Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with the Guru Puja verse that self-cherishing is the doorway to all torment, Geshe Pema Tsering uses this 44-minute commentary to trace why that mind underlies every form of suffering — and how to uproot it. He walks through the relationship between self-cherishing, ignorance, and the three types of suffering; explains bodhicitta and compassion as partial antidotes; and identifies the direct realization of emptiness as the only complete cure. He also covers rejoicing in others’ virtue — Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and ordinary beings alike — as the most efficient way to accumulate the merit emptiness-realization requires. The session then shifts into Mādhyamika debate, working through two Sautrāntika objections from chapter nine of Śāntideva’s Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: whether illusion-like beings can take rebirth, and whether harming an illusion creates negative karma. Best suited to practitioners already familiar with Mādhyamika philosophical debate.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 Guide 2002 09 05.mp3
UUID: d0e34131-abd6-4138-bf8c-1a563f3be11a
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Bodhisattva Way of Life (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-09-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~3,671
Yeah. So Geshe-la said has said a quote from the Guru Puja that was written by the Pänchen Lama Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen. And it says, since cherishing others, since cherishing ourselves is the doorway to all torment, while cherishing our mothers is the foundation of all that is good, we seek your blessings to make our core practice the yoga of exchange of self for others. Entrance to all the different types of suffering is this idea that it cherishes ourselves. The idea that things that we’re important, things that the self is something that should be held as precious.
So because of this clinging and this making ourselves important, then this is the door through which we experience all these different types of suffering, the door through which we experience the three main types of suffering, that is the suffering of suffering and suffering of change and all pervasive suffering. Every single different suffering all come from this idea of cherishing ourselves and holding ourselves to be So on the other hand, this idea that holds all mother sentient beings to be precious is the thing that is the door or the foundation for everything that’s good that can come to us. All the different qualities that we can possibly have come from this come from the the idea of holding other beings to be precious and holding to cherish to cherish them and holding them as precious and wishing them to be free from suffering and also for them to find happiness. And wishing them to be free from suffering is a wish is what we call is what we call compassion, and wishing them to be happy is what we call love and kindness. So these two aspects, if we have these two aspects, then we are holding other sentient beings to be precious, This becomes the foundation for all different qualities, all different good qualities, and that includes everything from having qualities that are good in the short term, qualities that can be a benefit to us in the short term, in this lifetime, or even at this time, and it goes all the way up until the qualities that we need to achieve Buddhahood.
So because this this idea of holding mothers all mother sentient beings or all other sentient beings as our mother and therefore cherishing them, because this idea or this practice or this yoga is the heart of all Buddhist practice, then they they then request the lamas to bless them to be able whoever’s saying the prayer or bless us whoever’s saying the prayer, and to be able to do this practice, to be able to cherish all beings as if they were our mothers, and to concentrate on this, because this practice is the heart of all different every single different Buddhist practice, and it’s the thing that we should be concentrating on. So this idea of of cherishing ourselves is one of the most difficult things to get rid of. It’s one of the things that is the hardest to cut at the root. But if we can do that, make everything we do for the benefit of all beings and not just ourselves, and this is the most important thing for us to concentrate on, hope that we can do that. So this is what Pänchen is telling us to do here.
He’s telling us to concentrate on this idea of making everything we do be for the benefit of all sentient beings and not just for ourselves, because this is the heart of the of the Buddhist practice. So this isn’t the usual way that we think. We’re usually thinking if we see a lot of suffering for other people, we don’t hold it as important as if something really small happens to ourselves, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can get ourselves out of a situation that is making us suffering. We invest all our energy and all our time into getting out of small sufferings for ourselves, and we don’t necessarily think about big sufferings that other people are experiencing. We can kind of go, Oh dear, oh, no, about other people, but we don’t In Tibetan, they have the expression, and yeah, that’s what Geshe-la was saying.
