Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland — anything arising from attachment, hatred, or ignorance is non-virtue — Geshe Pema Tsering spends most of this 45-minute commentary on karmic groundwork before reaching the Heart Sūtra text. He walks through the ten non-virtues (three of body, four of speech, three of mind) with plain definitions, then argues that the real obstacle to abandoning them is weak belief in karma. His paycheck analogy makes the point: we go to work only because we genuinely believe we’ll be paid; karma requires the same concrete conviction. He notes that all negativities, however ingrained, can be purified, then turns to the Heart Sūtra’s uncommon prologue, explaining why it opens “at that time” — the listeners’ virtuous roots had ripened enough to receive the teaching on emptiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 HS 2003 02 18.mp3
UUID: 8e0473e2-13ab-404a-9a4c-e2313e1f8df3
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Heart Sūtra (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-02-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~3,591
To start with a quote, Master Nāgārjuna said in his Precious Garland, Anything that arises from attachment, hatred, or ignorance is non virtue, and anything that arises from the absence of hatred the absence of ignorance, hatred, or attachment is virtue. So that is anything that we have in our mind that comes from our desire for objects, anger or hatred towards anything else, and our basic ignorance. Anything that arises from any of these three, anything that we do that’s an action that comes from these three becomes non virtuous. So from the negative of this, anytime that we’ve we have the absence of attachment, anytime that we have the absence of anger, anytime that we have the absence of ignorance or we have knowing, anything that we do, any mind that we have that arises from the absence of these, anything any action that we take that arise from these, from the absence of these, and any karma that we accumulate that arise from the absence of these, all of these become virtuous. So, then if we take it one step further from that, anything that arises from virtue becomes pleasure, and Anything that arises from non virtue becomes suffering.
So therefore, you want to look at the antidote to suffering, we have to say that it is getting rid of non virtue or increasing virtue. So in that case, it makes it very important for us to understand what what causes what is what is virtue and what is non virtue and what causes suffering and what causes happiness because if we understand what causes happiness and suffering and this being what’s virtuous or non virtuous then we can create circumstances in our life where we get in our lives where we get happiness and we avoid suffering because there’s not any any creature any being that wants to be unhappy There is if we’re humans, whether we’re humans, whether we’re animals, whether we’re ghosts, whether whatever creature it is, we want to be happy and we want to be separated from suffering. So, we want to create the causes that will make us separated separate us from suffering and make us have pleasure and happiness in our lives. But we don’t actually know the difference between virtue and non virtue. And we don’t actually know the difference between what’s going to be the cause of happiness and what’s going to be the cause of suffering.
So because we don’t know the difference with this, cling to things that are actually going to cause us suffering in the mistaken belief that they will cause us happiness. And by this clinging, we actually get more caught up in saṃsāra and then perpetuate the cycle of suffering that we are actually experiencing now. So we don’t know that we don’t instinctively know what is going to cause us happiness and what is going to cause us sorrow. The the person that does know or the beings that do know what’s gonna cause happiness and sorrow is Buddha. That’s why their name is Buddha which means awake because they realize what’s gonna cause happiness and what’s gonna cause sorrow.
And what they’ve also done to help us out is to teach us what is going to cause happiness and what’s gonna cause sorrow. So by studying their teachings and understanding their teachings we as well can try and understand what’s going to cause happiness and sorrow. Okay, just making sure on that. Right, so a long time ago Buddha was like this is Buddha Śākyamūni we’re talking about here. Buddha Śākyamūni was just like us.
He didn’t understand what was going to cause happiness and he didn’t understand what was going to cause suffering and therefore he was caught up in a cycle of suffering and happiness much the same as we are now. But he came across a godlike being who knew everything called Mañjuśrī. Mañjuśrī actually explained to the Buddha Śākyamūni how suffering came about and how pain came about. And from his learning from Mañjuśrī, Buddha went away and then tried to incorporate this understanding in his life and came to know what was going to cause happiness and what was going to cause suffering and eventually became the Buddha. So by listening to the teachings of Mañjuśrī, Buddha Śākyamūni was able to understand what it was that he had to practice and what it was that he had to abandon.
