Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of a burning house to convey genuine renunciation, Geshe Pema Tsering closes his series on the Four Noble Truths in this 45-minute session. He explains nirvana as a permanent happiness beyond impermanence, then maps the Fourth Noble Truth across the three vehicles: hearers, solitary realizers, and bodhisattvas. The hearer’s path is traced step by step — renouncing the lower realms, then all of saṃsāra, progressing through the paths of accumulation and preparation, developing direct insight into selflessness via meditation on impermanence, and finally attaining liberation through the path of familiarization. A Q&A covers the ethics of leaving family to pursue renunciation, karma as an entry point for beginners, and how the Eightfold Noble Path fits within the Tibetan Lamrim framework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 4NT 2003 09 01.mp3
UUID: b4b8ab10-ce34-43d5-8b8f-053de88634a4
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB The four noble truths (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-09-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~4,004
Completely gotten rid of all of that, then we have the actual cessation of suffering, we have actual nirvana. And this nirvana liberation or cessation of suffering is a glimpse into the it’s it’s like an ultimate happiness. It’s a glimpse into ultimate truth, and it’s an ultimate happiness. The other ones are only a temporary state of affair. Okay.
So this truth of cessation, this nirvana or cessation, sorry, or liberation, whatever it’s called, only comes about when we have completely gotten rid of all of those afflictive emotions that we were talking about before. Not only have we gotten rid of them, we’ve gotten rid of the causes for those to come about, the seeds of those, the patterns of those, the imprints of those that we have on our mind stream so that they will never ever come back. Once we’ve done that, then we have achieved this liberation. And this liberation guarantees that we will never experience any kind of suffering ever again. So the happiness that we experience in that state, joy that we experience in that state isn’t something that is bound by impermanence, isn’t something that is bound by disintegration, it’s something that doesn’t go away and the suffering never comes back so that’s that’s the truth of the truth of cessation what we need to do in order to get there is described in the fourth noble truth which is the truth is the path.
And this explains to us how to get rid of all these afflictive emotions that we have that cause the suffering. The actual truth of the path is usually described as what’s called the five paths of the four vehicles three vehicles. Just made one up. So the five paths of the three vehicles. Now within those five paths of the three vehicles, if we’re talking about the actual truth of the path, then we have to talk about only the the the paths that come after the realization of the true nature of reality.
So there’s the first type of vehicle is called the vehicle of the hearers. That’s the people that listen to the teachings and follow the teachings of Buddhas towards individual liberation. The second path is the path of the solitary realizers who in their final lifetime spend all their time meditating by their selves and develop realizations that way. The third path is the path of the bodhisattva, one who puts off their own enlightenment in order to benefit of all sentient beings. Now in all three of these paths, there is this path of insight of understanding reality directly.
This path of insight where people and reality is understood directly varies in the three different paths, but they’re all called supreme paths or Ārya paths or paths of the supreme beings. So once this insight into reality is directly experienced, then that path that that being is on, once that path is actually a type of of practice, then practice that that being is engaged in, that way of thinking they’re engaged in, is the truth of the path. And so the truth of the path then is divided into three for each of the three vehicles. There’s the path of insight, the path of meditation or familiarization, and the path of no more learning or Buddhahood or or enlightenment, depending on which path you’re on. Which vehicle?
Sorry. Okay. So if we’re talking about, for example, the the paths the path the different paths that the path of the hearer progresses through, then they’re before they have this understanding of insight, understanding into the true nature of reality, then there’s two previous paths that they must have accomplished. They are called the path of accumulation and the path of preparation. If they haven’t, first of all, accumulated a lot of merit on the path of accumulation and then done practices leading towards insight on the path of preparation.
They can’t have this understanding of emptiness. In order for someone to enter the path or develop the mind of the path of accumulation in the hearer’s vehicle. This is the the Hīnayāna vehicle. The first of the Hīnayāna vehicles. Then a being needs to develop an unfabricated naturally arising renunciation.
So that means completely turning their mind away from all everything in saṃsāra. So we’re talking about the Hīnayāna path here, the path of the the hearers, the followers of the Buddhas. Now they in order to develop this renunciation, it was working backwards from from their liberation. Right? So before liberation, needed to have insight into reality.
Before developing insight in reality, they need to develop this renunciation, completely turning away from from samsaric activity and saṃsāra in general. Then before that they need to develop this renunciation towards the lower realm. So that means renouncing or turning away from any of the causes that may lead them into the lower realm. So that means renouncing all negative actions. Once they’ve renounced that, then they see all the faults of saṃsāra in its entirety and are no longer attached to the upper realms of saṃsāra either.
