Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute introduction to Buddhism, Ven Jampa Ignyen walks students through the First and Second Noble Truths using a striking parable: an Indian king tries to cover his palace grounds in leather to avoid thorns, but a minister suggests cutting leather to fit his feet instead. This frames his central teaching: we blame external causes—other people, circumstances, genes—for our suffering and try to change the world, when the real work is internal. He traces why mental suffering persists in the West despite material comfort, examines our tendency to externalize blame, and explores what actually gives rise to negative feelings: ignorance and the law of causation. Concrete examples throughout—jealousy, boredom, attachment, aversion—anchor abstract Buddhist concepts to lived experience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 Intro to B 2001 05 21.mp3
UUID: 1cc24749-09ab-46fe-bffc-84ffec6141cb
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Introduction to Buddhism (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-05-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.7 minutes
Words: ~5,080
Is correct, and in fact, is a reasonably valid interpretation of how the world is. And superficially, there is a certain level of validity in the way that we think. But because it doesn’t actually, it’s not grounded in wisdom. And in fact, fundamentally, way we think is grounded in ignorance. Therefore, we tend to experience problems and dissatisfaction and unhappiness and so forth.
This all comes about because the ground from which our thinking emerges is not not valid. So this is very difficult for us to see anyway. This we need to investigate. And this, in fact, is beginning to merge with the second noble truth. Last week, talked about the first noble truth, which is the truth of dissatisfaction, how Our current experience is unsatisfactory.
The second noble truth is the origin of that dissatisfaction, where this dissatisfaction is coming from. So these two points are not easy at all. Even understanding our level of dissatisfaction at present is not easy. It’s not easy because actually we’re at the center of this experience, and it’s not even easy to see the nature of the center of our experience. What’s the nature of the eye that actually experiences the various emotions and thoughts and insights and ignorance and so forth that we experience day to day?
Not easy to see this at all. Not therefore, it’s not easy to see that are the levels of dissatisfaction that that we have. This we need, of course, to investigate. Sometimes it appears that actually we’re doing okay. Our current situation is is quite okay, and to talk too much about levels of dissatisfaction is just gonna make us unhappier, and it’s not a very skillful thing to do.
But, of course, to do this, we’re investigating our current experience is to find out what the bottom line is. What is exactly our current state? And if there’s a problem, how do we overcome it? Of course, if there’s no problem, then we don’t have to to be concerned in the least about, what we may need to do to overcome this. So initially, the Buddha taught the truth of suffering or the truth of unsatisfactoriness in order to, fundamentally, to get us to check on what our current experience is and whether it is unsatisfactory.
And, of course, within that, there’s different levels of, what is unsatisfactory. And generally, for ourselves, we can survive okay day to day, and, you know, we can provide enough resources for our ongoing existence. And within the span of our life, we can probably do reasonably when we check around it. What we have to go on is how other people are doing and if we can match what they’re doing, then we’re all we’re doing roughly okay. But, of course, our lifespan is limited and we have to face death, and we’re not sure about what comes after death.
So even though we can patch things up day to day, still on the in the long term, the fact that we have to experience death is unsatisfactory. It’s something that we need to think in-depth about because because these topics are so important and the things that we’re gonna face in in future at some point that’s definite, we need as much preparation as possible in order to see us through those types of experience. That’s because we need the better we are prepared, the better that we can maintain a steady and un unruffled, unagitated state during the death process and so on. So really, in a sense, the truth of suffering is dealing with death itself, that in fact this death, our pending death is what is unsatisfactory. We shouldn’t in fact have to die.
That’s what’s initially unsatisfactory about it. We shouldn’t have to go through this process of aging and sickness and so forth. All of these things we tend to accept as given, but really they’re unsatisfactory. From a Buddhist perspective, we’ve been through these processes many times before. We’ve died many times in the past.
But when we go through the death process, because the mind, the grosser levels of mind dissolve into the subtler levels, right down to the subtlest level mind possible, and then reemerge from that very subtle state and become grosser again. It’s not easy for us, not easy for the trained mind to remember the gross minds of a previous existence. So there is a tendency for us to think that we didn’t exist in the past. We don’t remember, so therefore it didn’t exist. But as the Tibetans say, just because we don’t see something doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist.
And it’s rather ironic that we often sit and think that this is my first existence, that my memories go back so far and I can’t remember before that. And we discount the possibility of having existed previously. But on the other hand, if we look at the law of cause and effect, then the law of cause and effect will tend to establish that previous life must have existed because we of the way that we exist at present. If we really examine how we exist at present, especially on the level of subtle cause and effect, especially on the level of internal cause and effect, then it’s possible to begin to establish that there must have been a preceding life and a life preceding that and so forth to explain our experience in the present life. And that from this life, our existence will continue again.
