Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 44-minute talk with the Buddha’s image of saṃsāra as sitting on the tip of a needle — a discomfort so pervasive we mistake it for ordinary comfort. He builds toward renunciation through three vivid analogies: a prison whose walls define our entire world, a house full of snakes, and a beggar unknowingly cooking over lumps of solid gold. He distinguishes the three types of suffering, focusing on all-pervasive suffering as karma-driven bondage we cannot escape by choice. The arc then rises to bodhicitta — the wish to reach enlightenment for the sake of all beings — and closes on precious human rebirth: why it is rarer than it appears, how quickly it is wasted, and its definition in terms of eight freedoms and ten endowments.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 MP 2003 05 27.mp3
UUID: d5612a34-11c9-404f-82cd-a1cd68408354
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Mind and its potential (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-05-27
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.8 minutes
Words: ~3,793
Buddha said, Śākyamūni Buddha said, sitting on the point of the needle of saṃsāra, there can be no pleasure. There can be no happiness. So what this means is that even though we think we may experience we may experience happiness in saṃsāra, the it isn’t really happiness. It’s just that we think that it’s happiness because once we’re we’re once we’re in saṃsāra, it’s like we’re sitting on the tip of a needle and that’s not comfortable.
So therefore, in a similar way, living in saṃsāra, if we think about it properly, shouldn’t be comfortable. So because we don’t know that saṃsāra is nothing but suffering, then we think that we have a lot of pleasurable experiences in saṃsāra. But unless we turn our mind away from this and start to understand the true nature of saṃsāra and how it’s all made up of different types of suffering, then we won’t develop a mind looking towards renunciation. We won’t develop a mind that wants to be free of saṃsāra. So in order for this to come about, we need to understand the true nature of saṃsāra and and look at it from a different perspective.
So Samsāra’s cyclic existence is a bit like if we were in a jail we’re in a jail. Right? And if we were in a jail and we knew what it was like outside the jail, and we weren’t really happy inside the jail because we knew the reality of our situation, then if we had the opportunity or if we could come up with a way to get out, we’d take it. We’d get take get out of jail. We’d do that.
We that would be the the natural thing we did. But if our understanding didn’t go beyond the walls of the prison, if we thought being inside the prison was a really happy place and that if we stayed there we’d continue to be happy, then we wouldn’t be looking for a way out of the prison. We’d be content with our lot in the prison. So this is a similar thing to Samsāra. We’re actually in a prison, in the prison of Samsāra.
But because we don’t have any understanding of outside Samsāra, then we don’t look for ways out of Samsāra. Yeah. The problem is that the cause for getting out of saṃsāra is a mind that wants to get out of saṃsāra. It’s developing a consciousness that wants to get out of saṃsāra. If we don’t want to get out of saṃsāra, we’re not going to get out of saṃsāra, so therefore we won’t experience going beyond suffering.
We’re trying to understand what saṃsāra is like. One way of looking at saṃsāra is that it’s like a house that’s full of snakes. We don’t particularly want to go and live in houses full of snakes. We don’t think, oh, I I wanna go move in there because there’s lots of snakes. It’s not something that comes up to it in our minds.
But we tend to do that with with Samsāra. We think, oh, I wanna stay here. So we should start thinking of it as being like a house, or that’s full of snakes, or like a prison that we’re trapped in. And by doing this, then we develop a mind that turns away from saṃsāra, that looks for a liberation, that looks to get out of saṃsāra. So Oh, it it sounds simple, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.
It’s actually very difficult for us to develop this idea to that we wanna get out of Samsāra. You know, Geshe says from his side, he doesn’t think about getting out of Samsāra that much. He thinks being a human is pretty alright. He he doesn’t spend he he tries to think about it, but he tends to spend a lot of time thinking that being a human is a good existence most of the time he’s happy and he has everything he needs. He has trouble seeing it as suffering even though he knows it is if he looks at it analytically.
He says he remembers that if he asked the cat, if he said, Now, are you happy? The cat will probably say, Yeah. I sleep. I get fed. I’m really happy.
