Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a child-in-a-crib image to ground karma as personal responsibility rather than victimhood, Ven Jampa Gendun gives a 36-minute survey of the entire Buddhist path of awakening. He works through three layers of dissatisfaction — daily physical and mental pain, the subtler suffering of change illustrated by a mountain sun-and-shade story, and the pervasive weight of ego-based existence — before identifying our innate capacity for wisdom and compassion as the basis for transformation. The talk then covers renunciation, bodhicitta (the awakening heart), and opening to others, drawing on a passage from Thich Nhat Hanh on understanding as the root of love, before closing with the rope-mistaken-for-a-snake as a vivid image of how all suffering traces to one linchpin: our misconception of a fixed, independent self.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 TPA 1990 03 18.mp3
UUID: 7f5cf5a4-b9ea-407e-a812-a1a992a53b2a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Path of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1990-03-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 35.8 minutes
Words: ~4,863
Is that we are responsible. That’s what karma is saying. That we are not victims unless we allow ourselves to be victims. That that we have a choice. You know, it’s just that sometimes I use the example of a child in a crib.
The various things that that child finds in the crib, the very fact that that child is in the crib was not his choice, her choice. But he or she has a choice of what they’re going to play with in that crib. This is the idea of what we are now is what we have done. What we do now is what we’re going to become. So this begins to create some kind of urgency.
And also, you know, we are responsible. No one else can do our work for us. No one else can create our karma for us. No one else can develop our mind for us. If we don’t change our mind, what’s going to happen?
And this brings up the whole question of suffering. The developing a sense of confronting our problems. You know, it’s not made to make one to make us any more depressed than perhaps we are are already, but it is to make us begin to look realistically at the quality of our life. And we’re trying to develop this sense of energy that I need to do something to change, to get unstuck. We know we don’t come to this to the path, this exploration, this question freely, but only through deep crisis, through emotional pain, through an important level of a feeling of unmanageability in one’s life.
So the acknowledgment of suffering and the question which many people ask at some point during the course of their life, what is the meaning of all this? What is the meaning of that? What is is all this about anyway? It is a very painful question because it’s usually associated with despair, hopelessness. We don’t know quite where where to go, what to turn to, what to believe in, or in fact there’s anything to believe in.
So in response to this, we can simply try to run away. We can simply try to ignore it, to refuse to admit the high level of dissatisfaction that we might be experiencing. Or we can confront our issues. And it’s this this tension between the need to resolve the tension aroused by this confrontation which is going which is the beginning of the path. You know, the Buddha, he’s he perceived a system that governs people’s lives, and he called this cyclic existence.
And if we want to call it reoccurring compulsive patterns, Our lives are are bounded by reoccurring compulsive patterns. And he said that it is characterized by three marks, Suffering, impermanence, and selflessness, and therefore was dissatisfactory and should be exited from, that we should try to free ourselves from these reoccurring compulsive patterns. There’s all types of ways that we can look at dissatisfaction. You know, I just mentioned the three marks of reoccurring compulsive pattern, ego based existence in terms in terms of dissatisfactory quality of it. In the sense of the suffering of dissatisfaction of suffering, this physical and mental pain.
Every day, we have some physical and mental pain, headaches, toothaches, body aches, depression, anger, anxiety, back pains. But this doesn’t really move us much. We don’t aren’t getting at the nature of our situation. It’s kind of a it doesn’t we’re not looking at it very deeply on the very deep level. There’s we can look at the the the dissatisfaction of change.
And we’re now beginning to look at the situation in perhaps a more deeper level. That is in the nature. It’s not something that we can take an aspirin for. It’s something in the very nature of the way our mind is operating that causes us dissatisfaction. Let’s see.
Yeah. It’s the one one of the illustrations. There’s a long story, but I won’t I won’t be able to we won’t get to the end of the path in this way. I’ll tell you a shorter story. Just as a way of illustrating what we can mean by this quality of the satisfaction of change.
If you’ve ever been up in the mountains and in the mountains, the air is very thin. And due to that, if you’re out in the sun, it’s very harsh. The sun is very harsh. And, you know, you’re out there walking, trekking in the mountains, which I did quite a lot in India, and it gets very oppressive. It’s burning up.
