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 frames impermanence in strikingly psychological terms: every neurosis, he contends, traces back to denying one of the three marks of conditioned existence. After recapping dissatisfactoriness from the previous week, he maps four registers of impermanence — the stages of a human life, the fortunes of health and relationships, the cycling of seasons and civilisations, and moment-by-moment disintegration intrinsic to all things. A Buddhist text’s unflinching portrait of old age and death, alongside Blake’s “He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise,” drive home the core point: the problem is not change itself but our clinging to permanence. He closes with going-for-refuge prayers and a guided meditation on compassion toward a difficult person, breathing, and impermanence.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 19 HoM 1993 09 15.mp3
UUID: 22cc2834-c98b-4ff4-8733-3211abbf2168
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-09-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~4,905
This process of reorientation and getting back in touch with some of our more deeply held values, certain guidelines that we’ve set for ourselves over the course of our life that in our final moments we’d like to see our life as an expression of. And this, you know, as I’ve mentioned before and I mentioned last week, this process of redirection or reorientation. I guess, in a one way, perhaps abstractly, it’s finding new metaphors by which to live by. And I’ve mentioned the motivation. The reason that we involve ourselves in this process has two basic causes.
The first being is dread and the second being faith. And dread in the beginning to see the reoccurring dysfunctional patterns of our life, the pathological themes. You know, we change partners, we change geography, change careers. But no matter how much we seem to be manipulating the outside world, the same problems seem to keep reoccurring. And there begins to be a sense of anxiety, a sense of dread that things are going to continue very much as they are now.
So we begin to it helps us to get unstuck, to be motivated, to look for more skillful and we’re beginning to look for more skillful metaphors by which to live our life, to begin to, look for more profound solutions to our problems. And in terms of this this process of reorientation, redirecting ourselves, I’ve mentioned in the past that to a large extent over and above our rationality, it is very much the principle of pleasure and pain which determines most of our behavior. That pleasure and pain have priority over logic. So we have to actually begin to look at our lived experience in terms of pleasure and pain. And therefore, to avail ourselves of our basic sanity, to begin to reorientate ourselves quite spontaneously.
There’s going to be some new direction in our life once we begin to see that our present modes of behavior, patterns of thinking and be and ways of being in the world aren’t delivering the goods. They they’re dysfunctional. They’re not very skillful. And so this entails looking at what are termed the three marks of conditioned being, Being conditioned by karma and afflictive emotions. And by afflictive emotions, the various types of emotions such as attachment and hatred, spite, jealousy, miserliness, jealousy, ignorance.
Basically, ignorant driven existence. Ignorance governed existence. And we began to talk about this last week in terms of we looked at the mark of the dissatisfactoriness of suffering. I’m talking about these three marks. These are three marks or rather three characteristics.
In my thinking, what we’re to a large extent, what we’re working with are our ways of being in the world, the way that we relate, are all very much dependent upon some presuppositions that we have, premises that we base our life on. These may have been instinctively formulated or they may have been learned somewhere along the line. But we have certain ways of being in the world, ways of viewing the world, ways of relating with the world, ways of seeing the world, certain metaphors that we live by, are based upon these premises, based upon these presuppositions, based upon these systems of ideas and beliefs that we have, many of them unconscious beliefs, ideas and assumptions and presuppositions. And if we can begin to see that a life, a way of being based upon these particular types of premises doesn’t work very well. It’s it’s it’s unhealthy, pathological.
It has it causes one to experience suffering, not peace. And we can begin to work. We’re going to take up the difficult task of reshaping the premises on which we live our life, the metaphors, but through which we live our life, these these presuppositions, these these ideas. You know, there’s no objective reality out there, which is forcing us to experience the various states that we undergo. And as I repeated oftentimes, it’s not so much the things and the people and the situations about us, which are our problems, but it is our opinions about those things and people and situations which are problematic.
And why are they problematic? Because we our, our opinions, our ways of relating are based upon problematic premises, ways of our worldview, ways of dealing with situations and seeing it. How do we view the world? How do we view people? These these premises, our particular worldview, you know, this approach is called ego-orientated existence or ignorance governed existence or conditioned existence or cyclic existence.
