Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute teaching, Ven Jampa Ignyen opens with a meditation dividing all sentient beings into three categories—friends, enemies, strangers—then reveals how temporary and arbitrary these divisions are. He then teaches mindfulness of feelings, a fundamental practice for understanding mind. Using the metaphor of a king who alone tastes the food his cooks prepare, he explains how feelings “taste” each object that consciousness encounters, moment to moment. He identifies three types of feeling—positive, negative, neutral—present in body and mind, then illustrates with the story of Angulimala: a bandit-turned-monk whose understanding of feelings freed him from mental suffering even as past karma ripened as physical pain. The talk concludes with ethics and harm: how not harming others generates lasting happiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Mindful Life 1996 05 18.mp3
UUID: 2e2c51a1-cc4e-4902-9d9e-499f735882f4
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Living the Mindful Life (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 1996-05-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.5 minutes
Words: ~3,442
All sentient beings in a semicircle facing us. In the front directly in front of us, we can visualize those beings who are indifferent towards, who are strangers to us. Those on the right hand side, we can visualize those that we don’t like, our enemies, those that we’re not attracted towards, and so on. Those on the left hand side are as those those that we are attracted to, our friends, family, and so on. This field of all sentient beings is divided into these three types of relationship, either one of neutrality, one of attraction, one of repulsion, includes every being.
And then we can think about the nature of this relationship that we have with others. How temporary it is. Those who are directly in front of us, who are strangers to us now, may tomorrow become a friend or an enemy. Those who we’re friendly with today, may tomorrow be our enemy. Those who are our enemy today may be our friend.
So in fact, this field sentient beings is changing all the time. Nothing fixed. That’s all. A lot of a lot of our time is taken up with with this situation of preserving these divisions. And yet there’s nothing inherent within ourselves or within other beings that makes these relationships fixed.
In fact, the way we generate these different types of relationships is often very fickle. Simply, on the basis of whether they like us or not, whether they see ourselves as we see ourselves. So generally, on that basis, we therefore divide up other beings, whether they affirm our impression of ourselves or not. If they affirm that impression, they become our friends. If they don’t affirm it, they become our enemies.
If they neither affirm it nor don’t affirm it, then they’re strangers. So we should reflect that there’s nothing permanent or fixed within who our friends are, who our enemies are, But everyone’s a potential friend. Everyone’s a potential enemy. What decides is our own evaluation of ourselves, who we think we are, and whether other people affirm that or not. So that basis for deciding relationships is quite shallow.
And in fact, every being is a potential friend. So, again, we can dissolve that visualization and then visualize that we ourselves into light. This light we can imagine to be white. We radiate this white light, white light of equanimity that pervades all the ten directions. Has a nature of a very being a very even attitude towards all beings.
Seeing the essential sameness in all beings beyond the temporary changes of circumstance and time, whether they’re at some time an enemy or a friend. We can visualize this light purifying all the attitudes that see others as being either attractive or repulsive. Like, this light generates complete evenness, even attitude for all beings. This light fills the entire universe. Like an ocean of clear white light.
And within that, all our unhappiness that’s derived from taking some to be our enemy and others to be our friends and so on. All that is also dissolved. Then we can visualize this mind again dissolving into ourselves, into the center of our heart. And we can just reflect on dedicating the positive merit for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then we’re gonna relax for a few moments.
This is where we come back to mindfulness of the body. All the aches and pains. So in the the morning, we covered something of the mindfulness of body and the way we exist with a body and the various ways that we can use the body, our relationship to the body, the gross impermanence of the body. And this is generally the mindfulness of the body. By being aware of the body in this way, can, in a sense, anchor the mind in mindfulness.
Just noting how we we are, you know, from time to time. Just being aware. Being like an observer. Now the second topic, second main object of awareness is mindfulness of feelings. Feelings are something that we’re always part of our experience.
We always feel something, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral. Feelings always arise in terms of an object. And it’s said that there’s five, maybe six different types of feeling. So, there’s physical feeling or there’s mental feeling, those two types. And each of those has again three types.
