Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 47-minute talk by reading Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in full, then using it to frame the session’s central theme: the daily, often-unremarked choice between ego-driven habit and what he calls “the path with heart.” A Don Juan quote and a Dalai Lama passage ground his argument that authentic living means closing the gap between inner values and outward behavior, and that personal growth is also a social responsibility. He then works through the third root of the nine-point death meditation — that inner qualities, not wealth or status, sustain us through life’s upheavals — before introducing the Tibetan Wheel of Life and Buddhist cosmology’s six realms of existence. A guided compassion practice and a classic Mahāyāna verse on the mind-made nature of hell close the session. Accessible to newcomers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 H and M of B 1992 09 09.mp3
UUID: a721a445-b3cc-4b87-a622-25dd144a99b0
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-09-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.6 minutes
Words: ~5,165
Come. We begin with reorientating ourselves, redirecting ourselves. Guess reprioritizing our values. Can you hear me in the back okay? Yes.
I thought I’d read a poem. It’s quite a nice poem. It’s by Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets. It’s just four verses long. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
And sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth. Then took the other just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear. Though as for that the passing there had worn them really both about the same. And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first one for another day, yet knowing how ways lead on to way, I doubted that I would ever come back.
I should be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. So what I like to call the choice of the path with heart. In all our day-to-day life, the good times and the not so good. And all the various seemingly insignificant choices that we have to make every day of our life, every certain ways, every moment of our life.
We’re choosing making a choice whether we do it with awareness, whether we do it consciously or not. The choice of the path of heart or a path of growth or a path which is going to extend, support, maintain our problematic patterns, neurotic compulsive patterns which constitute very much our lives. That is to say whether we’re going to choose the path of self centeredness, selfishness, ignorance, attachment, hatred, anger, miserliness, spite, jealousy, all the various factors which we constitute, ego based existence. Whether we’re going to choose the path which is going to lead us to actualize this potential that we’ve been talking about for so many weeks now, this potential to become a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being, a possibility to somehow solve our problems at a very basic level, a more fundamental level than perhaps we normally operate them at. And talking about, know, it’s not so much that we’re going to have a lot of dramatic decisions to be made over the course of our lives.
Life creeps on at its petty pace, and we have infinite number of seemingly petty decisions that need to be made. But over the course of making these seemingly insignificant choices, we create a type of life for ourselves. We create, as it were, a path for ourselves. And the point is if we can maintain some sort of awareness and some sort of mindfulness of the type of person that we would like to become five years from now, ten years from now, and hold this before our mind’s eye as a sort of direction, some sort of guiding principle for our lives by means of which we can use it as a standard for making these seemingly petty, insignificant choices. And one petty, insignificant choice leads into another petty, insignificant choice.
And that opens out to another, and that opens out to another. And it is the consistent choice of the path with heart, the path of growth, the path which is going to lead you to all that somehow you have found valuable, that you find authentic, that you find worthwhile in your life. You know, you autonomously derive values. That which you hold as a priority in your life. So this process of redirecting is getting back in touch with some of our priorities that from time to time that we have all felt, that we have all experienced, are moments when life I think is when we experience the goodness of ourselves and the goodness of life.
And at those moments, those finest of our moments, those noblest of our moments, and holding that value as preeminent, as a guideline for making these seemingly insignificant choices. There’s a quote by Don Juan. Don Juan was, as I mentioned before, a Yaqui Indian, a man of knowledge. And he’s talking to a student Carlos Castaneda. And he said, years ago, I told you that in his day to day life, a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart.
It is the consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace, a pleasure, as he traverses his lane. You know I think a consistent choice of a path to talk. Some kind of, there’s some type creative tension between our noblest ambition, our highest priority, conscience you might say, in the way that we’re expressing our day to day behavior. If there’s some kind of conflict, there’s some kind of rupture in our being, there is always a sense of tension, some sort of creative tension.
And it is the authentic response to this creative tension out of which emerges a path. And if trying to become whole, and as I mentioned before, this word whole and holy have the same root. Trying to heal the rupture, the schism between our most cherished internal values, our noblest dreams, our highest ambitions, the finest parts of ourselves, and our day to day behavior. To feel a sense of authenticity that one is expressing one’s deepest level of being in one’s daily life is a heart of struggle that each of us can can pursue. And we have to carry on this battle every day of our lives.
