Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Geshe Pema Tsering completes the Second Noble Truth by working through all twenty secondary afflictions — the mental states that amplify and sustain suffering. He opens by finishing the six root afflictions with afflicted doubt, distinguishing three varieties: doubt leaning toward fact, doubt leaning away from it, and equal uncertainty. He then moves through all twenty secondary states in sequence, pausing on distinctions easy to blur: belligerence (a sudden reactive flash) versus resentment (holding onto that flash); shamelessness (lacking one’s own moral sense) versus non-embarrassment (failing to respond when others point out wrongdoing); and laziness split into three — preoccupation with non-virtue, procrastination, and flagging enthusiasm. He closes by noting how tightly these twenty states interconnect with the six root afflictions, then signals the transition to the First Noble Truth and its four aspects: impermanence, manifest suffering, emptiness, and selflessness. Best suited to students following the full Introduction to Buddhism series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 ItB 2003 03 24.mp3
UUID: 5518f391-fd9d-4714-a8fa-f397d54745fa
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: IB Introduction to Buddhism (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-03-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~3,468
Okay. So we’re up to the second noble truth, which is the truth of the origin of suffering and within this truth of the origin of suffering there was another division into the truth of the origin of suffering referring to karma and the truth of the origin of suffering referring to afflictive emotions. Now we’re up to afflictive emotions and within afflictive emotions there’s many divisions yet again and the one that we were talking about last week was afflicted views and we’ve talked about that and today we’re going to talk about doubts, afflicted doubts. Now, what afflicted doubts are is when we have a thought in our mind, our mind has two points to it, we’re in two minds about whether the, Three Jewels exist, whether the past and future lives exist, and whether the karma and cause all cause and effect exists. This one.
This one. Done. Okay, so normally we consider afflicted doubt that is doubts afflicted by ignorance, or afflicted doubts afflicted by confusion, to be something negative What we actually mean by a doubt is when we’re saying is it is it true or isn’t it true? And if we have this thought is it true or isn’t it true? Then we aren’t going to actually accomplish anything It’s very difficult to finish something or accomplish it when you doubt whether it’s true or not So we normally consider afflicted doubt or doubts caused by afflicted emotions as being negative.
And the way that we get rid of afflicted doubts is to investigate situations, to study things, to understand them more clearly because if you understand something clearly, you don’t have doubts about it. Okay, so these types of doubts are again divided into three. The three types of doubts that we have are doubts tending towards fact, doubts that are in the middle and doubts that tend towards fiction or tend towards non fact. Now the first one, doubts tending towards fact, is when we have a mind that, for instance, says, do the Three Jewels exist? Does karma exist?
Well, I’m not sure if it exists or not. Maybe it exists. Maybe it it doesn’t exist, but it probably exists. So our mind go goes towards the fact. Yeah.
Okay, so doubt tending away from fact or tending towards non fact is when we have two minds and we’re thinking, oh, does something exist? Does it not exist? Does the Three Jewels exist? Does it not exist? And we think, does it?
Does it not? Does it? It probably doesn’t, And we come down on the side of her, more on the side of it not existing, then that’s called doubts, and doubt tending away from fact. Yeah. And the third one, doubt that’s equal, is when we think does it exist, does it not exist, I’m not sure if it exists or doesn’t exist, and our mind is kind of equal between deciding whether something exists or doesn’t exist, and we’re in the middle stages of that.
So because, doubts, are caused by afflictive emotions and doubts are caused by, not understanding a situation, if we understand a situation completely we don’t have any doubts about it because of this then doubts are something that we need to get rid of. When we’re talking about the truth of the origin of suffering in reference to afflictive emotions, there was two different groups of afflictive emotions. There was the six root afflictive emotions and there are twenty secondary emotions. And we’ve just finished the six root afflictive emotions, and we’re on to the twenty secondary afflictive emotions. So so, yeah, there was the four truths and then there was the four truths and then from amongst the four truths and then from the second truth, the truth of the origin of suffering, there was a division of two and then from amongst that division of two we’ve already talked about karma and then we’re talking about afflictive emotions and then from the division of afflictive emotions that’s again divided into two which are the six root afflictions and the twenty secondary afflictions And we just finished the six root afflictions.
