Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Nāgārjuna’s image of morality as the earth supporting all moving and unmoving things opens this 45-minute session. Geshe Pema Tsering works through verse 7 of the Letter to a Friend, explaining how negative emotions defile ethics and what antidotes apply, then clinches the point with a bowl analogy: just as a clean container protects valuables, ethics safeguards any realization we develop. The session then pivots to the bodhisattva path and the six perfections: generosity motivated by method and wisdom; ethics rooted in eliminating self-cherishing through wisdom perceiving emptiness; patience defined as bearing suffering with a happy mind; diligence as joy in practice; meditation requiring a virtuous object free from dullness and excitement; and wisdom realizing emptiness combined with compassion. Geshe Pema closes by unpacking the etymology of “paramita” — getting to the other side of the two obscurations — and quoting Śāntideva on expanding the perfections again and again.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 LF 2004 08 31.mp3
UUID: 8e4f9a3f-8e6a-41e3-a018-c7b830033652
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Letter to a Friend (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-08-31
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~3,647
Mhmm. So whatever virtuous thing we do do becomes virtuous not necessarily by the action, but by the motivation with which we do it. So the best motivation that we can have for doing anything, the thing that makes it not only dharma but Mahāyāna dharma, is that we think we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing in order to attain enlightenment and from that from that state be able to lead all sentient beings out of suffering. So today we’re going through the letter to a friend by Nāgārjuna. And so you should think that by studying this text, by listening to teachings on this text, that we can develop understandings about what Nāgārjuna is saying.
And through this, be able to put his instructions into practice. Through putting these instructions into practice, we can become Buddhas and therefore be of the utmost benefit to all sentient beings. So please develop please please have this motivation for listening Okay. Okay. If I say a lot less than Geshe-la said, it was because he said a lot, and I said, oh, he kept going.
And I said, can you fight there so I can translate? And he goes, oh, that was too much, wasn’t it? Okay. We’ll go back to the beginning. So now I’m actually gonna translate half voice because he told me.
Anyway, the first, the verse we’re up to is verse number seven, and it actually is, translated in the copy I have anyway saying, you should practice a morality unbroken and not debased, undefiled, untainted, uncorrupted. Morality was declared the foundation for all virtue just as the as the earth is for all things moving and unmoving. And now when it says the earth is for all things moving and unmoving, all sorts of things can happen on the earth. It it we don’t have to think about this too much to know that. Even the things that we’ve experienced and if we look around and see what other people are experiencing as well, really bad things can happen here.
Really good things can happen. There’s a variety of different things that can happen, and they all take as their stage. They all take as their base the Earth. So there’s a variety of all things. So just as the Earth is a is a basis for all sorts of things to happen, is the stage in which all sorts of things happen, then morality is said to be the base or the stage from which we’re able to develop any positive qualities that we may want to develop.
Without morality, there is no place to develop other positive qualities. So this includes the other higher trainings like meditation and wisdom. It also includes all worldly and unworldly qualities. When we talk about worldly qualities, we’re talking about the things that are the excellent aspects of Samsāra, also all the good aspects of Samsāra, so this means fame and wealth and beauty and all of these things. And that can also include meditative, concentrated states and those kinds of mental abilities, intelligence and so forth.
And then in otherworldly or the transmundane qualities that we can develop are included. The the trainings of arhats and bodhisattvas, the the qualities of aryans, the realization of emptiness and suchness and and so on and compassion great compassion and so on. So the Buddha, who’s in this instance called the conqueror, is the one who actually said this. So it says it has been said, and the person doing the saying or who who did the who said it was the Buddha, the the conqueror. They all of these all of these qualities that we may develop depend on the basis or the stage of ethics or morality.
So then in the next section sorry. One second. I’m getting I’ve gotten confused. I’ve got myself confused. It made sense to me.
Anyway, So the in the next section of the explanation from of this this, then the author says this. What Nāgārjuna is explaining here to the king is that the king has, in general, is a very good practitioner. He has very good ethics. He tries to practice meditation and so forth, but what he has to really watch is that occasionally or in specific instances, he doesn’t develop the causes for his ethics to become downgraded or for his ethics to become defiled. The reason that his ethics would become defiled was because he wasn’t in control of his neurosis or his negative emotions.
