Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a guided meditation directing compassion and love toward a stranger and then toward someone dear, grounding the aspiration for awakening in felt experience before shifting to an in-depth exploration of emptiness. His central claim — that all phenomena lack inherent, independent existence — is developed through sustained comparison with Western thought: Descartes’ mind-body split, Darwinian natural selection, and Newtonian physics all embed assumptions of inherent existence, while contemporary particle physics and Gregory Bateson’s systems epistemology independently approach something close to dependent arising. A child searching a room to confirm there is no monster illustrates why emptiness must be discovered through analysis rather than pointed to directly. Suited to practitioners already familiar with the three fundamentals of the path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 HoM 1993 11 10.mp3
UUID: 2ad22728-5ef9-4ac0-adb5-861c3ff334e4
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-11-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~3,955
You know, to develop the attitude that I have to develop myself, you know, that I can do what I can do now and that I must do. To that degree, I can take responsibility. But that in itself is not going to solve all of this person’s problems. And according to the degree of my ability, to that same degree, I can be a I can take responsibility and be able to respond to their needs, their problems, both articulated and unarticulated, both apparent and not apparent, not obvious. And to determine that resolve and dedicate it, for you, I’m going to actualize my fullest potential.
I’m going to develop all of my skills, all of my abilities, develop in wisdom and open my heart so that some kind of something can communicate, some kind of some means can come about whereby you can be able to find that same state for yourself, that you can find to working with you and your problems, working with you to solve your problems and helping you to be happy. Developing a sense first, involvement and caring and taking responsibility and developing and understanding that we can do something. But the sense of the need of that person is such that we have to develop our ability to respond to their needs in terms of our own development and develop and dedicating, committing yourself to actualizing your fullest potential in terms of your ability to take responsibility in terms of your skills and your wisdom to be of maximum possible benefit to this person? And you’re kind of giving your mind some direction and dedication toward this person’s welfare in terms of one’s own growth, one’s own development of skills and abilities, doing it for them and dedicating it for them. So we’ll work with that.
So if you take a comfortable, firm posture and begin. So imagine yourself a stranger, someone you feel a sense of indifference, unrelatedness toward. And first, development of compassion. Just trying to feel these, what these words are seeking to indicate. It’s a friendly feeling of it’d be wonderful if you didn’t have any problems.
See if you can feel that toward this person and work with the idea. I wish you didn’t have any problems. May all your suffering be eliminated. You be free of suffering. I’m going to help you, commit myself with working with you and solving your problems.
The cultivation of love. It would be wonderful if you were happy. May you be happy. I wish you great happiness. I’m going to help you commit myself in working with you to find happiness.
Take responsibility. And the way I’m going to express my commitment here at this very moment is through my meditation. By developing my skills and my abilities, my wisdom and love, I can be a real practical significant benefit to you more and more. And then bring your mind to the breath. Just a gentle, easy, in and out flow of the natural breath.
If it’s helpful, using the techniques of counting and noting. Visualize before you someone that you care a great deal about. Again, if you can’t see them, it doesn’t matter. Just feel that they’re there. First, think about some of the difficulties they may be experiencing, whether physical or mental.
And develop the wish that they didn’t have this problem, that they were free from this suffering. And even if they were free from this difficulty, would they still be happy? And develop a wish of love, wishing them all the good things of life, wishing them happiness. What can you do but wish? Maybe in a limited way you can help them, but they need more than that.
It’s not enough just to wish, to wave your hand across their their troubled brow and to wish them well. We have to actually be able to respond to their needs, to be able to do something significant. If you really developed all your potential, all your powers, your wisdom, then you could really do something tremendous benefit to this person. So try to summon up the dedication and the commitment to this person that you’re going to develop yourself, developing your wisdom and love and inner strength, all your skills and abilities so that someday you can eliminate all their problems, bring them complete happiness, which is what they really want. And then bring your mind back to the breath.
And slowly becoming aware of your body in a very gentle and relaxed manner, becoming aware of your surroundings. There’s no hurry. Okay. So we’re trying to develop ourselves in terms of wisdom, develop the awakened mind, which is the third fundamental of the three fundamentals of the path. And within the development of wisdom there are four discernible stages that we’ve been working through: hearer stage, mind only stage, the autonomy middle way stage and then finally the final thought of the Buddha on the nature of reality, the Consequentialist Middle Way stage, which is what we’re presently discussing and trying to bring to an end.
