Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The “stew” metaphor anchors this 47-minute session: Ven Jampa Gendun argues that our attitude is the liquid base — circumstances are just vegetables, and without the right inner quality life is flavorless. He frames the opening meditation not as mystical preparation but as daily integration of values, and introduces a breath-counting technique that traces the breath from nostrils to navel and back in five steps. The talk then picks up Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path at the second topic — opening the heart — working through equanimity (the labels friend, enemy, and stranger are arbitrary and shifting), recognizing all beings as past mothers, and remembering maternal kindness in concrete, embodied terms. It closes with interdependence as a basis for gratitude: every garment involves growers, weavers, and sellers; even one’s job depends on others existing.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 3 PA 1988 07 29.mp3
UUID: 9938a039-f643-42f8-8797-f27ee5cf573d
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-07-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.0 minutes
Words: ~5,477
I’ve been talking a lot. In general, we start the evening off with a short meditation. I instituted that because I thought it was necessary to create some kind of buffer between, you know, your normal day activities of of which you, for one reason or another, have to be engaged in, that you have to concern yourself with the practical affairs of your everyday life. And then, you know, to give some kind of pause, some kind of space, create a buffer so that perhaps you could get in touch with parts of ourselves that we normally are unaware of or insensitive to or that we’re just out of touch with in the course of our busy day. But hopefully, you know, meditation is to help us to remain in touch.
It’s not to It shouldn’t be just a prelude to some kind of mystical experience or something out of the ordinary of our everyday life. It should be a way of integrating, you know, whatever you may hear in the talks, whatever you may learn from your studies, the insights that you may gain into integrating them into your everyday life. You know, very much the world that we live in, each of our individual worlds is a reflection of our own mind. I think it’s much more so than I can even imagine or any of us can imagine. But even on a very mundane level, a very coarse level, you know, we are confronted with many situations and many types of relationships.
And how we deal with these is very much a reflection upon our own states of mind. We have a tendency to see that, you know, the people and the things that happen to us are somehow independent of the quality or the state of the mind that we bring to the situation or the relationship. But I know for myself when I see when people start hassling me, you know, and I see people as an obstacle to my happiness, and I it come and then I see it quite often in the course of a short space of time, then it becomes a clue to me that sort of shakes me. A little something in the back of my mind said, hey, wait a minute, you know, something’s wrong with inside yourself. There’s no problem out there.
And so I have to sort of become a regain my get in touch with my own state of mind, which I’ve, for one reason or another, I’ve sort of gotten out of touch with. And I realize that I’m approaching my situations with my relationships with some kind of preconception, some kind of negative attitude. And this is like wearing sunglasses. You know, if you wear green sunglasses, then everything looks green. If you wear negative sunglasses, then you shouldn’t be surprised that the world looks pretty miserable and confused to you.
So by becoming aware of our interstates, we can Becoming aware of the, you know, the very quality of our mind. You know, it’s like I was trying to think of some kind of a metaphor analogy or something like that. And, you know, we can make a very nice stew. And there’s the all these nice vegetables. There’s the celery and the carrots and what else potatoes, peas.
And we can have very good ingredients. But if, you know, the liquid part, if it doesn’t taste very good, then our stew isn’t going to work isn’t going to be very delicious. It’s not going work very well. Then on the other hand, if the liquid portion is pretty good, you know, it has good flavor. And even if we have poor quality vegetables in our stew, it’s still going it’s gonna taste good.
You know, I think the French say, you know, if the if the sauce is good, then we can eat shoe leather. It doesn’t make any difference. So like the the liquid part is our attitude. It’s our whole world view, what we bring to our life. You know, a lot of us go through life as if life were a rehearsal for the real thing, which is coming sometime.
I don’t know quite when. Hopefully sometime in the not too distant future. And this is the way we pass our life. Never really quite having gained the satisfaction, fulfillment, the alive quality that we’re all looking for. You know, in Zen, for example, they talk about a thief who practices Zen won’t necessarily become a saint, but he’ll become a better thief.
