Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 32-minute talk, Ven Jampa Ignyen introduces the first noble truth through the concept of suffering of change. Rather than focusing on obvious pain, he explores a subtler, more pervasive form: the disappointment that comes when pleasure inevitably fades. He illustrates this through the arc of car ownership—initially a source of happiness, then marred by a scratch, rendered obsolete by newer models, and finally embarrassing to drive. This pattern repeats with possessions, relationships, and worldly pursuits generally. He contrasts this subtle suffering with gross suffering (illness, pain) and explains why understanding these layers matters: recognizing what ails us is the first step toward healing, just as a doctor diagnoses before prescribing medicine. The teaching is grounded in everyday examples, including a story about a dog at an ashram, and concludes with a Q&A addressing whether this framework is too pessimistic. Pitched at newcomers to Buddhism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 Intro to B 2001 05 14.mp3
UUID: 5e48c70a-9b08-4da4-b99d-56ae201def12
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Introduction to Buddhism (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-05-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 31.8 minutes
Words: ~3,289
So therefore, these four noble truths were set down. So initially talking about the the the truth of suffering, we have on the grossest level. What is the truth of suffering? It’s the suffering of suffering. What’s the suffering of suffering?
It’s our present negative feelings, whatever they may be, external or internal. External negative feelings are our sensory feelings. You know, we burn ourselves and we touch something hot, negative external feeling. But the most important ones are our internal feelings or the mental feelings that we experience. And, again, the good thing is that they’re impermanent.
We should rejoice that they’re impermanent. So miraculous. Yeah. Yeah. Commit suicide.
Well, not all human beings are destructive, but perhaps human beings have more of a potential. Here the question is about why are humans potentially more destructive than animals? Why do humans, for instance, commit suicide, whereas animals tend not to? Although probably some animals do commit suicide. I’ve read of cases.
In fact, I was reading this story once of this Indian sadhu in South India who lived on this mountain. And he it’s a very interesting story, without going into how he actually got to this mountain, he set up an ashram there and he became widely known as a teacher and many people came and studied with him there. And these animals were on the side of the mountain. There were lots of monkeys and sometimes he would have to intervene in disputes between the monkeys. And also there were dogs there.
And there was one dog called Blackie. Blackie used to like coming in and sitting and listening when he gave a teaching. And he’d come in and just sit up the back, you know, and just near the door, but he liked to do that. And anyway, one day some of the students saw the dog in there and they chased it out. This was I think they were new.
They were new students and they saw the dog in there and they thought that it was offensive that there should be a dog in the temple. And so they chased it away, threw some sticks at it. And the dog was so upset that it went and drowned itself in this tank. He said that it committed suicide. They found it, you know, that afternoon.
So in a way, anyway, if that example is true, then even animals potentially can commit suicide. But humans, probably because their capacity to understand is greater, humans have the capacity to think about the past and the future beyond this one life, which is more difficult for animals. Animals tend to be locked more into the concerns for just this life. And they’re very good at looking after themselves. And, you know, in this one life, they can feed themselves, you know, house themselves and so on.
humans have the tend to have the added capacity, although it’s not always used, to think about where I’ll be in my next life or the life after that, or whether there is in fact a life after that. And also humans have the capacity to think about this life and the conditions of this life probably more deeply than animals in general, but there is no pervasion there. And it’s true, many humans, when they start thinking about our conditions in this life, contemplate suicide. They look at what we have and what may be potentially achievable for ourselves. Some people become so depressed that they even take their own life.
Yet this is evident, especially amongst young people. And that’s true. The mind’s impermanent like the body. They’re both completely impermanent. The mind cannot be harmed by anything because it’s not a physical object.
But it does need to be healed, absolutely. And in a sense, the four noble truths reflect that because the first noble truth is really like the diagnosis of the ailment and suffering. And the second noble truth is a little bit like the cause of the ailment. And the third noble truth is really like recovering or being healed. And the fourth noble truth is like the medicine that heals.
We are at the stage of determining whether there is a problem, determining what ails us. And unless we fully understand the symptoms, we can’t, a cure is gonna be, or a course of medicine won’t be easily prescribed for us. But it is possible to heal the mind, mainly because it’s impermanent. That’s the only reason necessary. The mind is impermanent.
It only got to its current state through the law of cause and effect. Nothing else is required. And just as it required the law of cause and effect to get to its current state, it requires the law of cause and effect to get out of its current state. Right. So so far, we’ve been dealing with the suffering of suffering.
We need to really identify that. The suffering of suffering is negative feelings that we experience, whatever they are, whenever. And when they arise, well, that’s the suffering of suffering. That’s the physical suffering of suffering. That’s an external suffering of suffering, or this is an internal suffering of suffering, and so on.
But more subtle than those types of sufferings are what are called the suffering of change. And the suffering of change is, we can say oh, actually, suffering of suffering is really related to negative physical and mental feelings and everything that’s associated with them. In other words, the feelings only occur within our mental continuum and within the continuums of other beings. When those feelings are negative, either sensory or mental, then that’s the suffering suffering. But also included is everything that’s associated with them.
