Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute commentary, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a sharp reframing: conventional tolerance is “dam-like” — gritting one’s teeth while anger builds behind the wall. True tolerance, as Śāntideva defines it in chapter six of Entering into the Bodhisattva Deeds, is an undistressed mind that stays at peace when desires are frustrated. Before reaching the text, Gendun uses a thermostat analogy to explain why spiritual motivation collapses when life improves, then distinguishes two types of faith — reasoned and believing — as preconditions for consistent practice. He frames anger as a symptom of distorted knowing, borrowing Gregory Bateson’s phrase “the pathology of epistemology,” and outlines two approaches: recognizing anger’s destructive quality and understanding its underlying causes.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 Tce 1991 02 27.mp3
UUID: af79c39c-bd25-4826-8283-54af1d1878d3
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Tolerance (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-02-27
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,433
Begin with mindfulness meditation for five minutes. You know, it might have occurred to me in talking about coming to an understanding about our nature of our situation. I may have read this to some of you, I may have heard this, but but it’s good to to hear it again, think. Or suppose 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 and tries to remedy it by exiting the present system, the television program, and flipping the channel now, looking for a better show.
Person B may have a more radical concept of what it is to 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 before even been recognized as a system. Then such a then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system is there, really is there, and it ought to be exited from. So as I mentioned, Buddha Śākyamūni was a systems analyst, and he perceived a system which governs our lives, and he called this system cyclic existence, so perhaps another more relevant way of terming it, reoccurring compulsive patterns which govern our lives. This negative feedback loop that we’re involved in, this recursive cycles that keep reoccurring.
Unless we there’s a problem and I mentioned this on Monday night, it’s so fresh in my mind I thought I’d mention it tonight. We are involved in a system. Our mind is a system, and within this there is a subsystem which we call cyclic existence, or these reoccurring impulse patterns constituted or expressed by the ego. And somehow we have to become convinced that it’s necessary to exit this system, that it’s not satisfactory. Now all of us at some time, quite often during the course of our life, experience some sort of crisis, some sort of real low moment in our lives, maybe a death, a separation, something tragically goes wrong.
And we think, I gotta I gotta get my act together. I’ve I’ve gotta change my life. I can’t go on this way. Things have to change. I’ve got to change.
We have real, sincere, firm determination to make things different, to work out a method to change, and to really work at that method. And we do for a while, but things get better, don’t they? Things always get better. It’s impermanence. It works both ways.
Things get better. We begin to lose the awareness of the necessity for change. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, everything’s okay. It becomes like a you know, it’s very much like the analogy I used the other night with a a thermostat, a heating thermostat. As the atmosphere warms up, the room warms up, the temperature in the room warms up, the gauge goes up.
And it reaches a certain point and it begins to shut down whatever the heating element is. It shuts down the flow of the gas to the gas heater, and this shutting down of the flow of the gas shuts down the flame, and the temperature begins to lower. And then when it gets to a certain level, it opens up a valve which causes more gas to flow, and the flame strengthens. The room begins to heat up. So there’s this negative feedback system.
It is self correcting, continually turning itself on and off. It maintains a very balanced, steady state. And we’re involved in a steady state because we haven’t developed the awareness of the dissatisfactory of our state. That even if those we haven’t developed the consistent, creative, wholehearted motivation to exit the system. Why?
Because every time things go well, we forget about, we lose sight of the fact that the causes of our difficulties, the causes of our dissatisfactions, frustrations, and disappointments are still present within our mind, though they may not be manifested at that particular moment. The causes are still there. But we forget, we lose our awareness, and so we’re not motivated to change, to remove those causes from our mind. We’re very slow learners, I think. And so we give up or we simply backslide.
We forget to try, make effort. And nothing changes. Another crisis occurs, which it will. It’s another aspect of impermanence. It works both ways.
And then again we’re motivated, and again we make effort. But things get better as they will. And then our motivation, just like this thermostat, begins to shut down and things get worse. And then our motivation rises, things get better. Our motivation goes down, things get worse.
