Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a verse from Śāntideva — that ignorance acts as the enemy of virtue, destroying happiness from within — Geshe Pema Tsering devotes this 43.5-minute session to explaining why every samsaric attempt to find happiness reliably produces suffering instead. He walks through all ten non-virtues using vivid contemporary examples: troops killing in Iraq and consumers eating meat both illustrate how actions done for happiness generate the karma that deepens misery. He then addresses why practitioners who understand this still struggle to act virtuously, tracing it to weak belief in karma — captured in a paycheck analogy — before closing with the three wisdoms of listening, contemplating, and meditating, each anchored by the right motivation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 21 HS 2003 04 01.mp3
UUID: 728721b7-6376-41a5-a328-449e24f86782
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Heart Sūtra (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-04-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.5 minutes
Words: ~4,016
So, Śāntideva in the Bodhicaryāvatāra said that if you want to get rid of suffering, then you have to deal directly with the cause of suffering, which is in your mind. If you want to experience happiness, then you have to understand that your ignorance kills your virtue as if it was its enemy. So, yeah, this explains how our mind is. All of us, without exception, want to be happy and don’t want to suffer. We have this mind that searches for happiness and tries to get away from suffering, but we don’t actually work with our minds in order to make this happen.
We have this idea that we don’t want suffering and we want happiness, but we don’t try and work with the causes of suffering and the causes of happiness. We don’t try and understand what is the main cause for our suffering, and instead we go about perpetuating the circumstances that create suffering, and then we have to experience more suffering in the future because of this perpetuation of these circumstances. So, in order for us to actually abide in happiness, in order for us to get the happiness we want, then we need to be able to create the circumstances for happiness to come about. So we have this desire to abide in happiness, but by the power of our ignorance, our ignorance actually goes about around destroying our happiness or destroying our virtue, because they act as a similar thing here, as if that virtue or that happiness was this ignorance’s enemy, as if it had to destroy it completely in order to be happy, so the ignorance just keeps destroying the happiness, destroying the virtue, and not understanding what it actually is. So, we’re in this kind of difficult situation where we want to be happy, but because of our ignorance, the only thing that we’re good at creating that induce suffering, there are circumstances of suffering.
So, we’re trying to be happy, but instead of making ourselves happy, we make ourselves more miserable by creating more causes for suffering. So, everything that we do with the desire to be happy actually turns out as being a cause for more misery. So if you look at the circumstances in the world today so if you look at it in a broad perspective, we look at the world today, then we can see that people, out of a desire to be happy, have even started a war. And because they think that if they win the war, if they finish this war and they come out on top, then they’re going to be happy. That’s going to make them happy and feel safe.
That’s the purpose for them starting the war, but in the process, in the actual fight, that they’re killing people, they’re killing animals, they’re destroying homes, they’re destroying people’s environments as well, they’re causing so much destruction, all in the name of trying to make themselves happy, but what they’re actually doing is creating lots of causes for suffering in the future for themselves and others. So, works on the that’s like how it works in the extended, in the kind of global view, but we can also see how it works for ourselves. In order to make ourselves happy, we eat fish flesh, we eat cow flesh, we eat sheep flesh, and we’re doing all this in order to make ourselves happy. We’re not doing it in order to help any other beings. We’re doing it for our own satisfaction and our own pleasure, and in doing so we’re creating misery and negativities for ourselves.
So, by doing this, because other people are killing animals in order for us to have things to eat, then we are creating the negativity of one type of killing from the ten non virtues And in a similar way, in a global manner, the troops in Iraq are killing people in order for them to have happiness in the end. But all it’s coming down to, whether it’s globally or with ourselves, is that we’re creating the karma of killing from the ten non virtues because of trying to make ourselves happy. So, though we don’t get the direct karma of killing, we are eating the results of other people’s killing, so they wouldn’t be killing their animals if we weren’t after the animal’s flesh that we wanted to eat, if we weren’t after the meat. So, although we don’t get the direct karma of killing, there is still killing going on in order for our own satisfaction and our own happiness. Okay, so in this way, in a global and local level, then there’s killing going on in order for people to have satisfaction or happiness.
It also works with stealing. People steal in order to be happy. They act as bandits or like bushrangers in order to be happy. They indulge in dodgy business, they push up prices to get extra profits in order to be happy. And all these come under the banner of stealing according to the ten non virtues.
