Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun opens by mapping the eight worldly concerns — hopes of pleasure, gain, fame, and praise, each paired with its mirror fear — as the unexamined values most people live by without ever choosing them. Citing Jung’s observation that neurosis is an unwillingness to accept legitimate suffering, he uses a fractured relationship to illustrate two paths: flee the pain immediately, or listen to it as diagnostic truth about what needs to change. A guided meditation sequence follows — loving-kindness toward a stranger, breath counting, choiceless awareness with a gentle noting technique, and resting the mind at the heart area to watch thoughts arise as objects rather than self. The doctrinal close works through Tsongkhapa’s verse on the four currents driving cyclic existence, the mother-all-beings contemplation, and the altruistic intention to awaken as the natural culmination of both. Suited to practitioners with some Tibetan Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 H and M of B 1992 11 24.mp3
UUID: 541ea534-072d-49d8-8649-645bf98c33e3
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-11-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.8 minutes
Words: ~4,945
So we begin the as we usually do, you know, trying to reorientate ourselves, redirect ourselves, reprioritize what we’re about, get back in touch with some of our more central values, those principles, guidelines that we’ve in our finest moments, moments of clarity and sanity and compassion that we’ve tried to set for ourselves at one time or another. Trying to perhaps act out of a more authentic place inside of ourselves. This process of realigning our allegiance from a life passively based under the influence of hopes and fears. Hopes of pleasure, fears of pain, hopes of gain, fears of loss, hopes of fame, fears of notoriety, hopes of praise, fear of ridicule, which these are the standards, the values which we fall into unthinkingly and awarely, which determine our behavior, our ways of thinking, what we do with our lives. And perhaps, probably not consciously chosen.
They don’t constitute the values that we would like to be living by. Unaware and they fall into this reoccurring ways of thinking and behaving. And so it’s necessary from time to time to reflect, to reevaluate, to reprioritize, and begin to realign our allegiance to a life based upon, actively based upon choosing to grow, choosing to awaken and all that that entails. It may mean having to face pain and go through it rather than our natural habitual reaction to avoid it immediately upon experiencing it, upon coming in contact with it. It may mean going beyond what we’d like to hope for.
But understanding that this is simply something which is going to perpetuate our problem. We might like it, but we see in perhaps a greater longer perspective. It’s not in our own ultimate best interest when our best interest is seen in terms of growth and what is going to help me to solve my problems at a very basic level. I guess it’s how we’re going to deal with suffering. It’s said that the taught two things.
Comes down to the fact of dissatisfaction and suffering and the way to go beyond our dissatisfaction and suffering. There are primarily two basic attitudes that we may take towards suffering. One is something which sees suffering as simply being an interruption to our life, an obstacle, something which is to be overcome as quickly as possible and to get on with our happiness. In the case of separation, way or another from a partner, there may be loneliness there may be great pain. And one simply sees the pain as something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible in any way that we can.
There’s a great fear of the loneliness and the pain associated with it as if it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to be there. And moving on to another partner as quickly as possible, never perhaps really dealing with the problems at a more basic level, which is the second alternative which we can view our difficulties with, in perspective that we can look up on our problems with. Let’s just say our pain, our difficulties, our dissatisfaction are trying to tell us something. They are a kind of truth about ourselves.
There’s the The wounds are the mouth, and we should listen. They’re trying to say something about the way that we’re living our life, the processes. There is an imbalance,, that there’s something wrong and we have to listen. So it can indicate something that needs to be done next, where we need to grow, where we need to look at. It’s it’s telling us something about ourselves. It’s a statement.
You know, rather than simply moving on to another partner as quickly as possible to alleviate the pain of loneliness, maybe it’s telling us that we need to look into the problems of not accepting aloneness, not being willing to look into the problem of attachment, befriending ourselves, being able to enjoy one’s own company. Not to say that eventually we are to move on to other healthy relationships, but not as a means simply to avoid our pain because it doesn’t work in long run, does it? To be involved in a relationship out of a sense of fear, There’s always going to be some degree of manipulation that this person has to remain with me one way or another because of the undercurrent of anxiety of returning to that previous loneliness, which you don’t want to go through again. And one can never quite be authentic and you never can’t quite allow the other person to be who they are. There’s always some degree of manipulation, coercion, some kind of violence both to oneself and to others, never having dealt with the problem at a more basic level.
