Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Drawing on a memorably unsettling image — that enlightened beings observe humans in saṃsāra exactly the way we observe pigs rolling contentedly in muck — Geshe Pema Tsering uses this 72-minute opening to the Seven Points of Mind Training to dismantle the assumption that self-focus produces happiness. He traces the text’s lineage from Serlingpa through Atisha to Geshe Chekawa, then builds the foundational case, drawing on Śāntideva, that all suffering stems from self-cherishing and all happiness from cherishing others — even though earning and spending money feels like proof to the contrary. A Q&A section covers the distinction between ordinary family love and the equanimous compassion this practice cultivates, how to receive gifts gracefully while nursing the sick, and why helping others with hidden expectations means you are still working for yourself. Suitable for those new to Mahāyāna mind-training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 7P 2005 05 15.mp3
UUID: ba88adad-de2f-41dc-9860-240e93045f37
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: 7 Point mind training (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-05-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 72.5 minutes
Words: ~6,555
Turning your mind and getting turning your or purifying your mind from the things that cause suffering, then we’ll be able to move towards becoming an arhat and becoming a Buddha, and that becoming a Buddha will be able to benefit others So the the name of the text is the root is is the seven points of training the mind. Now it’s called training the mind because it is by completely familiarizing yourself with the idea of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment, familiarizing myself with the idea of bodhicitta, and then familiarizing myself with this idea, actually going in to develop a spontaneous presence of this thought. And then it’s called the seven points of mind training because there are seven points in it. So this teaching, this practice of mind training was handed down from teacher to teacher. Alright.
So Atisha who is an Indian pandit who went to Tibet, and he was given this teaching or given this practice by his teacher, Serlingpa, who came from Indonesia. And it passed down from Atisha to his student to his student until it came to as an oral tradition. And so it came to a Tibetan called Geshe Chekawa. And Geshe Chekawa composed this text, the seven points of mind training, based on the oral instructions that had been given that had been passed that had been passed down to him. Because of this, because this teaching was passed down from Serlingpa to Atisha and then down to who composed this text.
It starts with paying homage to Serlingpa. So in this text, he says that Serlingpa is said to be a person who didn’t hold some people close and push others away. He was equally loving to all beings. And because of this, was said to be a source of happiness and goodness. So as one person was describing as being equalness equanimous.
In their dealings with all other beings and also to be a source of goodness and happiness. And it’s said that Serlingpa was someone who sought to lead all the beings who exist in three different realms from darkness to light. So what this means is that they’re trying to move beings from ignorance into knowing. So the word that’s that they’ve described as darkness is said to be a form of unknowing that we exist in that causes us to do things that we experience suffering from. Serlingpa was someone who saw that beings through not knowing how to create the causes for happiness and not knowing how to get rid of the causes for suffering were experiencing were tormented by suffering and he wanted to move them out of that state, to move them out of suffering and to I would say move them out of the ignorance that caused suffering by showing them what to practice and what to abandon.
Okay. I was just making sure it’s okay to say because I’m the same. Practitioner of mind training in the in the development of bodhicitta, and he had this teaching or he had this he had been taught this practice by his teacher. He had been taught it by his teacher and so all the way back to the Buddha Śākyamūni. Now the Buddha Śākyamūni emphasizes this idea of training the mind when he was teaching on earth, but was only he he this in many different ways.
So he did this in many different ways. So when the Buddha came to earth, he he said that he turned the wheel of Dharma three times. So that means he gave you three different sets of teachings. So these three different sets of teachings he gave have some of them focus on how to achieve nirvana. Some of them focus on how to have good lives within saṃsāra that is there to perform virtuous actions and to abandon negative actions.
And he taught by what’s called the Hīnayāna and the Mahāyāna traditions. That is Mahāyāna where he taught the teachings of the great vehicle and the teachings of the lesser vehicle which have a different focus for the practices. And then in Mahāyāna tradition, he taught both the path of the perfections or the path of the transcendences which is a practice focused on the six transcendences or paramita. And he also taught the path of tantra or secret mantra. And so there’s many different ways that the Buddha taught.
