Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. When the Indian master Atisha saw an injured horse by the road, he cried out “My mother!” — a recognition, Ven Jampa Gendun explains in this 36-minute talk, that every being we have ever encountered has mothered us across past lives. Starting from the beginningless continuum of mind and karma-driven rebirth, he builds toward a sustained, psychologically rich treatment of maternal love: the baby’s absolute dependence, the formative power of unconditional care, and how that primal openness gradually hardens into calculated, accountant-style love. He addresses practitioners who carry wounds from unskillful parenting before turning to step-by-step instructions: visualizing one’s mother, then transferring that warmth to a trusted friend, to strangers, and finally to difficult people. Suitable for those following a Lamrim curriculum or exploring the meditation as a psychological practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 HoM 1993 03 03.mp3
UUID: d09f9706-26af-444f-bd6f-0f3d7e46acd4
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-03-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 35.6 minutes
Words: ~3,825
There’s something wrong. That that mind of this morning has continued in a similar type. A similar mood has proceeded down to the present moment. The mind of this morning arose from yesterday’s morning. Yesterday’s mind arose from last month’s mind.
Last month’s mind arose from last year. Childhood, child and your kid. You know, childhood, something happened during your childhood. It affects who you are now, the way you think, the way you feel, the way you act. It is not an isolated incident.
It becomes a conditioning factor which is transferred into the continuum of mental life from the time. Reaching all the way back to the first moment of consciousness. That first moment of consciousness in this life, at the moment of fertilization. The moment of the the consciousness joining with this, the fertilized ovum and sperm, that union. The previous moment of life, the previous moment of mind is the last moment of mind in the previous life.
That mind also, that last moment had a preceding moment of mind. Preceding backwards, backwards and backwards, backwards and backwards. That’s why we can never point to any instance where we can say, this is the beginning of the continuum of my mind. This is when my mind began. That is our mind, our continuums of our minds are beginningless. There is no place that we have not taken birth into.
We can point to no person who has not been in fact a relation over the course of any known or given existence. Due to the force of mind, due to the force of karma, has a tendency toward embodiment. It’s always seeking to express itself in space and time in terms of physicality, materiality. It becomes to fixate, to freeze and become permanent, and to expand and to take up space. It’s been driven to take embodiment due to the force of karma.
When this karmic bond between mind and the body, the embodiment, And that body weakens and finally breaks due to the exhaustion of the karmic force. This breaking of this body is death. But the mind still has the tendency toward re-embodiment. It is driven to reassociate itself with a new embodiment. Again, the common tendency to, which maintains this connection with this particular type of embodiment, weakens over time, finally is exhausted.
The bond breaks, the mind continues on. Due to its current intensity, it is compulsively driven to re embody, to reassociate. This process has gone on since the beginning of time, a reoccurring process of rebirth. And then we have formed a continuum of rebirth since the beginning of time, infinite numbers of rebirth. Over the course of this infinite number of rebirth, we have been born to infinite numbers of parents, infinite number of times.
There is not one sentient being who has not an effect on our mother in the same way that our mother of this life has been on us. All of the people are born to us, our fathers, fathers, our brothers, our children, friends, our acquaintances, our enemies, our mothers, our mothers. Everyone in this room has been in that room. No matter who the person might be, whether it’s a black, white, red, yellow, whether they’re Americans, Russians, Chinese, whether they’re good, bad, or ugly, whether they’re fat or thin, whether they’re female or male, they have all been our mother. And even though we feel unrelated to the majority of people in the world, each of them have in fact been our mother and erases in kindness the same way as our mother at this time.
Even over the course of this life, our relationships with one another aren’t static. They can just continually influx, continually changing. It’s very much like a a stew, you know, like a vegetable stew. It’s it’s it’s boiling. Sometimes there’s a potato on top, sometimes there’s a carrot on top, sometimes there’s a piece of celery on top.
And this is the way our relationships are continually changing, transforming, becoming something else. Now this person is close to me, now this person is my mother, will eventually that relationship will change just like this person will now become my mother. You know, it’s essential in coming to this understanding that we see, remember that everything, and the emphasis on every, every being that we encounter has been central to our life over the course of our universe. That we are directly related to all living beings. That the universe is in fact our home and all living beings are not.
