Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute commentary, Geshe Pema Tsering opens by explaining why the Heart Sūtra earns its name — it is the condensed essence of all perfection-of-wisdom teachings and, citing Lama Tsongkhapa, the root reason the Buddha became an object of veneration. He then develops the idea of Buddha nature: because any sentient being’s mind is empty of true existence, every being — gods, humans, even mosquitoes — carries the same essence as the Buddhas and therefore the seed of full enlightenment, like an apple seed that will become an apple tree given the right conditions. The session moves into Q&A, where a question about Buddha nature’s two aspects leads to a careful philosophical distinction: emptiness itself, as mere absence, does not change, but specific instances arise and cease with their objects — illustrated by a cup that breaks and a historical figure who dies. A final question about whether the mind resides in the brain or the heart is answered through dependent labeling.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 HS 2003 02 04.mp3
UUID: 79225848-700b-4e11-b037-f2c4fd3f9683
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Heart Sūtra (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-02-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~3,101
Emptiness. So it’s the wisdom of the mother who bore all Buddhas, and it’s the heart of this wisdom. Heart — why they say the heart is because it’s the root of it or the main reason. Okay. So the reason that this text is titled is because title, we can understand exactly what it’s about.
If they hadn’t titled it in such a way, we wouldn’t understand that it was about emptiness instantly. We would be puzzled as to what that text was about. So the title lets us know what’s in it. So why is it called the Heart Sūtra? The heart is supposed to be the center of all the consciousness in the body.
All the consciousness in the body is actually supposed to be collected at the heart. So this is why it’s called the Heart Sūtra. So in the same way, main essence of the three major texts was short, medium and long sutras on the perfection of wisdom, and every other text on the perfection of wisdom, their meaning is condensed or is is here in the Heart Sūtra. Sometimes it’s also called the sūtra of sutras, because sūtra is actually a word meaning condensed, so the condensation of the condensation of the essence of the essence. It’s also supposed to not only contain the meaning of all the Buddha’s teachings, but sorry, all the teachings on the perfection of wisdom, but also the the thought behind all of the Buddhas teachings are supposed to be condensed in this.
So then there’s a quote from Lama Tsongkhapa. He says that any any words the Buddha ever spoke and took as their subject the dependent arising, which is a sign for emptiness, And they were only spoken in order to give peace to sentient beings and to establish them in nirvana. So because of this, because this was the only reason that the Buddha taught and the the the essence of all his teachings, this is why he becomes a thing to prostrate to, a a person of veneration. Yeah. So the Buddha only taught in order to establish beings in nirvana, because only by establishing them in nirvana could they all be free from suffering.
So in order to do this, the the best the only way for him to do this was to be able to explain emptiness to them. So this is why emptiness becomes such it becomes the reason for most of Buddhist teachings. So this this the fact that the only way for Buddha to establish beings in nirvana was to show them emptiness means that the and the emptiness is is thus described in this text is another reason that it’s called the Heart Sūtra because it’s like the essence of all of what Buddha wanted to teach us. So, if we wanna know how beings achieve nirvana, then how this process comes about is that what is left after beings achieve enlightenment, the emptiness of the mind that achieves enlightenment is the same emptiness that is in our minds at the moment. So this emptiness, the emptiness of our minds and the emptiness of the minds of people in nirvana being the same, it’s called the essence of the Buddhas.
This is also sometimes called Buddha nature or Buddha potential. And it is not it’s called, in Sanskrit, in Sanskrit, Tathāgatagarbha or the heart of the Tathagatas. And Tathāgata is a is also sometimes translated as the Thus Gone One. But it’s basically a synonym for Buddha. So the essence of the Buddha is is this emptiness of the mind, which we also have.
And it’s not a Buddha, but it is the same essence of the Buddha or the Buddha nature. So this this essence of the Buddha is this this Buddha nature is it actually says in a text that it it pervades it pervades existence. It pervades everything, this emptiness. It pervades and it definitely pervades us. So we have this mind at the moment, this mind, the same mind that the Buddhas have.
It could and it and it pervades us through through being emptiness. Okay. So anywhere that there’s a mind, any being that has a mind, and then that’s like a sentient being. Any being’s mind that that is sentient has as its nature emptiness, and this emptiness of the of any sentient being’s mind is what we call the essence of the Buddha’s. Therefore, the essence of the essence of the Buddha’s is also called Buddha nature, and it’s the reason that we can become a Buddha.
So all of us have this potential because we’re all pervaded by emptiness. Okay. So this isn’t just humans we’re talking about here, whether it’s gods or insects or mosquitoes. Any any any being that has a mind also has the emptiness of that mind. The emptiness of that mind is the essence of the Buddhas and the our Buddha, our potential to become a Buddha.
So it’s not just us that it pervades, but it’s all beings. So this this this emptiness of our mind that is the Buddha potential is the reason that can become a fully enlightened being, it pervades all of us. There isn’t anybody that you can say doesn’t have this. And in the same way as that if you plant an apple seed, you get apple trees. If you do the right practices because because we have the seeds of Buddhahood, if you do the right practices and meditate in the right way and do the hard work, then you do become a Buddha because of this this emptiness, which is the essence of the Buddha.
