Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with precious human rebirth compared to a flash of lightning in an otherwise dark sky, Geshe Pema Tsering moves from urgency to anatomy in this 45-minute session. He cites a Tibetan teacher’s wry observation that most people waste sixty years before getting serious about practice, then explains how motivation — not the action itself — determines whether prostrating or studying counts as Dharma. The three scopes of motivation (seeking good rebirth, liberation, or enlightenment for all beings) are illustrated with a vivid analogy: two walkers on the same road heading to different destinations. The second half details the death process: twenty-five factors dissolving in sequence — the five aggregates, four elements, sense faculties, and five ordinary wisdoms — with external and internal signs at each stage. A peaceful death lets a practitioner recognize and work with each dissolution; sudden or violent death compresses the process, making it unavailable as practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 DAR 2003 10 14.mp3
UUID: ae3ff6a6-5c55-4930-9bed-55d2df798886
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Death and Rebirth (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-10-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~3,674
But because we have come into contact with the Buddha’s teachings and because we have the opportunity to practice them, it’s like there’s this one flash of lightning that enables us to see and this is by the power of the Buddha’s. It isn’t even just all human lives that are like this one flash of lightning. It’s only human lives where people have come into contact with spiritual practice. It’s only human lives where people believe in things. So it’s only precious human rebirth that we’re talking about here.
So if we limit it in this way, then we can again see how fleeting and how precious this human rebirth is because it’s it’s like a flash of lightning in a dark So we may think that eighty, ninety, or a hundred even a hundred years is a long time. We’ve got this amount of time probably to live, and that’s a really long time. We may look at it like this. But in actual fact, eighty, ninety, or a hundred years isn’t very much when we compare it to this idea of beginningless time. It’s it is about a brief moment.
It is like a flash of lightning in the sky. So because it is it is like this flash of lightning, then we have to take the make the most of that opportunity before the lightning fades or before the light from the lightning fades, and we end up back in darkness, which is a synonym for the lower realms. Before we end up back in the lower realms, we have to make the most of that opportunity. So this means that from now up until the time we die, then we have to do our best to practice Dharma, to do spiritual practice to the best of our abilities. Otherwise, we haven’t taken advantage of what we can actually see at the moment, what is appearing to us, which may not appear to us for that long.
And, also, the thing is once the darkness comes back, once we’re reborn in the lower realms, it’s very difficult for us to find the life again or to find, rebirth in a higher realm again, to be reborn as a human, to be reborn as a human with a precious human rebirth, or to be reborn as a god. It’s very difficult for us to establish the causes for that to happen. So because we’ve got it now and because it is like a flash of lightning that we’re experiencing, then we have to make the most of it. So even though we have this opportunity, we also have this great danger of wasting what we have, wasting our precious birth or rebirth or experience, throwing it away and not using it properly. It’s like what Okay.
Sorry. Okay. I thought it was Mañjuśrī, but it’s not someone called Mañjuśrī. Okay. Gungthang Mañjuśrī, yeah, he was a Tibetan teacher, and he explained it this way.
He said, for the first twenty years, you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to study, and you don’t understand the Dharma properly. So you spend all this time studying it, and then you finally get to have some understanding of it. Then you spend twenty years finding other things to do, so then you’ve wasted forty years. Then you spend twenty years deciding that you don’t have to practice immediately, and you’re up to sixty before you actually start doing anything.
And he said that’s the way that it usually goes when people think about practicing Dharma. Okay. So in order for us to stop wasting time, in order for us to stop doing things that will cause us to regret or have regrets in the future, then we need to start practicing Dharma. We need to start doing things because we don’t want to get to the stage where we’re too old to actually do anything. Lots of time, people start thinking about doing Dharma when they’re about to die, and at that stage, they may be too old to actually concentrate or be able to do anything properly.
So we have to start doing things as soon as we’re able, as soon as we’re able to now. Now there’s lots of things that we can do when we’ve got spare time, when we don’t have much on that can stop us from wasting time. We can say prayers, we can think of refuge, we can go through these processes. When sitting around, we don’t need that much training to do these things. So we can use our time effectively by doing these things.