And how we respond authentically to this tension between who we believe ourselves to be at some very deep level and how we express it in our daily lives. Out of this, the necessity to respond authentically to conscience emerges the path. And perhaps all of great art, great music, great visual arts, literature His response to this seeking to find expression, an authentic response and somehow actualizing in some way in our daily being what in our finest moments we all have some taste of, some sort of experience of doing our peak experiences perhaps. So you know, I think we have to talk in this way. We have to talk together, we have to create an atmosphere, some sort of sacred atmosphere as a means to inspire ourselves and as a place to where we can set aside the normality of the society that we live in.
And if only for a few moments, get in touch with our higher values, our deepest felt aspirations. And in some way, try to integrate, to carry that over, that sense of purposefulness, that sense of the sacred within us into our everyday lives such that, you know, we can we can find our way even in the course of the practical dealings that we have to work with in our, you know, in all our various everyday affairs. Some way we have to find a way to carry over the finest part of ourselves into our everyday life and to lead the type of life that somehow we feel is our own, which is our is our birthright, which is an authentic response to our own unique divinity, the person that we believe ourselves to be. So this is simply a word of encouragement, would say, about these things need to be talked about. They need to be expressed.
This realignment of our allegiance from a life led under the influence of hopes and fears. The hope of gain, the fear of loss, the hope of pleasure, the fear of pain, the hope of praise, the fear of ridicule, the hope of fame, the fear of notoriety, that life, that such a life is at best coping. That’s not satisfactory, that’s not enough. To live, to be born, simply to cope and to die is not to have lived at all. We should find something more in our life than really to cope, to be normal.
We should find some way to express the possibility of our humanity, the possibility of the potential in terms of compassion, in terms of wisdom, in terms of service and responsibility. Our most human value. Then something there is there is not only a sense of having left a worthwhile life, a full and rich life, but indeed we have left the planet a better place. We have made a better world. We have made a contribution.
Our life was useful. It had great meaning. And that’s a very noble calling. That’s a noble very noble calling. I think it’s very worthwhile to lead a life based upon growth, upon a path of heart.
In this way, this is I think what we mean by redirecting of ourselves. In terms of the inner focus of our life, it becomes the Buddha. And I try to emphasize that to become a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being becomes a priority in our life amongst our other priorities. But it does we do give it some space. We devote energy and time.
It becomes as significant as our various other pursuits. This is we need to eat in order to stay alive. We need to nourish the finest parts of ourselves if we’re to really live. And so the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha. And this is actionized by means of the Dharma, which is able to facilitate the expression, to help us to actualize, and to help us to go from attachment to openness, from hatred to love, from self centeredness to other centeredness, from ignorance to wisdom.
Anything which has that key, that ability, that has the power to facilitate growth, that is a direction that we can make use of. Something that we can take recourse to. And the context is within the spiritual community. The support, creation of a social atmosphere where we can give expression to the finest of our humanity. And we try to raise our level of our motivation for doing this, that we’re not seeking specifically to grow for our own needs, for our own ends, but becoming beginning to see ourselves and our conduct and our our way of life in terms of a social awareness.
Beginning to see ourselves as something more than a single entity which we normally conceive of ourselves to be, this skin encapsulated ego. To begin to see ourselves as a greater being of living life. And there’s a quote from perhaps most of you read it. It was in the last Buddha’s newsletter by the Dalai Lama. I’m talking about the necessity to develop a social awareness, taking some universal responsibility.
The purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples, but to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity and love. Every world religion, no matter what its philosophical view, is founded first and foremost on the precept that we must reduce our selfishness and serve others. Then he goes on to say, I often joke that the moon and the stars look beautiful, but if any of us try to live on them, we would be miserable. The blue planet of ours is a delightful habitat. Indeed, the earth acts like a mother to us all.
Like children, we are dependent upon her. In the face of such global problems as the greenhouse effect and depletion of the ozone layer, individual organizations and single nations are helpless. Unless we all work together, no solution can be found. Our Mother Earth is teaching us a lesson in universal responsibility. I think we can say that because of the lessons we have begun to learn, the next century will be friendlier, more harmonious and less harmful.
