Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 41-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun dismantles the overworked English word “love” — pointing out that while Eskimo languages reportedly have fifty-two words for snow, we use a single word for hamburgers, violence, and our children. His working definition: love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing another’s well-being, a volitional act and daily labor rather than a sweeping emotion. He traces what that commitment demands — willingness to struggle, grow, and take real responsibility — and argues the paradox that we learn to love one person truly only by choosing to love all. A story about Lama Yeshe patiently receiving students while his heart was literally failing illustrates the teaching; a line from Dostoevsky anchors the stakes: hell is the suffering of being unable to love. The session closes with a guided meditation on exchanging self with others, asking practitioners to imaginatively inhabit a series of people and look back at themselves.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 HoM 1993 11 03.mp3
UUID: 40298813-a1b5-4102-8810-2af04ca0dec8
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-11-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 41.5 minutes
Words: ~4,808
And again, reorientating ourselves, reprioritizing, redirecting ourselves, you know, trying to develop the attitudes where we’re very much concerned with our inner growth. The inner focus of our life becomes Buddha in the sense of the personification of the preferred outcomes, and what has meaning for ourselves we see as an authentic and fulfilling way of being, and trying to you know, direct ourselves to those practices and ways of beings, those methods and techniques, truths, which help us to actualize the Buddha within inside of ourselves, the Dharma, and seeking some kind of support or fellowship within the spiritual community, the social context in which this process of growth and actualization of our potential is realized, is actualized, finds expression. But going beyond that, trying to raise the level of our motivation, why we do what we do, to include an ever widening circle of others. And the basis of this attitude of You can’t hear it? Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now? Don’t know. It’s it’s coming to the it’s not to the is is it connected back there, Khan? There’s a connection between the speaker. And in conclusion, I’d like to simply add, well, what more can I say?
So, okay. We’ll begin again. You can always begin again. So we can begin as we usually do, again, in terms of this process of redirecting ourselves, reprioritizing, getting back in touch with, you know, our deeply most deeply held values, those ways of those values and ways of beings, guidelines that we’ve set over the course of our life, which have brought meaning to our life, which in our final moments that we’d like to see our life as an expression of. And this process, this reorientation, is in terms of one’s inner growth, seeing the absolute necessity to, in the course of living out one’s preferred outcomes, that it’s necessary that there be some internal change, development or growth in terms of our attitudes and ways of beings, in relationship to others and ourselves and the world.
And this personification of this outcome, you know, we call Buddha. We direct ourselves to this realization of the optimum mode of being, or what we could be, that we are of the potential. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, this possibility for a rather radical alternative way of being in the world, an optimum way of being, happy, healthy, loving, sane human being. And we orientate ourselves toward those methods, those techniques, those means which facilitate this process, which help us to actualize Buddha, help us to realize our potential. And we orientate ourselves toward those who support us in this process, who authenticate and assist us in performing our preferred story of our life.
The process of growth occurring within a social context of other like minded individuals who aid us in our progress, who act as supports and guides, as teachers, as inspirations, as examples, whatever is necessary to facilitate the growth of another individual. And we continually try to raise the level of our motivation why we do what we do, to include an ever widening circle of others. So, you know, we’re trying to develop a vast vision to go beyond our clinging to limited ways of being and viewing the world and ourselves. You know, we can we can progress to this perspective, which the universal vehicle is trying to raise the level of our conscious toward, to begin to embrace an ever increasing, growing, wider circle of others. Why we do what we do.
And this entails the development of love. You know, last week we talked a little bit about equanimity, beginning to overcome our biases, our biasnesses, our prejudices, clinging to these absolute categories which we place people within, and then in terms of those categories, the way we relate with them. You know, the development of on the basis of a sense of equanimity, developing a sense of love. And, you know, love is an extremely well used word, in the sense that it’s probably an overused word, an extremely misused word. And a way, it’s too bad because words do have power over our minds.
