Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A Carlos Castaneda passage — a lone dog barking at dusk, its cry likened to men who drift through life without direction — opens this 46-minute commentary by Ven Jampa Gendun as a vivid image of the human dilemma. He then distinguishes two responses to suffering: numbing avoidance or treating pain as an intelligent signal about what needs to change. The Buddha’s analysis of conditioned existence through its three marks — dissatisfactoriness, impermanence, and insubstantiality — follows, with particular attention to the second level, the dissatisfactoriness of fluctuation. Through a sun-and-shade mountain analogy and the image of someone hitting themselves with a hammer, Gendun shows that ordinary pleasure is merely relief from prior pain, and argues that genuine happiness requires stepping outside this dualistic loop entirely.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 H and M of B 1992 10 21.mp3
UUID: f1c977c5-cb1f-4246-864f-aae76b8fd538
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-10-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~5,378
The heart, that is to say opening our hearts to others, the cultivation of love and compassion, and the awakening mind coming to an understanding of the nature of the world about us and ourselves, the ultimate nature of reality. That’s why we’ve been working through the method of developing the determination to be free, beginning with the fundamental understanding that we have the basis of transformation within us, our Buddha nature, our basic sanity. This is the working basis on the basis of which we can transform, that we can actually grow. Overcoming our misconceptions with respect to ourselves, sense of insufficiency, sense of lack, that we don’t have quite what it takes. However we may conceive of ourselves.
As I’ve mentioned in terms of if we believe we can or if we believe we can’t, we’re right. Our own limitations are very much those we acknowledge and helping to break through this pattern of this sense of insufficiency we usually have in association with our self image, that we are not our self image, that we are not our concepts about our self. And that going beyond that, that we have all the necessary external and internal conditions necessary to actualize that potential, to solve our problems at a very fundamental level. But this chance that we have to grow is not going to last forever, it’s definitely that we’re going to die and the time of our death is uncertain. And the only thing which is going to be a benefit at the time of our death is the skillful patterns, the karma, the impressions that we have created within our mind, the skillful attitude.
And not only at the big death at the end of our life, but all the small death which occurs over the course of our life. Those times in our life when for one reason or another our entire world is as it were turned upside down when all our values are brought into question, when we can find no meaning, we have nothing to hold on to. Something has come to an end and the new is yet to begin. There’s a gap, there’s a finish, some sort of death. And what can give us assurance that not knowing how I’m going to, the circumstances of how I’m going to end up, what will give us the confidence to enter into change voluntarily with courage and enthusiasm.
It is how will we know that I’m not sure how I’m going to the circumstances will be when the change comes to an end, but I have a sense that I’m going to land on my feet. Now we can’t know the outcome, the future is only existing in probabilities, it’s not certainty. But we can have a sense, a feeling of confidence about ourselves because I have developed skillful patterns within my mind and these are going to hold me in good stead through this transition period. But I don’t know what the circumstances, the particular circumstances will be, but things will go well. I can have that self assurance and therefore enter into change voluntarily.
The question of karma, the question of development of these skillful patterns within our mind. And then we looked at the types of worlds that we’re creating for ourselves. But what is the quality of our world? What type of world are we creating for ourselves? And this brings us to the question of suffering.
The pathology of conditioned being, confronting the issues of our life. There’s a quotation which I’m going to read from. It’s from a book called Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda. Carlos Castaneda was at that time that he wrote this was a PhD candidate in anthropology at University of California at Los Angeles. And he was interviewing, working with Don Juan.
Don Juan by appearances was just an old ignorant Yaqui Indian. But in fact, he was a man of knowledge. In this quotation, we’re trying to get across some sense of the quality of the dilemma, of the human dilemma in which we find ourselves in order to arouse the energy and the determination to go beyond our present dissatisfactory situation. So Don Juan is speaking to Carlos Castaneda and they’re probably somewhere in northern Mexico in a desert region on a high plateau. It’s it’s coming toward evening and the wind is softly hissing and there’s a dog, a lone dog which is barking in a village nearby.
