Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with the image of a Zen gardener who buries weeds as fertilizer rather than discarding them, Ven Jampa Gendun spends this 96-minute session reframing the five hindrances to meditation — desire, hatred, sloth, anxiety, and doubt — as teachers rather than obstacles. He draws on the Dalai Lama’s account of finding unexpected strength through the Chinese occupation of Tibet, leads a brief mindfulness-of-breathing instruction using noting and counting, then moves to verse seven of the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, a fourteenth-century Tibetan text. The central argument: bodhicitta — the aspiration to awaken for the benefit of all beings — is not sentiment but a rational correction to self-cherishing, which he identifies as the root epistemological error underlying suffering. The session closes with a guided loving-kindness meditation expanding outward from self through enemy to all of Australia.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1988 05 13 3 P A P.mp3
UUID: 3312b2d4-6e6d-40d6-8ea3-4b8736ce1b48
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 1987-1988 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-05-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 96.0 minutes
Words: ~10,479
We’ve been talking about the five hindrances to meditation. The five main types of negative emotions which usually arise, which are predominant, usually most of our lives, most of our waking moments, but they become very obvious when we sit down and try to meditate, when we try to direct our minds, when we try to produce some sort of specifically skillful state. In many ways, when we talk about meditation, we’re talking about the uninterrupted production of skillful states. We have some skillful state that we wish to cultivate, to generate. So we use a technique, a method.
It might be love, it might be wisdom, compassion, and we use the various techniques in order to generate specifically. It’s like putting ingredients together to make us a type of cake. There are specific ingredients we can put together to produce a specific state of mind. And we try to hold that mind, that particular state, as long as we can so our mind becomes habituated to it. In Tibetan, the word for meditation is gom, and gom simply means to get used to or to habituate, to become familiar with.
So we begin to familiarize ourselves with specific skillful states of mind. And in this process, there are many obstacles which arise. And the main five obstacles are termed the five hindrances, The five hindrances to meditation. There’s desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, anxiety and worry, doubt and indecisiveness. So these are the five main hindrances.
But in a way, we’re talking about our whole attitude toward meditation in general. Now if we keep in mind that we’re not so much trying to become perfect meditators, that we’re not trying to have good meditations, but that we’re trying to work with our mind. We’re trying to solve our problems. Essentially that’s why we’re meditating, in order to solve problems, not to create more problems for ourselves. We have enough difficulties without adding new sources, new methods of inflicting some difficulty on ourselves by thinking, Oh, I can’t meditate.
I can’t do this. I should be meditating better. I should be meditating more. I can’t meditate. There’s something wrong with me specifically.
Everybody else probably can, but not me. So we don’t need any more of that. So meditation should be solving our problems in some way. That’s its purpose. So it becomes a learning process.
Very much Buddhism is simply involved in learning about ourselves. So in our meditation, even if we never get around to the meditation as we had preconceived, we had some meditation planned, well, first I’m going to meditate on mindfulness of breathing, then I’m going to meditate on selflessness, and then I’m going to meditate on generation of compassion. And you realize that you’re having many hindrances, that many obstacles are beginning to arise, many difficulties. So this even in itself is not an obstacle to meditation. It’s not an obstacle to learning about ourselves.
It’s simply an obstacle to fulfilling your preconceived plan perhaps, but we shouldn’t hold so tightly to our preconceived ideas of how things should go. If we sit down with the idea I’m going to learn about myself in some way, I’m going to try to gain some insight in the way my mind is operating, this is essentially what we’re trying to do. We’re learning about our minds, about ourselves. So in this sense, we very much learn from challenges, from obstacles. And in a way, these are our best teachers, difficult situations.
And it’s no different when it comes to meditation. Mankind progresses for the same reason that the amoeba evolves from irritation. There is never any flower of human achievement, but some great sorrow lay at its root. So our enemies teach us patience. Painful situations teach us courage.
So it’s from obstacles that we really grow. Painful situations, from the five hindrances we can develop, we can learn how to develop, how to cultivate a balanced mind in the face of all these difficulties, in the face of desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, indecisiveness, doubt, anxiety and worry. So we can work with these. It’s actually a method of growth. It’s not that something that they are an obstacle to our growth because they can become a source of growth if we’re willing to see them as that, as a way of beginning to work with our mind, working through these problems, these hindrances, a way of it becomes a transforming process.
Actually, it’s quite For example, in Hatha Yoga. I had a very good Hatha Yoga teacher many years back. And she said the best The students who make the best teachers are those who have the greatest difficulty learning, have the worst bodies to begin with, you might say. Because they go through the painful experience of having to stretch their muscles, stretch their cartilages. And so they know when they get the exact correct position, this tactile sensation, this bodily sensation, they’re very aware of all the pains involved in the movement of the body.
So they’re very aware of when they’re in the correct position. But someone who is very naturally very flexible, very limber, they have a very difficult time becoming aware of when their body is in the correct position. They haven’t developed this tactile, this bodily awareness. And these people usually, the people who have the most difficult time, usually become the most agile in Hatha Yoga and they also make the best teachers. So in this way, also they can identify with the difficulties of their students much more, much better.
They know what’s going through the agony that their students are going through. They can identify, I went through the same thing myself. And therefore, can through this identifying and empathy, they become better teachers. So in a way, in some ways we can look on our difficulties in general and specifically in our meditations as being a real source of learning, a real challenge of growth. A Zen gardener, for example, they have a saying that when they’re gardening in their flowers or their vegetables, they don’t just chop the wheat and throw it away.
They chop it and bend it over and they push it under the ground. So they appreciate their weeds as fertilizer for their flowers, for their vegetables. They might not desire weeds as the end product, but they serve a purpose. They appreciate them. They don’t simply throw them away as if they’re of no use.
