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 explores the often-overlooked sufferings of human existence, drawing from Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. He dwells on the suffering of birth—a fetus trapped in darkness, its body shaped by pressure, heat, and cold, then forced through the birth canal—and the suffering of aging: wrinkles, lost teeth, trembling hands, failing senses. He touches on sickness and death. Throughout, he explains why contemplating suffering is not morbid: it generates a healthy fear of lower-realm rebirth that motivates ethical restraint. The session includes Q&A on consciousness and karma. Pitched at practitioners engaged with the Lamrim path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 2001 05 10 LR.mp3
UUID: 52785bde-0b1e-4f3e-a5b9-7bf055bb298f
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: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~4,946
So we’re continuing with, this particular text, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. And it’s one of the nine great Lamrim texts that’s composed within the Gelugpa tradition in Tibet. And this one was composed it’s the last one to be composed, and it was written about eighty years ago. And so far, we’ve dealt with the small scope. And now we’ve begun with the intermediate scope practices or the middling scope practices.
And I think we had a certain number of pages to read for this section. So last week, we did the general the general disadvantages of existence. And I think there were six points. And now we move into the more specific features of our existence. So really, is all part of the intermediate scope meditation.
And previously, we were dealing more with the small scope and we need to know as much as possible the difference between the small scope and the intermediate scope. Now, dealing with the intermediate scope, we’re dealing about we’re dealing with the specific sufferings. So this is dealing with the sufferings of the lower migrations and the higher migrations. Now in general, there are said to be six types of existence. I think everyone is probably aware of the division in Buddhism into the three lower realms or the three lower types of being, which is the hell beings, hungry ghosts, and animals.
And then the three higher beings, three types of higher migration, and that is humans, demigods, and gods or the divine realms. The divine it’s interesting. The word divine actually comes is related to the Indian word deva, and it has exactly the same meaning. Deva really refers to those beings who exist in in the best circumstances, relatively the best circumstances in Samsāra. And within that, there’s two types of divine being.
There’s the the actual divine being and what are called the suras or the demigods who are similar to gods, but are not quite as influential, don’t have the same level of power as the gods themselves. Right. Now in the previous section, in the last scope practice section, we dealt extensively with the sufferings of the lower realms. And it’s quite beneficial for us to think through the the various afflictions of beings in the lower realms, but that meditation is primarily a meditation of the lower scope, of the least scope practitioner. Because there we’re meditating on what sufferings exist, for instance, for animals and for hungry ghosts or the and for the hell beings.
And this also can be incorporated into a meditation on the intermediate scope. And as much as possible, that is good to do because here, in fact, we need to reflect on what the purpose of these types of meditation are. They’re not, of course, just to frighten us or because that would serve no purpose. But here is to develop a positive fear of being reborn in such realms. Some types of fear are positive.
They’re good for us, and they’re to be cultivated. Well, that could be a positive type fear because if we have fear of being reborn in the lower realms, then we will tend to avoid those actions that are gonna generate rebirth there. So that type of preventative action is very positive. And it comes about through fear of being reborn in the hells. It depends what the fear is, but I think it’s okay to say that there are positive types of fear and negative types of fear.
The negative types of fear we don’t need. That’s true. But we do certain types of fear are very beneficial for us. For instance, if we’re driving a car and we have a fear of crossing onto the other side of the road, that’s quite beneficial for ourselves and anyone else driving the other way. Or if when we’re crossing a road, if we have a fear about being run over, then we look both ways and and that’s also very beneficial.
So in our life, actually, we have various concerns. In a sense, can say they’re they’re like fear, which are quite useful and beneficial for us and they stop us doing things that we might otherwise engage in. And just as our mother used to drum it into us, you know, when we get to a road, make sure we watch both ways. And she would try and instill a healthy fear in us of of cars and so forth. And that type of fear is quite positive.
It’s not done our mother or our father doesn’t do that, that teachers at school didn’t do that in order just to frighten us. They did it, of course, in order to benefit us. And similarly today, are certain things that are very useful to develop fear in relation to. So contemplating that sufferings of the three lower realms does generate a certain fear within us, or it should. If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong with that contemplation.
We contemplate the hells in order to generate fear. If we contemplated the hells and we just, you know, became complacent about the hells, then it wouldn’t be of much use to us. On the other hand, we don’t wanna have negative types of fear either. You know, just fear, you know, like sort of blind fear or fear of things that we really, you know, understand and so forth. Those sorts of fears are not so useful.
