Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 37-minute talk, Geshe Pema Tsering prepares practitioners for an upcoming calm abiding retreat on Kangaroo Island. He opens with a working definition — calm abiding is single-pointed mental placement on a chosen object — then explains its foundational role: once mastered, it enriches meditation on bodhicitta, emptiness, or a tantric deity. Four preparatory divisions follow: making proper provisions so one need not rely on divination; limiting desire for fine food and clothing; cultivating contentment with whatever one receives; and keeping pure ethics, walking through the ten non-virtues of body, speech, and mind. He stresses that during the retreat itself one must not shift attention to emptiness or compassion — only the single object. The session closes with a Q&A on Om Mani Padme Hum: no initiation is needed to recite the mantra, though those who have taken the Chenrezig empowerment can additionally visualize themselves as the deity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 CAR 2002 10 08.mp3
UUID: a6eb852a-6939-48c7-8349-682299c224a5
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 37.6 minutes
Words: ~2,615
Okay. He said, do we know what calm abiding is? And calm abiding is this definition, which I hopefully can get right because it was quite detailed. But it is the mental placement which focuses single pointedly on the object of the focused object and is a meditative absorption. I can get that again for anyone else who wants it and write it down properly because it was true.
So he doesn’t think that we perhaps can achieve mental absorption in weekend, but what the most important thing to do is to try and to focus one pointedly on the object that we’re focusing on, our focus object. Calm abiding, once we’ve mastered the art of focusing on one object, then anything we do, whether it be meditating on bodhicitta, or meditating on emptiness, or meditating on a specific tantric deity, Any of these practices we do become a lot more focused and we’re able to do them. So first, in order to be able to do those later, first we have to meditate on calm abiding, which is the process of focusing our mind one pointedly on an object, which enables us to do the other practices properly. So now you guys know what calm abiding is. You can meditate on it.
So then it says thAt this stage people don’t really know what they’re doing when they’re meditating on calm abiding. They don’t know where to get their provisions from and what preparations they need to do in order to practice. So they rely on people throwing mos, which is Tibetan dice, it’s like a divination system, and things like that in order to find out when and where and how to do their practice, instead of knowing themselves through their practice how to do it properly. So it says, of all, that we should make proper preparations before we go into a retreat. If we make proper preparations, then we don’t have to rely on people throwing mos and things to tell us when and where to go into a retreat.
Next, we move on to the second division in the preparatory practice for developing calm abiding. This is that we should have limited desires or small desires. It says that when we have a desire for good food and clothing, this can distract us from trying to develop calm abiding and contentedness. So when we eat, we’re not allowed to get caught up in how delicious the food is and the different variety of foods because this is not limiting our desires. This is encouraging them.
And he said, s difficult because we stay in such a nice place and there s really nice food and it s really easy for us to get caught up in our surroundings. We have to keep focusing on that. So when we go there, we should take good clothes and make sure we have good food. So we’re not thinking, oh, I wish I had good food and I wish I had good clothes and I was warm. We’ve just got them and we don’t think about it.
We’ve got the preparation done and we don’t have to think about it. So yes, make sure you’ve got the right clothes. And the third division is that we should be satisfied with what we’ve got. And so this is that whatever clothes or food and anything that we receive should be enough. So if we have a lot of food and it’s really nice and we’re really enjoying with that.
And also, if there’s not much, if we’re only getting scraps and little bits of food, then we should try and be satisfied with that as well. So these two divisions, the division that is we should have small desires and the next division, which is that we should be satisfied. These two are important because if we’re thinking about getting better clothes and better food and everything in our worldly possessions, then and our mind keeps running after how we can get do better in terms of comfort in food and clothing, then we’re not going to be able concentrate on achieving calm abiding because our mind’s running after those things. So the next thing the next division is pure ethics. In general, if we want to do any type of meditation practice or any kind of Dharma practice at all, then we need good ethics, otherwise we can’t do it.