Our motivation rises, things get better. Our motivation goes down, things get worse, and we’re trapped. That’s why it’s necessary for if we’re going to one of the two causes for committing ourselves is an awareness, a continual, consistent, and deep awareness of the dissatisfactory quality of any state bounded by ego. That even when the sun is shining, still we have to make effort because the causes of suffering are with still within our mind. This is using we go beyond the mentality of of we begin to use our intelligence in the sense that things don’t necessarily have to be obvious to us in order to understand them, in order to be mindful of them.
We use our intelligence in the sense that we can begin to gain an inference, to to to go beyond the superficial appearances that we’re usually stuck in. You know, though things are not though things are present, I use my intelligence to motivate me, to help in motivating myself that I still must make some kind of consistent effort to change, to still to grow. Even though the situation is satisfactory at present, I still must grow. That’s the human potential. No other being has that.
To be able to to be able to look beyond the the the immediate gratification of immediate goals. You know, if I’m if one is satiated, one just simply does not lie back and sleep at all. One can One sees a necessity even though it’s okay, satisfactory at present. I still am aware that I still must grow. I’m mindful of that fact.
And this becomes out of this motivation, this awareness, this anxiety, a healthy anxiety of that though things are okay, the causes of my discontent, of problems, of my suffering are still present within my mind. And I still, though things are okay, I still must make effort at removing those causes because it’s just a matter of time until they’re going to manifest, until conditions will change as they will. And having some anxiety about that. I know it. This is what energizes you even in those moments of self contempt to still make commit yourself to grow, to making that consistent effort.
The other cause is faith. Faith, there are two types of faith. I think perhaps faith in the you know, we use the same word as far as translation is concerned, but it has probably a different meaning than the general Christian usage. There are two types of faith. One is reasoning faith.
Reasoned faith. Reasoned faith. And the other is believing faith. Faith is that having gone through the process of listening to the various teachings, reflected upon them, contemplated them, maybe actually experienced some of the fruit of the teachings, one reasons for oneself, the validity of the path. One sees this makes sense, this works.
Faith has the connotation of seeking to emulate, to become that object to which you have faith in. If you have faith in the Buddha, it is as if you wish to become the Buddha. If you have faith in the path, it is as if you wish to generate the path within you. It is striving to embody that which you hold as worthy, that which you hold as high, that which you hold as a prime value, to embody that within yourself because you see it as so worthy, so worth so valuable. You want to make it part of yourself.
So we begin to, you know, through this process of reasoning, you know, looking within a making use of our reasoning, making use of our experience, making use of our own intuition to validate the methods, the techniques, the path. And out of this comes our reason faith. It’s extremely stable. It it cannot be easily overcome. It cannot it even we even have the faith to doubt, to question.
You know, there’s no room for dogma. We’re trying to change our mind, not to please anyone. Not even there’s no one to be pleased. So the only way we can change our mind is through integration to through this of the of the Dharma, of the path, of the realization, of that object to which we have faith. Now we it does no good for me to carry this this book around with me no matter how holy it might be.
Maybe a little bit, I don’t know. Yeah? But if I put it under my pillow it’s doubtful whether my mind is going to change all that much. What I have to do is integrate all of what it says in here, what it’s getting at, the realizations. I have somehow to make it a living part of myself, that I have faith that there is something worthwhile there to work at because I have seen it, I have validated it within my own experience, through my own reasoning, my own intuition.
I know it very directly. The other type of faith is believing faith. And this is the type of faith, you know, we we simply at present cannot ever understand everything that’s said in this book. The ninth chapter is extremely profound. It’s it understands for it explains, example, the view of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality.
We can’t understand many doctrines that Buddhism is presenting. So, you know, we can we don’t have to take the whole package. We can sort of make use of what works for us. But as far as believing faith is concerned, it is it is at times necessary for us to act in certain ways which are going to be pragmatically beneficial for ourselves even though we may not understand we may the basis for acting this way. We may not have understood the very the very deep causes or reasons for acting in this way.
