Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A Tibetan village story — a woman, a crowded house, and a lama who keeps adding animals (goat, chickens, cow) before removing them one by one — anchors Ven Jampa Gendun’s 36-minute exploration of the three types of suffering within ego-based existence. The story illustrates the suffering of fluctuation: what we call pleasure is merely the cessation of prior pain, never real or lasting happiness. Gendun then turns to the subtlest level, the all-pervasive burden of ego — the exhausting, unwinnable struggle to maintain a self that can never solidify, compared to a fire whirled on a stick that creates the illusion of a solid ring of light. He closes with the hair-in-hand versus hair-in-eye image: someone genuinely sensitive to this underlying dissatisfaction cannot rest until they find a way free. Part of an ongoing series; the following session will take up impermanence and insubstantiality.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 H and M of B 1992 10 28.mp3
UUID: b9423bde-f9a4-4f1e-a5d8-922c4b087abe
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-10-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 35.9 minutes
Words: ~4,451
That evolves out of basic ignorance, misconception with respect to the nature of the soul is by its very nature dissatisfactory. It cannot bring all that life has the potentialities to bring ourselves. That there’s always some kind of bone, a bone in a fish, something that catches us, you know, trying to describe the actual nature of our experience. The reason, you know, if we become sensitive and aware and overcome our pig headedness against accepting the actual texture of our existence, then we’re going to change. I think I mentioned last week that it’s a truism, and truisms are quite often true.
That psychological change only comes about when there is an awareness and an associated discontentment with our present situation. If there’s no awareness and there’s no discontentment, there’ll be no change. There may be intellectual curiosity, there may be speculation, there may be cosmetic dressing up, there are no basic fundamental change. Unless we see that it’s quite necessary that some internal transformation take place in our approach to the way we’re living our life, then we won’t change. There’s no need to change.
And this need because the change requires to go beyond our fears and our hope. And this requires some great determination. It requires that we accept legitimate suffering. As I mentioned, if one thinks that traveling a spiritual path is the skillful avoidance of difficult people and difficult situations, then one is making it horrendous mistake. It’s not an escapism from our problems, it’s going into our problems.
It’s to take such tremendous determination. It’s something that we’d rather avoid, that we’d rather not talk about, that we’d rather not confront. But we will only confront it, we will only cease avoiding it, we will only enter into the difficult necessity to change unless we have an overriding dissatisfaction with our present state of existence and a deep awareness of it. A deeply felt need that that a deeply felt recognition of the dissatisfactory texture of our existence is the nurturer of creative change, the mother of invention. We will find a way to get well, to heal ourselves.
So we’re looking at the various levels of dissatisfaction. First in terms of the three marks, three marks of ego based existence, the mark of suffering. I decided to call it suffering. I used to call it dissatisfaction, but I think I was playing around here, cold like it is. Suffering is suffering.
We can’t dress it up in nice words. It hurts. The mark of suffering, the mark of impermanence, the mark of insubstantiality. That ego based existence has these three marks and therefore is dissatisfactory. There’s something which is by its very nature ought to be gotten rid of, ought to be exited from this system which the Buddha perceived, a system which governs people’s lives.
And we looked we’re looking last week at this first mark of ego based existence, the mark of suffering in terms of suffering of pain. All the things we just meditated on in terms of all the various types of physical pain, mental pains that we experience every day of our life. You know this is not a cynical view in the sense that we’re not trying to detract from any all the pleasures that we have. We’re not trying to simply accentuate the bad parts of life. We’re trying to look at the reality of our life, trying to look at the way we actually experience.
We do have pleasures, but even those we have to begin to look at, and we begin to look at those in terms of the suffering of fluctuation. That all that we call pleasure is simply, from the point of view of the second mark of ego based existence, the suffering of fluctuation. It is not, it is contaminated, it’s flawed. What do we want? The bottom line is we want complete, unchanging, permanent, ultimate happiness.
That’s what we all want. That’s what everybody needs to want. Let’s not mess around. This is what we want. And it can’t be found within this system of ego based existence.