The reason that we don’t do that much practice, the reason we don’t that we don’t practice enough Dharma or do enough spiritual practice is because we don’t investigate enough, because we don’t analyze things enough, and we just deal with what’s in front of us. We only think about this life, and not only this life, but the things that we can see that will be of immediate benefit to us, the things that we can concretely understand without analysis to be of of of immediate benefit benefit to us. And so we don’t think about the next life. We hardly think about the latter parts of this life. We’re only thinking about what we can get as a result immediately or in the near future.
And and in order to achieve those, we do a lot of hard work. So Geshe-la said that most of us are over forty or over fifty. Well, he said most of him is anyway. So then therefore and there’s not many people here that are under twenty. Right?
So we take into consideration that we’re not going to live much past, say, eighty, ninety, or a hundred, and in actual fact, we don’t know when we’re going to die. We don’t know at what time we’re going to die or how it’s gonna happen. And then we need to establish what’s gonna happen when we die. Now the only thing that is going to be a benefit to us when we die is our Dharma practice. So if we have done beneficial things, if we have practiced the Dharma, then we can actually take that with us when we die.
That will come along with us. Nothing else we do will. So he thinks that most of you know this. And because you know this, then you should be you should know that you should practice Dharma. So for for us to be practicing Dharma, for us to be doing a spiritual practice, then we at least have to have set our motivation at the next life.
If we do something that’s focused on this life, even if it is meditating, even if it is reading texts, if it is doing other types of so called spiritual practice, they don’t count. They’re not considered to be our Dharma practice. They’re not considered to be our benefit to us after this life. They’re what’s called worldly practice, and worldly practices don’t help us that much. So we need to be able to focus at least on our next life, at least on obtaining a human rebirth or on obtaining a higher rebirth of some kind in the next life.
That’s what’s called the lowest motivation or the motivation of the lower scope. The motivation of the middle scope is that we are doing things with the motivation that we are doing this in order to attain liberation or nirvana or personal nirvana. That’s what’s called the middling scope. The final scope is that we are working in order to achieve enlightenment to the benefit of all sentient beings. That’s what’s called the great scope or the highest motivation that we can work or we can do things with.
Whatever action we do or what type of action it is actually depends on our motivation for doing the action, not on the action itself. So that means that there’s things like reading texts, texts, studying studying Dharma, meditating, prostrating, making offerings, doing pujas. All of these things are by their nature Dharma practice, but if they aren’t done with the correct motivation or motivation seeking one of these three things that we spoke of earlier, then they don’t actually they’re not actually counted as Dharma practice even though the action itself is a a virtue. It’s not considered a a dharmic action unless it has that motivation behind it, unless it has one of these sorry, one of these three motivations behind it, unless someone’s doing it in order to attain a good rebirth, in order to attain liberation, or in order to attain the final enlightenment. It’s the same as if, for example, there was two people.
Now, these two people are both walking down the road together, and one of those people has decided that they’re walking into Adelaide, and the other person has decided that they’re walking to this to a restaurant down the road. Now, both of them are doing the same action. They’re walking down the road together, and if someone looked at them, they wouldn’t be able to tell that they they were doing anything different. But in actual fact, they are doing something different because one of them is only going to a restaurant and the other one’s going all the way into Adelaide. So dependent on their motivation, even though the action is the same, their destination is not.
So therefore, the whole action isn’t the same. What we need to do then is we need to establish our motivation as the highest motivation. That is, we need to establish our motivation that we are doing whatever it is we’re doing in order to achieve Buddhahood, in order to be able to establish all beings in a state beyond sorrow, in great bliss. So, we need to establish our motivation like this, whatever we’re doing, whether it’s reading, whether it’s studying, whether it’s, prostrating, whether it’s making offerings, whether it’s doing any other kind of work that we have to do, whether it’s doing anything that we need to do. We should try and establish our motivation as as this, that we’re doing it in order to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, to establish all beings in happiness.