So they develop renunciation towards that. That is the true renunciation, and this true renunciation acts as a cause for them to achieve liberation. Because they don’t have ties to saṃsāra, they work continually towards liberation, and liberation from suffering is the goal of the hearer’s vehicle. Renunciation of the lower realms. This renunciation of the suffering of suffering is actually quite easy for us to to develop because we don’t wanna go to hell.
We don’t wanna experience the suffering outright suffering. We don’t wanna experience the suffering of being born a spirit who can’t eat and drink. We don’t want to be born an animal. So developing renunciation towards these different states is relatively easy. And it’s something that if we think about it, then it’s fairly easy for us to develop.
So this next one’s a bit harder though. The next one is just developing renunciation towards the whole of saṃsāra. And this renunciation isn’t just a general idea that I don’t like Samsāra very much. It’s seeing Samsāra as being like a burning house that we absolutely have to get out of. We don’t want to stay in a house that’s burning down.
We have this intense desire to get out of it. Now once we start seeing Samsāra in the same manner, that’s when we develop this renunciation. This doesn’t just mean the sufferings, the outright suffering of Samsāra. It means all the pleasurable aspects of saṃsāra. It means all of the negative emotions that we were talking about earlier.
It means all the negative karma that we can create. So if we have this sense that all of that, all of the phenomenon that are included within saṃsāra, is like this burning house that we absolutely have to get out of, that’s when we develop renunciation or true renunciation from the whole of Sansara. And it’s not as easy to do as developing renunciation for the lower realms. Especially because we don’t understand that two types of suffering, suffering of change, you know, pervasive suffering are actually suffering. We see them as being happiness.
So it’s very difficult for us to turn our mind away from these things. This this is not the way that we usually look at things. We usually look at the suffering of the suffering of change and or pervasive suffering as being something that we should seek after that something that we consider to be happiness or pleasurable and we should be trying to get rather than trying to turn our backs to trying to turn our backs on but if we watch it if we if we start examining then we can understand that in actual fact the suffering of change is nothing but suffering and all pervasive suffering is nothing but suffering we just have to put in the effort we have to put in the the in the the effort in order to analyze, in order to be able to see things in this way. So in order to achieve liberation, then we have to develop this renunciation. And what renunciation does is sees that every aspect of saṃsāra, whether it’s the happiness of saṃsāra or the suffering of saṃsāra, all the phenomenon within saṃsāra are things to be abandoned.
They’re things to be chucked out that we don’t we don’t need in order to be happy, things that we need to get rid of. This mind that this mind that understands that all samsaric phenomena are things to be abandoned, that we don’t need any of them. They don’t help us to experience true happiness. They only cause us suffering. His mind that completely turns away from those and focuses single pointedly on renunciate on sorry, on liberation is called the mind of renunciation.
When we’ve developed this mind, that’s the mind of the mind of renunciation, the way of thinking that is renunciation. Once we’ve developed that idea, that that’s when we enter the first of the paths, the path of accumulation in the hearer’s vehicle. So the beings on this path Okay. So we’re talking Right. Okay.
Now these beings are beings that are on a Hīnayāna path, which means that they are only seeking their own enlightenment and not in order to benefit all sentient beings. So they’ve developed this mind of renunciation which is leading them towards towards liberation. In order to develop in order to achieve complete liberation or in order get completely rid of the afflictive emotions that we were talking about earlier, then they need to develop an idea of selflessness. When we were talking about the four different aspects of the first Noble Truth or the truth of suffering, then we said that this first Noble Truth had the characteristics of being misery, it had the characteristics of being impermanent, had the characteristic of being selfless, and it had the characteristic of being empty. In order for these beings that are trying to achieve liberation for themselves to achieve liberation, then they need to understand this third one, selflessness.
They need to understand selflessness in order to get rid of ignorance, which is the root of all the afflictive emotions. In In order for them to develop this understanding of selflessness, they first of all have to focus on the first aspect or the first characteristic of suffering, which is this idea of impermanence. Now, they don’t need to just understand the gross aspect of the impermanence, which is the death of all things, but they need to understand the subtle impermanence of all objects, which is that in every moment they exist in dependence on the previous moment or the previous cause for that existent moment. In every single moment there is arising, abiding and disintegration. Nothing is in a constant stream.