So you go into shade. Now if you’re in the mountains, high up, say, you know, five or six thousand meters, then when you go into shade, And then for this, ask, it’s getting a little chilly. It’s cold. I think I’ll go back out the sun. Oh, it good.
Wow. It’s getting hot. I think I because this is the suffering of change that it’s inevitable. You know, for example and then I think you get the idea from this. But if we look at trying to make it some relevancy to most of our lives, unless, you know, you you fall in love.
Unless you develop some unless you have an ongoing growing relationship with that individual, then what was the source of excitement will turn to will become boredom, and the boredom will turn to pain. And then you’re going to want to move on to something new because compared you’re always going to lose your reference point. You’re going to forget what the what it was that made you so happy. What made you so happy is going to become ordinary, and then you’re going to have to look for something more than that. We’re always forgetting what our reference point is.
This compared to this is pleasure but then that pleasure becomes boredom and the boredom becomes pain and we have to move on to something new. It’s this constant struggle. We have to renew our happiness again and again and again. Going from this quality of dissatisfaction is a change. From the from the hot to cold, back to the hot, back to the cold.
Relative to that this is happiness then lose our ability, our reference point. What was happiness becomes the standard of it. It becomes neutral, bored, boring. And then eventually it becomes painful. We have to move on.
Then there’s the suffering of dissatisfactoriness of what is called compositional universal conditionality. Universal conditionality, a big word, but just means having this ego hanging out all the time. It’s it’s said to be something very much like carrying a a bundle of thorns on our back wherever we go. Whatever we do, it’s there, sticking us. Always having to watch ourselves.
This feeling of self consciousness, this feeling of separateness from other people, from ourselves, this feeling of not being whole, not no spontaneity of of guarding, reaffirming our credentials, reestablishing our self image constantly, guarding our territory, having to watch out for us, sure that you get yours. I mean, it’s really tiresome. It’s a very quite a burden that we’ve set up for ourselves. And this is, the quality of ego itself. So then there’s the the suffering of impermanency.
There’s nothing that we can hold on to. We can’t hold on to people. We can’t hold on to our own life, our own body, and selflessness. But things don’t have they have no essence. You know?
But if things had an essence, then maybe we could hold on to. We could hold on to our love that we have for someone, but then it’s the thing. Or then we could hold on to it. But this always this is always going to bring me happiness because it has the essence of happiness, but we know that’s not true. It’s very disappointing to meet someone who was your friend before, and you we meet them again, and you realize that that’s gone.
You can’t bring it back, that that good feeling that you had previously. Maybe it’ll come back, but just now it’s not there. But there’s no essence of it within this. There’s nothing we can it’s just our way of relating. So the idea behind all looking at our basis for change, that we have some wisdom no matter how faint and obscure that we have some love and compassion no matter how exclusive and limited it might be, that we have some zest for life, some exuberance, some energy no matter how unrefined and unspontaneous it might be, that we have some basic goodness, that we can solve our problems, that we have the circumstances beginning to appreciate the chance that we have to change, to grow, to become that type of person that we want to be.
You know, we may not be able to conceive of ourselves as changing, but we couldn’t conceive of ourselves the types of views that we have now, the the ideas which the the thoughts which run through our minds, the values that we hold twenty years previously, ten years previously. So why if we can’t if we don’t direct ourselves, can’t we ten years down from down the line, can’t we have change in a very positive direction? There’s no reason why we can’t just because we can’t conceive of ourselves doing it. This is simply a limiting factor in the way we conceive of ourselves. There has no nothing to do with the objective reality of what we can do.
The mind has this thought ridden mind of ours has one wonderful quality. It will follow in whatever way it’s trained. We can guide it in any way we we like. We can take this this stuff called mind, and we can make an ashtray out of it, or we can make a microscope out of it. It’s up to us.
So I have the basis for change. I have the circumstances beginning to appreciate that it’s not going to last forever. And what’s going to at the time of my death, what can I expect? What kind of patterns am I creating? What kind of tendencies?
What kind of programs am I computing? And within all of this, in any state bounded by ego, it’s simply not satisfactory. We should develop the determination to be free. In any state bounded by ego, there’s nothing within the bounds of ego. Ego based existence, there’s nothing worth becoming or having.
