Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 40-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun launches the third of Tsongkhapa’s three fundamentals — the awakening mind — by framing Buddhist practice as a correction of epistemological error. Borrowing from anthropologist Gregory Bateson, he argues that “the psychology of misery is the pathology of epistemology”: suffering arises not from the world itself but from the mistaken models we impose on it. The central claim is that everyone harbors an unconscious belief in a permanent, singular, independent self — revealed not by introspection but by emotional life: attachment, hatred, and jealousy are the smoke that signals the fire of this hidden premise. Quoting Tsongkhapa, Āryadeva, and Candrakīrti, he argues that without insight into selflessness, even genuine compassion cannot cut the root of suffering; Buddhism without the awakening mind is merely psychotherapy rather than liberation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 22 HoM 1993 06 09.mp3
UUID: 42de9ec1-2405-4d9b-b63c-f1400399f8c0
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-06-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 40.2 minutes
Words: ~4,707
But still they haven’t realized their fullest potential. So transforming all that you have, letting go lovingly. Transforming all that you have into brilliant white light, which gives them all the conducive conditions for their spiritual journey. Now there’s no more to do. He brought them complete bliss and peace.
And then sympathetically sympathetically share in their complete happiness. And bring your mind to the breath. And then gently, in your own good time, slowly become aware of your body. Slowly become aware of your surroundings. So we’re looking at, Tsongkhapa’s, the three fundamentals of the path.
The three fundamentals being the determination to awaken, the awakening heart, and the awakening mind. We’ve completed the first of these the first two of these three fundamentals. And tonight, we’re going to begin the third of these three fundamentals on the awakening mind. So this is gonna be something of a of a long journey for us both. This third fundamental, the awakening mind.
It’s this process of change. The first step in this process of change or our growth is to to begin to challenge our self perception, our experience of reality. And which as I’ve I’ve mentioned a number of times, to the degree that our notions about what reality is, the nature of our situation, do not accord, do not approximate, do not approximate or correspond with the way things are to that same degree we are correspondingly going to experience frustration and disappointment, some type of or some level of dissatisfaction. So, in a way, you know, this spiritual journey, this path is consists of exploring our erroneous and distorted conceptions, our models of reality. And once we have identified them, beginning to transform those models into more accurate ones.
And then our expectations can be fulfilled. We can achieve that which we desire. We have to become aware that we are persistently holding on to dysfunctional views. Views, premises, ideas, beliefs which don’t work, which are pathological, which are harmful to ourselves, harmful to other people. But we hold on to them.
And we have to begin to identify them and begin to transform them. And then finally, ultimately, to transform the tyranny of all views. And as I’ve mentioned, this quotation or this idea by Gregory Bateson, the American anthropologist, he said that the psychology of misery is the pathology of epistemology. The psychology of misery is the pathology of epistemology. That is, the symptoms of our suffering stem from unhealthy ways of trying to make sense out of our world.
Epistemology is the way that we try to make sense out of this, what this experience, what we call the world. And some of the epistemology are the rules that we make use of in interpreting our experiences and in organizing our reality. They are along certain lines, certain rules we make use of, certain premises. And many of our rules, many of our premises don’t work. They’re dysfunctional.
They’re unhealthy. They’re harmful to both to ourselves and to others. You know, if a suffering individual ever expects to get rid of their misery, then they have to be prepared to let go of their mistaken deep seated beliefs about the world in general, but also in particular about their lives. You know, our convictions are constantly being invalidated by own experience, but we continually miss the lesson or we or we continually dismiss the lesson. And therefore, no real change ever occurs.
You know, the the the central assertion of Buddhism is that we are all living our lives on the basis of mistakes. That’s all. There’s nothing wrong with ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with the world. It’s just that we’re involved in some erroneous ways of thinking, some mistaken ideas, wrong premises, which aren’t working which are working against ourselves, our best interests.
That’s what we call epistemological errors. And that because we have not spotted these mistakes, or have not clearly seen their pathology, that they aren’t working, that they’re harmful to ourselves, or we’re continually losing sight of what we might have once learned about them. We continue to recreate ourselves a world which is, by its very nature, unsatisfactory. You know, there’s there’s nothing wrong with the world. The Buddha lives in the same world that we live in.
