Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The jaundiced-eye metaphor anchors this 47-minute talk: just as hepatitis makes a white snow mountain appear yellow, ego-driven ambition distorts meditation practice, leading practitioners to chase dramatic states rather than valuing simple quietness of mind. Ven Jampa Gendun argues that real practice is about being rather than becoming — resting in one’s present situation without grasping. He then introduces a practical exercise: imagining the kind of person you want to be in five or ten years, and checking whether your daily choices are actually building those causes. A swimming-pool analogy illustrates how karma works as accumulated momentum, and how consistent small decisions — the path with heart — slowly redirect identity. The second half covers the bodhicitta curriculum: self-cherishing versus cherishing others, the equality of self and others, and why genuine relatedness and individual self-worth are mutually necessary rather than opposed.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 3 PA 1989 11 04.mp3
UUID: cd01b9c6-9c36-49f3-b109-d7a5c83dbe1b
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-11-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.7 minutes
Words: ~5,047
I’ve talked quite a lot about meditation. There are many, many techniques, methods and meditation. We can do various visualizations working with the channels, working with the winds visualizations, analytic meditations, formless meditations, meditations on emptiness. But essentially, without creating the atmosphere, the proper attitude, then it’s questionable whether we’re going to derive any benefit from these various types of meditations. In a lot of what we do, you know, in trying to practice, in trying to become happy, which is probably essentially what we’re all about.
It seems that we’re unwilling or perhaps unable, but more or less that we decide that somehow things should be different than they actually are. We’re not willing to accept and take responsibility for our present situation, That the world reality should have been ordered somehow differently and I shouldn’t be in the position I’m now in. Somehow, finding a method to not necessarily change myself, but to change the way I experience the world. Clinging to an idea of who we should be, the same type of ambitious competitive quality that we have been bringing to all our various activities, the acquisitiveness, the manipulative attitudes. And we bring all this past history to our meditation.
Many people get very frustrated in meditation because it’s not giving them the experiences they think it should be. Rather than being seen as a way of changing not the particular instances of how we react on particular occasions or that we have particular experiences or visions or sights, sounds, but that we’re working with a way of being, our entire perspective on how we view our life and how we relate with the world. I think it’s a much more subtle process than perhaps most of us would be willing to concede. The idea of simply being, developing an attitude where we become friends with ourselves, that we become quiet within ourselves. And we find this in itself a valuable experience without having it to become an object of our grasping, without it having to somehow become an object which we can hold up in front of our ego’s eye and think, What a great accomplishment I have made.
In fact, most of For example, in the Zen practices, they say that the more we The further we progress in our meditation, the less we know. That a lot of meditation involves simply an unlearning practice. I’m beginning to dismantle a lot of unskillful habits, which have gotten us nowhere. But it’s difficult to appreciate this quality of meditation, of the fact of appreciating just being, of being silent, of being at rest with yourself, at peace with yourself. We want something a little more flashy perhaps, a little more substantial to get hold of.
This perhaps is one of our problems. We’re trying to judge in our meditation, our Dharma practice in general, through eyes which are jaundiced in a way. We use this example quite often when we’re studying awareness and knowledge, the various types of mind. One of them is a wrong consciousness. That is to say, through jaundice, through hepatitis, something like that, the person sees yellow when actually there’s only white.
When he looks at a white snow mountain, sees a yellow snow mountain. No amount of looking will anyway correct his vision. He’s always going to see yellow. So it becomes necessary to point, to be able to indirectly, to in a roundabout way, for him to create some doubts in his mind that he can’t trust the appearance that he sees before him. That in fact, though it appears yellow, that in fact, that’s not the way it exists.
There must be some fault somewhere. When we look at our practice, when we look at the accomplishments that we’re trying to make that we haven’t made, that we feel we should have made, When we look at our meditation, the experiences that we think we should have, that we haven’t had. We’re looking at all this through the perspective of the jaundiced eye of ego, of our sense of competitiveness accomplishing the acquisitive nature that we bring to all our actions, all our worldly actions. In a way, it becomes necessary to reestablish our orientation. As I’ve said before, in meditation we’re re routing our sense of identity in being rather than becoming.
Constantly trying to be someone else than we are. Constantly trying to be somewhere else than we are. In meditation we find satisfaction in being at that moment, whatever we are, and in being where we are. This begins to carry over into our lives. We find that, hopefully, that indirectly we created an atmosphere of simple satisfaction, that things aren’t quite as complicated as they once were.
