Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Jampa Ignyen continues his commentary on the Lamrim in this 45-minute session, focusing on the sevenfold cause and effect instruction for generating bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment. He begins by addressing how practitioners should assess whether Buddhist teachings have practical value for their own lives, then explains why bodhicitta—equated with winning millions in the lottery—is invaluable for both oneself and others. He traces the lineages of this teaching back through Maitreya and Mañjuśrī to the Buddha himself, showing how Je Tsongkhapa unified two classical methods of cultivating bodhicitta: the six causes and one result (from Atisha) and the exchange of self with others (from Śāntideva). He then outlines the eight stages of training, beginning with immeasurable equanimity toward friends, enemies, and strangers, and explains how each stage builds on the previous one to generate authentic compassion. The session emphasizes that compassion is difficult and requires sustained effort, but is essential groundwork before attempting to awaken the mind of enlightenment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 2001 08 02 LR.mp3
UUID: dae66a39-b830-48a5-b68a-457143d6b8db
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Lam Rim 2001 Month 07-09 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-08-02
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~5,137
Very good to have discussion on on these issues as much as possible, simply to clarify them. But good to investigate this. Sometimes the text doesn’t it is difficult and the subject matter is not so important or and so on. So these are good to observe because the main thing we’re seeking to do here is gain an idea of what Pabongka Rinpoche is saying. He’s implying that the subject matter is quite important, So we need to come to an understanding of his reasons for why it’s important and so on.
And then also how it can be applied. If it’s a can we apply it day to day in our lives? If we can’t apply it, then it’s not much use to us. If it’s not, it doesn’t have some practical value for us. This we need to investigate.
Sometimes the subject matter is very difficult or it’s a little bit abstract or hard to bring it down to a practical level. At other times, it seems very practical, but we don’t seem to be in a position to make much use of it at present. Or it seems practical, but how do I relate it to myself in my situation? How can I you know, where is what is being talked about in the present for me? How can it help me in the present moment?
Or why aren’t I feeling happier than I am? If I’m reading all this stuff, why isn’t why isn’t it generating happiness for me in the present? What’s the practical value here? Is there practical value? So these things we should anyway, we do.
We do assess this. So we need to investigate if in fact what is being said does correspond to the way things are. Now last week, we started with the great scope practices, and these practices are very inspiring. The thought of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment, just what that is. Great compassion and compassion and so on.
And the author talked a lot about the advantages of this of developing these states. And so we should investigate the doubts we have about the benefits of developing these states. Alright. Because we probably have doubts about them. So then it’s good to be mindful of these doubts when they arise and just see where where the doubts are coming from.
This is necessary. Maybe they’re coming from self-cherishing, but we don’t necessarily want to blame everything on self-cherishing. Although, some do. self-cherishing has got a bad bad name, cause of all our unhappiness. So this we need we need to investigate.
And often we do have resistance to these ideas, which is fine. That’s just where we are. But then we should observe this resistance. Maybe it’s positive resistance, maybe it’s not so positive. So anyway, last week, the author talked at some length about the advantages of developing bodhicitta.
And what is bodhicitta? bodhicitta is a type of mind, mental consciousness that we can generate. This very fundamental type of mental consciousness that is the gateway itself to the great vehicle. And it’s likened to a wish fulfilling gem and so on. Something that is has value not only in this life, but in every future lifetime.
Better than winning Tats Lotto, better than first you know, one of those bumper thirty million dollar Tats Lotto coming in first, we’re the only winner. Even better than that. Or even if we won an American lotter, you know, two hundred million US dollars, even better than that. So on. Because something like bodhicitta has benefits on a deeper level and on a much more enduring level than, say, winning the lotto or becoming prime minister or becoming the president or general secretary of the United Nations or the chairman of Microsoft or or the ruler of the world and so on.
So these claims were made last last week when we in that section of the text, that in fact, this mind of bodhicitta is that valuable. It’s unequaled in value. So then if we begin to develop an idea that it’s valuable, we should then investigate what it is and how we generate it. Often, it’s we need a lot of encouragement. Of course, there’s the stick and the carrot approach.