And as much as possible, we should try and eliminate them. Or we could even replace them with a positive fear. Replace the fear of the unknown with the fear of the hells. That might be quite useful. So the purpose of doing these types of meditation are for the lower scope practice which is really going through the eight hot hells and the eight cold hells, the occasional hells and the near hells and so forth are really in order to generate awareness of the causes within us that would cause us to be reborn there.
And if they’re not doing that, then it’s that sort of contemplation is not much use to it. Sometimes it’s even said that if we’re practicing meditation, you know, we’re just sitting quietly doing meditation, then it can help to visualize that we’re sitting on the edge of a cliff or just finely balanced. If we move a little one way, we’re gonna topple over the edge. She’s thirsty. So the reason for doing that is that, you know, if we visualize we’re sitting right near a cliff, then we’re gonna be less susceptible to falling asleep and nodding off and that can help to keep us awake.
Also, contemplating the hells is a bit like that. It’s in order to help us stay awake and remind ourselves of our situation. We haven’t gotten beyond the hells. The hells may only be one breath away. We may not finish the next breath.
We may pass away, spend a short time in the death process, and then be reborn in the hells. It’s possible. And then if we have fear of the hells, then it really starts to wake us up. Well, what should we be doing? This might happen.
It’s possible. What do I need to do in order not to be reborn in the hells? And the strength of our concern really reflects on the success we’ve had on meditating on the sufferings of the hells and the fear that we’re able to generate within us about being reborn in the hells. And that type of fear is not negative. Although we may think back if we went through Sunday school and church when we were quite young and the talks on fire and brimstone and so forth with some resentment, still there’s something positive about that if it’s done in the right way.
In fact, there’s many things are, if they’re done in the right way, become positive. So here’s, Pabongka Rinpoche says, we’ve covered the sufferings of the hells and the disadvantages of hell existence previously. And as he mentions, if we talk any more of this on this subject, it would probably revolt it would revolt us. It would turn us, turn our stomach just as alcohol revolts someone with a hangover. So everyone’s used to having a hangover, of course.
And then if someone offers us another drink first thing in the morning, it’s enough to turn our stomach. And we also get that way, perhaps with talking about the hells, that if we start talking about them again, we’re gonna but that’s that’s not necessarily a bad thing. So now we think about the sufferings of the upper realms. Everyone’s everyone except that there are hells and ghosts, ghost realms and so forth. Anyone skeptical about the existence of these?
Skeptical of where they may exist, whether it’s in the mind or somewhere else? Oh, well, they exist in the mind, then they exist. They don’t literally exist. What about the literal description of the sufferings of animals? And humans?
Yeah, pretty much. That’s true. I mean, it’s easy to accept those because we can see them directly. It’s hard for us to, I mean, we just are not aware of the hells or the ghosts. So it’s not easy for us to verify that.
And to an extent we need to be skeptical, we shouldn’t just accept what is written down in books. But we also need to keep an open mind about these issues. So firstly, Pabongka Rinpoche talks about the sufferings of a human. And we’re reasonably familiar with the sufferings of a human. And of course, they’re the four common sufferings, so the sufferings of birth, sickness, old age, death.
The suffering of birth is something that we don’t clearly remember. I’m not sure, does anyone remember going through the birth experience? Actually, it’s surprising we don’t because it must be such a traumatic experience. But we don’t remember it. But has everyone read this section of the text?
So the suffering of birth is set out in some detail by Pabongka Rinpoche. And the suffering of conception itself, being conceived into the womb, is probably not so traumatic. It’s actually once the consciousness has entered into the union of the egg and the sperm and is trapped, it’s trapped there within the initial what, moments of the, in the first moment of the embryo. Then from that time on suffering will start to develop in the womb. And there’s some very interesting descriptions of what a fetus experiences.
Now what Pabongka Rinpoche is basing this on, we’re not sure. Actually, it’s probably he does mention a few sources such as the there’s one particular sūtra which occurs further down, I can’t find it. But anyway, it’s very interesting to read, as he says on page four eighty seven, First, when When the head and the cauldron. When the head and the swellings for the limbs appear, you suffer as if you were stretched out on rack. Each limb adds only one more suffering.
