Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening a 45-minute session with a Śāntideva verse on the futility of self-focused striving, Geshe Pema Tsering offers a striking estimate: even committed practitioners spend only around two percent of their day on genuine Dharma practice. He uses this to press home the verse’s argument — that effort directed at self-benefit perpetuates suffering, while turning the mind toward others creates the causes for happiness and seeds bodhicitta. The commentary then pivots to its central subject, impermanence, mapped across four categories: external versus internal, and gross versus subtle. Subtle impermanence — the moment-by-moment disintegration invisible to ordinary perception — is illustrated through the image of a car bought new and discovered old fifteen years later, with no single moment of change ever noticed. Geshe closes by defining impermanence as a ceaseless alternation of generation and disintegration in every instant.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 D and I 2003 09 16.mp3
UUID: edc9fb67-67cf-490a-b6f0-bbf7172126ca
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Death and Impermanance (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-09-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~3,601
In a Bodhicaryāvatāra somewhere, which I wasn’t able to find, but anyway, it’s in there somewhere, Śāntideva said, Now, we, our minds, have been working for our own benefit, desiring our own benefit for countless eons. But working benefit for countless eons has got us nothing but the worst types of suffering. We have done nothing but exist in horrible states. All we’ve managed to achieve is suffering. So what this means is that it’s a description of saṃsāra.
What it means is that our minds, because our minds are intent or us when we say our minds here, mean us our consciousness, our understandings, our feelings. Because our minds are us, we have been concentrated on our own benefit, on working towards our own benefit. We’ve put in a lot of work in order to serve our own benefit since beginningless time for helpers, for eons. We’ve done this, all we’ve managed to achieve, all we’ve managed to focus on is the achieving of suffering, of more different types of suffering, and this has all been because we have been focusing on our own benefit. In this quote, Śāntideva actually says, ‘I’ or ‘we’ have been working for our own benefit, but when he says ‘we’, he’s actually referring to other people and trying to make them feel better, because he’s actually gotten out of Samsāra and he’s only talking about people that are in Samsāra.
Now, when he’s talking to these people that are in Samsāra, what he’s telling them is that you’ve existed since beginningless time. You’ve taken countless rebirths. If we tried to figure out how many rebirths we had, we wouldn’t be able to. And it’s not just like we hung out in those rebirths, doing much. We’ve been working really hard all this time trying to make ourselves happy, us trying to give ourselves pleasure and happiness we haven’t just been thinking that we want to experience suffering if we look around and there’s not a single being or in any of our previous existences not for one moment did we think, well, I’m doing this so I can suffer.’ We don’t have that as part of our makeup.
We do things in order to experience happiness. So we’ve been trying since beginningless time to experience happiness and all we’ve been doing is creating more opportunities or more situations in which we’ll experience suffering. So in all this time, since beginningless time, in all our different lives, we’ve done all this work and we’ve put in all this effort in order to achieve happiness. But we haven’t actually achieved happiness. True happiness is the cessation of suffering that comes about through liberation or through Buddhahood, and we haven’t achieved this.
Instead, we’ve achieved what we think is happiness, which is occasionally we have achieved what we think is happiness in the form of saṃsāra happiness or in the form of the suffering of change, which isn’t actually, in fact, happiness it’s still part of saṃsāra, but we just don’t realise this. Our search for happiness, we just create more situations to experience suffering in. So this is what Śāntideva is saying. He’s saying to us, So have you gotten anything from it? Are you happy?
Did you achieve anything? Or have you achieved nothing but suffering? Is that what it is? Have you achieved nothing but suffering? He’s asking this question.
And what he’s trying to point out is that by all our work, all our effort, we haven’t achieved anything but suffering. So what we have been doing since beginningless time is basically establishing or achieving suffering. We haven’t achieved happiness, we’ve achieved suffering. Now, if that’s too big a time frame to us to think about, if we’re sitting here thinking, Since beginning of this time, I can’t get my head around that, then we should try and think about this life instead. Even if we focus on this life, we will realize that most of the things that we’ve done in this life have been in order to achieve some kind of samsaric happiness, been in order to try and bring ourselves what we consider to be happiness and pleasure.
