any religious dimension or any categorize it in terms of some system of belief. But we have to begin to identify it in terms of our own human experience, what we’re all about, in terms of what a successful life looks for ourselves, what it feels like, what it might be for each of us, you know, what it is that we value most. We oftentimes get out of touch.
For the most part, most of the people in the world, they really don’t know what they want. Though not knowing what they want, they’re they’re willing to go through hell to get there. So, you know, it’s sad, but nonetheless, that seems to be the case. You stop, actually stop speeding, and we have to ask ourselves, what works for me? Beyond the oughts and the shoulds of our life, beyond all the ideologies and psychologies, beyond the taken for granted truths that we go our indoctrinations of our religions and so forth, what brings my life fulfillment?
Where do I find meaning? What makes me feel alive, feels good about myself? I feel like I’m a successful human being leading a successful life. That has nothing to do with religion, doesn’t it? It has to do with the human condition, which is universal.
So much of our lives is spent in longing and search for what we do not know. So many of our ostensible goals, so many of the things we think we want turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide. They are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person. They are psychological qualities.
Love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose. Something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical, a house, a car, a better job, or a human being, but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.
Sacredness is, in a sense, a feeling, but a feeling that goes to the very heart of life. It is a feeling of recognition directed toward what is great and high enough to give our small lives meaning to put our personal journeys in a greater perspective. It is the feeling of reverence. What we call the sacred is ultimately a universe of meaning against which we can measure our own personal efforts, our own personal life, to see whether they too have meaning. Tell me what you yearn for, and I will tell you who you are.
We are that which we reach for, the image that we long for. You know, I guess I guess the spiritual journey or the journey as a human being begins by stopping and beginning to reflect what it is that I’m yearning for. What is it that resonates with me at the deepest level of my being, which we get out of touch with, out of necessity, seeming necessity of our practical everyday life? It’s sad, but none nonetheless, it seems to be the case. You know, there there’s a one of my old friends, he was a one of reason I call him my old friend, he’s he’s an eighteenth century Zen poet.
Zen is a type of Buddhism which is mainly practiced in Japan, Korea, China. And his name was Ryokan. And I lived in India for a number of years. In my room, sometimes there was no heating in the little single room and I’d be wrapped up in my sleeping bag at night. And sometimes in my loneliness and not sure what I was doing and why I was there away from all that was familiar to myself that I loved and the people who loved me and all the pleasures that I had, at least thought I had waiting for me back in the West.
And he would give me some consolation, his book of poetry. And there’s one poem that I liked very much where he says, Buddha is your mind, and the path goes nowhere. Don’t look for anything but this. If you point your cart north when you want to go south, how will you ever arrive? Buddha is our mind, and the way goes nowhere.
So, you know, this is a you know, I don’t know what a Buddha is. Have you ever met a Buddha? I’ve never met a Buddha. Maybe the Dalai Lama is a Buddha. I don’t know.
But what does it mean to me? What relevance? What kind of connection? To me, we can say something like a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being that’s found some kind of inner peace inside themselves and skillfully and fearlessly works with the world about them, trying to help others as best they can. And that would be my model, paradigm of sanity, of a successful human being, what I’m holding up as my goal of my own life.
That’s what I call Buddha. You know, a Zen master once said, and Zen Zen is, you know, sometimes they’re pretty tough people and they talk in a tough way, which is kinda nice, but sometimes it takes some interpretation. There a Zen master once asked once said, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. And that’s a pretty radical statement at best. Certain places you could get beat up.
Buddha is your if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. If you see the fundamental solutions to the fundamental problems of life outside yourself, you’re looking in the wrong place. There’s no big deity up in the sky who’s going to solve your problems, matter how long you wait. Sincerity is not enough. It’s sad, but that seems to be the case.
I know a lot of people, they come to me and they have tears in the eyes and they want to change. They want to be a better person. They want to be happy. I respect that. I admire that.
But that in itself is not enough. We have to bring about the changes. One of the fundamental notions of Buddhism is called dependent arising. Arising in Sanskrit, pratītyasamutpāda. One time the Dalai Lama said we should have little badges, like slogans, dependent arising.
Can be interpreted in various ways, in various levels of profundity. But in its simplest form, but nonetheless a profound statement, is our happiness and suffering are products. And what I mean by product is they arise dependent upon causes and conditions. They aren’t the adventitious happenings of fortune or luck or chance or the whims of a supreme deity, they arise out of cause and effect. If we don’t create the causes for our happiness, we won’t be happy.
