Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A member of the Buddha House community had died the previous night, and his peaceful death becomes the emotional pivot of this 45-minute session with Ven Jampa Gendun. The talk opens with the eight ego-based preoccupations — hope for pleasure, fear of pain, hope for gain, fear of loss — drawing on a Krishnamurti passage about why genuine change is so rarely attempted. Gendun frames Buddhism as a supermarket: identify your unique problem, take what applies, test it against lived experience. After reflecting on what it means to die well, the session shifts into a Chenrezig visualization — white-light nectars filling the body, Om Mani Padme Hum mantra — dedicated to those recently deceased. Gendun then walks through the seven cause-and-effect instruction for developing an awakening heart: recognizing all beings as mother, recalling their kindness, and cultivating compassion, closing with an Einstein quote on widening the circle of concern beyond the self.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 HoM 1993 03 17.mp3
UUID: be0e4e2c-aed4-4707-9fa1-8922053ace4c
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-03-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~4,852
Begin by redirecting our attitude, reorienting, reprioritizing our values. This process, I think I’ve spoken on a number of occasions, whereby we begin to realign our allegiance from a life passively based upon hopes and fears to one which is based upon actively choosing growth, actively choosing to oppose our habitual patterns which control our lives in terms of hoping for pleasure and fearing pain, hoping for gain and fearing loss. You know, these are the eight principal preoccupations of ego based existence. But the premises which we unconsciously base all our decisions upon. So to begin to work against, to interrupt these patterns.
It requires a great deal of motivation. To a large extent we are our habits. And to break a habit is not easy. To change is not easy. It requires a high degree of motivation.
And unless we begin to see the disadvantage, the detriment, the dissatisfaction, the disappointment, the frustration behind this particular way of acting, this mode of conduct, this way of thinking, then we’re simply never going to become sincere, serious about change. There will be no change. But if we see the disadvantages, we’ve been at some very deep level, then in a way nothing more needs to be done in the sense that we begin to avail ourselves of our basic sanity, beginning to clearly show the reality of our situation through our own innate wisdom, our own brilliant intelligence. We aren’t going to purposefully, with understanding and awareness, cause ourselves pain. But we do so without awareness and with a lack of understanding.
So this is why it becomes necessary in terms of the motivation for this redirecting process to look at our pain, the reality of our lived experience, the themes of dissatisfaction which permeate our existence. There’s nothing particularly depressing or something to feel ashamed of, but it is our human dilemma. And we have to acknowledge that fact. There’s a quote here by Krishnamurti concerning pain, concerning why it is we never change. There is personal sorrow and the sorrow of the world.
There is the sorrow of ignorance and the sorrow of time. This ignorance is the lack of knowing oneself, and the sorrow of time is the deception that time can cure, heal, and change. Most people are caught in that deception and either worship sorrow or explain it away. But in either case, it continues and one never asks oneself if it can come to an end. And somehow we never quite become sincere about change.
Somehow things will get better tomorrow. And tomorrow becomes a great disappointment because it didn’t deliver the good that we hoped it would. But we somehow inevitably, though we’ve had all had the experiences, dismiss or miss the lesson. So Buddhism is trying its best to point out the lessons so that we no longer miss them, that we no longer dismiss them, that we bring the reality of our situation to conscious awareness and we confront it. And the diagnosis becomes the initial means of intervention, looking dispassionately at the nature of our situation.
Then our own basic sanity. It is not as if we have to force ourselves into some if we use wisdom in our practice, if we use our understanding, then we don’t have to put ourselves in any sort of straightjackets. We don’t have to manipulate ourselves. We don’t have to do further violence and coercion with respect to ourselves. That we are extremely brilliant beings if we allow ourselves to make use of that brilliance.
One simply will not bring with understanding and awareness bring harm to oneself. And this is our basic sanity. Almost what it means to be a living being is a sense of moving away from that which one conceives of as pain, and moving toward approaching what one conceives of as pleasure. So we just have to make sure that that which we conceive of as pleasure is in fact real happiness, real satisfaction. And that what we conceive of as pain is in fact pain.
If we get our values straight in the light of our own understanding, then the very nature of our situation, that our mind will evolve. It will begin to quite naturally. When we were children, we played with the toys of our children. But as we grew older, we began to set aside those toys quite naturally. No one had to tear them away from of our toys at least.
