Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Geshe Pema Tsering opens with an unexpected Q&A question: does recognising saṃsāra mean we should feel revulsion at a beautiful flower? His answer: noticing beauty is virtuous only when the mind simultaneously sees impermanence and emptiness, not when it simply grasps at pleasure. He then works through the second pitfall in the Calm Abiding text — “forgetting the instruction” — citing Bhaviveka’s image of tying the elephant-mind to its object with a rope of memory, then disciplining it with the hook of intelligence. He explains why calm abiding rests on mental rather than sense consciousness, surveys valid meditation objects from the Tibetan letter A to an ox horn, and recommends visualising Śākyamūni Buddha per Lama Tsongkhapa’s lineage. His closing image: switching objects mid-session is like turning off the gas before the match catches.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 CAR 2002 10 05.mp3
UUID: 3ccaeca8-f39f-4097-96c4-1547d36812c0
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: ~2,863
So we said if we just think, oh, I’m gonna have kids. That’s gonna be good. Isn’t it? Because it’s like and, you know, the the especially as, like, just kind of think it’ll be alright without having a specific purpose. If it’s just, yeah, it’ll be good, you know, without really clearly thinking about it Yeah.
Then that actually comes into non-virtue. Because he said if we if we’re thinking I wanna have children because it will make me happy and it will be something to enrich this life and to and because it’s you think it’s a good idea instead of they’ll look after you and things, that that’s that’s not virtuous. He said that actually the idea by itself is that we want to have children. He’s actually saying we want someone to experience pervasive suffering. But there is this concept that if we say we want to offer someone a precious human rebirth, if we want to offer them this, then that becomes virtuous.
That’s like a it all comes down to the motivation. But we have to be careful that we’re not kidding ourselves and saying yeah. So it’s difficult to separate. So, yeah, so if we’re like the mother of a Sangha, like Vasumitra and we want to have children for the benefit of all beings, then it’s positive thing. If we’re doing it just for the he’s so clever, I don’t know how that works.
If we do it for the the good bits, I guess, that come out of it, then that’s not positive. I said, is it really is it really like a pleasure to have children? And he said, not actually when you’re having that, but after that, when they grow up, then, yes, that can be. So was there any more? It has to do with and that’s actually something of change and Mhmm.
Opposing suffering. And so when seeing a beautiful thing which inspires delight, like a beautiful sunset or a flower, should we vomit? What was that mean? Should should we? Because because in terms of the pleasures of saṃsāra, the natural ones, like the beauty around us, we have a natural delight.
It’s a delighting. Yeah. Just a spontaneous natural delight. Should we train ourselves to dislike those things? The extent that even Even vomiting.
To have an aversion to saṃsāra. Right. We don’t have to vomit. But if we see a flower, and I was using that for an example, if we see a flower, if we look at the flower and think, wow, that flower is beautiful, but it is actually part of all pervasive suffering. And if I get attached to this flower then I’m not going to get out of saṃsāra.
If we think like this then it actually becomes a virtue. But if we think that flower is so gorgeous and it’s so lovely and don’t think about how it’s a part of pervasive suffering, then it’s a non virtue. It’s an attachment to the flower. But if we understand its beauty and then understand that it is actually a part of saṃsāra as well, then it’s virtuous. Looking at a beautiful flower can be virtuous.
But is not the very definition of beauty a conditioned pervasive thing based on karma? The very notion that we see it on Is is that not just a samsaric problem? This flower that we’re seeing, the idea that it’s beautiful comes from our delusions because don’t have a pure understanding of things. So we look at the flower and see it being beautiful, but we don’t see that it’s going to die and it’s going to wither. It’s only made up of causes and conditions as well.
So that actually comes from our delusions, this idea. And when we look at a flower, if we see it as a pleasure. And it’s like, oh, look at that flower. If we see it as a pleasure, this is by the cause of our delusions because we’ve got so many stains in our understanding. But if we can understand that looking at the flower at the same time seeing its emptiness and that it’s impermanent then, yeah, once again that becomes positive.
Anymore? I have a question that’s not written. It’s alright. When I in doing calm abiding, I was meditating on the the shape of the stupa, and I just couldn’t hold it for any more than about three seconds. Like, I really had to try hard, and then I felt tense, and it went and, you know, I got a headache and all that stuff.