He taught to many different people in many different ways. But the main crux of everything that he said, the main focus for everything that he said was showing us how to abandon self-cherishing or holding on to our sense of self really strongly and to start cherishing others. By abandoning our self-cherishing our idea of self importance, then and focusing on others when we work towards attaining Buddhahood and personal liberation. So this means that in order to practice the Buddha’s path, we need to learn how to get rid of self grasping and start working for the benefit of others. Those are the two different aspects of the Buddha’s path.
So in order to start practising this, in order to start taking this on in terms of our behaviour and in terms of what we do, then we need to know why we’re doing it. We need to understand why we would be getting rid of this idea of self being really important and this idea of there being an inherently existent sort of self. We need to know why we’re getting rid of that. And the main reason that we’re getting rid of that idea is because it’s false. It doesn’t it it it is it’s a fault it’s based on a faulty premise, and it’s a false idea.
And because it’s a false idea, because it’s an incorrect assumption that we’ve instinctively made, we experience suffering as a result of that. Because it’s false then it leads us to experience all sorts of difficult situations, different types of suffering. Now the other part of this equation is starting to work for the benefit of others, to focus on others. Although we don’t have that idea as strongly in our mind stream at the moment, then this is something that can actually benefit us. Conversely, this is the thing that we need to know.
We need to know how to cherish others and how to get rid of this idea of and a personal identity and considering that to be considering that to be the most important thing for us to focus on. It may that may seem incongruous when we consider how many different teachings the Buddha gave. But he taught it said to me eighty-four thousand different teachings. You know? And where he met many different people and gave them instructed them in many different ways.
So it may seem strange to us that this is the case, but he was only trying to teach us two things. He was only trying to teach us how to cherish others and how to get rid of this sense, this strong sense that we have that we are an individual person that we need to look after first and foremost. So it may seem strange but if we think about it, then he did this in many different ways and there’s many different stages that we need to progress through in order to develop that understanding, in order to reflect, first of all learn and then reflect and then meditate on the different ways that this is the case. So it is a fairly basic premise that we’re trying to understand but because our minds and the way that we hold onto this idea of self are so complicated and so ingrained that we have to teach it in many, many different ways in order for us to develop an understanding of this. And in the same it’s the same case with the way that we don’t cherish other beings and that we need to learn to cherish other beings because this may seem like a simple premise, but the way that we’ve the way that we think, the way that we’ve developed our worldview, it doesn’t go along these lines.
Now the problem that we need to deal with, the idea that’s the basis of these seven points of mind training, is this thing called self grasping or grasping at an identity, a personal identity. Now what this means is that we hold on to an idea of ourselves as being a sole, independent, singular, permanent thing. We have this mental fixation on that idea. And because we have that, we think then that the self is very important. If we’re holding something to be permanent, we’re holding something to be independent, we’re holding something to be singular like an individual identity then we think, Okay, that’s a very important thing.
That’s something that I need to work for constantly. And if we’re working for ourselves constantly then the flow on effect from is that we don’t work for others. If it comes down to a choice between ourselves and others, we invariably choose ourselves. Even if we’re doing this in a very subtle way that we can’t see it first. We may have this idea of looking after others but if we investigate then we find that most of the time we look after others because of ourselves, because of or we are holding on to this idea of self and holding on to this idea of self and others.
So this is the main problem that we need to deal with. We need to get rid of idea of self grasping or holding on to our personal identity very strongly and we need to start focusing on working for others, working for the benefit of others. So we’ll find at the moment that we’re focusing on ourselves so much means that we forget about other people. If they present a problem for us, we forget about them, know, throw them away. But if something is affecting us, then we never do that.
It’s always, How can I fix this situation? What can I do for this? What we’re trying to do is to change that around so we start focusing on others and not grasping and holding on to our idea of self so strongly because that’s the problem. That misperception that we have is the problem. So I forgot something.