What thoughts and things that he was doing did he need to stop doing and get rid of and what other things there were that he needed to do in order to get this understanding of suffering and happiness. So by incorporating this and meditating on this and doing these practices and accumulating merit, he eventually became Buddha because this was the basis of his understanding of Buddha, was understanding what he needed to abandon and what he needed to incorporate. So this is the most important thing for us to understand is that what we need to do in order to get rid of suffering and what we need to do in order to experience happy happiness. And from that, that if we practice virtue, we get happiness. If we practice non virtue, we get suffering.
So for every virtue that we do and every virtue that we accumulate, there will be a correspondent happiness that comes our way. And in the same way, for every non virtue that we do and every non virtuous action we accumulate, there will be a corresponding suffering that comes our way. So the main things that we have to abandon are what are called the ten non virtues. There’s also other things that people have to do if they have certain vows. There’s certain things that they have to refrain from because they hold certain vows.
But for most of us, that doesn’t apply because most of us are, well, most of us, I can’t say most of you, lay practitioners. So therefore we don’t have to abide by as many vows. Because of that, the main thing that we should be focusing on is trying to get rid of the ten non virtues. If we’re unable to get rid of them completely, to try and decrease the amount of the ten non virtues that we accumulate. Okay, so in order for us to abandon these ten non virtues, we actually have to know what they are.
The ten non virtues are divided into three. They’re divided into three different sets. That being the three non virtues of body, the four non virtues of speech and the three non virtues of mind. From the first set, the three non virtues of body, we have killing, killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. So then we have the four non virtues of speech.
The first one being lying. So it’s telling people something that you distinctly know is not the truth in order for self gain. The second one being a divisive speech, which is when two people are good friends saying something to each one of them that will make them not like each other, whether it’s two people or a group or however many people. The third one being harsh speech, which is telling bad things about people even if it’s true. The fourth one is speaking rubbish.
It the literal translation. It s any time you just sit around going yak yak yak and talking this and talking that and for no purpose. Okay. So the three different ones of of mind, the three negativities of mind, the first one being covetousness, saying I really want that and having this attachment to things and saying and thinking that you need to have them and you do whatever you can to get them. The second one is called a harmful mind.
So that is like any consciousness which wants to harm others or harm their stuff. So if you don’t like someone and you want to beat them up or damage their stuff, even if you want to ruin that and not necessarily hit them, then that’s still this type of mind. Then the third one is what they call wrong views, which is basically not not accepting the sanctity of the Three Jewels, not accepting karma and not accepting our past and future lives and things like that. So that’s the ten that we have. The three of the three of body, the four of speech, and the three of mind.
The idea is to stop doing, to abandon participating in these actions, and to abandon being part of these actions. Every time that we abandon one of these things, every time we stop doing any of these, or stop ourselves from doing any these, that actually becomes a cause for happiness. It’s not just in general if we abandon all ten that we get some kind of happiness. It’s that every single time that there is some kind of abandoning of bad doings happening, there is a corresponding happiness to that one little abandonment. So so in the same way that every little thing that we do that’s good comes back at us in a in a positive way.
Every little thing that we do is bad can come back at us in a negative as way as well. And if our goal is to try and come back as a human in our next life and be able to practice Dharma, then we have to be really careful of this because it s really difficult to achieve a human rebirth. So we have to try and do everything that is possible for us to be able to attain that. So this is like the lowest level of motivation. So we have to be really careful about the negativities that we accrue and the positivities that we don’t accrue if this is our goal.
So yeah. Because if we are accumulating a whole bunch of bad deeds, then it’s every like every likelihood that we do only even achieve a human rebirth in the next life. So we have to know what these ten non virtues are. We have to understand them properly. It’s really important.
