Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The fishbone image — borrowed from a Thai coastal master who preached to fisher-village audiences — anchors the opening of this 46-minute commentary by Ven Jampa Gendun on Je Tsongkhapa’s Three Fundamentals of the Path. Dukkha, he argues, is not cynicism but realistic diagnosis: life is delicious yet always has a bone preventing full perfection. He traces the two causes that drive spiritual practice — suffering and faith — and insists that awareness of suffering, rather than distraction from it, is what allows problems to be solved at their root. Drawing on psychiatrist Scott Peck’s observation that therapy is about power and confidence, Gendun frames the awakening heart as an empowering, pragmatic choice rather than a sentimental ideal. The session moves through all three fundamentals but focuses on the second, closing with a short guided meditation on cultivating love and compassion toward a specific person.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 HoM 1993 02 17.mp3
UUID: c5502896-1f84-40cd-9ed9-a053f4c7398a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-02-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~4,906
So most of you had a busy day. You had to deal with all the practical necessities of life, having to deal with work, whether it be the wage earner outside the home or in the home. And quite often, having to meet all your practical necessities in dealing, interacting with people and situations, it’s easy to lose sight of what perhaps are some of our more central values, what is most important to us, the source of our dreams. Again and again, getting back in touch, again and again, this process of reorientation, this process of redirecting myself, getting in touch with some central values. I think it’s quite important, isn’t it, for us to all be continually doing this.
Now what is it that we feel? What is it that we ourselves believe in? Most of our beliefs probably are conditioned by our culture, by our peer groups. To a very small extent are they ours. Having been arrived at, having been generated by our experiences, Using our own reasoning, using our intuition, what is it that works most for us?
And this process of reorientation, can you hear me in the back okay? Sounds like there’s a pinball machine going on next to me. Just. Is that a little bit better? So as I mentioned last week, there’s a motivating force for what is traditionally called going for refuge.
That is there are two causes for this continual reorientating ourselves. One is suffering and the other is faith. It’s the reality of our situation that it is only suffering which makes us think. And that when we’re when we’re happy, we never ask the reasons why. Oh God, why am I happy?
It’s suffering, it’s when things go wrong, dissatisfaction, conflict, which makes us question, What is the reason for my suffering? So at bottom most, it’s suffering which motivates us to look at our lives, what we’re about and how we’re dealing with the world around us and people and situations. And so we don’t need any more suffering. I think we’ve all had enough suffering. But what we need to do is to develop an awareness of suffering.
I don’t think an awareness of suffering is going to make us suffer any more. As a matter of fact, I think it’s going to serve as a catalyst for solving our problems, for removing the causes of our suffering once and for all. And it’s because we continually distract ourselves from our suffering, that we continually discount. That we never confront our problems, that they keep reoccurring. We never really solve our difficulties at some very fundamental level.
In Pali, there’s the word dukkha. That’s also the same word in Sanskrit, dukkha. And this idea of what our life is about. And a lot of people, especially Westerners, it sounds pretty heavy handed, sounds pretty cynical, and that they don’t like to hear about it. But it’s the reality of our situation, and It’s necessary to deal with it.
We have no choice but to accept reality and work with the way things are. If we superimpose any degree of negativity or superimpose some sort of fantasy upon the actual situation, then our way of dealing with the situation, the way we’re going to interact, is not quite accurate. It’s inexact. And therefore there’s always that. It’s this disparity between the way we can perceive of things, the way we look at things, our view of things, and things in themselves, are experienced as tension.
There’s discrepancy between how we relate to the situation on the basis of our misconceptions, our distorted premises, and the way things are in fact. This tension is experienced at some, what we call dukkha, generally translated as suffering. Just to give you an idea, perhaps, to broaden our feeling for what perhaps Buddhism is trying to get at when they talk about this quality. Of not life. Buddhism has great faith in the possibilities of life and ourselves, but a particular style of life, a particular way of living, a particular approach to life.
Is what meant, this is what is really meant by dukkha, a sort of disharmony, a jarring quality that we experience in the course of everyday life in this world. Things are never one hundred percent right. There is always something, even if it’s a little something, that goes wrong. Even in the course of the most beautiful day it seems only too often a cloud has to float across the face of the sky. Something goes wrong.
Maybe you’re prepared expectantly for a beautiful day. You’re going to meet someone whom you like. Things are going to be so lovely, so beautiful. But then some absurd incident happens and all goes wrong. Then you feel completely out of tune, completely tangled by whatever has happened.