And that in fact, the mind itself is a beginningless continuum that has no end. It has no beginning, has no end. But all at present we can see is this one short lifetime, maybe thirty years, forty years, fifty years, and so on. We just have this small amount that we remember. And even in this small amount that we have, it’s unsatisfactory.
Even our experience within that is we haven’t as yet found what we wanna find. But in a sense, that is not something just particular to ourselves. In fact, it’s quite universal. And in fact, when we go around and we talk with other beings, we see that this experience is quite universal. And not only universal to humans, but animals as well.
We can see that animals experience something similar to ourselves. But, of course, all we have to go on is this short period, this period of, say, you know, a number of years. And it’s not easy if we try and expand this beyond one lifetime. It’s it becomes difficult to really discern. Did I live before?
We’ve often heard about people claiming that they were alive when the pharaohs in Egypt were alive or they were reincarnated as this in the past and so forth. Here we need to keep an open mind and examine to the extent that we can examine these things. But here we’re dealing initially with the first noble truth, and that’s the noble truth of things being unsatisfactory. And that we can see even in the period that we do remember that things are unsatisfactory. And what’s unsatisfactory, what’s immediately unsatisfactory for us is our current our current feelings.
Whatever we’re feeling in the present moment is really unsatisfactory. That’s really what we’re contending with, whatever our feelings are. And our feelings are either physical or mental. The physical ones are a little easier to bear. The mental feelings are a little bit harder to bear.
But if we can set things right on a mental level, again, the physical ones are easy to bear. Just setting things right on a physical level doesn’t mean to say that it’s easy to bear the mental feelings, mental feelings of pain and so forth. That’s true, isn’t it? The mental is a little bit more difficult than the physical in general. And especially in the West where there’s so many ways that we can overcome physical pain.
And in fact in the West, to other cultures, we move around almost like gods. We can fly, we cruise around on the roads in air-conditioned comfort. A lot of the physical suffering that existed in previous times has been eliminated, at least temporarily, in our society. But it’s the mental suffering that still exists for us. And sometimes by removing so much physical suffering, it seems that our mental suffering becomes even more difficult, becomes even harder to bear.
So really this mental feeling of unhappiness, mental pain, and so forth, this is really what the meaning of unsatisfactoriness is. And within that, we have many different types, feeling that we’re not gonna achieve what we want to achieve. Our time is short, it’s getting shorter. I wanna do this, I wanna go there. That’s really a type of mental pain.
Or the feeling associated with those thoughts is really a type of mental pain. That’s unsatisfactory. That’s the truth of suffering. And the thought that I’ll have to die and I’ll have to give up everything that I’ve got together in this life, That’s also a type of that thought, it’s an accurate thought. We do have to give these things up, but the feeling associated with it is negative.
It’s mental pain. So the feeling we’re gonna be separated from other beings that we want to be close to, that has an associated feeling, and that feeling is mental pain. We have so many types of mental pain. We we don’t have to do anything and they’re there. And we sit down and just thinking about people.
We’re jealous of these people, all those people. We think about them. Oh, yeah. They used to make fun of me. Or they I really saw that they had this quality.
I really wish I had that quality. I’ll never actually be as good as that person in this lifetime. And so on. We have these thoughts of jealousy towards others. And along with that, there’s a feeling of mental pain and so on.
All of I have many, many different types of thoughts. They just automatically, they keep coming up. So the mental pain that’s associated with those is all the truth of suffering. Even boredom, just, you know, boredom often has an associated mental feeling of indifference or a neutral type of feeling. That’s also unsatisfactory.
We just get bored with things. So we gotta go out and entertain ourselves. Even that’s a type of suffering. It’s a subtler type, but it’s also a type of dissatisfaction. And sometimes it would seem to us, oh, we can’t.
How can we possibly overcome these states? They’ve been with me from this from when I was two years old, can remember. Remember I had thoughts like that. You know, even when I was very young, I used to get depressed from time to time thinking about this, thinking about that. I had them even when I was very young, these negative mental feelings.
Sometimes it seems that it’s not possible to overcome them. And in fact, we’ve had them from that time up until now and everything that we try, going to another country, getting an education, if we try drugs, we try alcohol, we try all sorts of things. Everything that people recommend to us, we try. But it doesn’t actually act as an antidote to these negative mental feelings. And on top of the negative mental feelings, we also have negative physical feelings, which often lead to negative mental feelings.