And likewise, the obstacles in our meditation and life in general, we can begin to We don’t perhaps want them as an end, but we can appreciate them when they naturally arise as they represent a challenge and as a source of growth and help us develop our mind, become more skillful. And likewise, in having the challenges for ourselves, we can appreciate when others are having difficulty also. So in this way, the difficulty, our own difficulties become a method for developing compassion for others. I know the Dalai Lama, he once said, he often says that we have to thank the Chinese. I’m not sure, Probably most of you are aware of the situation in Tibet, I don’t know.
Since nineteen fifty nine when the, you know, the Chinese invaded the communist Chinese invaded Tibet in nineteen fifty one, and there was sort of an uneasy coexistence till nineteen fifty nine until the Tibetan people couldn’t stand the oppression of the communist Chinese, and they revolted. And subsequent to that, they had to flee with about the Dalai Lama with one hundred thousand refugees into India mainly and that’s where they live now. And during since nineteen fifty nine perhaps one million Tibetans were killed. It’s not very well known by the world since China does not allow freedom of press and very few journalists were able to know of the situation which was going on in Tibet. But still the Dalai Lama said, we owe the Chinese a great favor.
They are probably our greatest friends because through them, we learned how to be strong. We learned how to develop courage through the difficulties. And he said of himself, I think I was becoming a little bit soft in my castle, in my palace in Lhasa, in the capital of Tibet, and now I’ve become much stronger and I’m a better person for it. In a way, the Chinese have done us a great favor. So this takes a great deal of perspective.
It’s not an easy attitude to develop, but it’s quite helpful in our life in meeting situations that rather than letting them get us down, seeing them as obstacles to our happiness, seeing them, appreciating them as a source of growth, as a source of learning. So likewise, when we sit down to meditate, some hindrance is going to arise. One of these five hindrances that I just mentioned, most likely. Now, if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it.
Maybe you have a good meditation, I hope. That would be nice. It’s probably more enjoyable in the long run. But we can sort of set aside our meditation schedule that we a preconceived plan that we had set up and we can say, okay, now I feel this worry, now let’s find out what this worry is about. I’ve got this anger, I feel this, you know, I wish I had an earache.
And let’s work with that. That’s what’s happening in your mind at that present time. And so this represents a really valuable moment to really work with your present state of mind, learn about yourself. If you’re lazy, you can become an expert on lazy mind. It’ll become the world famous Institute of Lazy Mindedness or something like that.
How many people know really what a lazy mind is like? They never looked at it. They go to sleep. That’s one of the terrible things about lazy mind is we’re too lazy to find out anything about it. We can’t be bothered.
So if there’s some awareness and some feeling that, well, there’s something to learn here, there’s a challenge, then any of these particular hindrances or in general any situation can become a source of insight into your own mind, learning about yourself. And this is what growth is all about, learning about yourself and applying it in your everyday life, these new skills and these new insights that you begin to pick up along the way. So when we sometimes we say, Oh, I can’t stand this. I can’t stand myself. This garbage mind of mine, I’m probably the worst thing that ever happened since Adolf Hitler or something like that.
Sometimes we get in that particular state of mind and this is not only unproductive, it’s not only a matter of egotism, it’s very unskillful from the point of view that we really aren’t learning. Many people who have been involved with what we call dharma, what I mean by dharma are those methods, the techniques where we raise the level of our consciousness. From example, from desire to openness, from attachment to generosity, from hatred to love, from ignorance to wisdom, these methods. And some people who have been applying themselves to these methods for many years, quite often get discouraged if they have a moment of anger. They say, oh, should never be angry, or I should never have attachment.
All these years I’ve been practicing, practicing, practicing, look at me. There’s something wrong with me. I’m useless. I can’t do it. This not only is of no benefit, but it’s quite unskillful.
They haven’t seen the fact that they should be thankful that this state of mind was actually expressed. They had to have something really to work with, that they saw something which was there all the time but it was unnoticed. It was like a hidden enemy that finally came out behind a rock or something like that and it gives them a chance to learn about themselves and be able to oppose these negative states of mind and develop their skill even more. So this, you know, it’s not so much that if one has anger or one has desire that makes one a Dharma practitioner or not. It’s one that opposes the negative states of mind.
So when you say that in some way practicing Dharma is actively opposing negative states of mind or in a more positive way, cultivating skillful or positive states of mind. So even though we have lots of anger, we have lots of desire, doesn’t mean we’re not practicing, that we’re not developing ourselves spiritually. If, in fact, you’re aware of it and you, in some small way, are actively opposing them, applying some antidote, Then you’re practicing, no matter if your mind is negative ninety nine percent of the time. Before, last year it was one hundred percent. Now it’s ninety nine percent.
So you’re practicing. There’s some development. That’s what counts. Not that your mind is always We’re not trying to be Buddhist angels or anything of that nature. We’re just trying to cultivate, develop our minds to grow, that’s all.
And we can grow through adversity. We can grow accepting ourselves as we are now. As a matter of fact, we have to. Many people they talk about it’s the idea of perfection, the idea that somehow if I’ve been practicing, if I’ve been taking all these growth courses, I’ve been listening to teachings, I’ve been going to all these various masters, I should be perfect by now. So it’s not so much that we’re trying to be perfect in a perfect world.
That we’re trying to rather than enacting perfect actions in a perfect world, or simply trying to enact appropriate actions in an imperfect world, make the best of all the situations as they arise. We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. We should find perfection in imperfection. For us, complete perfection is not different from imperfection. The eternal exists because of the non eternal exists.
