Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A flag flapping in the breeze on a rooftop — that sudden flash of almost-timeless freshness — is how Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 41-minute talk, using the image to introduce basic goodness: an unconditioned quality always present yet rarely noticed. He compares Buddhism’s message that we are all Buddhas to be with Christianity’s promise of forgiveness, arguing both point toward the same recognition. The commentary then examines why we persistently discount our own goodness — self-defeating thought patterns, confirmation bias, and the fear of disrupting a familiar self-image. He closes with the parable of the Rabbi’s Gift, in which monks treat one another with extraordinary respect on the chance that one is the Messiah, and the dying monastery revives — a concrete illustration of what shifts when we genuinely believe in our own potential.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 HMA 1996 06 05.mp3
UUID: 2f0b613a-38ea-4105-ab3d-e6933266b93a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1996-06-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 40.7 minutes
Words: ~5,395
And you’re ready to go out for an appointment, but you’re not in a hurry. You sit there looking out the window at the street. It is a warm day with high clouds. People are walking down the sidewalk in bright summer clothes. Blue suits, a red and yellow dress, a white shirt, some are moving briskly, almost urgently, others are strolling.
A horn hoots, a vendor cries, somewhere a child laughs. Suddenly, catches a flag flapping in the breeze on the rooftop, a ripple across the street. For a moment your mind rests with that flag, the sudden flash of freshness, almost of joy enters your state of being. Your mind stays with it, is fresh and open, your body relaxed and warm. There is a quality of lightness, humor, and almost timelessness.
It is very simple, yet for the remainder of the day you feel utterly refreshed for no good reason. This is the flavor of basic goodness. Unconditioned goodness is said to be the most immediate, intimate and all pervasive aspect of our everyday experience. It is always there. It does not come and go.
Our recognition of it may be fleeting but does not depend upon any particular circumstance. We may be in a very mundane situation such as I have just described or in a more extreme situation. A sudden glimpse of unconditioned goodness is always possible. Traditionally, such realizations are said to be most likely to occur spontaneously at a moment of sudden surprise or they occur as a result of the practice of meditation. Still the glimpse of openness that can come along at any moment.
Such moments are a first step If they are acknowledged and allowed to enter our state of being, then gradually our life begins to open up. We begin to cheer up and feel a natural wholesomeness and dignity. If we do not acknowledge these simple experiences, then they are forgotten and our life continues along its particular familiar groove. Discovering and acknowledging such moments constitutes a journey of opening that needs some discipline and some training. The simplicity and naturalness of discovery of unconditioned goodness needs to be emphasized again and again and again because although we may never have studied philosophy or been particularly religious, we nevertheless are very much influenced by the philosophical and religious attitudes of our culture.
Scholars, theologians, materialists, and cultures have made a very big deal out of reality. They have tried to be convinced and to convince us that any sense of connection with something beyond our own individuality, in connection with the profound basis of our existence, is either impossible or only for the chosen or meaningless. Unconditioned goodness is our Buddha nature. And it’s not something which needs to be gotten. It’s not something which needs to be improved upon.
It only needs to be recognized in as self-existing at the depth of our own being, within our own mind, and gradually to be accepted and unfolded to find some means and through devotion to allow a greater and greater expression of it in our daily lives, in our conscious lives, through our practice, through aligning ourselves with our own Buddha nature. You know, what is so different between us and all the other Buddhas or the past? You know, the Tathagatas. Someone has done it before us now. And they are no different than ourselves fundamentally, essentially.
And this is the message of Buddha nature. This is what we are trying to to to feel at some deep level of our being. You know, it’s a beautiful thing. It has already happened to somebody. It has already happened to someone.
Why not to me? You know, why not to you? Why discriminate between ourselves and the Buddhas of the past? You know, my Buddha nature, your Buddha nature is as good as any Buddha’s Buddha nature. No difference whatsoever.
The great message of Christianity, perhaps, is that all all our sins have already been forgiven. And all we need to do is open to that to find salvation. The great message of Buddhism is that we are all Buddhas to be. And all we need to do is open to that to find liberation. And we have to find some way of cutting through this impoverishing and self subjugating story, the self identity that we develop for ourselves.
Which disallows the possibility of even imagining the possibility of change, that we could be any other way than the way that we have always been. You know, beginning to see there is some goodness about ourselves, something tremendously sane about our dreams and our aspirations. We all know that, deep in our hearts, that we may be afraid to admit it, to admit the gold within the shadow. Even to ourselves, we find it hard to bear the burden of our own divinity who we could possibly be. By basic goodness is meant a natural goodness.
