Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 31-minute talk, Geshe Pema Tsering identifies self-cherishing — valuing ourselves above everyone else — as the root of all suffering in saṃsāra. He opens concretely: we spend our lives chasing praise and dodging blame because we assume “I” matters most. A memorable stretch is his good-humored, stumbling retelling of a Tibetan village story about a ngakpa (village tantric practitioner) whose self-serving maneuvers end in losing his sponsors — the confusion itself becoming part of the lesson. He draws a practical line: abandoning self-cherishing doesn’t mean giving up eating or working, but shifting motivation — the same actions reoriented toward sustaining practice for the benefit of others. The Q&A covers illness, job loss, and conflict, each traced back to self-cherishing, with the closing insight that in any argument two self-cherishings are fighting, and practicing patience dissolves it from one side.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 D BC 2004 06 08.mp3
UUID: 7d21de40-2fa8-45d1-b3b7-2079b3c4960f
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB How to Develop Bodhichitta (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-06-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 31.0 minutes
Words: ~2,178
Being as as as ourselves. As as? I don’t know if that works, but anyway. So, anyone, whether they’re considered really an important person in the outside world, whether they’re a highly attained spiritual person or whether they’re a very lowly person that we maybe should try and help, this idea of separating things, none of these people or not even a whole group of these people, is as important as me. We have this idea that we are more important than everybody else, and that idea of being more important than everybody else is this idea of self-cherishing.
Okay, alright. I’ve got it back together now. This idea of self-cherishing means that we are constantly striving to get flattery from other people and we’re constantly trying to avoid I keep thinking ‘dissing’, but that’s like slang, isn’t it? We’re trying to avoid how do you say dissing in normal words? Thank you.
People being rude to us in one way or another. We’re trying to avoid that. We’re trying to get people saying nice things about us, people praising us. Think praise and blame, that was the two words I was looking for. So, we spend all that time trying to stop getting the blame for things and we’re trying to spend all that time getting praise.
So, this means that we’re under the control of trying to do these two different things. We’re trying to focus on attaining one and not the other, and that whole process comes from this point of view of self-cherishing, again, of thinking that we are very important and not focusing on others. Another way we could say self-cherishing is grasping at the idea of self, alright? Or it comes about because of grasping at the idea of self. It’s actually a mistake to think in that way, but because we think of ourselves as being an inherently existent thing, we then go on to add on top of that this idea that if I’m inherently existent, well, I must be very important.
So, since forever, up until now, we have constantly been considering ourselves to be incredibly important and cherishing ourselves above all else. All it has done for us all this time is to create suffering for us. The other thing that we need to is until we get rid of it, until we get rid of this idea of self-cherishing, until we start focusing on others, we’re constantly creating the causes for more suffering. There’s nothing in the idea of cherishing self that will create the causes for us to achieve nirvana or liberation from saṃsāra. It can only create the causes for more suffering and many more years spent in saṃsāra.
That was Geshe-la’s impersonation of a tantric practitioner. I’m sorry. You just told me the story, it makes absolutely no sense. But there’s all these weird words in it. He goes, What do you mean you don’t know the word for someone who does something very strange?
Anyway, Sorry. So far, I figured out there’s After all that, like, I still don’t get it. I don’t understand what this guy was doing there or this guy was doing there. He goes, Oh, if don’t worry, forget it. It’s like, What do you mean you don’t understand that?
Don’t understand. But anyway, I think what’s going on is there’s a village, right? And if anyone knows this story, please help me out because I’ve never heard it before. I’m very confused. Okay, so there was a village and there was these two people continually fighting over who could help someone who was a tantric practitioner, like a ngakpa, they’re called, who could help him so they could get more merit from giving things to him.
Because they were both trying to get more power in the village, right? They were trying to use this man in order to get more power in the village. Does that make sense? Yeah? Because he was the local practitioner.
They were actually fighting over who could get more power in the village and trying to use this man to get more power in the village, right? He came down to try and So, he came down to try and mediate between these two people to say, you know, there’s no point in fighting over this because it’s not helping anything and they got so angry with each other that they said, Well, if he can’t help you and I can’t help you then we should kill him, right? So then they killed him and neither of them actually got the power that they needed and they both created a negative act. I think that’s the story but there’s lots I don’t understand because they had specific jobs and that I’ve never heard of that I think are peculiar to ancient Tibetan villages. I don’t know.
Okay, so after that debacle, I guess you’ll say, If that doesn’t help because I didn’t understand the story properly, sorry. It’s best to focus on ourselves anyway. And if we just think that, Okay, from beginning of this time until now, we’ve all experienced all these different types of suffering and the main cause for those different types of suffering is the self-grasping. If we want to get rid of all our suffering, we need to get rid of that mind of self grasping and self-cherishing. So, self-cherishing is at fault for every little piece of suffering that we experience.
So if you wanna have any questions for it, ten, fifteen minutes. But I was just gonna try and figure out what the hell that was about. Yes. There. Yes.
Okay. Mhmm. Yeah. We may need to keep putting food in our mouth to sustain our body, right? But that doesn’t necessarily have to come with desire, but this idea that we have, I want to eat so I’m not hungry so I’m comfortable so I’m happy, that’s self-cherishing.
