Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 23-minute teaching on the Lam Rim, Ven Jampa Ignyen examines the root afflictions—mental patterns that bind us to saṃsāra—starting with anger as the most destructive. He traces how anger arises from viewing others’ faults, progresses from dislike to agitation, and remains hidden even when unexpressed; it destroys merit whether overt or concealed. He then addresses pride as an obstacle to learning, ignorance of the Four Noble Truths and the law of cause and effect, doubt about the path, and five wrong views—particularly the dangerous belief that certain practices (asceticism, fasting, fire ritual, extreme postures, nails) bring liberation. Through examples from Indian renunciate traditions, he shows how these false paths persist. For practitioners studying Buddhist fundamentals.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 2001 05 24 LR.mp3
UUID: f8bcbece-32b2-467b-b9d4-4c07cd9a1d39
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Lam Rim 2001 Month 04-06 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-05-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 23.4 minutes
Words: ~2,726
And disturbed state, which looks at the the repulsive aspects of things, just focuses on what’s repulsive. So we look at other p other beings, and if we see their faults, then hatred and anger arise. Firstly, when we look at their faults, dislike arise. The feeling of dislike arises, negative feeling arises, then hatred and anger. First, negative feeling, then hatred and anger.
On the other hand, with attachment, we look at something first positive feeling arises, then attachment. The feelings are so important. It’s a feelings that lead into attachment or feelings that tend to precede attachment, feelings that precede it also then hatred and anger. And hatred and anger, they’re just looking at the negative aspects of objects. And so therefore, when we look at the negative aspects and we develop this dislike, we develop negative view of that object, that person, and so on, the mind becomes agitated, rough, and so forth.
And it can, you know, be something internal like hatred, or it can become anger, impatient even with the object, because anger is this being impatient, not being able to bear in a sense the object. That can even become more physically disturbed or more disturbing when it gets to a verbal level or even to a physical level. So anyway, anger also is one of the root delusions, one of the root afflictions. So that anger is the grossest type of mind that we can experience. The grossest, the worst type of mind, the most violent, the most agitated type of awareness that we can generate.
Very destructive. As Pabongka Rinpoche says, anger does great damage. It does things like destroying our root merits as if they were burned in a fire. Anger is responsible for people taking lives, stabbing or beating others, and so forth. It is said there is no sin like hostility.
There is no austerity like patience. The Tibetans have this saying. Yeah. There’s no dik pa or sin like hostility or this idea to harm others. This idea to harm others is incredibly negative.
There’s nothing worse that we can do. Think of harming other beings. And there’s no austerity like patience. So if we wanna be austere, if we wanna practice austerities, we should practice patience like the earth. Or another saying of the Tibetans is, anger is the weapon to murder your high rebirths.
So our anger is gonna destroy all our high rebirths. It’s done it many times in the past. You know, we spend so much time and effort trying to be good and through that then accumulating some merit for ourselves, and then we get angry and we destroy the lot. So anger, there’s nothing more destructive. So in other words, of all afflictions, anger is the greatest, has the greatest strength to destroy root virtues.
And it’s the main thing that throws us into the lower realms. So anger is the main cause of rebirth in the lower realms. It does great damage. And in fact, anger is also exists on many levels for us, and we may not even realize that it’s manifest when it actually is manifest within us, or that it’s unmanifest within us, or that it exists on a seed level within us. Because we’re very skillful at hiding anger when we’ve got anger.
You know, we can get impatient with things, but we can still disguise that we’ve got impatience. But that impatience is anger. It doesn’t have to be, you know, red face, you know, frothing at the mouth, you know, breaking windows or something like that. That’s really anger that’s become physically and verbally manifest. But anger, you know, can exist even on a a very subtle but still manifest level.
And this is often how it is for us. We it’s there, but it’s it’s either just slightly manifest or even unmanifest, but it still exists within our continuum. It’s like awareness that’s on the back burner. It’s not really doing much, but it’s there. And it just takes one word from one person.
They just have to say the wrong thing. It’s like we’re waiting there, almost as if we’re waiting for them to say the wrong thing. They say it it’s like, you know, the it’s like throwing kerosene onto the coals immediately, full anger, fully manifest, right there. We’re impatient. We start, you know, maybe yelling at another person or we get really impatient with We start to tense up.
