Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Ingyen opens this 27-minute session with a tent-building metaphor: many conditions must be set in place before results manifest, requiring patience. His focus then turns to wrong awareness—how difficult it is to recognize invalid cognitions in our own minds. After defining valid awareness as “new nondeceptive cognition,” he distinguishes its two main types: valid perception and valid inference, then introduces a second classification: self-knower and other-knower valid awareness. The teaching walks through technical distinctions central to Tibetan Buddhist epistemology—appearing objects versus engaged objects, illustrated with the rope-mistaken-for-a-snake example—and explores mental factors: why positive, negative, and neutral states cannot occur simultaneously on the same object, and why afflictive factors are the real source of suffering. The text is demanding but becomes accessible through repetition and contemplation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 20 M and C 2001 06 26.mp3
UUID: abe4a614-4819-4fe8-aca6-28be50ee7285
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Mind and Cognition 2001 Month 04-06 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-06-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 27.1 minutes
Words: ~2,402
Oh, it may not directly generate those understandings. It’s a little bit like putting up a tent. You know, when you put up a tent, you’re first, have to find a bit of ground and then you have to lay things out and then you put a few pegs over there and a couple of pegs over here and you put the pole there and, you know, you have to put lots of things up. A lot of things, a lot of conditions need to be put in place before you even start, you know, putting the tent up. And even when you start putting it up, it’s, you know, it doesn’t look like a tent in the beginning and so on.
Same for us. It’s we need a lot of conditions put into place first before results start to be generated. Yeah. So we need a lot of patience with that. A lot of patience with that.
But even just here, we’re discussing wrong awareness. So even coming to an understanding of what wrong awareness is is very beneficial. Because we look into our mental continuum at present and just examine, what’s a wrong awareness there? Presently, we don’t have much idea. Oh, that could be a wrong one.
That’s another one. Was that wrong? Maybe wrong. Don’t know. What about that one?
Is that a wrong awareness? Don’t know. It went too quickly. It’s gone. When we look into our mental continuum, it’s hard for us to discern what’s valid there, what’s comprehension, What sorts of minds are actually comprehending their object there?
So this sorry. From the school’s point of view, yeah, it can be comprehending. It can be inattentive. If it’s inattentive, it’s not comprehending. But certainly part of the process of meditation is just observing this process of what is manifesting within our mental continuum.
Is it valid? Is what is there reliable, valid, correct assessment? Is it something that we should cultivate or is it something that we should try and diminish? And for the most part, we’re not that in a sense, we need to be a little bit critical of or, you know, check on what’s happening. See if what is happening within our mental continuum is gonna benefit us.
And really, any wrong awareness we can accept to be of little benefit to us. Any wrong awareness that is generated in our continuum will not benefit us. Is that true or untrue? This we have to examine. At present we think that wrong awareness benefits us.
We actually, although we think oh, yeah. Yeah. I don’t don’t accept that. But, actually, we have so many examples of wrong awareness day by day. And perhaps the vast majority, we tend to accept or we think, oh, yeah.
They’re sort of benefiting us in some way or other. Sorry. It’s good for knowing why you don’t want. In a sense, yeah. It’s something we can learn from.
Thirsty. Right. Oh, it can be wrong awareness of anything. Anything which cognition wrongly engaging its object. So it’s any type of cognition which holds its object in the wrong way or holds the object to exist in a way that it doesn’t exist.
It can mean anything. For instance, hatred holds the object, say that person, to just have negative qualities when in fact they it’s not the case that they just had negative quality. That itself is supported by the view that myself and other beings are truly existent. But holding myself for other beings to be existent is not the same as having hatred for another being. One’s hatred, one’s ignorance.
Hatred and ignorance are not the same. Yeah. We should investigate whether a particular thought is valid or not. Right. Right.
So we’ve done ascertaining mind. Now there are some examples given of ascertaining mind. So these are types of comprehension that must precede the generation of valid inference. And if those types of comprehension are not manifested within one’s continuum, then valid inference can’t follow. They’re necessary preconditions.