That if we develop an attitude which looks upon ourselves and others in a friendly way, that we’ve made friends with ourselves, and that we no longer feel as complicated in situations and the conflicts arising between ourselves and others begin to resolve themselves. They just don’t arise anymore, or at least as strongly or as frequently as they once did. Perhaps there’s some kind of subtle transformation which slowly takes place, is unsuspected, unlooked for, perhaps unnoticed, because we’re looking somewhere else. We’re perhaps looking for to become our idea of who we should be. You know, and then perhaps one day you see the white snow mountain, and you forgot that you had once seen it as yellow, and you think nothing has changed.
And it’s difficult to, at times, to establish the fact that perhaps you are changing. Essentially, when I’m talking about meditation, your attitude towards it is developing a sense of being, that it’s enough just to be that I can get along very well by doing nothing, that I don’t have to always be running after something else other than what I am, or to be going somewhere else other than where I am. Maybe we can begin to relax a little bit and find some peace within ourselves. Perhaps for many of you, this is not much of a goal of all the hours that you might want to put in the meditation. But I think it’s a real It has some taste to it.
All the other possibilities that we may be looking for in our meditation are probably more than that, fantasies. Whereas just simply being able to be, to be quiet with oneself, to be friends with oneself, to enjoy where one is at, just for that short time when you’re meditating, is in a small way to begin in a very simple way, a simple minded method to gain sanity. I think it can be the atmosphere, like the context, in which the rest of our growth can take place. Otherwise, our entire practice is going to be incorporated into the structure of our ego, into the same old patterns that we’ve been using up to now. People talk to me and they say, nothing’s working.
I’m just not changing. Things aren’t going right. What can we do? We can only try. That’s all we can do.
Consistently creating the causes for the type of person who we want to be. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. Coming to some determination of the type of person we want to be and being that person. So let’s sit for a few minutes and practice mindfulness of breathing. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create by talking about 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 attain enlightenment through the merit I create by talking about 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 talking about the Dharma, I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all being. Quite often, I’ve been talking about what I mean by refuge.
And I guess it ties up very much with what I was talking about previously and what we can do. You know, we have external problems and we have internal problems. For external problems, first we have to begin to differentiate. What are some of our external difficulties? What are our internal difficulties?
And coming to understand the difference between the two, and understanding the limits of the potentials of external methods, that in fact they cannot really solve our internal problems. That we have to use external methods, material methods to solve external problems. But for certain types of problems which are attitudinal, psychological, spiritual, We have to use some type of internal method and be able to distinguish the two. And coming to the decision that, you know, how we want we want to be happy. There’s no question about that.
And the course of making ourselves happy, and developing some discriminating awareness of what types of causes are going to bring us happiness, and what types of causes are in fact unskillful, are going to bring us results which we don’t want in the least. There’s one meditation that we use. Simply thinking, what type of person would I like to be five years from now? What kind of qualities? What kind of characteristics?
You know, actually trying to imagine, what do I want to be like five years from now, ten years from now? You know, many of you probably think what kind of possessions or what kind of husband or wife or what kind of job. What kind of person would you like to be, what kind of mentality, what kind of characteristics would you like to have? I think this is something realistic, something that we should take the time to think about. In determining that, deciding, am I creating the causes in my everyday life to become that type of person that I want to be five years from now, ten years from now.
This is a very significant aspect of Dharma and Buddhism. It isn’t simply the law of cause and effect. If we create the causes, then we can expect the effect. If we don’t create the causes, then we should not be surprised if the result doesn’t arise, because it won’t. It’s an invariable law.
And if we determine what type of person we want to be, what types of qualities, what types of attributes, do we want to be a loving person, a kind person, a gentle person, an open person? You know, what type? You know, we have to sort of come to some clarity, some decision. This quality of decision is quite important. Perhaps this is the most important significance of karma, the quality of decision, of deciding, of making choice.
Sometimes karma is the law of cause and effect is equated with volition or simply making a decision, setting a direction. And this is oftentimes another term we can use for refuge, going for refuge, setting direction. If you want to go north and you point your cart south, you’re never going to arrive where you want to get to. Something like this, determining how you want to get there. In fact, are you pointing yourself in the right direction?
Years ago I told you that in his day to day life a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart. It is this consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace, a pleasure, traversing its length. So it’s a consistent path of heart, a consistent choice, decision in the direction that we want to arrive, our destination. Deciding what is your destination, the type of person that you want to be.