Otherwise, we can end up in in some bad situations. So if you can understand them and remember them by just hearing them, then that’s good. Otherwise, if you can’t do that, then write them down, learn them, get them into your head in some way or another so that you can remember for the future. Most people don’t even know about these ten non virtues, so they don’t have this concept of, Oh, I can’t do that and I should do this. I mean, they may know about some of them, but they don’t know about all of them.
So from amongst most people, we’re lucky in that we have the chance to be able to study them and to try understand what are the Ten non-virtues properly. But then even in terms of us being able to implement them fully and being able to, in our everyday lives, know what to abandon and what to practice is very difficult. It’s not just a matter of knowing what they are. It’s it’s trying to implement them as well. So Geshe-la says the the reason that we can’t do this is because we don’t believe well enough in karma.
Because if we do believe in karma truly, then we wouldn’t be doing anything that was that was bad because we would understand that the direct the direct fruition of that bad deed would be suffering coming our way. Because we don’t have a strong enough or a good enough belief in karma, we do bad deeds out of these ten non virtues. We still don’t do enough good deeds from these ten non virtues. So he says that okay. So if someone comes up to us and says, if you do if you do good things, then good things come from that.
And you say, well, I’m a Buddhist. I have to say that if I do good things, good things will come from that. And If they say, And what about bad things? If you do bad things, will bad things come from that? We go, Yeah.
And they say, Are you sure? We go, Yeah. And it’s like, How do you know you’re sure? It’s like, Well, I’m a Buddhist. I have to say that.
By the way and even if I wasn’t a Buddhist, that that lama over there said it, and he knows. And so this this kind of concept isn’t isn’t quite good enough if we’re trying to abandon the ten non virtues. So even so even though we keep saying, yeah, yeah, I believe in karma and stuff, we don’t actually act like we believe in karma, so we can’t believe in it really strongly. But there are things that we do believe in, like, we believe, for example, that if we’re hungry and we eat, we get full. So therefore, when we’re hungry, we look at food and go, nice.
I’m gonna eat that because I know if I eat that, then I’m gonna be full. But we don’t look at karma this way. And in the same way, we believe that if we go to work at a certain time every day and we do our work, then we’re going to get a paycheck. And that’s the reason that we go to work because we think, well, if I go to work, then I’ll get the paycheck at the end of the day. And we believe that we’re going to get the paycheck at the end of the day, so we go there.
So if we didn’t believe we were going to get a paycheck and there was no point to going to work, we wouldn’t go. So in the same way that we believe if we go to work, we’re gonna get paid. We have to believe that if we do bad things, bad things will come we will experience suffering. And if we do good things, we will experience happiness. It has to be on that fundamental level.
So in the same way that we’re struggling with this now, a long time ago, the Buddhas had the same kind of problem. They they didn’t necessarily believe it strongly enough. They had this idea that maybe there was this thing called karma, maybe if they did good things, then good things would come, but they weren’t absolutely convinced of it. So what they did was they started practicing and seeing what would happen, and then going over and over again in their head and developing stronger faith. Then once they developed this faith and their understanding of karma grew more subtle and more subtle.
And the more subtle it grew, the more they understood what it was they had to do was good, and what it was they had to abandon was bad. And eventually it became so subtle, this understanding that they achieved Buddhahood. So the thing is that we have to abandon guess like I said we had to abandon non virtue, but he changed his mind. So we had to abandon non virtue and accumulate virtue. But this isn’t actually as easy as it sounds because since beginningless time, we’ve had this habit of doing bad deeds and accumulating negative deeds.
If we got some scales and we put our bad deeds on one side of the scale and our good deeds on the other, it would go like this. So there wouldn’t be any competition. And it’s actually difficult because we’re so habituated into doing doing non virtue and doing bad things that it’s really difficult for us to do good things even. We we find it a chore of something that’s that’s difficult to do because we’re just so habituated into doing what the we’re so habituated into thinking about what pleasure we can get at the moment and therefore creating non virtue. So it’s difficult for us to try and accumulate virtue, and especially difficult for us to try and accumulate big virtues.
