Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a sharp challenge: meditation used to prop up the ego rather than transform it is spiritual materialism, and practitioners must honestly judge whether their practice is actually solving problems. He covers the five hindrances — desire, hatred, restlessness, sloth, and doubt — then guides a mindfulness-of-breathing session, explaining how counting the breath creates space between observer and arising emotions so that anger can be watched without being owned. A story about stumbling on a stone Buddha overgrown by Sri Lankan jungle anchors the teaching on refuge: enlightenment’s qualities are seeds already present in us, visible even in our darkest moments as the very mind noticing our faults. The talk closes with an introduction to Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects and a frank discussion of the student-teacher relationship — why growth requires surrendering preconceptions and sitting through disappointment rather than feeding the ego’s fantasy of attaining Buddhahood.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 1988 02 26 3PA.mp3
UUID: 68ac241a-d0d2-4113-8b10-a3e091c7758f
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-02-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.8 minutes
Words: ~5,055
We shouldn’t be using meditation merely to extend the domain of our ego. That would be what we might say is spiritual materialism. Just because we’re sitting in a cross legged posture, meditating on some holy object, doesn’t mean it’s a spiritual practice. It depends very much on our attitude, on our motivation for doing it. Meditation can What we call meditation can be simply a way of supporting our neurotic patterns.
Meditation is to solve our problems. If it doesn’t solve our problems, then we have to begin to examine, we have to begin to check out. Perhaps that meditation doesn’t work at all. Perhaps meditation in general doesn’t work at all. Perhaps that meditation is inappropriate for you at the present time.
Or perhaps you are misapplying, you are applying the meditation incorrectly. So we have to check out for ourselves and judge for ourselves whether our particular meditation is worthy of pursuing, whether it works for us at that present time, and if in fact we are applying the meditation correctly to ourselves. Are we getting some results? Meditation is the direct method to transform our mind. As we talked about last week, there are many methods, both direct and indirect, indirect from the point of view of the type of work we do, devotional practices, right livelihood, exercises, yoga, tai chi, whatnot, chanting, rituals.
Meditation should be the direct method whereby we’re transforming our mind, solving our problems. For example, we break up with our spouse, our boyfriend or our girlfriend, and immediately in order to eliminate the pain of being separated, we join up with another spouse, another boyfriend, another girlfriend. But have we solved our problem? Or have we more or less given ourselves a morphine injection to numb the pain? The problem is still there.
It’s it’s been submerged for the moment at least. We have to finally begin to confront these problems and work with them rather than trying to avoid them, suppressing them, administering anesthetic morphine in order to numb ourselves. All the various difficulties that confront us in our meditation. There’s said to be five hindrances to meditation: desire, hatred, restlessness, anxiety taken as one, sloth and torpor taken as one, and doubt and indecisiveness taken as one that makes five. It’s said that the absence of these five hindrances denotes a meditative state.
Therefore, can say that meditation doesn’t necessarily have to occur when we’re sitting cross legged. Meditation can occur anytime, when we’re out walking, when we’re riding on a bus in a car, when these five hindrances are not present. We have to ask ourselves why do we have all these problems in our meditation? Why do we have these five hindrances? For example, desire, the first of the five hindrances.
We have to come to the emotional decision that we want to meditate. This is why it’s necessary before meditation to have some understanding of the practices and the path where you’re going to so that you have some confidence, some inspiration, some motivation, some determination to meditate. Otherwise, you may intellectually decide, wouldn’t it be great to be able to sit there in bliss for hours on end? You may think that intellectually, but emotionally you don’t want to meditate because you don’t believe in the practice. You have no reason to believe in the practice unless you’ve studied analyzed it, gone through it, cleared up your doubts.
Therefore, the very fact that you have desire shows that you’re not serious about meditating, that you still see the objects of sense desire as more rewarding than the possibilities of meditation. Therefore, even though you have your eyes closed, have your ears closed, you have your mouth shut, there’s no sense stimulation, you’re going to create objects of desire within your own mind. Fantasies, dreams, memories are going to come. It’s a product of this ongoing process if you’re trying to fulfill sense desires because you haven’t decided in your mind, I have to meditate, I have to transform my mind, I have to cut through these neurotic patterns which are governing my lives, which are bringing me dissatisfaction, disappointment and frustration. With this determination, this automatically lessen the hindrances, will automatically lessen your desire because you’re getting sincere about what you’re doing.
But we have to have some reason to meditate. We have to have some study, some analysis, listening to the teachings, thinking about them, and then seeing that they probably do work. At least some intellectual decision that meditation can in some way reasonably bring about a lessening of my problems and can solve some of my difficulties. So you have to know where you’re going. Buddhism makes a very great demand upon us.