Why do we act this way? Why should we go ahead and act in a way that we don’t understand? Understand? It’s because the person, the teacher, is such that we have no reason to doubt what they’re saying, that they seem to embody what they’re saying, that they say, this has worked for me. I have found this useful in my life, in my practice.
And though we don’t understand subject in itself, the person who is presenting it is such that we can we will temporarily at least make use of it out of the believing faith. Now obviously we have to examine. You know they say traditionally that one should examine one’s teacher, one’s lama, spiritual master, for ten years before you commit yourself to that particular teacher. It’s a very as it’s a very important, profound type of relationship. It’s not like taking a course at a university.
So out of this sense of believing in the person who is teaching, then we are willing to experiment with what we presently don’t understand, with what we presently aren’t able to validate for ourselves. If I were to if qualified spiritual teacher were to say, don’t kill. Maybe we don’t understand why we shouldn’t kill. But we have enough respect. We we see that this person in person embodies qualities which we would like to emulate, which we would like to develop, and he or she says this has helped me in my life, in my practice.
Okay. I’ll try that. I don’t understand why I shouldn’t kill, but I’ll give it a go. And this comes out of believing faith. So these two types of faith, reasoning reason faith, believing faith, will help us to actually commit ourselves to implementing the methods of Dharma, to making use of them, to committing ourselves to a path.
Because we believe in it. We have faith in it. We want to become that. We want to embody that. We want to integrate that either through our valid having validated it partially within ourselves or a conviction in the vehicle of its presentation.
And this acts as a motivating force to force to go ahead. So out of this, these two causes, the this consistent, this awareness, which is an anxiety of the reoccurring compulsive patterns, dissatisfaction in our life, and faith that there’s a way out. We call this the Dharma. This faith is born out of reason faith and believing faith. And then there’s some kind of change, some kind of evolution.
We we seek to make the inner principle of our life, the Buddha. This is realized through the Dharma in the social context of a spiritual community. And hopefully we can raise the level of our motivation, you know, beyond our own isolated self to be able to extend our vision. One of one of our greatest problems is that we’re completely caught up in our own problems. If you want to solve the world’s problems, you have to put your own household in order, your own individual life in order first.
That is somewhat 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 how to rule your own household, your immediate world. There is no doubt that if you do so, then the next step will be will come naturally.
If you fail to do so, then your contribution to the world will be further chaos. So we can begin to develop a sense, feeling that of getting ourselves together as a way of helping others ultimately, a necessary prerequisite. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect virtuous collect by practicing giving and the other perfections may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
And virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. We’re looking at Śāntideva’s Entering into the Bodhisattva Deeds, and specifically the sixth chapter entitled Tolerance. Śāntideva is trying to he’s trying to show us the necessity and the methods for overcoming anger in the development of tolerance.
Overcome our anger and how to develop tolerance. There’s a the conventional notion of patience is to be very kind and wait and hold your temper, repressing your restlessness. If you are waiting for someone, we smoke cigarettes, read, pace back and forth to keep ourselves cool. When they say, I’m sorry. I’m late.
We say, oh, don’t mention it. I’ve been enjoying myself looking at the scenery, talking to strangers. Strangers. Let’s get on to our business. I’m glad you’re here.
Although we pretend that we are not concerned about the time, actually, we are compulsively caught up in living by the clock. So our denial of concern and the hiding of our angry our anger is hypocritical. So, you know, I don’t know. I use this is like one notion that we have of tolerance or patience is like dam-like. You said Australian?
Damn like patience or damn like tolerance. But it’s like you have this wall and water just keeps building up behind it, you know, like gritting your teeth. And this is a general notion of patience, just holding back anger, not allowing yourself to become angry. So this isn’t that this is a rather heavy handed approach to the development of tolerance or to not becoming angry is probably a better term. So what is tolerance?
