Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 38-minute commentary, Geshe Pema Tsering opens with a striking image: Saddam Hussein, once so wealthy that gold was mixed into his food, found within months living in a hole, dependent on others for every meal. The example anchors the core argument — no wealth or power shields anyone from saṃsāra’s suffering, so happiness simply cannot be found there. Recognizing saṃsāra as completely faulty is not cause for depression but for intelligent redirection: the desire to be happy just needs to be aimed at nirvana instead. Geshe Pema traces the mechanics — self-cherishing as saṃsāra’s root cause, motivation determining where karma leads, and positive actions done to secure samsaric gains never accumulating the causes for liberation. A Q&A session addresses the superior stability of nirvana’s happiness compared to saṃsāra’s, mothers’ kindness as the foundation of compassion practice, and why ignorance prevents recall of past lives.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 22 2004 05 11 RG.mp3
UUID: 0f1ccca6-0801-4d8a-95b8-4e93b623e762
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Essence of Refined Gold (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 37.7 minutes
Words: ~3,706
Okay. So this isn’t supposed to be an exercise in it’s not supposed to be a way of thinking that makes us miserable. It’s supposed to be a way of thinking that we’re able to look at the situation honestly, and then, through looking at the situation honestly, we’re able to change it. If we don’t look at something honestly, we can’t change it. If we’re not accepting the way things are, we can’t change anything.
So we shouldn’t just think of ourselves in this instance but try and focus on all beings, but we should think that we are very fortunate in a way because we have the opportunity to look at this honestly and to try and work towards a better situation by developing our minds as opposed to trying to think we can fix it with material objects. Because if we look at it then, there’s beings in the world. We’ve got presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, very rich people. And Geshe-la said, I’m sure there’s very rich in Australia because there is in India. There’s very rich people everywhere.
All these people have to experience this kind of suffering. They may have all of the things that people think make them happy. They’ve got an amazing place to live or they’ve got lots of wealth and they’ve got lots of amazing experiences they can have. But all of these things that we’re talking about, all these sufferings we’re talking about, they also experience. They don’t get out of it by being rich or by being fortunate in their situation at the moment.
It’s something that all beings experience. So we have to look at it and think, Oh goodness, all these beings, every single being who’s born into saṃsāra experiences this, no matter what their station in life, no matter what their experience is. So there’s no point looking for happiness in this situation that doesn’t bring happiness. Material things don’t bring happiness. The only way to actually achieve happiness is to work towards liberation.
I know the means to do that, so I have a great opportunity. I have the means to make myself happy. I have the way to make myself truly happy. So the trick is that we shouldn’t be looking for happiness in saṃsāra. We should be trying to find we can see that through this that saṃsāra is actually a place of suffering, Any of the things that we usually think make us happy, in terms of that are called saṃsāra’s excellences, saṃsāra’s good bits, is actually not going to make us happy.
It doesn’t matter how much wealth we have, how much power we have, how much personal happiness we think we have we can’t change saṃsāra into a true happiness by accumulating wealth, by accumulating all these things. Now, if we take, for example, Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein, before the Americans stormed into Iraq, was a very, very, very rich man and with a lot of power who was in control of a whole country and could take anything that he wanted. So he was completely in control of the situation, incredibly wealthy, and had everything that people think would make you happy. He had all the wealth, all the power he could possibly want.
And a couple of months later, we see him on the television with a very, very long, straggly beard, absolutely nothing, having lived in a hole, literally in a hole, for a couple of months. None of the things that he had amassed, none of the saṃsāra qualities that he tried to take on stopped that happening. None of the wealth that he had was able to stop that happening. So even in that situation, even someone who is like the king of a country with that much wealth and that much influence can’t stop saṃsāra’s nature happening. So Geshe-la said he had heard that sometimes they put gold into Saddam Hussein’s food as a sign of his excessive wealth, that they mixed gold into his food.
That was just like this as an extreme show of how wealthy he was and everything. Was the way his servants wanted to make himself feel better that he could even eat gold. Then that didn’t help him having that much wealth of power didn’t help him in his situation. It’s the way that saṃsāra works that if you are trying to find happiness in these material things or in the things that are considered excellent in saṃsāra, then it’s not going to work. It doesn’t stave off her suffering in any way.
