Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 30-minute session with a striking image: well water that feels cold in summer and warm in winter, though its temperature never changes — a pointer to how ordinary experience obscures a nature that is always already pure. He then walks through the two aspects of Buddha nature (intrinsic wakefulness and the mind’s natural purity), drawing on Nāgārjuna’s verse comparing inner wisdom to uncontaminated underground water and on the image of lapis lazuli obscured by dirt. A long parable — “The Rabbi’s Gift,” a dying monastery revived when monks began treating one another as a possible Messiah — makes the doctrine tangible. Asaṇga’s nine similes for how afflictions hide this goodness follow, before Gendun contrasts the Hīnayāna focus on acknowledging confusion with the Mahāyāna call to live as an awakened being even amid doubt.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 H and M of B 1992 06 10.mp3
UUID: 46b27140-f4a6-4fd3-ac83-a5a9e2d576d5
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-06-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 30.5 minutes
Words: ~3,603
You take a bath out of a bucket, quite often it’s simply a pump. And there’s a well that’s been dug, and you pump up the water from the well. And the water, because it’s quite a distance below the surface of the ground, the temperature remains fairly constant, whether it’s summer or winter. The temperature of the water itself remains rather constant. But you notice, you don’t generally just take a dipper and throw the water over you, and so you don’t heat the water, in other words.
And the water remains constant, but in the summer it feels very cold. In the winter it feels very warm. So it’s relative to the weather, to the atmosphere around you, and likewise with respect to ourselves. We as ordinary individuals, people, some afflictive emotion, we have some problems. Remove these problems, these afflictive emotions, and we are Buddha.
There’s no difference other than that. It’s simply this fact. Buddha nature. There are two types of Buddha nature. One refers to the primordial intrinsic instinct toward wakefulness, an intrinsic instinct toward wakefulness.
That is to say that there is a natural instinct towards awakening. It is as if were wisdom in search of wisdom. This constant movement towards wisdom, towards love, intrinsic instinct towards wakefulness. And then there is the natural purity of the mind itself. Each of our minds are by its very nature pure.
So intrinsic wakefulness is referred to as evolving Buddha nature. It is that fundamentally we are decent, gentle, compassionate, And it is only our patterns which obstruct the expression of who in fact we are. It is the manifestation of our basic goodness. Manifestation, the expression of our brilliant sanity, which is we have a potential to know things as they are. This is word by the word tathagata, knowing how things are.
That there is the potential. That it’s simply these very afflictive obstructions do just that. They obstruct our natural ability to know how things are, to know how things are, and to be able to respond spontaneously, skillfully, to the way things are. Then there’s natural purity of the mind. This is called naturally abiding Buddha lineage.
Simply most, this means that we aren’t our patterns. We never have been. By patterns, we have all these various distress patterns: anger, hatred, spite, jealousy. We have patterns. I’m not much am I?
I don’t have what it takes. The world’s not a very nice place. Whatever. These positions that we’ve taken, these reference points that we use to to qualify about who I am. This pattern.
We are not our pattern. We never have been. But we identify with them as this is who I really am. This is the true me. Nāgārjuna, this great Indian master, he compares this intrinsic wakefulness, this ability to see things clearly to uncontaminated underground water.
So he has a verse. Just as the water which lies beneath the earth is uncontaminated, likewise the exalted wisdom which lies beneath the afflictive emotions is uncontaminated. And he goes on to compare it. So this is the greatest of Buddhist Indian masters, saying that in each of us there is underground stream of exalted wisdom, just like an underground stream of uncontaminated water beneath the earth. He’s trying to give us inspiration, to give us a rational hope, to give us a sense that we have the resource within ourselves.
And he goes on to compare the natural purity of the mind. Natural purity of the mind is the mind’s emptiness. It’s emptiness of adventitious and natural stains. Adventitious means temporary, temporary. Natural means by way of its very nature.
That the mind is ultimately free of adventitious, accidental, temporal, stains, contaminations, thoughts. But it’s also by its very nature it’s free. By its very nature our mind are pure. And he compares this with two dirt-encrusted precious gems. Just as precious lapis lazuli is a semi precious blue stone.
Just as precious lapis lazuli always shines bright, though when encrusted with dirt, its brightness is not apparent. Likewise, though the element of qualities is extremely pure, the element of qualities is the emptiness of the mind, this natural purity of the mind. Likewise, though the element of qualities is extremely pure, within cyclic existence its brightness is dimmed by the afflicted emotions. But passing beyond sorrow its brightness becomes apparent. So this element of qualities, the emptiness of the mind, or we could say if we state it more positively, the openness of the mind, the dynamic quality of the mind.
The mind has no inherent fixed quality. It’s open ended. From beginningless time the mind has been free of stains. It’s been unmixed with the afflictive emotions. But the mind is primordially pure, it is, as it were, obscure, like the sun behind clouds.
