Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using George Bush and elite athletes as unlikely examples, Geshe Pema Tsering argues in this 45-minute Lamrim commentary that even the most powerful samsaric beings are no freer of suffering than a pig unable to control its cravings. The session pivots from the middle scope — seeking personal liberation — to the great scope, explaining why individual nirvana, though extraordinary, still leaves the mind incompletely purified and falls short of Buddhahood. Geshe-la then introduces the seven-point cause-and-effect method for cultivating bodhicitta, opening with equanimity: dismantling the habit of sorting beings into friends, enemies, and strangers before moving to the recognition that all beings have, across countless rebirths, been our mother.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 25 2004 05 25 RG.mp3
UUID: 268519a0-492f-4ebb-8728-b245dfc881c8
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Essence of Refined Gold (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~3,974
So we need to develop the right motivation for listening to the teachings. If we have the right motivation, whatever we do becomes virtuous. And if we have a negative motivation, whatever we do becomes unvirtuous. That means even if we do something that is by its nature virtuous, if we do it with a negative motivation, it becomes a cause for suffering. And we don’t want to experience suffering we want to experience happiness, so we need to create the causes for happiness.
In order to create the causes for happiness, we have to do whatever we do with a good motivation. The best motivation we can possibly have for doing anything is the motivation of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment. Above this, there is no motivation higher. The mind of enlightenment, the bodhicitta, is the idea or the concept that we are working towards enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. So we’re going to become Buddhas ourselves in order to be of the utmost benefit to all sentient beings.
So that’s the mind of enlightenment. That’s the way of thinking that we need to generate. If we have this way of thinking, we need to investigate ourselves. If we have this way of thinking, we need to expand it we need to strengthen it. If we don’t have it, we need to work hard to develop it.
We need to train our mind so we develop it. If we have it or not, we need to investigate, and in that case we either need to strengthen it or to try and generate it. So the development of this concept, the development of this mind, is actually quite difficult. May have the idea that we want to achieve Buddhahood, and it’s not that difficult for us to develop the idea, I want to achieve Buddhahood, because it’s such an exalted state and you’re so happy in that state and so forth. But it’s more difficult to develop the part of the equation where we’re doing it for the benefit of all sentient beings.
We may be able to develop the idea of becoming buddhas ourselves, but using all sentient beings as our motivation is very difficult. So because it’s difficult for us to focus on all sentient beings, we need to train our mind to do this. The way we train our mind is to think that every sentient being, without exception, at some time in the past, has shown us incredible kindness and they will continue to do so in many different ways. So they’ve shown us incredible kindness. On top of that, they don’t want to experience suffering.
No sentient being wants to experience suffering they want to experience happiness. If people who have shown us great kindness want to experience happiness, then we need to do what it takes in order to bring that about. So if we think about the way they’ve shown us kindness and the way they don’t want to suffer, and we go over this again and again in our mind, then that makes the development of the mind of bodhicitta easier because our mind becomes accustomed to the idea. So, with this idea in mind, we should think that the reason we’re listening to the teachings on the Graduated Path of Lamrim is in order for us to understand them and be able to practice the path and become a Buddha to help all sentient beings. So, we should have that motivation for listening to the teachings as is, and, we should try and meditate on it, for a couple of minutes before we start listening.
So we went through the we’ve been through the smallest motivation and the middle motivation for the path, and we’ve now arrived at the greatest motivation, the motivation of bodhicitta. So the first motivation we went through, or the first scope we went through, was this idea that we needed to do positive actions in order to gain a positive rebirth and not end up in the lower realms. That’s the basic motivation of the smallest motivation or the lesser person. Then we have the middle motivation. The middle motivation was to develop the idea of achieving freedom from saṃsāra completely, including higher realms.
But this was done for our own benefit, so it’s only a middling motivation. So when we are contemplating the motivation of the greater scope or the altruistic vehicle, then we need to recognize that even though the trainings in the three higher trainings that is, the training in meditation, the training in wisdom and the training in ethics will enable us to achieve individual liberation, that this isn’t enough. When we achieve individual liberation, we’ve actually put in a lot of effort and we’ve done a lot of work and we’ve achieved a very exalted state. The state of liberation, or nirvana, is a state which doesn’t have any suffering in it at all. We’ve completely gotten rid of all of the causes for suffering from our being and we don’t create any more negative karma.
