Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 31-minute session, Geshe Pema Tsering works through a verse from Letter to a Friend that urges the king to fill every hour — dawn and dusk especially — with virtuous practice rather than sleep. He then dwells on the ethics of sleep itself: sleeping is a neutral act made positive or negative entirely by the intention carried into it, so establishing a wholesome motivation at bedtime turns the sleeping hours into positive karma. He describes the correct sleeping posture from the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life — lying on the right side in the lion pose, facing objects of veneration, with mindfulness intact. A lively Q&A follows on choosing a marriage partner: what character qualities to prioritise, how parental responsibility operates in arranged marriages, and why jealousy and conflict ultimately trace back to the practitioner’s own afflictive emotions rather than the partner’s behaviour.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 LF 2004 11 02.mp3
UUID: f042c0b9-6d9f-4d47-bdd9-a3f4e805a093
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Letter to a Friend (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-11-02
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 31.3 minutes
Words: ~2,244
Okay. I just confused myself. So, yeah, the in the first section where it says righteous one, it says that he is calling out to the king. He’s trying to get the king’s attention by by making this statement. So it says that he’s using the evocative case.
So that it means just basically going, hey. And then it says that you that he’s saying to the king, Make sure that you make the most of all of your day. That means the whole of the day and especially the first and last stages of the night to practice virtuous action. So it’s saying to all of the day in the first and last sections of the night try and behave virtuously. The first and last stages of the night, because it says here the first and last.
Now that depends on which day you’re looking at it from. This is where I got a bit confused. The evening is the end of the day, but it’s also the beginning of the night. Whichever way you want to look at it, it’s either the beginning of the evening or the end of the day. So you can have the morning as being the end of the night or the beginning of the day.
You can have the evening as being the beginning of the night or the end of the day. Whichever way you’re looking at. Basically, we’re talking about the evening and also early in the morning. Not being asleep early in the morning and not being asleep in the evening. Of course, this depends when the sun comes up, but it’s about waking up about this time the sun comes up.
Depending on daylight savings, may be like five or six or whatever it is. I guess I say, what time is it at the moment?’ like, well, I don’t know because of daylight savings!’ It on what time it is. It means basically not going to bed as soon as the sun goes down and waking up at about the time the sun comes up. So that you are not wasting time sleeping too much. But even at those times when you are going to go to sleep, it’s important to try and sleep with the right motivation.
Sleep by itself is said to be something that’s called a neutral act. Sleeping is neither positive nor negative. It becomes positive or negative depending on what mind you sleep with. If you go to sleep with a positive thought, then the whole of the time you’re asleep becomes positive. If you go to sleep with a negative thought, the whole of the time you’re asleep becomes negative.
It’s important to try and have the right motivation for sleeping. I’m sleeping in order to refresh myself. I’m sleeping in order to benefit beings, whatever it is that we have the right motivation for sleeping. Whatever motivation we can develop to sleep properly means that all of the time that we are asleep becomes a positive action. Sleep by its nature is a changeable act and can either be positive or negative, then we need to make sure that our mindfulness doesn’t decrease before we go to sleep and that we’re able to remind ourselves to think of positive things before we go sleep so we’re not wasting our time sleeping as a negative act.
Okay. So In the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, it describes the process of sleeping by saying in the same way that the protector went into nirvana. So this means in the same way that the Buddha went into Parinirvana when he passed away, then we should lie down. So that means lying on our left hand side with our in what’s called the sleeping lion pose and with that one leg on top of the other and we should be facing it says we should be facing towards that object of our aspiration. So that means facing towards where the facing towards where objects of veneration are in our house, so the statues and the images of the Buddha and so on.
Then with mindfulness, with introspection, we should be aware of what it is we are thinking and try and have a positive positive state of mind, positive motivation for when we first go to sleep. And that’s what it said, and then we can stop there today. If but if you have any questions, you can ask them.
And Geshe-la’s got tea, so you might as well. Yes. Is it? Okay. Lie down on your this is right side.
Did I say left? Yeah. Yeah. Right Right side. Right side.
Meant to say right side. Why are you asking questions about is he gone? Okay. So Geshe-la says that what he reckons is if your parents are looking for a partner for you, then they should do all of these things. They should be investigating to see if this person can really help you has all of these qualities and more.
Investigating. They should also discuss with you whether you want to get married to this person. If they’re not appropriate for you and you don’t feel like you want to get married to them, then they shouldn’t be getting you married. I said, Well, that doesn’t always happen because my friend Youssef, his parents wanted him to get married to this lady that was morbidly obese. And when they took the marriage bracelets, they wouldn’t even go on her hand.
Poor Youssef was going, No. And then my parents were saying, No, you’ve got to be respectful. But he got out of it and guessed that they said, Well, in that case, parents have to take responsibility as well. Youssef didn’t want to marry, then they have to look at that situation as well. They should be doing exactly what this describes here, so it shouldn’t really be in contradiction with this advice.
What they should be doing should be the same as this advice. He’s a he was a Muslim. I don’t think it’s gonna happen. But he wasn’t just if she had the last one and that was cool, that would be fine. But she was he was it was just yeah.