So I think in meditation, you know, hopefully we’re not going to become better thieves, but at least we can begin to develop some alive qualities, some the attitudes, the the the liquid part of the stew that we bring to all the ingredients, the awareness. It’s going it’s going to add a quality of vividness in everything that we do. I think this is most of what we are all looking for, the quality of joy and fulfillment and of participation. So this process of meditation is not so much that we’re specifically setting out to gain specific realizations. It’s that we’re beginning to work with the whole liquid part of the stew to develop various seasonings.
So that our whole approach, our whole attitude, our whole world view is going to be more in tune with the quiet type and quality of life that we want to live. So we shouldn’t be, you know, constantly looking over our shoulder to see what realization is coming up next. But just relax into the state and knowing that we’re seasoning the stew in this liquid portion of our mind to develop these qualities. And it’s the entire totality of our approach to our existence which is wrong. It’s not one specific particular instances which are calling us our problems.
The particular problems are going to go away by themselves. They’re impermanent. They’re going to rise, abide for a while, and cease of themselves. But it’s the entire theme of our lives that we’re trying that we’re working with, and we have to begin to see the patterns and the attitudes which are flavoring, which are determining the quality of our life. And this we can we can begin to do in meditation, and we can begin to season the type of life that we want to live.
A life, you know, of happiness, love and fulfillment with some energy. So we’ve been doing mindfulness of breathing. Mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of what I’m saying, mindfulness of breathing. And I think most of you, you know, know these instructions that I’ve been giving. We’ve gone over the various five hindrances, for example.
Just generally becoming aware of the breath. That is, by breath, we simply mean the tactile sensations of the breathing process. That’s what we That’s the only way we can come in contact with the breath. You know, the lifting of the chest, the The rise and fall of the abdomen. They have air rushing in and out of the nostrils.
So that all these tactile sensations add up to a feeling of breath. And we want to know we’re developing the factors of mind called awareness and mindfulness. The mindfulness is that which holds us to the breath, like holding a glass, for example. And awareness tells us as to what object our mind is attending to at any particular moment. For example, if we are in fact holding the glass or not, and how tightly are we holding the glass.
The Buddha has said that a person without mindfulness is as if he’s dead. That, you know, we can begin to prioritize the values which we wish wish to express in our life. You know, if you feel that the that some of the the values of of the religious practices or spiritual practices or Buddhism or Christianity are are are worthwhile, are are beneficial, will make you a happier person, then somehow you have to bring these values to each of your situations again and again and again. You know, if leave them for Sunday morning or Friday evening, then they aren’t of much value to us. But in our daily situations, it’s mindfulness which reminds us.
Mindfulness simply means memory, which by which we recollect what we hold our most value in our lives. What is worth most worthwhile? What what turns you on in particular in your own experience? And we bring this to all our situations, you know, to our relationships. So it’s necessary to develop the factor of mindfulness and begin to establish some creative values in your life.
And through the process of mindfulness, to bring keep again and again bringing this these qualities that you wish to imbue the situation with to your everyday situations. And this way, you know, we begin to integrate the values that we seek into our very being. You know, I think it’s called You know, this factor of morality, for example, you know. It’s simply the harmony between our convictions and our behavior. We develop convictions of what is worthwhile, what is meaningful, what is beneficial for our lives, what makes us happy.
By integrating these values not merely as convictions, but into our very behavior, then this is ethics, this is morality, and this is what And the highest morality is peace. So we’re always at conflict with ourselves. We never have morality, we never have peace. So this process of mindfulness can help us to move simply from wishes, from deep convictions, to an actual integration into our behavior of the values that we think are worthwhile. And then the factor of awareness.
Without without awareness, we’re going to be overwhelmed even if we have, you know, high aspirations. Initially, our minds simply aren’t strong enough to to overcome negative states of mind when they have become very pronounced, very dominant. So we have to be aware of the states of our mind. We have to be aware of, for example, when we’re becoming angry, when desire is beginning to arise. If we can catch these moments early enough, then it’s quite easily to avert them.