So this is why this idea of the way that we hold on to ourselves as being important and the way that we learn and don’t focus on others means that we constantly collect negative karma and we experience these results as suffering. And this is then why Śāntideva in his text, The Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, said, all of the happiness that we experience comes from showing kindness to other beings, and all of the suffering we experience comes about through grasping of ourselves, through self-cherishing. So now they explained that if we want to experience happiness, we really need to be thinking about others, and if we want to get rid of suffering, we need to stop thinking or focusing on ourselves. Okay. This is what we needed to do, but nobody said it was going to be easy.
It’s a very difficult thing for us to do to turn our way of thinking around so dramatically, especially when most of our experiences seem to contradict this idea that by working for others we’ll get happiness. Our experiences contradict this idea when we think about, for example, our wages. Right? So most of our motivation for working is to get money for ourselves. Right?
And we know that when we we do a job, we get money, and we spend it, we feel good. Alright? We have this strong experience of this. It’s something that we can we don’t have to examine. We don’t have any doubts about.
You do a job, you get money, you spend the money, you feel good. So then if someone’s coming along and saying, Well, actually, that’s creating suffering, they’re just like, No, it isn’t. I know. I buy things. It feels good.
So it’s difficult for us to start thinking in a different way to that, especially when we consider how much work we do for ourselves. If we start thinking about it like that, most of our motivation, most of the things that we do in this life are for ourselves. So if we look at it then, if we work pretty hard for ourselves, we get money for ourselves, we get to spend, and we have a good time. We can see that. That makes sense to us.
Right? So what are they talking about here? Doesn’t make any sense. And then and not only that, but if it says not only does it say stop thinking about yourself, it says start thinking about others. Right?
This also doesn’t make any sense. If we want to experience happiness and if we wanna experience, like, pleasure and someone gets in our road, we need to stop them. If we stop them, then we experience happiness. Right? This is this is our this is our our experience.
We work for ourselves. We get happy. We stop other people interfering with our happiness. We get happy. We focus on ourselves.
We get happy. This is the way we experience it. Is that the way that you’ve experienced your life? So we see this. We experience this.
This is the way we relate to the world. So they’re asking us to turn that around to stop to to to look through something that we have solidified in our experience, an experience that an experience that we’ve had so many times that the thought becomes very we’re very sure about that’s how you experience happiness. It’s a very difficult process to undertake. This process because it’s what we know and it’s what we think we can rely on. We think that if we focus on ourselves, if we ignore others, and if we work hard to get a lot of money and to set ourselves up comfortable, then we’ll be happy.
But the truth is that this isn’t the way it works. Accumulate, then if we’ve made our mind greedy, we’re gonna want more. We’re never gonna experience satisfaction. We’re constantly going to be looking for some way to make ourselves more comfortable or or more happy. So these things that we think are happiness this is the problem is that these things we think are happiness aren’t happiness.
The things that we think are making us happy are only perpetuating our situation that we have created where we are looking and searching and wanting and wanting. And so we think that it’s making us happy. We think that they’re getting what we’re working for that we’ll be happy. But in fact, by getting what we’re working for, we just want more. We’ve just set up our mental habit of wanting.
And by that mental habit of wanting, we’re going to continue to experience suffering because we’re never going to have as much as we think we should have. If this was actually happiness that we were working towards, then it wouldn’t change. If it was actually happiness that we were working towards, if it was true happiness that we’ve been working towards, then we would have done the hard work, got happy, and never got sad again. We would never experience suffering again if it was true happiness we’ve been working towards. If you think about it, we’ve spent a lot of time and we’ve put in a lot of effort, not only in this lifetime but in other previous lifetimes, trying to make ourselves happy.
Trying to working really hard for that for ourselves, making certain sacrifices, putting in a lot of effort to try and make ourselves happy. If it was true happiness that we’ve been working towards, we’d be happy. We wouldn’t experience any suffering. We wouldn’t experience a change of mind. Our experience would be a constant experience of happiness.