But then if we had to live like a cat, we wouldn’t really think that that was the best way to be living. We wouldn’t get that much satisfaction from it. So it depends on our perspectives. And gods or people in the god realms look at us and go, man, I don’t wanna live like that. So in Tibetan cosmology or in the way that they set up the universe, there’s a a level of being that’s higher than us called the god realms.
And in the god realms, the beings there live for five thousand years, and they live in complete bliss and happiness. And then and they don’t experience much suffering. So then there’s us, and we live for a hundred years, and we experience some suffering and some happiness. But if we think about it and we start getting attached to the happy moments, then we get trapped into this idea of being reborn. But we’ve got to remember that even if we were, like, as happy as we possibly could be, and that lasted for all of one hundred years or for a couple of ten thousand years or so in the God Realms, at some stage it has to end, it has to come to a, it has to cease to be, and we have to die.
So there’s there’s no absolute escape from suffering. There’s no, true happiness to be had in this cyclic existence going from rebirth to rebirth. So when we divide suffering, we usually divide suffering into three. There’s the suffering of suffering, the suffering of change, and all pervasive suffering. Now for us to understand all pervasive suffering, which is as it says it pervades our very existence, is very difficult.
If we start with trying to understand suffering of suffering, that’s a little bit easier. All people can understand the suffering of suffering. Suffering of suffering is when we have disease, when we have illness, when we have death, when we lose people that we care about, when we are separated from anything that we desire or want, then we have suffering of suffering. It’s very difficult for us to try and understand this other one that we’re talking about, all pervasive suffering. All pervasive suffering is actually a different way of saying saṃsāra, and what this means is because we have negative karma and delusive thoughts in our mind, then we are propelled from life to life through saṃsāra, through cyclic existence without any control over that, and that by its very nature is a type of suffering.
So it’s almost the same thing if we say pervasive suffering or we say saṃsāra, but it gives us a different perspective on it. We get to look at it from a different angle. So we’re almost like slaves or or servants to our karma and these delusive thought patterns or mind states, and we end up getting thrown from to life because of those. If we think about this, we can actually see it because if it was our choice, if we actually did have independence and we did have our own autonomy, then we wouldn’t suffer. We wouldn’t get old.
We wouldn’t die. We wouldn’t have anything. We wouldn’t not have something we wanted. So we can see that we don’t actually have independence when it comes to these things if we think about it and we can understand that there has to be something propelling this. And that is the karma and the afflictive emotions or afflictive states of mind that we have.
So if we do good things, then good things come up, but we get, we get a positive or happy existence is coming back to us. If we do positive things now, we experience happiness in the future. Likewise, because we’ve done negative things in the past and created negative karma, then we experience suffering in the present time and in our lives. We experience illness. We experience death finally.
We lose things. We hold dear. This all comes about because we did negative things in the past. But it’s not something that we actually experience by choice the results of this suffering. If we could have it our own way, stay like Geshe-la said he’d stay like he was fifty years ago and and then we’d stay happy like that for, say, fifty years, really happy and and and not experiencing any suffering at all, and we wouldn’t let it change.
But this doesn’t happen because we have to experience the consequences of our previous actions and our previous negative the previous negative karma we’ve accumulated. So this is what Buddha meant when he said that abiding in saṃsāra, there was no happiness because it was like sitting on the on the point of a needle. It was that that if we’re in saṃsāra, we’re underneath the power of karma and delusion, and therefore we can’t expect to experience anything but the results of our negative actions in terms of suffering. The way that we get rid of suffering is to get rid of negative activity, get rid of negative karma. So we need to learn how to do that, how to get rid of negative karma, because if we do that, then we only experience happiness.
Okay. So if we don’t have the if we don’t create the causes because we don’t have the delusive thoughts, if we don’t create the causes to be reborn into saṃsāra again in the next life, that’s when saṃsāra ends, where we’re no longer in cyclic existence and we don’t have the causes to be reborn into suffering again. But in order to do that, need we need to know how to do that. We need to know that that depends on getting rid of the karma and delusions, and so therefore we need to work on getting rid of our karma and delusions. If we don’t know how to do that, if we don’t know which path to take to do that, then we may think, oh, we I’d like to be out of Samsāra, but I don’t really know how.