And we use the word love in so many vastly different ways with so such vastly different meanings that it begins to obscure and it begins to lose the ability to have any effect, influence, to describe what we’re about. You know, we we can use the word love in such ways as, you know, I love McDonald’s hamburgers, or I love to hit you in the face. But when we say, I love my mother, I love my partner, I love my children, I love my country, and these are all vastly different feelings, I think. But we we just have the same word, this one word. You know, it’s it’s interesting that in the I’m I’m told that in the Eskimo language, they have fifty two different words for the word snow.
All the different types of snow: powdery snow, wet snow, damp snow, heavy snow. And it would probably be quite useful for us to have as many different words for the one word we now use: of love. But whatever we might mean by that word for ourselves, I think it’s useful to clarify in order to develop it, to know what it is that we’re seeking to develop. I think love is simply not just a feeling. It’s simply not an emotion which sort of sweeps us away, as it were.
But it entails some kind of conscious decision to act, to act for one’s own or another’s welfare. And the definition that I have that I like best is the is the the defining love as the the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing one’s own or another’s well-being. So, it it is a volition, a choice. You know, it Talking about love. Love alters our sense of importance.
Through love we see the other individual has great value in the cosmos as ourselves. It becomes just as important to us that he or she should be whole, should live fully, should find the joy of life as that our own needs be met. In the world of unconsciousness, in the world of the unconscious, love is that one great psychological force that has the power to transform the ego. Love is that one power that awakens the ego to the existence of something outside of itself, outside of its plane, outside of its plans, outside its empire, outside its security. Love relates the ego not only to the rest of the human race, but to the soul and to all the gods of the inner world.
Thus, love is by its very nature the opposite of egocentricity. We use the word love loosely. We use it to dignify any number of demands for attention, power, security, or entertainment from other people. But when we are looking out for our own self style needs, our own desires, our own dreams, and our own power over people, this is not love. Love is utterly distinct from our ego’s desires and power plan, power plays.
It leads in a different direction toward the goodness, the value, and the needs of people around us. In its very essence, love is an appreciation, a recognition of another’s value. It moves a man to honor a woman rather than to use her, to ask himself how he might serve her. And if this woman is relating to him through love, she will take the same attitude toward him. So, you know, the quality of love that might be being addressed here, trying to develop a sense of a feeling for what we might be meaning here, so that we can, you know, set some kind of goal in the development of love, that we can begin to gain some kind of feeling about what the type of love that we’re speaking about here.
You know, that love is nested in the feelings of connectedness and desire. But in itself, it is an act of will, both intentional and aspirational. Aspirational, aspirational in the sense that love begins with a longing, a desire that others be happy. It’s the wish that someone be happy, that they have whatever it would need to feel fulfilled and content at peace. But then it goes beyond.
It actually develops a set of intentions in terms of one goes about realizing what is simply an aspiration, in fact, a practical application in order to develop the means and the skills to bring that aspiration to into some kind of reality. So a practical task about a practical task about bringing it about. So love is volitional rather than emotional, you know, rather than the idea of being simply swept away by love. One chooses to love. It’s a choice and some kind of commitment to another’s true happiness and doing whatever needs to be done to promote that happiness of another individual, or indeed even ourselves, to love ourselves.
You know, it’s poses some kind of willingness to struggle and to work, to suffer, but also to rejoice in the life of another individual, and indeed our own achievements, own satisfactions that we find in the course of our life. And talking about love, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. And it is work, day labor, day labor. God knows there is no other word for it. For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, that last test in proof, the work for which all other work is about preparation.
He explained that the essence of love is to labor, for something and to make something grow, that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves. So, you know, I think if we begin to question then why love, if it’s so much work, if it simply involves labor? Why choose to labor? Why choose to work?
Why take up this difficult task of opening our hearts to others? To take love seriously and to bear and to learn it like a task, it is this that young people need. Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life. They have made it into a play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work. But there’s nothing happier than work, and love just because it is the extreme happiness can be nothing but work.
So, whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work. He must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself. He must work. He must become something. For believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences.
