Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute Q&A session from a 2002 calm abiding retreat, Geshe Pema Tsering fields practical questions from meditators working through the nine stages of mental placement. He opens by untangling dullness from excitement — daydreaming while half-asleep still counts as excitement — then explains why breath cannot serve as a true single-pointed object: it moves in and out, so there is never one stable thing to hold. The session’s main focus is the fifth and final pitfall, over-applying antidotes when none are needed, illustrated by the image of watching a friend approach out of the corner of your eye while you keep eating. A pointed historical warning caps the talk: Tibetan masters at the eighth stage sometimes mistook it for calm abiding itself and cultivated subtle dullness instead. Suited to retreat participants working through formal calm abiding instruction.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 CAR 2002 10 06.mp3
UUID: ba475687-5794-4883-82db-ae41fc301b8a
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~2,532
So you’re falling asleep but your mind’s going, and then I’m going to have that piece of cake and then go, you know, is that what you’re talking about? Yeah. Yeah. I was just Yeah. Images occur.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But you’re falling.
You’re really tired at the same time. He’s he’s gonna get in trouble if he’s caught with his eyes. Jampa. He said that the sinking bit at the beginning is the dullness, and then as soon as you start thinking about things, that’s excitement, even if you are nearly asleep at that stage. It’s still excitement if you’re thinking about trying to I said cake, I hope that’s what you’re thinking about. Apart those two there isn’t any others.
So if you’re falling asleep and then at the same time you start feeling like you’re having daydreams or whatever, then those things are considered excitement, even if they’re happening at the same time as dullness. So you got everything wrong. So, yeah, if you hold it too tight, then you have excitement. Excitement and if you hold it too loose then you have this sinking dullness. Oh yeah, there’s heaps more, isn’t there?
Where are we up to? And the next one is: When should we start meditating on insight or wisdom? Should we try each calm abiding session to finish with some calm abiding and insight together. He says, it should be really good to try and think about special insight or the understanding of emptiness at the end of meditation sessions because in terms of the way that it develops after you develop calm abiding because you have mental suppleness then you can develop an insight into emptiness. But because we don’t have Calm Abiding at the moment then if we try and focus on emptiness insight at the same time then that can be a benefit to us because we get an understanding of why it is that we’re trying to develop pliancy in body.
Okay, this one the second to last one is: For beginners, is it good to focus on breath as a focus of concentration or should we persevere with images of Buddha rather than reverting to the breath? Is that implying that focusing on breathing is easier? He said the reason that it’s not mentioned is not because it’s of less benefit, but because it’s not actually single point of meditation. Because you’re not meditating on one thing, you’re meditating on something going out and something coming in, and it’s something that’s changing, so therefore it can’t be single pointed. And what they actually use it for is a preparation for single pointed concentration.
So you prepare your mind by focusing on your breath and then after that, then you move on to a single pointed concentration. But you can’t use your breath as a single pointed concentration because there’s too much going on with it. He said it goes up and it comes out and it goes up, so you can’t place it on it. I didn’t get a sound science but he said, what actually focusing on your breath does is draw your attention away from external objects so you don’t get distracted by external objects and you bring your focus into being on the breath. But it can’t technically be single pointed concentration because it goes in and out.
He said you can’t meditate on an out breath when you’re breathing in. You can’t put your mind on something that’s not there yet. Did you have any other He said that’s a fantastic start. It’s a great preparation. So from tomorrow, you can do a real proper meditation.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a good start. And this question is: how can we save other sentient beings from their ignorance if they don’t know they are suffering? So he said, we don’t save other people from their suffering.
What we do is we achieve Buddhahood. And then Buddhists, once they have achieved Buddhahood, they don’t go around saving people from their suffering. What they do is teach them Dharma. And if they teach them Dharma, then it shows them the way to save themselves from their suffering and to stop themselves suffering. So he said we can solve the suffering of suffering.
We’re talking about three different types of suffering. And the suffering of suffering has different manifestations as well. It can manifest as starvation, it can manifest as illness. And he said if we can give people medicine for their illness or we can give them food when they’re starving then we can help them from the suffering of suffering. But in terms of all pervasive suffering or the other types of suffering then we have no idea how we can help them.
There’s one more. Okay. It says, all these antidotes, there’s so many of them that these in themselves can be a distraction. He said, yeah, they can be. That’s why there’s one of the pitfalls is to apply antidotes when you don’t need them.
So there’s the idea that he said we’re concentrating single pointedly on one thing and in the corners of our minds if we know what the antidotes are, then when the problems come up we can apply the antidotes. But that’s not the main thing that we’re focusing on. They’re just like tools at the side that we can use when we need them. But the main thing we have to be concentrating on is our objective concentration. So if we stop thinking about that and start thinking about the antidotes, then that becomes a problem and it becomes an obstacle to our meditation.
So they should be there, but they shouldn’t be the main focus of our attention. He said it’s like when we’re eating our food and we can see out of the corner of our eye that our friend’s coming. But we don’t actually have to stop eating our food to see that our friend’s coming out of the corner of our eye. So we can concentrate on still eating our food and just keep an eye out that our friend’s coming. It’s like this.
So, yeah, in the same way, we’re not losing our concentration on our food while we can see out of the corner of our eye that our friend’s coming, but it’s the same mind doing both these things. So in the same way, when we’re we don’t lose concentration when we’re doing this meditative concentration, don’t lose our object of concentration, but we can still be aware that these dangerous situations could be coming up. Yeah. Keeps throwing in Tibetan words that I don’t know and going, You don’t. Now How do you want?
