Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth — a physician asked to cure a diseased mind who replies that the patient must heal himself — Ven Jampa Gendun frames this 44-minute talk: inner transformation is entirely our own work, no external teacher can perform it for us. He then works through Śāntideva’s three-part framework for developing tolerance: accepting difficulty as a spur to growth rather than something to avoid; raising perspective above the ordinary hope-and-fear calculus of ego; and refraining from retaliation. The final section receives most attention — drawing on Thomas Merton on self-hatred and an image of hatred as a crocodile consuming its own tail, he argues that because no one acts with complete autonomy, anger toward those who harm us is philosophically unjustified. Suited to practitioners with some grounding in Buddhist ethics and Śāntideva’s thought.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 21 Tce 1991 04 17.mp3
UUID: a08f531c-5719-45a9-9db4-8e8477e90952
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Tolerance (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-04-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~5,121
There’s a I thought I’d read a verse from Macbeth. Macbeth is talking to a physician, a doctor, and he asks, Canst thou minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuck bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart. And the doctor answers, Therein the patient must minister to himself. Recognizing, taking responsibility for our internal problems, The various dissatisfactions, the various pathological ways of perceiving which cause us the basis of our problems. That nothing outside of ourselves can cure us.
That we have to become our own physician. We have to diagnose who we are and our problems and begin to apply the antidotes within our own mind. And it is very much our own responsibility and something which is done within our own mind for ourselves and by ourselves. So this requires to some degree a healthy reorientation from looking outside of ourselves to the solutions to our problems to other people. And there’s quite a limit to what others can do in the end.
In the end we have to be our own spiritual masters. As the Buddha said, Who else can be your spiritual master? By being your own spiritual master you will be liberated. We can avail ourselves of the methods and the way which has been set down by others. For example, the happy, healthy, loving beings who have achieved that and before us.
You know, Buddha, for example, is worshipped, if you like, is revered for showing the way, for demonstrating to us what we too can become. The Buddha is worshipped, is revered, respected, admired as a teacher, as an exemplar, and as a guide. And so we can make use of him as by way of example, her by way of example, her by way of teacher, him by way of teacher, him and her by way of our guide. But still, the onus of responsibility, the burden of actually applying the antidotes within our own mind. The Buddhists do not wash away sins with water nor do they remove sufferings with their hands nor do they transfer their realizations to the minds of others.
But by showing us truth, all will be made free. And the truth is therapeutic. If we’re able to realize it within our own minds, it can help us to solve our problems. And the truth is not unrelated to the various activities and ways of being of our everyday life. So bringing one’s life and one’s total being in line with truth and trying to become a living expression of truth, of the Dharma, of the method to become a healthy, sane human being.
And the end of this is Buddha, one’s own Buddha within oneself. There’s no Buddha outside of yourself which can serve all your various needs. And the Buddha of what it means to be healthy, our conception of what it means to be healthy, is going to change over the course of our life what a Buddha might be like, what it might be like to have solved our problems. But no matter what our conception is that end goal might be, still the journey is lived in our everyday life. You know, all the various ways, various choices which are continually confronting us during the course of our life.
You know, that we have to make choices. We can pick a choice for retrogression or evolution toward growth or toward regression toward maintaining the structures which we find security and which we find which we seek to cling to in our confusion and fear. So it takes, requires some kind of courage. And this courage is expressed in very small choices. There are probably very few dramatic choices that we will have to be called upon to make in the course of our life.
But there are infinite number of small, courageous choices. Choosing the path with heart, choosing the path of growth, choosing the path toward truth, choosing the path of light, away from darkness, away from falsehood, away from the easy, the comfortable. If we will only choose the difficult, then everything will work out well. So this is the actual going for refuge, this process of taking recourse to the truth, to the Dharma, whatever we might want to call it, in order to make the central focus of our inner life Buddha to grow, to become a healthy, loving, sane human being in the social context of a spiritual community so that in others who inspire us to make the consistent choice, others who help us to make that consistent choice, who act as examples of others who are making that consistent choice of a path of growth, of some kind of evolution. Now we should hopefully want to think that five years from now we’re not going to be the same person that we are now, that we will have moved on toward the direction of our aspiration, toward the direction of our dreams, our visions of the type of person we would like to be.
