Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Jampa Ignyen introduces the intermediate scope of the Lamrim by showing why even a fortunate human rebirth is insufficient. Using vivid analogies—a condemned prisoner granted temporary reprieve but still awaiting execution, a criminal receiving brief relief from torture—he argues that without genuine understanding of saṃsāra’s inescapable control, we solve nothing fundamental. He walks through the Four Noble Truths as the essential key to developing a deep disenchantment with cyclic existence that makes liberation meaningful. The talk includes an extended narrative of the Buddha’s enlightenment and journey to Varanasi to teach the five monks, anchoring abstract doctrine in concrete story. Pitched at practitioners ready to move beyond concern for better rebirths toward liberation itself.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 2001 05 10 LR.mp3
UUID: 0ac27fe7-dea7-4e07-aaba-2d33c4b98db2
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Lam Rim 2001 Month 04-06 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-05-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~5,494
Everyone’s had a chance to read the section? I take that as a yes. Okay. So now we’re starting with the intermediate section. So having comprehended the lower scope section, we now can easily progress to the intermediate scope, the middling scope.
And so last week, we did a bit of a summary of the lower scope. And here today, we start then with the medium scope. The lower scope is sometimes it seems a little bit superficial or hardly a religious practice. But, really, the lowest scope practices are the foundation for the intermediate scope practices, and the intermediate scope practices are the foundation for the great scope practices. So in a sense, one’s a key to the next, and the next is a key to the one following.
So unless we can understand what lower scope the lowest scope practices are, then we really have no foundation to enter the intermediate scope practices. And also that means if we don’t understand what the common lower scope practices are, we have no foundation for the common intermediate scope practices. So, of course, in brief, the lower scope practices are engaging in the seven or the ten virtuous actions that serve as a foundation for attaining a rebirth in the higher realms. So that is that is a human, a demigod, or a god. So this we need for our practice.
We need as much leisure as possible, as many conducive conditions as we can pile one upon the other. We need a long life. We need to be reborn in places where wars are few, that the government is not too oppressive, where poverty and famine and so forth are not too frequent. And, also, we need things like the teachings of a Buddha to have spread there, for them to be extent and not have died away. And we need the support of other beings around us.
Many conditions have to come together. These conditions we’re establishing in the common lower scope practices by the practice of the ten virtues. Really, we’re practicing the seven virtues, the three virtues of of body and the four of speech. On top of that, we’re also trying to practice the three of mind, but the three of mind are not so easy. So that’s non-avarice or non-covetousness, which means not being stingy, miserly, and so on.
And the second is not having ill will towards others, not holding ill will towards others. So diminishing that as much as possible. And then also overcoming wrong view. So part of our practice here is really overcoming wrong view. Overcoming wrong view means eliminating the worst types of view that go to establishing our world view.
At present, we have a particular way of looking at the world, of interpreting the world. And the way that we interpret the world is not necessarily valid. We have to work towards developing a valid view of how we exist and how others exist. And this process of developing correct view enables us to overcome ignorance, which is not quite the opposite of valid view, but they’re quite similar. Meaning, wrong view and ignorance can be quite similar, but they’re not exactly the same thing.
So here we need these ten. We need the ten positive actions in practicing the lower scope practices, but especially eliminating the wrong physical and verbal actions. By doing them them alone, that helps to train our mind. But the Prātimokṣa vows and so forth are designed primarily to eliminate wrong actions of body and speech. The bodhisattva vows and the tantric vows are more directed towards training our mind itself.
Right. So dealing then with the practices of the medium scope. So then, as Pabongka Rinpoche says, that this really involves thinking about the general suffering of saṃsāra and think about thinking about its specific sufferings. So even the practices for lower scope are very important. They form the foundation for taking a future human rebirth and then a human rebirth beyond that.
And in fact, by practicing virtue at present, we’re setting down karmic imprints for future higher rebirth. All whenever we’re strongly practicing virtue, we’re setting down in a sense white karma, white imprints that will serve as a foundation for taking a future human rebirth. Whenever we’re engaged in negative actions, we’re laying down black imprints for future rebirth in the lower realms. So we have to minimize one. We have to minimize the black actions, course.
