Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using a Zen saying — “the best fence is a big pasture” — as its central image, Ven Jampa Gendun works systematically through the five hindrances to meditation and their antidotes in this 42-minute session. He opens by mapping the felt quality of each: the magnetizing pull of desire, the exciting sharpness of hatred, the restless impatience that cannot abide the present moment, the slow dimming of sloth into sleep, and the churning indecisiveness that prefers staying in potential to ever committing. For each he gives a specific remedy — contemplating unattractive qualities to cool desire, cultivating love to displace hatred, patient non-suppression for restlessness, and building faith through effort until meditation itself generates bliss, dissolving torpor. The session closes with basic mindfulness-of-breathing instructions and a group refuge recitation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 3 PA 1998 05 30.mp3
UUID: f1d6a88b-527e-474c-a112-32933afbe732
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1998-05-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.4 minutes
Words: ~4,908
Desire, that’s two. Love and anger. Anger’s three. Okay, think we got them all good. So we’ve been talking about the five hindrances: desire, hatred, restlessness, anxiety, sloth and torpor, doubt and indecisiveness.
That’s right. Okay, we’ll get a feeling for what these are about, to be able to recognize these minds, these conditions, states which arise. Desire, I think we’re very familiar with that probably. The thing is, these are always arising, aren’t they? Desire, hatred, laziness, whatever.
But we never are aware of them. We identify with them. There’s quite a big difference between having a particular state of mind and being aware of its nature, isn’t it? We quite often, after you finish a meal, if someone says, What did you just eat? Quite often you wouldn’t even know what you just ate.
Your mind was somewhere else. Your awareness was somewhere else. It wasn’t knowing the condition of what was present in front of you, of your actual meal. This is one thing we’re learning just through our meditation. I’ve been talking about the fact that hindrances aren’t hindrances unless you see them as obstacles to developing a higher state of consciousness.
We can work with the hindrances as a method, become aware of its qualities. So this first, the quality of the hindrance of desire. There is something which is attractive. We’re going to get a feeling tone for the various hindrances. The object has some sort of alluring quality.
There’s a movement of the mind towards an object, towards the object of desire. It’s like you’re being drawn to it, like being magnetized, this kind of quality. So the object appears to be extremely desirable. When you walk down the street and you’re walking in a city, for example, and there’s all the nice things in all the store windows, And there’d be all these suits or all these dresses or I don’t know. One of them kind of out of all these suits maybe, all these mannequins, one of them kind of stands I want them to say kind of brighter than the other.
It’s kind of saying, Take me, come. It’s kind of inviting you. There’s something about it which is attracting you, like magnetizing you. And you sort of go into a trance. You’re sort of like being drawn away, this quality of desire.
Again, talk about this quality, how we lose our ability at this moment to discriminate the quality of objects. With all the various obstructive emotions in general, there’s a loss of discrimination. We no longer see the object in a balanced way. We’re always accentuating or depreciating, exaggerating or dismissing some qualities of the object. We’re filtering out, in the case of desire, we’re blocking out the bad qualities, the undesirable qualities, and we’re exaggerating the desirable qualities.
So there’s always some kind of mental imbalance. This will come up when we talk about the actual methods to overcome the hindrances, we can work with the desire and all the afflictive emotions in general. Desirable objects are very exciting objects as if they only had good qualities. A lover only has good qualities, something like that. Then the quality of hatred, the hindrance of hatred.
So it’s associated with aversion, anger. So there’s a feeling of wanting to take revenge, of wanting to destroy, of wanting to cease contact, not repeat contact with the object, and get rid of it as soon as possible, whatever the object. This sort of gives your life some sort of direction. At least you’re doing something before perhaps your situation was rather boring. So it’s very exciting.
Becoming angry is very exciting, which for some people is a very desirable state. Feel very alive, very sharp. Hatred is a very sharp, clear mind. There’s also perhaps a feeling of self righteousness associated with hatred. But there’s no patience.
There’s a feeling of wanting to hurt. You only see the negative qualities. Desire and hatred, as we talked about, are like a pair. They both are craving. Craving in one sense to bring an object toward you, to own an object, to possess the object, and the other sense of craving that the object cease to exist or craving that it be dismissed or lose contact and not repeat contact.
So it’s a very exciting quality. The last of the five hindrances are much more subtle. They’re kind of boring. They’re not quite as interesting as these first two. They become actually perhaps more difficult to work with.
