Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the classic debate examples of rabbit horns and skyflowers, Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 44-minute commentary with a foundational logical rule: anything that exists must be either singular or plural — there is no third option. He then applies this framework to expose the incoherence of an inherently existent self, arguing it cannot be separate from the aggregates (nothing remains once mind and body are removed) and cannot be identical to them (the aggregates are plural, yet the self appears singular). A Q&A section addresses what selflessness means for the mind stream, including why transformation toward Buddhahood is only possible because the self is not fixed and permanent. Geshe-la closes by explaining why beginners should start with the selflessness of persons — it is ever-present, easier to establish than the selflessness of phenomena, and goes directly to the root of self-grasping and samsaric suffering.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 TT 2004 10 12.mp3
UUID: 6776a626-d8d2-40ff-9dc9-0a254a53f8e4
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB Thought Transformation (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-10-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.2 minutes
Words: ~3,685
So this is the only two ways this self that we think inherently exists can actually exist. It can only exist as being either one with the aggregates, one with the groups of things that make us up, or separate from the aggregates. There’s no other third way that it can exist. It’s either with the aggregates or separate from the aggregates. The other thing about phenomena is that they can only exist as being singular or plural.
So if something exists, if we can establish that something exists, we have to say that it is either one thing or it is a collection of things. Alright? We can’t say that there’s another way that it can exist. It either has to be singular or plural. Alright?
And so, for example, these are the favorite examples from debate. Horns of a rabbit don’t exist. So they one of the reasons they don’t exist is because they’re not singular, and they’re not plural. That’s the logical way to establish their nonexistence. Or skyflowers.
You can’t say skyflowers. That they’re the two classic examples. Skyflowers exist as a singular entity or as a plural entity because they don’t exist as either. So if you can establish something as existing, you can either establish it as existing as one or plural. There is no other way that it can exist.
Okay. So we have the self of person can either be posited as being something separate from the aggregates or something that’s the same as the aggregates, and we also have to remember that if things are going to be posited as being existent, they either have to be singular or plural. Now we can’t posit the self as being separate from the aggregates because then there is nothing to posited on. There is there is no self if we take away our mind and body. There is nothing else that we can posit as a self.
So therefore, it cannot be separate from the aggregates because there’s nothing deposited on. We can’t say that is self if there’s nothing there to say that it is self. And so it also can’t be the same as the aggregates because the aggregates are just that, aggregates. They are plural. And the self that we perceive is singular.
So because it can’t be separate from the aggregates and because the aggregates are combination, they’re a group of things, Then the self that we’re positing is neither singular nor a collection of aggregates. Here are are you looking at aggregates? Yeah. Like a collection of things. Yeah.
It’s just the technical more technical, but collection, group of stuff, like a group of physical bits and a group of different ways of thinking. Alright? So and so I just saw you going like, Okay. So if we’re going to posit the self as being if we look at the thing that we are trying to negate, it doesn’t appear to us as being plural. We don’t say selves.
We have a sense of I. We don’t say eyes. Yes? And as as this thing that we’re saying is that things have to be singular or plural because we can’t say it’s separate from the aggregates, but then we’re saying it’s sing we’re trying to say it’s singular and plural, which doesn’t make sense. It’s illogical.
Therefore, the self can’t be posited as as a logically existent thing. So we need to in order to develop an understanding of shunyata, or develop an understanding of emptiness, we need to be able to develop a stability with regards to our understanding of this concept. So this means going over and over and over again in our heads thinking if the self is to be posited, if the self is to exist, it has to be either singular or plural. Because the self to be refuted is singular, but it doesn’t exist as a singular object. It’s existing in conjunction with plurals.
Therefore, it can’t exist. And we have to go over this and over this and again and again and again until it becomes very clear, and we have no doubts about it and we can perceive it. So if the the next the next thing that we’re up to is the third key point of understanding emptiness, which is called determining that they are not truly the same. Now what this is talking about is determining that the self and the aggregates cannot be established as the same thing. The self or the self and the collection of different stuff that make us up cannot be established as the same thing.