On the other hand, if we continue to create the causes for our suffering, we will continue to suffer. That’s in the nature of things. And that’s part of an understanding we have to begin to incorporate into our belief system, into our worldview, and see how that begins to express itself in our everyday actions. We begin to implement that understanding and bringing about the causes of happiness and beginning to diminish the causes of suffering. It’s not rocket science, is it?
But it’s common sense, but sometimes common sense isn’t all that common, is it? So there’s this so it all comes down to the mind. You know, the the mind is in its place and its way. It can make a heaven of hell hell of heaven. The mind is the determinant of all things.
Story. I was I was going to tell that before, and I got lost. I waffled on, didn’t I? It’s about a king, and he’s he’s walking about, like, as kings do, his countryside. And he stepped on a thorn, and he hurt his foot.
And he went back to his castle, and he called together all his ministers. And he put the royal foot up on the royal table. And he said, look. Look. Look.
You know? This hurts. We we can’t allow this to happen again. You’ve got to do something whereby I can walk about my kingdom safely without the threat, without the danger of stepping on thorns and sharp objects and stones and so forth. And the ministers got together, and they thought and they thought and thought.
And one of the cleverer ministers spoke up and said, I have an idea. We’ll cover all the roads in your kingdom with leather. And that way, you’ll be completely safe from the danger of stepping on sharp rocks and stones and so forth. And the king said, fantastic idea. Let’s do it.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever served on a committee. But there’s always one guy or girl, maybe, like the treasurer, the one who ruins all these perfectly great ideas and brings you back down to earth, as it were. He said, it won’t work. First off, there aren’t enough cattle in your kingdom to produce that much leather. And even if there were, it would bankrupt the treasury.
It’s not practically possible. Okay. So then they thought, and they thought, and they thought some more. And as is often the case in these stories, there was one wise old minister, and she spoke up. And she said, I have an idea.
We’re going to take a piece of leather, and we’re going to cut out two pieces of leather to the shape of the sole of the king’s feet. And we’ll take these two pieces of leather, and we’ll apply them to the sole of your feet, and we’ll bind them to your feet with thongs. And that way, it is as if you covered your entire kingdom with leather. Wherever you walk, your feet will be safe. You’ll be free of the danger of stepping on thorns and sharp rocks and stones and so forth.
So there’s two, I think, this little story. It’s a nice little story. I think there’s two morals that we can draw from it. One is fairly obvious, and the other is perhaps not so obvious. The first one is that we can’t control the world.
You know, that we cannot realistically order the world about us to follow our agendas, to fulfill our needs, you know, to that it somehow should accommodate all that we want. But nevertheless, we try. We make these kinds of demands on the world, these irrational demands, as it were. And when we do, we either experience a sense of rage because the world doesn’t follow our orders, it doesn’t fulfill our needs, it doesn’t, you know, somehow accommodate our particular agenda, things should not be like this, they should be other than this way, this is unfair, this is not right, what’s going on here, I won’t allow this to happen. Or we experience a sense of powerlessness, a sense of emptiness or failure because we can’t do the impossible.
But there’s another message, I think, or a moral that we can derive from this little story. It is that and it’s perhaps not such an obvious fact that if we can control one thing, our own minds, it is as if we control the world. You know, all that we can realistically hope to control in our life is our own inner kingdom, our own inner mind. But this is sufficient to find happiness in this world, to be fulfilled in this world. It’s enough.
You know, the mind is in its place, in its way, can make a heaven of hell a hell of heaven. You know? It has that possibility. You know? It’s like the things and the people and the situations about us are are in some way in some way, and, you know, we could this needs to be developed and talked about, are neutral, like a knife.
A knife or a scalpel or something like that in the hands of a surgeon can be life enhancing, constructive. That same exact implement in the hands of a thief, in the hands of a murderer can bring destruction, can bring great suffering. So it’s very much in terms of our skill or lack of skill or understanding how we make use, our attitudes toward them, of the people, the things, and the situations about which are determinant in terms of whether they are sources of happiness or simply more problems for ourselves in one way or another. It all comes back to the mind. We were talking about a path.
A path is that which takes you from where you’re at now to where you want to get to. Where do we want to get to? We call that a Buddha in Buddhism. That’s the goal of the path. If you want to become Christ like, then by all means, it would be wise to follow the path of Christianity.
You know, we have our models, our paradigms, and we orientate ourselves toward those. And we try to implement the causes which bring about that particular type of result. So the result, the orientation, the model of sanity which Buddhism is trying to actualize, we call a Buddha. Or what is a Buddha? It’s said that the Buddha was walking along one day, someone was very struck by his presence.