Maybe this is an important point. By basic goodness is meant a natural goodness. A goodness which is not conditional, which is not dependent upon being any particular way. It is not a stance or a belief of any kind. You know, could you ever begin to imagine that just being your most basic self was the best that you could ever hope to be, you know, for yourself and the world itself.
That you don’t have to take on any posture, contrive to be any particular way, that you are by nature perfect in all that you could hope to be. It is not a stance or a belief. You know, that’s kind of almost unimaginable, isn’t it? In the course of our struggle to be something other than who we are, to think that maybe the struggle is completely unnecessary, that we could give it up, if we could only be true to our deeply buried selves when true to which we are one with ourselves in the world. It is not a stance or a belief of any kind.
It is not something we can contrive to be. Every stance, every posture and belief we adopt and identify with creates some kind of inner division activating an opposite tendency inside of ourselves, a shadow. If we try to be good, we will have to repress what we conceive of as our bad side. Basic sanity is not a stance that creates a shadow. Rather is more like the radiance of the sun itself.
Unconditional because it is beyond both our attempts to be good and the shadow that these attempts create. The basis of the spiritual path, as is tried to be emphasized, is devotion to the lama, the spiritual master, which at a deeper level is recognizing, acknowledging, and opening up to our own inner lama, our own inner wisdom, our own inner intelligence and understanding and decency, our own basic goodness, our Buddha nature. You know, if we did not possess a basic sanity, we would not be able to appreciate the necessity and the possibility of change or growth, you know, the possibility of another way of being. Some kind of something brought us to life. What is it that’s driving us?
What is it that we’re meaning for? Trying to find our way home, to some kind of rest, a place to lay our heads. And somehow normality would be enough for us if we didn’t have good nature. But we understand at some level that to be normal in the same society is not enough. That to be normal is not to be very healthy.
It is wisdom seeking wisdom. The starting point is beginning to relate positively to both the sun and the clouds that are hiding it. At first, the clouds of our confusion and our pain, which hides the sun, are more predominant. When we try to disentangle ourselves, the first thing that we experience is entanglement. We only see the clouds.
And to become aware of and acknowledge our ignorance and our dissatisfaction is the first step towards some kind of real wisdom. You know, moreover, that in itself, that awareness in itself is a kind of wisdom itself. An expression of our very good nature itself. Our confusion and our pain are a kind of truth about ourselves, trying to tell something to ourselves about ourselves. You know, there’s a statement about what it means to be an ordinary human being that we talked about before, the human dilemma.
You know, to see our confusion, to see our pain is telling us that somehow we are not being true to ourselves, that somehow we’re acting some unskillful manner. Some way inappropriate manner. An unhealthy manner. That we’re not acting in our own self best interests. Our awareness, that very awareness of our confusion and pain is a sign, is indicative of our basic sanity.
That we’re well enough to be sick. That we’re well enough to be aware that we’re sick. That we’re that intelligent that we’re that same. This dissatisfaction is indicative, the spiritual dissatisfaction is indicative of our Buddha nature. It’s not, and a neurotic abnormality is not good enough.
There’s intrinsic instinct toward wakefulness, purpose of nature of mind. Now, we are precious because we all possess Buddha nature. But additionally, we are vulnerable because we are confused and in pain. So, you know, we have to be gentle with ourselves because we are confused and in pain. Also we have to, at the same time, respect ourselves and be courageous because we are all Buddhas to be.
You know, we’ve all tried, and this is something which is useful to think about oneself and even also about others. And we’ve all tried to do our best and to be the person that we thought we were. And everybody doing the best they can in a way, aren’t they? Even with their laziness, even with their procrastination, even with all their, you know, what appears to be afflicted emotions and reprehensible qualities. That’s the best they’re doing with what they have.
Know, but what we couldn’t be, we can become. You know, ultimately, to be yourself is to be a Buddha. People talk about being yourself. Being yourself. And the point of view of Buddhism is to be yourself is to be, you know, to become within your own nature.
A Buddha. That is our most basic self. But this might mean, conventionally for most of us, that a coherent ego first needs to be created before it can be transcended. In other words, first we have to work with the clouds before we can be the sun. In other words, we have to be somebody before we can be nobody.