It’s not there. The the the it doesn’t have the capacity to capacity to deliver that those goods. So we have to exit this system and move to another order of systems, another possibility, another way of approaching life. It’s not that we’re not talking about life. We’re talking about approach, our attitude, the way we’re dealing, the way our view, the way we’re working with life.
Life is not the problem, it’s our attitudes toward it, the way we’re dealing with it, the skills and the unskillful ways we’re relating with it. So this is what needs to be dealt with, the place where change occurs. In fact, Buddhism has great faith in the goodness of life, its potentiality. So in terms of the suffering of fluctuations, that all that we call pleasure is tied up in pain, the cessation of prior deprivation, the cessation of lessening of tension. All the duality that we’re bound up in that cannot be solved.
This dualistic puzzle of relativity which can only be transcended beyond the very nature of our thinking process. There’s a there’s a story. If if if things if the things about us, you know, were inherently pleasurable or inherently unpleasurable, then we should always, whenever we came in contact with these pleasurable objects, experience pleasure with respect to them. And when we came in contact with those objects which are inherently displeasurable, unpleasurable, we should always experience displeasure, pain with respect to them. That’s because that would be the only valid way of experiencing them because that’s their nature.
We are lonely and we meet someone who, under normal situation, we might not find very attractive. Someone who we have very little in common with, someone who under ordinary circumstances we might have no basis for an ongoing mature and caring relationship. But to our surprise, we find that we get along very well. Know, we we Things seem so much better with them now than they were before. But inevitably, unless the way of relating changes with that person, we begin to forget the prior pain, the prior loneliness, the hurt of separation.
And slowly the pleasure, the appealing aspects of the relationship in this person begin to be lost. We begin to find this person a little bit boring. We become a little bit indifferent whether we’re around them or not. The other person doesn’t quite seem quite as appealing as they once did, as they used to be. We may not be even be able to find it what it is that appealed to us about them in the first place.
And slowly, you know, compared to the good times we once were having together, the relationship is not only boring, it’s becoming down like painful. And we begin to think how nice it would be to be on my own. There’s a story about it’s my favorite story. It takes place in a small village in Tibet. And there’s a I hope this is I don’t know what to do with it.
There’s a there’s a young woman running down the street, down in a small village in Tibet, a small street near the near the center of the of the village. And she’s, you know, tears are flowing down her eyes and she’s quite disheveled. Her hair is missed out. She’s obviously quite upset. And her teacher, her spiritual master, her her lama sees her, calls her, calls her, come come over.
And she’s crying. And and the lama says, what’s wrong? What’s what’s your problem? And she said, oh, lama, I can’t stay in my house anymore. I have to get away.
I have to run away. I can’t I just can’t bear to stay there any longer. There’s so many people in the house. There’s my there’s my there’s my mother and there’s my two sisters and their two kids and their and their husbands. And there’s my three cousins and then my husband’s side, there’s his brother and his wife and their two children and then there’s his mother and I it’s just too much, it’s so noisy and I just I have to go, I can’t stand anymore.
And the lama said, no problem. I can help you. And she’s she’s quite excited about the possibility of being helped. She said, what can I do? What can I do?
And the lama says, do you have a goat? Take the goat and put it in the house. So this girl had a lot of faith. So she said, I’ll try it. Next day, same place, same time in the middle of the town, in the village, there’s the girl again.
This time she’s even worse shape. Tears are flowing down her eyes, her hair is messed up and dresses, it’s all wrinkled and it’s soiled and she’s crying. And the lama sees her calls her over. And she says, lama, come, come, come, come. Oh lama, it’s worse than it was yesterday.
You know the goat is eating the mattress and the floor is filthy. It’s it’s worth I’m I’m leaving, lama. I’m going. I’m going. No.
No. No. No. It’s gonna be okay. I I’ve got an idea.
No. No. No. No. Yes.
It’s it’s it’s going to be okay. Do you have some chicken? Oh, lama. Yes. This is gonna, this is worse.
Take the chickens and put them in the house. Very hesitantly. Hesitantly, she agreed. Next day, again the girl running down the middle of the village. This time she’s got feathers in her hair.
Tears flowing down her eyes. She’s worse than ever. And again the lama sees her, come, come, come. Mama, no, no. Okay.
