Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 84-minute session, Ven Jamyang teaches a central Buddhist insight: all suffering arises from the self, all happiness from the kindness of others. After detailed guidance on meditation posture and breath awareness, he leads 30 minutes of breathing meditation to settle the mind. He explores how attachment and aversion—grasping at pleasant experiences, rejecting unpleasant ones—drive negative actions rooted in the delusion of a separate, controlling self. The second half examines why others are fundamentally kind: they provide for our survival, offer opportunities to develop patience and compassion, and are essential for awakening. A striking point: even those who harm us become invaluable teachers, offering chances to purify karma and perfect patience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Track 1-1.mp3
UUID: d12489ea-6cf2-4977-8b2f-9bab865d25cf
Teacher: Ven Jamyang
Collection: Ultimate Healing (Ven Jamyang)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 84.1 minutes
Words: ~2,712
Good morning everybody. For those who don’t know me, my name is Jamyang. And this meditation, we’re actually in the middle of a three day retreat, Easter retreat. So you’re part of that now for a little while? Before we start the meditation, I just would like you to make you aware of the long life that we’re going to have in two weeks time on Sunday morning.
Long life puja, if we participate in that it helps to create for us the causes that our teacher is going to remain long and that we will meet him in our future life again. Maybe not this teacher personally but our teacher. It’s a traditional ceremony that takes I think around three hours with lots of offerings and beautiful flowers and music and singing and that kind of thing. So if you to like, if you like to be part of that, Buddha House is going to offer everybody who comes lunch after that so that we have a real day. And if you would like to come outside on the notice board there is recitation form just to let we know how many people we cater for.
If you could fill that in if you would like to come. And also this Saturday is a meditation day from Establishing Your Daily Practice. So actually if you’re wondering, I would like to do a daily practice. I’m not sure where to start, what to do, why I do what. In that day we will go through daily practice, doing the daily practice and there will be explanation why you’re doing certain things in a certain order.
And then you can choose whatever is suitable for you. This Wednesday starts a new module of discovering Buddhism, Samsāra and nirvana where Jampa is going to explain how we create our own happiness and our own suffering basically. So this meditation will be on that all our suffering comes from the self and all our happiness comes from the kindness of others. But first we’ll do half an hour just breathing meditation to relax the mind and to make some space in the mind. So for that, it’s good if we have a posture that supports our meditation.
So if you sit in the chair, make sure that your back is not leaning backwards to the back of the chair. And if you sit on the cushion, make sure that your back is straight. Maybe you need a cushion on I like it. You like it? If you sit a little bit higher, it’s easier for your back twist to without any effort or not?
Yeah. You you try. That looks easier. So just focus away your awareness for a while on your back. And you can imagine that you check your back as if you look at it or maybe you feel it.
And you can start in your tailbone, in your sacrum and put that in a certain position that you feel that your back is straightened up without any effort. If we could pile the vertebrae nicely one on top of the others, we do not need any muscles to hold the back straight. So try to find that posture in each and every vertebrae starting in your sacrum and then go to the vertebraes in your lower back. And you can play with it. Move it a little bit forward, backwards until you feel, oh, this is really easy if I sit there.
And then go to the middle of your back. And then the vertebraes between your shoulder blades. When you arrive at your neck, drop your shoulders. Allow your stomach to relax And feel that all your muscles become soft. And hence, can put the right hand on top of the left with the thumbs slightly touching each other.
The elbows a little bit away from the body. Or if you find that too difficult, you can also put them in your lap or in your thighs. Just make sure that they are relaxed. Your head is a little bit bent forward. If your eyes were open, you would stare to the floor a few meters in front of you.
Your jaws are relaxed. Your tongue is touching the part. And your eyes are closed within a relaxed way. And you can even allow a little bit of light to come into your eyes so that the mind stays awake. And then if you feel the need, you can breathe out three times deeply.
