Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 96-minute commentary on Lama Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path by coining “trans-hot-dog analysis” — thoughts passing through the mind are like a stranger’s hot dog being passed along bleacher seats: no obligation to bite. He links this to breathing meditation instruction, then reframes taking refuge as a personal decision to stop suffering, illustrated by his own path from small-town Ohio to ordained monk in Adelaide. The doctrinal core works through the three marks of existence — suffering, impermanence, selflessness — as the engine of saṃsāra, using an extended street-crossing vignette to show how karma and afflictive emotions drive behavior like a mechanical program, with no real freedom of choice. He closes by gesturing toward Deity Yoga and the Buddha-as-wish-granting-tree as exits from compulsive identity. Suited to practitioners with some Lamrim background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1988 03 18 3 P A P.mp3
UUID: 9556dccd-2b89-433a-badf-99b15c8bc795
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 1987-1988 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-03-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 96.0 minutes
Words: ~10,512
I’m going to start a new school of psychology. It’s called, I coined the name last night. It’s called, let me get it right, trans-hot-dog analysis. First time I’ve unveiled it. You had a hotdog in my story, don’t you?
No, it won’t work. Okay. I was thinking about the breathing meditation and the idea that we don’t have to identify with our thoughts, we don’t have to identify with any particular state of mind, any particular emotion, any particular feeling. That we can just allow them to come and go without grasping to them as mine or I as a subject, an agent. We can simply observe them as any object and that they will arise, abide for a while and then they will cease.
We don’t have to grasp hold of them. And so I was thinking of some analogy. The one that I normally use is sitting on a railroad bank, a railway bank. That’s what you call it in Australia, don’t know. Sitting on the side of the railroad tracks and you’re watching the train go and the train go by and you’re watching and you’re watching and you’re watching and then you’re watching the countryside go by as you sit in the train.
Know, you get aboard the thought. You identify with that thought and it begins to unravel a whole panoramic story for you before you know what happens because you’ve lost awareness of it merely being a passing object, but it becomes something very real. It almost becomes like the actual fact, almost. So I was thinking of some more convincing analogy for this and I don’t know if they do this in Australia. In America it’s quite popular if you go to a baseball game or a football game.
They have long rows of bleachers’ stands where people sit and many people, they eat hot dogs at baseball games and football games. If you order a hot dog, you just hold up your hand. You may be sitting in the middle of a long row, maybe twenty five people on each side of you. So it’d be very inconvenient to have to go, you know, to inconvenience yourself and everyone else to go down to the aisle to get the hot dog. So you raise your hand or you wave or you scream and the hot dog man, he sees you, he acknowledges you and he sort of passes the word on, do want on your hot dog?
Do want mustard or relish? And he says, want this and that word passes down. So, it puts on the mustard and relish. What they do, they give it to the first person, the first person gives it to the next person, and the second person gives it to the third, and it sort of passes down to you. It’s quite simple.
Now, I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but you know, you may be hungry yourself and somebody nudges you and you look over and he passes you this hot dog. And, you know, it looks very delicious. It it takes a great temptation to take a bite of it. You know, just take a bite, but it’s not your hot dog. You realize that you have to get your own hot dog.
But this particular hot dog that’s been passed along is not your hot dog. So you watch it very carefully, you let go of it and you pass it on. Maybe you order your own hot dog, but that’s beside the point. There’s those thoughts that come along. Some of them look quite delicious as they come along.
We don’t have to own them. We don’t have to bite into them like this hot dog. We can just let them go and pretend it’s not ours, that someone else has ordered this hot dog or this someone else’s feelings, this is someone else’s state of mind, This is someone else’s emotion that we don’t have to bite into it and grasp to it as our own. This I call trans hot dog analysis. It’s about passing the goodies that you don’t have to, every particular thought that you have, you don’t have to attach onto.
You don’t have to spin out some fantastic maze of story, some tale. A particular notion. It’s interesting. Sogyal Rinpoche, he suggests in one of his books somewhere, if you’re unhappy, you know, for some reason you wake up on the wrong side of the bed and you can’t see any particular reason why you should be unhappy, you just don’t feel very great, Just pretend that you’re happy. Just play a role that you’re very happy and start, this is my interpretation, he didn’t say that.
Then just start singing or jumping around dancing or kind of shake yourself and try to put yourself in another frame of mind and play a role that you’re happy. That is to say, you don’t have to hold onto that specific state of depressed mentality that you were sort of indulging in. That you can actually shift your attention, change the state of your mind very radically without much cause. If you become skillful enough, just by letting go and playing for a moment another role, beginning a new train of thought, a happy train of thought, more productive train of thought and grasping a hold of that, identifying with that particular new state of mind. And it works, I think.
Pretend for a couple minutes that you’re a happy person. You have to believe it, think. You have to identify with that happy state, not expecting well I’m going to do this for two minutes and I’m going to return to my sadness and my depression, but really think wow, I can be happy. Start being happy that we don’t have to buy into any particular negative state of mind. Likewise, this tuning in mindfulness of breathing.
This is I think one very important byproduct of the practice is that we begin to understand that we don’t have to follow any particular train of thought. We don’t have to grasp through any particular emotion or state that they will come and go. Actually we have little control over our thoughts. For many people when they first begin the practice, it’s a revelation and quite often it’s quite a depressing revelation because they begin to realize how out of control their minds are, what chaos is going on beneath the surface of their mind. We really can’t control very much the various thoughts which are arising.
