Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun anchors this 43-minute session on tolerance with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Please Call Me by My True Names” — the Vietnamese monk’s refusal to condemn the sea pirate who raped a twelve-year-old refugee, because he recognizes himself in both victim and perpetrator. This becomes the lens for Śāntideva’s case against anger: whether harmful behavior is fixed in someone’s nature (like fire’s burning) or a product of circumstance, neither warrants retaliation. A lively Q&A then examines whether anger can ever be useful — Gendun draws on the Dalai Lama’s view that wrath nested in compassion can motivate change. The session closes with a striking story of post-hypnotic suggestion to argue that the autonomous, freely-choosing self we project onto others when we grow angry is itself a conditioned fabrication.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 Tce 1991 04 10.mp3
UUID: fe449b69-45f6-44c3-a8d2-f57cbcb9f594
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Tolerance (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-04-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.3 minutes
Words: ~4,585
If we begin to review the situation of ourselves and other people in a sense of how much violence and how much harm they unwittingly bring to themselves, and how much they will endure, how much pain, how much suffering, how much violence they will endure bringing to themselves as a consequence of being driven by these self destructive factors within their own mind. And we can’t reasonably be surprised or We can’t reasonably expect them not to hurt others, to commit violence to others, bring suffering to others if they’re going to do it to themselves. Because if they’re going to hurt that one thing that they cherish most themselves, then those who they cherish less, they would be even more predisposed to harm. So it shouldn’t come as any shock that others hurt us when we review the situation and see how much others harm themselves. Every day, what we put ourselves through, the violence that we commit upon ourselves.
You know, with all our self reproach, all our guilt, all our internalized oppression, How can we be surprised when from time to time others harm us, when they’re continually causing harm to themselves uncontrollably? How can we blame others when they’re just like ourselves? Christ said that she who is without sin cast the first stone. How can we have so much self righteous indignation and get angry and want to hurt another person? When that same quality is within our own hearts.
And there’s a poem that I was reminded about last weekend. It’s by Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s called Please Call Me by My True Name. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese monk who now has a community in France. You know, how can we cast the first stone when we have that same sin within our own hearts?
And introducing this poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, I have a poem for you. This poem is about three of us. The first is a twelve year old girl, one of the boat people crossing the Gulf of Siam. She was raped by a sea pirate, and after that she threw herself into the sea. The second person is the sea pirate who was born in a remote village in Thailand.
And the third person is me. I was not on the boat. I was tens of thousands of miles away. But because I was mindful, I knew what was going on in the Gulf. I was very angry, of course.
But I could not take sides against the sea pirate. If I could have, it would have been easier, but I couldn’t. I realized that if I had been born in his village and had lived a similar life, economic, educational, and so on, it is likely that I would now be a sea pirate. So it is not easy to take sides. Out of suffering I wrote this poem.
It is called Please Call Me By My True Name. Because I have many names, and when you call me by any of them, I have to say yes. Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive. Look deeply, I arrive in every second, to be a bud on the spring branch, to be a tiny bird whose wings are still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of the pond. And I am the grass snake, who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve year old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet incapable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the Politburo with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his debt of blood to my people dying slowly in the forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, warm it makes flowers bloom. My pain is like the river of tears, so full it fills up the four oceans. Please call me by my true names so I can hear all my cries and my laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are but one. Please call me by my true names so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. You know, we are all prisoners.
It’s just that some of us are in cells with windows and some of us aren’t. Some of us perhaps have a little more perspective on things and therefore should know better. The point is that none of us are free. To become angry at someone, we must momentarily and mistakenly conceive of that person as being in perfect control, being totally aware of what they are doing, and having freely chosen to bring us harm. No one is in total control.
No one is in full awareness of what they’re doing. And they do not freely choose to bring harm because they are not free. But we have to conceive of that person in that way momentarily and on the basis of mistaken beliefs and notions if we are to become angry at them, to hold them responsible, to seek to harm them. We have to overlook the fact that they’re a product of their culture, of their values, of their past history, of everything about them. And just like this Thich Nhat Hanh referring to this pirate, how can he become angry at that pirate no matter how despicable the act might be when he realizes that if he were raised in that same village under the same conditions that he too might very well be raping twelve year old children.
You can’t become angry when you take that perspective. You have to develop a sense of compassion because they simply can’t help what they’re doing. Śāntideva goes on in the text. How is it possible to not have compassion and instead be angry with those who engage in such acts as suicide on account of a disturbed mind. The qualities of Do you have any comments so far?
What do you think about what Thich Nhat Han said about the pirate? Do you have any objections to that? I’m having difficulty with that concept. Yeah? What’s your feeling about that?
For example? What do you think? Do we have that freedom to become angry, not angry, sad and not sad? Would you ever become angry by choice? Would you ever choose to become angry?