Tolerance is an undistressed mind. An undistressed mind, undisturbed mind, an undistraught mind, undiscontented mind. So, you know, it’s a very different type of conception of what tolerance might be. You know, a mind which remains undisturbed when its wishes are frustrated, when something undesirable occurs. The mind remains undisturbed.
It doesn’t lose its peace. It doesn’t lose its contentment. Even though something some kind of its desires are frustrated, it wants something and there’s some obstacle. It still it doesn’t get upset. It doesn’t lose its balance.
It’s cool. Or some unwanted circumstance arises. It doesn’t get unbalanced. It doesn’t become distraught. It doesn’t become distressed.
It remains content, peace. This is what we mean by tolerance. You know, it’s characterized by our ability to cope with without becoming distressed when undesirable situations arise, when our desires are frustrated, when they’re obstructed in some way. We we somehow it’s a coping mechanism. It’s a way we can remain at ease without becoming upset.
Anger is just the opposite, isn’t it? It’s characterized by our inability to cope when our when our desires are frustrated, when something occurs, unwanted occurrence happens. Anger is and it’s quite interesting. Anger is trying is saying something, shouting at us. It’s saying, I’ve been wronged.
I’m hurt. I’m afraid. I’m suffering. Anger is saying, I’m suffering. Make this suffering go away.
It’s it’s, you know, it’s a a distressed person is not tolerating. A distressed person is not tolerating. In other words, they lack the coping skills necessary for their minds to be at peace. An angry person simply lacks the coping skills for their minds to remain undisturbed in the face of frustrated desires or unwanted occurrences. So we can begin to learn some coping skills.
We can begin to change, and thus become tolerant and have our mind remain at peace, undisturbed. In in a you know, our our mind is is all of these emotions, you know, whether positive or negative, are modes of behavior to try to make sense of the world, to try to organize the world along some preconceived lines. We constantly are trying to figure out what this is all about, trying to secure our place in it, trying to freeze the situation, trying to cope. It’s a frightening business life, and all of what’s going on around us. And we we oftentimes don’t do it very well.
We we oftentimes have inappropriate or inefficient, ineffective coping mechanisms, ways of organizing, making sense of our world. You know, this when we say anger is a way of organizing the situation to help us to relieve pain. Just pain. An angry person is experiencing pain, suffering. And this is a a behavioral response to relieve that pain.
It’s just in a way, interestingly, it’s like compassion, isn’t it? Compassion is the sense of wishing to relieve pain for oneself, one’s own pain. Attachment is a way of seeking to relieve distress, this distress of not having. Desire is painful. It’s unpeace.
It is the awareness of not having a lamp, insufficiency. And so desire is the mode of behavior which seeks to relieve that tension of not having. And love is the same in that sense of wishing to have, have happiness, have something which makes you happy. So that in a way, all of these emotions are simply coping mechanisms. Love, compassion on the one hand, hatred, anger, attachment on the other.
But there there must be a difference somewhere. Right? The important difference is that anger and attachment are symptomatic of distorted premises, are symptomatic of distorted premises. Love, compassion are based upon correct premises, ideas, beliefs, principles, assumptions. Attachment and anger arise in dependence upon epistemological error.
You know, this is one of my favorite phrases, is by American anthropologist Gregory Bateson where he said that the psychology of misery is the pathology of epistemology. You like that? Put that in your stationery or something. The psychology of misery is the pathology of epistemology. So the psychology of misery, the reason that the mental context in which we experience pain is due to pathology.
And what what does that mean, Sylvia? Bad? It means unhealthy, unhealthy ways of knowing. Epistemology most simply is our ways of knowing, the way we make sense out of the world. We have an epistemology, the study of the way that we make sense, that we know the world.
And we have unhealthy ways of knowing the world. And out of our unhealthy ways of knowing the world we have this mental context of pain. This is this is from where all our pain arises. Simply from that, mistaken ideas, assumptions, beliefs, distorted premises. There’s no there’s no no one else is pulling the strings.
