Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The metaphor of earning money — applied to building meditation motivation — gives this 45-minute session from Geshe Pema Tsering a memorable practical anchor. After clarifying that shinne, śamatha, and mental quiescence all name the same practice, he makes the case that calm abiding is prerequisite to any spiritual attainment: renunciation, understanding emptiness, bodhicitta, and Buddhahood all depend on it. He then unpacks the first of five downfalls — attraction to unhelpful things — breaking it into three recognizable forms: procrastination, working purely for this-life benefit, and self-dismissal (“enlightenment is for big people, not me”). The four antidotes follow in sequence: cultivating faith by reviewing calm abiding’s qualities, generating aspiration, arousing perseverance, and keeping the final goal — mental and physical suppleness and bliss — clearly in view. Suited to practitioners beginning a structured meditation retreat.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 CAR 2002 10 05.mp3
UUID: 25e4e4ad-6c29-4049-9dfb-2aff482e4a70
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~2,806
So yeah. So by abandoning the the negative thoughts and and actions and accumulating these three the three higher trainings, then we achieve liberation. And if we do this, then we can achieve liberation and not only liberation but Buddhahood and not only ourselves can achieve it but all sentient beings. So if we have the thought, I want all beings to be free from suffering, if we have this thought, and not only this thought, but this thought that we will ourselves separate them from suffering and we will achieve Buddha Buddha in order to separate them from suffering, then this becomes bodhicitta, enlightened mind. And this is generated in our mind stream.
So therefore we should meditate a little bit on bodhicitta for a few minutes. So now you guys all should have this? So it gives us that bodhicitta is incredibly beneficial. Its benefits are beyond our comprehension. And even just thinking about it is incredibly beneficial.
So if we’ve just thought about it for a while, then that’s really helped us a lot. Now we’re talking about calm abiding. So we’re talking about calm abiding at the moment. And just before I start, I was talking to Geshe-la before and thought it might be prudent to clear up something. There’s about I found about four different translations for calm abiding.
Sometimes it’s called Shinne which is a Tibetan word. It’s called mental quiescence which I can’t even say. It’s called calm abiding. It’s also called śamatha in a lot of other traditions. So if you hear any of those, we’re talking about the same thing.
I’ll try and keep it consistent and say calm abiding. And guess I said that when we’re actually talking about calm abiding, what we’re talking about is placing our mind single pointedly in meditative concentration on one object and not moving from that object. So therefore, if in order to achieve enlightenment or any other practice we wish to do, apart from developing calm abiding, there is no other way to do it. So why is this so? Because it’s because we can’t concentrate on anything at the moment.
As at the moment, Geshe-la says, we’re all if we can concentrate on an object for a couple of moments, that’s a good thing. And after we’ve concentrated on an object for a couple of moments, our mind goes hither and thither like it’s being blown in the wind. Mhmm. But what calm abiding means is that for a minute, for a month, for a year, we can concentrate on one object. And this becomes a very powerful practice and a good way to work with our mind if we have developed it.
So if we’re trying to develop if we’re trying to liberate ourself from saṃsāra or we’re trying to develop renunciation or we’re trying to develop an understanding of emptiness or bodhicitta, if we have abiding, we can do this quite easily. But until we have calm abiding, it’s very difficult to keep our concentration on these things and therefore develop an understanding of them. It’s very difficult for us to do this. So then in order to achieve this, as it says in the text by Maitreya, Distinguishing Between the Extremes and the Middle Way,, we have to abandon what is called the five downfalls and to cultivate what is called the eight eight what would you say? Eight.
Oh, the in this text, it says eight adjustments. The eight adjustments, eight mental tricks, perhaps. Yeah. It also goes on to say then that this method of abandoning the five downfalls and accumulating the eight adjustments comes from the ancient texts of Maitreya and and Asaṇga and the Indian pandits. There is nothing above these texts in terms of describing how to achieve shinne or calm abiding.
So if we don’t rely on these texts, if we if we rely on any old instructions about how to achieve calm abiding, it’s very difficult for calm abiding to actually happen. If if we end it apart from that, on top of that, if we do rely on any old texts to try and achieve calm abiding, what can actually happen is that we actually harm our mind more than we help it. So in order to do this, we should rely on the really renowned and really profound texts. And this is why, at the start, we quoted from Distinguishing Between the Extremes and the Middle Way, which is a text by Maitreya. And this is one of these old very profound texts.