It’s the same even with the guy that was the Prime Minister of India, Vajpayee his name was. He had a lot of power, he had a lot of power and a lot of influence for a lot of years, but now he’s just lost all of that. Within a couple of days, he went from being the most powerful man in India to being completely a has been. We can see the way that saṃsāra works. None of these things that people place so much emphasis on are stable enough for us to rely on, for us to see as being something that’s worthwhile working towards.
So for example and sorry. And this is something that people we put in a lot of effort. We put in so much effort. And we put in a lot of effort to achieve. So if we go back to the Saddam Hussein example for a moment.
So Saddam Hussein put in all this work to make himself the most powerful man in the world oh, sorry, in his country. He made himself these very, very powerful man in his country, and then he got to the stage where people were putting gold in his food or whatever, and he was asking for all these ridiculous, extremely indulgent things. So he goes from that, and then now he’s probably sitting there going, now I have to rely Americans to give me some food. What food are the Americans going give me today? He can’t even ask them to give him specific food.
He has to rely on the kindness of these people to give him even a little bit of food. So, he’s gone from ordering people to put gold in his food to not being able to ask and, you know, demand what he wants to eat at all. So in this way, we can see in this way and through other examples, can see that there is nothing certain in Samsāra. There’s nothing we can rely on in Samsāra, there’s nothing worth striving for in Samsāra. It’s just not worth our time and effort trying to make ourselves happy in saṃsāra because it’s not possible.
Samsāra is by its nature suffering. Because there’s nothing worth striving for in saṃsāra, then we need to strive for nirvana. We need to strive for our personal liberation. And if we see this, then there’s no point getting sad about saṃsāra either. There’s no point getting depressed about the things that happen in saṃsāra because that’s what saṃsāra is.
It’s just that we have to stop trying to find happiness there and try and find happiness in nirvana. So we need to know this. So the way that we need to look at it then is that well, the best way to look at then is that we think, well, there’s no point getting sad about saṃsāra because there’s nothing worth striving for in saṃsāra. And I have and we have the ability to achieve nirvana. We have the ability to develop ourselves in that way so that we never experience suffering again.
The same for all beings we all have this ability to attain nirvana. Because of this, we don’t need to make our mind tight or get depressed about the negativities of saṃsāra. Just need to recognize the negativities of saṃsāra or how saṃsāra is just there’s nothing worth striving for within saṃsāra. If we recognize this and we strive for liberation, then we are on the way to making ourselves truly happy. The other thing you need to remember is that this is possible, that many beings have attained nirvana before they become what’s called an arhat.
Before they became an arhat, they were just like us or just like all other beings in terms of experiencing suffering in all these different ways. It’s not so much thinking of how terrible saṃsāra is, as thinking how there’s nothing worth striving for in saṃsāra, so we might as well strive for So the way that we can think is, No. Samsāra has not even an instance of positive qualities because it’s all based on illusion sorry, not illusion. That wasn’t the right word. It’s all based on ignorance and misunderstanding, and therefore, we’re creating these situations that we have to experience that are, by their nature, suffering.
There’s nothing worth striving for in saṃsāra. Samsāra is a miserable place, but I don’t have to make my mind miserable or depressed Thinking about that depressed isn’t the word the word he’s using is small, like making my mind contracted. I’m thinking about this because I have the ability to achieve nirvana. If I start working towards nirvana instead of trying to achieve happiness in saṃsāra that which is impossible, then I have the ability to experience true happiness without it changing or without it actually making myself more miserable. The way that saṃsāra comes about is that we accumulate what’s called contaminated karma.
There’s two different types of contaminated karma. We can have positive karma that leads to saṃsāra happiness, and we can have negative contaminated karma that leads to saṃsāra suffering. But we don’t particularly want either of these. Want to create the causes, because karma is the process of cause and result, right? We want to create the causes that lead us to liberation from saṃsāra, so we want to create wisdom that is the cause for getting out of saṃsāra as opposed to creating the causes for experiencing saṃsāra happiness or suffering.
So so we need to we need to create the causes for getting out of saṃsāra. Now, the reason that we’re in saṃsāra then needs to be gotten rid of. So if you want to experience nirvana, we have to get rid of the causes that create saṃsāra. Now, the main cause that creates saṃsāra or the cause that creates saṃsāra and all other causes bring from that cause, right? It’s the root cause, is the sense of considering ourselves to be very important and the idea of an indivisible self that we cling to.
