Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Śāntideva’s pledge to remain in existence until all beings are free from suffering, Geshe Pema Tsering uses this 45-minute public talk to introduce core Buddhist principles to a general audience. He explains karma through a seed-and-tree analogy — past positive actions yield human rebirth, present choices shape future lives — and contrasts the Buddhist account of selfhood with both the Christian creator-God model and the purely physical explanation. He then covers the role of vows in generating virtue, the aspiration to reach enlightenment for all beings as a practice that gradually transforms how we perceive everyone we meet, and the ten virtuous actions. The talk closes with a cross-religious comparison: every tradition, he argues, reduces to one formula — abandon harm, cultivate good. Pitched at newcomers with no prior Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 PT 2003 04 06.mp3
UUID: 203251e8-f8b5-4185-bb48-851389893e2b
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Public Talks (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-04-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~3,914
Śāntideva, the eighth century Indian saint, said, as long as space remains and sentient being remains, then shall I also abide to try and wipe out the misery of sentient beings. And the reason that we mainly have to abide, the reason that binds the thing that binds us to keeping in saṃsāra because of other sentient beings is the vows that we have that binds us to sentient beings. The word vow in Tibetan is actually can also be translated as the binds, the things that bind you. So we make these vows, different vows that we make that are used as an for in order to help sentient beings. We aspire to be able to help and to be of service to sentient beings, and they work on all different levels.
We’re working for our own liberation. We’re working for the liberation of all sentient beings. So in order to do that, we take these vows. We bind ourselves to sentient beings. So, because everybody is a Buddhist, then we should explain that this is being described as from the Buddhist point of view.
As a Buddhist, your focus stops being about trying to enjoy happiness in this life, and trying to get the best out of this life, and you start looking at things from a different perspective. The first thing that we should think about when we look at things from the Buddha’s perspective is that things are forced or things happen by the power of cause and effect, by the power of karma. This is a fairly simple rule, and the simple rule is that if you do something good, then happiness will follow, and if you do something negative, then suffering will follow. So this is a manifest. This is how the teaching, the Buddha’s first teaching on the four noble truths manifest in our reality.
The first two truths, the truth of suffering and the truth of the origin of suffering, are what we have to deal with on a day to day basis, because if we do something that’s negative, we have to deal with the consequences of that which is suffering, and this is what he talks about in the first two of the Four Noble Truths. So if we wanted if things were the way we wanted them to be, if things worked out the way that we wished without having this karma in effect, then everything will be great. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to have any negative experiences. So if we choose what was going to happen, of course we would choose things to be all fantastic.
This isn’t actually what happens though, we have to accept that we are going to suffer, we have to accept that there is suffering in our life, and in order to stop suffering then we have to understand karma and the way that karma works. So we also have changed our focus. We don’t start thinking about we stop thinking so much about getting happiness in this life and change our focus to at least the next life, and start thinking about how things will be in the next life. In order for things to be positive and happy in the next life, then we have to do positive things in this life. The way that karma works is a lot like when we’re planting a seed and we want it to grow into a tree.
First of all, we need the seed, we need the root cause for that tree to grow, and then we need to do a lot of work in order to help the tree to grow. We need to water it, we need to put the conditions in place for that tree to reach its fullest potential. So likewise, in our past lives, we must have done something incredibly important and incredibly good. We must have created a lot of positive karma in order to be experiencing the results of that karma now as a human being. In order to be born as a human being, you have to have done something pretty good.
You have to have created a good cause to start off with, and then you have to have nurtured that virtue, nurtured those positive thoughts and those positive actions you did in your past life, and then as a result of that, you are now experiencing a human rebirth, which is a very good thing. So, the same as we did in our past lives, then we have to nurture our positivity, nurture our good thoughts now in order to experience another human rebirth in our next life. So this is speaking from the Buddhist point of view. In the Christian point of view, they say that a creator God creates each individual, and these individuals come into being because of the power of that creator God. From the Buddhist perspective, this isn’t accepted.