She’s, oh, it’s I couldn’t even sleep last night. There’s feathers all over the place. The place stinks. I can’t I can’t stay there another day. I’m leaving, lama.
Goodbye. But I have an idea. No. No more ideas. No more No.
Listen. Listen. Let’s let’s discover. Oh, lama. It’s all over.
Do you have a cow? Yes. Take the cow and throw it in the house. Next day. And she was a mess.
Totally. The tears flowing down the hairs, uncut, uncombed, dress with soil. She’s she’s in bad shape. And along the same thing, come, come, come, come. No, no.
Takes her by the hand. How are things? Don’t ask me. Have to leave. I couldn’t sleep at all last night with the cow lowing.
I can’t even walk on the floor. It’s filthy, it stinks, it’s noisy. It’s terrible. I’m leaving. I’ve got no more ideas on here.
I have great faith in you, but I think you blew it this time. No, no, it’s gonna work. I have an idea. I have an idea. Take the cow out of the house.
Oh, okay. I’ll try again. Next day, she looks a little bit better and she’s not crying, but still her dress is dirty and her hair is uncombed and the lines. How is it now? It’s a little bit better.
I missed that. I got I got a decent night night sleep last night. The cow wasn’t moving all night. Good. Good.
Good. Good. Things are going well. Take the chickens out of the house. Okay.
Next day, she’s got on a clean dress, combed her hair. She’s just walking down through the middle of village. How is it now? Oh, it’s it’s not bad really. You know, just it doesn’t smell as bad as it used to and there aren’t these chickens clucking all the time and I can walk around quite freely.
Yes. It’s not bad, really. Take the goat out. Next day, she has a nice clean dress on, her hair combed. She has a smile on her face, and the lama calls her over.
How’s it now? Oh, lama, I have such a nice home. It’s so clean and quiet. I don’t know why I ever wanted to leave my home in the first place. Forget the story.
Anyway, externally nothing has changed whatsoever from what it was previously, few nights before, a few days before. The only change has been an internal shift in her perception of the same situation. That there was a reframing of the situation took place. If there’s no external change in her situation, if there’s no change in her basic attitude towards it, then her memory of that, of how comparatively bad it was will begin to fade. You know with all the various animals in it.
She’ll begin to lose that as a reference point, as a standard for determining the quality of her present experience. How she’s going to look at it, the attitude she’s going to take from towards it. There’ll be a gradual shift in her perception of the present situation from pleasant back to where it was perceived as miserable as it was before with all the corresponding feelings of unhappiness and pain. Know nothing changed, just your perception of the standard of how relatively miserable it was compared to what it was immediately before, it’s quite nice. But unless she changes an attitude, unless some kind of situation adjustment takes place, that standard, that new standard that she developed is going to fade and memory that past difficulty with all the animals is going to be lost and again she’s going to return, she’s going to fluctuate back to that same previous discontentment when the situation appeared to be so miserable that she couldn’t stay there.
That’s the that’s the sort of her pleasure in which you go ah, it’s not all that, it’s really nice. That pleasure is contaminated pleasure. It’s the suffering of fluctuation. The cessation of a prior deprivation, the cessation of past pain, of past difficulties, of tension reduction. We experience as pleasure we call it happy, but it is not real happiness.
It’s not stable, it’s not complete. This is the type of happiness that we want. The next level of dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction is suffering, okay, is that of universal conditionality. Sometimes it is called all pervasive suffering. Universal conditionality, metaphysical suffering.
Suffering of fluctuations like psychological suffering in terms of the psychological mechanism of our perceiving process. This is more of a metaphysical suffering. This is the wearisome burden of the ego or contaminated aggregates, the wearisome burden of ego. I’m talking about the wearisome burden of ego. Whether you are polite or blunt, seemingly happy or unhappy person is irrelevant.
As long as we try to hold on to our existence, we become a bundle of tense muscles protecting ourselves. This creates discomfort. We tend to feel that our existence is slightly inconvenient. Even if we are self contained and have plenty of money, food, shelter, companionship, still there is this little thing in our being which is in the way. Something is protruding from which we constantly have to shield and hide ourselves.
