Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The story of Asaṇga — who spent twelve years in retreat before generating great compassion by using his tongue to lift maggots off a dying dog, then watching the dog transform into Maitreya — anchors this 44-minute Q&A session with Geshe Pema Tsering at a calm abiding retreat weekend. Questions move across the practice: how to gauge readiness, why verifying another person’s attainments is nearly impossible, the karmic roots of dullness (ignorance) and distraction (desire), and whether beginners may switch their meditation object. Geshe Pema Tsering explains that steadiness and clarity — not the object itself — are what matter most, and distinguishes analytical from placement meditation when using an abstract concept like bodhicitta as the focus. The session closes on fine-tuning mind-tension: tightening to dispel subtle dullness, loosening when excitement takes hold.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 CAR 2002 10 06.mp3
UUID: ed2d0293-64bd-43a1-9adb-238e715a8d0a
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~3,096
So can you do the rapid fire? So we’ve got some questions here that people have given to ask Geshe-la. The first one being how do I know if or when I’m ready for a calm abiding retreat. What does it mean to do a calm abiding retreat. Yeah.
Sorry. A calm abiding meditation. Meditation. Ready now. We discussed it a few minutes as well.
But Okay. You know, Yeah. He said, you know, it’s up to individuals whether they’re ready to meditate on abiding or not. But he said, If you came here from Adelaide to meditate on calm abiding, then in some ways you’re ready. And I said, But we’re not doing a six month retreat here, Geshe-la, we’re just doing three hour weekend.
And then he said, But what we’re doing is preparing us for a calm abiding retreat. We’re studying the text, we’re studying what we need to know in order to do the retreat and in order to do the retreat. What we need to do and what we need to not do in order to do the retreat properly. So in this way we prepare ourselves for it. But it really comes down to the individual, is what he said.
Whether you’re ready to do it or He said it’s like the not the it’s something that you do at the start. Whether you’re ready to start or not is up to you. So he said, the question was, when the great mystics do calm abiding meditation, are often depicted as thin, haggard, and even with a change in skin color, like mould green. So how do we know they weren’t hallucinating from hunger, lack of oxygen or loneliness?’ And Geshe-la says we don’t know, basically. It’s very difficult for us to be able to recognise whether someone has developed calm abiding or not, or whether they have realised a path or not, if they have any realisations.
We can’t tell that. Only other beings of that level can tell it. And the thing is, there are lots of people that are fake around. Like he said in India there are so many fake sadhus, which are holy men, are so many fake sadhus that it’s not funny. So it’s really almost impossible for us to tell whether someone’s faking it or not.
We only have to rely on other holy beings that have achieved these attainments to tell us whether they were legitimate or not. So he said, so what that means is that we have to rely on the text and the people that are practicing according to them because they set out the way that we can achieve these things. Then when we’ve achieved them ourselves, then we know according to the text, according to descriptions in the text, whether we’ve achieved it or not. And and then we can know for ourselves what it’s like as opposed to seeing it in other people. And if there is this there’s a couple of examples he was giving.
Like, there’s a a man who has had achieved all the the different parts. So we have two examples. We have the example of someone who didn’t look like a Rinpoche. We have the example of someone who didn’t look like they had realizations, which is this Indian pandit called Tilopa, who was around many years ago. And his student Naropa found him frying fish after he picked them out of a creek.
He put the fish in a pan and was sitting next to the road frying them while they were still alive and then eating them. And this is someone doesn’t look like they’ve developed compassion. This was his mask that he put on to test his student Naropa. Naropa had to see past this facade of his to see whether he had attainments or not. So this was his test.
That’s on one side. And there’s another side, there’s Rinpoche, apparently in India at the moment, who goes around saying he’s a the Gelugpa tradition most of the people are monks. He goes around saying that he’s a Gelugpa tantric practitioner and does some strange stuff according to Geshe-la. And most people go, ‘Yeah, right!’ This is someone that probably is putting on the facade of being someone with realisations but may not be. And then on the other hand we have someone who is putting on the facade of not having realisations but did have.
Is that question answer is it your yeah. Is that answer okay? Yeah? He said you’re tired? Was it yeah.
Someone was tired? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So The question is, how did Maitreya Buddha communicate to Asaṇga the teachings of the Maitreya’s five dharmas?
There’s a story, as you may have guessed. As he said yesterday, there was a nun who had a vision and just prayed in order to give birth to Asaṇga and his younger brother. It’s not a teacher. You got a teacher? Who’s is it your question?
Mike, I’m staring at you. Yeah. It wasn’t Atisha that teachings of seven-point mind training. It’s Asaṇga, but that’s okay. Yeah.