Carlos Castaneda says, he paused, the silence around us was frightening, the wind hissed softly. And then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog. Listen to that dog barking Don Juan went on, that is the way my beloved earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. We were quiet for a moment.
The barking of that lone dog was so sad and the stillness around us so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish. It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my not knowing where to go or what to do. That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man Don Juan said, It comes from a house in the valley towards the south. A man is shouting through his dogs as they are companion slaves for life. Don Juan’s words had caught a most disturbing line in me.
I felt as if he was speaking directly to me. That barking and the loneliness it creates speaks of the feelings of men, he went on. Men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go or what to do.
That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium and then suddenly it was over, it was already night. We do not come to this path freely, this exploration and this questioning as it may appear to some of us, but only through some kind of deeper crisis, some sort of deep crisis in our lives, some kind of emotional pain, some important level of recognition of unmanageability in our life. If one is unhappy, one wants to know the reason why. But it never occurs to one to ask why one is happy. It is therefore unhappiness rather than happiness that causes us to reflect upon our condition.
It is unhappiness that makes us think. So the acknowledgement of our suffering. What is the meaning of all this? What is I mean, many times it’s almost like a cliche, isn’t it? It’s like it’s kind of becomes kind of corny.
What is the meaning of life? But at some time or often time in our life, it becomes a very burning issue, a tremendously important question. What is the meaning of all of this? This is the beginning of of our spiritual journey. It’s a frightening acknowledgement because it’s always associated with pain, with despair, and some high degree of hopelessness.
We don’t know where to turn to, we don’t know what to believe in, or moreover, we don’t know if there is anything to believe in. And what is this all about? Just think whole life. It all seems like almost like a monstrous joke again, and we are afraid that this feeling is never going to go away. So in response to this, we can either run away by ignoring, by cultivating an unawareness, by desensitizing ourselves, by becoming absorbed in particular, taking flight and finally stubbornly refusing our own consciousness, own truth, our own feelings.
Or we can confront suffering and the meaninglessness of our life. This confrontation and the need to resolve the tension aroused by this confrontation is the beginning of the journey. The sense that out of this will come a path. Consciousness demands to be heard, conscience demands to be heard. Such hearing is more than passive receptivity, it implies a response.
Hearing the voice of conscience, man can respond by running away, obedient to the call of temptation, or he can summon the strength to place himself under his own truth, which calls in conscience. The voice of disclosure, this voice discloses to man his essential being. The authentic response to such disclosure is a resolve to be oneself in the face of the essential precariousness and groundlessness of human existence. So there are two basic attitudes that we can take toward pain and suffering in our lives. One is that pain and suffering are somehow or something to be overcome.
They are, as it were, some sort of interruption, an obstruction to our happiness. Things should not be like this. They should be other than the way they are. We should not be suffering. It’s just that something is temporarily going wrong, which I can put right.
The other attitude is that pain and suffering give us a glimpse of what needs to be done next. That our pain and suffering are kind of our truth. They’re a statement about our life, the way we’re living our life. They’re kind of intelligent trying to tell us something. They’re saying that there is something wrong in the way we are living our lives.
Just as physical pain can be seen as a sign that there is some kind of there’s something wrong with our body, that there’s some imbalance, some kind of disharmony with inside of ourselves. It’s calling our attention. The pain is calling our attention to something that is wrong with ourselves physically, bodily. Likewise, in terms of our mental suffering, it’s saying that there’s some kind of imbalance or some kind of disharmony in the way we are living our mind, our lives, in terms of our mind. Your pain and suffering tell us that there’s something wrong with the process of living, That the way we are living our lives is imbalanced and we have to listen.
You know, there is the wound the wound is like a mouth and we have to listen both physically to our physical wound and to our mental wound. For example, if reacting to the depression of the breakup of a romantic relationship, we can either see that this suffering is simply a state to be gotten rid of, a temporary obstruction to one’s happiness and move on as quickly as possible to another relationship in order to alleviate that pain of loneliness that we experience. Or that’s one attitude that we can take to that pain, that depression. Or on the other hand, we can see this suffering as a symptom of an inappropriate way of relating to the fact of change, to the fact of impermanence, that we can, perhaps to the underlying problem of attachment, perhaps to the underlying problem of unrealistic expectation, that we can begin to see that pain as telling us that it’s indicative that it is necessary to work on a more fundamental level with inside of ourselves. That there’s some wrong assumptions, mistaken ideas which we’re operating on, which are expressed as pain given this type of condition.
