Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. What distinguishes emptiness from selflessness — and can renunciation arise from sheer disgust with saṃsāra before understanding selflessness? — these questions drive the final portion of this 42-minute session from Geshe Pema Tsering’s Essence of Refined Gold series. He opens with the four methods for guiding disciples: giving materially to build trust, teaching with warmth rather than a stormy face, encouraging practice, and living in accordance with the teachings oneself. A Q&A then covers the seven-point meditation posture (a chair works if the back is straight); why calm abiding alone cannot free one from saṃsāra — only direct insight into emptiness of inherent existence breaks the first link of dependent origination; and how realized Bodhisattvas, unlike Hīnayāna practitioners, freely choose where to take rebirth. The philosophical depth presupposes familiarity with basic Lamrim concepts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 41 2004 08 03 RG.mp3
UUID: 54f5ca4c-6a44-4649-bcff-3a64e1ef7f17
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Essence of Refined Gold (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-08-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.4 minutes
Words: ~3,202
Okay? So, this was the description of the six perfections. Now, our bodhisattva practices the six perfections in order to attain Buddhahood, in order to attain Buddhahood to benefit all sentient beings, alright. So this is what says establishes their own purpose, alright. They become Buddhas but as they are bodhisattvas and working for benefit of all sentient beings, they are not just working for their own Buddhahood, they have to work for the benefit of all other sentient beings at the same time.
So the six perfections are what they do in order to achieve Buddhahood themselves and therefore be able to benefit all sentient beings to a greater capacity. But then along with this comes what are called the four ways of benefiting trainees or the four ways of benefiting disciples or sentient beings who wish to have instruction. So the first of these is said to be first of all they need to have the motivation that they’re doing this in order to liberate all sentient beings from suffering and so the motivation of bodhicitta but then they should first of all do what’s called practice supportive generosity towards one’s entourage of trainees. Geshe-la said this basically means giving people stuff alright so as much as you can as much you’re able to give, give. And if you give, people like you.
So it’s developing trust in the people that are listening to you. It’s creating a positive environment for them. The second way of benefiting trainees is it says then after you establish this good relationship with the students then you need to inspire them with your teachings. Now the way that it instructs to do this is to make sure that you don’t have a serious like there’s this expression Tibetan black face, means like a stormy face, don’t, with a very stormy face, you should laugh, you should be happy, you should be showing the yeah, no like storm clouds on the face. So, and speak to them gently, so it means to like have a laughing happy presentation and speak to them gently about the, gently and clearly about the six perfections.
This is how you instruct students, so you don’t scare them. So then it says teach the Dharma sweetly and nicely. Not only do you teach the Dharma in this way but then you also try and encourage the people who are learning to practice in accordance with what they are learning or have learnt and so you’re not only asking them to you’re not only teaching them the way to practice the perfections but you’re also asking them to be you’re helping them or encouraging them to live in accordance with these teachings. The other thing to remember is that even though teaching the Dharma is actually practicing generosity from your side then it actually combines the two things. You are practicing generosity by giving Dharma but you are also doing this thing of training disciples by or giving to disciples so it’s benefiting the disciples and yourself.
So the fourth one is then that you not only instruct and help others to practice the teachings but you also must live your life in accordance with the teachings so it’s not good enough to have this idea of teaching and instructing people in a way to behave and then going off and not behaving that way yourself you have to actually live in accordance with teachings otherwise you’re not really helping the people that you were said to be that you’re trying to be help because they will be disillusioned by your activities so the fourth of the ways to help or instruct disciples is to live in accordance with the teachings yourself So then it says you should in every possible way develop these four profound methods of benefiting others. Three was encouraging them to practice in accordance with the teachings, other people. So we probably have one day left of this text. We’ll do combining śamatha and wisdom and then also and then the, what is combining śamatha with wisdom and then a little bit on tantra. So we’re finishing.
Can’t think. I’m sorry. If I say I was not thinking yesterday, guessing it goes, yep. So if you have questions. Yeah.
The best position for meditating is said to be what’s called the hang on one sec. I’ve got to make sure that Okay. Just in case people couldn’t sit like me, couldn’t sit in the Vajra posture. Yeah. Yeah.
So the best way to sit when you’re meditating is in what’s called the seven points, seven pointed posture. I forgot his name. Yeah, that’s it. I’m going blank, blank, blank. So there’s seven points to that.
You have to have a straight back, your legs should be in the full lotus position if you can manage it and if not the half lotus position. Your tongue should be in your mouth touching the palate of your mouth with your mouth slightly open or your lips just touching. Your eyes should be looking down just on top of your nose. Yeah? Straight back.
Oh, your head should be tipped forward and your arms should be like this. Yeah? One on top of the other. I think that’s seven. Yeah, yeah.