So it seems it’s necessary to, as I often quote Jung, where he says that the basis of neurosis is an unwillingness to accept voluntary suffering, or that is to say legitimate suffering. The unwillingness, the refusal to accept legitimate suffering, and being able to work through it. So this is the, you know, a person who wants to grow has to acknowledge that the spiritual path, the path of growth, is not simply becoming more skillful in avoiding pain, but in fact it may entail voluntarily Taking on difficult situations and working with difficult people as a means to go through those generally problematic situations and relationships in order to come out to a healthier, more appropriate, more working with situations and people in a higher level of quality so that we can get more and more of what we want out of life in our relationships and situations and people. So it seems as if it may be necessary to go into some difficulties, and we won’t do that if we don’t have this determination to develop ourselves to awaken. If we simply habitually, if we simply compulsively allow ourselves to remain in this compulsive pattern of immediately upon encountering any difficulty, any resistance, any dissatisfaction, pain, we move away and we seek another course of action.
Or we simply try to perpetuate the priorities in terms of ego, of what will enhance, of what will solidify in terms of hope. So I think this takes some maturity, I think, and takes some sort of determination to voluntarily accept legitimate suffering and to go beyond our hopes and work through our fears. This is what we are trying to do to again and again remind ourselves to develop this perspective. We try to shift the level of motivation for this process. That I’m not only trying to develop myself for myself, my own personal betterment, which is important but limited.
But in fact, that part of my motivation and an ever growing part of my motivation is that the more I develop myself, then naturally enough the more I can be of benefit to others. And the more I can be of benefit to others, then in the end the greater service I have been to myself. This quality of solving one’s own problems through helping others to solve theirs. There is a gradual shift in our motivation such that I’m trying to grow not just for myself, but out of concern for others. A shift from solely self concern toward a growing concern for others and helping them also to grow.
And then, you know, we can do this. You know, we’re continually reorientating ourselves in this way. And I’m quite certain that gradually this reorientation takes place, unknowingly perhaps, that we find ourselves and our actions as more and more determined in the light of what will help us to grow beyond our hopes and fears and more and more determined by what is of greatest interest in my widening circle of concern about others. Our decisions are made in the light of our social awareness. What feels most right for me becomes more and more the rightness of the entire situation and the people and the environment that I’m a part of.
I think it becomes a natural response to this ever widening concern for others in the world about us. That what feels right, the authentic response, becomes something which is appropriate for both oneself and others and our environment as a whole. One becomes a greater and greater The social aspect of oneself becomes a greater and greater part of one’s basis for determining one’s behavior, one’s actions, one’s thinking. We become very much a social being and existing more and more in relationship with others and concerned with others. And it’s quite a natural evolutionary process as we begin to concern ourselves more with these values and other ways of being.
So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, the Buddha within inside of ourselves. That is to say the realization of our complete potential in terms of wisdom, in terms of this appropriate way of relating with the world about us. That is to say, love and compassion and the development of some inner strength, creative energy, mental and physical exuberance for this process. By means of the Dharma at which it’s able to raise the level of our consciousness, the actual technique, actual things that we do in a practical sense to actualize Buddha, this healthy, loving, sane human being. And then this all occurs within the social context of a spiritual community.
That is to say, those individuals whom we necessarily rely upon and interact with, who are very much a part, a necessary component of our growth of becoming a Buddha and raising the level of motivation such that we’re not doing this just for ourselves alone in isolation for others, but in fact for the sake of others and trying to ever widen the circle of concern for others until it includes all living beings. I go from refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving in other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. On the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving in the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving in the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. We’ll begin with meditation. And we’ll cultivate love and compassion. And perhaps we can do that toward If you can think of a stranger, perhaps someone that you saw over the course of the day.
And if you can remember what they look like, a male or a female, just somebody perhaps in the room that you aren’t particularly connected with. And we use them to try to develop these feelings of love and compassion towards us, and training ourselves to invoke these states with respect to various objects, various types of people. It’s a matter of cultivating this training. It’s a matter of learning again and then developing these feelings toward different people, different objects until it becomes something very much a natural part of ourselves, until we come to the place where the feeling of loving compassion and arises with whatever living being that we come in contact with. And there’s no reason why this can’t come about.
