Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute commentary, Geshe Pema Tsering opens with a Jātaka story: the Buddha, as a ship’s captain, uses clairvoyant perception to recognize that one merchant plans to murder 499 others, then kills the would-be killer himself — demonstrating how purely compassionate motivation can transform even a violent act into positive karma. He then unpacks verse six of the Thought Transformation text: those who harm us after we have helped them should be viewed as excellent spiritual guides, because only enemies give us genuine chances to practice patience. A lively Q&A applies this framework directly, including a pointed comparison with the Iraq War — explaining why actions rooted in self-preservation are self-cherishing and fundamentally unlike the bodhisattva’s example.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 TT 2004 08 24.mp3
UUID: 216493d3-c158-4b45-a7fb-ec496d747a11
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Thought Transformation (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-08-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~2,769
An example of how we can behave wrongly is given from the previous life stories of the Buddha. In one of his previous lives, the Buddha was born as a ship’s captain, who was, called the great compassionate one. Now when he was born in this lifetime, he used to take, traders on his ship from one port to another port and back again. And while he was taking the traders on his ship, they would carry all of their wares, all of their merchandise with them. Now on one of these trips, the previous incarnation of the Buddha Śākyamūni, actually, through his clairvoyant perception, understood that one person on his ship, one trader on his ship intended to kill all of the other four hundred and ninety nine traders on the boat in order to take their goods.
So he could become rich from selling all of their goods. Previous incarnation of the Buddha tried to dissuade this man from doing this, from killing all of these people, again and again with many different means. This person was so powerful and bent on destruction that he couldn’t stop him or change his mind about this course of action that he was going to undertake. So when the Buddha realized that he wasn’t able to stop him from killing all of these people, he developed a very strong compassion. He developed very strong compassion to the four hundred and ninety nine merchants that were going to lose their life and also for the man himself who had who was about to accumulate the negative karma of killing four hundred and ninety nine people.
So given this this compassion that the Buddha previous developed for all of the beings concerned, he then thought, Well, if this man kills four ninety nine people, not only are the four ninety nine people going to die, but also he is going to have to experience the karmic repercussions of killing massive amounts of people, which will be horrendous, so everyone would experience extreme suffering because of his act. He then thought that if he was to take on the negative action of killing this one person, then that person wouldn’t accumulate this negative karma, and the people wouldn’t die, and he wasn’t so much worried about what happened to himself. He thought he would take on the negative karma of killing in this way if it would prevent such a tragedy occurring. So even though the Buddha performed a the previous negative action, the negative action of killing, and that was a negative karmic action for him to perform, which had negative karmic consequences. His motivation for performing this action was so pure that the positive repercussions or the positive outcome of that action outweighed the negative act of killing immensely.
So it was it became a very positive action because of the motivation. This kind of selfless action where the Buddha purposely decided to take on the negative karma of killing one person in order to save and help that many other people is part of the practice, the appropriate practice for those seeking to undertake the path of the bodhisattva. So the next verse, verse number six, says, when one whom I have benefited with great hope unreasonably hurts me very badly, I will learn to view that person as an excellent spiritual guide. When one whom I have benefited with great hope, this refers to people that we have tried to, out of compassion and loving kindness, work in order to help. We’ve put in a lot of hard work or a lot of effort or expended a lot of energy, in order to benefit these people.
If they then turn around for no reason, because of their afflictive emotions, because of their non understanding of the situation, are harmful to us, hurt us either physically or mentally, or steal from us or whatever it is that they do, then because of the opportunity, the unique opportunity that they have given us to practice compassion, then we should see them as being like an excellent spiritual guide, an excellent teacher. Now the normal situation we would expect to happen is that if we show someone else great kindness and we benefit them in many different ways, then we would probably expect them to be polite to us at the least and more likely repay their kindness in one way or another. But if they are not polite, they don’t realise our kindness and their behavior towards us is rough and unhelpful and harmful, then this goes against what we would normally think the what what what we would think would should normally happen. And we should we may end up feeling very sorely disappointed in these people and hurt by their actions. However, if we are practicing mind training, we should be happy about this situation, because if we’re practicing mind training, then this rebuff to our previous positive actions gives us an amazing opportunity, more than any other, to practice patience.