It doesn’t matter. Yeah. Asaṇga Atisha. Yeah. It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, Asaṇga sangha was born with all these auspicious circumstances because his mother knew that he was going to help the world and everything, right? So Geshe-la said that yesterday. And he actually went into retreat. And he was in retreat in a cave for twelve years meditating on compassion but didn’t actually develop great compassion. And so at the end of his retreat he kind of given up.
And he was walking down the road from he was in retreat in a cave on a hill and he was walking down the road from the hill a bit despondent because he’d given up on his retreat. And he came down the hill and he saw a female dog lying on the side of the road. And this dog was covered in burrs and, maggots. There’s one generic word in Tibetan that covers all insects and small animals. Anyway, so it’s covered in all these different maggots.
On seeing this dog with all the maggots all over him he actually experienced great compassion. It generated his mind stream. And he thought, ‘I have to save this dog, but I don’t want to hurt the maggots’. So what he actually did, which is a bit gross, is lie down next to the dog and put his tongue on the maggots so he could lift the maggots off the dog without hurting the maggots. So he had all the maggots on his tongue and then he put the maggots on the ground with his tongue.
Yeah? So he didn’t squish the maggots or hurt the dog because he generated this great compassion. And then after he’d gotten all the maggots off the dog, the dog actually turned into Maitreya. Yes? He jumped out at us.
Oh, it’s on my own. Yeah. And so he turned into Maitreya. The dog turned into Maitreya. Yeah.
Yeah. And he said, where have you been? I have been meditating on you for twelve years, and you didn’t show up. And now you turn up as a dog, you know? And he said Maitreya said to him, I’ve been in front of you the whole time.
It’s just that you had so much so much delusion and so much negative karma. You couldn’t see me. And it took this act for you to be able to see me. So then he left the place where he’d met Maitreya on the side of the road, and he went into the village. And he was walking around the village, and he’s like, I’m bit tired, I’m carrying this being.
And the people said, There’s nothing on your shoulders, what are you talking about? And nobody could see Maitreya apart from this old lady saw a being on his shoulder. So after this, Maitreya is Buddha. He’s Buddha. You know?
So he could take him to the god realms to Tuśita, which is where where he lives is Tuśita, one of the Pure Lands. And so he took him there and he taught him all these lessons and all the seven points of mind training and all these things. And then came back down to earth after he spent just one morning. And one morning in the God Realms, he got all the texts. It’s like there’s five teachings from Maitreya.
There’s a cycle of five, and including his five texts. And he says he taught him the cycle of teachings that’s known as Maitreya’s five dharmas. So I guess it says that Tārā and Chenrezig and all these people or deities or whatever you wanna call them are actually hanging around us all the time. But because we have this ignorance and we think things exist substantially by themselves and we have this basic ignorance, then that causes us to have negative karma which obscures them from our view. Then if we could realize emptiness and we see all deities everywhere all the time.
The next question I was going to ask him is what is the karmic cause of dullness? He said it’s it’s karmic causes ignorance. So if we’ve had ignorance since beginning of this time of the way things really exist, then that’s the reason that dullness comes about when we start meditating. Mhmm. Because ignorance is like fog.
And the the karmic cause for excitement is desire. So because we’ve had desire for things since beginningless time, then when we try and meditate, that desire comes up again and again. But these two kind of go together because if we have ignorance of how things truly exist and don’t see them as empty as we see them existent, then we have attachment for these things. Therefore, the two of them go together the same way as excitement and dullness go together in our meditations and teachings on calm abiding usually. Right.
Now you guys have got heaps. Right? So if I go to someone else’s and come back to you, is that alright? Yes. Yeah.
No. It’s okay. At what point? Alright. And this question is, at which point should we not change the object of our concentration?
If we are beginners and start concentrating on one object, then decide to change this. Is that okay in the beginning? And how much can you experiment with what is good for you? Yeah. So k.
She was like, I didn’t understand English. You have to tell me. Okay. He said if something isn’t working for you at the start, then yes, definitely you can change the object. But if you start changing them all around, you’re not going to achieve calm abiding.
It’s like unless you start focusing on one object, you just don’t go anywhere near calm abiding. And in terms of how much you’re allowed to change things around before you settle on one object, it comes down to your self-watcher again that we were talking about in the text. The little bit of your consciousness that’s watching what you’re doing. And if you can see that what you’re doing is just not helpful by changing everything around, then you have to stop it. But if you haven’t found something that you can abide on, then you have to keep changing something until you find something.
But if you’re just using it as an excuse, if you’re just perpetually changing, it’s so simple. You don’t achieve calm abiding by changing the object. So you have to stop Because he says the main things that we should be watching is actually not so much the object but these two different aspects to our concentration. The that’s part of our concentration that’s steady and the part of our concentration that’s bright. And we shouldn’t be thinking about anything but those two.