When we grow, it is because we are working at it, and we are working at it because we love ourselves. It is through love that we elevate ourselves. It is through our love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves. Love, the extension of the self, is the very act of evolution. It is evolution in progress.
The evolutionary force present in all of us, in all of life, manifests itself in humankind as human love. You know, there’s a common thought in the West that we can learn to love many by loving one. But, you know, if we begin to look at love in this way, maybe we can begin to question that seeming truism or cliche, and begin to consider the fact that perhaps it’s by seeking to love all that we can actually begin to love one. I mean, truly to love one in and of themselves, for themselves. But love for any man cannot be separated from love for one individual.
To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, insofar as it is divorced from love for all men, can refer only to the superficial, to the accidental. Of necessity, it remains shallow. You know, in choosing to love all persons, we can learn to truly love ourselves. You know, to truly love humanity, rather than being those who say, you know, I love humanity.
It’s just this person I can’t stand. You know, that we begin to love the core of what it means to be an ordinary human being, the human dilemma, the human condition, which we’re all caught up in. We we see that when we see a person, rather than getting caught up and clinging to and making judgments about what is, in fact, superficial amongst us, whatever that might might entail, whether it be in terms of our gender, in terms of our education, in terms of our attractiveness, in terms of our wealth, all the possibilities and ways that we could discriminate on the level of superficialities. And therefore, we know we aren’t able to see and to relate with and connect up with the essential of who it is that we you know, who it is who is this person in front of me aside from these superficialities, these these these incidentals? You know, in choosing to love all persons, we can learn to truly love ourselves.
You know, the primary teaching of Christ does not mean to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But in the same way that we love our neighbors, treat our neighbors, we will love ourselves. We will treat ourselves. We will feel about ourselves. He who cannot love feels unworthy, and at the same time feels that somehow no one is worthy.
Perhaps he cannot feel love because he thinks he is unworthy of love, and because of that he also thinks no one else is worthy. You know, this is the terrible dilemma of our ego based existence, I think. There’s the I oftentimes think of a line from by Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov, where there’s an old Greek Orthodox father is dying, a teacher, and his students are gathered around him. And he says to them, Fathers and teachers, I ponder what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
So, you know, in spite of all our feelings of unworthiness or unlovableness, we have to choose to love if we are ever going to escape the hell of being unable to love, unable to love ourselves, you know, escape the suffering of our own self hatred. You know, one one is not loved accidentally. One’s own power to love produces love. Just as being interested makes one interesting, people are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive, while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. The Buddha was once asked by a leading disciple, would it be true to say that a part of our training is for the development of love and compassion?
The Buddha replied, no, it would not be true to say this. It would be true to say that the whole of our training is for the development of love and compassion. He extolled love as that faculty that far more than all other lofty religious and ethical deeds is capable of softening the hardened ego structure or the ego delusion, and so opened the way to liberation and enlightenment. He said, Therefore, monks, you should learn thus that love that is the liberation of the heart and the mind. We will produce it in ourselves, increase it further, make it wholly ours, practice it, perfect it more and more, and employ it to perfection. You know, it is you know, it’s said that within psychotherapy, that psychotherapy is not about happiness.
It’s about power and competence. And power lies where the decisions are made. What then could be more empowering for an individual than to choose to love in contradiction to our usual habitual egocentric demands, our perceived unworthiness of ourselves and other people. You know, I choose to love, to exercise that freedom that we all possess, to extend myself for the purpose of nourishing their and my own well-being. You know, this this creative power is the force which eventually will enable us to break out of all our self destructive habitual patterns, we are bound within, these reoccurring patterns which destroy any possibility of lasting happiness and fulfillment and authenticity in our lives.
But, remedially, you know, even temporarily, to break out of our self perpetuating and self reinforcing cycles of our feelings of unworthiness and inabilities to love. You know, when when we love, we love, our love becomes demonstrable or real only to the extent of our exertion. You know, that that to the fact that we are willing for that someone, for that person, even for ourselves, that we take an extra step, that we go that extra mile, that we choose to to go beyond our limits. And this this is somewhat something of a definition of love that I I keep mentioning. This the will to extend oneself, to extend.