And very often this is our experience of life. Most of the time this is how we go through life. Feeling like this. We feel that everything from which we expected so much fails and it doesn’t live up to our expectations. This is the sort of experience.
This sort of experience is what is called dukkha, unsatisfactoriness or suffering. I know one of the great Thai masters in Thailand, He used many metaphors around fishing because he lived on the coast, and many of his talks were given to the villagers who were mostly fisher people. And he would say that this quality of dukkha is like the fish bone in a fish. It’s really delicious, but there’s always a little bone that kind of doesn’t make things quite perfect. And I don’t think this is a cynical statement about life.
I think it’s realistic. But more than that, it should serve as a motivation to remove the fishbone. That everyone in this room should be blissed out. It is one of the most fundamental doctrines of a great vehicle of Buddhism, or universal vehicle of Buddhism, that eventually everyone in this room will be a Buddha. That is to say a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being.
It’s just a matter of time. Someone once said that evil, the concept of evil, evil is the amount of time until that we remain in the unawakened state. That how long it’s going to take before we awaken, before we become this happy, healthy, loving and sane human being is very much up to us. It our individual task to transform our mind, to go beyond our present state of being an ordinary person with our very subjective emotions and dealing with these afflictive emotions and the problems that they create and simply moving on to higher orders of self-correction. Our living systems seek to heal themselves and we are no different.
But we have to consciously take up this evolution of humanity. You know, that perhaps we can harmonize evolutionary theory in terms of Darwin’s theory with Buddhism. I don’t think we’ve had any problem. But hopefully Buddhism is going beyond the simple animal stage that we’ve arrived at. It’s saying that we can consciously begin to take control of our evolutionary destiny and begin to constantly direct our mind to fulfill the possibilities of what it means to be a human being.
And as we call Buddha, our paradigm of sanity, this model that we’re continually redirecting ourselves toward. I think it’s good to talk in this way. It’s like it gets us back in touch. We get centered again. We remember the possibilities of ourselves.
It’s quite easy to get caught up in superficialities, things which aren’t central to our well-being. But due to having lost our perspective, magnified to the extent where it seems central, They seem reshaping the importance as if our life depended upon them. I know it’s a television commercial which I think is, again I won’t comment on it. It’s about a woman with a shampoo commercial. And she says, wouldn’t you kill to have hair like this?
I know that’s an extreme, isn’t it? But that’s the mentality that we’re having to deal with, isn’t And that becomes terribly important. Earth shaking important. If one doesn’t have hair like that, one feels bad about oneself. Something’s wrong.
It’s dukkha. Things aren’t quite right. Things aren’t quite perfect. But that’s just the way of looking, approaching our existence. Now we can begin to choose.
And I think the idea of choice I think we have more choice than we have admitted up to now. That’s perhaps more choice than we have been aware up to now. But this choice is very much dependent upon our own inner strength, our own creative potential that we build up. The more inner strength that we develop, the more awareness and I think the more circumstances in which we can begin to exercise choice. That is to say we have the strength of mind, the clarity and the balance to redirect ourselves, to maintain our direction in the course of being buffeted about by these waves of various afflictive emotions, the waves of our hopes and fears, our hopes of pleasure, our fears of pain, our hopes of gain, our fears of loss, praise and criticism, fame, notoriety.
That amongst all of these preoccupations this oriented existence, we can chart a course for ourselves through consistent direction in our lives. I think my week after week reminding myself, day after day reminding myself and reminding you is important. We have to remind each other what is important, what we need to get back to. Now we have to, as I mentioned, deal with the world, deal with all the pertinent necessities of life and try to deal with them effectively and skillfully and efficiently as possible. But remembering to maintain some kind of perspective, maintain our balance, remain centered upon our deepest, most cherished values, those values which are going to be realized in the highest states of possible being, that is to say, as a Buddha.
So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, which is actualized by means of the Dharma. And this all occurs within the social context of a spiritual community. And we try to raise the level of our motivation such that we’re not doing this for our own sake alone, but for the sake of others. This is an empowering process, as I think I’ve mentioned a number of times. Think it was Scott Peck, the psychiatrist, American psychiatrist said that psychotherapy is not about happiness, it’s about power and confidence.
Power and confidence. And I think that’s very, in my own studies of family therapy, I’m beginning to see the validity of that statement. Oftentimes there’s no solution. That is to say, there’s no satisfactory solution to a particular problem that a client may bring. It’s the worst of difficult possibilities that you have to choose among.