It’s all our within this foundation, within our own mind, our own beliefs, ideas, assumptions, principles, distorted premises. So these symptomatic behaviors, that is say ineffectual, inappropriate types of behaviors, are are are, say, like, for example, anger, attachment, pride, jealousy, all the eighty four thousand types of inappropriate behaviors, unskillful behaviors, are expressions of errors of epistemology. Errors with stupid ways of knowing the world, making sense of the world, ineffective, uncreative, distorted, wrong ways of making sense of the world. We can’t we have to make sense of the world. Otherwise, there’d just be chaos.
There’d be sounds and colors and noises. It would it would be just noise. It would just be that’s rather a frightening prospect. So we’re constantly trying to stay on top of it, to keep trying to integrate this data into some coherent pattern, make sense out of what what’s coming into all these all our senses. And we and we quite often do a bad job of it in many ways.
Quite often we do a good job. You know, we have we have these misguided attempts to make sense out of the world, to organize our world. We want to change. And Buddhism is saying this is the premise of Buddhism. It’s a it’s a correct premise.
It’s not a distorted premise, I think. There are many many premises that we have to accept, that we can have faith in, this premise. That that that change, that is therapeutic change helped those which are are more conducive to to fulfilling ways of being, optimum modes of being. That this type of therapeutic change will only come about when we become appropriately responsive to our symptoms, our symptomatic behaviors. We’re not going to change until we become appropriately responsive to our symp symptomatic behaviors.
Symptomatic behaviors are our ineffectual, incorrect, painful ways of behaving, responding, reacting. We have to become we have to begin to appropriately respond to them. You know, they they are it’s not enough that we express anger. It doesn’t it’s that’s a coping mechanism. It’s an ineffective coping mechanism.
It’s it’s a self destructive coping mechanism. We sense at some level of our awareness that it’s working in our favor, that it’s some method to get what we want or to remove that which we don’t want. That’s the reason we maintain it. It’s that particular structure, that particular reactive pattern that we we call anger, that way of relating because we think there’s some payoff that is of some value. But the anger in itself so just is not enough.
We have to listen to what the anger is trying to tell us. You know, all our all our all our sufferings are are wounds which are trying to speak to us. So we have to listen very closely. This is the that going back to the idea of anxiety. Anxiety is the most subtle and pervasive wound that we experience.
It’s always there. We have to continually try to listen for it. It’s trying to teach us something. It’s trying to teach us to help us to exit the system which is the basis of anxiety. So but there are more gross, more vivid types of cries, what we call anger attachment, jealousy.
So anger is like a cry that we we need to begin to listen to. And perhaps even maybe we can even have some compassion for our anger in a way. Maybe it sounds rather strange. You know? In this sense, what I mean by this is because because behind that anger, there’s some pain.
And so then rather than reinforcing reinforcing the pain and becoming heavy handed on ourselves and becoming angry at ourselves or being angry or being angry, we have to find some some way of intervene. We have to intervene in such a way so that we allow our mind to heal itself. We haven’t done anything wrong. We aren’t bad children as it were. Our mind our our anger isn’t a naughty child.
We just have to begin to intervene in such a way that allow to our mind to heal itself, to begin to see, to begin to understand our anger, and begin to respond to it appropriately. You know, we have to we have to become aware of the pain and the destructive qualities of anger. And the with the the healing and constructive qualities of tolerance. So this becoming aware of the pain and destructive quality of anger and the constructive and healing qualities of tolerance is like a platform upon which we can can begin to change the distorted and erroneous epistemologies, way that we know, the distorted premises upon which anger is based. Anger is based on particular premises, on particular beliefs, ideas, assumptions that we have.
And these beliefs are wrong. They’re distorted. So there are these two allied approaches. Now I I mentioned this. There are two allied approaches which we have to make use of in working with anger, with any afflictive emotion.