And tries we made, it’s very difficult for us to push them back, to get rid of them. Them. And in fact, they seem to be coming up from right from the very central core of ourselves, these feelings. And, of course, that’s where they are. They’re right in the very center.
Anyway, we need to investigate this. If that’s not how things are, then we we need to throw that out. What we need is things as they are, because it’s only understanding things as they actually are, our situation as it actually is, that’s potentially gonna help us. So in this regard, the Buddha mentioned the truth of suffering. And it’s really our feelings of suffering which is the grossest level of suffering.
It’s our negative feelings. And then in a sense, everything that’s associated with those becomes the truth of suffering. Any object just by looking at it, a feeling of suffering arises, then that’s the truth of suffering, even the object itself. We look at other people. We look at other attractive people.
We may have feelings of attachment arise. We may have thoughts of attachment arise. They’re associated with feelings as well. So that’s mental suffering. So this process occurs a great deal continuously without much respite.
In fact, from the beginning of this life up until this point, we’ve never had like a respite. Sometimes we have moments of happiness unexplained, it just occurs. Sometimes it endures for a bit longer. But even when we’re happy, the thought arises, oh, this is not really the happiness that I’m looking for. It’s okay.
But it’s not really what I want. So these thoughts occur. I mean, and this is how it is. So this is the the truth of suffering or the truth of dissatisfaction. Sometimes if we use the word suffering, it sounds like we mean, you know, someone that’s undergoing just gross suffering.
But often our even when we we have mental pain, we don’t necessarily show it. It doesn’t appear to other people. But even the fact that we have mental pain that occurs intermittently, sometimes it endures for a long time, but it’s always impermanent. The fact that it’s impermanent, first is something to rejoice in. It only occurs moment by moment by moment.
It’s impermanent. It’s momentary. Being momentary establishes the fact that it has a cause. If something is impermanent, momentary, it necessarily is the result of something. There’s nothing impermanent in the world that’s not the result of in of something, not the result of its cause.
Similarly, our feelings, no matter what they are, whether they’re neutral, positive, or negative, they’re the result of a cause. They have to have a cause. It’s impossible for a feeling to to arise without having a cause. So our negative feelings, whenever they arise, they have a cause, and the cause is similar to the result. Just as in the world, no matter what we look at, everything has a cause.
Everything that appears to our eye has a cause. Everything that we hear has a cause. Everything that we smell has a cause. Everything that we touch, all of these things have causes, even down to the subtlest possible level and beyond. All have a cause.
Maybe they have one main, generally they have one main substantial cause and many conditions that come together in order to produce a result. It’s true, isn’t it? Everything in this room is a result of something, including ourselves. True? Absolutely.
We’re completely pervaded by the law of cause and effect, aren’t we? Is our mind pervaded by the law of cause and effect? Or is it something adventitious that just arises without any causes? What about a physical body? Is it a product of causes and conditions?
What’s the cause of our current physical body at this moment? Well, the easiest the easiest thing to say about what is the cause of our current physical body at this moment is the previous moment of our physical body. It’s true, isn’t it? So, body of this moment is caused by the physical body of the previous moment. It was caused by the body of the moment before that.
It was caused by the moment before that. So, there’s a continuum of our physical body, isn’t there? And within that, each of the organs has its own continuum, doesn’t it? We may have lost the continuum of our tonsils. If anyone’s had their tonsils out, they had them up until the age of then they’re finished.
Appendix is the same and so on. But our physical body is the result of a causal process that began with our parents, the joining of the egg and the sperm of our parents. Prior to that, our physical body didn’t exist, did it? But even then, the genetic material in our parents existed, which was a cause of our current physical body. True?
And if we go back into our grandparents, then their genetic material gave rise to the genetic material of our parents and so forth. So we can see that there’s a physical continuum going back for our current physical body. And the way that our physical body exists, at least physically, is due to this substantial continuum of atoms and molecules. It’s true, isn’t it? Our current physical body is a product of causes and conditions.
Similarly, our mind, our mind as it exists, is a product of causes and conditions. Our feelings fundamentally are a product of causes and conditions. So whatever we feel at present is due to prior causes and conditions. What was put in place in the previous moment and in the previous moment before that and so forth. That’s true, isn’t it?
Is there anyone disagree with that? Are our feelings beyond the law of causation? They are. They’re a result, aren’t they? It’s hard to see where the cause is for our feelings, but we can accept that they’re a result of a causal process.