But we can begin to pick and choose what thoughts we are going to follow along. When we wish to, we can think very logically, we can develop a train of thought, reasoning, rational thought, and follow it through very methodically. If we don’t wish to, we have that choice once we become aware and develop mindfulness. Also, by not attaching to any particular types of thought, any particular images that arise, we will become more and more aware of parts of ourselves which usually remain repressed. Parts of our self that perhaps we don’t like to look at, that up to this point the very speed of our mind, our mental activity has prevented these from surfacing, these various images and thoughts.
But as the speed of our mind slows down and we no longer attach or grasp at our thoughts as being particularly important, then we can begin to allow certain memories, certain past experiences, thoughts to arise and let them begin to play themselves out without either repressing them or indulging in them. Either way we would feed them energy in some way. We would strengthen that very pattern. In this way they begin to lose their energy and it’s playing these memories over and over again. They’ll just wear themselves out like wearing out a shoe.
Pretty soon if you walk in that shoe enough, it’s just going to wear itself out and it’s going to fall apart. Likewise, if we dispassionately simply watch our thoughts, keep returning to the breath without evaluating the goodness or badness of the thought, whether it’s a wholesome thought or an ugly thought, whether it’s something we like about ourselves or dislike about ourselves, to suspend any sort of discrimination, any sort of judgment and disregard these as thoughts and not only thoughts, but just objects, not even our own thoughts. They’re just arising, they will abide for a while and cease. But in this dispassion, we’re beginning to wear out all these old programs. We don’t only have to either keep them repressed which energizes them or indulge in them or be afraid of them.
So this is in a way we can begin to more and more accept ourselves. We don’t have to be afraid of all the skeletons in the dungeon, all the nasty little things that we don’t want to get in touch with. Don’t want to get in touch with that we don’t want to see. It doesn’t really matter. We can sort of start cleaning the house and let these things just work out themselves by themselves.
So, know, we’re going to do breathing meditation and just when thoughts arise, it’s just, you know, just pass the hot dog. You don’t have to bite into it, just let it go, no particular emotion, particular feeling. You can do this by a hell being yourself by noting and thinking, thinking, hot dog, hot dog, whatever, if that works for you, that’s okay. Whatever, it’s just a technique, whatever technique works for you, that’s what you should use. Just thinking, feeling, thinking, hearing, tasting, you know, pain, pain, pain.
And don’t try to move away with it, away from it or indulge in it. Just acknowledge it and then return to the breathing. Now we can go on with the breathing technique. Up to now we’ve been counting the breath in general. Noting in out, in out one, in out two, in out three.
And then more specifically we have a second type of exercise where we follow the breath, that we actually more or less tie the mind to the breath. Beginning at the nose tip and counting. One, two, three, four, five. And returning. One, two, three, four, five.
You can follow. Up and down. In and out, counting and noting. Also noting your thoughts, thinking, thinking. Now we can also, for a few minutes, try to develop the sense of contact.
The air rushing in and out of your nostrils can be felt either depending upon the shape of your nose, either on the inside of your nose at the tip or on this upper lip. Now you may not feel it initially. You haven’t perhaps developed the sensitivity. It’s not important that you can make an effort to concentrate at that spot for a moment, for a few moments, and then return to a more grosser type of mindfulness, either this following or just the entire breath in general. But you can try going there every so often, For a moment, for one minute, for example, either on the inside of your nose tip or right there, upper lip, and try to feel the contact of the breath going in and out, in and out.
And also you can use the counting technique again, in and out, and out, two, in and out, three, counting, counting, thinking, thinking. Okay, so we’ll do that for a while. Bring your mind back to the breath. So we recite the refuge prayer. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create, 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, 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, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. We go for refuge to the Buddha, clarity, wisdom within our own minds.
And if we look at refuge from the point of view of the effect refuge, our own Buddhahood, that even within the present moment, within everyday life, Taking refuge within our own wisdom. I was talking the other day. I was giving a talk and one of the points that came up was the point of change. How much we fear change. You know, it’s better to be stuck in a dissatisfactory state, but at least feel secure and to be open to the possibility of the unknown, to be vulnerable and expose yourself to who knows what.
So we resist change. We fight change even though we may superficially talk about change. How is it that we can bring about change if we’re in this position, if we’re stuck, or is having to seek security in what has gone in the past? So I think it takes a good deal of faith. Faith in ourselves, in our own wisdom, our own basic sanity, our own basic goodness.
I think it’s like a safety net. You you feel as though you can take a chance that there is within your own mind some basic sanity which is going to catch you if you fall through your own experiences, through intuition, you develop a greater and greater belief in your own basic sanity, your own Buddha nature if you like, and you’re willing to take a chance even though you weren’t quite sure how the change is going to come about, that you allow yourself to be slightly vulnerable, slightly exposed, to go into uncharted territory. Do things that you’ve never done before, and you do this on the basis of belief that you have this basic sanity which is going to operate in your favor, is going to catch you if things go wrong. You begin to believe in yourself It’s going for refuge in the Buddha. You go for refuge to the Dharma, the techniques to help foster this belief and develop this basic sanity, the truth, reality to the degree we act in our body, speech and mind in accordance with the way things are, to that degree we’re going to go beyond suffering.
Our suffering is going to lessen. We go for refuge to the Sangha, the spiritual community in which all this takes place, the context. We’re very much social beings. We don’t exist in isolation. We need the inspiration of others.
We need the support of others. We need others to help us cut through our own games and to see our own games. Others are very important to our practice. They’re just as important as the Buddhas. Buddha, Śāntideva says, we rely on sentient beings just as much as the Buddhas to attain enlightenment.
Why is it that we respect the Buddhas and we don’t respect sentient beings? We have the potentiality. If we make the effort, we can get there, enlightenment. But we are not destined in the sense that we must gain enlightenment whether we like it or not. No.