We say, Oh, dear, about other people, but we don’t really think We don’t spend as much time invested We don’t invest as much time and energy in getting them out of their sufferings as we do getting ourselves out of little, small sufferings. So if we can’t get rid of this self-cherishing, if we can’t get rid of this idea that we hold ourselves to be really important, then there’s no way that we can develop great compassion or bodhicitta. These things are dependent on holding others to be dear and not ourselves to be dear. So if we can’t achieve Buddhahood without bodhicitta, and we can’t achieve bodhicitta without getting rid of our self-cherishing. And the best way to achieve the best way to get rid of our self-cherishing is to do this practice of exchanging ourselves for others to try and understand others’ suffering, then that is how this practice becomes so important and is described as being like the heart of the Buddhist practice.
Because without that, then there’s no way to actually achieve Buddhahood. So it’s not like this is something new to us. This is something that we have this is some way we’ve been thinking since beginningless time or since time immemorial. We’ve been holding ourselves dear, and we’ve been under the influence of ignorance. So there’s these two aspects to it.
There’s the self-cherishing and the ignorance, which is actually the ignorance of holding things to be truly existent. So these two things work together, and they work in our mind stream to create this situation where we’re trying very hard to make ourselves happy. And by trying to make ourselves happy, we’re actually creating more suffering. And it’s this process that we have to try and get rid of. So now that we know that we’ve been a slave or a servant to these afflictive emotions, then we know what it is we have to get rid of, then we can get out from under their control.
We can get out from their control, and even though we may feel like we have experienced some kind of pleasure and happiness, we don’t actually know what it’s like to experience the pleasure and the happiness of liberation. And if we can get out when we can get out under the control of these self-cherishing and this holding things to be truly existent, then we can actually experience the true happiness and pleasure that comes about with achieving liberation. So once we’ve become a slave to these two things, once we’ve become a slave of ignorance and self-cherishing, then there is no end to suffering. While we’re their slaves, is no end to suffering. But if we can get rid of them, if we can chop them away, then then there is an end to suffering.
Then there is a then there is a peace and a peace and a and happiness that we have no experience of until then. So the idea is that we try to get rid of or we try to harm or to interfere with our our grasping itself, our our self-cherishing, and we have to try and make all that cherishing apply to all beings, to all beings that have once been our mothers. We’re supposed to apply this cherishing to all of them. Because when we apply this cherishing to all of them, then everything we do comes to be for their benefit, that we can achieve Buddhahood in order to help them, in order to make them free from suffering. So our purpose for doing anything becomes incredibly large, as opposed to being very small if it is concerned with our own self-cherishing.
Meditating on bodhicitta and meditating on great compassion become like the the tool or the weapon that can destroy self grasping. They become the thing that we use as an antidote to self grasping. And was saying like, we can they can chop at it. So therefore, this is the things that we need to concentrate on in order to achieve it. That is yeah.
But we can’t actually get the direct antidote at it until we can achieve an understanding of selflessness or emptiness, because this is the direct antidote to this self grasping. The direct antidote to self grasping is understanding emptiness directly. So this is the real thing that can get at it. Therefore we need these two minds. We need to be concentrating and meditating on bodhicitta and the mind of compassion, and we also need to be meditating and concentrating on emptiness and how they realize emptiness directly, because with these two minds, then we are able to achieve Buddhahood.
So we should be thinking, may all the actions that I’ve done that are positive in the future I mean, sorry, in the past, and the present and the future, may the merit for all of them be dedicated to achieving enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. We should have this thought. And we should also have the thought that we can achieve enlightenment, I mean, that we can understand emptiness in order to achieve this enlightenment. So these two thoughts should be working together because they’re the basis for achieving enlightenment. So but in order to be able to achieve bodhicitta, to have this mind of bodhicitta arise, we actually need a lot of merit, and we probably don’t have enough merit in ourselves, in our own experience to do that.
