Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of a lost ox searched across two valleys — and found in neither — Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 45-minute commentary with a vivid argument for why the self neither truly exists nor is simply nothing. He traces the search for a truly existent “I” through body and mind, then introduces a near-cliff thought experiment to isolate the visceral, instinctive sense of self that Buddhist analysis targets. The discussion turns to how all phenomena exist through mere labeling, illustrated by everyday examples: a director appointed by others, a name given by a parent. A lively Q&A closes the session, exploring whether even practitioners who have realized emptiness still experience self-grasping — and how that grasping persists, even subtly, through the eighth bodhisattva ground. Suited to practitioners with some grounding in emptiness philosophy.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 SoP 2002 10 22.mp3
UUID: 3bb64900-8d67-4bdd-90a2-7ee2f8f523b8
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Selflessness of Person (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~3,138
Not that it’s not there because we had this mind beforehand that wasn’t actually intent on something being truly established or not being truly established, but it still was having an interaction with things. It still said, This is me, I’m doing something. So, we can’t say that it doesn’t exist completely, that it’s a non existent, because it is having this conventional interaction, it has conventional interactions. So this minder says, I am a really truly existent being, then that is a is a non existent, But it can’t be a it isn’t a non existent that is a non existent. The truly existent I is a non existent, but there still is something there that is existent, because there is still something that has to exist conventionally.
Okay. So so when we’re looking for this truly existent I, the sense that goes, I, this is me, I’m truly existent, then we have to look first of all in the body. And if it’s not in the body, if there’s not one truly existent I in the body, then that means that there can’t be many truly existent I’s in the body, or two truly existent I’s in the body. And in the same way, if there can’t be one truly existent I in the mind, then there can’t be two truly existent I’s in the mind or many truly existent I’s in the mind. So both the mind and the body are devoid of a truly existent I.
So this non existence of self in either the body or the mind is what they call the selflessness of the person. Because when we say selflessness, the self we’re talking about there is the self of person. So, because it s the selflessness of the person, then this also means that it s the emptiness of person, because the selflessness of a person is the same thing as the emptiness of person. So in the same way that if you lost your ox and you went looking for your ox and there was two places that your ox could be, it could have been in one of two valleys. And you go looking all around the first valley, and you can’t find your ox anywhere.
You have to come to this slow realization that your ox just isn’t in the valley. So you get this idea that it’s just not there. And then you go to the other valley that it could possibly be in. It can only be in one of these two valleys. It can’t go anywhere else.
You go to the other valley and there’s no ox in the valley. You look everywhere for the ox and you just can’t find it. Then you have to come to the realization that not only is the ox in neither of those valleys, but it just doesn’t exist. It’s not anywhere. Because there’s nowhere else it could be, and it’s not where it should be, it could be, so therefore it’s not there.
It’s non existent. Even though you can’t find your ox in either of the valleys, there has to be an ox, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone looking for it. Therefore you have to say that the ox exists in some way, it just doesn’t exist where you thought it was going to be. So if it doesn’t exist in the same way where you thought it was going to exist there, it won’t exist in a similar place somewhere else. But it does exist conventionally because otherwise there would have been no point going to look for it in first place.
In the same way, we say our mind doesn’t exist completely. We can’t say that because we have this concept of it. Even though it doesn’t exist in our mind or our body in the same way that we think it’s going to exist, then it has to exist conventionally. Otherwise, we would be saying that something that we can experience or see doesn’t exist at all, and that would be a contradiction. Sorry, was just trying to understand the analogy and the logic, and it was a bit tricky.
Even though we’re going looking for this self in our body and our self, if we’re going looking for our ox in this valley or that valley, then we’re not going to be able to find it because it doesn’t exist in the valley. It doesn’t exist in the way that we think it’s going to exist. But we can’t, at the same time, say that it doesn’t exist completely, that it’s a nonexistent. We have to establish it in some way. It’s not truly established.
How is it established? It’s established by convention. It’s established by us labeling it. Then we can so we can say that even if we can’t find ourselves in either of these two things, that means we’re not gonna find it in something exactly the same somewhere else. We’re not gonna find ourselves We can’t find ourselves in our body or our mind, then we’re not going to find some other self in another body and mind.
So this can be multiplied out, it becomes something that can be applied to many things. But we can’t completely make it a nonexistent because we’re still labeling it with our mind, so this mere labeling, the mere labeling of something becomes the way that it exists. So what we’re talking about, the thing that we actually need to abandon is the sense of our self being truly established or established by its nature. And and the the sort of thing, the the expression of self that we are trying to isolate in this instance could come about quite easily if we were going to go to the edge of a really high cliff and nearly fall off. And then when we’re nearly falling off, go, Me, me, what’s happening?