It demands that we use our intelligence which we probably try to avoid as much as possible. It also demands that we take responsibility for ourselves, that we judge what is best for ourselves. So we have to know what we’re doing when we meditate, where this meditation is supposed to be taking me, and after some period of time being able to decide for ourselves, is it going where I want to go? Is it creating more problems for me? Is it actually solving my problems?
Are my desires lessening? Am I becoming less angry? Do I have more energy, more creative actions in my life? And ultimately, do I have wisdom, more compassion? We should be able to see some transformation in mind because it should be working.
There should be a growth through the process of the motivation, through the process of meditation. This is why we’re doing it. We should expect something from it, not just calm states, ways to hang out for a while. We should have expectations from meditation over a long period of time. We should see a difference in our lives.
We’re talking about the technique of mindfulness in breathing. It’s a technique to help us transform our mind. And we were using the counting method to help us develop mindfulness and awareness. Breathing in, breathing out, noting mentally. When you breathe in, noting in.
When you breathe out noting out. You can use a counting technique. In out one, in out two, in out three, up to five, come back down to one, go back to six, and seven, and eight, then nine, and ten. Does anybody know where this meditation is going to take them? Does anybody know the benefits of doing this meditation?
What do you think, Peter? Pardon? Enlightenment. Enlightenment. That sounds pretty good.
So someone has some idea of where he thinks this meditation will take him. So after a while he’ll have to check up. But at least he has He’s not doing it mindlessly, you might say. He’s made some determination for himself. So the ego, the nature of the ego is that it’s always seeking entertainment.
It’s always trying to maintain these various neurotic patterns. These neurotic patterns are what we call ego in a way, this process of securing itself in space and time. And we can begin through the simple discipline of mindfulness of breathing to cut through these neurotic patterns because we no longer are entertaining the ego. We bring to our meditation a sense of nowness, that we just want to know what’s happening now. We’re not going to submit to the dreams and fantasies and the memories of ego.
We’re just going to know something very simple in the present that when I’m breathing in I can know now that I’m breathing in. That’s what’s happening at this very moment, and likewise when I breathe out. And we can create some space by space. Usually we identify so strongly with ego that the very thoughts that occur to us, the very feelings, the decisions that we make, all these various processes that are going on in our mind and also our body, we think this is us. There’s a one to one correspondence.
When you think the thought, I love, then you regard this as being in a state of love. There’s no space between you and that thought, for example. There’s no space between you and that feeling. There’s no choice to go along with that thought. There’s no choice to go along with that feeling.
This particular emotional state arises. There’s no space between you and that emotional state. There’s a oneness with it, identifying so closely with the mental processes that are occurring. By simply becoming aware and mindful in the meditation of mindfulness of breathing, we begin to create a space between ourselves, this awareness, and what is going on, these various mental processes so we can begin to determine do I want to go along with this thought, this train of thinking? Do I want this emotion, for example, anger begins to arise?
You can actually watch an emotional state of anger arise, and you don’t necessarily have to identify with it. Up to this point you’ve never questioned it. When emotion anger arises, I am angry. You were the same as this emotion that’s arising, but now you’re beginning to create some space between the observer and this emotion, and you can begin to have some influence, some choice in your life whether you want to identify with that emotion, that thought, that feeling or not. It gives us some degree of freedom before we transcend ego altogether.
We can have some choice. We can decide from the point of view practiced and what is to be abandoned. We can think this is an unskillful state of mind. It’s not going to take me anywhere. Anger has never benefited me in the path.
It’s not going to benefit me now. It’s not going to benefit me in the future. Therefore I’m not going to have anything to do with this anger which is arising in my mind. You short circuit it. Generally, we either try to repress it or we feed it.
Either way, we’re going to energize it. When you try to suppress something, the energy is going to bounce right back at you. In this way we merely observe it, and because it’s merely an impermanent phenomenon, it arises, abides momentarily, and ceases. If we aren’t feeding it energy by either suppressing it or supporting it, it will go away of itself. We don’t have to do anything except cease identifying with these positive, with these various states which are arising, with these various feelings, with these various thoughts.
This all comes from the simple practice of mindfulness and breathing, creating a space, ceasing to support the neurotic patterns of ego. So let’s meditate for a few minutes of mindfulness of breathing. Make some determination in your mind. At the moment I become aware that my mind is strayed from the object, the meditation that is the breathing, I’m going to bring it immediately back without the second thought. I’m going to bring it immediately back.