Didn’t seem quite appropriate. We moved on to other things, newer things, better things, things which seemed more stimulating, we had hoped would bring as happiness. And so there was some sort of evolution quite naturally occurring. And likewise, I think in the course of our working toward happiness that we don’t have to have everything. If we simply analyze, use our wisdom, look at our situation, try to see where our happiness is coming from, try to see where our pain is coming from within our own daily experience, then our reality, our everyday situations become our teachers.
It’s raining reality but it runs off like water off a duck’s back. Then out of this a path revolves and our mind begins a movement toward what is our real happiness. And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago this idea of follow your bliss. Lama Yeshe, founder of Buddha House, used to quite often tell people, Do what makes you happy, which is a dangerous statement to make, isn’t it? Because it can be quite easily corrupted, misinterpreted to mean go with the flow.
It doesn’t matter what you do. But to know what really makes you happy, one has to be extremely sensitive and aware individual. We have suppositions, assumptions about what makes us happy and then we never really check up within our experience whether our pursuits are actually bringing us that happiness that we hoped they would. Is what we’re doing working? Is it bringing the happiness that we feel it should?
Or have we been deceiving ourselves at some very basic level? You know, if you can believe in happiness, happiness is like will lead you to greater happiness. It’s like wisdom seeking wisdom, happiness seeking greater happiness, love expanding itself to further love. And then I think our values change. What is important in our life changes quite naturally.
Just like the setting aside of the toys of a child as we grow older, that we don’t have to believe in any dogma, we don’t have to impose any sort of external systems upon ourselves, that we can begin to evolve a path out of our own experience, in terms of our own wisdom, in terms of our own understanding, our own happiness and bliss. But we have to get over the deception that things are going to get better by themselves. This hope that we have. The sorrow of time and the sorrow of ignorance, not understanding ourselves. Not only just in terms of who we are in the nature of the self, the nature of reality, but ignorance of what actually has happened, what actually within our own lived experience is bringing us satisfaction, fulfillment.
Sometimes peace is very subtle and we miss it, we overlook it. So this is a certain confrontation with the reality of it. I don’t think we have to have any new thoughts come to our mind particularly. I don’t think any light bulbs sort of flash on. Maybe they will.
Maybe they won’t. Possibly. But somehow things change. We’re looking for change, if that becomes a prime motive in our life, by looking, by becoming aware, by trying to understand in terms of seeing what is bringing us happiness, what is causing us problems. And we learn.
And above all that’s what we have to do. And what we learn we come to know and what we come to know becomes a part of who we are and we change. Growth is very much a learning process and an unlearning process. Unlearning unlearning Going beyond all the misconceptions, these distorted premises, crooked ideas on which we have based our lives, all the conditioning which has been foisted upon us, And then using our own intelligence, learning from our own experience. So I guess I have a great deal of faith in our own good in nature as well, whatever we want to call this quality that we all possess.
This ability to discern what is what is What is right and what is wrong in terms of our experience? The Buddhist doctrine, there’s a tremendous complete philosophy which has been developed over two thousand five hundred years. And it’s like maybe a huge supermarket that we can go into. And if we learn where everything is, then we learn about ourselves, what are our needs, what are our problems, very unique to ourselves. And then we can go and we can begin to take these off the shelf according to our individual needs and problems.
We don’t have to buy the store when we walk in. Finding out what your problem is and what will work for you is a very unique self actualizing individual. And you take it down and you take it home and you prepare it and see whether it brings you the satisfaction that you’re looking for, whether it actually solves your problem. You know we each have our unique nature. We each have our own unique history.
And accordingly, we’re going to find within Buddhism unique methods to solve our problems. In a way, we have to make all of these, the various discoveries that the Buddhists of the past have made, we have to discover all of this for ourselves. And we have to take The Buddha simply pointed, I think. The Buddha in the teachings of Buddhism are general ways of approaching ordinary human life. And we have to take those and find how they work to our unique experience.
They’re like generality, universal, describing the human dilemma, which is common to us all. But our way of experiencing that human dilemma is very unique. And we have to use our intelligence and see how it fits in with our particular condition, with our particular patterns, with our particular situation, our environment, our social setting, and begin to adapt it as a means of integrating. So it’s not something, it’s something that we are forced to think about and work with. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha.