But if this hasn’t been the case, if we aren’t experiencing constant happiness without any instances of suffering and that experience of happiness isn’t a permanent unchanging thing, then we have to have been doing something wrong. We have to be working from an incorrect premise or have made a mistake somewhere along the line. And we have put in so much effort so much effort to try and make ourselves happy. Is it and it just hasn’t worked. So we need to look at why it hasn’t worked.
If, on the other hand, we’ve been working for the benefit of others since beginning this time, and we’ve been putting in as much effort as we have for ourselves, then we’ll be be Buddhists by now. When we were there, we would have gotten rid of all of our faults and accumulated all the positive qualities that we could and then and we’d be Buddhas. People have done it. Buddha Śākyamūni did it. Nāgārjuna did it.
There’s other Buddhas, many, many Buddhas that have done it. Right? And the way they did it was by focusing on others, not on themselves. If we focus on ourselves, we experience suffering. If we work for ourselves, we experience suffering.
If we work for others, we experience happiness. If we if we think the the reason that we think that we experience happiness by working for ourselves is that we have these moments of happiness. You know? And we get caught on this these moments of happiness by thinking, oh, I experienced happiness. I remember it.
If it was true happiness, it wouldn’t have changed. And this is something that we need to investigate. We need to see whether what we’re working for is worthwhile. If we what we are working for was worthwhile, the suffering it wouldn’t it wouldn’t turn into suffering again. It wouldn’t the happiness would would stay.
Alright? But happen the happiness we know is some sorry. The things that we work so hard for and experience moments of joy from don’t last. It’s very rare for someone to stay happy for an entire lifetime and even then we don’t know what’s going happen to them after death. But most of the time for most of us that’s not even the case.
To stay happy for a year is difficult. Alright? And you say forget about a year. What about a month? Even a day.
Even if we have something incredibly happy happening to us in the morning, it’s difficult to stay happy all day. To stay happy from morning till evening time. Our minds change very, very you can’t say very, very constantly, can you? Our minds change constantly. One minute we’re up, the next minute we’ve come down a little bit, there’s no consistency in our experience of happiness.
Of course there’s no consistency in our experience of happiness. It’s not something that we can rely on. This inconsistency in our happiness shows us that these moments of happiness that we experience in are actually by the nature of suffering. They’re by the nature of suffering because they don’t last and they lead to more suffering. Because then when they’re gone, you think, I want that back.
So the inconsistency of the happiness that we experience in saṃsāra points to the fact that saṃsāra is, by its nature, suffering, completely suffering. The most important thing that we need to understand Buddha’s teachings is that to be happy, we need to work for others and to get rid of suffering, we need to get rid of our self-cherishing, our holding onto self as being the most important thing. If we do this, then we experience happiness. If we don’t do this, then we experience suffering. This is the main part of Buddhist teaching.
But in order to do this, in order to bring this around, in order to start focusing on others and in order to stop holding onto ourselves as being the most important things around, then we need to know we need method. We need a we need a a practice, something that we can do in order to bring this about. And this is what the seven points of mind training were about. And this is what training the mind is about. Training the mind what we train the mind in is focusing on learning to focus on others and spending less time focusing on our own on ourselves.
Right? We’re training the mind. We’re habituating the mind with those ideas. And the more that we habituate the mind with these with these ideas, the more that ourselves reasons for this, the more that we give ourselves reasons why it’s more important to focus on others and it’s less important to focus on ourselves, the stronger our capacity to do this becomes. And this is what but this so this is what mind training is about.
Thank you very much, dear. I’m sorry. He thinks you may have questions. Yes. Yep.
Alright. So said he knows this very hard, and it’s something that we need to work on all the time, and it’s it takes a lot of analysis and it takes a lot of application in what it’s really about. But it’s something that’s worthwhile doing because what we’ve said about the Australian dream isn’t exactly true. It’s just a dream. It’s not true.
Yeah? Maybe think that if we if we get this or we get that, then we’ll be happy, but that’s just a fantasy. There’s nothing real about what we’re working towards. There’s nothing real about that happiness that that’s put forward towards it. It is just a dream.