So in the text, Pänchen Rinpoche in particular goes on to say that if we’re relying on the section on calm abiding in the works of Lama Tsongkhapa, which is based on the works of Maitreya and which he was guided by the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, then we don’t have any chance or any danger of falling into any of these wrong paths in our meditations and teachings. So I guess the things that you may wanna write down, what the five the five downfalls are. So if we can go through them, the first one is it’s often translated as laziness, but it actually means more like attraction to things that aren’t beneficial. If that makes any sense. Then the next one is forgetfulness.
There’s also excitement and dullness. That’s the third. So forgetfulness, excitement and dullness is one being the third. The fourth is non adjustment and the fifth is actually adjustment. So the first downfall being attachment to things that aren’t helpful has actually four antidotes.
And those four antidotes are the first four of the eight adjustments. I hope this is going together for you. So the first one of those being yearning and wishing for single pointed concentration. That’s the first antidote. The second antidote being perseverance in seeking single pointed concentration.
Third Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ve got them in. The first one Yeah. Is face. No.
No. You can leave them all there. This is I lift out the first one so they will move down one. Right? Yeah.
Does that make sense? Okay. The first one is face due to seeing the good qualities of single point concentration. First of all, have the faith. Then you have the yearning and wishing.
And then you have the perseverance in seeking single point of concentration. And then this seeking the result of single point of concentration, which is called meditative suppleness. That’s the fourth. So has everyone got four now? So the first one when they talk about developing faith in the good quality is a single pointed concentration.
Single pointed concentration here is actually a synonym for calm abiding. So you’re developing faith in the thing that you want to achieve. And you you do this by focusing on the good qualities or going through in order of the good good qualities of calm abiding. So so how we focus on these on these qualities of calm abiding is we think about what we can actually achieve once we have calm abiding. And once we have calm abiding we can achieve an understanding of compassion.
Can achieve an understanding of emptiness, can achieve the mind wishing to be free from saṃsāra. Any of these things become a practice that’s easy for us to accomplish if we have first of all developed calm abiding. So once we’ve established the qualities of calm abiding it then comes about in our mind that we want to achieve calm abiding and we develop a wish to achieve calm abiding and a liking for calm abiding. And this liking for and wish to achieve calm abiding is a similar concept to the idea of how you’re favouring calm abiding. So once we’ve established the qualities and developed a desire to gain calm abiding, then we’ve developed a faith, so to speak, a faith in calm abiding.
And this could be likened to the same thing as if we go to work. We don’t go to work necessarily to work. We go to work to get money. And so in the same way as our goal in that case is money, in this case our goal is the qualities of calm abiding, not necessarily just the practice in order to get calm abiding. We have to look at the end goal, so to speak.
So once we’ve established this yearning and wishing for single pointed concentration then this naturally comes about the perseverance in seeking single pointed concentration or calm abiding. Because we have to do a lot of things in order to achieve calm abiding. It just doesn’t come about. We have to meditate. We have to make offerings.
We have to collect merit. We have to study what calm abiding actually is before we can actually try and figure out what it is we’re doing. We have to put in a lot of effort in order to achieve calm abiding. This desire to put in that effort comes about once we’ve established how good the qualities of calm abiding are. So in the same way that And and it’s similar to the way that we do a lot of things in order to get money.
We do a lot of work. We do a lot of manoeuvrings. We put in a lot of effort in order to get money. In the same way, we have to put in a lot of effort to get calm abiding. It’s a similar kind of process that’s going on in our mind.
In the one instance, we have this thought, I want to retain money. And in the other instance, we’re talking about calm abiding, we have this thought in our mind all the time, I want to attain calm abiding. So we think if I work really hard, I’m gonna get a lot of money. And in the same way, if we’re thinking if I meditate really hard, I’m gonna get I’m gonna develop shinne. It’s gotta be the same mental process happening for us there.
So we also have to concentrate on the end goal, the final result of developing single pointed concentration or calm abiding. And that is suppleness and bliss of mind and body. So that’s the eventual goal from once you’ve developed calm abiding. You get these two different types of physical suppleness. So your body can do things which means your body can do whatever you want it to And mental suppleness, your mind can do whatever it wants to do.