This is, you know, we’re this is an indication that often the anger is already exist within our mental continuum. It’s an indication that it exists there because it’s so easy to generate. Certainly, it’s not as if we have to really put effort into generating anger. You know, someone says something really nasty to us and we gotta sit down, god, I should be angry with this person. Let me you know, really, gotta meditate on this anger.
I’ll be angry with this person. You know, meditate on it. But we try to meditate on compassion, but take it the opposite way around. They just people just have to say one thing and we get angry. But it doesn’t it’s not necessarily the anger that is gonna be shown.
We’re just getting impatient with them. We may not even display it to other people, but already that’s the anger has been manifested within us. That anger has the capacity to destroy our root merits. Just having it there even in a in a hidden way. The only function it has is to destroy merits, really.
So we shouldn’t generate any anger whatsoever. We should in fact completely eliminate it. Take it from our mental continuum and throw it out completely. There’s no justification for anger. Then we have pride.
Pride is an inflated sense of oneself. It’s also a root affliction, having pride. It’s a great obstacle for us to learn anything, having pride. And as Pabongka Rinpoche says, to overcome pride, then we should contemplate all the categories that are found in Abhidharma. So if anyone gets a text on Abhidharma, then one can reflect on this, the eighteen realms, the division of the eighteen realms into sixty four realms, or we could enumerate the two hundred and fifty three vows of a monk or the three hundred and sixty four vows of a fully ordained nun and so on.
This helps to lessen our pride in so whatever we can use to lessen our pride is useful. A little bit of pride at times may may have some it’s said by some, may have some benefit in a studying if we take pride in our studies. We put energy into it because we want to master the topic and not be seen to be able to, you know, not to be able to answer questions on this or that. And actually, it’s quite useful that we need to, of course, remember the limitations and teachings of pride as well. Then ignorance.
Ignorance is just not knowing. It comes from the Tibetan word. Means to know or to cognize something. Is just not knowing, like a passive state of not knowing something, passive state of not knowing something, like blindness or darkness. Here, it’s not knowing the four noble truths, the law of cause and effect, the Three Jewels, and so on.
It’s ignorance focused on those objects. Not any type of ignorance, but the ignorance here which is a root affliction is ignorance to the four noble truths. Ignorance to the law of cause and effect, both external and internal. Ignorance of the Three Jewels, the nature of the Three Jewels. And then doubt.
Doubt also is a root affliction because it’s doubt again in relation to the four noble truths, having doubt about the path in fact. But also it can be directed towards the Three Jewels, law of cause and effect, and so on. Having doubt about these things can be a great obstacle to us. If we have doubt about the pervasion of the law of cause and effect, then it’s very difficult to even establish the four noble truths. So doubt is also an obstacle.
It’s an affliction. It’s stopping us from progressing. And then the sixth one is view. So here’s view, again, is divided up into five. So what are views?
Views are what we have at present. This view is the mental factor which is interpreting the world around us. It’s putting it together and coming up with a view about how things are. So in general, that’s what view is. It’s a way of looking something.
It’s a way of interpreting something. Now the first of the five views is called the view of the transient collection or the perishable collection. So this is view focused upon the mind body continuum. So at present, we have a view of our mind body, which focuses upon the mind and body, the mind body continuum, and holds there and holds or grasps at an eye, at itself existing within the mind body continuum, separate from the mind body. So that’s called the view of the transient collection.
The transient collection. In Tibetan, it’s means transient or destructible. Is what we do. We go to. Don’t we?
Means to come together, collection. Means to, means view. View focusing on the transient collection. The transient collection are the five aggregates, the mind body continuum, in other words. So it’s the it’s this view looking at the mind and body and holding there to be an eye existing there separate from the mind body.
So this this type of view really is pervasive for ordinary beings, for animals. Animals have the innate type of transient view. We have innate and even imputed transient view. What this means is that we have an innate sense of I. When we focus on our mind body continuum, we have an innate sense of I, but we can even have a fabricated or imputed sense of I as well, one that forms a philosophic view about our status.
So humans can have actually both types. Animals and other beings who don’t develop philosophies generally only have the the innate version. Is this difficult material? It is, isn’t it? Right.
