Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The central question Geshe Pema Tsering unpacks in this 46-minute commentary is whether perceiving emptiness is strictly necessary to escape saṃsāra — a debate Gyaltsab Jay stakes out clearly at the start of his commentary on Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Geshe Pema first explains the traditional structure of Tibetan texts — homage, oath to compose, reasons for writing — then traces Gyaltsab Jay’s oath and his position as a Middle Way consequentialist: only realizing emptiness, not merely the selflessness of person, leads out of saṃsāra. He then sketches the three-stage path to Buddhahood: developing bodhicitta, practicing the six perfections, and accumulating merit and wisdom. The session closes with an animated Q&A on whether space, as a mere negation, can have causes. Suited to students already working through the text.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 WBS 2005 02 01.mp3
UUID: 9a04ebf5-d9e6-4ea3-b46b-09acbea04d0c
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Bodhisattva Way of Life 2005 Feb-Mar (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-02-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.8 minutes
Words: ~3,542
The path or move towards Buddhahood. And then to all of the beings with these qualities and specifically the Buddha Śākyamūni who is called the great Muni here and then also to the teachers who are great beings and to Mañjuśrī. The author says here, bows with respect. Okay. So Geshe-la said that’s the end of sentence.
Okay, so Geshe-la said that finishes the prostration, now we move on to the oath to compose. And I say again, I’m not sure that everybody knows that Tibetan texts start with a prostration and then go on to an oath to compose. He goes, well, don’t you tell them? I said, okay. And he goes, well, there he says, I said, am I supposed to tell him?
He said, yes. First of all, start with the prostration to the Buddhas and to a specific Buddha depending on which suit which basket the teaching is associated with, and then you move on to an oath to compose. The person right composing the text makes a promise to compose the text despite any obstacles that may come up in the composition of the text. So the thing that we just went through is the the prostration, the the homage that’s always starts Buddhist texts. The next thing we’re up to is the oath to compose the text.
So in the oath to compose the first section that’s the first line that Gyaltsab Jay wrote says that in order not to forget the teachings of the guides of bodhisattva’s way of life, in this lifetime and in many lifetimes to come, he is going to put in the effort to compose a commentary to this text. He says, also, he hopes it will be he thinks it will be of benefit to those who have a similar fortune to him. So that means that to those who are born into a similar existence to him and have enough of the same karma to be able to or enough of the same conditions to be able to understand and use this text. It says that this text he’s going to compose is a commentary explaining the meaning of the words of entry into the Bodhisattva’s way. Sorry.
The entry into the behavior of pure sons of victors. Now pure son of a victor is a is is the same as a a Bodhisattvas. It’s another way of saying the victors, of Buddha, is the sons or daughters. It doesn’t actually say sons. It says Uh-huh.
Offspring. Yeah? Of a a Buddha is is another way of saying. Yeah. So this word that is means the children of the victors is also the word that means prince.
But Geshe-la says in this instance, it doesn’t say whether it’s a male. In colloquial, it means prince, but in this instance, it’s not referring to a prince or a princess necessarily as to the children of the Buddhas. The children of the Buddhas those beings who have developed both bodhicitta and an insight into emptiness and therefore can perform the six perfections or the six practices of bodhisattvas. And then the type of text that he’s going to compose, Gyaltsab Jay is going to compose as a commentary to Śāntideva Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life is one that is focused on the meaning of the words in Śāntideva’ text. Okay.
So there’s usually two different types of commentaries that are written to root texts in Buddhism. The first is what’s called a commentary of the meaning, and the second is called a commentary to the words. And so one would explain what a text means and the other one would explain the individual words of any text. Now what Gyaltsab Jay is undertaking to do here is to write a commentary to both the words and the meaning of Śāntideva’s text. So he’s combining the two there.
And then he says he will write it like he was an expert. Okay, these are the trickiest bits to translate because it’s poetry and it has no commentary. The rest of the Śāntideva poetry has a commentary and this one doesn’t. Okay, so the next section says, for those who are chained by the robes of grasping at the view, the supreme views. Now this supreme isn’t a good supreme.