Consistently choosing the course, those types of actions of body, speech and mind, are going to take you in that direction. We can take the example an analogy of swimming across the swimming pool. We dive off one end, that’s our birth. We go through all these various strokes, backstroke, freestyle, I don’t know, what else is in the stroke? The butterfly.
Anyway, we’re going through all these various strokes, and we arrive at a point in the water. Everything that we’ve done up to that point has gotten us to that place, that particular situation. All these various styles of strokes, all the various happenings in our life have gotten us to this point. Any particular point, it’s a dependent origination. Everything that we’ve done in our past history has brought us to this place now in the mentality that we all possess at this particular moment.
Not only that, but in the case of the swimming pool, the nature of the situation is also determined by our present situation. Our physical surroundings, the size of the pool, the nature of the water, whether it’s a cement pool or whatever, plastic pool. Also, how many people are in the pool, in our physical situation, the other people swimming, what directions they’re swimming, whether they’re swimming across our lane, whether they’re swimming along with us, and our social situation. There’s our past history, our various experiences, and our present situation, both physical and social, which determine the context we find ourselves in. But now there opens up a possibility, a possibility of veering to one direction or another, taking one direction as opposed to another.
Anticipating some kind of future, making a determination. Where we’re at now has been determined in the past, but the future is potential within the present. Anticipating the future, setting our goals, we can make use of our volition, our decision. You know, we can only make use of our decision within the specific confines of our present situation. Most of you cannot become the empress of China, for example.
That’s not within our situation, within our realm of possibilities. But within our realm of possibilities, we can begin to anticipate what type of future we want the present to lead us to. You know, what we have done in the past has determined where we’re at now. What we do now is going to determine what we will become. This is the significance of the law of karma.
When we talk about decisions, we’re talking about beginning to cut out certain possibilities and thereby actualizing the potentials of other possibilities. So in doing that, we have to begin to determine what to anticipate the future. What do I want to become? Where do I want to go? And I talk about, you know, what can you do in practicing, I mean, your daily life, actually practicing the Dharma.
Maybe we don’t have, at our level of practice, that much power, that much control aside from small insignificant moments which occur every day of our life, where we can make small almost insignificant decisions, but they’re not quite insignificant. We’re not quite powerless. But we can, from moment to moment, see in our situation whether that decision I’m making, this choice I’m making, which in fact is karma, volition, whether it’s taking me in the direction I want to go or it’s taking me in fact away from the choice I’m making, the destination that I’ve somehow arrived at, that I’ve determined that this is where I want my life to take me. It’s not perhaps a very earth shaking possibility, but maybe it’s the only possibility open to us in our day to day life, choosing this path over this path. Having cut out this path, this path will open it up.
Then going down this path the other way, we may have another choice open to us. We keep making these very insignificant choices, but over a period of time, in fact, they become rather significant. They become transforming. We become another person. When taking refuge, as Don Juan said, it’s the consistent choice of a particular path to the direction that you want to arrive at.
Consistently. If we don’t take this, this is our only power that perhaps we have in our life, to determine to take control, to bring our lives under some kind of manageable control. The simple choices, consistent simple choices in the direction that we want our lives to go towards, to become the type of person that we want to be. It’s not very earth shaking, is it? That’s why I’m You know, when I was talking about meditation before, you know, we’re probably not going to have very earth shaking meditations.
Just being with yourself, being friendly with yourself, not wanting to perhaps go anywhere else or be anyone else than you are at that very moment. But I think it’s consistent with the type of person or the type of person that I want to become, the type of person who doesn’t have to use others, who doesn’t have to be competitive, who doesn’t have to be constantly seeking, always seeing happiness outside of myself, outside in the future, somewhere else. That is to be at peace with oneself. This type of quality, this type of direction. The problem is we’re swimming across this swimming pool, and we’re using these various strokes, and we’re building up some kind of energy, some kind of direction.
We have a particular style of swimming. We also develop a particular kind of inertia. Inertia simply means that a body in movement will remain in movement or in motion until it’s acted upon by an external force. Or if it’s at rest, the same thing, it will remain at rest. So we develop a kind of inertia, which is hard to overcome.
We have a tendency to keep going in the same direction that we’ve already been, and we keep repeating the same unskillful patterns. Perhaps unskillful. Maybe not. You have to decide for yourself. This is the inertia of our quality, of our existence.