So, a physical feeling is positive feeling, negative feeling, and indifference or neutral feeling, something that doesn’t immediately register often for us. A sort of feeling that merges into a neutrality, that it’s not a sharp negative feeling or a sharp positive feeling, a strong positive feeling, something more background. We’re not really aware of it. Mental feeling also. Mental feeling can be happiness is mental feeling.
Sadness is negative mental feeling. Indifference would be like a neutral mental feeling. So, our experience tends to merge or travel from one to another. So, we feel sad. Then then we get a cramp in our knee, physical pain.
Then we remember we won a lottery and we got one hundred dollars We had a positive, happy feeling about that. And so, we go on like This our feelings go up and down. So we’re not always aware of our feelings. They often impose themselves upon us. But we have varying degrees of awareness of our feelings.
Now, what actually are feelings? Feelings are said to be one of the main mental factors. Like, if we divide the mind up into different categories, there’s main minds and secondary minds. Main minds are types of mind that is simply aware of the object without evaluating it in any way. Like, if we have an eye consciousness of an object, the eye consciousness of whatever it is, say a table, is the bare awareness of the table without any differentiation of the object.
It’s not trying to evaluate it, decide what it is. It’s simply the awareness of the shape and the color. That’s eye consciousness itself. Now, with eye consciousness, there are many different other states of mind that occur that have very specific functions and feeling is one of those. For instance, when we look at an object, we have a certain feeling about the object.
The feeling that arises depends on that object. Now if it’s a pleasant object that we look at, then there’ll be a pleasant feeling that accompanies it. We look at something and we’ll be attracted towards it. Maybe we see a nice painting and we look at it and we say, you know, the artist has really put a lot of work into painting this and it’s, you know, it’s nicely balanced and it’s got nice colors in it and we’re really attracted towards it. So there’s a certain positive feeling that is derived at the same time as the eye consciousness.
Or maybe, you know, we look at something and it repulses us. That’s because there’s a feeling that arises with the eye consciousness that views the object, that doesn’t like the object, doesn’t like the experience of the object, registers a negative feeling in relation to that object. Now, there’s of course, when we’re aware of something with our eye consciousness, it’s not only feeling that arises, but we have discrimination as well. Discrimination is the function of labeling an object, of naming an object. Like when we look at something and instantly we know what it is, we recognize it.
That function of recognizing the object is discrimination. Also, we have the mental feeling or the mental factor of contact. Just the simple contact between the consciousness and the object is the function of a particular mental factor. So anyway, here we’re dealing with feeling. What is feeling?
Feeling is the taste of the object. And there’s an example given for this. It’s like a king who has all these cooks, fifty or so cooks out the back cooking lunch. And all the cooks are like the other mental functions that are arranging an object, arranging food for the king. And only the king can taste the food.
So, our feelings are what in a sense taste the object that are brought to mind through the actions of the other mental factors. Just like the king is the one that can taste the food, the cooks aren’t allowed to taste the food. They just get to cook. So, to feel them within our mental functions, within our experience of objects, feeling is what actually tastes the object, experiences the object. So, is an ever present mental function.
It’s always there. It can be actually feeling can be of many different shades. In general, can say it’s either positive, negative or neutral, but there can be many, many different shades of feeling, shades of experience, or you could say taste of the object. So generally we’re not that aware of how we feel. We have a certain degree of clarity about this, but not often not a great deal.
The stronger feelings we’re aware of. We come across someone we really dislike and the feeling imposes itself upon us, even if we don’t particularly want it to be so. But at other times, feeling is not necessarily that clear. But our feelings are always there and they arise through causes and conditions and reflect our experience. Our feelings really are our experience of the world, both the external world and the internal world.
Both of the external situation and our inner situation. So this is something, this is the second object of awareness, our feelings. To note, do you know that, oh, this particular object gives rise to this particular feeling. You know, as we we sit, we can say, oh, there’s a negative feeling, negative feeling, negative. Oh, there’s a positive feeling, so on.