He seemed to exude some kind of charisma. Obviously, he had some great realization just by his his presence, his being, impressed this person. And then the person asked him, who are you? Who are you? Are you some kind of celestial god?
And the Buddha said, no, I’m not. And he said, you some wizard, some kind of magician? And the Buddha said, no, I’m not. And finally, the man, exasperated, said, well, then who are you? Who are you?
He says, I’m awake. So what does it mean? Where is the orientation of Buddhism trying to take us? What does it mean to be awake, in other words? This fills up all these volumes of text and text and text.
But maybe we can begin to simplify so that we can begin to conceptualize, wrap our minds about where Buddhism is trying to take us. Essentially, qualities of wisdom. And what do we mean by wisdom? The quality, the ability to see things clearly, the way things are in their actual nature beyond all our illusions, beyond our misconceptions, our wrong beliefs, our mistaken ideas, having some kind of accurate vision of the way things are in their true nature. You know, what do we mean?
Like, call this realization, realization. Sometimes Buddhism goes on and on about talking about realization. What do we mean by realization? You know, one way, an easy way to think about it is as if you were wearing green sunglasses and you were out in a mountain somewhere and you looked at these snow mountains and saw green snow mountains. And if you believe that appearance and you relate with it, the appearance in some mistaken way, You know, snow mountains aren’t green.
And you take off the the green sunglasses, and you see the snow mountain in its true nature as it actually is. And you relate with it now in a more appropriate way, in a way which is in accordance with the way it actually is in its true nature. That’s what we call realization. It’s no big deal in that sense. It’s like removing this overlay of projections, mistaken projections, that we’re continually projecting onto the world about us.
That’s what we mean by wisdom, seeing seeing things as they actually are, that clarity of mind. But that’s kind of the cognitive. But there’s also the heart, the affective aspect of awakening. You know, it’s like love and compassion. And sometimes it’s compared to the love and compassion of a mother for her only child, a burning desire that others go beyond their suffering, that they too find happiness.
And this desire for others happiness extended equally to all living beings. And that’s the heart aspect of awakening. But it you know, that in itself is not sufficient. There’s also a sense of personal power, you know, an inner strength. You know, a Buddha is not a wimp.
You know? There’s a sense that we can be effective. We can make a difference in this world. That’s the inner qualities of awakening. But that in itself is not enough.
Begin to express this in our everyday life and how we relate with the world, especially in the tradition that we follow here, which is a Mahāyāna tradition or a universal vehicle tradition. We see ourselves very much we see our paradigm of sanity, the goal of the path, to be a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being as a social phenomenon. Mental health is a social phenomenon. You cannot escape from being in this world with others. Even if you run off to the Himalayas, that is your way of relating with the world.
It may be useful, or it may not. In that same individual’s life it might be more useful to enter into relationship with the world. We can’t avoid it. There are two aspects to our being, to the dimensions of our life. There’s the inner aspect, our own inner lived experience, the private domain, which is inaccessible to others.
But there’s another aspect to our being, that which exists in relationship to others, the social dimension. When we talk about the successful life in the Buddhist context, we’re to concern ourselves or address both of these aspects of ourselves in terms of finding some kind of experience of inner peace and fulfillment with inside of ourselves, but also how we’re going to relate with the world about us in some more skillful and more productive ways in terms of skillful means, being able to benefit others fearlessly and working with others. So this is kind of the paradigm that we’re working with. That’s more or less what we mean by the goal of the path, what we mean by a Buddha or awakening enlightenment, all these possible terms we can use. Wisdom, love and compassion, an inner power, inner strength, and the way in which these are expressed in our everyday life and practically benefiting others in a skillful and fearless fashion.
That’s the goal of the Buddhist path. And so the path is that which takes us there, creating those causes which are going to bring about that quality of result. Maybe it sounds a bit fantastical. Is there such a word? Fantastic, fantastical.
I sometimes make up words, but it doesn’t matter. Like religious fiction. We don’t need any more fiction. We have to believe in ourselves. We don’t need any more overlays, overlays, more doctrines, systems.
We can’t look to mommy and daddy. We have to look within our own lived experience. We’re talking about the goal of Buddhism in terms of becoming a Buddha. And is this is this the, you know, religious fiction to make us feel better about the the human condition, our lot in life? You know, like like a like a nice bedtime story to make us feel better so we can go to sleep again?
Or is there really something about what we’re describing which is relevant to each of ourselves? We talked about a Buddha in terms of our wake being wisdom. And if we check up, and Buddhism is always advising us to check up, we all have some experience of reality, however faint and obscure that experience might be. Sometimes we know clean, clear the way things are. We can trust that.