In Buddhism, is heretical view to expect something outside the world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves. We should find the truth in the world through our difficulties, through our suffering. This is the basic teaching of Buddhism. Pleasure is not different from difficulty.
Good is not different from bad. Bad is good. Good is bad. There are two sides of one coin. So enlightenment should be in practice.
That is the right understanding of practice and the right understanding of our life. The basic dishonesty is not accepting the situation as it exists, thinking that the situation should be somehow different than it actually is. I think that’s all we have to work with is the present situation. How we confront the present situation determines whether we’re going to grow, whether we’re practicing the spiritual path, or whether we’re just going to maintain, support our present unskillful patterns of how we relate with situations. There’s nothing else to work with No matter how many ideas we may develop in our mind, there’s nothing else but the present situation to work with.
So basically we’re trying to learn about ourselves and apply it and what we learn about ourselves, apply it in our everyday life in order to become happy, healthy, loving human beings. Not dharma robots, not growth freaks. We can’t be anybody else but then what we who we are. So this involves working with the material, the raw material just like the and appreciating just like the Zen gardener working, taking the weeds and using them as a means to further in to develop this crop. In our retreat last weekend we discussed a lot about shoulds and shouldn’ts, how very much our life is involved with shoulds and shouldn’ts, the idea of should.
Shoulds are those things which are written up in the sky in stone and engraved on big stones. They’re absolutes. You should respect your parents or you should love your children. The universe should somehow support you. You should be happy all the time.
You shouldn’t have to work. We have a great long list of irrational shoulds and shouldn’ts, and they become quite a burden. They very much govern our lives. We should be doing more than we are now. I should be different than I am now.
Reality should be something else than it is now. It may in fact be preferable to love your children, to respect your parents. It may be preferable that if the situation were different than it is now and we can preferring that change, that some other situation, we can work toward that change. That’s not to say that the situation should be any different from now, the way it is now. Somehow the present situation could be no other way.
It has its reasons for the way it is now. We may not be aware of all the various variables that go into making up the present situation. It’s probably doubtful that we could be, but somehow everything’s right about the present situation. It could be preferably different and we can work to change it, but we have to accept it as being the way it should be or the way it is. So even in our meditation we can begin to work, this is the way the situation is.
I have these present states of mind. Maybe you don’t particularly like them, all these various hindrances. You don’t desire because it hurts. It’s suffering. It also probably doesn’t fit in with the self image you would like to develop of yourself.
Or you don’t like to experience hatred. You don’t like to experience doubt. It’s a very unpleasant experience. I shouldn’t be like this, but that’s the way it is. And you have to accept that and this is what you have to work with.
It would be preferable if it weren’t like this and you can work towards that change. This whole preface is sort of getting to the idea that when you sit down to meditate that there has to be some fluid and openness, fluid attitude and openness to what you’re doing, that you have to welcome anything that comes to you at that time as something to work with, some way to learn about yourself. And obviously this is going to carry over to your everyday life. You’re not going to make demands that reality be somehow different than it is. You’re going to be open to actual situations, the way people actually are, relating to the world a little more realistically, and therefore you’re going to relate with the world a little more skillfully and neither run away from it or demand that it should be some way than it is now.
And so in many ways, meditation is like a laboratory experimenting with our mind so that we can go out into our everyday life and carry out what we’ve learned and it spills over into our everyday life. So we’re talking about the five hindrances. Maybe we won’t. I have to be open and fluid to the situation. I think maybe I think we’ll save that.
We’ll go into that next time. We’ll go into the five hindrances some more. We were talking about the various antidotes to the five hindrances, the various ways that we can begin to work through them. The first one was simply recognizing the hindrances as hindrances. That is something which in a sense of if you want to go to where?
I don’t know my way around Adelaide. That’s a problem. If I want to go to town, to the city, I think it’s a really small If the street is blocked by a tree falling down, then it becomes an obstacle to my driving. If I wanted to walk, I could get there anyway, but if I’m willing to walk, if I’m driving to the city, then that tree becomes an obstacle to my goal. If I don’t care about getting to Adelaide, then it’s not an obstacle.
There’s no problem at all. It’s only if I want to go somewhere, right? So if you want to work with your mind, if you want to produce more skillful states of mind, develop a concentration, insight, then they do present an obstacle, a hindrance. And they do have to be worked through. Otherwise, if you don’t see the potential of your own mind, if you don’t see the possibility of developing uninterrupted positive states of mind, finding unremitting peace and being able to develop the skillful means to benefit others in an effective way.
If you don’t see their potential within yourself, if you don’t appreciate that fact, then these aren’t obstacles at all. They may be unpleasant, but they’re not obstacles because not preventing you from attaining any particular goal. So we have to very much initially begin to appreciate our potential, what we can achieve, and to see the necessity of working through these hindrances because it’s necessary to transform our minds directly in order to achieve, to actualize the potential of our mind. The most effective, direct way of transforming the mind is simply through sitting down and meditating, working with the mind directly. So initially the first of the antidotes to working with the five hindrances is to recognize the hindrances as hindrances and to work with them to be motivated.
So we’re going to meditate now on the mindfulness of breathing. There’s a few new people here. We’ll just meditate about five minutes. I’ll explain the initial technique of meditating on mindfulness of the breathing. So the breathing is natural.
It’s neither forced or it’s not prolonged in any way. It’s just the natural breathing that you normally breathe. You’re just going to, if you can, there’s many variables, methods to the posture, but essentially we just want to keep a straight back, essentially. If want to keep your eyes open, that’s preferable, but if you find it difficult then you can close your eyes. And we just want to begin to know the breath.
When we’re breathing in, we want to know that we’re breathing in. That sounds like quite an easy task but you’ll find it very difficult probably. When we’re breathing out, simply want to know that we’re breathing out. So to help us, we have some techniques and the first one is called noting. And this is mentally noting.