Bring the bring the mind back to the breathing. We’ll recite the words of refuge. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. To the merit I create by practicing the Dharma, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings? So there’s an asterisk at the third line, a substitution.
To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. To 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. We go for refuge to the Buddha and the Dharma and Sangha.
Buddha in the sense of our own clarity, our own wisdom, the Dharma, the methods whereby we can develop that wisdom, that clarity, in the Sangha whereby this process of attaining wisdom, of attaining enlightenment takes place to the supporting community of fellow pilgrims. We’ve been talking about, in conjunction with going for refuge, the qualities of enlightenment. When we say, What is my refuge? What does that mean? What are we going for protection to?
In a sense of the qualities of enlightenment, the qualities of awareness and knowledge, qualities of love and compassion and of creative spontaneous actions in the world benefiting others. These are our refuge, these very qualities, the qualities which constitute enlightenment. And we talked about the fact that whether these were natural to us or were we really trying to impose some sort of romantic, noble sentient being upon ourselves. That in fact we do have these very qualities at a seed form at present. That the germ of knowledge and awareness is there no matter how faint or how obscured it’s still there.
That the germ or the seed of love and compassion is still there no matter how limited or how exclusive our love and compassion may be. That the germ and seed of these creative actions are still there, that this energy is still there no matter how unrefined, no matter how unspontaneous it might be at present. So we have determined what we mean by our refuge, that is enlightenment. We have determined that we have these qualities, at least in a seed form at present, that it’s natural to us. It’s not something we’re trying to impose upon ourselves.
It’s not something artificial. But where does the very fact of enlightenment come from? And where does the idea of human enlightenment, of Buddhahood come from? It it comes from life itself. And it comes from the history of humankind, of humankind.
Let’s say mankind. There have been people, many, many people who have actually achieved Buddhahood, who have achieved enlightenment, who have achieved these precise qualities to their fullest degree of knowledge and awareness of love and compassion and creative spontaneous energy acting in the world for the benefit of others. Many, many years ago, I was in Sri Lanka and I was on a guess unknowingly I was on a pilgrimage. I was a tourist at that time to the very many of the Buddhist ruins. The Most of the Buddhist ruins were in a state of neglect at that time and they were overgrown with jungles, with vines and trees and bushes.
And I remember just walking through the jungle, the forest alone and it’s very quiet. I came upon a figure of a seated Buddha very similar to my right in stone. And I got the impression in this solitude in this quiet place with this stone Buddha sitting there overgrown by vines and weeds in the jungle, that he had been waiting there for thousands and thousands and thousands of years to be discovered very patiently waiting with infinite compassion, with infinite patience, to be discovered. I think, who was it that wrote two thousand and one? That’s right.
Arthur C. Clarke. He lived in Sri Lanka when he wrote the book two thousand and one. And if you remember it had much to do with the evolution of human humankind. These bursts of advancement in the evolution from more of an ape like person to a humanoid to a child of the universe. And somehow I had the feeling that perhaps he came upon the same setting that I had come upon.
In movie there were always these large stone pillars, I’ll say. Stone, very fat stone, rectangular shapes which represented in some way a leap forward in the evolutionary consciousness of these beings. And somehow I got the feeling that Arthur Clarke perhaps came upon one of these stone images of Buddha in the jungle. And it serves as a in the same way. Somehow it served as a catalyst to raise the level of consciousness by the various beings who came in contact with it, that the idea of Buddhahood.
That I think very much the Buddha has been waiting patiently, with infinite patience within all of us, waiting for us to wake up and recognize our potential, waiting for us to take the evolutionary step into our own hands consciously and begin the long process of becoming all that we can be, becoming enlightened. I think Buddhahood is our birthright. We all should be Buddhists. You have seen our pain and our confusion. We take this as sign of our limitedness, our insufficiency, our incompleteness.
And therefore we often, more than not, develop very negative images of ourselves, negative identities on who we think we are. But this has nothing to do with who we actually are. We are neither who we think we are conventionally or ultimately. Now even in our most depressed moments, even in our darkest, black moments when perhaps we look up, we look out through this garbage mind of ours. We might think that we’re the lowest thing in the world at that very moment.
At that very moment, the mind which is aware of that, which is aware of where we’re at at that moment, is Buddha mind. That very mind which understands that we’re the lowest must have some conception that there is something better, there’s something higher, that that very mind has knowledge. That very mind which is seeing our position we said I should be happy. It’s a Buddha mind because it’s saying, you know, I love you. I have compassion for you.
