Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Can you trust what appears in front of you — even a ghost? In this 10-minute session, Geshe Pema Tsering applies a key logical tool from the Pramānavārttika, a classical text on valid awareness: reasoning by nonobservation. His central point is that appearances are not reliable guides to existence. The concrete example: since no valid awareness discerns a ghost or harmful spirit before you, doubt is established and there is no need to accept its presence. He then addresses the Three Buddha Bodies — dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya — arguing that although obscurations prevent ordinary beings from perceiving them, their existence can nonetheless be established, giving practitioners valid grounds for accepting them during sadhana recitation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 LR 2002 02 26.mp3
UUID: 478544f0-be04-4cb0-80b9-91b4e79b177e
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Lam Rim 2002 Bodhisattva Deeds (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-02-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 10.6 minutes
Words: ~457
Here, there is some doubt because it’s hard for us to really be certain of the status of a particular being. And in fact, as I said, only Buddhas are truly capable of fully assessing the state of another being. For the rest of us, there is just a degree of doubt about, in fact, whether they possess those faults or not. Here, there’s some different types of reasoning that is set forth. And in fact, they’re all there to prove that what appears to us doesn’t necessarily exist in the way it’s appearing.
And even if it doesn’t appear to us, doesn’t mean to say that it doesn’t exist. There’s various different types of reasoning, such as this reason by nonobservation. But fundamentally, it’s it comes back to the initial point here that we can’t trust appearances. What appears is uncertain. So here, we’re using various types of reasoning, whether it is in fact reasoned by nonobservation and so on, the various other types of correct reason that exist.
They’re all here arrayed in order to establish that what appears is not necessarily the way it exists, that we can’t actually rely on appearance. So here in this context in the Pramānavārttika, which is the commentary on valid awareness, and in terms of reasons by nonobservation, then it it sets forth a great deal of a great number of different examples in order to establish the reason by nonobservation, such as in a space in front. There is no valid awareness discerning the existence of a smell eater because that being is someone about whom there is doubt about whether it exists or not. That particular reasoning is reasoned by nonobservation. So in brief, what it means is that, for instance, that reasoning can be applied to for instance, if one may think that there is a ghost in front of one or a harmful spirit, one can establish that there is doubt in one’s continuum.
There’s no need to, you know, accept that there is because there isn’t a valid awareness discerning the existence of a ghost in front or a harmful spirit because there is doubt. So this is a type of reasoning called reason by establishing a thesis by nonobservation. Yeah. The presence of the three Buddha bodies, the dharmakaya, the sambhogakaya, the nirmanakaya, are to be accepted. They do exist.
And it’s true. It’s just because of the obscurations of of the ordinary beings that they’re they’re not seen, or they don’t appear to ordinary beings. But they can be established to exist. That’s right. We can accept their existence when reciting sadhanas.
And on the basis of that, then it’s possible later on to actually gain a vision of those deities.