Even though they aren’t truly happiness and pleasure, they are only the suffering of change. This is the way we’ve been working. And if thinking about our whole life is too difficult, maybe we should try thinking about today. If we think about today and we look at what we’ve done since we got up this morning until now, then we realize, if we think about it and we go over it, then we realize most of the things that we did today were in order to try and make ourselves feel better in some way or another, trying to make ourselves temporarily happy in one way or another. The actual practice of Dharma, the actual focus on doing something in order to achieve enlightenment, in order to achieve liberation is incredibly rare.
It’s a very, very rare thing to do. So we need to train ourselves in this because it’s difficult. We look at what we did today and if we think about all the things that we’ve done today, then we’ll probably figure out that most of the things that we’ve done today have been not dharma, they haven’t been dharma focused things. Most of the things we’ve done today have been in order to get something for us in this lifetime, in order to experience something in this lifetime. If we add them up then we will see that if we have had moments where we were doing something in order to achieve liberation and in order to achieve Buddhahood then those moments would be very small the definition of practicing Dharma or the definition of working towards enlightenment and Buddhahood or even the next life is that we don’t focus on this life we’re not doing something in order to get some kind of benefit or some kind of happiness in this life in order to practice Dharma we need to change our focus from that and focus on at least the next life, but also liberation and enlightenment.
Right, now, the other thing that we need to do is to look back or to imagine our previous lives way back to the beginning of this time and see how much of those from what we can imagine, or how much of our life now has actually been happy, has actually been pleasurable and how much of those lives that we’ve had in all the different places have been suffering. So, we need to So, need think about that because now we started doing practice. We do meditation, we do study, we do things hopefully for the benefit, hopefully dedicated towards or with the motivation towards achieving liberation or achieving Buddhahood. But if we look our day and we divide our day up and we will notice that probably, if we are lucky about two percent of our day is focused on trying to achieve Buddhahood or trying to achieve liberation and the other ninety eight percent and this is if we are lucky because some days it one hundred percent you know but if we’re lucky we dedicate two percent of our time to achieving Buddhahood to achieving liberation and the other ninety eight percent we dedicate towards our desires but on some days is one hundred so we have to look at that.
Ninety eight percent of the time, we’re working towards attaining benefit in this life, we’re working towards temporary happiness. Two percent of the day, we may be doing something virtuous. But this is okay. This is we’re doing pretty good. Most of the time, when people don’t even have this idea, they they haven’t haven’t come into contact with Buddhist teachings, they haven’t tried to follow the Buddhist teachings, they haven’t put any effort into trying to do as the Buddha said, and they haven’t done anything at all.
So, these things that we’ve done, this little two percent that we have put in from those days where we have actually focused on what it is we are trying to do, those little two percents won’t disappear. Those little two percents will become a cause for us to achieve our aims. That is, if we don’t become incredibly angry people and destroy all the merit that we’ve accumulated. But if we don’t do that, these little two percents that we’ve accumulated will act as a cause for us to experience this true happiness in the If we keep doing this, if we keep thinking trying to achieve enlightenment, trying to achieve liberation, if we have a bit of spare time and we think about refuge, or if we have a bit of spare time and we think about developing bodhicitta, or we try and do something for the benefit of all sentient beings, or we do something with positive motivation. All these things that we do are a cause for us to achieve.
These are a cause for us to achieve a good rebirth and they act as a catalyst for us to experience happiness in one form or another. So we should just keep trying with our spare time and the spare moments that we have to try and remember these things. So, we should be very happy about this. It’s a good start. Śāntideva is saying in this verse that we spent all this time doing nothing but achieving suffering.
So, we’ve done nothing but achieving suffering for all these eons and now we’re doing something. Even if it’s something small, we’re doing something that will cause happiness, something that will cause the cessation of suffering. This is very good and if we keep doing it and keep doing more, then that will be of more benefit. Okay, so, the reason in this quote, Śāntideva also says that we have only managed to achieve suffering. The reason is that we have been working for our own benefit.