Compassion, the seeds of peace, will be able to flourish. I am very hopeful. At the same time, I believe that every individual has a responsibility to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes alone are not enough. We have to assume responsibility.
Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives. So seeing that we as individuals can and must make a difference, and that we can not only change the course of our own lives, but we can have, through the development of our social awareness, have an effect upon those about us. And that even if we have to make that effort, we have to try even in some small way, even through our own individual efforts. And this working out of our own growth and the development seeing ourselves in terms of part of something greater than this isolated ego, which we habitually cling to, and developing a sense of social awareness, and then being able to respond. It is this response, you know, out of the necessity to the mother of invention is necessity.
The greater our awareness and the willingness to take responsibility to that same degree, we will find the resources to respond. We will be able to respond. So as our social awareness grows and the necessity in making these choices of a path with heart becomes more and more paramount in our life, then we will be able to draw, we will be able to actualize all this vast potential which up to now has laid dormant within us all. You know, like this Buddha which I described, this stone Buddha, simply waiting in the jungles of Sri Lanka, waiting with infinite patience to be rediscovered, to be acknowledged. This authentic response to something is our refuge.
This is what’s going to solve our problem, and it’s going to help us to solve the world’s problem. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the highest assembly. By the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. And the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I’m going to continue to a meditation on death. Now in the trying to emphasize the fact that we we develop a mindfulness of death not to simply depress ourselves, but as a means to appreciate our life. You know, all so we don’t We won’t be satisfied with just coping.
And the question of discussing terminal issues gets us very, gets us back to basics. What is most important to me? And not what I’ve been told is important or what I should believe or what others in my life need to believe, but what I feel is right for me. And the question of death, what other is of more importance than what is right for me. It gets us back to the basics of our reality, our very unique reality.
So the purpose for contemplating death is to appreciate our life while we still have it. We’ve been discussing death or contemplating death in terms of what is called the nine-point death meditation. This involves three roots. The death is definite, the time of death is uncertain and what is going to be of benefit to ourselves at that moment. And trying to come to, you know, and again emphasizing the fact that by death, it doesn’t we’re not only talking about that big death at the end of this life, but all the small deaths which occur over the course of our lives.
That death is this radical change of lifestyle at the end here. We have these minor radical changes of lifestyle over the course of our lives. When the whole world is turned upside down, all our values are called into question, when we we simply do not know. There’s a transition. It’s something has ended and the new is yet to begin.
There’s a dying away of the old. So this small death, how how are we going to enter into them? Are we, you know, what will be our attitude toward them? What can be of any benefit over the course of these transitions, these upheaval over the course of our lives? And trying, you know, we’re looking at the fact that no others may in fact love you a great deal, very sincerely want to help you.
But still you have to live through them as your own personal experience drawing upon your own resources, your own development of your attitude, the skills that you’ve developed up to that point. Though you may have gathered together great wealth of material objects, status, power, money, working through these difficulties of what value are they? Can they somehow remove the pain from your mind? Can they give you hope? Can they give you some kind of solid?
All these material things which you’ve gathered together with so much effort over the course of your life. And even all the effort that we expend to beautify our body, that we identify with so closely as our best friend at the moment of our death, even that going to be of no use to us. So the purpose of meditating on this third aspect of the nine-point death meditation is to emphasize the fact is to reorientate ourselves from a life which is based externally to one which at least has a sense of balance between external factors and internal factors bringing about well-being. That our attitude, the skills, our internal skills that we develop are at least as important to a good life as all the things about us. And in fact at the moment of these radical changes in the course of our life, it is these internal values, these skills, these attitudes that we have developed which are going to hold us in good stead, which are going to give us a sense of confidence and trust But I don’t know how things are going to turn out.
You know we can’t foresee the future quite often. We cannot even imagine what the situation may be like a short time in the future when this flux is occurring. But I know I have confidence I’m going to land on my feet. I don’t know what the particular situation may be like or the various conditions, the elements. But I have a sense it’s going to be okay.
And therefore one can enter into it. But we can take some kind of solace in that. You know, maybe we would like to hold on to what has passed, but we accept. And we need not fear the future. There’s a certain sadness for the passing away, but there’s no fear of what the new is set to be.
