Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Two misconceptions frame the opening of this 45-minute talk: that meditation means spacing out, or squeezing the mind. Ven Jampa Gendun replaces both with a radar image — choiceless awareness that neither indulges nor suppresses what arises. Personal stories carry the middle: a Thai monk whose only counsel through the dark periods of a year-long retreat was “Begin again,” and a Sri Lankan jungle encounter with a vine-smothered Buddha statue offered as an image of inner potential waiting to be found. He then addresses the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, arguing that for Western students with little conviction about past lives, exchanging self for others is a more practical route to an open heart than the sevenfold cause-and-effect method. The session closes on equanimity — seeing friend, enemy, and stranger as arbitrary projections — as the ground for genuine, unattached love.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 3 PA 1988 07 08.mp3
UUID: 1b8cb90f-c94f-4b3a-ade9-63944aaab5d2
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-07-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~4,619
In the West, the word meditation brings much misconception. Sometimes people interpret meditation as squeezing oneself. Others interpret it as spacing out. Both are misconceptions. If you space out, you become completely distracted.
If you squeezed, you are completely selfish. Meditation is very simple. Close your eyes. What is happening? Your awareness radiates like a sensitive machine.
It is like radar. If there is any kind of signal or vibration, you notice it, you are aware. Similarly, when you are aware in meditation, you are very sensitive, totally awake, aware of what is going on. Communicating, that is what I call meditation on consciousness. Meditating does not mean, Oh, there is a light.
There is blah blah blah. We’re not having a conversation. Suppose you are meditating, you’re aware of your surroundings, the sky, trucks passing by. You’re aware of everything. Yet you do not make conversation saying, All these trucks must be very nice trucks full of cheese or juice on their way to the market.
That type of conversation you should not do. Although you are aware, you need to be in control of not making conversation. By meditating you are learning control and eliminating the uncontrolled mind. What makes you uncontrolled? By making conversation.
She’s like that. Says this. He says that. I don’t like. I like.
You’re constantly reacting. Control means not reacting. If somebody says, You are a bad guy, you do not react. You do not say, He called me a bad guy. My ego is hurt.
This is reacting. It is uncontrolled mind. It is also a mind that is obsessed. My interpretation is that the obsessed mind has two objects, either an object of beauty or hate. Obsessed means you cannot get away from thinking about the object.
Do you understand what I mean? Obsessed means you are not free or peaceful. Instead you are always thinking this, this, this, this. This is being obsessed. So the mind of hatred, jealousy or craving, desire is too obsessed and disturbed.
That is why meditation is to teach you the habit of not reacting when you are obsessed, when obsessed objects arise. In our meditation, simply by being mindful of the breath, noting whatever arises, but we don’t react. We neither indulge nor suppress. We simply note. A particular emotion, particular thought, feeling, worry, whatever doesn’t make any different sound.
Sensation arise with simply note it’s not necessary to react either by indulging or repressing it. This way, we begin to gain real control over our mind. We create space between ourselves and the objects of our consciousness. We begin to have some choice over when and how we wish to react in situations. We just simply aren’t reacting when our button is pushed, having to reflex action, that we gain control, we gain choice in our lives, and a certain degree of freedom by creating a perspective in space.
This may seem like a very simple meditation, but I don’t think it is. We’re simply noting whatever arises without having to react as we habitually do. It’s a retraining process. We’re gaining control. We’re gaining some choice in our lives.
At the end of about five minutes, we’re constantly being mindful of the breath. Keep it returning to the breath, our mind will be distracted, wander. We note whatever it is, it’s an object of ear consciousness, a sound, or a thought arises, or a feeling, and when we bring it back to the breath. But after five minutes, just try to be aware. Whatever the mind is attending to, you know, it’s like a choiceless awareness.
Just allow the mind to go to whatever object is most stimulating for it, but be aware, always noting. If it goes like the sound of someone closing the bathroom door a second ago, and hearing, or maybe you’re sitting there, and thoughts arise and thinking, thinking, and the pain arises and you need sensation, sensation. Just let the mind be directed choicelessly, but never lose awareness. Don’t bite into the hot dog. Don’t get on the train or however I’ve described it, whatever makes sense to you.