We need, you know, couple of truckloads of carrots in front of us in a way in order to get us to think about the benefits of of bodhicitta. But the benefits of bodhicitta are for both ourselves and other beings. Because for ourselves to attain enlightenment, we need to both establish our own purpose and the purpose of others. They go along hand inherently simultaneously. One can’t establish the purpose of others without establishing one’s own purpose.
And eventually, by establishing both one’s own purpose and the purpose of others, then one becomes a Buddha with the four bodies of a Buddha. And those four bodies, two are for are the perfection of one’s own purpose. Two are the perfection of the purpose of others. So the perfection of others purpose is really coming about through generating compassion for others and even compassion for oneself. We can even add ourselves in there as well.
We have compassion for ourselves, don’t we? There may be no one else in the universe we have compassion for, but we have compassion for ourselves. And what is compassion? Compassion just means the wish to be free of suffering. And we look at ourselves and we wanna be free of suffering pretty much all the time.
Do we ever wish to be unhappy? It may be possible. Maybe superficially, we may say that, oh, well, I, you know, I wanna be unhappy or I’ll, you know, I’ll spite them. I’ll be unhappy. Especially when we’re young, we do that.
I’m not the last thing I’m gonna be is be happy in this situation. But even then, there’s probably some thought that I’ll be satisfied in showing my unhappiness. So we’re really doing it in order to gain some level of satisfaction. So we’re always wanting to be satisfied and free from unhappiness. So we have compassion for ourselves, but we can’t perfect compassion just focusing on ourselves.
We need also to extend this to other beings who are just like ourselves. Physically, there’s some differences, but underneath there’s not much difference. And in fact, we could very easily be just like anyone else in the universe. And just as other beings grasp the eye and their continuum, we could equally grasp that set of aggregates, those sorts of minds as I as well. In a way, there’s not much difference between us and other beings.
So developing compassion is, in a way, it’s seeing the equality between ourselves and others and extending, however difficult this may be, this little window wishing to be free of suffering, extending that beyond ourselves to other beings. It really is not easy. Compassion is not naturally born to us. It takes effort. It’s just all effort, all hard work.
And that’s why in Pramānavārttika, the text by Dharmakīrti, the compassion of a Buddha is used as a proof for rebirth. Rebirth. One has a fully compassionate being like a Buddha. They have perfected compassion, perfecting compassion only comes with great effort. There’s no other cause for it.
And because perfecting compassion takes a huge amount of effort over a vast period of time, no one can perfect it in one lifetime. It’s a proof that there must have been prior birth. The Buddha himself must have lived before many times in order to perfect compassion. And we can see it for ourselves. Difficult for us to generate compassion.
We think about compassion. We like the idea of compassion, but putting it into use, putting it into practice is not so easy. Some resistance is there from our side. We look at another being. We don’t spontaneously develop compassion.
It’s more like, oh, I don’t like don’t like that. I don’t like this and and so forth. We look at others and, oh, yes, superficially. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. But then compassion, we look again, there’s not necessarily any compassion there. We don’t necessarily empathize for that thing. We don’t necessarily look at their situation from how they’re looking at it. And look at their situation in the way that they look at it and desire themselves to be free of suffering.
And even then when we sit there and we try we try to develop that, it’s not easy. You have to give many reasons. Why am I developing compassion for this person? Okay. This person.
Why? In fact, the more reasons we can bring to bear on this, then the more chance we have. We may need fifty reasons, a lot of contemplation, maybe a hundred reasons, maybe a thousand reasons, correct reasons. And that’s where we are at present. We look at other people, it’s not easy to develop compassion.
Sit down, we grit our teeth, and we okay. Five minutes, I’m gonna meditate on compassion for this other being. Not necessarily easy. So in a way, talking about the benefits of compassion as Pabongka Rinpoche did last week, is a way to inspire us to persevere. There’s such great benefit for developing great compassion and bodhicitta that we should be prepared to spend at least one lifetime, two lifetimes, ten lifetimes developing great compassion, whatever it takes.
