Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Quoting Hume, William James, Nietzsche, and Bateson in quick succession, Ven Jampa Gendun shows in this 38-minute session that Western philosophy has long circled the question of self without finding Buddhism’s therapeutic answer. He argues that even if we cannot consciously identify our belief in a fixed, unitary, independent self, we can infer it must be present because attachment, hatred, jealousy, and pride all depend on it as their root. An extended rope-snake analogy then carries the core argument: fear of a coiled rope mistaken for a snake dissolves the moment we see it clearly, and suffering rooted in the grasping self dissolves likewise when wisdom directly contradicts that misconception. He carefully distinguishes the conventionally existent self from the self held by ignorance, and traces how doubt gradually weakens grasping until it collapses entirely. A closing note encourages skeptical practitioners not to let peripheral questions — such as whether hell realms exist — block engagement with the central doctrine of emptiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 HMA 1997 07 30.mp3
UUID: 3592480c-f070-4497-a787-7b5ef4353f81
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-07-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 38.1 minutes
Words: ~4,806
No such self can ever be found. When we look at the way we suffer, when you look at your fear of death, you know, why are you so afraid to die? Why do you feel guilty about what you’ve done? Why does why does the world appear so threatening to you? Now if you’re investigating those notions, the notion of how we respond emotionally and the nature of the quality of our suffering, whether you believe in a self or not, whether you believe in any philosophic system or not, still you respond emotionally and in terms of the quality of the suffering.
It is as if you believed that you, the I, the self, the person were a unitary, a singular, partless, homogenous whole that was unchanging, fixed, independent, separate. You know, all of this, all of we can’t identify this belief at present. It’s at an unconscious level. It’s held at a very subtle level. The more that we know something, the more difficult it is for us to be aware of it.
Even recognizing that holding that belief is a tremendous insight. But we can infer that we must be holding that such a belief because of the the very nature of the fact that we have attachment, hatred, jealousy, pride, the very fact that the way that we respond emotionally to life. We can infer that because these all arise on holding that basic premise, if we did not hold that, have that conception in our mind, then these other conceptions which depend upon that as their foundation could not arise. Attachment, hatred, spite, jealousy, miserliness, pride, etcetera could not arise. You know, we can infer that.
So the practical significance of this position and the other point that I want to make is I said I wanted to make two points. One, that we have to come to some kind of sense that even though I’m not aware of it at present, I can’t articulate it. I can’t bring it to that sense clearly to my mind. That belief must be there. I must at some level be harboring such a belief.
And we can work at that and we can begin to sense have a sense that that belief is there. It becomes more and more plausible or necessary that everything that I’m experiencing entails that. The other one is, and I’m only saying this as, you know, it’s it’s it’s something that we must keep in mind throughout our discussion. Is that the I exists, the self exists, the person exists. Everyone in this room exists.
I exist. I’m speaking. You listening to me. I, this empirical self, the conventionally existent self, is not a problem. It is the misconceived I.
The I which is held to exist by ignorance, which is problematic. So in all of this, in all of our discussion, we must never lose sight of that fact that you in fact exist. You know, if you feel like you’re going out of existence, you know, who is it that’s so afraid of going out of existence? You know, who would go out of existence? I would go out of existence.
Well, okay, you exist. The I exists. The self exists. It doesn’t exist the way that we normally conceive of it to exist. That is normally conceived of by ignorance.
That’s correct. That’s true enough. But still the I exists. The I which talks, which walks, which eats, which comes to the Buddha house, does all this such activity. That I exists.
So throughout all of our discussion we should never lose sight of that fact. But there is an I which is held to exist by ignorance which in fact does not exist. But we believe it does. So there is a therapeutic basis for our discussion. It’s not simply philosophic speculation.
I think that’s important. The Buddha was not interested in philosophic speculation for itself alone. Only when it related to the practical matter of the alleviation of suffering. So the practical significance of this position that we’re all holding, and we’re holding it though we are not presently aware of it, this belief in such a type of self, this unitary, unchanging, fixed, independent self, is that a life lived on the basis of that belief is experiencing, is experienced as various levels of suffering, continuous frustration, fear, anxiety. While life based upon the absence of such a belief, what are we saying by belief when we say that?