So in the same way that people are indulging in sexual mispractices and they’re doing negative business practices and they’re doing killing and all of these three, all these physical and negative acts are done in order to have pleasure, but apart from some little bits pleasure that may be experienced after the act, then they are actually all just causes for more suffering in the future. So likewise, as it’s the same it is with these three non virtues of body, the four non virtues of speech, speaking lies, etc, and the three non virtues of mind, they are all participated in, they’re all practiced in order for people to find some kind of happiness. They’re all done with the motivation that people will get happiness out of those acts. All that is coming out of the acts is actually more suffering. So, what happens?
All these things are done in order for us to have this little bit of happiness, but this little bit of happiness or this little bit of pleasure that comes from those isn’t actually really pleasure and happiness at all. It’s a very fleeting, changeable form of samsaric pleasure that doesn’t actually have pleasure or happiness as its nature anyway, because it turns quite quickly back into suffering. Therefore, its nature isn’t happiness at all. But it’s very difficult for us to see that it is actually suffering, so we see that as happiness and keep trying to strive for it. We can’t, it’s very difficult for us to see that it is actually another form of suffering.
So, we’ve actually had the habit of doing these ten non virtuous things, of participating in these different activities since beginningless time. Since beginningless time we’ve thought we’ve gone after things, we’ve chased our desires for fleeting samsaric happiness, so we have the habit of it. The habit is really strongly embedded in our minds, and this strongly embedded habit means that we do it easily, we don’t have to think about it, we don’t have to put in effort in order to participate in these ten non virtues, the things that come easily to our mind and things that we actually have to try and work hard at in order to stop. So, this means that what Śāntideva said, when he said that we have to stop the causes of suffering, it was right on the money, was correct, I was on it, because if we don’t stop the causes, if we don’t stop the reasons that we’re creating suffering in the first place, then we’re not going to be able to do anything about the results of causes that we’ve put into play. So, we are actually at the moment, as it says in the second part, we are not actually abiding in pleasure or happiness at the moment.
It’s just that we don’t realize this, we don’t have an understanding of what pleasure happiness is. We want it, but we don’t understand how to get it. So what happens is our ignorance acts as its enemy and kills any chance that we have of actually experiencing it. Sorry, I just made this mistake. We aren’t abiding in it.
Abiding and desiring it is the same. We do want happiness, not that we’re abiding in it. So this ignorance, this fogginess that we have in our mind is not understanding. The thing that we don’t understand is what the true nature of happiness is, and what the true nature of suffering is, and what the direct cause of happiness is, and what the direct cause of suffering is. And because we don’t understand that, then this ignorance acts as a way of chopping at all or getting rid of any of the happiness that we may be able to achieve.
So, this ignorance stops us from being able to see what true happiness is and what true suffering actually is, because at the moment we see very, very slight bits of happiness as being true happiness, when they’re actually just suffering another different manifestation of suffering, because they don’t sustain themselves as being a happy experience or a pleasurable experience. The only way that we can actually understand true happiness is by perceiving emptiness directly. If we understand karma and we get to understand what is good and what is bad, what is going to create suffering and what is going to create happiness via the ten non virtues, then we can begin to develop a direct understanding of emptiness, we can bring about a direct understanding of emptiness. And from these three, from good actions, from an understanding of karma and an understanding of emptiness, then we can achieve a liberation from saṃsāra and then we can experience true happiness. And that true happiness isn’t isn’t fleeting and it’s stable and it’s something we can rely on.
So, because we don’t understand this now, because we don’t have this understanding of emptiness, because we don’t have this understanding of karma, then we only see happiness as being the fleeting happinesses that we have of samsaric pleasure at the moment, and in order to get those, have this thought in our mind, oh that makes me happy, I’ll keep doing that, and we kept chasing after that, we keep having using that as our objective desire, in trying to achieve it, creating more and more negativities, and because of the more and more negativities, then we have to actually experience more suffering. So this ignorance is not understanding how things really are, not understanding how cause and effect properly works, and not understanding the emptiness of things, means that our ignorance acts as the enemy to our virtues, virtues and acts as the enemy to our pleasure, our happiness, and actually destroys that instead of what we think it’s doing, which is leading us towards happiness. So because we have this habit of doing non virtuous things, and because we have this habit of desiring things that actually aren’t going to bring us lasting happiness, then it’s very difficult for us to change our mind away from that and try and practice virtuous things and trying to establish causes for us to experience lasting happiness, because not only do we understand not understand lasting happiness, we don’t understand the causes for lasting happiness.
