Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a verse from the first Dalai Lama’s Praises to Tārā — an ocean image where karma-driven desire tosses beings like waves — Geshe Pema Tsering uses the first half of this 45-minute talk to explain why desire, more than anger or ignorance, is the chief force cycling us through saṃsāra. He unpacks the Tibetan word for desire, dö chak, meaning “chained to a wish,” to draw a sharp line between samsaric craving and the valid aspiration for liberation, then shows how seeing desire’s futility gives rise to renunciation and bodhicitta. The second half defines karma as the mental factor of intention, classifies all actions as virtuous, non-virtuous, or neutral, and introduces the eight worldly dharmas — gain, loss, pleasure, pain, praise, blame, fame, and notoriety — as the hidden engine behind everything we do.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 DB K 2003 10 28.mp3
UUID: c1a53a15-cf16-4744-9668-30306ef0814e
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Karma (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-10-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~4,015
Yeah. Okay. Okay. From the praises to Tārā, in the Praises to Tārā by Gendun Drub, the first Dalai Lama, he said: We are carried along on a difficult to cross ocean through streams of water, which is Samsāra, through our karma. The strong wind of karma throws us around through causes and negativities.
The waves of death, old age, sickness and birth crush on us and confuse us. Please protect me from the fear of the ocean of desire. Now, what this is referring to is a metaphor for the way that we exist. It’s like we’re in an ocean of our own making, an ocean of suffering that is very difficult for us to pass to the other side of. While we’re in this ocean, the conditions, the causes that we create that are generating suffering are like waves that toss us around and we experience death, birth, old age and illness.
They are like the waves that we have. What we actually need protection from, what we actually need help from, is our fear of the ocean of desires. That’s the thing that we need to ask protection from. So, in these prayers and aspirations, Please Tārā, protect me from this situation that I’m in. This ocean of suffering that we find ourselves in, that s the thing that we need to ask for refuge from because we re continually experiencing this suffering.
Whether we re born into the lowest hells or into the highest peak of saṃsāra, we re continually cycling in this suffering of Samsāra. Now, if we really want to get rid of this suffering, then what we need to do is get rid of our desires, and this is what we re asking Tārā to do in this verse, is give us protection from the ocean or the great stream of our desires that causes us to cycle in this existence of suffering. Now, in actual fact, it’s desires that cause us to suffer. Ignorance may be the root of Samsāra, it may be the main cause for us to experience desires or to create desires, but if it was just ignorance and there was no desires, then we wouldn’t create negative karma in order to experience suffering. So while we have to get through the root of ignorance in order to get out of saṃsāra, the thing that causes us to suffer is our desires.
So it’s our desires that we need protection from, and it’s our desires that we for protection or refuge from. We ask Tārā to grant us refuge from. So it’s the desire that is greatest problem. It’s the desire that we have that cause us mainly to recycle in saṃsāra. It says that these three desire, ignorance and aversion or hatred or anger, that like being one, aversion, hatred or anger they all come into one group.
Those three things, ignorance, desire and anger attachment, yada yada, those three things are the main are the roots of our cycling in Samsāra. Although anger is something that is much more powerful and negative than desire even, it doesn’t happen all the time and only comes about occasionally. Our desires are what we are constantly dealing with. We’re dealing constantly with our desires because we’re constantly trying to be happy, and because we want to be happy, because we’re trying to search for happiness, then we are constantly desirous of happiness and we’re constantly attached to the concept of being happy. We’re constantly doing this.
This is why in this prayer it’s likened to a stream or an ocean because it’s something that carries us along, it’s something that’s a constant. Anger may come up occasionally, it may be destructive, but it only comes up occasionally. Desire is something that we’re constantly swimming in, we’re constantly taken along by our desires. It’s the desires that we desperately need to deal with the most. If we can get rid of our desires, we can get out of saṃsāra.
It’s that simple. Anger comes about because of our desires, because we’re not getting what we want. So, the desires are the things that we need to deal with. But getting rid of desires isn’t that easy. It’s in fact incredibly difficult for us to get rid of our desires because we constantly have the desire to be happy and that leads us to do all sorts of things.