It’s a particular approach to life. And it has this this that is to say, a a type of existence which is lived out on the basis of these dysfunctional pathological premises, these crooked ideas, ideas which aren’t which aren’t in our best self best interest. But we’re basing our life on them and the way the way that we operate in the world on them. They’re they have three marks, three characteristics. These types of premises that we’re presently operating under, the in and the influence of, that we base our life on, they have three characteristics or three marks, three primary qualities about them.
One of them is, we talked about last week, suffering, dissatisfactoriness in all its various forms. Let me quote, I think we’ll see that every psychopathological phenomena has at its root a particular relationship to these three marks of existence. These three marks of existence, dissatisfactoriness, impermanence and selflessness or identitylessness. These are the three marks of the premises, the presuppositions, the ideas which we base our life upon. These premises have these three marks.
They have these three characteristics. They’re in the nature of suffering. They’re called suffering. They bring about suffering. They’re they’re dissatisfactory.
They’re impermanence and selflessness. So we’re going to we’re trying to understand how these aren’t working in our life so that we just through the very pleasure pain principle, we begin to transform principles, transform our principle our premises, the ideas upon which we base our life, to more functional, more skillful. Those premises and weight and ideas which lead to a higher quality way of life. I think we’ll see that every psychopathological phenomenon has at its root a particular relationship to these three marks of existence. We could trace every psychopathological form, system or complex, everything that we call severe neurotic or psychotic disturbance back to a highly sensitive and meaningful encounter with one of these three basic truths.
The attempt to cover up the acknowledgment of these very simple facts has led to a lifelong struggle and to one form of psychopathology or another. We will find that each psychopathological form, such as obsession, hysteria, phobia, depression, and various character aberrations, contain within it a denial, a rejection or struggle against the recognition of the texture of existence. It is like someone who refuses to accept that summer changes in the fall. They dress inappropriately and become ill. So it’s necessary to again and again confront and acknowledge these three basic facts about the nature of our present approach to life.
So that we begin to transform the premises upon which we operate our life, our approach to life. We talked about the first of these three markets last week in terms of the mark of dissatisfactoriness in all its various forms. In the the overall categories of dissatisfactoriness of pain, mental and physical pain, the dissatisfactoriness of fluctuation, the the the psychological suffering, the very nature of our dualistic of our dualistic thinking process, which is bound up in pain. We can never know happiness without knowing suffering. We can never know the warmth of a friend without knowing the coldness of an enemy.
And then finally, the dissatisfactoriness of universal conditionality, metaphysical suffering. That is to say the very fact of being susceptible, vulnerable, we don’t have control. We are at the we are like leaves blowing in a storm, whether as a child, but also as in in the view of old age, disease, and death. We have no choice. We are susceptible.
We are vulnerable. But then there’s the second mark of condition, existence. It’s existence which is governed by karma and afflictive emotions. And basically most, when we say afflictive emotions, ignorance, distorted awarenesses. The most basic of our afflictive emotions.
Impermanence. Impermanence refers to the fact that there are no permanent things to be found anywhere in the universe. No permanent material objects. No permanent thought, idea or perceptions. No permanent laws of nature.
No permanent beliefs or systems of beliefs. All without exception is changing. And we see wherever we look around us or inside our own minds, the weather changes, the trees and flowers change and decay, our loved ones are constantly changing, our own bodies are changing, growing and decaying. One day we may be happy with good family, a group of friends, sensible political and religious views, and a job. The next day one of our children becomes seriously ill.
Our political views are shaken by revelations of corruption. One of our friends turns out to be suing us. We discover that we have suddenly lost heart in an artistic activity that has brought us joy for twenty years. We develop a fear of flying that means we cannot keep our jobs. These are the vagaries of life, we say.
Yes. But the mark of impermanence points out that there is nothing other than the vagaries of life. The idea of changing is not even the best way of talking of impermanence because this implies that there are things, and those things change. The mark of says that the universe should not even be thought of as composed of things that change. Rather, the universe and all of its parts should be thought of as processes of continual becoming and decaying.
At a very deep level, we do not accept the mark of impermanence. We surround ourselves with objects we feel are permanent, and we become attached to them. We hold to certain beliefs that we regard with certainty as true and unchanging. We seek permanent laws of nature and for a final theory of matter or of human personality. All this is an attempt to fix an ever changing universe as if you could take a snapshot of it at this moment, and it would always be like that.
Everything changes. Everything is continually passing away. It is becoming something other than it was before. That’s in its very nature. There’s simply nothing that we can hold on to.
