Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of standing in swimsuit on a diving board — poised to leap but held back by fear — Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 46-minute session by introducing bodhicitta, the awakened heart, as the series’ central subject. He makes the case for love and compassion from several angles: understanding as another name for love, illustrated by meditating on a difficult son; a Desert Fathers story in which one hermit conceals his own crisis of faith to steady the other; and the Dalai Lama’s counsel to be “wisely selfish” rather than conventionally self-absorbed. Monsoon clouds shrouding Dharamsala serve as a metaphor for the narrowing effect of excessive self-concern. The session ends by previewing the two classical methods — equalizing and exchanging self with others, and the sevenfold cause-and-effect instruction — that will guide the months of practice ahead.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 HMA 1997 01 15.mp3
UUID: a1846808-c388-4eba-8704-6451b1dda6b0
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-01-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.8 minutes
Words: ~6,600
In one way or another, in one form or another, to one degree or another, suffer. That’s all. There’s no other possibility. The game is rigged in that way. Within this set, there is no real element of happiness, true happiness, what we would want out of life, is not life.
You know, it’s not that it can’t you know, it’s not that pessimistic or that cynical view that that somehow life is in itself flawed. It is our approach to life, the way that we live it under the influence of self centeredness and ignorance. And, you know, when we have to see that and say, I’ve got it. And if I ever really want to find some happiness, if I ever want to find some meaning and fulfillment in my life, if I ever want to be of real use to myself and to other people, I’m going to have to work through these dysfunctional patterns in my mind and determining at a very deep level of your being and arousing the energy and the direction and determination to actually bring about that change, the absolute necessity to rid my mind of ignorance and self centeredness, the determination to awaken, awaken our hearts, and awaken our minds. So now we’re going to no.
We’ve done that. Okay. Yeah. Good luck we didn’t have any examinations. Begin again?
Can we start again? Begin again. Resolve to always be a beginner. Yeah. You know, so this is a, you know, an ongoing process, obviously.
So we’re going to begin the explanation of the way to awaken our hearts, the way, you know, bodhicitta bodhicitta is the Sanskrit word. Technically, the altruistic aspiration to achieve highest enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. If you can do that, then you’re doing very well. I just want to you know, we’re talking about the development of real love, real compassion, you know, becoming stepping outside of our usual me, my mind approach to existence and opening it up to a greater vision of what it means to be in a world with other people, you know, a social being. In order to overcome selfishness, it is necessary to be daring.
It is though you were dressed in your swimsuit standing on the diving board. So we’re on we’re standing in our swimsuits on the diving board. Okay? We’ve we’ve developed this determination to awaken, the will to awaken, and now we’re on the diving board. And you ask yourself now what?
The obvious answer is to jump. That is daring. You might wonder if you will sink or hurt yourself if you if you jump. We are attracted to our cocoons, our selfishness, and we are afraid of selflessness and stepping beyond ourselves. So in order to overcome our hesitation about giving up our privacy and in order to commit ourselves to others’ welfare, some kind of leap is necessary.
So this leap is the awakening of our hearts to others, the overcoming of our hesitation about giving up of our our cocoon, you know, the our our egocentric approach to life, you know, and beginning to commit ourselves to others’ welfare. And as as I said, renouncing committing yourself to renounce whatever stands between yourself and others, all the barriers, all the obstacles, all the deceptions, and finding some way of real communication. You know, the the we are social beings, human beings are social beings, that mental health is ultimately a social phenomena. Now if we’re failing to recognize this fact, a great part of the human dilemma, a great part of our dilemma, my and your problems, is that we’re constantly completely absorbed in our own problems to the expense and oftentimes to the exclusion and oftentimes the expense of others. Now that is to say, part of our biggest problem is that we’re so come so totally focused, absorbed in, wrapped up in our own problems.
So opening up and responding to the needs of others. You know, we’re we’re as I said to this is a a reconstitution of our of our worldview. It’s a it’s a reeducation. So open you know, overcoming our cowardice, you know, our our psychological inertia, stagnation, you know, summoning up some kind of courage, some kind of inner strength necessary to to crawl out of our cocoons and fly. In other and to fly, we need wings.
