Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 23.5-minute Q&A session, Geshe Pema Tsering fields sharp questions from IB philosophy students, producing one of the more philosophically direct introductions to karma and rebirth available in this series. He opens with karma’s three tiers — actions ripening in this life, the next, or at some indefinite future point — before turning to the students’ harder challenges. The heart of the session is a careful argument that consciousness cannot arise from physical matter alone: sperm and egg carry no mind, so there must be a prior moment of consciousness before conception, which grounds the theory of rebirth. He addresses the population-growth objection (more humans need not mean new consciousness, given transmigration across realms), cites the case of an Indian girl who walked back into her former home and identified her old bed, and closes by distinguishing cell-level physical consciousness from individual autonomous awareness. Pitched at curious, sceptical students encountering Buddhist ideas for the first time.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 2004 05 10 P and M.mp3
UUID: c36b3b6d-8a1e-4f5d-b389-27050f6824d4
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: IB Philosophy and Meditation (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 23.5 minutes
Words: ~2,054
There’s different types of karma. Specifically, karma is karma is divided into three types. karma that ripens in this lifetime, karma that ripens in future lifetimes, and karma that ripens at some indefinite stage in the future. So if you do a very forceful action then it said that its results will come to you quicker so then they will ripen in this lifetime. If it’s a mediumly forceful action then they will ripen in the next lifetime.
If it’s a fairly weak action, then they can ripen at some stage in the future, depending on the force of the action. The thing with karma is that it doesn’t disappear. It’s not like you can do a negative action and then get away with it — results will come to you. So you have to do positive actions to eliminate the negative actions. Yep.
How can people have had past lives? Geshe-la said that it’s difficult for us to remember our past lives because of the experiences we go through. But if if we think about it for a lot, right, then we can start to see that it could be a possibility. So for example, can you remember when you were five days old? So does that mean that you weren’t five days old? He said, but we weren’t there to see you when you were five years old.
So you can’t prove to us that you were five years old. We have to take your word for it that someone else can prove it too. In this example, it is like relying on people who have developed their minds to have the ability to see through their life and death experience. Through their ability, rely on their word that they’ve seen it. So you’re relying on someone else the same way you’re relying on your parents, whoever, to say you were five days old.
He sees the maintenance of birth patterns. And He said that you then in that case, your thinking is, yes. Well, that happens to other people. This and this and this and this happens.
Therefore, it must have happened to me. But you’re hypothesizing. Okay. So, is a hypothesis as well. It’s not a fundamental thing.
It’s a hypothesis. The other thing is that you have to hypothesize or have an idea about the way that things progress. The hypothesis or the theory for why there is past life rests on is this idea that we are made up of two things. We’re made up of form and consciousness. We’re made up of mind and physical form.
Now, we can see the physical cause for our physical form of the sperm and the egg from our parents. But there is no consciousness in the sperm and egg. There is no previous cause for consciousness there, so if you need a previous cause for consciousness then it needs to be something of a similar type — just as the cause for an egg and sperm to come together and create a physical being is of a similar physical type. Next thing creates a similar type for a similar type. The moment before consciousness comes into a being has to be a moment of a similar type.
Therefore, it has to be consciousness. That means that there has to be some consciousness existing before conception. And then that’s the basis for theory of rebirth. You need to think about it. But you don’t have to accept it.
He just wants you to think about it, but you don’t have to. So it’s up to you whether you accept it or not. You know, but it may be helpful to think about it. So it’s just a matter of thinking about it and thinking about it in terms of the question of consciousness or the question of mind. Where mind comes from is something that’s puzzled many different people.
A lot of different religious traditions have come up with this idea of the continuation of consciousness either pre birth or death. Scientists don’t really have an explanation for it. So it’s a matter of looking at where it comes from and where it goes to and analyzing how you think it comes about. Okay. So can’t remember the beginning.
Goes, The reason that there’s more and more people coming onto the planet is because usually two parents have more than two kids. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that there has to be a new consciousness coming into existence. The reason for this is that this is only one type of existence that we can be born into. We can be born as an animal, as in a more blissful state, and all different sorts of things. What’s happening at the moment is that there are more people being born on earth in this realm, in these types of body.
It’s not necessarily the case that a horse dies and is reborn as a horse, a bug dies and is born as a bug, or a human dies and is born as a human in the same existence. If that was the case, then your statement would have validity. Because there is transmigration from a different existence or a different body into a different situation, then it just means that in this particular environment that we’re in, there’s more and more humans being born. They may be coming from all sorts of different places. Because we’ve had different experiences in many different lifetimes as many different types of being.
Okay. So this could possibly be the case. It’s definitely not what scientists say, but it’s not what Buddhists say either. He said he was not teaching from a Buddhist perspective. The reason that Buddhists don’t agree with this is because they say that this may be an explanation for how things physically come about, but it gives no explanation for where mind comes from.