It would be sad if five years from now or ten years from now we looked at ourselves and saw that we hadn’t changed. And the only way this change takes place is in the present moment, in those myriad infinite number of small choices which we confront ourselves with over the course of our everyday life. And being mindful of making the choice in the light of your wisdom, in the light of your compassion, and those prime values which you hold most high. And we do this if we can to raise level of our aspiration. Choosing to become healthy people in order to be of more benefit to others.
To go beyond our sense of over individualism and begin to see oneself as existing interdependence with others. That one’s mental health is very much bound in one’s attitude of wishing to be a benefit to others. So beginning to place one’s choices in the context of how it’s going to benefit others. Wanting to become a healthy person, a happy person, to be that much more able, that much more skillful in helping others to be happy and healthy. I was thinking, you know, there’s this phrase that seems to come up quite often lately by Śāntideva in which it’s quite simple.
It’s almost simple minded. That everything becomes easier upon habituation. Everything becomes easier upon habituation. You know, who we are now has evolved as if, to a large extent, without our even making conscious effort. We form certain habits, develop certain patterns, condition them in certain ways, and we have ended up the way we are now.
It’s quite appropriate to what has gone before. And the mind is dynamic. It is no thing in itself. Its prime characteristics are simply clarity and knowing. And so being no thing in itself, it is simply an entity which is the summation of all the conditioning factors which have influenced over our evolutionary history.
It is no thing in itself. It is just the summation of these these conditioned factors. And if we begin to consciously direct this conditioning process, We we consciously create the type of mind and thereby the being that we want to be. And this process, there’s no reason it must work this way. It’s quite reasonable to think in this way, that we can become the type of being.
It’s not to say that it will be easy because there are various conditioned factors which in our mind which have been reinforced and are continually being reinforced, even against our wishes over, you know, myriads of lifetimes. But still, we can begin to take it, bring a conscious influence in the conditioning factors of our mind in some small way. And it will become easier to generate a real thought of love, the wish for happiness, beyond these words that I might use to express that thought. It may be difficult initially, even directed toward a few people, but it will eventually develop. It must develop.
There’s no obstruction to its development inherent in the mind itself. And having developed that, there’s no reason why the number of individuals that it’s directed toward could not be increased. The force of this thought of love can be increased. The frequency of this thought of love can be increased. There’s no reason inherent in the mind which prevents this, which obstructs this.
You know, we have, to some extent, you know, that up to now people have talked a great deal about the physical evolution of humankind. But Buddhism is more concerned with our conscious evolution. And we can either allow it to our future and the quality of our mind, which is to say who we are and what we will experience, to be repetitive of the past, the same reoccurring compulsive neurotic patterns to go on infinitum, or we can begin to exercise some element of choice no matter how small that choice might be. But in the cosmic scheme of things, it’s rather a revolution. It would be like at such and such a point in such and such a world at such and such a time, a choice was made, which was like this first step on an effort and long journey.
And someday we will all be Buddhas because of that choice. The I’m going to talk a little bit about the idea of delayed gratification in terms of various levels of goal gratification, immediate and intermediate and long term goal gratification. But from the point of view of Buddhism, it’s quite difficult because we have difficulty forgoing having any perspective on our life over, you know, over a few years, over the like we have a maximum point at which we are able to delay our gratification. But trying to gain some kind of cosmic perspective is quite inspiring. It’s quite it’s actually is quite useful because it helps us not to become completely captivated by the present moment, captive at present moment.
It seems to create some kind of space. You know, we are all going to be Buddhas someday. And it’s just a matter of when. And I think that simply matters perhaps is a matter of how many of these infinitely small choices that we make over the course of our lives. Know that we’re always building on something else that has gone before.
That there can be it’s like this rather than simply circling a cyclic existence, we can begin to shape some kind of spiral existence, if you like, which is actually moving in the direction of the person we want to become, the solution to our problems. And this solution is Buddha by means of the Dharma in the social context of the spiritual community, and seeking to raise the level of our motivation for this journey. That we are going to reach our destination, reach that blessed mountain, and upon attaining its summit, we’re going to return to the valley to lead others up that spiraling path. That we can you know, just talking about love, talking about growth, it makes the mind it doesn’t sound so foreign. Even just the words, saying words like that, mind is that much influenced to actually being gaining that experience of what the words might mean.
If we never even use the words, how can we ever hope to have anything which comes near the experience? So just talking about these ideas, which is all I can do, and using these words of love and Buddhahood and sanity and happiness is worthwhile. We we we develop a vocabulary of sanity, of health, rather than our normal day language, which is full of violence and anger and attachment. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. 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, the highest assembly. And 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 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 any other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. So, tolerance.