We did the other five last week, and we just did afflictive doubts now. And now we’re on to the twenty secondary afflictions. So the first of these is what’s called belligerence. Belligerence is defined as the mind that — sorry,. The mind that desires to cause harm to something, the mind that wishes to harm an object or a person.
This is caused by some sort of resentment towards that object, and then out of that resentment comes this need to harm it. Okay, so last week we actually talked about anger as being one of the six root afflictions and if we want to know how anger is different to this belligerence then belligerence is a mind that just springs up quite quickly and doesn’t have any very much deliberation in it. So for example, if there was someone that we haven’t seen that we don’t feel good about that makes us angry. If they’re not there, then what we’re stewing on, what we’re thinking about over and over again is anger.. If they come into our into our sight like someone came into the room that we really didn’t like and we saw them and went, then that’s belligerence.
If we saw them and had that tension, then that’s belligerence. Okay. The next one is called resentment or holding a grudge. And what that is is when, belligerence is something that comes up and goes away. It’s something that we feel when we see someone that annoys us and then it goes away.
Resentment or holding a grudge is when we hold on to that sense of belligerence, that we hold on to that resentment and, the the feeling of wanting to harm, and the feeling of having wanting to harm because we have been hurt and we hold on to it in our mind and don’t let it go. Okay, the next one is the third of these twenty secondary afflictions is called denial or concealment and what that is is the mind that seeks to hide something that we’ve done that was was a bad thing to do so it’s not it’s not the the means that we go to to hide something that we done that’s wrong. It’s the mind that wants to suppress it. So it’s not something that just comes about when we actually put into practice trying to hide what we’ve done that’s wrong, but the mind that actually wants to suppress it is considered negative. Okay, so the next one is called spite, and what spite is is what arises from this belligerence, this sense of anger towards someone that just comes up.
After that, if we have the idea of coming up with a way of getting at them, whether it’s hitting them or doing something else to hurt them, then the mind that’s trying to think of that gets that has the idea to hurt and thinks of a way to hurt is then called spite. The next one is jealousy. Jealousy is defined as a mind that or a thought or a thought process that sees someone else with something good, someone else with a collection of good things or something good, whether it be they have done something good or they have a good house or they have lots of different goods, assets. They have, lots of money. They have lots of friends.
We see someone else with something good, and instead of thinking, wow. That’s great for them. We think, I don’t feel so good about that. Okay. So then the next one is called miserliness.
What miserliness is about is, by the power of our holding tightly at our sense of self, then when we actually accumulate goods or accumulate good things, then we want to hold on to them really tightly and we don’t want to give them up no matter what. And so we hold on to them because of the sense we have that this is I am me and this is mine and therefore, I wanna hold on to it and and and to improve, things for me, and we don’t wanna give them up. That’s miserliness. The seventh one is could be translated as pretense, and it’s the idea that we have a little bit of quality. We’ve done something to create a little bit of weak quality within ourselves.
But we, because of arrogance or pride or something, decide that that little bit of quality is fantastic and we like it a lot and we don’t need to do anything else because we’re alright, because we have this quality. And so we’re not gonna try anymore. We’re just gonna chill out and relax and yeah. Because we’re alright and we don’t have to do anything else. Okay, the next one is called dissimulation and that’s for example when we’ve done something that isn’t so good or something that’s just really bad But instead of taking responsibility for it ourselves and saying this is something that we did, we pass the blame onto somebody else.
We say that was someone else’s responsibility. They have to take the blame for that. I didn’t do it. I’m fine. It was them.
