Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The provocative claim that opens this 25-minute session sets the tone: Geshe Pema Tsering argues that any action — meditating, studying the Lamrim, making offerings — is non-virtuous if its underlying motivation is happiness in this lifetime. He walks through the three scopes of motivation (next-life positive rebirth, liberation from saṃsāra, bodhicitta for all sentient beings), showing how a single thought can drop the mind from the highest to a lower scope in an instant. To make the sheer weight of accumulated karma visceral, he invokes the image of countless past lifetimes as a lion, killing endlessly. The session closes with the four opponent powers for purification, followed by a Q&A on whether ordinary happiness must be avoided and how intention operates in spontaneous, unreflective actions.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 2004 03 30 RG.mp3
UUID: 1a91410d-05d9-44ad-99f6-de42d5563009
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Essence of Refined Gold (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-03-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 25.3 minutes
Words: ~1,975
That’s that’s attachment. That’s obsessive. So, if we have this mind, then that means we have attachment, that means we have grasping. And everything that we do to bring that about is something done with a grasping mind. So, therefore, it’s a negative action.
So if we start thinking like this, we don’t have much virtue left. Okay, anything that you do, any action that you perform, anything that you think, right, which is in order to bring about happiness in this lifetime, is non virtuous. It’s not dharma. It’s worldly. So, if your motivation for doing any action is to experience happiness in this lifetime, is to experience pleasantness or a good feeling in this lifetime, then that’s motivated by desire and that includes studying the graduated path it includes meditating it includes making offerings to monks and nuns or teachers or whatever it is that you do anything that you do that is motivated by a positive outcome in this lifetime happiness for this lifetime is a negative action, is motivated by desire.
So, he said then you should get scared. So if you can develop any idea that whatever it is that you’re doing isn’t focused on this life, it’s focused on the next life. It’s focused on establishing a situation in the next life in which you can practice Dharma or you have a positive rebirth then that becomes the lowest motivation that you can develop. Motivation that is a positive motivation and if you can develop that on and think okay it’s not just about the next life because that’s just another experience or the next life or the next life after that it’s about creating the circumstances in order to achieve liberation from saṃsāra and then that idea is a middle path. If you can develop that onwards and think that whatever you’re doing, it may become a cause for you to be able to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings, then that’s a great scope.
So, when we are thinking about the highest motivation, the motivation of bodhicitta, then we have to remember that it’s not just about ourselves or sentient beings in this lifetime, it’s also about ourselves and all sentient beings in our future lives. It’s a very vast motivation in this way and if we for a moment slip from that idea and then have our thoughts return to ourselves and think, Okay, it’s about me getting out of saṃsāra, then we slip from the higher scope to the lower the middle scope in an instant with that thought. The motivation change? But if we watch our minds, we start watching the way we think, then most of the things we do are not only not for the benefit of others, are not even for the benefit of ourselves in the future. They are for the benefit of ourselves in either this life and usually the short term in this life.
We do things in order to make ourselves happy in the very short term and anything that we do with that motivation is a negative action. So therefore for us to practice Dharma is difficult. And we can be even more in trouble than that because we can be doing something not even with the motivation of it benefiting us in the short term or in this lifetime we sometimes do things with the idea that other people will think we’re a good person so that can be even more problematic and getting rid of all of these things is very difficult we have to work at it a lot And the problem comes with the fact that we tend to be distracted by the things in this lifetime so we have to spend that we feel like we have to spend so much time thinking about how much money we have in this lifetime how our health is in this lifetime doing things in order to support ourselves in this lifetime without thinking about future lives, that we have no time left to focus on anything else. If we think about it in this way, then we see that we do a lot of negative things.
So, Geshe-la said if we look at twenty four hours in a day and if we split them up then we can if we’re pushing it, if we’re putting a lot of effort then one hour will be positive. So there’s twenty four hours in a day. If you’re working hard, an hour will be positive. And this is when we’re doing pretty well we’re in a good situation at the moment we have the opportunity to study and practice and think of others and we do do that we’re doing a very good job at the moment we should also take into account the fact that we have had countless lifetimes as say for example a lion right and when we’re a lion how many beings did we kill and if we are having one lifetime as one lion killed that many beings then if we are multiplying that by countless times, how many countless beings did we kill as lions in the past? So, if that’s one we’ve created that much negativity in our lifetimes as lions, then we have to think about the other lives we’ve had where we’ve done negative things when we’ve been animals when we’ve been spirits when we’ve been humans all the negative things that we’ve done since beginning of time to now and if we had to measure our negativities as little tiny grains of sand then our negativities would fill up several oceans.