So if you have developed negative emotions, then you can’t keep your ethics, as it says, undefiled, untainted and uncorrupted. The way that you can maintain ethics is actually to apply antidotes to negative emotions or destructive emotions. This is, for example, if you experience a desire or strong attachment, then you can use the practice of meditating on the ugliness of the thing that you’re attached to as an antidote to that. There is specific antidotes to any of the different neuroses that you may develop. If you don’t apply these antidotes to those neuroses when they develop, then your ethics become defiled.
The first of these things is you should practice morality that is undefiled. The next thing is understanding difference between nirvana and sorry. Thinking on nirvana, then you really can’t afford to be in a situation where you seem like an ethical person, but what you’re doing is is I think the way they’ve translated it here is uncorrupt is corrupted. So you come across as being a very ethical person, but secretly, you’re doing dodgy stuff. Right?
So the you’ve got to make sure that your mind is being controlled because even if nobody else can see you doing unethical things, doing unethical things is going to stop you attaining an nirvana. So it’s not just a matter of looking like you’re an ethical person. You actually have to watch your mind and make sure you are. So this is backed up by a quote from Buddha Śākyamūni in which he said, in the same way that a clean bowl or a good bowl or a good container is precious to households, then ethics is precious for a practitioner. So what this is referring to is that if you don’t have a good bowl to keep your new food in, then you’re in trouble because either the stains in the bowl will pollute the food and you don’t have anything to eat, or you won’t have any way to store things for when there’s no harvest.
So in the same way that this is vitally important for people living in in because This is. Wait a minute. That doesn’t work work in this analogy. Nengeso said, yeah. But even if they they they also used to hide and it says also that everything precious so that he said that includes, like, jewels and stuff.
Right? So they’d hide the they’d hide their jewels in their pots and things. Now this is like the same thing as a bank, I guess. I guess, I guess, that like a bank? He said, yeah.
Probably these days would be a bank. Alright? So you you need to have somewhere solid to hide your precious things, to protect your precious things. So in the same way that a container like this works or a bank works for us to protect precious things, then ethics It works as a base for us to protect any realizations or any understandings we may develop. And so that was a description, and that was the end of the description of the practice of the middle middle motivation or the middle type of being.
So that was working towards liberation from Samsāra. Then the next phase we’re going to deal with that’s explained in brief is a description of the practice of the highest motivation, the practice of the Bodhisattva. So all three of the different motivations we’ve been through the two we’ve been through already, sorry, and the one we’re doing now, but all done very briefly at the beginning of this text. So the third section, the practice of the bodhisattva, the highest motivation that we can develop, the verse from Nāgārjuna’s text refers to this says, generosity, morality, patience, effort, meditation, and likewise wisdom. Develop these immeasurable paramita and having crossed the sea of existence become the lord of victors.
Now this expression the lord of victors is another way of saying Buddha. So the first of these things to practice according to the path of the Board of Directors of the highest motivation is the practice of generosity. And now it says that in combination with method and wisdom, the special practices in method and wisdom, then giving away the body, the objects, possessions, etcetera, is a practice of generosity. Now, giving away things, giving away time, giving away money and possessions and so forth is generosity. But if we don’t have this generosity motivated with the idea of method and wisdom, these two aspects to the bodhisattva’s path, then the practice doesn’t become the perfection of generosity.
It doesn’t become a cause for attaining Buddhahood. It’s still a positive action, but it doesn’t become actually a cause for attaining Buddhahood. So the two things that we need to focus on or that need to be developed in accordance with this practice of generosity are these two aspects to the Bodhisattva Path method and wisdom. Method being the development of compassion, bodhicitta, any of these relative truth practices, and wisdom being the development of understanding of emptiness, the lack of inherent existence of objects, which is the ultimate truth practice. These two aspects of the Bodhisattva Path need to be the motivation for practicing generosity in order for that generosity to become a cause for attaining Buddhahood and then and hence, a perfection practice.