The saṃsāra can go on indefinitely. You can remain in it indefinitely. You can remain indefinitely unenlightened and go on, you know, to eternity as it were. You are not destined for enlightenment. You don’t have to become enlightened if you don’t want it.
Going for refuge is stating that we want to become enlightened. It’s stating that we want to stop suffering. It’s stating that we want to be all that we can be. Whether you do this formally, verbally or simply within your own mind or more importantly in actions, in your that part of you that acts beyond words. So unless you want this, unless you want to stop suffering, suffering is never going to end.
You must genuinely want to stop suffering. It’s probably a question that we’ve never considered before. We always want this particular suffering to stop. There’s no question about that. But have we really considered the fact of ending all suffering altogether?
Perhaps it never crossed our mind the very possibility that in order to gain enlightenment, we have to want that, to go beyond all suffering altogether. You must choose to stop suffering. It’s very much your choice. You have this choice whether to stop suffering or not. In going for refuge, we choose to stop our suffering.
So it’s this consistent choice of the refuge of Buddha in the sense of one’s own wisdom, one’s own clarity of mind. It’s a consistent choice of the Dharma, the techniques, methods, the practice, truth, the way things are. It’s a consistent refuge of our fellow pilgrims, the spiritual community, which is going to stop your suffering. It’s your choice. Most of you think it’s out of your control, that you’re victims, victims of your history, victims of society.
Maybe I can find a quote, a regional quote. There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of circumstances. You buy that and you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women. It’s not straights who limit gays.
It’s not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is a lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the nerve or imagination to star in their own movies, let alone direct it. Yuck. Perhaps we don’t have a big choice either now.
We want to make grand choices in our lives, make earth shaking decisions. Generally, I don’t think you’re open to it. But we can make very small decisions, very small choices, and we’re doing that all the time whether we’re aware of it or not. And smallest choices open up other possibilities, and those open up other possibilities. You know the other day I gave a talk and I gave an example of myself.
You know, was born in the Midwest of the United States, a very conservative, more or less back, backwoods Ohio, state of Ohio. There wasn’t much going on certain respects. For example, spiritually, might say, in many ways. But I chose to leave Ohio and I went to California. Perhaps I didn’t choose.
I don’t know. I was going through a divorce and I dropped out of university. I guess I chose, I could’ve stayed. But it was painful to stay, so I left and I went to California. And in California, it opened up a different way of thinking to me.
There were people who had different values that I had never met in Ohio. There were people who were questioning what it means to lead a happy life. People who asked themselves, what do I want to do with my life? What makes me happy? I’m going to do what makes me happy.
I never that was really a revolutionary thought to me, doing what made me happy. I was very much, up to that time I hadn’t considered myself particularly under the influence of my peers or the influence of society, but then I began to realize that in fact all my values, all my goals were all being set to a large extent almost totally by the people around me and what they thought was worthwhile, whether it was a status or money or possessions. And then I I got into a new context, a new context. And they had a different value system. They said, well, let’s find out what makes you happy and do that.
So I tried that and I, you know, grew long hair and a beard and went out and lived in a cabin. And so I was, to some extent, becoming freer of social pressure. But still, there were times when I became angry. I didn’t want to become angry, and it hurt. There were times when I was attached, and I didn’t want to be attached, and it hurt.
So I still wasn’t free. I still had I was still under the influence of factors out of my control, which I didn’t I wanted to be liberated from the factors, but this time the factors were within my own mind. I saw that I wasn’t going to be happy. I wasn’t free. I had no real choice or freedom if I was under the control of attachment or anger and jealousy or spite or whatever, any of these afflictive emotions.
So I began to develop a desire to be free of these inner factors. So I made a choice. And now I begin to see that in fact even virtue, even positive states of mind limit your freedom. your conception of what it means to be virtuous, your conception of what it means to be a wise, loving person is going to limit your wisdom, is going to limit your love. So I wanted to be free of even those restrictions, of all restrictions.
And now I’m sitting here in Adelaide as a fully ordained monk. So from Ohio, a little town in Ohio, to Adelaide is a long way. I couldn’t have made the decision when I was living in Ohio, even if the thought had occurred to me, maybe I’ll go to Adelaide, be a monk, and sit and give talks on Friday night. No way. I wasn’t within the realm of my possibility of action.
There were too many obstacles, hindrances. I was ingrained in too many patterns of thinking. I couldn’t have done much of what I’m doing now even ten years ago. I would there would have been too much resistance within my own mind for different ways of relating, for example, different ways of thinking. But I made choices, little choices along the way.
And these little choices, going from Ohio to California, opened up new possibilities, new choices, which wouldn’t didn’t exist back in Ohio. Then I made a choice of going to Europe. This opened up more areas, more possibilities. Then I made a choice of going to India. If I hadn’t gone to Europe, would have never gone to India.
If I hadn’t gone to India, I would have never met, I would never have gone to Dharmasala where I was first introduced to Buddhism about seventeen years ago. So all these, you know, some people say it’s as if you were being led by the hand of God. I don’t know, But I know I played a significant part in directing myself through small choices as it were trying to get in touch with the inarticulate whisperings within my own heart, my own basic sanity which was saying there’s something more than what’s happening around you in this situation. There’s something more to life. Something more than just cars and a nice house.
Nothing wrong with a nice house, possession, but there’s something more, isn’t there? Some real fulfillment to be gained, some real satisfaction to be won if you’re willing to search for it. You begin to make choices in this particular direction. You desire to grow, you decide to grow. So it’s this consistent choice of growth which is your real refuge, which will eventually lead you to the goal.