Sometimes we all have some love and compassion, how Our limited and exclusive love and compassion might be expressed just to a few people on a few occasions. But nonetheless, it’s there. That’s not the question in terms of quantity, but at least that quality we can identify within our own experience. And we talked about the fact of awakening being characterized by the sense of inner strength or personal power. And we all have some degree, however weak and unrefined it might be.
Sometimes we act in very powerful manners you know, with all the strength of the Buddha. Sometimes we experience it, maybe not very often, you know. But nonetheless, we we said that awakening was characterized by skillful means and benefiting others. And we we all have that to some degree, don’t we? You know, no matter how unspontaneous, no matter how imprecisely our wisdom and love and compassion and compassion might be being applied to the various instances where we do actually benefit others.
But sometimes we can be there for others in a very real way. And we all have some fearlessness when we lose our self consciousness, when we forget how afraid we really are, and we act no matter how easily intimidated, no matter how fleeting these moments might be, when we act with great power and strength. So all I’m saying in talking this way is that all what Buddhism means, the goal of the path as it’s conceived of, as it’s thought of, as it’s realized within Buddhism, exists with every sentient being in all of us here and outside of here in a germ form, in a seed form. So what we’re talking about, the goal of the path, isn’t something that we’re trying to get from the outside. There’s no one that we have to beg, that we have to plead with, that we have to be good for.
It’s a matter of nurturing, creating the proper conditions, implementing the various practices which help us develop these seeds of wisdom, love, compassion, of personal power and how they’re skillfully and fearlessly expressed in our daily life. Each of us, and this is the fundamental doctrine of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the great vehicle of Buddhism, every living being will eventually be a Buddha. There’s no difference between that Buddha and this Buddha, the historical Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha, who lived about twenty five hundred years ago. There will be no qualitative difference between our each of ourselves and him. None whatsoever.
There’s no unbridgeable gulf. There’s no qualitative difference. He, just like ourselves at one time, was confused, going through the same difficulties as ourselves. Through his working with his own mind, dealing with his problems at a fundamental level, he was able to solve the problem of the human condition. And he was able to, you know, realize it’s full of potential, the same potential which exists in every one of us.
So that’s what the Buddhist path, I think, is very much about. You know, when we talk about our Buddha, historical Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha, he looked on with tremendous gratitude. He was an exemplar, a guide. By trying to gain a sense of his extraordinariness, we begin to see how deceptive our seeming ordinariness really is. That maybe I’m not this poor schmo, this incomplete person that doesn’t have what it takes to be successful in life, the way I normally conceive of myself, this habitual way that I’ve learned to identify myself, which more than not has become a self defeating, self fulfilling prophecy about myself, that maybe there really is something about me, which is something much more than I have ever imagined or even could even dream of about myself.
And the Buddha, he he traversed this path, and therefore, he became a reliable guide for those who who want to do the same. And that’s why we we we hold the Buddha with in such esteem. That’s why we have such reverence. He achieved what each of us is capable of achieving, and he became a guide to his having achieved it. So that we can we can trust in that.
So I’ve been going on about forty minutes. Maybe we could have some discussion. If you have any questions that you’d like to bring up, we can share some of the ideas. Anybody have anything they’d like to talk about? Or we could stare blankly at each other for the next fifteen minutes or something.
Anything? Yeah. So how do you take the path? If you wanted to follow the Buddhist path, what was it? Yeah.
I think I mean, I I see Buddhism as education. Yeah. I mean, essentially, that’s what this place is about. It’s an educational institute. I think it’s sad, but it’s the case.
You know, I I was Sometimes I listen to the news, and they’re talking about our new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is talking about the education revolution and so forth. And we have been talking about these latest levels of testing that came out in terms of literacy and numeracy. And that’s all well and good. It’s good if we can read and count. But how much of our education is lacking in terms of helping teaching us how to be a successful human being?
It’s sad that they don’t teach that in school. Maybe they don’t think it needs to be taught, or maybe they aren’t able to teach it. Think this is what hopefully someday will be the case. But until then, Buddhism is a means of educating ourselves, trying to look at the nature of what it means to be an ordinary human being. Is trying to look at the nature of our difficulties?
Or I guess saying stop and take a look, first of all, helping us to stop acting, stop speeding, and reflect upon the human condition. But giving us some tools to work with so that we fruitfully question. We actually even need some guidelines on what is a productive way to question the nature of existence and what it is that we’re experiencing. In our society, it’s not Okay to be not Okay. We should all be running on the beach now drinking Coca Cola laughing.