I’m gonna you know, like there’s a sense of, I don’t wanna die. So at this time, are we thinking, I don’t want my body to fall off the cliff? Are we thinking, I don’t want my mind to fall off the cliff? Is that what we’re thinking about? It’s not that we’re thinking of either one of these things.
There’s something else that we’re thinking we don’t want to fall off the cliff. It’s that thing that we don’t want to fall off the cliff that is our truly established, or what we believe to be truly established, I that we’re clinging to. But it’s not necessarily either our mind or our body. So most of time when we’re actually thinking about what we label ourselves, a lot of the times it comes down to our physical body. We say, this is me.
Or if we see someone, we say, that is them. We label them by well, we understand them the convention of their physical form. But this actual process that we’re talking about when we say someone is a physical being, what we actually recognize in them is the name that they’ve been given. So for example, yesterday’s example said that my mother called me Ruth, and therefore that I was Ruth, and when I went to places people said, Oh, that’s Ruth. But if my mother hadn’t called me that and I just decided that I was going be Ruth, then no one would actually believe that.
They wouldn’t say, Oh, that’s Ruth, because there would be no basis for that. There wouldn’t have been a labeling process happen there, so it wouldn’t be just on the basis of the physicality, the way that we usually recognize people. It isn’t just on the basis of physicality, because it has to be that they have been labeled as well for us to understand them. So in this state, we’re usually thinking that people are who they are because of their physical being, but this doesn’t always work. For example, if someone walked around saying that they were the president of India, then nobody would necessarily believe them.
It has to be something that has put a label on them from the outside. It can’t come from their side. It can’t be something that they are inherently, because it’s mere it’s just a label. If they just walk around saying that, then no one going to believe them. In the same way that Buddha House’s director is Gabe, right?
Gabe isn’t inherently Buddha House director. She’s Buddha House director because someone put this label of Buddha House director on her. If she was inherently Buddha House director, then there wouldn’t have needed to be a process of appointing someone as director, or any of these things wouldn’t have needed to happen because she would have inherently been the director by her nature. So if there was a naturally occurring, truly existing Buddha house director, then Lama Zopa Rinpoche wouldn’t have to appoint anyone. And there would be someone who naturally came into being as the director of Buddha House.
There wouldn’t need to be a labeling process involved in that, but that isn’t the way this is. What we need to happen in these situations is something needs to be labeled for what it is as opposed to just having the power to come about from its own side. So, for example, the director of Buddha House is a label. It’s something that’s put on someone. It’s not something that exists, that comes out of its own power.
Apart from being a label, it’s nothing else. So in the same way that Gabe was labeled the director of Buddha house, her parents labeled her Gay, and if they hadn’t even labeled her Gay, not only wouldn’t she be a director of Buddha house called Gay, she wouldn’t be a Gay. So there has to be this process of labeling going on in order for us to understand and interact with things. Apart from these labels, there isn’t anything else inherently existent there. So apart from things that are labeled, apart from things that we with the different consciousnesses, different moments of consciousness in our head, the different things that we label, then there isn’t anything else.
There is nothing that isn’t labeled in this in this manner. So if we label something, then it becomes an existence, becomes a convention, it becomes a it becomes something that exists because it is merely labeled. If we don’t label something, if we don’t put this idea or something on it, then it isn’t anything. It’s a nonexistent. So even the the he says, for example, the cat doesn’t have horns.
So we don’t label the cat as having horns. We don’t see the cat and say, oh, it’s got horns. This isn’t a process that goes on. So because we don’t label it when we see the cat and say, oh, horns. Therefore, the horns of the cat are non existent.
So there we don’t go around labeling things that we don’t that don’t arise in some way or another. We don’t label things that aren’t there. For example, if we label Gabe — I keep calling her gay because Gabe-la, is it? If we label Gabe, then she has to do the work of a director. Otherwise, she’s not a director.
There’s no no there’s no there’s no labeling of things that don’t arise. Right? So I think something has to have arisen in some way or another for us to label it. So therefore, we have to have something working from both sides. There has to be something that has to be that can be labeled a a base for labeling.
It has to be something that arises in some way or another. So for example, the the horns of the cat don’t get labeled because they don’t arise. We don’t experience them in any way, and therefore they are nonexistent. Because they don’t arise, then we don’t label them. But because Gabe does the work of a director and we can see that, then we can label that her as director.
But it arises, and then we label it. So in terms of then, when we talk about emptiness, we’re actually talking about a two fold process. There, we have to negate the concept of a truly established thing. When we’re talking about the selflessness of the person, a truly established person, so there’s this negation happening. At the same time as there’s this negation happening over something that’s truly established, then we also as something is being merely labeled, there is a conventional process happening here, where a thing that has arisen has a mere label on it, or is labeled.
