Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 24-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun builds the case for cherishing others by asking listeners to examine their own pleasure and pain: when are you actually happiest? His answer — that our most fulfilling moments come when ego boundaries dissolve, in music, in love, in aesthetic absorption — frames the whole session. He traces self-cherishing as a claustrophobic prison, drawing on Lama Zopa’s insistence that every difficulty traces back to the selfish mind, the Pänchen Lama’s verse on self-cherishing as the cause of all misery, and the Dalai Lama’s phrase “be wisely selfish.” A sunglasses metaphor anchors the practical point: wearing the lens of self-cherishing, the world looks threatening and alien; try another pair and it changes. The session closes with Śāntideva’s verse on joy and suffering. Accessible to any thoughtful listener regardless of Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 3 PA 1989 10 28.mp3
UUID: 3b653912-9d9f-402d-92ad-161764907831
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-10-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 24.1 minutes
Words: ~2,635
About the cold fact that other sentient beings want to be happy, don’t want to suffer to the same degree that we want to be happy and don’t want to suffer. This is the cold fact of the reality of our situation. So there’s nothing artificial. We’re not trying to There’s not some romantic notion. It’s very realistic.
And the realistic practicality of developing the ability to experience that equality and begin to identify with others and actually experience their pain. So this is the psychology of an awakening heart. It’s not anything wildly otherworldly. It’s something that is not beyond our ability as normal human beings to develop. You know, but okay, but why?
Why should I go to all this trouble? Maybe it can be developed such an approach, such a radically different state of mind than the types of mind that we’re normally habituated to, accustomed to. So we have to look in our own experience. As I said quite often, pleasure and pain takes priority over logic. And where we find our pleasure, where we find our pain, in fact, is where our heart is going to be, is the direction our mind is going to tend toward.
There’s very few individuals who are able to override their emotional quality of pleasure and pain through the rational process of their thinking. And we’re very much bound by what we conceive of as pleasure and pain. So we can look in our actual experience. What is the nature of our experience of pleasure in regard to others, and our nature of our experience of pain in relationship to others? So when are we the happiest?
I think it becomes evident within our own experience that people are the most happiest at those moments when they begin to transcend their habitual ego boundaries, their sense of self, the narrow habitual ego patterns, ego sense. You know, when they begin to lose the self confinement, to whatever degree they might be able to transcend this quality even momentarily to go beyond this quality of self cherishness, ego boundary, this sense of self, this burden. These perhaps are our happiest moments. And we’re probably never more miserable than when we are caught up in the claustrophobic world of our ego centered self concern, our exaggerated self conception of self, And they’re confined to this petty narrow I, I, I, me, me, me, this prison that we create for ourselves. Only parts suffer, not the whole.
And this realization when stated negatively by the mystic says, You are released from suffering when you realize the part is an illusion. There is no separate self to suffer. When stated positively it says, You are always the whole which knows only freedom, release, and radiance. To realize the whole is to escape the fate of a part, which is only suffering, pain, and death. Hīnayāna Buddhism stresses the former, Hinduism and Christianity the latter, and Mahāyāna Buddhism seems to strike up a happy balance.
Yet they are all witnesses to the same insight. That by transcending our feelings of part, of self, of this sense of isolated ego, identifying with the greater, with transcending momentarily the bonds of our imposed prison chains. These I think are probably our happiest moments that we experience. And to the same degree that we thicken the walls of our prison cell of ego, that we demand that the world somehow revolve around our needs, our wants to the same degree we experience dissatisfaction and suffering. You know, it’s as if we’re all very much a part of something greater, like a very complex clockwork.
And as long each part has its place, each part is as necessary as any other part. But it seems that the ego, in its basic bewilderment, decides to turn the other direction and disrupts the harmony existing within the whole. And this disharmony is experienced as suffering. So we can talk about sense pleasure. You know, the very fact that we’re talking about basic sense pleasure reaches its highest pitch, its highest experience.
For example, when you’re carried away by music. And the beauty of the completely absorbed and some beautiful music. For a moment you’ve gone beyond this self awareness, this sense of self consciousness, this ego quality, this burden of watching yourself constantly. Then emotional pleasure is greatest through love when we go beyond ourself, when we find union with the beloved, when we identify with the beloved. And this is our, I think, our experience.
