Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using a painting of the Buddhist universe on the wall, Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 43.5-minute session by mapping the six realms as psychological states cycling through a single day. He walks each in order: the god realm’s euphoric absorption, the demigod’s jealous comparison, the human realm’s restless desire and inadequacy, the animal mentality’s humourless rule-following, the hungry ghost’s insatiable consuming, and the hell realm’s self-feeding aggression, illustrated by a crocodile eating its own tail. He then turns to renunciation, clarifying that what is given up is not the girlfriend or chocolate cake but the discontented grasping mind. A Dhammapada verse and a story of a king who opts for sandals over leather-covered roads make the point that the mind, not the world, is what needs changing. The session closes with a guided loving-kindness meditation radiating outward to all sentient beings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 3 PA 1998 04 15.mp3
UUID: 9ab418e8-768f-44d8-877b-26558403cd28
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1998-04-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.5 minutes
Words: ~3,840
On my left hand side, that one painting is a representation of the Buddhist universe, or one section of the universe. You’ll notice there are six realms. This circle is divided into six parts, or maybe it’s five. Sometimes it’s five, sometimes it’s six. These compulsive patterns that we’re building up, this constant drive to manipulate, to order, to arrange, to create a reality in accordance with our ego desires.
We’re creating a reality, our own version of reality, our own style of suffering. This is categorized in the six realms, actually creating out of our own mind, of this desire, this demand that the universe be ordered the way we think it should be. This is the emotional attitude that we develop towards ourselves and our surroundings, our environment. Even in the course of a single day, we can pass through these six realms. You know, we don’t have to die and be reborn there.
Even in the course of one day, the course of one hour, we die and reborn in these six realms again and again again. Whether it’s hell, the mental and physical pain of a hell being up to the absorptions of the bliss of a God. In one of those realms, the first realm is the highest realm, is the realm of the gods, the deities. So it’s the search for extreme mental and physical pleasure, bliss, that that revolves around seductive goals. And they’re of all kinds, whether it’s health, you know, wealth.
There’s always this seeking of these beautiful goals. Beauty itself becomes a goal, fame, virtue even. So the approach to a God realm, for example, is always pleasure orientated. This is the way the maintenance of the ego. In this there’s an absorption, there’s a losing track of fear, of hope.
We forget what we are doing, we become so completely caught up in our occupation in this realm. We lose all track, all our values, completely absorbed, lost. For example, if you were to win the lotto, in that first moment, that euphoria, completely lost in that moment, the God realm. The first moment of romantic love, complete absorption. But what happens?
This blissful state is eventually shaken. There always comes some disillusionment. Your relatives start coming around to borrow money, a taxman comes around, you see a pimple on your lover’s face or something. There’s something to shake you out of this, this complete absorption that you’re experiencing. Or even just simple routines, you know, Tonight’s the night I watch football, you know, Don’t bother me.
Oh, why’d you have to come over tonight for it? Today’s the day I go shopping, and Thursday I go shopping. And now this had to happen. Our little routine, our little pattern is somehow disrupted. We react with anger, with repulsion, with aversion.
Our little cocoon is somehow broken that we tried to create. And through this developing, this anger, this aversion, we move on to another realm. This absorption is lost, and now we are forced to take rebirth in another realm, to relate with another world. So we can begin to relate with the world of the demigod, which is one step down from the realm of the gods, the realm of the demigods. So this predominant characteristic is jealousy and paranoia.
In human terms, we can think of preoccupation with comparison, the constant struggle to gain security and to achieve. In this constant struggle to gain security, to achieve, other people become merely standards of measurement. You yourself become a standard of measurement, your present self. Everybody becomes a fixed reference point to see how you’re doing, how am I doing? You yourself become nothing but a fixed reference point to compare, last week I was this much, now I’m this much.
Fantastic. So in this way, everybody including yourself becomes something of an opponent. The strive to improve yourself, to be somebody else other than you are. The demigods, the reason they are so uptight, jealous, and they are always fighting. I can’t see the painting here, but usually it’s depicted as there’s a tree which gives delicious fruit, which grows the root of the tree is in the realm of the demigods, but the tree is very tall, and the tree actually grows up into the realm of the gods.
So even though the roots are down in the realm of the demigods, the fruit isn’t only enjoyed by the gods. So they’re always fighting. The demigods are very jealous. They think that they should have the fruit since the root is in their realm. So they constantly are battling, constantly trying to overcome.