It’s the view that holds the self to be supreme. Alright? So it means that by holding onto this idea of what’s called a holding onto grasping it what is a grasping at the collection is one there’s these five views that are said to be wrong views, and they are what holds us in Samsāra. So the first one is what’s called grasping at the collection. And grasping at the collection means holding on to the the aggregates, the groups of things that make up for us, like our physical form and our mental states as being a solid entity.
So there’s also this idea of the self as supreme, the idea of the self as supreme. So it means grasping onto the idea of a self, grasping onto the idea of that self being the most important thing. These these ideas, these views are like ropes that bind us in saṃsāra. Yeah. So it’s saying in order to to get rid of those ropes, then we need to develop what’s called the profound understanding or the profound realization.
But then in this text, Gyaltsab Jay then goes on to say that those with the lower views don’t develop this type of understanding. Those with lower views don’t realize the sublime view or the true view of emptiness. And as they haven’t realized the true view of emptiness, they don’t purify these chains or they don’t get rid of these these ropes or these chains that bind them to saṃsāra and therefore are stuck in saṃsāra. So he says, if you don’t wanna get out of saṃsāra, if you don’t want to realize emptiness, then you don’t need this text. But if you do, then you then if you do wanna get out of saṃsāra, do need to develop this understanding.
And what he’s talking about is that I was gonna say something. It’s better to to explain it. You know, So okay, so there’s these Okay. This is just a very brief overview, and we’ll come up later, I’m sure. But there is a there’s a usual division of philosophical schools in the Tibetan texts on tenets into four main schools.
That is the Vaibhāṣika or the particular school, the Sūtra school, the Mind Only or Cittamātra school, and the Mādhyamika or Middle Way school. Now within the Mādhyamika or Middle Way school, the Tibetans also distinguish between those who present things in terms consequence of arguments and those who put forward syllogisms or arguments of their own. Now within all of these schools, Gyaltsab Jay belongs to what’s called the consequentialist school or those who refute arguments by showing the consequence of other people’s arguments. He’s saying that the other schools below the consequentialist school assert that in order to get rid of saṃsāra, order to get out of saṃsāra, you don’t actually need to perceive emptiness per se, but you can perceive merely the selflessness of the person. Alright?
And by perceiving merely the selflessness of the person, you cease to create based on that misperception and therefore cease to circle in saṃsāra. May not be a Buddha but you’re out of saṃsāra. Now the consequentialist school doesn’t say this. They say that in order to get out of saṃsāra you need to have realized emptiness. So he’s saying that in order to show that you do need to perceive emptiness to get out of Samsāra, he is going to extrapolate or explain Śāntideva’s text so that people will develop the desire or see the need to develop this clear understanding of emptiness in order to alleviate their suffering.
And he said, so listen if you wanna get out of Samsāra. The process by which we go about this is in three parts. This working towards Buddhahood and developing this view that will enable us to achieve not only liberation but Buddhahood. We come to that stage in three parts. The first stage is the development of bodhicitta.
Now it says that in order to, in the same way as the of the past, the Buddhas of the past have done, first of all, we need to develop the supreme the mind of supreme enlightenment. So this is talking about when you are like us at the moment, when you, don’t necessarily spontaneously work for the benefit of all sentient beings, but tend to be more caught up tend to be caught up in self-cherishing. When we’re in a state like we are at the moment, then the first thing that we need to work on is getting rid of self-cherishing and working to develop a mind that’s working to develop a mind stream that spontaneously seeks to benefit all sentient beings. Okay. In the middle, after we’ve developed this spontaneous mind to benefit others by becoming Buddhas, we need to work for, it says countless eons generating positive karma by performing acts of generosity and the other five perfections.
And in doing so, accumulating what are called the two accumulations, the accumulation of merit and the accumulation of wisdom. Now, if we practice the six perfections and in practicing the six perfections based on this bodhicitta mind, the mind of enlightenment, we then accumulate the two accumulations of wisdom and merit. This leads us to developing, finally, the body, speech, mind of a fully enlightened Buddha who is then able to turn the wheel the three wheels of Dharma. So this is what the Buddha Śākyamūni did. And then after developing the mind of bodhicitta, he then went on for countless eons performing these actions of the six perfections, accumulating the two accumulations of merit and wisdom, and eventually became a fully enlightened Buddha.