We have some choice whether to allow it to continue or whether a more skillful state of mind might be better suited to our needs or might be more preferable. And we have the ability at this initial moments to institute, you know, change when we want to. So the the factors in mindfulness and awareness are the factors are real the real spiritual factors which operate in our, you know, our everyday life. In this in this way, meditation is serving, you know, not merely as a buffer, but it’s serving as a way of relating what you learn, as I said, and what all the various insights and understandings, a way of integrating them into your everyday life. And this is the way we solve our problems.
So essentially meditation is the way we solve our problems. It’s a real workable method. You know, talk about the word Dharma, you know, whatever. Whatever raises the the level of consciousness, you know, whatever raises a person’s level of consciousness from desire to generosity, from hatred to love, from ignorance to wisdom. You know, we can call that dharma.
Someone who doesn’t have Dharma, someone who doesn’t have this method, he has a problem, but he has no handle, has no way to work with it. But someone who has a method, the Dharma, he has some means. You know, he has some practical way to change the situation in the direction that he wants to follow. Otherwise, we’re very much lost. Another, you know, in this process of mindfulness of breathing, you know, we’ve been talking about just the general awareness.
Another possibility, another technique which I haven’t explained in some time is what’s called following. Simply following the breath, beginning at the tip of the nose and as if there were a tube. You don’t have to imagine the tube, but just following the breath. That the breath comes in, natural breathing. It comes in, moves toward the head, the crown of the head, and moves down inside the, you know, some perhaps somewhere inside the spine, just inside the spine, and down to the navel.
And as we do this we count. Beginning at the nose tip is one, halfway between the heart center, let’s say the center of the chest, and the nose tip is two, and then heart center is three, halfway between the heart center and the navel is four, and the navel is five. And then we simply reverse that. Navel is one, halfway two, heart center three, halfway four, nose to five. And natural breathing, we just simply follow the breath in and out counting one, two, three, four, five.
Yeah. So you could try that. So let’s do mindfulness of breathing for five minutes. And then at the end of that, we’re just going to dwell in awareness. It’s not an perhaps I I hope I’ve made myself somewhat clear.
It’s not an it’s not particularly easy to do. Just the fact the the fact of, you know, we’ve we’ve been talking about this noting. Whatever the mind is attending to, we want to know it. Whatever the mind is involved in, you know, whether it’s, you know, for example, if I see Sue, I can see, seeing, seeing, seeing. And I hear the fans, hearing, thinking, thought, thinking, thinking, thoughts arise, images arise, imagining.
Whatever, we want to know it. We’re beginning to develop this factor awareness from moment to moment simply knowing what the mind is attending to, what it’s involved in, and to help us we simply note it. And so at the end of the mindfulness of breathing, we’re just going to allow what we call a choiceless awareness. We’re going to allow the mind to attend, to become involved, to rest on any object that stimulates us, that it wants to, in other words. But we want to know it, that’s all.
You know, if it goes to the fan, the sound of the fan, if it goes to a pain in your knee, if it goes to some thought, that’s okay. We’re not trying to control it, but we simply want to know. So we note thinking, thinking, hearing, hearing, sensing, feeling, feeling, whatever. Okay. Simply allow the mind to become involved in whatever object, but maintain awareness.
And we’ll recite the verse of refuge. Have a seat. So we substitute third line for the asterisk. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I’m enlightened. Through the merit I create, perfect, and quickly 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. May I go for refuge in 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, May I attain Buddha for the sake of all beings? Also, every week I talk about a little bit about refuge. I think if I can carry that what do you call that?
A metaphor of the stew? I carry that a little bit further, you know, it’s like taking refuge in the cook. You’re your own cook and you have a recipe book and you’re going to change the You’re gonna make a delicious stew out of your mind. Doesn’t sound so good, does it? You know, I keep I keep going back to it.