From the Buddhist perspective, the main cause for us to come into existence, the main reason that we come into this life is because we did something in the previous life in order for that to happen. If we have are experiencing the results as a human, that means that we did something positive in the previous life and the positive results we’re experiencing now is as a human, in much the same way as if you plant an apple seed, you get an apple tree. If we did something positive in the past, then we’re experiencing the positive results now, which is being a human being. Now, other people yet again say that the reason that we’re here is because of our parents. We come about as a result of our parents, from our mother’s egg and from our father’s sperm.
Now, this is technically true, but only in terms of the container which holds us. The container that we are in comes about from our parents, but the actual I, the merely labeled I that travels from one life to another, that is dependent on the causes that brought it into, that bring results in the next moment. So we don’t usually think about though how did we get here? I mean, of the time if we think about how did I get here, we usually come back to thinking about our parents. Our concept of how we got here revolves around our physical body and how our physical body came into being.
But even that isn’t something that we think about very often. So when we think about it, it’s actually really weird that we’re actually here, that we’re a result of something, that even our physical body’s here. Our physical body isn’t something that we made ourselves. It’s something that we created from ourselves. Our physical body came about because of the karma that caused us to be born from our parents, and it’s a very strange thing if we start to ponder it.
Even then, it just can’t be about something physical, because we’re not just physical beings. There has to be something that made us happen. There had to be something that brought us into this life. If we start thinking about that, it becomes a bit strange. This karma that brought us here becomes a very strange process.
But if we start trying to think about this process, then what we may come to is that in the past we did something positive that caused us to experience the results of that positivity now in the form of having taken a human rebirth. And in order for that to continue, then we need to keep doing positive things now in order that in the future we will again be able to experience a human rebirth. So if following this idea that we did something positive in the past, and that means we’re experiencing a human body now, and that means that whatever we do now acts as a cause for whatever we’re going to experience in our future lives. So if we do positive things now, then what we experience in the future will also be positive. We’ll experience good health, we’ll experience a human rebirth, but what we have to try and understand is that he said it’s okay because nobody speaks Tibetan.
Pardon? So what we have to try and get our head around is that when we die, we don’t turn into When we die, we go through an intermediary stage. From a Buddhist perspective, and that’s where he’s teaching from. Yeah. Sorry?
So from a gross level, even now we can understand that if we do negative things, we experience negative consequences. If we do things that harm, then we experience suffering as a result. And if we do things that make people happy and make people feel good, then But it’s his teaching, yeah? So the point he was saying was that the process that is performed in terms of Buddhist logic in order to understand this properly is, first of all, base what is said on the Buddha’s teachings, because there has to be a certain amount of faith in the Buddha. If you say Buddha or if you say Jesus, it doesn’t matter.
The definition of a Buddha is someone who has accumulated all good qualities and gotten rid of all negative qualities. So if what you see as being a manifestation of that is Jesus, or what you see being a manifestation of that is Buddha, as is a historical Buddha, then that’s fine. Whatever you have is your idea. Sorry? Okay.
So the thing that is the definition of Buddha is someone who has his mind, has a consciousness that doesn’t have any negativities and is an embodiment of supreme wisdom. Supreme wisdom is a being that can see everything completely and understands reality completely. Whatever label you want to put on that is fine. So the the from a Buddhist perspective, what we would say would be that Buddhists, because they are this wisdom, they are embodiment of this wisdom, then whether they manifest it at one time and explain to people reality in one way, as will help them most because of their predispositions, because of what they can have the ability to understand, then the Buddhas will manifest and explain what they are capable of understanding. Sorry, I haven’t finished yet.
Excuse me, this isn’t like you would think, so if you wait until Geshe-la’s finished. So, yeah, it doesn’t matter. Everybody can have different opinions about different things, but what we were trying to explain today was what the Buddhist perspective is. So from the Buddhist perspective, in the Buddhist the Buddhist philosophy, the Buddhist excuse me. Like, just just not forget the Buddhist thing.