So all of the teachings of the Buddha, all of the sutras and tantras that he taught, and there was a lot of them, the main purpose behind all of these teachings was to rid sentient beings’ minds of their defilements in them. Was the sorry. That was the only purpose of these teachings. And if you can understand that, then you can understand that all of the Buddha’s teachings therefore become non contradictory because they’re all different ways to rid people’s minds of these afflictive emotions and these negative aspects. So for example, when Buddha taught that for some people that they should take as their object have coming back in a good rebirth, and for others that they should take as their object, achieving Buddhahood, and for others that their object should be achieving liberation, the point of all these teachings was to bring everybody to final enlightenment.
But he used many different methods in order to to teach them that. So in order for us to know everything, we’d have to be a Buddha, like, because Buddhists know Tibetan and and Australian languages and all sorts of things. But because we can’t do that, we have to follow the Buddha’s teachings in the different ways that he set out for different beings with different abilities. And the main thing that he’s trying to get everyone to be able to see is emptiness, but uses all these different ways in order to teach us that. But we have to remember that the main points of all of this was that people can understand emptiness.
So Buddha knows everything, but we don’t know everything, so we have to study things. So if we, for example, study English, once we’ve studied English and we can speak in English, then we don’t have the ignorance of not knowing English. Geshe-la said, If you’re like him, then you don’t know English, then you have the ignorance of not knowing English. But even if you learn one word in English, that means that you’ve gotten rid of one bit of ignorance because you know one word of English. In that way, by a graduated method, you end up knowing everything, which is like what a Buddha does because you’ve gotten rid of all the things that you don’t know.
So because the Buddha knows everything, he can’t explain and we don’t, then he has to explain things in different ways. Okay, so in the same way that we have this emptiness, which is this potential, surely this is another way of looking at it, is the potential to achieve Buddhahood. In having the potential to achieve Buddhahood, we also have the potential to know everything. But because we have obstructions to our knowledge, we don’t know everything. But we have to understand as well that in achieving Buddhahood, by achieving Buddhahood, we also achieve knowledge of everything.
So one of the ways to achieve that knowledge of everything is to slowly, slowly get rid of things we don’t know. So so we just gradually keep learning things, which eliminates in the process of learning, we eliminate not knowing. So the reason that, so this is like why Buddha taught emptiness. He taught emptiness so that we can get rid of our ignorance of not knowing about emptiness. And in and through doing this, achieve Buddhahood.
The Buddha’s main purpose or the only purpose of of teaching was to alleviate our ignorance in order for us to achieve Buddhahood in this way. Okay. So the reason that it’s called that these these texts are called the mother of all the Buddhas, of all the Buddhas, is because if you don’t have a mother, you can’t have a son or a daughter. Actually, a child. So, yeah.
There’s the word for child. So, therefore, you we need this source. We need this this source for this knowledge. So in order to achieve Buddhahood, we need to understand that every single phenomenon is empty of true existence. And in order to understand that every single phenomenon is empty of true existence, we need to get rid of the idea of the ignorance that all phenomena are truly existent.
So this is the reason that the Buddha taught these sutras. Okay. So the the wisdom realizing emptiness is called the mother of all the Buddhas, and bodhicitta is called the father of all the Buddhas, and through these parents, then we are the the children that are given birth to is is the Buddha. So by understanding emptiness and by practicing bodhicitta, this is how you become a a Buddha, and this is the process that people go through in order to achieve enlightenment. So when it says Bhagavati, or the female Foe Destroyer, the reason that it says this is because it is the is the mother of all the of all the Buddhas.
Okay. So there’s a bit in the Tibetan translation, I don’t necessarily think is the Okay. So it says that the Heart Sūtra is actually one section. And what they mean by one section in this case is that it is made up of twenty five shlokas. And what a shloka is is like verse, and it’s a verse made up of four lines.
Hang on. I wrote this down somewhere. Four lines of seven words. So the Heart Sūtra is supposed to be twenty five verses made up of four lines of seven words. Okay.
So there’s there’s also a bit which I don’t actually know. So in all English translations, it says, to the to Ārya Mañjuśrī, I I prostrate, and to the mother of the Buddhas, I prostrate. And this is actually part of the original Sūtra. This is added by the translators when they were translating it from Sanskrit into Tibetan or maybe from Tibetan into English. And the purpose of doing that is that by prostrating to the mother of the Buddhas, to the wisdom to the perfection of wisdom sutras, then hopefully, then they’ll be able to translate it well.
It doesn’t — last week, my watch was wrong, and I think I finished early. Today’s guy, are you sure it’s time finished, really? He doesn’t believe me. But if we just leave it, and if anyone has any questions. Yeah.
Okay, yeah, there’s a very strong connection between, I’m not yelling and you can probably hear me. There’s a strong connection between these two. If there’s one that’s called, what’s called a compound phenomena, and the other one’s called a permanent phenomena. The compound phenomena is actually sentience or mind, and the permanent phenomena is the emptiness of that mind. And these two different sections actually make up the two sections of Buddha nature.