When we’re breathing in, to help us know that we’re breathing in, we mentally note in our mind, in. When we breathe out, to help us know that we’re breathing out, we note in our mind, out. So it just becomes a process of mentally, not verbally, but mentally noting in, out, in, out, in, out, at the same moment with the breath itself. Another technique to help us, we use the technique of counting. So we’re going to count in out one, in out two, in out three, in out four, in out five.
We come back down to one, in out one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, eight, one, nine, one, ten, and then if you keep on going, begin again with number five, one, three, five, one, three, six. So it’s a very simple technique. If your mind becomes distracted, which it probably will, it will wander off. You’ll be thinking about catching the bus home or what you’re going to do tomorrow for lunch or whatever. Immediately, when your first moment that you become aware of it, you know, just like training a little puppy dog when it runs off the paper, you bring it back very gently, with very patiently.
Just keep bringing it back, put it down, and if it runs off, you bring it back, put it down, runs off, over and over again. And pretty soon we get the idea, but we don’t want to be uptight, we don’t want to be heavy handed about it. But make a determination that the very moment I become aware that my mind is wondered, I’m going to note, maybe I’m hearing, maybe I’m thinking, thinking back to the breath, in out, in out, in out one, in out two. Hearing, you hear the heater for example, hearing, I come back to the breath, in out one, in out two, thinking in out one. And so just over and over again bringing our mind back to the breathing, knowing what’s happening in your mind.
If you’re breathing in, knowing that you’re breathing in. If you’re thinking, knowing that you’re breathing in, noting thinking. If you’re listening to something, feeling some pain, thinking, note pain, pain, then come back to the breath. So we’ll do that for about five minutes. And we recite the verse of refuge.
Everyone have a copy? I was talking about the practice of Dharma, the actively opposing negative states of mind. Very much what determines whether a practice is going to be helpful spiritually or psychologically, if you like, is our motivation for the particular activity, whatever we’re doing. It doesn’t have to be a type of activity that we particularly associate with any type of religious practice. And this depends upon our motivation, why we’re doing what we’re doing.
We can go to church, can go to Buddha House, whatever. If we go to church to show off our latest dress or to make business connections, then of course it’s in no way involved with a spiritual activity. There’s no benefit to be derived from it. But if we have a positive motivation, if it’s a means to help us go beyond the more unskillful patterns of our ego that we have developed, if you begin to have some insight into your particular style of dissatisfactory way of relating with things. And you think, I’m going to begin to sort of change.
I’m going to develop more skillful ways of relating with other people perhaps in this situation. And this is, anything that you do is such a motivation. Even if it’s to take out the garbage, it’s developing yourself. It’s in some way you’re growing. You’re going beyond some unskillful pattern, developing more skillful ways of relating, and this is what it’s all about.
Finally, we hope to transcend all habitual patterns, ways of relating. But initially, we’re simply trying to cultivate more positive, more skillful patterns, styles and begin to diminish the power of our unskillful negative ways of relating. So one way we do this, we can do this quite easily, is taking refuge. We take refuge, it’s not a new thing for any of us. We’ve all been taking refuge our entire life.
It’s just that we may not be aware of it and we may not be aware of the object of our refuge, whether our refuge is money, sex, drugs, job, houses, cars, we all have our various methods for alleviating our difficulties, for finding the happiness that we’re all looking for. So we have to very much check up and experience whether our particular refuge is working, whether it’s bringing us the happiness that we desire and it’s alleviating the problems, solving our difficulties that we don’t want. In Buddhism, we very much take refuge in our own mind. That sounds very strange, doesn’t it, to see, well, initially it sounds strange. After a while it sounds perfectly reasonable.
That it’s within our own mind where our problems come from, and therefore it’s our own mind where the solutions to our problems are going to come from. And so we begin to see that it is the cultivation of our own mind, of our own potential, which is ultimately the source of our happiness. It’s not to say that other people, other situations can’t bring us happiness, but they are only a happiness in respect to our attitude we have toward them, aren’t they? And the same thing can be the same situation, the same person can can be a source of suffering one moment and a source of happiness the next moment. It’s very much like fire.
You know, if we’re skillful, fire can be a it’s a very you know, we have a fire in a fireplace. It’s very pleasant. It us a great deal of happiness. Can cook your food, warm your body. It can serve us brings us a lot of happiness.
But likewise, if we’re unskillful, don’t know how to use fire, it actually destroy us. It can cause us a lot of pain. Likewise, all the various objects about us and the people in our life, they can become sources of pleasure or pain. In some way, things are neutral, you might say. It’s like a knife, a scalpel.
A scalpel in the hand of a surgeon is life giving, life saving. The same scalpel in the hand of a thief becomes life taking. It becomes a negative object, an object which only brings pain. So it depends on how we use the things about us, our attitudes towards them. So therefore, ultimately, our main protection, main way which we can find the happiness that we want in life is our own attitudes, our own mind.
So we go for refuge to our own mind. We acknowledge this fact. This is what going for refuge is, simply acknowledging the fact that it’s within my own mind where my happiness and my suffering lies, the source of all my difficulties and the source of all my potential for being a happy, healthy, loving human being. And we go for refuge to the methods whereby we cultivate the mind. We develop more skillful states.
That’s the Dharma. There are many types of Dharma. There’s the Christian Dharma, the Buddha Dharma, and there’s probably Dharma which isn’t necessarily connected with any particular religion, any particular spiritual practice. And we do this in the spiritual context of a community, a community of like minded people who we can turn to for examples, we can turn to for inspiration, guidance, support physically and spiritually. So these things become a real source of realistic way to work with the difficulties in our lives and find the happiness that we’re all seeking.
