Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of a flea forced to jump, land, and jump again without rest, Ven Jampa Gendun anchors this 21-minute talk in a visceral account of impermanence — seasons, civilizations, songs, new cars — before sharpening the point: the problem is not change itself but our refusal to accept it. He then moves through subtle impermanence (the moment-by-moment arising and ceasing of phenomena, like a candle flame) and into the third mark of conditioned existence: selflessness. There is no solid ego behind experience — only a rapid flicker of confusion and grasping that mimics continuity, like individual film frames generating the illusion of movement. The session closes with a verse from Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path on generating genuine determination to be free.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 H and M of B 1992 11 04.mp3
UUID: 475854b5-3c06-439c-ada4-4f3d5941a580
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-11-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 21.5 minutes
Words: ~2,264
Pride and jealousy, other times we’re full of wisdom, love and noble thoughts. And life is constantly changing. Life is an immovable, locked, three-handed struggle between your wants, the world’s for you and worse,, the unbeatable slow machine that brings what you’ll get. Locked, they strain around the hollow spaces of having to face days, sit down, live constantly, years. Then there’s the changeability of all the things about ourselves, around ourselves.
You know, civilizations come into existence and they go out of existence. Great cities rise and fall into ruin. The seasons come changing one into another. Some Sometimes there are floods, sometimes there are droughts, sometimes flowers come into bloom and then they wilt. The barren trees begin to bud growing leaves, the leaves are green turning to red, yellow, brown falling from the trees and the trees are once again barren.
Mountains are worn smooth, Lakes become dry, wells run dry, minds are exhausted. New cars eventually need repair, breakdown, wear out and finally they put on the junk heap. Dishes break, styles change, clothing becomes worn and outdated. You know, songs and all the various types of entertainment which usually bring us a great deal of happiness, lose their popularity, mean no longer seem significant, we don’t even want to listen to any longer or do, things change. Then there’s the impermanence of separation, the moving on, departing, leaving things behind.
The fact that we are all fleas on the hot griddle of life. The flea, the flea must jump and the flea that jumps must inevitably land and the flea that lands must inevitably inevitably jump again. That’s the situation that we find ourselves in. You know, there’s no lasting niche that we can carve out for ourselves. There’s no place that we can rest our heads for long.
There’s no identity that we can hold on to no realm of existence. No version of reality which is lasting, which can be sustained independently. You know, we are continually having to move on, leaving something behind. Fire and the windows bright glittered on the moorland. Song, truthful song built a palace in the wild.
Now when the day dawns on the brow of the moorland, lone stands the house and the chimney stone is cold. Lone let it stand, now the friends are all departed. Thy kind hearts, the true hearts that love the place of old. Spring shall come, come again calling up the more thou. Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers.
Red shall heather bloom over hill and valley. Soft flow the stream through the ever flowing hillside. Fair the day shine as it shone on my childhood. Fair the day shine on the house with the open door. Birds come and cry and twitter in the chimney, but I go forever and come again no more.
And with perpetually, we recycle through all the various psychological and material versions of our reality, of our existences, you know, from the blissful absorptions of the gods and the celestial beings to the paranoia and hatred of the hell beings that we’ve talked about and all the various levels in between. Continuing having to move on, no place to remain even within your realm, the poor become rich, the rich become poor, the high become low. George Bush. The low become high. The oppressed become the oppressors, and the oppressors become the oppressed.
The wheel just keeps on turning relentlessly. There’s no place to remain, to call home for very long. Then there’s the impermanence of disintegration. This is what we mean by subtle impermanence. The moment by moment arising and passing away of all things, moment by moment.
Things are such that when the appropriate causes conditions come together they are produced. And once having been produced without depending upon any further causes, they naturally disintegrate. That is in their very nature. It doesn’t require some other new cause for their disintegration. It is in their nature that once having been produced, they will, of their very nature, without any additional factor whatsoever, begin to process of disintegration.
If similar types of causes, if causes and conditions similar to the preceding causes and conditions again aggregate, then a similar type of product will again be created and if this happens again, then a similar type will again be created until we develop a continuum of similar types of this table, of myself, of the world, whatever it might be. Once those similar types and causes cease coming together, then the continuum ends. That’s gross impermanence. But during the continuum, the process of its maintenance, the continuity of any object, it’s necessary that it continues moment to moment being recreated. Like the like the flame of a candle from moment to moment, arising, ceasing, arising, ceasing, rising, I like the movement of a wave across the ocean, constantly changing moment to moment.
The water molecules which make up that ocean wave are never the same from moment to moment. This is a subtle impermanence. And finally, there’s the impermanence of changeability by nature. This means that even if something has not changed yet, it will. That’s its nature.
So in itself impermanence is not the problem. Things remain impermanent for Buddha, but they are not problematic for Buddha. The problem is in terms of impermanence arises through our denial, our rejection, our struggle against recognizing the basic fact of impermanence, of changeability. Expecting the constantly changing to be unchanged. Trying to hold on onto that which is due to decay as being eternal and something that’s going to last forever.
You’re demanding that the impermanent, demanding of the impermanent, permanent happiness. Simply notice, it’s our grasping at and clinging to pleasure which turns our pleasure into pain. Demanding, holding on, clinging to transitory pleasure turns those pleasures into pain, the pleasures become problematic, become sources of pain. He who bends to himself a joy doth the wing’d life destroy, but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise. But then who or what is it that continually tries and struggles to bend to himself a joy?
