Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. “What are you scared of?” — the opening question in this 14-minute session with Geshe Pema Tsering leads into a careful examination of fear as the psychological foundation of taking refuge. He distinguishes fear from worry: fear anticipates suffering and can motivate action, while worry merely dwells on what hasn’t arrived, creating suffering prematurely — the Tibetan word, he notes, literally means “tied-up mind.” He then contrasts ordinary refuge, turning toward the Three Jewels to escape personal suffering, with Mahāyāna refuge, where a bodhisattva’s focus shifts entirely toward freeing all sentient beings rather than protecting oneself. The session closes with technical definitions of the Dharma Jewel and Sangha Jewel. Best suited to practitioners already working through Lamrim or foundational Mahāyāna study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 OCR 2005 03 03.mp3
UUID: 302c0d73-9f8e-433d-a7e5-729bafc5396f
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Ornament for Clear Realisations (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-03-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 13.9 minutes
Words: ~941
What are you scared of? Okay. So I guess this says, yes, you would say the fear of being reborn in lower realms and the fear of being reborn in saṃsāra. So there’s two different elements to what you’re afraid of. So Geshe-la wants to know if you really are scared of that.
So that’s the first part of refuge. The next part is that by following the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, by going to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha I’ll try that again by moving towards the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha that you get protection from that suffering. So these are the two different aspects of refuge. And he said the idea of going for refuge only comes the moment after the fear of saṃsāra and that all rebirth in saṃsāra is generated. He didn’t actually say be afraid, he said worry.
That’s a different word. So Geshe-la said fear is very important. If you don’t develop fear of saṃsāra in the lower realms, you don’t have refuge. And then said and His Holiness the Dalai Lama didn’t say don’t have fear of the lower realms. If you read in his book, he said, you’re saying very many times that he said fear of the lower realms.
Right? And he said that what he’s saying is investigate. If you can do something about suffering, do it. If you can’t, then you have to accept it. There’s no point worrying.
But you can do something about the suffering of saṃsāra and the suffering of the lower realms. So what you do is you do something about it. You go for refuge. So he said, You don’t worry about it. You just do something about it.
He said that’s very good. He said yes, but Let’s just say yes, but actually, the refuge of a bodhisattva and the refuge that we’re talking about is slightly different because the refuge of an ordinary being that we were talking about is that you turn towards something in order to keep yourself from suffering that can lead you to a state beyond suffering. The refuge of a bodhisattva is to work to free all sentient beings from suffering. So refuge is totally a different place. Their refuge is something that can alleviate all sentient beings suffering.
Alright? So based on that refuge, they have this intense compassion and this intense love and kindness and the the mind of enlightenment that enables them not to focus on their own freedom from suffering and their own their lack of dying or suffering or whatever it is, but they’re working for the benefit of all other sentient beings. So there’s no fear because their focus is on others. So it says a bit different in terms of the refuge. That’s what’s called Mahāyāna refuge.
So yeah. Or the the Mahāyāna refuge or the refuge of the greater beings from the Lamrim. So their their refuge and the refuge of the middling and lower beings is different. Okay. So Geshe said I have to say that the word that’s usually translated as worry in Tibetan means tied up mind.
Right? Like a yeah. Or busy. Busy. Busy or tied up mind.
Or yeah. Busy or engaged mind. I was using exactly the same way. So I guess I said he doesn’t think if there’s any specific definition of fear. Alright?
But fear is the sense of, he said, agitation because something’s gonna happen that you don’t want to happen. Yeah. So in that way, you would be motivated to try and find a way for it not to happen. Whereas worry would be thinking, that’s so bad and just just focusing on that what might happen. Right?
So fear is as having a reaction to something and thinking I don’t want that to happen, which could either spur you on to doing something about stopping it happening or sitting there and worrying about it. Yeah? So if fear is the initial impulse, what what how you deal with it is is is is whether it becomes worrying or not. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Okay. So fear is the anticipation of suffering. Yeah? If you worry about suffering that hasn’t arrived yet, you’ve already created suffering. Okay?
So if something’s arrived already, that it’s suffering. If something could arrive, then you have fear of what could happen. So you have a choice of how to deal with it. Yeah. He said it is a mental factor, but it’s not counted as within the men the aspects of mental factors.
Do you guys know what the definition of the Dharma jewel is? Okay. So it’s Okay. Alright. Okay.
So its ultimate nature is emptiness, but it’s an entity, isn’t it? Or it’s — its ultimate nature is emptiness. Its nature isn’t emptiness. Alright? It’s nature and it’s not quite the true paths because the true paths are necessarily part of the the Dharma jewel, but the Dharma jewel isn’t necessarily just two true paths.
It’s only a three way pervasion. Yeah? So the definition of the Dharma jewel is a true path and true cessation is in the continuum of ārya beings. Okay. And the definition of the Sangha jewel is the being who has two paths and two cessations in a continuum.
Okay. Guess what, sir? But he’s not gonna go into the complete definition of the Sangha jewel because it’s got eight different characteristics to it. He said you can say in general that it is the being who has true paths and true cessations, but there’s other things they need to have as well.