And we remind ourselves of this fact over and over again by taking refuge formally in hopes that we become, we’re actually in our own mind thinking about what is our refuge. And we develop a going for refuge that is actually in fact, not just in words, moving toward this refuge, moving toward cultivating our mind, inclining ourselves to reorientate our lives from seeing our difficulties and our happiness outside of ourselves to more and more orientating ourselves to seeing our own mind as the source of our happiness and suffering, seeing the cultivation of our mind as the means to our happiness and alleviation of our suffering, and seeing that our like minded individuals around us are a support in this entire process of developing our minds and finding happiness. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddhas, the Dharma, and the Sangha Through the merit I create by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddhas, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Through the merit I create by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddhas, the Dharma, and the Sangha Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. So we’ve been talking about the three principal aspects of the path. Just a short text where we could there’s some copies of on top of the mantle. Can you pass this up, please? By J.
Pangatta, a fourteenth century yogi scholar from Tibet. There are three principal aspects to the path or that is to say, you know, a path is something which takes you from where you’re at now to your goal. And with respect to this path, there are three main attributes, three main themes. Developing the determination to be free, opening to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. So we’ve completed the first of the three paths, and we’ve been talking about the second that is opening up to others.
So we’re beginning to take the verse, the seventh verse. It begins with also. So we’re trying to develop, to have an insight to see why it’s necessary to open up to others, why it’s necessary to develop love and compassion. As I said, if we simply think of developing love and compassion simply from a romantic standpoint, from a sentimentality, romantic notion. And whenever any difficulties arise, we’re going to forget it.
And also the love that we do develop will be exclusive. It will only be directed toward those we like, who in some way enhance our existence, who help us in some way. It’s going to be almost impossible to develop a love for your enemy. And it’d be difficult to develop love for, for example, a stranger, for someone who feel no relationship with whoever. So we have to develop we have to see through our own, through reasoning, through experience, through our own intuition, the necessity for developing love and compassion, for developing, for opening up to others, to developing this attitude of wanting to develop ourselves in order to benefit others.
If the thought definitely to leave cyclic existence is not conjoined with generations of complete aspiration to highest enlightenment, it does not become a cause of the marvelous bliss of unsurpassed enlightenment. Thus the intelligence should generate the supreme altruistic intention to become enlightened. So if we translate that into English, also it’s difficult. Also, if this start definitely to leave cyclic existence, this start to definitely leave cyclic existence, I’ve been calling determination to be free. Maybe it’s a little easier language.
It’s not conjoined with the generation of complete aspiration to highest enlightenment. Maybe that’s plain. Enlightenment, you know, I’ve talked about this a few times. The basic qualities of what we mean by enlightened mind is simply seeing things, the situations, the nature of how things are. Developing a burning desire to benefit others, that is to say having love and compassion, and the idea of spontaneous actions, working in the world to benefit others.
This is like the feeling tone, the feeling quality of an enlightened mind. This is what we mean when we say enlightened mind. It’s like a healthy mind. Is a healthy mind, someone who has some wisdom, some knowledge, someone who has love and compassion, and someone who has some spontaneity in response to the needs of others, acts out, simply isn’t passive in one’s life. And this is what we’re calling a healthy mind, a sane mind.
This is like our model of sanity. And this is what we call enlightenment. This is what we’re trying to work towards. But we can’t achieve this. Unless we develop love and compassion, unless we develop the aspiration for it, then we’re never going to then our actions will never become a cause for the happiness, for the fulfillment of enlightenment, it says, unsurpassed enlightenment.
So we have to develop an aspiration to open up to others based beyond sentimentality, beyond our romantic notions, something which is based in reason, experience, intuition. I’ve gone over this last few weeks. Some of the reasoning, some of the basis for our own experience, and some of the intuitive aspects of developing, of some when you hear about love and compassion, how it begins to vibrate some cord within your own heart, within the depth of your own being, you know, from the point of view of your intuition. Why it’s necessary, it’s not that it’s it becomes a necessity if we’re going to develop, actualize our full potential of what it means to be a human being. You know, both from the point of view of self and from the point of view of others, that it’s only enlightenment that their full capacity, our full potential is realized.
So the point of view, from the point of view of self, we have if we approach it existentially from the point of view, we have two aspects to ourself. We have a private, personal, experiential aspect to ourself which isn’t open to others. It’s the way we experience our life. And then there’s that other aspect to our self, our public self, our social self, the self which exists in relationship to other people. So in one way, we have two aspects to our self.
And in developing these two aspects to our self, any type of therapy, holistic therapy, dealing with the whole person, the whole being, any type of spiritual path has to take into account these two aspects of our self. Now these two aspects are developed through opening up to others and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. Why? Because the faults of these two, the difficulties that we experience, that is our own experiential pain and being unable to open up to communicate, to relate with others in a skillful way, are based on two epistemological errors. Epistemology simply means the way we know things, the way we know things.
We know we’re making some mistakes in the way we know things with respect to ourself and respect to others. Eventually, when we come to the third path, we’re going to talk about this error with respect to the nature of our self, the nature of reality. Here we’re talking about the error with respect to others, with respect to our social self, our social aspect of our self. We believe from the depths of our being, beyond any shadow of doubt, that by placing ourselves first, by emphasizing our own happiness above others, that in fact this is a way, this is like the foundation for gaining all our own happiness. That is to say, we believe in the effectiveness of self-cherishing.
And if you like, the effectiveness of selfishness. It’s an effective means of getting your happiness. Selfishness is how you’re going to get your happiness. This me first attitude. They even write books about it, how great it is.
