Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Chögyam Trungpa’s verse — “a crow is black because the lotus is white; ants run fast because the elephant is slow” — Ven Jampa Gendun builds a liberating argument: our confusion is relative, not absolute. In this 21-minute talk, he traces the psychological root of suffering to the habitual belief that we are fundamentally worthless, drawing on Lama Yeshe and Krishnamurti to show how this self-image is a construction we mistake for bedrock reality. He then turns to Buddha nature: we cannot own or possess our basic goodness, only live out of it, with renunciation framed as releasing the ego’s urge to control what lies beyond its domain. The session closes with a preview of an upcoming teaching on Tsongkhapa’s “leisure and fortune.” Accessible to anyone exploring Buddhist psychology and the nature of mind.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 H and M of B 1992 06 17.mp3
UUID: 8fc99f4f-8cf7-48ef-9911-0fb615a9f9be
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-06-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 21.3 minutes
Words: ~2,464
There’s a psychiatrist sitting in the chair, and the client sits up off the couch and he says, I said, I don’t understand why nobody likes me. What the hell is the matter with you? Can’t your hair take the wax out of your ears? So somehow, you know, creating situations which confirm our conceptions about ourselves, our various patterns. You know, we’re very much like a person standing out in the rain, crying because they’re getting wet, and they don’t quite know why.
And all our world begins and ends with the limiting conception of ego in isolation from reality. In other words, it’s even difficult for us to feel or imagine that there’s another way of being and that we can change. You know, it’s difficult for us to feel that there’s another way of being, That there might be This is all that we know, and we think this is all there is. It’s difficult for us to feel the possibility of another way of being, another And even that we could change. You know, at best we just think I can use I can do a cosmetic job on who I am at present.
Put a little makeup on, adjust the, you know, kind of round off some of the corners so it doesn’t hurt so much. The main dealing, the problem. What is the problem? It is the ordinary recognition that I am poor man, poor woman. Do you understand?
This is Lama Yeshe. His picture is on the left of the Buddha inside that case. He is the founder of Buddha House. The main dealing, the problem, what is the problem? It is ordinary recognition that I am a poor man, poor woman.
Do you understand? Perceiving, holding as poor one, poor object, poor quality, and perceiving also such poor acting, ugly, having lower opinion of our body, lower opinion of our quality. That is the worst symptom to be healthy, to liberate it. That is the main dealing, to eradicate, to cut. As long as you decided, having preconception that I am the self pity one, you decided, you decided already that you are the bad guy.
You already decided. So when you decided you are a bad guy, you always do bad actions. Anyway, I’m worthless. I’m a bad guy, so I do bad one. Of course, that’s the way it is.
It’s true. And our life becomes a self fulfilling, self defeating prophecy. Buddhism is not asking us to believe in some kind of dogma, but it is asking us to be open to the possibility that we could mistaken about ourselves, to allow that crack of doubt to appear in the wall of ego. That maybe I’m not quite who I conceive of myself to be. And I begin to at least soften that rock hard belief about who I am in this negative self image that we may be carrying, that we may be basing our life upon at present, that we could be mistaken about ourselves.
And by mistaken about ourselves, I mean about the basic quality of who or what I am. I am not my parent. I am not my ego image. I am not any of the concepts that I have about myself. I am not any of the concepts that I have about myself.
That’s the reality. There’s a verse by Chögyam Trungpa, a past Tibetan master who lived in the United States, talking about the relative qualities and at the same time pointed to something unconditioned. He says, A crow is black because the lotus is white. Ants run fast because the elephant is slow. Buddhas are profound.
Sentient beings are confused. So the blackness of a crow only has meaning in comparison to the whiteness of a lotus. The quickness of an ant only has meaning in comparison to the slowness of an elephant. Our confusion that we conceive of ourselves as having only has meaning in comparison to the profundity, the clarity of Buddhists. But this is only relative to them.