It’s telling us something about who we are. It is an expression of our being, our truth. It’s an intelligence operating, helping us to call attention to what needs to be done next. And the suffering is telling us what we need to look at, what needs to be worked on, where we need to grow. It’s probably a truism that positive psychological growth, change, only comes about when there is a deep awareness of and associated discontentment with the present state.
Otherwise, without that awareness of the dissatisfactory state, but also a deep discontentment, there’s going to be a a movement toward maintaining the status quo, that there’s going to be resistance to change, some kind of mental inertia, psychological inertia is going to hold us in place. Even if we merely regret having to get out of a comfortable chair, in the course of sitting in a chair we become aware that our position has become uncomfortable, then quite spontaneously, naturally, we will shift our position. But only when we become aware and we become discontent with our position. But this awareness that is necessary to begin to cultivate if we’re ever really going to change, if we’re going to be sincere about growth has to be more than mere intellectual speculation. It has to be, if it’s going to serve as a catalyst for change, has to be a deeply felt need to change.
You know, pleasure and pain take priority over logic for most of us. You know, I know I shouldn’t, but it feels so good I can’t help myself. Or I know I should, but it’s too much trouble, I can’t be bothered. It’s not really all that bad. And we remain stuck.
When we get sick and tired of being sick and tired, then we’re going to find a way to get well. We can begin to take recourse to our basic sanity, to our basic intelligence. When we present the actual situation before our mind’s eye, before our own basic intelligence, then we can avail ourselves of our complete resources. But because we have seen the actuality of our situation, when we get, our basic sanity is going to help us to find a way. It’s going to find a way to help heal ourselves, to remove ourselves from that situation.
We will get unstuck basically. You know, a recognized necessity, a deeply felt recognition is the nurturing condition for creative change. Necessity is the mother of invention. When it becomes absolutely apparent to us, the necessity to change, then we will change. We will find a way to change.
We will invent a way to change, but there’s nothing within our environment which can lead us, which can aid us in that change. We will invent a way to change. We will discover a way to change. So though we would rather not, if we’re ever really going to change to develop ourselves, if we’re ever going to cultivate a strong consistent determination to be free, If we are really going to heal ourselves and if we are ever going to exit this system called ego based existence, then we are going to have to begin to systematically investigate the way we actually experience and live. Not in terms of what we’ve been taught, how others have told us that we should be experiencing our lives the way that we might like to experience our lives, but our own lived immediate experience.
What is this quality? Confronting issues of our immediate experience. Truth, know, confronting the truth of our dissatisfaction. I mentioned some time ago that the Buddha was a systems analyst. He saw a system which governs people’s lives and he called this cyclic existence or conditioned existence or ego based existence.
And he said that it is pathological, that by its very nature it is dissatisfactory. That everything within it is characterized by possessing three marks, dissatisfactoriness, impermanence and insubstantiality, and therefore should be exited from. That there is nothing within this system that we’re that we’re caught up in, which is worth having, which is worth becoming, which is worth being. That it can never be mastered. It can only Only its existence can is to be recognized, its nature understood and its causes abandoned and thereby the system is transcended.
I think we’ll see that every psychopathological phenomenon has its root, has at its root a particular relationship to these three marks of existence. So we’re going to look at the dissatisfactoriness of ego based existence, the pathology of conditioned existence in terms of these three marks, three marks, dissatisfactoriness, impermanence and insubstantiality. This is the way that we’re going to confront the issues of our lived experience in terms of happiness and suffering. I think we’ll see that every psychopathological phenomena has at its root a particular relationship to these three marks of existence. We could trace every psychopathological form, system or complex, everything we call a severe neurotic or psychotic disturbance back to a highly sensitive and meaningful encounter with one of these three basic truths.
