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 mind transformation using the powerful metaphor of washing laundry: gross stains come out easily, but stubborn stains require long-term, patient effort. He introduces the Rays of the Sun, a classical mind-training text, and teaches the preliminary practices: contemplating impermanence and death, then the six preparatory dharmas for meditation. These include cleaning the meditation room as an external representation of mental purification, arranging symbols of the Buddha’s awakened body, speech, and mind on the altar, and making offerings—a practice whose real purpose is shifting the mind toward virtue and merit. A story about two brothers, one slow to learn but persistent, illustrates how diligence overcomes obstacles.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Rays 2001 10 24.mp3
UUID: c095442f-2561-4d13-8033-168854f39767
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Like Rays of the Sun (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-10-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~3,774
And aware all all the time. And in fact, I think we aspire to have a positive mind, a virtuous mind, a mind that’s concerned about others all the time, but it’s not easy. Yes, please. It’s certainly not easy. The mind does resist.
It’s got a lot of inertia. So it does require effort for us to transform the mind. And of course, attaining a state of enlightenment is the most difficult thing we can do. So it’s no wonder that beginning to change our mind and set it in a positive direction, is not going to be easy. It certainly does resist.
We push it, it pushes back. We nudge it, it nudges us back. We have a present state of mind is just an afflictive state. We get bored. We wanna do something else.
We entertain all manner of negative thoughts towards other beings, gross ones and subtle ones. The subtle ones we’re not even aware of, and so on. And often we feel completely justified in the way we think about others, even though we know it’s a bit negative. And it’s very hard to extract ourselves from that. We’re tangled up in this in a certain types of negative view of other beings.
Not easy to withdraw from that. We even think we gain some satisfaction from thinking negatively about others. For certainly as long as we think that, that impossible to stand back and give those states up, but it is in our own best interest to do so. In fact, there’s no way we can be happy without doing so. Unfortunately, a lot of the ways we’ve trained the mind and spent a lot of time in doing and invested a lot of time in doing, which is making this current afflictive state of awareness that we have, We’ve got to give up.
It’d be nice in a way to be able to use it all to all these skillful ways that we’ve developed, which are really very unskillful in how to justify negative thoughts to others. And so in all of it, ultimately, we need to give up. But again, giving that up is gonna take a long time. As it said, when we go out and do the washing, it’s easy, not so difficult to get out the really bad stains or the mud and so forth. Throw it in the wash and generally one cycle with a bit of detergent will get rid of it.
For us it’s similar as well. The really gross negative things we can control and we can start to overcome. We stop killing animals, for instance. We give that up if we were once involved in in doing that. And really really using harsh words against other beings is not hard.
We can curtail that. We can stop that. And there are other things, different forms of lying and so forth. We can overcome the different negative actions of body and speech. We can start to restrain and stop ourselves from entering.
Entering. But when it gets down to the stubborn stains, it’s much more difficult. Look at that white shirt. The stains on the collar, we put it through the wash and it’s still there. We soak it overnight in something.
It’s still there. We get out and we start scrubbing. No. There’s still a bit of yellow there. The stubborn stains take a long time.
Similar with our mind, we can stop the gross negative actions. But those subtle stains that are there at present, they’re much harder to get rid of. They take a long term plan. We get the soaker. We have the one week plan to get rid of the stains.
We have the one month plan. But just as we have strategies for overcoming stains in the washing, the mind we have at present is going take a very long term plan. The stains within the mind are the most difficult of all to remove. And we can see this to a degree at present because there are some things we don’t like to do or we realize we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t really get angry, and certainly we shouldn’t hate other beings.
But we can see how difficult it is to overcome these states. So therefore, we need a long term plan and strategy to overcome these states. Now I was thinking of doing a little bit of meditation to start with. I think that might be useful. So we do a little bit of breath meditation.
Now why we’re doing the breath meditation is with a view to overcoming these inner stains, stains within the mind itself. Firstly, we need to prepare a bit of the ground to level the mind out a little bit. If possible, start to reduce the jagged edges of our awareness in a way. Make the mind a little bit more even. Make the mind more patient.