So basically we have a lot to purify so when we regret our negative actions then we should have this an immense sense of remorse which creates a very positive cause to regret negative actions we’ve done in the past. So, we shouldn’t be too worried, though, because we should be scared, but we shouldn’t be too down on ourselves because we’ve also achieved a very good human rebirth and we must have done something very good to achieve that, and we have the ability to perform virtuous actions in the moment, at the moment, in order to create the causes for experiencing that again. So, if we think about all the negative things that we’ve done in all the different lifetimes that we’ve experienced and we get this immense idea in our head that we can’t actually comprehend the extent of the negative actions we performed then if we think about the results of those negative actions what the karmic results of those negative actions that we have done then the fear that we develop in that instance will give us the motivation to purify those negative actions to regret from the bottom of our hearts the negative actions and also the strength or the impetus to do positive things in the future but the good thing about negative actions is that they can be purified that they can be wiped out by performing purifying actions and the most powerful what’s said to be the most forceful of these purification practices is the four opposing opponent powers and they are said to be the first one is contemplating the shortcomings of negativity in order to develop a sense of remorse at having committed a wrong the second one is relying on the object of refuge and the bodhicitta as forces with the power to purify the mind of karmic stains the third one is generating a strong sense of resolve to turn away from such negative actions in the future and the fourth is applying a positive counteractive force to get rid of the negative the stains of the negative actions like a mantra or some other practice Okay.
So we can stop there for today and go on next week. And if anyone has any questions, please ask them. Is there a this one. Hang on one second. I’m trying to find more.
Okay. Got it. Alright. I’ve got to put a very big mark so I don’t get confused and don’t get into a state of being happy or it means we just realize that this happiness is samsaric and then go He said, You don’t really have to work at it. He said, So if you experience happiness then that’s not something you should run away from right but it’s that’s not the problem the problem is spending so much time trying to make it happen Because the experience that we have at the moment in this existence is the existence that we need in order to become a Buddha in order to become liberated and so it has to have a certain amount of leisure in that otherwise we don’t get to practice Dharma so that’s something that we need to experience.
But what we shouldn’t be thinking is this is enough. We should be thinking I need to keep creating the causes for this to happen in the future. So you don’t have to walk around with it. So you don’t have to walk around with serious face. You have to do what Geshe-la said, he said happy, happy, happy.
Right? And then he said, which is like you have to be be happy happy happy. Right. Yeah, yeah. Okay, is that the question?
Geshe-la said that that’s not necessarily the case because before you do a positive action, you can think not only is this going to benefit them but it’s also going to benefit me it’s going to benefit me by establishing the causes for me to be able to practice Dharma for me to have a good human rebirth and so forth so in this way any action that we do for others benefits ourselves well but it also benefits them so it’s a two way you can think of both before you do something the trick is not thinking it doesn’t benefit me it’s thinking it will benefit me in future lifetimes, it will benefit me in terms of achieving liberation and so forth not how it will benefit you in the short term so Geshe-la said that you can’t do something without having a motivation for doing it so if you have this idea that it’s just there so you do it right there has to be a thought to do it and there has to be an intention to do something and so if that intention is that person is in suffering and needs help or that person needs I need to help that person then that’s a positive motivation but there still has to be a motivation so even to have the idea I’m going to help that person then that’s a motivation yeah, that happens But Geshe-la said there has to be a thought process happening there in order for you to open the door.
You don’t just you have to think someone’s coming, they need help, I have to open the door. It happens automatically but still there. So it’s not as if you have to sit down there and premeditatedly go through a motivation before something happens all the time. Motivations come out, intention comes about naturally. If it’s a bad motivation, you should have to try and stop it.
Yeah. That’s good. Then then it doesn’t matter what it tastes like. Through awareness we’re able to see what our motivation for doing any action is and if it’s a positive action then we have a positive motivation we don’t have to stop it but if it’s a negative we have to stop it so we are able to encourage positive action motivation sorry and stop negative motivations So it shows you how a very important awareness is. So we’re on page five.