There’ll probably be no major happenings, no dramatic insights or realizations in your life, but there will be this ever flowing dripping of water, which after a while is going to form a stream, is going to lead out to a larger river and finally flow out to the goal, whatever you make, conceive of that goal to be. So it’s our choice. We’re talking about the three principal aspects of the path by Lama Tsongkhapa. Developing the determination to be free, opening to others and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. We’re reviewing.
We’ve been reviewing for a number of weeks now. In developing the determination to be free, there is said to be four transforming thoughts, four reflecting thoughts, which help us to break our patterns of mind which are not conducive to growth, which in fact are hindrances which hold us and bind us, which the ego is continually seeking to secure itself in. You know, our various negative images of ourselves, for example, that we can’t in fact change, that we can’t grow, that there’s something hindering us, that we don’t have the possibility that we don’t have the potential, and there are various outside factors which stop us. That is to say we’re victims of circumstances in our society. But if so, in fact, we have to begin looking at the situation as it really is, and in fact we have the potential to change.
We have all the circumstances and all the leisure, all the fortune to change. That we’re intelligent, caring, kind human beings with healthy bodies and minds with all the material necessities, the leisure of time, the teachings. Everything that we need is there. Nothing whatsoever is lacking except perhaps effort. So we can no longer make up excuses for ourselves.
We begin by going over and over this very fact and the reality of the situation, cut through some of our basic misbeliefs that we hold about ourselves that I can’t change. There’s something particularly wrong with me, perhaps others, but something went wrong at my birth or something went wrong between my mother and I, wasn’t born with proper genes. And the fact is that there are things outside of myself, like my family, they don’t want me to change, but you know, all the various reasons that we thought about that we might articulate, but in fact aren’t really being honest, they aren’t actually the situation. And no matter what our situation, if we’re married and have a family, there’s no reason why you can’t change within that context. In fact, there’s no reason why you can’t make your family situation a catalyst for growth.
A chance to really get in touch with others, people who care about you, that you can a chance to share, a chance for people to support your practice. There’s no one or there’s no circumstance that can stop you from practicing Dharma, which cannot be transformed by some skillful means into a means, a method of growth. There’s no such thing. And people who are merely those who drop their practice, they say, don’t, for various reasons, they might blame their family, their mate, their social situation, their economics, are merely fooling themselves. They’re simply a rationalization.
People are very clever. You know, we’re very intelligent beings. We can interpret and rationalize our situation, our choices in any way we want. If interpret it and rationalize or make the choice not to grow, then we have to take responsibility for that in the fact that we’re afraid or that we’re lazy, that we don’t want to make the effort, but in fact there’s nothing outside of ourselves which is stopping it. If we’re willing to look at the situation dispassionately and honestly.
But this situation, this chance that we have isn’t going to last forever. It’s definite that we’re going to die. You know, as I’ve said, we think we’re very special, special in the universe, and somehow we expect the universe to serve out special treatment to us. And we think somehow death is quite unfair and that somehow we should be treated fairly, that we’ve been pretty good. We haven’t really hurt that many people or that very much.
And we don’t deserve death. It’s so sad. It makes you feel lonely and scared. I don’t want anything to do with it. I wish it’d go away.
But death may be sad, it may be unfortunate, but it’s normal. This is the situation, this is the reality that we have to accept. It’s not that when I say accept reality, some people say, oh, this is a fact of life, you just have to accept. This is a saneness in a sort of cynicism. When things go wrong, oh, that’s a fact of life.
So is happiness. Happiness is a fact of life too. We can accept that just as readily. Is it that we accept happiness without a second thought, but we don’t accept suffering so readily? This chance is not going to last forever.
We’re definitely going to die. In the time of the death, what is going to occur? We talked a little bit about the possibility of rebirth and karma, that is the actions of body, speech, mind, the latencies of which are implanted on our mind stream, which will shape what type of future existence that we may take. In fact, the various states of mind which are rising are continually being shaped by our karma. So we begin with trying to understand The possibility of a state which is more dissatisfactory than our present state, there is this possibility.
So we don’t come to the practice of spirituality, a path freely. You know, the exploration and the questioning. It may appear to us that we do, but usually it only comes through some sort of deep crisis, some emotional pain, and an important level of recognized unmanageability of our lives. Our life, we need to notice, is out of control. The acknowledgement of suffering and the question, what is the meaning of all this?
What is the meaning of life? So this is the beginning of a spiritual path. Acknowledgment of the unmanageability of our lives, the acknowledgment of our pain, and the simple questioning perhaps it’s never been articulated but it’s been deeply felt. What is the meaning of all that? This thing called life.
The beginning of our spiritual journey. It’s very frightening acknowledgement and question. When it’s being deeply felt, when it’s being deeply acknowledged, it’s always associated with pain, with despair, with hopelessness. Very much the beginning of the path of our life. So this confrontation this confrontation with the meaninglessness of our life, with our suffering, of this pain, and the tension it creates, which is aroused by this confrontation, this beginning of the spiritual path.
I suppose person A is watching television. So person A is watching television. When person B comes into the room and shows evident displeasure with the situation, Person A may think he understands the problem when he tries to remedy it by exiting the present system. That is the television program. This is written by someone who is very skilled in computer programming.
There’s person A, he’s sitting in the room and person B walks in the room and he shows displeasure, evident displeasure at this situation. Person A obviously as well, obviously he doesn’t like this program so he turns the knob on the program. And flipping the channel knob, looking for a better show. Person B may have more radical concept of what it is to exit the system. This is computer talk, exit the system, namely to turn the television off.
Of course there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many people’s lives, a system which had never been seen or recognized as a system before. Then such a person, then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there and that it ought to be exited from. So we’re involved in a system. The Buddha recognized, perceived a system which governs our lives. He called this system cyclic existence.