Who or what is the user of these ten thousand things? Who or what expects? Who or what demands? Who or what is actually grasping? You know there’s no substantial self trying.
There’s you know, when we ask the question who is struggling? There is no one struggling, there is only the struggle. Who is demanding? There is no one demanding, there is only demanding. Who is it that’s grasping?
There is only grasping. Who is it that expects? Who is expecting? There is only expectation. There’s no one behind, no agent, no controller. This is the third mark of conditioned existence, the mark of insubstantiality of selflessness.
There’s no substantial self behind all of this. You know, we are continually struggling to synthesize the flow of transient physical and mental events which constitute the experience of our being into an unchanging independent self. We are constantly struggling to create out of this transitory event that we call ourselves. These physical and mental events, experiences. Trying to fabricate out of them a solid, a concrete, unchanging, independent self.
The effort to secure our happiness, to maintain ourselves in relationship to something else is the process of ego. But this effort is futile because there are continual gaps in our seemingly solid world, continual cycles of death and rebirth, constant change. The sense of continuity and solidity of self is an illusion. There is really no such thing as ego, soul or ātman. It is successions of confusions that create the ego.
The process which is ego actually consists of a flicker of confusions, a flicker of aggression, a flicker of grasping, all of which exist only in the moment. Since we cannot hold on to the present moment, we cannot hold on to me and mine and make them solid things. The experience of oneself relating to other things is actually a momentary discrimination, a fleeting thought. If we generate these fleeting thoughts fast enough, we can create the illusion of continuity and solidity. It is like watching a movie.
The individual film frames are played so quickly that they generate the illusion of continual movement. So we build up an idea, a preconception that self and other are solid and continuous. And once we have this idea, we manipulate our thought to confirm it and we are afraid of any contrary evidence. It is the fear of exposure, this fear of impermanence that imprisons us. Nothing within the whole stream of the mental and physical phenomena constitute our experience of body and mind has the quality of being an unchanging independent self.
It is all change. It is all dependent arising. None of it is of substantial self. We can never isolate, we can never find anything within what we experience as self. Anything within that what we experience as body and mind having the quality of it being an unchanging independent self.
It is our persistent effort to treat the body and mind as if they constituted a unchanging independent self that produces, that makes the body and mind a constant stream of suffering. An endless struggle filled with self deception and anxiety trying to synthesize something out of what are merely arising out of physical, mental and sense experience into something which is solid and concrete. This is dissatisfactory, this is the pathology of conditioned existence. The mark of insubstantiality. So this is the predicament we find ourselves in.
The pathology of conditioned existence. And this is our existence that we’re talking about, experience. Somewhere it’s within our experience. Existence marked, characterized by dissatisfactoriness, impermanence and insubstantiality. It is necessary to repeatedly confront and acknowledge these basic three facts of our immediately lived experience, of our everyday life, if we’re ever going to develop the determination to go beyond that.
That’s something which I emphasized at the very beginning of our talk. That there is a gap between our beliefs and our belief-conditioned perceptions on the one hand and what is on the other. If we presently believe that conditioned existence, that is the existence conditioned by karma and afflictive emotion, that type of existence, that way of approaching the world, that that type of existence possesses the capacity to bring complete happiness. At some level that’s what we believe, that it has the potential to bring eternal complete, ultimate peace, fulfillment and happiness. We believe that.
We spend a great deal of energy, time and tears, blood and sweat in the pursuit of that happiness out there. Believe ourselves to be that the world is filled with permanent things out there that I can hold on to, that can bring me consistent, unchanging happiness, pleasure. We believe ourselves to be unchanging, solid, concrete. But in fact, none of this is true. And moreover, this gap between our beliefs and our belief conditioned perceptions on the one hand and our experience, the way that what is exists.
Reality, divested of our fabrications, our fantasies about it, that gap is experienced as dissatisfaction, as disappointment, frustration, alienation, fragmentation, anxiety, suffering. So Tsongkhapa says, and Tsongkhapa is the author of the text that we’re looking at, Three Principal Aspects of the Path. He says, If having meditated thus, you do not generate admiration, even for an instant for the prosperity of cyclic existence. And if an attitude seeking liberation arises day and night, then the thought definitely to leave cyclic existence has been generated. You’ve developed the determination to be free.
You know, if we as suffering individuals ever expect to solve our problems at their most fundamental level, if we ever expect to find the real peace which we are perhaps unbeknownst to ourselves essentially searching for, then we have to develop a powerful and consistent determination to be free, you know, to awaken, to confront our self deceptions, to go beyond our mistaken beliefs, all these wrong assumptions, these crooked ideas, these erroneous premises, these epistemological fantasies under which we operate, which exist within our mind. If we do not see this clearly then we will never understand what it is that we’re trying to be free of, what in fact liberation means. If you speak delusions, everything becomes delusion. If you speak the truth, everything becomes the truth. Outside the truth, there is no delusion.
But outside delusion, there is no special truth. Followers of the Buddhist way, why do you earnestly seek the truth in distant places? Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your own heart. So we dedicate the positive potential, creative energy that we created. This we can we can say the prayers together for the long life of 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, please remain until the cyclic existence is ended. And the prayers of dedication, verses eight and nine. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to the 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.
So those of you who like to stay and have a cup of tea and discussion, please.