We need two wings, and these two wings are the two wings of of the integration of wisdom and compassion. We need wise hearts and loving minds. That is to say, we need to develop fully our our our rational and emotional potentials, our intellectual and feeling qualities about ourselves. You know, this is the totality of our being that we bring to the that we can bring to our life. So, you know, the a life based upon ignorance and self centeredness is doomed to pain.
The only real method that we can to go beyond all the pain, all the fear, all the the the anxiety, all of what I talked about before, you know, all of the sense of alienation and inauthenticity, all this loneliness and meaninglessness in our lives, fragmentation, and just to grow, you know, to to expand the horizons outwardly and inwardly in-depth, to to begin to connect up with the world about us and to begin to penetrate deeply into reality, to become a a loving, sane human being. But, you know, we we have to use all our skills and our imagination and all our experiences to bring to bear upon us. You know, because it’s a it’s a tremendous undertaking, really, just to to radically reconstitute our worldview, our values, and our beliefs. You know, even though our beliefs are invalidated day after day and after day, even though, in all of in spite of all the blood, sweat, and tears that we’ve expended over a lifetime to find happiness and the fact that we haven’t found it, we’re still going to stick to our ways, our methods, you know, we’re going to we’re going to persist in in making use of the means that we’ve been taught to find happiness even though they haven’t worked up to now.
Unless we, you know, begin to despair of any possibility that some kind of change is necessary. You know, the reason that we don’t help others, each other, the reason that we don’t have the time, that we don’t have the energy for others is because we don’t understand others. And the reason we don’t understand others is because we don’t understand ourselves, our own problems, what’s going on in our own mind. Now the nature of our situation. Suppose we have a son who becomes an unbearable young man.
It may be hard for us to love him, that is natural. In order to be loved a person should be lovable. If our son has become difficult to love we will be very unhappy. We wish we could love him, but the only way we can is to understand him, to understand his situation. We have to take our son as the subject of our meditation.
Instead of taking the concept of emptiness or some other subject, we can take our son as the concrete subject for our meditation. We don’t blame our son. We just want to understand why he has become like that. Through this method of meditation, we find out all the causes near and far that have led to our son’s present state of being. The more we see, the more we understand.
The more we understand, the easier it is for us to have compassion and love. Understanding is love itself. Understanding is another name for love. Love is another name for understanding. You know, becoming aware of and acknowledging this is why we have to begin with ourselves, Becoming aware of and acknowledging our own pain, we can begin to really understand ourselves.
And thus and beginning to understand ourselves, begin to love ourselves. You know, by love I mean the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing one’s own or another’s well-being, the will to extend self, that is to make some kind of effort to go beyond the usual limits in order to nourish, to develop, to grow. That’s what love is. It is a choice. Yeah.
Volition. Understanding our situation, we make the choice to love, to grow. Understanding ourselves, our own pain, we can begin to understand others, you know, and other pain. And understanding their pain, begin to truly, maybe for the first time, to love them, not for what they can do for me, not because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, but because of their their hurting, and they want to be happy just like myself. And just as I love myself, I have to be I can naturally begin to love them and begin to extend myself to help them to grow, to work through their suffering.
You know, the taking responsibility for others is is the most skillful method available to us as a means of developing ourselves. You know, we we we have we’re going to eventually, when we come to the third principal aspect of the path, we’re going to talk about emptiness. We’re going to talk about selflessness, the wisdom, you know, the awakened heart. And and it’s terribly necessary to adopt this wisdom. There’s many profound insights which realizations which we need to to develop.
But the most readily available means to find some kind of mean meaningfulness, purpose, some goodness in your life, some kind of a sense of peace and a sense of connectedness with others is love. And it is the most it’s there. It is always it’s always as in some limited fashion available that we can make we can manifest and express it every day. It’s it’s the best way it’s the best therapy we have right now to heal our wounds, to to make ourselves better. You know, we have to work at these other means for sure, but this is there.