But the Geshe-la said if you can’t sit in the full Vajra posture, don’t worry about that, you can just cross your legs and even if you sit on a chair, that’s fine, because the main thing is to have straight back and watch what you’re thinking. The reason the Buddhas, one of the reasons that Buddhas say to sit like this is because of the stability that it gives your body and it enables you meditate clearly. If for example you try to meditate lying down, you’d be so comfortable you’d probably fall asleep and it’d be difficult to keep concentration. So the main thing is what you’re doing with your mind but sitting in these kind of postures helps you to stabilize your mind in that way. I don’t know, could you take medicine for it?
Or go to see a doctor? I said, what about exercises? Would exercises help? And he goes, well some exercises will help and other exercises will hurt more. So if you can get exercise that helps, that would be good, stretching and stuff.
So, it might actually be coming from your mind because all of the illnesses we have come from our mind because we develop causes for illnesses from mind. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take medicine for it. He wasn’t necessarily talking about Western medicine. But he said, I said like, because I think she said you don’t want to take Western medicine. He goes, why would you not want to take medicine?
Said, because Western medicine can disbalance you as opposed to putting you into balance. And he’s like, oh yeah, that makes sense. It gets rid of the pain but throws you off in other places. He said and also try sitting in a different way. If it’s hurting you just sit in one way, just move a little bit.
If you move a little bit, it might help to ease the pain. Yeah, Dennis. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Sure. Sorry.
I keep laughing because people say these and then they say, that’s my mind. Geshe-la said to make sure that you always start your meditation with breathing meditation and counting the breath for as much as you can until your mind’s stable. You said the same, so can I ask what if that takes years? He said, so what you do is then you meditate on the breath in the beginning and try and counting the breath and then this comes down the mind to a certain degree and once the mind feels calm and the proliferation has stopped, yeah, then you go on to your meditation. If it comes back, you go back to counting the breath.
So, every time that you start thinking too much you go back to counting the breath. Okay, so the thing that gets you out of cyclic existence isn’t calm abiding. Right? What you need to do is to develop calm abiding and then in dependence on that stable mind, start looking at the nature of reality, practicing special insight. Once you’ve perceived the nature of reality, once you have an understanding of emptiness of inherent existence you cease to have what’s called the ignorance grasping at inherent existence right so once you understand there is no inherent existence you don’t grasp at inherent existence which is this ignorance.
The ignorance that grasps that inherent existence is the first link in the twelve links of dependent origination and how you get reborn in saṃsāra. If you don’t have that link, then you can choose your rebirth. If you do have that, then you can’t choose your rebirth. So calm abiding isn’t the thing that stops you being reborn in saṃsāra. In fact, we’ve all probably achieved calm abiding heaps of times before and then lost it.
So if you develop an insight of emptiness, yeah, based on calm abiding, then you don’t have a cause to be reborn in Samsāra without your your direction. Calm abiding? Right, okay. I have to clarify this. This is what happens when you deal with Geshe-la.
If you’re someone who has, you have to have directly perceived the lack of inherent existence of all phenomena in order to get rid of the ignorance of grasp at true existence so therefore you can’t just be an Ārya or someone who’s realized the path of seeing to do that you either have to be a bodhisattva who’s realized the nature of reality or a someone who’s completed the Hīnayāna path someone who’s completed the Hīnayāna path doesn’t have bodhicitta so therefore they aren’t going to be coming back help anyone alright so the only people that you’re dealing with that would choose to reincarnate even though they don’t have the karma to reincarnate Mahāyāna Bodhisattva Aryas which is people, Bodhisattvas who perceive the nature of reality alright, we have to be specific. And these guys or women choose their rebirth in dependence on whether it will be most benefit, whether it will benefit people, right? So they have the ability through clairvoyance to perceive situations and see where their rebirth will benefit most beings in the best way so then they therefore search for a rebirth which will do that and once they found that then they rebirth in order to benefit beings So what happens with Bodhisattvas who understand the nature of reality, right?
So they see the way things are. They don’t have any idea of working for their own benefit. They’re all concerned, they’re only concerned with working for the benefit of others and in the same way that when we get something that makes us happy we feel like happy about that, bodhisattvas if they are working for others are happy. So they are not interested in their own suffering. They don’t experience personal suffering.
So they can be reborn in any existence in any place and be happy about it as long as they are benefiting sentient beings. If they not benefiting sentient beings, there is no point to them being there. So they take rebirth in a situation in whatever realm it is in where they can be a benefit and that’s the motivation for their rebirth, the cause for their rebirth is to spontaneously benefit beings. On the other hand, beings on the Hīnayāna path have great attainments, great understanding. They even develop an understanding of emptiness, the emptiness of self, but they don’t have this bodhicitta motivation.
They don’t have the idea of working for others. They don’t get their happiness from working for others. They get their happiness working towards nirvana for themselves so they don’t take rebirth in situations where they’re going to benefit beings because there’s no there’s no motivation for them to do that Okay, so all of the experiences that one has in a bardo and it’s interesting because I said to Geshe-la in a bardo and he goes which bardo and I said the one in between birth and rebirth because there’s like a gazillion different ones all of those experiences that one has in that state are because of karma and if you don’t have any active karma as a bodhisattva who has perceived the nature of reality have right then they don’t experience any of those hallucinations that other people do in that state so they can actually choose before they die where is the best place for them to be reborn or what’s the best course of action for them to take. So they have this idea of spontaneously working for the benefit of others so they have a direction that they’re going into depending on others karma.