It isn’t to be dismissed lightly. Achievement to achieve individual nirvana or individual liberation there’s many qualities to this state however from the point of view of our own goals and the way that we can benefit others, the path isn’t completed. When one achieves a nirvana or liberation, we’ve gotten rid of what are called the obscurations of afflictive emotions that is, the causes for suffering. But we haven’t gotten rid of the obscurations to omniscience. We haven’t completely purified our mind.
This means that our own goals haven’t been completely achieved. We’ve achieved something amazing, but we haven’t completed what we could possibly achieve. So that’s, from our own point of view, haven’t completed our potential and also from the point of view of others we haven’t done all we can to help them if we have focused on achieving our own liberation and have therefore achieved nirvana or achieved liberation, then we haven’t done so with the motivation of helping others. We’ve done it in order to get ourselves out of saṃsāra. So we haven’t focused on other people’s goals either.
In order for us to achieve Buddhahood, in order for us to completely finish our own goals, then we need to develop the motivation of working for others, because just focusing on our own liberation and getting ourselves out of saṃsāra doesn’t help everybody else who is also striving for happiness in saṃsāra and doesn’t know how to experience happiness. So, because all of these other beings who have shown us great kindness are immersed in the suffering of saṃsāra, then we need to find a way in order to get them out of that situation, because none of these sentient beings at some time in the past haven’t shown us great kindness or in fact haven’t been our mother or father. So we need to find a way in order to show them how not to experience suffering. They’ve actually shown us great kindness in countless lifetimes before, so all beings have shown us countless kindnesses, if that makes sense. And they’ve protected us, and because of this, then we should only try and think of ways to repay their kindness.
We shouldn’t think of anything negative they’ve done because they’ve all shown us great kindness, we can focus on that because it’s a common denominator with them. So we need to find a way to lead all sentient beings, these people who have helped us before. We need to find a way to get them all out of the state of suffering. Now, in actual fact, to get someone else out of the state of suffering or to get ourselves out of the state of suffering is incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of mental training, a lot of mind training, in order to bring this to fulfilment.
We may think this is strange we may think that there’s beings in the world who are very rich or very famous or very well like they seem very happy or they have all of the things that we may think is happiness, and we may be thinking, well, why do they need my help? Because they’re not experiencing anything but happiness. But in actual fact, well, being in saṃsāra. They aren’t experiencing happiness, not true happiness anyway. Everything that they experience is a type of suffering.
So in order for us to get them out of a state of suffering, we have to be able to show them how to get out of saṃsāra. This idea of leading all beings out of suffering or even thinking about others being suffering is something that’s quite difficult for us to develop in an easy way, so we need to spend a bit of time thinking about it or contemplating on it. If we think about it enough, if we think about our own suffering enough, we may get some understanding of it. We easily recognise our own suffering, which is manifest suffering, in terms of when we experience illnesses and so forth.
Can recognise that as suffering. If we concentrate on it enough, we can understand that our happiness isn’t something we can rely on, that our samsaric happiness isn’t something that can cause us true happiness in the long run, so that that is also a form of suffering. And if we meditate as well, we can understand the nature of our existence as a saṃsāra being is all pervasive suffering, so that’s going to give rise to all these different instances of suffering. So if we focus on our own situation, we can perhaps develop an understanding of this suffering, the way that our existence is pervaded by suffering. But when we focus on other people, then that is made all the more difficult, because our perceptions of other people may not be as complete.
So when we see other people who, it seems to us, experience great happiness. If we take, for example, George Bush, right? George Bush is someone that, when we look at, we can’t see that he would be experiencing the same sort of situations that we do on a daily basis, because he’s someone with a lot of power and a lot of money and a lot of influence. The little problems that we would have with trying to get things done and so forth, we couldn’t imagine someone like him having. Geshe-la said he was basing this premise on the fact that George Bush actually is a saṃsāra being and not a bodhisattva or a Buddha doing a job in a certain role.