This this is readily available to ourselves. The others are going to take time and cultivation and and lots of work, but this is there if we’re willing to to choose that alternative. You know, taking responsibility for others is if if in order to take responsibility, if if taking responsibility is to have any real meaning, we must be able to respond. That’s what take responsibility. Responsibility means able to respond and respond to their needs.
And the way that we can the only way that we we can respond to others is by developing ourselves, you know, through growing, through growing developing love and wisdom, inner strength. This is it is like a wish fulfilling gem. That’s this this this metaphor that’s used quite extensively in Buddhism. You know, it it is it it opens up new avenues of being. Buddhahood is almost there.
Why? Because to that same degree that we’re willing to we take responsibility for others, to that same degree we’re going to, of necessity, have to develop the ability to respond. If we take responsibility for all living beings, which is what a Buddha does and which is the driving force behind what makes a Buddha, then we’re going to have to become a Buddha to be able to respond because only a Buddha can actually has the has the maximum potential to be of, you know, the greatest benefit to others. This is what we mean. This is the paradigm that Buddhism uses.
The fulfillment of the human potential only comes about when of necessity, when it’s necessary that to fulfill others’ needs. You know, there there is a story the idea of the point here is that real love and compassion have an element of responsibility. You know, it’s an act of involvement. There’s nothing passive about it. It’s something you know, when we went through these levels of love and compassion, there was a growing involvement the lives and the well-being of the other, even in terms of ourselves, from a mere wish to a real sense of this is what I want, coming to some kind of firmness conclusion in your mind to a sense, I’m going to get involved in your life.
I’m going get in there in that mucky and confusion and stir it around and get myself sick and do what’s necessary, you know, taking responsibility, in other words. That’s that’s kind of the the the fulfillment of loving compassion. Responsibility in terms of love is responsibility for others’ happiness. In terms of compassion, responsibility to eliminate their suffering. And in order so if that has if there’s that driving force, then you will have to, if it’s to have any meaning, develop the ability to respond.
And therefore, it is like, you know, it’s it’s comparable to like the the rocket fuel. It’s it’s the driving force which is going to take us to mental health, being all you know, fulfilling our potential for the sake of others. The the the it’s, you know, being in this metaphor of the rocket, the rocket is like wisdom, but the fuel is love and compassion, the awakened heart. You know, there was this there’s a story about it’s a it’s a nice story about it takes place on the Egyptian desert in in the early, maybe third, fourth century, the Christian the Desert Fathers. And there is two particular Desert Fathers or Hermits who lived out in the desert, and they became rather well known in the in the area.
One was very meek and mild, but very saintly, and people went to him and for confession because, you know, those who he always gave very easygoing what do what do you call it when you say it? Penance. Yeah. That’s right. Penance.
So people who I know, didn’t want but on on the on the other hand, there’s there’s the other there was the other desert father here who was really heavy handed and those who were on a maybe on a guilt trip or something. Right? They would they would go to this other heavy heavy heavy father and he would give them heavy penance. Anyway, they were both very saintly and very highly evolved beings. But even even in their case, it occurred that almost simultaneously they they developed some sort of doubts vocation, about their calling.
Some questions arose in their mind. And they they thought to themselves both at the same time and but individually that they would go to the other father to visit and, you know, talk through their doubts, to regenerate their faith. And so they set out in the direction of each other’s caves. And in the along their journey, they they came to the same point at in the night, and they were going to where they were going to spend the night. And and the gentle, the meek father, he said, I’m I’m on my way to such and such a father’s cave, and we’ll call him the wrathful father.
Okay? He didn’t use that word. Do do you know where he lives? And the wrathful father, he didn’t let on that he was, in fact, the person that this the meek father was actually seeking. He said, oh, yes.
I know where he lives. I’ll take you there in the morning. So they they both proceeded. And, you know, before the the wrathful father had agreed to take him to there, the the father had explained to the wrathful father why he was going there. He explained to him that he had he had some doubts about what he was doing, and he was questioning his vocation, and he wanted to regenerate his faith, and so he was seeking counsel of of of his father.