Actually, I think I don’t know about you, but I have found this very beneficial for myself. I think I’m becoming a more tolerant person. Thinking about these talks and trying to prepare something worthwhile to say, I have found it beneficial for myself. I can only hope that maybe it’s been worthwhile, you know, in some small way for you. It’s like meditation for me and just thinking about trying to understand what is being said, what’s being talked about.
So the development of tolerance. So it involves, firstly, overall methods for the development of tolerance. Firstly, thinking about the, in terms of our own experience, in terms of our own reasoning, the destructive quality within our own lives of anger, hostility and aggression. Without this, as a prime motivating force, will not go on to the next step. If you think it’s okay to become angry, if you think it’s desirable to become angry hatred, hostility, aggression then there’s no further there’s no need to go any further with the various methods to reframe the situations in order to develop tolerance.
You won’t use them. It won’t touch your mind. There will be no space for the antidotes to begin to operate. There will be no force behind them. Using your reasoning and your own experience as your guide and seeing as vividly as possible for yourself the destructive quality of anger, hostility, aggression.
And then you’ll be motivated to go on from there, to actually implement the methods. And the methods finally are to reframe all the various previously problematic situations such that what was once a problematic situation which was associated with distress is no longer viewed as problematic. There’s no longer an associated distress and therefore no anger. That anger, hatred, hostility and aggression arise dependent upon a distressed mind. The main cause for anger being a distressed mind.
If there’s no distress, there’s no anger. The way we can remove the distress from the mind is looking at the situation, previously problematic situation from a new point of view, attributing new meaning to old situations. And we can do this. There’s no reason why we can’t. We can change the way we view a situation.
There is no object or inherent way in which a situation demands to be related to. We may have commonalities in our way of viewing a particular situation, but that’s just our commonalities in ways of thinking or viewing the situation. Has nothing to do with anything about the object itself. There’s no intrinsic nature to any object, let alone any intrinsic desirability or undesirability about an object. Or whether it’s to be objectively seen as a cause for distress or otherwise.
That all our views are relative. There is no absolute view. And we can change our view. We can change our mind. What was once difficult can become easy.
What was once distressful can become undistressful, non stressful. It’s not going to happen overnight. We have a whole program of misconceptions, of wrong views, what maybe unskillful views, crooked beliefs, distorted premises. And we can’t say, oh, want to change, like taking the hair out of butter. This is what I want to change.
I have this problem, doctor. I have such and such. As if the whole rest of our approach to life could remain unchanged and we could as if pull this hair out of the butter without anything clinging to it. I don’t think it’s possible. And people demand that.
I just want to change this one small thing in my life. Your whole life could be nothing but confusion, but I just want to change this. People I remember once Lama Yeshe who founded Buddha House, I thought he was quite brave. He was talking to some westerners and says, Your lives are a mess. All you do is shift around the garbage to different places, playing.
I don’t know. Trying to see that anger is we would rather probably be more skillful with our anger than get rid of our anger than try to dissolve our anger, try to become more effective angry people so that we can become more skillful in winning our arguments or being able to use our analytic reasoning capacity to be able to dig a little bit deeper to cause a little more pain. To see that anger is inappropriate, to see that it’s ineffective and self destructive. It’s a coping mechanism which is not working for us. So in the development of tolerance, Śāntideva outlines three areas of concern for the development of tolerance.
First, learning to endure difficulties and suffering with a sense of acceptance and satisfaction. So this involves overcoming our tendency to to problem and conflict avoidance and accepting legitimate suffering. Conflicting voices and difficulties. And working with problems involves some difficulties, some kind of uncomfortableness. But we can gain a satisfaction that we’re working we’re working through the problem, if we accept difficulties as a challenge to our growth.
You know, we can gain it’s still difficult, but we don’t make it in the background, there’s some kind of feeling of self worth, self satisfaction. That it’s hard. I’d rather not be involved in it. But it’s there. I accept it.
I’m going to work with it. And we can gain a sense of satisfaction, a sense of feeling good about ourselves. Self respect, I guess, maybe. That we’re growing, becoming more skillful at working with problems, that we’re not simply continually contributing to our neuroses. So learning to endure difficulties and sufferings with a sense of acceptance and satisfaction.
Second area, consistently viewing problematic situations from a higher order of perspective. Higher order of self correction is, I can’t think of the word. That’s my jargon for dharma. Higher order perspective. Dharma.