But that in itself is not gonna be sufficient in order to establish our ultimate happiness or our unending, uncontaminated happiness. Because otherwise, it’s a little bit like gaining a human rebirth is a little bit like being an animal in a in a slaughter yard who is just waiting for their turn, to be dragged out to the axe, we’re sitting there. Gaining another human rebirth is like gaining a couple of days reprieve. We’re not gonna be taken to the to be slaughtered a few days earlier. We’re gonna be saved for a few days.
Our situation is really something like that. Because even taking a new human rebirth after this one is only a temporary measure. It’s a measure that gains us some further space to practice, but we’re still in a sense within the grasp of the lord of death. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t generate a future human rebirth. Absolutely, we need that.
But we also understand that if anyone if we look at the the wheel of life Oh, we got a picture, haven’t we? Then we can see the lord of death with his claws coming over the top of the everyone see the claws coming over the top and the claws at the bottom of the wheel. That’s an indication that the lord of death is completely in control of this wheel. And that although we may be able to generate conditions that whereby we take future human rebirth, we’re still within the clutches of the lord of death. We haven’t gotten beyond the lord of death.
And the lord of death in a sense controls our destiny. Samsāra is really what’s contained within that wheel. Samsāra is cycling cyclic existence, and so we exist in a way within that wheel, within the confines of the lord of death. So we need to think of this regularly, but we need to think of it very skillfully as well. This is not a meant to be a way of making us unhappy.
In fact, we need as much happiness, worldly happiness as we can generate. We need to be light, flexible, and as happy as possible because this is a way that we can really generate positive karma, positive actions, meritorious actions. The unhappier we are, the more difficult it is to generate positive actions. We don’t feel like doing very much. And if we actually get our to say some mantras, we are pretty distracted and we’re, you know, we’re not feeling too happy and so on.
Far better that we’re happy and do some practice. We need to be as happy as possible. As one lama in South India, Buddharakita used to say that if you’re not happy, at least pretend you’re happy. There’s some benefit in that. When we think about the the wheel of life and we think that we’re actually in there, we’re in the human section at present.
We’re there, you know, in the southern continent, in this southern planet, in this region of the galaxy. We’re born as human. And this is a planet to which the Buddha has actually come two and a half thousand years ago. And we we actually have a precious human rebirth, but it’s impermanent. And the lord of death is still potentially controlling our destiny because our death is uncontrolled.
And the lord of death is really our uncontrolled death in this lifetime. So thinking about the intermediate scope is beginning to think beyond the next life and beyond the life after that. It’s really beginning to think about the fact that actually just the gaining a future higher rebirth doesn’t mean to say that I’m beyond the lord of death, that I’ve attained the deathless. That in fact, we’re still within the grasp of the lord of death. And in fact, this was the very issue which the Buddha took, which the Buddha stated when he left the palace and renounced the palace and all the the pleasures of the palace that he sought the deathless state to be beyond the grasp of the lord of death.
So the intermediate scope is basically realizing that we need to attain our ultimate benefit, not just a temporary benefit of a future human rebirth. If our goal ends there, then we’re the least level practitioner. We’ve at least got some spiritual practice because we’re thinking about our next life. Whereas, if we just thought about this life, we don’t even have a spiritual practice. We are a little bit like the animals in the fields that basically just think about this life.
And just by thinking about this life, even the animals are on our would be on our level. They do, and they can often do a better job than we do. But humans have the capacity to conceive of a future life, to conceive actually correctly conceive of how we exist. And having this capacity, we should at least strive to be a lowest scope practitioner and see that we must also dev devote energy and time to our future life and the life beyond that and the life beyond that. But still just creating positive actions for that alone, again, is not really, it’s not gonna, excuse me, establish our ultimate purpose.
Right. So this text by Pabongka Rinpoche is really excellent because it does summarize. The entire teachings are given by J. Rinpoche in the great Lamrim. It simplifies them and puts them in in words that are much easier for us to understand and fills and is full of illustrations and examples that we can appreciate, that we can connect with.