If George Bush is a samsaric being, then his very nature is suffering. Everything that he experiences is suffering, no matter how much money or how much power or how much influence he has. And not just him, but also there are many other beings in the world that we can look at and we can think, well, how can they possibly be experiencing suffering? They look so happy they have everything they have so much money, so much influence, so much pleasure that they’re experiencing. How can they possibly be experiencing suffering?’ But every single one of them, if they are in Samsāra, is experiencing nothing but suffering.
And it’s more difficult for us to develop an understanding of this than it is for us to focus on our own suffering. So there’s many people that are experts in many different things. They may be incredibly talented, incredibly inspirational. They may be experts in words, in sports, experts in making money, whatever it is. And there’s a danger that we may look at these people and think, I want to be just like them.
Or we may think about making ourselves happy and having other people be made happy by becoming like them we may have that as our idea of that’s what it means to be happy is to be like those people to think that if I just had their skills or if this person I know just had their skills and their money or their circumstances, then they’d be happy. So there’s a danger, if we don’t think about it, that we’re going to end up thinking like that, that we’re going to be praying for that that we’re going to be praying that we ourselves end up as an expert in something or very rich or something like that or another person we know might pray that they end up like that. And we’re basically praying for them to end up in saṃsāra, so it’s not a very positive thing to be praying for. So if we see someone playing sport, for example, and we think, Oh, they’re really good at that. I wish I could do that.
If we have this idea that the way that they kick the ball or whatever is very good, and we want to be able to do it like them, then there’s this natural thing that comes up in our mind, I wish I could kick a ball like that, or I wish I could play like that. This isn’t something we should necessarily be praying for or wishing for, because we’re asking to keep on experiencing saṃsāra. Even though these beings may look like they have more than us, they’re still in saṃsāra. They’re still experiencing suffering in all these different ways. So we may be looking at these people who play sports or whatever they’re and think, we look at the qualities that they have and the way that they’re able to play and to do these things and we think, that’s really good.
Look at the way they can do that. I really wish I could do that, or Isn’t it amazing what they can do? We generate this idea of them that they’ve got something that they’re onto it that look what they can do isn’t that amazing? But in actual fact they’re not any better off than we are they’re in saṃsāra they may be able to kick a ball very well but they’re not very good at getting rid of their anger necessarily. And if we watch the way that people behave, they may be an expert at their field, but they are under this way of attachment and aversion and hatred and all of these things in very obvious ways.
We can even see it if we watch them. They can be very aggressive or they can be very arrogant, and there are all these negative qualities that we can see in these people, but we tend to focus on the qualities they have and think, Oh, wish I had those attributes, their expertise and so forth. In actual fact, even the most skilled people that we may look up to for their skills aren’t much better off than a pig, all right? Because just as a pig isn’t able to control their desires and their hatred and their pride and their so forth, neither are they. They aren’t in any much better of a situation than the pig because if they were in a better situation they would have controlled all of their emotions, they would be able to do things without experiencing suffering and they’re not.
So even though we may ascribe all of these attributes to them, it’s actually things that don’t matter that we’re focusing on. We need to be able to look at everybody’s situation, including the people that we tend to ascribe very positive qualities to that don’t actually have them. We need to realize that just as we experience all these different types of suffering. We went through the different types of suffering that we experience when we were talking about the Middle Scope and seeing how there isn’t anything but suffering in saṃsāra. When we look at how all sentient beings, including ourselves, experience this suffering, then we have to try and figure out a way to get ourselves and everybody else out of this situation.
The way that we get out of this situation is by cultivating bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment. But, in order for us to develop bodhicitta, we need to put into practice a lot of mind training. One of the ways that we can train our minds into developing bodhicitta is through what s called the seven point cause and effect instruction. This is a process of meditation that we can do and contemplation that we can do to develop bodhicitta. The basis of this seven point cause and effect meditation is this idea of equanimity, and that is that all sentient beings and ourselves are exactly the same that we can’t think that some sentient beings are, in actual fact, better off than others because we re all experiencing these different types of suffering.
So if we don t have this sense of equanimity, then we can t go on to use the seven point cause and effect process, so that s what we need to focus on first. Then after that, we meditate on how all sentient beings at some stage in the past have been our mother and therefore have shown us great kindness. If we don’t have this idea, then it’s also difficult for us to develop bodhicitta, because we don’t have any sense of why we should work for other beings. Then, from this idea that all beings have been our mothers, we develop the idea of remembering their kindness, remembering the ways in which they have shown us great kindness. From there, we seek to repay their kindness.
