Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Ryokan’s verse “If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure,” Ven Jampa Gendun anchors this 44-minute session in a story from the early Tibetan tradition: a teacher named Geshe Drom tells an old man that circumambulating a shrine, reading sacred texts, and sitting in meditation all miss the mark unless he first renounces the eight worldly concerns. Those eight “principal preoccupations of ego-oriented existence” — pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and ridicule, fame and notoriety — are then unpacked not as life-denial but as rigid hope-and-fear patterns that block any genuine creative response to the present moment. The second half is guided meditation: loving-kindness directed toward a culturally unfamiliar stranger, mindfulness of breathing, and a structured exchange-of-self-with-others practice moving through loved ones, acquaintances, and difficult relationships.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 HoM 1993 05 12.mp3
UUID: 89001a61-84ba-41af-b93b-c69b38927751
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-05-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~3,734
Is everyone warm enough? So we begin by redirecting, reorienting ourselves, getting back in touch, resetting our priorities, what is important for each of us that is very unique, self actualizing individuals, and what certain guidelines or certain principles that in our final moments, our moments of great clarity and insight and compassion that we have found meaningful and purposeful in our lives, that we would like to. Can you hear me okay? You turn up just a little bit? I’d like to read a verse by my old friend, Ryokan.
The rain has stopped. The clouds have drifted away. And the weather is clear again. If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world.
Abandon yourself. And the moon and flowers will guide you along the way. So, you know, we have these these storms that oftentimes pass and we get caught up in and and we’re blown about by all our both by external events and the and the various, you know, reoccurring these compulsive patterns within our own mind. But then sometimes the rain lifts, the wind dies down, And there’s a great clarity after the storm. You know, it says, you know, that if your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure.
And this is is part of this and this expresses part of this reorientation process of beginning to see that it is very much the qualities of our own mind which determine the qualities of our experience and therefore our life. You know, beginning to see the problems and therefore the solutions with inside yourself. You know, if your heart is pure, if your mind is pure, then this is a pure land, this place that we sit right now. And it says abandon this fleeting world. You know, it’s You know, that’s I think some people perhaps see Buddhism as somewhat pessimistic as life denying, you know, all the good things of life.
You know, what does it mean to abandon this fleeting world? I like to read a verse in trying to look at what it might mean to abandon this world. One day, an old gentleman one day, an old gentleman was circumambulating the Reting Monastery. Geshe Drom. Geshe Drom was a great master of what is called the Kadampa tradition.
He was the he was a lay person. And he was the main disciple of Atisha, who was probably one of the two most important Indian masters with respect to bringing the dharma to Tibet, the other being Padmasambhava. So Geshe Drom, a layperson, was his main and direct disciple. And Geshe Drom said to him, sir, I am happy to see you circumambulating, but wouldn’t you rather be practicing the Dharma? You know, in in Tibet, in India, Nepal, eastern countries, it’s considered very virtuous to to walk around a stupa, a reliquary monument where these relics are placed.
And it’s considered very virtuous to walk around it, circumambulated. Thinking this over, the old man felt it might be better to read Mahāyāna sutras, you know, the Mahāyāna texts, the text of the universal vehicle. While he was reading in the temple courtyard, Geshe Drom said, I’m happy to see you reciting sutras, but would you rather be practicing the Dharma? At this, the old man thought that perhaps he would meditate. He sat cross legged on his cushion with his eyes half closed.
The teacher Drom said again, I am so happy to see you meditating, but wouldn’t it be better to practice the Dharma? Now totally confused, the old man asked, Geshe la, tell me what should I do to practice the Dharma? The teacher Drom replied, renounce attraction to this life. Renounce this renounce it now. For if you do not renounce attraction to this life, whatever you do will not be the practice of Dharma, as you have not passed beyond the eight worldly concerns.
Once you have renounced this life this life’s habitual thoughts, and you are no longer distracted by the eight worldly concerns, whatever you do will advance you on the path of liberation. So to give up this world, to give up this life is to renounce these eight worldly concerns, these eight principal preoccupations of ego oriented existence. If we these are the primary boundaries of the prison in which we now subsist. And if we become aware of these and continually challenge these primary patterns of mind, then we are we are renouncing the world. We are abandoning this fleeting world.
