Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 15-minute talk, Ven Jampa Ignyen opens with a striking analogy: understanding the mind is like tasting ocean water and trying to discern which river or region it came from — nearly impossible. The mind is an ocean of different mental functions, layers, and states. He explores why mind is harder to understand than modern physics, then shows how mindfulness becomes the tool for discerning moment by moment how we think and what shapes our thoughts. Developing wisdom means understanding the mind’s nature and recognizing what leads to happiness versus unhappiness — understanding that underlies ethics and self-knowledge. Extended Q&A explores consciousness terminology and levels of mind development. He concludes with a story: a monk overwhelmed by 253 vows learns from the Buddha that practice’s essence is simple — avoid physical, verbal, and mental harm.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Mindful Life 1996 05 18.mp3
UUID: 6c8afa5b-54c9-4994-b984-b179a03b0510
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Living the Mindful Life (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 1996-05-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 14.8 minutes
Words: ~1,155
Very difficult for us to discern all. You know, the reason I’m thinking in this way is because of this course. We tend well, just naturally not to be able to understand it is a little bit too difficult for us. And one can easily understand it if one looks at even science. Science has progressed a long way with analyzing form, with matter, with atoms, with parts of atoms, with quarks, or with astrophysics you know, too.
Modern science of which we’re very much a part, you know, has developed a great deal. And many things can be explained in terms of modern physics, but modern physics concentrates on form. The mind itself is even more difficult to understand. Just like if we go to an ocean somewhere and we taste the water, it’s difficult for us to discern, oh, this water came from the Murray and this came from the Arctic and so on. Not gonna be easy for us to do that.
Similarly, our mind is like an ocean, an ocean of different mental functions, different layers, different states. It’s not easy for us to discern how our mind operates. Even moment by moment, why we think in a certain way in one moment, and why this influences the next, and so on. But this is part of the practice of mindfulness. And in fact, if we can see the way we think, This is a way this is the way, actually, to developing understanding.
For developing wisdom is the ability to understand the nature of the mind. Wisdom is actually defined as the ability to discern what leads to happiness and what leads to unhappiness in general. Discerning what leads to happiness and what leads to unhappiness depends on understanding the nature of the mind. And that leads itself to to understanding the meaning of ethics. So this all is part of developing mindfulness.
Coming to be aware of who we are as individuals and how we think, how we act in different situations and so on. Mindfulness also helps to eliminate the confusion of everyday life. We do begin to see? How our emotions are determined. It’s a way of getting to know yourself.
So it’s very important. Anyway, let me leave it there anyway for the first session. I think we have a tea break. Tea break now? Okay.
We’ll have questions. Yeah. Anyone wants to? Alright. Plenty of time.
I’d say it’s probably synonymous. It means the same thing. I I think mind if you go back to the Tibetan terms or even the Pali or the Sanskrit terms for these days, these terms are often completely interchangeable. They mean the same thing. Like mind is often the translation for sem.
Consciousness you can translate for sem pa. And they’re synonymous. Mean the same thing, although they may be defined in a slightly different way. Virtually the same thing. No.
Not from the traditional perspective. Yeah. Mind consciousness, awareness, cognition are all synonymous. And in a sense, that’s all there is. There’s no, like, big c consciousness or big m mind that lies beyond that.
But the whole field of consciousness we already possess. Because we’re sentient beings. Or really the reason given for that is because we have buddha nature. The full potential for development already exists for an individual. Individual.
The only thing is we haven’t developed various states of mind to their full potential. Oh, well, omniscience. Yes. Namkhen. Yep.
Oh, and also there’s various levels of developed mind. Fully developed mind, mind that has gone to the end of the process of development where the full potential of mind is realized, called Namkhen, which means omniscience, all knowing. The mind? Awakened mind. Yeah.
The mind of a Buddha. Prior to that level, there are other levels such as the the mind of a noble being, like an ārya, ārya state, which is a level above what we’ve realized, above our level of ordinary mind. And even that state of mind has many different levels. That’s true. I think the terminology is not standardised in English.
So, one word is often used for meaning one thing, you know, in one text, or one system, and another thing in another. So, it’s not easy to differentiate. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
That’s right. Yeah. Needs to be standardised. The Western English terms need to be converted into synonyms of the Tibetan, for instance, or the Sanskrit, just to avoid confusion. Of course, a lot of debate just centers on defining terms, even in Tibetan, and of course also in English.
So, it’s very important to standardize the terms. Otherwise, you can spend hours in debate over one thing and just to come to the conclusion that you’re talking about something different. But in a way, it’s like, you know, science, going back to science, that within physics or within medicine or within any field of science, the terms are very specific and have very clear definitions, more or less. And in a sense, have to do that with the mind as well. Yes.
Yeah. The stream. Yeah. Yeah. We would define them as past life consciousnesses.
But in that past life, they function pretty much as they function in this life. But within that, you know, we have many different levels or different types of consciousness that a sentient being would possess, a human being would have. You know, the gross sensory awarenesses, different levels of conception, different mental factors, the fifty two mental factors, the eighty nine different types of consciousness, and then the different levels of transcendent awareness, the different levels of mundane awareness. Yeah. So there’s many.
It depends on which way you look look at consciousness. Like compassion. Compassion has two types or four types or twenty two types or more depending on how you look at it, how you define it, how you classify it. I think this is one thing that Buddhists are very good at, is having long lists of classifications. But that’s not the purpose of practice, to have endless lists of different states of mind.
It’s there’s a story of a monk at the time of the Buddha who became a monk, and then he realized that there were, like, two hundred and fifty three vows to look after. And he became very despondent and he went to the Buddha and said, know, like, there’s no way I can, you know, I can’t even remember the vows, let alone practice them. You know, what can I do? So the Buddha said, well, look, there’s basically only three things you’ve got to do. Just don’t commit any physical non virtue, verbal non virtue or mental non virtue.
So, in a sense that’s saying that if you have the basic understanding of what has to be done, then all these other classifications are added extras. They’re not that necessary.