I want to be free. And we we really got the basis for going on to really the great work unfolding our love, to awaken in our hearts, and awaken in our minds, seeing deeply into the nature of reality. Now we can you know, talking about, you know, the idea of loving and developing compassion, Ultimately, we call an awakening heart. It’s not a romantic notion. It’s I mean, we we have this we develop this determination to be free.
I’m I’m fed up with suffering. When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, then you’ll change. I wanna I I want to you know, we call this determination to be free. We call this renunciation in traditional terms. We this the thought to be separated from suffering, when it’s directed towards oneself, it’s we call it the determination to be free, to grow.
We take that same thought and we direct it toward others. We call it compassion. So developing this thought to be free is like having compassion for yourself, loving yourself. And we have to begin with ourselves. We have to love ourselves.
We have to have compassion for ourselves. Otherwise, if we don’t really want to end our own suffering, how and we know our own suffering intimately, firsthand experience, how can we ever really sincerely want other to help others to end their suffering when we can only know they’re suffering secondhandedly? We can’t. We have to really begin to see our own situation very deeply and appreciate it for what it is and develop the determination to be free ourselves. Then we take that same thought and say, ah, you know, that person that is no different than myself.
I know they’re going through the exact same thing that I’m going through. They may be smiling on the outside, but inside, just I I know they’re going through the same difficulties that I’m experiencing. And I know my experience, and I know I don’t want it to continue. And we begin to become develop this an other centered quality to our lives, beginning to develop a sense of equality between ourselves. You know, it’s true.
I think I’ve talked to many people over the last few years, you know, and and you scratch beneath the surface and we’re all very much alike whether it’s female or male, whether it’s whatever status, whatever the appearance might be on the outside, that we’re all undergoing very much the same experiences. The the details might be a little bit different, the the the tragedy, is that the the experiences, but the quality of our qualities. There’s no difference. Developing, opening trying to begin to open our hearts to others as a necessity to becoming a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being. And we can look at this from from a reasonable standpoint, from a sense of a rational standpoint, since the viewpoint of logic.
We can look at it from our own experience from the viewpoint of our own intuition. And looking at it from from reasoning standpoint, why we should make this effort to open our hearts to others. Because we have it has to be based upon something more than romantic notions. Otherwise, when the sun is shining, we can all love one another. But when it starts raining, we we run for cover for ourselves alone and we forget.
It’s not a very stable compassion, not a very stable. Talking about, this is a book by Lama Yeshe who founded Buddha House. Lama Yeshe, in this glass case, his picture’s on the left. He died about I guess it’s been about five years ago. So he uses the word bodhicitta.
bodhicitta means awakening heart, essentially loving compassion. When some people first hear about the bodhicitta, they confuse it with sentimental, highly sentimental suffering. Feel so overwhelmed by the needs of others that their mind becomes depressed. But true bodhicitta is not like this. It has nothing to do with such an upset and paralyzed state of mind.
Instead, it is clear and easily going, possessing a calm wisdom as well as a deeply felt compassion. It is an attitude of opening our heart completely and leaving it open as much as we can. So also in the point of view of our experience. So love and compassion is a social expression of our wisdom. We use our wisdom, and that sounds strange, but they’re not it’s just like, it’s a type of wisdom that we develop in understanding other people’s problems and responding being able to respond to them.
Understanding that comes from under compassion comes from understanding. I read you because I just take the time to read this. It’s very nice, I think. It just the thought just came to me when I said understanding. It’s this is by a Vietnamese monk by the name of Thich Nhat Hanh who was in Australia, I think, about two years ago.
You know, this idea of understanding that we sometimes think of love and compassion as simply feeling, but maybe it’s something more than that. Suppose we have a son who has become unbearable young man. It may be hard for us to love him. That is natural. In order to be loved, a person should be lovable.
If our son has become difficult to love, we will be very unhappy. We wish we could love him, but the only way we can is to understand him, to understand his situation. We have to take our son as the subject of our meditation instead of taking the concept of emptiness or some other subject. We can take our son as the concrete subject of our meditation. And it goes on.
We don’t blame our son. We just want to understand why he has become like that. Through this method of meditation, we will find out all the causes near and far that have led to our son’s present state of being. The more we see, the more we understand. The more we understand, the easier it is for us to have compassion and love.
Understanding is the source of love. Understanding is love itself. Understanding is another name for love. Love is another name for understanding. So, you know, using our reasoning, coming to an understanding as a means of actually developing love and compassion, but also through our own experience.