Samsāra, that’s a Sanskrit word that’s usually translated as cyclic existence. He said it is characterized by three marks: suffering, impermanence, selflessness. And therefore, it is unsatisfactory and should be exited from. So up to now, we’ve taken more or less our difficulties, our frustrations, disappointments, all our problems piecemeal, one by one, confront them, try to work with them, pass on to a new problem, work with it, confront it, resolve it either well or poorly, pass on to a new And we have been working very much with our life situation in this manner. As if these various problems which arise and work unrelated to one another.
That there is no particular pattern to our problems. So we have to develop some perspective, begin to step back, try to see the forest for the trees. Buddha, he said that there is some pattern involved in all our difficulties and all our problems, that they’re not really random. There’s some type of cause and more than that, these causes follow some logic and therefore they follow certain rules and patterns. He called these rules and patterns which bring about dissatisfactory states, cyclic existence, themselves.
And he said that such a pattern, such a system should be exited from, that we should try and make effort to go beyond this pattern altogether, to step out of it. The Buddha, I think on that wheel of life, on this far left hand wall, my left hand wall, on the left hand wall, there’s a Buddha with the real life and he’s pointing, you know, he’s pointing this way out, the exit. He said, know, this system is dissatisfactory by its very nature. Nowhere within it will you find fulfillment, you find complete happiness. It is to be exited from.
It is totally to be gotten out of. Any sort of happiness that you may experience is simply a low level of suffering and moreover, it’s impermanent. It is not going to last long and more a worse type of suffering is going to arise in its place. He wasn’t being cynical, he was trying to describe the way things as accurately as he could as he saw them. This was his experience.
This is what he saw and he tried to convince other people that this system did in fact exist and it’s governed their lives and whether you want to admit it or not, it’s still, you know, we don’t have to believe in karma. We don’t have to believe that saṃsāra or cyclic existence exists or not. It still is there. It seems to be the reality of the situation. We have to investigate it and see for ourselves that we, in fact, do exist with these compulsive reoccurring patterns within our mind and anything within these reoccurring patterns, anything within the fantasy world of ego is going to be, by its very nature, dissatisfactory.
So he described these particular patterns, this particular system as having three main characteristics or marks. Some of you are familiar with what are called the four seals of a Buddhist doctrine. The four seals of a Buddhist doctrine. All that is contaminated is suffering, all products are impermanent, all phenomena are empty, nirvana is peace, beyond sorrow is peace. Those are the four seals of a Buddhist doctrine.
If anything which is said or written is in accordance with these four seals and it’s said to be in accordance with the Buddhist doctrine, It can be said to be Buddhism. So these three marks are coming from these four seals. So that is suffering, impermanence, and selflessness. These are the qualities which make cyclic existence dissatisfactory. So we have to begin to see these within our own experience, these three marks of not just cyclic existence, but these are the three marks of our lives.
These are what are governing our lives. These are the qualities of our own ego within our own mind. They aren’t outside of ourselves. When follow a path, that is we take up spiritual practices, this involves a resolution between the tension, between the awareness and acknowledgement of these three marks. The three marks of existence on the one hand and the struggle against their awareness.
It might seem remarkable to you that we are in fact struggling against seeing the way things are. But as I was thinking about before, it’s very much the situation that we’re in. That in order to find security, we are quite willing to put up with and to hide, to put up with reoccurring dissatisfactory situations. Simply because we’re afraid to change. We’re afraid to look at the reality of the situation.
If you begin to look at the truth enough, I mean it forces you, doesn’t it, into a choice. Either you’re going to close your eyes or you’re going to have to change. There will reach a certain flash point, a certain tension in your mind where you’re either going to say, okay, I choose ignorance, I choose to be blind, or you change because the tension builds up and builds up and you can’t stand it any longer. So you’re going to do something. You make a choice.
To a large degree, we’re making small choices all the time. We’re choosing against growth, against enlightenment. We’re choosing to resecure ourselves over and over again into habitual patterns which are dissatisfactory through fear, fear of change, fear of the unknown, and the death of the ego ultimately. So this is a cultivated ignoring, cultivated unawareness, stubborn refusal to accept reality. So we have to make a lot of effort over and over again to try to see these three marks as they’re acting out in our lives.
It doesn’t have to be a painful struggle, but it has to be a consistent and disciplined one. Don’t think Buddhism is very much against ascetics, for example. But it seems that it’s necessary to accept some small voluntary suffering to go beyond suffering altogether. In a way, we don’t have any choice. If we don’t accept suffering voluntarily, we’re going to continue to suffer.
If we do voluntarily accept suffering, some types of suffering, if we voluntarily take them off, then this can act for us to go beyond suffering altogether. So if we can really get realistic about the situation, then we can do a little, can’t we? We can take a little bit of suffering, a little bit of self discipline that perhaps doesn’t feel so good to wake up fifteen minutes earlier than is necessary in the morning to to breath, sit and do breathing meditation. Maybe at present it seems to be some of suffering and perhaps you question why you’re doing it. So you’re going to have to find out for yourself why you’re doing it.
Ego is not going to apply you to answer. You’re going to have to use a part of yourself, your own wisdom, which is willing, which sees the situation you’re in in a broader perspective. It is the nature of the ego that it can’t think in long term goals. In Buddhism we talk about goals which are lifetimes, millions of lifetimes in the future, for example. You know, the bodhisattva being willing to work as the Buddha did for three countless eons in order to attain enlightenment.