Mhmm. And how long before that conditioning improves? Like, you know, and how often should we be trying to do kind of sitting? Mhmm. Even that we have other things Things to do.
So he said, in order for you to actually be able to stay on the object for much more than a few seconds, then you’d have to actually do this kind of meditation for six months non stop at least. And then from that up without any other distractions, without any working or anything. But it’s not pointless to try and keep doing these kind of meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings when you’re going to work and things like that, even if it is for a few seconds. Because it gives you the idea in your head, it plants down seeds that this could work. It’s like a positive thing to do on your mind stream.
So if you can keep doing this then it’s very positive for you for your mind and for the future in terms of imprints. But he also and he also said it’s very difficult, and we can’t do it. So it it doesn’t matter if we can’t do it for more than a couple of seconds at the start. So in any of these meditations that we’re doing at the moment, whether it’s on emptiness or whether it’s on bodhicitta, whether it’s on calm abiding, any of these things we should really be thinking about them in terms of how much benefit they can be in the future. Because at the moment we probably don’t have that much chance at the moment of regenerating them.
So if we can try and think of them in terms of how much benefit it will be to us in the future that we’ve done it now, then that’s the most positive thing. And even if it means in future lives that you get the chance to do these intense meditations, then the things that you’ve done now will be of immense benefit to them. Anyone else? Do have a question, Michael? He said, you’re you’re taking lots of notes.
Must have a question. So then if we leave it there and do some more of the text, of the Calm Abiding text. Is that? So the second pitfall we’re up to the second pitfall, which is forgetting the instruction. And the instruction that they’re talking about here is losing a memory of or losing focus on the object of meditation.
That’s what they’re talking about when they say forgetting the instruction. And if we lose focus on the object when we’re doing this kind of practice, then it becomes a really big fault. So if we’re like us, Geshe-la says if we’re like us and we’re beginners, then we actually can’t keep our concentration on the object. So we keep losing it. We keep losing our concentration and this is called forgetting the instruction.
So what the antidote to this is is actually memory and trying to increase our memory. So there’s actually a quote in here from The Heart of the Middle Way, which is the text by Bhaviveka. It says, tie the wayward elephant mind to the pillar of the object you’re meditating on with a very thick, strong rope. And so that means that our mind is like an elephant. It goes hither and thither and all over the place and doesn’t concentrate on the object.
And our memory should be like a really strong rope that keeps our mind attached to the object of our meditation. So the next section says, and then break it in like you do with horses with the hook of intelligence or wisdom. And Geshe-la says that back in the olden days in India or even today when people are training elephants, they actually get a hook and bang them on the ears. Bang them on the ears to get them to do what they’re told. And in the same way that this is used to train the elephant we should use our intelligence to train our mind.
And so we have to tell intelligence can say to us, I need to remember the object. I need to remember the object and to bring our mind into line. So it doesn’t matter what our object of meditation is, whether we’re meditating on bodhicitta or an image of the Buddha, any of these things, we have to keep our intelligence sharp and use it to remind our memory, to keep us stuck to the concentrated on the image we’re meditating on. This one? This one?
Oh, yeah. So it then says that people in India, the the Hindus who do it and and so forth who do Brahmin meditations use rocks and sticks and so forth to concentrate on. And So yeah. So that and actually, that they are so we have Hindu and Shaivite practitioners who are meditating on rocks and stones and there’s also a tradition in Tibet before Buddhism came there called Bön. And they used the letter A which is the last letter of the Tibetan alphabet.
They used that to concentrate on and they actually achieved calm abiding in their mind stream just by meditating on that. But the thing we have to keep in mind is that the object of meditation isn’t something that’s external to us. It’s our mind. And that a calm abiding is achieved by the mind, not the eyes. So there is actually a type of calm abiding that is achieved by focusing on an external object, but it’s an inferior type of calm abiding to the ones that focus on a mental object.
Because, as mentioned before, the object should be the the thing that achieves calm abiding should be the mind, not the eyes. Because usually when we see an object it’s actually a visual consciousness that comprehends objects. And after And the visual consciousness arises in our mind stream we then have a mental consciousness which comes after that. And what calm abiding actually relies on is the mental not the visual consciousness. So most of the time when we see objects we’re actually seeing them with our visual consciousness but what we have to focus on here is the image that comes up in our mind after we’ve seen something visually and that’s what we call the mental consciousness.