This is my experience. Emotional pleasure. And then there’s the pleasure of aesthetic pleasures and intellectual pleasures. I think we can say that it’s proportional in intensity to the degree that we are talking about intellectual pleasure or aesthetic pleasure, to the same degree that we are able to let beauty or truth take one beyond oneself into some sort of expansive universal universality of bliss and transcendence. Through the possibility of beauty and truth transcending the quality of neural confines of our ego, you know, intellectual and aesthetic truths, intellectual and aesthetic pleasures.
As long as we remain so tightly focused upon our own happiness, whether temporal or ultimate, we will never experience the expansiveness of a truly open heart. The only way to achieve the total vision of complete enlightenment is to free ourselves from the restrictions of this narrow self-cherishing attitude. In the teachings of all the highly evolved men and women of the past it is clearly stated that the narrow self-cherishing habit of mind brings us nothing but spiritual suffocation. If we truly wish to fulfill our highest potential or even if we only want to achieve a certain mundane satisfaction in our daily life, then we must overcome the self-cherishing and dedicate ourselves as fully as possible to the welfare of others. This is the only way to achieve a completely opened heart, the only way to experience lasting happiness.
Dedication simply means that having created a certain atmosphere of positive energy within yourself, you determine to share this happiness with others as much as possible. According to Buddhist psychology, if you do not have a dedicated attitude to some extent, you will never be totally satisfied. Instead, you will remain bored and lonely. As the Pänchen Lama says in his Tantric text entitled Offering to the Spiritual Master, self-cherishing is the cause of all misery and dissatisfaction while holding all mother sentient beings dearer than oneself is the foundation of all realizations and knowledge. Therefore inspire me to change myself cherishing into concern for all others.
So this is, you know, what we’re talking about is not some complex philosophical theory, but a very simple statement about life, about, you know, what is actually happening to us in our everyday life, you know, where our pleasure and pain are coming from. So we have to find some way to create an opening, you know, a key to create some crack in the wall of our self-cherishing, the wall of our cell of ego, the prison wall, which we’re all trapped in. You know, to create some inkling, some doubt that maybe your approach up to this time hasn’t been working. That to actually look within your own experience, not superficially but deeply, and try to see where actually your happiness is coming from, moments of real authenticity, satisfaction, fulfillment. The happiest moments in your life, where are they coming from, basically, very deeply?
And where is the over riding tone of your dissatisfaction coming from? Going beneath the superficial causes and trying to see deeply what is the basic root of my problems, difficulties within our own experience. You know, what is bringing me The happiness I want, the peace, the love? So these are, you know, these aren’t intellectual ideas. They’re very experiential.
We’re trying to bring into question that perhaps there’s another way, a more skillful way of relating, a more effective, appropriate. You know, it’s not that we’re trying to perform perfect actions in a perfect world, but just to act appropriately in an imperfect world, to get back in harmony. You know, all are very much involved in self-cherishing. We have to begin to look at the disadvantages of self-cherishing and the advantages of cherishing others for ourselves in our own immediate experience. This is where our pleasure and pain lies.
This is where our heart lies. So it has to go beyond the mere intellectual sphere into the nitty gritty world of our own actual pain and pleasure. And the fact that we’re very much involved in self-cherishing. You know, we all try to take advantage of someone else. That’s our basic approach to life up to this point, to profit only for ourselves.
You know, the entire world is built upon self-cherishing, self attachment. You know, whatever is. It’s racism, classism, sexism, whatever. Big countries overwhelm small countries. Big children take candy away from little children.
Husbands take advantage of their wives. You know, I make friends with someone because they’re going to be able to benefit me in some way. You know, it’s the same with the rest of the world. Know, boyfriends, girlfriends. Everybody wants something.
Everybody’s got their hidden agenda. Everybody’s using everybody else. This is a little article by Lama Zopa, who is the spiritual director of FPMT, of which Buddha House is a member. This is his photograph on the wall there. However, the essential thing is, whatever problems arise, to be aware every time, immediately, that all these problems come from your selfish mind.
This problem is given to me by my self-cherishing thought. Every time, immediately try to recognize this solution. As long as you put all the blame outside, there is no happiness. In reality, all problems, all the difficulties of life come from the self-cherishing thought. All these problems are a result of negative karmas accumulated in the past out of self-cherishing thought.