Because of the constant battling, there is constant paranoia. So there’s always this constant potential threat, this mentality of an demigod. So you have to be on guard, even with yourself, to make sure that you’re achieving, that you don’t let yourself down. Your whole world becomes a matter of shoulds, ought’s, musts. You can’t trust others, you can’t trust the situation, you can’t even trust yourself.
So you begin to ignore the situation, how actually is, and you refuse to learn from it. It becomes very close minded, and there becomes an atmosphere of hostility about everything. Then we come down a little bit further, and we’re talking about ways of ordering your reality, our inversions, our realms, which you probably pass through every day of your life. There’s the human realm. So the major occupation in the human realm is desire.
So there’s an acute sense of separateness, as we said about love, that the pleasurable objects are out there and this feeling, this sense of poverty, you have to go out and drag them back into your territory. It’s a feeling of loss, that insufficiency. I don’t quite have what it takes in myself. So you bring the feeling that only pleasurable objects are ever going to bring you happiness, security, comfort. You don’t feel adequate in yourself.
You don’t feel that these objects are going to naturally come to you. You have to feel you have to magnetize them, draw them to you, this constant effort, this constant needing, desiring, appropriating. So everybody has their own styles, their own standards in the human realm. Generally, don’t criticize those who meet our particular standards, who you know, particular style. We each have our own particular styles.
We’re quite impressed by those who have our particular style and are much more clever in working with our particular style, superior in achieving using our particular style, and we want to just like that person. We admire them. So it becomes a matter of we’re very fascinated with what we lack. They are significant. I’m insignificant.
Continually comparing, selecting. So it brings a never ending process of desire, always seeing what we lack, always seeing our own insignificance, always seeing significance outside of ourselves, pleasurable objects outside of ourselves. So in the human realm, intellect is the most active. There’s a constant churning out of ideas, images, plans, hallucinations, fantasies, dreams. So the mind is constantly looking for ways to improve its situation, improve itself.
Manipulating, magnetizing, a constant ambition created out of suffering, and suffering created out of this constant ambition. So that’s kind of the version of the typical human realm. So we can step down a little bit further, another version of reality we call the animal realm. We can see animals, but we also can experience an animal mentality, animal patterns within our own mind, animal like patterns. The animal mentality is one of ignoring stupidity, stubbornly pushing forward to predetermined goals.
Very serious, like a pig, you know, very serious. This pig, he looks directly ahead, and he doesn’t look to the right or the left. He’s got his nose down to the ground, very sincerely going about his business with great earnestness. Straight ahead to the next situation. Next situation, adjusting everything so that it must conform to our expectations of how the next situation should be.
You know, it prefers blindly to play by the rules of the game. It’s what we call I call a reactive mind as compared to a creative mind. You know, working with programs, it doesn’t matter who it destroys or what it destroys. In the process, as long as it plays by the rules, And as long as the rules are followed correctly, that’s what it does. It’s very brutal.
So with this ignoring quality, there’s not really any concern to be truthful, only to follow the rules. You always can find a way to justify whatever you’re doing. People are very clever, very intelligent. They can rationalize, interpret almost anything and justify it, whatever they might do, whatever their behavior may be. So you don’t see your environment, you don’t see other people, you just see your goal.
And you invent all kinds of excuses to prove that you are doing the right thing. So the essence animal style is to get what you want, but with extreme honesty and sincerity and seriousness. And that is very sincere pity. Just no humor, no openness, just going along like a tank, rolling over everything, whatever comes in front. That’s the animal mentality, the animal version of a way of ordering reality.
Next level down, hungry ghost. This is a mentality which is preoccupied with consuming. Again, it’s this idea of fundamentally you feel poor, There’s a sense of inadequacy. So you use the people around you, use your environment, your possessions as a way of propping up your self image, but there’s never quite enough. You know, in this painting, if you were to look at the details, the hungry ghost is depicted as having an extremely small mouth, extremely thin neck, and a huge tummy.
It can never be filled. It’s forever experiencing the pain of hunger, of thirst, always searching, never finding contentment, never finding satisfaction. Is constantly involved in this process. Never a moment’s fulfillment, satisfaction. So in this way, within the mentality of this hungry ghost, people and things become just consumer items.
Even a beautiful sunset becomes a consumer item. You want to take a photograph of it, you want to write a poem about it. Somewhere else you want to eat the sun, you want to eat that sunset, make a part of you. So the hunger for new entertainment, new methods, tai chi, new yoga, Tibetan Buddhism. But there is always this becoming bored, return of hunger again.