He needed some help. So the the wrathful father said, I’ll take you there in the morning. And so they they went to the wrathful father’s cave, and upon arrival, it became apparent that this was, in fact, the wrathful father’s cave himself, and that the the gentle father had had who he had met in the along the course of the journey in the middle of the night. And the the wrathful father said to the to the gentle father, he said, I want you to stay with me for a while. So the the gentle father served him and and over the course of a period of time, maybe a year or so, the the gentle father would hear the you know, the people would come for confession and and counsel and advice, and the wrathful father would would give various penance give various advices and counsels.
And after about a year’s time, the gentle father came to the wrathful father and said, you know, I spending this year with you has awakened my faith again. It’s all my doubts are resolved. My questions have been answered, and now it’s time to return to my own cave and continue in my vocation, my seeking God. And the the he wanted to thank him very sincerely for all that he had done for him, for for his assistance in helping him find refined his faith. And the the wrathful father said to the gentle father, you know, I have to confess something to you.
You know, that night that we met out on the desert and you told me that you had had doubts, that you had lost a moment of loss of faith, I too was experiencing the same, and I was coming to you to seek your help. And the gentle father said to the rest of the day, why didn’t you tell me that night? Why didn’t you tell me that you were experiencing very much the same that I was? And the wrathful father said to the gentle father, because if at that moment one of us had not been strong, we would have both been lost. So, you know, the point is that maybe we don’t have the strength or we don’t think that we do.
We acknowledge some kind of limit, some kind of insufficiency. But maybe sometimes it’s necessary to fake it, to actually rise to the occasion, the necessity to be there for somebody else even though you feel you can’t be. Maybe that maybe we and then in that process we live up to the necessity of the moment, and we fulfill that need. We we give what is necessary. We find some kind of inner strength or some kind of inner wisdom, some kind of resources made available to ourselves that we weren’t even aware of was there.
You know, that this this this call of necessity, this by taking responsibility. You know, that the the that others are able to elicit help us to reach out toward a deeper deeper and wider dimensions of being, you know, to go beyond these temporarily self-imposed isolation and loneliness, our self imposed limitations that we’d be perhaps drawing on resources of inner strength and caring and wisdom, participating through participating in the life of another. From the point of view of the universal vehicle, the Mahāyāna, or sometimes called the greater vehicle, the the individual vehicle, the Hīnayāna or the lesser vehicle, is seen to fall to the extreme of individualism. You know, that an imbalance of the emphasis on these two aspects of ourselves. You know, the two aspects of ourselves are that we have a private self, the self of the I as experience is inaccessible to others, which is our own lived in lived inner experience of life, something which cannot be known to you directly.
But there is another aspect to ourselves, that aspect of ourselves which exists in relationship, the social self, the I of relationship, the I of being with others in the world. So, you know, in order to to fulfill our complete potential, we have to develop both of these aspects of ourselves. Sure, we want inner peace. We want fulfillment within ourselves. But that would be that in itself is not the complete fulfillment of our potential.
That in itself is what is seen by the universal vehicle as an imbalance. We also have to fulfill our social potential, that we exist part of ourselves exists in relationship with others, in interdependence with others. We have to find some skillful way of being in this world with others, and that skillful way is called love, is called compassion. You know, that we cannot become healthy, we cannot find all of what life has to offer simply through the solitary acquisitions of realizations for ourselves alone, you know, like many people try to do. Even, you know, that they corrupt even their spiritual path, that it becomes something that they are trying to do for themselves so that they experience a lessening in their own pain independent of how they relate to the world.
Somehow that they you know, not being able to see themselves as as part of a greater system. And the absolute necessity of awakening our hearts to others is is is not based merely upon sentimentality or romantic notions, but it’s based it’s but it’s pragmatic. It’s rational. The Dalai Lama has said, if you’re going to be selfish, at least try to be wisely selfish. What he means by this peculiar sounding advice is that in a way, bodhicitta and bodhicitta is the awakened heart.
bodhicitta is like a huge selfish attitude. When you when you dedicate yourself to others with loving kindness, you get back far more happiness than you ever experienced otherwise. Ordinarily, we get so little happiness and it is easily lost. So if you want to be as happy as possible, the only thing to do is dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to the welfare of others. You know, it sounds absurd, doesn’t it?
