Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a passage from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet — “try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms” — Ven Jampa Gendun frames the Buddhist path as a response to suffering rather than a search for easy comfort. In this 46-minute talk, he broadens that inquiry from personal relief to universal compassion, citing Śāntideva: no one wants to suffer, so all suffering must be addressed. The session then turns to the Wheel of Life and the twelve links of dependent origination, with extended attention on the first link, misknowledge — illustrated through an analogy of panic at a cliff edge and a comic strip about a student locked into a “C-grade” self-image. The talk closes with dependent arising as the foundation for understanding how present awareness can reshape future experience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 H and M of B 1992 09 16.mp3
UUID: 666c3fed-4931-4507-8d65-eb32c81e9cd6
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-09-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.0 minutes
Words: ~5,151
In touch with some of our our fundamental feelings about what it is to lead a worthwhile life and what it means to feel good about yourself. I’d to read a quotation from it’s a collection of letters written by an Austrian poet by the name of Rainer Maria Rilke, who did most of his writing at the beginning of the of this century. And these are a collection of letters that he wrote to a young poet, letters to a young poet. And he’s talking about patience. He’s talking about, Our questions are more important than our answers, but it’s difficult to live with questions.
We want to They involve some sort of tension. There’s some uneasiness, some sort of uncomfortableness. But out of this uncomfortableness, this tension, there’s synthesizes some sort of path, some sort of way, perhaps unbeknownst consciously to ourselves. Some sort of transformation takes place through questioning process and living with the question. But it’s our questions are perhaps more important than our answers.
And it’s the burning questions which will bring about burning answers, will bring about radical transformations in our lives. He’s talking Rilke is talking to this young this young poet. And I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with every unresolved with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which would not be given to you now, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now.
Perhaps then someday perhaps then someday far in the future you will gradually without even noticing it live your way into the answers. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating, forming as an especially blessed and pure way of living. Train yourself for that, But take whatever comes with true trust, with great trust. And long as it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself. Living with our questions, some people perhaps are more in tune with their questions or the questions are perhaps more critical, you know, at some point in their life.
I think we have to acknowledge the fact that we don’t come to this path, this searching, this exploring, this questioning process voluntarily. There is probably a high degree of sensitivity to pain over the course of our lives. Some great suffering has occurred and it is a need to resolve the question of suffering that we search for some answer. And sometimes we get impatient with ourselves and we get impatient with perhaps the types of answers that we’re finding. But the issue is not to feel comfortable again, but to live the question until you find yourself living your own answer, something which you uniquely evolved for yourself, some path which has emerged from a very deep part of your own being.
So in this process of reorientation is redirecting ourselves toward looking and searching out the questions within the innermost of our being. The inner focus of our life becomes Buddha and the Buddha within inside of ourselves. This is our answer to the most fundamental questions of the nature of the human dilemma we call Buddha. We try to give it expression as a basic fundamental solution to our problem. And the way that we begin to evolve the solution, the way we begin to answer the question is by means of Dharma, that which helps us to actualize Buddha, helps us to actualize the solution of becoming a healthy, loving, sane human being.
And this is done in the spiritual context of a in the social context of a spiritual community. Those who who share in our dilemma, those who are like minded and are in themselves carrying on their journey. And maybe we can You know, think everyone is on a journey as Rinpoche mentioned last night that the past Buddhists the past students become the future Buddhists and the there’s a there’s a sharing. It’s as if we’re all on a long journey while climbing a mountain and while we’re holding on to individuals who are above us pulling us up, we have to turn and pull those who are below us, helping them up and together solving the problem of suffering in our lives. And we try to raise the level of our motivation such that we’re doing it not just for ourselves, which perhaps is one of the reasons we never find the answers to our problems, that we never live out the question.
But that we we begin to broaden our question as to how can we in suffering, not just my own suffering, but the suffering of the general condition of wherever there is misknowledge, wherever there is self centeredness, wherever there is wrong beliefs and mistaken assumptions, some inappropriate way of life, some unskillful way of being. You know, whatever lends itself to feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness and frustration and disappointment or inauthenticity, fragmentation, alienation, all of these qualities which beset us and everyone else. You know, as Śāntideva says in the book called Engaging in the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, it’s not a question of whose suffering. No one wants to suffer. As long as suffering exists, it must be eliminated.