So the next one is called haughtiness and haughtiness has the same essence as pride. It’s the idea that having no qualities that we actually do have qualities and not only do we have those qualities, do we think we have those qualities that we don’t, but we really like ourselves for having these qualities that we don’t. And then from believing in this, then we go around treating everybody else as if they are lower than us and looking down on them based on an illusion that we have qualities that we don’t. And if we have a little bit of quality, if we develop something tiny within ourselves, we get very pleased with ourselves for developing that, and start thinking that we’re better than everybody else because we’ve done something that’s very small, and start treating everybody else with disrespect, because we believe that what we’ve done, what we’ve accomplished means something. Okay, so the next one has been translated as harmfulness but it’s kind of more like ignoring people who are in pain.
Its description is that if it’s the mind that when seeing someone suffering or the consciousness that when seeing someone suffering doesn’t acknowledge that suffering doesn’t care about that suffering and decides that it’s the other person’s problem and decides to ignore it and get on with whatever they were doing and not help the person who’s suffering. And it’s described as the opposite to loving kindness. So the antidote or the way of turning that mind around is to meditate on compassion. Okay. The next one is shamelessness.
So for example, if we, killed someone, or killed something, then the natural reaction will be to think or natural reaction for most would be to think that was not appropriate behavior. The thing that I did harmed a being. It was it was it caused suffering and it didn’t didn’t treat them with compassion so therefore what I did was wrong. It was inappropriate. If there’s a lack of that sense of that being inappropriate, if we don’t think that what we’ve done was wrong, then we describe it as being a shamelessness.
Next one is called non embarrassment. Non embarrassment is similar to shamelessness, but in this case the agent for describing something as being negative is someone else. So if with shamelessness we ourselves lack the feeling that we’ve done something wrong, and non embarrassment is when someone else points out to us that we’ve done something wrong if we don’t recognize what they’re pointing out to us and don’t feel any shame because they’ve showed us what we’ve done is wrong then that’s called non embarrassment. So, the only difference between shamelessness and non embarrassment is that shamelessness depends on our own sense of what’s right and wrong excuse me and non embarrassment depends on other people’s sense of what’s right and wrong but apart from the fact that the person pointing out what’s right and wrong is different they have the same substance to the thoughts. The next one is called lethargy or like fogginess of mind would be a more literal translation.
And that’s when it doesn’t really matter if what we were intending to do was negative or positive or was going to be a benefit or not. Just can’t be bothered doing it. We just have like a fogginess and think, oh, well, I’d rather sleep. Then that’s what’s called lethargy. So that so that that needs to, like, rest and not okay and not be bothered to do anything that comes to us occasionally is called is called lethargy.
Our next one is called excitement. Excitement is a sense when we go when we our mind’s agitated and whatever it is that’s gonna cause us happiness, we’re running after it left and right without any real control of what we’re doing. We’re just very agitated and think, yeah, yeah, that’s gonna be fun, run over there. And then that’s gonna be fun and run over there. And our mind doesn’t rest at all.
Our mind doesn’t come back to a resting position at all. It’s just running after whatever it is that we think is going to be fun. The next one is called faithlessness. What faithlessness is referring to is that when we are showing the qualities of, say, the Buddha and the Dharma and Sangha, when we’re showing the qualities of the teachings, when we’re showing the proof for karma that we don’t believe it and we don’t have faith in these things. So the lack of faith is called faithlessness.
Okay, so the next one is often translated as laziness, but it’s not just laziness, it’s laziness with respect to doing good. So it’s more like, if it was more literally translated, it would be being attracted to that which is not positive. Alright, and that itself has a division of three. There’s three different types of this laziness. The first one being that being so busy doing negative things that you have no time to do anything positive.
So feeling your life running after desires and trying to either do things that are and have neutral karma or negative karma, that there’s no time left to do anything positive. The next one is called procrastination. So that’s the idea that I won’t do it now, I’ll do it in an hour. I don’t have enough time today, I’ll do it tomorrow. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe the day after that, and maybe I’ll do it next year.
