Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Taking refuge in ice cream, Coke, and a sunburnt beach afternoon — that image opens this 45-minute commentary as Ven Jampa Gendun reframes refuge to expose our habitual search for relief in mundane pleasures. He models afflictive emotions — desire, anger, jealousy — as the mind’s unskillful self-correcting mechanisms, arising from distress but ultimately failing to deliver peace. He distinguishes contaminated pleasure (mere release from frustration) from genuine peace, and positions nirvana as a steady state beyond the oscillation of wanting and getting. The talk then walks through Śāntideva’s three spheres of tolerance: accepting inevitable suffering without compounding it with frustration, viewing situations through a dharma lens rather than distorted premises, and refraining from retaliation. Suited to practitioners ready to examine their reactive patterns through a psychological lens.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 Tce 1991 03 20.mp3
UUID: 46597d8f-2a17-4c00-a1df-3480c487c522
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Tolerance (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-03-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~4,768
Adjusting our motivation. The phrase taking refuge is often borrowed from its traditional context, the often repeated Buddhist declaration of faith in the teacher, teachings, and the spiritual community. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.
To make the point that taking refuge in momentary transitory pleasures is something we are doing all the time with an almost religious fervor and conviction. For example, one day we may think, oh, I’m so depressed. I think I’ll go to the beach. So we drive to the ocean, jump into the water, play around like fish, and then lie down to fry in the sun. When this becomes worrying, we think, now I’m hungry.
Where’s the refreshment stand? Then we stuff ourselves with as much junk food as possible, hoping to find some satisfaction in the ice cream, popcorn, Coke, and chocolate we are devouring. We take refuge in these things as a way out of our depression and boredom, only to end up fat and sunburnt. When Buddhism speaks of taking refuge, it is emphasizing the importance of breaking out of this desperate, unfulfilling search for satisfaction. Taking refuge involves a changing of our attitude.
We cease to be tossed this way and that by the changing fortunes of our life, and gain the space to begin tapping into our inner potential. So the inner aim of our life becomes Buddha, awakening, by means of the Dharma in the social context of a spiritual community. There is a quotation by Martin Buber, If I am not for myself who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
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. 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. 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 the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I’m talking about the various afflictive emotions such as hatred, anger, spite, jealousy, miserliness, whatever. I call these symptomatic states. They are all part of a process of self-correction. In the mind, the person is in distress, and they have a learned behavior pattern, a certain mental patterns which are triggered off as means to relieve the distress of the system of their own mind, of themselves.
You know, these are these patterns, you know, anger, jealousy, attachment. These are relatively enduring reoccurring patterns, ways of relating, ways in which our mind seeks to relieve its tension, its distress, its frustration. The mind, this unhappiness of the mind, this frustration, this tension triggers off an impulse, an urge, a mode of thinking is brought into train. There are two types of karma which are operating here. There is intentional karma and karma of intention.
Or just the word action rather than karma. There is action of intention and intentional action. Actions of intention this urge to move toward a particular object, to think in a particular way. It’s the impulse which gives direction to the mind. It is directed, conditioned out of past impressions, dispositions, predispositions of the mind, latencies, grooves which have been laid down in the mind by previous actions.
So there’s a, there’s a, in conjunction with a particular condition of distress, and a cooperative condition of a particular object, certain impulses are fired in the mind. Certain actions are ripened, brought into play, which give a direction to the mind, an urge, an impulse to think along certain ways, to direct itself towards certain objects. These in turn bring about intentional actions. Now this impulse serves as a motivating force, an impulse, which in turn brings about actions of intention, intentional actions. That is to say particular states of mind are generated, feelings are generated, perceptions are generated, and ways of acting, expressing verbally, physically are brought into play.
These are all brought into play to relieve the tension of the mind. That’s what triggers off these karmas or actions of intention. Out of actions of intention comes intentional actions. We do things, we say things, we think there’s certain things. Various states of mind arise.
Emotional patterns are brought into play. So all of the various reactive patterns such as desire, anger arise within the condition of an unhappy mind. Some distress, some tension. The mind is not at peace. This acts as the context for the triggering of intentions, actions of intention.
They are the mind’s habitual way of coping with tension, with frustration. The coping mechanisms of the mind to achieve release from that tension. And all systems will naturally tend toward a balanced state if left to themselves. And they’re all ecologies, all self correcting systems. And this is the mind is a self correcting system.