So as he says, as I’ve already said, when you cultivate the part of the lamb rim shared with a small scope and uphold the ethics of abandoning the ten non virtues, you will get a rebirth in the upper realms and be temporarily free from the sufferings of the lower realms. So exactly that. We’re temporarily free. But this is insufficient. Suppose a criminal has been condemned to death, people go and see a man of influence for him, and for a few days, he no longer receives other minor forms of punishment.
That is, he’s not flogged or burnt or hot wax is poured over him and so forth. But he is still not released from the order of execution. Similarly, one should we should similarly, one would not be free of saṃsāra forever. In other words, if we gain a reprieve, which is like gaining another human rebirth, then that has a temporary benefit. And if we’re on death row and we had friends go and get the governor to give us another three months or six months, that’d be good, but it would not necessarily produce the result we really strive for, that is of overcoming the execution order.
So in other words, we have to deal with overcoming overcoming saṃsāra itself in order to overcome the lord of death. And as it says in engaging in the deeds of a bodhisattva, you should go again and again to upper realms and enjoy so much bliss. But when you die, you fall to the suffering of the lower realms where the suffering is unbearable and lasting. So even though we’re reborn in the higher realm such as a human, and even as a human, we enjoy many things. Or even in fact, if we’re reborn as a an asura, say as a demigod or as a divine being, as a god, because the cause is limited and contaminated, the result is gonna be gonna exhaust after a certain period.
And then beyond that, we can take rebirth, in the lower realms, in the hells, as animals and so on. And as he says, in other words, you are certain to go to a lower realm when you run out of the right throwing karma or the right projecting karma. If you wanna stop the flow of suffering for good, you must be free from saṃsāra for good. So in other words, we must develop thoughts of learning, of yearning for liberation. And there are two ways of of doing this.
That is about thinking about the four noble truths or thinking about the twelve fold set of links, which describe how Samsāra functions. So if we understand these, then it’s not difficult to understand what Samsāra is. We do understand what Samsāra is, and we’re able to develop a yearning to get beyond it. Without understanding the four noble truths, then it’s not possible to understand saṃsāra because saṃsāra is contained in the first two truths, the truth of suffering and the truth of origin of suffering. And the truth of suffering and the origin of suffering are then expanded into the twelve links.
And those twelve links then describe exactly what saṃsāra is. So then, of course, as has been mentioned before, Samsāra refers to the five contaminated aggregates or the five aggregates derived from contamination. And as says that the seventh Dalai Lama, Kelsang Gyatso, stated that Samsāra is one’s continuum of rebirth into the contaminated aggregates. It’s slightly different, but it’s the meaning reduces to the same thing. One is liberated from Samsāra when one has broken the continuity of being reincarnated and being reborn under the power of karma and affliction.
Until we understand what karma and affliction are, then we won’t develop aspiration or a yearning to be liberated from them. It’s not easy to comprehend them because they’re very subtle. When we look inside and try to perceive karma and the afflictions, then it’s almost as if they melt away. It’s almost as if, they’re no longer there. So this area, this coming to understand the four noble truths is of great importance for us.
They’re the central issue that we need to deal with. And, again, as the Buddha himself stated once when he was with a group of monks in a in a grove of trees, in a grove of trees. And he picked up a handful of leaves and he said to the monks, which is more, the leaves in my hand or the leaves in the forest? And the monk said the leaves in in your hand is much less than the leaves in your forest leaves in the forest. And the Buddha then reflected so too, is what I teach.
What I teach is like what is in, my hand. Hand. The limit of all noble things is like the leaves in the forest, but what you need to understand is small. We don’t need to understand everything in order to overcome overcome Samsāra. The leaves in the Buddha’s hand were the four noble truths.
So it’s these four truths, that are absolutely essential. But just knowing that they’re truths and knowing that there’s four of them is not gonna help us. We have to know where they are. You know, is this a noble truth? And we can go around the room.
Is this a truth? Is this one of the four truths? Is this one of the four truths? Is this one of the four truths? And so on.
Where are they? Can we see them? Can we smell them? Unless we gain a clearer and clearer understanding of what the four truths are, then it’s not gonna be possible that the four truths really help us. It’s a little bit like we can carry around a book like Pabongka Rinpoche’s book of the entire stages and parts to enlightenment, and that the book is very valuable.