So we’ll leave that. We won’t go into any more depth into that. Right. So then valid awareness, is classified again into two types. So with that section there, we complete the first division of valid awareness into valid perception and valid inference, or valid perception and valid inference.
So if is valid awareness, it’s got to be one or the other. It’s either valid perception or valid conception. There’s no third possibility. Alright. That’s straightforward.
That’s pretty easy, that bit doesn’t. Right. We’re moving right along to the next section. Halfway down to page eighteen, we’ve got another twofold division of valid awareness. Self-knower valid awareness and other-knower valid awareness.
Now, what is valid awareness? It is new nondeceptive cognition, isn’t it? Valid awareness. We had a definition a while ago. These definitions can be quite useful just to on the top of page thirteen, new nondeceptive cognition is the definition of valid awareness.
Although the definitions may be very simple, they’re even worth contemplating. New non deceptive cognition. I just wonder whether we shouldn’t go back into a couple of yep. Sorry. Awareness and cognition.
Yes. Absolutely equivalent. To simplify it yeah. You do. At times, that happens.
If it does happen, it’s not it shouldn’t happen actually because no word that occurs in the definite in the object defined should appear in the definition. You should separate those. They should be separated out. At times it does occur. But here we’ve got awareness and cognition, so they’re different, but they’re completely equivalent.
So new nondeceptive cognition is the definition of valid awareness. That’s okay. That type of awareness there includes minds and mental factors both. Not absolutely equivalent. They possess the eight pervasions of equivalence.
They’re mutually inclusive. Look at the pervasions. No. Don’t know. Those eight are very simple.
Independence, khyab pa, mi khyab pa, khyab pa, mi khyab pa. If it is one, it is the other. If it’s the other, it’s one. So there’s two. If it’s not one, it’s not the other.
If it’s not the other, it’s not one. So there’s four, right? If A exists, B exists, five. If B exists, A exists, six. If A does not exist, B does not exist.
If B does not exist, A does not exist. So there’s eight of those altogether. So that’s the type of equivalence they have. They’re completely interchangeable. Oh, no.
It makes fine definition because they are distinct. Because even the object defined in the definition have those eight pervasions, but they’re distinct, aren’t they? They’re distinct in name. Okay? If things are distinct in name, then they’re distinct.
Yep. And the yep. On page eight, The appearing object and the reference object on page eight. Or the engaged object is, but here, the held object and the appearing object, is not the same as the engaged object. The engaged object and the reference object are the same.
Now there is a bit of a problem here with the text. It says held object here, it’s saying that the appearing object and the held object are the same. There is a technical point about this. That held object there is for this Tibetan term, gzung yul. And here in the Tibetan, it’s giving it gzungs there in the past tense.
So therefore held object. But, actually, there’s some case to be made that it should be the future tense or object to be held. And you’re probably asking why we’d be concerned about this. And that’s only because if we say the held object, it almost implies the referent object. And the referent object is exactly the object which is held.
Whereas the appearing object is something which simply appears and is not necessarily held. Anyway, without going into this, engaged object is the referent object. The referent object is really the object, independent, it’s the object of the held mode. The referent object here is anything that we hold or our awareness holds. Right?
That’s the referent object. That’s the held not the held object. That’s the referent object, the engaged object. Okay? When we have you know, when we think about anything for instance, if we have hatred towards something, it’s what’s what’s being engaged there, that person.
Right? That’s the reference object. That’s the engaged object. That’s really what our hatred is holding, isn’t it? You ask what what is our hatred holding there?
It’s holding that object. And really that object that had no positive qualities whatsoever. That object actually doesn’t exist because that person has at least one or two good qualities. But it’s what our awareness is holding. That’s the reference object.
That’s the engaged object. The appearing object is in general what’s appearing. It’s an object, and in general, it appears to awareness like the generic image. The generic image is the appearing object. It’s not the reference object.