So so parents, they have a responsibility here to pick someone that’s gonna be suitable and they have a responsibility to investigate properly because it can be that oh, hang on. I didn’t understand the rest of it. So the other thing is if your parents, you guess, the things that if your parents choose someone for you to marry and it doesn’t work out and you can see all these things wrong with them, that’s not actually your responsibility. That’s your parents’ responsibility. So it’s your parents’ responsibility to fix it.
If it doesn’t work out for you, then you didn’t take on that responsibility yourself as your parents did. So you should say to them, this isn’t this isn’t working out. This isn’t gonna happen. It’s their responsibility to take that into account too and to try and find a way to do it. So if you do something that your parents say to do, then it’s not your responsibility if it’s not doesn’t work.
But sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t. Yeah. Even though we may still have afflictive emotions and self-cherishing, doesn’t mean that we don’t have the ability to investigate. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have the ability to look at someone and try and examine them properly. We have ability to look for faults and not be just carried away by the superimposition of positive qualities that comes about through desire.
We have the ability to try and look at the way they behave, look at the way that they do things, the way they think, the way they speak, and try and do so with a balanced mind. Okay, so Geshe-la says that this is describing a process by which we choose someone that we’re going to pick. So we want to start with a good base. We want to start with something we can work with. So for example, if we’re looking for a husband, then we want to look for a husband that has a good mind, that is kind, that is patient, this is my favorite one, that is able to put up with us.
That’s right. That is able to put up with that can do that, right? That has the ability to put up with what we like. And we need to have the ability to put up with them. All right?
So we need to have yeah, this compatibility between us that we can stand each other. This is this is what we’re starting with. Alright? And we start with the idea of having similar ethics, being able to put up with each other, being and having compassion and caring for each other. After that then then we make a decision, then we get married.
And then after that, we’re still gonna have to deal with afflictive emotions. We’re still gonna experience certain things. We’re still gonna experience desire. We’re still we’re still gonna experience jealousy, all of these things. But the source for all of these things is our afflictive emotions.
If we started off with a good base, if we started off picking someone that’s a good person, then we’re not starting with a we’re not we can’t go, oh, it’s all their fault. Right? We’re dealing with our own and we’re with our own stuff. We’re dealing with our own afflictive emotions. If we look at the problem, the root of jealousy is desire or aversion.
We have desire for the object that we feel jealous of and aversion to the object that we feel jealous of. Yes. Thank you. Because that’s what we’re actually I’m trying to figure out which one we’re jealous of. But that’s our problems.
And the root of all of that is the problem of desire, whether it’s desire for them not to go off with someone else or whether it’s our desire to keep that situation or have aversion to losing the person we’re attached to or have aversion to this situation. So we’ve started with a a good base, but we still need to work with our emotions in that context. So we can’t blame them for everything. That’s like a pretty hard practice. Walking out the door every time.
Said until you get rid of afflictive emotions, you’re gonna have these situations. So this isn’t necessarily about that you should be focusing on what the other person is doing. You’ve to be focusing about what you’re It’s your afflictive emotions. It’s your negative states. It’s your problems that are gonna create suffering for you.
And that’s gonna happen until you get rid of them. So whether there’s someone else there or whether there’s not someone else there is not the problem. It’s your afflictive emotions. So that’s what you need to be working with. Sorry.
Oh, sorry. I was, like, going there. Sorry. She scared me there. Because I was like, you have to see your partner as a teacher.
Come on. It’s hard not saying teachers is teachers. And then Geshe-la said, no, no. You can see your partner as someone who helps you, someone who benefits you. Think of all the kind things they’ve done for you.
If you focus on that, then that, like, alleviates the negative situation. And then he goes he said to me, so you don’t see Jackie as a Buddha? I’m like and I was also saying, wouldn’t have anywhere to sit in the house because every time he sat somewhere, he’s like, can’t sit on your teacher’s chair. Wouldn’t have anywhere to sit. What I mean is teaching you how to deal with your own you can’t even look at it as a one-sided thing like that.
It’s the situation that we’re dealing with here. It’s not as if there’s one person who’s making the situation happen. If you have a relationship, then you have two people that make that situation happen. So what usually happens, is that we don’t look at the two people in any situation. We look at the other person in that situation.
We look at what’s their problem, what they’re doing that’s wrong. We don’t look at what we’re doing that’s wrong. Alright? So if you’re if you’re not looking at what you’re doing that’s wrong, you’re looking at what the other person is doing that’s wrong, then you don’t you’re not dealing with the situation. You’ve never been you’ve never eaten when you’re angry?
Okay. So this this is a plate of nice food, but there’s some, like, vegetables on the side. So there’s always really nice food, and there’s another person there that you don’t like very much. So you think I’m gonna eat your own food because I don’t get any. Right?
So then you’re eating with the motivation of hatred. Otherwise, they’re going to enjoy them. You don’t want them to enjoy it, so you’re gonna eat it all yourself. They don’t I’ve got a bed. Yeah.
Being very naughty, I’m gonna eat it. Yeah. So if you eat so someone else doesn’t get it, then that’s hatred. That’s like an aversion. Yeah.
He thinks eating would be best. Yeah. Because yeah. Because it’s Okay.