That’s the way we should be. And we should be ashamed of ourselves that we’re not living up to that image in some way, that we’re causing all this trouble. Why don’t you get your act together and be happy like everybody else? Be productive in whatever way you can in the marketplace like everybody else. But we’re not like everybody else.
So Buddhism is trying to first give us some tools to begin to help us to question fruitfully or productively the actual nature of what it means to be an ordinary human being, dissatisfactory. And moreover, it’s trying to say, in analyzing the nature of the human condition, we begin to see where the problems lie. There are two basic dysfunctions of the mind. This is the orientation: self-grasping and self-centeredness, or in other ways of saying this, ignorance, most basic, and self-cherishing.
And this is seen as the two fundamental dysfunctions or problems existing in ordinary ordinary human beings. Out of this arises the multiplicity of mistaken beliefs and ideas and unskillful unskillful ways of relating and being in this world with others, and therefore all our suffering, all our problems. So we can begin to see we can check we have some we can fruitfully analyze the nature of the human condition. Otherwise, we’d say, well, is life just a bitch and then we die? We can’t get a handle on it.
Don’t have any context to put our suffering in. Education is the way that gives you a context, that your experiences take on a particular meaning. They have a particular significance. Understand. You begin to make sense out of it.
Otherwise, it does it doesn’t make any sense. You know? Our suffering and difficulties, you know, this is we can just say, well, this is the way it is and let it go at that. But Buddhism is trying to give us some tools by we can make productive sense out of our experience. And they’re saying, see if you can see where the root of your problems are coming from within your own lived experience.
Maybe you if you know, you’d be able to trace them all the way down to ignorance and self centeredness. Okay. If you can do that and if you begin to gain some confidence that is that is the case, and I’m talking about within your own experience, it’s not a matter of accepting some doctrine or signing membership into some club. If you can see that for yourself, then maybe you’ll be willing to implement the methods, the trainings. Everything is a product.
The products have causes. What is the cause of ignorance? Can we remove that cause? Can we generate wisdom? What is the cause of self centeredness?
Can we remove that cause? Maybe we can regenerate love and compassion as means of overcoming. What is the goal of all this? It is what we’re calling a successful life, a happy, loving, sane human being. So we begin to gain some kind of confidence because we are able to validate this within our own experience, using our reasoning, logic.
We check up. We analyze. We use our basic intelligence. We begin to gain some kind of confidence through this process of education that there is a fundamental cause to our problems. And moreover, problem can be dealt with.
We can begin to remove those causes, and we experience the type of result that we would want for ourselves. And so we begin to travel a path. So it’s all a matter of education so that we can begin to successfully question the nature of the human condition, what are the fundamental difficulties involved, the methods of working with those difficulties, and what kind of outcomes we can expect realistically. Yeah. Something like that.
Yeah. So, I mean, we address, in implementing the path and actually working with some of these methods. We’re educating ourselves. Want to improve the quality of our mind. There are basically two ways that we can go about it: an indirect way and a direct way.
The indirect way I like to go for walks in the country, trekking in the hills. My mind feels much better. That’s great. The the type of work that we do, the motivation behind what we do, bring about the listening to good music or literature, which expresses a higher state of consciousness in some way, or doing voluntary work for little or no self-service, without any self-serving motives can be of use. So making offerings at an altar or working at a charity, lots of different ways that we can indirectly help induce more positive states of mind.
And these are a necessary part of the path of any spiritual endeavor. And just being successful human being, We have to work in these all, use all the various methods that we have at hand. Okay? But there is a direct method, and the direct method of working with the mind itself. And this is usually explained in terms of a threefold stages, a threefold method: listening, reflecting, and finally meditating.
It’s said that meditating without listening and reflecting is like having legs but no eyes. And on the other hand, listening and reflecting without meditating is like having eyes with no legs. In neither case do we get very far. So I’m talking about meditation at its best. Meditation is not a holy grail.
It is an activity which exists in a context. Everything that we do exists in a context. The worldview that we bring, our understandings that we bring to whatever activity we do, and to meditation. So we begin with listening, and this is part of the education process, what I was talking about. You learn the terms, you learn the structure of the teachings and the categories, how it all fits together.
You begin to get a sense of the forest, and then you begin to reflect upon it. There’s nothing that it doesn’t do any good to accept the doctrine without having thinking for yourself. There’s no getting around it. It’s like otherwise, it’s like pouring oil on water. It kind of just floats on the surface.
It’s not integrated. We have to examine it. We have to use our reason, our logic. Does this accord with my own experience? Is it valid?