To ask the question whether it’s my suffering or another’s suffering is to miss the point. Raising a level of motivation such that we’re going to develop the skills and the ability and the the means of helping to solve others, solve their problems of suffering. So that we can end suffering. You know, taking a universal responsibility, a universal viewpoint as a means of living up, living into living into the answer of our own question. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving and 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’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving in the other perfection, 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, and the highest assembly. And the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
We begin by cultivating love and compassion. Let’s choose someone that that we don’t know very well, but that appears very has an attractive appearance to us, but is very much a stranger for us and developing the qualities of compassion and love toward that individual. And then we’ll go on to meditate mindfulness and breathing. And finally we’ll practice again choiceless awareness. And choiceless awareness it’s useful to note this process of noting whatever the mind is involved in initially in the process and mindfulness of breathing.
When as we know when we’re breathing in we note in, breathing out we know that we’re breathing out we note out. In choiceless awareness we allow the mind to become involved in any object that it naturally tends toward. We don’t try to direct or focus the object, the mind on a particular object. We simply allow it to become involved in whatever is most stimulating your environment. It may be an external object, it may be an internal object.
By internal objects I mean it may be a feeling, may be a type of thought, maybe an emotion, whatever. Or an external object, the sound of the door closing, cars going by, the person next to you rustling, moving. Simply note whatever it is and allow the mind to move to whatever object it naturally tends towards. But this time, be aware, Maintain your awareness. And it’s quite helpful to use the process of noting to maintain your awareness.
So if you take a comfortable firm posture and begin by cultivating love and compassion. So let’s choose that stranger, but someone who appears very attractive to us. We have a sense that we could easily come to like. Imagine that person before you, and if you can’t see them, it doesn’t matter. Just feel that such a type of person is before you.
And beginning with the cultivation of compassion towards this person. First with the simple friendly thought, Be nice if you weren’t suffering, you didn’t have any problems. I like that if you were free of all your dissatisfaction. Try to feel that towards this person. And strengthen that.
May you be free of all your difficulties. I wish very much that you didn’t experience any dissatisfaction. I’m going to help you and I’m going to commit myself in whatever way I can to work with you. To help you end your dissatisfaction, to help you to solve your problems. I’m going to take that responsibility.
And the cultivation of love toward this person. It would be wonderful if you were happy. I’d like to very much to see you smile and be happy. May you be happy. I wish very much for your happiness and your well-being.
Going help you, work with you to find happiness, commit myself to your well-being. The way I’m going to express that commitment to you at this present moment is through my meditation. I developed in myself my skills and my potential to be able to ultimately help you in a significant way. And then bring the mind to the breath. It’s easy, gentle, in a natural of the breath.
Helpful. You use the counting and noting. This discussion is the culmination of the section on karma, actions as causes and the results. This represents the full picture of the result of the product of all our various actions. The ego empire, we’ve been looking.
This is iconographic representation of the ego empire, usually called the wheel of life. Anyway, at its hub and it’s being driven by, that which keeps it turning, keeps cyclic existence perpetuating, keeps our neurotic compulsive patterns in movement, is the three fundamental afflictive emotions of attachment and hatred, but mainly that of ignorance or misknowledge as I usually call it. And then the next concentric circle denotes the passing away and rebirth into new realms of existence according to the types of actions one side has accumulated, the variables which determine the situation patterning. And then the next concentric circle of the six realms of the desire realm, six levels of the desire realm, which we talked about last week. And then now we’re going to talk about the outermost circle, which depicts the mechanism by means of which the ego is continually being recreated, by means of which is being continually reconfirmed.
How we reconfirm our reality and its ego and its fantasy, the fantasy world and ego. The twelve links of dependent origination. So this is the process of compulsive rebirth under the control or the influence of action, emotions and karma. Emotions and karma. So there are twelve links which we’re going to look at.
Maybe I’ll just read them all to give you some idea. Beginning with basic misknowledge or ignorance. Out of basic misknowledge we engage in action. That’s the second karmic formations. We create action formations, latencies within the mind, which is the third link of dependent origination.
That is a consciousness which is imprinted or coded with these latencies, which leads to the fourth name and form essentially body and mind, which leads to the fifth, sixth sense faculty, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mental sense faculty. We’re going to go through these in detail, which leads to the seventh, the sixth contact, the coming together of objects, sense faculties, consciousness, which leads to the seventh, feeling, pleasurable, unpleasurable, neutral feeling, which leads to the eighth craving, which leads to the ninth grasping, which leads to the tenth coming to be, which leads to the eleventh birth, which leads to the twelfth, and the final outcome, aging and death. And then the process begins again. So the very first link, the initiator, the foundation of all our problems, ego based existence, of the ego empire, of all neurotic compulsive patterns is basic misknowledge, usually called ignorance. So it’s the first in these twelve links of dependent origination.