That is the world of ego-orientated existence. And this is a primary practice that we can express in our everyday lives. The primary, you know, eight principle preoccupations of ego oriented existence, pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and ridicule, and fame and notoriety. And when we hear this, we say, it sounds life denying. You mean if I’m going to practice the Dharma, if I’m going to travel a spiritual path, if I’m going to develop myself, then I have to stop trying to find pleasure, that I have to stop avoiding pain.
I have to stop working for gain, stop trying to avoid loss. This sounds rather life denying. And there’s a quote by the Dalai Lama where he says, human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that feeling, everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering. And everyone has the basic right to do this, then if it is our basic right to seek happiness and to avoid suffering, then what does it mean that I am to give up pleasure?
I am to give up avoiding pain. And these eight principle preoccupations of ego oriented existence, what it means is that we are to abandon our hope for pleasure and our fear of pain. Our hope for gain, our fear of loss, our hope for praise, our fear of ridicule, our hope of fame, our fear of notoriety. And this is what it means to give up this life, to develop the determination to be free. You know, we should be happy.
And we have every right to pursue all the various means which we see as as methods for achieving this happiness. And we should not suffer. And we have every right to strive to eliminate our problems, to go beyond our dissatisfactions. These are quite reasonable and rational aims. You know, in many respects, this is the reason that we’re seeking to grow.
It’s seeking to make use of a spiritual path, to achieve a real fundamental happiness, a real peace, and to alleviate our problems at a very profound fundamental level. Ultimately, to benefit, to bring about our own welfare and that of others. But the path of growth, a path of spiritual development, that way of being of a flexible, creative behavior, of a rational, self actualizing human being is completely different from the rigid, behavior of a life conducted on the basis on the patterns of hopes and fears. You know, we can’t these patterns of hopes and fears cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be communicated with.
They are only capable of calculated, rigid, repetitive reactions rather than creative responses. Hope can be understood to be the setting one’s priorities in terms of which enhances ego. You know, an ego’s attempt to establish its own priorities in terms of what confirms itself, to arrange a world in which it can gain complete mastery over. And fear is is ego’s reaction to anything that it sees as a threat to itself. So the priorities of growth, of the path, are not the priorities of ego or ego oriented existence.
Their goals Buddhahood on the one hand and egohood on the other are mutually contradictive, incompatible. We are not our patterns. We are not our hopes. We are not our fears. But as long as we identify with them, there can never be any spontaneous creative responses to the present moment, and never really going beyond the walls of this, the boundaries of these eight principal parameters that we that we have, imprisoned ourselves within.
No real wisdom, no undistorted awareness of the way things are. You know, to think that to travel a spiritual path, a path where we are seeking to develop ourselves and solve our problems, is the skillful avoidance of difficult situations and difficult people would be would be self deceptive. You know, as I’ve often mentioned in terms of the of what Jung said that the basis of neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering. It’s the fear of suffering, a legitimate suffering that may have to be worked through. And it is, you know, the the hoping that things will be better when we’re doing nothing to change the rules, which are governing our existence.
It’s simply, wishful thinking without creating the causes. That’s what hope this is the type of hope which is being referred to here. So avoiding those situations which, in any way, are seen as painful, and hoping that things will get better for no reason at all, is a primary delusion which governs our lives, which keeps us stuck, due to which we and we have been caught up in these reoccurring patterns consistently. And nothing has changed. And Ryokan goes on to say, you know, abandon this fleeting world.
Abandon yourself. And again, I think this is perhaps what he was talking about in the last verse that I read last week in terms of the self of self centeredness, you know, the our exaggerated self concern. If we can only go if we abandon these eight principal preoccupations of ego oriented existence our hopes for pleasure, fears of pain, our hopes for gain, our fears of loss, our hopes for praise, fear of ridicule, hopes of fame, our fear of notoriety. And if we can only go beyond our self centeredness, then everything becomes our teacher, everything becomes conducive to our spiritual growth. You know, we’ve all had the experiences, but we continually miss or dismiss the lessons.