And then as a fully enlightened Buddha, he turned the wheel of Dharma. In particular, Śākyamūni Buddha turned the wheel of Dharma in three different stages. So the first of these wheel turnings, the first set of teachings that he gave were what are called the Four Noble Truths or the Four Realities or Four Understandings of the aryas or the Noble Ones. In delivering this teaching on the four noble truths, he only actually spoke twelve words. However, these twelve words were said to be the first turning of the wheel.
So it said then there were some who by their nature or by their lineage or their family. You know in the Heart Sūtra it says sons and daughters of the lineage or yeah, that thing. We’re able to develop an understanding of selflessness and dependent origination, the lack of without the extremes of eternalism and nihilism through the teachings of the Four Noble Truths. So these beings were by their nature, by their lineage, hearers and solitary realizers. So by listening to the first teaching of the Buddha, they developed an insight into the nature of reality that was not different from, that was the same as the explanation of emptiness that the Buddha later expanded on.
Their understanding of selflessness of the person that is described in the sixteen aspects of this four noble truths in the third part of the first one, where it says selflessness and emptiness, this was the same as the emptiness that was described by Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti later in their text on the middle, the view of the middle way. He thought that I was just being slack and saying stop, but I might know. Two times up. Okay. So the point of this section is to establish that Gyaltsab Jay’s view is that all views of emptiness from whichever path you’re on, whether it’s the path of the hearers, the path of the solitary realizers, or the path of the Mahāyāna, are all views of emptiness.
And it’s only a view of emptiness that can get you out of saṃsāra, can stop you experiencing suffering. Now at the time that Gyaltsab Jay wrote this text, he came after Lama Tsongkhapa, was a student of Lama Tsongkhapa, and Lama Tsongkhapa had a new way of explaining emptiness. So there was many debates backwards and forwards at this time. So Gyaltsab Jay is starting his commentary by being very specific and very clear about which position he’s coming from. And the position he’s coming from is that if you want to get out of Samsāra, if you want to stop experiencing suffering, if you want to perform the actions of a Bodhisattva, you need a view of emptiness.
The other school’s positions, the ones that Lama Tsongkhapa and Gyaltsab Jay were debating with, had a different view. They said that you can get out of Samsāra, you can achieve the annihilation of your personal experience of suffering through merely developing an understanding of selflessness that was what’s called the lack of a substantiated self, which is different to the perception of emptiness. So basically, he’s starting off his commentary by putting forward a very strong philosophical line, which was part of a debate that was going on at the time that he wrote it. Oh, I love the lines. I blame So does anyone have questions?
Yes? Just a technical one. Where does this So this idea of starting with the prostration, then moving on to the oath to the composed, and then start setting out the reasons for for composing, is what Gyaltsab Jay we’ve just moved on to Gyaltsab Jay’s doing, isn’t something that started in Tibet. It’s something that started in India, and Geshe-la thinks that everybody apart from the Buddha did this. So usually, you start off with the homage and then the oath to compose and then the reasons for writing the text.
Then it moves on to the name of the text in in in Indian. It literally says Indian. And then it says in Tibetan what its name is in the Tibetan text. And he said Geshe-la said that the the Buddha’s text only start with the name in Indian and then move on to in Tibetan. I think they usually translate it in the language of India, not in Indian, which isn’t the language.
Anyway, Geshe-la said that we’re going through Gyaltsab Jay’s homage at the moment in Gyaltsab Jay’s Oath to Compose and his reasons for writing this text. In the next class, we’ll actually get up to the beginning of the actual text itself. And you’ll see how that starts also with a homage and then moves on to a oath to compose and then a reason for writing the text. The first three verses are the actual guides to Bodhisattva’s way of life in the same format. Said that it starts with the prostration.
Oh, sure. How much and he started going, and I didn’t understand a word of it, but he said it was the Roots of the Middle Way. So yeah. He said that if they missed that and started the first section, it would be about dependent origination. If they missed the homage, the first verse would be about dependent origination.