I think it’s quite necessary to constantly be reorientating the understanding of where the source of your happiness lies and the way we can work with our problems, as I’ve just talked about. You know, this quality of our mind that we bring to this situation is going to determine our happiness. Now it’s not that, you know, having a warm, loving relationships, a comfortable home, a nice car, a good interesting job, where you get paid well, these are all conditions conducive to a happy way of life. But without the internal cause, that is your the attitudes and the quality of your own mind, they’re worthless. They can never bring you one moment of happiness.
But with ino, I mean I’ve seen this for myself when I lived in India. Meditators and Tibetans in general, they’re very religious people who have nothing. They’ve lost their home completely. They’re refugees. They’ve seen maybe a large part of their family killed.
They had almost nothing when they came to India. But they had a refuge in their Dharma. And the meditators who live in the mountains, in mud huts, cardboard walls, live on roasted barley flour and buttered tea, Happiest people I’ve ever met. The most loving people, most generous people I’ve ever met. So it’s the you know, it was if you have richness of mind, then what you have on the outside doesn’t make so much difference.
But it’s good to have a loving, warm relationship. It’s good to have a cheerful, comfortable home to come home to. It’s good to have a good job that you find interesting, that you find creative. These can add to the abundance of your life. But without this source, without the proper attitude, then your life can just simply be hollow, recurring events without any particular meaning, without any significance.
So this is what we keep reminding ourselves when we again and again go for refuge. To simply again and again orientating ourselves. Where does our treasure lie? I hope you don’t take this to mean that you should give up your family, should give up your home, your jobs and run off to the mountains of the Himalayas. That’s no answer to the you’re going to still take your mind wherever you go.
You can’t run away from your mind, so you might as well work with it in your in the present situation, which is the best situation to work with. It’s Anyway. In Buddhism, a human being should be completely happy, free from ideas, philosophy, religion, doctrine, everything. Free. All living beings are one unity, one family, so your mind is happy.
You don’t feel jealous when you see Muslims because they have oil. If you’re practicing, if you look, really objectively look, all these sentient beings are equal. It’s actually deluded to have different opinions about them. So you realize this and then you understand that your dear friend, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your enemy, non-Buddhist, non religious people, people who are against religion, actually they are all equal. For example, we have a problem now in this country.
Must be India, I don’t know. We have terrorism. Maybe the terrorists are showing some reality, who knows? Maybe we can learn something from them. Maybe, I don’t know.
Anyway, they are showing you some reality, aren’t they? Another good example also, Mao Zedong threw threw me out of Tibet without any clothes. I came like this. Speaking personally, however, I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful to him.
I was kicked out of my samsaric nest. Tibet was my samsaric nest. I have hundreds of relatives here and there, relatives nature is like this. In Tibet we have saṃsāra too, Tibetan saṃsāra. So kicked out, great.
True, you know, for me. I learn more real dharma when they kick me out, so it’s good. You’re learning something. Many times instead of learning, I just intellectually spaced out. Never learned.
Never never never ever learned, I tell you. I never ever learnt. I just said words. I believe them. I believe that.
By words, just words. You cannot learn anything actually. Reality is something else. But in a situation situation, then you really know. In one way the western environment is very good because it’s very hard to practice Dharma.
Delusion is so strong. Desire is so strong. Hatred is so strong. So this is good. Good for practicing Dharma.
One needs this. It’s true. You know what the Himalayan mountains are like? Nothing happens. The rock is always there.
The water is always flowing, always there. Not too much challenge. To stay in the Himalayan mountains is such an easy life, you know. But you come to the west to care to take care of this one here. I don’t feel western students are worthless.
I really feel their challenge is very difficult. I really feel this, you know. Their practice is much stronger than Himalayan monks. I feel that way. They have to deal with society, difficult I tell you.
You bring a Himalayan monk and you put him in a western society, maybe he goes berserk. That’s true because it’s too much for him, Too much. Also, that’s why my point is that when you put yourself in a situation then you practice, then it becomes your experience. Dharma is the idea but you have to put it into action. Then it becomes experience.