Home There’s no place to where we have not taken new birth, there’s no one who has not in fact been our mother. One of the the masters of Indian Buddhism by the name of Atisha who revitalized Buddhism in Tibet. It was said that once he saw a horse hurt, injured, and he screamed out my mother, my mother, was hurt. And this was a, we call it a profound recognition that all the beings have to know that. And I think this may be difficult in that sense.
But I think that we can play, we can begin to work with this idea As challenge, even if our sense of realization, makes realization is not so convinced, is not very strong. Having recognized that all living beings are our mothers, that in itself is not enough. We begin to remember the kindness of our mother. We’re trying to nourish the extreme emotional association that we have with our experience of the relationship with mother and child. When we first come into the world, we are utterly dependent.
Without food, physical care, emotional sustenance, we cannot grow. Emotional connection is such an important feature of our survival that babies taken to care but given no love and personal attention cannot sustain life. They give up and dominate. Whoever cares for us first and most consistently, usually our mother, becomes our psychological umbilical cord. We depend upon her for our very existence.
We are merged with her and have no sense of where we begin or where she ends. What she gives us emotionally forms the very essence of our personality. Her love and tension is essential food that fills our personality. It is as important as the physical nurture we receive to develop our body. She fills up our world and our first experience pleasurable and painful take place in an emotional context that she has created.
We are enraptured by her, fascinated by her, and very much in need of her. And when our mother tenderly takes us to her breast and her warmth, we feel life giving fluid flowing into our body. There are very few blisses which are created, which are experienced by a human being in that. This merger as if this is with another human being. Now when a yogi directly realizes emptiness, it is said that this is one of the greatest blisses that our mind can experience.
Because the mind merges with, at the moment of directly realizing emptiness, one directly realizes the emptiness of every phenomena in the universe simultaneously. And it is just one merging with the universe. But it is said that if a yogi does not open his or herself up to the merger of, the psychological merger with the mother, then one is becoming attuned to the psychological merger, the bliss of psychological merger with the mother, which facilitates the development of the bliss experience in psychological merger with phenomena and the universe. How many of us have ever felt truly loved?
That you’re thoroughly loved. You’re not for what you can offer, not for what you can do, not for what you don’t do. You felt love which a type of love which can never be earned, for which we can never make ourselves worthy. Because it’s something that we can’t because we’re already deserving of it, because we’re already worthy of it, because of our very existence, the very fact of our existence beyond Everyone should be able to look back in their memory and be sure that he had a mother who loved him. All of him, even his piss and shit.
He should be sure his mother loved him just for being himself, not for what he could do. Otherwise he feels he has no right to exist. He feels he should never have been born. No matter what happens to this person’s life, no matter how much he gets hurt, he can always react to this and feel that he’s loveable. He can love himself and he cannot be broken.
If he can’t fall back on this, he can be broken. You can only be broken if you’re already incomplete. As long as my baby self had never been loved, then I was impeaching. By loving me as a baby, you made him whole. A baby is totally vulnerable.
It’s helpless. There’s no way for it to earn its mother’s love. It cannot knowingly give anything in return for the warmth, for the care, for the attention, for protection that’s given to freely to it. There’s no way that it can earn that. There’s no way that it can deserve that.
All this caring, all this worry that’s shown toward the baby, shown toward our soul. All the physical and mental hardship that it’s mother unwearing you to the child brings to Now what gives us the right to arrogantly assume that somehow we deserve all the attention that we get, And all the trouble that we that we cause by mother. You understand, from the very moment of our conception, you know, just being a lump of cell, a massive cell, a mother becomes aware of it and continues to become concerned about our well-being, about our welfare. Now we can’t deserve that, it’s simply at that point a lump of cells. How can some love itself be deserved to be loved?
Am I right? How can we command the right to bring to anyone all the life threatening possibilities of pregnancy, all the discomfort, all the pain of birth? We come into the world completely helpless, naked and in need. We have nothing to give. We can only take, And we have to take.
We’re completely dependent. If we don’t take, we die. Could we rationally ever expect that only once after having given birth to us, after hours of labor, you know the pain of birth, that someone who is beginning all the pain, all the exhaustion, all that had just gone before, will tenderly take it into their own and look upon it like if we were the most precious jewel in the world. The way that we appear. And yet that almost like a miracle.
