Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Can voting for a politician who wages war breach a bodhisattva vow? In this 9-minute Q&A, Geshe Pema Tsering answers directly, framing the discussion around 2005 references to John Howard and George Bush. The hinge is motivation: voting without harmful intent does not break the vow; only voting expressly to cause war does. He extends this to a broader principle — since we cannot read minds, we cannot know whether even controversial political leaders act from bodhicitta, however unlikely it appears, so definitive judgment is beyond us. He draws a careful distinction between observing that an action looks harmful and claiming certain knowledge of wrong motivation. The session closes with a reminder that transforming all beings in one lifetime is unrealistic; the real task is to improve one’s own capacity steadily.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 BV 2005 02 06.mp3
UUID: 3e81eb0d-6a84-4ace-a328-3a53a684f15e
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Bodhisattva vows (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-02-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 9.3 minutes
Words: ~530
Okay. So Geshe-la said he thinks that that can be an individual’s responsibility, it comes down to what you personally would want. He said that if you voted for someone thinking, I’m gonna vote for this person because I want them to start a war and destroy cities, this would be a problem. If you voted for them without that intention, then that wouldn’t be a loss of this vow, and if you didn’t agree with what they were doing and didn’t vote for them, that wouldn’t be a loss of the vow. The only way that you could participate in this or your actions could be at fault in this situation is if you purposely voted for them with the intention that they were going to destroy cities or or create wars.
And he said Okay, Geshe said, and because we can’t read minds, we don’t actually even know that John Howard this is a stretch! John Howard isn’t a bodhisattva, and hasn’t perceived things in such a broader perspective that what he or George Bush is doing isn’t ultimately for the benefit of beings. So we don’t know that. It doesn’t look like it, but we don’t know it for certain. So if the motivation for performing these actions is bodhicitta, then it would have a different outcome than it wasn’t.
We can’t read other people’s minds and know what their motivation I don’t know that. So from an ultimate point of view, because we can’t read other people’s minds and we don’t know where George Bush and Johnny Howard are at, then we can’t say that what they’re doing is wrong. We aren’t really in any position to judge other people because we can’t perceive what they’re doing and see all of the reasons for what they’re doing, or read their minds and know their motivation. But from our perspective, if we think that war isn’t very good, then that’s the way it looks to us.
We have to interpret things according to the restrictions of our perception. We can’t know enough to judge other people directly, but we can look at actions and say that doesn’t look like a good action. And we don’t know that they don’t have the ability to send all the beings that are dying in the wars to pure realms. We don’t know. If they do have disability and they are fighting wars based on disability, then that’s a totally different situation than if they’re not, and we don’t have the ability to read their minds and tell what’s going on.
Know. Geshe-la said that to think that we have the ability to help all sentient beings at this stage in this lifetime is a bit funny. It’s not gonna happen that easily. We have to work very hard to bring it about. So you just you can only help people as much as you have the ability to help people.
Then the thing to do after that would be to improve your ability. Oh, it’s me. Yeah. Okay. I was waiting for someone else to leave prayers.
Okay. So we’re on page twenty six of the morning prayers section.