And we’re not absolutely confused. Now we do have problems, And compared to Buddhas, we are confused, but we’re not absolutely confused, only relatively so. But we conceive of ourselves to be absolutely confused. That somehow our confusion is absolute and that our confusion is inherent within us. But our confusion is neither inherent nor absolute.
If profundity of the Buddhas did not exist, our confusion would not exist. We wouldn’t be confused. The existence of these two are mutually interdependent. If there’s no wisdom, there’s no ignorance. If there’s no ignorance, there’s no wisdom.
So compared to Buddhas, perhaps we are confused. But if there were no Buddhas, there would be no question about ourselves being confused. We would not have a conception of ourselves. There would be no conception of confusion. There would be no conception of this quality, of this continuum of confusion wisdom.
It simply wouldn’t exist. Buddhas are simply individuals who have removed their very subjective emotions from their mind, the various patterns from their mind. When they removed these patterns from their mind, they did not cease to exist. They were never their patterns. We also are not our patterns, these various reoccurring modes of thinking, communicating.
I compare myself with the saint, the master. This is Krishnamurti. I compare myself with the saint, the master, the great musician, the man who knows, the man who has arrived. In this comparison I find myself wanting and insufficient. I have no talent.
I am inferior. I have not realized. I am not, and that man is. So out of our measurement and comparison comes the enormous cavity of emptiness and nothingness. And the flight from this cavity is fear, and the fear stops us from understanding this bottomless pit.
And so we have found along the line, somewhere along the line we have found ourselves wanting, somehow insufficient, somehow unworthy. And all our neurotic needs, all our dependency patterns arise, and we hold to the self image that we have of ourselves as absolute, and we identify it as the real me. This is who I really am. This is I really can’t change. I wouldn’t be me any longer if I were to change.
And there’s a fear about not being me. And it stops you from understanding this bottomless pit, because there’s something unknown which cannot be made into a thing to be brought under ego’s control. There’s something within us which lies out of the domain of ego, something which is not conditioned by patterns, like the depths of the ocean. It is not moved, is not disturbed the waves on its surface. So somehow it’s understood as wisdom, and it’s felt as love and compassion.
And it’s experienced as some sort of exuberance, some sort of aliveness. And it’s expressed as creative activity. So it’s no thing in itself. And we can’t own our basic goodness. It cannot be another possession of ego.
We can’t control it. We can only be our basic goodness. We can only live out of our basic goodness. You think you can take — again, Chögyam Trungpa — you think you can take a little bit, a little pinch of basic goodness and keep it in your pocket. So the idea of privacy begins to creep in.
That is the point at which you need renunciation. Renunciation is giving up the temptation to possess basic goodness. It is necessary to give up a localized approach, a provincial approach, and to accept a greater world. We cannot own our basic goodness. We cannot own our Buddha nature.
That is to say that the ego can never own our basic goodness, our Buddha nature. But we have to, as Śāntideva says, try to renounce the temptation to do so. It is there, but it can never be a possession. We can never make it simply into another object of our manipulation, another something to put in our collection, another specimen. We can the point I’m trying to get across is that we can only be our basic goodness.
We can only live out of our basic goodness. We can only express our basic goodness, our Buddha nature. It’s something that we can only live out. We cannot control it. When I say we, obviously, I’m talking about bringing the basic goodness into the domain of ego.
You know, it is as if, you know, there’s this tremendous psychic world within outside of ourselves. And we’ve carved out a little bit of territory in the corner here. We put this huge wall out a fear of an open fluid way of relating. And we’re trying to secure the ego in space and time. And we keep going through these same repetitive patterns in this small corner of this vast potentiality of our psychic world.
And within the psychic world lies our Buddha nature, our basic goodness, our basic sanity. We can only act out of that. There is a great temptation to try to bring it under control, to manipulate it, to secure it, to try to figure it out, to stay on top of it. But in the end all we can do is trust in it and live out of it. We can’t control it.