That’s the reality of our situation. It is a more, what, functional premise to live your life on, a more sane premise to live your life on in order to avoid suffering. And if you don’t mind suffering, then it doesn’t matter, but we do. There is simply nothing that we can hold on to, nothing that remains fixed and unchanged, Nothing that can endure. It is not in their nature.
Everything that we love, everything that we hold dear, everything that we work so hard to gather together to obtain and attain as if as from moment to moment, you know, like grains of sand slipping through our fingers. All of it will be forever lost eventually, never to return again. And whatever whether it be something as simple as a beautiful sunny day or something as enmeshed in the fabric of our life as our as our life partner, as our children, our relationships, even our own bodies and lives themselves will will come to an end. They’re all going to have to be given up, sooner or later. And talking about impermanency, there are various types of impermanency.
Impermanency of impermanence of changeability. There is, for example, there are many different states or stages that we go through over the course of our life. We are newborn babies. We become infants, toddlers, children, adolescents, adolescents, young adults, middle aged, and finally the stages of old age and then death. And we’re passing through all of these stages, continual process.
From the from the second moment of our life, aging death begin, and with all the inevitable changes which they manifest. The each of them each of these stages has their peculiarities, their their particular qualities, you know, from the from the vulnerable vulnerability to a baby, to the innocence of a child, to the curiosity and strength and enthusiasm of adolescents, to all the fluctuating fortunes of middle age, to the the illnesses and dysfunctions and, disorientations of old age. And then there’s death. There’s only change. And then now now there’s quite beautiful quotes I’d like to share with you.
And now we may be in our prime, beautiful and strong. Did you ever see in the world a man or a woman of eighty, ninety, or a hundred years old, frail, crooked as a as a gable roof roof, bent down, resting on her crutches, with tottering steps infirm, youth long since fled with broken teeth, gray scanty hair or none, wrinkled with blotched limbs? And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to decay and that you also cannot escape it? And now, perhaps we’re healthy, and we feel that we’re able to care for ourselves. Did you never see in the world a man or a woman who, being sick, afflicted and grievously ill, wallowing in his own filth, was lift up by someone and put into bed by another?
And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to disease, that you cannot escape it? You know, now we are alive, and we are seemingly immortal. But did you never see in the world the corpse of a man or woman one, two or three days after death swollen up, blue black in color and full of corruption? And did the thought never come to you that you are also subject to death, that you also cannot escape it? The impermanence of changeability.
And then there’s the impermanence of all the various elements which constitute our life, our prosperity, our relationships, our physical and mental well-being. And sometimes, at times everything is going well for us, and we have all the things that we need. At another time, things nothing goes right for us. And we seem like if we we are poverty stricken, we don’t have anything that we need. Sometimes things are constantly wearing out, being lost.
All our meetings, all that we meet with end in separation. Our closest friends become our enemies. Our enemies become our best friends. And sometimes we experience pleasant feelings, sometimes unpleasant feelings, sometimes feelings of indifference. At times, we are healthy and strong and excited about life.
And at other times, we are sick and worn and weary and wish to get it over with. Sometimes we are full of hatred and jealousy and attachment. Sometimes we are filled with love, wisdom, noble thoughts. Then there’s the changeability of all the things about us, our environment. You know, the civilizations rise and fall.
Great cities are built up and fall to ruin. The seasons change. You know, becomes summer and summer, fall, fall to winter. One season comes after another. Flowers bloom and wilt.
A barren tree begins to bud, grows green leaves, turns red and yellow. The leaves fall away, and the tree is barren once again. And we this constant reoccurring cycles of being in the world with around us. You know, we we get a new car. Eventually, it needs repair.
And, finally, it’s assigned to the junk heap. Dishes break. Styles change. I remember having been away in India for almost fifteen years, coming back to Australia coming to Australia and seeing the styles that were being worn. And I I was amazed from one point of view is that many of what seemed to be the most stylish clothing being worn at that time.
And the people wouldn’t have been caught dead walking down the street with him, wearing them fifteen years ago. They wouldn’t have dared. They wouldn’t have but, you know, but the styles change. And the songs that were most popular and entertainers and types of entertainment, were popular at one time, they’re long forgotten after a while. And they don’t seem quite right.
