Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 24-minute Lamrim teaching, Ven Jampa Ignyen exposes self-cherishing as the root of all suffering and the true inner enemy requiring defeat. He walks through the detailed logic Pabongka Rinpoche uses: self-cherishing as a butcher stealing higher rebirth, a burglar carrying off merit, a sower of destructive karma — no external practice can touch it. He contrasts Buddha’s choice to uproot self-cherishing with our own three countless eons of loyalty to it. The core movement comes in genuinely grasping that all happiness stems from cherishing others, all suffering from cherishing ourselves, a truth the untrained mind resists but can gradually accept through persistent contemplation. He closes with practical counsel: reflect on these points anywhere, anytime, until conviction dawns and your automatic responses begin to shift.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 2001 08 16 LR.mp3
UUID: 01a7e621-aa53-4936-8c8a-d0a050972a9b
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Lam Rim 2001 Month 07-09 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-08-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 23.7 minutes
Words: ~2,568
So anyway, we develop this thought that I myself and the the I for myself or my I and the I of others is equal. There is no difference. And so in practicing that, we’re practicing understanding all sentient beings to be our mother. We’re remembering their kindness and repaying their kindness. We’re practicing prior to that immeasurable equanimity.
We are bringing all of that to bear and contemplating I, the I in my continuum is equal to the I in the continuance of others. So, here in this practice, as before, we’re employing these preliminary stages and they come together and in a sense they can be merged as one process. And also the latter stages of the six causes and one result, that is the development of altruism and bodhicitta is also similar to the stages of exchanging self for others. Okay, so we’ve got the initial stages of the six causes and one result, that is immeasurable equanimity, then what? And then their kindness, repaying their kindness, great love, those plus equalizing self for others can be merged in a sense in one practice.
They represent similar levels. And also the latter two stages, altruism or the superior intention plus bodhicitta also are similar to the mode of practice within exchanging self for others. But the others, there’s some difference. Oh, in fact, here, sorry, as Pabongka Rinpoche points out, for both great love and great compassion, for those two, there is some difference in the two types of practice. So, and as Pabongka Rinpoche says, these two aspects receive special treatment beyond what they receive in the six cause and one result, here in exchanging self for others.
Remembering their kindness and so on only gives a method of recalling the kindness of sentient beings, and so on. Anyway, what we’re concentrating on here is great love and great compassion are exalted in the second practice. And they’re exalted because here we think about the faults of self-cherishing and the favorable or the positive aspects of cherishing others. And these two then form the second and third parts of this fivefold process in the preliminary stages of exchanging self for others. So as Pabongka Rinpoche says, now firstly we contemplate the many faults resulting from self-cherishing.
And then the Guru Puja says, I see this chronic disease of self-cherishing is the cause to produce unwanted suffering. And in Bodhicaryāvatāra or exchanging or practicing the deeds of Bodhisattvas that he said, all worldly sufferings that have occurred stemmed from wanting happiness for oneself. Anything that befalls the worldly, any fear and suffering, all stemmed from self-cherishing. Why should I have this great devil? And our root text says put the blame on one thing alone, which is We should place the blame on this one enemy alone, which is the self-cherishing attitude.
So firstly, we should contemplate here all the disadvantages of self-cherishing. So Pabongka Rinpoche continues. All our unwanted sufferings come from self-cherishing, coming to grief through weapons, poison, ghosts, and nagas, being reborn in hell as hungry ghost animals. These are due to having killed other beings in the hope of some gain for our own happiness in doing so. Whatever we’ve done in the past, whatever negative actions we’ve done in the past, in other words, really come from our self-cherishing, holding ourselves to be more important than others.
Likewise, succumbing to the diseases of the wind, bile and phlegm. The wind, bile and phlegm are the three causes for disease in Tibetan medicine. Wind, bile and phlegm exist in a balance within our physical body and when one of them is out of balance with the others or two are out of balance or all three are out of balance, then we become sick. So, all disease is coming from cherishing ourselves, fearing enemies, getting into quarrels, or fearing prosecution by the authorities. All these are due solely to our self-cherishing, our self-cherishing, gorging ourselves on food, and being obsessed with food, fashion, and fame, which are due to self-cherishing.