And it says here in the text, because this is because as it says in the text that ethical discipline is the basis for all good qualities. So what do they mean when they talk about ethical discipline? It basically means that you should abandon doing bad and cultivate doing good. And on top of that, if you’re a fully ordained monk like Geshe-la, then you have a lot of vows that you have to protect, he says. And if you’re a Getsulma ordination like Venerable Anilas, Sholaas over here, then you have a lot of vows that you have to protect as well and have to encourage your mind in this way.
And even the lay people when they’re practicing, they should have vows that they’re trying to keep as well and they should try and do good and abandon doing bad. So at this stage we don’t naturally keep our ethics. We tend to make mistakes a fair bit. Therefore, if we want to do any kind of meditation, focusing on ethical discipline is really important. So if you want to practice ethical discipline, then the main thing that we need to practice in ethical discipline is the ten non virtues, which are the three non-virtues of mind, which is the mind wanting to hurt others.
And and I don’t remember these also, I have to get asking again. Then there is the ten non virtues. The first three that Geshe-la mentioned were the three non virtues of mind and they are there’s wanting to hurt others, there is holding wrong views and the third one is something like covetousness where he said, if you see someone with a good car, you think I want that car. He described it. That was the three non virtues of mind.
And then there’s the three non virtues of body, which is stealing, killing, and sexual misconduct. And then there’s the four non virtues of speech, which is lying, divisive speech, which is splitting up two people who are friends, etc. And then there’s pointless chatter. Oh and getting yeah yeah you probably got that one but being speaking angrily about people. So yeah, the last one that I’ve forgotten again was that yeah, you shouldn’t speak harshly to other people as well.
That’s the fourth. So then if you know what the ten non virtues are, you shouldn’t do them. This one. And once we know that the the ten non virtues are and that we shouldn’t do them, we can also cultivate the ten virtues which are linked to the ten non virtues in that by abandoning each one of the ten non virtues, we accumulate one of the ten virtues. So for example, if we abandon the act of stealing, we accumulate the virtue of not stealing and it works in that way through the whole ten.
Okay, so our ethics is like a field. It’s like our field that we can create and create merit and create any type of practice that we want to do in the field. If the field is a good field, then anything that grows in that field will be productive and helpful. In the same way, if our ethics are good, then anything that we do will carry through it the benefits of our good ethics. So therefore, we have ethical discipline and we try and abandon the bad deeds of speech, for example, then our speech becomes more purer and more purer.
And in the same way with our body, the more that we focus on trying to keep our ethics pure with our bodily doings, then anything that we do has the ability to become purer and purer. So the next division is abandoning completely societal concerns. And it actually in the outline at the beginning came before ethical discipline, that the explanations come around the other way. But what this is is that if we get caught up in what our friends are doing, he said for example, if we sat around going, what are those guys doing over there? Then we can become easily distracted.
We wanna play. We want to go places with them and we’re not going to be able to concentrate on our meditation. So the next part of the text says that if we want to develop one point of concentration, then we can’t concentrate on things like astrology or medicine or throwing mos or going into people’s houses down in the market and performing ceremonies. And Geshe-la says, as the monks do in Tibetan culture, Geshe-la says that we don’t really do this a lot. We don’t concentrate on astrology or medicine and things like that.
But what we do concentrate on is our work and our enjoyment. So if we to put that to the side, then we will be better placed to develop one pointed concentration. And if we want to do meditation on calm abiding, then we really need to put that to the side for the time that we’re meditating. What time are we supposed to be? So he said, there’s these stories in here, but that’s not really important at the moment.
These stories describing what happened to people in the past. Put that aside for the moment. What’s really important is that we’re going to Kangaroo Island to meditate on calm abiding. And before we go to Kangaroo Island to meditate on calm abiding, we need to set our motivation that that is we’re meditating on calm abiding in order to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. So once we’ve got our motivation set, when we actually start doing the meditations, we shouldn’t be thinking about emptiness.