Then it becomes indestructible nature. Otherwise, it is just philosophy. So you don’t have to go anywhere to practice. We’re talking about the three principal aspects of the path by the fourteenth century yogi scholar, Tsongkhapa. Developing the determination to be free, opening our hearts, opening ourselves to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality.
And we’re discussing the second of these three, opening our hearts to others. Within this discussion there are two systems. There’s a system for developing the awakening heart, which is the sevenfold cause and effect instruction, and the system of exchange of self with others. And the system of the sevenfold cause and effect instruction has as its foundation equanimity, developing an equal mindedness towards all sentient beings. That is to say, the important insight to be gained is that the labels that we use, that we apply, the labels of friend, enemy, and stranger are arbitrary.
They’re not based on any rational reasoning why we would apply them in one case and not in another case and that they’re constantly changing. In order to help us to develop a more fluid and open state where we no longer hold onto these labels as solid and as concrete as we once did, that we allow some space, that we know that this enemy can quickly become a friend, and a friend can quickly become an enemy, and the person to whom we are now indifferent can easily become one or the other. And that in fact, why do I call this enemy an enemy? And we have to look into our reason. And based upon this, we developed a recognition of all sentient beings as our mother, the first of the sevenfold cause and effect instructions.
And this, as I said, is probably very difficult in our culture that we have to have a firm conviction in rebirth. That is, we have to begin to understand the nature of the mind essentially, and where does the mind come from? Does it come from the nervous system, the brain, the body? Or does it have another other substantial cause that is previous moments of mind? And we discussed some of the possibilities and we brought up some questions in this consideration.
So the conclusion that is to be drawn from this first precept is that all sentient beings have been our mothers, as surprising as that may sound at first. That there’s not one place in the universe that we haven’t been born. There’s not one situation that we haven’t experienced. That in fact our mind has had no beginning and over infinite beginningless period of time we’ve taken infinite beginningless number of rebirths. In all of these rebirths we’ve had a mother just like the mother of this life.
And therefore in fact in literal fact everyone in this room has been our actual mother and has raised us in kindness, just like our mother of this life. And we move on to the second precept, which is remembering the kindness of our mother. We’ve And the third precept developing the wish to repay our kindness, our mother’s kindness. So we were discussing the kindnesses of mothers. The kindnesses of mothers.
I get to see it quite often. I’m quite fortunate. It’s nice. It’s very warming to see. It may not be for the mothers, but it’s nice for me to see, you know, their worry and their concern.
Out of this in this little thing which doesn’t doesn’t even know that it’s being loved so much that that there’s someone so concerned about it. You know, just even when, you know, we’ve gone over this, the fact that even just as a mass of cells, you know, in our mother’s womb, our mother begins to direct her concern, her attention, you know, her love toward us. You know, this mass of cells which can no way deserve that, that love, that concern, that worry that the mother goes through from the moment of our moment that she becomes aware that we are conceived in her womb. And wishing us that we’d be wishing us well, that there no harm come to us. You know, from the moment of our inception, someone concerned about us without our even knowing it.
You know, usually we’re it’s the other way around. We try to find out as much as we can if people are concerned about us. We found out that perhaps they aren’t. But here this is something that I think is quite important to try to get in touch with this awareness. That unbeknownst to us there was this complete unconditional love being directed at us which was came completely undeserved, unearned.
Just because the fact that we exist, we’re deserving of our mother’s love, that we receive our mother’s love as a gift as as it were. And they get in touch with the the psychological merger of being cuddled to our mother. You know, this is an emotional experience, isn’t it? It’s it’s not something which we can very easily intellectualize on. It’s not meant to be.
It’s getting in touch with some very deep, profound memories which are embedded within the recesses of all of our hearts. This is what meditation is meant to do, as I said, to get us in touch, aware with what’s inside of us already. Our complete helplessness, complete dependency. You know, our mother is feeding us, cleaning us, changing our clothes, caring for us, protecting us, worrying if we’re sick, relieved when we when we become well again, constantly concerned about our welfare. And I see this.