So if we want to find the antidote to desire, if we want to work on not developing desires and getting rid of it, then we need to think about the shortcomings of desires or the shortcomings of Samsāra and by focusing on that, then we can limit our desires and we can eventually get to the other side of this ocean and achieve liberation. So, what are the shortcomings of desires? Well, first thing is that they don’t work. We’ve been constantly trying to make ourselves happy since the beginning of this time and it hasn’t worked. There’s no satisfaction in Samsāra, there’s no place that we get to where it’s okay, we’re in a constant cycle of trying to get to a place where we’re happy, we’re doing extensive work all the time to get to a place where we’re happy and it just doesn’t hasn’t worked since beginningless time and it still hasn’t worked now.
This is the first shortcoming that we can see with looking at it. Just to embarrass you if you’re trying to sneak in, guess what? There’s a chair on the other side of the room, whoever else just came in. Okay. So that’s the first thing that we need to focus on is this idea that there is no satisfaction in Samsāra.
The other thing we need to focus on is that by constantly craving satisfaction, constantly looking for a way to be happy in Samsāra, all we’re doing is creating more negative karma that creates more suffering. By striving for these actions, we’re not actually getting anywhere, we’re just creating more situations where we feel and experience more negativities, suffering, and then more striving for desire. By thinking about these two aspects, we can realize that there is great shortcomings to our desires, that these desires actually don’t do anything to help us and they in fact harm us. By concentrating on these two things, by concentrating on the shortcomings of our desires, then we can gradually diminish them. It’s not easy, but it is this is what we need to think about is these faults of saṃsāra, and if we look at it, or these faults of our saṃsāra cravings, if we look at it, isn’t, if we examine it very well, there is actually no qualities or positive aspects to this craving that we have.
We may think there is because in the short term we actually do get some satisfaction or very brief satisfaction from our actions. For example, if we are craving something in this life and if we work really hard towards it, then we may get some small happiness in this life that last temporary, and by all the work we put in, when we get that little bit of happiness we think okay, this makes it alright, I’m happy now, it’s fine and so it is worth me keeping on working and struggling in order to get these little bits of happiness because I feel happy now, we kid ourselves into thinking like that, but in actual fact we’ve only given ourselves a tiny moment of happiness and in order to achieve that tiny moment of happiness we’ve created all this negative karma that we’re going to have to experience the results of in the future. So even though it may appear to us as if there is some positive outcome from our desires and all the work we put in in order to achieve our desires, there is in actual fact no positive outcome and desires can only lead us to experiencing more negativity in the future.
We don’t see this but this is the way it is. Okay. Right. Now, what we need to do is transform this need we have, this desire, this need we have to be happy away from objects that aren’t going to cause us happiness towards objects that are going to cause us happiness. So at the moment we have this desire to be happy in terms of desiring samsaric happiness, but there is a problem with that because the more we desire samsaric happiness, the more suffering we experience, the less happiness we actually get, the less happiness we actually experience.
Instead of that, if we turn that need to be happy towards liberation and towards achieving Buddhahood, then we’re actually focusing on something that will make us happy. So in Tibetan the word for desire, the word that she’s literally translated desire has these two aspects to it, two syllables, dö chak. The first one is dö means a wish, the second one means chained to, so it’s like chained to a wish. Our desires are the things that we’re chained to, our wishes are the things that actually have a point to it. So, we have to make the distinction between things that we are attached to or stuck on and things that will actually work for us.
So, the things that we need to focus on liberation, enlightenment, the five paths or the three vehicles, the mind that sees towards those we don’t call a negative emotion, don’t call something that we need to abandon. That wish to get out of saṃsāra, that wish to achieve enlightenment is a positive mind that we need to cultivate. The difference between these two, the difference between our desires that chain us to saṃsāra and our wish to get out saṃsāra is not based on the intention because both of the intentions between these two things are that we want to be happy. We want to be happy so we strive for saṃsāra happiness. We want to be happy so we strive for liberation or enlightenment.
The difference between these two things is the object that we’re focusing on. Now if it’s an object that actually has qualities that actually is able to make us happy like achieving liberation like achieving Buddhahood then it’s a valid a valid and a helpful mind is a valid and a helpful way of thinking. If the object that we’re focusing on isn’t able to make us happy, isn’t able to give us lasting contentment, then it’s an invalid mind. It’s a it’s a wrong way of thinking about things. So, when we’re looking at these two things, the desires for saṃsāra happiness and the wish to get out of saṃsāra, we need to understand that although both these ways of thinking are based on the the need to be happy, then the differences in the object that they’re focusing on, the differences in the thing that they are needing, the thing they feel like they need.