The first is to recognize the the destructive nature of anger, of any destructive of any afflictive emotion within our own experience in order to to that way we say that calibrate our motivation in order to you know, going back to that idea of the thermostat. You know, by calibrating our motivation is that if we begin to the more that we begin to see destructive nature of anger, the less frequent and the less powerful we will allow anger to arrive just by recognizing its destructive quality. We’re lowering the thermostat, the the value. You know, we will always stop. Well, anger will always be stopped one way or another.
Any type of motor behavior cannot go on. There there is always some what do you say? Pulling back. You know, maybe the police will have to pull you back. And maybe suicide.
But any the system always system will not disintegrate. But but but if we can begin to by seeing the destructive quality of anger, we’re going to lessen that threshold where anger will run away, where we will be overcome by the anger as it were, and less frequently. Then so understanding the destructive quality, the pain involved in anger. And the second method that we’re using is to understand why we become angry. What are the causes of becoming angry?
First, understanding its destructive quality, and then understanding why I become angry. What are the causes? What what is the epistemological basis? What is the distorted premise upon which I’m I’m the in dependence upon which anger is arising and correcting them? So as we began last week with the very first verse of the text where Śāntideva, you know, talking about the destructive quality of anger and that all of the all of the the skillful actions that are created over a thousand eons are destroyed by moments of anger.
This this moment of anger was directed toward either a Buddha or Bodhisattva. It’s it’s a little bit less for ordinary people like I saw that we get angry at each other. So but it’s still pretty heavy. All of these constructive action, all of these skillful actions are destroyed by moments of anger. And this is, you know, this is perhaps difficult for us to maybe it doesn’t it’s not so relevant.
We can’t perhaps feel that. But we can, you know, I mentioned what’s by skillful actions. Skillful actions are those types of action which predisposes to interpret and construct our reality in such a way that they are experienced as pleasurable. That they appear attractive and associated with their attractive appearance, we experience pleasure. That’s what we mean by a skillful action in one area, one very important area.
Positive actions, skillful actions, you know, like generosity, patience, ethics, love, compassion. All of these various types of skillful actions that we can create, they set a contact, they set a a disposition within our mind, a tendency, whereby we will, you know, with the world with our thoughts we make the world. That is to say, our beliefs inform our perceptions. You know, some people see the world as being benevolent. They view the world as being benevolent.
Some people view it as being hostile. Some people view it as being neutral. It’s just out there, inert matter. And why do they have these different views of the world? These are the these are the impressions, the tendency of the various actions that they’ve created in the past.
The way they’re organizing their reality. This, you know, obviously, this is about a grand scale, the way you view the world. But even on a on a particular scale, why I why this appears attractive to me, why this appears repulsive to me. It’s dependent upon our tendencies of mind build up which causes causes us to perceive, to organize, to create constructs, and then interpret this construct such that they appear attractive. Destructive actions, unskillful actions, negative actions have just the opposite effect.
They cause us to to create constructs to interpret our world and the people and the things and the situations of our life in such a way that they appear repulsive, unattractive, negative. In association with them we experience suffering, pain, frustrations. So all, you know, all of these tendencies that we’ve built up over a thousand eons to help us to begin to feel good about the world, to experience happy moments. You know, we can’t you know, we can say this causes this or this causes this. We can we can make that one to one relationship.
But the very general context of a mind which the myriad skillful actions that we’ve created which helps us experience a happy day. I had a good day today. I mean, it’s the infinite number of causes which had which went into having that good day. We we destroy a hundred thousand eons of those in one moment of anger. So I don’t know.
Maybe that’s I don’t know if that makes so much impression or not. It could be pretty heavy. God, we work so hard trying to you know, we you know, we spend hours making a good meal, let alone trying to have a good day. You know, we’re we work so hard trying to be happy, but we’re it seems as if we’re continually destroying our own happiness. You know, all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into what we do, and then we turn around and just wham, bam.
It’s all gone. All the positive actions, the constructive actions that we treat. Continually destroying the causes of our own happiness through our anger. Then in the next verse, Śāntideva begins to he begins to simply discuss the destructive nature of anger and the constructive nature of tolerance. So the the actual text.