The first there was restlessness and anxiety. It’s mental and physical agitation. It’s this idea, this sense that you want to get up and do something besides what you’re doing now, especially meditate. The mind wants to do or feel something else than what it’s feeling at that particular time. It’s not content with what it’s experienced in that present moment.
It wants to cease what it’s doing and move on to something else. It’s impatience. They’re like impulsively shifting around, for example, without giving it any thought. So this is the quality of this restlessness and anxiety. Anxiety in the sense of some subtle fear that we perhaps can’t get in touch with.
There’s some kind of subconscious, unconscious fear, uneasiness. And then the sloth and torpor. The mind is just simply bored with its object. It’s not interested, it’s not stimulated. So we begin with some slight lack of clarity.
Now this is the most subtle type of sloth and torpor as far as torpor is concerned, the mental aspect of these two. Some slight lack of clarity. As this is going to progress, it’s going to begin to degenerate. The mind is very dynamic in its nature. It’s not static.
It’s not going to hold to any one particular state for long. It’s going to either degenerate or it’s going to improve. If we create the causes for it to improve, it will improve. If we don’t, it’s going to tend to degenerate by the force of habit, our tendency toward increased states of torpor, increased states of lack of clarity. So we begin with the simple state of lack of clarity.
Have some object, whether it’s a visualization, whether it’s a breathing, whether it’s a thought thinking about some subject, and it’s not quite so little bit fuzzy, it’s not quite so clear. So it begins a little more fuzzy. And this leads to mind becomes cloudy. It’s like your mind is made of cotton. You’ve got some cotton wool in your head.
Something like that. And this leads to stupor, this leads to drowsiness, and this leads to sleep. Very heavy, and we just sleep down, and this is carrying this idea of sloth its fulfillment. We just fall asleep. We become unconscious.
And then there’s the hindrance of doubt and indecisiveness. So this is the thinking mind. It’s this churning out thoughts, and questions. Am I doing alright? How am I doing?
It’s constantly checking up. I don’t know if I can really do this or not. Maybe there’s another type of meditation which I should be doing at the present time, maybe another tradition. I’m not into Buddhism really. I think maybe the Krishna people, Can women become enlightened?
Can men become enlightened? Is there really such a thing as enlightenment? Your mind is constantly churning out all these questions. And it has the quality that even when you come up with an answer the mind says, Yes, but and it carries on. So it’s a state which can never be satisfied with any type of answer.
It’s an uneasiness, a not knowing, some conflict within the mind, and it’s unable to come to any firm decision. So it’s not as if we could come to any firm decision. It’s a state of mind which has the inability to come to any firm decision. There are some healthy doubts, skepticisms, which are quite useful, which we should cultivate in our path in thinking about Buddhism and thinking about spiritual path in general. It’s good to question, have doubts.
When I studied in India at our school, we spent about three hours a day debating. Part of this was the intention of creating doubts, questioning everything that we were taught that day, just trying to raise doubts, beginning to understand what we didn’t understand. You know, there’s no use in pouring oil on water. It doesn’t mix with your mind, it doesn’t mix with the water. You want the teachings or whatever is being said to mix with your actual experience, how you actually see with your own intuition, your own reasoning.
In respect, doubts are quite useful. They’re desirable. But this doubting mind, in the sense of indecisiveness, is an obstacle to understanding since it has an inability to come to any firm decision. There’s even a tendency to look in the other direction. It’s like the mind is stuck and it’s content to be stuck in this questioning position without even seeking any resolution to any answers.
It doesn’t want to come to any conclusions. To come to conclusions, just in life in general, forces us to some degree to act. Acting is very decisive. It becomes very clear about who we are about and what we are about. Many people would rather remain a potential.
I mentioned one time about the schizophrenic mind. One of the marks of a schizophrenic mind is that it always seeks to exist in potential. It never commits itself to the objective element. It can remain omnipotent without ever having to do anything. But once it acts, then it realizes its limitations, and it doesn’t want to be limited.
Once we do something, we actually try and we realize you can’t do everything that you thought you did, that you in fact have some limitations, then we have to get a more realistic impression of ourselves. We can’t sort of exist within some fantasy illusion of who we might be, who we think we are. So this indecisiveness, this doubt is quite often promoted. Therefore, because we don’t have to act, we don’t have to commit ourselves to the objective element, we really don’t have to begin to realize what limitations we do have and where we need to work on ourselves. It’s a very immature approach.
So these are these five qualities which hinder raising the level of our consciousness. Five hindrances. Last time we talked about the first method of overcoming these hindrances in general. This simply is recognizing the hindrances as hindrances. We have to believe that we have some potential.
