Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 31-minute session with a pointed provocation: if your human rebirth amounts to chasing comfort and sensory pleasure, you might as well be a pampered pet in Australia — fed, idle, and never required to think. Drawing from Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, he anchors the teaching with two stories: the Buddha dismissing gold as “poison” to illustrate how greed breeds suffering, and Lama Tsongkhapa retreating with nine companions on almost no money yet lacking nothing because their wants were few. The main subject is three kinds of patience — enduring harm from others, accepting suffering, and persevering through Dharma study — with particular stress on the latter two being continuous practices rather than situational ones. Geshe-la adds that patience practised without a bodhichitta motivation falls short of the perfection of patience. A Q&A rounds out the session, covering how patience is cultivated through steady non-reactive practice and how helping others is itself a form of patience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 D BC 2004 07 20.mp3
UUID: 86a0c7fc-1332-42f6-a315-80753caa5d53
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB How to Develop Bodhichitta (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-07-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 31.3 minutes
Words: ~2,147
So if we don’t practice Dharma, we’re not getting the best out of our human rebirth. human rebirth becomes pretty meaningless. If we’re living our life and that’s what we’re focusing on, this lifetime getting the best of sensory things that we can in this lifetime, and we get to the end of this lifetime, then that lifetime hasn’t benefited us unless we’ve practiced Dharma. Being able to practice Dharma is a situation peculiar to human existence. If we don’t use it to do that, if we don’t use our life to do something positive in terms of the process of Dharma, then we’ve wasted this precious existence of a human rebirth.
If we don’t do that and we’re just being comfortable, making ourselves comfortable, helping ourselves to the pleasures of saṃsāra and enjoying ourselves, then we might as well be an animal, or at least an animal in Australia. Best to say most of the animals in Australia, like cats and dogs and things like that, eat well, they sleep well, they have slaves, they look after them, servants that look after them. So you might as well be an animal in Australia if you’re not going to take the most out of your human rebirth. In fact, if that’s what you want, then you might as well be an animal, because you don’t have to think too much as an animal, especially if you’re an animal in Australia, don’t have to work very hard. You get just to lie around, do not much, get fed and be really comfortable.
If you’re a human, you have to work, you have to think, you have to ponder things, you have to experience these different situations. But as an animal in Australia, you don’t have to do much and you get everything given to you, so if that’s what you’re after, it’s probably better to be an animal. Okay. So a story To illustrate how to use our lifetimes, there is a story from the life of the Buddha where he found some gold and said, Oh, look at the poison, and chucked it and kept walking. There was a guy that came up behind him who was a timber merchant who went poison, and he looked down and he saw gold and he said, That’s not poison, that’s gold.
He took the gold and he became really rich, and then the king found out that he was rich and the king says, How did you become rich? And he lies to the king. He said, No, I just had this gold. He didn’t tell him where he found it and where he took it from. The king finds out that he’s lying, and he was about to execute him for lying and taking the gold.
The man says, Oh, this really is poison, and this poison is strong about the gold. The king says, What are you talking about? The Buddha told me this was poison, and I didn’t listen. Now I understand that it’s poison and not only is it poison but the poison is potent. Because he was talking about the Buddha, then the king didn’t kill him and put him in jail.
What the story is meant to illustrate is that most people in jail and most people experiencing suffering are in there because greed and of looking for things and not being patient with what they’ve got. So it said that if searching for wealth is like a poison, and if you are able to live in a simple way as a monk, a nun, or in other types of simple ways and your wants are few and you can be content and practice patience with what you’ve got, then your conditions become favorable no matter how much you’ve got. It tells a story about how Lama Tsongkhapa left to meditate in a place called Jayal with eight students, servants, or helpers. And so he, along with the others, made up nine. Geshe-la said, don’t know if they were students, servants, helpers, or a combination of both, or a combination of two or more.
But anyway, when they went to this place to meditate, they only had eight sho. It’s a type of currency called a sho, which is a bit more than an Australian dollar, they said, but not that much. They basically went to this place with no money. But because they went there to meditate and because they were very content with anything that they had, then they didn’t experience any suffering from the lack of anything. So in this way, it explains that the pursuit of better clothes, places to live, money, food, etc.
The pursuit of those things can harm our practice and stop us from being able to practice the Dharma properly and taking the most from this lifetime. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have any of these things, it’s just that if we strive after them and striving after them hurts our Dharma practice, then there’s no point to that. But if we happen to have wealth and a good place to live and any of these other conditions because of the karma that we’ve accumulated in the past, that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy those things. It’s only when they start harming our Dharma practice that’s the problem. It s only when we start focusing on those things as opposed to practicing Dharma that we actually have a problem.