So, the mind that we need to be cultivating, the way of thinking that we need to be cultivating is the thought that strives after liberation and enlightenment. The problem with this is that developing those kind of minds is kind of hard for us at the moment. Developing positive thoughts, creating merit is difficult for us because we’re not in the habit of doing it. We’re not in the habit of practicing the six perfections. We’re not in the habit of thinking of others.
We tend to think about ourselves in the extreme. So, at the start when we start working on it, is very difficult. We have to put in a lot of effort in order to create virtuous actions, we need to put in a lot of effort in order to develop these minds that strive for enlightenment and strive for liberation. But we need to put in this effort because these are the valid minds. These are the minds that actually this is the way of thinking that actually works.
This is the way of thinking that will actually make us eventually stably happy. The the thoughts that we’ve been having generally our desires because that’s what we’re talking about at the moment. Our desires for saṃsāra happiness haven’t worked for us. We’re not happy all the time. They don’t have a valid base.
There’s nothing in those desires that make us more happy and happier and happier. For example, if with food, we have the desire to eat when we’re hungry. We think, I really wanna eat that food and if I do, I’ll be happy. But the more we eat, the happier we don’t get happier, we get less happy, the more we eat, we feel sick. The food we eat doesn’t get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, it gets less appealing and less appealing and less appealing.
So, in this way, we can see desire, attachment we have to samsaric things isn’t valid. It doesn’t have any solid reasoning behind it, that we can say, yes, that will definitely make me happy in the long run if I do that. Whereas the minds of enlightenment and the minds of liberation do have a valid base behind them. By striving towards them we do get happier and happier and more and our happiness becomes more stable and more stable. So, is way we need to look at it.
We need to differentiate between what is actually going to make us happy and what we think or what we are in the habit of thinking will make us happy. So once we realize this, once we realize that there are no positive qualities in desire, there is nothing in desire that can help us. And once we realize that there is nothing in Samsāra that can help us, and our mind turns towards getting out of Samsāra to the mind striving for liberation, then we develop renunciation. When that mind comes about or that way of thinking comes about in an uncontrived natural manner, then we develop renunciation. And mind striving for true happiness by the achievement of liberation.
So once we’ve developed this idea for ourselves that we don’t want to have anything to do with samsaric happiness or so called happiness. We want to strive towards liberation. Once we’ve seen that there is nothing in Samsāra but faults and we’ve seen the qualities of liberation, that mind is renunciation. But that’s not enough. Once we’ve establish that for ourselves then we need to look at other people and we need to think okay these people also don’t want to experience suffering, want to experience happiness, so it’s not enough just for me to look for my own happiness, I have to try and work towards the happiness of all beings.
So we think okay how do I make these beings happy? Well, I show them true happiness by first of all becoming a Buddha myself and then showing them the path towards true happiness. So, this mind thinking, I wish to seek enlightenment or I wish to attain enlightenment in order to be a benefit to all sentient beings is what’s called bodhicitta or the heart of enlightenment. So we should think, in order for all sentient beings to attain enlightenment and be completely free from suffering, I am going to strive in order to become enlightened. And may me teaching Dharma, listening to Dharma, doing this meditation, may that all be a cause for me to attain enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings.
And so we should meditate or contemplate on that thought for a few minutes. So tonight we’re talking about karma, a cause. It’s karma or lé. It’s not cause and effect. In fact, we’re talking about action.
Right? Now, usually, when we talk about karma or action, then there is this idea of it having some other function. But in actual fact, karma means action, and there’s three different types of action that we can do. We can do action of the body, speech, or the mind. And even amongst those, the only time that we that that all the both the action of body and speech are dependent on the mind.
Because if there’s no intention, there is no action. There’s no action of body, speech, and mind. So therefore, the definition of karma or the definition of action is the mental factor of intention. Yes. No?
Do want me to start again? I’ve I’ve just had and I had it. I was like, yeah. Yeah. That’s that word.
Got it. Intention, intention, intention, got it. Right. Now, so, yes, okay, so, in actual fact, the definition of karma or action is the mental factor which is intention, alright? That is where all action springs from, the intention to do something.
Get those mics on. So, this is where all of it comes from. There’s body, speech and mind, the actions of body, speech and mind, all of this comes from a mental factor that we have from amongst all the different mental factors. Then mental factor is an accompaniment to a main mind. So we have main minds and mental factors in our mind stream and main minds cognize objects, mental factors accompany that cognition.