It seeks, it has mechanism whereby it relieves, brings itself to a balanced state. It’s continually, there’s a continual drive to achieve a balanced state. And this is continually disturbed, these balanced states. But there is always this, this balanced state is experienced as peace. Now just as for, you know, on a gross level, in a particular situation where you might, in a social situation where one feels uncomfortable, One may have the habitual pattern of reaching for a cigarette as a way of coping with that uncomfortable feeling.
Habitual pattern. The mind has an uncomfortable feeling, has tension. It reaches for a particular habitual pattern of thinking as a coping mechanism to relieve that tension, to bring itself back to balance. These different patterns, desire, hatred, jealousy, are simply various means that the mind has developed, has learned to bring itself back to a balanced state, to a state of peace. Generally we see the fulfillment of our goals as peace.
More than that, we see the fulfillment of our goals, the goals of desire, the goals of anger as pleasurable. The greater the desire, the greater the hatred, the greater the feeling of pleasure associated with that fulfillment of desire, with the aim of our hatred. There seems to be a correspondence. But if we look at desire, desire is based upon an awareness of not having. It is an awareness of not having accompanied with a frustration, the frustration associated with not having.
So there’s some sort of dissatisfactoriness. The mind is in a restless state of dissatisfaction, seeking to relieve this state of frustration at not having. It doesn’t want to allow this state to continue. It’s going to try to act out first mentally and out of this will flow various types of verbal and physical actions in order to create the condition to relieve itself of this frustration of not having. So when we get that object that we’re aware of not having, we’re released from that state of not having an associated feeling of frustration.
We call this pleasure. We associate this, what is in actuality, a release from suffering, a tension reduction. We associate that with pleasure. And we go on to associate that pleasure with the object which seemed to bring us that pleasure, acted to alleviate the tension of desire of not having. And these two become inextricably mixed together, the object and the pleasure.
It’s to the point where it seems as if that pleasure actually exists within that If I had that object, I can have that pleasure. It’s as if the pleasure in here is in the object. The association with that object is so strong. You know this could be, this desire could be for anything. It could be for stylish clothes, for food, for a companion, for a sexual partner, for spiritual realization.
They all have this as if there’s a sense that the pleasure resides within those objects. And we interpret the attainment of those objects as pleasure. Because the two become inextricably mixed, reduction of frustration at not having, and the attainment of that object. So, you know, we develop what is well-worn patterns, consistently reoccurring ways of thinking to relieve particular states of distress. So the fulfillment of desire is psychologically the feeling of the cessation of dissatisfaction.
That’s why in Buddhism we say that is contaminated pleasure. All the pleasure that ordinary people experience is an example of the suffering of change. Buddhism doesn’t hold it to be real happiness because its basis simply, it exists in the context of the cessation of suffering. Therefore it’s not real happiness. It is a negative, alleviation of a negative state rather than a positive state.
Therefore it’s become contaminated. It’s not real happiness. It must always be accompanied with displeasure, with frustration, with tension. The mind simply is able to return to a state of equilibrium temporarily. And this, we, the mind is no longer at dis ease.
It’s no longer dis ease. It’s no longer tense. And we call that pleasure. So desire is a self correcting mechanism of the mind whose function is to relieve the frustration associated with not having. But it’s not, but from the point of view of higher orders of correction, it’s not effective.
It’s not appropriate. It’s not effective because The desire will return. It’s not effective because we simply cannot always get what we want. You know, if we can always get what we want, we’re saying that this way of relieving tension of the mind, there’s frustration within the mind and we act out a pattern, what we call desire, in order to relieve this tension. But desire doesn’t simply, isn’t a very effective way of relieving the tension.
For one, we cannot always get the object that we desire. Our life isn’t constructed like that. The world simply isn’t arranged according to our wants. It’s not appropriate because desire will continually return. The frustration associated with not having will continually return.
It becomes like drinking salt water. So from the point of view of what we call, might call higher orders of self correction, desire and hatred and all the afflictive emotions are an attempt of the mind to correct itself, to heal itself, to relieve its tension. But they are ineffective, inappropriate. In terms of Tantra, even that these are I don’t like to use the word energy because in some ways talking about mental energy is inappropriate because energy is associated with the physical and the mental is non physical. So it is a misdirected function of the mind.