Is my way of is my method of testing it, is that valid? Questioning. Examining. This will bring about doubt. There are two types of doubt, afflictive doubt and non afflicted doubt.
Doubt, in its best, is the precursor to true understanding. I talked about the fact experience tension in the mind, we experience some kind of incongruency between our expectations and what we actually experience and so forth, we experience some kind of dissonance in mind, we can either take one of two paths. Either we try to change the world to conform to our preconceptions, or we can change our minds to conform to the way things actually are. Doubt is the transition in this process of change, in the process of change in one’s mind. You’re not sure anymore.
You used to think it was this way. And this is the way I used to believe things were, but now I’m not so sure. Doubt is the precursor to true understanding, to true wisdom. Most people, they don’t feel good with doubt. There’s a certain groundlessness.
We all want things either black or white. That’d be nice, but it doesn’t We don’t want to think for ourselves. Just tell me how I should think. You won’t grow. There will be no change.
The change will be superficial. It be in terms of your actual nature. We begin to question. Out of this arises true understanding validated it for ourselves. We know for ourselves.
No one has to tell us. We don’t have to look to the right or the left because we have validated it with our own experience. And we gain some real confidence. And with that, without gaining that confidence, going beyond all hesitation, we can, as it were, put our mind. We allow, we can trust.
You know, think if and perhaps I’m complicating this answer beyond what you might have been asking. But if we really check up, there’s a part of us that doesn’t want to change. It may not be much, but this is home. However barren and humble, however much suffering there is, at least I know what to expect. There’s some kind of solace in that.
It’s very difficult to give over and actually, there’s a certain wisdom in not giving over the deepest levels of our being to whatever passing belief system comes along. That would be stupid. And moreover, you can’t do it. There’s a resistance. Only when we work through in terms of overcoming our own hesitations, our own misconceptions, our own misconceptions, our own inability to trust.
And we feel some really deep confidence. Will the mind allow itself? And it’s not an intellectual or conscious choice. But the mind begins to you know, it’s like when you become you’ve had this relationship with this person, and you’ve tested it over many years through thick and thin, through hard times and good times, and they’ve always been there for you. And through this process of analysis and experience, you begin to trust at a very deep level of your being.
You open yourself up to this other person, likewise to these ideas, to these new understandings. Only through a long process of checking up, examining, questioning, coming to deeper understandings, will the mind allow itself to open up to the possibility of change? This is where meditation comes in. Again and again, experiencing these understandings, this new vision of the world, what we’ve come to learn. We evoke these states just like love and compassion.
You know, change we are the change. We have right now, when we think about change, when we think about study. Is like we we we have a sense that we’re, like, becoming a Buddha is like, know, getting a whole portfolio of PhDs or becoming an encyclopedia of knowledge. Or it’s like a psychic implant, which releases a sort of growth hormone. But it a part of us, a section of us, leaves basically ourselves as a person alone.
It’s like an implant. That’s the way that we think of the spiritual path at present. That’s the way that we think of change. Oh, I’d like to be a more compassionate person. It’s like thinking to grow flowers.
You can grow gardens and gardens of flowers without yourself appreciably changing. And we bring that same notion to this process of spiritual change, to growth. We have the sense that, oh, I can go the gardens and gardens of the flowers of love and compassion. I can decorate my inner house with them. And I can give them to special friends on special occasions when it suits me, when it serves my purposes.
That’s that’s that’s But growth is about change, and not just to a part or a section, but to the person. The way their entire worldview will change. What they see as the source of their happiness and how to find that happiness, what they see as the source of their suffering and how to be rid of that suffering, the type of work and how they do it, all of their values, the way that they relate with others, their experience of the world. Change. Why?
Because I am the change. It’s not just a part of me is changing, as if I can control that change. We are the change. And we won’t give ourselves over to that change until we we won’t entrust ourselves until we’ve examined thoroughly the means and ends and found that they are only for our own benefit. On the other side, can’t predict.
To become a loving, compassionate person, we can’t predict all the real world impact that it’s going to have on the type of work that you do and what you do, the type of your relations, all the ramifications of becoming a more loving and compassionate person. But we have a sense, we can trust, that on the other side of that change, I’m going to land on my feet, that I’m going to be a better person living in a better world, bringing about greater benefit for myself and others. I trust in that. I don’t know exactly all the details on how that’s going to look, but I have some confidence that that is the case. So we’re talking about faith, aren’t we, in the sense of trust, in the sense of confidence in what I’m doing?