So this idea we have I, I, I. We think I need this, I need that, I do this. Then that is what we need to get rid of. self-cherishing is the reason that we create saṃsāra, and self-cherishing is the reason that we suffer in saṃsāra. So and then the it works in this way.
The reason that this self creates us this idea of self and causes us so much problems is that we have this idea of self. We think, I’ll be happy if I get this, or I’ll be miserable if this happens, so I have to do everything I can do to make myself feel happy. We do this with a sense of attachment, a sense of an obsessive quality that this is all I have to do to make myself happy. If I have that, I’ll be miserable if I don’t have that, I’ll be happy if I have what I want, I’ll be happy if I don’t have what I don’t want, then I’ll be happy. We’re constantly under the sway of this idea, but because everything we’re doing, we’re doing with the motivation that we want something and that wanting something will make us happy, we’re actually creating more causes to experience suffering.
Because there is no association to that, there’s no there’s no way of satiating that desire. So the desire is creating the causes for experience of suffering. So we have this idea that happiness is possible in saṃsāra. And because we have this idea that happiness is possible in saṃsāra, we seem to spend most of our time trying to make this self that we consider so important happy by doing one of two things: the first of which is that we try very desperately to get everything that we think will make us happy, and we spend most of our time under the sway of this desire for happiness, to make the self happy. Means that we’re constantly doing things working from this base of this ignorance that thinks we exist inherently, and if we do this, then we’ll make ourselves happy, right?
And then this process of doing something to make ourselves happy is what’s called creating projecting karma. It’s creating the causes for us to be thrown in another rebirth. Because we’re setting up a situation where if I make this I happy, then I’ll be alright. That concept of I means that that I will want to take another rebirth in saṃsāra. We’re forced to take another rebirth in saṃsāra.
Now, that’s the first type of thing that we focus on. The other type of thing we focus on is that we don’t want to experience suffering. We try and do everything we can to stop ourselves from experiencing suffering. But in actual fact, trying to stop ourselves from experiencing suffering is the same thing as wanting to experience happiness. It’s that we want to be happy, and the way that we want to be happy is by not experiencing suffering.
It’s actually the same process going on. We’re constantly having this idea of, I want to be happy, but the thing is we think we can be happy in saṃsāra. Alright? So we’re constantly, through striving for happiness in saṃsāra, are creating the causes for saṃsāra. So what we need to do then is, if we’re able to see that there’s nothing in saṃsāra worth striving for, if we’re able to understand that saṃsāra is suffering, then we can use this idea that we have of wanting to be happy in a more intelligent way.
We can use the idea of wanting to be happy to make us strive for nirvana, to make us strive for liberation from saṃsāra, because that is the only way we’ll actually become happy. We don’t find happiness through striving for the things that we consider excellent in saṃsāra because they’re not excellent. They are suffering by their nature. If we can’t achieve satiation through our desires, we can achieve satiation by not having desires. If we are striving to be happy by looking for nirvana instead of trying to be happy by looking for saṃsāra, then we may actually get somewhere.
So we don’t get rid of the idea of wanting to be happy. We just start realizing that because saṃsāra is completely faulty, we can’t get happiness in saṃsāra. So if we have this idea if we have this idea that there’s excellent things that we can achieve in saṃsāra, that we can actually be happy in saṃsāra, that means that the motivation with which we do positive actions will be to get something good from saṃsāra. So we’ll think, if we don’t recognize saṃsāra as completely faulty, we’ll do something. We’ll think, I’ll do this good thing in order to have something happy happen in saṃsāra, because we don’t understand saṃsāra is completely faulty.
We don’t understand that there is no true happiness in saṃsāra. If we have that as our motivation, then that will be the result. So we won’t be able to accumulate the causes for achieving liberation. So we need to see saṃsāra as completely faulty, so any positive action we do, we do it with the motivation to achieve nirvana instead of doing it with the motivation to achieve happiness in saṃsāra because our motivations decide where the karma goes, how the karma manifests. So we can stop there.