But it is an expression of our sanity in the sense that it is the intrinsic drive toward release from tension, hatred, and desire. But it’s simply seen from higher levels of self correction, seen from, just say, the dharma point of view. It’s ineffective, it’s inappropriate, it doesn’t work. There are better ways, more effective ways, more appropriate ways to relieve the tension of the mind to achieve ultimately peace. You know, we have to ask ourselves, you know, which would be more preferable, to always continually have your desires fulfilled or never to have any desires at all?
Which would be a more preferable state? To always continually have every one of your desires fulfilled or never to have any desire at all? From the point of view of, you know, this first state of always having your desires fulfilled would simply be oscillating between tension and release from tension. From the point of view of Buddhist thought. Because tension always involves desire always involves tension.
And gaining your desire is the release from that tension. So you’re continually just oscillating, going back and forth between tension and release from tension, tension and release from tension. So the other, the latter, not having any desire, is a steady state of peace. So obviously, from the point of view of Buddhism, rather than having all of one’s desires, even if that were possible, which it is not, it would be more preferable to simply have no desires whatsoever. And this is what we call nirvana.
This steady state of peace, where the mind is no longer, you know, what we call beyond sorrow. There are, you know, this is a, you know, we, people, and we can talk about many states of bliss. Are four qualities which determine a Buddhist doctrine. The four essentials which are principles to Buddhism. All products are impermanent.
All contaminated phenomena are dissatisfactory. All phenomena are selfless and empty. And the fourth is nirvana, that is the state beyond sorrow is peace. This is what the Buddha took as the, what we say, his particular system as the highest state to which the mind can achieve as far as its experience. And then we can talk about great blisses which are hundreds and thousands of times perhaps greater than the bliss of sexual bliss.
And if you study the various subjects of meditative states, when pass beyond the desire realm to the form realm, and this is done through meditative concentration, there is a greater achievement of peace of the mind. Not bliss, bliss eventually begins to be seen and viewed as a disturbance of the mind, as an excited state, as a matter of some degree of tension. Even bliss begins to be seen as a fault of meditative concentrations, of meditative states, until one achieves a state which is even beyond bliss. Got, you know, it it is approaching peace of the mind. So this idea of peace when the mind is at peace.
And we, you know, we we are continually overlooking the subtlety of peace. The The quality of peace in our life. We because we do have moments of peace. And we we we aren’t able to in in the in our constant restlessness to be doing something, even to be experiencing bliss, we aren’t able to appreciate those moments of peace, relative peace, which do come naturally from time to time. But from the point of view, this is the direction that the path is taking us.
Not toward bliss, but toward peace. All the various, you know, we’re symptomatic behavior, afflictive emotions based upon distorted premises, wrong ideas, mistaken notions, wrong beliefs. The basic wrong belief, distorted premise is ignorance. All actions which are based upon ignorance, this distorted premise, requires some type of corrective action. Know, we keep having to clean up the messes that we made previously.
It’s a perpetual having to fix up what we what the mistakes that we created before. As there is the basic sanity of mind, which is expressed as an intrinsic, instinctive intrinsic drive for wakefulness. Awakened state of being. To and this is the this is what gives impulse to all the corrective, self correcting modes of behavior that we try to enact. And we call it, you know, Buddha nature.
So all living systems are self correcting. They all are tending toward harmonious integration of all their parts. And whether this be a world system, a particular environment, or the mind itself. So desire and hatred are unskillful attempts of the mind to heal itself, to relieve its tension, to correct itself. So these are learned behaviors which are not effective, but ultimately are seen as self destructive.
They simply do not achieve the ends that we hope they will, that they were designed to achieve. So learning involves some kind of change. When we learn something we aren’t quite the person we were before we learned it. We, to a large extent, we are afraid to change. We are afraid to learn because to learn means to change and to change means to grow.
And to grow means that we have to begin to assume greater responsibility. That goes with growth. This responsibility entails responsibility towards oneself and on a higher level responsibility towards others. So learning involves some kind of change. Having learned something one is not the same person as one was before.
You hear what we are changing, we are modifying these patterns, our views. You know our our life, our view of life, our story. And we and in certain extent, we are our stories. We are our view of life. We are our beliefs, our ideas.
This is, in one sense, this is who we are, all of these taken together. So Buddhism is a particular story. It’s a particular life view which is consistent with the way things are and which is characterized by a sentient beings, fulfillment, peace. Know, Buddhism, it’s interesting because Buddhism holds no absolute. Nothing absolutely exists.