There’s also a homage added in the Tibetan translations of Sanskrit or other languages texts in that they start with what’s called the translator’s homage, and that translator’s homage shows which of the three baskets the text will go into. So if it’s a homage to Mañjuśrī, it’s a Abhidharma text. And if it’s a Vinaya text, it’s a homage to the foremost of the three, the foremost of all. And if it’s a a sūtra text, All the Buddhism Buddha’s life is in the ten direction. So it actually the homage actually acts as a way for you to tell where to file it.
But that’s not the actual homage of the text itself. It’s the translator’s homage which tells you which basket it goes in. So Geshe-la said in the Roots of Knowledge, the text first text of Nāgārjuna’s text on the middle way or the Mādhyamika school, It starts off with homage to all of the Buddhas in all the different directions and has one way of unique way of putting it. And Candrakīrti’s commentary on that Mādhyamika text is called the Entry into the Middle Way, he actually starts by prostrating to great compassion, which is it was an unusual homage for anyone. A rise.
A dependent yeah. It has to have causes and conditions. But So it’s not a very good metaphor. Faces sort of nature, which is actually there’s no beginning or end. Uh-huh.
Uh-huh. I was wondering, what does Okay. Yeah. I think I understood. You’re having a problem with your example perhaps, and then we can get a I’ll but I’ll explain it to Geshe-la and see what My example is just a simile.
A simile. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So a space in a form. Yeah? Is that the words you were using? Okay.
So the problem with the metaphor, yeah, the problem with the simile, the idea you had, alright, is that trees are dependent on causes and conditions in order to come into being. Okay? Now they’re not dependent on any old causes and conditions. They’re dependent on what are called causes and conditions of a similar type. Right?
So the the what’s called the governing cause or the main cause for a tree to be is the previous moment of tree. Alright? Tree. Right? So there’s this continuum of a similar type which creates the idea of tree.
Alright? Now, space doesn’t come into being based on causes and conditions. So your metaphor doesn’t work. Alright? Space doesn’t come into being based on causes and conditions because it is the mere lack of something.
It’s the mere lack of something. It’s the lack of something. So for example, at the moment, I put my hand here, as Geshe-la said, right? The reason I can put my hand there is because there is space. When I take my hand away, space come there’s still space.
When I put my hand there, it’s not as if the space is affected by my hand, right? It’s just that you can’t see any space because my hands there. I take my hand away the space is there again. So it’s just the mere lack of any it’s the mere lack of anything obstructing me from putting my hand here that is space. So because it’s the mere lack of nothing obstructing me, yeah, we can’t say that it is caused by anything because it’s the lack of something.
It’s the lack of an object. It’s the lack of anything that’s impeding movement, the lack of obstruction. And anything that is the lack of something can’t be caused by anything. Anything that is the lack of something, yeah, can’t be caused by anything. So the other thing to remember is that, as you said, without space, form doesn’t have the space to exist.
Alright? So if there is no space, there is nothing. So if space disappeared, there would be nothing. But space can’t disappear because as it’s the lack of something, it’s a permanent. It doesn’t change.
The the mere lack of something is a permanent. It doesn’t change. Nothing. Right? Geshe-la said, for example, if we had a big rock and we put a big rock on the table, then we wouldn’t see space.
Right? We would see a big rock. But space is where the big rock is as well. So there there is nothing. There is so we don’t see the space, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
There’s space there, so this the rock can be there. So space is defined as that which is non obstructive. So it means anything that we can’t see, something that we can’t see, and something that we can’t touch, right, is the definition of space. Isn’t form, but it’s that which enables form to be. But it’s only defined in what it’s not.
It’s a negation. It’s not anything that is positive thing. So if space disappeared when we put a rock, a big rock on the table, that would mean that when we took the rock away, the space would would still not be there. But when we take the rock away, the space is there. So there is something in the space, but the space itself doesn’t disappear.
Lack is not caused. Mhmm. Example. Mhmm. There were twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York.
Mhmm. There was a horrific cause. Mhmm. They no longer to be there. There.
Mhmm. People still walk around, and they in their mind, they acknowledge that lack. Mhmm. You know? That is a lack that has a cause.
Mhmm. In a hundred years’ time, maybe nobody will remember. Mhmm. You know? And there will no there will no longer be an imputation of the lack.
Mhmm. But that seems to me to be a Lack with the cause. With the cause. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So guess the