This is a matter of habituation, familiarization, accustoming the mind to this process. There’s no reason why it can’t come about. There’s no obstacle, and it’s quite reasonable that it could. Then we’ll meditate on mindfulness of breathing using the technique of emphasis on counting the breaths and noting. And then we’re just going to practice choiceless awareness.
And in choiceless awareness, we don’t choose any particular object to focus the mind on. Generally, we always have an object which is being held by mindfulness. The factor of mindfulness holds objects, like my hand holds the stick. But here, we simply are going to allow the mind to become involved in any object that it naturally tends toward. There’s going to be some object within your environment, either internally or externally, which is going to be attractive to the mind, which is going to be the most stimulating object.
And your mind will naturally tend toward that. And we’re not going to try to focus the mind on any particular object. We’re not going to choose the object. We’re simply going to allow the mind to become involved in any object that it naturally tends toward. But which we naturally do anyway.
There’s one significant difference perhaps here than what you may normally do, and that is we’re going to try to maintain awareness. And we do this by using the technique of noting. Simply this gentle noting within your mind from moment to moment, what your mind is involved in. It may be that a car comes along the street. It may simply note hearing.
It may be that somebody moves next to you making a sound, hearing. It may be that, you smell something, smelling. Maybe a pain in your knee. Pain, feeling, feeling, feeling. Some kind of emotion may arise.
Thinking, thinking. So the mind is simply moving from one object to another, but we simply want to maintain the awareness. And we do that by emphasizing in our mind through noting what it naturally tends toward. Just a gentle quiet noting, hearing, thinking, feeling, pain, pain, feeling, hearing, thinking. And then we’re going to try to bring the mind to focus upon the mind itself.
And we’re going to bring the mind to the heart area. And you can just imagine, we’re going to go back to the breath. And just imagine that your mind is the breath, is like a boat which is flowing on this river with the breath. With the breath. And we’re going to bring that boat, let it flow down in the river with the breath, and bring it to your heart area, and leave it there.
And you’re going to bring it maybe three times. And try to sense that your mind is in the heart area and try to focus upon the mind itself. Mainly what will rise are are feelings, emotions, visual images, thoughts in general. We can simply note these as thinking. So it’s important to maintain this awareness because this will create some space.
Generally we identify with our thinking process, with our thoughts, and as if these thoughts were ourselves. But by maintaining the noting, we can create the space. We can maintain some kind of perspective in which we can begin to view thoughts as simply objects of the mental consciousness. They arise, they abide, and they will cease. And begin simply to watch the mind itself.
And this will be facilitated a great deal if you if you note. Just continue making note. Maintain your awareness. Maintain this perspective, this space, so that you don’t get hooked on your thoughts by simply noting thought, thinking, thinking, feeling, thinking, thinking, feeling, seeing, in a case of mental image, picture, imagine the mind. So trying to focus upon the mind itself, bringing the mind down to the heart area by imagining the mind is on a small boat on your breath, and flows down with your breath.
But when your breath goes out, the boat doesn’t rise back up, stays at your heart. And try to imagine, have a sense that your mind is in the heart area, and then focus upon the mind itself. This will generally take the the process of watching thoughts, feelings, emotions, pictures arising along. Continue to note them. But see if you can begin to sense a medium in which these thoughts are occurring.
There’s a context in which these thoughts are taking place, in which they arise. So watch very closely. What is around that thought? The medium like the fish in water. The fish exists in a medium.
It’s very clear. It’s very difficult to recognize. The fish isn’t even aware that it’s in water. It doesn’t know any difference. So watch very closely.
And the way that we can maintain that perspective, that space is able to maintain this awareness, is by continuing self intentionally noting, thinking, thinking, feeling, thinking. Whatever arises, seeing in case of picture. You know, these various images which arise in mind, you can simply note seeing, or image, image, seeing. It will help you to maintain your perspective, some kind of space. Shall we try all that?
So if you take a comfortable firm posture. So first think of a stranger, perhaps someone that you saw over the course of the day, someone in the room that you don’t know, someone you neither like nor dislike and may have a sense of indifference toward. We’re going to begin with a cultivating compassion towards this person. Now these are words that are used, but they are indicating some sort of feeling. So the important point is to seek the feeling.
First with a simple friendly thought, It would be wonderful if you didn’t have any problems. I would like that very much if you didn’t have any difficulties. Try to strengthen that. May you be may you be free of all your difficulty. I wish you didn’t have any problems.