That is to say, the evolvement of a way of being in which basic problems of human existence are being solved. This becomes the inner focus of our lives, working on a very basic level. I think somehow we will begin to experience situations our life will become less problematic. We will experience what was difficult before will become less difficult or will go unnoticed in the future. And there’s almost, I believe very sincerely, a subtle evolvement in how we relate with the world and the situation.
Things simply are no longer hassles. We begin to cheer up and we begin to find something basically good about ourselves and the people about it in life. And there’s sort of a real develops a real confidence in the possibilities of something better than you have ever experienced before and a moving in a sense that you’re moving towards them. One becomes a source of one’s own inspiration and one’s own experience looking back over the past, over fifteen years or twenty years or five or ten, and that there has been some movement, there has been some change. And you see yourself going in some really positive direction, which you like, which feel good about yourself and what’s happening to you and about you.
You become more useful to yourself and the people about you. And it becomes self perpetuating situation where the more you become encouraged by what you are experiencing, the more you’re willing to give yourself over to this method, these means to use your intelligence, to seek to develop an open hearted attitude and to create some kind of inner strength to tie yourself to the method. And this again, out of this comes a greater growth and again looking, becoming encouraged, gaining inspiration from your own experience. And I think it becomes, I think at some point perhaps very almost trigonometric. The curve becomes more and more perpendicular, vertical.
Because there’s a sense of willingness to give over oneself to it more and more, to trust in process more and more because one is encouraged by what one is actually experiencing, what one is seeing in oneself and the people about you. It’s a very rich way of life I think to become concerned with these profound matters of suffering and happiness. The way we find ways of communicating with other people and even within our own thinking, which are extremely fulfilling, meaningful. We’re talking about a quality of life, a quality of life. So I think we just have to keep in our own way, in our own unique, according to our own unique capacities, simply keep encouraging ourselves and encouraging each other, which I try to do in my in my rather limited way, and and sharing our understanding and keep reminding ourselves of what what we’re about.
And things will get better. It’s in the nature of the situation. We can have some faith in that. It’s not a matter of that things will get better because it’s simply a matter of time. But it’s because things will get better because we’re working to get them better.
Things will change not because it’s simply a matter of time but because we’re creating change. And we can have some confidence in that. So the inner focus of our life becomes the personification of this process of growth, this happy, healthy, loving, sane human being which we all can become, which we all, to a certain extent, are at present. And the way the means to achieve this in, the way that we begin to express Buddha within our being is through the Dharma. And that is where Buddha, this evolution is facilitated.
Change takes place. And this all occurs within the social context of the spiritual community. Now this is what we’re about. Need each other. We need each other’s encouragement.
We need each other’s guidance. We need each other’s inspiration. We need each other’s help. And we try to raise the level of our motivation in a sense that trying to expand the scope of our concern, to include within the limits of our capacity a greater and greater number of individuals. And something positive will come out of all this, if you can be assured.
And this becomes our refuge. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and highest assembly. From the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all to the new beings. May attain the state of a Buddha I share an experience that I had last night. Many of you know Bruce Bowring.
He’s been a member of Buddha House and a good friend for a few years now. He died last night and he had cancer. And he was very courageous. It was quite a humbling experience over the last few months, the way he has lived his faith in Buddhism, his faith in what he has learned in the course of his study, his understanding was expressed in the way that he conducted his life, these last few months. Last night, I had the honor to be there when he died.
And he died a very beautiful death with his wife, Anni, and his daughter, with cancer. He died very peacefully. And I thought it was very beautiful. I guess, I don’t know what’s happening. A very odd descriptive term, covers a lot of qualities.
But to see him in the love and light which surrounded him at the moment of death was a very beautiful sight. Khensur Rinpoche said that it was things went very well for him. That he died in a very positive state of mind and had a very peaceful day. And I know that I couldn’t hope to die in a better way than what I what I saw last night, being surrounded by so much love and light and with so much inner peace. And he used during the course of his illness many times, he used to say how much how grateful he was for what he had learned and for the support that he was getting from the community at Buddha House.