The attempt to cover up the acknowledgment of these very simple facts has led to a lifelong struggle and to one form of psychopathology or another. We will find that each psychopathological form such as obsessions, hysteria, phobia, depression and various character aberrations contain within it a denial, rejection or struggle against the recognition of the texture of existence. It is like someone who refuses to accept that summer changes into fall. They dress inappropriately and then become ill. So it’s necessary.
I think, maybe I’ll read the last sentence. It’s like someone who refuses to accept that summer changes into fall. They dress inappropriately and then become ill. We have to accept the way the world is. We have no choice in that matter.
If we don’t, then we’re either doomed to a sense of rage because the world does not operate according to our wishes or a sense of powerlessness because we cannot do the impossible, we cannot force it to agree to operating in terms of our wishes. In either case, it’s dissatisfactory. Now we’re not trying to perform perfect actions in a perfect world, but appropriate actions in the world the way it is. It is necessary to repeatedly confront and acknowledge these three basic facts about our everyday life. If we are ever going to begin to solve our problems at some deeper level, some more fundamental level than what perhaps what we’ve been doing up to now.
And you’re working with our issues in terms of at a rather superficial and perhaps inexact, inaccurate, inappropriate means. I hope don’t This is not a cynical or morbid or pessimistic view of life. But I think it’s more of an honest one. I think it’s a more accurate one. Because I mean ultimately Buddhism, though it concerns itself a great deal with suffering, is tremendously optimistic.
Optimistic to the point where one of the most fundamental doctrines of the great vehicle, universal vehicle, is that every living being every living being will eventually, ultimately be liberated, will achieve perfect Buddhahood. That’s the ultimate optimism of Buddhism. It’s just a matter of when. You know, if there is there is evil in the universe, it is just that. The time the time it takes us until the achievement of Buddhahood.
Between the time of an ordinary being with all their dissatisfactions, frustrations, disappointments, all the suffering in a time when they liberate from all of their problems. How long should it take? How long do we have to wait? Buddhism, it’s this view of Buddhism is based upon a pragmatic premise that the truth is therapeutic. If confront ourselves with the actuality of our lived experience, then we can avail ourselves of our basic sanity, of our brilliant wisdom, and we can solve our problem.
That we have the resources to to discover the truth and thereby to solve our problem. You know, the Buddha was simply, you know, he was more than anything just kept pointing to things. Okay. And take a look at this. What about this?
Not what you think about things, but actually how do you experience these things. It all comes down to our lived experience. So we begin with these three marks of ego based existence, with the mark of dissatisfactoriness. That there is trying to get a sense of feeling, that there’s kind of a texture, a feeling quality about ego based existence which makes it uncomfortable, disappointed, frustrating, that it’s kind of it’s flawed, it’s incomplete. Even at its best, it just is not completely satisfactory.
It is not all that life could be. We cannot somehow pretend as if we don’t have happinesses. It’s not as if we’re in basket cases. We’re not. We have many happiness, but we even have to begin to look at those happiness, what we call happiness, the nature of those happinesses, let alone the various sufferings which we, what do they say?
Within the mark of dissatisfactoriness, there is first the dissatisfaction is the pain. There are three levels of dissatisfactoriness. The first is the dissatisfaction is the pain. And here, feelings of mental and physical pain. Physically there are the experiences of headaches, stomachaches, backaches, toothaches, cuts, bruises, broken bones, pain of birth, aging, disease, death.
Mentally there are the experiences of worry, depression, frustration, disappointment, hopelessness, despair, being separated from that which we desire, coming in contact with that which we do not desire, not finding the happiness that we’re seeking. All of these, each of us could add to this list indefinitely, endlessly. But this list doesn’t really move us. It seem very profound. Know, just this simple enumeration of all our mental and physical pain.
We are not touched very deeply by this simple enumeration of all our many trouble. There’s like an unexpressed assumption that we can handle it. And we can handle it all without basically having to change ourselves. That we don’t really have to change our attitudes, there’s no basic transformation that’s necessary. That if I have enough, if I just learn some more techniques or if I just had more of this or that, some more information, some kind of factor x, then I can remove these problems.