So if you have any questions, please please ask. Yes? It’s completely different in two different ways. The first of which is that any experience of happiness we have in saṃsāra changes, and the happiness of nirvana is something that doesn’t change. Apart from that, because of the perception of reality and the lack of confusion in the mind, happiness is much more intense.
He said, yeah. And the mother obviously has and not just that, mothers have to work really hard. So mothers have to, for starters, have to carry someone around for months. He doesn’t have any experience, but you guys might. Mothers, for starters, carry something around for nine months, so they are carrying us around.
Then they have to go through birth, which isn’t a pleasant experience. After that, they even have to keep really working hard in order to feed their children, in order to look after their children, in order to provide food for them, and sometimes even go without their own food to give to their children, things like that. So this is why the whole basis of the development of compassion is on the kindness of mothers because the mothers have shown us so much kindness. Some people, Geshe-la said some people here have this idea that my mother didn’t show me any kindness, my mother stuffed me up or whatever, right? And when he said then, even if your mother abandoned you when you were born, she still spent nine months hauling you around.
So there is still this like engagement from her body and everything like this. Even if he said that this idea of mother is not helping us, it comes from not looking at it, not thinking about it in that way. Oh, okay. Okay. I’m like, what are you talking about?
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Baby being born into water and gradually Sure.
Sure. And then I was trying to think of a Tibetan word for breath. Yeah. Yeah. He wants to know how cold the water is.
He goes, I wouldn’t be wanting to be born into cold water. Said that he was like, so you have to be careful because if the water’s not exactly the right temperature, they’re either gonna get feel really hot when they come out or really cold when they come out. Okay. So they may have missed out on the suffering of growing older in that lifetime, but they’ve also lost their opportunity to practice Dharma through having a precious human rebirth, and the relative happiness that comes with having a human rebirth has opposed to another rebirth. And then if they actually do have the merit or the karma to be reborn as a human in their next life, then they’re still going experience old age at some stage.
Their life doesn’t mean end of suffering in a sense. So even if they were to be reborn after dying young, if they were to born in, like, a heavenly place, let’s call it god realm, basically. Basically. It’s like a blissed out place. Even if they were to experience that, that’s still not out of saṃsāra.
At some stage, that karma would end, and they’re reborn in another situation where they have got to have suffering. Unless you get out of saṃsāra, then the suffering doesn’t end. Okay. So at some stage, any animal at some stage in the past an animal must have been a human, so they must have had the capacity to generate positive karma. If for some reason, because of the results of that karma, at the time of their death they come into contact with something positive, then that can create the cause for them to be reborn as a human.
So the last thought you have before death determines the direct cause for your next rebirth. So if their last thought is something positive, then they can be a human again. Doesn’t necessarily know if the animal would understand the significance of the stupa. But because the actual act of walking around a stupa or circumambulating a stupa is positive in itself, right? So you have three aspects to come of the motivation, the action, and the dedication, right?
So From that, if they have just the one part, which is action, they do something positive by action, then they are still creating positive karma. That would be beneficial. Also, if they are hearing dharma, then that creates the imprints or the tendencies towards that. The thing that we deal with in saṃsāra is we create a tendency in our mind stream. That’s where our mind goes.
It’s a habit for something. We’re habitual creatures. So if there’s an animal that has a habit of listening to dharma, then they’re going to be focused on that when they go Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
The reason that we don’t recall our past lives or even ten years ago, very clearly, is because we’re pretty stupid. If we’re able to meditate and develop our mental capacities, then we’re able to recall our past lives. That means that the development of renunciation will come easier as well. Okay. So the nature of saṃsāra saṃsāra’s characteristic is that it’s based on ignorance.
So they are on our ignorance. Samsāra is a personal experience. So it’s based on our ignorance. So that means that it’s the nature of Samsāra that we can’t remember things, and it’s our nature that we can’t remember things because we’re ignorant. So we need to perceive that ignorance is a misperception, and we need to develop wisdom, and especially the wisdom understanding emptiness or the nature of reality.
And through that, then we are able to get rid of our we are we are able to develop our mental capacity. This one. Is that okay? Probably. Alright.
So then we do prayers on page five. And so dedication prayers. And then after we do dedication prayers, we turn over to page ten. Did I get it right this time? Let’s stick together for the Dalai Lama’s long life prayer.