When at the top of the ladder, when at the peak of status such as being a king or a minister and so forth, or when on the bottom of the rung as a subject of the kings and so forth, all these faults, all these negative experiences that occur no matter where we are in Samsāra are due to self-cherishing. So, Pabongka Rinpoche here goes on to highlight a number of the experiences that we undergo which are due to self-cherishing. And this we need to remind ourselves. As it says in the Guru Puja that all our suffering is coming from self-cherishing. All our happiness comes from cherishing others.
At times we just need to sit down and think through this because we’re we have such strong habits to thinking that our happiness is coming from other things. Our suffering is coming from other things. But actually, all our suffering is coming from self-cherishing. So at times we need to remind ourselves of this and then just go through. We can just take a see where our mind is at present and the suffering that it’s experiencing, and then remind ourselves that this is coming from self-cherishing.
As many reasons as we can bring to bear is good, is better. So, in the past we’ve died from poison or undigested food and so on. We really don’t die from poison or undigested food. Cherishing. All our deaths are due to self-cherishing.
self-cherishing has killed us countless times over. There’s no greater enemy to us than self-cherishing. In fact, as Pabongka says, self-cherishing is the butcher who kills our chances of high rebirth or liberation. It is the burglar who carries away all of our accumulated merit. Any merit that we are generating at times is liable to be stolen by self-cherishing from us.
And self-cherishing is like the sower who sows the seeds of evil karma in the field of our awareness or the field of our consciousness conditioned by ignorance and so on. So in fact, every negative that happens to us has as its root the self-cherishing in our continuum. It’s not the self-cherishing in the continuums of others. So, of course, at present, our suffering does appear to be coming from other beings, but it’s really coming from our own self-cherishing. But again, we need to think about this and examine with reasoning and apply reasoning to establishing why this is true and why the appearance of things at present is not true.
At present, it appears as if our suffering is coming from outside of ourselves, but actually it’s coming from within us. It’s coming from self-cherishing. And so, Pabongka Rinpoche then goes on to give stories about how in Tibet amongst the Tibetans, are various Tantric practices such as overcoming obstacles by doing certain pujas or offering practices, making images, throwing rice at images and so forth in order to overcome enemies and so on. Pabongka then gives instances of where people are, monks and so on, are highlighting that these practices that imply that there’s an external enemy, or if we were to take it that they were an external enemy, we would be completely wrong because self-cherishing is the enemy that we need to overcome. And so we don’t need to even attempt to overcome external enemies.
There aren’t any. And there’s this old quotation, self-cherishing is a blue headed bird of ill omen. Mind training is the bribe to make this nuisance go away. Which is true. I’m not sure where This blue headed bird of ill omen, I think in Tibet they must have had an idea that some birds with a blue head, if they came, if they arrived nearby, then that was an ill omen.
But it’s our self-cherishing which is the bird of ill omen, and no practices to subdue external enemies are going to have much use against it. And Pabongka then goes on to say that, for instance, once a man who practiced Chöd, usurped a place where a spirit lived. The spirit then used its magic to drive him out. One day, the man’s two benefactors fell into a quarrel. The man went to heal the dispute and one of them took up a weapon and killed him.
It was somewhat ironic. The practice of chöd, in Tibet there was a practice called chöd. Chöd means to sever. It’s quite a highly developed practice that seeks to sever self-cherishing, sever the thought of self. But even for someone that was in the midst of undertaking this practice in retreat was killed, killed by the dispute of his benefactors whom he tried to break up.
But still, his death was due to his own self-cherishing. And in a sense, death was like the very practice of chöd itself. Anyway, there’s some irony here anyway in the way that this is stated. Yeah. Perhaps.
But again, what Pabongka Rinpoche is talking about here is the fact that it’s self-cherishing, which is the first enemy that needs to be overcome. And so, in doing this, we need initially to list all the negative qualities of self-cherishing, go through them all, name them, put them in front of us, put little stickers on the fridge about self-cherishing. Right on our glasses across the front. Right across our forehead, you know, self-cherishing has many disadvantages so that we see it whenever we look in the mirror. Don’t follow self-cherishing.
We put stickers all over our cars and so forth. This would be very good for us. teachers. teachers, absolutely. We can write it on our hands and, you know, have messages played back to us at regular times during the day.
But we do need to remind ourselves because we’re always susceptible to self-cherishing. And it’s self-cherishing that as is stated by Pabongka Rinpoche, Śākyamūni Buddha was like us at one stage, except the only difference between ourselves and Śākyamūni Buddha was that at some point in the past, Śākyamūni Buddha said, okay, I’ve had enough with self-cherishing. It’s just, you know, it’s going nowhere. So self-cherishing is simply problematic. Okay?