There was a book written in the States, but I can’t remember the title. It actually had the title Getting Mine First. And it was extolling this virtue, you get yours first. This is the way life is. This is where you’re going to bring yourself happiness.
This is antithetical to all the teachings of Christ, Buddha, of any spiritual teachers who happy people. As I said, we’d rather believe the guy on television who says, State Bank is going to solve all your problems or if you use this deodorant, you’re going to find the man that you’ve always wished for and he’s going to bring you happiness. Rather than believing Mother Teresa, rather than believing the Dalai Lama who are happy, healthy human beings saying, care about others more than yourself and you’re going to be happy, you don’t have to worry about We would rather believe them, the people on television, the commercial makers who are insane people when it comes down to it, rather than healthy, happy human beings who are expressing in their everyday life this fact of putting others first, dedicating their lives to helping others. And we’re happy people. That’s strange.
We’re very strange creatures. We’re not very rational. One of our irrationalities is having never analyzed this error of always putting ourselves first as a means of getting happiness. It hasn’t worked up to now. It probably isn’t going to work any better way in the future.
And so we persist. Now the other epistemological error is simply what we call ego grasping. Always trying to hold to a concrete, permanent, unchanging, independently existing self identity, self image. But we’re going to talk about that more later when we come to the third principal aspect of the path. Here we’re talking about this error of self-cherishing.
The way we overcome this error is by developing, opening up to others. This is the way we realize the full potential of this social aspect of ourself. So what Buddhism is saying overall, what any religion is saying, We have to develop wise hearts and compassionate minds. We have to be totally integrated human beings if we’re going to have a full meaningful life. We can’t go to either of the two extremes and become imbalanced, either seeking our own passive peace or not developing ourselves, wholly being orientated outside of yourself, trying to work in the world to alleviate others and forgetting about developing yourself.
This can also be, if we haven’t done our homework, to be another extreme. If you want to solve the world’s problems, you have to put your own household, your own individual life in order first. That is somewhat of a paradox. People have a genuine desire to go beyond their individual cramped lives to benefit the world. But if you do not start at home, then you have no hope of helping the world.
So the first step in learning how to rule is learning to rule your own household, your own immediate world. There is no doubt that if you do so, then the next step will naturally will come naturally. If you fail to do so, then your contribution to the world will be future chaos. And I think we’ve seen that a great deal even in present situations. People have a sincere wish out of a loving compassion to help others, but they simply lack the wisdom, the skill in order to bring it off correctly.
And in fact, they may There’s an old saying that the streets in hell are paved with good intentions. Buddhism wouldn’t quite go that far because good intentions are quite skillful in themselves. But if we really want to be of effective benefit, we really have to do our homework. We have to begin with ourselves in conjunction with working for the benefit of others. We shouldn’t say, Well, okay, I’ll wait till I’m Buddha and then I’ll go out and do something for the world.
This wouldn’t be a proper attitude to take. And the Dalai Lama has said, within the time frame that we have, within the space that we have, we can devote fiftyfifty. Fifty percent solely to your own development, fifty percent to helping others. The point is to create some space in your life consciously concerned with benefiting others as a necessity for your own mental health. So part of our growing is learning how to make what Trungpa Rinpoche says, learning how to make a good cup of tea, a proper cup of tea.
In order to make a proper cup of tea, you have to necessary to study a little bit about the methods for making tea, the various qualities of tea, different types of tea. Learn how long to brew the tea, how to serve the tea properly, and how to wash up when you’re finished. You know, like a Japanese tea ceremony, completely aware. You know, we develop a feeling that we know what we’re doing. Because we know ourselves, we don’t have to we don’t make mistakes.
Or if we do make mistakes, it wasn’t it wasn’t because we didn’t seek to know the situation as best we could. We have to study ourselves, study our own mind. What man accomplishes in the outer world is his achievement. If this achievement in the outer world is no way coincides with his own inner truth, then it creates a rupture in his very existence. For it is not true that he exists only within himself.
He also exists a great deal through others by the way he is known to them. Know thyself is not indeed the ultimate maxim. Be known to others is also a vital necessity. This effort to be known to others reigns supreme throughout the world so that the true nature of my own religion, though deeply rooted in me, cannot remain confined within myself. So to simply use others as objects for your manipulation, as means to your ends, to your happiness, is simply to not understand the nature of yourself and the way to your happiness.
To see your inner world as separate from how you relate with others, as separate from how you relate with the outer world. This is the seed of schizophrenia that becomes this split, this rupture between your own experiential world, this inner aspect of yourself, and the social aspect of yourself, how you relate with others. There has to be some integration of these two around certain central principles. You know, like eating ice cream and cake in India, it’s very difficult because if you go in a restaurant and there’s some windows and it’s on a busy street and you’re sitting there eating, really indulging yourself. And then all these beggars are outside, maybe they haven’t eaten all day and you’re in there, you’ve eaten well and now you’re having dessert and you feel pretty justified.
Work hard for your money and now you’re enjoying it and you’re on your holiday eating this cake and ice cream. But somehow it’s difficult to enjoy looking out the window. Usually you move your chair to somewhere else out of sight. But this is much the way our life works. Somehow how we relate with others can never be divorced of how we’re going to experience our world inside.
We can’t shut off part of ourself And we’re very much bound to the social aspect of ourself, and the social aspect of ourself, its fulfillment is in how it relates to others and relating skillfully with others. Trungpa Rinpoche is talking about basic goodness or basic sanity. You think that you can take a little pinch of basic goodness and keep it in your pocket So the idea of privacy begins to creep in. That’s the point at which you need renunciation. Renunciation of the temptation to possess basic goodness.