They’re impermanent. They come and they go. They can change. One object may give rise to a positive feeling one day and then negative feeling the next day. Negative feeling one day, positive feeling the next.
So this second object of awareness, of mindfulness, the feelings, is very important because it expresses our experience as it stands, moment to moment. And so to become aware of the nature of our experience is important for ourselves in our lives. Because the way we experience things expresses causation. It expresses the process of causation. Feelings don’t arise without a cause.
The causes are not easy to see. Not easy to see because the causes may lie in past lifetimes for why a particular feeling arises in regard to a particular object. I think as, you know, as we experience, everyday life, we often realize we can’t account for why we feel this way about this object or this way about another object. Countless arguments go on about why people like this object and not that one, or why this one and not another, so on. Why paintings in a gallery would be attractive to some and not attractive to others.
But positive feeling or negative feeling does have a cause. And as the Buddha said, happiness, the feeling of happiness. Well, it’s funny because happiness is what people are looking for in general. Feeling of happiness, which is really mental happiness. If one has mental happiness, then you can really endure a lot of physical pain without much trouble.
But if one doesn’t have mental happiness, then even slight physical pain can be unbearable. An arhat, someone who attains liberation, eliminates completely negative mental feelings. But still, they can experience negative physical feelings through the negative actions in past lifetimes coming to maturation. Like at the time of the Buddha, there was a particular thief, a particular bandit called Angulimala. You may have heard heard of him.
He through conditions of his family early in life, he he took a quite a negative view of society and decided to go out and wreak revenge on society. And he became a a bandit to highwaymen. And he lived in the middle of this forest, and he used to prey on people going through the forest. He had a bow and arrow and a sword and so on. And he would kill people as they walked through the forest and cut off their little finger, which is called anguli.
The little thing is called the anguli and a mala is one of these. So he’d string all the little fingers on a mala until he had nine hundred and ninety nine. And then one day he thought, I’m gonna get my thousandth victim. And it was just that point that the Buddha decided to walk through the forest. Well, the people told him don’t go through the forest.
There’s this brigand Angulimala, who lives in the middle of the forest. But the Buddha said the Buddha continued anyway. And Angulimala spotted the Buddha and started running after the Buddha with his bow and arrow, with his knife, sword. And faster he ran, even though he ran very quickly, faster he ran towards the Buddha, he still could not catch him. And eventually yelled to the Buddha and said, stop, stop to the Buddha.
And the Buddha turned around and said, I’m already stopped. You’re the one that’s moving. And at that Angulimala stopped and sort of setting back a little bit. What was the Buddha? What did that mean?
So we began to talk with the Buddha and the Buddha gave him some advice. So he decided that he had stopped being a bandit at that point, and he became a monk. And he practiced very hard. He went to the forest and he remained in, you know, meditation for a long time. Even though he had this huge accumulation of negative actions, killed many people.
Still, he was able to attain liberation. But after attaining liberation, he decided to go and collect alms in one of the villages that he’d terrorized formerly. And as he was walking through the village, they recognized him. And the people came out with sticks and stones, and they stoned him and they beat him with sticks, broke his legs, arms and so on. He managed to crawl back to the forest where the Buddha was.
The Buddha saw him and asked him, how is it? Angulimala said, oh, it’s not so bad. The reason being is that an arhat, a foe destroyer has eliminated negative mental feeling, all unhappiness. But even though they suffer physical pain, it’s not so bad. It’s like enduring a little bit of physical pain.
Well, that’s a lot of physical pain. But if one has eliminated the root, like the negative mental feeling, then it’s very easy to deal with physical feeling. If someone at that level has attained has attained freedom from any future unhappiness, because they’ve eliminated the cause of unhappiness. So, it’s this idea of feeling that is very important to us. The second object that we should be mindful of.
In fact, happiness, positive mental feeling is probably the one goal that unites all beings to be happy. Have positive mental feeling. Not to have any worries. Not to have any negative feeling whatsoever. No hatred.