It sounds like a romantic notion. As long as we stick with that self-sufficient notion that we that we have, you know, that I know better, we’re going to keep continuing experiencing the same after what we’ve experienced up to now. You know, maybe we have to create some kind of crack in this of doubt that there might be something to what’s being said here, practical and realistic. When some people first hear about bodhicitta as the awakened heart, they confuse it with a sentimental, highly emotional state of mind. Oh, how I want people to be happy.
I cannot stand to think of their suffering. They feel so overwhelmed by the needs of others that their mind becomes depressed. But true bodhicitta, that’s the awakened heart, is not like this. It it has nothing to do with such an upset and paralyzed state of mind. Instead, is clear and easygoing, possessed of calm wisdom as well as a deeply felt compassion.
It is an attitude of opening our hearts completely and leaving it open as much as we can. So trying to as I said, pleasure and pain take priority over logic for most of us. And so we have to come at this, why should I develop love and compassion from as many possible angles as possible using as many reasons, using see seeing giving it as as much assistance and opening that crack of doubt as best as possible from as many points of view. You know, the the necessity to awaken our hearts to others is also based within our own experience. You know, sometimes, like, you know, looking at your life in the way we lead it you know, I spent many years in Dharmasala, India, and it’s a hill station.
It’s in the I guess it’s fairly fairly high up in the mountains and and during monsoons. Sometimes I remember the first few monsoons that I spent there, and then you go for weeks without seeing the sun, completely shrouded by clouds. And then your whole world becomes narrowed down to a meter or two in front of you, and you’re walking around in clouds. And and that that’s that’s your world. This is few this little area right right around you.
And that becomes almost a perspective from the way you deal with life, you know, in such you know, the light of our of our own wisdom, you know, that’s the way our problems become. You know, we we only see my problem. We we become totally enshrouded in such in such a such a state, the the wisdom of our own, you know, own the sun of our own wisdom can’t can’t break through the clouds of our own exaggerated self concern. You know, completely wrapped up in my problem. You know, the but the moment we become aware, we we we take another tact, another viewpoint.
You know, there there’s a Sufi there’s a Sufi expression, I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet. It hurts not to have any shoes, you know, it’s uncomfortable, you cut your feet. But but so we have to deal with that problem. But it’s not the end of the world, you know, That we can we can the moment we open up to others’ problems, our own problems either pale to insignificance or they become simply more manageable. You know, we we can begin to see our difficulties on a grander scale scale.
So often we make such a fuss of insignificant events in our life that we turn minor difficulties into major problems. As we develop the universal view of bodhicitta, however, these small concerns become unimportant and no longer bother us. As the burden of self concern drops from our shoulders, we experience a small taste of the complete freedom that comes from full spiritual fulfillment. Experiences like this are encouraging because they demonstrate so convincingly the practical day to day value of training and transforming our minds. And it just the very practical effect of our experience in opening ourselves to other’s difficulties places our own problems in a in a in a more manageable perspective.
You know, we we don’t magnify and compound our difficulties difficulties by thinking we’re the only person in the world with problems and that this is the only problem in the world. Then, you know, and then there’s something beyond all of this. You know, we’re we’re looking at it from different pragmatic points of view, rational points of view, reasoning points of view, experiential points of view. This is the the necessity of awakening our hearts to others in terms of our own intuition, you know, the poetry of love, and speaking with the almost inarticulate whisperings of our own hearts. Something that maybe isn’t rational, isn’t logical, but feels right, the necessity to to try.
For when the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven. You know, we don’t we don’t have to to be saints or we don’t have to be superhumans, but we have to at least try to to, in some small way, to live the life of our waking dreams, you know, to live out our most deeply felt aspirations. You know, these these there’s a I think it was in his book, The Desert Fathers, where that story came from, by Thomas Merton. He talks about the fact of, you know, we have to take these these treasures out of our hearts once in a while as if they were clothing stored away and try them on for size. Otherwise, they’re going to rot and be lost to us, you know, and our life will simply be hollow and unfeeling, you know, to to to to bring these these these finest and most noble thoughts that we all have from time time to time and try to give them some expression in our life, you know, to to to allow them to practice upon ourselves, to change ourselves, to transform us.