It is necessary to give up a localized approach, a provincial approach, and accept a greater world. So we want to be kind people, but we want to dole it up very exclusively to the people we like, to the people who are nice to us, to the people smile at us. In some of the meditation techniques, one of them is developing equality amongst others, equality between yourself and others, and then equanimity amongst all the various types of people, various superficial appearances that people take. Some people, there’s one method of meditation where you imagine you’re walking down the street and there’s a line of beggars. And some of the beggars, this my actual experience.
Some of them are quite nice people. Of them say please, sir, thank you, all the nice words. Some of them are quite friendly, but some of them are really nasty people. Don’t, it’s as if you get the feeling that they think you owe them a living. They just give.
They hold on to you, they grab hold of you. So there’s some of them are pretty, some of them are ugly, some are female, some are male, some are young, some are old, all kinds of shapes, attitudes, sizes. And so you have different feelings naturally enough. You look at them from the superficial aspect, you have different feelings. Some of them you want to give to, some of them you just go away, don’t bother me.
And you see this arising in yourself. But each of them is holding out their hand to you. Each of them maybe didn’t eat that day. Each of them has the same need, the same want. But generally, we don’t look beyond the superficial differences.
We’ll give to this person. No, don’t bother me. Let me give our money to this person. We base our life on our relationships on these superficial appearances, these superficial levels of discrimination. So, you you, for example, through this meditation, may begin to develop at least an attitude of going beneath some of our superficial discriminations based upon superficial appearances and getting to more of the essential qualities of people that everyone wants to be happy, that no one wants to suffer, exactly equal, no difference whatsoever.
Every person in this room, without a doubt, you know, even the men want the real happy. They don’t want the sunburn. I’ve been talking to a lot of feminists these days. I don’t know. It’s good point, I have to be careful.
Men also have their problems. There’s this, I don’t know, it’s an old saying I guess. It’s not very old, it’s probably fairly modern. But we can learn to love others by learning not to love one person. And I have a feeling, pardon them, I have a feeling that the way we learn to live, we can only really love one person until we love everybody.
Until there’s no longer any exclusivity in our love. It’s just loving human beings, wanting others to be happy. Then we can properly love one other human being I think. Otherwise, at best it’s going to be mixed with attachment. There’s going to be expectations.
There’s going to be provincialism. There’s going to be your own self referencing, there’s going to be your ego trip in some way. But once we can learn to really love, like an environmental generosity, just loving our environment, loving anyone we meet, wanting them to be happy, then we can begin to really, I think, to love one person properly. So one of the qualities that I talked about with respect to enlightened mind was this idea of spontaneity. You know, it’s one of the most it’s a very desirable quality, isn’t it?
Generally, we’re always there’s always this guy looking over our shoulder, you know, watching everything we do. We’re always checking up, make sure we don’t goof up or something, that everything goes well. But sometimes when we act very positively in a spontaneous way, and it’s so happy to see someone in your body and just don’t even think about it. Just good. There’s something, or if you give something spontaneous, there’s some spontaneous action, which is positive.
It’s a very fulfilling experience. And this is what doesn’t happen. The exact opposite that gets to happen is schizophrenia. There’s always this checking up to the point where he sees a split between his inner self and his outer self. He thinks I don’t want to be doing this, I’m doing this just for show, for public display.
I really want to be doing something else. It becomes a total rupture between the inner world and the outer world, the way he experiences the world and the way he expresses himself to the outer world. And this is one of the marks of mental unhealthy and this quality of schizophrenia. So we have to develop, if we have to begin to develop a healthy mind, we have to begin to integrate our inner world and how we express ourselves to our outer world. There has to be a one to one correspondence.
This is the quality of spontaneity. You know, this is the way we can develop to heal the split, is by opening up to others, by no longer seeing others as either a threat or as a means to manipulate for one’s own happiness. Begin to see the necessity to make others happy, to begin to develop love and compassion for others, wanting others to be happy, not wanting them to suffer, wanting them to be separated from their suffering. So we have to, as a foundation, we have to develop the determination to be free, to develop ourselves. And based upon this foundation, we’re going to take two directions.
One of them is to develop the wisdom aspect of ourselves and the other is the method. And by method here we mean love and compassion. This is the way we fulfill our potential. But without first coming into contact with our own difficulties, developing determination for ourselves to grow, then we have no real foundation to build these two, develop these two aspects of ourselves. And we have to make some effort in both of these areas.
And seeing deeply in the nature of reality and how we relate with others by opening up to others, developing love and compassion as a necessity for our own mental health. But also in this cultivation through meditation, next week we’re going to start talking about the actual technique, the methods for opening up to others, the various lineages. There’s two main lineages, one coming down from the Buddha then to Maitreya, Asaṇga, and the other coming from the Buddha down through Mañjuśrī and down to Śāntideva. Methods whereby we can actually develop love and compassion. We can develop this aspiration to develop ourselves in order to benefit others.
But even outside of our meditation we have to, in some practical, real way, be willing to give up a little bit of our own privacy. We’re very much, westerners are very much attached to their privacy, to their own space. It’s either larger or greater, but there is always some space and we don’t want people to invade our territory. You know, our cocoon is what it amounts to. So we have to, in some practical way, begin to forego some of our privacy and begin to share our cocoon with other people, just in some small way for short intervals of some time.
So we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior. This is the theme of the ego. This is what I’ve been coming back to again and again. We all have our particular style of suffering. We’re very connected with that style.
Our whole environment, our whole way of acting, our entire behavior pattern supports that style. We keep recreating a particular way, a pattern of behavior, a pattern of thought. And in order to, we have to make some leaps from time to time into fresh air, onto fresh ground. It’s not easy and we have to sort of build up our confidence to make small leaps, to take chances. Growth only comes through vulnerability, taking chances.