So, if we can’t understand the causes for it, we don’t understand that true happiness comes about because of doing virtuous things, then we can’t even start to build this put the causes into place to build a situation that we will experience only happiness in. So, it’s very difficult to get this concept of there being a cause for happiness and a cause for suffering, and by doing virtuous things or good things and not doing non virtuous things and bad things that you’ll be happy. Apart from people who are trying to practice Buddhist faith then you’re apart from those it’s very difficult to try and find that in Christian religions and other religions, they do have this concept as well. They have this idea that if you do good things then you will experience happiness, and if you do negative things you’ll experience suffering, but there isn’t really the explanation of karma or the explanation of how that actually comes together developed as much. So amongst Buddhists there’s even a lot of Buddhists that don’t know what is a virtuous action and what is a non virtuous action.
They have a vague idea of what it is to be a Buddhist and call themselves Buddhist, but they haven’t ever studied what it is to, what means to do good action and what means to be negative action. We could probably say that most people in here, because they’ve studied Buddhism for at least a few years, have a general idea of what is meant by good actions and what is meant by negative actions. So we’re supposed to have this understanding of what it is that we have to do that’s virtuous that’s going to create happiness and what it is that is non virtuous that we don’t really want to do because that’s going to create suffering and that we have to abandon that. We know this, but it’s hard to do, hard to keep it up even if we start. So, it’s hard because there’s so many things that can go wrong.
We can forget to have the right motivation for doing something and then try and do something positive without the right motivation, or we can be doing something with the right motivation, but it’s negative, or we can forget about both, or we can just think it’s too hard some days. There’s lots of times when it’s just not something that we’re doing, minds are focused on something else and we’re concentrating on virtuous things. So, if we think about it, most of the time we’re probably not doing virtuous things. And if we do it, it’s very difficult. The reason that we’re finding it difficult to keep practicing virtuous things all the time is because in previous lives we didn’t have the habit of doing virtuous things all the time, so in this life we have to push ourselves into the habit of doing virtuous things.
The main reason behind that is because we say that we’re Buddhists, we say that we understand karma, we say that we believe in karma, but if we really believed in it, we wouldn’t be doing a single negative thing wrong. If we had a stable clear understanding of how karma worked, we wouldn’t and couldn’t do anything negative and we could only do and want to do positive things. So, what it actually comes down to is not having a strong faith or strong or clear belief in karma. So, we have faith in the Three Jewels and we have faith in karma or belief in karma, but because it’s not strong, it makes it difficult for us to try and practice and to try to do positive things and to try and have positive thoughts all the time, but we have a lot of habit in doing negative things and we can see the immediate or what we believe are benefits of doing negative things. It’s not that much effort to actually do negative and to go after our desires and everything.
It comes pretty easy to us. If we had this really strong faith and belief, we’d be like the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the past who achieved all these different paths and all these realizations pretty easily. It wasn’t that much of an effort for them. They didn’t have to struggle so much. They say that Śākyamūni Buddha, after he had achieved Arhatship, became a Buddha pretty quick.
It wasn’t that difficult for him. He didn’t have to struggle because he had such firm belief and clear belief. So, because Buddha the Buddha had such faith in the Three Jewels and such faith in karma, then it didn’t take much effort for him to do all this work because he naturally believed in it and he couldn’t think of doing anything else. For most of us, that faith isn’t that strong. For most of us, although we don’t necessarily have ignorance about the Three Jewels or the karma we don’t necessarily not believe it at all we still have doubts and those doubts make our faith a little bit unsteady and a little bit unclear so we could say that we don’t have complete ignorance about it like people who don’t believe in it at all but the doubts are the things that we have to work with So, we’re trying to deal with these doubts.
We’re trying to deal with doubts about the Three Jewels. We think that they probably exist, but we don’t one hundred percent believe it. We’re trying to deal with doubts about past and future lives because we’ve never seen them. And we how do we know that they exist? We’re trying to figure out a way of convincing ourselves that they exist completely by using logic when we usually rely on seeing things in order to believe it.