So these two things happening together is emptiness. This mind that sees that things don’t exist inherently, this mind that understands emptiness is a direct antidote to self grasping. This idea of self grasping is why we haven’t achieved nirvana or liberation. So if we can understand this mind that we’re talking about, this mind that understands emptiness by negating the true existence of phenomena and seeing that they’re merely labeled, then we can realize emptiness. And by realizing emptiness, we achieve liberation.
Because this mind that understands that things aren’t truly established is the direct antidote, the thing that chops from the root, self grasping. Sorry. Grasping at true existence. Okay. So so this mind that realizes emptiness works in companionship, or friendly works, with bodhicitta.
And what happens with bodhicitta is that the mind of bodhicitta actually accumulates a lot of merit, and its merit can lead us along the path. And what happens when we understand emptiness is we abandon a lot of things. So on the one hand with the from the aspect of bodhicitta, we’re accumulating a lot. And in the other hand, from understanding emptiness, we abandon a lot of things. And the end of this process is the achievement of Buddhahood.
So we have to if we have both of these things, then we’re able to achieve Buddhahood. So what we need to do is, alternately, going between the two, we need to meditate on emptiness and on bodhicitta because these are the two main aspects to or the two main reasons that one can achieve Buddhahood. And then he said, Then we leave it here and please meditate on this. Does anyone have any questions? I got pretty confused here, but okay.
So should it is So if someone has seen it or has some experience Yeah, so if someone has seen it or has some experience as a cat, or even smells it or anything, say, What’s that smell? What have I seen? Like, for example, if we go to a place where there are animals we don’t know, we go, Oh, what’s that animal? Then that’s still a process. Even though we haven’t put a label in terms of a concept on it, our eyes or our senses have still labeled it as being something.
Yeah? But I didn’t I said, what if it comes about and goes, if someone sees it, it’s labeled. So so even though we haven’t said that’s a cat because we don’t know how to say that’s a cat, what we have said is in our mind that it’s something with four legs and ears and fur and all these things on it, so there’s already this labeling process going on, even if we haven’t labeled it cat. He said that if nothing has seen anything it’s something, then it’s nonexistent. He said even if someone has a really good understanding of emptiness, they’re still going to say, I’m not a thief.
And this idea that it’s me, I’m not a thief, coming to the surface would be something that they’d work with. So even if someone has this idea of emptiness and they understand how things go apart and that they’re merely labeled and everything, then if someone calls them a thief, they’re still going to have this ‘I’ coming up, this I’m not a thief, I didn’t do it’, this feeling coming up inside them. What they will be able to do is to understand that the person labelling them is labelling a merely labelled thief, and the thing that they are labelling also is merely labelled, so in this way they will be able to think about it in this way. Mhmm. They’re both mandatory.
You need both the concept of emptiness and the concept of bodhicitta. Usually, the process of understanding emptiness comes about by getting rid of obstructions to omniscience and obstructions to liberation. How you get rid of these obstructions is based on understanding, and you get that understanding by having created a lot of merit. The best way to develop merit is by having bodhicitta. If you don’t have the merit from bodhicitta, then you can’t get rid of these obstructions or the obscurations, so you need both of them.
If you don’t have both of them, then there is no way of doing it. So at start, you actually get an unclear understanding of emptiness, This is like a mind that’s generated an understanding of emptiness, even though it’s very unclear. Then it gets clearer and clearer until you actually get a mind that’s generated an understanding of emptiness clearly, but this still isn’t realizing emptiness directly. First of all, you have to understand emptiness, and then later, after that, you realize emptiness directly. But they are not synonyms.
He said if someone has realized emptiness and someone calls them a thief and they’re not, they’re going to say, I’m not a thief.’ If they are a thief, they have to say they are because but if they haven’t if they’re not a thief, they’re still gonna say, I am not a thief. Sure. But would they have the same They’re still self grasping. Yeah. They’re still grasping.
Alright. Okay. Someone who has an understanding of emptiness, he said there’s a difference between saying I am not a thief and having intense self grasping, but people who have realized emptiness directly still have self grasping. Up until the eighth ground, out of the ten grounds, they’re still self grasping. When they’re actually in the meditation on emptiness, there’s no self grasping, but in the post-meditative stages, they’re still self grasping.
But he says even people on the eighth ground, if someone says to them, You’re a thief, they’re going say, I’m not a thief. So how does that work? Is that okay? Okay. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. So we’re doing a mandala offering because it’s the end of teaching. And then we do the dedication prayer on page five, and then the Tuśita prayer on page ten. And then prayer on page.