Infuse it with a little bit more compassion, a bit more love. Make it a little bit more flexible. Because at present, the mind is just so stubborn and set in its ways that it’s going to take a lot of meditation to make it flexible. And not only meditation on the breath, also meditation on compassion, love and compassion are the two central attitudes that are really going to, in time, make the mind more flexible, more open to others, more pliable, less ready to get angry and hate others. So love and compassion are really absolutely essential.
But prior to meditating on love and compassion, we can do a little breath meditation, which helps to simply control our or settle our discursive thinking. So having a strong positive motivation, that we’re gonna make the our present mind positive, then we can just reflect on the breath. And here we just watch the breath and we allow the mind to settle to relax while we’re watching the breath. Any thoughts that come up, just let those pass. But here we’re not we have to be careful we don’t fall asleep.
We’re training the mind to simply be aware of awareness itself and to let go of thoughts as they arise. In a way, this is training to overcome attachment to our thoughts. Give us some inner space. So for the next five minutes, we’re simply going to, with full awareness while relaxing the mind, we’re just gonna practice letting our thoughts go and not hold on to them. So we’ll just read for a little while from this text.
Initial text is actually by Geshe Chekawa, who is one of the Kadampa lamas who lived about eight hundred, nine hundred years ago. And there’s a text written as a commentary to it called Nyi ma’i ‘od zer, the rays of the sun. So we’re actually looking at this text called the rays of the sun, and it’s a text on mind training. And where we are at the text is where it says first, which means first we should train in the preliminaries. So here we’re examining the preliminary practices that we should be engaged in, in mind training.
And so the first thing that we should contemplate is the significance and rarity of attaining a life as a human being, able to contemplate impermanence and death. And so in contemplating our impermanence, then we reflect that our lives can end at any moment, and we think about the causes and results of actions and the vicious nature of, or the problematic nature of cyclic existence itself. So in training in the preliminaries, we have a look at our current status and we need to remind ourselves of this as often as we can. It’s a bit like a bitter medicine that helps to ground ourselves in a realization of actually how we do exist. That even though for every day we get caught up in various issues, still our basic nature is that we’re impermanent.
Death could occur at any moment. Just thinking about this helps us to stop entering negative thoughts, if we really have understanding that we are impermanent, that we may die tomorrow, we may die this afternoon, this evening, midnight, three o’clock in the morning, then this will tend to ground us, we’ll tend to stop thinking in ways that are irrelevant to our actual situation. Much of our thinking is irrelevant to the fact that we’re going to die. So here initially we train in the preliminaries. We think about impermanence and death.
And when we’re training initially, it’s said here by the author that we divide up our practice into the actual meditation session and the period between the sessions. And the actual session itself actual session here is when we have time during the day that we set aside for our practice, then at that time, when we really wanna sit and do something that’s of actual benefit to our current life and our life in future, and the life after this life, and so on. So those sessions that we set aside for spiritual practice, divide in three, preparation, meditation, and behavior. So then firstly, since we wanna develop a meditation practice, so firstly, it said we should engage in proper preparation. So this in accordance with the life story of the guru, Dharmamati, Lobpon Chökyi Gyungdrung, who lived in India.
So in accordance with the way that he lived his life, then we should initially decorate the abode where we’re going to practice meditation. And we arrange representations of the Three Jewels and offer a mandala to the Three Jewels and complete the six kinds of conduct up to the request that the three great purposes of self, others, and both be fulfilled. So what this means is that in a way, also, involves just some simple practices that we can do that, put the mind in a proper state. So in fact, here we’re talking about the Jor Chö. In Tibetan they call them the Jor Chö.
The Jor means preparation. Chö means Dharma, the preparatory dharmas. So what are they? So firstly, the first one is we clean the room. Where we’re practicing meditation, it should be clean.
So we sweep the floor. We dust it. We make it clean because basically what we seek to do in our meditation practice is clean the mind. And in a way, this is an external representation of that. Where we’re engaged meditation, we clean that.