And it is by working through, trying to see how our life is governed by hopes and fears, and not to allow it to control us, our behavior, in the way we’re going to run our lives, way we’re going to perform our story, our preferred story. And we’re not going to and to begin to, as we’ve been doing, look into the disadvantages of self centeredness and the advantages of other centeredness, and not let this our total preoccupation, our exaggerated self concern run our lives, determine how we’re going to behave, the way we think, the way we speak, and the way we act. Then everything becomes supports our our being. Everything becomes our teacher. The and the moon and the flowers will guide you along the way.
So the this process of reorientation, this process of resetting our priorities is in terms of growth, in terms of going beyond these eight principle preoccupations of ego oriented existence, going beyond our own self centeredness. It’s a matter of beginning to realign a realignment of our allegiance allegiance from life based upon, a life passively led under the influence of hopes and fears to one which is actively choosing growth. And it becomes one of a shift in our motivation why we’re doing what we’re doing. From a sense of self concern, a total involvement in our own narrow confine of our own world, to that of opening out to a wider world, opening out and be beginning to respond to the needs of others. So the inner focus of our life.
You know, I think this is what we’re learning about. Learning about how we can begin to take control. Cease being victims of our hopes and fears cease being victims of our self centeredness and to begin to reform, to express our preferred story of the person that we have always dreamed that we could be to find a way to actualize in our everyday life, to be everything that we feel that we can be at some level, to be our preferred story, to be a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being. So these, I think, teachings and these understandings and what is being talked about here are are the means for it to help us to express what is self existent within all of us, which is lying dormant, which is the seeds of wisdom, the seeds of love and compassion, and vitality, creative energy, mental and physical, which are the qualities of an awakened way of being. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, the Buddha within inside of ourselves.
The metaphor for the for the outcome of our preferred story, of the consummation, the actualization of our fullest potential. It finds expression, it’s able to find a vehicle for actualization through the dharma, that which raises the level of our consciousness, that which takes us beyond our hopes and fears, our self centeredness, and helps us to express our wisdom and our love and our creative energy in our daily life, In the social context of a spiritual community, those individuals who like minded individuals who who support one another, who freely associate one with one another in order to to facilitate each other’s stories, to authenticate and to assist us becoming all that we feel that we can be. And if we, each of us, can become a Buddha, if each of us can become sane and healthy, then everyone else can. In raising the level of our motivation, going beyond the our self absorption and beginning to accept a greater responsibility till till we accept a universal responsibility till we take our rightful place amongst within this great being of living life. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha and the Dharma and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain the state of the 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. And the virtue virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain the state of Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha the Dharma and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving any other perfections may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings Judy gave me this this evening. Maybe I’ll share it with you.
It’s a it’s a poem by, a monk. It’s in four verses. He lost the plot they say, but it simply isn’t true. You can’t just lose the plot, it’s stuck to you. Nor can it be chucked out or thrown into a pit.
You can’t just dump the plot, You’re stuck to it. But you can soak the plot and loosen it with your tears and slowly peel it back. It could take years. And you can lose your face and you can lose a lot and feel blessed when they say, he’s lost the plot. Okay.
Trying to escape the tyranny of normality. So we are going to meditate. We begin with the cultivation of love and compassion and choosing a stranger who is of some different ethnic background than yourself or some different color skin than yourself, in some way they feel perhaps a little bit foreign, little bit there seems to be some kind of barrier between yourself and them. They have some kind of perhaps some kind of preconceptions about what type of person they are. Maybe you have some bad associations with that particular type or variety or race or ethnic background.
And we will work with that individual in the development of loving compassion. And then we’re going to meditate mindfulness of breathing. It’s helpful using the techniques of counting and noting. Sometimes even if you use both counting and noting toward the end of your session, then stop counting and just use noting. And then further on you can even stop noting.