Suffering. Each time as the limbs develop, they just generate more potential for our suffering. When your mother drinks something hot, when she moves, sleeps and so on, rolls over onto her stomach, you suffer as if you were being boiled in a hot spring, carried off by the wind, or crushed under a huge mountain. As Chandragomin states in his letter to a disciple, Chandragomin was a great Indian scholar who lived maybe fifteen hundred years ago, Enclosed in a most intolerable stench, you live enveloped in pitch blackness. After entering this hellish place, the womb, you must endure with great suffering with your body all hunched up.
So we do go through the process in womb of being trapped there. When as an intermediate being, we find our future parents, if we’re to be reborn as a human, we find our mother and father, we’re attracted to that site, we enter the union of the egg and the sperm. The consciousness of the intermediate being is trapped there and dies. They go through a minor death down to the clear light and then are in a sense conceived in the reverse process from the clear light to black near attainment to white to red increase, white appearance. And then further back through the stages manifestation of the gross physical form of a human being.
And then in the next nine and a half months, that gross physical form which began with the embryo, reaches a sufficient size to be reborn. During that entire time the consciousness, our consciousness, is there. And it’s said from the beginning we have body awareness and mental awareness. But the other senses don’t occur straight away. They develop slowly.
But even so, through just having those two, we experience these various types of suffering. They’re like birth pains, or not birth pains, they’re like growing pains in the womb. Does everyone accept that there are such pains in the womb? Right. Right.
Although, as a child that’s already born and yeah. But the consciousness does exist from beginning of conception, doesn’t it? Well, perhaps so, But when you think about it, you know, what’s happening with this little fetus, you know, it’s starting off as two cells or one cell that’s been fertilized, that splits into two, that splits into four, so on. It just keeps on developing. Now it is asserted here that the consciousness does enter that at the beginning of the fertilization.
So it’s there right throughout this process. So is it inconceivable that what is occurring with the basis, the physical basis, which is the genetic material received from our parents the life force and so forth, that that is affecting the consciousness that’s trapped or supported by that physical basis. You know what I mean? Well, feeling occurs, doesn’t it? Well, it’s said that pain is experienced by feeling.
Feeling experiences pain and so forth. Feeling is an omnipresent mental factor. It’s a type of awareness which always exists. There’s no state of consciousness anywhere that doesn’t have feeling associated with it. Do you have renewal of the activity or absorbing in the stimulus?
Ah, very, very important question. That’s right, because from the early stages of the embryo, even the head is just beginning to appear, and you may have the beginnings of a brainstem and so forth. But from a Buddhist point of view, the consciousness exists even in the embryo before the development of the brain, and there is feeling also there. So in a sense, one doesn’t need a brain in order to have awareness. That’s already evident, yes.
We see that day to day. Do you think that’s possible? If it’s not possible, we’re finished. Because when we die and we leave our brain behind, if our awareness stops at that point, we’ve got nothing more to worry about. We might as well just live out the rest of our life and enjoy it.
If our awareness depends on our brain as such, they’re interrelated, but they’re not causally related in the sense that first comes the brain and then comes our awareness. That embryo or its past causes that exist within the continuum of that being. That was brought on by conception. That’s right, even in the process of well of course they’ve achieved a rebirth at that point once their awareness is trapped by the egg and the sperm. And then what they experience is really due to completing karma that’s been accumulated in past lifetimes.
So whatever the mother does, if the mother smokes a lot of cigarettes or she drinks a lot or she hasn’t given up her Brazilian dancing class or whatever, that in a sense is all the completing karma of that embryo to experience that. It’s not good for the mother to do that because she’s creating the causes to experience something similar herself in future. But that embryonic being has karma. They do experience. They have experience because they have feeling.
And it’s said they have feeling because they have consciousness. They have consciousness because the stream of consciousness is not severed. It continues from one life to another. So there is a continuum there. Now, of course, some of the sufferings that are mentioned here are quite extreme.
Like, almost Pabongka Rinpoche is saying here that it’s almost like the sufferings of a hell when we’re going through the rebirth process. Probably at present we have this idea that it’s like nine, ten months of sitting back and relaxing, we’re not doing anything, don’t have to eat food, we get everything from our mother, you know, it’s like they’re in a hammock or something, know, just taking a break. And in fact, some lamas describe it in this way as well. That when they pass away, they get a couple of years holiday before they have to do anything again. But here, Pabongka Rinpoche is saying that it’s not much of a holiday because we’re in a very dark place.