So the third type of patience that we need to work towards is what’s called the patience in acquiring the Dharma, to have patience when we’re practicing the Dharma or understanding the Dharma. This refers to patience in developing the three different ways to develop the Dharma: meditating on the key points and the practices that we need to perform, learning to modify our behavior, by memorizing and writing, reciting texts and analyzing the significance of the good qualities of the Three Jewels, the Path, selflessness and so on. What this means is anything that we do that is listening or studying, contemplating or meditating on the Dharma is developing patience in understanding the Dharma, because anything that we do to and develop our understanding of the Dharma through listening, contemplating or meditating requires patience, it requires effort and it requires hard work and patience when dealing with that hard work. So with the three of these types of patience that we need to practice, the first is patience when enduring adversity or people hurting you in some way or another. But it’s not just when they’re talking about you or harming you that you need to practice patience.
They may also be harming people that you like or being good to people that you don’t like being good to people you don’t like or they may be doing something to help someone that you don’t like or help someone that’s friends with someone you don’t like. So there’s all these other circumstances which revolve with other people that you’re going to need to practice patience, but they’re not things that happen constantly they’re things that happen in specific circumstances. So this is something that we only need to practice when we’re in that situation. But the other two types of patience patience in accepting suffering and patience with acquiring the Dharma those are the two things that we need to practice all of the time. Every time that we do things that are virtuous, we need to be patient that, patient with the experience of that and not get angry or frustrated with that experience.
Also, we need to be patient when we are experiencing any kind of suffering, so we need to keep those two practices of patience continually in our mind. So this means that whatever we’re doing, we need to be patient with the experiences that we may have, and when we’re practicing any kind of Dharma, need to be patient with that experience. That includes, for example, listening to teachings. No matter how uncomfortable you are and no matter how long they go for, it means being patient and listening single pointedly and thinking over the meaning. This is also when we’re doing any other kind of activity, a virtuous activity.
We shouldn’t be getting caught up with whether we’re hungry or thirsty or how long they’re going for or whatever. We should be thinking that what I’m doing now is virtuous action and this is going to help me more than anything else I could do, so I should be concentrating on doing this well. The other thing that we need to remember with patience is that if we don’t do these things with the motivation of bodhicitta then they don’t become the practice of the perfection of patience. So we need to be doing it with the motivation that we’re doing whatever we’re doing, that we’re practicing patience in whichever way we’re practicing patience, as a cause for us to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. If we do something like this with the motivation that we achieve a good rebirth or we achieve liberation, then it’s a positive action, it’s a Dharma action, but it’s not practicing the perfection of patience.
So that’s it, patience is finished. What page are you on? Well, see that’s roughly six forty one, this is why I got very confused earlier. I was like, But that’s the next one, no it’s not. But it is!
Six forty one, disposition. So if you have questions, please ask them. Yeah. Sorry? Oh, guessing this is from this book that’s called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, but he’s not doing a normal thing of line by line.
He’s kind of a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of this, you know, from that section. It’s a graduated path text. So there’s many different texts that are of this type, but this particular one is called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by. Yep. Mhmm.
Sure. Conditioned responses. If you practice patience, you said, you don’t create the causes for experiencing suffering, so the more you practice That is. So if you’re able to practice patience and you stop experiencing so much suffering because you’re not creating the causes for suffering, so you’re able to deal with the suffering but you get less of it. So this means that bodhisattvas are able to even chop up their bodies and give them away without experiencing suffering.
I say we don’t have to do that and go because I think that it might be bit tricky. Is that okay? No more questions? Yudrin How do we improve patience? Geshe-la said that you improve your patience, you develop your patience through anything that you experience, then you don’t react to that with anger you just keep practicing patience, you keep focusing on being patient.
Whatever suffering you experience, you don’t turn it into suffering. You keep your mind happy, you focus on happiness and rejoicing no matter what kind of suffering you’re experiencing, so that means that any kind of suffering that you experience ceases to be suffering and you’re able to have a happy mind about that experience. So if you’re able to do these things and keep practicing patience in this way, then your ability to practice it will become greater and greater. So there was a story about a man who was meditating, and someone came up to him and said, What are you doing? He goes, I’m meditating on stainless patience, yeah?
Then the guy goes, Oh, and walks off, right? Then he comes back again, and he goes, What are you doing? He goes, I’m meditating on stainless patience. The guy goes, Oh, okay, and walks off, and he came back again and he goes, Now what are you doing? He goes, I’m meditating on patience.
Then he comes back again and goes, Are you still meditating? He goes, What are you doing now? He goes, I’m meditating on patience! So he doesn’t think that that was okay. Drink the tea and people ask questions. Yep.
Okay. Helping situations and helping people is actually practicing patience because if you can help someone you should help them and in helping them you are practicing patience because you’re being patient or you’re enduring a situation. You’re enduring the fact that you’re helping. You’re being patient with the fact that you have to help. So that is practicing patience as well.
If you can help, you should help. And if you’re helping someone then the things that you’re working with there are usually loving kindness and patience because you’re being patient in performing the dharma, you’re being patient in doing an action. That loving kindness and patience both come into helping people. So page five, that’s the dedication.