But at least you can empower that person. And it’s a tremendous benefit. That at least we don’t compound our problems by our sense of powerlessness. We can begin to deal even though the solution may not bring us happiness, but it may just bring a lower level of suffering. But at least we’ve taken some control.
We’ve begun to exercise choice about direction that we want to go into. So I think this idea of choosing to develop oneself, to cultivate one’s skills, to work with these reoccurring patterns in our mind, not only for ourself, but to choose to be able to do it for others. This choice is terribly empowering. Beyond our feelings of insufficiency, beyond our feelings of lack of self worth, to choose to love another person in spite of our feelings of unlovability and perhaps about ourselves and others that I choose to love is terribly empowering. And what it can facilitate is that in empowerment comes the necessity to become competent.
The other benefit of psychotherapy is to become confident. That is to say, if we’re going to take responsibility, developing the ability to respond. And it is in this, and it is only this, which can take us beyond our own egotistical image, To begin to reach out, to take more and more universal responsibility is the way we can begin to go beyond the limits that we bound ourselves to. And it becomes recursive cycle to empower oneself by choosing. And by choosing to become confident, and becoming confident one gains more inner strength And then we’re able to choose more and more in all the various situations that life brings us and we become more confident, more empowered, growing in more inner strength.
And know it is this, you know rather than going around the circle, continue in a bad way to a large extent, I do it now, we we gain some kind of direction. Our life becomes a purposeful spiral, and we begin to move. The things aren’t quite what they were before. There’s a change, there’s a movement. So this process of realigning of our allegiance from a life based upon hopes and fears, the hopes of pleasure, of pain, fears of pain, fears of loss, to one which is based upon actively choosing growth.
And over and above that growth, not only one’s own growth, but actively choosing to help others to grow, becomes our way of life, our particular style, what we keep coming back to, reorienting ourselves to. And then our life becomes a purposeful involvement And we begin to solve our problem. And we become a blessing to both ourselves and to it. And I think this is the possibility, you know, it lends itself to the possibility of a good life. That’s what we all want.
I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha for the benefit of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma, and the highest assembly. And the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma, and the highest assembly.
And the virtuous merit that I collect, by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all of you. Meditate. And we’re going to generate the motivation by cultivating the three levels of compassion and love. Tonight if you can choose someone that you’re not intimately involved with, not your main focus of your caring or your relationship, but someone slightly removed, but someone that you care a great deal about, someone that you like, that you love. And we’re going to cultivate love and compassion towards this individual as a motivation for our meditation.
Then we’re going to meditate on mindfulness of breathing focusing upon the in and out of the natural breath if it’s useful using the two techniques of counting and noting. Counting the breath, in out one, in out two, in out three, out four, out five, one, six, one, two, seven. Noting whatever the mind is involved in from moment to moment. Ideally, the breath. Breathing in knowing that you’re breathing in, noting in, breathing out knowing that you’re breathing out, noting out.
In out one, in out two. Your mind is distracted or wandered during the course of your meditation, then noting whatever it is. But then in a very gentle patient manner, bringing your mind back to the breath, whether it’s an outside object like the sound of the cars going by or the fan or whatever, or whether it’s internal objects such as various feelings, feelings of pain, feelings of pleasure, thoughts, emotions. sinking — bringing the mind back to rest upon the breath again and again and again, and noting whatever it was. And then we’ll meditate on I’ll guide you through a meditation.
So if take a comfortable Are you comfortable in the back? Okay. Now if you think of someone that isn’t the main object of your caring and your love, but someone slightly removed, that someone who you do love, that you do like a great deal, that you feel very close to, And imagine that person in front of you. If you can’t see them, doesn’t matter. Just feel that the person is there.
Begin by cultivating compassion for this person. First with the simple family thought, it would be wonderful if you didn’t have any problems, And strengthen that. May you not have any problems. I wish that you had no dissatisfactions or disappointments. And strengthen them.
I’m going to help you, and I’m going to commit myself to working with you to help you to solve your problems, to go beyond your dissatisfaction. I’m going to take responsibility for your well-being. Cultivate love toward the same person, beginning with this simple, friendly thought, you’re wonderful, you’re happy. I would like that very much. Strengthen that.
May you get happy. I wish you all the good things of life. And strengthening that. I’m gonna commit myself to helping you to get happy. Take responsibility for working with you.
