Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Je Rinpoche’s verse on never generating the wish for samsaric pleasures — not even for an instant — Geshe Pema Tsering uses this 44.5-minute session to trace how that aspiration works in practice. Renunciation means catching samsaric desire the moment it arises and redirecting attention to its shortcomings. Karma is then explained through a seed-and-fruit analogy across its three types — body, speech, and mind — and all afflictive emotions are traced back to self-grasping, which can be dissolved because the self it clings to is empty of inherent existence. A brief argument for past and future lives leads into bodhicitta. The session closes with an introduction to the Ornament for Clear Realizations — transmitted by Maitreya to Asaṇga in the Tuśita Pure Land — and how it foregrounds method over wisdom, reversing the perfection-of-wisdom sutras.
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File: 01 ST 2003 01 30.mp3
UUID: f41516cb-853a-4001-a898-d71fbbb5632b
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Seventy Topics (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-01-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.5 minutes
Words: ~4,153
We start with a quote from Je Rinpoche from the three principal aspects of the path. Is: By contemplating in this way, do not generate even for an instant the wish for the pleasures of cyclic existence, when you have day and night unceasingly the mind aspiring for liberation, then you have generated the determination to be free. And what this means is the contemplating in this way is like is a meditative cycle the things that we go over and over again in our heads the things we meditate on this is what they mean by contemplating and the the things the pleasures of cyclic existence the Tibetan actually says everything great about cyclic existence everything the all the good bits of cyclic existence and Geshe-la said that that’s that’s like getting a lot of wealth having a lot of pleasures in our life all the things that we spend a lot of time and exertion exertion going after and all these things that we concentrate on and if we instead when we’re thinking about these things and we’re we have this desire to accumulate things and we have this desire to and excuse me we have this desire to make ourselves feel really healthy and happy and and if everything in this life then we have to think about how that isn’t gonna last so long and know how much however much work we do in order to acquire it it really doesn’t help us in the end because in the end we have to die and can’t take this with us so therefore whenever we find ourselves thinking of this what we have to do is turn our mind away from that by concentrating on the shortcomings of all those things that we desire in saṃsāra so this is when it’s talking about don’t don’t let your mind generate desire for this even for an instant it’s like don’t let your mind go there even for a second as soon as it comes up you have to stop it you have to turn it around by concentrating on the shortcomings of all those things that you desire So this turning our mind away from the pleasures of saṃsāra that’s actually what they call renunciation and renunciation is the first part of the Three Principal Aspects of the path.
This is the first thing that we need to concentrate on but this renunciation isn’t in itself easy because it’s actually a lot easier to get pleasure and to get good feelings from things that are in saṃsāra it’s a lot easier to get as soon as we get one of the things we like we actually get pleasure from it so this because this is our habit and it’s a lot easier than it is to turn our mind away from that and concentrate on liberation and we find it difficult to try and get our mind to go towards liberation instead of saṃsāra. So the way that we should should turn our mind away from in these pleasures of saṃsāra is to think about karma if you think about karma and we think about that along with the faults of all the things in cyclic existence then that’s the tools that we should be using in order to turn our mind away from our attachment to cyclic existence actually karma is really subtle and it’s very difficult for us to see it’s one of the most difficult things in existence to be able to see the subtle aspects of it but we can see the more gross aspects of it the rougher aspects of it we can experience them and we can see them so if we concentrate on these then we can get some kind of understanding of what the more subtle aspects would be like so the way that we can see how the rough aspects of karma works is for example if we watch farmers planting seeds we know that if they plant and for example one type of fruits fruit seed and then that tree can only give rise the tree that grows from that seed can only give rise to that kind of fruit.