You know, talking about emptiness. Emptiness. Emptiness is the very heart of Buddhist practice in Tibet. In Tantra, even the visualized gods or goddesses, channels, winds, drops, and so forth are all qualified by emptiness. Without an understanding of emptiness, the practice of Buddhism, be it sūtra or tantra, cannot be complete.
Phenomena are empty of a certain mode of being called inherent existence, objective existence or natural existence. This inherent existence So the word emptiness, it means a lack or an absence of something. It’s a lack of something. That something has we use different terms to try to understand what that something is or that what the things lack. It is a fantasized mode of existing.
And imagine a hallucinated way of existing, which we’re continually projecting upon all phenomena, glasses, tables, people. Things are absent. Things lack that way of existing. They are empty of that way of existing. This way of existing has different names.
We use different words. True existence, inherent existence, intrinsic existence, natural existence, self defining existence, objective existence, long list of synonyms, all trying to just give us another viewpoint, another hint, another way of approaching what that something is, that things lack, that appear to us to have but in fact lack. Phenomena are empty of a certain mode of being called inherent existence, objective existence, or natural existence. This inherent existence is not a concept imposed by philosophical systems, but refers to our ordinary sense of the way that things exist, as if they concretely exist in and of themselves, from their own side, covering their parts. Phenomena are the things which are empty of inherent existence.
Glasses, this glass of water is empty of inherent existence. An inherent existence is that of which phenomena are empty. So what are the things empty of? What is this glass empty of? It’s empty of inherent existence, a fantasized way of existing, a way of existing which it doesn’t have, but we think it does.
It’s empty of that. It lacks that. It doesn’t have that. Emptiness, or more properly, an emptiness is a phenomenon’s lack of inherent existence, and emptiness is a negative or utter absence of this concrete mode of being which we are so familiar with. So although inherent existence is not a concept imposed by philosophic systems, Still, there are many systems of thought which shore up our innatewe have an instinctive, innate conception of inherent existence.
The tendency to conceive of every object that appears to us to exist inherently, to exist objectively from its own side, independently existing. We have that innate instinctive tendency. This is ignorance. That that that that particular pattern of mind which relates with objects in this manner, in a distorted manner. We we have that instinctive.
It’s not a matter of learning a particular philosophic concept and then getting lost in it, perhaps. But all of the stages that we’ve studied up to the Consequentialist stage insist that phenomena inherently exist. The hearer stage, the mind only stage, and additionally, the autonomy middle way stage, all assert that phenomena inherently exist. So such explicit assertions contribute directly to an acquired conception of inherent existence. So there are two levels of inherent existence in terms of mind.
There is instinctive, conception of inherent existence, innate, which came with the package. And there is acquired, learned, intellectual, artificial conceptions of inherent existence, such as all of the lower schools teach that things inherently exist. So this shore up our acquired sense of conception of inherent existence. But many of the assumptions, both explicit and implicit in Western science, are entirely based upon, until fairly recently, the notion of inherent existence, objective existence. For example, trying to it was Geshe-la who said, who first proposed, that the scientific method was to study the world as if there were no consciousness and no living creatures in it.
So there exists a world out there independent of all consciousnesses, and this is the way that scientists go about their business of learning about it. As if there were no creatures, as if there were no minds. Just studying the concrete, objectively existing world out there independent of an observer, which exists independent of an observer. So in mechanistic worldview of classical physics, Newtonian descriptions classified items according to attributes and characteristics which inherently exist. On the other hand, these days we’re getting toward different types of descriptions of physical phenomena, recursive description, an interplay between objects and subjects.
They define things about us, the objects about us, in terms of their relationships with one another, in terms of, you know, in terms of interaction with one another, in terms of biology. We’re looking at some of the notions of inherent existence systems which are implicit in most of the scientific thinking up to fairly recently. Now we begin to see some of the epistemological fallacies of Occidental civilization. The epistemological fallacies, epistemology, as we have discussed, are the rules by which we make sense of the world. We have certain guidelines which we make use of in trying to come to grips with what the things about us mean, what they are.
In accordance with the general climate of thinking in the mid-nineteenth century England, Darwin proposed the theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of that sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is the organism and the environment. We are learning from bitter experience that an organism that destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is the organism plus its environment, that they’re inseparable, they exist in interrelationship with one another.
The field of psychotherapy. Ignoring the role of language and bringing forth our lived world has serious practical consequences at the level of so called therapy. Almost all modern therapeutic systems ignore the fundamental role of language in creating the imaginary nature of false conceptions. Most therapies are in fact means of helping the patient to create a new inner dialogue, and therefore a new imaginary nature, rather than to see through inner dialogue altogether. Thus the imaginary nature and ego corresponding to it is patched up and made to feel more harmonious.