Now we can experience that this from our understanding of the way the self appears to us. The self doesn’t appear to us as being aggregates. We don’t think of ourselves as being just the parts of our body, just certain experiences, just certain ways of thinking, just our six consciousnesses. It appears to us as being an inherently existent thing. The aggregates we know continually change.
Our physical being continually changes. Our mental being continually continually changes. But the way that this self appears to us as existing isn’t continually changing. It’s as if it could exist by itself, it comes into being by itself, and it doesn’t rely on anything. And this is what we mean by inherently existing or truly existent.
Something that can exist by itself, not dependent on causes and conditions, and not dependent on parts. So if this this is the way that the self appears to us as existing, then it has to exist separate from the aggregates. It has to exist as something completely different from the aggregates. So because we know that our body changes, we know that our mind changes, we know that these things go through a process that doesn’t stay the same and isn’t truly established in this way. But the way that the self appears to us is as a truly established thing, as something that doesn’t that doesn’t change, that doesn’t come into being based on causes and conditions.
Okay. It’s just it’s I’m just trying to be very clear, and I keep thinking there’s very specific words in Tibetan, and I’m thinking, okay. What’s a word I can use that actually makes sense and doesn’t send poor Hiro to his little machine? Okay. So there’s so, basically, when we’re dealing with reality, from our perspective, we talk about two different ways that things are.
The way that things appear and the way that they actually are. Now to us, those two things are different. The way things appear to us isn’t the way that they actually are because they appear to us as having being inherently existent, being truly truly established, having the ability to exist themselves. But this isn’t the way that things actually are. So for us, the way that things appear and the way they exist doesn’t link up, doesn’t come together.
Alright? There’s a there’s a disparity between them. So because of this, we think things inherently exist. Right? Now if things did inherently exist, they would have to exist the way that they appear to us as existing.
That is they would have to come into being by themselves. They wouldn’t have any causes. They wouldn’t they would be able to exist permanently without change. So this is because this is the way most things appear to us as existing. So this this shows us that the way that things appear to us as existing isn’t the way that they actually exist.
So the fact that things don’t exist the way that they appear to us as existing is another logical reasoning for emptiness. If things existed the way that they appeared to us as existing, we could say that things inherently exist, but they don’t. So we have to say that they don’t inherently exist. So if something’s inherently existent the way that it appears and the way that exists are important. They can be established the way that they appear.
And if things actually existed the way that they appear to us as existing, there would be no logic in saying that there were such things as a person’s aggregates or an aggregates person. So we wouldn’t say we wouldn’t be able to say my mind or my body because our body would be us. Our body would be our mind would be us. So as soon as you say the mind’s the mind’s self or the self’s mind, then you’re establishing them as being separate. This one?
No. I got that wrong. Yeah. No. Yeah?
Yeah. You’re establishing them as being separate. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
This one. No. I I’ve got it wrong. I’ve made sense in Tibetan, and got in my head, and it’s coming out garbage. Okay.
So if something was going to be inherently existent, the the aggregates that make up the self, which is the way that the self appears, The self would have to be exactly the same thing. In order for the self to be inherently existing, it would have to be the same thing as the aggregates. But this doesn’t make sense. If this was the case, then you can say the self self or the aggregates aggregates, then you wouldn’t be positing them as being a you wouldn’t be thinking of them as being separate. But because we posit them as being separate, as we think of self not being necessarily the mind, not necessarily being the body, and we think of my body, my mind, or the mind that belongs to a body or the mind that belongs the self that belongs to a mind and the self that belongs to a body, then that means that we have to establish them as separate.
And as separate, they don’t actually appear the way that they exist because they don’t exist separately, which we already established before. So we can stop there tonight. Have the questions. Uh-uh. Guess what?
It’s difficult things to understand because it’s a matter of learning about logic and learning the way logic works and looking at what you can posit and what you can’t posit and the logical inconsistencies in things. So it’s a difficult thing to understand. So in general, we could say then that is. So the the in in general, we’re just saying that there’s, like, the logic is that if things are going to exist, they have to either exist as a single entity or as a a multiple entity. You can’t say something is either is is neither is neither singular nor plural.