So the next of these six perfections or the six paramita of the practice of bodhisattvas is the practice of ethics. Now this is described here as being ethics which stop the karma which is accumulated through the base that seeks to hurt others. What this is referring to, the base or the root of this problem is grasping itself, the idea of holding onto itself as being an inherently existing thing. Now, the antidote to that, so the ultimate ethics that we need to practice is the development of the wisdom perceiving emptiness. Because if you have wisdom perceiving emptiness and you realize selflessness, then you don’t you don’t break you don’t degrade your ethics in any way because the degrading of ethics comes about through self-cherishing.
And the degrading of ethics comes about like, the the ethics is defined as not harming others, as not working from a point of view of selfishness to harm others. So if you work at the root of that, work at getting at the root of that, that means if you work towards getting rid of self-cherishing, self grasping, selfishness, then your ethics are pure. So in this way, perfection of ethics is again melded with great compassion, which is working for others, and the wisdom perceiving emptiness, because through the wisdom perceiving emptiness, ethics are stainless. This way, because ethics is defined as harming others, and the way that we stop harming others is by stopping self-cherishing and focusing on realizing emptiness. And then in this way, the two things of method and wisdom work in order to bring about pure ethics as well.
Okay. So the next of the perfections that we need to practice is the perfection of patience, which is described as being able to forbear or have tolerance for any of the austerities or any of the difficulties that we may encounter. Now, we’re going to encounter difficulties. It’s the nature of Samsāra. We’re going to encounter suffering.
Practicing patience and forbearance with regards to these means realizing that these experiences we have come about as a result of causes that we’ve created and that they give us opportunity to practice patience and to eliminate that us the sorry, I’ll try that again. They give us the opportunity to practice patience and also to purify the negative karma that we have created in the past. So means that practicing patience doesn’t necessarily mean waiting for things practicing patience means being able to withstand anything that we experience with a happy mind. It doesn’t mean that we don’t experience illness. It means that when we experience illness or when we feel sick or when we feel we’re having a negative situation, that we’re able to think positively and happy happily about that situation instead of being depressed about guess I said, so basically when you’re going, oh, I feel so sick and horrible, you’re not practicing patience.
Yeah? If you’re if you’re moaning to yourself and and getting caught up in the idea of being sick or something bad happening to you, that’s not practicing patience. Practicing patience is being able to withstand suffering with a happy mind, realizing that it’s giving you the opportunity to practice and it’s getting rid of the results of negative karma that’s accumulated in the past. The fourth of the perfection is the practice of diligence or enjoying what you’re doing. It’s called the diligence which enjoys practicing virtue.
Virtue. If you’re really liking doing something, you’re not going to get really tired about it. You’re not going to be, I’ve had enough of this, did it for a bit, but now it’s over, I’ve had enough. That’s what happens to us when we try and do things in aversion all the time. What we need to develop is this idea of joy in what we’re doing, this idea of being happy about it.
If we understood the benefits, if we understood we look at it from a broader perspective then we’re going to be really happy about being able to do Dharma practice. It also means that we’re able to sustain it for longer. If we’re happy about what we’re doing then we’re not going to get to the stage where we’ve had enough. So if we can develop this if we have this joy that comes along with practice, then we can keep going with it for as as long as as for as long as it takes. There was another thing that I just I forgot from last time, Geshe-la said.
So this in taking enjoyment in practicing Dharma is this perfection of diligence. Means, basically, if you’re sitting there feeling tired from thinking I’ve done enough or you’re feeling tired or agitated or cranky about practicing Dharma, that’s not perfection of diligence. Now and then the next bit, which is the practice of meditation. There’s this word here, which is either gewa or tapa, right, depending on whether there is a a little vowel on top of it, which we can’t actually see. Right?
If it’s Gewa, which means virtue, then this means that the perfection of meditation is dependent on a virtuous object. It says that the perfection of meditation or the perfection of samadhi, which means that single pointed concentration on an object has to be on a virtuous object. So if this word is virtuous, it means meditation has to be focused on a virtuous object. So it may be easy for us to have single pointed concentration when it comes to anger or when it comes to something that we desire or something that we feel proud about, but this isn’t the perfection of concentration. It has to have a virtuous object.
It has to have a concentration on something that is beneficial to us for it to be the perfection of meditation. If this word is tapa and not gewa, right, so it’s just one vowel, one little line and it changes it, that means to purify. If this if that’s that’s what this refers to, then it is the purification of the these two things that disturb our mind and stop us from being able to practice meditative concentration properly. They are excitement and dullness. So if we’re able to completely get excitement and dullness out of our mind stream and concentrate single pointedly on an object, then this is another way of looking at perfection of meditation.