Would you ever choose to be sad? Yeah, think I could choose not to be angry. Yeah, but would you choose to be sad, for example, or choose to be angry? I choose to be sad. Today I’m going to be sad for whatever reason.
Could you? I would say yes. Yeah? You have that ability, that control, to determine your state and mind. Sometimes.
When would you have control? What kind of situation? Rational. Anger and sadness aren’t rational qualities, aren’t they? That’s a good point, though.
You’d have to have compassion for yourself, wouldn’t you? Pretty nice, wouldn’t it, for a change? Instead of giving ourselves such a hard time. Yeah. That poem reminds me of a true Buddhahood.
In other words, it’s not the self committing the crime. It’s every one of us. Or yourself. Like, life then beyond the rage, there’s a possibility of saying, yeah, okay. This character sort of wasn’t really responsible.
The the one throws oneself into the sea at the moment of, I will not surrender. I’ll do myself, away with myself before I’ll surrender, before I’ll cope with the impact of this. Sort of steps to this. It’s not retaliation. It’s not easy to just say, okay.
No. I don’t think I shouldn’t we shouldn’t mistake compassion for idiot compassion, always being a nice person. Not the point. One has every right to defend oneself. We’re just talking about from the point of view of reframing the situation such that we on a higher perspective, so we see that anger is not appropriate.
Think about it for a while. Imagine imagine five big burly boys taking you away and raping you. Imagine. Just you have to imagine it for a long time, I think. I don’t know what it would would be for different people, but I think one has to imagine it in in circumstance.
I mean, you know, I guess I guess for a man, it would be easiest to imagine if one were in a cell, locked in a cell with some big burly prisoners. And then, I don’t know, is it is it is it the fear of being physically hurt How is it possible to not have compassion and instead be angry with those who engage in such acts of suicide on account of a disturbed mind? You know, the people, all the various acts of hostility and aggression are committed out of distress. People don’t commit acts of aggression, hostility, because they’re happy or they’re at peace with themselves. But basically because they’re suffering.
And this hostility, aggression, their own anger, their hurting. Seeking to hurt is the way they’re trying to cope. This is the way they’ve learned to deal with their, as a solution to this problem of distress. Just like this pirate whose heart is not yet capable of seeing and loving, an angry person at that particular moment, an angry person at that particular moment is incapable of seeing and loving, Is not capable of dealing with the distress in their own mind in a more skillful way, a more productive way. At that particular moment, the angry person is not able to deal with the distress in a more skillful way, in a more productive way.
They’ve been conditioned to deal with it in this particular way. And just like ourselves, they want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer. In way, they are doing the best they can with what they’ve learned, with how they’ve been conditioned. It may hurt you. But for the present, that’s all they know.
That’s all they can do. So we all, all that we do, we do in the hope it’s going to bring us happiness. And the hope it’s going to solve our problems. Going to alleviate this distress at some level or other. You know, people, whatever we do, People become vegetarians because they think it’s going to they hope it’s going to bring them happiness.
People of people eat lots of meat because they think they hope it’s going to bring them lots of happiness. So they will become secretaries, psychologists, teachers. Some people go in the dole. I hope it’s going to bring them happiness. Some people have as much sex as possible in order to find happiness.
Some people become celibate in order to find happiness. Some people become dying. Everybody’s out there struggling the best they can with what they got, with what they know, with what they’ve learned, with the way they’ve been conditioned, trying to solve the basic human condition problems. Some are quite unskillful. Some are a little more skillful.
So we can’t begrudge in a way them trying to be happy, trying to remove their pain. That’s what we’re all trying to do, each with their own different name. You know, though it, in fact, may be difficult to generate compassion towards someone who is harming you, at least we can try not to become angry at them. Because in a way, we know better. Maybe our prison cell has a window.
Hopefully, we have some perspective. We have perhaps a greater responsibility in the way we act. You know, we to some extent people don’t want to learn because concomitant with learning is an acceptance of a greater responsibility in terms of one’s own action and responsibility toward others. You know, it’s not to say that we’re talking about developing compassion for these people who are harmful because they’re hurting and they don’t know any better. I just reminded, what did Christ say on the cross?
Please forgive them for they don’t know what they do, for they know not what they do. Maybe that’s something that we can aim for, that kind of qualitative mind. Also Christ didn’t say that when he said to love your enemy, he didn’t say that we didn’t have to like them. You know, it doesn’t mean because you you love your enemy that you have to invite them home for dinner or something like that. You simply you you wish them you wish them well.
Or if you can’t wish them well, at least don’t wish them harm. That’s the minimum of the great vehicle. And if you can, help others, benefit them. If you can’t, then at least don’t hurt them. Don’t harm In terms of our enemy, a quote from, again, from I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.
Yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. It’s very much a way of viewing, an attitude to be developed within the category of mind training, mind transformation texts, that our greatest teacher, those who advance us most quickly and most powerfully in our spiritual practice, are our enemies, those who try to hurt And the Dalai Lama once said that we owe the Chinese a great debt because we’ve had to actually practice our Dharma. And this is trying to see them in their kindness. Anyone who helps us to grow is kind because it is through growth that we’re going to ultimately solve our problems. In a way, our friends what?
It’s difficult, isn’t it? It’s dangerous for two people to try to grow together, isn’t it? You’re never quite sure you’re going to grow in the same direction, at the same rate. Never quite sure. And so maybe there’s this little bit of subtle placing obstacles, holding on to what has gone before quite naturally out of attachment.
Śāntideva goes on. He begins the discussion of overcoming the causes of anger. Any comment about anything you said up now? Yeah. How much is it conditioning the sea pirate or the karma through his past actions?
The same, wouldn’t it? Oh, I don’t know. You mean the I mean I don’t know, I couldn’t even begin to guess. Is it like individual for every person or As to what? Well, I imagine that this sea pirate is pretty ruthless.
And I imagine that is a product of his past lives. Yeah. Which complicates things for me. And how is that? Just us.
It makes the conditions not so important. It’s lifetime conditions. Makes it less easy to be compassionate, you mean? Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. It coming. Or maybe he was born he’s been born in that Thai village for the last twenty rebirths or something like that. Discussing how to overcome the causes of anger. Śāntideva goes on in the text. If it were the nature of the immature to cause harm to others, it would still be absurd to get angry with them. That would be like getting annoyed at fire for having the nature to burn. You know, if someone is causing harm to us, that quality of wanting to cause harm is either a part of their nature or it’s a temporary state which has arisen within them. It’s either one of these two possibilities.
Their wanting to cause us harm is either in their very nature of their being or it’s simply a temporary state of mind, a temporary an emotion which has arisen in them. One of the two. So Śāntideva points out that if it was in their very nature to want to harm, to want to hurt, then it makes no sense to get angry at them and to retaliate. They simply can’t help it if it’s their nature. It would be like, how could we That would be like getting angry at fire because it burns us.
That we demand that fire be some other way than it is. That it have another nature than it possesses. In order to have another nature than it possesses, would have to be something other than fire because it is in the very nature of fire that it burns. And we can’t begrudge the burning nature of fire. We can, you know, that’s the way it is.
It has to be accepted. No matter if we experience, even if we experience pain from it, it’s not at the fault of the fire if it’s its very nature. If it didn’t burn, it wouldn’t be fire. It’d have to be something else. So in this situation, if quality is in the very nature of the object, then the only reasonable response is acceptance.
It would be completely unreasonable to want that object to be otherwise because it would have to be something other than that object. As Śāntideva goes on, Even if this unfortunate characteristic of theirs were accidental, and by nature they were sympathetic, anger would still be unjustified. It would be like resenting space for allowing smoke to fill it. So again, the notion of other power arises. You know, when specific causes and conditions come together, a result arises.
When there is fire, there is smoke. And though the smoke may irritate us, it is unreasonable to get angry at the space for allowing the smoke to rise within it. Certain causes and conditions have aggregated and out of that a result arises. And though we might find that result disturbing, we can’t begrudge the person whose mind that harmful intention has arisen in. You know, a person is not you know, we talk about patterns.
Anger is a pattern. Desire is a pattern. A person is not their pattern. A person is not their afflictive emotions. Their patterns of anger, patterns of hostility, aggression.
But they do arise in their minds when the proper causes and conditions arise. And just as we we cannot begrudge space simply because it’s filled with smoke and though that smoke may irritate us, likewise we can’t begrudge that person simply because certain causes and conditions have aggregated, certain circumstances have been met with, causing anger to arise in that person’s mind. If we want to be angry at something, then we can become angry at their anger, not at the person. Dharma student who’s trying not to get angry at the individuals, the poor people that have to walk work in the DSS system. There’s this there seems to be beyond the people that make up the system something greater than them.
Mhmm. And I was just thinking of, you know, could anger ever be a a motivation for something good? And I was thinking of the scenario that if one was so frustrated with a system that the anger would give one the motivation to act to change that system, ultimately, to benefit other people better? Do you think it’s a valid argument, a valid progression? I don’t know.
Yeah. Think if I say this one. There’s sometimes the Dalai Lama’s talked about anger. Anger may be useful at times, but if it’s in the context of love. For example, if you have a child who’s doing something wrong, a criticism can be quite useful, wrath might be quite useful.
But only in the context. It must be nested in a general acceptance of that person. Generally you accept this feeling has a sense this child has a general feeling of acceptance by you. That they’re an okay person. That what they do is generally okay, then the criticism is quite effective.