And we may in fact enter in joyfully into change, We may voluntarily rather than being dragged willy nilly into these difficult situations against our will as it were. We may we may look for them. We may pursue change because of this sense of inner confidence that it’s going to work. Things will go well. So let’s We’re going to begin with cultivating love and compassion.
Then we’ll meditate on a death meditation. We’re going to describe a visualization where we’re going to look at our depth. Then prior to that we’ll do mindfulness of breathing. So if you take a comfortable but firm posture. So let’s begin by developing compassion.
Well develop compassion toward again towards someone you like but not within your intimate circle of friends or loved ones. But someone that you like, that you care about, that’s slightly distant from you, an acquaintance, but that you have a good feeling toward naturally. And imagine that person in front of you. If you can’t see them, it doesn’t matter. Just feel that that person is there.
Begin with development of compassion toward this person. First, with a simple friendly thought, be wonderful if you didn’t have any problem. I like that very much. You didn’t have any difficulty, that’d nice. Just this friendly gentle caring towards this person.
Try to feel that towards this person. And then strengthen that feeling. May you be free of all your difficulties. I wish very much that you weren’t suffering. To take you free of all your difficulties and dissatisfaction.
I wish that very much. And then try to strengthen that again. I’m going to help you and I’m going to commit myself to working with you and your problems, taking responsibility to assist you, to solve your difficulty. I’m going to commit myself to you. And cultivate love toward this person.
First, with the friendly thought, Be nice if you were happy. I like that very much if you were happy. And then strengthen that. May you be happy. I wish you great happiness.
Strengthen that. I’m going to help you. I’m going to take responsibility with for working with you to bring you happiness. I’m going to commit myself to your well-being. And the way I’m going to express that commitment at this very moment is by developing myself through my meditation.
I’m going to do this for you. I’m going to develop my mind, cultivate my mind so I can be of greater benefit to you. And bring your mind to the breath. Be gentle, easy, even, in and out flow of the breath. So this is the I sometimes when I this is like what they call the briefing room for desert storm or something like that.
This is the target men. We’re going to go out there and bomb hell out of them. This is Like a iconographic representation of cyclic existence, what I call the ego empire. The evil empire. The evil empire.
Isn’t that Ronald Reagan said? Guess that’s It was interesting. Remember I guess I was kind of raised on the cold war and I still find it quite When I think about the fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists. So that’s quite amazing. It was always there, the enemy, you know, as it gave the United States a purpose for its existence.
Now it doesn’t quite know what to do with itself, don’t think. So if I mean if the Soviet Union can dissolve overnight without a bullet being shot, then I guess we can do something about this. So we were describing cyclic existence of the ego empire. This is a high-tech high-tech Tibetan visual aid. And we begin in a very concentric circle, we’re just going through and describing them.
And at the center, the very hub of the wheel, that which gives it impetus is this continual reoccurring compulsive patterns that that were bound up in. It are a cock, a snake and a pig. A cock, snake and a pig and a cock is symbolic of desire. The snake hatred. And but most basically the pig.
Don’t know why pigs have them. I think they’re oppressed they’re oppressed class. Anyway, they’re symbolized ignorance for one reason or another. I think there are some very intelligent pigs actually. Anyway, so this whole system is maintained, supported and extended over time through the force of these three main afflicted emotions of desire, hatred and ignorance.
But most basically ignorance and we talked some about ignorance, or I call it misknowledge. I like the word misknowledge, but anyway. We’re going to talk a lot about misknowledge very briefly in this context in terms of these twelve links. That is the way the mechanism how the ego is actually created, you might say. But very much so when we get to the three fundamentals of the path, we’re looking at the three fundamentals of the path.
The determination to be free, the awakening heart, that is the awakening hearts to others, the development of love and compassion, and the third fundamental, the awakening mind, Awakening our mind to reality, seeing deeply into the nature of the self, nature of phenomena. And it is this third path by means of which we overcome our basic ignorance or misknowledge that which is at the root of all of our problems. Mainly we’re trying to overcome what I call epistemological errors, errors in the way we know things. We have some mistaken beliefs and wrong assumptions and mistake, erroneous premises upon which we’re operating our lives. And therefore our actions which are based upon these erroneous premises are inappropriate.