So misknowledge is depicted as a as a blind man. You can’t see it. Maybe that tells you something. you’ll need to take my word on it. A depicted as a blind man.
So it is, we’ve talked a little bit about ignorance and misknowledge previously. We’re going to talk about misknowledge a great deal in the future when we when we take up the third fundamental of the path, the awakening mind and how ignorance, the nature of ignorance, the nature of misknowledge and the necessary antidote to develop to overcome ignorance or misknowledge, that is the wisdom understanding emptiness or the wisdom understanding selflessness. So when we talk about emptiness and selflessness in the third fundamental of the path, the awakening mind, we’re going to go into more detail about what the nature of ignorance or misknowledge is. But here, just more or less giving some rough approximations. It is a sense of absence of precision, a lack of an unclarity.
It is a cloudiness, some kind of obscuration. And it’s experienced as some kind of confusion or bewilderment. So it has this feeling of cloudiness and precision and misclarity. It is a type of reoccurring pattern within the mind which tends to obscure our ability to see things as they are. And we experience it as confusion or some sort of panic, some sort of bewilderness.
Confusion. So it’s analogous, trying to get a sense of the bewildering quality of this knowledge. It’s exponential quality as opposed to psychological. How we actually experience. It is analogous to trying to get some feel for it.
You’re walking along very peacefully and unselfconsciously And suddenly you find yourself next to a cliff, very close to the edge. And basically nothing’s changed. The ground is is still as firm as it ever was. Your legs are still as functional as they ever were, still steady. But But still you panic, that there’s some kind of sense that there’s a vague feeling that you don’t quite know how to conduct the situation.
That the situation may take you over. It may overwhelm you. A sense of there’s a high degree of unmanageability which is threatening you, which is presented to you. Like you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this sense, but anyway, like the sense that the universe may swallow you up. That if you make a mistake, your will might fall apart.
This this kind of vague uneasiness, bewilderment at some deep level. But you have to get it right, you have to do the right thing. If you goof it up, things are you know, your world could fall apart, it could be lost. And you’re following a struggle to cope, to secure one’s position, to stay on top of it all, it’s like treading water. In a sense, if I stop treading I’m going to sink.
I can’t quite relax, I can’t let go, I have to keep fighting, not quite sure what. There’s a certain bewilderment, an irrational panic about oneself in the way that one is experiencing one’s situation, one’s life, one’s reality. It it’s moment by moment, it becomes necessary to recreate the ground upon which you stand, secure your position. You know, you try to You want to make the best of the situation and then you want to cling to it. You want to ignore the possibility that it may be possible to relax, ignoring quality.
That you do not have to keep recreating the ground upon which you stand, that the ground of being the ground of being is more fundamental than the ground of ego, that we could in fact let go and still be. That there’s an unexamined assumption that to give up the struggle is to lose control, to to become mindless, to become powerless, to become vegetative. You know, they would have to feed you intravenously. To be taken over, to to be lost, to be be no more, to be you know, it’s too painful. We don’t we don’t want to look.
We don’t want to examine what it might be if we let go, if we see, if we gave up the struggle, the burden of ego. It’s too it’s too frightening to look. So we choose to ignore it. Miss knowledge is bliss from ego’s point of view. This ignoring quality, this inability to see things as they are and almost an unwillingness.
So we continue to struggle against situations which are in fact our own projections reflecting back at us, bouncing back at us. You know, we begin to selectively impose patterns and cultivate an unawareness to any factors which somehow don’t fit in with our patterns, with our expectations in order to gain a sense of being able to predict. And we try to slow the situation down, we try to freeze it so that we can gain control of it, so that we can manipulate it and we divorce ourselves and all the things about us from the context in which they exist. We see them as isolated entities in ourselves and individuals and we hold to them as isolated entities objectively existing in order to be able to possess, to to exclude and control the things about it. So you know, some of the feeling tone about ignorance, misknowledge, the feeling tone, you know, we’re going to, as I mentioned, we’re going to look at ignorance or misknowledge in a great more detail as far as in terms of its antidote of wisdom.
