Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Starting from an unusual interfaith comparison, Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 29-minute public talk by arguing that Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam share the same basic structure — each sets out what leads to happiness and what causes suffering — and that no tradition is logically superior to the others. A Q&A follows, including a lively exchange on body image and karma: how past-life aspirations shape present results and why changing them demands sustained effort. The central teaching is a clear walkthrough of the ten non-virtues — three of body (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct), four of speech (lying, slander, harsh words, idle talk), three of mind (covetousness, ill-will, wrong views) — and why each harms both oneself and others. The session ends with practical advice on teaching children about karma, balancing encouragement with honest warnings about consequences. Accessible to anyone new to Buddhist ethics.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 PT 2003 04 06.mp3
UUID: e826ab22-54e2-40aa-afd0-a0e12b8600d3
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Public Talks (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-04-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.5 minutes
Words: ~2,357
Geshe-la, as a monk, has certain rules that he has to obey and certain things that he must abandon. For example, he’s not supposed to wear any other clothes apart from his robes. So, as someone who is following these rules, he has to be very clear about what he is allowed to do, what will cause him happiness and what will cause him suffering. So he has to be very clear about that, otherwise he will experience suffering from his actions and won’t experience happiness. And it’s not just people who are monks and nuns in the Buddhist tradition.
Everybody who’s a Buddhist needs to know what it is that’s virtue and what it is that is positive that they need to do and what it is that is negative and how they should go about abandoning those. They need to know how to abandon and how to cultivate. Okay, so from a Buddhist perspective you have very clearly set out what is negative and what is positive and the Buddha told us what we can do in order to achieve liberation from suffering, in order to achieve enlightenment and what will cause us to suffer more in the future. It’s very clearly set out and in Christian tradition Jesus also set out that if you do certain practices and you abandon certain actions, that you will go to heaven or you will achieve some kind of liberation and you will become like Jesus who completely abandoned negativities. It’s very clearly set out what you need to do.
So it’s even the same in the Muslim religion in Islam. They have this idea that they believe that Allah told them what’s positive and what’s negative. They have certain specific practices they need to do and prayers they need to do and they have negative things that they’re not allowed to do. It’s very clearly set forward and if someone is doing to the best of their ability and trying to do what Allah said and has abandoned these negativities and is practicing the positive things, then they can very rightly say I am a Muslim, I am a follower of this religion and this is the way I live my life according to their truth. So if someone isn’t doing this, if someone’s doing negative things and they’re not following the words of the teacher of their different religious traditions, and they go around saying, Yeah, I’m not doing anything positive, but I’m a Muslim.
Or if they go around saying, I don’t try and follow the ten virtuous actions but I am a Buddhist or if likewise they’re not following the words of Jesus and they say they’re a Christian, then there’s no meaning in their words. There’s no truth behind the way they’re living. Therefore there’s no point in them saying that. So, all of these religious traditions there is this idea that if we do these things we will be happy, if we don’t do these things, if we do these other things then we will experience suffering, therefore we have things we need to abandon and that we have things we need to practice. All of these religions set out a way for people to be happy and people to do positive things.
Therefore, for us to say one of these religions is better than the other is really wrong. So, because of this, because all of these religions are all setting out ways to show people happiness and to show people how to lead a more positive life and to treat others kindly, this idea one is better than the other isn’t something that you could prove logically. People keep saying one religion, this religion is the best, or this religion isn’t so good, but they can’t say that. You can’t say one’s better than the other. You have to say all are better.
So, we may have something that appeals to us more, we may have something that we find easier to focus on, we may have one of these religions that resonate with us more and we may, because of this, think to ourselves, well, this religion is better than the other ones, but we can’t say that. It is better for us. But it’s not something that’s like a pervasive statement. It’s not a point of view that pervades all beings. If you’re going along in a car with five people, then you’ll find every person in that car has different points of view on different things.
Some people in the car will like yellow, some people in the car will prefer blue. There’s never anything that we can say this is the definitive way it is. So, that would be the general idea of how happiness works in terms of Buddhist religion and other religions and if anyone has any questions please ask. Yeah? Sorry, two at once.
One. Neither of you are saying anything. He said he didn’t need these. Yeah. Sorry.
He said something to do himself. Uh-huh. Something to actually do with other children. Some kind of ceremony or something. Yeah.
Right. So they come in all shapes and sizes, they come in different ways. Sometimes people take vows off teachers and there’s a specific ceremony involved. There is also vows that you can make to yourself saying I’m not going to do this or any time where you make a strong thought in your mind to abandon something is what is considered a vow. Hang on.
Not quite, but we can get there. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure.
What is it you wanna achieve, you said? The problem is, I said, you know, this lady thinks that that she thinks she thinks she’s Okay. First of all, I have to point out to Geshe-la that we consider it to be bigger in this society as not being a good thing. He goes, well, it could be something like in your past life because most other cultures consider being bigger to be good that you’re going, I’m gonna work really hard in my next life. I’m gonna be bigger.
Alright? And he goes, so now you’re thinking, in this life, I’m gonna work really hard and in my next life, I’m gonna be really thin. Alright? And then in your next life, you’ll be somewhere where it’s considered better to be bigger. He said, the main thing is that it relies on karma and aspirations.