A life lived on the basis of the absence of ignorance. A life lived on the basis of wisdom is experienced as continuous peace. So we have the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures throughout all the days and changes of our life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity and safety of this enduring core, the center and soul of our being which we call I. So, you know, asking ourselves and trying to answer this question, Who am I?
Is extremely important. Our ultimate happiness directly depends upon our realization and the answer to just this very question. You know the question Who am I? Has been asked, you know, it’s not particularly an Eastern question, it’s not particularly a Buddhist question. It’s been asked in Western philosophy for thousands of years.
For example, David Hume, the Buddhist philosopher. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. I never catch myself. And then William James, the American psychologist who did that in late nineteenth century. William James concluded that the self and the belief in self were constructed out of an unbroken sequence of thoughts.
He went on to say, The passing thought alone is the thinker, the thought of ownership. Each thought dies away and is replaced by another. And then finally, Nietzsche, the German philosopher. Subject, object, attribute. These distinctions are fabricated and are now imposed as a schematism upon all apparent facts.
The fundamental false observation is that I believe it is I who do something, suffers something, have something. So, you know, there’s been a great deal of speculation as to the nature of the I throughout thousands of years of Western philosophy. But it would appear, and this is, you know, by all means, I know very little about anything at all, but even less about Western philosophy. It appears there was a matter of philosophic speculation or just there was never the notion that there was some kind of therapeutic significance in the investigation that Buddhism attaches to the inquiry and to the nature of the self. But there was in this, and I’ve mentioned his name before, Gregory Bateson, the American who died perhaps in nineteen eighty, something like that.
He seemed to have a notion about the therapeutic or the beneficial value of such an inquiry into the nature of the self and even into the nature of reality altogether. He said, There is a difference between the conscious self and the world and the true nature of the self and the world. And then later on he went on to say, I have worked to practice living in a world of truth instead of the world of epistemological fantasies. Remember that? A catchphrase?
epistemological fantasies. But I don’t think I’ve succeeded. It is not sanity after all, it takes therapy, takes psychotherapy to change it, or some very great new experience. And then six years later he said, If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. So Buddhism would totally agree that we have to restructure our thinking about ultimately who we are.
And this very great new experience that we need necessary to overcome our misconception, our mistaken notions about who we are. And this very great new experience is the experience of selflessness. Bateson was probably getting that something, but he didn’t quite know where to go. So, you know, what the Buddha discovered and which brought about a radical transformation at the very basic the deepest level of his being, was that the experience of suffering is always associated with a strong emotional attachment to a vague sense of self. So he he was interested in suffering.
Is life a bitch and then we die? And this was fundamental. This is why he proceeded on his search. This is why he did everything that he did. And he turned his attention to this strong emotional response associated with the sense of self And he investigated what is the nature of the self.
In all of suffering there was always he traced an evolution and an association with that suffering to a sense of self. Somehow there was a connection between the two. And if we see our our suffering, as being his fault or her fault or being not enough of this or too much of that, that’s our connection, that’s our association. With his investigation carried him to the place where he saw it, it was always somehow intimately tied up with a notion of self. So this is where he began to investigate.
What is this self that seems to be so tied up with our suffering? How is it experienced? And can it withstand analysis? What he found was, when he investigated the self, was that nothing in the whole stream constitute our experience of the self has the quality of a unitary, unchanging, independent self. It is all diversity, many parts.
It is all momentary, constantly changing. And it is dependent arising. Of this can be called self. If you simply investigate the continuity of body and mind over time and your investigation is carried on in a critical manner. You will never identify anything within that stream of events which can be called I or self.
He concluded that it was all, it was our persistent effort to treat the body and mind as if they were a self that makes our bodies and minds a constant stream of suffering. So you know the, working with some kind of images that we, had to help us to gain some some handle on what’s going on here, what we’re talking about. You know, the I it’s hard to begin to I mean, we we are slowly undermining a great deal of our present, uncritical thinking. That, you know, if if I don’t exist the way I think of myself to exist, then what can I trust in? What can I ever believe in?
Maybe nothing exists. And it’s very frightening. There’s resistance. So, you know, we have to understand that we have many misconceptions. That we have that we can we readily in our everyday life see things wrongly and begin to work back from there.