So if we have this idea that we’re going to do something virtuous but maybe not until a few years from now, then that’s what’s called laziness of procrastination. So the third type of So the third type of laziness is the laziness of flagging enthusiasm. So this kind of laziness describes a situation where at the beginning we’re like, yes, I’m going to do very good things and I’m going to work very hard to be good and do lots of positive things and for the first day we do really well and we work really hard and we’re getting a lot of positive things done and by the second or third day we’re struggling and we’re getting a bit tired and then maybe by the fourth or fifth day we think forget it, it’s too hard. And we just chuck away the idea completely and give it up and think, no, that was too hard. So from amongst these three different types of laziness, like laziness that is actually being busy with things that aren’t positive, procrastination and flagging enthusiasm, most of what we do involves these three.
There’s not many times when we actually don’t have one of these three going in our minds. The next one, non conscientiousness or carelessness means that when we’re trying to do something positive, we’re concentrating on doing something positive, whether it’s like prostrating or offering mandala or doing some other type of practice. We’re trying to concentrate on what it is that we’re doing, and then we get distracted and our mind races off after something else and becomes involved with doing something else, and in the end we end up not completing what we were doing. And I was laughing because when Geshe-la was explaining it, my mind went somewhere else. So the next one is called forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness is the idea that we don’t have a clear idea of what’s good in our mind. Every time we try and figure out what it is that will create happiness for us and that will be positive on our mind stream, we don’t maintain a clear picture of that. We, we kind of, it starts to become foggier and we start to have a clearer picture of what it is that will actually cause us suffering but maybe will cause us, will give us more short time pleasure. So we learn something good and then straight away forget it. The nineteenth out of the twenty is what’s called non introspection and non introspection is when we don’t watch what we’re thinking, speaking or doing physically.
These three things are called the three doors. There’s the door of mind, the door of speech and the door of body. And non introspection is when we’re not applying attention to these three doors, then we do things with our body that cause harm or that create negative karma. We do things, we say anything and we don’t think about what we’re saying and that can cause negative karma to come to us or we can hurt people with what we say. If we don’t watch our mind then we’re always thinking of different things most of them probably aren’t very good.
We’re creating negative karma with our thoughts as well. Non introspection is not being aware of what’s going on with these three aspects of our being. Okay, so the final one of these twenty secondary afflictions is distraction. What distraction is, is when we are trying to concentrate on something, when we’re meditating, if our mind runs away to different things, is easily distracted, does not keep us focused on the object, keeps thinking about different things, isn’t stable, then it’s called distraction. So, yeah, that is the twentieth of the twenty secondary afflictions.
So the twenty secondary afflictions come from the second of the Four Noble Truths, the truth of the origin of suffering. So these twenty secondary afflictions actually have a close relationship with the six root afflictions in that a lot of times they come up together, a lot of times one acts as a cause for the other, A lot of times, the absence of one encourages another one to come about. So they have such a close connection, that, that you can’t really separate them out most of the time. So having described these afflictive emotions and therefore the afflictive emotion section of the second noble truth, the truth of the origin of suffering, and we finished the second noble truth. Right.
So that was the end of the second noble truth, the truth of the origin of suffering and we have to now describe what’s actually usually described as the first noble truth, the truth of suffering and usually when we’re doing practice, first of all you have to establish truth of suffering before you look at the truth of the origin of suffering because you have to understand that suffering exists before you want to look at what its origins may be, but in terms of describing things by cause and effect then the truth of the origin suffering comes first. That’s why we describe the truth of the origin of suffering first. We actually have some understanding of the truth of suffering and the truth of origin of suffering because it goes with our experience When we hear teachings on these things, there’s something that we recognize, we think, oh yeah, I understand that one so this is something for us to to concentrate on now the truth of suffering is often divided into four when you hear any teachings or there is any anything that’s included as an explanation or any experience that is, related to impermanence, misery or suffering, manifest suffering, emptiness or selflessness, then these are included as being part of the truth of suffering.