Each of us possesses the essence of a Buddha, this essence of a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being. No matter how we may conceive of ourselves, we are not our conceptions of ourselves. All these ups and downs that our mind is continually working through, all the moments, whatever the ups and downs may be, moments of confidence, moments of uncertainty, moments of self affirmation, moments of self denigration. Throughout all of these ups and downs, we have to try to remember our essential nature, what the Zen Buddhists might call our original face. That even cats have Buddha nature.
Zen Buddhism there’s a saying, human nature is Buddha nature, and Buddha nature is no nature. We are, as it were, open ended. Our minds are open ended. What this means is that there is the stuff of mind, like clay. And out of this clay, the stuff of mind, we can form whatever it is that we desire, whatever it is that we have the skill in making effort to form.
Then we can form an inspiring Pieta of Michelangelo, a thought provoking abstract of Henry Moore, a child’s figurine of an animal. Or we can make the clay of our mind an ashtray where people can put out their cigarettes. It’s up to us. It’s up to our skill and our determination and the effort that we make. The mind is open ended.
We can make out of it what we will. And what is true of us is true of everyone else. This is one of the fundamental notions by which we can develop the awakening heart. There are many causes for developing the awakening heart. And one of the main which is emphasized is that we to respect, we should love, protect, have compassion for sentient beings.
We should train in all of this ultimately because all beings are Buddhas to be, just like ourselves. Each one of us knows, and I remind you of this, that he or she is really a good person. You have been told you’re not, and in the presence of fresh criticism you get the feeling you’re not. But in your heart of hearts you know you’re a good person, that you’ve always done the best you could, and that is true. Each of us knows that he or she is much smarter than he or she can often show, that he or she has a lot of intelligence that doesn’t come out in the tensions of final exam or the upsetting situation.
And this is true. I now tell you that what you know about yourself is also true of everyone else. This profound knowledge that you’ve hidden — to escape ridicule, that you’re a good person, that you always do your best, and that you’re much smarter than you sometimes act or than people think. This is true, not only of you, but of other people as well. And this quality, you know, this being able to identify some kind of goodness about ourselves, perhaps some kind of divinity about ourselves, some element of something special about ourselves, and being able to identify it in others.
There’s a story. It’s a very nice story. It’s called The Rabbi’s Gift. It’s a very practical outcome of adopting, not only adopting but beginning to sense in oneself and others this exceptional attitude.
The story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order, as a result of waves of anti monastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth, all its branch houses were lost, and it had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house, the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly, it was a dying order. In the deep woods surrounding the monastery, there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation, the old monks had become a bit psychic so that they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage.
The rabbi is in the woods. The rabbi is in the woods again. They would whisper to each other. And as he agonized over the intimate death of his order, it occurred to the abbot at one such time to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery. The rabbi welcomed the abbot at his hut.
But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. I know how it is, he exclaimed. The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.
So the old abbot and the old man wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. The time had come for the abbot to leave. They embraced each other. It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years, the abbot said.
But I have still failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order? No, I’m sorry, the rabbi responded. I have no advice to give you. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.
When the abbot returned to the monastery, his fellow monks gathered around him and asked, Well, what did the rabbi say? He couldn’t help, the abbot answered. We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving, it was something cryptic, was that the Messiah is one of us. I don’t know what he meant.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us. Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? Is that the case? Which one?
Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes. If he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas.
Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man. Everyone knows that. Thomas is a man of light. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Elrod. Elrod gets crotchety at times.
But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn to people’s sides, when you look back on it, Elrod is virtually always right, often very right. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Ellrod, but surely not Brother Philip. Philip is so passive, a real nobody. But then almost mysteriously, he has a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. He just magically appears by your side.
Maybe Philip is the Messiah. Of course, the rabbi didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an ordinary person. Yet supposing he did, suppose I am the Messiah.
Oh, God, not me. I couldn’t be that much for you, could I? As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one amongst them might be the Messiah. And on the off chance that each monk himself might be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect. Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that people still occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate.
As they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed that this aura of extraordinary respect had now begun to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling about it. Hardly knowing why, they began to come back to the monastery more frequently, to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place, and their friends brought their friends. Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks.
After a while, one of them asked if he could join them, then another and another. So within a few years, the monastery had once again become a thriving order, and thanks to the rabbi’s gift, a vibrant center of life and spirituality in the realm. So we have to appreciate our own basic goodness, but we also have to appreciate the basic goodness inherent in all people. That there is a goodness about ourselves. That there is something tremendously sane about it, something tremendously sane about our dreams.
We all know this deep in our heart. Though we may be afraid to admit it, afraid to admit it perhaps even to ourselves, we would rather be normal. So we find it often quite difficult to bear the burden of our own divinity. We are continually forced to conceive of ourselves as normal. To place limits upon ourselves.
By basic goodness, is meant to natural goodness, a goodness which is not conditional, which does not depend upon any particular way, It does not depend upon being any particular way. It is not a stance or a belief of any kind. It is not something we contrive to be. I think that it’s not something that we can contrive to be. To be nobody but yourself.
Every stance, every posture and belief we adopt and identify with creates some inner division activating an opposite tendency inside us, the shadow. If we try to be good, we will have to repress what we conceive of as our bad side. Basic sanity is not a stance that creates a shadow. Rather, it is more like the radiance of the sun itself, unconditional, because it is beyond both our attempts to be good and the shadow these attempts create. This is, I think, what Paul Tillich talks about, the courage to be.