To extend means to go beyond one’s perceived limits, one’s acknowledged limits, as it were. It’s work. You know, if we always kept within the bounds of our limit, then there’s no extensions. There’s no real work. You know, and it is this which is going to make us healthy.
You know, there’s no other force which can help us to actualize our fullest potential than the force of love. This choice to extend oneself. To, you know, we take responsibility. And in taking responsibility, we necessarily have to develop the ability to respond. And it is in that having to develop the ability to respond that our own problems will be solved.
All the blood, sweat, and tears that we’ve expended over the course of our life have not solved our problems. That’s our present situation. That is our own experience. Maybe there’s another alternative that we can begin to look at that we will, to the degree that we choose to love and taking responsibility for the welfare of another others, that we will develop that we will have to develop the ability to respond, and in that development our own problems will be solved. Maybe that’s the alternative that we have to look at, an alternative mode of being, a way of relating with others.
You know, it’s this consistent choosing to extend ourselves and taking that extra step and walking that extra mile for ourselves and other people that we will grow. And in growing growth is commensurate with a more meaningful, more fulfilling, more authentic way of being, more fulfilling and satisfying relationships with others. So I think it’s worth thinking about and cultivating a sense of its worthwhileness to keep redirecting oneself. Even if it’s only an aspiration, it will find a way to find expression in our life if we keep redirecting, keep reorientating ourselves, keep reminding ourselves. Something will occur, something will change in our life.
So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, which is actualized by means of the Dharma in the social context of a spiritual community, and this continual reorientating process, this continual re dedicating ourselves to the awakening of our heart as the motivation behind what we do in this process of actualizing our potential and developing the ability to respond in a skillful way to the needs of others and ourselves. 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 a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. 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 a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
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 a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. So we’re going to meditate, and we’ll begin, you know, by adjusting our motivation again through the process of visualizing someone who isn’t particularly close to ourselves, but is we have a natural we like a friend, an acquaintance, but isn’t an intimate friend or an acquaintance, but someone that we naturally like, that we do have a caring for. Choosing that person to develop these qualities of compassion and love with respect to. Then we’ll meditate on mindfulness of breathing, and then we’ll meditate, as a means to foster our love, on coming to be able to identify with others by means of exchanging self with others.
And we’ll visualize a series of different individuals in front of ourselves, and we’re going to play a role, as it were. We’re going to, as best we can, imaginatively put ourselves in their place. You know, this American Indian, Native American Indian saying, you know, don’t judge another person until you’ve walked a month in their moccasins. So, you know, that we can develop a sense of sympathy, and then empathy, and then finally being able to identify in a very powerful manner what the experience of another person is by, you know, going beyond our own myopic vision, only seeing the world out of from one perspective, that is, say, our own. And developing a multi faceted perspective, being able to see situations out of other people’s eyes, and being able to, in some way, at least vicariously, being able to understand.
You know, if someone it was interesting. When I was in, yeah, I was in Queensland just recently, and many of you, I’m sorry to say, were not fortunate in having met Lama Yeshe. Lama Yeshe was the founder of Buddha House about eleven years ago now. He was an extraordinary individual, had tremendous influence over many, many, many people, especially Westerners. And, you know, he died about, I guess it’s been about six years ago or seven years ago now.
And he had an enlarged heart, which became inoperable. You know, there was a hole in his heart, so it was a slow death, you know, that his body simply couldn’t his heart couldn’t function, couldn’t keep up the necessary function for him to maintain his physical well-being. His well-being slowly deteriorated over time. But he individuals would still come to him, many, many, many over the course of a day, asking questions, making demands, pleading with help, breathing in all their problems. And he with tremendous patience, he would see each individual and whatever would try to fulfill whatever their request was and try to fulfill whatever their need was.