So in a sense, this is we’re dealing here with the second noble truth, the cause of the origin of suffering. When we look at the grossest level of what suffering is, it’s really like our current negative feelings. And then questioning where do these negative feelings come from? Where does this experience come from? Where does the mental pain that we experience come from?
Does it come from outside of ourselves, for instance? We tend to think it does come from other people. It’s other people that are always causing us problems and that gives us mental pain, isn’t it? I mean, that’s how we tend to blame other beings for how we feel. If it wasn’t for other people, I’d be happy, left up to my own devices.
That’s often how we feel, isn’t it? It appears that way to us. And in fact, all the enemies that we have in the world, Who we tend to blame for our negative feelings are external. They tend we see our enemies as being external, don’t we? And it’s those beings that create pain for us, lack of joy.
We tend to see our enemies as being outside of ourselves and other beings. Is that true? Or We do naturally tend to think in this way, and it’s so deeply ingrained in us that it’s almost obvious. And if we don’t think that way, I mean, it’s just obvious that we think in that way. But, actually, from the perspective of the Buddha, other beings are not the enemy.
Other beings are not the cause of our unhappiness or negative mental feelings. It just appears that way. Actually, they’re not. We are hooked on thinking that they are the enemy. We tend to think quite naturally that whenever anything happens, that it’s coming from other people, that the negative feelings that we’re experiencing in the present moment are being generated by this other other person.
They’re telling me to do something. I don’t wanna do it. They’re the problem. They’re yelling at me. Why are they doing that?
Why are they yelling at me? That’s creating a problem for me. I’m getting impatient myself. I got these negative mental feelings. And then all the other things, they criticized me.
They said I was, you know, I had this fault or I had that fault. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t the right size. Didn’t have the right qualifications. They stopped me from progressing.
I didn’t get the job. I didn’t get the appointment. I didn’t do as well in school as I should have because of the teachers and so forth. I mean, when we stop and think about where we’re identifying the cause of our negative mental feelings, generally, it’s external. Generally, we’re looking around and even from a young age, we’re identifying the cause of our feelings as being external to ourselves.
Because that’s how it appears. It appears ninety well, it appears a hundred percent to be that. We’re almost convinced, absolutely convinced. In fact, it’s not almost. We are absolutely convinced that the cause of our negative feelings is external to ourselves.
We don’t have to look far. We can just think about it, other beings. Sometimes we blame ourselves for certain things, but if we take that back far enough, we’ll generally find someone else to blame for the fact that we’re blaming ourselves. Okay. I got this this bad habit because of my mother.
She beat me when I was young. It’s even a defense in court and so forth. Or my father, my father drank too much alcohol. I developed this resentment of him and that’s created problems ever since. Or my uncle used to beat me or my teacher used to beat me or and so forth.
When we look at the negative mental feelings that have arisen even in this lifetime and where we think the problem is, we generally tend to pinpoint the causes being outside of ourselves. It’s society in general, it’s particular members of society, or it’s particular situation that I’m in, and so on. The world in general. The genes that I inherited from my parents, they’re to blame. God, if I now I’m condemned.
I’m condemned to, you know, looking like my father or looking like my mother. They’re the why do they have to look like that? Now I have to look out like them. Or why do they have those traits? Now I tend to have those traits myself.
I’m blaming. We tend to blame others. And in a sense, the second noble truth is is just it’s saying stop and think or stop and check. Is the cause of our negative mental feelings external to ourselves or not. In one sense, if they’re external to ourselves, there’s very little we can do.
If in fact the nature of the world is how we think it is, there’s very little that we can do about it. It’s a bit like the that parable of a king in India who had this problem that when he’d walk around the grounds, he would, from time to time, tread on a thorn. And so he he gathered a few of his ministers together and said, what can I do? And one of them said, well and then he said to them the king said to the ministers, look, I want you to go and cover the entire palace grounds in leather so I don’t stand on anything sharp, so I can protect my feet. This is how we are.
This is our approach. And one of the ministers said, sire, far better you get a small amount of leather and cut it to the shape of your feet and then tie it with some thongs to your feet, and this would achieve the same end. At present, we tend to think that the source of our unhappiness is coming from an external cause. And the only way that we can survive and maintain a certain degree of happiness is by subduing as much as possible the external world. Almost our approach is we have to cover the entire earth in leather to protect ourselves.
This is not our exclusive idea. Anywhere in the world we can see this. You know, the wars that go on thinking that in order to live with a degree of happiness, you’ve almost got to annihilate the enemy. And the enemy is seen to be external. Actually, what the Buddha is saying in this regard is that the enemy is never external.
