Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A village man who beat his wife and wept when forced to reflect on it — Geshe Pema Tsering uses this story from his own upbringing to illustrate how uncontrolled anger harms the actor as much as the victim. This 45-minute session in his Introduction to Buddhism series works through the last three of the six root deluded emotions: pride (equanimity as the working antidote; recognizing the emptiness of self as the deeper cure), delusional ignorance (split into not seeing the true nature of things and not understanding how karma operates), and doubt about karma, past lives, and the Three Jewels. Between these he lays out five types of wrong views, from treating possessions as truly existent to holding self-harm practices as paths to liberation. The Q&A covers how karma ripens across lifetimes — strong actions bear fruit in this life, lighter ones in lives to come — and gives a plain, direct account of what emptiness of self actually means. Best followed by those attending the series from the start.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 ItB 2003 03 17.mp3
UUID: 3f9bcddf-f1a2-4a02-b4f5-1391ba74503c
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: IB Introduction to Buddhism (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-03-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~2,592
So so pride is a sense that we don’t know what other people have in their mind stream. We don’t know how different it is towards in our mind stream. But if we walk around with the sense of, yeah, I’m better than them, then that can be a really destructive thing to our to our to our way of thinking. I forgot something, but I can’t remember It’s okay. So the the the idea is not then to go, I have no qualities, and they have all the qualities either.
And that’s not the antidote to pride. The antidote to pride is to think that everybody is the same that everybody has qualities and everybody has shortcomings everybody is the same so when we find ourselves feeling like we are better than other people or lesser than other other people, the antidote is to think on equanimity. Okay. So when we’re experiencing full on pride, the idea is to have the thought in my head in in our heads that other people are better than that that nobody is as lowly as we are and that other people everybody else is better than us that’s when we’re experiencing the full on pride but it’s not the direct antidote to to pride the direct antidote to pride is to realize the emptiness of self so the idea when we have this mind now when we’re experiencing pride and arrogance we have this understanding that I am better, I am good, I really like myself The idea is to turn that around so we think that everybody else is better and that we really really like everybody else. Okay.
So, it’s easy for us to kind of get a sense of pride because we really think that we’re okay. We don’t spend a lot of time concentrating on our karma and our negative karma we’ve accumulated and our delusive mind, And we don’t think about that all the time. We can see other people’s own negative karma and delusive minds a lot though, and we tend to focus on that quite a bit. We we don’t know where we’re gonna go. We don’t know where we’re gonna end up or where our karma and the karma we’ve accumulated in the past is gonna take us.
But we don’t think about this most of time. Most of time, we kinda think, yeah. I’m pretty sure I’m good. If we have pride, then we don’t have qualities. And if we have a great pride, then no qualities will come into our mind stream.
So in order to develop qualities, we have to get rid of pride. Okay. So the third one is ignorance, but it’s ignorance that’s caused by the power of delusion. So this ignorance takes into account anything that we don’t know because we have a delusive a delusional? Is that a word?
No. Delusional mind. So so anything that we don’t understand because we have a a delusional mind comes into the word ignorance. So the two main delusion the two main divisions of delusive ignorance are not seeing the actual nature of things and not seeing the effects of karma and the effect of karma. Okay.
So the way that this ignorance is defined is that if we’re talking about the the main consciousnesses and the accompanying mental factors that go with it beforehand. So when the main mind is focusing on an object, when the main consciousness is focusing on an object, if this kind of side mind or side consciousness doesn’t understand that object properly, then that’s what they mean by ignorance. So for example if someone was concentrating on how karma works and they don’t understand how karma works and in the even in focusing on a mundane object like a carpet or something then if they don’t understand how karma brought that into effect, then that is what we call the ignorance of ignorance of karma. So likewise, this if if main consciousness is focusing on something and there’s a another part of consciousness that doesn’t understand the true nature of that thing I. E.