But anyway, don’t have eyes. Eyes don’t develop until later, much, much later anyway. Anyway, we’re in a very dark place and we’re subject to heat and cold and and we can even experience these from a very early stage because we have body awareness. And right at the end the page as Pabongka Rinpoche says, in other words, imagine you are placed in an iron pot filled with various kinds of filth and the lid is put on. There is no way you could stay in that in it for even a day.
You’ve had to stay in your mother’s womb, in its smelly filth, and in its black darkness for nine and a half months. Yes. So this is the other view of the womb, guess. Because the poor mother is putting up with the, you know, all the pain and disadvantage and discomfort of carrying a baby around. But from the baby’s side also, it’s not ideal.
But of course, if the mother decide if mothers decided they weren’t gonna have children, we’d be in a fix. And then as he goes on to say, The suffering is like having your body, then at the time of birth, one stays in the womb for a certain period of time, and then at the time of birth one has got to take birth through the birth canal. And we’ve all been through it. It’s quite amazing. In fact, it must have been quite traumatic because we’re pretty of course, we’re young.
And then all of a sudden, one day, we’re just suddenly it’s as if we’re being squeezed by two mountains. It’s amazing. We’ve all been through it. And somehow, we manage to emerge in the world after what’s a very traumatic experience for our mother and ourselves. When you emerge, your skin is like raw flayed cowhide, very tender.
And when you are placed on a cushion, no matter how soft it is like being thrown on a bramble patch, then you feel an outside wind is like being penetrated by a sword. When your mother takes you in her arms and carries you, it is like a sparrow being carried off by a hawk. These things terrify you. But in a way, we could imagine it, you know, you’re born from the womb and there we are, lights all around. We can’t, We don’t know what’s going on because we see everything upside down anyway in the beginning.
That’s true, isn’t it? I think we do see things upside down for the first three weeks. So we just hear all these noises and we don’t know what the noises are. We see these sites, we don’t know what they are. It’s true though, isn’t it?
We see things upside down. They’ve done experiments on this. That’s right. Already hearing occurs then. That’s why because we have examples of hot housing, don’t we?
Of the embryo. What is that? Because you’re connected for so long. Yeah. Anyway, all of this is just to investigate the first of the human sufferings, the suffering of birth, and this state that we’ve been through many times before and that we will go through in our future lives.
We’re gonna go through this process of being conceived into a womb, remaining there for up to ten months, and then having to be reborn. And this is all the pain of birth. Then we have the pain of aging. The suffering of aging. Suffering of aging starts from the second moment after conception.
First moment of conception is called birth. The second moment is aging. Aging actually begins then, which is true. We start to age after the first moment. And so aging is probably not something that we’re really concerned with until we get into our thirties and forties and fifties, and then all the all those great all those features of aging start to appear, the wrinkles, the gray hair, and so on.
And as one sūtra states, age makes a beautiful body ugly. Age takes radiance. Age takes strength. Age takes happiness. Age humiliates.
Age kills. And age robs the complexion. It’s true, we don’t need any reminder of this. And of course there’s a huge amount of money spent on trying to hold back the years. And as one lama said, how good that old age comes bit by bit.
It would be impossible to bear if it all came at once. It’d be absolutely a nightmare if one day, you know, we came went to the mirror and there we were, you know, how we would look at eighty five years old. We would just wouldn’t believe it. God, you know, there’s something wrong with it. The mirror this morning, We die of fright.
Is that me? God. It’s only we can only bear it because it occurs little by little and we hardly notice it happening. Otherwise, we would die of fright. There is no doubt.
We wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. And as Milarepa said, once you get up, one, he mentions here the some of the advantages of aging or some of the the features of aging. I can’t say say their advantages. One, you get up like someone tethered to a stake, and it’s true. Two, you will walk like a cat stalking birds.
It’s true. We’re hunched over. Three, you will sit like the earth breaking out of a sack just as we drop a sack down and the earth just sorta that’s how we sit down. When the time comes for you, grandmother, to have all three, the decay of the body, that mirage will depress you, he says. One, outside your skin creases with many wrinkles.
Two, inside your flesh and blood thin out so bones start to protrude. Three, between these, you’re dull, stupid, deaf, blind, and senile. When the time comes for you, grandmother, to have all three, you will look ugly, wrinkled, and wrathful. So it’s true that’s the suffering of aging is just like that. In fact, there’s even a one Gungtang Rinpoche, I think he was a Kadampa Lama, and said, it is as if the old received initiation water on their heads.