They have names, the first one being the emptiness of that mind being the naturally abiding lineage, and the mind itself is called Well, I haven’t actually found a translation for it, making one up, it’s the lineage that has the ability to achieve Buddhahood. These two aspects are the two parts of Buddha nature, and then the two aspects of mind, the emptiness of mind and the mind itself. Okay, so the relationship between them also means that if one doesn’t exist, the other one can’t exist. So, for example, if there’s no sentience, there can’t be no emptiness of sentience, and if there’s no emptiness of sentience, there can’t be any sentience because sentience isn’t truly established. And what actually happens with these two aspects of Buddha nature is that once we’ve achieved enlightenment, the natural abiding lineage actually becomes the wisdom, the emptiness wisdom no, sorry.
The emptiness body of the dharmakaya, and the other aspect becomes the wisdom body of the dharmakaya. The mind becomes the wisdom body of the dharmakaya, and the emptiness becomes the nature body of the dharmakaya, that’s what it is. Yeah. Oh, hang on, you can go. I know you’re there.
So the emptiness doesn’t actually change, but every single instance that there’s change going on, there’s a new emptiness arises. There’s a new emptiness along with it. It doesn’t arise because I’m not like, dude, that’s wrong. Because every every instant that there’s a new there’s a change in the object that is changing, new emptiness is there. It arrives.
He nearly said it arises as well. It arrives. So every time that there’s a new, the phenomenon has changed, a new emptiness comes along with the change in that phenomenon. So the two are going to be linked, but one doesn’t change and the other one does. As soon as one changes, then a new emptiness arrives to fit that change.
It doesn’t exist. For example, we have a cup, and at the moment we have emptiness of cup. But if the cup breaks, there’s no longer emptiness of cup, there’s emptiness of broken cup. Okay. So the actual different instances of emptiness are linked to what they are empty they are the emptiness of, right?
But emptiness itself, yeah, doesn’t change and is always abiding and doesn’t cease. Yeah. Even though the emptiness of a cup may change. Ceases when the cup breaks. Sure.
But then it’s become there’s like a emptiness of broken cup. I said, emptiness doesn’t change. Okay. So you can’t have a emptiness of something that doesn’t exist. Emptiness has to be the emptiness of something that exists.
So, for example, Mao used to be around, yeah, the China dude. While he was alive, his emptiness exists. But now that he is no longer alive, you can’t say that his emptiness is there anymore because his emptiness no longer exists. It’s not an existent, right? So it’s the lack of something.
So you can’t say that there’s you can’t say, for example, that skyflowers have emptiness because they don’t exist. So something has to exist in order for it to have emptiness. But because it doesn’t exist substantially is why it has emptiness. So the the emptiness, this is where the emptiness may change from the old cup to the new cup and from the child to the adult, but emptiness itself is the lack of something. So it’s the same essence.
That’s what doesn’t change. So it’s actually the lack of something, and it’s this this lack of something means that it doesn’t change because it’s the absence of something, and the absence of something can’t change because it’s a negative. Right? It arises because of causes, and the causes change, but its nature doesn’t change, because its nature is the lack of something. Whew.
Yes. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. He said it’s really difficult because scientists say that our mind is in our brain, and they say our mind is in our brain for this and this and this reason, but he said that he hasn’t seen any conclusive proof that proves our mind is in our brain. It’s just what they posit.
And in the same way, Buddhists posit that our mind is actually at the place of our heart, but they haven’t got any conclusive proof for that. It’s just what they posit. So he thinks it’s difficult, and he doesn’t understand it properly. But in Buddhism, they say that everything that exists exists because of people labeling it. So we have to investigate this because if we label something, our mind is being in our in our brain, then that’s where our mind’s gonna be.
And if someone else labels their mind as being in their heart, by the power of that that labeling, that’s where it’s gonna be. So he said if you’re thinking my mind is in my brain, then you’re probably gonna find all the reasons why your mind is in your brain. That’s a lot of your brain. Yeah. But that’s probably him.
It’s not a good habit, I guess. Is that someone or just giggling? Right? Yeah. I can’t hear you.
Sorry. Yeah. He wants me to give it to oh, Yeah. Sorry about this. It’s the cat.
So hang on. The emptiness is realizing no. Sorry. The my the wisdom is realizing the emptiness of cup. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. The mind. The wisdom. Sure.
Okay. Oh, that’s good. Okay. No. But this is gonna be tricky because in Buddhism, we don’t just have one mind.
When they talk about minds, don’t it’s not like every every split second, there’s a different mind. So there’s like a mind or a con maybe a consciousness is a better word, a consciousness seeing cup, and there’s a consciousness seeing the emptiness of cup, and then the consciousness that sees the emptiness of the broken cup is actually a different consciousness to the consciousness that saw the emptiness of the cup. So it’s a different mind. I thought you yeah. Is there anything else?