Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Lama Tsongkhapa’s verse — “renunciation without bodhicitta cannot cause supreme enlightenment” — Geshe Pema Tsering uses this 44-minute session to bridge motivation and meditation. He steps through the seven-point mind training: recognising all beings as former mothers, repaying their kindness, cultivating great compassion, and taking universal responsibility — the resolve to free all beings oneself. Along the way he addresses a real obstacle: since every being has also been our enemy in past lives, ambivalence is a genuine risk; the antidote is directing that energy at ignorance, not the person. The session then pivots to calm-abiding at the third stage, distinguishing gross from subtle dullness and insisting that genuine concentration requires steadfastness, clarity, and a vivid brilliance — illustrated by the contrast between a cloudy sky and bright sunshine.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 CAR 2002 10 05.mp3
UUID: b50ff551-d664-4014-9e54-b513b67adf76
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.7 minutes
Words: ~2,902
And so the quote that Geshe-la said is from Lama Tsongkhapa, and it is, renunciation without bodhicitta cannot cause the supreme bliss of unexcelled enlightenment. Therefore, the wise develop bodhicitta. bodhicitta. And yesterday, we talked about renunciation and how important renunciation is. But renunciation alone can only cause the liberation of self or nirvana.
It can’t be a cause for the supreme enlightenment. In order to achieve enlightenment, you need to develop bodhicitta. And therefore, bodhicitta becomes a very important part of the Mahāyāna So yesterday we said that renunciation was the wish to free ourselves from suffering, from the suffering of saṃsāra. Well, bodhicitta is the wish to not only free ourselves from the suffering of saṃsāra, but to free all other beings from the sufferings of saṃsāra as well. And in order to do this, we need to create in our mind stream a great compassion.
And great compassion’s definition is the wish for all beings to be free from suffering. And once we’ve developed this idea of great compassion in our head, then bodhicitta, the wish to to achieve enlightenment in order to do this, comes about after that. The Tibetans when the the monks study, they learn a lot of definitions, and they reel them out like that. And I was like, what? So the definition of definition of great compassion is the wish to free all sentient beings from their sufferings, and that comes with an immeasurable capacity to be able to do this by achieving enlightenment.
Enlightenment. And that’s probably a really bad translation of it because it’s very complicated, but that’s roughly the idea. And then in order to be able to achieve this mind, there’s they talk about three different types of compassion. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a a compassion which is a wish to free someone else from suffering. There’s a great compassion, which is a a wish to free all beings from suffering.
And then there’s immeasurable compassion, which is a wish that to achieve enlightenment to free all beings from suffering. So if you have hang on. No. I’ve got that wrong. Hang on one second.
Okay. So, sorry, I was getting a bit confused. Now, we have great no, immeasurable compassion is wanting to free most people from suffering. So Geshe-la says, if we start with thinking about ourselves and thinking we want to be free from suffering, and then we think about our parents and if they’ve helped us a lot, and wanting them to be free from suffering, then thinking that everybody else in our city is the same as us and wanting them to be free from suffering and then extending it out to everybody in Australia and thinking we want all people who are in Australia to be free from suffering and then out to the world. And this is called immeasurable compassion because it’s very difficult to count the amount of people that you’re directing compassion towards.
But it’s not great compassion, which is wanting all sentient beings to be free from suffering. And then on top of great compassion, the next step in the development of bodhicitta is this concept of universal responsibility, which is thought, it’s sometimes translated, which is not only do I want them to be free from suffering, but I’m going to do it myself. I’m going to take responsibility for all these people’s suffering and achieve enlightenment in order to free them from So universal responsibility is actually a greater thought than great compassion because it’s thinking not only do I want all these beings to be free from suffering, I myself and I alone am going to do it. So it becomes a very powerful thought in this way. But it can also only be generated after we have developed great compassion.
Because if you don’t have this idea that you won’t want everyone to be free from suffering, it’s impossible to think, not only do I want them to be free from it, but I’m going to do it by myself. So it has come about in order, these different types of of thought. So before we even get to the stage of developing compassion, there’s a process set out in actually came from the Buddha to Maitreya, or the Buddha Maitreya to Asaṇga, and it’s a seven point mind training that is used to develop bodhicitta in our mind stream. And it starts with the base of equanimity, that is, that all beings are like myself. We all want to be free from suffering.