Their hair is conch shell white, but not because it’s pure of filth. It’s been spat on by the lord of death and has taken on a frosty look. So true, the fact that our hair is going gray is not a sign of purifying anything. It’s a sign that the Lord of Death has breathed on us and that frosty breath has turned our hair white. Wrinkles cover our foreheads, but it is not from baby fat.
Times messengers made these tally marks to count the many years gone from our lives. Drops of mucus dribble from our noses. These do not look like a necklace of pearls. No. More like that.
Their youth, their carefree times are glaciers melting in the sun. Their rows of teeth have fallen out, but no replacement teeth are growing. They have eaten all this life’s food. So their cutlery is being confiscated. It’s like that.
The older we get, the more our teeth begin to disappear. And as Kṣitigarbha is saying, it’s a sign that our last meal is approaching. Their drawn faces in poor color are not because they’re wearing monkey masks. When we get older our face looks more drawn and the color is poorer and poorer. And that’s not because we’re wearing masks like a monkey mask.
Their loan of youth has been revoked and now their true colors show. Their heads are nodding and nodding, but not because they’re sniggering at others. Yama prods them with his club and they can’t help shaking their heads. Their faces look down bent towards the road, but they’re not searching for lost needles. Their memory and jewels of youth have spilt on the ground, hence the posture.
They use all four limbs when they get up, but not because they pretend they’re cows, their legs cannot support their bodies, so their hands have to assist. They sit down with a thud, but not because they’re furious with a friend. Health and mental happiness no longer act as handrails. Actually, what he says here is just so pertinent. Because really the older we get, then the more we get down to the bottom line of just how things actually are.
Prior, there’s a lot of the pride of youth that we have in the earlier parts of our lives and that pride does disappear in time. When they walk or when we walk, they sway and lurch, but not because they’re walking like a lord. They’re under a great burden from their age and the weight has upset their sense of balance. Their hands clutch all at things and tremble, but they’re not scooping up some gambling gains. They’re afraid that yama will steal everything in reach.
They’re eating very little food and drink, and not because they’re stingy with their meals. The fire in their bellies has declined, so old people fear they may faint. They wear only thin light clothes, but don’t dress this way to go out dancing. They have lost their inner body strength and even clothes have become a burden. They wheeze and puff for breath, but they are not blowing mantras like a Lama.
The gurgling sound they’re making when they breathe disappearance into thin air. They go the way they go about their daily tasks is not done to amuse others. The evil spirit of old age has captured them, and they aren’t free to do as they would wish. They forget to do all their work, but not because they’re shallow or don’t care. Their faculties have declined, dimming their memory and mind.
So really this is old age, and of course we see it every day. But it’s almost as if we don’t see it at the same time as well. And we like to hide the fact from ourselves. We’re always patching ourselves together, know, trying to make us look better and hide the wrinkles and so forth. But that can also be a type of that may not be so skillful.
It’d be better if we spend our time practicing Dharma. And also the suffering of illness. So another of human sufferings is the suffering of illness, and this is a limitation of our current existence. We get ill from time to time for various reasons. And that is another limitation of our current status.
So this is also something we need to reflect on that, in fact, We’re not beyond illness. We’re not beyond aging. We’re not beyond birth. And then of course the suffering of death, which is probably the most obvious suffering. And that can occur, of course, at any time.
Really, it is a profound state that one has to go through, and it certainly is not. In a way, if we look forward to death, to overcoming the conditions in this life, that also is an unskillful contemplation, because death is not going to overcome the sufferings of life. In fact, death is just the last stage in that process. And of course, that death leads into future rebirth. So our death leads into future death again and again and again.
And if we are in a sense looking forward to death, that it will, you know, as something by which we can put aside or put down the burden, then that’s a misconception. Because death isn’t the state in which we can take refuge in from the sufferings of life. It’s a little bit like the euthanasia question, and I should, if we’ve got terminal cancer, then to really be compassionate we should be allowed to die earlier than later because it’s ending the suffering. But that’s a great assumption we really have to, that’s quite a large assumption that we really should investigate. If in fact, by dying it were to end our suffering, then maybe best to die.
Then there’s a good, certainly a good case can be made for death. But if the consciousness continues beyond death, and death itself is not ending anything except our current mind body continuum, then death is not a solution for anything. It’s a problem. It’s the big problem. Yes.
That’s yeah. That’s a very good point. And it needs, I think, some contemplation because it’s not easy to see, you know, that by