I mean, what are that? It’s a Buddhist center, dude. There’s a sign. Buddha house. If you wanna put Buddha’s teachings to the side, what do you want to talk about?
He said, if you wanna if you didn’t come here to hear about Buddha’s teachings, what did you want to to hear? Everything else. I mean, you know, I mean, he’s with a house. Uh-huh. And I’ll walk up the road.
You know? And what’s the difference between walking up the road and coming into a house? He said, If you go for a walk on the road, there’s many destinations, and Buddha House is only one. So that’s the main difference. If you’re going for a walk on the road, you’re going all different places, but if you came here, you’re only going one place.
And you can go on the road in a car, and you can go on the road by foot. There’s many different ways to go on the road, but here you can’t bring a car. To sleep. All that is not a literal translation, and that’s how things get so translated. Yeah.
Was the point. Yeah. You remember what I said? Yeah. You said what’s the difference between going to the road and coming to put a house?
It’s I’m sorry. To be honest with you, it didn’t make sense when you said it. So that’s my problem. I didn’t understand it properly. Okay?
So if you have a different way of asking the question, then I would appreciate that. You can think of a different way to ask it. So if you have another way of asking the question then I’d be quite happy to translate it if I didn’t understand. So, we were talking about the difference between this life and the difference between thinking about the next life. If we’re thinking about this life, then we do things that are going to give us happiness in the short term.
If we start thinking about the next life and future lives, then our concept of happiness becomes one where we’re thinking about what will make us happier for longer. So, if we are thinking of things from this perspective and start thinking about what will make us happier longer, and we are also working into the concept of karma, then what we need to be thinking is that every time we do something positive, every time we do something from a positive perspective and something that is going to help instead of harm, then that will result in a positive outcome, that will result in happiness. And every time we do something negative, every time we seek to inflict harm, then that will result in some kind of suffering, will result in something that we don’t necessarily want to happen to us. So, if our goal is to have a next life that’s happy and have a life that’s to be reborn as a human and to have a positive next life, then we can’t just do any old type of positive things. We can’t do random positive things that don’t have much power behind them.
We have to try and concentrate on developing very powerful positive things in our mind stream. The eleventh century Saint Atisha said that the main way for us to create positivity is by these vows. There are different types of vows we can have: vows to not harm, vows to be a monk or nun, vows to refrain from doing negativities. These things were the best way that we could create positivity. Apart from that, also, if we have refuge in the Three Jewels, the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, if we have a sense of going to them for safety, then these are the two main ways that we can develop virtue.
So in the Buddhist religion, people take types of vows at different stages. At the start they take what are called the refuge vows and then after that one of the next things people usually take is lay vows. Now, what these vows do is that you say: from this day forward I am not going to do whatever this negative thing is, I’m going to abandon that negativity. So by restraining ourselves by practicing ethics and trying to abandon things that are negative, then we are creating merit and we will experience the results of those merits, the positive things that we’ve done, will experience the results of those positive things. Actually, in one way, negativity and positivity work in the same way.
In that you do something negative that’s like a cause and then it acts as a cause for something negative as a result. Positivity is the same way as that if you do something positive, then you experience the results of that positive action as something in accordance with the cause. For something that is a big example of that, something that in Buddhism is considered very important, we can look at what is called bodhicitta or the mind seeking to reach enlightenment for all beings. This is a very strong cause. If you meditate on this thought all the time, then that acts as a cause for patience, it acts as a cause for whoever you meet.
You see them being a good person and you meet them and think positive things about them and that acts as a very positive result that comes from the positive cause. Likewise, if you meditate on anger a lot, you constantly think angry thoughts all the time, if you constantly think of different ways that people annoy you and how they make you feel angry, then whoever you meet will make you angry. So, the negative creates a negative result and the positive thought creates a result. So the main way to create positivity, the main way to set up that we experience happiness, that we experience positive karma from the causes that we put into place is to practice what are called the ten virtuous actions and to get rid of what are called the ten non virtuous actions. The best way to do that is to take vows where you vow to refrain from doing the negative So we can experience how these positive and negative karma works and the way that it plays in our mind in some ways pretty easily in our lives.