Or even in this lifetime, we spend six months, twelve months, meditate for five minutes every day, ten minutes every day, thinking about the situation of other beings. And through developing an understanding of the situation of ourselves and others, then compassion is possible. Now, at this point in the text, then Pabongka Rinpoche starts to talk about the ways for developing compassion and the ways for therefore developing bodhicitta or the mind of enlightenment. bodhicitta just means enlightenment mind. bodhicitta.
Chitta is mind. Body everyone’s heard of body? Bodhisattva, enlightenment being. Bodhi means enlightenment. So the mind of enlightenment is what we seek to generate.
Now, as it says in the text, this has two subheadings, the way to develop bodhicitta. The actual stages in training for bodhicitta and how to develop bodhicitta by means of a ceremony. Ceremony there refers to the Bodhisattva vows, how we take those. Then the author goes on to the actual stages in training for bodhicitta. And there are two further subheadings, training the mind by means of the sevenfold cause and effect instruction and training the mind through interchange of self with others or exchanging self for others.
So the first one is the sevenfold cause and effect or the six causes and one result instruction. The instruction on the six causes and one result, otherwise known as the seven fold cause and effect instruction. So this type of instruction, so what these instructions are done, whether it’s exchanging self for others or the six causes and one result, it’s the way we train ourselves in order to generate compassion for others. So the first one, the six causes and one result, was the method used by Atisha, Candrakīrti, Chandragomin, Shāntarakshita, and others. Śāntideva’s system on the other hand was to train the mind through the interchange or the exchange of self and others.
So either of these methods is fine, but they are also combined by Je Tsongkhapa into one method. But we will examine both of these methods. So bodhicitta, can develop through either of these methods. And these lineages, both of these lineages of instruction come from the Buddha himself. So they’re authentic instructions.
In one sense, one thing within Buddhism is one finds is this idea about lineages and the necessity or this sometimes it appears a bit like an obsession with lineages that, you know, why are people always talking about lineages and where does this come from and who and if it came from that person, where did they get it from and where did they get it from? The reason for doing this is to identify the source of the teachings, especially back to the Buddha. And here, recognizing that the Buddha is an authentic source, is an ideal being. Because if the source of the teachings is not from an enlightened being, then they probably won’t be of that much benefit to us because the ground from which they’re coming from is not in a sense that of a purified vision or unfettered seeing of how things actually are. So for this reason, here, Pabongka Rinpoche is indicating the lineage.
So both of the lineage, whether it’s coming from Śāntideva or whether it’s coming from Atisha and so forth, then both of these are coming from the Buddha. Because in fact, these came down through Maitreya and through Mañjuśrī. Maitreya and Mañjuśrī are two of the eight near sons of the Buddha. The Buddha, in fact, had eight close disciples as Bodhisattvas. And these eight near they’re called the eight near sons of the Buddha, include Mañjuśrī, Avalokiteśvara, vajrapani, Ākāśagarbha, Kṣitigarbha, Samantabhādra, and so on.
The other one is a very long name, Sarvanivarna Vishkambini. But, anyway, these these two lineages come from Maitreya and Mañjuśrī. Everyone knows Maitreya. Maitreya is the actual main disciple of the Buddha. Maitreya is, of course, the fifth Buddha of this eon who currently abides in And Tuśita is a realm or a place within a desire realm where traditionally the future Buddha abides until the time is right for them to take rebirth on earth.
So the teachings that are coming from Maitreya are in a way, there’s a double blessing there because not only are they coming from Śākyamūni Buddha via Maitreya to us, But by training in the teachings of Maitreya, one generates a connection with Maitreya, which will potentially manifest when becomes the fifth Buddha of this eon in future. So it’s, in a way, there’s a twofold benefit there. So then the text goes on to say that Atisha’s Lamp on the Path. When Atisha went to Tibet, he composed a text called the Lamp of the Path. And this particular text will be taught by the Dalai Lama when he’s in Melbourne next year.