Letting go of all the tension that we hold in our body and our mind. Allowing your energy to be completely here in the gompa, in your body. Try to let go of everything that kept you busy before you came here. Let go of thoughts that hold on to things that happened in the past, and try to let go of the thoughts that are already preparing for the future. Meditation is about quality time with yourself.
And you can get the most out of it if you can bring your mind completely to the present moment. And the body is always in the present moment. Our body is never in the past and never in the future. So if you bring your awareness to your body and let it rest on your body, then your mind is automatically in the present moment. Then focus on your breath either by observing the sensations under your nostrils caused by the inhalation, exhalation of your breath, or you can focus on the movements of your abdomen, the rising and falling every time when you breathe in and breathe out.
Let your mind rest on that object, and at the same time, be aware of every moment of that mind resting on its object. And if you notice your mind wanders off to the past or the future, just bring it gently back to either the sensations under your nostrils or the movements of your abdomen. Allow the mind to completely rest. Either on the movements of your stomach or the sensations under your nostrils. At the same time, check every moment if your mind is still resting on its object.
And if you notice that it is distracted, bring the mind gently back to its object. Keep the mind sharp. Observe every moment. And at the same time, let the mind relax. Completely relax.
Resting on its object. Okay. And then if you feel that your body needs a little break, relax your mind. Slowly open your eyes and stretch if you need to. If you’re comfortable in the meditation, just stay there.
And then if you feel ready, go back to your seat and to your posture. And you can check quickly. You’re back again. Starting from the bottom, moving your awareness upwards. Relaxing your muscles.
Your head is a little bit bent forward, and your jaws are relaxed. And then first of all, to generate a bodhicitta motivation, a positive motivation. A motivation that goes further than I want to be happy. And the best way to do that is to think what you would like to achieve eventually, ultimately. If we look at the happiness that we would like to achieve, it’s very short term happiness.
And although deep inside, we want we may want to achieve stable happiness, real peace. If you look what we’re reeling, trying to achieve, what we’re really going for, That’s all changeable happiness, unstable happiness. If we would like to achieve more stable happiness, We will have to set out our motivation at least for happiness in future lifetimes. But even better than that, for happiness that is completely free of all suffering, where all the emotional obscurations, all our afflictive emotions are completely removed. And even better than that, we can set out for a state of perfect happiness.
And we can only do that when we’re only want ourselves to be completely free of all suffering, of all the afflictive obscurations, but if you also want that for all other sentient beings, by recognizing that we have a connection with all sentient beings from past lives, from previous lives. And that we have been close to all of them, very close. So try to generate that motivation in your mind so that whatever benefit comes from doing this meditation is gonna become a cause for you to achieve that state that you set out for, that goal. And then we look at why it says in Buddhism that all suffering comes from the self and all happiness comes from others. If we check our own mind and how we think in daily life, we believe the opposite.
We believe that all happiness comes from self and that all suffering comes from others. As soon as we experience happiness, goodness, we think it is because of me, And check that in your own mind if that is true. If we receive a lot of money during our work, we think it’s because of me. I’ve earned this money. I deserve to earn this amount of money.
Somebody gives us a present, we think it’s because of me, because I’m so special, because they like me, because I’ve done something good for them. So go to through a day and through go through the experiences of happiness that you experienced there. And then look at your normal reaction, where you think that happiness is coming from. And then think of all these experiences of discomfort, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, suffering that we experience during a day, and who we blame for that. Just observe how strong that tendency is in our mind to put a finger towards others.
It’s almost naturally there. It comes so quickly. So this is how we see reality. All the goodness is coming from me, and the suffering is coming from others. According to Buddhism, this is completely wrong psychology.
This is not based on the truth at all. And holding on to that creates a lot of suffering for us and obstructs the opportunity to create real happiness. So first of all, Buddhism says all suffering comes from the self. Why is that? To understand that we have to look in the mind.
In the mind, we can experience pleasant feelings or unpleasant feelings. As soon as pleasant feelings arise, there is a reaction that we would like to have more of that. There is attachment to that. And we grasp. We grasp at the object that was a condition for that pleasant experience to arise.