We have been doing things for ourselves all this time and we have been focusing on ourselves this way if we turn that around if we do the opposite of that and we start focusing on others and we start using others as our motivation instead of using ourselves as our motivation then we’re doing nothing but creating the causes for happiness instead of suffering. If we do something with our self in mind, then that’s a cause for us to experience suffering. That’s a way that we can achieve suffering. If we do something with someone else in mind, that’s a way that from that we will only achieve happiness. Because the thing is, if we’re all the time thinking, ‘Okay, I’m doing this to benefit myself, I’m doing something in order to be of benefit to myself, to make myself happy’, and it really isn’t for our own benefit.
The way that we really achieve the way that we really work for our benefit the way that we really help ourselves is by helping others if we help others then we help them and we help ourselves if we try and help ourselves then nobody gets helped So the best thing to do is to help others. And if we really want to help others, then we need to achieve Buddhahood. And in order for us to do that, then we need to achieve liberation. In order for us to achieve liberation and Buddhahood, we need bodhicitta, we need renunciation. Because the thing is, we really want to be happy.
We just don’t know what happiness is. We don’t really know how it is that we can truly be happy. So, in order for us to be happy, in order for us to experience true happiness, we have to realize this state of freedom from suffering, of liberation, of Buddhahood. Just because we can’t say it as such, just because people don’t or creatures don’t say it as such, doesn’t mean that they don’t think that. They just don’t know how to articulate it or which path to follow.
For example, dogs and cows and animals like that, they want to be happy. They don’t come out and say, I want to achieve the final happiness of Buddhahood. But in their mind stream, they’re saying, I want to be happy. I really want to be happy. They just don’t articulate it and they don’t know how to achieve that final happiness.
Yeah, so animals may have this idea about being happy but they don’t have the processing capacities that we do. We have much more we have the ability to think a lot more than animals. So, we come up with all different ideas about how we’re going to make ourselves happy. Most of these don’t really help us either because most of these are based on ourselves. Most of these are based on working for our benefit and not thinking of others if we really want to be happy then we have to start thinking of others if we really want to be happy then we work we will work really hard for the benefit of others to achieve final outcome, which is the achievement of Buddhahood.
So we have to think, ‘Okay, just like me, all other beings don’t want to suffer.’ So in order to show them how not to suffer, then I have to work really hard towards this outcome, the final outcome. So, in that way, then, in order to establish or in order to take all sentient beings to a place where they don’t have any suffering, in order for them to be completely free of suffering and have the final happiness experience the final or the ultimate happiness then I myself will have to achieve Buddhahood so in order to be a benefit to them in this way I will work really hard to achieve Buddhahood. And we should think on that for a few moments, and that’s called meditating on bodhicitta. Okay. Geshe said, You’ve been meditating on bodhicitta.
Did anyone manage to develop it? Don’t worry, you’ve got good imprints. If you ever get a chance, try and meditate or remember bodhicitta, because it’s really good for putting imprints on your mind and it’s very, very beneficial. He said it would have been very difficult to develop it then. Because at the moment we hold ourselves to be incredibly important, we hold on to our sense of self incredibly strongly, so in order for us to develop bodhicitta, what we need to do is turn that around and start thinking the opposite of that.
We need to be holding on to the concept of benefiting others that tightly. We need to turn our mind completely around. It’s a difficult thing to achieve. I just had this bad thought that I got the topic wrong. His death.
Yeah? Saying death or saying impermanence is basically the same thing because the impermanence of humans is death. Because we’ve come into this existence by the power of karma and delusion or by the power of karma and afflictive emotions, that means that we are a compounded phenomena and at the end of this life, that compounded phenomena will disintegrate and we will experience death. So in this way, and impermanence are similar things. There’s all different types of impermanence.
We talk about impermanence that’s subtle, impermanence that’s gross, we talk about internal impermanence and we also talk about external impermanence. When we’re talking about the external and internal types of impermanence, the external types of impermanence refer to objects that are not persons. So, are not talking about sentient beings here. Any object that is external to a person, that isn’t the continuum of a sentient being, is referred to as an external impermanent thing. Now, these things come into being based on causes and conditions and hence they disintegrate because there is no permanent entity there.