And this particular text is really the source text for the Lamrim, for the Lamrim teachings itself. And it’s a text for the Lamp of the Path. When a teacher composed the lamp for the path when he first went to Tibet in the eleventh century, that was based on the instruction lineage coming from his guru, Serlingpa, who was this master who lived in Indonesia. And Atisha received the lineage from him. So the sevenfold cause and effect system was introduced into Tibet from Atisha who gained from Serlingpa, who was living in Indonesia.
He gained it from the lineage of masters stemming back from, or going back to Maitreya and then to the Buddha. And then as Pabongka says, the sevenfold cause and effect system was popular in the early period during the Nyingma and the Kadampa periods, but the instruction on the exchange of self for others was passed on in secret. The exchanging self for others is more difficult as a practice. Six causes and one result is a little bit easier, easy to understand, easier to practice. So one traditionally was passed down openly and the other one was more in secret.
But in this way, one coming down in an open fashion, the other one coming down more in a secret fashion, the lineage came down to Je Tsongkhapa. Je Tsongkhapa was born in around thirteen fifty seven in Tibet, so in the fourteenth century, three hundred years after Atisha. And Je Tsongkhapa then managed to unite both of these lineages. As Pabongka says, his own teachings told how to train the mind in both types of instruction. And we should also attempt We should also put into practice both of these systems.
That’s probably the most beneficial for us is to unite the two systems together. However, though they must be combined in our meditation, when we train our mind in bodhicitta, these two are discussed separately. We can combine them, but initially we because they are separate systems of instruction, then we need to study them separately. And then Pabongka Rinpoche goes on to say, there are eight sections in training the mind by means of the sevenfold cause and effect instruction. So the first is immeasurable equanimity, and then understanding all beings to be one’s mother, remembering their kindness, then repaying their kindness, then generating great love, generating great compassion.
Then here in the text he says altruism, which is okay. We can leave it as altruism. Also, it means like superior intention or an excelling intention. The term in Tibetan is lhaksampa. His Holiness at times is described as universal responsibility, but it’s a very important and it’s a stage beyond great compassion that allows one to develop bodhicitta.
And then bodhicitta is the last. So there we have eight stages. Okay? Anyway, this is within the text. If possible, if we have the time, we should memorize the eight.
Does anyone know the eight? They’re not difficult to move. They’re not so difficult. One of the advantages of memorizing them is then we’ve got them whenever we need to think about them. I’ve got the memorizers in there.
There’s not eight. Oh, that’s okay. Here we’re dealing with six causes and one result into eight. So what we’re doing here is we’re putting one more stage before the first. So in fact, there’s a preliminary stage, then the six causes, then the one result, so there’s eight altogether.
So, the first one there is immeasurable equanimity. Anyway, we’ll continue a little bit. Or as it says, as Pabongka says, therefore the six from recognizing all beings as one’s mother, mase. In Tibetans, just So one nice thing about Tibetan, it’s often so brief. And the English often tends to be very long in order to get the same meaning.
And sometimes the Tibetans have quite surprised by this. They’ll say just, you know, like, And then if you could translate that into English, it means recognizing all beings to be your mother. And they look and I all I said was. What did you say? But is just well, is meaning mother.
Is awareness. Mother Recognizing all beings to be one’s mother. Yeah. It’s all very short in Tibetan, which is nice for memorizing. We may think that actually memorizing things is not that useful.
We went to school and we memorized the twelve times table, and that was hard enough, and we didn’t particularly enjoy the experience and that’s it. You know, we although, actually, we memorized lots of things, people’s names, telephone numbers, and so on. One of the advantages of memorizing things is just the convenience. If we need to know them, they’re there. It’s not very difficult to memorize things.
It just takes a bit of application, reciting it a few times through, and we tend to remember it. So this also for these key why do we bother memorizing these instructions here is because they’re the stages, the essential instruction for generating bodhicitta. And having accepted the value of bodhicitta, maybe provisionally at least, then and the importance of generating bodhicitta, then the importance of the causes of bodhicitta start to become apparent. Therefore, each of these stages is important, these eight. So it’s good to reflect on them as much as we can.
Of course, when we reflect on them, know, at times we get this hard work and we don’t have the energy to do that and so on. We have to, you know, push ourselves a little bit to do these things. It’s true that our mind is like that. Has a lot of inertia. It doesn’t wanna engage in positive actions.