Your hunger has never really been satisfied, so you move on. There is a constant need to be moving on to something new, continuing searching for some new satisfaction. So it’s very painful to be suspended in unfulfilled desires. The lowest of these realms, the most painful, is the hell realm. So this is characterized as pervaded by aggressiveness.
It’s based on the perpetual condition of hatred. So you build up a complete environment of hate, and you’re no longer even quite sure of what it is you hate. Hatred begins to feed on itself, like a crocodile begins to eat its own tail. And as it eats its own tail, it gains nourishment from having eaten its own tail. So its tail grows longer, and it eats more, and it grows longer, and eats more, and it grows longer.
So it’s a perpetual recycling of aggression, aversion, hatred, anger churning again and again. The more you destroy, the more that you see that needs to be destroyed. The more that you hate, the more you see that needs to be hate, or that is deserving, worthy of being hated. The hating mentality grows and develops. Your whole environment becomes hostile, aggressive.
So you become completely consumed in aggression. Everything becomes fire, you become fire. So it’s characterized by continuous mental and physical pain. So these are some of the categories of compulsive reoccurring patterns, some versions of a reality which some of us, at one time or another, are stuck in from time to time. The determination to be free is the determination to renounce any particular style of suffering.
All these realms which I just described have as their foundation, seeking to secure an identity, a self image, a perpetual way of reacting to people, to situations, in order to gain security, in order to perpetuate pleasures which were found in the past, in order to avoid pains which were experienced in the past, in order to avoid fluid and open ways of relating to reality. So we develop fantasy, which is the keynote, the mark of ego. We become imprisoned in our own fantasy world. These worlds have different characterizations, for example, these six realms. Anything within the boundary of ego is dissatisfactory.
When we decide the determination to be free, we want to emerge, we want to renounce any state of mind, any possession which is within any of these six realms, within any of the compulsive patterns of ego. Anything which is in the fantasy world of ego, we want to step out and get in touch with the reality, the way things are. So, when we talk about determination to be free, when we talk about renunciation, we are not talking about giving up your girlfriend, your wife, your husband, your boyfriend chocolate cake. It’s giving up the mind which is discontented, which is worried, which is frustrated by not having a boyfriend, by not having a girlfriend, a wife, a husband, or a piece of chocolate cake. Or the mind which is discontented, worried, frustrated when having a husband, a wife, a boyfriend, a wife, a girlfriend, a piece of chocolate cake, when continually tries to hold on to that wife, that boyfriend, that piece of chocolate cake.
This is the mind which we’re trying to grow out of. This is the mind which is being renounced, which is being given up. It’s the cause of pain. Essentially, we’re trying to renounce the cause of suffering. So this piece of chocolate cake has never been a problem to anybody.
Your wife, your husband, your boyfriend has never been a problem. So it doesn’t need to be given up. The problem is within your own mind. And this is where renunciation takes place. This is where the determination to be free develops.
This is where growth takes place. This is where saṃsāra ends, nirvana begins. This is where the struggle ends, peace begins within your own mind. The very first verse of the Dharmapada, which is a collection of sayings by the Buddha: We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind, and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you as your shadow unshakable. The mind is the creator of all things, the creator of our version of reality, of our happiness and our suffering. There was a traditional story of a king in ancient India. One day he was walking along the road and he stepped on a thorn and it was very painful. When he went back to the palace, he called together all his ministers and said, We have to do something about this.
Look at this thorn in my foot, it’s very painful. I don’t want this to ever happen again. What can we do about it? So his ministers thought and thought and thought about it. Finally they came up with the idea, If we cover all the roads in your kingdom with leather, then there’s no chance of getting a thorn in your foot.
Then it’s a idea, they all thought about it. But then the treasurer, the one who has to actually give the money out, it won’t work. You’ll bankrupt the kingdom. Do you know how much leather that would take? Do know how many cows we’d have to have?
And they said, We can’t be done. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have enough cows. But there was one brilliant minister in his cabinet, and he said, I have an idea. Why not just take a small piece of leather and tie it to the sole of your shoe, of your foot, and that will serve the same purpose, have the same function as covering all the roads in your kingdom with leather?
Likewise, we can’t control the world. We can’t manipulate the world to our satisfaction, but we can control our own mind. Then ultimately, that’s quite enough. That’s all we need to do. But there’s a second kind of growth, a second type of renunciation, which goes beyond this.