Alright? So we need to look at what the problem is. We need to look at why we’re not happy. Yeah? And then the thing the thing that we we usually experience or suffering with is that our body isn’t comfortable.
We’re not happy. We’re mentally or physically happy. And so why are we so attached to our physical being? Why are we so attached to that? And then we think, like, that’s this is our idea of self.
We hold on to this idea of self and we can see it mainly reflected in how we relate to our body. An extension of how we relate to our body is our house, our car, our pets, and all these things that we think we possess. They’re an extension of this self-cherishing, this self grasping that we have so strongly. And we and we hold on to these things as being an inherently existent thing that is going to make us happy. If we just had the car, if we just had the house, if we just had all of these things, we’ve been happy, and it depends on them that we’re happy.
Right? And now this isn’t the case. Again, this is this is a dream. It’s a fantasy that we’ve made up. If it was the case that there were certain external things that made us happy, then that would be it would be a bit pervasive.
All beings would relate to a house as being something that made them happy, and that’s not the case. For example, Geshe-la said, if you take a pig, right, a pig likes wearing around crap. They they enjoy it. Yeah? But and and if they don’t have that, if they don’t have the the rubbish and everything around them, they’re not very happy.
Yeah? But there’s nothing inherent about their environment, right, that says this makes them happy. Because if we did, we wouldn’t be very happy. It’s the same there if you put different people have different experiences and relate to different things in different ways. If those things were were a cause for happiness in and of themselves, it all beings would relate to them that way.
So when we look at pigs, right, we don’t think they understand what’s what what it’s about. Right? We don’t look at pigs and think they understand. They’re rolling around with rubbish. You know?
They they understand. They’ve got it going on. Right? We don’t think that. We think, oh, poor pigs, they really don’t understand that rolling around in in excrement and rubbish is gonna make them is a way to find happiness.
Alright? Now when beings who have gotten out of saṃsāra look at us, they have exactly the same experience. Alright? So they’re like the poor things. They don’t realise that being caught in saṃsāra is not a way to experience happiness.
So if we recognise these things that this was talking about, that working for others is a way to find happiness, that holding on to self isn’t a way to experience happiness, then this acts as a catalyst for us to get out of saṃsāra. When we get out of saṃsāra, when we look at those in saṃsāra in the same way that we look at pigs now. Yep. I’m sorry. Yeah.
So Geshe-la said, we need a house. And not only do we need a house, but we need food. And we need good food that is going to benefit our bodies, that’s going to help our bodies. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that we look at that house and we look at that food as being a cause for happiness.
We look at the house and we look at the food as being something that can cause us to be happy and it can’t. Right? So the house, the food, all of these things that we need to maintain and grow and look after are no have absolutely no beneficial sorry. They’re they’re they’re not causes for happiness. They’re instances of suffering because we need them to maintain our body.
We need them, it’s true, but we shouldn’t be attached to it because they’re they’re actually a a manifestation of our experience of suffering. Right? Because if we didn’t if we didn’t experience unhappiness, we wouldn’t need a house. We wouldn’t need food. We wouldn’t need these we wouldn’t need these necessities.
Necessities. Right? So we we need them, but we shouldn’t be attached to them. We should see them as, okay. This is part of bringing in Samsāra.
This is what I need to do at the moment. So the way that we should look at it is, okay. I need this house. I need this food. I need this job to survive.
Right? I need all of these things because of where I’m at the moment. But I shouldn’t look at them as being a cause for happiness because, in fact, they are just a necessity and an instance of the truth of suffering that is a necessity for my survival at the moment. If I want to perpetuate my situation, I’ll be attached to them. If I don’t want to perpetuate my situation, if I want to experience true happiness, which is the bliss of nirvana or the unchanging happiness of nirvana, then I’ll use these things that I have to get out of saṃsāra.
I won’t use them as a reason to stand in saṃsāra, which it would be if I was attached to them. So we can use these things but we don’t have to we can recognise them for what they are too. So if we do that, if we have that mindset towards all of these things that we need, if we see them as something that we need in order to practice Dharma, in order to train our minds to think about it and and to to use as a means for getting out of saṃsāra, we’re we’re dealing with them in a very positive way. Okay. Geshe-la said he wouldn’t think that that was usually that was usually working for the benefit of others.