I don’t have to change basically. I just need something external to myself added on and I can work with it. I can remove them. At least most of them. And those which we cannot, well, life was never meant to be easy.
In life, you have to take the good with the bad. Don’t you? I mean, this was this was one of the most fundamental questions that the Buddha asked. This is why he left home. And he actually had it pretty good.
But he began to question is, is the nature of the human dilemma such that we have to experience both pleasure and pain in all the various sufferings that he saw about him? Is it just in the nature of human existence that it has to be coupled with pain or can we transcend the pain? This was a burning question which he had to find the answer to. But simply enumerating our mental and physical pain, we’re not really getting at the nature of our problem, the underlying nature of our suffering, just the qualities and the quantities of our problem. So it’s necessary to look at this dissatisfaction at a somewhat subtle level, a deeper level than that just talking about the feelings of pain.
So the next level is the level of the dissatisfactoriness of fluctuation. The level of dissatisfactoriness of fluctuation. Usually this is called dissatisfaction is a change. I think fluctuation is a better term. Maybe even oscillation.
Oscillation. Fluctuation. But this is psychological dissatisfactoriness. That it is the very, you know, we’re trying to get some deep feeling for the dilemma in which we’re involved in in terms of ego based existence such that it’s felt very deeply that the dissatisfactory quality of ego based existence to such an extent that we develop a tremendous urge, determination to be free from it. So we have to feel it very deeply and we have to overcome the notion that somehow I don’t have to change, I don’t have to free myself from this ego based existence, that I can become the master of it, that I can manipulate it, I can order it in such a way that I can find it satisfactory.
Or to be satisfied with the good and the bad taken together isn’t it, that’s enough for me. And no matter how comfortable a prison cell we may have made for ourself, it is not freedom. But unless one becomes tremendously discontented with being in prison, one is simply going to continually look how comfortable one’s self is and there will be an inertia. There will be security in what has gone before. You know, it may not be much but it’s home.
It’s enough. Don’t let’s talk about it. Here we’re trying to see deeply into the dilemma of ordinary ego based existence, where we’re at. It goes further than simply a matter of lots of different physical and mental pains, but it’s in the very nature of our situation, of ego based existence, in terms of psychological dissatisfactoriness, That the very nature of the ordinary thinking and feeling process predisposes us of dissatisfaction. Predisposes the way the ordinary feeling and thinking process is working.
We have to experience pain. We can never know happiness without knowing suffering. We can never know success, without knowing failure. We can never know harmony without knowing conflict. We can never know the worth of a friend without knowing the coldness of an enemy.
We can never know union without knowing separation. This is the dualistic puzzle of relativity which we’re bound up in. Look at your ring finger, the ring finger. Is it long or is it short? In comparison to the middle finger, it’s long.
Comparison to the middle finger, it’s short. In itself, it’s neither absolutely long nor absolutely short. It’s only relatively so. All our discriminations are made in terms of opposites, in dependence upon what the object is not. This is the unsolvable puzzle of dualism, of relativity, that things depend upon their opposites.
It’s unsolvable in the sense that it is embedded in the very fabric of our ordinary discriminating process. It transcended, it can be transcended but cannot be solved. High only has meaning with respect to low. Long only has respect, only has meaning with respect to short. Without short, there’s no long.
Without low, there’s no high. It would have no meaning to the mind. Without pain, happiness has no meaning. And we’re going to discuss this at length when we discuss the awakening mind, the nature of reality. That nothing exists independently, absolutely in and of itself, only dependently, relatively.
Their existence is dependent upon how we perceive them. How we perceive them in turn is dependent upon this discriminated categories of objects and situations of the world. I know if you’ve ever If you’ve ever walked in the mountains, then you probably have experienced the harshness of the sun due to the thinness of the atmosphere. So it’s quite often the case when you’re walking in the high mountains that the sun becomes very uncomfortable. And so you become very hot and you move in the shade.