The way I’m going to express my commitment here at very moment and by means of my meditation. By developing myself, my skills, my wisdom, my love, I can be of real benefit to you. That’s why I’m going to meditate for you. Bring your mind to the breath. The easy, gentle, in and out flow of the breath.
I have to stand up for minute. Just stretch. Maybe we could turn the light on in the back. I was thinking just now How wonderful it is, what we do. One simple way of looking at our situation is that to a large extent, people are their habits.
And to a great extent, many of our habits are dysfunctional. That is to say that they’re working against our own self best interests. They don’t work very well to bring us the happiness that we want, to eliminate our problems. And I think we can all believe in a simple manner that habits can be reshaped, that we can cultivate more skillful habits. We can begin to reduce the force, the frequency, the duration of these dysfunctional patterns, these reoccurring compulsive patterns of our mind.
And then slowly, almost unawareingly, we become different people. What was problematic before is no longer a problem, or what was very difficult before becomes a minor insignificant episode that you can simply work with and it’s gone. Maybe none of us will have any profound earth shaking realizations. I don’t know. Some people seem to do.
I don’t. But I know that if we keep reminding ourselves, if we keep working, we’re going to talk about the second of the three fundamentals of the path, the awakening heart, the cultivation of love and wisdom. It’s a wonderful thing to talk about again and again. Precious that we come here and we talk about love and compassion. And we work with these ideas.
Expose our mind to these ideas. We begin to think along these lines. And there’s some you know, it’s like the like when you go out in the morning, in the winter, and there’s perhaps some kind of mist early in the morning, and your clothes imperceptibly become soaked. You never notice quite the moment when they become damp, when they become wet, but after some time you notice. But there was never any moment you could point to where you say, oh, now my clothes suddenly became damp or my bed became wet.
But imperceptibly, drawing the clothes, drawing the moisture. You know, working with all these various ideas, new ideas, ideas which are very revolutionary, which are very much different than the mainstream ideas which we’re exposed to to a large extent over the course of our everyday life. And then, you know, this simply becomes a part of this, working with their ideas, thinking about these ideas. You know, the word gom, the word for meditation in Tibetan is gom. It is not a very mystical term.
It’s a very mundane term. It simply means to get used to, getting used to some new idea, ideas that perhaps we haven’t heard before. The Buddha is always pointing out, you know, look at this, what about this, analyze this, take a look at this, and availing ourselves of our own basic sanity. That we have the resources to solve our problems and more that the mind will change, it will move to a higher order of self correction. And what was once a problem is no longer a problem.
And we become angry a little bit less. It doesn’t last quite as long. It doesn’t come quite as often. We’re not quite as attached. We don’t have as great a desire.
We’re not quite as miserly as we used to be. And imperceptibly, perhaps, it’s not a steady progression, perhaps. You know, there are rises and dips, but there’s a direction. There’s always an upward movement. And there’s change.
And we feel good about ourselves and we’re happier people. And we can be of use not only to ourselves but more and more to others. So we’re looking at the three principles or three fundamentals of the path. Three fundamentals of the path, developing the determination to awaken, to grow, the awakening heart and the awakening mind. And these are the three principles set up by Je Tsongkhapa in his text, The Three Fundamentals of the Path. And on the basis of a determination to be free, to awaken, you’re beginning to see at some very deep level the dissatisfaction of these compulsive patterns which govern our life, determining to be free from them, to begin to work with them on a very realistic level and to liberate ourselves, to go beyond this particular approach. We each have our particular world. We each develop our particular version of this thing called reality. And we are involved in therapeutic world making.
We’re trying to develop an approach to this thing called life which is self validating, self authenticating, which is consistent, and which moreover is experienced as peace. It’s a particular approach to life, a particular view. It works. We have to develop the tremendous drive to go beyond our particular world that we’ve developed for ourselves, our particular system of beliefs and ideas and assumptions, our various premises upon which we’re operating, which aren’t working as skillfully as they could and begin to integrate more therapeutic version of reality, which is experienced as peace. We need to develop a desire to go beyond these dissatisfactory compulsive patterns, to grow.
That’s the determination to awaken. Then how are we going to grow? We grow outwardly in terms of expanding our horizons, taking a greater and greater responsibility for others until it’s a universal responsibility and inwardly in-depth beginning to understand the nature of our own mind, the nature of the self, beginning to develop the profundity of our wisdom. So we’re looking at the second of these Three Principal Aspects. We’re going to talk about the methods, the ideas, ways of reframing the facts, new ways of looking at the same situations, which are pragmatically useful to our mind, which help us to find some peace in our lives.