What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others. This is the renunciation of the great vehicle. Once one has developed the determination to be free, one looks around and sees that others are in the exact same position as yourself. Others want to be happy.
No one wants to suffer exactly like yourself. So you begin the great renunciation of any barrier between yourself and others, and begin to open up to others, which is the second principal aspect of the path, which will begin next week. Now we’ll meditate on loving kindness. Consider your difficulties, problems, and the fact that you want to be happy. Whatever you may have done in the past, whatever mistakes you may have committed, you can simply regret them and determine not to repeat them again in the future.
You can begin again. However you may conceive of yourself, whatever identity you may hold to, you can change, you can become anything that you want to be. You can begin again. But for the present, you have to make friends with yourself, all of yourself, both the good and the bad. Be gentle with yourself, quit torturing yourself, and wish yourself happiness.
Simply direct positive feelings towards yourself. Have some compassion for yourself. May I be happy, May I not suffer? May I grow? May I be well?
Direct positive feelings towards yourself. Now think of someone you like, that you love, someone of the same sex, and imagine that person in front of you. If you can’t see them, it doesn’t matter. Just feel that this person is in front of you. And remember all the good times that you’ve shared together, all the happiness, all the kindness that this person has shown you.
Begin to direct the positive feelings which naturally arise towards this person. Begin to radiate out good feelings. May you be happy. May you find everything that you want. May you never suffer.
Begin to direct these positive feelings towards that person. Now think of someone you neither like nor dislike, a stranger, someone for whom you feel indifferent. Imagine that person in front of you. And try to go beyond the superficial appearances which we usually cling to appearances of sex or age, beauty, color, status, economics, intelligence, education, personality. Try to see to the depth of that person, their essence, that there’s someone there who wants happiness and doesn’t want to suffer exactly like yourself.
That’s their essence. And just as we wish our own self happiness and not to suffer, we have to begin to wish this person happiness. Because how we feel about that essential person is very much a reflection about how we feel about ourselves deep down, since we’re exactly the same. Direct positive feelings towards this person, wishing them happiness. Now think of someone who you have problems with, that disturbs your mind, an enemy, and imagine that person in front of you.
This person wants happiness and doesn’t want to suffer just like yourself. Perhaps their method of finding happiness, eliminating their suffering, has come in conflict with your method of finding your happiness, eliminating your suffering. It’s just a conflict of interest. You’ve hurt others either intentionally or unintentionally in the past to gain the happiness that you were looking for. Now this person has done the same.
So just for the moment, set aside your hurt, your grudge, your anger, and see someone just like yourself trying the best they can to find some happiness in life and being confused about how to go about it and making many, many mistakes along the way. Forgive them just like you have to forgive yourself and wish them happiness. Now imagine all four people together, yourself and these three other people. Try to see the equality of their essence, that they essentially all want happiness, that they don’t want to suffer. There’s no difference whatsoever.
And we radiate out positive feelings without any bias equally to all four, wishing them happiness. And all the people in this room, people taking responsibility for their lives, for their happiness, People making effort, looking, searching, wishing everyone in the room happiness, which radiates out positive feelings to everyone in the room, everyone just like you, just like me. And everyone on the block, eating, watching television, cooking, getting ready for bed, whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re saying, they’re doing it and saying it in order to find happiness. Radiate out positive feelings, touching everyone on the block, wishing happiness. Radiating out further, extending your heart out further to all of South Australia, all the animals, people, insects.
And further extending out, radiating out these positive feelings further and further. Perth and Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Hobart, encompassing the entire country, wishing happiness. Extending out further. New Zealand. The entire southern hemisphere.
And further and further, enveloping the entire world in your heart, your concern, your caring, your wish that they’d be happy, that they’d not suffer. All the people, animals, insects, everything that lives on the earth is touched. Extending out further, just radiating out positive feelings. Further and further opening your heart. Finally, without any boundaries, without any center, pervading infinite space.
The wish may all things be happy. May all things be happy. We’ll dedicate the positive energy that we’ve created in listening and talking. One reason we dedicate is that we give it away so it doesn’t become incorporated into the realm of ego. We let go of it.
It does not serve as a way of maintaining, supporting, prolonging these patterns of ambition, of securing, of trying to possess. We just keep giving away, giving away, giving away. Through these merits, may I soon attain the enlightened state of Guru Buddha, and may I lead every migrating being without exception to that state. May the precious Bodhi mind not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore.
Thank you.