But they aren’t considered internal impermanent structures because that is only referring to the continuum of the sentient being. This external impermanence also has two different types which is subtle and gross. So external things the gross aspect of external things is fairly easy for us to see when things cease to be, for example, houses, cars and all those kind of things. Internal impermanence is much more difficult for us to try and understand. Internal impermanence refers to things that are related to or are part of what are called our five aggregates or our five collections that make up the basis for a sentient being.
So this refers to our form, our physical form, our feelings, our discrimination, our compositional factors, which is basically something that’s not in the other three, and our consciousness. So, these five aggregates, anything that’s referring to these, is called internal impermanence. The impermanence of these is called internal impermanence. But these are two separate realizations. Impermanence of external phenomena and the impermanence of internal phenomena are said to be two separate realizations.
The gross impermanence of external objects is something that’s fairly easy for us to experience, where we see directly even ordinary beings see this directly. This is when phenomena such as cars or houses or anything that we can see ceases to exist in the manner that it was. So we can see that, we can see the disintegration of external objects fairly easily. This is why it’s called gross The subtle impermanence of external form is much more difficult for us to see. In fact, ordinary beings can’t see this subtle impermanence of external form directly.
Ordinary beings don’t have the subtle understanding or the subtle types of mind that they need to be able to understand this. What the subtle impermanence of external forms or external things refers to is that, in every moment, they are changing they are constantly changing there is nothing stable and consistent there. There is just a constant process of change. If we buy something new, so for example, if we buy something brand new and we look at it in the morning when we bought it and we think, now that’s brand new, whether it’s a house or a car or whatever it is, we look at it again in the afternoon, we’re still going to say, that’s brand new. We’re not going to notice any of the changes that have occurred within that car or that house or whatever it is that we bought during that time.
We can’t perceive the changes that are going on. There are changes that are going on, but we can’t perceive them. The fact that we can’t perceive them is the reason that this kind of impermanence is called subtle impermanence. After a couple of months, however, we’ll start to see the changes. We’ll start to see that there are slight different things in our car and our house that weren’t the same as a car or a house that weren’t the same as they were a couple of months ago.
This doesn’t mean that we’ve understood the subtle impermanence of the thing. It’s just that the subtle impermanence has been going on so long that we’ve started to notice it in a more gross form. So, that constant changing that we haven’t noticed is the subtle impermanence, but we know that it’s going on because we start seeing it in a gross manner. Geshe thinks this is really weird, right? Strange.
If we have something, and we have it for, say, fifteen years, whether it’s a house or a car, it’s easiest to work with the example of a car. If we have something for that amount of time, all of a sudden it’s old. Well, not all of a sudden, it becomes old the car is old. It’s not new It’s fifteen years old. It’s old.
So if we bought something, for example, in nineteen ninety, and now we’ve got it now, so then it’s like an old car. But when we bought it, it wasn’t an old car. Now it’s an old car. So where did the old car come from? When we bought it, it wasn’t old.
Now it’s old. How’d that happen? We didn’t buy an old car, he said. And in the same way, the new car we bought doesn’t isn’t there anymore because the new car does is is not there anymore. It’s an old car.
And so what happened to the new car? Okay. Yeah. So, what’s happened is, it’s really strange because we had a new car and now we’ve got an old car, how that happened? So the only way that we can understand that it happened is by looking at subtle impermanence that we can’t see.
And what subtle impermanence means that in every single moment there is a change happening there, in every single moment we have Okay, so the definition of impermanence in Tibetan is usually translated as momentariness, but it can also take on the sense or whatever you like of being translated as disintegrating. So what it means is, in every moment we have disintegration, disintegration, disintegration, disintegration. Also, in every moment we have generation, generation, generation, generation. So you have generation, disintegration, generation, disintegration like that. So in each moment oh.
Okay. So what we have is a continuum of a similar type, right? So within this continuum of a similar type, a cause creates a result.