Dharma jargon. So this entails not only the willingness to work with difficult situations, but to work with them from a higher order of perspective than we normally deal with situations. And I just talked a little bit about gaining perspective and making the consistent effort to work on situations from perhaps a more profound level than we’re normally working with situations. From to go beyond our superficial level of the immediate goal gratification pleasure pain principle. This is what runs our life to a large extent.
The ordinary, you know, the principal preoccupations of ego based existence are hope and fear. Our lives are run on the basis of hope and fear. Hope of pleasure, fear of pain, hope of fame, fear of blame. Hope of gain, fear of loss. Hope of praise, fear of criticism.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, this is our prime criteria for almost all of our actions. And trying to purposely and consciously and consistently raise one’s level of perspective out above one’s simply immediate consideration of hopes and fears and being willing to do what you’re afraid of and being willing to forego your hopes in terms of what hopes and I mean setting one’s priorities in terms of ego gratification, of what enhances, aggrandizes one’s own ego self image. Being willing to go beyond that level of working with situations. Trying to gain some higher perspective, working on that kind of higher order of self correction of dealing with situations. Then the third area that we’re concerned with in terms of developing tolerance is refraining from retaliation.
So this is what we’re presently looking at, this third area, tolerance of non retaliation. And this is discussed again in terms of three ways of developing this tolerance of non retaliation. So firstly, in terms of developing compassion, we come into seeing that we are simply not free to do and to act, to think as we might like. We actually don’t look at our lives in terms of the reality of our lives. Our lives are based on a tremendous number of assumptions about ourselves and about others and about our world in general.
Uncritically assumed assumptions. Never really analyzed assumptions. How many of us can control the content of our own mind, what we think? You know, most of what we think is pathological. Most of what we think is pure pain, but we can’t stop it.
We simply don’t have control over our own thoughts, patterns, what we think. For most of us, in the West, the greatest source of our suffering, the greatest violence that we do, is committed by our own minds to ourselves. People can’t sleep. People can’t have a moment’s rest. People are continually turning a knife in their own heart out of no reason than this berserk mind which they have no control over.
Thomas Merton. There is in every week lost and isolated member of the human race an agony of hatred born of his own helplessness, his own isolation. Hatred is the sign and the expression of loneliness, of unworthiness, of insufficiency. And insofar as each of us is lonely, is unworthy, each one of us hates himself. Some of us are aware of this self hatred, and because of it, we reproach ourselves and punish ourselves needlessly.
Punishment cannot cure the feeling that we are unworthy. Is nothing we can do about it as long as we feel that we are isolated, insufficient, helpless, and alone. Others who are less conscious of their own self hatred realize it in a different form by projecting it onto others. There is a proud and self confident hate, strong and cruel, which enjoys the pleasure of hating for it is directed outward to the unworthiness of others. But this strong and happy hate does not realize that, like all hate, it destroys and consumes the self that hates and not the object that is hated.
Hate in any form is self destructive. And even when it triumphs physically, it’s triumph is its own spiritual ruin. So what perhaps is being said in this context is, One who hates and one who harms is suffering. One who hates and one who harms is suffering. And if we cannot presently develop compassion for them in their hate, in their suffering, we can hopefully begin to develop some kind of tolerance.
That is to remain undistressed in the face of their hatred, in the face of their harm, because they’re suffering. They are destroying themselves in their own hatred. And this is the primary quality of a hell being, the primary cause of hell. It’s like a crocodile which eats its own tail. And the more it eats, the more it’s nourished, and the more its tail grows.
And it becomes a self perpetuating process. And the hater no longer is quite sure what he hates. He only needs that it needs to be something that is to be hated. And everything becomes fire. He himself becomes fire.
His whole atmosphere is aggressive, hostile. You see the quality of hell when expressed in physical terms. So one is as if in hell when one is hating. And though, you know, it’s difficult because our minds aren’t trained, we haven’t made effort in developing this, reframing the situation from this point of view that the hater is in pain. But at least we can if we can try to see that they’re in pain, if we can consistently remind ourselves, take that point of view, then maybe a little bit of compassion.
I wish that they weren’t in pain. In which there’s no distress for ourselves, there’s no anger can arise. But at least not to retaliate, to compound their pain, to add pain to their pain. So the second area for concern in the developments of tolerance of non retaliation. The tolerance of, as discussed in terms of overcoming the causes of anger.