We each have our reality in accordance with our views, in accordance with our particular story, our beliefs. And Buddhism is saying that our particular story doesn’t work very well. And that perhaps the Buddha wrote a story, created a type of reality. A system which was self authenticating, self validating, which was experiences peace. And if you can realign your reality, your story, with the Buddhist story, then you will experience the same.
Because there’s no ultimate reality, in the sense nothing ultimately exists, we cannot say that somehow Buddhism is absolutely right. That this is the way things actually are. But this particular reality, this way of viewing the world is consistent with peace, with meaning, with fulfillment, and these values which we, it seems as if there’s a natural tendency, natural drive toward. So you know according to some psychotherapist, is a human beings possess what is called a critical conscience. A critical conscience, maybe it’s something like Buddha nature, basic sanity.
Anyway, they call it a critical consciousness. And this enables them to see the inevitable reality of various types of world views, views of life. What is the inevitable outcome of your particular view of life? You know, I talked about the, you know, what is the outcome of a view of life which holds that the external reality is benevolent as compared to malevolent, that it’s chaotic compared to ordered. You know, world view is going to have certain inevitable outcomes.
You’re going to experience that reality in a particular way. Śāntideva in his text is like he’s trying to play the part of a good therapist. They’re trying to help us to become aware of the dissatisfactory type of reality that we are creating for ourselves. Trying to help us to change our story, our world view. Trying to help us to contradict the erroneous premises upon which our view is based.
Which, these premises upon which control our behavior and help us to rewrite our story, to rewrite a Buddha story, the Bodhisattva story. And to create a high ordered view from which to act from. I mean, desire does work from a low order point of view. If we see the immediate situation, desire, we have a desire, we gain the object of our desire, there’s an experience of pleasure. But if we step back and look at it from a more distant, more far ranging perspective, it’s not effective.
It’s going to occur again and again and again and again. The desire is going to arise again and again and again. There might be a more effective way to deal with the same types of situations, which basically is this suffering, dissatisfaction in the mind, tension, wisdom, for example, love, for example, compassion, generosity, openness. They seem to be more effective mechanisms, more far reaching, more satisfactory, more encompassing. Śāntideva in the text goes on to say, For myself and for those I love, I want no suffering, no disrespect, no insults, and no bad tidings.
But for my enemies, I want the opposite. So there are said to be nine sources towards which we generate the harmful intentions of anger. There’s someone who has harmed oneself, someone who has harmed oneself, is harming oneself, will harm oneself. Someone who has harmed one’s friend, is harming one’s friend will harm one’s friend. Someone who is helping one’s enemy has helped one’s enemy is helping one’s enemy will help one’s enemy.
So these are the nine sources towards which we can generate a harmful intention of anger. You know, been mentioned that anger rises in dependence upon the main cause of frustration, distress, and the two cooperative conditions of a frustrated desire and identifying, for example, a person who is preventing you from realizing your desire. And dependence upon those, that one cause and two conditions, anger arises in the mind as a way of releasing ourselves from the tension, the frustration, the unhappiness of mind. In general, we desire happiness for ourselves and for those that we love. We desire that we ourselves not suffer and that those we love not suffer.
And we desire the exact opposite for enemies that they suffer and not be happy. So anything which prevents us from realizing this desire we’re going to become angry with. So, Śāntideva goes on, you know, we’ve discussed the causes, nature, the unskillfulness, and the objects of anger. And he goes on to talk about the three areas, the three spheres in which tolerance is to be developed. The first is learning to endure difficult situations.
Learning to endure difficult sufferings with a sense of acceptance and satisfaction. Learning how we’re going to cope with the difficult situations, how we’re going to cope with our suffering. In the sense of tolerance we develop a sense of acceptance. We can actually generate a sense of satisfaction. Not with the suffering itself, but we can begin to take a perspective in which we do not compound our difficulties by feeling frustrated that we’re suffering.
So the first area that we’re trying to develop tolerance with is respect to learning to endure difficulties and suffering with a sense of acceptance and satisfaction. The second is consistently viewing situations in terms of higher orders of correction, in terms of distorted premise. That is simply not as very accurately, perhaps more accurately, learning to look at situations from the point of view of the dharma. And here dharma I’m using these ideas of higher orders of correction. The dharma is simply that.