So it takes some energy, some effort to be able to veer in another direction, if in fact that’s you decide that this isn’t the direction that you want to maintain. It’s not getting you where you want to go. We have to make decisions and make effort to uphold our decisions, to maintain ourselves in the direction requiring some real awareness and real mindfulness. And these are the qualities that we can develop within our meditation, the qualities of awareness and mindfulness, which I’ve emphasized again and again many times. So it’s these qualities of developing awareness and mindfulness, determining where we want to go, and reasserting ourselves, keeping in mind, remembering the direction, being aware of what direction we in fact are going from moment to moment, and again and again deciding, consistently deciding upon the path of heart, the path which is going to take us where we want to go, which is maybe all the refuge that we have.
Maybe that’s all there is. I don’t know. Maybe, you know, this is our wisdom. This is our basic sanity. Making use of our potentials, cutting off those aspects of ourselves which aren’t taking us in the direction and allowing those aspects of ourselves, our basic sanity, our wisdom, our love and compassion, and our energy to become manifest, to actualize themselves and to act as a force to become an ableness, to become the type of person that we want to be, taking refuge, taking a direction in our life.
And then five years from now, ten years from now, maybe, the yellow mountain won’t appear as yellow as it used to. But maybe you won’t notice, but that’s okay. Maybe you’ll be just a more loving, healthy, a little happier, saner human being than you were before, and able to help others a little bit more if that’s the direction you want to go. So we’re talking about opening our hearts to others. The second of the three principal aspects of the path: developing the determination to be free, opening our hearts to others, and seeing deeply in the nature of reality.
We’re talking about the second of the two major traditions in opening our hearts to others. The first being the sevenfold cause and effect instruction, the second being equalizing and exchanging oneself with others. We completed the explanation on equalizing self with others, both from the conventional and ultimate points of view. The essential insight to begin is to begin to seek others’ welfare to the same degree that one seeks one’s own welfare, to the same degree. That others are just like ourselves, they want to be happy, they don’t want to suffer.
Just like ourselves, there’s no difference. Ultimately, self and others are just a manner of speaking, a convention that we use. If we don’t create self, we don’t create others. And since there is suffering in the world, and just as I don’t want suffering, suffering is to be eliminated, whether we call it my suffering or the suffering of others. That we’re all part of we’re all limbs of a body of sentient life.
And just as the hand removes the thorn from the foot because it’s part of a greater whole, that each of us individually are part of a greater whole called humanity and that in turn of all sentient life. We share in this equality and we share in this suffering. Essential insight is simply to remove suffering to the same degree whether we called ourselves our own or we called others. Then we’re talking about the disadvantages of self-cherishing and the advantages of cherishing others. We began to talk about this last week about within our own actual experience, our own nitty gritty level of pleasure and pain.
That in fact, most of our happiest experiences, most fulfilling experiences, most authentic experiences are those when the ego is transcended, when the feeling of self-cherishing is somehow diminished and the cherishing of others are moving out to others, are going out to others. The melting of the bounds of this ego encapsulated self are somehow disappeared for a moment and we become one with others, when we touch others and they touch us, then probably our most important moments in our lives are those moments when this self-cherishing is at least momentarily absent and there’s a cherishing of others, empathizing with others, sharing with others. We have to look within our own experience. As I said, it is pleasure and pain which has priority over logic, over the intellect for most of us. We can think rationally about various ideas, have various thoughts, views, but more than that, they don’t really affect our emotional life very much.
Our emotional life is very much based on the principle of what will bring us happiness and what will bring us pain. And that’s the way we conduct our lives. So we have to actually look in our lives and actually analyze the situation. The point is, throughout all of this, is that we are basically sane people. This is the position that Buddhism is taking.
If we present ourselves, if we analyze very clearly our life and our experiences in life, we are going to make the right decisions on the basis of our basic sanity, our basic intelligence. It’s not that we are going to think a thought, Ah, I should be like this. We’re not talking about intellectual the intellectual apparatus having to become involved. That a child, knowing that he’s going to be burnt if he puts his hand in the fire, ceases. He doesn’t have to think, Oh, I shouldn’t put my hand in the fire.
He naturally will no longer put his hand in the fire once he’s been burnt. Once he is able to look at his experience, his basic sanity will prevent him from being burnt. He’ll move away from the fire. Likewise, once we begin to see that self-cherishing in our actual experience, our pain and pleasure, is a source of suffering and cherishing others in our actual experience, in our pain and pleasure, is actually a source of happiness, then we won’t have to do much else. Our basic sanity, like a needle rotating toward north.