Once we start thinking like that, then we will also think that it’s not alright for us to just us to experience happiness and be free from suffering. We can’t be just doing something for ourselves. We should be trying to do it for all other beings because there’s no being in existence that hasn’t in some past lifetime been our mother or father or someone who’s been kind to us. So we can’t leave them suffering as well. Have to try and do something in order to help them not suffer.
So what the best thing that we can do in order to help them not suffer is to become a fully enlightened Buddha and be able to show them how they can stop suffering. So therefore, this thought comes up in our mind. May I, may I achieve enlightenment so I can be of best benefit to all sentient beings? And this is something that we really have to, think about and look at. Possible so I can try and establish all beings in happiness and try and separate them from suffering.
This thought that may I become a being in order to be a benefit to all these beings, that thought is called bodhicitta, and that’s the thought that we should try and meditate on. Yeah. So so we should try and thought fine. Meditate on that thought now. Sometimes I have trouble when Geshe-la spits out really fast ancient texts at me in Tibetan and still.
Alright. Okay. There’s a text by that’s the smallest of the three Lamrim texts he says he wrote. And in there somewhere is, a quote that says something like, because I’m just translating it on the spot, which is a bit difficult, The mind that seeks for liberation is like a wish fulfilling gem. Yeah?
A wish fulfilling gem. It fulfills all your wishes. Its base is precious human rebirth, but the precious human rebirth is difficult to find and easy to lose. It’s like a flash of lightning in the dark. If you think like this, then you won’t you won’t chase after worldly things.
You will see the worldly things as being like a snake skin. The snake moves on from its skin all the time and leaves it behind and doesn’t concentrate on the skin, And you will try and develop your mind. This is what will become the cause for you to seek for liberation and enlightenment. And at the end, he says, I, the yogi, have practiced like this. Those who seek enlightenment should also do so.
So, you know, this mind that’s looking for enlightenment is one of the most precious things that we can actually ever find in in any existence. So if we have a base for being able to use that, then we should try and use it as to the best of our ability Actually, being born into a human existence and having all the qualities we need in order to strive for this is something that doesn’t happen very often. We had to do something very special to get here in the first place, and actually losing it is a very easy thing to do. So we should be trying to remember that in order for us to get this life, we had to have done something very, very special in the past. It is something that’s cause is very difficult to attain.
It’s very difficult to do to develop a cause for getting a precious human rebirth. Once you have it, it’s also very easy to lose it. It’s and then once you’ve lost it, to regain a precious human rebirth is very difficult. So what this should bring to mind is that we should use every moment of our precious human rebirth in order to to benefit ourselves and to work towards liberation. Otherwise, we’re wasting it.
And we tend to think of our life as being a fairly long thing. But if we think about it, then we’re only here for a hundred years. And if we compare a hundred years to beginningless time, then a hundred years becomes like a flash of lightning. It’s not in the dark. It’s not something that lasts a very long time.
So we we’ve only got this a certain amount of time to have, so we should be using it. That’s that’s what they mean by it’s like a flash of lightning in the dark. So if we start thinking like Right. So, if we start thinking in this way, then we will start thinking about all the stuff that we have in this life our body, our possessions, all the things that we’ve accrued, and when you start looking at them differently, we’ll start to see that they actually don’t hold that much importance because when we die we can’t take any of them with us and if we’re only here for a very short, what amounts to a very short amount of time, then there’s not much point placing a lot of emphasis or a lot of importance to something that we have to leave in a few years and therefore we we should start to see our body and our things and our possessions as like a a snake skin, as something that can be discarded and doesn’t hold the essence of anything. Because these things don’t actually hold the essence of anything, they can’t, help us ultimately.
Ultimately, the only thing that can help us, especially when we die, is our practice of Dharma or our spiritual practice. Everything else we do, is only for this life, and therefore its its its meaning is very short, and its meaning is very superficial or fleeting. It’s a better word. Its meaning is very fleeting, and we need to turn our mind away from that kind of thing. So the last part he says is basically very straightforward, where Milarepa says, I have practiced like this, so if and I have become like a yogi.