And to a large extent, our minds have they’re like what do call it? Velcro. You All the little hooks. Yeah. If you if you take a a silk cloth and you rub it across Velcro, it doesn’t get very it catches.
Our minds are continually catching on everything. We can’t get a smooth mind. You know, by reframing, by you know, in reframing, the situation remains the same. And it’s not so much the things about us which cause us trouble, but our opinions about them. If we can, without trying to propagandize ourselves, without trying to brainwash ourselves, without trying to believe something which we at heart, know isn’t quite true.
But if we can, within using our logic, our rationality, our experience, our intuition, develop a worldview. Which is consistent with the facts as we see them, but which is skillful, both to ourselves and others. This is really pragmatically useful to ourselves. It’s not some romantic notion. It is something we can do it’s a way that we can help ourselves.
Working with these new ways of looking at the same situation. Our ways aren’t particularly working very well. We have to begin to admit that. Anger doesn’t work. It’s counterproductive.
It may have a sense that it has some immediate short-term payoff, but in the long run it’s self defeating, but destructive. One has to live with it. Our minds are struggling the best they can to deal with tension, to deal with the primordial distress that the misconception of self brings about. It’s doing its best. What does it have to work with?
It only has those tools that it’s learned somewhere along the line. It’s information that’s been given over the course of our lives. Nothing more than that. So it’s taking that information and it’s trying to do its best to relieve its own distress. And maybe the information that we received up to now hasn’t been all that value, hasn’t been all that accurate, hasn’t been all that profound, hasn’t really dealt, hasn’t really seen the depth of the problem and therefore a really profound solution.
So now maybe we’re learning, getting new information, information which can begin to make a difference, a difference which makes a difference. And our minds can begin to, you know, anger was resorted to because that’s all we knew. That was the tool that we have at hand. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t make use of the tools that we have. But once we begin to see that they’re better, more skillful tools, then obviously we’re not going to we’re going to make use of the best that we have available to us.
And as I mentioned, all of these systems are self healing. They’re trying to move toward a sense of equilibrium which is experienced as peace. Our minds are continually seeking to move toward peace, to resolve conflict, trying to move toward harmony, both internal harmony and harmony between ourselves and the world. There is this intrinsic instinct toward wakefulness, toward harmony, and away from distress. This is what we mean by sentient life, a movement away from it’s an approach in avoidance.
We’re simply developing some more skills by sharing information and trying to validate that information with our own experience and then integrate it so it becomes a part of our repertoire of dealing with situations, a natural part, an instinctive part, spontaneous part of ourselves. We’re trying to develop an awakening heart as a natural, spontaneous, intricate part of ourselves because it is the most skillful way that we can relate with the world about us as social beings on the basis of love, on the basis of compassion, altruistic activity in the world. That’s the best tool that we can make use of in trying to hone our own tool. There’s no more noble thought than the thought of the awakening heart. There’s no greater meaning that we can begin to bring to our lives.
No more powerful means to go beyond our own suffering than the awakening heart, to awaken our hearts to others. Through developing the determination to be free, awaken our hearts to ourselves. We begin to take our problems seriously and become sincere about working, confronting, and dealing with the real issues of our life and where, in fact, our problems are coming from. And we simply begin to extend that to others as a skillful means of finding like the Dalai Lama says, the awakening heart is a way that we can become wisely selfish. For selfishness, be wisely selfish.
We’re going to get unimaginably more happiness than we could have ever hoped by awakening our heart, development of love and compassion. There’s no greater way to help ourselves and others than to develop this one thought, the thought altruistically aspires to seek awakening for the sake of our living being. Tsongkhapa says thus the intelligence should generate the supreme altruistic intention to become enlightened, to become awakened. This quality of mind has as its object all living beings and awakening. It has as an aspect compassion, the thought to eliminate the suffering of others.
And in order to develop it, we have to reflect upon our own problem, upon our own difficulties. Having once done that, then we can begin to extend the understanding that we develop with respect to ourselves. All the various problems that we have, the various levels of dissatisfaction that we experience, dissatisfaction of pain, dissatisfaction of fluctuation, the alternation of our happiness and suffering continually over the course of our lives, psychological suffering. And finally, dissatisfaction of the universal conditionality of our physical existence, that we’re vulnerable, that we’re susceptible. Out of our control, without choice, we undergo experiences of suffering.