So the tool that we use in order to create merit is this idea of not only thinking about the good things that we’ve done, but thinking about the good things that all beings have done, including Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Arhats and so forth, and rejoicing in that, rejoicing in the things that they’ve done. And then that becomes the best tool, the best way to create the merit that we need in order to generate the bodhicitta that we need in order to become enlightened. So achieving an understanding of emptiness and achieving an understanding of and developing bodhicitta is something that takes a lot of merit, like we said. So the best way to when we’re doing this, when we’re trying to rejoice in other people’s merit, there’s a process we go through as we remember the we remember the good deeds that the five different types of beings have done, and the five different types of beings are Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and here are Arhats and self-realizers, Pratyekabuddhas and ordinary beings like ourselves. So we go through each of these and imagine the good things, the positive things that they’ve done.
And then once we have imagined the good things each of these individuals, types of beings have done, then we have a glad heart about this, we rejoice in it, we become happy, and we think, that was really good. Then this process is the best way for us to try and collect merit. Because also trying to understand emptiness is very difficult. If we don’t have a lot of merit, then we can’t understand emptiness, and if we don’t have if we don’t use a lot of philosophical reasoning paths, reasoning paths of reasoning, then we can’t understand it. And then we also need to rely on having access to a lot of scriptures so that we can try and get a basis for understanding emptiness.
And The main thing that we need in order to do all of these is merit, so we need to concentrate on trying to accrue as much merit as possible. So in order for us to achieve Buddhahood, the two things that we should be concentrating on is to meditate on bodhicitta and also to do this process of rejoicing in all people all other beings’ good qualities and good deeds in order to accrue a lot of merit, order to understand emptiness and to generate bodhicitta. And then in order to achieve bodhicitta, we also have to realize that first of all, we need to have renunciation. We need to turn around our attachment to saṃsāra and not have any attachment to it anymore. We need to yeah.
It’s it’s like we’re attached to it, and we have to block attachment to it in order to achieve renunciation. And then after we’ve achieved renunciation, then we can clearly look at what other beings want and not just ourselves. So in the same way that we can see that we have to concentrate on figuring out that saṃsāra doesn’t help us and makes us suffer when we think it’s making us happy. In the same way that we have to turn around that thought, we also have to generate that thought for the benefit of all other beings so that they don’t have to suffer in saṃsāra, that they can be free from saṃsāra. And in order for them to be free from saṃsāra, then we should try and achieve Buddhahood to be able to bring that about, to be able to show them the way not to suffer.
And so this thought that we will achieve Buddhahood for all of them is bodhicitta, and this is what we should try and meditate on now. So whenever you meditate, you should it’s best that you should try and concentrate on these things at first. You should concentrate on compassion and then try and kinda develop before you start doing any type of meditation. And now we have to try and understand emptiness. And we’re not allowed to do it as a as a Cittamatrin or a Sautrāntika.
Okay, so we were going through eliminating all these different arguments that the Sautrāntika school or the Hīnayāna school put forward, and we’re up to it was eliminating a a list of debate debates, and we were up to the third of five, which was getting rid of the debate about the non correctness of the gap between lives. So this argument depends on the next six lines in the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, which is chapter nine and verses halfway through verse nine and ten. And it says that the argument that the Sautrantikas are putting forward this time is that if all sentient beings are like an illusion, how can they be reborn? So Geshe-la said that the idea is that we have to understand the different words that are being used here. So the Sautrantikas say that sentient beings are actually existent, that they exist in the way that they appear.
Whereas the Mādhyamika school is saying that they exist, yes, but don’t exist in the way that they appear. They exist as being like an illusion. Okay. So the argument that these Sautrantikas are using is that if you have an illusory horse or ox that is created by magic, that once it’s gone, it’s not going to come back again. So in the same way that if we are just illusions, once we’re gone, we’re not going to take rebirth again.
So the answer that the Madhyamikas have to this is that in the same way that the illusory or mirage like horse or ox is actually created out of mantras, the power of people’s mantras illusory tricks, then in the same way as that, then all sentient beings take rebirth because of the power of the collection of causes and conditions that come about because of ignorance and karma and delusion. So by in the same way that these illusions that people create from magic only last as long as the thing that’s making the magic come about, then humans only or beings only last as long as there is karma and delusion and ignorance propelling them to into their from rebirth into the next rebirth. But this these Sautrantikas or the Sūtra School, they don’t believe that. They say that if a being has existed since beginningless time, then that isn’t an illusion, because illusions don’t last that long. Therefore, if something has existed since the beginning of this time, this doesn’t accord with saying that they don’t exist.