So let’s try that for a few minutes. Just allow the mind to attend to whatever object it’s drawn to naturally, but maintain your awareness by noting what it’s looking at, what it’s hearing, what it’s thinking, what it’s doing. Now we’ll recite the verse of refuge. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing the Dharma, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create by practicing the Dharma. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing the Dharma, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. A few years ago, I spent a year in Thailand.
Most of that time I spent in retreat, meditation. Living in an isolated situation, in retreat, you get in touch with the various parts of your mind that in normal daily activities perhaps you don’t get in touch with. You sort of go unnoticed, somewhat untouched in our daily life. During this experience, during this most beautiful experience in retreat, that you experience both the beauty and the light of your own mind, and you experience the ugliness and darkness within our own mind. Can you hear me okay?
You know, both the peaks and the valleys of our own mind. After some time, the peaks perhaps aren’t so hot and the valleys aren’t so low. There seems to be a gradual leveling out process where there seems to be a gradual ascent over some period of time. But still, there are moments when all you can see, your mind is only filled with your shortcomings, your own inner ugliness, failings, limitations. Or at least this is the way we Those moments when we conceive of ourselves like this, that where we conceive of ourselves as being petty, insufficient, full of hypocrisy, lazy, stupid, not a very nice picture to see of yourself.
There’s moments when you lose sight of your goal, of your own self worth, if you like, of our own divinity. All we see is lots of blackness, our minds are just completely beset by doubts and conflicts. This is like the long dark nights of the soul. In such a time that I experienced, you call into question everything that you’re doing. Is it of any worth?
Is of any use? What is all this about? What is this thing called Buddha? What is enlightenment? What is freedom, liberation?
It doesn’t make any sense. What does it mean to become a Buddha? Is it just some romantic idea to try to love all sentient beings, to dedicate your life to alleviating suffering of others. What does it mean to try to become like a Christ or a Buddha? What does the mind of, for example, Mother Teresa What goes through her mind?
What does she think about? What does the Dalai Lama think? What kind of mind does he have? Am I wasting my time, you know, sitting here halfway across the world from everything that was familiar to me, from everything that I had grown up with that felt like a home, sitting in a cave, literally, eating out of a bathing bowl once a day. So you have to There’s periods where you have to sort of battle with the various demons within your own mind, you might say.
During these periods, at this monastery where I lived, I lived on an island. Was a monastery with three monks, not a very big one. There’s lots of little monasteries in Thailand. They were both Thai, the two other monks, and one of them spoke almost no English, the other one spoke reasonably good English. I used to talk with him, and we would I don’t think he understood everything that I was saying to him, all the various details of what perhaps I was going through, all my ups and downs, and conflicts and doubts and worries and frustrations.
But anyway, it didn’t really matter. He used to say, Whether things were going well or whatever things were going bad, they Begin again. Whatever I’d say is that. Okay, begin again. It’s perhaps nice that he didn’t understand so much English.
He kept things at a very minimal level, simple and straightforward. Start again, start over fresh. Again and again, auspicious beginning, whether things are going well with it, whether things are agreeable, dissatisfactory. They just begin again. It’s like beginner’s mind.
You hear this expression a lot in Thailand, especially amongst the meditators. Start again, beginning as if nothing had happened up to this point, and just start anew, start fresh. So we all have our histories. We all have our various experiences, our various biographies, and the various circumstances and causes which helped to shape who we are at the present moment, which made us what we are now, more or less. And it seems to me that we have some choice in this matter of who we are.
A choice either to remain the victims of our past or to use our past as a source of learning. We may actually have some choice in this matter to use our history, our experiences as a source of growth. A choice to whether simply acknowledge our pain what we’ve experienced in the past, or whether we’re going to indulge it and carry it around like a burden, like a bundle of thorns on our back for the rest of our life. It’s just as in our simple meditation that we’re doing now, we begin each Friday evening with. We have a choice whether to react to it, repress it, indulge in it, or simply acknowledge it.