I’m going to commit myself to working with you, taking responsibility to help you to go beyond your suffering or dissatisfaction. The combination of love. Would it be wonderful if you were happy? May you be happy. May you have all the good things of life.
I wish you well. I’m going to take responsibility for working with you to find happiness. The way I’m going to express my commitment to you at this very moment is through my meditation and developing myself. I’ll have that much more ability, that many more skills to be able to really benefit you, and I really want to do. And then bring your mind to the breath.
The gentle, ease in, in and out flow of the natural breath. Extremely briefly looking at the last two of the three fundamentals of the path. The three fundamentals of the path: determination to awaken or to grow, the awakening heart, awakening our hearts to others in terms of love and compassion, the awakening mind, awakening our mind to reality, understanding the ultimate nature of reality, the nature of the self and the things about us. This more as an introduction because we can’t go into them in detail. There aren’t enough sessions left in the year.
But just to give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about when we do take up these fundamentals next June. We’ve been discussing the second of these three, the awakening heart. Trying to to see through our own reasoning, through our own experience, in terms of our own intuition, some kind of authentic response to a deeply felt need within outside of ourselves, the necessity to begin to move in this direction. I think that’s the message that can be gotten here, is that it gives us something to think about in terms of where we can move, in terms of our relationships with others. That is not good enough to indulge in our anger and our hostility and our aggression.
As if we can justify them. We’re going to become angry and we’re going to develop hostility. There’s lots of people we don’t like. But we simply don’t try to justify it and say that’s okay. That’s actually maybe useful.
Maybe it’s healthy even to have anger. It’s not. And at least even when we become angry, it’s not a matter of self blame or self guilt about it, at least we can begin to not perpetuate, indulge in, as if it’s with some ultimate benefit to ourselves or to somebody else, because it’s not. And if we can begin to work in that direction, at least begin to play with the ideas that it is our own self best interest to begin to develop a sense of altruism, to at least begin to move in that direction, to begin to aspire, to become more and more other centered, and to have compassion and love both for ourselves and others. So this altruistic intention to achieve awakening, to develop ourselves in order to be of that much more benefit both to ourselves and to others, altruistic intention to become awakened, has as its object, this object of observation, ultimately is all living being without any discrimination, without any bias, without any qualification about who we’re going to love and who we’re not.
It has as its objective aspiration, awakening, this state of being a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being. And it has the motivation in operative terms. It is seeking this state of awakening, the realization of our fullest potential in order to be of greatest benefit, maximum benefit, to achieve this optimum mode of being, both being for self and being for others. In order to develop great compassion, it’s necessary to reflect upon the ways that we ourselves suffer, our own difficulties, and develop a sense of compassion, which in terms of our self, we call the determination to awaken, the determination to be free, become sincere and serious about working through our problems at some very basic level. Really all that is necessary once we begin to understand our own problems and how they’re revolving is to shift the object of this concern for others, to extend the understanding that we’ve developed with respect to our own problems to others, and to understand that they are undergoing the same difficulties.
They may be superficially different, but basically, fundamentally, our problems aren’t very different. Developing a sense of compassion for them, which is expressed in the thought to determine to help them to grow. So this determination to awaken and compassion aren’t very different. They’re just the objects. The determination to awaken, the object is ourselves.
Compassion and love is the awakening heart. The object is others. So this determination to be free, to awaken, is actively expressed in our taking responsibility and initiative for our own suffering. You know, extending compassion toward ourselves and taking responsibility and initiative for other suffering, extending our compassion toward others. Then Tsongkhapa in the text, you know, how are we going to develop love and compassion?
And what kind of context are we to foster it? All ordinary beings are carried by the continuum of the four powerful currents, are tied with tight bonds of actions difficult to oppose, have entered into the iron cage of apprehending self, inherent existence, are completely beclouded with thick darkness of ignorance, are born into cyclic existence limitlessly, are tortured ceaselessly by the three sufferings. Thinking thus of the condition of our mothers who have come to such a state, generate the supreme altruistic intention to become enlightened, to awaken. As I said, just very roughly speaking, that these four powerful currents, when they’re considered from the point of view of the cause, there is sensuous desire, desire for conditioned existence. There is ignorance with respect to karma, that is to say the relationships between actions and the results.