Mind is not physical form. So if you need an explanation for where mind comes from, have to think a little broader than to think of it in terms of the physical form that we have the experience of seeing in a scientific way. And scientists, when they’re talking about consciousness, they think, well, maybe it’s like this, and maybe it’s like this, and maybe maybe because it came about like that, but they don’t know. They can’t say for certain. Their theories about evolution are theories as well, so they can only put it down to a certain amount of possibility, but they have no explanation for where consciousness comes from.
And there are scientists that believe in previous reincarnation. There are scientists that believe in reincarnation as well. As well. He said, yeah, that it’s difficult for them to perceive how in detail how things come about, so theorizing on it. But it doesn’t necessarily the idea of evolution doesn’t necessarily completely exclude the idea of reincarnation or lifetime going from lifetime to lifetime because there are scientists that can accept both.
And there are actually scientists who are doing investigations into especially children who remember their past lives and are able to go. He read about in a newspaper in India that there was one girl who was born into a family who walked back into her old house. Her family took her there on an excursion to the city, and she walked into her old house and said, I used to sleep in this bed and explained everything and what she’d done and everything as well. So there are scientists examining the phenomenon of past life as well. Yeah.
Last question. Tell me, I want to He’s impressed by you. He said said you obviously think about things, isn’t it? Yeah. He’s very good, he says.
Yeah. Yeah. Is there consciousness in cells? Which cells? Like, individual cells.
Like, cells in our body or individual cell animals? You have to get more specific. So single cell animals or the cells in our body? Just the the cells in our body. Okay.
So there is consciousness in every cell of our body, but it isn’t an individual consciousness. It’s what’s called physical consciousness, and it’s our sense of feeling. Have consciousness pervading our body because we experience the sensation of touch or the sensation of physical sensation. If we stick a needle in our leg we feel it. If there is a part of our body that physical consciousness isn’t going to then it sets into decay.
We to have blood pumping to all the parts of our body and we need to have an awareness of our body, and that awareness of our body is our physical consciousness. Our body is pervaded by consciousness. But each individual cell doesn’t have its own autonomous consciousness. Right. Autonomous?
Yeah. Okay. Well yeah. In terms of metaphor.
Uh-huh. I have an Italian friend who said, you know, Every time someone says that, I keep hearing her voice. He wants to know what the exam he doesn’t get it. He said, so what is it a metaphor of? Sorry.
Metaphor of. A metaphor for what? So one lifetime is like many lifetimes in terms of the experiences you have. He said he can understand why they would see it as a metaphor for this lifetime, but it doesn’t necessarily preclude the fact that there may be future lives as well. So we know that we experience many different things in one lifetime.
At some stage we’re very small and at other stage we get to be grown up. Some stages we experience happiness, some stages we experience sorrow. We experience many different things in one lifetime and we can directly perceive those. But just because we can’t directly perceive what happens after we die doesn’t mean that there’s nothing happening. So if you develop this idea that perhaps there was there was a preceding moment of consciousness before my conception, then that means that we can develop the idea or we can have the idea that death isn’t going to be the end.
Having death not be the end of our consciousness means that we have to take responsibility for what happens to us after death. That gives us the focus for developing ourselves as a person in performing positive actions or and it’s what’s called doing Dharma, practicing Dharma or practicing any kind of religion or any kind of positive acts where we’re benefiting others. Because we have to take responsibility for our actions in the next life. So we in in actual fact, even people that do believe in reincarnation don’t spend enough time thinking about reincarnation. We have this idea of okay maybe I will have a future life but at the moment I’m just focusing on this one and we spend all our time focusing on making ourselves happy in this time in this lifetime and if we were focusing more on what was going to happen in the next life then we would spend most of this life preparing for the next life instead of worrying too much about this life which is definitely going to end.
Yeah. It’s not going to end? Don’t worry. Would it be possible to perceive consciousness that had existed in the past with somebody else’s in the past that somebody else’s consciousness. Okay.
You lost me there. What do you mean? Like, if you you can perceive someone else’s consciousness from the past? Yeah. Alright.
So that the the girl in the that was walking around saying that I used to live here. Yeah. But that would be her own Yeah. It’s her own past. Yeah.
Would it be possible to see Other people’s past lives. Okay. So if you like us, it’d be pretty difficult. But if you have developed your mental abilities and you’re someone like a Buddha or a Bodhisattva or something, then may have the ability to see it. They actually talk about in Buddhist texts, talk about what’s called the five different they’re usually translated as clairvoyant abilities, but they don’t refer to sight.
So they’re not really all clairvoyant. Some of them are clairaudient or whatever. And one of these is the ability to perceive the past and future lives of others. That’s So that’s possible. But Yes.
But it would be dubious. Okay.