And so when I talk about meditation in terms of these three stages of listening and reflecting, we have to set the context whereby we allow our mind to entrust itself at the deepest level of our being to this new vision that we’re trying to cultivate, that by becoming a more compassionate person, I’m going to live in a better world as a better person. We have confidence in all that. And then the meditation. Meditation simply means to familiarize, to accustom. In the Sanskrit, bhavana, it means to bring something new into the world.
Before, there was a fallow field. And now there is a field of golden wheat that wasn’t there before. We change. We grow. We are the change.
So this brought this consummation through meditation, through this familiarization process. But at its best, it’s part of an overall education, reflecting, listening, reflecting, and then actually being the change that we want to make. Not thinking about it, but being. I be compassion just for that moment in my meditation. And I keep being again and again.
I familiarize. And then something new comes. Something through my meditation. Through my meditation? I think you have a good idea.
Can you work it out? The more you meditate, do you think we can make progress? Definitely. The mind is like clay. Depending upon your skill or lack of skill, you can make of that clay, that wet lump of clay, a beautiful sculpture of Michelangelo or a monstrosity.
Or you can make of your mind that piece of clay an ashtray. It’s workable. It’s pliable. It has no intrinsic nature. It’s not self defining.
We can shape it. We can create the type of mind and therefore the life we want if we have the skill, if we’re willing to put forth the effort. There’s no reason why we can’t. You it’s really good to set motivation. You know, your motivation.
Why are you doing this? What’s the purpose behind it? Yeah. So the reason why or the purpose for the motivation that we do something is very important. It’s not so much what we do but we do what we do.
So, you know, your fifteen minutes, if you have really beneficial motivation, no matter whether your mind is crazy, the next fifteen minutes, no matter what it’s this thinking about all kinds of things of your motivation, you know, why it will be of benefit. Know, it’s good. I always thought meditation was to rest the mind. So, you know, that I don’t think you can get rid of thoughts. Yeah.
So they’re they’re overall. There are two types of meditations, especially within, yeah. There are analytic meditations and meditative stabilizations. Analytic meditations use reasons, use a particular method of analysis. Like, for example, the meditations on cultivation of compassion, we use various reasons which help us to arise at a feeling of compassion.
Or we try to gain an insight into the nature of an object, its deeper nature. We might use various reasons methods of examining, investigating. So that’s one area of meditation. The other is, as you mentioned, called meditative stabilization where we don’t analyze. We simply want to hold the object, you know, like my hand holds the stick, whereas we want to be able to develop the ability to focus on a single object for as long as desired.
So it’s So our our our meditation practice, our overall meditation practice should be a combination of both of these types. You definitely need concentration, a stable, calm mind as a foundation. If your if if your mind isn’t calm, if you can’t concentrate, then this analysis won’t proceed very productively. Your your mind will just be continually Already? Yeah.
Yeah. Be continually distracted. All night. You fall asleep. Or you have a good sleep.
Some people can’t sleep very well. You’re very fortunate. So we think our overall meditation should be a combination of analytic meditations, but also this concentrated meditation. And the concentration is a necessary foundation for analysis. When do we start?
Two thirty. How long have been doing? Anybody have anything else they’d like to talk about? No. How did you come across the Buddhism?
How did I okay. It was something of a journey. I think we’re all on a journey. My journey was actually in the physical world. Went through Do you want the long story or the short story?
Maybe we can have a cup of coffee I was traveling around India with my girlfriend, and we were going to go back overland. This was in nineteen this is when the horse and buggies, nineteen seventy three. Yeah, you were this before your time. And we were going to go back overland to Europe. We were traveling around India and Nepal and so forth.
And they closed the Afghan border for two weeks. They were having some kind of conference in Kabul, they didn’t want the hippies littering the streets. So they closed the border. So we had to find some place to hang out for a couple of weeks. And we heard about this guy called the Dalai Lama.
And we thought, well, I had this image of him living in these tents. He said, oh, you’d probably like to have a cup of tea with westerners, probably enjoy that. So let’s go to Dharmasala, that’s where the seat of the Tibetan government in exile is in Himachal Pradesh in northern India. And we got to Dharmasala, and then there was this institution called the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives. And we happened upon that, and there was a teacher there, a Tibetan teacher, by the name of Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey.
And he was teaching six days a week, three hours a day, with a translator. And I said, Okay, let’s go along to hear what he’s got to say. And what struck me most about my first impression was, wow, these people seem happy, Tibetan people. Here they are, refugees living situations and having just lost their home, you know, about twenty three years previously. Almost every one of them had lost a member of their family, had been killed in the ‘fifty nine uprising.
Losing your homeland, family members, your material possessions. But still, they had something. You get to suspicion, well, there must be something going on here. People in the West, influence. They have all this prosperity, and they’re miserable.