This idea of making ourselves happy and not thinking of anyone else. It’s the idea of I’m going to be happy by doing this action. Okay, there’s a ghost in this story somewhere. Okay, so hang on. I just thought I’d get this right because it’s got all these old words in it and he was using even older words to describe it.
You know what I mean? So I was like, is it an obscure word for ghost? And it was that. So anyway, there was a practitioner who lived in a place where there was many ghosts. So I don’t know how that came into it.
And then one day two of the tantric practitioners, Ngakpa’s sponsors, right? They were like arguing with each other. Okay so then the the two sponsors were arguing with each other then the tantric practitioner I’ve got it, yay, woo hoo! Alright, okay, where he lived there was this ghost, yeah? And it’s all about the Tantric practitioner self-cherishing.
Oh man, no wonder I was confused. Okay, so there’s this one specific type of ghost that lives somewhere, yeah? And he can harm people, but he can’t harm Tantric practitioners because they’re like armored with, they’re like Tantric Tantric stuff, right? And so this guy didn’t want to live in a place where there was this ghost because it was annoying him and so he had these two sponsors that were arguing and so then he got one of the sponsors to swap houses with him and come and live where he was, so that he would have a nice place to live and there’d be no ghosts. But the ghosts actually killed the sponsor so that it meant that he had no one looking after him.
So, ended up he like, in order to get himself something good, he knocked off the source of his income, basically. I got even wronger. Okay, sorry, sorry, even wronger. I don’t know if that’s really bad English as well now. All right, okay, now he actually got the two sponsors to move in to where he was and then the ghost was tormenting them and they killed each other.
Alright, so once they killed each other then he had no sponsorship. See it would have been tricky to try and understand that, right? Like you got ghosts and sponsors and anyway, sorry. There’s no ghost involved, Thank you. It seems necessary.
Sure. He didn’t do that when I didn’t understand the story. So, it’s not a matter of giving up the essential things that we do in life, it’s about changing our attitude towards those essential things that we do in life. So, at the moment we do these things with the idea that I’m an important thing and I’m gonna look after myself and all of these things are gonna make me happy, right? If we change our attitude and think the reason that I’m doing this action is so that I can sustain my body, so I can sustain my life, so I can practice Dharma, to achieve enlightenment, so I can benefit all sentient beings, means that we’re doing all of these things for others, not ourselves.
It means that we’re doing all the actions that are necessary, but we’re doing them with the focus on other beings and not focusing on ourselves. So it’s about changing the way we think about what we’re doing as opposed to what we’re doing. Okay, so, in instances like that, we should not worry too much about them because they’re not that important. We think about it in a way that we’ve continually been experiencing suffering since all this time and we’ve had all these different existences and look at it from that perspective, losing our job isn’t that big a deal. We really shouldn’t be that worried about it.
Working and getting money and all of these things are all just bits of saṃsāra. They’re like worldly activities. Whether we’re able to do those worldly activities or not, it isn’t that much of a difference in the general scheme of things. If we can focus on the fact that if those situations happen, we re still able to practice, we’re still able to focus on the ultimate goal. Whether we have worldly happiness or not isn’t actually the main point.
If we haven’t lost our body and we’re able to keep practicing towards achieving Buddhahood, then we’re doing alright. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, in this case, we should try and not let our mind get depressed about that situation, so we should think that, in actual fact, the reason for our experience is self-cherishing.
If we had had no self-cherishing, we wouldn’t have any experience of illness, we wouldn’t have any experience of death, and we wouldn’t have any of these things. All of those sufferings come about because of self-cherishing. So we can look at the faults of self-cherishing and see that this is why I’m experiencing this. And we can also think that if I don’t get rid of self-cherishing, I’m going to continue experiencing this. I’m going to continue experiencing all these different types of suffering because I’m creating the causes for these different kinds of suffering.
So, what I need to do is to purify as much as I can the past negative causes that I’ve created so I don’t have to experience these things in the future. Yeah? So, if we can start looking at the faults and therefore stop trying to create the causes for the future, then that’s a good thing to do. The other thing to do is to remember that any suffering that we may experience in the human realm is nothing compared to what we could experience in our lower realms or in coarser forms of existence. If we think that it’s good that I’m able to burn up this negative karma now as opposed to experiencing it in a more negative state, then that way of thinking can also lift our mind and make us less sad and be able to focus on what we need to do.
One more question. Yeah. Last question. So, in actual fact, if we look at who’s actually So, if we actually look at who’s fighting, then who’s fighting is two different people’s self-cherishing. It’s not actually ourselves that are fighting with each other.
It’s the two different, the people fighting self-cherishing that is fighting. Does that make sense? Who’s actually at it? It’s the self-cherishings. Okay, so if we take ourselves away from that situation in the fight there is no more fight.
If we think okay this is my self-cherishing it doesn’t matter and we start practicing patience in that instance the fight dissolves because there’s only one side to it so you just like whatever. If you say whatever then the fight dissolves. Yeah? There’s only one side left in the argument. So therefore, it’s a matter of two.
Yeah. In that instance, then you think I’m practicing patience and let them win. This one. Is that okay?