So if you want to become like a yogi and have this experience, then you have to practice the same way I have. So there’s three different ways that we should think be thinking about the precious human rebirth and how difficult it is to get and how easy it is lose. The first one is by the nature of life and how fleeting life is when we compare it to existence since beginningless time. The second one is about how easy it is to lose a precious human existence and how difficult it is to find it if we think about it from that way. The third way to think about it is by example, and the example that’s used is not mentioned yet.
Okay. That’s coming. Yeah. So the last one is an example. Yeah.
Okay. So the first thing we need to do is to find out actually what a precious human rebirth is. And a precious human rebirth is described as something that has eight freedoms and ten endowments. So if we do if we focus on that first, then if we move on to how easy it is to lose and how difficult it is to find later, then we understand what it is we’re actually losing or what it is we’re actually winning. So the first thing trying to understand the nature of a precious human rebirth.
So not knowing how precious a precious human rebirth is is a bit like being a beggar and a beggar who’s on the side of the road, and they’ve put up a little, like, they’ve made a stove for themselves, and they’ve got, an aluminium pot, and they’ve got these three rocks underneath the aluminium pot, and that’s how they’ve set up the stove. And they’re trying to boil the water just so they have some warmth, but they have nothing to eat. But actually, each of these rocks is gold, and inside the inside the rocks is all this gold that they could use. But because they don’t realize it’s gold, then there’s still a beggar standing on the side of the road boiling up water. So that’s like that’s the kind of the example for us not recognizing how precious our human rebirth is.
So so if if the beggar was able to find out that inside those rocks was a whole bunch of gold, then he would get the gold, he would use the gold, and he would be much happier. And it’s the same with us. If we recognize that our our existence now is is very precious, and we can use it to actually attain liberation and Buddhahood, then we are really taking the the wealth out of our life instead of not realizing it’s there. So the next thing we have to realize is the cause for attaining a precious human rebirth. And the thing to think about in this is how rare attaining the cause for a precious human rebirth is.
Not all humans have a precious human rebirth. There’s a lot of humans, but not all of them have the right conditions to be able to practice, to do spiritual practice and to develop themselves. So we can’t say that all humans actually have a precious human rebirth. And on top of that, in terms of the way beings are or the way they live, there are more beings living in the hells than in the spirit world. There are more beings living in the spirit world than in the animal world, and there are more beings living in the animal world than in the human world.
So it it goes in a descending order as we go upwards. So there’s many more beings in the other realms than there are there is in the human realm. So it’s like there was a man from Mongolia who came to Tibet, and he was explaining he was trying to explain a precious human rebirth to someone else. And he was saying, if you wanna know how precious how rare a precious human rebirth is, you should go to China, because if you go to China, then you’ll see how many people there are and how hardly any of them actually have the opportunity to to do practice or anything like that. So it’s easy for you to sit here and not think that he was saying to the his student, it’s easy for you to sit here and not think that you’re in a privileged position.
But if you just went into China for a trip, then you could see how privileged your position is. So Geshe-la thinks it might be easy to think that way in Adelaide as well because there isn’t that many people, and the people that are here have a relatively good existence. So we may not be thinking about, all the different people that are in other places because there isn’t even that many people in the whole of the country, let alone in Adelaide where there’s even less. So we may have a a bit of a distorted idea about how how millions of other people are actually living. So they so a precious human rebirth is a a rebirth that is endowed with eight what are called eight freedoms or eight leisures and ten endowments or ten things going for them.
So it’s sometimes translated as freedoms or leisure, but it’s in this in a real sense of leisure being time to do things, like leisure time or an experience of of not being rushed or or or have your time eaten away by mere survival. So because of this, it’s said that there are four freedoms and ten endowments of time that are associated with not like, you’re you’re free from not being other types of beings, and you’re also free from certain situations as a human. So there are four of each. Yeah. So the four freedoms in which you are free from being a nonhuman, the freedom from being born in hell, freedom from being born as a spirit, freedom from being born as an animal, and freedom from being born as a long life god.