And this idea of seeking to repay their kindness leads us to a mind or a way of thinking that finds all beings appealing, that finds all beings likable, that finds all beings worth helping. And from this basis of finding all beings worth helping, we develop two things. The first is the mind of loving kindness. Loving kindness is the idea we want everyone to be happy, And compassion, and compassion is the idea that we don’t want anyone oh I got them around the wrong way okay loving kindness is the idea that we don’t want we want everyone to be happy sorry and compassion is the idea that we want everyone to be free of suffering all right one’s happy, one’s free of suffering.
And then from there, we develop the idea of trying to bring that about ourselves, and eventually this leads to the development of the minds of enlightenment. The first thing that we need to look at then is this idea of equanimity. If we haven’t got the idea of equanimity, then we can’t move on to try and understand that all beings have actually been our mother and have shown us great kindness in that capacity. Usually, we divide people. We have those that we think are close to us and those that we think are neutral, that we don’t particularly have any feelings for one way or the other, and those that we have an aversion to.
But while we’ve got people divided into these categories, there’s no way we can develop this understanding of their kindness, of how they’ve all been our parents in past lives. We may develop loving kindness and we may develop compassion or a little bit of it anyway but it’s biased and it’s so one-sided and it’s only focused on the people that we like that it isn’t going to get us anywhere. First of all, we need to develop this idea of all beings being exactly the same in their kindness to us and in their desires for happiness. Us to develop properly this idea of all beings having been our mother we need to be able to look at ants and think, that ant or that bug has been my mother before and has shown me great kindness. This is something very difficult, so we need to really focus on this idea of equanimity in order to achieve this.
So we need to develop this idea that looks at all beings as if they had been our parents and shown us great kindness. If we look at the way that our mind works most of the time, and especially when it thinks about this lifetime, we divide people into groups. We have this idea of those who have benefited us in this lifetime, have shown us kindness, and therefore we have a sense of good feeling towards those people. Then we have an idea about other people that have harmed us and we have the idea of getting rid of them throwing them away. Then we have this idea about people we don’t feel either way to, that we have no particular feelings about either way.
We group them in these different ways. Someone may have shown us kindness when we want to keep them close. Other people may have harmed us and we want to stay away from them. There are other people we just feel really neutral about. In actual fact, when we look at it most of the people that we are in most beings we actually are either indifferent to or feel negative towards there aren’t that many people that we actually feel close to that we feel we wanna stay close to or feel indebted to.
It’s us. In order for us to develop this to get rid of the divisions that we’ve placed people into and to try and develop some equanimity when we refer to sentient beings or we think about sentient beings then the way we do this is by meditating first of all on those who haven’t either harmed us or shown us great kindness and think about how in past lives they have shown us great kindness, they have done many things for us. So we have developed this idea that we actually should feel gratitude towards these beings even if we can’t remember the specific kindness that they have done for us. That’s people we don’t feel any particular way about. The next group of people we can focus on is those that we consider very close to us like our family and friends and we think that they have obviously shown us great kindness but no more than the other beings have shown us great kindness.
It s just that we don t remember particularly what the neutral beings have. Then we should try and meditate on the idea that even our people we consider our enemies or people that we think are going to harm us have also shown us great kindness in the past and developed a sense of gratitude towards even those beings that we feel are harming us. Then once we meditated on those three categories then we have this idea meditating on everybody, all beings together, and think that all beings have shown us great kindness, and therefore we should feel gratitude towards them. So then after we’ve meditated on developed this idea of equanimity amongst all beings, we then go on to develop an understanding of how, at some stage in the past, they have all been our parents and they’ve shown us the intense kindness that our parents have for their children. The logic behind this is that if there is no such thing as the beginning of time, because it doesn’t make sense, then we have had countless rebirths.
We’ve been continually being reborn and reborn and reborn and reborn. Every time we were born and died and we were born again, we had a different mother. This means that we’ve had countless mothers, so that means that everybody’s had a chance to be our mothers. These beings