And it’s very heart fulfilling to hear words like that because then it has some what we do here has some real meaning. It has some very apparent effect. Something really valuable has come out of it. So I felt very good about that. I felt very positive about that.
So I think we can all rejoice in someone who lived a good life and died a good death. And I’d like to, in the course of our meditation tonight, let me do a special practice involving the meditation of the deity Chenrezig. Chenrezig is the deity over the fireplace in the back room. And to your right of the Dalai Lama, personification of compassion. Compassion is the state of mind, We’re going to talk about it more tonight.
But if compassion were to personify it, sometimes it’s quite useful to States of mind are quite intangible. It’s hard to get hold of them. If we can give them some sort of objective appearance so that we can begin to work with them, we can call upon our own compassion, as if giving it form. And this is the form that it would take, the personification of compassion, the embodiment of compassion. Basically this wish that others not suffer, that they be free of their problems and their troubles.
Compassion is a real force in the universe. Compassion helps us to access a greater part of our psychic potential, which is closed off due to our limiting conceptions of who we are. A compassionate mind is more open to accessing all its resources and fulfilling that wish that others not suffer. And it’s like opening up the channels which have been clogged by our own self centeredness, by our own selfishness, and allowing a greater and greater extent of innate sanity to be accessible to our youth, to apply it to the situation. So we as it were, we can generate compassion and give it a visible form in the form of Chenrezig.
And I thought we’d work with that practice. The mantra of Chenrezig is Om Mani Padme Hum. I think most of you probably know it. Maybe it’s not in the book. Om Mani Padme Hum.
It’s sort of like know, the mantras can be thought of in many, many different ways. Way that they can be thought of is simply prayers of aspiration, are unlimited by conception. They can embody feelings. Like we say, rather than being limited by intellectual verbalizing those feelings. They can encompass just like poetry, one word can encompass tremendous associations and meanings, very powerful.
One word or one sentence, one image. Mantras, we can imbue them and protect them and value them with great power and meaning beyond the written word, the spoken word. So these words are like the yearning for others to be happy inarticulate aspiration embodied in sound. Sound is the way that we communicate what it is that we’re about. So we’re going to imagine Chenrezig before us and we’re simply going to generate the sense of compassion and begin to recite his mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum.
Reciting this mantra as if you know, asking compassion, which is already within sight of ourselves, to come into our lives, to become integrated into our conscious awareness to a greater and greater extent, and opening ourselves up to, as it were, our own deeply buried treasure vault of compassion that we all possess inside of ourselves. And it begins to flow inside of ourselves by means of compassion flowing down along a ray of light extending from Chenrezig who was visualized before us. And along this ray of light, nectars, white nectars begin to flow inside of ourselves. Nectars and lights flow inside of us and completely filling our body with brilliant white brilliant white light eliminating all the various darkness, all the various negativities, a sense of heaviness, any types of guilt, sense of limitation, poor me, all of these conceptions that we have, all negativity, our obstruction. And then again reciting the mantra, and Chenrezig comes down to the crown of our head and dissolves into ourselves.
And we become beyond all limitations of conceiving ourselves as ordinary and limited beings. We become ineffable, beyond concept, embodiment of compassion. Let go of your usual self image, usual model that you use to refer to yourself, that I am the embodiment of compassion and radiating out light from yourself as you recite the mantra. Imagine that those who are in need, those who are dying and those who have just died and are in the process of rebirth. That by your emanating lights from your body that their minds are positively influenced.
The mind is in a delicate state. It’s lost its anchor, having left the human form. And the winds of karma are blowing, and it’s being shifted blowing back and forth. And if we can exercise even some minute influence over that consciousness into a positive state, then we have done a wonderful thing. We have done something very significant.
So, you know, just suspend your disbelief or your cynicism or skepticism just for the present practice. And believe, not necessarily believe, but actually perform, act beyond thought. And imagine that you’re positively influencing those who are in such a state in the process that they take a positive rebirth, a rebirth where they will have loving, caring parents and all the material necessities to meet their material needs and that they will come into contact with kind spiritual teachers and come under their influence and grow and develop themselves until they become happy, healthy, loving human beings. Buddhists, and help others to do the same. There’s nothing better that we can do than that.