So when we talk about we have an eye consciousness, we can also have nose consciousnesses, ear consciousnesses, taste consciousnesses and touch consciousnesses. They aren’t actually what we’re after when we talk about calm abiding and trying to develop calm abiding. These all rely on the actual sense faculties and give rise to an image in our mind and after that, from the power of that image, we get a mental consciousness. And we have to be concentrating on that mental consciousness and not any of the sense consciousnesses that we may experience. Okay, so the mental consciousness that we’re talking about here is a conceptual consciousness.
After we’ve seen something with our eyes, then the image that we have in our head after this is conceptual as opposed to a direct consciousness. It’s the conceptual consciousness, it’s like a generic image of well not generic image, that’s the wrong word because otherwise I’ll get confused in my mind It’s an image of the thing that we’ve seen that comes into our mind conceptually as opposed to directly. So all our conceptual consciousnesses rely on a direct consciousness. Was trying not to use that word twice. Therefore if we’re going to use something as an objective meditation we should look at it very carefully first.
We should remember its characteristics and imprint it on our memories so we remember all the details and everything. And then when we bring it to mind conceptually, then it becomes lot clearer to us. So there’s even a story that many years ago, a man came from India to Tibet, and he meditated on the horn of an ox. And by meditating on the horn of an ox he actually achieved calm abiding so we can’t discount the other ways. We should know that we can get realizations from that as well.
But if we’re going to follow the oral tradition of Je Rinpoche Lama Tsongkhapa, then there’s a specific way to meditate by focusing on an image of Buddha, Śākyamūni. And This has a lot of different specific characteristics why this is a good thing to do, lot of different qualities. For starters, it’s by actually doing this meditation you clear away obscurations and you accumulate merit by just focusing on this object. You also get training for doing tantric practices later on. And it it is also very beneficial to be reminded of the Buddha.
So there’s a number of different ways that we can do this meditation. The first first is to imagine your teacher coming out of of being placed on top of your head and being inseparable from Śākyamūni Buddha and the size of your thumb. That’s right. Depending on your thumb. And he can either sit on the top of your head, in the middle of your eyebrows, or at your navel, or alternatively you can imagine yourself as Śākyamūni Buddha as your object of concentration, or for some people it’s even better that they actually focus on the mind itself as their object of concentration.
Objective, yeah, focus. So there’s many different things that we can use as our focus object when we’re doing this meditation. It says in here there’s examples of an all pervasive object which means taking everything as your object. There’s an antidote of the mind that you can use as your object or a particular behaviour or even the disappearance of an afflictive emotion. All of these things can be used as your object and it basically comes down to whatever suits you best, whatever feels the most comfortable in your meditation.
This should be your object of concentration. So but once we have chosen a object of concentration or an object to concentrate on, then we should stick with that object until we have developed calm abiding. We shouldn’t change in between different objects. The — what’s his name? It’s called something like Acharya — Acharya Ashvaghosha.
Yeah. He said that he’s quoted as saying that you should concentrate on one object And if you and keep that object steady in your mind. If you go from object to object and change, then all that you’re going to create is confusion. The actual word is stirring. So it’s stirring in your mind from your negative emotions.
So then it gives an example then that we have to concentrate on one object and not chop and change in between different objects in the same way that if we’re using two sticks, two rubbing sticks to make a fire, that we have to use the same two sticks. If we start changing the sticks around, we’re not going to be able to catch fire. It’s not gonna catch light. Geshe-la said we can kinda update this example. And if we’re using a gas oven, if you turn the gas on and then light it, it it will light.
But if you keep turning the gas off and then on and then off and then when you turn it off, then you light the match and then you turn it back on and you put the match out, then the gas doesn’t light. So if we keep changing our object, then that’s like trying to light a stove with no gas. So once we have a found out object object to focus on, then we shouldn’t break our concentration on that unless we are eating, sleeping or going to the bathroom. And once we have this concentration, even if it takes six months, if it takes years, then we shouldn’t break our continuation how would you say it we shouldn’t break the continuation of our mind focusing on this object. Oh, it’s terrible.
Even for a second because apart from, as we said, to go to the bathroom or sleep until we actually achieve calm abiding. And if we’re the sort of person that says, ‘I’m bored with this’ or moves on to something else or Geshe-la says is like him and wants to have a rest for a few days, then you’re not gonna be able to achieve calm abiding.