You know, clinging to the ideal, identifying with the appearance of a model. You know I talked last week about models. That cognitive systems, our minds are model builders. And we have a model of a type of I. This particular model that we’re discussing at present is a type of I which is unitary.
Which is, you know, I’ll go into what I mean by that. Unitary, unchanged, independent self. We have a model. And we cling to that model as if it were the self, the actual I, the actual self. So clinging to such an idea is like clinging to the idea that a coil of rope, a coil of striped rope that’s seen in the dim light is a snake.
So this example is made of a great deal of use in the discussions and it’s going to be made use of in various teachings in the future. So, you know, imagine that you’re walking along and it’s growing dim, the sun is going down. And in the grass along the side of the path there’s a coil of what is in fact a coil striped rope. But it appears to you to be a snake. It could happen quite easily.
So it’s, you know, a light is shown upon that, we see that there in fact is no snake there at all. And all the fear and suffering that arose from our clinging to it as real as an actual snake dissolves. The snake never existed in the first place. So it is only our mistaken clinging to our misguided clinging to a mistaken idea that caused all the fear and suffering and nothing else. You know, if you saw a snake along the side of the road, along the side of the path, you’d become afraid and all these various emotions would start to be churned up.
The moment you realize it’s not a snake, then we can understand that that fear and all of that suffering that entailed was based upon a misconception and nothing else. Nothing else. A wrong idea in your own mind and nothing else. That fear and the suffering and all those various negative emotions which may have arisen, unsettled feeling, whatever, they all arose on the basis of a misconception. So in the case of a snake, you know, we see a snake, a valid cognition would apprehend a rope at the place where the snake appears.
There’s a place where the snake is appearing but a valid cognition would see a rope there. That’s the reality of what’s there. So the conception of a snake is baseless. There is nothing in the reality which is able to support it. So it is contradicted by what we call a valid cognition, a non mistaken conception, which in this case conceiving the rope.
So the valid conception of a snake, the valid conception of a snake, and the valid conception of a rope existing at the same place and at the same time are mutually exclusive. We cannot conceive simultaneously of a rope and a snake being at the same place at the same time. They would negate one another. They’re mutually exclusive in terms of our ways of thinking. We couldn’t manifest such types of thoughts simultaneously together.
You know, just like hot and cold cannot exist together. They would negate one another if they were placed at the same place and the same time. So by conceiving of a snake, we generate fear and all the various other associated emotions that go along with it, all our emotional responses. But if we generated a strong contradiction to that concept by investigating the nature of the object, you’re trying to see if in fact there was anything which corresponds to what is appearing to ourselves. And here we’re getting at the notion that appearances can be deceptive.
And this is basic to our understanding. That just because something appears doesn’t mean it is that, that in fact exists. In this case we can understand that there was never really anything there to be afraid of. And all the fear and all the associated emotions will dissolve of themselves. But just like, you know, the moving of, you know, like balance beads, you know, where you begin to increase the weight and slowly the balance shifts from one side to another.
The adding, like adding of hot water or cold water, this is a process of gradual change and this is what we’re working with. Initially, taking this image of the snake again, initially we conceive of a snake. We’re walking along and it’s evening. In the grass there’s what is in fact a coiled rope, striped rope. And we conceive of it as a snake.
So you know, we’re surprised and we’re afraid but we don’t run away. We’re brave, okay? We recall that there aren’t any snakes in this area. Must be a very rare snake. I’m curious.
So we shine a light, you know, and we watch it for a while. Wow, it’s not moving. Maybe it’s dead. Maybe it’s molding, molding, molding. Maybe it’s molting.
But, you know, from a safe distance we’re watching. Watch. It’s not moving. That’s strange. And maybe even there flickers almost unnoticed
A thought, maybe it’s not a snake. That goes almost unnoticed. Just a faint flicker of a thought. Maybe it’s not a snake after all. So we move up closer, we get braver and braver.
It doesn’t appear to have a head. It’s a pretty strange head it’s got there. Or something like that. And doubt begins to arise in our mind. The concept of grasping a snake is beginning to be undermined, is beginning to weaken.
And we move closer and closer. You know, it looks like it looks a little bit like a striped rope. And so doubt begins to arise in our mind. As our conception of snake is being directly contradicted by this perception. You know, we get to a place where we aren’t sure whether it’s a snake or a rope or not.