Admit that it’s there and try to learn from it, but not let it control our lives. By learning, by growing, by learning, I mean something more than merely accumulating more information. We all have enough information. It’s the age of information. We don’t need any more beliefs.
We probably all have enough beliefs. We all probably have enough ideas. It’s not enough simply to change the conception of who you think you are. I think, you know, real growth is an openness and a faith in yourself and allowing yourself to become all that you can be. Some faith in your basic sanity, some trust and confidence, in the goodness of yourself and the goodness of the possibility of life.
That the qualities of wisdom and compassion can be trusted, and that we have within us some wisdom and compassion, no matter how limited, no matter how unrefined, no matter how mixed with attachment and ignorance, there’s something there which we can trust. Getting in touch with our wisdom, our compassion, trust that they can take us where we want to go, that they have the power to transform our lives, and that all situations are workable and that we can solve our own problems. That everything can become a potential for growth, matter what the circumstances are, if we’re willing to bring to bear the clarity of our own mind. I was in the area many years ago, sixteen, seventeen years ago, was in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka there are many Buddhist ruins.
I wasn’t particularly interested in Buddhism at that time when I first went there. I was just traveling around with my girlfriend, and we were sort of We were interested in the Buddhist ruins simply from a More or less their beauty. So we visiting all the ruins. And one time I was walking with myself, by myself. In the jungle, near the forest, and just traipsing through off the path.
And I came upon some ruins. There are many old Buddhist ruins scattered all over the island of Sri Lanka. And there, there was an old stone image of a Buddha, completely overgrown with weeds and vines, almost hidden. And I was sitting there. You know, if you see a Buddha, there’s a certain quality of timelessness.
It’s as if, I saw this Buddha, it was like he’s been sitting there since the beginningless time, waiting very patiently, with infinite patience, sitting there amongst being overgrown by the weeds and the vines, waiting to be discovered in this jungle. Now, this was Sri Lanka is where Arthur C. Clarke, he lived. He wrote two thousand one, you know, which which depicted the evolution of consciousness. That was the main theme of the movie.
I think perhaps he saw something in the jungle there, I don’t know. Because in every evolutionary jump, conscious evolutionary jump that occurred in the history of mankind, there was always this monument, some kind of I don’t know what you call it. In the movie, it was some kind of huge black marble slab, highly polished. Whenever this was present, was always this leap in conscious evolution of mankind, womankind, humankind. So I had the feeling that this image of a Buddha waiting with infinite patience overgrown by weeds and vines, waiting to be discovered as a catalyst to help us get in touch, to bring about some evolution in our own mind, in our own consciousness.
Whether this statue, whether this image is a Christ or a Buddha, it doesn’t matter. But that there is this within each of us, whether it’s the image of God, whether it’s our Buddha nature waiting to be discovered, amongst the overgrowth of vines and weeds. There’s a there is a I don’t know if I have this. Through the unknown remembered gate, when the last of Earth left to discover, is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall, the children in their apple tree not known because not looked for, but heard half to heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea.
It doesn’t matter. Something, what I call, the inarticulate whisperings of our hearts. In Christianity, sometimes talk about many They use the phrase many are called if you are chosen. So there’s within inarticulate whisperings of each of our hearts, we’re called, you know, everyone here. But it’s in full conscious awareness that we choose, choose to become everything that we can be.
To begin again, know, to make some effort. We have to make some effort. I knew Lama Yeshe. You know, this picture on the right. I quite often read from Just what I read about meditation was by Lama Yeshe.
He was like a poet. His grammar was atrocious, you know, and many people couldn’t understand a word he said, but that was their karma. I’m sorry to say that. For me, he could inspire me more and bless me more than probably any teacher I’ve ever had. He would talk about trying to communicate within his broken English, and he would say, I’m trying my best.
I have something over here which I’m trying to communicate to you. And maybe my English is no good, which it wasn’t very good. And maybe it’s difficult for you to understand, but I’m trying, I’m trying. That’s the best I can do is try. You know, there was a movie that I saw on a video a couple of months ago called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I think it was Jack Nicholson. It took place in a mental institution. In this mental institution there was in the bathroom area. I’m not quite sure what it was. I think it was a washbasin.