They’re not in accord with the way things are and this there’s some disagreement or discord between our expectations and the actuality and this is experienced as some sort of tension, some sort of level some level of distress, some dis ease. And so we’re going to be talking about ignorance, most a great extent when it comes to the third fundamental awakening mind. So this is what keeps it all going, what keeps it all turning. And then the second concentric circle was simply beings, all the various types of beings moving from one level of existence to another in accordance with their karma and we’ve talked. This is kind of the cOmination of our discussion of karma.
Those various conditioning factors within the mind which determine, which find expression in the various patterns of ways of relating. What we’re slowly, hopefully beginning to get some feeling for is that the world does not exist objectively out there, divorced of our conception of it, independent of our mind. But it is in it involves in mutual co creation with these conditioning factors within our mind. And these conditioning factors are karma, our unique evolutionary history imprinted on our mind stream, which when it comes into contact with the correct condition brings about activates ways of thinking, ways of conceptualizing, ways of viewing. Out of this we begin to organize our universe.
We begin to create constructs. This will determine our experience ultimately. So we’re creating this world moment by moment in which we take so much for granted as being out there very solid and concrete. What kind of world are we creating for ourselves? And this is this third concentric circle which we’re going to discuss tonight.
So according Buddhist cosmology, cosmology is the study of the universe, the nature of the universe. cyclic existence, cyclic existence, the ego empire is reoccurring compulsive patterns which bind ourselves, which constitute our life. The cyclic existence is this system which we find ourselves in due to the force of ignorance essentially. The type of system which has as its initial or primary cause, misknowledge, that type of system as opposed to a type of system which arises out of wisdom or arises out of compassion, but that type of system, this world, this type of world and our relationship to it has three main realms. There is the desire realm, the form realm, and the formless realm.
The form and formless realm are realms which are attained by means of meditative concentration. They are characterized by more and more subtle levels of peace, But they are not satisfactory, completely satisfactory in the sense that when the karmic energy to maintain that state of being is exhausted, then one necessarily has to pass beyond. One has to go into another state. One has to be reborn as it were into another realm. So they may be temporarily satisfactory, but not ultimately so.
So the idea is that anything which is bound by ego, any state within it is not satisfactory. And so we’re trying and developing the determination to be free to ultimately determine to grow beyond ego, to transcend ego, to transcend our neurotic compulsive patterns completely. That even we aren’t trying to become comfortable with our neurosis. That’s not good enough. We’re not trying just to cope to be normal, etc, but we want to be healthy in other words.
So nothing within this system is satisfactory. No matter how comfortable your prison cell might be, it’s still a prison. It’s not all, it’s not freedom, it’s not all of what life could be. So of the three realms, the form and formless realm are attained through meditative concentration. The third realm is called desire realm and that’s where we live, Fullerton.
Can’t quite see but The desire realm. Within the desire realm there are six levels. So we’re talking about the desire realm. Within the desire realm there are six levels. The level of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell being.
So these are actual physical places that one can be born into. Yeah, I don’t want to anyway. Actual physical place that one can be reborn into. And I think we can begin to, at least begin to open our mind to the possibility and loosen up our preconceptions. Well as we as it becomes more and more apparent and as I mentioned, we’ll become visibly so when we talk about awakening our minds to reality.
That the world is an objective concrete world which we take so much for granted isn’t all that objective, isn’t all that concrete. You know, it doesn’t simply stand apart from our own mind which is becoming apparent to contemporary particle physics. You know, if the observed and the observer are somehow independent. But in fact, the mere process of observation interacts with the system, which has great ramifications. The hell realms.
The hell realms are just as real or for that matter just as illusory as the realm, this realm, the human realm that we take so very much for granted, that we are so accustomed to. A quotation I’d like to read. No matter how real a hellish state may seem to those undergoing it, it comes into being solely on account of the self destructive elements within one’s own psyche. In the fifth chapter of his book, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, Śāntideva asked, who intentionally forged the weapons in hell? Who constructed the burning iron floor?
The Buddha taught that all such things arise from an evil mind. Now within within a nightmare or within any dream, that is our reality. It is only the fact that we have another, that we’re a waking reality to come back to, that we dismiss it as being unreal. But if there’s nothing else to come back to, that is our reality. Our dreams only arise.