Maybe something like that. Maybe we have to Even on a very mundane level, it’s tremendously important that we try to appreciate who we are. Setting aside awakening and all the possible goals of the spiritual practice. The main obstacle to appreciating our potential, our basic goodness, and the chance to actualize it is our tendency to ignore, to devalue ourselves, to devalue our situation, to think poorly of ourselves, contracting inwardly. The inward contraction of the ego, becoming lost and absorbed in its own fantasy.
Completely lost in its inward and isolating patterns. It is as if we are in a trance. The psychological construct of ego is the primary delusion we live in within. And within it, we’re completely alienated from reality, the way things actually are. We cannot see that we are not the prisoners of our patterns, we are not the patterns of our own egos.
You know, we cannot see that ego is but a corner of psyche. That, you know, it is not our totality. We we can look at the geography of psyche and understand the religious life in a new way. It is the same religious faculty that approach with different language. We see that this ego, this so called conscious mind, is like an island in the vast ocean of psyche.
But out there in the ocean of being, outside the limits of ego’s world and beyond what it knows or can see, are the missing parts of our total selves. We are psychological beings. The greater portion of our totality is not physical but psychic and most of that is in the unconscious. Contrary to our popular notion of psychology, the unknown and unconscious parts of our totality greatly exceed the conscious parts. We do not find our sentient beings, wholeness, or fulfillment within this tiny ego world.
We sense that there is more, much more out there, although we know neither where to look or what it is we search for. You know, on the contrary, you know, unawarely we tend to perpetuate our patterns, which keeps us stuck in our patterns. We tend to notice and dwell upon data that seemingly confirms our patterns. And we tend not to notice or we forget or we discount the data which disconfirms. You know, for example, someone who thinks of themselves as bad or unkind.
We certainly dwell upon instances where they let somebody down, when they hurt somebody, when they acted unkindly. You know, also they would tend not to notice those times when they did act kindly, when they did act in a caring manner, in a considerate and thoughtful manner. And even these times were pointed out to them, they would somehow, in their own mind, by means to discount, to not have to confront the reality of what this individual or other person is saying. In their own minds, would be saying, you know, that was an exception. You know, I’m not really like that.
Oh, I did that for myself. Some way of disconfirming, of discounting what the other person is trying to indicate to us. Also, we’re likely to misinterpret data to fit with our patterns and our preconceptions so that they seem to continue to be confirmed, our conceptions about ourselves, the patterns which constitute ourselves. And for example, someone who had a nobody likes me pattern consistently interprets other people’s behavior to fit that. They can see that that other person doesn’t like them.
The frown on that other person’s face is not because the other person is having headache, which is the reality of the situation. It’s because that person is disapproving of them. You know, it’s like three or four hundred years ago when people saw the sun move around the earth. You know, they didn’t actually see the sun move around the earth. That was their interpretation.
And it’s a wrong interpretation, at that, because the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. But these people thought that’s what they saw. You know, we continually mistake our interpretations for reality. And also, we are likely to surround ourselves with people whose patterns agree with our own. It’s all your fault tends to be attracted to it’s all my fault.
I’m no good is intrigued with, You’re not much, are you? And it sort of fits together. The patterns work and reinforce one another. Also, we’re likely to set up situations which seemingly confirm our patterns. For example, there’s a cartoon where it takes place in a psychiatrist’s office and the client is lifting himself up off the couch, pushing himself up, he’s yelling at the psychiatrist.
I said, I don’t know why anybody doesn’t like me. Why don’t you clean a wax out of your ear sometimes? Creating the actual situation confirms our own self identity and who we think we are and our own pattern. It was very much like a person standing out in the cold rain trying to figure out why they’re wet, why they’re so miserable. Our world begins and ends within the limiting concepts of our own ego in isolation from reality.
And we aren’t actually touching the other things, in fact, are in the people about us. You know, to a great extent, all we ever see is our own projections reflecting back, bouncing back at ourselves. In other words, it’s difficult. Now, the point of all this is, you know, the question was raised and it’s important to them, why don’t I see it? If I’m a Buddha by nature, if I have a seed of Buddha nature, why don’t I see it?
It’s because you don’t allow yourself to see it. It’s all these interfering patterns. It would interrupt. How could you ever dare to have anything conflict with these perpetual ways that you deal with the world? You know, the unknown.
You know, there’s a fear. How could you ever allow yourself to latch onto something which didn’t reconfirm your identity? You take such great security? Would you feel the need to reconfirm continually, to shore up, to find some kind of permanency in, to take refuge in. How could you be willing to participate in that creative tension, in possibility of a more fluid and open way of relating.