They don’t we can’t understand why what we ever thought in them, what we ever saw in them or found pleasant about them. Change. There’s impermanence of separation. You know, this is the fact that we are all like fleas on the hot griddle of life. And the flea has to jump.
And whatever jumps must eventually fall and must land. And having landed, in in inevitably must jump again. And having jumped, it must again fall and land. And having landed, it must again inevitably jump again. There’s no there’s no lasting niche for ourselves that we can carve out for ourselves.
There’s no place that the what do they say? The Son of Man can rest his head or the for long. There’s no identity, no realm of existence, that, no version of reality that we can hold on to for long, that we can sustain indefinitely. We are continually having to move on to begin again. Here’s a poem I’d like to share, a verse I’d like to share.
Fire in the window is bright, glittered on the moorland. Sung! Kung built a palace in the wild. Now, when the day dawns in the brow of the moorland, lone stands the house, and the chimney stone is cold. Lone, let it stand, now the friends are all departed. The kind hearts, the true hearts that love the place of old.
Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorland fowl. Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers. Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley. Soft flow the stream through the everlasting hours. Fare the day shine as it shone on my childhood.
Fare the day shine on the house with open door. Birds come and cry. Birds come and cry there and twitter in the chimney. But I go forever and come back no more. Perpetually, we cycle through all the various mental and material versions our existence from all the from the blissful absorptions of the god realms of the celestial beings down to the paranoia and pain of the hell beings and all the various realms between.
Continually moving on, leaving behind, beginning again. The high becomes low and the low becomes high. The oppressor becomes the oppressed, and the oppressed become the oppressor. And this wheel just keeps on turning relentlessly. Then there’s the impermanence of disintegration, which this is subtle impermanence.
The moment by moment arising, abiding in disintegration and passing away of all things. Things are such that when the appropriate causes come together, the appropriate conditions and causes aggregate, they come into existence. If a similar type of cause and condition aggregate again, that product, that result will come into existence again from moment to moment. There’s a continuity, a stream of the object just like this table, just like our lives. But it is the nature of things and the very nature of the product that when when the causes and conditions aggregate when they produce there is no more cause which is needed for the disintegration of the object.
The cause has been exhausted. The conditions have been exhausted once they once they have brought a product to existence. And there’s nothing more. There’s no another, no additional cause which is necessary for that product to disintegrate. It is in the very nature of a thing that automatically it begins to disintegrate once it has achieved existence.
By its very nature, if there is not a similarity of type of cause and conditioning arising the next moment, there’s a cessation of continuity of whatever it was, whether it be a table or whether it be our life. That’s gross impermanence, the coming to an end. And finally, there’s the impermanence of of changeability. And this is that, you know, even if things haven’t changed, they will. That’s in their very nature.
So, you know, the thing about we’re talking about this as a mark of impermanence in itself is not a problem. The world isn’t permanent even for a Buddha, and it’s not problematic for a Buddha. So we’re not talking about impermanence in itself, but impermanence as a our particular approach to impermanence is problematic. It’s because, you know, the problem of is in terms of the mark of impermanence is rises through our denial, our rejection, or our struggle against recognizing the basic fact of impermanence. You know, expecting of that which is constantly changing to remain unchanged, like, holding on to that which is doomed to decay as as if it’s going to last forever, you know, demanding of the of that which is impermanent, that it bring you permanent happiness.
That’s the problem. That approach, that premise, that attitude that we take to impermanence is problematic. That’s why it is a true suffering. Impermanence is not the problem, but it is simply those it is our grasping and struggling to cling to the transitory and its pleasures that marks conditioned existence as in the nature of suffering. Conditioned existence means existence which is conditioned by afflictive emotions and karma, basically ignorance.
That makes it pathological. Ideas are struggling and seeking are trying to hold on to that which is impermanence, which is the problem. Impermanence in itself is not the problem. It is our approach to it, our attitude to it. At some level we have a premise which holds all of these various objects about us as permanent, as everlasting.