So a mental factor that is intention is a definition of karma. Now, because we have this karma, because we have this intention to perform actions, and because we perform actions that all stem from this thought we have to do things, which is the first type of karma. Then we create all the different conditions that we experience. We create the causes to be born in all the different realms. Everything that we experience comes originally from this mental factor that’s intention.
Okay, so this intention, where this intention comes from or this idea that is the first of the actions comes from is our desire to be happy and to not experience suffering. The problem with the way that we approach this is what we think will make us happy and what we think will make us suffer. So because of this we get confused and base our perception of what will make us happy and not make us happy on what are called the eight worldly dharmas. Our actions come out of the desire to not experience suffering and to experience happiness. Every action that we do comes out of those two types of desire.
Within the eight worldly dharmas there is four that are our wish not to experience suffering and four that are our wish to experience happiness. So the first two are gain and loss. So if we gain things we are happy, if we lose things we are not happy. So one is an experience of happiness, other is an experience of suffering. The next one is just the experience of pleasure and happiness.
So if we get happiness then that makes us happy and if we experience misery that makes us feel miserable. The third set is praise and blame or criticism. So we wish for praise and we don’t wish to be — it’s got here ‘degradation’, but come on. Okay, and then the final two is that we want to have a good reputation and we don’t want to experience infamy or notoriety. So, therefore, within these eight, that s the things we re constantly striving for and constantly trying to distance ourselves from.
So, in order for us to experience the four out of these eight that we do want to experience, in order to not experience the four that we don’t want to experience, we do lots of different things. We constantly are are doing actions of body, speech and mind in order to set ourselves up in this experience. Everything we think is how not to suffer and how to be happy, and the other associated dharmas with those. Everything we think, everything we say, we are saying in order to try and be happy or in order to try and not experience suffering. Everything we do is in order to try and experience happiness etc.
And trying not to experience suffering, etc. So all of the actions that we do body, speech and mind are all based on our desires for these four things. Are four sets of two. Okay. Every action that we do can be put down to being either an action of the mind, speech, or body.
All of which come from mind, from this intention that we had. So every action that we do or every every action is play on words like earlier we had dö and chak and now we got le and le and it’s been translatable. So the Tibetan word for karma is lé, the Tibetan word for work is lé, so I guess they were saying. The reason that there is two syllables for lekka is because every type of action we do, all the work we do, all of the things that we come up with in body, speech and mind have karma in them or in the nature of karma. That s not translated.
And that s why the word is put together like this. So, have to watch everything we are doing because everything we are doing is for this purpose of trying to be happy and not to experience suffering. So within all of the things that we do, whether it s a body, speech or mind, then there is three different types of action that we can do, three different types of work that we can do, three different types of intention that we can have. And they are positive, negative and neutral, or virtuous, non virtuous, and neutral, or literally virtuous, non virtuous, and not described in scripture. Neutral literally means in Tibetan.
So we can have a thought that’s virtuous, a thought that’s non virtuous, and a thought that’s neutral. We can say something that’s virtuous, we can say something that’s non virtuous, and we can say something that’s neutral. And the same with our physical actions, we can do something neutral, we can do something positive, or we can do something negative. Every action we do of all of these three things is either creating a situation where we experience suffering or a situation where we experience happiness. Action that we do is either a cause for us to experience happiness or suffering, dependent on whether it is positive or negative, or whether it’s a virtuous action or a negative action.
And in fact, the definition of whether something is a virtuous or a non virtuous action is dependent on its result. If something causes us to experience happiness, then we say that it’s a virtuous or positive action. If something causes us to experience suffering, then we say that it’s a negative or non virtuous action. That’s how we define whether something’s virtuous or not virtuous. Actions that we do that are positive, if they’re done with the intention of achieving a positive rebirth or whether they’re done with the intention of achieving liberation or whether they’re done with the intention of achieving Buddhahood, they last until that action has been accomplished.
So all of these things can be positive. Whether it’s done with the intention of a positive action can lead to being reborn in one of the higher realms of a God, human or a demigod. In itself, that action is a cause for being born in that. If all of the actions have been completed in a positive way, then this will come about. Negative action, on the other hand, is a cause for us be reborn in a negative realm, either a hell being, a ghost, or an animal.
Then, after we’ve been born there, we experience the sufferings that are associated with those with those realms. Any one single action is a cause for an experience of suffering or happiness, if it was in a vacuum,