Even towards yourself, You should be a Buddha. You should be better than this. I want you to be happy. And that very mind is saying, don’t go back to sleep. And then wake up.
Now that you’ve woken up a little bit, don’t go back to sleep. That’s energy. That’s the Buddha mind. So even in our lowest moments, the mind which sees our ourselves as being in our lower states, which sees all our faults, all our negative aspects of ourselves, is a Buddha mind because there is knowledge, there is love, and there is energy. So rather than becoming discouraged at that moment, depressed, really dwelling upon your shortcomings, your negativities.
You should rejoice in the fact of this awareness, realizing that this is your brilliant sanity beginning to break through, recognizing more than that we lead our lives as hollow men and women, more or less as automatons, you know, robots. So the mind which sees us where we’re actually at, even if it sees us as being only in our negative aspects, only in our shortcomings, is knowledge, is love, is trying to wake us up. So that very mind is a potential Buddha mind. So I think we’re very much unimaginably more than we think we are. We are all Buddhas to be.
I think it’s important to remember that. We will all someday be Buddhas. It’s just a matter of whether we take our evolution into our consciousness, into our own hands and use the methods of Dharma. Those methods which raise our consciousness from desire to openness, from hatred to love, from ignorance to wisdom, and apply themselves to ourselves consistently so that we can become all that we know we should be, that we should all be Buddhas. We’re talking about a way to become a Buddha.
It’s called the three principal aspects of the path by Tsongkhapa, a fourteenth century yogi scholar of Tibet. The three principal aspects of the path, developing a determination to be free, opening to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality, into the way things actually are. We are examining the first of these three aspects, developing the determination to be free. Now, we’ve already covered this aspect last year, I’m afraid. So I’m not going to go into it in detail, but I will go over it roughly.
So, last week I mentioned there were four, what are called the four reversals or four transforming thoughts whereby we can develop this determination to be free. First we have to begin to become aware and then appreciate our potential. Then we have to realize that this chance that we have to grow, to make use of our potential, isn’t going to last forever. And then there’s the discussion of the law of cause and effect, karma. And finally, understanding that all states bounded by ego, bounded by reoccurring compulsive patterns are dissatisfactory.
We shouldn’t really accept them as being the ultimate consequence of what it means to be a human being. Those are the four reversals that we’re going to take a look at briefly. Now in his text, which is a very short text, it’s only about fourteen verses long by Tsongkhapa, he first pays homage to the Lama, homage to the foremost holy Lama. So I’d like to say just a few words about spiritual teachers, lamas, gurus. Lama is a Tibetan term.
It’s a translation of the Sanskrit term guru. Somehow we have to get a feeling for what it means to practice a spiritual path And for I have to get a feeling for what it means to relate properly with a spiritual teacher, a spiritual master. You have to develop some feeling. So, when coming to the teachings, to a spiritual path, we’re faced with the problem of how to relate with the spiritual teacher. People always come to the practice with preconceptions.
Preconceptions of what it means to practice, preconceptions of what it means to grow, preconceptions of what the teaching should be like, how they should relate with the teacher, what they expect from the teacher. And very much this developing of a feeling for the proper relationship with the practice and the teacher means a giving up of almost all our preconceptions, the ideas we had before we met the path, before we met the Dharma, what it means to practice the Dharma. The very thought that we are going to get anything from our lama must be given up. We expect him to give us happiness, we expect him to give us peace, wisdom, liberation. Whatever we think, we have to even give up this preconception.
It’s one of the most difficult preconceptions for us to give up. The process of receiving teachings is very much bound up with giving something in return. It’s not like an academic setting where you merely pay your course fees and then you receive the teaching. There has to be something more than that. The student has to give something in return, something more than just material.
Ultimately he has to give up his Has to be some sort of psychological surrender. This is not to say that one becomes a mindless being on the contrary. But it’s necessary to make a gift of opening to the teacher. Even when we have a Dharma talk, generally there’s a prostration which is made to the teacher. One gives up one’s pride.
One gives up the notion that one knows it all. One lowers oneself before the teacher as a way of surrender. Stating, making a statement to yourself not to the teacher, I don’t know it all. Perhaps this person has some answers. I’m going to try to open up to the possibility that he can give me some answers, that somehow he can connect with my mind and invoke some answers from my side.
So even in a very mundane sense, the sense of making a prostration before a dharma talk We’re surrendering. We’re giving up something even if it’s only our pride, our closed mindedness that we have all the answers. If you sit there with a closed minded attitude, it’s very doubtful that there will be any benefit whatsoever from sitting to a Dharma teacher to talk on a spiritual path. So there’s a process of openness, honesty involved in relating with the teacher. We don’t try to make ourselves that we’re a worthwhile student.
It doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay for the teachings, how correctly you behave, how clever you are saying the right things. It’s not like having an interview for a job or buying a car. If you’re having an interview for a job, if you have good manners, if your shoes are polished, if you’re clean and neat and you speak well, there’s a good chance you’ll get the job. Or if you’re out buying a car, if you have the credit, then you’ll get the car. But presenting ourselves, working with the teacher, working with the Dharma is not quite like that.
There’s something more which is required for us. We have to make a real commitment to being open with the teacher through exposing ourselves. You know, we have to begin to be willing to give up our preconceptions, to give up our games, to be honest. If we’re going to communicate directly with the teacher, we have to give up our self deception, our pretenses. So it’s a relationship of real communication and working together to achieve a goal.
If we consistently try to present ourselves in some respectable, some clever, intelligent manner to our teacher to impress him. There’s never going to be a direct communication. There’s never going to be a working together possibility. So it’s a very humbling experience to expose yourself and become vulnerable. So the process of relating with the spiritual teacher, practicing the path is a continual process of abandoning, abandoning our preconceptions.
What it means to grow, what it means to practice Dharma, what it means to be related with the teacher. So this abandonment that’s usually going to occur is experienced as disappointment. This happens to I heard about this happened just a few weeks ago. For example, we have a preconception of what we’re going to get out, what the experience of marriage and having a baby is going to be. But as many women will tell you, it’s not like they thought it would be after the first child comes.
And they have to abandon completely what their preconceptions of what it was going to be like. And there’s a feeling of great disappointment that I think many women experience when after their first child is not quite like what they thought it would be. Now they have a choice. This is the reality of the situation, how it is now. It didn’t meet their expectations.
Now if you’re willing to accept that disappointment and not run away from it, then we can begin to appreciate and really work with the situation as it is, not how we would like it to be, not how we would dream it to be or desire it to be, but in fact how it’s actually unfolding. And then we can possibly have an experience which goes beyond even what we preconceived, which goes beyond what we could have imagined it to be. After you’ve had the baby, it’s very doubtful whether the experience of having that first child is going to be as you preconceived it would be. So you can either dwell in your disappointment, in your loss of your expected happiness, bliss, joy, and see it completely from a negative point of view. Completely indulge in your disappointment and your lost expectations, or you can begin to accept the situation as it is and see its richness and see its workability and begin to see its positive aspects, its positive qualities.
Perhaps the joy and the happiness that will arise out of that, out of really seeing and getting in touch with the situation would be far more than you had previously before. Likewise, the same process goes on with the spiritual teacher. How a spiritual teacher is supposed to act, how he’s supposed to relate with you, how that Dharma practice is supposed to go, we have to begin to give up up all our preconceptions and this process is a disappointment. But if we stick with it, if we work through it, then it’s been my experience. The joy happiness and the satisfaction is more than I had ever expected.
We have to stick with it and work through the disappointments which are bound to occur. There’s no growth without disappointments. Coming again and again out of the fantasy world of ego and in touch with reality is an experience of disappointment. It’s an experience of growth. It’s an enriching experience.
So the Dharma, the practice of Dharma becomes a rather mundane affair. It’s not as glorious as we had thought it would be. There are no brilliant lights. We think about it, what we want to do when we first approach the Dharma is have our ego attain enlightenment, isn’t it? Our ego wants to be there and celebrate the attainment of Buddhahood.
So, at first we’re very entertained by the whole process, all the rituals, all the meditations, the inspiration. The meditations, the inspiration. It’s very fascinating, Buddhism and the philosophy. And so this is a period of spiritual materialism where the ego is sort of fantasizing, someday when I have all my disciples around me, when I’ve attained Buddhahood, I’m leading all sentient beings, and they will all look up to me and we can all sing and dance together, and we can drift off into the sunset with beautiful music. But there reaches a point where there’s a disappointment.
It’s not like that. Where the ego begins to realize, catches glimpses of the fact that it’s not going to be around with the moment of enlightenment. Nobody really attains enlightenment, especially the ego, that this is serious business, that there’s nothing in it for ego. The spiritual path is ultimately the death of the ego. There’s a dying process that goes on.
So this in a coupled with the feeling of disappointment that it’s not as thrilling a prospect as it had been expected to be, most people give up. They find, well, this isn’t my path. I don’t like this particular teacher. I don’t like a lot of rituals. I don’t like I don’t think we should have to sit and meditate.
I think it’s too disciplined. I think you should be more