You know, even to be happy in a very mundane sense, in a very mundane way, we have to respect ourselves, we have to like ourselves, we have to, you know, we have to feel that part of ourselves, part of a part which is not fully perhaps comprehensible to ourselves, but we’re a part but a but a personal part of ourselves we we that we believe in, which brings meaning to our life, that it’s that our life is being lived out of something deeper with inside of ourselves. Something deeper with inside of ourselves, that we don’t aren’t leading the life of of an accountant, of the of the, you know, the the profit and loss columns in a book, that there’s something more to life than that. You know, the the the intellect requires proof and demonstration. The soul requires belief and meaning. And it is our souls and here I’m using it, I think, in a rather poetic sense.
It is our souls which we are in danger of losing, which we are out of touch with, which brings meaning to our life, purpose to our life, which brings life to our life. And the part of ourselves that when we are one with, we are we are one with our total being. We are one with ourselves, we are oneness with all else, whether, you know, that takes place a deep healing at some deep level of our being. You know, difficult but necessary. The life of poetry and aesthetics and the life of belief and going beyond the rational and the calculated.
We’re talking about a quality of life. You know, we are selfish people, but we can be tried to be wisely selfish selfish by cherishing others. We can try this. We can we can we can, you know, set our our our direction, our cart in that direction. You know, it’s not unrealistic but even compellingly practical that we should develop a natural, rational, instinctively powerful altruism altruism, a wish to benefit others.
It’s the most readily available remedy for all of our of our psychological ills and as a means to find some real peace in our lives, some real meaning in our lives, you know, mental It’s like, know, it’s the best therapy. You know, you can go to the best shrink in town and he can’t touch it. No no question. It’s not that we’re not talking about some complex philosophic theory here, we’re not talking neither are we talking about some romantic flight into fantasy, but a simple pragmatic statement about life, about the quality of life, that loving, caring, compassionate people have a much more meaningful life, have a much more profound quality about their life and the nature of their relationships, that they have less problems. You know, it’s not to say they’re not going to be hit by buses.
It’s not to say that they’re not going to be cheated and that bad things aren’t going to happen to them, but they’re going to experience a greater quality, a more worthwhile, a more quality way of life that we would all want for ourselves. You know, The awakened heart is a real internal revolution against the tyrannies of normality. You know, to be normal in an insane society is not to be healthy. We can’t take our standards of how we’re to live our our life by what’s going on about us. Otherwise, you’re going to lead a pathetic life, and you’re going to die that very much that same way.
So, you know, it’s the awakened heart is so so far removed from our everyday attitudes that it might seem that it’s it’s something reserved for only superhuman people, for saints, for the Dalai Lamas and the Mother Teresas and maybe the Mahatma Gandhis. Know, that’s that’s what we would like to believe. We that’s the way that we can let ourselves off, taking responsibility. As if, you know, the Dalai Lamas and the Mother Teresas, you know, somehow by their very nature they’re loving people, compassionate people, saintly people, you know, organically different than ourselves. Their biochemistry is not the same as us in their in their brains.
You know, they have these loving electrons and compassionate protons and selfless atoms running around in their heads, you know, as if they didn’t have to if they didn’t have if they didn’t have to go through trials and discouragement, as if they didn’t have to make the effort and keep redirecting themselves and keep reopening their hearts again and again. You know, we can’t conceive of ourselves to be like them perhaps at present. You know, what goes on in the mind of a Dalai Lama, what goes on in in the compassion of a mother Teresa. I mean, we can’t feel what maybe what Mahatma Gandhi experienced spiritually, but just because we can’t conceive of what their minds might be like, we can’t just because we can’t feel what such a mind might feel does not mean that we cannot develop such a mind, that we cannot that we cannot eventually feel such feelings, we cannot consciously begin the difficult task of opening our own hearts just as these people have at some time in the course of their existences. You know, the this is the stuff for the mind.