So, you put in a lot of work in your past life in order to have this status symbol, which was whatever, and then you get the results of that in this life. So, you put in the work and then you get the results. He said from another point of view that it depends on the result has to go with the cause and that usually in their culture, if they have this thing of being thin is a sign of being poor and monks sometimes want that sign. So what they usually do is focus very hard on using food as a meditation. They eat one meal a day, they don’t eat meat, they don’t eat anything else but little bits of vegetable and concentrate very hard on that.
He said it has to be something very specific to the result. If you want a specific result, have to put into place the specific cause. He said, So unfortunately, you put in all this hard work to get the good result of being bigger, and now you don’t want the good result anymore, So, now you have to put into place lots of work in order to achieve a different result. So, karma isn’t something that’s very easily changed. Sorry, it’s not something that’s very easily done.
Something that has to involve a lot of hard work. So you have to keep working hard in order to get the result. And the other thing is to remember that things that we consider good now may not have been things we considered good before. Yeah. Where is that?
So is there no more questions? Okay. He said, you don’t have to, but it is very of benefit to be. Because a lot of the time, if we’re relying on our own concept of what’s good and what’s bad, it doesn’t have a very vast concept behind it. So most of the ideas that we have of good and bad come from religions.
Whatever qualities we want, we need a teacher. We don’t think of them ourselves. We need someone to explain qualities to us and to show us things. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Sorry? Then isn’t that the same thing? If you’re getting the same You’re not being a particular religion. That’s what Oh, sure. Sure.
He said yes. He said that it’s possible, but he thinks it’d be more difficult to separate what was your desires and what was your ideas from what were the the ideas of the different teachers. Yeah. No. It’s two.
Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. I’m just finding them because I can never remember them in English.
I’m in. Now I have to remember them, I think. That’s good practice. Okay. First of all, there is the three non virtues of body.
There is first of all there is the three non virtues of body, that is killing, stealing and sexual misconduct. That’s considered the three non virtues of body that you do with your body. So there’s then four non virtues of speech. They are: telling lies, slander, or separating two people that are close by telling them different things telling lies, slander, harsh words, using harsh words with people and talking nonsense or talking rubbish. They’re the form of speech.
These four, we’re called the four non virtues of speech because they all originate from the mouth, all originate from what we’re saying, those four. Then there’s three that are called the non virtues of mind and there are three different negative ways of thinking. The first one is covetousness, the idea of someone else having something and us desiring that, whether we want to be something else, have something else, take something else from someone, there’s that thought. Then there’s also the thought of harming others, having thoughts that incline towards harming others. The third one is called wrong views, which is from the Buddhist perspective saying things like the Three Jewels don’t exist, that karma doesn’t exist and so forth.
So, these ten are called the ten non virtues. Stopping or refraining from these ten non virtues and practicing the opposite of them is called the ten virtues. This is what we should be trying to abandon and what we should be getting rid, what we should be trying to abandon, what we should be cultivating. But it’s not as easy as it sounds, because we actually like doing negative things. We have a habit of doing negative things, so we find it much easier to immerse ourselves in these ten non virtues than we do in trying to practice the ten virtues.
So the thing that we should be remembering in order to try and stop doing the ten non virtues is that all of them will result in suffering for ourselves. Every time that we do one of the Ten Non Virtues we’ll have to experience the results of that action which come about as suffering. We can also remember that the Ten Non Virtues harm others. For example, if we steal, it’s not just ourselves that we should be worrying about. We’re harming ourselves because we will have to experience the results of that negative action, but we’re also harming another person by stealing from them.
So the ten non virtues don’t have any qualities, don’t have any good aspects to them apart from the fact that we can stop them. Is that okay? Does anyone else have any questions? Yep. Yeah.
Oh. Yep. Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Mhmm. Good things, yeah. He said both ways can work. If you say to a child You can say to a child in one way, if you don’t steal No, if you steal, sorry, you’ll have to accept the consequences of stealing, which will be negative. But you could also say to them like, if you don’t steal, that will be better, and you’ll have experiences in the future.
So you could explain them either way. So you could say the benefits of not stealing, or you could say the negativities of stealing. He said, from the point of view of the way that it may come about, to say refraining from stealing is good and saying stealing is bad, they both have the same meaning. Usually with children you have to use both friendly ways and more wrathful ways when you’re dealing with them. You have to sometimes be friendly to them and sometimes be strict with them.
Children are different, they have different ways of reacting to things. With some children, if you say you will have to experience negative things then that makes them sit up and listen more and other children if you say that to them they get scared so they don’t hear it properly. So some children it is better emphasize the positive and other children it’s better to emphasize the negative. He thinks. So the most important thing to do is to teach them how to think.
Because if they can think about it and they can think about what’s going to happen, then they will naturally not want to do things that are negative. So if they know how to think properly, that will stop them doing lots of negative things and make them focus on the positive. So if they know how to think about karma and know how to think about how every phenomena has a result and every phenomena is a result, then they will be able to understand the way things work better and then they will be able to make more informed decisions. They will come from a basis of logic. Yeah.
There’s no more questions percolating. Okay. So that’s