Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The one good quality of a negative action, Geshe Pema Tsering argues in this 45-minute talk, is that it can be purified — a claim that anchors a practical teaching on the purification limb of the seven-limb prayer. He opens with a brief comparison of Buddhism and other traditions, distinguishing Buddhism’s goal of personal Buddhahood before turning to why clearing karmic obstacles matters for developing realization. He covers the five heinous actions, differing philosophical views on whether severe karma can be fully eliminated, and Nāgārjuna’s image of clouds dispersing to reveal the moon. Two historical examples — a matricide and a serial killer who each became arhats — illustrate that deep regret and strong purification can dissolve even extreme negativity. He closes by pressing practitioners not to overlook small habitual wrongs, which unpurified can grow as forceful as dramatic ones.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 DP 2004 02 17.mp3
UUID: ebb6ebf2-9f3f-4f1d-88d3-afe7ff218582
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Establishing a Daily Practice (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-02-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~3,751
Okay. So in guide to Bodhisattva’s way of life or the behavior of Bodhisattva, Śāntideva said, if in one moment you develop bodhicitta, real bodhicitta or completely qualified bodhicitta, then in the next moment, you become a an object of an object of veneration for all gods and humans. So what this means is that it doesn’t matter how powerful or how strong or what qualities gods and humans have. If you have bodhicitta, then that is something that they will have to venerate because it’s more powerful and more strong and more important than any worldly qualities that we may wish for or people may have. Now this is the way it may be, but developing bodhicitta is quite difficult because it means that we have to totally turn around the way we think.
But although it’s quite difficult, it’s not something that we can’t train in. And it is said to be much more coarse in its object of realization, in the thing that you’re realizing there, than for example, realizing the true nature reality or realizing that objects are empty of true existence. So because of that, it means that the process of developing bodhicitta can be based in training the mind, can be based in something a lot more coarse or a lot more pliable than trying to develop a wisdom that understands emptiness. In fact, it’s said to be a lot easier to develop bodhicitta than it is to develop an understanding, a direct realization of emptiness. Now, the reason for this is that we’re dealing with something pretty basic that we just have to turn our mind around.
We have to stop thinking about ourselves all the time because we always think of what’s going to benefit ourselves, what’s gonna help us help ourselves and start thinking of others. So if we’re able to do that through mind training, then we’re able to develop bodhicitta. And that’s something that’s much easier to develop than an insight into emptiness. So this idea of working for others, the work of taking others as our objective focus or our objective trying to achieve things is something that’s actually in most religions. So if we look at we look at Christianity, if we look at Hinduism, if we look at Islam, in those religions, there is the idea of working for others, being selfless in working for others.
It’s in every religion, and it’s considered very important in every religion. But the difference between those religions and Buddhism is that unique to Buddhism is this idea that for the benefit of all beings, I’m going to work towards enlightenment. It’s very important to work for other beings in all their religions, but unique to Buddhism is this idea of achieving Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. So the other other religions still, though, have this idea of working to help things and this idea of making as many people as happy as possible, as many beings as happy as possible. So that means that beings will, in their next life or after death, be reborn or go to the place where either where Jesus is or in the presence of Allah or in the presence of a Hindu god or merge with a Hindu god in order to experience happiness.
So I have this idea of achieving that and idea of getting as many people to that state as possible or as many beings to that state as possible. The thing that’s unique about Buddhism is that you’re not just relying on an external external being in order to create that happiness. You’re not seeking to be in something or someone’s presence in order to have that happiness. You’re seeking to achieve Buddhahood yourself in order to benefit beings, in order to benefit all beings. So the idea of attaining Buddhahood is perhaps the unique aspect of Buddhism, although all different religions have this idea of working for others, of trying to make as many people happy as possible.
This this is because in Buddhism, we accept that all beings have what’s called Buddha nature. They have the ability to become a Buddha. And this ability to become a Buddha is similar to all children have the ability to learn in some way or another. So if you have a child and they hear something, then they’re able to learn from what they hear. They learn words very quickly.