North is cherishing of others. It’s naturally going to move in that direction. It’s simply making use of our basic sanity, but it’s necessary to create this time and space and to look at the actuality of our situation clearly, which we probably never do. It’s too much running after happiness to find out what actually makes us happy. Never taking the time perhaps.
You know, we have also in this idea of cherishing others and disadvantages of cherishing oneself, It can be taken wrongly. Most of these ideas can be incorporated into an ego structure, almost all of these ideas within the dharma. That’s why they talk about the necessity to develop determination to be free as a foundation. By determination to be free, we’re talking about the determination to go beyond all states within the bounds of ego. That we’re not going to allow our practice, our inner methods, our psychological devices to become simply another means for ego to aggrandize itself.
Simply another means to perpetuate our unskillful patterns, that we’re going to try to emerge out of those, go beyond those, to transcend those, to transcend the ego. But, you know, what can we do? At present, we have to just be aware that most of these practices, most of these ideas can be twisted, that can be used simply as a spiritual materialism, as it were. Maybe we can talk about some of these ideas a little bit. This idea of advantages of cherishing others and disadvantages of self-cherishing.
Now, obviously, initially when you hear about this, could sound very heavy handed, really kind of an ascetic trip, the idea of self denial perhaps. Denying one’s own needs, one’s own wants. A heroic ego trip, something like that, and cherishing others. Romantic notions could become involved in this. We have two basic aspects.
We want to begin to develop a feeling of connectedness with the world, with others, our interdependency, our interpenetration, with all that exists, but more specifically with other sentient beings. Perhaps we can just limit it to other people, our interdependency, our relatedness with other people. But on the other hand, the feeling of our own self individual worth. It’s not like we’re drops of water and we’re going to drop ourselves into the ocean and become lost. Many people get involved with organizational work because they simply are running away from confronting their own personal problems.
They sacrifice themselves for some cause, but they can’t give up the cause of their own suffering. We have to be able to develop our own individual worth in parallel with developing our feeling of relatedness with others. As I’ve talked about in the past, you know, essentially we can talk about two aspects to the self. The self which exists in relationship to others, the social self, the public self, and the private experiential self. This part of ourselves which is not accessible to others.
You know, it’s kind of our own little world that we live in. The two overall aspects to the self. Essentially, we want to begin to relate with persons, cherishing others. But at the same time So this is this development of the social aspect of ourselves, the self which exists in relationship to others, and develop skillful, effective ways of relating with others. Also, to be self directing, you know, to develop a uniqueness as an individual.
You know, whose actions, you know, and thoughts, concerns are valuable in themselves. There’s this necessity to begin to develop the skillfulness in relating with others, and to value others, find worth in others, and the necessity to find value and worth within ourselves at the same time. We have to begin to see how these two are not, in fact, conflicting. They’re mutually necessary aspects of our everyday life. We begin at the beginning.
We have an image of ourselves as being some kind of isolated substance, an independent existing ego, for example. Up to now, it has appeared to us that in order to affirm your oneself, one must deny the world, one must deny others. Then on the other hand, in order to affirm the world, in order to affirm others, to go out to others, one has to deny oneself. It seems like there’s always this conflict between other and self. Once we, you know, once we decide, grasp at an isolated entity, substance, ego, unchanging, permanent, independently existing, in order to enhance that self, that I, that ego, in order to develop its values, it seems that we’re going to have to come in conflict with others.
Or, on the other hand, in coming to enhance the happiness of others and to bring about their potentials, to develop them, we’re going to have to deny parts of ourselves. These are the two extremes of self centeredness and self denial. Self centeredness and self denial. Affirming oneself, one’s own existence at the expense of others, and affirming others’ existence at the expense of oneself. And then self denial, self centeredness.
We can begin to see that our human life is not static. It’s not something which is an unchanging fact, some kind of isolated substance. This often, in a patriarchal society, in a patriarchal society which we live in. Men have been encouraged to cultivate their uniqueness and personal freedom their uniqueness and personal freedom. This, you know, at the expense of their relatedness with others, men have been encouraged to develop their uniqueness and personal freedom at the expense of their feeling of connectedness with others.
The outcome of this is the macho mentality, doesn’t need I don’t need anybody else. You know? I can handle I can handle myself. You know? The feeling of that we’re not dependent on another person.