It means that they have to exist because they’ve existed for so long, and illusions don’t last that long. So the answer from the the Mādhyamika school is that you can’t test if something is illusion or not by the amount of takes, by the amount of time it exists only. For example, if we have a dream, sometimes in a dream it feels like we’ve been dreaming for, as is, an eon, and other times we feel like we haven’t been dreaming at all. So the dream itself may take a certain amount of time, but that isn’t the way that it is perceived to us. So they say that this discounts their line of reasoning, that they can’t use the line of reasoning that they were, that illusions last a long time because even in our dreams, it may seem like they last a long time.
So the between an illusion is an illusion and a and something not the difference between a dream and an illusion is not that they may both Okay. Okay. So there isn’t a difference between both an illusion and a sentient being. Both of them are illusory, and both of them both of them are only conventional. It’s not that one is real and the other one isn’t.
They’re not different in this way. In this way, they accord. Okay. So the next argument that we’re trying to get rid of is dismissing the debate that there’s no difference between good and bad. And this depends or it relies for its arguments on the next ten lines, but it actually works out because I went through it and it actually works out to be nine lines.
It’s ten lines in the Tibetan and nine lines in English. So it starts with verse eleven, twelve, and the first line of verse thirteen. Yeah. Okay, so the argument that the Sautrantikas are putting forward this time is that if everything is like an illusion, then if we kill an illusion, this isn’t actually a sin or this isn’t actually a bad thing to do. So therefore, we kill people, then that isn’t actually a bad thing to do because they’re illusion.
And the reply from the Madhyamikas is that if you have the intention of killing something that’s illusory no. Sorry. If you kill something that’s illusory or you beat it or do anything bad like that to it with any kind of weapon, by by the fact that you have this thought in your head that that is a real human being or that is a real animal or a real being, then you actually accrue the negativity of what they call the badness of action. Yeah? It’s it’s like it’s a bad action, but it’s because it’s not a real it’s not a real being.
Like, in in one way, if it was like something that wasn’t even human, let alone being an illusory human, if it doesn’t have breath and it doesn’t have mind, even if it doesn’t have these things, if you think that it’s a human and you go about bashing it up or killing it, then you then you’ve already done something bad, even if it’s not you’re actually not hurting anyone. But it doesn’t have what they call the base of the sin or the base of a bad deed, because there isn’t actually anything that’s receiving the bad deed. So there’s no base for that bad deed, but in terms of the behavior that it is engaged in, it’s a bad deed or a sin. Okay. So if you So if you try and kill something that isn’t really there, that that doesn’t have life, that doesn’t have mind, and you go through the whole process of killing it and you wanted to kill it, then you still create this negativity, but it’s the negativity of action.
Whereas if it’s a human being, if it’s something that has well, not necessarily a human being, any type of sentient being that has consciousness and life force in it, then once you’ve killed it, then you have created these two different types of negativity. There’s the negativity of the base, like the negativity of actually hurting something that’s alive, and then there’s also the negativity of your behavior being negative. So when when we’re talking about the difference between killing something that we think is a real person and it’s not, it’s an illusion, and killing something that is a real person is an illusion like person. Then the difference between these two acts is that is not in the fact that one of them is truly existent and the other one isn’t, because neither of them is truly existent. The difference between the two is that one possesses consciousness and the other one doesn’t.
But they’re both not existent, but one of them has consciousness and the other one doesn’t. So therefore, when we perform an act towards something without consciousness, it doesn’t actually have this idea of a base for the negative action, but it still has the idea of the negative behavior. So then it says that in the same way that once we have this collection of different conditions, when they talk about bringing something like magic to life, they’re using what they call a substantive mantra. It’s like a conjuring act. Once you don’t have the conditions that bring the conjuring act together there anymore, then the conjuring act ceases to be.
In the same way, when we don’t have this