In some small ways, know, doesn’t have to be earth shaking, but you know I was talking to a psychologist and one way he works with his patience, he asks them every time they visit to do something unusual that week, something they’ve never done before and they promise to do some specific unusual thing. And this is the way you can begin to break up this constant repeating maintenance of these particular unskillful patterns simply by leaping onto fresh ground, into the fresh air. So in some way we have to take a chance. So it’s not easy to open up to others. Is it there?
Someone said, It’s difficult to constantly be loving, but it’s even more difficult not to love at all. Intellectually, we may want to grow intellectually, but basically we probably don’t. This is why it’s the necessity to first develop the determination to be free, not mere intellectual exercise, curiosity, but from a very deep source, have the determination I’ve got to change, Seeing into your own existence, own suffering. If I don’t change, this whole pattern is going to continue. It’s hopeless.
So if we really want to grow, but growth entails taking a greater responsibility. Responsibility not only for yourself, but for others. And we’re very much afraid of this responsibility. Responsibility for your own happiness, for your own suffering. That’s your fault whether you’re happy or not, and also taking responsibility for others for helping them.
This idea of taking responsibility can hurt. This is a kind of a Christian quotation from Mother Teresa. It’s the idea of hurt. It is not enough for us to say, I love God, but I did not love my neighbor. Saint John says, You are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor.
How can you love God whom you do not see if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. It hurt Jesus to love. It hurt Jesus to love us. It hurt him.
So that was Mother Teresa. And the reason I bring that up is not because to bring into the idea of Jesus or God, just to emphasize the fact that it would be a great mistake that if you think to grow or to travel a spiritual path, it simply involves the avoidance or it involves, simply involves the avoidance of pain and problems. Very much in fact, if we’re going to grow, have to be willing to invite problems, invite pain. And this is very much a part of a spiritual path, not the avoidance of pain and problems. Thus, the intelligence should generate the supreme altruistic intention to become enlightened.
So we’ll stop there. Then we have a meditation on loving kindness at the end. So if you’ll sit comfortably. So for a moment consider your own difficulties, your own problems, the fact that you want to be happy. No matter what you may have done in the past, no matter what mistakes you may have created, you can simply regret them and determine not to repeat them again in the future.
And however you may conceive of yourself, whatever identity you may hold to, you can change. You can become anything that you want to be. You can begin again. But just for the moment, for the present, we have to accept ourselves, all the various parts of ourselves, even the parts we don’t like, and have compassion for all those various parts. So just make friends with yourselves and be gentle on yourself and wish yourself happiness.
Just direct positive feelings towards yourself. May I be happy. May I not suffer, may I grow. May I be well. Simply direct positive feelings towards yourself.
Now think of someone that you like, that you love, someone of the same sex, and imagine that person in front of you. If you can’t see them it doesn’t matter, just feel that the person is there. Simply remember all the good times you’ve shared together, all the happiness, all the kindness that this person has shown you. Direct the positive feelings which naturally arise, feelings of concern, wanting this person to be happy. Just radiate out these positive feelings towards that person.
May you be happy. May all good things come to you. May all your desires be fulfilled. Just pleasant thoughts, good feelings. Now think of someone that you neither like nor dislike, a stranger.
Imagine that person in front of you. I want to go beneath the superficial appearances that we usually judge people by, whether they’re beautiful or ugly, whether they’re male or female, rich or poor, educated, uneducated. Try to go beneath all these appearances to the essence of that person. There’s someone there who wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer exactly like yourself. Beneath it all is someone just like yourself.
And just as we wish our own self happiness and not to suffer, begin to wish this person the same that you wish for yourself, because how we feel about this person deep down is very much a reflection of how we essentially feel about ourselves. Just wish them happiness. Now think of someone who you have problems with disturbs your mind, an enemy, someone you don’t like. Imagine that person in front of you. This person wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer just like yourself.
And perhaps their method of finding their happiness, eliminating their suffering, has come in conflict with your method finding your happiness. Eliminating your suffering versus the conflict of interest, yours and theirs. You’ve hurt others either intentionally or unintentionally in the past to find the happiness that you were looking for. Now this person has done the same to you. So if we’re ever to begin to forgive ourselves for the mistakes that we’ve made, We have to begin to forgive this person for making mistakes just like ourselves.
So just for the moment, aside your grudge, your hurt, your anger, and see someone very much like yourself, someone who’s trying the best they can to get some happiness out of life and being very confused about how to go about it and making a lot of mistakes along the way and wish them happiness. Now imagine all four of these people together, yourself and these three others. When you look at these three, usually you feel close to one, distant from another. But try to see them all from the point of view of wanting happiness and not wanting to suffer. Try to see them all equal, that they’re all equal in this respect.
Without any bias, radiate out positive feelings to all four equally, wishing them happiness. And all the people in this room, Taking responsibility for their happiness, for their lives, trying to develop themselves. Radiate out positive feelings to everyone in the room. May you be happy. May you find everything that you’re seeking.
May you grow. Help others to grow. Love and be loved. Just radiate out positive feelings, good feelings to everyone in the room. And all the people on the block watching television, cooking, eating, getting ready for bed, they’re all looking for happiness, whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re saying.
So radiate up happiness to everyone on the block, touching them, fulfilling their wishes. And all the people in Adelaide, people in their cars and buses walking on the streets, in their homes, just keep radiating out, spradiating out further and further, extending out this wish of happiness, of caring. Extending out further and further, opening your heart to all of South Australia, all the people, animals, insects. Further, reading out further, Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Hobart, the entire country. Spreading out further and further.
New Zealand radiating that positive feeling. Entire southern hemisphere. Further and further.