They develop an understanding through their experiences. And so because they have consciousness or because they have this capacity to learn, then they’re able to learn. And it’s a similar thing with Buddha nature. Because we have Buddha nature, because we have the capacity to become a Buddha, then eventually we will become a Buddha. So it’s a matter of that is the unique aspects, the idea of Buddha nature and the fact that we’re eventually able to become Buddhas.
So this means that we because we have this ability, then we have the ability through our study, contemplation, and meditation to develop the understandings of Buddha. So the Buddha didn’t say you you achieve realizations through me or through my powers. He said, if you study and learn like I did, then you’ll be able to become like me. He didn’t say it’s through me. He said, if you’d be if you do what I did, then the outcome will be Buddhahood.
So because this is the way that he explained explained it as Buddhist, then we should follow the teachings of the Buddha and study and put things into application in order to develop these understandings and eventually become Buddhas. So this is very important. This is what the graduated path is all about, and this what we should be trying to focus on is to follow the teachings of the Buddha in order to follow the path in order to eventually become Buddhas. So, in this way, we should think that all beings have this potential to become a Buddha, all beings have Buddha nature, they have the potential to become a Buddha. So because of this, then I need to motivate myself to become a Buddha in order to show them how to become a Buddha so they can cease to suffer.
So we should have this idea in order for all beings to become a Buddha, then I must myself become a Buddha. And in order for that to happen, then I need to create merit. And therefore, by studying what I’m studying tonight, by focusing on what I’m focusing now, then may that be a cause for me to attain Buddhahood in order for all beings to attain Buddhahood. So we should meditate or contemplate that thought for a few minutes. So, last week and the weeks before, we were going through the six preparatory practices before we start doing a meditation session.
So, this is meditation sessions to do as a daily practice. So we went through cleaning the area, making offerings, offering mandalas, and the prayers that you do at the beginning of the session. Then we one of these one of these prayers to do at the beginning of the session is what’s called the seven-limb prayer. And in the seven-limb prayer, one of the limbs is what’s called purification. So we do prostrations, make offerings, and purify.
Now purification is something that we should do as often as we can. We don’t have to do it at specific time, but we should try and know what it is that we have to do in order to be able to do it as regularly as we can whenever we think about it. So why we need purification is that in order for us to develop understandings, in order for us to develop realizations, then we need to have gotten rid of obstacles to the development of those realizations. Now obstacles to the development of those realizations come in the form of karma ripening from negative actions that we’ve done in the past. So if we have some kind of obstacle to our development of realizations, then that stops us from being able to get a steady understanding of the past, to develop a steady comprehension that we can use as a basis to move on and progress.
So, for example, if we’ve done a lot to develop meditative concentration or we’ve done a lot to develop a loving kindness and then we get very angry, then that destroys what we’ve done in terms of the positive work that we’ve done. So, what we need to do is to keep purifying the negative actions we’ve done like getting angry, so that they don’t keep coming up in our mind stream. We don’t keep getting angry. We don’t keep experiencing the negative results negative actions. Okay.
So what we need to do in order to stop experiencing this is to purify the negative actions we’ve done in the past. And now we know from our experience that we experience a lot of suffering in this lifetime. Even if we look at this lifetime, we can see that there’s a lot of suffering in it. And we can also notice that however much work we do to try and experience happiness, because we all wanna experience happiness, that we all end up suffering anyway. Now, the reason for this is that we have accumulated negative karma that we have to experience the results of, which is suffering.
So in order for us to truly experience happiness, what we need to do is to purify our negative actions so that we don’t have experience their results. Now, it’s said that negativities, that is negative actions or harmful actions, have only one good quality, right? In general, we would say that negative actions have many faults. Cause suffering. They stop us from reaching liberation or achieving realizations.
We can say that they’ve got many faults, but there is one good quality that negative actions have. The only good quality that negative actions have, and that is that they can be purified. So, the only good thing that we can look on to we can look at our the only good quality that we can find if we look for them in negative actions is the fact that they can be purified. So, what we need to do is to purify these negative actions so we don’t have to experience their results. Okay.