If it’s nested in this general acceptance, the child will listen. But if it’s just continual criticism and there’s no general acceptance, then it’s of no use. And likewise, anger may be of use, but if it’s in general context of love, of wishing well, of constructive, of wanting to benefit, then anger in that context may be quite functional, may be quite useful. But just the general anger of an angry person is quite destructive they don’t have this context in which it operates. So anger could bring about generally they call this wrath.
Could catalyze something change. But if it’s in the context of wanting to benefit, and wanting to change the system for for benefit, not to not wanting to destroy, but something productive in an overall context of wanting to promote the welfare of others, beneficial intention, then anger might be really productive. At least that’s what the Dalai Lama would say. So, yeah. Yeah.
I could, we could finish off this particular section if you like. We could stop now. How do you feel about that? There’s not very much more. Just when you’re talking about the causes of anger and tolerance of non retaliation.
And the fact that getting across this idea of other poweredness. One our fundamental beliefs is, as was mentioned previously, the self. But more not just self here, an autonomous self, a self powered self, independent self, a self which is completely independent of all causes and conditions. This is the type of self which is one of my most fundamental misconceived beliefs, wrong beliefs. You know, our experiences are laden with the theory of such a self, That we view and we relate with the world in the context of such beliefs of a type of autonomously independent existent self.
Our experiences are conditioned by our beliefs. They contain our beliefs. Our experiences are and our reactions are constructed on the basis of our beliefs. Our beliefs inform our perceptions. And this is just to get a feel of what might be being gotten at here.
In terms of the sense of other power, in the sense of the conditioning factors, in the sense that we are operating on the basis of beliefs, ideas, assumptions, premises. Several years ago when I was moderating a seminar of psychiatrists and clinicians, the real dimensions of this affirmation process were brought home in a very simple and powerful way. We were discussing the use of hypnosis in therapy. At some point during the discussion one of the participants began to speak in a manner that riveted everyone’s attention. He was a psychoanalyst, the oldest and most respected member present.
Only once in my life, he said, did I ever use hypnosis with a patient. It was in the Second World War when I was in the Swiss Army. There was this poor soldier in front of me, and for some reason I decided to test whether or not he would be susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion. I easily brought him into a trance, and simply by way of experiment, I suggested to him that after he awoke he would stamp his foot three times whenever I snapped my fingers. All perfectly standard procedure.
After I brought him out of the trance state and we spoke for a while, I dismissed him. And just as he was leaving the room, I snapped my fingers. He immediately responded and stamped his foot according to the suggestion. Wait a minute, I shouted. Tell me, why did you stamp your foot?
His face suddenly turned red. Damn it all, he said, I’ve got something in my shoe. The speaker slowly puffed on his pipe and his face became extremely serious. The rest of us couldn’t understand why he seemed to be making so much of this well known phenomenon of post-hypnotic fabrication. But he maintained his silence, staring somberly down the length of his pipe.
No one else said a word. It was obvious that he was trying to formulate something which he took to be quite important. Then with his face suddenly open as a child’s, he looked up at me and said, Do you think the whole of our psychic life is like that? A strange and rather awkward silence followed. Some of the company obviously felt that this man, whom everyone acknowledged as a great practitioner, was having a temporary intellectual lapse.
But the others, myself included, were struck by the extraordinary feeling he had put into this simple question, as though he were at that very moment internally revising everything he had ever understood about the mind. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to reply. And in fact, what he was driving at had already dawned on me. But before I could speak, he went on in exactly the same way, except that his face now registered not only amazement but something akin to horror. Do you think, he said, that every movement we make, every word we say, every thought we have is like that?
Could it be that we are always fabricating in a sort of low grade post hypnotic haze? Because there’s one thing I am sure of, though only now do I see the importance the moment I ask the soldier why he has stamped his foot. There was a split second when he realized that he had not done anything at all, a moment when he realized that the fact was simply that his foot stamped the ground all by itself. By asking him why he had stamped his foot, I was in effect suggesting to his mind that he had done something. In short, I was still hypnotizing him.
Or rather, I was playing into the general process of hypnosis that is going on all the time with all of us from the cradle to the grave. The contradictions made him blush and the true facts about the foot stampings were blotted out of awareness. I was totally fascinated with where the thought of the speaker was taking him. He went on for quite a while, weaving his speculations around the possibilities that the whole of man’s psychic life is a product of suggestions coming from different sources, some immediately external and others stored up in the mechanisms of memory. And this whole process, he concluded, is constantly screened from our awareness by the belief, also conditioned in us that we are acting individual selves.
Our so called freedom of will is only an ex post facto identification with processes that are taking place all by themselves. You know, we all are to a lesser or greater degree, a lesser or greater extent, in a hypnotic trance. We are continually suggesting to ourselves that we are autonomous beings who should be in perfect control regardless of circumstances, regardless of the situation. And we mercilessly place demands upon ourselves, expectations upon ourselves, completely isolated, completely divorced of the context.