This one, it’s a ten pass. So now you can actually do some of the text questions. Yep. Because the questions are all finished. Unless anyone has any more questions that they thought of during the other questions.
He said that it’s not analytical meditation and it is a type of placement meditation but it’s a preparation type of placement meditation. It’s not the actual placement meditation. So therefore, while it stops you from having thoughts about external objects and prepares you to do the real placement meditation, you can’t count it as a real placement meditation. I’ll I’ll I’ll go into it later because he reckons this. So he says that it’s not actually being able to watch your breath for twenty one times.
It’s being being able to focus on an object for twenty one breaths. But I remember yeah. So No. He said if you start calming the breath when you’re meditating single pointedly, it harms the meditation. It.
I can’t find it now, so I have to do it later. Wasting people’s time. She said it’s clear in the text. It’s your problem. This is quite possibly true.
So we’re up to the fifth and the last pitfall, out of all these pitfalls. And it is the pitfall that applies that uses mental application when it doesn’t need to, or readjustment. What this means is that when we get to a certain point in our meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings, we don’t have excitement and dullness coming into our mind stream. So if we start applying antidotes then when we don’t need them, then this in itself becomes a pitfall. And so how we stop ourselves from doing this is we use eighth out of the eight antidotes, which is called I’m trying to think of it equanimous mental application.
And what this means is that when we get to this stage, we don’t start applying antidotes to things that aren’t there, but we balance our mind on the object and leave it the way it is. So, up until the eighth stage of the nine stages of mental placement in development of calm abiding, we actually experience excitement and dullness. In order to stop excitement and dullness, we have to use our mental adjustments. But once we’ve reached this stage, two problems don’t come about, so there’s no need for us to apply any of these adjustments. And what we need to do is to look at them, to see the concentration the way it is, and to leave it like that, to leave it just the way it is.
So at this stage, we still have to keep our mind’s eye on whether calmness what is it called? I’ll try again. We have to keep our consciousness on the fact that dullness or agitation may come about. We have to keep an eye out for this. We still have to worry about these.
But we can’t be over vigilant and try and break something up that isn’t actually there. We can’t stop something that actually hasn’t arrived. This can happen when we are relying on our self watcher too much. Instead of leaving things that are good the way they are, then we can keep trying to, over vigilance, through our overzealous, we may try to fix things that don’t need to be fixed and this can become a problem in itself. So while we, at this stage, in the eighth stage, still have to watch to see if dullness and agitation are coming.
We don’t actually have to put in any effort with our self watcher into stopping them from coming about. And we’re allowed to let our mind relax a bit. It’s appropriate to let our mind relax a little bit and rely on this mental application that is balanced, basically. So this relaxation isn’t the same type of relaxation that we were talking about negatively in the previous sections, where we said we had to keep a tight rein on the mind and make sure that it was focused on the object, otherwise we were to lose the vividness even if we had the steadiness and the clarity. This isn’t what we’re talking about here.
What we’re talking about here is we’ve already reached a stage where the image is abiding by itself. It’s abiding without us having to put that much effort into it. So we can let our mind relax a little bit here. But then we also have to know where to draw the line, we also have to know where the balance comes into being, because we still need to keep in mind things like our memory, which is already in gear, memory and the way that we’re holding the object. And we don’t want to be like several old Tibetan experts, who got to this stage where they didn’t have to keep adjusting things and thought that they had attained calm abiding and called it relaxation in the deepest meditation, but they’d actually got themselves to that plane where they didn’t have to adjust things.
They’d got that confused with calm abiding and they’d mixed the two up. So these experts from the past, the mistake they made is that once they achieved the eighth level in the nine levels up to achieving calm abiding, they thought that was it and they started relax but they made a mistake on when they were supposed to relax and what they ended up cultivating was subtle dullness instead of calm abiding itself. So we have to be very careful not to behave like that because if we do that we are actually losing our calm abiding and end up, the expression is we get thrown a long way from the actual calm abiding meditation. Therefore, we have to put in great effort to try and protect the way that we’re holding the meditation object, and maintain it. We have to be able to guard the way that we’re protecting our concentration.
And we have to do this all the way up from going from refuge to the generation stage of Tantric practice, which is the stage just before enlightenment. We have to be able to guard the whole way up and not let our guard down at any stage. So the actual way that we are supposed to be protecting the object of our concentration is this: first of all, once we’ve accomplished the five preliminaries, the five things we needed to do, the five preparations before we go into retreat, then we actually go into retreat and find a comfortable cushion and sit in the comfortable cushion in the sevenfold posture of Vairochana. There’s seven different points to his posture. And then from the space on top of our head, from our teacher comes the image of Śākyamūni Buddha.
And then this image comes down and sits at the space before us at the level of our navel. Geshe-la says, even though he’s talking about this here, this is an example. So if we’re using something else as a meditative focus, then we can substitute whatever it is meditating on for this. But this is the example that they’re using in the text. And then, the start, when we try and visualise it, it’s not going to be very clear.
But this isn’t necessary that it’s very clear. What we actually end up with is bits of the image. We can see its hands or we can see its head, or even if we can’t see that, then we get a yellow blob instead of what is the image of the Buddha, we can get a blobby outline of what it is we’re looking for. So then after we’ve developed our blobby outline, have to use, as it was said before, we have to use our memory to make sure that we don’t lose our focus on the object and hold a tight rein on our mind so that it doesn’t get distracted and protect against distraction. And by doing this, our distractions naturally become less.
And by doing this also, our distractions become less and we naturally get rid of these problems of dullness and agitation which can act as can interrupt our concentration. And because this process works like this, this is why the great meditators of the past, it says here, they hold this text to their heart because it is so precious.