So we I don’t know if I’m making sense. Am I? This takes a lot of nerve to trust, doesn’t it? What is the difference between a madman and a and a Buddha? We have to believe in ourselves.
We have to commit ourselves to becoming more and more of who we really are. There’s something about we have to commit ourselves to that part of ourselves which we can only perhaps intuit, which we can only from time to time catch a glimpse of, some kind of experience of. So there’s something very wonderful within ourselves, something which is beyond our imagination, which is beyond our conception, which is the ground of our being, And beyond ego’s ground, have all these habitual patterns, these reoccurring neurotic ways of thinking, communicating, behaving, these repetitive dead, self absorbed, self limiting, self confining walls that we have built for ourselves. That there is a more basic ground to our being than within ourselves. I hope trying to recognize the moments that we experience, when we’re able to find our basic nature expressed and begin to believe in ourselves beyond our present conception of ourselves.
Cease trying to confirm the patterns as only who we are and only who we can become. To have almost a certain amount of faith in one’s basic goodness and the possibility of another order of being, even though we cannot at present even begin to conceive of it. To try to live out the answer of the question of what it means to grow, to live out of that answer, because the answer is there residing within yourself. How do we you know, we have this basis of transformation even though perhaps we don’t believe. You know, it’s almost, I guess, you know, there’s a certain stage when someone realizes emptiness.
They have a realization of emptiness that things do not inherently exist. That things still appear to inherently exist. They still exist. They still appear to objectively exist from their own side. They still appear that way to the mind.
But at one part of the mind, the objects are still appearing that way. But another part of the mind understands very deeply that this appearance is merely that appearance and it’s a false appearance. So it no longer succumbs to this appearance. It has enough confidence and conviction in its understanding. The belief is penetrated so deep that it no longer accedes to that appearance.
So if we can, though we appear to be limited beings with all our hang ups, with our wrong views, with all our neuroses, with all our confusion, our insufficiencies, our worthlessness, though it still appears, always appearing, always appearing, we no longer accede to that appearance. We don’t allow that appearance to run our life because somehow we’ve we have felt in a very deep level another possibility. We feel very deeply that there’s some sort of goodness about ourselves and we want to act out of that. And we no longer allow that appearance to run our lives. We no longer allow that appearance to overwhelm us.
We try our best. There are times we fail, but that’s okay. We still try to be all that we can be in spite of what part of ourselves keeps telling ourselves. We simply no longer allow it to affect us, you know, that constant chatter, the constant belief, that constant appearance. We have this opportunity, this chance.
So now we’re moving. Trying to I think I’m treading water here. So perhaps we have is develop this determination and grow. And it’s based upon a deeply felt conviction that there is something within us which is very precious and which is the source of sanity, the source of all enlightened qualities, the source of an optimal mode of being, of the solution to our problems, the answer to our questions. Maybe it’s not apparent, as I mentioned, but we begin to create some small crack of doubt in this wall, in the prism of ego, that there is another possibility of change.
Then begin to understand that we have all of the necessary conditions, that we have a chance to change. I don’t know if she’s going or not. The basis for transformation. The basis for transformation. And then we have all the necessary conditions.
As Tsongkhapa says in his text, line, Leisure and fortune are difficult to find. Leisure and fortune. So that’s going to be what we’re going to be talking about next time. That we have there’s nothing lacking either externally or internally. You know, again, we have a conception, another wrong belief, where we devalue, we overlook, we ignore, we miss focus our attention as if we’re waiting for Godot, we’re waiting for somebody to tell us it’s okay to grow.
I give you permission, I give you this diploma. That you have all the conditions. It’s as if it needs to be pointed out to us. What are you lacking? What are you waiting for?
What is it that you need which isn’t there? It’s as if we’re waiting for permission, waiting for some unknown factor X which needs to be added before I can get on with growth, get on with growing. But there’s nothing lacking. And this is what we’re going to be pointing out, I guess, next week. Maybe we’ll stop there.
So if you’d like to get a cup of tea. Thank you. Yeah.