It can’t give rise to some other kind it can’t sprout to some other kind of fruit. It has to the fruit has to accord with the seed that was put into the ground in order for it to grow And the same thing if if we work really hard for something, we get the thing that we get in return accords with the work we’ve done. We don’t that we have to have done something in order to get something in return. Okay so in the same way that the with the fruit seed the seed of the fruit tree only grows the fruit tree which only produces the fruit in the same way as that if we do bad things then only bad, bad results can come from that and if we do good things only good results can come from that. There’s three different types of, karma that we can accumulate the first being a karma of body, the second being karma of speech and the third being karma of mind and the karma of body and speech we can actually see so for example if the karma of body karma means action so therefore if I do something with my body we can see that action coming about so if we walk from one place to another we can see that that action has been completed the same thing is if with our speech we can see how the karma of speech works because if we say to someone come over to my house for dinner at seven o’clock and then they come over at seven o’clock then that’s how the karma of speech works there’s a cause and then there’s a result but the karma of mind how the mind works is much more difficult to see and that’s the one that you need to have vast understandings to be able to see the intricacies of it so the the karma of mind is a lot more difficult everything that we think everything every single thought that passes through our mind comes under the category of a karma of mind and there’s two different types of this karma of mind there’s karma of mind that we want to encourage and induce and accumulate and then there’s karma of mind that we want to get rid of and chuck out of our mind so the first type the karma that we want to induce and accumulate is the kind of positive things like compassion and generosity and so forth and the negative things that we want to get out of our mind the main one of those is afflictive emotions but that kind of manifest in all different ways so anything that’s negative that will cause us suffering we want to get rid of those from our mind.
From these two types, the first type actually the afflictive emotions they’ll come about because the root of those is our self grasping, grasping at self grasping at our concept of self so from the power of our grasping itself all these different afflictive emotions come out that actually cause us suffering in the end and don’t have positive results the other type of other type of thoughts we can have the positive ones we’re talking about before cultivating compassion and these kind of things the things that are all the cause for attaining enlightenment but we don’t actually have the habit of doing that because since beginningless time we’ve been under the sway of afflictive emotions so it’s very difficult for us to concentrate on those kind of positive states of mind because we’re not in the habit of doing that we’re in the habit of of being under the control of of our own self grasping so it’s very we have to put in a lot of effort and we have to work hard in order for that aspect of our mind to gain precedence. Okay, so there’s two different types of mind that we have the first one is the mind that clings to the sense of self that’s called self grasping and the other type of mind we have is either translated as Buddha potential or Buddha nature and that’s the mind the aspect of our mind that can achieve enlightenment and so that’s like doing all the positive things in this part of us selves. If we do practice this, constantly that’s encouraging that aspect of our mind then we can like this well I guess best way to say is the sky’s the limit we can fly.
We can do anything. We can achieve even achieve Buddhahood. So that’s the one side. The other side is this self grasping and this self grasping is actually a bit of it’s a bit of a trick actually because it doesn’t the self doesn’t actually exist so we can’t actually grasp at anything because there’s nothing there to grasp at so because there is nothing that inherently exists and there is no self that we can inherently grasp at that means that we actually have the potential to let go of that self grasping and attain Buddhahood because there’s nothing there to grasp at in the first place. So if we can turn our mind away from this self grasping and which is the cause of saṃsāra then what we’re left with is our potential for Buddhahood and in this way we can achieve we can go ahead and achieve it So once we realize, once we get some understanding that this thing that we’re grasping at doesn’t actually exist and in the same way that nothing actually exists from its own side, that nothing is inherently existent, that it all is emptiness then once we have some understanding of this this is accessed like a tool to turn our mind away from the things that we’re grasping at and to put a stop to our craving which causes saṃsāra.
It turns that around And because of this, then we can go more towards Buddhahood than we can towards saṃsāra. Okay, so the other way, so that’s the one side. We’re concentrating on our Buddha nature and can achieve Buddhahood by doing this by cultivating all the positive things in our mind the other side is that if we concentrate on our self grasping which manifests everything and all the things that we are attracted to in saṃsāra all the things that we must have all the constant grasping that actually causes saṃsāra to come into existence if we are focusing on that and that’s part of our other thing that we’re thinking about the most then all that actually comes out of all of this is more afflictive emotions and more suffering and more of the the things that make us miserable so if we take a step back from that so the things that make ourselves miserable actually caused by our afflictive emotions which are actually caused by our self grasping. So the way of dealing with it is to get back to the root of the problem which is the self grasping. So the thing that keeps us circling in the saṃsāra the thing that causes us to have it works the other back the other way as well the thing that causes us to have self grasping is grasping at other things in order to fulfill any satisfaction that we may think is coming from the I so that is what keeps us in Samsāra is this is like the cycle the cycle between our self grasping and the things we’re grasping at and the things in Samsāra that we would really want and then they cause us to redefine our sense of self because when we have them we get some satisfaction from it and so it’s this cycle that actually keeps us in cyclic existence so once we have this understanding that it’s these things it’s this desires for the things of saṃsāra that actually keep us here and it’s this desire for the things of saṃsāra that are actually making us suffer once we understand that then we can turn our mind away from that we can turn our mind towards liberation and by concentrating on how everything is empty then we can actually actually even achieve liberation.