And we believe that if we have the object or if we have more of that object, we can experience more happiness. Check if you can see the tendency. When unpleasant feelings arise, immediately, we have a resistance. We don’t like it. We don’t want it.
And we want to get away from it. We want to be separated from it. So that is aversion which can be the beginning of anger, of hate. We believe that if that object, that is a condition for that unpleasant feeling to arise, if we are separated from that, we will be free of that suffering. So that’s what we try try to do.
So observe where you do that in your own mind, in your own life. So any action that we are doing out of that attachment or that aversion will lead to a result in the future. And because it’s motivated by our delusions, motivated by our delusions, its result will be suffering. And if you find that difficult to see, exaggerate the delusion, exaggerate the attachment that is grasping at an object and see what comes from that, How envy can arise, how jealousy can arise. And how from aversion the anger and the hate can arise.
And out of jealousy and envy and hate and anger, we create very easily harmful actions. And the results of harmful actions is suffering for ourselves in the future. So both that attachment and an aversion arise on the basis of that notion of self, that feeling of I that we have. That feeling of I that arises, especially we can feel that when we are very disturbed, very emotional. There is a sense of I that is an I completely separate from the body and the mind.
An I that is in control. An I that can rule the body and the mind. And the way how that eye appears to us is not how it really exists. If you really look into that feeling of I that sometimes can arise so strongly. If you look for that I, you cannot find the I.
There is nothing there. So, though there is an eye, it is not there in the way that it appears to us. That I that appears to us is not there. But on that basis of that I, we create constant, constantly negative actions driven by our attachment, driven by an aversion, which means that the suffering that we experience today is a result of actions that we have done in the past based on that sense of I. So then that’s what Buddhism means by saying all suffering comes from the self.
And all kindness comes from others. And there are many reasons for that. The first reason is that others have protected us since beginningless lifetimes from dangers. Others have benefited us again and again. And if you look in your daily life, think whatever you need to survive, and then think where that comes from.
Think what is needed to make cloth. How many sentient beings are involved in that process? What do you need in order to protect yourself from the weather, from the sun, the heat, the cold? Where does it come from? And even the money that you need in order to be able to access the protection.
Where does it come from? And you can think of any pleasurable experience that you have in life. And then again, wonder where does it come from. Even the meditator in the cave was doing solitary retreat. The happiness that he generates in that cave completely depends upon us.
And then they say sentient beings are equally kind as Buddhas because in order for us to achieve enlightenment, the highest goal, we need sentient beings. In order to achieve enlightenment, we have to generate bodhicitta in our mind. That’s the substantial cause for enlightenment. Without it we cannot achieve enlightenment. Generating the bodhicitta mind, we do that on the basis of sentient beings.
So without sentient beings, we would not be able to achieve that state of happiness. And then think for all the qualities that we have to develop in order to achieve that state. Also, rely on sentient beings, our love, our compassion, equanimity. The six perfections. Without others, we cannot generate gen generosity or ethics.
How can we stop harm harming others when there are no others? And then you might think, but what about those who harm me? In order to develop our mind, we need them. In order to develop our minds, we have to purify our negative karma. And those who inflict harm upon us help us to do so.
They help us to exhaust that negative karma. They’re very kind. And also, in order to become a Buddha, we need to perfect the perfection of patience. And patience, we can only practice in the face of suffering. So when others harm us, that’s for us a fantastic opportunity to practice patience.
Without that, we cannot achieve our highest goal. So in that way, sentient beings are extremely kind. Then we can dedicate merits of doing this meditation, of generating the bodhicitta mind at the beginning. For reflecting on the kindness of others. You can think that may this meditation become a cause for us to achieve that higher state, that state of perfect peace, perfect happiness, where we have developed developed our wisdom completely, our compassion completely, and our ability to help others in a perfect way.
Then you can relax the mind. And if you feel ready, have a cup of tea. Would you like to tell them that? Yeah. Opportunity?
Alright.