Being under the control of self-cherishing thought, you allow the disturbing thoughts to rise. Then you are motivated by this negative karma. These problems not only come from past karma accumulated under control of self-cherishing thought, but also come from your self-cherishing thought in your day to day life. You know, if you wanted to give Lama Zopa a nickname, you would call him the disadvantages of self-cherishing thought Lama. That’s all he talks about.
And it’s a If we have to hate somebody, hate your own self-cherishing thought. It’s your greatest enemy. You know, that’s his single message, if he has one single message. It’s the cause, the root of all our difficulties, whether it’s personal, within yourself, or your difficulties in relating with others, between husbands and wives, between child and parent. It’s all based on self-cherishing, exaggerated self concern, selfishness.
So, you know, setting aside, I’m gonna stop at nine o’clock tonight. I didn’t plan it. Or maybe a stretch or something. So, you know, if we Setting aside all the philosophical theories, abstract intellectual ideas, all the philosophies, dogmas, doctrines, Buddhism, whatever. And just to see whether or not our self-cherishing is the cause of all our confusion and frustration and all that we have to do is look at our own life experience.
Whether we call ourselves Buddhists or Christians, atheists or whatever, it doesn’t matter. All your confusion, difficulties, where is this coming from, what is the cause? Check up to see if perhaps it’s your self-cherishing. That’s the change. Your mind will naturally flow in the direction of what it conceives of.
Of its happiness, it will naturally withdraw, begin to move away from that which it conceives of as the sources of difficulties, the sources of its problems, suffering. That’s the dynamic quality of mind. If we consistently conceive of putting our hand in a fire as happiness, then we shouldn’t be surprised if we’re consistently being burnt. So we might be mistaken in our conceptions. And this is one of the basic statements of Buddhism, I think, that we are very much mistaken as to what is really happiness and what is really dissatisfaction.
But we never take the time to check up. We’re too busy chasing after this elusive happiness that’s somehow always slipping out of our fingers. You know all the various feelings, the feelings of isolation, of loneliness, frustration, conflict, defensiveness, competitiveness, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unwanted. All stem from self-cherishing. This exaggerated self concern.
So you know with self-cherishing there is no space to love others. There is no communication. There is no ability to really touch others deeply nor to be touched by others. Just this sore spot with this huge iron fence around it to protect it. Just this kind of a huge black hole which sucks up everything within it.
It’s like a bottomless pit. So that’s self-cherishing. For a man to be alive, he must exercise not only the acts that belong to vegetative and animal life. He must not only subsist, grow, be sentient, not only move himself around, feed himself and the rest. He must carry on activities proper to his specifically human kind of life.
He must, that is to say, think intelligently. And above all, he must direct his actions by free decisions made in the light of his own thinking. These decisions, moreover, must tend to his own intellectual and moral and spiritual growth. They must tend to make him more aware of his capacities for knowledge and for free action. They must expand and extend his power to love others and to dedicate himself to their good, for it is in this that he finds his own fulfillment.
So maybe the cherishing of others is the way we can find all the happiness that we’ve been looking for our entire lives. You know, as the Dalai Lama has said, Be wisely selfish. Cherish others. And by cherishing others, we are going to receive more happiness than you had imagined possible otherwise. Know?
Perhaps our method You know, it’s like if you have yellow sunglasses on, the world appears to you yellow. You relate with it in that way. If they’re green, the world appears to you green. If we have the attitude, the sunglasses of self-cherishing, then somehow we’re going to interpret the world in that way. We’re going to feel the qualities of alienness, being isolated from others, the defensive qualities, that others are threatening us.
There’s going to be conflict, hostility, simply because we’re wearing inappropriate sunglasses, the sunglasses of self-cherishing. So maybe we could try another pair on for a while to see if maybe the world looks a little bit better. So this is maybe the way to become a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being. This is what Buddhism is saying, at least. You have to check up and try for yourself.
But this has been the eternal message of all spiritual traditions. It has been the eternal message of all spiritual masters. And it has been the message which my spiritual teachers have pounded into my tough brain over and over and over over again. If you want to be happy, you can begin to concern yourself more and more with the happiness of others. So this is talking about the disadvantages of self-cherishing and the advantages of cherishing others.
Whatever joy there is in the world all comes from desiring others to be happy. And whatever suffering there is in the world all comes from a desire in myself to be happy. But what need is there to say much more? The childish work for their own benefit, the Buddha’s work for the benefit of others. Just look at the difference between them.
Stop there. We can meditate on loving kindness.