There’s nothing more that a person can aspire to than that. Should we try that practice? So first we’re going to, we’ll do mindfulness of breathing and then we’ll imagine this visualization before. So Chenrezig approximately the size of your hand, about a meter and a half in front of you, approximately at the level of your eyes. And it’s made of light.
Chenrezig is radiant, a light body. So you might actually want to look at it very carefully, the drawing or painting. And we’ll begin with the development of love and compassion as have been doing in terms of someone that you are attracted to, that you like, that’s pleasing to you, that you’re not particularly close to. Maybe someone that you have spoken to from time to time and you have a natural likely inclination caring for them but you don’t know them very well, but someone who appears very pleasant. We’re looking at the first of the two methods, a meditative tradition for the development of an awakening heart.
The seven cause and effect instruction. It is based upon the foundation of equanimity, having an unbiased attitude, even minded attitude toward all others, a type of attitude which is the flaw is holding some close in terms of attachment, others at a distance in terms of hatred. As upon this even minded attitude, a likemindedness toward all others, as we begin to develop the awakening heart. First we begin to recognize all living beings as our mother quite literally over the infinite numbers of rebirths that there is no living being who has not been our mother again and again and again. And that moreover these beings have shown us all races of kindness again and again and again.
And we’re beginning to remember the kindness of our mothers and the moment of our conception and how their constant concern, their attention is drawn to our welfare and all the care that we were given over the period of gestation and at the moment of our birth how our mother takes us, forgetting the pain of the labor, trauma of the delivery. And with loving kindness and joyful eyes looked down upon us as we were the most precious treasure in all the world. For in that moment, we are in her eyes and all of the great kindness. I was talking to a woman who just had a baby a few weeks ago about the kindness of mothers and thinking that there’s this being there which is solely completely dependent upon me. I wake up it’s crying in the middle of the night.
And my first thought is to say, oh, you go back to sleep. But this being needs me. It’s not crying because it’s trying to give me a hard time, because it’s a bad child or any of these other motives which I could easily attribute to it. It’s simply crying because it needs me. And I respond to that.
Our mothers have responded to our need. Our very life depended upon them at some time over the course of our life. Without them we would not be here at all. All of the sacrifices, all of the concern, the worry, you know, I think that we have been shown by our mother at some time in our life, at some time in our life. You know, we have to begin to work with this situation of how we relate with our mother even if perhaps at present we have a difficult relationship.
Feel strange. We have some difficulty, you know, trying to understand, get back in touch with some feelings that were there at some one point, this primordial bond. Our mother was us at one point in our existence. There was no separation, no distance, a feeling of oneness with that being with another being. Remembering all the kindness in developing a sense of gratitude, of wishing to repay that kindness.
It’s an expression of our innate sanity, that one feels that one is worthy of all that unconditional love. And one wants simply to return the kindness as best one can. And upon that developing a sense of affectionate love or loving kindness. We begin to see beings in these terms developing this mode of relating, using this model of a way to interact, of a way of seeing others, that they begin to look very pleasant to us. They look captivating, attractive.
A mother is captivated by her small child playing with all its little movements, all its little gestures, smile and its cooing. It keeps moving their heart. They’re captivated. They’re fascinated. They can’t take their eyes off each other.
Attractive. People become very attractive to us. We’re drawn to you. They’re very pure. And then we move on to the development of great compassion, which we’re going to talk about tonight. I’m sorry I went on quite a long time as a preliminary to the talk tonight.
But it’s quite appropriate that we’re talking about great compassion. There’s a beautiful quote by Albert Einstein. A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Compassion is the other side of the coin of love. Even though it’s presented traditionally subsequent to the development of attractive love, they both develop simultaneously, in fact. There’s no particular order. Whatever we apply to love, we can equally apply to compassion.
The only difference between them is the emotive quality in the sense that love is concerned with the happiness of others, wishing them happiness, whereas compassion is concerned with their suffering, wishing to eliminate their suffering. So they have a different object, a way of viewing the person’s situation in life. So considering the alleviation of suffering, very few people amongst us are sensitive to and are willing to acknowledge even to themselves the immense level of pain permeating their life. This is, I guess, going back, perhaps I’m repeating myself what I talked about when we were redirecting our