It doesn’t, does it? I mean, in lift to itself, it wants to go the other way. You know? Let’s do something. That’s what I like doing.
You know? I like doing other things. I don’t wanna sit here and do something positive necessarily. It’s a bit you know? This is the way the mind is, isn’t it?
Left to its own devices, as they say it. Practicing the path is like rolling a boulder up a hill. It’s just all hard work. You know? Boulder naturally wants to roll down to the bottom where the hells are, of course.
And just pushing it up is hard work, and even holding it there is hard work. So we need plenty of perseverance and patience and effort in doing this. So it’s good if we can memorize these these eight and then reflect on them from time to time, also reflecting a great deal about all the benefits for having bodhicitta. This we need to, you know, purifies vast amounts of negative karma. It generates happiness for oneself and others, etcetera.
In this life, in all one’s future lives, there’s nothing better. There’s no better — in a way, there’s no better medicine for us than compassion for each other. Absolutely. So we need to generate it. The only way we’re gonna generate bodhicitta is manifesting the causes.
If we don’t know what the causes are, then the result definitely is not gonna come. And even if we know the causes, but we’re not assembling them, then the result is not gonna appear. Just having the wish that we have bodhicitta is not the cause. What are the causes for bodhicitta? There are just these eight.
Equanimity, immeasurable equanimity, recognizing all beings to be our mothers, reflecting on their kindness, repaying their kindness, great love, great compassion, superior intention or altruism. They give the result of bodhicitta. Unless those causes are assembled, unless they’re actually generated, they’re all states of mind, these causes. It’d be a bit easier if they were like bricks of gold or something. We could go out and, you know, do something and, you know, assemble the causes in that way.
But these are all internal causes. And the result will not manifest until the causes are there. So all these six plus the preliminary one give rise to the eighth bodhicitta. So we will we need therefore an before we generate bodhicitta, we need the stage before that, which is here stated to be altruism or the superior intention or the higher intention. So in order to generate that sort of superior intention, we need, prior to that compassion, itself is generated on the basis of love for all sentient beings.
And that love is has an attraction or is really seeking the happiness of other beings. So in a sense, we need great love and great compassion in order to generate the superior intention, in order to generate bodhicitta. That great love and great compassion is not one-sided love or compassion. It is in fact great love and great compassion that nears or draws near to all sentient beings without any discrimination whatsoever. And then that is supported by remembering the kindness of all sentient beings.
That then is supported by reflecting on the kindness of all sentient beings. And that supported itself on this fact that all sentient beings have been one’s mother and recognizing that. So those six causes there do generate bodhicitta, but they themselves are supported by the this initial state of equanimity. Everything really stems from equanimity. And as Pabongka says, that we shouldn’t be shortsighted, shouldn’t think this process too long, because we will definitely be able to generate bodhicitta if we train gradually in stages by keeping our mind on what the causes are and gradually and slowly assembling the causes.
And we can rely on the authenticity of this instruction on the causes for bodhicitta because it comes from Mañjuśrī and Maitreya and so forth. And then these teachings were very extensively taught by Je Tsongkhapa. And Je Tsongkhapa himself is an authentic teacher in the lineage of instruction himself and is variously praised in many texts and by many realized beings. So what we’re doing when we’re reading this text here, because this text here is based on the work of Je Tsongkhapa, we’re relying on the authenticity of this Lama’s words, who’s relying on the authenticity of Je Tsongkhapa. Je Tsongkhapa is relying on the authenticity of his teachers going back to Atisha.
Atisha himself received instruction from Serlingpa in Indonesia. He himself received teachers going back to the Buddha in a lineage to the Buddha himself. So this, in fact, is quite important. Do we is this is this important, this whole idea of lineage? It’s it is it is important.
Although also within the within Buddhism in general, the idea of logic itself also is very important. But it probably needs to be a mixture of both because just ourselves left up to logic. We can apply logic anywhere, but not come up with the path. As the Buddha said, once the Buddha was sitting in this grove of trees, trees called the Simsapa, and the Simsapa Grove. I’m not sure what a Simsapa Grove is, but I just the name stuck stuck in my mind.