There’s no no such thing as an external enemy. But then the question arises then, but what is the source of these negative mental feelings, negative physical feelings? Because in a sense, if we can just deal with those and all this vast variety, when we say negative mental feelings, there’s such a range and diverse diversity of these types of feeling that it’s beyond enumeration. When we just sit and and thoughts emerge from within our mental continuum, there’s so many varieties of feeling that emerge as well. Simply being aware of them without being concerned by them is a great thing.
It’s really essential to begin to develop that. And in general, we can do that to a certain extent. We’re patient with our situation and what we experience. We need to develop that even more. Now anyway, the second noble truth, the truth of suffering.
So here, this is the question of where do these feelings come from and all of their diversity. So this isn’t easy. Because even the feelings themselves, they manifest for us, it’s hard for us even to be aware fully of all the, you know, the mental process as it’s unfolding even superficially. We have a feeling and it’s not even clear what the what the object of that that feeling is. What what’s appearing to that our awareness which is experiencing that feeling?
Sometimes we wake up in the morning, we have this feeling about something. We don’t it’s probably coming from the dream we had. We don’t even remember the dream, but we got this feeling. Similarly, we often carry feelings through the day. We’ll have a variety of feelings arise.
We may not even be aware of the object in which in relation to which those feelings are arising. And we tend to take our feelings as almost being given that that’s how they should be, that that’s just how it is. And we tend to identify that’s me. That’s me and my feelings. And almost as if we take our feelings to be ourselves.
But it’s not hard to understand why we do that because feelings are just so central to us. And so here, just being aware of even gross feelings is not easy and the the objects that that feeling is focused on. But then questioning where does the feeling itself come from is not easy. We have all manner of different minds arising, and the mind works very rapidly and very precisely all the time. It’s just that we’re not often aware.
We’re inattentive to what’s happening. So it’s not easy for us to look back and even begin to see where our feelings may be sourced. What gives rise to these feelings? So from a Buddhist perspective, where these feelings are really coming from, the roots, the root cause is does anyone have an idea about that? Where our feelings are actually emerging from?
In a way, is it a conscious process? It’s not really something that we can consciously direct, is it? Because if we could consciously direct it, we would only have positive feelings. Yes. That’s true.
We can. We can change our current feeling. External stimulus are conditions, but is that where the thoughts themselves are coming from? The feelings themselves are emerging from? That’s right.
It’s not easy for us to see this process. There’s a saying that, well, there was an incident that occurred once. There was a king in Western India, a place called Bactria. He was actually said to be a Greek king called Menander. And he had a there was a famous Buddhist monk whom he used to consult on various things called Nagasena.
And one day he was asking Nagasena about what were some of the things that the Buddha had done which were difficult. And Nagasena said, well, there is one thing that the Buddha did which is very difficult to do. And then the king asked, well, what what was that? And so Nagasena said, sire, if you went down to the ocean, king, if you went down to the ocean, here talking about the Arabian Sea, which is to the west of on the west coast of India. If you went down there around the mouth of the Indus river and you took a mouthful of salt water, could you tell from where that water came from?
Would you be able to say that, ah, yes. Of that mouthful of water, there was some that came down the Indus river. There was some that actually came from the Sutlej and some from the Beas and so forth, and then name the different rivers from which that water came. And the king, of course, said, well, no. That would be extremely difficult to do, to be able to taste a bit of water and be able to tell where it actually came from.
Just like that, then the capacity to look at the current state of mind and be able to determine, oh, that is feeling, that’s discrimination, that’s intention, that is attachment, that is aversion, That is compassion, and so forth. To be able to distinguish the different mental factors is something that the Buddha has been able to do, but which is extremely difficult to do. So that was given as an example of something difficult. Similar for ourselves, the mind is very difficult to comprehend, to be able to look at and discern how it’s actually functioning and what is there. Although, we know these states are there.
We have feelings. We have discrimination. We have intention. We have many different mental states. So, therefore, the truth of the origin of suffering has got to do with where our feelings are emerging from, and there’s different levels of subtlety of the states from which they’re emerging.
But fundamentally, the root is ignorance, that our feelings at the present, whether they’re negative feelings, positive feelings, or neutral, they’re all emerging from ignorance. Ignorance just means not knowing. Ignorance is just a simple it’s like the passive state of not knowing something. It’s not actively misconstruing something, but it’s just not knowing is said to be the meaning of ignorance. Or in Tibetan, the term is.