Anywhere, it was very heavy. It was made out of marble or something heavy like that, some kind of huge wash basin. It was extremely heavy. He was taking bets on it, if he could pick it up. They were all making fun of him.
He said, Come on, come on, let’s bet. He was taking all these bets. He got under this huge washbasin. He was really straining, he had every muscle in his body to pick it up. He tried again, and you could see that he was really hurting, almost hurting himself.
And then he quit. Then they all laughed at him, were poo pooing him. Then finally he said, You know, at least I tried. That’s all we can do. The results will take care of themselves, but we have to make some effort.
We just have to try from our side. If we try from our side, then we can respect ourselves. Then we’re fulfilling our potential. Without respecting yourself, without making effort, there’s no way you’re ever going to be happy, either now or in the future. So at least from our side, we can make some effort whether we gain the results, whether there is a future in existence, whether there is Buddhahood, it doesn’t matter.
We have to try. If you make effort and you fulfill the innermost desire of your heart, then you’re satisfied. There’s some contentment and peace in your life. And that it’s worthwhile to try. Whether you achieve or not, it doesn’t matter.
When we make this innermost effort, in our desires of peace, and nirvana is there. There’s some peace, and we can live with ourselves. It doesn’t matter whatever path you follow, whatever direction you may take, whatever method you may use in your growth, We have to keep questioning, we have to keep examining, exploring, and searching for the essence of whatever it is we’re doing. Taking essence, seeing for ourselves what is a value, what is true. But there is no certain way that exists permanently.
There is no way set up for us. Moment after moment, we have to find our own way, Some idea or perfection or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us. Each of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. When you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way, you cannot help anyone, and no one could help you. We have to make our own way, we have to make our own discoveries.
Everything that the Buddha realized, everything that Christ experienced, we must discover for ourselves and duplicate the same experience. But we’re at an advantage. We have some methods. We have some inspiration of the kindness of teachers. Often we mistake some information, some knowledge experience.
A mere intellectual understanding of experience for actual experience. And mere words for emotions. We think of repetitive patterns as certainty. Simply by repeating the same thing over again, we lull ourselves into a sense of security that we know what we’re doing. What we have to do is try to find the essence of whatever is doing.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Buddhist or a Christian. The object of Buddhism is not to become good Buddhists, or the object of Christianity is not to become a good Christian, it’s to become a Buddha and a Christ, to be able to develop compassion and wisdom so that you’re able to dedicate your life to benefiting others, not to become good Buddhists or Christians. There are enough of those in the world. You know, to become a happy, healthy, sane human being, able to love and be loved and able to benefit others. But like anything, you know, things can be twisted.
Ideals are definitely unstable, and the better the ideal, the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it’s this process whereby fresh, stimulating, humanely helpful ideas are exchanged into robot dogma. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideals are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road. The Buddha is always killed on the road.
You know what that I think I know what that means. I think it’s a Zen expression from Zen Buddhism that that, you know, if you if you if you if try to look for the Buddha without outside of yourself, you’re looking in the wrong place. If you see him outside of yourself, then kill him because you should be looking inside yourself. So we have to begin our journey, cease being victims, and choose to grow. Find a path with some heart and follow it with heart.
I’m not selling Buddhism. I’m not trying to put shorts on the natives. In this journey, this process of growth, there’s bound to be disappointments. You should expect that. There’s bound to be struggles, bound to be moments when everything is meaningless, everything becomes a farce.
But it would be a tragic mistake to think that following a path of growth is simply the skillful avoidance of pain. There’s going to be moments when there’s long dark nights of the soul. Again, you have to begin again. It’s a never ending process of beginning again, I think. I think it’s easier if you begin to understand that ultimately you have no choice.
Once you begin, you sort of have to finish the job. You become a little bit awake, so there’s no stopping. There’s no setting aside and you say, Okay, let’s have a recess. Let’s forget about it. It will always come back to haunt you, the unfinished business.