So often we make such a fuss of insignificant events in our life that we turn minor difficulties into major problems. As we develop the universal view of bodhicitta, that is love and compassion, however, these small concerns become unimportant and no longer bother us. As this burden of self concern drops from our shoulders, we experience a small taste of the complete freedom that comes with full spiritual fulfillment. Experiences like this are encouraging because they demonstrate so convincingly the practical day to day value of training and transforming our mind. The fact is we’re never so more miserable than when we’re claustrophobically caught up in our own problems.
We we exaggerate low in high proportion our own difficulties to the extent that we think we we feel emotion as if we’re the only person in the world that has problem. And it’s like like a mountain completely enveloped by clouds. There’s no sort there’s no ray of wisdom. There’s no ray of light which can break through this. And people freak out.
But the moment you look about yourself and you you gain some perspective that there are other people who are suffering much more than myself. And it’s a that’s a fact. It’s not that we are trying to avoid our problems. We have to solve our problems. But we if once we put them in some kind of perspective, instantly, automatically, it becomes less of a burden.
It’s not quite as significant. It’s not quite as heavy as it once was when you compare yourself to a mother watching her starving child die in Ethiopia or even here within, the people dying of cancer or the people. All the you know, we can list you know, you have your, own sources of understanding of where the the horrors that go on about us. Instantly your mind is relieved. This is from your own experience, the value of beginning to concern ourselves with others, that our problems simply do not have that burdensome quality that that we are able to work on them and gain some kind of perspective.
Also, from the point of view of intuition, opening our hearts to others. This is a verse by Shelley. And we’re talking about intuition. So all I can do is quote a verse of poetry because poetry is is addressed to our intuition. It’s not addressed to in the in the main to our intellect reason.
For when the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven. So, you know, some intuition, something which touches the heart directly. Developing, opening our hearts to others, going beyond this ego centering tendency. And we don’t have time, but there’s a there are two two meditative traditions which we make use of to actually open our hearts to others. The sevenfold cause and effect method in exchanging ourselves for others.
To understand that this becomes in overcoming these two basic mistaken understandings that we have, we have to open our hearts to others. That we have to if we’re going to develop ourselves holistically, we have to develop our social self and our private self. And the way we develop that social aspect of ourselves is by developing love and compassion. It’s not a matter of romantic notion that it would be nice, but it’s a necessity to becoming sane human being. But we we can’t stop there.
We have to go on we’re running out of time. Okay. And it’s necessary to see deeply into the nature of reality. To see in in this context, we’ll say, to begin to see the nature of the self. What do I mean by self?
By the eye. That based upon this misunderstanding, we experience disappointment, frustration, all of the various afflictive emotions, what I call afflictive emotions. For example, desire, hatred, pride, miserliness, jealousy, all stem from this basic misconception of the nature of who in fact we are, our misunderstanding, our lack of awareness. Now in this context, you know, Buddhism is not telling anyone that they that they should or should not believe that they have a self or they don’t have a self. It is saying that when one looks at the way one suffers and the way one thinks and responds emotionally to life.
It is as if one believed that there were a self that was unchanging and independent. But upon analysis, when we look closer, no such self can be found. And that a life based upon a model of reality, which is associated with a belief in such a type of self is experienced at their that life has the quality, the overall quality of frustration, disappointment, and dissatisfaction. A life which is based upon a model in which does not conceive of a permanent, unchanging, independent self is associated with qualitatively the experiences of peace, tranquility, fulfillment, spontaneity. So, you know, that’s kind of, there’s no doctrine involved.
No dogma involved. It’s in there. I’m I’m not saying you have a self or don’t have a self. But a pragmatically speaking, we act emotionally. We can look within our own experience.
We act emotionally. We respond emotionally to situations. We think as if we had an unchanging somewhere in here, unchanging independent self. And a life based upon that type of thinking, that type of believing is associated with disappointment, frustration, and pain. A life which is not associated with that type of belief system, that model is associated with peace, fulfillment, spontaneity.
That’s all. So that’s a lot, isn’t it? But that’s all. So we have to take up the task of actually beginning to to see whether in our own experience if how we are believing in this type of self unchanging independent self and how it’s manifesting. You know, all as I said, if we don’t have to within Buddhism, there’s a one, we don’t have to prune all the branches of the tree.