There’s a story at the time of the Buddha of two brothers. One was born the one that was born first was given the name of Great Path. And there was a prophecy said when they were born that, or they were taken to see a particular person and they recommended, this, the child should be actually taken to crossroads and should ask for blessings of all the beings that come past on that crossroads. And so this, the servant of the household did, they took the baby out and they requested blessings at this crossroads. And this servant was quite diligent and she went to a large crossroad where many monks and Brahmins passed by and they each gave their blessing to the child.
And then the child was brought back and it was said that if this was done it would be to the great benefit of the child, so it was done, and the child was given the name of Great Path because they had received many blessings on a main road when they were initially very young. Then later a second child was born and the same advice was given, but the girl, the servant girl to whom the child was given was quite lazy and they took the child instead of a back lane. They didn’t really feel up to, they didn’t really feel that enthusiastic about seeking blessings on the main road. And not many people went by and the child received few blessings. And the child was given the name of Small Path.
Later the child who was named Great Path ended study and they were very successful in their studies. They learned the three Vedas. The Vedas were studied at that time by a traditional member of society in India, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, the Rig Veda. And they were the repository of knowledge within the traditional Brahminic society. Then later he became a monk, a Buddhist monk, and he practiced well and eventually became an arhat.
On the other hand, his younger brother went to school, but he wasn’t very successful at school, had trouble learning, eventually left school. After a while, as an adult, he thought he’d become a monk. He went to see his brother and his brother said, oh, well, yes, you can become a monk. And he ordained him. And then he set him the task of doing some study.
And so he gave him a verse to learn. And when he started to try and learn and memorize the verse, could remember the first syllable of a word. When he moved onto the second syllable, he would forget first and only remember the second. And when he went back to the first syllable, he’d remember that but forget the second syllable. So he had great problems in learning and his brother eventually sent him out into the fields and said, look, go out there and you memorize this verse.
This is your work as a monk. You should at least learn this verse to begin with. So he struggled and tried and he’d recite the first line through, but he’d forget the first part of the line. And when he’d remember the first part, he’d forget the second part, and he’d start on the second line of the four line verse. And he kept going like this for month after month.
The shepherds in the fields minding the sheep and the goats had memorized the verse completely. Still, small Path was having trouble with the first word. Remember the first, forget the second. His brother became very despondent, who was an arhat, a liberated being, thinking my younger brother is not going to learn anything. So eventually he said, look, it’s better you find some other teacher.
I’m not having any success. The Buddha himself, on seeing this, took pity on the small path and he decided he would help and, he went past nearby the small path and, he again recommended that he should memorize a verse. And this time he gave him a verse or this line of eliminate the dust, eliminate the stains. And then he set him to work in a monastery in the temple itself, sweeping the floor. But while he was sweeping the floor, he had to recite this verse.
Eliminate the dust, eliminate the stains. But while doing this, he’d start on one side of the temple and sweep sweep all the way through to the center. Then a wind would come back in from the other side and blow all the dust across the floor again, so he’d start again. The Buddha was actually causing the wind to come in and blow the dust into the part that he had already swept. But he persevered with this line, eliminate the dust, eliminate the stain.
And over a long period, eventually, these words stuck in his mind, and he was able to remember them. And then by persevering over a long period, he eventually gained understanding and insight and actually entered the path. The meaning of this story is that even though we have obscurations to learning, we can develop understanding, we can develop insight, and this we do through eliminating the dust, eliminating the stains that we have. We eliminate the inner stains, which are like dirty washing. We do this by perseverance over a long period.
So initially when we settle down to doing sessions on meditation, then it’s good for us to clear the room. And we can even, as we are cleaning the room, we can say, eliminate the dust, eliminate the stains. So the first of the six preparatory practices here is to sweep out our room, make it clean, vacuum it out, whatever we’ve got. We’ve a brush, we’ve got a duster, we should sweep it with a recollection that what we’re doing in meditation is cleaning away the stains that are there. The purpose of our meditation is to clean the stains, not doing to increase them.
Perhaps in our meditation, though, that’s what happens. We sit there and we try to meditate, all we can think about is people we dislike and anger arises, hatred arises. If that’s the case, then it’s really our stains are increasing. But, really, our meditation is directed at overcoming these stains. So we clean the room to begin with.