But here just to get a sense, some kind of feeling, some of its fundamental characteristics. For example, grasping at a self which is singular, unchanging, independent, when in fact the self is multiplicity, when in fact the self is continually changing, when in fact the self is interdependent, dependent. The fundamental qualities of ignorance. It’s basically what we call an it’s a epistemological error with respect to the ontological status of the self. And we a misknowing as to the way the self exists, but it has all of these senses of feeling quality about it.
So there’s a, you know, to give you. There’s a comic strip which like a comic tragedy. Illustrates superficially the mundane implications of this knowledge operating our everyday life. And again, you can’t see this, so Anyway, I’ll explain. There’s three boxes and there’s two boys that are walking home from school and the first boy has just received an examination paper back from his teacher and he’s looking at it and he’s saying, the first boy is saying to the second boy, that new teacher really did a number on me.
In the second box he says, I thought I’d get a B on that test and he gave me a C. In the third box he says, how did he know I was a C student? So the boy tried to pretend that he was somebody other than who he really was. The teacher saw through his deception. He could fool for a little while, but there was something about him, something inside of maybe.
Something like some kind of which is, you know, kind of oozed out of his skin. I mean basically the guy’s a c guy, he’s a c student. And he could, he tried to appear like a b student. He tried to pretend like he was a b student, but you can only give up that pretense for so long, right? So finally the teacher was able to see through his pretense.
The C-ness quality was just all over him, there for anyone to see. And you know, he’s always been a know, essentially he’s a c grade person, there’s something about him. He’s always been a c grade person, he’s always going to be a c grade person and he’s going to get a c grade job, marry a c grade wife, have c grade children and teach them how to be c grade people And his life becomes a self fulfilling, self defeating prophecy and a c grade one at that. That’s his essentially essential nature at work.
We all of us are involved in this in some way about who we believe ourselves to be, something which is independent, unchanging essence about ourselves. So that’s the the that’s the quality of ignorance. It ignores the possibility of change. It obscures the possibility of seeing that we could change. So because it doesn’t fit in with our pattern in wanted to protect to secure the self in space and time to do it resistance against an open fluid way of relating with ourselves in the world we are to.
We want to know who we are. It may not be much but it’s home, that kind of attitude. So in order to predict, order to secure, in order to be able to control, affirm who we are without question, we really become attached, we fixate and upon this specific identity and we ignore anything which would contradict that identity. We cultivate an unawareness to anything which doesn’t fit into our preconceptions of who we are, our identity and we remain stuck. Nothing within the whole stream of mental and physical events that constitutes our body and mind has the quality of an unchanging independent self.
Upon examination we will never find such a quality, such an element, such a factor. But it is our persistent effort to grasp at the existence of such a self that makes the body and mind a constant stream of suffering. This is the basic fundamental problem of misknowledge, misconceiving the nature of the self. So this is the first link in these twelve links of dependent origination, fundamental misknowledge, the source of all our problems, of all our compulsive neurotic patterns, which are simply are playing out of this fundamental first step in this process. So it the first in a series of correlated conditions culminating in a particular happening.
We are happening, our reality is a type of happening. You know, it’s the first step on a journey toward perfect complete peerless ego-hood. The first is like the first piece in a puzzle. The first piece in a puzzle determines what the next piece that can fit into the puzzle will be, which determines the next piece, which determines the next piece. So the very first piece, the shape of the first piece that can be fitted in, it will ultimately determine the final picture.
The very shape of the very first piece determines the ultimate outcome. And this very first piece in our particular puzzle of the ego empire is misknowledge as opposed to wisdom. So everything everything fits together and this is the idea. Everything that happens is appropriate to what has gone before. Everything that we experience, everything who we are and what we have is appropriate.
It couldn’t have been any other way. It fits. Discernible variables obey natural laws bringing predictable outcomes. Discernible variables obey natural laws bringing predictable outcomes. It fits, it’s appropriate.
You know if you throw a brick straight up in the air and you don’t move, it’s going to come back down in your head. You you shouldn’t be surprised that it does. It comes down when it hits you on the head, there’s no one out to get you. The brick is simply following a natural law, the known law of gravity. It’s appropriate to what has gone before.
Depending upon this, then this happens. Depending upon that, then this arises. This is a natural unfolding, an outflowing from what has gone before. These twelve links of dependent origination, they’re not a causal chain in the strict sense of the word, like in mechanistic physics, like billiard balls, one billiard ball hits the next billiard ball, that moves and causes that the next ball, they hit the next ball, the next ball hits the next ball. This serial chain of causation, it’s not quite like that.