We have to appreciate the fact that we can develop. If you hold tightly to the usual negative, limited conceptions that we have of ourselves, you just don’t have what it takes. That’s what my mom used to tell me anyway, and she always told me the truth. Somehow we’ve been very influenced and taught to have a very negative conception of ourselves. It’s very difficult to appreciate the fact that this conception of ourselves is not in fact who we are.
You know, we talked about, for example, in last Saturday we had a multi faith seminar on the various religions. Every religion, every spiritual tradition says we are more than we had ever hoped to be, that we are greater than we can ever conceive of ourselves. In Christianity, they talk that man, woman is created in the image of God. In Buddhism, talk about Buddha nature. These are our actual potential, who we can be, Not how we conceive of ourselves to be, but who we are beyond our conception.
So we limit ourselves, and we have to get in touch with the fact that we are more than our conception of ourselves, that our conception of ourselves, no matter how they may be, are not who we in fact are. We can develop beyond even our greatest imagination of who we think we are. If we appreciate this fact very deeply, then we’re not going to allow ourselves to be limited by these hindrances. We simply will not tolerate any obstacle to raising our level of consciousness. But if we don’t appreciate it, then it doesn’t matter really, You can never be anything better than what you are now.
So why bother? Why bother taking the trouble? Because it is some trouble. It takes some effort, for example, to overcome laziness, stupor, indecisiveness. It takes some commitment and effort.
And this only comes about by appreciating who we can be. In the Korean tradition of Buddhism, they spend many years just on this very fact of meditating on Buddha nature. Is sort of the energizer, the motivating force behind the entire practice of coming to a real sense of our vast potential, really believing it deeply and committing ourselves to actualizing it. It’s not a matter of curiosity, not a matter of making cosmetic changes in our personality to make life a little more tolerable, but really believing to the depth of your being that you can be a happy, healthy, sane, loving person and help others to become the same, believing that to the depth of your being. If you believe this, you can imagine what that can do for you.
You just would not tolerate any obstacles to actualizing who you know who you are. So this is the first of the methods for eliminating the five hindrances, recognizing the hindrances as hindrances. Creating the second, we cultivate the specific antidotes to each of the five hindrances. So as I was saying, all afflictive emotions by afflictive emotions I mean desire, hatred, spite, jealousy, miserliness they all have one of their main qualities a lack of discrimination with respect to their object. There’s an imbalance of the mind.
There’s always some exaggeration or depreciation of the object. It’s very difficult to believe that, that the object as it appears to us does not exist the way it appears to us. It just doesn’t exist that way. We can take a simple example. You have your best friend, and you say, Wow, he’s a great person.
I really like him. He’s got all these wonderful qualities. He’s kind and loyal, he’s generous, he’s got a good sense of humor, she’s got a good sense of humor, whatever. And you can just see all these qualities about them. They really objectively exist.
They’re there for everybody to see. But you have another person. You meet another person on the bus perhaps, and you begin to talk about it comes out that you have certain friends in common, and one of these is this good friend of yours. You don’t mention that he’s good friend, you just begin talking about him. This other person says, Oh, what a louse, you know, can’t stand the guy, can’t stand the woman, whatever.
He’s got a terrible sense of humor, he’s always angry, and he just goes down the list, telling all the terrible qualities that this person has. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Which is this person? One person is filtering out all the positive qualities. The other person is filtering out all the negative qualities.
Due to this imbalance, one of them develops aversion, hatred, anger. The other develops attachment, desire. So there’s always this indiscriminate imbalance, not seeing the object as it actually exists, seeing as it appears and holding it, that’s the way it really exists. Therefore all the afflictive emotions are dependent upon this indiscriminating quality of the mind to see things in an imbalanced way. So it’s not that we’re trying to do away with our friends.
It’s not You know, some people I think are very much afraid if they begin to lessen their attachment, that somehow they won’t like people anymore, for example. There’s no question about that. You can still like people, enjoy their company, but there’s a lessening of attachment, having the needing to hold on to a person. Beginning to see that this particular person isn’t uniquely endowed with these positive qualities that you see, that it’s a matter of your own mind seeing these qualities in others. If one controls one’s own mind, one can see these qualities in everyone.
Therefore, why do I have to hold on to this person so tightly? I can begin to enjoy everyone in the same way that I enjoy this friend. Because everyone has positive qualities. I took a course at Kopan a couple months ago, and we had to sit there. They do this exercise called strokes.