So, and Śākyamūni Buddha said to himself, made the commitment, I’m going to root out this self-cherishing at any cost. Whereas we took the option of self-cherishing. We decided self-cherishing is a good thing, and we’ve hung in there with it for the last three countless eons. Three countless eons? That’s a hundred and eighty great eons.
Every one of those hundred and eighty great eons, there’s eighty intermediate eons. Each and one of those eighty intermediate eons, there are two small eons. Each of those small eons is the time that it takes for a person for the lifespan of beings to decrease from eighty thousand to ten and back from ten to eighty thousand, altering or increasing or decreasing one year every hundred years. So it’s a huge amount of time. But if we decided to root out self-cherishing at that stage, we would now be completely enlightened.
The question remains, why haven’t we? Why have we been so loyal to our self-cherishing? We cherish ourselves, cherishing, let’s face it. Not only do we cherish ourselves, but we cherish the fact that we cherish ourselves. We do.
If we didn’t cherish this cherishing so much, we’d look at it a bit more carefully. But it’s it’s almost it’s beyond out of bounds to us. No. No. No.
Leave the self-cherishing. Attack everyone else in the universe. Kill, maim, slaughter, commit genocide, but don’t harm self-cherishing. So really we need to examine our self-cherishing, which is at the very center of our experience, and begin to examine its disadvantages. Then we contemplate the many good qualities resulting from cherishing others.
And as Śāntideva said, all worldly qualities may be found, all worldly happiness to be found comes from wishing others to be happy. This also is very difficult to understand. We think happiness, the cause of happiness lies everywhere else but making other people happy. Often, think the opposite. If that other person’s unhappy, I’ll be happy.
When we hear that they’re unhappy, we’re happy. Good. I’m satisfied. Yeah. Oh, they’re experiencing problems.
Oh, pity. That’s that’s a pity. And so we think this. We don’t believe that cherishing others is the cause of happiness. We think that and other people being happy, us generating happiness for others is gonna create happiness for ourselves.
And primarily here, the center of our field or our focal object should be our enemies. If our enemies are happy, then we will be happy. But our self-cherishing tends to think that if they’re unhappy, we’ll be happy, which is the opposite. So as Guru Puja says, I see that cherishing these, my mothers, is the thought that leads to happiness, is the door leading to infinite qualities. And our text on mind training says, this is the Seven-Point Mind Training, meditate on the greater kindness of all.
In other words, having the body and wealth of a high rebirth or having magnificent surroundings resulted from the cherishing of other beings. Anything that good anything good that happens to us in the present moment is coming from cherishing others. Anything bad is coming from cherishing ourselves. This we have to examine. So here we need to contemplate at great length the benefits of cherishing others and the negative qualities of cherishing ourselves.
So, this we can do at any time of day and night. We don’t have to be seated on a cushion or when we’re walking down the street, can think of of the disadvantages of cherishing ourselves, and then the advantages of cherishing every other being that we see, reflecting in this way on whatever comes to mind. So again, this is not gonna be it’s not gonna change our mind overnight. Our mind is very not easy to change, but it will the mind itself will automatically change when it understands something to be detrimental.
At present, we practice self-cherishing and abandon cherishing others as our policy, as a given. To actually change that, turn that on its head, is really gonna be difficult. We can see that it’s just our automatic response at present to cherish ourselves and to blame others for our unhappiness. Actually, it’s the complete opposite of what’s a benefit to us. Cherishing ourselves and blaming others for our unhappiness is guaranteed to generate unhappiness for us.
So we need to contemplate this until doubts actually begin to arise. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe this is true. Maybe cherishing myself is like a poison. It really is harming me.
And then whatever reasons we can bring to bear, the more the better. Again, it might a thousand reasons, ten thousand. Reasons, ten thousand. As it said in the text on on logic, everything is a correct reason. Everything in the universe is a correct reason.
Whatever we see in the room around us, the floor, other people, everything is a correct reason to establish what is valid. Also, in a sense, we can say everything is a correct reason for establishing that we need to practice cherishing others and not practice cherishing the self, cherishing ourselves. These we need to contemplate. So we just stop there have a break, have a cup of tea.