We have to be watchful in case we goof up, but we are uncertain as to what we are going to goof up. There’s a sort of universal understanding that there is something we must keep secret, something we should not goof up, something unnameable. It is not logical but it is still some sort of threat. So you know as I just described it, having an ego is experienced as or metaphorically as a bundle of pain, a bundle of thorns carried on our back. Wherever we go, whatever we do sticks.
It is having to constantly reestablish our credentials, maintain our self image, guard our territory, reaffirm our existence. And the awareness of ourselves as being separate entities makes us feel unbearably alone, lost, powerless, imprisoned in these reoccurring compulsive tendencies. Our feelings of inauthenticity, of fragmentation, feelings of alienation, shame, guilt. Forced having to seek union with ourselves, with others, with the world about it. You know the burden of self consciousness, the loss of innocence, the loss of spontaneity, the fear of meaninglessness and the dread of death.
And this underlying need of the perpetual rebuilding of who we believe ourselves to be. And this crumbling facade that we have to keep reestablishing moment by moment. All of this is very tiring. There’s no peace in any of this, this struggle that we’re continually involved in. We cannot rest.
We keep hoping that tomorrow we’re going to find all the conditions whereby we can give up the burden, but it never comes. Again tomorrow we have to take up the burden, the struggle. You know, have great hopes for tomorrow and then when tomorrow comes there’s some disappointment because it didn’t quite live up to our expectation and we have to begin again. Always continue to begin again, this constant struggle. Unable to sustain itself, that is the ego within itself and perhaps tormented by feelings of unworthiness, guilt or sin becomes prone to melancholy and despondent moments of loneliness, frustration and despair.
Inwardly plagued by restlessness, insecurity or contempt and even hatred of itself, outwardly it possibly manifests any number of psychosomatic disturbances. Yet often the ego manages to contain these pangs of disquietude and to finish out its life in just this condition. But even as it does so, it is under the continual threat that the smoldering deep seated uneasiness may erupt and surge forth in an anguish and dread which is uncontainable. This could occur should the ego no longer be able to rationalize its way, away its sense of unworthiness or its sense of guilt. Should it be morbidly uncertain of the divine forgiveness of its sins or should the component necessary to maintain its subject-object image otherwise come to be lost, destroyed, or unavailable or while remaining prove disillusioning, go empty, or simply cease to be engaging.
Finding some ordinary occurrence of daily life can bring the abrupt traumatic realization that not only is every possible content transitory and ephemeral, but so too is the ego itself. Ever vulnerable in youth as well as in age to illness and to infirmity in body and mind, it must die. Intellectually, the inevitability of its death is of course known to the ego only. Actually experiencing however the prospect of its own non being as a shattering existential shock in effect destroys the illusion as to the possibilities of consummation in terms of any object image. Cut fully and comprehensively in the double anxiety of having to live and having to die.
Ego undergoing the excruciating torment of the most piercing indecision of all, to be or not to be. You know, we I don’t you know, there’s the line Shakespeare’s lines where is it from Hamlet, Hamlet, to be or not to be. And we are caught. And the ego cannot be. It is always trapped in becoming.
An illusion can never be made secure. I will point out if light a fire on the end of a stick and you whirl it around with enough speed and in the same repetitive pattern, it gives the appearance of a solid ring of light. But if that solid ring of light is merely an appearance due to the speed and the patterning, in order to maintain that illusion, one must never give up the struggle. The moment one stops, the illusion disappears. So the ego can never come to full being because it is based upon speed and repetitive patterns.
We have to continually constantly be involved in its continual recreation moment by moment creating this illusion of what we call the ego. It can never come into full being. But then again it can never, we can never allow it to go out of being. Because we have a sense that we fail to see that there is a more basic fundamental ground to our being than the being of ego. So we are trapped as it were in this continuous struggle to be or not to be.
Never, you know, never, you know, this great fear of letting go, of giving up the struggle. We are if we could, if it were possible, we would have now, by now with all the blood and sweat and tears that we have expended in the course of no long many lives, have achieved perfect complete and unsurpassed egohood but we haven’t done it. You know that it is as if the greatest expression of the ego would be to pervade all of existence and freeze it to a permanent unchanging entity and to identify with that. But it can’t, but it’s constantly struggling to do so. It’s constantly struggling to be something real, fixed, solid, permanent, concrete and it never can become that.