Then we arrange first we clean the room, and then we arrange symbols of the body, speech, and mind of a fully awakened being. We’re doing this to remind ourselves that that’s the state that we want to attain. So therefore, we put them in a clean place up high. Representation of the body of a fully awakened being is the statue. We have a statue of a Buddha.
Then that’s a represent representation of a body. Representation of the speech is a text on the perfection of wisdom if we have it, like the eight thousand verse perfection of wisdom sūtra or the Heart Sūtra or the hundred thousand verse if we have it or the eighteen thousand verse or the seven hundred line, the six hundred line, so forth. So that represents the speech. Then the mind is represented by a stupa, like this one up here. And there’s a golden one over there.
That’s the representation of the mind of the Buddha. So these we put on a table and we pay respect to them because because that is what we wish to achieve ourselves. What we want to achieve is the body, speech, and mind of a Buddha internally. So we pay respect to that externally. So having swept the room and arranged the representations of the body, speech, and mind of a fully awakened being, That’s what we want to attain.
True? So therefore, because we want to obtain that, we put it in front of us, and that’s gonna be the object of our meditation. Then we have the second Jor Chö, or preparatory Dharma. And that is we make offerings to the body, speech, and mind of a fully awakened being, the Buddha, Dharma, and the Sangha, for instance. And we make offerings there by whatever we have to offer, we can place in front of the body, speech and mind of a Buddha.
Why are we doing that? Is that reasonable thing to do? Like if we had food, we’d put it on the or if we had a glass of water, we’d put it in front of those objects. Is there any doing that? Yeah.
How do we accumulate merit by doing that? Yeah. Yes. We’re really trying to work internally here, aren’t we? Because of course, if we have a statue of the Buddha, a text by the Buddha, and stupa in front of us, and we offer food, for instance, of course, we know they’re not, gonna be able to eat that food that we put there.
In a way, our offering doesn’t benefit the object. But it does benefit ourselves when we do that. Why is that why is that possible? How could it benefit us? How could it improve our current state of mind?
If it doesn’t improve it, there’s not much use in engaging in in such a practice. Or in fact, does it improve the mind? If we do that, do we notice that the mind does benefit? Our mind does benefit. Possibly.
Oh, This is very important. In a way, unless we have a feeling for this particular practice, the second of the six, then it’s not something that we’ll readily do. It’ll become more like a I don’t know, something that we would do more out of habit than out of liking the practice. Oh, very much. We also, we need to like to do it in order for us to do it, because otherwise we will not do it.
If we don’t like doing something, we don’t do it. Generally, we liking, how does liking come about? Possibly. Possibly? Probably, yeah, seeing the benefit.
Actually, often these simple practices are not easy to understand. In a way, it indicates they’re not so simple. Or, in fact, we’re quite complicated. Understand what is simple takes time. We have to work through a number of things because we’re so complicated.
Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.
In fact, we’re offering to an object that is without stain, perfected. And in a way, we’re making that offering in order to receive blessings, inspiration. In a way, we’re seeking to change our current state of mind by doing this practice. So this requires some investigation. Absolutely.
In a way, blessing means the mind is changing. Something that changes the mind in a positive direction is a blessing. Yeah. We need to move towards developing our inner potential in that direction, whatever. And that, in fact, is the positive direction, the direction of virtue itself.
Some degree of self interest will arise in that, but there is a certain self-interest in that. Well, in a sense, yeah, that’s right. It’s not exactly that’s a good point. It’s not only that there is power within the mind itself, that the work is done solely in regards to the mind itself. In fact, even external objects can have an influence.
It can be a potency within the object. Anyway, here we’re dealing with the second of the six preparatory and that is making offerings, obtaining pure offerings appropriate, they’re attractive, they’re worthy to be an offering, and just simply making an offering of that. Whether in fact it’s water, here we can offer water. In fact, things that we’re not attached to is good. Of course, if we try and make an offering of something that we don’t want to offer because we’re attached to it, it’s not a really faultless offering.
Of course, we have a lot of attachment to objects, so it’s not easy for us. What’s stopping us from making these offerings? Probably our attachment. We don’t like giving away things we’re attached to. So here, having established the object to which we’re