He, the Buddha’s, both he and she, experience the same world as sources of bliss, as sources of fulfillment and meaning. On the contrary, we experience that same world as the sources of prostrations, as sources of suffering. It’s not the world, but it’s our it’s not the things about us which cause us problems, but our opinions about them, which are the source of our difficulties, source of our dissatisfaction. You know, the the the world is based upon varying levels of illusion. So in awakening is to become to a large extent, to become disillusioned.
These illusions might surround our feelings of feelings of insufficiency, feelings of immortality, that chance or external forces are primarily determinant of the quality of my life. That self centeredness is an effective way by means of which to find the happiness I’m seeking. And ultimately, the nature of ourselves. We have illusions about the nature of ourselves and the world about us. So we grow up with models of the world in which we put our trust, but which are in countless ways false.
So I don’t, you know, this is not a bitter or a cynical view or attitude towards life in general. But it’s a critique of a particular style of life, which is marked with frustration, disappointment and dissatisfaction. Such a a type of life is is based upon illusion. Peace is and harmony are based upon arises in letting go of illusion, becoming disillusioned with our with our hitherto, ingrained approach to life and accepting a reality, accepting what is. As a quote, you know, this isn’t a new idea.
It’s not something eastern. A certain attitude or doctrine that has periodically cropped up in history of human thought is the stoic theory of contentment or adjustment, was that peace is to be had if you accept reality. If you are dissatisfied, you are at fault. Reality is not accountable. But in a strange way, you are.
So, you know, there’s no one else to blame. There’s nothing out there which is forcing us to experience suffering. This redirecting process is reprioritizing this reorientation that we have to change internally if we are ever going to find happiness. From the Buddhist point of view, a person suffers because she or he has a very limited point of view of the way things are or ignores other levels of reality other than those that they believe in, or are capable of perceiving, or hold their views as absolute. You know, we continue to suffer because we persist in living a life which is characterized by a stubborn, close mindedness about learning anything which disturbs our present view of reality, which we feel might threaten our ego identity and somehow upset our sense of security.
So in relating what is being said to this third fundamental, the fundamental of the awakening mind, coming to an understanding of selflessness, coming to an understanding of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality. Buddhism is not telling anyone that he should believe that he has a self or that he does not have a self. It is saying that when one looks at the way one suffers and the way one thinks and responds emotionally to life, it is as if one believed there were a self that was lasting, single, and independent. And yet upon closer analysis, no such self can be isolated or found. So Buddhism would say that a life based upon a model of self, of such a type of self, and we’re going to ad nauseam about this type of self, a singular, unchanging, independent self, that that we have a belief in such a type of self.
That we have a model which we which we hold to exist of such a type of self. That a life based upon such a model of a type of self is inextricably bound up with disappointment, frustration, with dissatisfaction. While on the other hand, a life based upon a model of selflessness, of the absence of such a type of self, of the absence of a singular, unchanging, independent self is characterized as associated with peace, clarity, and spontaneity, and the absence of conflict, both internally and ex and externally. This you know, the Buddha said, all I teach is two things, suffering and the way out of suffering. The rest I’ll leave to the theologists, the theologians.
You know, the the you know, one of the which we’re going to look at and hopefully come to some feeling for is that there’s no objective reality out there. And and therefore, even everything is a matter of a point of view. Buddhism is a point of view. It is a point of view which when integrated has an experiential quality that one experiences a deep peace, a deep sense of fulfillment and meaning in one’s life. There are other views, points of view, which are just as valid.
But perhaps they’re not as desirable from the point of view of one’s experience of suffering and happiness. Moreover, this point of view is internally consistent. It cannot be contradicted. Therefore, in adopting it, one is in accord with a type of reality, a way which is self perpetuating state of peace which can never be contradicted. That’s not that’s a lie.
So we are in terms of our present beliefs. We have a belief about the world. We have a worldview, everyone, whether we’ve developed this worldview consciously or not. We have many beliefs which we operate our lives upon. Most of our beliefs, the the thing most of our most deeply held beliefs are unconscious, are inaccessible to our present awareness.