Like, we don’t have to cut away attachment, hatred, pride. If we remove this one linchpin, that linchpin is the ego forming tendency. This misconception is the nature of the self. We believe that an unchanging independent self. We believe that.
If you check up, you why if we if we didn’t believe that, why would death be such a fear frightening proposition to us? Why do we become angry? Why do we have attachment? I can’t stand you. Get away from it.
Why do we have such fear? Why? And you If you you you experience this, where what is the root cause? We explain them away on some superficial level, but what is the, really, the basic cause if we were to examine this this mistaken belief in the nature of our self? That it that when this belief is not present, the mind is at peace.
So, you know, just to make this perhaps a little bit clear, you know, the sense that we can be mistaken with respect to the way we perceive things. You know, you’re walking along the road in the evening, it’s getting dark and there’s there’s a what is actually a coiled striped rope in the grass. But if you because it’s getting a little bit dark and you don’t see it clearly, you see a snake and do you react with fear? It’s painful. You jump back.
And you look at it. And you’re really afraid. You’re upset. And you look at it. It’s not moving.
Moving. So you begin to wonder. Maybe it’s not a snake. The possibility that you could be wrong. There’s some doubt that rises in your mind.
You look closer. You get a bit braver in there. Look more examine a little bit closer. Like the balance begins to shift. The the conception that it’s not a snake begins to be stronger.
So then you get up and you say, oh, I was oh, that was stupid. Mean, that’s it’s a rope. All of that fear, all of that upset and the suffering associated with and all the emotion which arose arose only on the basis of a misconception. So it had no correspondence to reality. There’s no basis for your fear.
No basis for all those base emotions and all that suffering which arose. It was only from your own side of your own mind based upon a misconception. Likewise, with respect to the nature of the self. All of the fear, all of the pain, all of these various emotions which arise are only based upon a misconception which exists within our own mind. All suffering begins and ends within our own mind.
So this is the way we can become awake, this path. We begin the path by beginning to appreciate our potential to change, that we have the chance to change, that this chance is not going to last forever, and what type, what is going to occur upon this radical change which is bound to come during not only at the time of death but during the course of our life. What types of patterns are we creating within our mind? What types of tendencies? What types of karma?
And within this karmically reoccurring compulsive patterns, there’s nothing worth becoming or being. That it’s all dissatisfactory by its very nature, the way these patterns are operating and this developing the determination to be free of all pattern modes of existence, of all these neurotic reoccurring compulsive patterns. But then pointing is understanding this wish to be separated from this dissatisfaction and beginning to understand all other sentient beings are just like myself. No difference whatsoever. And beginning the difficult task of opening our hearts to others as a means to develop one’s fullest potential, as an inspiration, and as a as a source of energy to go beyond your limits.
The more we love, the more concern we have for the number of people, that much more we’re going to be able to tap in to our source of energy. I’m just one person. If I want to free one person, I’m I have that much energy available to me, that much determination, that much inspiration. Inspiration. But if my burden becomes infinite, then I had that much more potential open to me, that much more energy open to me to the same degree of in accordance with my goal I’m going to exercise my potential.
I’m going to realize my potential. And to go beyond all modes of pattern, modes of existence, to be able to really be able to benefit others, we have to develop wisdom. The complete wisdom which understands the exact nature of the self. If you really want to help others to be free of their suffering, then you have to be free of their suffering yourself. You know, we want to change the world, but if we aren’t careful, our contribution to the world may be further chaos.
So we have to develop ourselves in wisdom. And from the point of view of the the ultimate basis of all our suffering is this misconception as to the nature of the self. And so we have to develop the wisdom of understanding the nature of the self in order that we ourselves be free, but in order to help others to do the same. And this is how we become awake. We step outside of our fiction, our our our projections, our fantasy world in which we live in, and we step out into reality by awakening.
We’re awakening our hearts to others and awakening our minds to the nature of reality. And this is the path of awakening. So, maybe we can have any points of discussion. Maybe we can spend five minutes. Questions or something.
If not, that’s okay too. So I thank you for coming. It’s there’s quite a lot of information. So this this structure was a lifelong work. And there are various meditations and going to various details on all of these facets of this path.
But I think it’s good to see, get an overall kind of view, perspective, possibility