To be nothing but yourself. I get that this is what it might mean to be an authentic being, to be in tune with who you in fact are beyond all your contrivances, beyond all types of concepts of normality, all social pressures, the cultural conditioning which try to make us everybody else, simply to be what one is in spite of the inner and outer demands to be someone else. It’s a difficult battle that we have to fight, but to believe that this is the ultimate way to be happy, the ultimate way to be sane. I think we all know this to some degree, I think, don’t we? Okay.
He said so. I think that we have to remind ourselves, we have to train ourselves, we have to encourage others somehow. And we have to acknowledge, I think, others when they are struggling to be themselves. Delight in it, you know, It’s a difficult task, I think, to go beyond all your conditioning and to try to abide in your unconditioned basic goodness.
Another one of the great Indian masters by the name of Asaṇga. He tries to describe how this basic goodness, this Buddha nature, is obscured by our disturbing patterns, our various conditions. Patterns are conditioned modes of reacting as opposed to spontaneity, as opposed to response in the context of the present moment. We react out of habitual ways of being, ways that we’ve operated through similar situations in the past. We project the present situation reminds us of past situations.
So rather than dealing with the new situation anew for the first time as if it never had happened, we react in terms of the ways I reacted to similar situations in the past. And they’re never quite appropriate, never quite on the mark because it’s always dealing with not the present situation, but the remembrance of past situations similar to that. So anyway, these patterns, how these various patterns, but especially our afflictive emotions, desire, hatred, etc, how they obscure this unconditioned basic goodness. And he uses a series of similes, the way to describe this obscuring quantity. It’s almost like we have to have faith, almost blind faith in a way.
But there are these moments of inspiration, aren’t there? When it’s enough to be alive, when it’s enough to be who you are, nothing more needs to be added. So we catch, as we’ve spoken of previously, we do catch the kinds of glimpses, and then we have to put a great deal of emphasis and focus upon those moments, those peak experiences. Because generally it’s obscured from us. There’s something within my mind which is hidden like the sun behind clouds, which only comes out behind the clouds for brief instances from time to time once in a while, unbidden and quite often unnoticed, but felt perhaps at some level of our being, but generally obscured.
It’s there within our own mind. Describing this. A Buddha in a muddy lotus. Honey covered by bees, grain in its husk, gold in a trash heap, treasure hidden beneath the earth, a bean in its pod, a statue wrapped in dirty rags, a future king in the womb of an ugly woman, a precious object buried in the ground. Similarly, the element of one thus gone, that’s an epithet of the Buddha, that is the essence of a Buddha, abides in all beings, obscured by adventitious stains of afflicted emotions.
In Hīnayāna, in Buddhism, overall division of Buddhism is into the lesser, or what I call the narrow vehicle, and the mahayana, the greater vehicle, or what I call the universal vehicle. So those are the two overall divisions of Buddhism, hinayana and mahayana, lesser vehicle and greater vehicle. In the Hīnayāna, the emphasis is on acknowledging our confusion. In the Mahāyāna, we acknowledge that we are Buddha, an awakened one, and act accordingly, even though all kinds of doubts and problems might arise. In the scriptures, taking the bodhisattva vows and walking on the bodhisattva path is described as being the act of awakening, bodhi, or basic intelligence.
Becoming awake involves seeing our confusion more clearly. We can hardly face the embarrassment of seeing our hidden hopes and fears, our frivolousness and neuroses. It is such an overcrowded world, yet it is a very rich display. The basic idea of that, if we are going to relate with the sun, we must also relate with the clouds that obscure the sun. So the bodhisattva relates positively to both, the naked sun and the clouds hiding it.
But at first the clouds, the confusion, which hide the sun are more prominent. When we try to disentangle ourselves, the first thing we experience is entanglement. When we begin to look and begin to search, the first thing we see is our confusion. The foundation of the path is acknowledging our basic goodness, having this confidence, this conviction throughout all our confusion. If we did not possess basic sanity, we would not be able to appreciate the possibility of growth.
If we did not have basic sanity, we would not be able to appreciate the possibility of growth for another way of being. That’s some kind of indication. Even the aspiration, this driving force toward solving our problem is an indication of our basic sanity. Maybe I don’t know if that makes sense. To work towards that end, there’s some kind of longing to go home, to find some kind of rest.
If we didn’t have this basic instinct, this basic sanity, this unconditioned goodness about us, We would accept our lot in life as it were. Life is a bitch and then you die. And that would be that, but we don’t. So in journey, in this drive to become awake, what appears most initially is how very much asleep we are. To become clear, what appears initially is our confusion.
That makes sense. I mean, that’s But we shouldn’t allow it to discourage us. We want to go home. So we have to begin again and again to go home. Wander lies, sweep chips and bones crumbling, left alone.
Wander, lies, chips and bones crumbling, left alone, to begin again, to begin again, home. So so I’ll get a cup of tea.