We don’t hold the generic image. That’s right. We can have a well, the reference object, basically, it either exists or it doesn’t exist. But whatever our awareness is holding, that is the, referent object. For instance, this, bowl here is both the appearing object and the reference object of our eye awareness that’s looking at it.
It’s both, isn’t it? You ask what is our eye awareness holding Figuratively speaking, it’s this object, isn’t it? And that’s the appearing object as well because it is appearing. But sometimes, you know, like with the example of the rope, holding the rope to be a snake, there the rope is the appearing object. The snake is the reference object.
There’s a difference, isn’t there? What appears to us? Just the rope. That’s the appearing object. It exists.
We look at it and, you know, we are grasping at a snake there. The snake is the reference object. That’s what is being held. Oh, that it’s just in Lorig in a Tibetan, it’s putting that in the past tense. When it there’s the the Tibetan term there is gzung yul.
Zhum means to hold. Past tense of gzung ba, to hold. And if the past tense is used there, it’s implying held object, which is almost implying a referent object. Alright? Whereas it’s probably better to put that in a future tense where it is done elsewhere because then it’s, in a sense, it’s pushing it back from being the held object because the held object and the appearing object are synonyms or equivalent, not the held object and the reference object.
Anyway, having a little bit of confusion about these issues can be very good. It’s a bit of grist for the mill. Something to debate about. Mental factors, it depends. Like our eye awareness holding this bowl is composed of both main mind and mental factors.
When we look at this bowl, we just think we have awareness, eye awareness holding the bowl, don’t we? That eye awareness itself is made up of, main mind and various mental factors. For instance, the main mind is just the eye consciousness itself holding the bowl. The mental factors are the feeling we have of the bowl, the discrimination of it being a bowl, the contact of eye awareness, sense space and object, facilitated by the mental factor of contact, etcetera. We have various.
We can have attachment. The attachment to the ball might be a very nice ball. Attachment arises in relation to the object and so forth. No. We no.
No. You would never have fifty one directed at the same object. You’d have a selection, a suite or a Let’s say we do it. We because within the mental factors, are three fundamental divisions, aren’t there? There’s the positive, negative and neutral.
And so if the positive are activated, then it’s just the positive that are there at any one moment. We can get from positive to negative quite quickly. Yeah. They can in one moment, we can be attracted towards it, and then we find out that it’s owned by some somebody we don’t like anymore. Then we can go to the other.
We dislike the object and and so forth, whereas initially, we’re attracted towards it. But in general, we can only at any one time, we either have neutral, positive, negative mental factors, what focused on a particular object. They can’t occur simultaneously to the one object. Serially, they’re connected. Yeah.
Well, actually, we have so much coming from our side. In a sense, we do project a great deal on what is actually there. A lot of it’s coming from our imprints. Yeah. We need to be aware of as much as possible of what mental factors we are generating because the problems we have as sentient beings is not with the main minds, it’s with the mental factors.
And and it’s not with it’s really only twenty six or fifty one, twenty six, the root and the and the secondary afflictive mental factors are the ones that are really creating problems for us. The rest are okay. Right. We might just leave it there. I noticed that we’re starting with this new section on valid awareness.
What we might do is when we have time a bit later, we’ll go back to page eight and no. Not page eight. Page eleven, and we’ll just read a little bit from there again, which may be useful for us. How’s the text going so far? Absolutely.
Truth. No. It is a tough text, and there’s a lot behind the text that is assumed. It takes a while to get some perspective on that. Yeah.
So it it does require a lot of patience. But that’s right. With some patience, it it does get a little bit easier in time. That’s yeah. It’s really just familiarity.
It’s the more we contemplate the material, the easier it becomes. And if we can get through the entire text just once, and if it’s possible to do it another couple of times over, it will become much easier. But it’s such a central text. That’s right. Having to deal with translations makes it that much harder again as well.
So there’s various factors. So hopefully, some of the terms are familiar with us in general. Oh, that’s good. That’s reassuring. Okay.
We’ll we’ll just do a quick dedication.