You know, it becomes it’s in the it’s it’s very efficient in some ways. We don’t have to run we don’t have to keep beating our heart consciously. Many of the what we call involuntary processes occur are occurring at an unconscious level. They’re being directed by the mind at an unconscious level. You know, it would be wouldn’t be very efficient if we had to remember to breathe every moment.
We couldn’t get on with the rest of our life. So most of our our most deeply held premises and beliefs are at such a level that we are almost unaware of them, probably unaware. But that is not to say that our life is not based upon them, that we might not be aware of them. We are not likely aware that we harbor a belief in a self, in this impermanent in this permanent, unchanging, independent self. We’re probably most unaware.
It takes a lot of digging to get at it that we harbor such a belief. But our emotional responses of but there are certain indications that, in fact, we do harbor such types of beliefs. That is to say, our emotional responses of attachment, hatred, jealousy, and pride, all of the various eighty four thousand afflictive emotions are indications that we do harbor such a belief because they only arise dependent upon such a belief. If we did not have a belief in an independent unchanging self, we would not get jealous. We would not get angry.
We would not have attachment. These this is the foundation upon which these more these emotional ways of acting are expressed. They’re all based upon this mistaken belief in a particular type of self. These are indications that we harbor. You know, just like when you see, in a distance smoke, smoke is an indication that there’s fire.
There’s a there’s a you can infer from the sign of smoke that there’s fire. Likewise, you can you can begin to infer from jealousy, spite, miserliness, attachment, hatred that there must be a belief in an independent unchanging self. There is a relationship between the two. If there wasn’t fire, there would be no smoke. If there wasn’t this particular type of belief, there would not be arise these various afflictive emotions.
And we’re going to investigate the relationship. But though we’re we’re not we may not presently be aware, and no one in this room, I doubt, would say, ah, yes, I believe in an independent, unchanging, unitary self. I don’t think anybody in this room would believe could make that statement. But whether we are aware of it or not, we’d probably harbor such a belief in an unconscious level. Both animals and humans act as if they had an independent self protect, to preserve, and to foster.
And we regard this behavior as automatic, instinctive, and as normal. And when pain arises, when some kind of discomfort arises, we automatically respond to our automatic response is to try to remove it. It pain, this discomfort is seen as extraneous to the self. And the implication is that the self would naturally be happy if all this pain and suffering were removed. We react with fearful and anger repulsion to get rid of the objects associated with that suffering, with that discomfort, and to exclude it permanently from our ego territory.
Therefore, anger and hatred arise. We hope to gain some kind of sense of security and comfort from not having it a part of ourselves, our domain, our ego territory. On the other hand, when pleasure arises, the automatic response is to try to incorporate it. Again, it’s seen as the pleasure and the pain is seen as extraneous to oneself. And the implication is that the self would always be happy if that pleasure could be made a part of the self.
And we react and therefore we react with craving. We react with attachment, with desire to appropriate, to get that object associated with that pleasure and to incorporate them into our ego identity such that we have a hope of getting a sense of security and comfort from having them as a permanent part of ourselves. Desire, hatred, and all the various afflictive patterns have as their foundation the belief in such a type of self, this singular, unchanging, independent self. Whether we are aware of it or not, we harbor such a belief. Our desires and our hatreds are all indicative that we in fact do.
And moreover, such beliefs ultimately create the type of world we live in and the quality of our life that we experience. So to persist in living a life characterized by ignoring other realms is to live only a frustrated and limited type of life. Not only that, but ultimately one that is inexact, incomplete, and illusory. You know, actions that stem from a limited erroneous and illusory world can only generate more of the same. And this is the principle of karma.
That is to say, where actions coming from a mistaken viewpoint necessitate some kind of corrective action. And because that corrective action comes from a mistaken viewpoint, that our way of looking at this situation is somehow mistaken. We’re we’re not seeing the way things actually are. So any any way that we relate with it is somehow in some way going to be mistaken. So we’re trying to correct our previous action.
And in correcting our previous action, we’ll continue we were still making the same mistakes with respect to the the now newly created situation. And again, we have to we’re going to make a mistake in the way we’re going to relate with it. And our life becomes a perpetual treadmill of cleaning up the messes that we continually are making. Having again and again struggle to find happiness, having again and again to eliminate our suffering. We have to continually try to fix ourselves up.