You know? I mean, I see Bronnie, for example. It’s nice to see. And all the mothers that I get to see. Completely I I One of the most notable things coming back to the West after many years was how very child centered the families are.
After there’s a birth of a child in a family, it becomes like the nucleus. The family becomes centered around the welfare of the child very much. And we all had this experience that we we’ve forgotten. We’ve forgotten the absolute trust that we’ve once felt in someone, the feeling of complete security that we once were able to experience. So some people, you know, may say that this is not The mother does all this for a child, not out of kindness, but it’s her responsibility.
And she’s sort of forced into this situation. So even though it may be her responsibility, But she’s chosen to accept that responsibility. You know, some mothers don’t accept that responsibility. If she didn’t, you know, for everyone in this room, if someone had not accepted responsibility for our care, would have died. And this is a fact.
Because we were completely at the mercy of other people at one time, completely helpless and dependent. We can also consider the kindness of people in general, not just from the fact of when they were a mother. This complex interdependence of life, you know, on the planet and the contribution others provide us to make to us and providing us with our food, clothing, our shelter, our warmth. So we are trying to develop new ways of looking at the same situation, which are in harmony, in accord with the actual situation, but in fact bring a greater dimension to our life, a more fulfilling, meaningful way of responding to the same situations that we are now. So we, you know, we have a tendency to think, well, know, I don’t need anybody else.
I’m pretty I’m self sufficient. I can stand up I can stand on my own two feet. You know, that’s looked on as very as admirable to be able to think that and to be able to do that. And in fact it is. But we have to look at the situation perhaps a little bit deeper than our simple minded arrogance.
We have to look at the fact that everything that we eat, everything that we wear, and the place that we live in are all a result of other people’s efforts. If we look at this situation deeply, that in some way, every moment of our lives is dependent upon the kindness of others. In some way, it’s dependent upon other people, other human beings. For example, you know, if the clothes that we’re wearing, you know, if you’re wearing cotton cotton, someone had to grow the cotton, someone had to pick the cotton, someone had to ship the cotton, weave the cotton, dye the cotton, sew the cotton, ship what do you sell the cotton? And finally, you know, we get to wear the material, the clothes.
Everything that we have is is the result of this long process requiring the efforts of many, many people. You know, so many hands, so many bodies, so much physical and mental effort All went into, you know, was involved. And in the end, we reap the harvest of all these efforts. So, you know, at this point, you know, many people we might think that, yeah, that’s right. Many people have been involved.
Many people have worked in this process. But we paid him, you know, for everything that we got. You know, I went out and I I did, you know, I made a lot of effort and I worked my job. And in return for that effort, for that mental and physical effort in my job, I got I got a salary, I use that money, and I go out and buy what I want. So, you know, where is the kindness involved in in this?
And why am I why should I feel any sort of gratitude or gratefulness to others since I worked for everything I got? But the simple fact that we have a job, that we have the opportunity, that we have positions is also dependent upon others. You know, if other people didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have our job, we wouldn’t have this opportunity to be able to make a salary in order to buy the things which are being made for us in the first place. So all this is the result of a large number of people. In the final analysis, the very fact that we’re able to survive is dependent upon others.
The clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, and the place that we’re sitting now, here in this building, Buddha House, It just didn’t appear out of nowhere. You know, there were carpenters and plumbers, laborers, masons, painters. And the dependence upon them, now we can gather here. We can sit here in relative comfort. Relative comfort.
So, you know, if we think about this in this way, this interrelatedness, and we can develop in some way some gratitude for others for what they’re doing for us, even though we might not even be aware of the long processes involved in, you know, in making use of all these articles. But we, you know, we might still think that they really weren’t doing it to be kind. And in fact, they’re just doing it, you know, to make money, to get paid for all this. They’re working for their own benefit. But even in a very ordinary sense, when someone benefits us, usually we feel some gratitude in a very ordinary sense.
Generally, we are grateful when someone benefits us, when we become aware of someone benefiting us. And and all the comforts of our lives arise through the benefit of others. You know