You know, five or ten years ago, you you you could not have conceived of your present mind, you know, what it would be like, how it would view, how it would feel differently than what it did before. Your mind has changed in some way. It’s evolved, perhaps haphazardly, perhaps without any particular direction, but still it’s not the same mind as it was five or ten years ago, relatively so, even if only slightly differently so. It’s not quite the same. There’s been some changes, you know, maybe some ideals are different, some values, some some attitudes that you didn’t didn’t have before, have been altered in some way or in one way or another.
So the mind changes. And if we’re willing to make the effort, we can direct that process of change. We can become anything that we want to be. We can become a Buddha if we want to be. We can awaken our hearts if we want to be.
It’s simply a matter of habituating ourselves to that way of of being with others in the world, of going beyond our own self centeredness. Presently, we not we we may not be able to conceive of ourselves to be to ever becoming we might not presently be able to conceive of ourselves of as being being that person that we want to be, but that should not stop us you know, from setting out in that direction of the person that we would want to be, you know, that to to to make a to simply begin to make a habit of the person that we want to be. You know, our our own limitations are acknowledged. Just just because we can’t conceive of what it might be to be a Buddha or simply to become a more caring person doesn’t mean that we can’t become that. You know, just simply we have certain limitations in our imagination, but but we shouldn’t allow these self imposed limits to determine who we will be.
And we can begin that journey of a thousand miles just with the first step and the next step and the next step. And then the the journey which we could never conceive of of ever ending will someday be fulfilled if we make that first step, that’s all. But if we never make that first step, then it doesn’t make any difference what we do. The magnificent conception the magnificent conception of this will to enlightenment is the central moment in the evolutionary career of living beings, the moment in which a new spirit of love and compassion pervades its whole life and destiny, and its further evolution becomes the purpose of creative progress. Even from this from this moment, a living being becomes a bodhisattva worthy of honor by gods as well as humans.
Śāntideva states that as soon as a being conceives the spirit of enlightenment, he or she becomes at once son or daughter of the Sugatas, a Buddha child. He or she should rejoice in the newfound fruitfulness of their existence. This spirit is a kind of spiritual gene, a DNA molecule of universal evolution life after life. Once one possesses it by conceiving the will to attain Buddhahood, the perfection of wisdom and compassion for the sake of all living beings, the quality of one’s experience and even one’s biological continuum is marked forever onward. You know, the now I’m going to finish here.
There is no more noble thought than this, the awakened heart, to to to aspire to to fulfill your complete potential for the sake of all living beings so that you become become you can be of maximum benefit for all living beings. There is no more greater meaning that we can bring to our life than just that, no more powerful method to go beyond all of our suffering, no greater way to be of help to others than to awaken our hearts to them. And in the text that we are making use of by Tsongkhapa he goes on to say, having said all of that, thus the intelligent should generate the supreme altruistic intention to become enlightened. That is to say, thus the intelligent should seek to awaken their heart. So it’s, you know, trying to arouse some aspiration, you know, some inspiration to toward actually doing it.
And others have done it, and we too can do it if we want to. It is we’re going to be there is a way, a method, and simply aspiring is not enough. We actually have to do something, and we have some means to work with. And we’re going to be describing these means over the next, I guess, few months. There are two meditative traditions for the development of an awakened heart, which we’re going to be working with, explaining the first of these being equalizing and exchanging self with others, and the second is the sevenfold cause and effect instruction.
These are these are the means, the actual tools by which we can take the clay, the stuff of mind, and begin to shape it into forming an awakened heart if we’re willing to work with the means and and make the effort. So I’m gonna stop there. Okay? So we’ll dedicate the creative potential that we accumulate. You notice one of the prayers of dedication that we continually make is, may this precious jewel the awakened heart.
That’s how important you know, this is the this is the this dedication is said almost on every occasion within the Buddhist tradition, within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition especially. You know, this is what great importance, significance. It’s not it’s not superfluous. It’s not a tangent or a practice which is set off to the side. Compassion is central to spiritual practice.
It is the foundation of spiritual practice. And