For example, the fourth link, we pass through we’re going to explain all of these. The fourth link is called name and form. In other words, mind and body. Mind and body does not cause the fifth link, that is sense faculties, eye sense faculty, nose sense faculty, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mental sense faculty, does not call them, cause them in a sense of a linear causation. It creates the conditions necessary for them to arise.
Without mind and body then there wouldn’t be the prerequisite conditions, the circumstances for the sense faculties to arise. So the body and mind are a prerequisite condition without which sense faculties could not develop. As we talked about over the course of this last weekend, talked about a great deal about dependent arising, dependent arising. This is one of the This was like This is called the Buddhist slogan. The Dalai Lama called it the Buddhist slogan.
They used to have some badges printed up called dependent arising. It’s like the it was one of the most fundamental doctrines of Buddhism, one of the most fundamental discoveries that the Buddha made. This, the twelve links of dependent origination are like an example, a subsection of the overall teaching on dependent arising. The Buddha said, when this is present, that comes to be. From this arising, from the rising of this, that arises.
When this is absent, that does not come to be. On the cessation of this, that ceases to be. This may sound simple minded, but it’s extremely profound. It’s something we continually forget. And all of karma, all of this teaching on twelve links of dependent origination, all of the teachings of dependent arising are simply ways of amplifying, exemplifying examples of this simple idea that in dependence upon this, this will come to be.
If this does not happen, then that will not happen. So in the case of dependent origination, we are discussing, what we are discussing is actually the whole process of karmic development without particular reference as to which developments are good or bad. We discussing the karmic situation as it is, what we call this, the situational pattern. The evolution of our present situation. Our present situation has evolved and there are discernible variables.
in dependence upon that variable being present, we are now experiencing this. in dependence upon that variable being absent, we now are not experiencing that. The evolution of the present situation, everything happens in the present moment. The potential of the future exists in the present moment and you cannot have a pre arranged future. It has not happened yet.
It is still open ended, and existing only as potential in the present moment. On the other hand, it is the past which presents us with the present moment. So determination, predestination goes that far. It only comes up to the present moment. The past has been determined, but it doesn’t go beyond the present moment.
The future exists only as probabilities, not certainty. It’s open to adjustment. For example, a baby in its crib did not choose to be in that crib nor did it choose all the various things which it finds in the crib, the rattle, the doll, the blocks. That is its given situation. But within the context of that present situation, that given, it has a choice about which of those to play with or which of those not to play with.
That’s the degree of freedom which is able to exercise. So therefore, that is to say in dependence upon its awareness. Without awareness there’s no freedom. There’s only the reoccurring patterns playing themselves out in this repetition. There’s only determination.
Therefore, making effort in the spiritual path, making effort in meditation and the various practices is important because it’s helpful because it is a way of learning about our present situation and relating to it properly, appropriately, skillfully. Like we’re learning about life. We’re learning about our present situation. We’re learning about our mind. And the more that we learn, the more that we’re aware, the more that we’re able to make skillful choices in the type of life that we want to live.
Different is as we increase our awareness and with the increase of awareness our ability to shape our future. There’s no one organizing the situation for us. All the various situations we experience arise in particular unique ways, you know, in dependence upon appropriate causes and conditions. So the potential for these ways, these causes and conditions exist within the present moment. So we don’t have to remain victims of the past.
By working with the present situation we can determine our future and the more we understand our present situation, more we’re aware of it, the more we can determine the quality of our future. And the past is contained within the present moment, therefore it’s workable. We can’t change the past, but we can begin to work with the result of the past which exists within the present moment. We simply have to try to understand our present situation, how it evolved, all the far and near causes and commit ourselves to a skillful way of relating with them and shaping of our destiny. It’s not that we’re seeking to perform perfect actions in a perfect world, but appropriate actions in the way the world actually is, the way the world really is.
Simply beginning to act more appropriate to what is given, the situational pattern. So getting back to the twelve links. in dependence upon the bewilderment of basic misknowledge, this first link in the twelve links of dependent origination, we engage in actions. We engage in actions of either extending or defending the now misconceived self. So out of this misknowledge there is a general misconception as to the nature of the self.
Based upon this misconception as to the nature of the self, we engage in actions of various varieties. Basically, we either extend toward objects which we see as going to enhance the self or we defend against types of objects which we