So that way it works out that there’s two things. There’s the things that we need to abandon and the things that we need to cultivate. The things we need to abandon are all the things in Samsāra that we’re, like that we’re grasping for. So this doesn’t really work unless we think about karma as well because if we don’t believe in if we don’t have a future life that we can end up in or if we don’t have a past life that caused us to be here, then we don’t have any frame of reference for getting out of Samsāra. If we’re not thinking about future lives, we’re not going to think that it’s worth giving up any of the desires from this life.
So that we should be thinking about our future lives and how if we do something bad in this life then we have to pay for it in future lives. So if we’re thinking in this way then and that these future lives keep going on and on and on then we’re going to be thinking about how to make that situation better so we’re going to stop clinging to this life even though the pleasures we can get from this life happen a lot quicker and there’s also a lot of people that say that future lives don’t exist and there’s Geshe-la’s opinion there’s not really any reason that they can say that future lives don’t exist. They say that they don’t exist because they haven’t seen them, but is that a good reason to say something doesn’t exist just because you haven’t seen it? So so these people that say that they don’t agree with future lives because they can’t see them Geshe-la said that that’s not a good reason because the things that we’ve actually seen are really small compared to the things that exist there are experiences of things that we’ve experienced and things we’ve seen if we compare them to to the actual capacity of existence or existence how how many different existence there are and then they become almost nonexistent.
They they become so small we can’t see our experiences. So it was a bit of a twist. So he said that if people if people accept future lives or not, that doesn’t really benefit them in either way. They can say I don’t accept future lives or I do accept future lives but if they don’t have this this concept of future lives then they don’t have anything kind of controlling the the things they do in this life. So even if they say I don’t accept future lives so I’m gonna do whatever I want, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t have to experience the karma from this life in future lives.
So we should think about past and future lives in this way. There’s really no reason to think that they don’t exist because if we think about the fact that we’re here today, that’s only reliant on the fact that we were here yesterday and the fact that we’re here yesterday is relying on the fact that we were there the day before that and all the way so on back until the first day we were born. And the day before we were born, we’re in our mother’s stomach. So the day before we’re in our mother’s stomach, we had to be somewhere else and that has to be the the Bardo or somewhere similar. And then before we were in the Bardo, we had to be somewhere else and that has to be another life because there doesn’t seem to be any other choices.
So in the same way that if we go backwards and backwards through our past lives, can go back into beginningless time. If we think about it, our future lives, they work in the same way. The fact that they were here today means we have to be somewhere tomorrow and if it’s in this body tomorrow, then that’s where we’ll be. And if not, we’re we we could be in the bardo state. And from the bardo state, we have to take another rebirth.
And then these rebirths have to go on until until we reach until we have no cause to being reborn which the cause for being reborn is karma and afflictive emotions and these karma and afflictive emotions only are exhausted when we achieve liberation which is the cessation of suffering and the cessation of our karma. So if we do good things in this life, then in the future life, we can come back as a god or a human. If we do bad things in this life, then we can we have by the power of our karma, we can come back as someone from the hell realms or a hungry ghost or a animal. And so in this way, if we think about that and how it goes on forever and how we have to get out of being under the sway of karma and delusion, then we have to think about emptiness and we have to concentrate on emptiness and hopefully by concentrating on emptiness then the final goal of that would be to achieve liberation So also if we’re thinking about past and future lives, then we have to think about how in every other life someone has been a mother or has been something that’s helped us a lot and if if our lives go back to beginningless time then in in at least one life we have had to have a connection with almost with every single being So in this way, we have to think about the kindness of all those people that have helped us in all our different lives, all the other sentient beings.
And so in the same way that they’ve shown us all their kindness, we want them to be free from suffering. We want them to abide in happiness. And so because we want them to be free from suffering and to abide in happiness, the only way we can actually do that is to achieve Buddhahood and in order to achieve Buddhahood we have to practice and we have to develop the mind of bodhicitta so if we can start by meditating on bodhicitta now, that would be helpful. So the thing that we’re supposed to be thinking about when we’re meditating is that we can achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all the sentient beings that have shown us infinite kindness in all our past lives. So for the benefit of all sentient beings may achieve enlightenment, that’s what you should be thinking about.