For example, are people that have a respect and love for Buddha images and Buddha statues and everything since a very young age in this life and isn’t usually there cannot be a scientific reason for that. So what we’d have to look to would be their imprints that they put in their mind in their previous life. Because of their connection to Buddha in their previous life, when they see pictures in this life, they have a love and respect. It also works, not necessarily with regards to Buddha, but with regards to doing positive and negative things. If we had a past life where we were accustomed to doing positive things, were accustomed to helping instead of harming, then in this life it becomes a lot easier for us to do that.
It becomes something that we relate to easier and something our mind naturally goes towards. This can also work with other religions and with other experiences as well. If we’ve familiarized ourselves with something, then it will be something that we naturally lean towards in this life. We may have had experiences in that life that accustomed us to something and then we experience the same thing in this life and it’s easier for us to do that. There’s another type of way that can happen where directly as a result of things we’ve done in previous lives where we’ve done something positive, then we experience something like happiness in this life.
Experience some positive situations in this life as a direct cause. So you have these different ways that karma can work. It can work in times of an experiential thing and it can work in terms of just a direct cause and result situation happening as well. As a result of these things that we’ve done in our previous lives, then what we can experience in this life and in future lives as well is we can either experience happiness, sadness or suffering or equanimity something that’s neither suffering or happiness something that we don’t feel either way about. Apart from these three types of experience, there really is no other experience that we can have.
If we want to experience happiness, we do positive things. That’s a direct result of our positive karma, we experience happiness. If we do negative things, then we have to experience suffering as a direct result of our negative karma. If we’ve done things that are neutral karma, that are neither positive nor negative, they just are, then we will experience results that are neither suffering or happiness. So from the Buddhist perspective, if we want to experience happiness, there is a pretty simple formula to follow.
If we want to experience happiness, we don’t do negative things. Therefore, we don’t have to experience negative results. If we do do negative things, then we’ll experience negative results. If we do things that are neither negative or positive, then we’ll experience equanimous results. There’s many different religions on the earth.
There’s many different ways that people can practice religion and different ones they follow. All of them say that if you do this, you will experience happiness and if you don’t do this, you will experience misery or suffering. They all say this in one way or another. So different people will have different religions that they feel drawn to and different religions that come into their life and they feel connected to and in each of these religions there is things you need to abandon, there are things you need to stop doing, are negative things you need to give up, are also things you need to incorporate into your life. In each of these religions if you don’t follow that, what’s set out, then you don’t set up to have a good experience.
Don’t set yourself up to have a good experience. So we need to really pay attention in whichever religion it is to try to understand what it is that we have to do and what it is we have to stop doing. In the religion, there is a simple formula that Buddha set down: abandon evil and do good. That’s what people need to know. In other religions, they have different things that they need to abandon and some things they need to abandon and other things they need to practice.
Whichever religion you are in, the most important thing is to find out what that is. You need to know what it is you need to abandon and what it is you need to practice. So if you don’t know what it is in these religions that that you need to do and what you have to stop doing, if you don’t know this, even if you may say I am a Buddhist or you may say I am a Christian or you may say I am a Hindu. If you are not doing what you are supposed to do and you don’t even know what it is you are supposed to do and you aren’t supposed to do, then you are not actually accomplishing your role as this thing that you are calling yourself. Are not fully a Buddhist or you are not fully a Christian because you don’t even know what it means to be one.
So it’s interesting how all of these religions all have something that you need to abandon in order to be happy and something that you need to practice in order to be happy. So, something you need to practice in order to it’s one simple formula in Tibetan, but anyway, you need to practice in order to not experience suffering and something you need to abandon in order to experience happiness. So all of these religions have something that we need to practice, something that we need to abandon and the stated reason for having something to practice and something to abandon is that people want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer. People want to experience happiness or pleasure of some kind and they don’t want to experience suffering. It’s just that in all the different religions they may have a different view of what it is that we need to abandon and what it is we need to cultivate.