So you begin again, understanding that you have no choice but simply to make effort, just to keep trying in a healthy context of some self discipline, without expectations, knowing that there are going to be difficulties. And I think this makes it a little bit easier. You can relax a little bit. So we’re talking about three principal aspects of the path. Developing the determination to be free, opening to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality.
And we’re you know, there were we’re going through two systems, two traditions of initially developing the opening our hearts to others and finally bringing it to its fullest culmination in the awakening heart, which is seeking to develop all the skills and abilities whereby you can be of maximum benefit to all sentient beings equally. In other words, that you can become a Buddha, a healthy, sane, loving person who has the skill and able to help others to accomplish that same feat, to be free of their suffering. These were the sevenfold cause and effect instruction and exchange of self for others. Now, I think, as I explained before, I briefly mentioned, in the sevenfold cause and effect instructions there are the two traditions. Perhaps the latter tradition, exchange of self and others, is more applicable, appropriate for Westerners.
Since the sevenfold cause and effect instruction, as we’re going to find out tonight, hopefully, necessarily have to have a strong conviction in the existence of past lives, which we do not have as a We’re not raised in that culture. We’re raised in a materialist culture which does not accept the existence of past and future lives on the whole. So we may have some feeling for it, we may have some intuition, or we can use reasoning, which I’m going to go through to some extent. But we may not have a really strong conviction. Nevertheless, that it’s useful to go through this particular system, because there are parts of it which will be of great use to you, even if you can’t make use of the entire process of developing the awakening heart.
Also, there individuals who have the temperament, which will be of great benefit, great use, who have conviction. Perhaps they have memories of past lives. Anyway, I’m going to present it. We presented it as a preliminary with equanimity, like the foundation, a smooth foundation upon which we can begin to build edifice of the sevenfold cause and effect instructions, the awakening heart. This equanimity was an unbiased attitude towards all sentient beings.
We would begin to have an equal regard, equal concern for all sentient beings. A type of an attitude which is divorced, separated from attachment, aversion and indifference. It’s not indifference. Equanimity is not indifference. There’s a sense of involvement.
Essentially, it’s an insight based upon seeing that the labels of friend, enemy, and stranger are arbitrarily assigned, and they quickly change and easily change. This is what we went through last week. We habitually label this person friend, this person enemy, this person stranger. In response, having once labeled in response to the friend we develop attachment, to the enemy we develop aversion, to the stranger we develop indifference as a response. Yet these labels are completely arbitrary and they’re easily changed.
We begin to not hold so tightly. The insight of equanimity is such that we no longer hold so tightly to the validity of these labels that we’re projecting. We begin to see them as labels, as projections, that they in fact, aren’t truly existent enemies, they aren’t truly existent friends, nor strangers. So we develop a more fluid, open attitude towards others, and we don’t cling to these labels. We understand that these labels are arbitrary and can quickly change.
If we don’t do that, if we don’t create this space, then there’s no way that we can develop love, I mean, a pure type of love, unmixed with, for example, attachment. Our way of relating with others is in such a way that we do not hold the individual as intrinsically valuable. They’re only valued to the extent that they either enhance or threaten our ego, our existence. Those who enhance our our ego, oh, that’s my friend. Come here.
Those who, you know, threaten your your self image, your well-being as enemy, to push them away. So they’re only valued from this self centered egoistic point of view. They’re not valued for who they actually are, for themselves. Love is becoming aware of the intrinsic value of the object of our love, That for themselves they are worthy of our love. Just as you yourself are worthy of love, you don’t have to do anything to deserve love, to deserve happiness.
Just by being, you’re worthy of being loved. All this is being reflected back in ourselves. You don’t see others as worthy of being loved, you’re never going to see yourself as worthy of love without having to earn it, without having to go through guilt trips, Just by our existing just by your existence, you’re worthy of being loved, worthy of my wishing you happiness, and so am I. So, this basis, this foundation of equanimity, we can begin to relate with others in the deepest and purest level of love.