And on top of that, you get all blissed out. Yeah. You get a lot of bliss. So if we do this by order, we develop faith and then we develop aspiration or yearning and then from this yearning we develop effort or enthusiastic effort and from that enthusiastic effort we concentrate on final goal which is the suppleness and that spurs us on. If we do this then our attachment to doing things that may not be helpful to our meditation are destroyed.
They’re just passed by and all left behind. So we have to think about the qualities of calm abiding and put in a lot of effort and then also to concentrate on the fact that unless we develop calm abiding we don’t get this suppleness of mind and body. There is no way that it comes without unless we have developed calm abiding. Is do you guys understand that? So then it actually goes on to say that the actual antidote, the direct opponent to this attraction to negative things is this suppleness.
So therefore, we can’t actually develop the direct antidote to this attraction unless we develop calm abiding. So therefore, because we’re beginners and we don’t have calm abiding, we can’t actually develop the direct antidote. But these other antidotes can help us to achieve the final antidote after we’ve developed calm abiding. So we have to concentrate on the qualities of calm abiding like the fact that if we achieve calm abiding, even though we’re beginners now, we achieve calm abiding then anything that we set our mind to including all the way up to the attainment of Buddhahood, we can do it through the power of having achieved calm abiding. And these things that we can achieve after we’ve developed calm abiding include worldly or ordinary powers like clairvoyance or being able to perform magic, like real magic or there’s also unworldly or super mundane powers like being able to achieve enlightenment or to be able to abandon our negative thoughts and to be able to do every aspect of the path and to be able to do it properly once we’ve achieved calm abiding.
So in particular every aspect because our negative emotions have decreased in particular every aspect of the path becomes easy to us and that’s everything from the beginning of Buddha’s path which is reliance on a teacher up until the end path of the completion stage of Tantra. And this we’ll be able to do quickly and easily. Okay. So we’re going through the different types of laziness here or laziness in inverted commas. Like, I don’t know, whatever.
And the first Okay. So the first out of this division of three things that is an attraction to things that aren’t of benefit is where they actually get the word laziness from and they apply it to all three. But this is actually more like procrastination. Geshe-la says it’s people who know they should be doing practice, they know they should be meditating, they know they should be doing something of benefit but they think ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ or ‘no I have to work today, I’ll do it tomorrow’ and then ‘oh I can do it next month because I have to do this and this this month. And it gets put off and put off and he said in the end they just don’t do it.
They end up procrastinating so much that they don’t do it. So that’s the first division of these three different things that are attractions to things that aren’t of benefit. And the second one is actually something that Geshe-la says we all do all the time. Is work for the benefit of this life. We think, oh I’ll go and do some work because I get benefit in this life.
I’ll go and see these people because I get friends for this life. And everything that we do most of the time is actually this form of this shortcoming or this down fall. It’s this idea of everything being for this life and not thinking about future lives or our liberation or enlightenment. And the third one is this idea that we can’t do it, that we’re not good enough to do it, that we’re not good enough to achieve enlightenment, that enlightenment is for big people and we’re only a little person. That it’s something that’s out of our reach and out of our power to achieve.
So we have this idea of, oh, if I can’t do it then why bother? So this comes under the third category. And therefore, anything we do that isn’t going to be of benefit in an ultimate sense that is to cause our own enlightenment is actually thing of being attracted to things that aren’t of benefit. So any activity we perform, if it’s this, it is actually an afflictive emotion. It comes from the idea of an afflictive emotion and therefore is something that we need to be abandoned.
That we need to abandon and something that will keep us in saṃsāra. So coming here from Adelaide, I thought he said Elaine but he said Adelaide, is coming here to meditate and to try and concentrate on developing calm abiding. That’s actually benefit. That’s actually a positive action. It’s a virtuous action.
But everything else that we mainly do in life, all the work we do, all the social interactions we have, all of this is usually what it comes under the category of this attraction to hard to say over and over again. Attraction to unhelpful things. Okay so when we’re talking about the second one which was doing things for the sake of this life, it’s difficult for us to abandon this completely because we need food and we need places to sleep and it’s a very subtle thing as well so you have to have a high level of insight into understanding when you’re doing something for this life and when you’re not doing something for this life. So it’s very difficult for us to see this. If we could see it and abandon it all then we’d be way down the path.
And so it’s difficult for us to do that but we should try.