But the fundamental problem, the problem of language based false conceptions, is not met. And finally, in terms of Rene Descartes, he was a mathematician who developed the Cartesian philosophy, you know, which for many centuries has divided humankind from the world, has divided mind from matter. He asserted, There is nothing included in the concept of the body that belongs to the mind, and nothing in the mind that belongs to the body. The Cartesian division between mind and matter has had a profound effect on Western thought. It has taught us to be aware of ourselves as isolated egos existing inside our bodies.
It has led us to set a higher value on mental labor than manual work. It has enabled huge industries to sell products, especially to women, that would make us owners of an ideal body. It has kept doctors from seriously considering the psychological dimensions of illness and psychotherapists from dealing with their patients’ bodies. In the life sciences, this Cartesian division has led to an endless confusion about the relationship between mind and brain. And in physics, it has made it extremely difficult for the founders of quantum theory to interpret their observations of atomic phenomena.
But this notion of an absolute division between a mechanical world out there, on the one hand, and an observer mind in here, on the other, in here, is slowly being displaced by systems of theory of a holistic interrelatedness or dependent arising. For example, in contemporary particle physics, there’s a notion of field theory and a participatory universe, that the scientist can no longer play the part of an objective detached observer, but is an integral part, an intimate relationship with the object being observed, that through this interrelationship of the observer and the observed phenomena are brought into existence. And likewise, in psychotherapy, that there’s this move toward the abandonment of a model of therapies that the therapist somehow stands apart from the client, kind of pushing and pulling the client to get him or her where they want him to be. You know, it’s some kind of force, like in a Newtonian universe, acting upon a sentient being as opposed to a therapeutic field in which the therapist joins with the client, forming a new system. You know, that there is a the client there’s feedback system between client and therapist, and therapist to client.
For Bateson,, I’ve mentioned him a few times, the American anthropologist. For Bateson, the subject of epistemology was an intensely moral concern. Epistemology for him meant the rules one uses for making sense out of the world. These rules, not always conscious, determine much of our behavior and our interpretations of the behavior of others. Bateson isolated two particular villains, epistemologically speaking.
One is linear thinking, which appears to assign cause and often ends up assigning blame. The other is any form of dualism. In this passage, Bateson is going after one of the most outstanding products of dualism, the idea of the self. To draw a boundary line between a part which is most of the computation for a larger system and the larger system of which it is a part is to create a mythological component, commonly called a self. In my epistemology, the concept of self, along with all the arbitrary boundaries which delimit systems or parts of a system, is regarded as a trait of the local culture, not indeed to be disregarded since little epistemological monsters are always liable to become foci of pathology.
Know, Bateson said that wisdom is an awareness of how all the circuits of a system fit together. I think we could say, taking the lead from that, that the wisdom realizing emptiness is an awareness of how the total circuits of causes and conditions, parts and language and concepts fit together, are connected together in emerging, evolving flow of world making. How it all this system that we’re involved in, that we’re inextricably bound up with. Nothing intrinsically exists. To hold that things intrinsically exist is to chop up the ecology you know, into absolute absolute little bits, mind from matter.
If if mind were completely divorced from matter, nothing could be seen, nothing could be heard. We divide phenomena from one from another. You know, if that were the case, then flowers would not grow from seeds. Mountains would not be worn down by rain. Each would be totally unrelated to the other, and thereby, you know, destroying the circuitry in which, in fact, exists, this interaction of ourselves, near things and events, one upon the other.
So phenomena lack any characteristic in and of themselves. The characteristic of phenomena, even the characteristic of existence itself, do not inhere in phenomena, not exist independently of being imputed, do not exist independently of our own minds. Sometimes, many times, I think you hear about the notion of oneness. I’m not quite sure what they’re talking about what they’re getting about, but it can begin to be approached. Our thinking process is linear, like links.
Like, we carry on this dialogue describing the world about us, thinking about the world, things, people. And one word seems to follow after another. And we have a sense that the world corresponds. It is that these mental images stand for the world. You know, we’ve talked about the map and the territory.