But at the time of death, it’s not gonna be much use to us. We can’t take it with us. Even if we’ve memorized it, we spend the next twenty years going through it page after page, and we manage to memorize the entire book so we can take it with us. We could. Still, if we don’t know the meaning of the words, it’s still not no use at all to us.
Even if we know the meaning of the words and, you know, we can clearly comprehend them and explain them to others, unless we practice them, still they’re no use to us. Even the meaning is no use to us. So we really have to penetrate the words themselves. Even having the word Samsāra, the four noble truths, and so on are only words. The meaning that lies behind them so that we can say, if someone says the four noble truth or these are what the four noble truths are, where are they?
Oh, there’s the truth of suffering. There’s the truth of origin. There’s cessation. There’s the path. We should be able to identify them.
Otherwise, we’re not repaying the kindness of the Buddha because the Buddha only came this planet in order to teach. And what he taught fundamentally is the four noble truths. And he didn’t teach the four noble truths for us to memorize them or or just to have them sit sitting in books, we really need to uncover the meaning of the four truths. So here it’s stated that by understanding the four noble truths, it’s possible to develop some sense of disappointment with Samsāra. Now present, we’re we’re pretty much looking in the other other direction.
We have great hope in Samsāra. Most of our hope is in Samsāra and we can see it. And for the rest of the world, most of their hope is in saṃsāra. That somehow saṃsāra can be perfected. That science is gonna be able to come up with something that, you know, will freeze bodies and will eventually be able to, you know, regrow a person or now, in fact, this group in Adelaide are producing pigs with human genes in them so that we can replace organs and with pig’s organs, poor pig, but we can take their organs and replace our malfunctioning parts and continue to live and so on.
This is all an attempt really to extend saṃsāra. Within a in a limit, it’s okay. Within a certain limit, it’s okay because, actually, we need to be healthy and, you know, if we can main maintain and prolong our life, it’s okay. But, actually, that sort of practice is probably not even a smaller scope practice. It’s more like a a mundane this life practice, isn’t it?
But, actually, most of what we do is focused on this life, is focused on developing and extending our current life. Not necessarily necessarily to practice Dharma. It’s in order to continue to experience the pleasures of this life. Do things that we feel like doing, that we’re comfortable in doing, that we enjoy doing. But if if that is our main main goal, then it’s simply not even a lowest scope practice.
So that’s not to say that we shouldn’t be happy and experience pleasurable things in this life or at least attain some level of contaminated worldly happiness because we need that in order to function. But we certainly also need to think about our next life. And here also, we need to think about overcoming even all contaminated future lifetimes, all lifetimes that are similar to this lifetime. Now really to actually think about this, we’ve jumped so many steps. We jump a million steps probably.
They’re actually getting to the intermediate scope, we’ve probably jumped far too many steps. There’s probably an extra, you know, five hundred thousand steps we need to take there, little ones. Because otherwise, the full force of then the lower scope is not we don’t really understand that. So just entering the intermediate scope, sort of it doesn’t make much of an impression to us. And that’s one of the reasons for that is because the steps one by one leading to the conclusions of why we need to practice the lower scope and all those step by step reasoning, step by step common sense whereby we can establish beyond any doubt that we need to practice intermediate scope practices are not established.
So often we have to go back and then think through the issues one by one, really at the point where we actually are present. But if we’re jumping ahead quite a lot here. But the reason things don’t impress us in a text is often due to this, the fact that we’ve we’ve jumped many steps and we don’t fully understand the the importance of of the words that are stated here. So that’s why people spend twenty, thirty years meditating on the Lamrim. You know, every day you read one page.
You spend all day meditating on the one page or spend the entire week doing one page to really gain some so that it sinks in a little bit. It’s not just sitting on the surface. Because if it’s just sitting on the surface, it’s like a bit of gold dust on on the road. First rain comes along, it’s washed away. So even though the words are very important, and they’re following a line of thought going back to the time of the Buddha that came to Tibet via via Atisha that was expanded by Je Tsongkhapa, again summarized by Pabongka Rinpoche.