So we need to know how to be able to purify negativities in order to not experience the results of those. So from amongst negativities, and we can say that there’s really strong negativities and there’s less negativities that have less strength. So we need to be able to recognize what are the most strong negativities and what’s the least strong negativities so we can tell what it is that we really need to avoid doing. Now, it’s said that there are what’s called the five heinous or five really bad actions. And there’s also actions whose results ripen very quickly.
So these actions are said to be the worst things that we can do and the ones that we have to really try and purify if we’ve done them. So the five heinous actions are said to be killing your father, killing your mother, killing an arhat, drawing blood from a Buddha, or creating a schism in the Sangha, that is splitting a Sangha community apart. These are the five heinous actions. Now, the quickly ripening negative action, that is a negative action that’s karma will quickly ripen upon you. It is one of these five and other things that are done with a very strong motivation to harm or a very strong motivation to of of any of the negative emotions.
And so we need to be able to purify those things in order to not experience the results of them. Now the even if sorry. Even if we’ve done it in past lives and we don’t remember them. Now according to the lowest philosophical tenet school, which is called the which is called the particularists or the Vaibhāṣika school. So they’re the there’s different levels of philosophical understandings of emptiness and the path and everything within the Buddhist Buddhist teachings.
The lowest level of these is what’s called the Vaibhāṣika or the particularist school. Now according to them, you can’t purify those kind of actions. You can go to purify them to some extent. You can clean clean away some of the negative karma that’s associated with with actions even though they’re that full on, but you can’t completely get rid of those negative actions. That’s according to this that tenet school.
But according to the highest tenant school system, which is called the Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika or the consequential school, then according to that school, you are able to completely purify those negative actions even by using very, very strong purification. You’re able to completely purify anything because it’s not inherent. It’s not an inherently existent thing, even these actions. So in order to get rid of the obstacles that these negative actions may have would create the obstacles towards progression on the path, and they need to be purified where they were done in past life or in the present life. Okay.
So it said that the negative actions that we’ve performed since beginningless time until now are what obscures us from understanding the way that things actually are from developing realizations. So Nāgārjuna used an example, and he said that by purifying our negative actions, our realizations will become clear. Our understandings will become clear in a similar way that if all the clouds disappear, then you can see the moon clearly. So this is the way he described the process of purifying our negativities. So for example, there is a there’s an there is three different examples.
Was three different people that achieved arhatship or completely got rid of the negative emotions in the time of the Buddha. One of these had already killed his mother and then did practices and developed true regret and was able to purify that action. Someone else had killed his father, who became a killer and chopped off people’s little fingers and was wearing them as like a mala, the little fingers around his neck. And he was about to kill his a thousandth person. And then he met the Buddha because he was gonna kill the Buddha.
And then the Buddha stops him. He met the Buddha and started practicing and was able to purify those negative actions through deep regret and purification. And he also became an arhat through that process. So in this way that we can see that purification can actually work if there is a if there’s hard enough work done with it and there’s true regret for negative action. So if we apply the purification very powerfully, then we are able to completely get rid of negative action no matter how powerful the negative action was.
That is get rid of the imprints or the karmic residue from that negative action. If we have a middling power of purification, then we are able to almost get rid of it. But even if we have a small power, we’re only able to purify to a limited degree. We can still get rid of some of the negative imprints or some of the negative residue from that negative karmic action in our mind stream. So we need to know how to purify things.
You said that if a intelligent person or an expert does a negative action, then that negative action will become small. And if a stupid person does a small negative action, then that small negative action will become big. And what this is referring to is if someone knows how to purify properly, then even the greatest negative action can be purified and therefore become smaller and smaller. And if someone doesn’t know how to purify, then even the smallest negative action can become bigger and bigger in terms of its power. Okay.
So the problem with us doing purification is that because we don’t understand karma very well, then we don’t usually purify that well. Because what the the what happens is we we can recognize that we don’t wanna experience suffering, and we wanna experience happiness. That’s pretty easy for us to recognize. But what we have a problem trying to understand is the whole concept of karma, that a negative action is gonna produce a negative result that is suffering, and a positive action is going to produce happiness. We have trouble understanding that.