That if you take the things about us, if you take these thoughts, these images, these maps that we use to think about the world as being the world, and since these are discrete units, linear one after another, then we suppose that the world is also chopped up in isolated bits one from another, like our words, thoughts that we use to think about the world. And therefore, we don’t see the interrelationship. We don’t see the interconnecting web of events, the subtle movements of variations, waves of being. These little you know, we draw very subtle lines about everything, and we see them as discrete parts, and we see ourselves as isolated from the world. So, you know, if that idea of oneness, if it has any meaning for me at least, it is when one has it either through cultivation during the course of meditation or perhaps there is some kind of spontaneous awareness, when the lines between things dissolve, if only momentarily.
And one begins to experience a sense of being at one with all of what is about us, that there isn’t there aren’t these black lines neither drawn around ourselves nor the various things about us. We have to realize this emptiness. Otherwise, our present way of relating with the world will continually be problematic. It will continually be inappropriate, inexact, unskillful. No matter how good boys and girls we may try to become, it will still be dissatisfactory.
We have to realize this emptiness of a particular way of existing to begin to see through our hallucinations. The awakened mind is just this seeing through, You’re going beyond this this distorted awareness which influences our approach to life. The realization of just this emptiness. It is only this realization which can liberate us from ignorance driven conception of inherent existence, and therefore it is only the understanding of emptiness which can bring us any real peace. So we have to understand emptiness.
It is only this realization by means of which we can give up the struggle, which our ordinary thinking process is bound up with. There exists this world in here and this world out there, and we have to stay on top of it. There’s always going to be some conflict. I think our approach is going to be always in some way inappropriate, inexact. Emptiness is a very simple truth made complicated by the attempts to elucidate it in words and concepts when it can be pointed to only as direct experience.
If a child awakes from a nightmare screaming that there is a monster in a room, we can only point around the room to convince her that there is no monster. We cannot point directly to the nonexistence of the monster. When the child is finally convinced that there is really no monster, one smiles and shows great relief. She smiles and shows great relief. I don’t know why they say she, but anyway.
In like manner, we cannot point directly to the nonexistence of inherent existence. We can’t say, This is the nonexistence of inherent existence. You know, we can’t say you know, when the child is frightened by a monster, a seeming monster in the room, We can’t say, oh, this is here’s the oh, here. Look. Here’s the nonexistence of the monster.
We have to have to look to all places where the monster may exist and see that it doesn’t exist. Then we are able to understand the nonexistence of the monster. We can only search for inherent existence until we are convinced that there is none anywhere to be found. Emptiness can be discovered in experience when experience is analyzed to try to discover objects having inherent existence. This begins with the recognition that everything one perceives is perceived as if it had inherent existence, that is, as if it were a real substantial thing independent of the perceptual process.
Having recognized that objects do in fact appear in this way, things appear to us to inherently exist, That is to say, that they appear to exist independent of the perceptual process. That is to say, that they appear to exist not dependent upon my giving an object a name by using language terms and the concepts which use those terms. In fact, all things are dependent upon the terms that we use, the names that we use to call them, and the concepts which use these terms, these names. They don’t exist independent of that. This is what we mean by the lack of inherent existence, the fact that they don’t exist that way.
But they appear to exist that way. The glass appears to my mind not to depend upon my conceiving it as a glass, as such. It appears to exist out there objectively from its own side, as if casting itself toward my mind rather than existing in terms of interrelationship with my mind, that we’re both, you know, the eye consciousness which is perceiving the glass and the glass arising in codependence upon one another. Having recognized that objects do in fact appear this way, then according to Hopkins, an attempt is made to try to find these objects which so boldly appear to be self existent. So we begin to see, well, that’s the way they do appear.
It does appear to exist independently, but we try to to clarify, to get a sense of what that independent existence looks like. You know, it’s like it’s like like a fish in the water. It’s a medium in which it exists, And it’s very difficult for it to become aware of the nature of water because it’s so close to it. It doesn’t know anything other than. It’s never experienced any other way of being existing except in the context of water.
How does it become aware that it’s in water? According to an attempt is made to try to find these objects which so boldly appear to be self existent. The mind becomes totally absorbed in trying to find an object among its parts, as a composite of its parts, as something separate from its parts, and so forth. If the search is done with keen interest, the significance of not being able to find the object will be earth shaking. There are various ways in which emptiness is categorized, this emptiness of inherent existence.
The most general, the simplest categorization is in terms of emptiness of persons and emptiness of phenomena. Here phenomena means all things, all objects aside from persons. So there’s emptiness of persons, that’s one category of emptiness, and there’s emptiness of phenomena, all things other than persons. The consequent school holds that these two types of emptiness so there’s an emptiness of persons that persons do not inherently exist