So it starts with this base thought. And then there’s a seven point process. So before we get to the concept of great compassion, we start with the idea of thinking that all beings are like our mothers. And in Tibet, they held their mothers to be all to be very kind beings. So and in India.
So that all beings are like our mother. And then we think about the kindness or think about the kindness that someone like our mother has given us. And then after that, you want to repay that kindness. So therefore, if all beings are like your mother and you want to repay their kindness, how do you do that? So the next step after that, which is the fourth step, is the wish.
It’s called and kindness, but its definition is the wish that all beings may experience happiness. So if we’re trying to think of all beings as our mother, then we have to remember that if saṃsāra has been beginningless, then our rebirths have been beginningless. We’ve been being born without a beginning. So if that’s the case, then we have had an infinite number of mothers. Therefore, every sentient being in existence has been our mother at one stage.
So if we think that at some stage existence, every single being has been our mother, then we develop this wish to want to help all our mothers. In in the same way that all beings have been our mother in previous lives, all beings have also been our enemy in previous lives. We’ve gone through stages where every single person that we’ve ever met and we’re close to has been our enemy. So we have this connection with all beings that we’ve either been very close to them or we’ve been in a very intensely negative interactions with them. We’ve been in a negative situation with them and a positive situation with them.
So we to think that we have a close connection with all sentient beings. So there’s if if we think like this, there’s also a danger that we think that, well, if everyone’s helped us and been one of our parents in our previous lives and everyone’s harmed us, there’s this danger that we can think, well, they’ve helped us and they’ve harmed us today. What’s the point? They they really have done both to us. So why why should we be nice to people that have harmed us as well as helped us?
We can develop, like, a he said, there’s a danger of ambivalence towards everybody. So if we think like this if if we do end up thinking like this, then there’s no chance that we can become a Buddha. So the idea is that when we’re thinking of people as our enemies, what we have to remember is that it’s not actually them that’s our enemies. It’s their afflictive emotions. It’s their negative thoughts that become our enemies.
And in the same way, when we are someone’s enemy and we harm people, it’s not us that’s harming them. It’s our negative emotions, it’s our negative thought patterns that we’re like a slave to. We don’t have control over because they come about as the cause of karma. So if we’re trying to get angry at someone, we should be getting angry at the negative thoughts and not the person themselves. So so then if we’re thinking that you know, if we think this, then what we’re left with if we if that’s how we get rid of the the the enemy aspect of us, thinking that everyone’s our enemy, then all we’re left with is their kindness, which has come from compassion for us.
So, therefore, when we’re focusing on the enemy, what we actually should be focusing on is ignorance, is our ignorance and other people’s ignorance. And if we want to focus that energy on or, like, the energy towards an enemy on someone, it should be on that ignorance because it’s these afflictive emotions that come about through, like, the five omnipresent factors and and the twenty different types of negative thoughts that you can have, base ones and then root ones. It’s all of those things that are the problem, not the actual sentient beings. So so we have to think that all sentient beings, including ourselves, are like the the slaves or the servants of that are self-cherishing and our sense of self, our holding our self as real. So this is all sentient beings without exception, whether they’ve been our enemy or whether they’re which have all been our enemy and which have all been our mother.
The thing that that holds them into saṃsāra is their grasping itself and their self-cherishing. So the the the things that sentient beings do, the the actions that they perform, the work they do, all the different things they do, don’t actually come about from their own power. They come about because they have a basic ignorance, and this basic ignorance leads to different states of mind that are negative and these, like, five omnipresent factors that are in our mind all the time which are polluted. And the twenty one different types of negative actions, they lead to all these different things because of this basic ignorance. Therefore, this big basic ignorance is this cherishing of self and grasping a sense of self.
So by the power of that, they create all these negative karma and they do all these different things. And they basically do everything. There’s a real similarity in Tibetan between the word for karma and the word for work. So I guess he was playing on that a bit and saying they they work for karma and they the karma works. It’s difficult to translate.
So they they, yeah, they do all these things because of this ground of ignorance. And so if we think that these poor beings have are doing all these things because of their ignorance, then we wanna going to want to be able to free them from this ignorance. Because if we free them from the ignorance, then we’re freeing them from suffering. We’re generating the thought that they should be, like, separated from all different types of suffering because that’s separating them from their ignorance. And by doing this, then we are we’re generating the mind of bodhicitta, the mind to try and achieve enlightenment to separate them all from their sufferings.