In this way, we’ll actually achieve the other results as as well. If we establish our motivation that we are going to try and achieve that we’re doing something in order to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, then that action’s results don’t evaporate or don’t go away until we achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. But in the same way as someone going to Adelaide who is walking next to someone who is going to the restaurant will actually be able to go to the restaurant on the way to Adelaide by establishing our motivation that we are doing something to achieve enlightenment for all sentient beings, we attain a higher rebirth, we attain liberation, we attain benefits or happy minds in in this lifetime as well. It’s just that we don’t have to worry about those things. Those things aren’t important.
The thing that we need to focus on is establishing our motivation to achieve enlightenment and to be able to lead all beings into happiness. So there also may be the danger that we think that, okay, in this lifetime, I’m not doing doing that much Dharma practice. So whatever Dharma practice I do, I don’t wanna waste it or throw it away by thinking about other people. I wanna save it for myself. I wanna hold onto it and making myself, my own experience better or my own result better.
We may think that there’s a danger we think this way, but it’s not actually the way that it is. So this doesn’t really work, though, because we need to be doing things that create the most powerful virtue, create the most forceful positive karma that we can. And if we do something with a motivation that we’re doing this to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, then that becomes an incredibly powerful positive action. And even more so, if we think, I’m doing this in order that all sentient beings achieve Buddhahood, in order for all sentient beings to become Buddhas, then that becomes a very, very powerful action because the qualities of a Buddha are immeasurable, and all sentient beings are immeasurable, like that is if we try to count them. So therefore, if we have immeasurable sentient beings creating immeasurable qualities, then that becomes an incredibly thought that we want all beings to be like this.
And therefore, those kind of actions mean that we accumulate a lot more of virtue. So therefore, then we should think, I’m going to do this and all other positive actions that I do in order that all sentient beings become enlightened. Now by the the merit that I create, by thinking that or doing this in order for all sentient beings to become enlightened, may that be a cause for me to become enlightened so I can establish them in that state of enlightenment. So that mind that’s that’s doing this processing is called the mind of bodhicitta, and so we should concentrate or meditate on on that mind or that thought all all those thoughts for a few minutes. Okay.
So last week, we’re talking about death, by the way. Alright. So we’re talking about death, and we discussed how the body is actually made up of gross elements and more subtle elements that we can’t necessarily see, but that that carry energy around the body. This is what’s called the winds, the channels, and the drops. This is the way that the body is set up in Buddhist explanations.
What we’re talking about now is the process that we go through in dying. The process we go through in dying has a gross aspect when which people can see, and then there’s a subtle aspect. Talking about the gross aspect here, and in the stage of dying Oh, yeah. So in the stages of dying, there’s says the twenty five factors that’s said to dissolve into each other as the dying process comes about. Okay.
Right. Now these things that are dissolving, these are what’s called twenty five factors that are dissolving. The first five of these are what’s called the five aggregates or the five collections of things that make up our being. Now the first of the five collections of things that we have is the the is form. We have different forms that come together, and we consider that to be our physical body.
So that’s the first aggregate or the first collection of form. The second collection that we have, a second aggregate, is called feelings. Now feelings in this definition is just the ability to discern suffering and happiness. So it’s feeling of suffering and happiness, just being able to understand suffering and happiness. Yeah.
The next aggregate or the next group we have is the the thought the thoughts or the mental processes that are able to discriminate. So that is we are able to see colors, are able to see textures, we are able to smell whether something is good or smell whether something is bad. We are able to distinguish one person from another, one color from another, one experience from another. That’s discrimination. The fourth aggregate is what’s called compositional factors or compounded factors, and this is basically any thoughts that aren’t included in the in the other sections.
Alright? Just to cover bases. And the the fifth aggregate is what’s called consciousness. Now there’s six different types of consciousness, and they are the way that they’re described is as a main mind or a main thought. So we have the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness.
So there’s six six consciousnesses that are included in in this. And so that’s like main thoughts and my main minds. What they’ve lit they’re usually called main minds. There’s main concepts of things, whether it be mental or through the senses. Okay.