Still, even though the words are invaluable, if they only sit on the surface of our mind, then they’re not that useful. Not that we it’s hard for those words then to change our mind itself. And that’s really the purpose of Dharma is to change our minds, change our current mind from how it is to a more dharmic mind. A more dharmic mind really is a mind that’s more infused with common lower scope practices and then common intermediate scope practices. Practices.
Because it’s not easy for us because when we go out and we’re involved in things in the world, then most people are just involved in things for this life. And if you talk about religion, then people begin to think, oh, god. You know, you believe in religion or is it much benefit in any of that? Or and often people don’t talk very much about it. We almost get embarrassed to talk about it.
Some people will think you’re a little bit strange if you talk about future lives or So for that reason, many Tibetan lamas when they go to the west, they say, it’s very nondarmic. The west is very nondarmic. They say, much nondharma exists in the west because it’s true. Nondharma, you know, just, you know, buying a big car and cruising down the road and going to supermarkets and spending all this time and energy into, you know, building these skyscrapers and so on. All this energy.
I mean, as you do need to live, you need a house, you need a bit of shelter and so on. So much energy put into this life. It makes it harder, very heavy for the mind to live, under those conditions. Whereas Tibet was very primitive, only one skyscraper probably. It was a potala, which is fine.
Just have one there in the middle. And don’t bother about roads. Don’t bother about having any cars. Who needs even a horse and cart? No.
One or two horses and carts in the entire of Tibet. If you wanted to go anywhere, you walked. And if you’re a religious bent, you’d prostrate for six months. You’d walk all the way from Kham to Lhasa prostrating. If you weren’t so religious, you’d just take your mala, and you’d recite mantras all the way.
Yeah. So it’s it’s not so easy for our practice in the west because there’s much nondharma, at least externally. Right. So for Pabongka Rinpoche, he recommends we think about the four noble truths and the twelve links of dependent arising. And we need and in thinking about these things, we need to really begin to wonder what sort of situation we’re in.
Now we hear these things over and over again. And sometimes we have this we maybe hear them once too often, and we almost get sick of hearing them. That’s not a fault in the words. That’s really a fault in ourselves. Not really reflecting carefully, taking our reflection at a step at a time so that we can fully understand the consequences.
Just take things gently and slowly, one step at a time. Maybe the smaller the step, the better. But here, again, Pabongka Rinpoche is saying that actually us our existence is like a prison. But until a prisoner understands they’re in prison, there’s not gonna be a very strong desire for them to leave that prison prison even though the conditions are pretty rough. In fact, if we’re born in a prison and everyone we know lives in that prison, it may take some convincing that we’re in a prison.
And we we may live in cell ten and person in cell nine keeps on telling us there’s some there’s an outside world, you know. Sure. There is. You know, there’s something better than this. Oh, yeah.
How do you know? Well, you know, I heard. Someone told me. Yeah. Sure.
And so on. It’s a little bit like that for us. We’re in a prison, but we’re very skeptical about what we hear in terms of getting beyond that prison. And to a degree, we have to be skeptical, have to test. And at present in general, we’re not fully convinced that nirvana is really the solution or intellectually, we hold to that.
But because we haven’t seen the faults of saṃsāra clearly, because we still have hope in saṃsāra, then to really aspire to get beyond saṃsāra is impossible. Unless one, as I say in Tibetan, unless one has kyok sem directed towards saṃsāra. And kyok sem is a mind of disappointment, really of utter disappointment in saṃsāra. One sees the bottom line in saṃsāra and says, you know, there’s no hope for achieving any happiness in saṃsāra. Now getting to that point will take some time.
So we need need a lot of patience with ourselves. But at present, even having a superficial understanding of what saṃsāra is is okay. We keep that in mind and we keep investigating, what this saṃsāra is. So as Pabongka Rinpoche says, prisoners must develop the wish to be free of their prison before they can escape from it. They will not develop this wish unless they consider the drawbacks of being in prison.
If you likewise do not want to be free of saṃsāra, you will not make any effort to be liberated. And when you develop the wish to be liberated, as Āryadeva’s four hundred verses says, scholars are just as afraid of high rebirth as they are of the hells. In other words, you must be wary of saṃsāra wherever it is, high rebirth or low rebirth. You must think about saṃsāra’s sufferings. Then and there are said to be two ways of doing this, by thinking about the four truths or the twelve links.