The person that behaved like an enemy towards us, by doing so, has given us a better opportunity than anyone else could have to practice patience. This is explained in Śāntideva’s Engaging in the Bodhisattva’s Deeds. Now the reason that we should see these in the sorry. First of all, in Engaging in the Bodhisattva’s Deeds, Śāntideva goes into great detail about how an enemy is actually one of our best teachers. Now the reason he says this is because our Dharma teachers are the people that are teaching us about Buddhism.
They may actually explain to us what patience is and how we should practice patience, but they don’t give us opportunities to practice patience. So the only people we can actually practice patience with are our enemies, are people that make us very angry. Our teachers don’t do this. They may show up late for things, but they’re not going to make us really angry. Teachers can explain to us how to practice patience, they don’t very often give us opportunities to practice patience.
So if we want to practice patience, we need to find someone we we need to have contact with someone who would actually make us angry, then we can actually practice patience. In order for us to develop compassion and loving kindness, we need to have a very good practice of patience. And if we’re going to have patience, we need to practice patience. Therefore, if we’re just surrounded by people who are beneficial and kind to us all the time, we don’t have very much hope of developing patience. In order for us to develop patience, we need to experience people who annoy us or are our enemies or behave hurtfully towards us.
In fact, they end up being our best teachers in this instance. In this way, they have shown us an amazing kindness by giving us this opportunity to practice patience, to to develop patience. Oh, yeah. So we can finish that and have to take the other. Oh, I’m And we can You might even.
Oh, we can finish next week. Questions while he’s drinking his tea, he’d be happy to answer them. Yes. I can see you. Okay.
In actual fact, in most situations, if you practice giving the virtue to giving the victory to others, you will you are more likely to stop them performing negative actions than if you yell back at them. If you are able to practice patience and compassion towards them and not react from a sense of self-cherishing to whatever they’re saying, then that is going to be much more likely to stop them than if you start telling them to shut up or whatever. So if you can be very patient with them and think, this is their victory. Other thing is to they’re doing something negative, and you can practice on them and take on their suffering, take on their negative action as well. If you behave in this way and think, please may it not ripen on them in terms of negative consequences, May they develop compassion.
If you have these thoughts towards them, then that’s much more likely to dissipate their negative behavior than by reacting. Yeah. I can’t see, but I believe you’d yeah? Just Can I just like to say? Yep.
I can hear you. Okay. The first thing, the Buddha’s responsibility and the bodhisattva well, the in this instance, he was a bodhisattva, not a Buddha. But the Buddha’s responsibility and all Bodhisattva’s responsibilities in this situation and all other situations is to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. So every action that they perform has to come that motivation.
It can’t have any taint of self-cherishing or self benefit within it. Also because of the Buddha’s perception, he was able to see all of the outcomes from this action understand how this action would be contained and so on. Now this sets it apart from the the situation in Iraq and other places at the moment because, for example for for starters, the unless the world leaders have this kind of perception that the Buddha did, then they they can’t read the minds of other people, and they can’t say exactly what they’re going to do. The other thing is that they may be saying we are we invaded Iraq and we did these things because we wanna benefit people. We wanna stop people from dying, and we made we we wanted to free the Iraqi people.
They may have had this as this may have been what they were giving lip service towards, but it would be very difficult for anyone who is in those situations to not be doing those actions without some kind of personal some sense of personal gain involved. There had something in it for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have done it. If they could do it solely for the benefit of others, solely for the benefit of another being, and with the psychic ability to understand what the consequences of that action would be, then it would be okay. If you have any doubts about what the consequences are, if you have any lack of knowledge as to what the consequences are and any doubts about your motivation, then you shouldn’t do anything like this. So it’s very difficult.
It’s it’s it’s very difficult to be able to behave in the same way as the Buddha did in this instance if you have any self grasping in your mind stream, if you have any sense of self-cherishing in your mind stream. And if you even think about what these people were saying before they invaded Iraq, it wasn’t the same as what the Buddha was talking about here. He was taking on he took on suffering for himself in order to help others. They were saying things like, these people have weapons that can harm us. We need to neutralize those weapons so we won’t get harmed.