Now the next type of view that Pabongka Rinpoche talks about is extreme view. So extreme view is firstly having a view of the transient collection, and then holding that that self, that I to be the permanent or or what? Annihilated at death. So that’s really having an extreme view in relation to the eye that’s held by transient view or the view of the transient collection. So in a sense, extreme view depends on first having transient view.
View. So that means having the view that the self will finish at the end of this life or didn’t exist prior to this life. So it’s an extreme view. Or holding that the eye is permanent, that it simply doesn’t change moment to moment. It just dissolve it’s always been there, will always continue to be there.
Both of those views are an extreme view in relation to the to the eye. Right. And then we have the view holding the aggregates to be supreme. This is supreme view. It’s actually actually, it might be easy to mention wrong view.
Wrong view is over the page. Wrong view also is the view that the law of cause and effect doesn’t exist, or the Three Jewels don’t exist, or the four truths don’t exist and so forth. That is the worst type of view that we can have. It’s called wrong view because it’s simply taking the opposite, the exact opposite of a religious or dharmic view in from a Buddhist perspective. Like, it can be it said that there can be nothing worse than having the view that the law of cause and effect doesn’t pervade our experience.
Because if we think that our actions have no result, then people can justify committing any action. And by committing such negative actions, then one experiences potentially rebirth in lower realms and so forth. So wrong view is is the most destructive type of view. Then holding those three views, that is the view of the transient collection, extreme view, and wrong view as being supreme views is the fourth type of view, view holding to the supreme, in Tibetan, holding those views as supreme. And then the fifth view is holding holding that ethics and the ritual or any a mode particular mode of behavior to be supreme.
And that in Tibetan. Is ethics. Is ritual. Chog is in the holding ritual and ethics as supreme. This particular view, the fifth of the five views, afflictive views, is the view that holds that doing certain actions will bring liberation.
In the west, there’s a view that liberation will occur if we believe, for instance, in a particular deity. If one simply believes in that deity, one will be reborn there and that will be liberation. From a Buddhist perspective, that would be insufficient to generate liberation. In India, one can see various types of practices that are asserted to bring liberation such as if you build five fires and you were to meditate in the midst of five fires for a long period, you can exhaust because it’s very especially in this heat of summer, it’s if you don’t die of heat exhaustion, you’re gonna exhaust a lot of negative karma. Or otherwise, if you sleep on a bed of nails, you often see this.
In fact, I used to go to market near Sera Je in Bylakuppe. There used to be a sadhu that would stand there regularly every Tuesday, which was market day. We’d go and buy our tomatoes and carrots and so forth on a Tuesday at the market. And he’d be standing there on the road on a on this he had this little bed of nails made up, I think about three inch nails hammered into these two bits of wood, and he would stand there ringing a bell as we all passed. And I used to want to give him some money, but actually wasn’t wasn’t so appropriate to give him money to encourage him to do this.
But this there are some that practice that with a view that this will exhaust karma and be a way of liberating themselves eventually. Other times, see people, you know, some sadhus, they hold their arm up in the air. There’s one at the Kumbh Mela. I think he held his arm up in the air for about fifteen years as a practice. Practice.
And by this time, the flesh had sort of withered and it lost use of the arm. But the view there is that by doing that, it will exhaust negative karma and help one to attain liberation. Pabongka Rinpoche also mentions jumping over tridents as being a practice and so forth, the five fires. So practices exist and they even in the west, we see them. Some people say fasting.
If we fast long enough, we’ll attain liberation. Or if we fast with the right foods, we’ll get liberation, and so on. There are various methods set out and so forth. These we have to carefully analyze to see whether they’re really gonna lead to liberation or not. Holding those wrong methods, those wrong types of ethics, like fasting for a long time and so forth, these don’t actually lead to liberation.
So they’re wrong view. Well, actually, they’re not wrong view. They’re called here view holding ethics and ritual as supreme. So all of these are regarded as root afflictive states. They’re states that tend to perpetuate our current contaminated state, and we need to overcome them.
We haven’t overcome them yet. Even though we wouldn’t get out and build five fires and sit in the middle of it or try jumping over tridents and things like that. Still, we haven’t because we haven’t understood the path yet, we’re still liable to practice wrong things, thinking that that’s a way to liberation. So these types of wrong these types of view, afflictive view need to be overcome. Right.
So we should have a break, I think.