Where you didn’t grasp to this particular identity, these particular patterns, ways of being, the ways of thinking, in a more open, dynamic way? You know, could you abide in that? Could you allow yourself that? To begin to allow yourself to even to acknowledge that, you know, even to feel an instant of feeling that maybe I’m something much more than I could ever hope to be. You know, that maybe I’ve always been mistaken about myself.
How would that disrupt your life? your conception about yourself. It may not be much, but at least it’s home, the sense that we have about ourselves. Our sense of identity and the security we seek to gain from it. You know, it’s difficult for us even to imagine, let alone truly believe, that there is another way of being open to ourselves.
That, in fact, we can change. I think it’s extremely difficult to open to that idea. To be open to that idea. The main problem. Again this is Lama Yeshe.
The main problem. What is the problem? It is ordinary recognition that I am poor man, poor woman. Do you understand? Perceiving, holding as poor one, poor object, poor quality.
Perceiving also, perceiving ourselves as ugly, having lower opinion of our body, lower opinion of our quality. That is the worst obstacle to being healthy, to being liberated. That is the main dealing, to eradicate, to cut. As long as you decided, have preconception that I am the self-pitying one, you decided already that you are the bad guy. You decided already.
So when you decided you are a bad guy, you do bad actions. Anyway, I’m worthless. I’m a bad guy. So I’m a bad one. Of course, that’s the way it is.
It’s true. And our life becomes a self fulfilling, self defeating prophecy. And we’ve already got it figured out. We know how it’s going to end. We’re just filling up, know, abiding our time.
The book has more or less been written. The plot’s already settled, more or less, to a great extent. The energy and the determination needed to begin to interrupt, to intervene in this process requires a great deal of faith. It requires a faith in something which may not be directly accessible to ourselves. Know, Buddhism is not asking us to perform some kind of mental gymnastics in order to conform to some prescribed way of being or to tyrannize ourselves into believing something about ourselves which is not the case.
It is asking us to try to open ourselves only slightly, create even a crack of doubt in the surety that we have about ourselves, about who we are, to the possibility that we could be mistaken about ourselves, about our basic qualities of who or what we actually are and who we might be. You know, to actually catch some glimpse of another possibility for ourselves rather than, you know, living out this self self defeating story, this prophecy that we’ve already written for ourselves. You know, I am not my patterns. I am not my self image. I am not any or all the concepts I have about myself.
None of these concepts, none of this identity, none of this self image that we have about ourselves, that we make use of, are able to encompass the totality of who I actually am, the totality of my being. Even if they were accurate, even if they were spot on, which they aren’t. I compare myself with the saint, the master, the great musician, the man who knows, the man who has arrived. In this comparison I find myself wanting and insufficient. I have no talent.
I am inferior. I have not realized. I am not, and that man is. So out of the measurement and comparison comes the enormous cavity of emptiness and nothingness. And the flight from this cavity is fear.
You know, we have found ourselves wanting, and in some ways insufficient, unworthy, undeserving. And all our neurotic needs and all our dependency patterns arise and we hold to this self image that we have about ourselves as absolute. Identify it as the real self, of who I actually am. This is me. This is who I really am.
I really can’t change. I really wouldn’t be if I were to be somebody else. And this fear stops us from exploring something about ourselves, something a dimly lit part of ourselves, an unknown area, an unexplored territory within our own mind, within our own being, something that lies outside of a conscious ego’s domain. That part of ourselves which is not conditioned by the patterns, like the depths of the ocean unaffected by the waves upon its surface, our Buddha nature. Now we don’t exist unless we are deeply and essentially in touch with something which cannot be touched, with something which can be touched but not known.
And it functions as wisdom. It’s felt as love and compassion. It’s experienced as an intensity of being. And is expressed as love and compassion. But it is no thing in itself.
And thus, we can’t own it. We can’t grab hold of it. It can never become something for ego’s control, its manipulation. You think you can take a little pinch of basic goodness and keep it in your pocket so the idea of privacy begins to creep in. That is the point at which you need renunciation.
Renunciation of the temptation to possess basic goodness. It is necessary to give up a localized approach, a provincial approach, and to accept the greater world. We cannot own our basic goodness. That is to say, our ego can never own our basic goodness, our Buddha nature. And we have to renounce the attempt to possess it, to make it into just another object for our ego to grasp upon, to control and manipulate, another specimen for the collection box.