The other person sits there in front of you and you have to tell them good things about them. First you tell them something like about their body, you know, they have nice hair, they have pretty earlobes or something. And you can always find something nice to say about someone, no matter who it is, no matter how ugly. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t a very good looking person from what I understand. I think one woman said, Oh, he had pretty ears.
That was the only good thing she could see about his physical appearance. Of course, he already cut it off and gave it to her. That’s another story. Anyway, so we can begin to accentuate the positive qualities, but we still maintain a balance by understanding that every individual has both positive and negative qualities in all the various objects, whatever. Therefore, we can lessen our attachment, we can lessen our aversion.
Likewise, with hatred. We’re talking about attachment, desire, this hindrance to desire, simply bringing the mind back to a balanced state by looking at the undesirable qualities of the object. Many people have, for example, sexual fantasies during meditation or out of meditation for that matter. Just to bring the mind back to a balanced state, we can simply think about some of the not too pretty aspects of sex or the sexual object. This will automatically cease the attachment, desire, the lust, by bringing the mind back to a balanced state, by accentuating for that particular moment the negative aspects of the object of lust.
This is the way we can work with desire, whatever type of desire. Also, the same holds true for hatred. It’s this quality of only seeing the negative aspects of the object. So again, seeing the object in an imbalanced way. Specifically, with regards to sentient beings, with people, we cultivate love and compassion, especially love.
This is wanting them to be happy. Hate wants people to suffer, essentially. It wants them to be hurt. So we cultivate the antithesis of that, the antidote to that, is cultivating love, wishing them to be happy. These various states of mind are like hot and cold water.
As you increase, for example, love, the mind, the thought of hatred has to diminish. It’s like a balance beam. As love increases, hate decreases. They cannot exist simultaneously in the same mind. We can accentuate the positive states, and this will automatically decrease the negative states of mind.
In this case, we accentuate, we purposely meditate on developing love for a person, and this will automatically begin to decrease the hatred we have for this person. So with restlessness and anxiety, ways to work with those. A difficult one. We have to cultivate patience. That’s exactly what we don’t want to do.
We don’t want to be patient. So we have to have a willingness to abide with unpleasant sensations and situations in our meditation. We have to have a willingness to abide with restlessness, to kind of stay with this restlessness. This becomes very much of a matter of accepting the agitation instead of running away from it, instead of trying to suppress it. Know, suppressing only would exaggerate it, would feed it energy, increase it.
So we have to be willing to bear the discomfort, both the mental and physical discomfort. Obviously, the antidote to restlessness is a calm mind, We don’t have a calm mind. So this requires patience, you know, this patience of training the puppy again, bringing the little puppy back to the newspaper. Again, gentle patience. Again and again, the puppy runs off, and you bring it back again and again.
It runs off, you bring it back, and it runs off. So this requires a gentle patience of accepting. We can also bring the mind down. There’s this quality of agitation, excitement, anxiety, we can bring the mind down through analytic meditation. Can, for example, meditate in on death, meditating on suffering.
We can go to a darkened place. Some way, the mind is heightened, it’s in a very agitated, energetic state, and we have to bring it down. We have to find some method to calm it, to bring it down. So we can use these within other types Without this meditation, without this accepting, we can actually apply the antidotes of meditating on death, kind of sober up the mind to think about meditating on suffering, going to a darkened place. These are ways we can work with.
The main thing is just accepting patience, gentle patience, accepting the agitated state and let it wear itself out. It’s like a cow. Mine is like a big cow in a pasture. When it first gets out there, the first thing it looks for is a fence. It has this energy.
It’s running around. The Japanese Zen masters have a saying that the best fence is a big pasture. Without any fences to be seen, accepting is what I mean by not having any fences, it becomes purposeless for the cow to keep running around. There’s nothing which is stopping it. It can run anywhere it wants.
Pretty soon it becomes the whole idea of agitation becomes senseless, and the cow just starts to settle down, eat the grass, and pretty soon it falls asleep. Hopefully you won’t fall asleep in your meditation. But after a while, if you don’t suppress it with fences, trying to close it in, in which case there would just be this energy reflecting back at you, rebounding, creating more agitation, getting the cow more uptight than it actually is present. If you’re willing just to accept, create a big pasture for it and bear with it, then the cow is going to settle down. Your mind is naturally going to calm down.
Then there’s the fifth hindrance of sloth and torpor. The mind is in a very dark state. It feels very heavy and depressed, lazy. So we have to somehow uplift the mind, we have to energize it, we have to lighten it, we have to strengthen it. So the main antidote specifically to sloth and torpor, but the main antidote to almost all the afflictive emotions or all the hindrances is bliss.