You know, it’s completely constant, continually giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, even though his own health was simultaneously, at that very time, at that very moment, deteriorating. And someone asked him, a Westerner who was attending him at that particular time, and he says, and he this Westerner got upset with these people because many of the requests were quite petty. You know, they were having arguments with other people. And here, Lama Yeshe was in pain. He was he was nearing death.
And these people would would bring what seemed to this Westerner to be totally petty and simply annoying and bothering. They weren’t a real wasn’t a real need to to take up his time and his energy. And he expressed this sentiment to Lama Yeshe. And Lama Yeshe says, but but you see, I understand them. You know, he he understood them.
He understood where they’re coming from. And then he looking looking looking beneath the petty annoyances and the the superficial hang ups and static. You know, there’s a there was a in Steppenwolf by Hesse. You know, there there was someone said one I remember a line which said that the the radio was they were listening to a radio, and the radio was very unclear, difficult to listen to. And this person was complaining about the static.
And and and second person, you know, don’t don’t focus on the static. Focus upon the music. You know, that people are difficult, and they’re very annoying. But still, if we see if we come to the commonality, the core of all humanity, we can understand who they might be, and we can find some energy and some time to relate with that, because we understand. Understanding, as Thich Nhat Hanh and I have mentioned many, many times, is love itself.
Love is another word for understanding. If we if we address the core of the individual and overlook the the petty annoyances and the and the and the difficulties in our relationships and and their various idiosyncrasies, all that static that we get hung up in, and just the core of the humanity of everyone who is driven by ego, who’s ignorance driven in their everyday life, the way they deal with others, and the way they think of themselves, and the way they struggle for happiness, and they’re trying to eke out a little bit of peace in their lives, and some kind of fulfillment. And then, you know, then we can have tremendous more then maybe we can begin to emulate someone like Lama Yeshe, who who is who who finds, even in his while he was approaching death, was able to find the time, able to extend himself for the purpose of nourishing these people, knowing that he, you know, that he could give them something, and overlooking the static and trying to listen to the music of people’s hearts. So, you know, we have to be able to identify, to understand others, put our how to put ourselves to some degree in their place, how they might feel.
So, we can practice this in some way. We can go beyond a complete self absorption, these blinders that we’re normally wearing, totally absorbed, wrapped up in our own problems, and practice, train in putting ourselves in other people’s looking out the world in their eyes, feeling their feelings. How would it be to be them? So, going to visualize in front of ourselves a series of individuals. And as best you can, try to, you know, get you set aside your own agenda, your own issues, and put yourself in their place.
Play a role. How would it be to be them? How would it feel? And then we’ll look back at ourselves, our former selves, before we made this exchange. Okay.
So we’ll practice that. Take a comfortable firm posture. So first, development of our motivation in terms of some a friend, but someone you’re not particularly attached to or very intimate with, but that you have a natural liking for, caring. Imagine that person in front of you Especially, you can. If you can’t see them, doesn’t matter.
Just feel that they’re there. And beginning with compassion in terms of just a friendly, simple, gentle thought. It’d be wonderful if you didn’t have any problems, if you’re free of all your difficulties. Difficulties. I like that.
Just a friendly, considerate thought toward this person in terms of their suffering. And try to strengthen that. May you be free of your suffering. I wish you didn’t have to suffer or have problems. I’m going to help you.
I’m going to commit commit myself in working with you to solve your problems. And then cultivating love toward this individual. First, this simple, friendly thought, would be wonderful if you’re happy. I would like it if you were happy. May you be happy.
I wish you great happiness, all the good things of life. I’m going to take responsibility. I’m going to commit myself in working with you and finding happiness. The way I’m going to express my commitment here at this very moment is through my meditation, by developing my skills, my abilities, my love and compassion, my wisdom. Then eventually, can translate this aspiration, this commitment to you into something real and significant, really practical way of fulfilling my commitment to you, benefiting you.
Then Then bring your mind to the breath. Gentle, easy, and enough flow of the natural breath, and if it’s helpful, using the techniques of counting and noting.