That’s beyond the ability, beyond the conception of ego to work with. I think even in very practical everyday life we notice that when we talk about mature people, some people, they can’t they have inability to have long term gratification. They only have short term gratification, that they have to have their goals met almost immediately, and therefore they achieve very little in life, either materially or spiritually. For example, they’re going to school, perhaps in high school, what do you call secondary school, and they want some good things in life. They want a stereo or they want a car, so they drop out of school and perhaps they get their stereo and they get their car.
But in economic terms, they’re really cheating themselves, aren’t they? Because their earning capacity is going to be much less as compared to someone who finishes high school. But they can’t, they don’t have the maturity to set, to put off their achieving their goals for a certain period of time in order to achieve a greater goal. And likewise, if a person goes through a university or takes some sort of training and sets up, is willing to forego his present needs, present goals for longer term goals, he’s going to realize a greater type of happiness, a greater, however you may conceive of it. Likewise, if we’re able to develop the perspective of a long term practice, of cultivating our mind over longer periods of time, of actually slowly training our mind, In this life and if we can begin, which is difficult, to begin to conceive of our practice over many lifetimes, then we’re willing more and more to accept voluntary suffering even though we don’t want it.
No one wants to suffer. Ascetics don’t want to suffer. We find it necessary for one reason or another. It seems to be that we have to have some consistent self discipline in our practice, and this goes against our grain. It goes against our natural, perhaps laziness, and therefore it involves some suffering.
But if we can begin to see that maybe twenty years down the line, if I can just cultivate a little bit each day, by then I’m going to be a much happier person with a greater sense of fulfillment and be able to help others to a greater degree. I’ll be that much more skillful. And if we can think of it in vast lifetimes, then what’s one lifetime? It’s not to say that you somehow don’t seek happiness at all or you reject happiness, but you begin to not emphasize the necessity of temporal happiness as much, but begin to see your happiness in longer and longer term goals. And you begin to set your goals higher and higher until it becomes Buddhahood, and you’re willing to do whatever is necessary for however long in order to attain that goal.
In order to do this, to derive such determination, we begin to see that in fact our present situation is dissatisfactory. That we’re involved in a pattern which had three marks, three characteristics, suffering, impermanence, and selflessness. In talking about these three marks, I think that we’ll see that every psychopathological phenomena has at its roots a particular relation to these three marks of existence. So he’s talking about from a very contemporary psychological point of view. This is written by a PhD in psychology in terms of psychopathology.
We could trace every psychopathological form, system, or complex, everything that we call severe neurotic or psychotic disturbance back to a highly sensitive and meaningful encounter with one of these three basic truths. The attempt to cover up the acknowledgment of these very simple facts led to a lifelong struggle into one form of psychopathology or another. We will find that each psychopathological form such as obsession, hysteria, phobia, depression, and various characteristic aberrations containing within it a denial, rejection, or struggle against the recognition of the texture of existence. It is like someone who refuses to accept the summer changes into fall, autumn. They dress inappropriately and they become ill.
We simply won’t accept the way things are and we act inappropriately and we suffer. That’s more or less the bottom line of the situation. The way things are, are these three marks of existence. So if we’re willing to confront our situation, the nature of our situation, become more and more aware of it, and to acknowledge it, then we’re going to be able to more and more deal with it, We’ll be able to work with it and we can develop the means to be able to relate more and more skillfully. If you misunderstand your situation, the object you’re working with, another person, if you understand them, you’re not going to deal appropriately with them.
You’re not going to be able to deal skillfully with them. This is often the difficulty when people go to a foreign country. They don’t realize they’re dealing with someone of a different mentality. They deal with them as if they were one of their fellow countrymen. They don’t deal very skillfully with them.
They have lots of problems. I saw this all the time in India. People didn’t have the flexibility the awareness, to realize that they’re in another country, a foreign culture, and they thought everything should run just as it did in the West, and when it didn’t, they become frustrated, disappointed, and many times they freak out. But if we can understand who it is we’re dealing with, what is the situation, be aware of it, then we can be able to realize with it skillfully if we know how it works. So we begin by recognizing the system, the system called cyclic existence.
So traditionally the cyclic existence is described as the compulsive taking of rebirth under the influence of karma and afflictive emotions. Or by instead of rebirth we can say the compulsive taking of contaminated aggregates under the influence of karma and afflictive emotions. So the aggregates are more or less a body and mind, but a type of body and mind which is programmed, which is predisposed to suffering. We don’t have any choice in this matter. We’re being driven compulsively.
This is the feeling that we have to begin to develop awareness of in our lives, this lack of freedom. There’s no awareness, there’s no freedom, there’s no real choice. These reoccurring patterns. This idea of programs, choicelessness. If a woman were walking along the street in a shopping center for example and just looking through the windows, looking at the windows, various things in the windows, At that moment, probably not conceiving of herself as a woman.
She’s not conceiving of herself in any particular way. That is to say, we can talk about this in the sense that she has yet to take up a role. She’s like in an in between state. This may sound rather strange, but stay with it, this idea. She’s walking down the street from there, looking at the dresses or whatever in the windows, and she’s not she’s just simply aware of dresses and store windows.
She’s not aware of herself as being a human being, as being a mother, as being a woman. Any of these particular labels, she’s not grasping onto them at that very moment. But she’s associated with a particular energy pattern, a materiality. Remember last week I talked about the body being a particular pattern, energy pattern. The body is a particular energy pattern.
She’s associated with a particular energy pattern, this particular energy pattern we call the female body. This will force her, without her choice, to relate with the world in a certain way. She has no choice. I have no choice. I’m not picking on women.
This is predetermined. So she’s compulsively grasped at a particular energy pattern which is going to predetermine the way she’s going to relate with the world. It would translate that into English. When she died in her last lifetime, she grasped for a female body. She was born in a female body.