Alright? Something exists that has to be as one or as a group. And as the self can’t exist either way, because if we posit it as being singular, then we’re not taking into account the parts of the self. And if we posit it as being plural, then there is no singular self. Right?
This means that we can’t posit you can’t say that a inherently existent self exists. It’s it can’t be established through logic. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Mm-mm.
Okay. But guess what? Don’t worry if it doesn’t make so much sense because he has trouble understanding it, and he’s done a lot read a lot of things. And he said so getting a he said it’s difficult for him to understand, and it’s difficult for him to teach. So the thing that we should be concentrating on or meditating on is this idea that if things are going to exist, is there any other way for them to exist apart from being singular or plural?
So plural means everything from two up to a gazillion. And so that it means that, like, if we look at things, then we can say, Okay, is there any other way? And once we become convinced that there is no other way that things can exist, then we can try and see which way the self exists. Does the self exist as singular thing? And if so, what about its past?
So therefore, when we can see that that doesn’t work, and we move on to does it exist as a plural thing? And then we can see that, no, because we perceive the self to be singular, it can’t exist as a plural thing. So by going over this logic again and again, we become lot very used to it, and it becomes a lot clearer. So if if the self was going to exist as being either singular or plural, then we’d be able to find it, and we’d be able to search for it and find it. So, for example, the the what’s called the terminal conventional use of the word self that we can say does exist, the idea of self, and it does exist.
We can posit that as being plural because there’s a heck of a lot of beings walking around saying I. Alright? And so because people are calling themselves or labeling themselves I, then we can say that that exists as a plural entity. That’s our conceptual self. I’m gonna change a bit of but if if we try and look for the self that we experience, this instinctual sense of I that we have, that doesn’t appear as being one of many, a multiple idea of self.
It appears to us as being an inherently existent, truly established, independent thing that comes about of its own volition. Alright? And if we come to that, then we can’t find it. And this and then and then if we keep thinking about it a lot, we’ll probably come around to this idea because if we watch the way we think, we go I, I, I, I, I. Alright.
So I do this, I do that. If we stopped saying I, would I still exist? And we can see that it wouldn’t. Alright? The I comes into existence because we have this idea of I, and we say this is I.
Alright? If we didn’t call ourselves I, we didn’t have an idea of I, there would be no I. So in this way, we can see that it’s a it’s a it’s a label. It’s a it’s a term that we’ve given, a term that we use. Okay.
So for you and then the other thing is that we have this instinctual sense of I, and that I being something that we’re very close to, that is very important to us that we need to cherish. And then when this idea of other comes up of them then we don’t have that and that very strong close feeling for other come up the same way that we do for self so this means that the self becomes more important than the other because the other is considered it isn’t as it does we don’t have an as instinctual a response to other as we do to self. So this means that the way that other beings appear to us as being inherently existent is called grasping at the self of other. Right? But the way that we appear to being inherently existent is grasping at the self of self at our own self, but also this thing of grasping at I.
There’s a there’s a they’re holding on to this idea of I as well. So we grasp at ourselves as being inherently existent, but we also grasp onto the idea of I very strongly. Okay. So if the self if the self of persons if this this idea of self that we had actually was an inherently existent thing, if it had the ability to bring itself into existence, if if it was more than just this idea of self that we have, this label that we give ourselves, then it would continually exist. It wouldn’t need to change.
There would be no process of transformation going on within that. And it wouldn’t have to experience suffering because it would have been making itself into the way that it wanted it to. Alright? So there’s all of these are are logical faults in positing a inherently existent self. But Oh, yeah.
So does anyone have any questions? Mhmm. Mhmm. So so so you wanna know what happens when we realize selflessness? Is that, like, when we figured out that we don’t exist inherently exist as a as an independent entity?
Then what happens to the mind stream? Is that No. What I mean is, like, I can understand that really what happens to those people in the body is at the moment. Mhmm. Okay.