So even the objects upon which those feelings arise are regarded as the truth of suffering. The mind that experiences them is also the truth of suffering. Anyway, with that going into to that aspect. Now more subtle is the suffering of change, and the suffering of change see, I’m not really sure whether we should talk about this one. It’s almost better to remain just with what we’ve done because the suffering of change refers to our positive feelings that we experience at present.
They are called the suffering of change. Although the positive physical and mental feelings as they arise are also a type of suffering because they don’t remain. Because even when we have a positive physical feeling, it changes in a course of time to something that is no longer positive, no longer pleasant. So it is also regarded as a type of suffering or what is called the suffering of change because it is changed from the positive to the negative. So this we are completely immersed in.
Negative feelings we understand to be unpleasant and something to be overcome, but our positive feelings about things we often see to be really something to be pursued. But really when we investigate, we also begin to understand that, wait a minute. Yeah. The feelings, all the positive feelings I have about objects in time, they do change. And I become bored with things.
What initially has such promise? Then later I become bored with it. Oh, I’ve been there. I’ve done that. It looked impressive to begin with, but halfway through I thought, God, you know, I’ve heard this before, I’ve done this before, I bought one of them before and that positive feeling no longer is there.
And that’s a subtler level of suffering. And this we’re fully immersed in. It’s almost our bread and butter. It’s something that’s there day in and day out for us. It’s like if we buy something new, if we buy a new car, we think about it for months, and we finally go into the showroom, and there it is.
Just the color we want. And, you know, it’s got all the features we were we really wanted in a in a car. You know, the wheels are okay. The you know, it’s got leather seats. It’s got mahogany dash.
You know, it’s a cruise control. It’s automatic or just a manual that we wanted six years. And, you know, it’s got the five year warranty. It’s a hundred and fifty thousand k or whatever. And, you know, I got good terms on it.
You know, and the whole process makes me happy. I go in and I sign the check, I pay the money, and and we have a certain amount of happiness in relation to that object. We think about the object and there’s a certain glow. It’s almost with the object. We think about it.
You know, there’s we’re happy with it. You know, we like to touch it and open the doors and smell it. You know, we’re gonna leave the plastic on the seats for a month or, you know, and we you know, it’s just a source of happiness. When we think about it, when we look at it, when we smell it, when we touch it, when we listen to the sound of the motor, it’s hardly you know, we can hardly hear it. Oh, you know, we lift up the bonnet.
We wanna look inside it, and so on. This is worldly happiness, taking that as its object, that car. So just thinking about it gives us a positive mental feeling. However, in due course, it becomes problematic for us. We take it to the supermarket, someone backs into the back of it, leaves a scratch on it.
You know, it’s almost something we can’t bear. You know, we look at it and we almost gotta take it down to the panel beater straight away and get it taken out. Because, you know, we can see the metal underneath or whatever, the plastic underneath. And it becomes then when we look at the scratch, it becomes an object of our mental unhappiness. We can’t you know, it becomes almost unbearable for us or someone stole it.
We sit there just thinking about it. Every time we think about it, it makes us unhappy and so on. But anyway, we have it for six months. Have it for one year, then they bring out the latest model. And now when we think about it, it’s we start to see the scratches and, you know, there’s a doesn’t smell new anymore inside and stains on the seats and, so forth.
No longer does it give us that happiness that, it generated when we when it was new. So this is an indication that it’s the suffering of change. That object is regarded as the suffering of change because the feelings we generated by looking at it initially were worldly happiness. They were positive feelings. Now they’re getting towards neutral.
You know, two or three more years, they’re gonna be negative. The feelings are gonna be right down in a negative territory. We’re gonna almost be embarrassed to get in the car. We’ll be the ones that walk out to the car, the car park, and everyone else will be, you know, opening their cars from, you know, two hundred meters away, and we’ll be there. We’ll have we can’t even get the thing, you know, that won’t beep anymore, you know.
And we have to use the key to open it. And we’ll be almost embarrassed to see what let people see what we’re driving around in. We have to get rid of it. That object is still the same object. But once it generated mental happiness for us, now it’s beginning to develop mental unhappiness.
But really, we want mental happiness. We want to be happy internally, mentally all the time. But we invest a huge amount of time and effort into external objects as being, the source of mental happiness for us. But external physical objects, it’s gonna be difficult for them to carry the load of being a source of mental happiness for us. They’re not gonna be able to bear it.
They’re not gonna be able to sustain our our hopes. But this we see. This is not something that, you know, is in a sense hidden from us. We understand this so well. We buy new things.
We go out in the back shed and it’s full of things that we once, you know, they were shiny and, you know, we had such hope in them. Yeah. My happiness is gonna be with this object. And I spent thirty dollars on this thing. Now you can pick them up at ten.
And I went ahead and I invested money in that. It had a purpose, but it made me happy just to think about it then. Now I think about it. I can’t even leave it in the house. I gotta take it and store it in the backyard where no one can see it.