And then when the reality catches up to our fantasy, we experience suffering when it doesn’t live up to our expectations. And finally, there’s a verse by, you know, showing other possibilities. Yeah. Another orientation towards the same fact of impermanence. By a verse by Blake, where he says, He who bends to himself a joy doth the wing life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise. So that’s a different premise, isn’t it? It’s a different metaphor to live one’s life, and it’s no longer problematic. So if you know, it is, by seeing the nature of our situation, we we are going to develop a motivation to change, to grow, to begin to transform the premises and metaphors through which we live our life. Once we begin to develop this dread, this anxiety about our particular ignorant driven approach to life, These dysfunctional premises and these pathological presuppositions that we are living our lives dependent upon, when we develop a dread of them, that approach to existence, and that becomes one of the basic causes to determine to awaken, to to reorientate, to to redirect ourselves, to go for refuge.
When we go for refuge to to the inner you know, the in going for refuge, the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha. Now this is the a metaphor again. It is the a metaphor is I’m just beginning to understand what a metaphor is. You have to excuse me. We were I I find it quite fascinating, actually.
We were I’ve been trying to figure it out for a long time. But, anyway, I’m a bit slow. It’s a representation, which is by which by means of which we can make sense out of the world. You know, you can you can have a you can live by a metaphor of life as a bitch and then you die. That’s the way you make sense out of your world.
On that metaphor, you approach life in a particular way. You can you can have the metaphor life as a bowl of cherries. That’s another metaphor. And you can approach life on the basis of that particular metaphor. They each of them would have a different flavor, different quality.
It would it would very much influence the way you responded. You you related with the world about you, which metaphor you lived upon, you lived out your life upon. We have even all of what we talk about, the path, growth, you know, like the like a bud like the seed growing in a plant and then it flowering. We talk about traveling a path. Or we talk about Buddha nature within like the like like gold covered over by rags or jewel encrusted with dirt.
These are metaphors trying to help us to make sense. And these metaphors are what we live by to a large extent. So Buddhism is trying to supply us a particular, from their point of view, efficient metaphors in in in that they bring about lives lived upon these metaphors, these premises, these these ideas is experienced as a cessation of suffering, as peace. It’s no longer marked by these three marks of existence. And we found another approach using these metaphors the way we make sense out of our experience we call life.
So, you know, to a large extent, that’s what we’re doing. That’s what each Wednesday night or each of our various meditations, then we involve ourselves, trying to change our premise, our ideas, suppositions about the world to more functional premises, ideas that work better for ourselves, to deliver the goods, because we all want to be happy. We don’t want to suffer. So Buddha is, you know, the there’s a metaphor for how we’re you know, you the preferred story of one’s life. And, you know, whatever whatever you think the the most finest possibilities of life could bring in terms of the quality of being, that’s what we call Buddha.
A happy, healthy, loving, sane human being. You know, someone who experiences peace within and out of compassion works skillfully with others to experience the same. That we that is the highest metaphor as far as the potentiality of humankind, as far as Buddhism is concerned. And that becomes our inner focus, trying to orientate ourselves actualizing that. And it’s actualized by means of the Dharma.
These ways and means which are able to transform the premises of our life, the ideas and assumptions about life and our approach to it and the things about us and the people, such that we can find out of that, we can find Buddha inside of ourselves. And this process occurs within the social context of a spiritual community. Those who hold like ideas are striving to actualize same metaphors, perform the same ways of being in their life, supporting and assisting one another, reinforcing these more skillful ways of being, more functional premises of our life, and trying to raise the, our motivation, why we do what we do, to include an ever widening circle of others. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the 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 and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. So we’re going to meditate, and we’ll begin with the cultivation of our motivation in terms of love and compassion with someone that we have some difficulties with and some problems with and trying to work as best we can with that objects in developing these various levels of compassion and love.
And we’ll meditate on mindfulness of breathing, and we’ll meditate on impermanence. So and I’ll lead you through some some thoughts about the impermanence. So if you take a a firm, comfortable posture. So beginning with our motivation, first considering someone that you’re having some problems with, someone perhaps you don’t like, Imagine that person in front of you. And trying as best you can to develop the feelings, sincere and genuine attitude toward this person.
It would be wonderful if you didn’t have any problems. May you not have any problems. I’m going to help you. I’m going to commit myself working with you to solve your problems. A cultivation of love.
Beginning with be wonderful if you are happy. May you be happy. I’m going to help you commit myself to working with you to find happiness. And the way I’m going to express my commitment here is at this very moment, through my meditation, developing my skills, abilities, my wisdom and love, then I can give real significant practical benefit to you eventually. Bring the mind to the breath.
Gentle, easy, and outflow of the natural breath. It’s helpful using techniques of counting and noting.