No anger. No pride. No avarice. No deceit. No nothing that could disturb, you know, a happy pure happy feeling.
In fact, you know, to obtain that level of eternal unchanging happiness is a common goal. Happiness, because happiness itself is impermanent, means that it’s a result of something. During lives, we tend to seek happiness, positive mental feeling, but we don’t really understand what’s the cause of it. But certainly we try many different things to attain happiness. In fact, we’re always trying to achieve happiness.
So this is why the Buddha said, So the cause of happiness is ethics or discipline. Here, what discipline means is not harming others. So if we don’t harm others physically or verbally, then that will be a source of great happiness to us. Beyond that, if we can even stop mental harm to others, then we progress onto attaining liberation itself. But it’s not not easy to give up negative negative feelings towards others.
Yeah, that’s a very good question. That’s true. If we benefit from a particular negative action, or if we affirm it in some way, then we also share responsibility for it. It’s a bit like eating meat. Even though we don’t go out and kill the animal, we don’t send anyone out to kill it, and it’s not killed specifically for us, It fulfills even those three conditions.
Still by eating meat, we accumulate some negative potential just because of the in general, it was killed for all the beings who ate it, potentially ate it. Yeah. If possible, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
Minimize the harm to other beings. It’s not easy because here you have, you know, so many beings competing for the same space. You know, if they’re dogs and cats, you know, the society rounds them up and, you know, puts them under and so on. Go out and they cull kangaroos and, you know, all the insecticide that goes under the fields every year and so on. Yeah.
We bear that responsibility living in society. Yeah. Yeah. I yeah. That’s right.
I think if we can do something at that point, put a bit of pressure on the coffee manufacturers to give a fair price to the the growers. Yeah. That’s good because, Because we re consuming all these things, we do have a certain responsibility, think, as you say, to be aware of how they got to our table. It’s like the Dalai Lama was once I heard this story that Dalai Lama was leaning out the window of this house where he was staying, and he saw someone at the back about to chop the head of a chicken off. And he yelled out, you know, what are you doing?
And he says, oh, this is being killed for the Dalai Lama. So immediately he said, don’t do it! Whatever you do, don’t do it! Because if something even is killed in a fear directly like that, you bear responsibility for it, if you know about it. Even if you don’t know, there’s still certain residue.
It’s not that much, but it’s still there. It’s like Gandhi, he would not even wear leather. He wouldn’t eat eggs and so on. For that reason, this idea of non harming. If you can live on that level, that is admirable, in the West it’s not necessarily that easy.
It’s like the Tibetans also, they like meat. Because living in Tibet, it’s, you know, twelve, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Hard to grow vegetables there. Can’t grow rice there. So, they often eat meat.
And the meat was often provided by the Muslims or by the the nomads. So, they made use of this situation. Although it’s, you know, it’s not perfect by any means, but that’s a problem living in, you know, in a society, it’s not perfect. It’s a bit of a trade off. Because often the animals get the worst of it there.
They have to make way for the humans. Yet this this is not easy. Although, it’s possible that there may be some contexts in which war is justified. If it meant, you know, like if Australia was invaded and if the people of Australia didn’t defend themselves, they’d be overrun and slaughtered, the whole society would be destroyed, then one has to think about the grounds for defending the society. But probably there’s nothing that one can do but defend oneself.
But killing is a natural non virtue. Killing only ever generates non virtue. No matter what the killing is, whether it’s killing an insect, killing an animal, killing a human. Killing a human is the worst. Killing an animal is not as serious as that.
Killing an insect is less serious again, and so on. But whatever the killing is, it’s always non virtuous. Always a natural non virtue. This is a story of the Buddha in a previous lifetime when he was the captain of his ship, and he had clairvoyance. And a pirate ship appeared.
And in that life, the Buddha, who was a bodhisattva, was in charge of about five hundred merchants who were on board the ship, he has said. And he could read with his clairvoyance the intention of the pirate to board his ship and kill all the merchants, all these beings. So out of compassion for that pirate and so