Almost unbelievable. But in reality, that did happen to each one of these people. That someone did do that to us, did treat us in that manner, did care for us in that way at one time. And all the years that followed, all the years of self sacrifice, all the years of of worry and concern. And what there was nothing that we could do in return. You know, even if we are not aware of what was being given to us.
You’re feeding us, cleaning, clothing, a hundred times a day, our mother’s attention turns to us. A hundred times a day, our mother protects us of the child. If she hadn’t done this, we would be dead. We wouldn’t have lived. Know she’s there, is all the security that we need To be covered by her, all the comfort necessary.
Motherly love is the most frequent and most readily understood instance of productive love. During the birth of a child, the mother’s body labors for the child. And after birth, her love consists in her effort to make the child grow. Motherly love does not depend upon conditions which the child has to fulfill in order to be loved. It is unconditional.
Based upon the child, based only upon the child’s need and the mother’s response. No wonder that motherly love has been a symbol of the highest form of love in art and religion. The Hebrew term indicating God’s love for man, man’s love for his neighbor is the root of which means womb. The complete faith and utter dependence of the child and its absolute trust is what the right way you are. When Jesus was dying on the cross and he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
This is the love and it’s interesting in this quote that this love means womb. That is the love which is trusting to the point of giving oneself love, returning to the one, the ground of one’s being. And this is associated with the matter. You have the complete faith, the complete trust that a baby is experiencing. You know holding back, giving oneself over.
It is this type of love which enables the Bodhisattvas to dedicate themselves to all living beings, to all their mothers and living beings. There’s a story about the traditional story about the Mongolian chieftain who had over the most of his life had been quite barbarian, killing, conquering. During a battle, a pregnant mare, a mare in foal, had been wounded. And she lay on the ground dying. And her foal issued from the womb..
And even in her death throes, she began to lick the fluids from the now dying foal. And seeing that Mongolian chieftain was transformed. Seeing this almost unimaginable, unconditioned giving over to another, dealing to another. But but this feeling that we have, this primordial bond that we we want to experience, this trust, this complete capacity to give ourselves over, connecting, connection. Now it begins to dry up, begins to wither away in the arid desert of our egoic minds.
And that this feeling of primordial bond is connecting it beyond all rational thinking. And eventually it’s replaced with our demands, our expectations, you know, this is conditioned by our selfishness. And it’s forming our hearts against the closeness. Our hearts were completely open at one time to another being. And slowly, it begins to close.
It’s our hearts begin to harden. Now we could begin to play the game of calculated love, you know, debit and credit points. We become accountants of love, which isn’t really love at all. You know, we forget what it felt like at one point to be completely loved, that we didn’t have to earn our love, that we didn’t there was nothing we could do to be worthy in order to be lovable. And sometimes that we were intrinsically, The fact that our existence was enough that made us lovable in itself.
And having forgotten that, we begin to feel that We find it, we become unable to love ourselves, that we aren’t quite worthy of our love. And we begin to see that and develop that same feeling toward others. It becomes increasingly difficult to love others simply because they exist, because they’re intrinsically worthy of our caring, of our concern. And then finally we’re unable to love at all.
And it’s remembering the kindness of our mother is like opening up a well. A wellspring of emotions. And it has to be some kind of living experience of these long repressed and long forgotten feelings. You know, beyond our intellect. You know Buddhism is not saying that we are to see black as white, that we are to see bad as good.
There are some parents, there are some, of us had mothers who were unskillful at parenting, who were toxic parents. And we still, many still bear the scars of this unskillful parenting. You know, Due to their parent’s inability or refusal to parent well. But we have to try to heal this wound. We have to you know, if we’re ever going to be able to really be healthy, to be able to really thrive, to be able to re experience that most profound way of relating, which is taken as the model of the most unconditioned, intimate, deep bond between two human beings.
Now we just can’t be able to fester ourselves. We have to work with it. And as as as as I just mentioned, to understand is to love, and to love is to understand. So we can begin to take as the subject of our meditation our own mother, and try to understand how it is that she evolved, how the situation evolved, what happened, how did it come about that she was the way she is. And try to understand how constrained he or she were.