So then if we have this idea that we want them to be free from suffering, then we have to look at it and say, well, they’re not able to free themselves from suffering at the moment, so I have to do it myself. I have to try and find a way for them to be free from suffering. I have to achieve Buddhahood in order to show them how not to be ignorant and therefore how not to suffer. Therefore, after this idea of wanting all beings to be free from suffering, which is great compassion, comes the universal responsibility that I take responsibility for myself and do it myself because they can’t. Then comes the idea of the mind wishing to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, which is bodhicitta.
So in order for us to achieve this thought of trying to liberate all beings from saṃsāra, we should in order to achieve it quickly, we need to meditate now. So we’re in the at the moment we’re in the third stage, which is excitement and dullness. And we start by differentiating between the two different types of dullness, which is subtle and gross types of dullness. So the definition of a gross type of dullness is that once you have established concentration on the object through memory, then you have two aspects to that concentration. There’s a part of your concentration that’s fixed and a part of your concentration that’s clarity.
There’s a clarity there and a steadfastness there. If you lose this clarity, then that’s called the gross form of dullness. If you have both of these, but there is the way that you’re holding the clarity in your mind falls a little bit, it doesn’t have a brilliance to it, isn’t really bright, then that’s that’s considered the subtle form subtle form of dullness. So this is actually the main danger when we’re meditating that we can that we have this subtle dullness, that we have a steadfastness and we have a clarity. So we think, oh, we’ve achieved calm abiding, we’ve gotten there, this is what we’re supposed to be looking for, but we’re missing the brilliance that comes along with it in the clarity of our image.
And this is harder to distinguish. Therefore, it becomes the main problem when we’re meditating. So at this stage, if we have a slight dullness and there isn’t this brilliance in our meditation, this becomes a cause for us to develop what they call subtle dullness and can also be a cause, Geshe-la said, to go from subtle dullness to coarse dullness and actually sleep. So if we cut it at the beginning before we end up asleep. So in order to to achieve actual calm abiding, we need three things.
We need to be steadfast on the image. We need to have clarity about the image, and we need to have a vividness about the image as well. And it’s easy for us to think that we have calm abiding when we have the clarity and the steadfastness and don’t have the vividness. So we have to be very careful when we’re meditating that we don’t get stuck in stuck there. So the what they mean when they talk about this this brilliant this this this vividness, this brilliance is that it has three aspects to it.
It has the aspect of alertness, that our mind is very alert, that is very vivid, obviously, and that it’s it’s it’s got, like, a a cleanness to it. It doesn’t have a kind of it’s a brightness or cleanness to the the image. So and I use an example that the way that we’re supposed to hold these things is is different in our mind. For example, if we have a a ball and a cup in one hand, the way we’re going to be holding them is different. So there’s so we have to recognize the the different the different aspects of our mind holding things.
And the other thing is that they say we may have a we may have a faith in a teacher. Like, guess, let’s say, we all have some some amount of faith in the Dalai Lama, but it may not be very strong. It may be a a slight feeling that he’s okay. And then something will happen. He will do something, and this this feeling can become very strong.
And in the same way that that that works in the same way as our mind holding this object. It may be there and feel alright, but then something has to happen to make it very strong and clear. And these three things are actually very difficult to describe. They’re actually supposed to come more from experience. If you can experience the clarity and experience the steadfastness, then you can get an insight into what they’re talking about.
And if we about it, if we think about what they mean, then we might get some idea. But in terms of trying to explain it, it’s very difficult because it’s more of an experiential thing. Remember that these three, this vividness well, the steadfastness, the vividness, and the brilliance, they’re all actually an aspect of our mind. They don’t come from the object object itself. They they don’t shine at the object, like the object’s bright.
That isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about in in the mind that it these three things, the clarity, the steadfast, and the and the vividness. It’s not something that we can look at something bright and go, oh, now we’ve got it. It has to come into our mind. And this steadfastness and when we’re talking about the steadfastness and we’re talking about the clarity, the clarity if we don’t the clarity, it’s like a veil has been drawn across our mind.
Geshe-la says it’s a bit like today. If you look outside, you don’t get the clarity when you’re looking at things. There’s things standing in the way. There’s clouds and it’s foggy. And no matter how hard you look, you can’t see it as clearly as if the sun was shining brightly.
So in that same way, even though you may have the steadfastness, you’re not going to have the clarity there.