It’s a good antidote, isn’t it? Bliss is very desirable. I don’t think I have to tell you that. If we’re willing to work through these hindrances, we’re going to reach a point where our mind is going to become happy in meditation. There’s some real happiness in the mind, some real contentment.
We actually will enjoy meditating. So this is one of the main antidotes in general, and specifically for laziness, for sleepiness, drowsiness, sloth and torpor, is the fact of bliss. To create this, in the Tibetan tradition, in the development of calm abiding, which is a very concentrated state of mind, to overcome laziness, which is considered one of the five obstacles to development of a calm abiding, this concentrated mind, there’s four opponents. The first is faith. Faith, which I have been talking about in the sense of recognizing the hindrances, is hindrances when we appreciate that there are higher states of mind.
We have faith in this fact. We have some real conviction that there are higher levels which I can take my mind to. So this faith what is that called? It brings us inspiration, which is the second antidote. So we begin with faith, some conviction.
This inspires us to work with these hindrances, to work through these hindrances. In dependence upon this inspiration, we make effort. Third antidote. On making effort, then we actually generate bliss, which is the actual antidote to laziness, to sleepiness, to sloth and torpor. So it comes back again to appreciating the fact of who we are and what we can achieve.
Having faith in that, this brings us inspiration. Through this inspiration we develop, we work, we make effort, and by this effort we attain bliss. We enjoy meditating, and this acts as the method of removing the obstacle of sloth and torpor. There are other ways we can work with sloth and torpor besides for example, we can visualize light. Just think of light, try to see light within your mind.
To wake up, you know, we’re trying to wake up lighten. Lighten up the mind. Brighten up the mind. Or we can imagine, for example, our mind shooting out the top of our head and becoming one with space. It becomes one with limitless space, quality of lightness expanding, opening.
That’s another possibility. Another possibility we can do some sort of conceptual thinking, like we can think about our spiritual teachers or someone just who you feel a great deal of admiration, who inspires you. This will help uplift your mind. We can think about, as I said, how fortunate we are, begin to appreciate our potential. We can sit up straighter, so we’re trying to of enliven the mind.
If you usually close your eyes, then open your eyes slightly to stimulate your mind. You can actually look at light, physically look at light, to lighten up your mind. And if none of this works, you can actually get up and walk around, go to some light, bright place, wash your face, take a shower, and then try again. Have some patience and try again. So these are the ways we can work with sloth and torpor.
The last hindrance, doubt and indecisiveness. So this is this unwillingness to come to any conclusion. So we have the inability to come to any decisive decision to make up our minds. We have to clarify within our own minds and determine exactly what we are doing and why. So you have to determine within your own mind whether you want to develop or not.
Is it possible for you to develop? You have to cultivate some confidence in yourself, some conviction that you can and that you want to, and that you know what you’re doing, and this is the way to go about it. So you have to come to some firm commitment, some decision, and this is the way you can overcome this doubt and indecisiveness. So I think I’ll continue the other methods. There’s more methods that we’re going to use.
I’ll continue those later. So now we’ll try. I know there’s some new people perhaps. I’ll just go over the meditation technique very roughly. We’re doing mindfulness of breathing.
We’re just going to use as the object of our meditation the breath, just the general breathing without any type of control over the breathing. It’s just natural breathing, neither long nor short in any way. We just want to know when we’re breathing in and know when we’re breathing out. So we do this to help us to do this. When we breathe in, we mentally note in, and when we breathe out, we mentally note out.
So it’s simply noting in your mind, in, out, in, out. To help us again, we use the technique of counting. In, out, one, in, out, two, in, out, three, in, out, four, in, five. We come back down to one, in, out, one, two, three, four, five, six. Come back down to one, one, seven, one, three, eight, one, nine, and one through ten.
Then if you continue past that, begin again one through five. We’re going to use noting to help us develop our awareness, to know what our mind is attending to, whether it’s actually on the breath, whether it’s thinking, fantasizing, remembering, imagining, hearing, tasting, feeling pain. We want to know it, so we use the technique of noting mentally. Thinking, thinking, and go back to the breath. Hearing, hearing, go back to breath.
Feeling, feeling, go back to the breath. All these mental notings are certainly to help us develop more and more awareness, knowing. We know what we know. Developing is knowing, and the mindfulness brings us back to the actual object, that is the breath. That’s what we’re holding on to.
So we’ll try that for a few minutes. Now we recite the verse of refuge. Make some of your habits. Make the substitution on the third line. 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. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. Through the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create by practicing the Dharma.