Okay. So the text that we’re studying this evening is called the seventy topics and eight categories — hang on. An excellent method definitely revealing the eight categories and seventy topics, the subject of the treatise ornament for clear realizations, the stainless oral transmission of. Now. Is the guy, the scholar who wrote — who wrote all the textbooks for Sera — shouldn’t have said that.
He’s the guy that wrote all the textbooks for Sera. There’s the monastery where which Geshe-la is from in India. He wrote and when we say textbooks, it’s like the Tibetan say, oh, the textbook, it’s like a whole wall of texts. So it’s more like he wrote the library. Yeah.
Okay. So the seventy topics is actually based on the ornament for clear realizations, which was taught by Maitreya the Buddha to a man called Asaṇga. The seventy topics referred to in the title is the divisions of this text and the eight categories come from the eight different chapters of that text. So this ornament for clear realizations that was taught by Maitreya. What that actually does is bring to the fore the method aspect of the Buddha’s teachings.
When the Buddha teaches, he teaches both method and wisdom. The method is sometimes called the method is called the the vast path and the wisdom aspect is called the profound path. So the vast path the methods the way in which you achieve Buddhahood and the profound path is the view or the explanation of emptiness. So when Buddha taught his Prajñāpāramitā sutras, his perfection of wisdom sutras, the view aspect was to the forefront and the method aspect was included and is literally like inserted in it, right? Now, when Maitreya is teaching this ornament for clear realizations, what he’s done is bring the method aspect to the forefront and insert the view into the method.
So the method is in the forefront and the view is in the background or it’s inserted in it and that’s the opposite to the way the Buddha presented the perfection of wisdom sutras in his life on earth. So at the moment the moment, Maitreya lives in what they call the Tuśita heaven, is the Tuśita Pure Realm. It’s where Buddha lived before he went to earth as well, Buddha Śākyamūni. And when he taught this sorry. The ornament for clear realizations to Asaṇga.
He actually led Asaṇga to the Tuśita Pure Land and taught him in the Tuśita Pure Land. And then Asaṇga came back to earth with the teachings that he had been given in the Pure Land. So Maitreya isn’t just abiding in the Pure Land. He is actually the king of the Tuśita Pure Land. When Buddha came to earth, when he came down from the Tuśita Pure Land to take birth on the earth, he left Maitreya to be the regent in his stead and then Maitreya later became the king of the Tuśita Pure Land.
His his aspect at the moment, the way he presents himself at the moment is as a young god. There are no humans in the realm. It’s all full of gods. And and in order it’s not the sort of place that humans can get to easily. In order for us to get there, we would have to do a lot of prayers and a lot of create a lot of merit in order to be born in in a place like that.
Okay so he gave Asaṇga this text so this text could be a benefit to us and Maitreya thought that if humans had the chance to study this text then it would be beneficial to their mind and they would be able to put into practice what said in the text in order to achieve enlightenment. Now this wasn’t the only text that Maitreya gave to Asaṇga. He also gave what’s it called, Sublime Continuum. There’s one that’s called the Ornament for Mahāyāna Sutras. Sorry.
I vaguely know them in Sanskrit. Hardly know them in English. Oh, yes. One’s called the ornament to the sutras, and the last one is called explaining the dharmas or something similar. Yeah.
So who was Asaṇga then? Asaṇga was an expert, what they call a Pandita which is someone who has mastered the ten sciences and he was from Nālānda University in India. Nālānda University was the best university that Buddhist scholars could go to in India for his time. So, Asaṇga’s mother was actually a nun, and she was a nun who saw that a lot of the experts and a lot of the Buddhist teachers at that time had actually died or passed away into other places or gone to different countries. And there was a distinct lack of Buddhist scholars and teachers living in India at that stage.
So one of her main practice became having aspirational prayers and, like, pleading with Tārā and Buddha and Chenrezig to help her to be able to help the situation in India. And what actually happened in the end was she gave her vows back and while thinking about Tārā and Chenrezig a lot gave birth to two sons. The first one of which was Asaṇga. So This — Geshe-la doesn’t know the name of the nun, but he doesn’t think she was any old nun. He thinks that she was oh, no.
No. He said any old nun like I’m any old monk. Yeah. And so okay. She was actually an emanation of Tārā.
Yeah. And so therefore she had this understanding that she could give back her vows and give birth to these children that were.