We shouldn’t be thinking about compassion. We shouldn’t be thinking about any of these things. We should be concentrating on the meditation itself in order to achieve that so we can that we can achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. In actual meditation, we shouldn’t be thinking about the other things. So if we have to stop and eat or we have to stop and sleep, then we’re allowed to stop and eat and sleep, but we should be trying to concentrate on calm abiding the whole time.
And if we get distracted by anything, things we would normally consider very beneficial, then we’re not going to be able to achieve calm abiding. So even though in Buddhism, two main the two most important things to meditate on are the wisdom realizing emptiness and compassion or the development of the wish to achieve enlightenment for all sentient beings. If we do this with having developed calm abiding first, then they become a lot more powerful. But what we need to remember that is that as Buddhists, we should try and take as our main focus for the meditation and the main reason for doing it, the development of either the realization of emptiness or the realization of compassion. Because calm abiding doesn’t necessarily have to be Buddhist.
It can have a whole different a whole different array of things that we can focus on in order to achieve it. Even non-Buddhist can achieve calm abiding. But as Buddhist, we should try and try and focus on either one of those as our motivation for meditating on calm abiding. So he said the most so the two most important things for us to meditate on as Buddhists is bodhicitta and the mind realizing emptiness. But we can’t meditate on emptiness because we haven’t achieved calm abiding.
So first of all, we have to achieve calm abiding. But if we’re going to focus it from the other side and look at how to meditate on the mind that wants to achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings, then that actually has two aspects. It has it has two aspects. Hang on a second. It has a there’s two types of meditation that you can do.
You can do analytical meditation or stabilizing meditation. Okay. There’s analytical meditation or there’s placement meditation. That’s it. Yes.
Thank you. Placement meditation, which is without an object. And we can’t actually do placement meditation properly yet because you have to develop the calm abiding first. So we’re gonna meditate on calm abiding. Now we don’t necessarily have to in terms of the practice of a Buddhist the Buddhist path, we don’t necessarily have to meditate on calm abiding.
We can meditate on compassion. We can meditate on refuge. We can meditate on a number of different things. But if we’re going to meditate, if we do meditate on calm abiding before this, then that enriches the rest of our practices to a large extent. Then that’s it.
Said. What? And does anyone have any questions? So whatever you want to do, that’s fine. Whatever is the best for you, then that’s fine.
But the best meditation you can do for the Buddha’s path is to meditate on bodhicitta, because that’s the most beneficial meditation that you can do. So that would perhaps be the best preparation. And he said the meditation where you see Chenrezig and recite mantras in front of Chenrezig and Chenrezig becomes inseparable from you is like a really beneficial meditation to do in order to develop compassion and bodhicitta. Okay, so he says that it doesn’t whether you’ve got the empowerment or anything. The most important thing is to think I don’t want other beings to suffer like I’m suffering.
I don’t want them to suffer and I don’t want myself to suffer. And with this really sort of strong as you can, then to say Om Mani Padme Hum as much as you can, then that would be of the best benefit and you don’t need to have an initiation to say the mantra. So if you’ve actually taken the initiation, then you have the empowerment to see yourself as Chenrezig, and that’s the difference with the empowerment. Just to say the mantra, you don’t need to have seen the, taken initiation. But if you have taken the initiation, then it’s more beneficial to see yourself as Chenrezig and that Chenrezig is saying the mantra is for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Is that okay? Any other questions? Okay. Okay. So if you think about emptiness or bodhicitta when you’re focusing one pointedly on an object then you can’t.
It doesn’t work. Order to develop a calm abiding you have to be able to focus one pointedly on an object. And so if you’re thinking about something else apart from focusing one pointedly on that object then you can’t develop calm abiding. Its base is the focus on one object. Therefore, if you’re thinking about the other things, then your mind’s going backwards and forwards and it’s not concentrating and therefore you can’t develop calm abiding.
Commitments that you have in the morning and the evening. There is no stopping doing commitments. There is no time where you stop to do your commitments and then go back to it. You just keep doing them all the time. So you do them in the morning and the evening as well as the calm abiding meditations.