Giving up our localized approach of an ego. And it’s our identification with its display, you know, and and the pattern of ego. Sometimes we talk in terms of ego psychology, what it might mean to transcend ego. To become aware, to become awake is to become whole, to become integrated, to become fully who we in fact are, not somebody else. You know, I can’t become the queen of England or Napoleon.
Buddhism would never ask me to try to be, but it would ask me to try to become a Buddha because I can become that. There’s a story many other times. There’s a beautiful story that I like to share. You know, the point that perhaps is being made is to, you know, it’s like a pointing to something.
And maybe we can begin to acknowledge and appreciate something about ourselves that has gone unnoticed up to now, or if noticed, discounted. But over and above it would seem, and this is where I think the element and the profundity of devotion becomes necessary. Because we can never own our basic goodness. We can only live out of our basic goodness. We can only express basic goodness.
We have to be willing to entrust ourselves to something within ourselves which presently is perhaps beyond our present understanding. This is a gradual unfolding process. And this is done in terms of the outer guru, by allowing ourselves to more and more trust in what we see and developing a divine perception, a pure seeing. And then beginning to understand that what we’re seeing is a reflection of something within our own being. And having accustomed ourselves to the willingness and the ability to more and more entrust ourselves.
Now to something inside of ourselves. And to live out of our basic goodness. You know, there’s a beautiful story. It’s called The Rabbi’s Gift, which illustrates, you know, a very practical outcome of integrating this exceptional attitude in our everyday life. To beginning to believe in something inside of yourselves which perhaps at present is inaccessible to ourselves, to our present understanding.
To creating, you know, aligning ourselves and creating the context and allowing it to find greater greater expression in our everyday lives. It’s called the rabbi’s gift. The story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order as a result of waves of anti monastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century, all its branch houses were lost and had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house, the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly, it was a dying order.
In the deep woods surrounding the monastery, was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for hermitage. Through the many years of prayer and contemplation, the old monks had become a bit psychic, so they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again, they would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the abbot at one such time to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if there was some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery. The rabbi welcomed the Abbot at his hut, but when the Abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him.
I know how it is, he exclaimed. The spirit has gone out of our out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore. So the old abbot and the old man wept together.
Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years, the abbot said, but I have still failed in my purpose for coming. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice that you can give me that would help me save my dying order?
No, I’m sorry, the rabbi responded. I have no advice to give you. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you. When the abbot returned to the monastery, his fellow monks gathered around him and asked, well, what did the rabbi say?’ ‘He couldn’t help, ‘ the abbot said. We just wept and read the Torah together.
The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving, it was something cryptic, was that the Messiah is one of us.’ I don’t know what he meant. In the days and weeks and months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If that’s case, which one?
Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man.
Everyone knows that Thomas is a man of light. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Elrod. Elrod gets crotchety at times. But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in people’s sides, when you look back on it, Elrod is virtually always right, often very right. Maybe the rabbi meant Brother Edward, but surely not Brother Philip.
Philip is so passive, a real nobody. But then, almost mysteriously, he has a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. He just magically appears by your side. Maybe Philip is the Messiah. Of course the rabbi didn’t mean me.
He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an ordinary person. Yet, supposing he did, supposing I am the Messiah, O God, not me, I couldn’t possibly be meant that much to you, could I? As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one amongst them might be the Messiah. And on the off chance that each monk himself Might be the Messiah.
They began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect. Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that the people still occasionally came to visit the monastery, to picnic on its tiny lawns, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the old stone chapel to meditate. As they did so without even being conscious of it, they seemed to sense this aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling about it. Hardly knowing why, they began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray.
They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends. Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while, one asked if he could join them, then another and another. So within a few years, the monastery had once again become a thriving order, and thanks to the rabbi’s gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm.
We have to believe in and commit ourselves to ourselves, to that part of ourselves which maybe we can only now intuit, but which from time to time perhaps we regain fleeting glance, glimpse of, know, inexpressible experience of our own, you know, teacher. You know, we have to believe in ourselves, We have to listen to ourselves and commit ourselves to becoming more and more of ourselves, to who and what we really are. Now, what is stopping us? And what is preventing us from from growing, from awakening, from becoming the healthy, the loving, sane human beings that we are meant to be? If you believe you can or if you believe you can’t, you’re right.
We have to learn to believe that we can. So, I’ll stop there. Dedicate the positive energy, the creative potential that we’ve accumulated together. In a land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and well-being. Please remain to 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. May that which has arisen never diminish, but increase. We have to help each other. Those who would like to stay for a discussion, if you’d like to get a cup of tea, as you’re leaving, have a good week.
Take care.