Our mind begins to vacillate back and forth. Snake, rope, snake, rope, snake, rope. And it’s flicking back and forth very quickly. So we begin to open up to the possibility that maybe our initial belief was in fact wrong. That in fact it’s not a snake.
Before, you know, was unquestioned. But now there’s an opening. There’s some kind You know, doubt is the precursor to true knowledge. Doubt is the opening of the mind to other possibilities. You know, as I probably mentioned, Āryadeva says doubt as to the ultimate nature of cyclic existence shakes the very foundation — doubt as to the ultimate nature, whether things truly exist or not, shakes the very foundation of cyclic existence.
So we begin to wonder, is it a snake or not? And our mind begins to vacillate back and forth. And we get a stick, you know, and begin to poke around at it. It’s too light to be a snake. The snake would be heavier.
And it’s not smooth like a snake. It’s more a rope. So the conception of rope is growing in strength in our mind. And concomitantly at the same time the conception of snake is growing weaker and weaker and weaker. It’s like this balance pans.
Now it’s almost impossible for us to support that notion that it’s a snake. And finally, it’s a rope. No doubt about it. The conception of a snake is directly and completely contradicted and eliminated from our mind totally with the certainty that it’s in fact a rope. And all our fears and all our all these emotions which are associated with that misconception dissolve into the absence of that snake.
And the cause is gone. The cause was a misconception. An attachment to something that was never there in fact in the first place. Whenever we respond emotionally with attachment, with aversion, with fear, it is always based upon a sense of a unitary, unchanging, independent self. That is a conception which has such a type of self as its object.
As its referent object. We talked about We think about things. We have mental maps. We have ideas. And these we have these models.
And these refer to things out there in the world, hopefully. Sometimes they don’t. These are what we call these refer to objects out there. Our ideals about things refer to things out there. My ideas about this table refer to something here.
My ideas about myself refer to something maybe here, maybe not. So that’s called it’s a referent object. You know, like, when we talked about the map, you know, with all the lines, little dots, that map refers to something out there. And then I can drive. That’s its referent object.
So when just as in the case of the snake, when we analyze the referent object of the conception of a unitary unchanging self. We have a conception. We have an idea of a particular type of self. This self has certain characteristics. Here the characteristics that are under discussion are that it’s unitary, that it’s unchanging, that it’s independent.
This conception is called ignorance. When we analyze the referent object, what is that conception referring to? What is that map referring to? When we analyze that object to which it’s referring to, there is nothing which corresponds to it. Just as when we poked around with that stick, there was no object which corresponded to our conception of snake.
We couldn’t find anything which corresponded. There was no snake out there. We looked. We investigated. We analyzed.
We had an idea in our mind, a conception in our mind, but when we investigated the object which it was referring to, we couldn’t find it. We couldn’t find anything that corresponded to it. There was no snake out there. We found something other than a snake. When we searched the place with regard to the self, this I, when we searched the place that such a type of self appears to ourselves, you know, where does the self appear to us?
It appears at this very moment, if I were to wanted to investigate the nature of my eye, myself, where would I look for it? Where is it appearing for me? It’s not appearing out in the kitchen or in my bedroom. It’s appearing somewhere here around my body and mind. I have a sense that it’s here sitting on this cushion here and somewhere.
That so when I when I investigate that place that it’s appearing, we cannot find it. We think it’s there. We have an idea that’s there. We have a conception that’s there. That conception is called ignorance.
The referent object does not exist. The referent object of ignorance does not exist. It never did exist. The self which is being referred to by ignorance does not exist. This is what we mean This is what the self and the word selflessness means.
It doesn’t mean that there is no self. It means that the self which is being held, being referred to by the conception of ignorance does not exist. Selfless. This self does not exist. It’s not talking about self in general.
The reference object of ignorance does not exist. This means that there is an absence, in this case, of a unitary, fixed, un changing self. There is an absence. There is a non existence. When this selflessness, when this absence, when this non existence is deeply realized, the conception which grasps at its existence.
You have to understand, we have a conception that this self does exist. And then when we analyze, we find it doesn’t. This is a wisdom consciousness. A wisdom consciousness is an analytic investigative consciousness which is trying to understand the deeper nature of things. When we investigate, we develop a wisdom.