And at first you experience a pleasure, but after a few moments of being in the shade, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable, becomes a little bit cool. And after a while it becomes down like cold and becomes uncomfortable. And then, okay, then you you you move out in the sun again. Oh, that’s just good. Nice warm sun on my skin.
And it feels very pleasurable. But after a few minutes, the sun, the harshness of the sun begins to make you feel uncomfortable, begins to become hot. So you move back into shade. At first it’s pleasurable, but then at the high altitude, the atmosphere is usually colder and it’s only the sun which warms you and so you become cold again. So there’s this constant fluctuation between the pleasure and pain, you’re feeling comfortable and uncomfortable.
Why was the first moment of the shade experienced as pleasurable and after that uncomfortable? And likewise, why was the first moment of moving back out in the sun experienced as pleasurable and after a few moments uncomfortable? You know, in both cases the temperature remained the same, it remained constant. But what happened, our perception changed. As we became acclimated to our new situation, we experienced the same situation differently.
We had a different feeling quality to it and our pleasure turned to pain, to some mild discomfort. So the painful feeling of hot and cold are instances of the actual feelings of hot and cold, the painful feelings of hot and cold are instances of the dissatisfaction of pain and we’re not talking about those here. We are not looking at the fact of the impermanency of feeling, that something else again. What are trying to understand here is the psychological process underlying the changing nature of those feelings. That there was a change that occurred over time, though the situation remained constant, the temperature remained constant, our perception underwent a change.
For example, suppose was an idiot sitting in the corner, you know, hitting himself over the head with a hammer. Yeah, and you walk up and you say, why are hitting yourself over the head with a hammer? And he said, because it feels so good when I stop. And it does feel good when he stops. He experienced a pleasurable feeling when he stops.
And assuming all our usual feelings of pleasure are the experience of the cessation of prior pain, the cessation of prior deprivation, the release from tension, tension reduction. All are instances of the dissatisfactoriness of fluctuation. What we call, normally what we call pleasure is simply the lessening of a previous pain. Comparatively from before, it’s pleasure, but only comparatively so. Just like with an idiot hitting himself over the head with a hammer, compared to what it was before, this is great, this is bliss, when he stops.
And this is what Buddhism is trying to tell us to understand, that all of our pleasures are simply pleasures in terms of our previous experience of pain. They relatively are pleasurable in terms of greater painful experiences. Giving that standard a basis of comparison, this is pleasure. But it’s not absolutely pleasure. If we’re going to have that pleasure, we’re always going to have to have pain to remind us about what pleasure is.
When we talked about How are you doing? Okay. Maybe that’s a good place to start. So we’re looking at the three levels of dissatisfactoriness in terms of pain, mental and physical pain. Okay, but trying to gain some insight into the profundity of our situation, moving beyond that into psychological realm of dissatisfaction in terms of the perceptual process is such that our very way of thinking, our very way of feeling predisposes us to experience pain.
What do we want if we say ultimately, if you had one wish, say I want constant unchanging happiness. That’s what I want. That’s the bottom line. And with an ego based existence, it’s not possible due to the dissatisfaction of fluctuation. In order to have happiness, it can never be constant, it can never be stable, it must be fluctuating, it must be always arising with respect to pain.
We can only know happiness in terms of pain, satisfaction in terms of dissatisfaction, warmth in terms of coldness. All of these dualisms, they only have meaning in terms of their opposites. But there is an unconditioned happiness which does not exist in relationship to pain and this is what we are seeking as to bring to mind as real happiness and wholeness before our mind as that which is the mind will begin to tend toward, that which is conceived as real happiness. We’re trying to create some kind of discontentment with anything but real happy, beginning to move away, to detach, to find some space and reorientating ourselves in terms of our conception of happiness toward what is real happiness. A happiness which does not exist in terms of pain, which is stable and complete in itself, is peace.
So I think we’ll stop there. Shall we have a break? As we did last term, we’ll have a discussion group. So those of you who’d like to remain, we’ll have a cup of tea and we’ll come back together. But before we do that, let’s dedicate the merit, the positive potential, the positive energy that we’ve created.
May all beings quickly become awakened spiritual teachers.