So is our concentration steady? Is our concentration clear? So if we have those two then it doesn’t so much matter about the object because it’s those two that are the main focus for our meditation. So we don’t really have a choice in this, he’s saying. Once we understand that once once we understand what it is we have to do in meditation, we have no friend, we have to rely on ourselves.
We have to watch ourselves to make sure that the clarity is there and watch ourselves to make sure that the steadfastness is there and rely on our self-watcher and we can’t rely on external things for that. Okay, Next question. Is that I hope that was okay. Okay. The next question is, if you are using a conceptual thought like bodhicitta, do you have to use analytical meditation before you get to the object of bodhicitta?
Is this analytical meditation okay to have in single pointed concentration? So he said that we definitely need to do analytical meditation in order to establish these conceptions if that’s what we’re going to use as our meditative object. But we can’t do them at the same time. First of all we have to analyse what it is we’re actually meditating on and from then we have to meditate on it single pointedly because you can’t do both analytical and placement meditation at the same time. So you have to do both.
And in terms of doing calm abiding, do one first and then the other second. So you do the analytical meditation first and then the placement meditation second. Okay, next question is: What’s the difference between a visual concept and an intellectual concept? Are they the same thing? Are they both images or mind material?
Can I be harassing and ask who this is? Because I don’t understand it. Sorry. I think we’re discussing how well Marika was saying See how you can For some reason he thinks they’re really funny. Yeah.
But but you can’t see a conceptual object. So mind or freedom we use as well is not something you can visualize. It’s a concept. So what’s the difference between something you can visualize like a visual concept like a Buddha, statue or a stupa or anything and a non, say an esoteric or something. A concept, yeah.
A concept that’s not an item. Because they’re both in the mind, don’t they? Mean you both, your object is, one’s visual and one’s abstract. There you go. What’s the difference between an abstract concept and a visual concept in terms of calm abiding meditation?
Is that I don’t know what. So you want to know so so hang on. Sorry. I’m going to have to clarify this a bit because One’s a they’re both conceptual, but one’s based on vision. One’s based on vision.
And the other is based on A concept. There’s a concept. Conceptual concept. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Alright. He said that when we’re basing our it’s like a generalized image or something. That’s what appears in our mind when we’re talking about conception. We have a generalized image of the object.
So if our generalized image is based on a sense consciousness, like a form or a smell or something like that, then it comes about from that. But if something is a conception, then we automatically go to that generalized image. So we would only ever in our mind have a concept of freedom. We would only in our mind have a generalized image of freedom. We would never have freedom itself.
So one of them comes about on reliance on a visual or sense perception and the other one is always a generalized image. So if we’re talking about in terms of mind, there’s two different types of minds that we can have. We can have a conceptual mind and a non conceptual mind. So with a non conceptual mind, what happens is when we look at something or we hear something, then our mind recognises that and it’s like an external thing going on. And if it’s a conceptual conceptual mind, it is always a generalized image.
So there’s no difference between a generalized image and a conceptual mind. Because for example, Geshe-la said, we look at the cup, even if we look straight at the cup then we can have a direct perception of the cup. But even a moment after that, if we try and get an idea about the cup, it’s not the cup, it’s an idea about the cup. Therefore that’s a conception, and anything we see straight is a non conceptual mind. Yes.
Is that alright? It is alright. It is right. So. No.
No. It It is right. Do do you mummy. Okay. And then the next question is oh, maybe I’ll go ask one of you guys for it.
Do we tighten the mind Do we tighten the mind for subtle dullness or excitement? Is that what you mean? Yeah. Which way was it? Or do we tighten the mind for subtle dullness or So, when we’re trying to recognize what subtle dullness is, it’s that we have a steadfastness and we have a clarity but we don’t have a vividness.
So once we’ve recognised that we don’t have a vividness, what we have to do is tighten the mind. But then once we’ve tightened the mind, there’s a danger that we can flip into excitement because the mind is too tight. So therefore if the mind becomes too tight, what we have to do is loosen the mind a little bit. And so excitement is too tight? Excitement is too tight, yeah.
On that, we had another discussion on day dreaming. Mhmm. That’s when your mind’s very coarse and yet there’s seems to be a lot of vividness. You can have very vivid daydreams. Yeah right.
So is is is that what vividness is? Because then if so, why is it at the same time as dullness? Dullness, the vividness. You said that during subtle dullness there’s no vividness, Right? Is that what Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. But but when you’re daydreaming Uh-huh. Then your mind’s gone completely off the object, and you might be thinking about something else which is very vivid. Yeah.
But that’s not dullness. So if your mind’s gone off the object, it’s not dullness. Oh, that when you’re falling asleep and you have it like sometimes, you know, when you’re kind of Uh-huh. Falling asleep. Yeah.
And you’re not asleep, but you’re sort of daydreaming. It’s like