So as long as, you know, as long as we believe that there is a self that is suffering and is necessary and is necessary corollary, a self that needs to to be relieved of suffering, then there’s no possible end to suffering. As long as we believe in a self that’s suffering and the corollary corollary, that is to say, a self which needs to be relieved of suffering, then suffering can never end. Each each would be meaningless without the other. And the Buddha said, suffering alone exists, none who suffer. The deed there is, but no doer thereof.
nirvana is, but no one seeking it. The path there is, but none who travel it. So as long as we believe in a self that is suffering, that needs improving, that needs to be served and made happy, life becomes the endless treadmill of cyclic existence, of ego-orientated existence, of unawakened existence. There’s no end to it. So the misconception of the the self is the linchpin, which keeps all the other wrong beliefs intact, locked into place.
So, you know, one of the optimistic or positive viewpoints of Buddhism is that we do not we don’t have to weed out all the errors individually, all our mistaken ideas, wrong conceptions, our crooked beliefs individually. But but in fact, if we’re able to pull out this single pin, then the other illusions will of themselves cease. So without the awakening mind, Buddhism would merely be a sublime ethical system in which the bodhisattva awakens his heart to others and dedicates his life or her life to the impossible task of leading all living beings to a state of complete freedom and peace. It would simply be an ethical system. Why?
It would be that there would be no way that the bodhisattva could ever fulfill that wish. There would be no way to to lead others to a state where they would experience complete happiness, where they would experience complete elimination of their suffering. Why? Because the sufferings could never be removed. The causes of their sufferings could never be removed.
The cause of all our problems, all our dissatisfactions, frustrations, dissatisfactions and sufferings is ignorance. The misconception has the nature of the self and the nature of reality. Without removing that, then there’s no way to remove suffering. We we can just make the best of a bad situation and get along as best we can in life. There would never be any state in which we could which could be achieved in which suffering would never reoccur.
There’s a quotation by one of the great masters of the twentieth century Tibetan Buddhism, where he says, you can make any great efforts you want in practices like charity and morality. But without this meditation on no self, you will never be able to attain freedom. As the four hundred verses says four hundred verses was a text by an ancient Indian master by the name of Āryadeva. As the four hundred verses says, there is no second door to peace. There’s no other way to peace than through the door of the realization of selflessness than you develop in the awakening mind.
The illustrious Candrakīrti has said as well, On the vast wide spreading wings of both the conventional here the conventional refers mainly to the awakening heart, the development of love and compassion And the real, this this refers mainly to the awakening mind, understanding the nature, ultimate nature of reality. The king goose flies on at the center point in the formation of other geese, all being spurred by the winds of virtue, reaching to the farther shore of the ocean of the victorious qualities. Without the view of selflessness and emptiness, Buddhism could not go beyond psychotherapy. You know, while, therapy and much of Buddhism pruned the branches of our misconceptions about what it means to be it means to be normal, what it means to be sane, what it means to be worthwhile, a worthwhile person. The view of Buddhism and the practice of meditation aim at cutting the roots, namely our deep unexamined, fallacious premises about what it means to be a person at all.
Buddhism is simply not trying to make us well adjusted individuals. It is trying to set us free. There’s a qualitative difference. So we’re beginning to and we’re setting off on this third of the three fundamentals of the path, the awakening mind. So this is going to involve gradually uncovering our layers of our beliefs.
And we’re digging down through the layer. And it’s like an archaeological dig. You know, there are stratas, levels of ancient civilizations, one buried up on top of another. And likewise, with respect to our minds, there are levels of beliefs one layer after another. And presently, many are inaccessible to our conscious awareness.
So we have to begin digging down, as it were, exposing more coarse levels of belief in order to be able to work down to more and more subtle levels. We’ve been doing that process. We’ve been evolving that process all along at one in one way or another. You know, this this uncovering, this, excavating is the process of challenging our self perception and our experience of reality. It represents stages in the development of an individual’s understanding of selflessness and emptiness.