Yeah, do you have to still look for mating parents but you don’t necessarily have to look for the mating because that’s attraction by desire, right? So you think, okay, if I’m born through those people then I can be a benefit. So I said that but there’s been instances of that like with Tulkus, some Tulkus, right? I’ve gone up to women and said I’ll see you in a couple of years and then like have been reborn as their son like they’ve given them direct instructions I’m coming to visit and then they die and they say why did they tell me he’s coming to visit and then they get pregnant like that. So Geshe-la said yeah but even like thinking about that limited because they can see anywhere and they constantly looking for how to benefit sentient beings so they just manifest or get reborn in order to benefit sentient beings.
Any other questions? Chris? Yeah. No. You said that’s fine.
No, yeah, has and we’ve still got five minutes. You’re doing well. No, no, it’s good. I was just teasing you. What’s the difference between emptiness and selflessness?
Right, an easy question, finish the talk. It depends on which school you’re talking from, right? If you talk from the point of view of the prasangika school then actually the selflessness is a form of emptiness but you wouldn’t say that selflessness is emptiness, alright? And so the lack of an inherently existent self is selflessness, it’s also emptiness, the emptiness of self, right? That’s from the point of view of a prasangika school right but there is other types of selflessness that you can realize that don’t come from that perspective so for example if you’re looking at it from the Consequentialist, no, wrong people — the Autonomous school, or the Svatāntrika school and then they have this idea that selflessness and emptiness are separate ideas and selflessness is actually the non existence of a self that is separate from the aggregates or part of the aggregates and it isn’t necessarily defined as the self lack of inherent existence.
Yeah? So in their view then selflessness is a separate thing to emptiness. So it depend and then all the different schools have a different description of selflessness and a different description of emptiness but from the prasangika point of view, selflessness is a form of emptiness. And now, I just had to clarify something in case you walk away with confusion is that Geshe-la was talking about in the teaching he was talking about the difference between ultimate truth realizing ultimate truth and realizing relative truth. When he was talking about ultimate truth he said realizing the emptiness of phenomena the Prāsaṇgika view that realizing emptiness of phenomena and that selflessness according to the svatantrika view is actually from the Prāsaṇgika point of view a conventional truth yes so that selflessness there is the Svatāntrika selflessness which from the Prāsaṇgika point of view is a relative truth.
Do you get that? Alright. Okay. So you don’t have to have I’m trying I’m using my hands because I have to remember all the bits that I fit. Okay.
You don’t have to have a realization of emptiness to develop renunciation. You can have a realization of emptiness to develop renunciation, but you can’t have a direct realization of emptiness before you develop renunciation okay alright now there’s all these different types of selflessness that you can also realize you can realize Sautrāntika selflessness, Svatāntrika selflessness, Cittamātra selflessness and Prāsaṇgika selflessness. Prāsaṇgika selflessness is emptiness, it’s the same thing. But you can realize for example the lack of an autonomous singular permanent entity, alright, the atma, lack of an atma there. That is selflessness, a form of selflessness.
It’s not prasangika selflessness, it’s a form of selflessness. And if you realize that, then you realize the faults of saṃsāra. So you can realize all but you could realize emptiness and realize the faults of saṃsāra, but not realize emptiness directly. Have an understanding of emptiness. Alright?
So there’s all these different types of selflessness that you can realize. Right? But to truly understand the problems of of saṃsāra, the faults of saṃsāra, need to have an have an understanding of one of them. Okay, so Geshe-la said the reason that he said this, developed this idea that, no, the reason that he taught that we really need to focus on selflessness in order to develop renunciation is because of the way we intellectualize things and we understand things, right? So that’s one way of doing it right but you can be in a state where you just realize Samsāra sucks right that is just like it’s completely faulty and there’s no positive qualities in it and you just think I want out of here right and you develop that mind so strongly that it doesn’t ever leave you yeah and you can have renunciation with that without having a clue about selflessness or liberate but you have to have the idea of working towards liberation and then you think okay how do I develop liberation I need to understand selflessness I need to understand emptiness.
Right, so you can develop the disgust with saṃsāra and then figure out how to get out of saṃsāra. So the disgust with saṃsāra and not wanting anything to do with it is renunciation. Yeah, so you can actually develop the, you can not have an understanding of selflessness at all and just develop a disgust with saṃsāra and then work on an understanding of selflessness that will get you out of saṃsāra, alright? You can do it that way, but you can also do it to the state where you by understanding selflessness that will engender disgust in saṃsāra right so there’s these different ways of doing it but that to actually come about a disgust with saṃsāra without understanding selflessness is rare but it is possible So if you’re asking one question when you say, Should we do it this way? Then yes, right?
Does it pervade all beings? Is a different question. Does that make sense? Didn’t do it. Yeah.
So that’s probably the case. Is that okay?