But look at these people. So it’s intriguing. And so we began to go to classes. He was talking about all the things that I had been unable to articulate, no one had been able to answer these questions, which I wasn’t able to express. And I was fairly religious, you know, you don’t want the long story.
Anyway, I don’t want to go well. Anyway, this fantastic person, individual who, know, he talked about all the things which I wanted to know about. Answering somebody so we hung out. We stayed. We were able to stay six months, and then our visa ran out.
So then we went to Nepal. And we stayed in Nepal for one year. And it’s where I met Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe. And Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa together founded the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition, of which Buddha House is a member. It’s a system of about one hundred and fifty centers and monasteries and nunneries around the world.
Think the reason that we’re sitting here now is because of the vision of one particular individual, Lama Yeshe. Right next to this central, what we call a blackboard, to your right, is a rather angelic looking face. That’s Lama Yeshe. And he was a great psychologist. He was one of the greatest masters that I’ve ever met.
And it’s due to his kindness and vision that Buddha House exists at present. And now the spiritual he died about I guess it’s been about twenty five years ago. And now his co founder of FPMT is now the present spiritual director. To the right is Lama Zopa. And so I did courses with him in Nepal.
We were able to stay one year, and then we ran out of money, finally, and went back on a round trip plane ticket to the United States. I’m from the States. I don’t know if you could tell. I hide my accent well, I think. I worked in a petrol station.
My girlfriend worked as a waitress. We came back to India, to Dharmasala, continued our studies, and about three years later, I think I became a monk, and she became pregnant. At the same time. I had nothing to do with it. She went back to the States and eventually traveling around.
I stayed about fifteen years. And in nineteen eighty eight, I came to Adelaide. I stayed about eight or nine years, one year in, I think, in Tasmania, one year in a center in Queensland, And then I went to Italy for seven years. We had a program there for what we call the master’s program. And I talked a little bit there and then the retreat.
And I came back about a year and a half ago. And here we are today. That’s a bit my biography. It’s in my book, Suffering Made Easy. It’s coming out soon.
What do you think you mean by study? How do how do you study? How do you how do you study? But I think reading books, attending teachings. Books by some monks.
Not monks. These days we’re quite fortunate. There’s lots of good books in English, so you can but also listening to in person, I think, oral tradition, I think, very important. The atmosphere and the context that the teachings are presented has a unique impact on the mind, think, but also reading. So that’s a way we can study.
So yeah okay did you have a question? Yeah. That’s a very profound question. Wish I I can’t no, it’s no. I say that before because I can’t answer it very well.
Otherwise, I could. I think the first thing that came to mind, there’s two things that come to my mind. One is that this is one of the importance of Sangha or spiritual community, the people who support us. It’s like a spiritual laboratory where we can experiment with different ways of being, different ways of thinking. We difficult to express outside.
And so they can it’s like a greenhouse where these fragile shoots of our spiritual development can find nurturing, you know, can be nurtured along in a protective environment. I say this because it’s like the social context or culture where this can take it’s like a protective environment, a social protective environment where we can feel safe to allow these transitions. And they’re acknowledged and they’re appreciated and they’re respected. And you can check. You can have a dialogue about this.
You can talk to each other about where you’re at. There’s a reality check. And these people understand and they respect what you’re experiencing, and you can do the same for them. So it’s a place where we can carry on a dialogue so we can keep on track, so that we can be assured that, yeah, I’m going in a productive direction. Okay?
So there’s that. That’s why the sangha is important, one of the reasons. The other reason is that the Dharma will lead you. It isn’t necessarily all these books, books, books, books. Sometimes a leaf floating from a tree can give you a teaching on impermanence.
So the Dharma comes in all various fashions and different ways if our mind is ready for the teaching. There’s a saying, at one time, a sixteen foot high golden statue of a Buddha is equal to a blade of grass. And at another time, a blade of grass is equal to a sixteen foot high golden statue of Buddha. So sometimes the teachings aren’t formal. And they don’t come in books.
But the little things about us, if you’re ready, if the mind is perceptive, if you’ve created the context to be able to see the significance, then you learn from everything as your teacher. Yeah? Okay. Thank you. That’s a good question.
I appreciate it. Okay, thank you very much for your patience. Have a good day. And there’s a oh, I if you’d like to learn more about Buddha House, there’s a newsletter outside. If you’d like to get on our listserv or our newsletter, you can provide your email address and we’ll be happy to send you a blow by blow account of what’s going on at Buddha House.
Okay? Take care. Thank you.