It’s usually working for your own benefit because you think this is my husband. These are my children. I need to look after and this makes me a good person. Alright? So that’s usually the motivation for doing it.
When we talk about doing something truly for the benefit of others, it’s doing something for others equanimously without thinking, I’ll do it for those people and not those people or not these beings or not those beings. So this is why it talks about all beings, now working for the benefit of all beings. And the only way we can really work for the benefit of all beings is to attain Buddhahood because there’s only as a Buddha that you can lead them out of suffering. So when we talk about working for the benefit of others, they’re actually talking about working towards one of them to become enlightened to lead other beings out of suffering. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t look after your family.
Beings that you’re attached to. It’s still a good thing. You still have compassion. You still have love and kindness. You’re still working with these positive emotions.
A good thing. Compassion and love and kindness are always a good thing. It’s just that you shouldn’t confuse them for great compassion and great love and kindness, which is this it’s it’s the same sort of feelings but directed towards all beings without exception. And this is the basis for both here. This is what mind training is about, is developing the equanimous loving kindness, and compassion.
Alright. It’s a little bit more pragmatic than that because the thing is, as we’ve experienced up until now in all the different lifetimes we’ve been in and all the different experiences we’ve had, if we work for ourselves, we don’t experience anything but suffering. We just work for ourselves experience suffering. Work for ourselves experience suffering. So the trick is that if we really want to experience happiness, we have to get over ourselves and start focusing on others.
So if we work for ourselves, we’re going to continue to experience suffering. If we start focusing on others, working for the benefit of others, then we do experience happiness. But it’s almost as if it’s a it’s a something that just what would you say? That a byproduct. That’s what I was I was gonna say something that happens by the by.
Right? A byproduct of working for others. If if we if we keep working for ourselves, we don’t experience happiness. If we keep working for others, we do experience happiness. Now the reason that we experience happiness by working for others is because we’re all interconnected.
So in working for others, we create positive merit or positive karma, but we experience happiness. By working for ourselves, by concentrating on ourselves, we only create negative karma that we experience as suffering. So we’re all interconnected, and by working for others, we do experience happiness. We do experience we do experience the results of good karma. But if we’re focused on that, it doesn’t work.
Right? So it’s it’s a byproduct of working for others. We can make others happy sorry, that we can become happy. That we can make others happy happy sorry, that we can become happy. And so the main motivation for attaining Buddhahood is bodhicitta, and that is to work for the benefit of others.
Right? So you can’t become a Buddha unless you’re working for others. So the the trick is that if we wanna experience happiness, if we look at it from the perspective of karma, the way that we experience happiness is by creating positive causes. The way we we create positive causes is by working for others. So if we wanna be happy, we have to work for others.
If we do things for ourselves, we experience suffering. So it’s it’s very difficult to create positive causes by doing something for yourself. Oh, They make shortcuts for everything into it, and then I have to kinda unpackage it when I translate it. Alright. So, basically, I just said, Now what that means is there’s things that are positive, and there’s things that are negative.
Ten words for two, but anyway and and then there’s the results of those, which is suffering and happiness. So you have positive things to do, negative things to do, suffering and happiness. Positive things lead to happiness, negative things lead to suffering. That’s the the way of karma. That’s the way of cause and effect.
So the way that we do something positive is working for others. We experience happiness. The way we do something negative is working for ourselves, being selfish focusing on ourselves. It results of our suffering. Oh, So If we have expectations, we’re not working for others.
If we have expectations, we’re working for ourselves. So if we have this idea that I’m doing this because in the short term, they’re gonna do this part for me. I’m doing this so that they can they’ll they’ll do this for me. Then we’re not really working for others. We’re working for ourselves.