So it is a self. It’s just not an inherently existent self. If it was an inherently existent self, it wouldn’t undergo a process of change. There could be no transmigration through different realms of existence, different experiences, through different realms. But it’s not inherently existent because I is constantly undergoing a process of change, and you can’t find the self in the mind either.
Right? But it is a labeled self. So if guess, I’ll say, so for example, when you attain Buddhahood, yeah, what’s happened is you’ve gone through a process of refining the mind, getting rid of negative obscurations, getting rid of deluded ways of thinking until you eventually become a Buddha. If the mind could be posited as an inherently existent self, that process would not be possible because it would exist in a certain way and it wouldn’t be able to go undergo a process of change or refinement. So because of that constant process of change, because of the different elements that come into play, we can’t say that it exists any certain way.
It’s it’s a we can say it’s a continuum of a similar kind, but we can’t say it exists in a certain inherently existent way. Okay. No. We can’t say that it exists as an inherently existent thing because if it existed in that way, if that’s the way it existed, it would be able to generate itself, and it wouldn’t need it wouldn’t change. It wouldn’t change depending on the causes and conditions around it.
The mind’s perception wouldn’t change depending on the causes and conditions around it. But as the mind’s perception does change because of causes and conditions, we can’t logically say that it’s inherently existent. Or that is because inherent existence means the ability to bring itself into existence and not rely on causes and conditions. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I understand. Okay.
So Really? So you so Geshe-la said that it’s it is better to start focusing on the selflessness of self or or the emptiness emptiness of an inherently exist self for several reasons. First of all, because we’re always engaged with self, so it’s something that we have a constant interaction with, it’s not something that comes and goes from us. Also, because it’s something that’s easier to establish than the non inherent existence of other things. And the third reason is that our problems, our major problems in being in Samsāra and not developing compassion are all of these come from self-cherishing, come from self-grasping.
So if we can get to the root of those problems by realizing selflessness, the lack of that this the grasping at it. If we can realize the lack of an inherent self or I that we grasp onto, then we’re not going to be performing any negative actions anymore, and we’re going to be thinking of others. So it’s it’s yeah. At the beginning, it’s good. It’s very good to focus on the selflessness of the person.
Yeah. Probably. Yeah. And nothing a bit of something flew in my face. That’s okay.
So every time that happens, I think, ah. That would be the self to be refuted. Yes. I I repeat you. But what you tell me?
What what you yeah. Right. Okay. So what you do then is to use the the logic that was used to go, okay. Is this self that I’m experiencing here, is that is it singular or plural?
Where does it abide? Is it in my body? Is it in my mind? Is it in is it in my thoughts? Is it in my feelings?
Yeah. So you go looking for it, you can’t find it. So to keep doing that every time you have that experience, to apply the logic of emptiness to that experience. Okay. Hiro, last question.
What is reality? Reality. Okay. That question isn’t what the word that usually translated as reality is That’s more like entity. Sorry.
The the word that’s sometimes translated as reality, I tried to translate, but then I realized that the way he replied, it should have been translated as entity, so it didn’t fit your question. So I was like, what do you mean by reality? That’s what I was just explaining. Yeah. That’s that’s that’s but but what do you but what do you mean by the word reality, I should say?
Uh-huh. These sort of things. Yeah. Yeah. We watch it.
Yeah. Yeah. But okay. I kinda get what you mean. Okay.
So it’s it’s difficult one to translate. Right? But this is one way I tried to do it is, like, through different people’s experience and different people’s experience of the world. What’s that? Yeah?
What’s their reality? Yeah? And Geshe-la said, everybody’s individual reality is dependent on their karma or the causes that they’ve created. So sometimes they experience suffering, sometimes they experience happiness, sometimes they experience a good situation, sometimes a negative situation. This is all dependent on their experience the karma that they’ve done in the path they’ve created in the path so if they’ve done something positive they experience happiness they did something negative they experience something negative but all of their experiences are not inherently existent they don’t exist from their own side.
They come about because of the karma they’ve created, because of the conditions that have come together. We are. Okay.