We have trouble seeing that clearly. We may think about it, but we have trouble seeing it clearly. So this means that we tend to do negative things that are going to cause us to experience suffering. And we tend to not emphasize purifying or not realize how important purifying our negative actions is because we don’t realize the idea of cause and effect properly. We don’t think that our negative actions are going to cause us suffering.
We don’t usually think in those ways very clearly. So this means that if we’ve done a little bit of purifying, then we get tired, and it’s hard work for us to try and do positive actions, to try and do something that’s actually going to cause us to experience happiness. We get very tired if we have to do something virtuous. It’s a bit it’s a bit wearing. And especially especially if we have to do purification.
If we do purification once we get a bit tired of it and think, yeah, I’ve done that. So the reason for this is we think other things we’re doing are making us happy, but they’re not. So because we don’t realize that the only way to truly be happy is to do positive actions, then doing positive actions becomes difficult, including purifying. This one? This one.
So the thing is the the thing is even though we may find it difficult to develop an understanding or to have an understanding karma at the moment because cause and effect may not be something that something that comes easy to us. It’s something that we can develop an understanding of just by thinking about. But if we look at the way that we act at the moment, we understand that things can bring results in a kind of saṃsāra or a worldly way. So we know that if we work hard, we’ll get money for that, and that money will bring us happiness. So we don’t win too much if someone says, if you work hard for a whole day, I’ll give you heaps of money.
We don’t think about so much about the hard work because we realize what the reward’s gonna be, and the reward far outweighs the hard work that we’re doing. So we can recognize that in terms of worldly things. But we have trouble recognizing it in terms of the law of cause and effect because we don’t get how happy we would be by doing virtuous actions. We don’t understand that virtuous actions will make us that happy the same way that we understand if we work really hard for a day, and we are going to get a really good reward and in terms of lots of money at the end of day, that working for that day is worth it. We can understand that pretty clearly, but we don’t understand that positive actions result in happiness very clearly, and that negative actions result in suffering.
We don’t understand that concept very clearly. So in this way, then we think about, purifying, and we think that it sounds like hard work. But if we understood, the results from purifying, then we would not perceive it to be as hard work as we currently perceive it. So what also something that we have a problem is is we can recognize that if if we do something that’s a very negative thing that we may develop a sense of regret about that very negative action that we’ve done. So for example, if someone was in where they killed someone or did something equally as as as drastic in terms of a negative action, then it’d be easier for us to develop regret about something that was that drastic.
It would be easier for us to develop regret for doing a negative action that we could see was that had such drastic consequences in the short term. But what we don’t realize is that small negative actions that we do also have negative consequences. And if we don’t develop a sense of regret or we don’t have an idea of regret about the smaller negative actions that we do, then they also will become more the the consequences of that negative action will become more powerful and more powerful and more powerful until eventually the consequences of a a small negative action hasn’t been purified or hasn’t been regretted. And the consequences of a large negative action that hasn’t been regretted become the same thing, become about the same, have the same power. So it means that we shouldn’t only think about the really bad things that we’ve done.
We should think about the smallish bad things that we’ve done as well. And think about regretting those things and going through the process of purification for all the negative actions we’ve done because all negative actions need to be purified. So we have this idea that we’re alright, that we’re okay. We haven’t done anything really serious. We haven’t killed anyone.
We haven’t killed any cows, or we haven’t gone out and tried to do extensive harm to animals. We haven’t stolen a lot from anyone. We haven’t been doing sexual misconduct either in this or the other. We haven’t been lying and stealing and slandering people in a big way. So we’ve been basically trying to keep to the keep away from the ten non-virtuous actions and lead an ethical life.
So then we think, yeah, I’m doing alright. I’m doing okay. I’m I don’t have that much to to regret because I’ve been leading an ethical life. This is the way we think, It’s not actually true because we do do small negative things very regularly, and we need to try and purify those as well.