This is what we were talking about last week, overcoming the causes of anger. We said if someone has a desire to harm us, then this desiring quality is either inherent in the individual, it’s a natural part of them, or it’s a temporary aberration. It’s simply a quality which has risen temporarily in their minds due to the of various causes and conditions. So it has to be either one of these two. If someone has a harmful intention toward us, desire to harm us, then this harming desire is either an inherent quality, and just like the quality of water is wet than fluid.
That’s its prime characteristic. Or it’s simply a temporary aberration. It’s something which has temporarily arisen. So if this harming desire of an individual is their inherent nature, an angry person, that’s all there is to it, then what sense does it make to get angry at them? They can’t help it.
That’s their nature. Someone an object in a water can’t you can’t begrudge water for being wet. You can’t begrudge fire for being hot even though it burns you. That’s its nature. So, if it’s the nature of a person that angers them, what uses your anger?
How can you justify it? How is it reasonable? They can’t be any other way than they are. So that’s the first possibility. Now we’re looking at the second possibility, that desire to harm is simply a temporary state which has risen in their mind due to the aggregation of specific causes and conditions.
And how are we going to work with this? How are we going to reframe that situation in order that our new way of viewing it, the new significance that we give it, will act in such a way that we will not become distressed in similar types of situations. We’re trying to always look into how we’re not going to become distressed. What kind of cues can we begin to see that trigger distress within our mind? So last week we looked at this possibility in terms of the notion of other poweredness.
This pervades all of Buddhism, but especially this section on tolerance. Everything is other power. Everything is other control. Nothing is self power. Nothing is self controlled whatsoever.
To retaliate with anger in the face of harm, we must view the other person at least unconsciously. And this is where our basic assumptions are about the world around us. Unconscious. Very deeply buried. So buried that one of the for example, in developing an understanding of emptiness, in developing an understanding of selflessness, that the most important and the most difficult task is to identify the way this ignorance is operating, the way this basic misconception is operating.
Once we do that, everything else is quite easy. The risk flows out of this quite naturally. We can see it’s wrong, but this premise that we’re operating from is so deeply buried that we can only understand it intellectually. And we can have very contradictive views on different levels of cognitive awareness. We can hold one view, one belief, one premise at one level, and hold a completely opposite one at another deeper, more varied level.
And somehow we have to bring intellectual, what is merely now in terms of listening, reflecting, bring it down through the process of meditation, cultivation, habituation, down to the actual level of where it’s now existing and begin to dissolve that pattern and replace it with this new premise, this more skillful premise, a premise which is fits the objective facts more skillfully. We have in order to become angry at someone, we have to have a basis, a premise that this person is autonomously, autonomous individual, that they’re completely independent of their conditions, their surroundings, their circumstances, that they’re completely in control, that they’re choosing with that they’re freely choosing with full awareness to harm us. These are some of the prerequisite premises which we necessarily must have as a basis for the generation of anger toward that person. We can know that we have these premises by the sign, that is, by becoming angry. Just as we can know that there’s fire on the other side of the hill because there’s smoke, that we don’t see the fire.
And we can inference that I must be holding this individual in this way. I must see them as autonomous, independent, fully and controlled beings. Otherwise, I couldn’t get angry at them. But this can be contradicted. This can be refuted by our reasoning.
It doesn’t hold to the light of our wisdom. It is false. It’s a mistaken assumption. No individual, you know, as we’ve talked about briefly and we talked about in more detail last week and the week before, is in complete control. That all are other powered.
Everyone is controlled by factors other than themselves. Everything is controlled by factors other than itself. Nothing brings itself into existence. And it’s really the idea of selflessness, the idea of other powerness, of interdependent existence pervades all of Buddhism from the bottom to the top. And we always and it’s one of the most profound levels that we can work with even at this level of remedial measures.
You know, we’re not talking about working directly with ignorance, misconception of the nature of self. But even at the level of working with a remedial measure of reframing in order to overcome anger, Still the antidote can still be pervaded by this conception of other poweredness. And so I think it’s a very powerful method to habituate one’s mind too. It’s contrary to all of our everyday reasoning, not reasoning, our everyday assumptions, the way of operating. Everything is under control of something else.
These individuals are not in complete control. They are under the control of other factors. When specific causes and conditions aggregate, a specific state of mind arises. That state of mind did not choose to arise. They did not choose that that state of mind arose.
They were not in control, as it were. A reactive pattern arises as a consequence of meeting specific conditions.