In this case we understand that that self doesn’t exist. Ignorance conceives, holds that it does exist. When this wisdom is strengthened, it begins to weaken. Ignorance, until such a self is no longer able to be sustained, until we can no longer grasp at the existence of such a self. That we can no longer hold that that’s a snake.
We’ve investigated the object to the extent where the misconception of snake can no longer arise in our mind. That conception dissolves along with all the tensions, all the suffering associated with it. The cause is gone. The cause was a misconception of an attachment to something which never really was there. So this wisdom which realizes that selflessness is the awakened mind.
It’s like the light, you know, that reveals the rope. The fact that it is not a snake. The snake the snake was merely an appearance. Nothing more than that. It was merely a model, merely an idea that we grasp at as having some reality, as if there was a referent which existed out there in fact.
It arises out of mistaken misconceptions, you know, due to various internal conditions and the lack of any kind of discriminating awareness. You know, things arise in dependence. That snake arose in dependence upon a dim light. It arose in dependence upon a coiled striped rope. It arose in dependence upon a lack of discriminating awareness.
When all of those conditions came together, a particular appearance arose. That’s the nature of dependent arising. Likewise, a unitary, unchanging, independent self is merely an appearance arising to the force of various conditions. The primary condition is the misconception the mistaken conception of ignorance. So in order goodness.
Didn’t get very far. So you know, if if we ever just like in this example. I think the the example, the the analogy of a snake. We we can that’s something that’s readily accessible in terms of our own experience. In the sense that all whatever fear and suffering that may have arisen as a consequence of grasping at a snake arose only from a misconception in our own mind.
Just an idea within our own mind, nothing other than that. There was something out there which was acting as a condition, the coiled rope. But but the but it was our misconception which was the primary cause of any difficulty that we had, of our problem, in terms of that coiled rope. And it’s we can’t blame it anywhere else. It was only an idea in our own mind.
Whatever suffering we experience, whatever difficulties it may have caused ourselves. In order to end our suffering there’s nothing more important than to realize than when we think and act as if the body and mind constituted or possessed a unitary, unchanging, independent self, we are unthinkingly attributing qualities to them which they do not possess at all. They don’t have that, but we think they do. Or at least ignorance thinks they do, or conceives or grasps that in fact they do. So we’ll stop there.
Okay. Yeah. Last night, I was talking to someone about you know, they were talking about Khensur Rinpoche was talking about hell realms and and, you know, And he was saying, you know, I can’t I don’t believe in existence of hell realms. Fair enough. You know, that’s okay.
But I did mention that, you know, this shouldn’t be an obstacle to our practice. You know, that there are many are many As His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, this idea of emptiness is like the the central focus of the doctrine. We can get at it through reasoning, through logic, through a rational understanding. We can establish it. If the central premise, if the focus of the doctrine can be established in that way, then these other more inaccessible areas, which aren’t aren’t central, We can simply provisionally accept them as a working basis.
We shouldn’t allow the peripheral issues to act as obstacles to our getting on with our practice. When this and I think it is, you know, we can get at it with all of our skepticism, with even our cynicism, with all our knowledge or lack of knowledge, we can somehow validate what is being gotten at here and see how there is it does establish the nature of our difficulties. And we actually work with it with reasoning and we can see how it is actually operating within our own lives to bring about our problems. If we can see that, then we can have some kind of conviction. We can have some kind of trust in the central premises of Buddhism.
Then we can work with the we can not necessarily believe, but we can provisionally adopt them as a working basis of our practice while at the same time investigating them further to see whether we can validate them or not, whether in fact they are true or not. But some people seem to and I think this is you know, they get hung up in the details. They get hung up in what are side issues. And they don’t see and they don’t try to validate what is central. And this is central.
And this I think we can work through and come to firm conviction in. That there’s only profit to be made in such a way of thinking. We’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll dedicate we’ll dedicate the positive potential that we’ve accumulated. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and well-being. Powerful Chenrezig, Tenzin Gyatso, please remain for the end of cyclic existence.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual master and lead each and every living being to that awakened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakened heart that has not arisen arise and grow. And may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more.