And just practice sometimes without counting and noting. Sometimes the counting, when your mind actually becomes settled, it’s calmed and concentrated. The counting can be somewhat of an agitating factor. It’s not necessary any longer, so you just set it aside. And if your awareness is becoming developed and you can come to the sensation on your upper lip or inside your nostril and see if you can catch the sensation of the air rushing in and out on your upper lip.
If you can stay with that sensation as the focus of your concentration. If you can’t find it, then just go back to the general physical sensations associated with the natural breathing. And then we are going to meditate on exchange of self with others. And we are going to choose various individuals and we are going to imagine them in front of ourselves And we’re going to try to put ourselves in their place. You know, as I used that expression last week with the Native American Indians say, you know, don’t judge a person till you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins.
Well, we’re going to try to to put on their moccasins, these other individuals for a while in in this laboratory of our meditation, experiment and being able to identify, developing sympathy and empathy, and finally being able to identify with the world of another person outside of ourselves. You know, trying to actually feel, how would it be to be them? You know, it’s we can only imagine, that’s all. How would it feel to be them? How would it feel to be in their situation, to look at the world out of their eyes, think their thoughts, live in their circumstances?
How would it be? How would you experience it? And it was kind of a breakout of our own narrow viewpoint, which we bring to all our situations and relationships, seeing everything in terms of only ourselves, being able to develop a more flexible perspective, being able to see things from other people’s points of view quite readily, perhaps quite naturally, spontaneously, in developing a social awareness. Okay. Should we try that?
So if you take a firm but comfortable posture. I’m thinking of that individual, that stranger, of a somewhat somehow different than yourself. Color, ethnic background. I wish you might have some negative associations with, possibly. But even if they aren’t conscious, there’s this sense of different.
This person is different than myself. Imagining as best you can that person in front of you. If you can’t see them, it doesn’t matter. Just feel that they are there, this this person. Begin by trying to develop compassion toward this person.
First with just this friendly thought, it would be wonderful if you didn’t have any problems. I would like it if you didn’t have any dissatisfactions, difficulties. Just that friendly gentle thought toward this person. May you not have any problems. I wish that you didn’t have any suffering or difficulties.
I’m going to help you. I’m gonna commit myself to working with you in solving your problem. And we’ll cultivate love toward this person. First, with a simple, gentle, friendly thought, Be nice if you were happy. That would be wonderful.
May you be happy. May you have all the good things in life. I’m going to help you. I’m going to commit myself in working with you to find happiness. The way I am going to express my commitment to you at this present moment is through my meditation, developing my wisdom and my compassion and my various skills and abilities.
Eventually I’m going to be a real benefit to you in a very substantial way. And then bring your mind to the breath. Just gentle, easy in that flow of the natural breath. Now we are going to meditate on exchanging self for others. Begin by thinking of someone that you love, that you are very close to.
Imagine that person in front of you as best you can. If you can’t see them see them, it doesn’t matter. Just feel that they’re there. And we want to put ourselves in their place, Feel their feelings, think their thoughts. Look at the world out of their eyes.
How would it be to be them? So put yourself in their place as best you can. And then look back at your old self, your former self, before you exchanged. And what is it that you see? What do you feel when you look back at your old self?
Do you feel loved? Do you feel valued? Understood? Respected? Cared for?
Express what it is that you feel, that you see to your former self. Think of someone who you are not particularly close to, an acquaintance, perhaps someone that you work with that you see every day. Put yourself in their place, thinking their thoughts, feeling their feeling as best you can, as best you understand them and their circumstance. And then look back at your former self. And what is it that you see that you feel?
See indifference, competitiveness, friendliness, Express what it is that you see that you feel. How do you experience your former self and express it to your former self? And then think of someone of the opposite sex. Imagine that person in front of you. And we are going to exchange places with them.
But from the point of view of gender, how would it be to be them from the point of view of gender? Trying to experience the world out of their eyes, their circumstances, their feelings? Then look back at your former self. How do you experience your former self? What do you see?
Do you feel appreciated? Do you feel devalued, objectified, suppressed, understood? And express what is it, how the, what it is that you see, you experience yourself, your former self, to your former self. And then finally, someone you’re having some difficulties with, someone who you’re not getting along with, some problems.