We’re trying to figure out how come we’ve got doubts about karma because we can see it generally, but we can’t see the direct fruit or the direct result of the things that we’re doing at the moment, so therefore we find it difficult to believe that those results will come about. So we’re trying to work with these doubts all the time in our minds. Some of us don’t have the doubt that tends away from the fact. Don’t have we have the doubt that may maybe some of us have the doubt that maybe karma exists, maybe it doesn’t, and jury’s out and we’re not gonna come down on either side, and then we may have the doubt that goes, does it exist? Maybe, maybe no, probably it does, but we don’t usually have the doubt that says, does karma exist?
I don’t know, I don’t think it does, and comes down on the side of the negative. So, we’re dealing with doubt tending towards the fact, but it’s still doubt. So if we didn’t have doubt, then doing virtuous things wouldn’t be a hassle. If we didn’t have doubt, then we wouldn’t get tired. There wouldn’t be any problems with doing virtuous things.
We would just do them naturally. So, if we were as certain about karma as we are certain of our paychecks, then we wouldn’t have as many doubts about doing good things, in the same way that we don’t really think, well, I’m not going to do that because I may not get a paycheck at the end of the week. We may get tired while we’re working, but we don’t decide to give it up because we know that we’re going to get the paycheck. So, when we’re working we get tired, we get exhausted, we get frustrated and everything, but we keep at it because we know we’re getting the paycheck. So, if we had the same kind of belief in karma then no matter how tired or how exhausted we got, we just keep at it because we knew what the results were going to be.
So the difference is that we can directly see the money when we get it, we can see pay, so therefore we don’t have any doubts about it, but when it comes to karma we can’t directly see the results of our actions, so we find it harder to not have doubts about it. But if we didn’t have the doubts, then anything that we wanted to do would be a lot easier for us to do. So the way that we get rid of our doubts about these things is by studying and reading texts and trying to understand things. We read and we try and understand and then we contemplate on it and then we see how it works in practice for ourselves. So we try and understand how karma works and then try and get some experience of it.
We try and develop faith in the Three Jewels and then see how that works for us and we get some kind of understanding that we’re going through the next life so we better start working towards it. So, they have a word in Tibetan that’s actually a combination of three words, which is listening, contemplating and meditating. So, this is considered a very important word. We have to listen very hard, we have to contemplate very hard, we have to meditate very hard, in order to be able to get rid of our doubts. So, out of these three, meditation depends on contemplation and contemplation depends on studying and hearing.
So, the one that we need to place most emphasis on at the start is on hearing and studying. So if we’re like us, then the most important thing that we need to do is to listen and study. So, from listening and listening and studying, we get an understanding of the words and we get an understanding of what’s behind the words, and from this arises what’s called the wisdom of listening. After we’ve developed the wisdom of listening, then we need to go through in our mind over and over again and do a lot of contemplating on the words to try and understand them. And then from this contemplation we develop an inferential cognizer, which is a conceptual thought that relies on a sign, and that inferential cognizer of this understanding is called the wisdom arising from contemplation.
And then based on that, then we start meditating, and then the realizations that we develop in meditation then are called the wisdom coming from meditation. So even these three, even this studying or listening, contemplating and meditation, these three also are defined by what motivation they’re practiced with. So before we do any of these three studying, listening or meditating, no, yeah, Studying, contemplating or meditating, then we have to define our motivation. Preferably it should be a bodhicitta, that is the thought to attain enlightenment for the benefit of sentient beings. If not, it should be attain liberation for ourselves, and if not, that we have a good rebirth, and that is in the next life, we go to the higher realms and spare the sufferings of the lower realms.
So in the same way that we do the listening, contemplating, meditating by order, where at the same time as this, we should also be concentrating on the three different types of beings, that is, with the three different types of motivations, the lowest of which is that we should be thinking about the next life. We shouldn’t really pay that much attention to this life, because we are already here, we already made it, we already achieved a human rebirth, we did something right in the past, so we can’t keep dwelling on that now, because it’s already over. We have to be working towards our next life and trying to do something right for the future. So it’s actually very difficult for us to achieve karma, or to finish karma that we can actually experience in this life anyway. It has to be something incredibly strong for us to experience it in this life, so there’s not so much point worrying about that.
We should be thinking about the next life, because at least if we’re thinking of the next life, then it becomes like a dharmic practice. Okay, so if we don’t work hard in this life to try and attain a good life in the next rebirth, then all the work that we put in in order to get here becomes wasted. We waste all that opportunity that we’ve just created for ourselves.