Having a female body means she’s going to relate with the world from the standpoint of being a female. Okay, there’s a man walking on the other side of the street. So he’s also in the same situation. He has grasp for a particular energy pattern, a male body, due to the previous tendency of his mind of karma. This tendency of the mind which begins to express, which provide fulfillment or quiescence in having grasped this particular pattern.
He is also forced, without choice, to begin to relate with the world in a certain manner. He didn’t choose to take his body. Didn’t he’s not going to choose the way that he’s going to relate with the world from the standpoint of being a man. He’s forced to. There’s no freedom.
His worldview, his values, even his future tendencies which he’s now even creating are going to be developed in the context of having a male body. Her worldview, her values, and her future existences are going to be developed in the context of having a female body. So everything that she does is going to be filtered through this association with the female body, whatever she sees in the world, how she views the world, how she looks at the world, and just as importantly, how the world looks at her and how she thinks the world is looking at her. This is further going to determine how she’s going to relate with the world. So she’s giving feedback from the world.
She can’t, she grabs her particular type of energy pattern in the female body and she’s going to begin to relate with this world from the viewpoint of being a woman. The world is going to look at her, begin to relate with her as having a female body. She’s going to begin to see how the world is relating with her and this feedback is going to further determine how she’s going to relate with the world. So there’s an interaction between the world and her which is good. There’s no choice involved in there.
She’s being forced to begin to interact in this world, with the world, from this particular context. So the man sees the woman. So the woman’s body acts as a condition to activate certain latency in the end of his mind. Certain urges, you know we talked about karma, certain urges or impulses are going to be activated. This woman’s body, he sees it across the street, this acts as the objective condition to activate, as the cooperative cause to activate certain urges and impulses within its own mind.
It’s like sticking a program at the computer. No choice. There’s not going to be any choice in any of this. Completely as if mechanical processes were taking place, causes and effects. So this brings into play certain tendency.
Know, urge happens, certain tendencies of mind, certain trains of thought will now begin to occur. Now if he had practiced mindfulness and breathing, perhaps he could take a choice at this moment. But this fellow hasn’t practiced mindfulness and breathing. He’s gonna bite down on his hot dog. A train of thought, he’s going to bite into that hot dog, that train of thought, he’s going to develop compulsive patterns, a program.
He’s going to accept this program. So he’s not aware at all that he’s being programmed. He’s not aware of the ensuing interaction of his program and what is going to occur with this woman. That this whole situation which is arising, which is being generated is purely conditioned by past tendencies, past habits, by his culture, by his social values, by how he conceives of himself, how he conceives of the world. That there’s all these forces working, operating, his own mentality, his own materiality which were determined by past influences, by previous actions is karma.
So there’s all these forces at work to determine this situation. There’s no freedom at any point in this situation. There’s no control, there’s no choice. There’s only conditioned reflexes, mechanical processes, reactive patterns. He’s totally unaware of them.
So the program is inserted. Put the program in your computer. And as if in a trance, the man walks across the street to the side where the woman is walking. And what happens? What does she see? A man?
Now her program is being inserted. So she could have some choices. I’m conceiving this object walking across the street. As a man, she was born as a woman. This latency, this train of thought, which is the thought that conceiving herself as a woman is activated, she will grasp to it.
She will bite into the hotdog of being conceiving of herself as a woman in response to conceiving that person walking across the street as a man. Now she could have just seen shape and color walking across the street, possibility. That’s all it is, is shape and color walking across the street. She could have seen a human being, just simply a human being walking across the street. But due to her previous tendencies, she conceives that that object walks across the street as a man.
This impulse, this train of thought arises and she grasps onto that train of thought. There’s been no choice. It’s purely mechanical. And as if in a trance, she crosses over to the other side of the street. So both of these people are being driven by karma and afflictive emotions.
There’s no choice and there’s no freedom in this entire, you know, this small interplay between them. It’s like, you know, two computers playing chess. One chess player makes a move and the other chess player consults its file, its program, it makes a move. And sooner or later one computer will win the game. But then there’s a slight pause and another program is inserted, another game starts.
Later this day, this same woman will be reborn as perhaps a secretary or a nurse or a homemaker, as a mother, as a wife, a lover. So each of those rebirths will have their particular suffering, their particular pleasure. It may sound like a rather radical idea, but if you weren’t to conceive of yourself as a woman, then you wouldn’t suffer the sufferings of a woman. Not in which you enjoy the pleasures of a woman, that’s true. If you were to consider yourself as a mother, you wouldn’t suffer the suffering of a mother.
You wouldn’t have the pleasures of being a mother. But we have no choice as long as we’re bound to these patterns. Each of these rebirth is associated with a particular mentality, associated with a particular type of suffering and pleasure, particular styles of pleasure, a particular style of suffering, a particular style of self punishment, a particular style of self reward. All these various values associated with this particular mentality. It all has all these associations that go along with being a mother, all the associations that go along with being a woman, a man, a father.
This whole script, this whole role goes along with all the suffering, with all the pleasure, all the responsibilities, rewards, punishment. There’s no choice involved in this. So as long as we identify with that particular conception, with that particular role, then we’re going to identify with all the sufferings and all the rewards, the pleasures that go along with it, never knowing quite why. Even with me this particular role of being a mother, of being a woman, of being a father, being a husband, even when we play that role out successfully, we enact out all the preconceptions of what it means to be a mother, what it means to be a woman, man, father perfectly. There’s still a feeling of hollowness, of dissatisfactoriness, of unfulfillment because it’s still a role.