It’s trying to help us to develop higher, more effective, more appropriate ways of dealing with life situation. And helping to point out distorted premises that we base our behavior and correct So consistently viewing our situations from how we can deal with them more effectively, more appropriately in terms of peace, in terms of compassion, in terms of correcting distorted premises that we might otherwise relate to the situations dependent upon. So that area of concern of tolerance. The third is the developing tolerance with respect to refraining from retaliating, not returning harm for harm. So the first involves the relearning of how to deal with and accept inevitable suffering.
And the line from the actual text, The causes of happiness rarely occur, whereas the causes for suffering are abundant. If we were to analyze over the course of some days the various states of dissatisfaction that we experience, both mental and physical, we would probably find that the preponderance of our distress, the preponderance of our dissatisfaction are basically caused by our unwillingness to accept what is. Know, it’s not that, that is to say, we compound our suffering by a stubborn refusal to accept what is. It may be suffering. When we become sick, there’s a frustration I shouldn’t be sick.
That this shouldn’t happen to me. The situation should somehow be otherwise. I shouldn’t have missed that bus. It should life should not be like this. Most of our most of our low level distress is something created out of our own making, our unwillingness to accept what is.
It’s not to say, this is not to say that we are to be fatalistic because something is that it should remain like that. That’s not the point. We should work for change to improve our situation. But we must accept the present moment as it is. We have no choice.
I think that practically the whole human race is out of its goddamn mind and could use therapy. All are biologically prone to think crookedly. All humans are somewhat nutty because they refuse pig headedly to accept reality and therefore make themselves depressed, anxious, and enraged. You know everything that happens is appropriate to what has gone before. Every happiness, every suffering that we experience is of our own making.
You know, the fact, you know, all of the little incidents which occur during the course of the day that cause us distress are simply our refusal to accept that this is the case. To go on from there, that you missed the bus. Now you have to, you cannot alter that fact, that is the case, and then go on from there. That someone treated you unfairly, to go on from there. That you’re sick, to go on from there.
There’s a zen, a verse which says the years of a man’s life are maybe a hundred years, but his grief is that of a thousand. And this is not necessarily a pessimistic view or a cynical view. But it is the attitude which is to be developed is that suffering should not surprise us. It shouldn’t startle us when we do experience dissatisfaction. You know, we are, at present we’re governed by a system.
Whether we call this system cyclic existence or compulsive neurotic patterns, it still exists. We are not free. We do not have control. It’s in the very fabric of our life that we are governed by this system and that we are unwillingly forced to experience suffering. We do not choose to suffer.
No one chooses to suffer. But it’s not our choice. No one asks us whether we want to suffer or not. We do so without choice. We wouldn’t choose, nobody would choose to become sick.
Nobody would choose to grow old. Nobody would choose to die. We would not choose to be separated from that which we desire. We would not choose to come in contact with the undesired. We would not choose not to achieve those things that we seek.
No one would choose this. But we aren’t asked. We have no choice. We are governed by a system of karma, actions, and afflictive emotions. We are blown around like leaves, swirled around by the winds of karma, our previous actions, and afflictive emotions.
Emotions such as desire, hatred, spite, miserliness, jealousy. The point is that we should not be surprised that if our life is permeated by the qualities of confusion, anger, hostility, aggression, attachment, desire that we experience suffering, dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration. There’s nothing amazing about that. The contrary would be an amazing thing that we do have experiences of happiness, joy, peace. We are not being unfairly treated.
There’s no one out to get us. It’s appropriate, the type of life that we lead, even though we have no choice in it. That we have never experienced one moment’s happiness nor one moment’s suffering that wasn’t of our own making. You know, we accept our happiness without question. Why don’t we do the same without, why don’t we do the same with suffering?
In the same way? Why do we insist that things should be other than they are when we suffer, but not when we have happiness? As I said, this is not to say that we shouldn’t be fatalistic. You know, we should change things, should change the situation, should try to improve it, to make it as we desire, as we want it. But why this irrational belief that suffering that this should not be happening to me?
Why compound our suffering with frustration and distress? This is the point. And we’re trying to find ways of developing tolerance. Tolerance is an undistressed mind. Beginning to become more accepting to inevitable suffering, to suffering of our own creation.
Overcoming the mistaken beliefs that this is not my fault, that this shouldn’t be happening, that it should be otherwise.