The next ten things that dissolve when we are in the process of dying are what’s called the four constituents, and that’s like the four elements that we have within us. That’s elements of earth, water, fire, and wind. Then what is called the six sources. So this is the six Okay. So now these six sources, what it’s actually referring to is what what’s called the the unique governing the unique governing governing instrument within the senses.
So it’s the thing that makes us see, the thing that makes us smell, the thing that makes us taste all of these, the things that that mean that we can feel things, the the subtle form that enables us to be able to do this. And in the mental sense, the the mind that enables us to do this, the rough consciousnesses that enable us to experience these things. Okay. So basically sorry. In the last in the next next five are the visible forms, sounds, odors, tastes, and tangible objects.
It’s basically the objects of the senses. Yeah? Now so, basically, we’re dealing with three things here. We’re dealing with a consciousness that’s perceiving something in one way or another, an object that they’re perceiving, and the faculty that enables that process to happen. And then there’s another five things that dissolve in this process.
So they’re what’s called the five ordinary wisdoms. These are all types of consciousness or or mental activity that we have. They’re called the basic mirror like wisdom, the basic basic wisdom of equality, basic wisdom of analysis, the basic wisdom of achieving activities or being able to do stuff, and basic wisdom of the nature of phenomena. Okay. Now the first one of these, the basic mirror like wisdom, is the clarity aspect of the mind, the aspect of the mind that enables things to appear.
Yeah? So the the the fact that things can appear to the mind is what’s talked about in the basic mirror like wisdom. The basic wisdom of equality, yeah, it means that that there’s it it means balance. So it means that things can abide. So equality means that things can abide in our life.
We can concentrate on things. Yeah? So they don’t fly around the place, so that we are able to concentrate on things as abiding somewhere. That’s I don’t know what that has to do with translation equality. Anyway Okay.
Now the next type of wisdom that we have is what’s called the basic wisdom of analysis, and that means that ordinary beings are able to analyze things. This is also present in our mind. We also have the ability to say we’re going to do things and not do some things and not do others. This is called the basic wisdom of achieving activities. And the last one, the basic wisdom of the nature of phenomena, is actually the perception of emptiness.
And now we don’t well, we don’t have the direct perception of emptiness in our mind. We have the ability to have that wisdom. And in actual fact, at the time of death, as our consciousness dissolves, finally, what’s called the clear light nature of mind appears to us. And in that point, even though we don’t recognize the understand we have this understanding of emptiness in our that that that then dies or then passes away. So we have to think we’re gonna die.
Okay. So this this we’re talking about a process here that happens when people die. But if someone dies very suddenly or violently and, for example, gets hit by a bus or hit by a car and dies very quickly, then this will happen very quickly, it may be very difficult for them to recognize what’s going on. But for someone who has studied this and is dying in a very peaceful environment, so during the death process they can actually recognize what is happening, then they can see all all different sorts of things will appear to them, that as these things dissolve, and then and they will be able to understand the process of what’s happening. Okay.
And now there’s two different types of signs that come along with this process of dying. There’s signs on the outside and signs on the inside. Now if someone dies in car accident or in a sudden way, then this process won’t play out in full. Therefore, the external and internal signs won’t manifest very clearly or they won’t manifest at all. But if someone knows what they’re looking for and is in a very mellow dies very very mellowly or very relaxedly, then these these this process will happen.
So this what this means is there’s these eight different stages that we can go through and eight different signs that we can experience. And if someone knows what they’re doing, they can actually use this as a practice, use the death process as a way to practice. But if they get if they die a violent death and they don’t understand what’s happening, then these things will happen so quickly or they will happen they won’t happen at all, so therefore, it can’t be used as a practice. Okay. So the other thing that could stop these signs manifesting and stop people being able to work with the signs of the death process is, for example, if their body is very wasted away from an illness, if their body has been attacked by some kind of illness and is very weak and has been destroyed in that way or harmed very badly in that way.
Was very difficult for them to understand what’s happening in the death process and for the signs to manifest.