Because we’re so habituated into accumulating negativities, first thing we wake up in the morning, we’re not necessarily likely to think of something virtuous. We’re more likely to think of something negative. So it doesn’t even take much effort for us to do something that’s basically negative. It does take a lot of effort for us to do something that’s positive. It’s not just a matter of focusing on the positive things.
It’s more like our mind just habitually goes towards negative things and it’s easy for to do negative things. So it’s a constant battle to stop it from doing negative things. Oh. Or it takes not constant battle. It takes constant effort.
But fortunately, negativities have one good quality. Negativities have the good quality that they can be can be purified. They can be that we can regret our actions, and we can purify our negativities. So it doesn’t matter what the negativity is, it doesn’t matter how strong it is, or at what stage we’ve done it there, it has the ability to be purified. Okay, so we don’t really have enough time to go into the whole process of how it is that we purify things because we have to start talking about the Heart Sūtra.
But it’s suffice to say that if any kind of study that we do about the Heart Sūtra or anything like that actually harms our negativities. It eats away at our negativity so they are less strong. So it’s really positive that we do these things. And by abandoning negativities and accumulating positivities, we we walk further proceed further along the the path towards Buddhahood. So by meditating on emptiness, by meditating on bodhicitta, by doing doing any kind of practice, you’re actually stopping.
Oh, yeah. So you’re actually you actually put a stop to your accumulation of negativities. Okay, so now we have to try and meditate that all beings like us don’t want to suffer, they want to be free from suffering, they want to experience happiness. And how they have to do that is by accumulating positivities and getting rid of negativities. So in the way that the Buddhas of the past have done, may I do this and achieve Buddhahood and in so doing be able to help other people become free from suffering and be at peace.
We should meditate on that. So we have finished the common prologue in the last class and we’re now up to the uncommon prologue. The uncommon prologue reads: ‘At that time the blessed one was absorbed in the concentration of the countless aspects of phenomena, or the categories of phenomena, called profound illumination. At that time also superior Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva, the great being, was looking perfectly at the practice of the profound perfection of wisdom, perfectly looking at the emptiness of inherent existence of the five aggregates also. Okay.
So the reason that it’s called the the uncommon or unique prologue is that most of the Buddhist sutras actually have a prologue. But the Heart Sūtra as opposed to the other ones actually has two prologues. There’s one that’s kind of common to all of them, and then it has this uncommon prologue, which is the one that we just read. So the reason that it starts off with then or at that time, There’s a very specific reason why it starts off with that. It’s because at that specific time, continuums of the people that were listening to it, their roots their collection of virtue had actually ripened sufficiently that they would be able to understand what the Buddha was going to say.
So this is the whole point of why the uncommon prologue is used. The Buddha didn’t just teach any old how. He didn’t just say, Oh, I’m going to teach on this today in the same way that Geshe-la says he does. We just go, Oh, we’re going to teach on this now. The Buddha had so much understanding that he only taught when it was he only taught things that were going to be absolutely helpful to the people that were listening.
So at that stage, knew that the minds of the people listening to his their continuums were ripe enough to be able to understand the meaning that he was about to teach and at that specific time he taught them. So the next part, the bit that says, he was absorbed in the profound illumination. The reason that it’s with regards to this profound illumination statement, the profound aspect of that is that he was absorbed in a concentration that was very difficult. It wasn’t something that was easily achieved because what they’re actually talking about is the profound illumination of emptiness, which is a very difficult thing to be able to understand. So this mind realizing emptiness is called profound because it is difficult.
Depending on whether we’re talking about emptiness, whether we’re talking about the selflessness of persons, whether we’re talking about the non separation of subject and object, that depends on which school, which tenet school whoever is saying it comes from. But we don’t have to get into that now. The main thing to remember is that this is a very difficult thing that he was meditating on at this point.