And are exactly are our memories accurate portrayals of what happened? Maybe temporarily we need to set aside our negative feelings about her. And to look at the reality of our situation, that at one time there was a person upon whom we were taken complete care, upon whom we were completely dependent, without whose care, without whose nurturing we would not be here, we wouldn’t be alive. There was somebody there at some point in your baby who fulfilled that role. Sustaining our judgment temporarily.
Going beyond our usual egocentric standard and now trying to allow our hearts to soften to our mother. To awaken to some of those deepest feelings which are there. To a time when we were not this self pitying selfish demanding person who we now are. Seeing everything from our own point of view. But there was a time when we were completely helpless, completely dependent, completely in need, and unconditionally loved.
So this is the feeling that we’re trying to get in touch with. And we want to begin to associate that feeling with all living being, all in another. Each and every person that you meet today, that you met today, that you will meet today, each person that you met yesterday, that you’re going to meet tomorrow was your mother and cared for you in that same exact way that your mother of this life cares for you at some point in your life. They treated you in the same way. They gave you the same care and the same nurturing, the same protection, the same concern, the same attention.
No matter who they might be. There might, you know, for some people there’s too much resistance with respect to developing such an attitude. They’re getting in touch with these feelings that they might have with respect to their mother. So if that’s the case, if there’s obstacles, if there’s too many hard feelings, if there’s too much pain in them, then simply work with Someone you feel has cared for you, has loved you in a very deep way. And someone that you can take as a model for every being that you feel very close to, that you feel safe with Take that as a model of your relationship.
That’s the feeling that we want to begin to associate with others. That same intimacy, that same connectedness, that same sense of closeness and relatedness. So what we can do is, you know, we have to soften our heart, find ways to Allowing ourselves the pain of getting in touch with these feelings, Allowing us hearts to soften and begin to open. Remember your mother, whoever whatever model that you can make you so if you can’t work with your mother, and getting in touch with that feeling. And then having gotten in touch with that feeling, visualize next to her, someone that you feel close to, that you trust.
And see, trying to reassociate, to associate that feeling with this person, this person that you naturally feel close to, that you feel safe, you trust. Try to transfer the same sense of interest, trust and closeness that you feel to a distance, your mother, to this person who you feel close to, that you trust. Try to make that object, try to maintain the same feeling quality, but take it and transfer it to this person. We can do this, we can associate that state of feeling, the complex of emotion, and begin to transfer it onto this person next to your mother. Then we can, having done that, can visualize your mother and begin to again get in touch.
We’re using a model of feeling, a particular state, emotion, complexes, beliefs, ways of relating, feelings of intimacy, caring, very rich emotional state. And we can can induce that and we can begin to transfer that to other objects, that same way of feeling, using that model of a way of relating and transfer that way of relating to other objects, other people. There’s easier objects. People we naturally feel safe and trusting with, we feel careful about. Then it’s really more more difficult.
People who are quite quite so intimate to ourselves. People who are not so close, associating these people, these objects with these states of feeling related with care and then strangers. And even without belief in rebirth, Such a practice can be done as a psychological exercise. With the conviction in rebirth, we can gain perspective on all our relationships with others. And it’s like that stew with the carrots and the potato and carrots and celery, potatoes, rice on the top.
Well, we are involved in a huge churning cosmic pot of thinking being stewed. Our relationships are moving, changing, transforming, relating close to some, distant, mixed, indifferent at other times, continually changing. And over a lifetime, we’ve all had every conceivable type of relationship with one another. We have, you know, children of the universe, and all living beings are together in this. And we take a model of ways of relating, the relationship with mother and child, and we try to relate with every living being on that same basis.
So in this way we can begin to break down our self imposed isolation, our self imprisonment, the boundaries which we have encased ourselves in. And our hearts begin to awaken, they begin to open up. And we try to keep our hearts open in all the varieties and all the vicissitudes of life, all the various situations that life brings, trying to keep our heart open. And if we think about that, that’s what a wonderful way to be, to the realization of this meditation that will be awakening heart. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened realm through the scope of action.
May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart does not arise and grow. And may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more. Thank you. I’d like to would you like to stay for discussion? Do you want to get a cup of tea?