Again, Pabongka Rinpoche is stating stating we should be aware of the four truths. I shall now discuss the first of these two. So then he goes on to talk about the four truths. When the Bhagavan Buddha first taught at Banaras or Varanasi and first turned the wheel of Dharma there in the Deer Park at Rishi Grove for his five earliest disciples, he said, monks, that is the noble truth of suffering. That is the noble truth of the source of suffering.
That is the noble truth of cessation. That is the noble truth of the path. He discussed the four truths three times each, making twelve versions in all. This was his turning of the wheel of Dharma on the four truths. They are called truths because they are true, according to how aryas perceive things.
Right. So the Buddha taught the four noble truths after he attained enlightenment in Bodh Gaya. And he attained enlightenment in Bodh Gaya on the full moon of the second month, which is called Vesak, which is now about the we’re celebrating about May or even June. And having attained enlightenment in Bodh Gaya, then the Buddha decided to walk to Varanasi. First, he thought, after attaining enlightenment, this enlightenment is is so profound, so difficult to understand.
Who only those with little dust in their eyes can understand it. So then he thought, who should who would be capable of understanding? Who would have little dust in their eyes? And he reflected back that before, in fact, he went to the, the grove at Uruvilla, which is just over the Naranjan river from Podgaya or the tree under which he attained enlightenment. Before he even went there to spend six years in austerity, he trained on the two teachers, and he trained until he reached the level of understanding of those teachers, and then he decided to depart.
And he thought, if anyone could understand this truth, then they would. And so he then reflected and saw both had passed away and were reborn in the divine realms and were no longer in a, conducive situation to understand the teaching. So then he thought, who after that? Then he reflected there were these five mendicants who had been with him for the six years of austerity that he practiced, but who had departed after he ate a bowl of curd mixed with rice given to him by Sujatha. And then he reflected, where are they?
And then he thought, ah, they’ve wandered off to Varanasi. So we decided I’ll go to Varanasi because anyone in the world can understand what I’ve realized with little dust in their eyes is those five. So, therefore, he set out to Varanasi. And not long after he left, Bodh Gaya. It is said that he actually met a sadhu on the road as well. And this sadhu saw the Buddha coming, thought the Buddha had a radiant appearance.
And so he thought, oh, I’ll ask him who his teacher is and what and what his Dharma is. And so he stopped and said, excuse me. Meaning a mendicant. Your appearance is is clear. Your features are very clear and glowing.
Who is your teacher, and what Dharma do you teach? And he said, I have no teacher in this life, and I am awakened. Buddha. I am the Buddha. Buddha meaning awakened.
And then he said, and I teach the way beyond suffering. And the side who thought, oh, that sounds interesting, but left. He didn’t stay to ask any more questions. Sometimes think if we’re in that situation, it might have happened to us as well. We might have been there.
We see the Buddha coming along. We have no idea who he is. And we’re impressed by his appearance. And if they said, you know, they have no teacher, they’re awakened, we may think, oh, that person’s got a bit of pride. Okay.
I’ll let them pass. That could very easily happen to us. It’s hard for us to judge the who is a Buddha. So, anyway, the Buddha then walked on and about about six weeks later, he arrived at the deer park just outside Varanasi. And they’re in a field where the five former mendicants, his companions.
And when they saw him coming, were said, oh, here comes the the backslider, Siddhartha. Don’t get up when he approaches. You know, we’re not gonna, you know, encourage him. You know, we don’t talk to him and he’ll he’ll go away. Anyway, but in spite of themselves, then as he drew closer to them, they found themselves getting to their feet and making a place for him to sit down.
And then he sat down and then the other sat down And then he said then he proclaimed the, what’s called the turning of the wheel of dharma, the sūtra on the turning of the wheel of dharma. And I thought I’d just read a little bit of it out from one translation from the Pali. Thus, I have heard. The blessed one was once staying in Baranasi. And there the blessed one addressed the former company of the five bhikkhus and said, there are two extremes, oh bhikkhus, which a man who has given up the world