So the idea of having expectations means you’re not working for others, you’re working for yourself. But there is this distinction, though, too, between something in the short term and something that’s focused on this life and something that’s focused on the long term or Buddhahood. And so we can think, I’m doing this in order for in order to become enlightened, in order to be a benefit to all sentient beings. And that’s but but there is expectations involved in that. There is a hope involved oops.
There is a hope involved in that, but it is a hope that is based on the only way to really work for the benefit of others. So if we have expectations, there need to be expectations that can be a benefit. But we also need to remember that this works on two different levels. The perspective of saṃsāra, the perspective of everyday life that we experience, it even benefits us there to work for others, to do things for others, to help others in this very limited way. We know from our personal experiences that if we help other people then they will want to help us.
If we help other people make money, if we help other people move house, if we help other people learn something, then rewards of that may be that they help us in a different way. If we are motivated by that idea that we want to help others because we want other people to help us, then that probably will happen. If we are a very helpful and kind person, then people will probably be helpful and kind to us. But the results are limited. If we help someone now thinking, Oh, they’re going to help me out, then they help you out, then it’s finished.
There’s nothing else that happens from that. It’s a very limited result. It’s positive and it’s considered to be a way to experience happiness but in a very limited kind of way, in a very now kind of way, a very restricted kind of way. If you, on the other hand, are doing something in order to get all sentient beings out of saṃsāra, that’s big. That’s not something that ends when they do a favor back for you.
It’s something that continues on. So the idea of helping others in big receiving, like, big receiving good things back from helping others works in a limited kind of day to day type type of way, and it also works in a bigger scope achieving enlightenment kind of way. Is that okay? Okay. So being able to work with sick people is said to be a very good thing, good situation to be in.
It’s said in the Buddhist text that the three main ways for you to attain merit, right, is to help or work for either your guru and the Buddhas or teachers and your parents, people that benefit you, or people who are ill and suffering severely in some way. Right? So there are three main ways to do something beneficial to accumulate merit. So you have what’s called the field of merit, which is the spiritual teachers in the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas, and then there’s a field of benefit, which is like your teachers and your parents, people who have benefited you, and then there’s a field of suffering, which is beings who are suffering. So you develop a lot of good karma by helping beings in those three fields.
So if you’re doing something like that and someone gives you a present as a in that situation, it’s a sign that you’re really helping them. Right? So you should think, oh, excellent. I’m really helping these people. That’s fantastic.
They wouldn’t you know, they wanna give me a present because I’m actually helping them. Right? And then if you think that makes me tops, right, then that’s not a positive way to accept the present. But if you think this is a sign that I’m really helping people, may that help be a cause for me to attain enlightenment and be able to lead beings that are suffering, then you’re treating it as a you’re rejoicing in the positive things you’ve done and you’re not getting arrogant about it. Yeah?
So you should accept it and think it’s very nice of them to give it to me. This is a sign I’m helping them. May that be a cause for me to attain enlightenment? So I guess I said that if you feel uncomfortable, then you’re not helping them any either. Right?
So he said that if someone’s giving you something, then you should think, wow, that’s really good that they’re giving, and if you don’t take it, then you’re not giving them the opportunity to give. Right? But the thing is, it depends how you take it. If you take it thinking, this makes me a cool person, and I’ll use it whatever, you know, getting arrogant about it and then thinking I’ll use it any way I want, and that’s not beneficial. But if you think, I’m gonna take this hoping that that creates merit in them, that they get to do something positive, and I’m gonna take it and think, okay.
I must have done something good and rejoice in that and dedicate that towards Buddha towards attaining Buddhahood, and then you think, I’m gonna use this the best way I possibly can. Right? Then the whole thing becomes positive. Whereas if you have feel uncomfortable about it or if you’re you reject it, then you stop that process happening. Because it’s a good process to happen.
You just have to involve yourself in the process in a positive way. Yeah. So that way, you’ve helped them create merit. You’re creating merit. It’s all good.
That’s so good. Wow. That’s awesome. Right. So yeah.
Anyway, I’ll tell you. So if we go to page twenty six in the morning prayer section, you’ll see that there’s two dedication prayers and two short long life prayers. So just say