Everything is in a constant state of arising in degeneration. Once they understand that, so something exists in dependence on the cause of the previous moment of that thing and see that directly, then they realized impermanence, and impermanence will stop them grasping at the inherent existence, the continuing existence of things. So once they’ve understood that things don’t exist in continuous solid aspect or in a continuous solid way and that they do come into being and disintegrate like this, they’ll cease to grasp at the idea of the self of things. They’ll cease to think of things as being solidly as having some sort of solid sense of self, whether it’s a self of phenomena or the self of an individual. This this this practice that they’re doing of meditating on impermanence and then developing an understanding of selflessness comes about while they’re on these two paths that we talked about before the path of accumulation and the path of preparation.
These states of mind that these beings have are called the path of accumulation the path of preparation once they develop this direct understanding of selflessness once they see clearly non conceptually this idea of selflessness that there is no inherent self in that in any object, then they enter the path of seeing or the path of insight. They have insight into the true nature of selflessness. So once they have developed this understanding of selflessness, they enter the path of insight. From the path of insight, they then enter what’s called the path of meditation. Now meditation also means the same thing as familiarization.
So they become so familiar with this idea of selflessness that they completely get rid of what’s called the afflictive obscurations. That’s the seeds of the seeds for negative afflictive emotions to develop. So they completely get rid of them. They’re so familiarized with the idea of selflessness that the seeds of afflictive emotions don’t develop into full blown afflictive emotions. Once they’ve completely got rid of that, it’s called the obscuration to liberation, then they attain liberation or they attain this state of nirvana.
Once they’ve developed insight into selflessness and they see that directly and non conceptually, that’s what’s called a truth of the path or an instance of the truth of the path. From that, they then develop this full blown liberation, which is getting rid of the seeds of obscurations as well through the path of meditation or familiarization, and then they come to the truth of cessation, which is this liberation. But, I forgot something, but that isn’t full blown Buddhahood. It isn’t enlightenment because the motivation for that action wasn’t to achieve enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings. It was to achieve liberation in order to cease suffering.
So they ceased to suffer, but they haven’t attained full enlightenment. Okay. So that achievement of liberation is from the point of view of the Hīnayāna or the lower scope of being is the end of the road, the end of the Four Noble Truths. So they started off understanding suffering, the origin of suffering. In order to develop cessation, which is the true end of the path, then they practice this truth of the path.
So that s gone through the whole of the Four Noble Truths. Explained it from the beginning to the end of that teaching. Then Geshe-la said, so that’s the end of the four noble truths. Did you understand? The the entire Buddhist path, the things that we need to abandon, the things that we need to practice, the phenomena that are included within nirvana, the phenomena that are included within Samsāra are all explained within the Four Noble Truths.
If we start with this idea of what it is we need to realize in terms of where we are and where we need to go, they’re all included within the four noble truths. So the four noble truths are considered an incredibly broad and incredibly sacred teaching. So even if all of this didn’t make sense to you, if you can take something away with you and have a rough outline of what the four noble truths are and how they work together then that will be of benefit to you. Oh yeah, let me try and I should have done. So if anyone has any questions.
Yeah. You’re married? Yeah? Oh, yeah. In renunciation, the point was merit and had children, he’s going to renounce and follow that path.
Uh-huh. How does Buddhism account for the hurt that that might cause to those who are left back in life? Uh-huh. Did everybody hear that? Yes?
No? Everyone? No? Yeah. If we’re developing renunciation, and and that means leaving family and children how does Buddhism account for the hurt that that would bring to those people I love it when he used my personal life as an example.
Okay, so first of all, you don’t have to go off and achieve liberation, achieve renunciation at this stage yeah it’s not something that is necessary for everybody to do at the same time if you can be like Buddha Śākyamūni and do that then that’s fantastic right but if you’re at that stage you wouldn’t be asking these questions yeah if you if someone has developed that understanding then they wouldn’t be worried about their what’s going to happen to their wife and child in the short term in terms of in terms of that they would be understanding the process of the accumulation of karma and would be more worried about their relatives, their partner and their children developing renunciation. Would be helping them to do that as opposed to worrying about providing benefit to them in the short term. Yes? So the you don’t have to do it, but if you did do it, you would help your partner or you would help your children more by becoming an arhat than you would by giving them by providing short term benefit to them in terms of food and clothing and everything like that. So and and and you’re not as not you wouldn’t be abandoning them in the sense that they wouldn’t have food.
They wouldn’t have clothes. They wouldn’t have some way to sleep alright if they if they didn’t have the essentials then that would be negative but if you’re leaving them in a situation where other people would look after them and if you’re going off to be some great arhat then or to be this realized being then you would have people looking after your children yeah or looking after your your partner so they wouldn’t be completely left behind like he said that if like Jackie who’s my partner if he went off and became an arhat then I would have food He’s like, See, would you have food? Would you have clothes? I was like, Yes. I don’t quite Anyway, so he’s like, You don’t have to worry about the basics.