And he was seated there with a group of monks, and he held up a handful of leaves. And he said to the monks, which is more? What is more? The leaves in the forest are the leaves in my hand. And the monk said, oh, the leaves leaves in the forest are much more than leaves in your hand.
And then the Buddha said that so to what I teach is like the leaves in my hand, the four noble truths. What exists is like the leaves in the forest, but it’s just these, the teachings on the four noble truths that you need to hear. Because the learning about the four noble truths really has the capacity to benefit us. Developing understanding of all objects of knowledge in the universe, there’s no guarantee it’s gonna help us. So from that point of view, logic is important, but unless logic is directed to those areas where our benefit really lies, then logic is not so much benefit to us.
We could spend, you know, our entire life investigating something with, you know, great deal of acumen and accuracy and so on, but not really benefit ourselves or other beings in doing so. So it really requires a mixture, a combination of the both, both in a way, scriptural authority and logic. But certainly logic needs to be accepted wherever it’s applied. Oh, well, that’s a good question. How do we know that this text does really follow from the lineage of the holders of the teachings from the time of the Buddha?
Well, really, we need to investigate the subject matter and to see whether the subject matter conforms with what the masters, the previous masters said, or whether it doesn’t conform, whether it conforms ultimately with what the Buddha said or not. And investigating it in that way, can determine whether it’s authentic or not. Just as an authentic what? A text is established as being authentic because it’s not harmed by the three analyses. And it’s similar.
This would be a very similar process. The three analyses are that for those which are obvious, if the text is talking about obvious things, then what it states about obvious things should not be harmed by our sense perception of those things. Obvious things are just things that are accessible to the senses. And if it’s talking about, you know, being, you know, like, what, a mountain. If one had a text, for instance, about the teeth of crows, a long treatise, you know, five hundred pages long, describing all the features of crow’s teeth, then because that’s something that we could actually examine just by, you know, finding a few crows to see if there are teeth, then we could, you know, come to the conclusion that such a treatise was not an authentic treatise.
Similarly, on a subtler level, on the level of hidden phenomena, then we can apply logic. We can apply reasoning by the strength of fact to establish whether if the treatise was dealing with hidden phenomena, hidden entities, by logic applying the strength of fact, we could establish it to be valid or invalid. And then for extremely hidden subjects such as the law of cause and effect, we would then rely on the word of the Buddha or fully awakened being and their statements to see whether it if it accorded with those statements, we could accept what it states in relation to those extremely hidden phenomena. But it’s that type of analysis that would have to be done. And then that would establish that the teachings were in the lineage, or were within the guidelines set down by the Buddha.
But still these need to follow logic as well. Teachings must be logical. That’s what Dalai Lama said. If scientists prove that there is a self, then Buddhism must accept that there is a self. If scientists prove there is no rebirth, then Buddhism would have to accept there is no rebirth.
Because the fact, the teachings must accord with the facts as they are, whatever the facts are. Right. So firstly, have the immeasurable equanimity. Now here, Pabongka Rinpoche discusses a little bit about immeasurable equanimity, and this is the foundation practice of the six causes and one result. It’s the preliminary topic.
It’s not included. Some say it should be included in the six causes, making seven causes. But it doesn’t it’s not a problem. It’s there anyway. So as Pabongka says, immeasurable equanimity is the first thing to meditate on in the sevenfold cause and effect instruction.
We need to have equanimity of mind towards all sentient beings. But at present, our mind streams do not react equally to all. We get angry at some and attached to others. We should take strangers as our first object of mind training, then move onto our friends, and then on our enemies. Or we should take all three together as the object.
And Pabongka says that I think the latter of these two has the wider application. So we should generate or meditate on equanimity by taking the field all sentient beings, friend, enemy, stranger. We should meditate on our enemies, friends, and strangers, visualizing them in front of us. So this is the fundamental method. Very simple.
We have these three different reactions towards them, hostility, attraction, and indifference. In the first place, we become angry with the people we take to