This perfection of meditation also has to be something that is motivated by bodhicitta and wisdom. It can’t be any old meditative concentration because there are many people who can develop meditative concentration without actually being motivated to benefit others or motivated to get out of saṃsāra. It has to be a virtuously motivated practice for it to be the perfection of meditation also. So the last of the the paramita is the or paramita or the perfections is the perfection of wisdom. Now the perfection of wisdom is defined here as that which is perfect or pure, which is the wisdom recognizing or realizing thatness or thusness or or it is his individual phenomena’s nature.
This wisdom, that is the perfection of wisdom, may be common or may be similar to the realization of emptiness that is perceived by solitary realizers and hearers, which are those who attain arhatship. But it’s not the same thing because it doesn’t have the method aspect that comes along with it. But it doesn’t have the method in that it doesn’t have the motivation of seeking enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings. It doesn’t come along with great compassion. And therefore, because of the lack of a breadth of their motivation, the lack of result is also stifled in in certain ways.
So this means that this the perfection of wisdom is the perfection of wisdom of bodhisattvas, the wisdom that is motivated by compassion and perceives all phenomena as being empty of inherent existence. So this word that is usually translated as perfection or sometimes perfection, sometimes paramita. Now paramita is a Sanskrit word. In Tibetan, it’s pha rol tu chinpa. Pha rol in the the para and pha rol tu chinpa.
Paro literally mean the other side. So para meter is similar to the English or English from Latin I don’t know if it’s from Latin perimeter, which means the the — is it Latin? Hills?? Okay. Yeah. Because I because I read yeah.
Because I read somewhere that it comes from a similar Arabic root as parameter. Alright? So parameter and perimeter. The outskirts, the the limit of something. And so the the para is there, the outside and the meter is the way of getting there.
That’s what anyway, I was just checking. So I’m trying because because Geshe-la did it once I asked him to do it one syllable by syllable because it doesn’t fit with perfection, this description. But so you have this idea of the para or the para being the other side and you’ve got to get to the other side of where you are. Now, there’s two different other sides that you can get to. You can get to the other side of saṃsāra, which is the realization of nirvana.
You can also get to the other side of the two obscurations. Now the two obscurations are the obscurations of afflictive emotions or neurosis, is actually another way of saying nirvana, and the obscurations to omniscience, which is another way of saying to become a Buddha. So you need to get rid of these two veils in order to become a Buddha. So in this instance, we’re saying the practice of the six perfections because it’s emphasized these two things, the practice of method and wisdom, it’s talking about the going to the other side of getting rid of the two obscurations, the the paramita of getting rid of the two obscurations and therefore becoming a Buddha. So, through the practice of these six paramita, of these six things that take you to the other side, you’re able to become a Buddha.
In this text, it then goes on to say that if you do these things, if you practice these six things, the six paramita that are the generosity and so forth motivated by the wish to become enlightened for the benefit of all sentient beings, then you will become a Buddha. You will pass over to the other side of Samsāra or to the other side of the obscurations and have crossed and and in in having crossed to the other side become a Buddha. As a Buddha, you then have the ability to show others how to get to the other side as well. So it says at the moment we’re is we’re sinking in a sea of samsaric suffering and neurosis. If we practice perfections, we get to the other side of that sea.
We become a we can become a Buddha. And if we become a Buddha, then we then have the ability to show other people how to get out of the ocean and to end up with Buddhas as well. This one? Śāntideva. Okay.
So then there’s a question. So there’s a quote from the Bodhicaryāvatāra, which says the practice of perfections and giving and so on, expand them again and again and again practice expanding them again and again. If you do this, what’s small becomes big, So the main thing is to focus on others. Now what this is referring to is that these practices of six perfections encompasses all three different things that we could achieve as as Buddhists. Is a good rebirth, liberation from Samsāra and Buddhahood.
But if you are focusing on Buddhahood, then you get the other two as part of a package. You don’t have to focus on them individually. The main thing that can stop us from focusing on Buddhahood that is working