We haven’t chosen a role. It is a role that we’ve taken with the force of afflictive emotions and karma. No matter how well we play that role, it’s never satisfactory. But we can, you know, we can ask the question, okay, I have to play out these roles. I’m being driven by the power of afflictive emotions and desire, hatred, miserliness, spite, jealousy, whatever, and karma, my past actions, the latencies that I’ve created.
By society, by my physical relationships. But in these roles, I play them well, isn’t there I experience some kind of pleasure. I experience some kind of happiness. Isn’t that really happiness? Isn’t that pleasure happiness?
So each these various roles, no matter whether it’s within this existence, whether it’s being a mother or father, whether it’s in the various realms of existence, which is the role of being a hell being, the role of being a hungry ghost, and the paranoia and fear associated with hell beings, the consumerism of a hungry ghost, the ignoring quality of an animal. They all have their associated pleasure and their associated suffering. So we have to ask ourselves, are these really pleasures or not? Now the driving force behind this compulsive taking of role, this compulsive rebirth, in this existence and within the various realms of existence is ignorance. It is a confused mind, a mind which grasp at the self or the eye to be solid, concrete, independently existing.
Though in fact it’s really a collection of tendencies, of mental and physical tendencies, mental and physical events taking place. We have the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all days and changes of life. We see our struggling to make sure of the permanence, the continuity, and safety of this enduring core, the center and soul of our being which we call I. For this we think to be the real man, the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. So all these various compulsive patterns is programmed, recurring dissatisfactory qualities of existence have as their root ignorance, this confused mind which misconceives the nature of the self.
If an object enhances the self, then we wish to maintain contact, we wish to repeat contact, we develop desire attachment. If somehow the object threatens the self, we want to cut off contact, we want to destroy that object. So we develop anger, we develop hatred. In developing this desire attachment, hatred, anger, we commit action, karma, which leave latencies on the mind, which predispose us to reenact again and again these same particular patterns. There’s no freedom at all involved in this process.
Everything becomes self reinforcing. So I think we’ll have to wait to find out what happens to the woman next week. Stay tuned. She crosses the street. She you know, the idea was this.
I’m trying to get across from this idea is how very much programmed, how very little freedom we actually experience, whether we call these influences external to ourselves or internal, then very much we’re just acting out our lives very mechanically. This woman is going to experience a great deal of fear. You may think it odd that I said that she conceives of herself as a woman, as if she had a choice. You know, I think, you know, there are many times when, you know, you’re sitting here quietly and you’re not, I doubt, very much thinking of yourself as a woman or a man. It’s only when certain conditions arise and you become aware of your femininity, not your femininity, we’ll say your femininity or your masculinity.
This is usually in connection with a member of the opposite sex, we’ll say, not always. So this opposite so in order to for that to arise, you had to conceive of that person sexually in some way That you had to it wasn’t just a person, it was a male person or a female person. And why did you do that? Why couldn’t you just relate to that being over there as another fellow human being? Why were you why did you conceive of that being as a man and thereby consider yourself in reaction to that as a woman?
And therefore, you consider that as a threatening man, and therefore, you’re going to have fear arise in your mind that you’re going to suffer. Why did this whole string of events start to take place in which you had no control, just cause and effect, know, reactive patterns? Why did you conceive? Why couldn’t you just let that person be a person? Why did you have to conceive of that person as being a man?
You had no choice. You were being driven by your afflictive emotions, for example attachment, and by urges of karma, these impulses. A particular condition arises, particular urge, a train of thought, a tendency in your mind, you grasp onto that, that he becomes a man. You become a woman. He becomes a threat.
You’ve experienced fear and suffering. No choice, just purely mechanical pattern acting itself out. This is the point I’m trying to get across, that we’re caught in the system without any freedom, without any choice, and it’s dissatisfactory. Until the point where we begin to recognize it, develop awareness of it, and possibly begin to make choices. We can begin to make choices, little choices as I mentioned in the beginning, with awareness, if there’s mindfulness.
We don’t have to bite the hotdog. We’ll leave it there for now. Meditate on loving kindness. Does that make some sense? I don’t know.
I it’s kind of I don’t feel I was being very clear. Ultimately we want to go beyond all conception. Perhaps We can begin to refine our conceptions. For example, we can begin to refine our conceptions of who we are in the sense of being a worthwhile person, having potential, whether as opposed to having negative conception of ourselves, being limited, not quite having what it takes to be happy. So we can begin to work with our conception of ourselves in a very mundane way that I’m not this negative, limited person, but in fact I have some real potential.
I have the ability to change. I have a kind heart. I have some intelligence. I can work with that. But even to develop a better conception, when you use Deity Yoga, for example, and Tantra, to identify with the enlightened qualities which are within ourselves in a seed form at present, love, wisdom, and develop the divine respect, dignity.
And you begin to consider yourself as a deity. Not in a sense of, I’m better than anyone else, in fact everyone is a deity. You begin to see everyone as having Buddha quality, as having deity quality. So you begin to lift up your conception. But ultimately you want to go beyond all conception and it becomes what is like a wish granting tree.
In Buddhism, they use the metaphor of a Buddha as being a wish granting tree. The tree is, you know, the fruit tree is simply there, it’s growing, it’s always giving forth this delicious nourishing fruit, and other people just simply come along and pluck it and enjoy it and nourish by it. The tree has no intention to grow fruit, nutritious fruit. It’s just its natural way of being. It’s a situation it creates and people, by relating to it properly, are nourished and benefit from it and find pleasure.
Likewise with the Buddha, the Buddha has no intention of helping sentient beings. But its very nature is if we relate to it skillfully in such a way, then we are nourished and can take pleasure from it. By appearances, it’s as if he is trying to help us, but in fact this is his natural way of being. It’s just like a tree, a wish granting tree.