And this is our basic struggle that we’re by its very nature caught up in. And Buddhism is saying this is the bundle of thorns that we’re carrying along with that. Let’s take it off our back and set it aside. That’s what’s called freedom. That’s peace.
The average person, you know, is is unaware of this ongoing this undercurrent of struggle and the fear within inside of ourselves and the unconscious influences these fears and hopes and the struggle play in our daily lives in creating our world. You know, perhaps at most, from time to time, everyone gets has a sense, gets some sort of feeling the quite not quite rightness about the way we are, about the way we’re living our life. Some kind of discomfort, some kind of inconvenience about our life, in our life. Uneasiness about the very nature of the way we are thinking, about the very nature of the way we are acting. It’s something which we find very difficult to define and even more difficult for us to acknowledge even to ourselves.
This overall picture of our reality. So we return to our habitual unawareness by distracting ourselves and we turn the channel to another program. We are as it were half asleep. We are aware of reality to the extent which our goal of survival demands of it. We are aware of reality to the extent which our goal of survival makes such awareness necessary.
That much and no more. That is all the awareness that we demand of ourselves as long as I can survive. That much and no more. Therefore we have to sleep. And this last quality is said to be the most subtle of the levels of suffering, of suffering of pain, suffering of fluctuation and finally of universal conditionality.
And this unawareness that we’ve cultivated towards it is such that the analogy which is used to give us a feeling or our lack of awareness is that for us the quality of the suffering of universal conditionality is like a hair in our hand. It makes no difference whatsoever to her. We don’t we aren’t even aware of it, it goes unnoticed. For someone who has cultivated an unawareness, for someone who is sensitive to this most subtle level with the satisfactory quality of ego based existence, it is as if they take that same hair and they put it in your eye. They can’t bear, they can’t stand it for it to remain there a moment longer.
They have to get it out, they have to do something. They’re that much moved by it. It affects them that deeply. They want they didn’t they will find a way to be free from it. They will do anything.
So these are the mark of dissatisfactoriness, these marks of suffering, marks constituted of pain, fluctuation and universal conditionality. They can never be mastered. You know, we have a sense. They can never be mastered. They can never be brought under control as if they were extraneous to ourselves, as if we could cut them out of ourselves.
They are woven within the very fabric of our life, a particular way of life. This way of life is called egocentricism. They are enmeshed, are interwoven, integral part, characteristic of that way of being, that way of relating, that world view. It’s not as if we can become masters of them and not change our world view, not go through some fundamental transformation of how we approach existence. These marks pain, fluctuation and conditionality.
They must be recognized, they must be related to as a means whereby to eventually transcend them. But still You know, have hopes. I mean by hopes here irrational hopes that if I can find that there’s some factor x which I can get hold of, which is out there, which is going to solve this problem. But I don’t basically have to change myself. That’s not the problem.
Like there’s some x, maybe a new partner, another degree, more money. If I was only more attractive. If I had better health, Everything would be There’s some factor x that we could we could only make it get hold of. And we have great hope. We’re going to we’re going to look for it and we’re going to find it.
It’s going to be there. We keep we keep looking and looking and looking and sometimes we are, oh, this is it. And then it fails, it disappoints. And we have to keep going looking for that factor. Never seeing, never reorientating ourselves toward the basic reality.
The fact that we the only thing which is going to change the circumstance is by changing ourselves. We have to grow, we have to awaken, we have to adopt this determination. So the next week we’ll talk about the second and third marks. Third marks of impermanence, and mark of insubstantiality. So we dedicate the creative energy that we’ve accumulated.
I thought it might be nice if we began to recite the long life prayer to his holiness, the Dalai Lama on page ten. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good. Our powerful Tenzin Gyatso, Please remain until cyclic existence is ended. And then the final dedication prayers. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to the enlighten 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. So if you’d like to for those of you who’d like to stay, please get a cup of tea and we’ll have a we’ll make a circle and have a discussion group. Thank you. Good night.