They’d be there. Then at the same time, they to actually hold someone back from achieving that kind of realization is much more negative in the long term than having them feel left in the short term. Alright? Now there’s something else I’ve forgotten. But it doesn’t isn’t something that needs to be done instantly, but it’s much more broader scope in terms of the the the view of someone who’s who’s avail is able to achieve renunciation.
Their view is much broader than just thinking about short time consequences for for children and and and partners. And the other thing oh, that’s the other. Sorry. The other thing was and there’s no reason why they couldn’t become if you if you’re at that stage, there’s no reason why you couldn’t help them to become that realized as well. So he said the actual experience depends on the individual collection of karma of individuals.
Yeah? It’s not it’s not on whether they’re helping you or not in the short term. It’s about their collection of karma that’s more important. Right at the beginning it is best to focus on the idea of karma cause and effect because it’s not something for a start that is so foreign to our concepts. If we grew up in a Christian culture, but if we grew up in a Christian culture we have the idea of cause and result. We have the idea that if you do something good, then there is benefit.
If you do something negative, then there is a negative result. That’s a good thing to start with because it s not so foreign to us. So to think again and again about karma to try and meditate again and again on karma and how that works after developing idea of karma the next step is what’s called refuge now what refuge is is this idea that in order to not to experience suffering then we need to go to the place that can explain to us or do the practices we need to do that can explain to us how not to experience suffering and in Buddhism that’s described as the Three Jewels the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha so refuge is this idea of going towards something or seeking refuge in something that can stop you experiencing suffering whether you have refuge or not determines whether what you’re doing is a Buddhist practice and whether you are a Buddhist or not that’s the next step after meditating on karma and it’s how you enter the Buddhist path the closest thing that I was thinking about was the Eightfold Noble Path, the right speech. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. That’s basically the way to practice your living so that you you accumulate good karma because you’re living a good type of life, and then from then on, you can lead on to refuge from there. I’m not sure if it’s a different it s a different school. It s a different school. Was just trying to think about how to say.
It is in this school, but it’s described as one of the qualities of the mind of a Buddha and not necessarily the path. But I’ll I’ll ask anyway. Yeah. I’m trying to think of a way to ask. Yeah.
Okay. So in this tradition, they’re described as being eight aspects of the Buddha’s omniscient mind. Okay? You have to practice them once you’ve realized emptiness. So you are able to and actualize them once you realize the emptiness.
But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be trying to practice them now. Said they’re not given as the main essence of the path in this tradition. The main essence of the path in terms of developing renunciate in terms of achieving liberation is to develop renunciation and a view of emptiness. And in terms of achieving enlightenment, it’s to develop renunciation, bodhicitta, and the understanding of emptiness so they’re the main aspects as presented in the Tibetan Buddhist presentation of Buddhism but that doesn’t mean that they have discounted the Eightfold Noble Path it’s still there and it’s still something that should be practiced it’s just discussed in a different light. And I said it wrong as well.
I didn’t remember Tibetan. Anyway. Yeah. Obviously, are things that are important to do with the practice, but they’re not usually yeah. Describe that.
Yeah. It does to me whether it will to Geshe-la or not. It’s a different matter. It’s in another school of Tibetan Buddhism, so I’m just trying to think of I just have done a lot of stuff in a different tradition in Geshe-la and I always have these arguments about stuff. This is about one of them.
Say, Do you guys say this? It was like, can you see can you get a glimpse of emptiness because in this other tradition they have this idea that you do a lot of practice and then a teacher points out the nature of your mind to you and it’s a glimpse and they show you a glimpse of emptiness then once you’ve done that then you start practicing and then you develop a direct insight into emptiness and Geshe-la says yes they have it in their tradition and they say it’s pointing out your Buddha nature too and he said then and that Buddha nature is synonymous it that Buddha nature has as one of its aspects emptiness so it’s like the emptiness of your Buddha nature emptiness of the the nature of your mind and once you’ve done a lot of preparation and if you have the right connection with a teacher then they can point that out to you that aspect yeah and then so in some schools they call that the dharmakaya and Geshe-la and I said you don’t say but Geshe-la school they don’t so I said who says that and he said you said it so some schools they call it the dharmakaya and other schools they just say it’s the emptiness of the buddha nature Does that make sense?