So this is indication that it’s, an object associated with the second level of suffering, the suffering of change. Suffering of change itself is the happiness of mind and body. And the objects that generate that are also really associated. They’re also the truth of suffering. And this we need to investigate.
We need to be happy. We need physical happiness. We need mental happiness. But the current mental and physical happiness that we experience tends to be limited to this type of happiness that changes again into unhappiness. So this is unsatisfactory.
Therefore, it’s associated with the truth of suffering. Of course, understanding the truth of suffering is not it’s not to be discussed or the purpose of discussing it is not to make us unhappy. It’s a little bit like if we had a disease and we went to the doctor. The doctor is not just telling us, oh, we’ve got, you know, you got this ailment in order to make us unhappy. Of course, doctor is telling us this so we understand what we’ve gotta do to get better again.
And in a sense, all the teachings of the Buddha are just there as instructions on how to overcome the our current state. This process does in a way involve some pain. It’s a little bit like having an operation in order to overcome something. But this, in fact, the fact that we have to undergo some trials in order to overcome our current state, In a way, shouldn’t come as a shock to us because up till now, we’ve tried everything to be happy. And in our relationships with others, let alone with our relationship with the things that we own or external physical objects, we try also with, especially with other beings in order to generate relationships that are going to create happiness for us.
But similarly, we are very much immersed in the suffering of change, also in relation to other people. New friends bring happiness. After a while, they start pointing at our faults to us. They’re no longer as we’ve been thinking about them makes us unhappy. We wanna we make new friends when they’re new.
Even thinking about them makes us happy. And some people some people really have the those special qualities whereby one’s always friends with them. They’re really quite special such people. Many others we’re friends with for a time and then then that’s it. They drift into becoming neutral.
We lose contact. We don’t know what’s happening with them. Others change from being friends to enemies. It’s also in that sense, other beings are not the source of our happiness, our real happiness. And anyway, they can’t they could never support that.
But often we there is a tendency for us to put that load onto other beings, And we really resent it if they if they, in a way, go against our trust in them or if in fact they start criticizing us in other words. When they praise us, they’re our friends. When they start criticizing us, they become our enemies. When they praise us, when we think about them, it makes us happy. If they start criticizing us and we think about them, even just thinking about them makes us unhappy.
This also is an indication that other beings are are not the source of our happiness. Anyway, just to summarize what what we’ve discussed tonight. Here, we’re discussing the four noble truths. Another four noble truths, we’re discussing the first, the truth of suffering. And the grossest level of the truth of suffering is really the negative feelings that we experience.
And they’re really suffering. When we have physical illness, we’re throwing up or whatever, it’s really just gross suffering that we’re experiencing. And then mental suffering. The most difficult thing we have to overcome is our mental suffering. But it’s impermanent, has causes those causes we can eliminate.
But to understand that takes a lot of thought and contemplation. But that’s on a grosser level. On a subtler level, even our positive feelings that we have are said to be a type of suffering because they change. So all the effort that we put into that second level tends to, in the end, result in unhappiness. Unhappiness.
In a sense, what this is saying is that we tend as humans to look in the wrong directions for unending happiness, the type of happiness that we really seek. So just the contaminated feelings that we have at present are are really not what we ultimately are seeking, but we need to understand that they’re the initially, the truth of suffering. They’re in fact the state from which we seek to emerge from, that allows us eventually to attain a state of, pure happiness, happiness that’s completely uncontaminated by the limitations that we currently experience. I just think, are there any further points that questions or anyone disagree with? This is too pessimistic.
It might be too pessimistic. It’s possible. Yeah. But from a Buddhist perspective, they would have followed the four noble truths to attain a, you know, to evolve or to get to a state outside of the limitations that we’re currently experiencing. The reason, I’m saying that is that everything is merely a product of the law of cause and effect.
Any result that’s achieved has to have a cause. We ourselves are merely the product of external and internal causation Completely. The soul I guess from the Buddhist point of view, the soul would be something like the mind itself. Within Buddhism, the mind is an unending continuum, has no beginning, has no end. That’s sort of like what I saw we said.
In a way, that’s true. In wanting to control things really comes from the sense of I itself, Gradually, yes. Yeah. Yep. Really in in disciplining the mind itself.
That’s right. That’s the foundation. It’s really but it’s discipline that’s coming through understanding, you know, seeing where different states of mind lead and so forth. Yeah. Yeah.
So Mhmm. What’s going on with the Yeah. With the cause. Yeah. Really, those two are really central, suffering itself and then the origin of suffering.
And then the the last week, probably the last two topics. Yep. Anyway, we’ll stop there. Was anyone sorry. Sorry?
Yes. I think so. Unless, yeah. I think so. Yep.
Alright. Well, we’ll do a short dedication. Dedication is really just to mentally dedicate anything positive, to the happiness of ourselves and other beings. The reason to do this the reason why we do this is to preserve what positive potential we generate and direct it at the best possible end that we can think of, our our own happiness and the happiness of other beings.