That it is empty of inherent existence then it is also called ignorance but in this case it’s the other the other division that is the ignorance of not seeing how things really are Thanks. Okay. Okay. Finally, we got it. Sorry about that.
I love it. I’m trying to remember something that I studied, like, a year ago, and it’s, like, divisions everywhere. Okay. So the first there’s, these five different ways that the mind can be incorrect. So that was the next one.
It’s like wrong views that are established by delusive minds or delusive consciousness. The first one is holding worldly things to be of meaning. The second one is holding extreme views that is the extremes of nihilism and eternalism. The third one is seeing things incorrectly, directly incorrectly. The fourth one is holding extremes to be good, and the fifth one is holding bad ethics as supreme.
Okay, so the first one is holding worldly things to be supreme is this sense of I am inherently established, the things that I own are inherently established and therefore have great meaning so therefore I am very meaningful, my hand is very meaningful, The things that I own are very meaningful. My car is very meaningful. Everything that is of a like a worldly nature is very meaningful. And not understanding that they are inherently not not inherently existent or not truly existent. Therefore, this is like a obscuration of wisdom.
Okay. So the second one is the extremes of nihilism and eternalism. The extreme of eternalism is that we hold things that are not truly existent or truly established to be truly existent or truly established and therefore we grasp at them and and all the other different delusions we’re talking about before come about that’s the one extreme the other extreme is that if we say well if things don’t exist they just don’t exist at all. So therefore, everything’s meaningless, and I can do whatever I want. Then that’s the other extreme of nihilism.
So the third one is this idea that you the way that you see things is the supreme way, and the way that everybody else sees things is not right. And therefore, they if if they don’t agree with you, then they’ve got it wrong. Yeah. And because there but there’s different views. So this holding your own view as as supreme is is is the third third one.
Hold holding wrong views as supreme. Okay. So the the wrong views is what is is holding the future lives and past lives and karma and the Three Jewels and things like that don’t exist. That’s what they mean by wrong views. That was the third one of the five.
Yeah. Okay. So these wrong views, it can it can be very destructive. In this life, it will create a suffering, and in future lives, it will create a a suffering. Alright.
Yeah. Okay. The the the last one holding wrong virtues to be supreme is when people do things like they think that they can attain liberation by making burnt offerings, offering live animals and killing animals and chopping their fingers off. Like, in the in the different religions in India, they chop their fingers off and and do things like that in order to achieve liberation. So it’s it’s holding the view that those things can be a benefit.
Okay. So the last one was a doubt caused by delusion. And so this isn’t just any old doubt. This is doubts about whether karma exists, doubts about past and future lives, doubts about whether the Buddha is Buddha and then things like that. So these kind of doubts can lead us to do negative actions and then create negative, karma, and more delusions that we have to deal with in the future.
So that’s the six root delusions no. That’s the six root deluded I keep saying delusive, and it’s not a word. The six root deluded emotions. Yeah. Okay.
So that was the sixth. There’s still there’s, like, twenty one different negative emotions left, but we’ll go through them quickly next time. Yeah. Yeah. And stop now.
Think you might have questions. Yeah. I have really difficult I really have difficulty with karma Uh-huh. About He said that every time that children experience happiness and they experience suffering and both the happiness and both and the suffering come about by a power of karma and things that they’ve done in previous life is the cause for their karma and their happiness and their sadness and not only their happiness and their sadness but also our happiness and our sadness and karma is also the reason that people have doubts about karma and it’s the reason for everything Yeah. Right.
Okay. Okay. So the main problem here is the anger that’s happening both from whether it’s from your side. So if you’re hitting someone with anger, then it becomes a non virtue. And if that person has anger towards you that they wanna stab you, then they’re experiencing some kind of non virtue as well.