So we begin to see very deeply that our models of ourselves and our maps of reality are often in contradiction with the way things are, are in contradiction with our actual experience and our rational expectations. The pathology of these erroneous models and maps are ultimate obstacles to experiencing an optimum mode of being, which we call Buddha. Tsongkhapa says in our text which we’re looking at from time to time, If you do not have the wisdom realizing the way things are, even though you have developed the thought definitely to leave cyclic existence, and let’s say the determination to awaken, and the altruistic intention, that is to say the awakening heart, the root of cyclic existence cannot be cut. The root of our reoccurring compulsive patterns cannot be eliminated without this wisdom. Therefore, work at the means of realizing dependent arising.
You know, if you do not have the wisdom realizing the way things are, if you have not awakened your mind to the nature of the self and reality, You know, even though you have developed the the thought to to grow, to begin to transform these compulsive patterns which govern our life. And even though you’ve developed the awakening heart from your love and compassion, you still cannot cut the root of your compulsive patterns which govern your life. You still cannot go beyond your attachment, your hatred, ignorance governed existence. This ego based existence, which is rooted in ignorance, which is rooted in misknowledge, and which is marked with dissatisfaction, disappointment, and frustration, which is not satisfactory by its very nature. So talking about most generally, we’re going to define this in more precise terms, what we mean by ignorance.
But just generally, ignorance is stubborn, closed mindedness about learning anything which we feel might threaten our ego identity, which might upset the sense of security that we derive from our ego identity, our particular version, our model of reality. Ignorance is a is an absence of precision, some kind of lack of clarity out of which is created mistaken models of the nature of the self, of the nature of reality. You know, it’s kind of a cloudiness, a veiling of the mind, an obscuring factor of the mind. It is a function of mind, and it acts to hinder us knowing the actual situation, the way things actually are. There’s some some factor within our own minds which we call ignorance.
It it it you know, this it prevents us from seeing the absurdity of many of our most fundamental beliefs, our assumptions, our various ideas. It functions to hinder basic sanity from learning about ourselves and our situation. It is what prevents perpetual awaken based existence. Now what what does it mean to be awake? The full awakening of the total personality to reality, the integration of all our various models.
Now, we’re going to talk about models, maps that we make use of in dealing with our our reality. All integrating all our various models about a consistent, self validating, holistic experience of well-being. Well-being is possible only to the degree that to which one has overcome one’s narcissism, to the degree which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty in this instance. Well-being means to be fully related to man and nature effectively, to overcome separateness and alienation, to arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists, and yet to experience myself at the same time as a separate entity that I am, as the individual. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is.
To put it still differently, to awake from the half slumber the average man lives in and to be fully awake. It is all that. It means also to be creative. That is to react and to respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists. To react and to respond as the real total man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as he or she is.
In this act of true response lies the area of creativity of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world. The world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it, so that the world ceases to be a strange world over there and becomes my world. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after preservation and the aggrandizement of ego, to be and to experience oneself in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, and using. And no matter how determined we may be to grow, no matter how much love and compassion we may have in our hearts, we still are not fully awake. We still have not fully realized our potential.
We still have not cut the root of ego oriented existence, still do not possess the skills to be of ultimate benefit to both ourselves or others. To that, we have to awaken our minds to the nature of reality. Therefore, Tsongkhapa says in his text, he advises us, work at the means of realizing dependent arising. Work at the means of realizing dependent arising. We’ll work at this beginning next week.
Alright. Dependent arising is the corollary, the other side of the coin of emptiness. We’re going to talk about emptiness. We’re going to talk about selflessness. Talk about dependent arising, and work at it from different levels, from the coarsest view down to the most subtle final presentation as it was the final thought of the Buddha on the subject.
It’s quite necessary that we make effort and it’s not simply an academic intellectual exercise, but it’s ultimately necessary to if we’re going to be experience the our total potential to actualize all that we can be if we’re going to be of ultimate benefit both not only to ourselves but to others. We have to make effort. We have to take up this difficult task of awakening our minds to reality, to ourselves. It’s all there.. So we’re going to dedicate the creative potential,, skillful actions that we accumulated.
Some kind of, you know, something something some stuff of the goodness of mind. Some type of positive energy is created out of our motivation and the actions that arise out of those motivations. And sharing around that goodness, that stuff of life. In this continual process of letting go. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened realm through these skillful actions.
May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow and may that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more. Thank you. So if, if you’d like to remain in further discussion, you might get a cup of tea. Thank you very much.