Also the ignorance with respect to the ultimate nature of reality. And finally, various types of wrong views, for example, eternalism and nihilism. So these are the four powerful currents which our mothers are being swept up by, being swept along by. When they are considered, these four currents are seen from the point of view of the result. Then they are generalized as the types of suffering as birth, aging, disease, and death.
These are the results of the previous four causes. Though none of us want to experience the sufferings of birth, aging, disease, and death, We are, as it were, swept along by them without choices and powerlessly uncontrollably. That’s our situation. Upon this currents of ignorance of desire, sensuous desire, the desire for conditioned existence, all of these various wrong views. And Tsongkhapa goes on to say that we are tied with tight bonds.
So These tight bonds, these reoccurring compulsive patterns, our habitual tendencies to keep repeating the same types of thinking, the same ways of behaving. These difficult to break, are difficult to overcome, and are hard to change, hard to escape from. Tsongkhapa goes on to say, We live entrapped within the iron cage of conceiving the self to be inherently existent, to conceive of the self as being a singular, independent, unchanging self. This becomes like a prison for ourselves, this misconception that itself is independent of causes and conditions, that the self is conceived as being independent of its parts, independent of the labeling process, the perceiving process itself, and completely enveloped in the heavy darkness of ignorance. This knowledge misconceiving the nature of the things about us, that things appear to exist independent of the mind itself.
That the beauty or the repulsiveness of an object appears to be an inherent quality. It’s not something which is culturally conditioned, which is coming from our own side, from our own mind, but it seems to be imbued in inherent quality, characteristic coming from the side of the object. And we develop attachment and aversion dependent upon that misconception. So based upon these misconceptions, we generate a variety of afflictive emotions, desire, hatred, spite, jealousy, miserliness. And under the control of these afflictive emotions, we engage in various types of ego-orientated actions, ways of thinking, behaving.
And as a result of these ways of acting, are again and again compulsively re-embodied in ego-based existences, the physical and mental patterns which perpetuate our problems. And this is what is termed as we being reborn within a cyclic existence. Tsongkhapa goes on to say that in such a state we are tortured ceaselessly by the three types of suffering. We’ve talked a great deal about the three types of sufferings. The sufferings of pain, fluctuation, and universal conditionality.
And that’s the situation that we find ourselves in. As we’ve discussed previously, the continuum of each of our minds is beginningless. We have taken countless numbers of rebirths over the beginningless of time. And the vast, vast, vast majority of these rebirths, we’ve been born to a mother. And so, in fact, though it may be difficult for us to think about, every being that we meet, whoever it might be, has been our mother.
And that’s why Tsongkhapa refers to thinking thus and the condition of our mothers who have come to such a state. That we are trying to see that relationship between ourselves and all living beings, that of a mother and a child. Is the model of a relationship that we’re seeking to develop. And seeing our own pain, we develop the determination to awaken. And thinking about the condition of all of our mothers, we develop the determination to help them to awaken, to go beyond their problems.
But we have to, you know, I think all of us, from time to time, we sincerely wish to help others. But all of us have, from time to time, come to understand or come to question, well, can I help anybody? Can I even help myself? We sometimes wonder. And if we don’t develop some kind of skill, if we don’t develop some abilities, then our situation is very much like the blind leading the blind.
We may have the best of intentions, but in fact, simply may cause more harm than good in the end. Not having the ability, not having the skills be a practical benefit to others. So the more developing the thought that the more that I develop myself, both rationally and emotionally, then the more I can be of benefit to others. The more I develop in wisdom and love, the more I can be of benefit to others. The more I develop in inner strength and skillful means, the more I can be of benefit to others and to myself.
And the more that we can help others, the greater the possibility that we can begin to translate this aspiration to benefit others into some kind of practical reality. So the fulfillment of our potential is the state of awakening. This is the goal of Buddhist spiritual life, and we term that awakening. The state of, as I often term it, the state of being a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being. As someone who experiences unremitting peace within themselves and compassionately, having the force of their compassion and love, works with others skillfully in order to help them to experience that same state.
This is what we mean by awakening, this is what we mean by a Buddha, someone who does that, who is experiencing it, who has their skill. You know, if we sincerely want to help others, in fact, if we want to help ourselves, there’s no more profound and far reaching method than to develop, to generate a spontaneous, powerful altruism, this awakening heart, this aspiration to develop oneself so that one can be of much more benefit to others. There’s a beautiful quotation from a book called A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life by Śāntideva, where he extolled the greatness of this aspiration.