So the idea is to try and explain to them that what they’re going to do is negative, right? And if you actually put yourself out there like that, right, and don’t have any anger coming from your side, then Geshe-la thinks that this would diffuse the situation. If there’s no anger coming from you, and you try and explain to them that what they’re going to do is going to be harmful to them, not to you, and then that’s the best thing to do. So the most important thing is that you control your own anger in that situation that you’re not reacting from your own anger by people’s anger they start wars they do they start all these they start wars they have fights they kill people they do all these sorts of things so the most important thing is to control your own anger in that situation Okay. So he says, for example, he knows that in his his his village where he was growing up, there was this guy, and he got really angry at his wife, and he really beat her.
And everyone was trying to tell them him to stop because there was no there was it was not good to beat his wife. And they eventually pulled him off and put him down and said, now did that help you? They said to this man, did that help you? And he had to sit there and try and think about if it had helped him. And he ended up just crying because he said it didn’t help me at all.
It just made everything more miserable so that you could see that that was like an example of how someone wasn’t thinking about what they were doing with their anger but when they were made to stop and think about what they were doing with their anger then then they understood that they were creating suffering for themselves as well. The the way to purify negative things that you’ve done in the past is to think, I really I understand that that was a bad thing to do. I don’t want to do that from now on. So therefore by doing that and by stopping yourself from doing it from now on, you don’t experience the negativities from the things that you have done and then acts as a stop to the suffering that may come in the future. That was to the first bit of how to purify karma.
If if you and if you’re experiencing suffering So, if you’re experiencing something now, then that actually is the result of the things you’ve done beforehand but it’s also the extinguishing of it naturally because if something you’re experiencing the result of something you’re also experiencing the extinguishing of that karma The idea is after that, that I don’t want to suffer like this anymore. In order to bring that about, there is the idea of refuge and the idea of bodhicitta and concentrating on these. And by the power of these things, then you can bring about the stopping suffering. Yeah. Yeah.
He said no, it actually comes about by the nature of karma itself. That if you by the nature of the karma itself. So if you do something that’s of a very strong nature in this life, then you will then you will experience the results of it quickly, I. E. In this life.
And if it’s something of like a middling type of strength, then you’ll experience the results of it in the next life. If it’s something that’s of a light nature, then you may experience the results of it in like hundreds of lifetimes to come. So It comes from the nature of the action itself decides when it will be experienced. Therefore if you do something positive and it’s a very positive thing, very strong positive karma, then you will experience some kind of positive karma ripening in this lifetime. And then if it’s middling and it’s positive, then you will experience some kind of pleasure or happiness, forgot that word in the next life or if it’s a minor one then in lifetimes to come so it’s nature of the karma that decides When you talk about pride you mentioned you used the phrase emptiness of self.
Yeah. What does that mean? You got a few days? Okay. This self of persons, opposite of the selflessness of persons, that strong sense that we have I, I, I.
And that that tends to to come up in in different circumstances where we feel threatened and things like that. There’s a really strong grasping at I. In in terms of Buddhist texts, this I isn’t an actual inherently existent thing. It’s something that’s labeled onto a pile of different connected phenomena as being being I, it doesn’t actually exist as that I. So this well, we understand it when we understand the really strong sense of I that we hold on to in ourselves.
Yeah. Okay so the point Okay, so if you realize the selflessness of the person, and then you don’t have self grasping, then you don’t have desire, then you don’t have, you don’t collect negative karma, and you don’t have negative emotions, therefore you don’t forget, you’re not reborn therefore you don’t have the power to be reborn in saṃsāra by the power of your karma and delusions but the people these beings still take rebirth sometimes in order to benefit other people and sometimes they take rebirth in in pure places where there is nothing but happiness Sure. Okay, desire for doing positive things is not called desire, it’s called faith okay now did you still have one the guy in the red shirt he’s the no I’ve changed mine I just didn’t want to let you think you’ve been forgotten. Yeah. He said it’s not only if you’re a Buddhist then you should try as many times as possible to think about all the negative things you’ve done and regret them and then to make a like aspirational prayer not to do it in the future.
So therefore not only every day but as many times as you remember. Sorry?