And so it was all about us getting harmed. And if it’s about if you’re going to hurt someone in order to stop yourself getting harmed, then that’s self-cherishing. And anything that you do from a motivation of self-cherishing is a negative action. Yep. Yeah.
Unless anyone else is gonna I mean, if if if the whole story turns on Okay. So from my understanding, there’s actually two questions in that. The first one was if it’s a Bodhisattva has a perception that someone has a clairvoyant perception that one person is gonna kill another person, only one other person. Right? And they kill that person in order to stop them killing the other person and by doing so take on the negative action of killing in order to save that person from experiencing that.
Is that okay? And Geshe-la says, of course. It’s the same principle. They’re taking on someone else’s suffering. They’re happy about suffering for others because they’re working for the benefit of others.
So it’s the same principle. That’s the first one. And then the second part, it was like, what are we supposed to take from this story? Yeah? Was said, well, it’s an example.
You may he said, not only do you not have clairvoyance, but you’re hardly likely to be on a boat with five hundred merchants and have the clairvoyance to perceive that someone was killing someone else. Yeah? But you may have you may be in situations where someone is behaving rudely, where someone is is is is going to be do something negative to someone else and you have the ability to stop them. Yeah? And then you can think, oh, just like the Buddha behaved in this previous story, then I can behave like that now because I can see what the outcome of this is going to be even without clairvoyance.
And if I stop this person, then that will be beneficial to them. Yeah. Ain’t it?
Everyone hear that? How how are they gonna kill four hundred ninety nine people? You know, you start killing one person, everybody else would know. Right? He thinks he would have sunk the boat and I and kept it.
There was, like, and kept it. He said he must have had a way even if it was poison. Yeah. For yeah. He said they didn’t have bombs in those days, and he couldn’t but he they there were different weapons that they could have used, like poison and so on, to kill people.
Okay. Yes? Yeah. One more. Sorry?
Discriminate. What do we need to do to develop better discrimination for ourselves? Yes. Discriminate. Oh.
Better understanding? Better. Bit better. This is that. This is it.
This is that. Or? Discernment. Discernment as in I’m not Can you give me an example so I know so Yeah. Yeah.
To to broaden capacity. Is that one of the, you know, important key element here? Getting rid getting rid of self-cherishing? Yeah. Is that a Okay.
Cherishing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I think I’ve got that. Okay. The way that you develop better discernment is through habits, through training your mind to do certain things, then your mind is easier is more easily able to do them. Now, once you get rid of self-cherishing, what you’re left with is other cherishing. Those two are the two opposites.
So, you either cherishing your own situation or cherishing all sentient beings. They’re not directly related to discrimination or discernment. So the discernment through habit and the opposite of self-cherishing is through other cherishing. Broad. Is this broad?
Yeah. Yeah. Wide. Yeah. So if we’re focusing on others instead of ourselves, everything improves.
Yeah? Alright. But not specifically determined, everything improves. If we are focusing on others instead of ourselves, we are creating a lot of positive karma. This means that all of our qualities improve exponentially.
This means that have, any of our ways of thinking and so on, increases vastly. Okay. By lower scope, do you mean a Hīnayāna practitioner, or do you mean a person who because the technical definition of a lower scope is one who is striving to achieve a positive rebirth. Yeah. Which one do you mean?
Do you mean a Hīnayāna practitioner or someone who’s trying to get a good rebirth? Higher rebirth. Higher rebirth person. Okay. Okay.
From the point of view of someone of the lowest scope, they’re not focused on this lifetime, so fighting to defend your country is not okay. Talking to defend your country is. So what you need to do is develop discussions and try and find some kind of reconciliation between the two different elements. If you go to war, then you kill many people, and this is a heavily negative action. So that doesn’t help anyone in that situation.
Talking through things and trying to develop a dialogue with the other people will be beneficial to Yeah? Doesn’t make any sense because you can’t stop people from invading who are gonna kill you by killing people. Because you’re stopping killing by killing, that doesn’t make any sense. You’re there’s still killing happening. So the whole purpose of this idea whole idea of this is my country.
I’m defending my country. I need to defend my situation. My people is all self-cherishing. No. It wasn’t good.
He said not only was it not helpful no. No. What not only was it no good, it was pointless. And it and then it came from the point of view of self.