Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Renunciation — not bodhicitta — is where Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 45-minute session, arguing that without first turning the mind away from saṃsāra, neither great compassion nor the aspiration for enlightenment can take root. He traces the sequence: understanding one’s own suffering leads to recognising others’ suffering, which opens the door to compassion, then bodhicitta — at which point the path becomes self-sustaining and genuinely joyful rather than effortful. He then moves into close textual work on the Seventy Topics, a commentary on the Abhisamayālamkāra (the Clear Ornament of Realization), working through definitions of the “knower of bases” — distinguishing varieties distant from, close to, and antidotal to omniscience, with careful attention to how Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna minds intersect. Suited to students already working through this text.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 ST7 2003 07 24.mp3
UUID: 37d143d4-ab0e-47d4-8566-edc5908baedf
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Seventy Topics (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-07-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~3,588
Sorry. I didn’t hear the last bit. It was, yeah, please bless me to develop bodhicitta, not please develop bodhicitta. So the reason that it starts off by saying we and all sentient beings have experienced the sufferings of the lower realms, will experience the sufferings of the lower realms, is because says we or us individually first. Unless we understand our own suffering properly, unless we understand our own situation properly, then there’s no way that we can understand the situations of other beings.
So, need to understand our own suffering. By understanding our own suffering, we will then see how other beings are suffering, and by understanding that other beings have shown us great kindness by being our mother or father, then we will understand that we need to develop a way to free them from suffering. This way we can develop to free them from suffering is the bodhicitta mind striving for enlightenment. Once we’ve understood our own suffering, then we understand others’ suffering, and then we try and develop this mind — or develop this way of thinking — that is a means for getting rid of all that suffering for ourselves and other beings. If we think about that in the best way, the best way to get rid of suffering of ourselves and other beings is bodhicitta.
So the requestor in the Guru Puja requested teachers to bless them to be able to develop this bodhicitta. But what this passage also shows us is that in order to develop bodhicitta, we need to develop a good understanding of suffering first. If we don’t understand our own suffering, and therefore other people’s suffering, we can’t develop bodhicitta. So we need to start with an understanding of suffering. So once you develop bodhicitta, then it should be fairly easy.
Once you develop bodhicitta, the power of that mind alone or that thought alone should impel us, should force us or inspire us or push us along the path towards enlightenment. The mind itself will give us enough energy to keep doing whatever it is we have to do to achieve enlightenment. So quite apart from the fact that it’s easy to focus on what we’re it’s supposed to be focused on once we’ve developed bodhicitta, apart from that, beings who have bodhicitta in their mind stream, whenever they do anything good or virtuous or help other beings, they experience great joy about that. So not only don’t they get tired, but they’re really happy about whatever it is that they have to do. That can include such things as giving their bodies away, as well as other items they may have, doing any kinds of practice they have, practicing any of the perfections doing any of these things makes them incredibly happy, even blissful, you could say.
So that is the main difference between those who have bodhicitta and those who do not have bodhicitta, like us. Because for us it’s really hard to do anything. Anything we do, sometimes we can’t even see the point. It’s like, Why am I doing this? What is the point of doing this?
It’s really making me tired, I don’t understand it properly, I don’t know if they’re listening, if it’s actually going to help. We have all these thoughts, and we have to push ourselves hard in order to do any of these types of practices. Whereas for bodhisattvas who have bodhicitta, doing any of those things is really easy. In fact, it makes them more blissful and happy. So then we can see the difference between what having bodhicitta in your mind does for you and what not having it does for you or doesn’t do for you.
Once you’ve developed bodhicitta, should also be pretty easy to understand emptiness after that. Once you have bodhicitta in your mind stream, you can develop merit really easily. Everything you do has an incredibly vast, meritorious result once we have bodhicitta in our mind stream. Also, because everything is easy and the bodhicitta is happy about doing anything, if they start meditating on emptiness, then they will be able to achieve the understanding of emptiness without that much hassle or without it tiring them that much. The problem is before we have developed bodhicitta, we need renunciation.
Developing bodhicitta in itself is very hard, but even before that, we need renunciation. If we don’t have renunciation, we can’t develop great compassion. If we don’t have great compassion, we can’t develop bodhicitta. But developing renunciation is incredibly difficult. So we have to do the hard things first.
We get renunciation, and then after that, it starts getting easier. So that’s that’s what we need to be focusing on at the beginning is is renunciation. If need to develop renunciation in order to do any of the other things that we need to do on the path. We should be praying that we can develop renunciation. We should be asking for blessings that we can develop renunciation.
Until we develop renunciation, any of the other things we try and do will be incredibly difficult. So that’s the thing that we should be concentrating on, is trying to develop renunciation. Once our mind is turned away from saṃsāra, then we can focus on other things much easier, and we don’t and we don’t have it isn’t as difficult. So so this is what we need to be concentrating on. This is what we need to be working towards.
With the motivation of doing it in order to reach enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, we should be striving to try and develop renunciation. In this lifetime, we kind of made a pledge. We say we’re Buddhists, and if we say we’re Buddhists, that means that we’ve made a pledge to try and do as much practice as we can, to concentrate on doing any of these things, any of the study or practice that we need to do. Even if we don’t achieve renunciation in this lifetime, if we keep working at it, if we keep putting down imprints in our minds that incline us towards study and practice, then in the next life, these things will come up easier for us. We will be able to do the practices easier.
We will have an inclination towards that, so it will be easier for us to develop things then. So this is the thing we need to concentrate on, doing things with the mind of enlightenment that will lead us to, first of all, developing renunciation. So from this point of view, from developing the the inclination or developing the situation in our mind where we are inclined to study, we’re inclined to practice, we’re inclined to understand the Buddha’s teachings. From this point of view, then studying the seventy topics is incredibly important. It’s an incredibly important thing to do, what we are trying to do here.
The seventy topics isn’t any old text. It’s not something that we refer to lightly. Seventy Topics is talking about the Clear Ornament of Realization. Clear Ornament of Realization describes the mind of Bodhisattvas. It describes the mind of the states that we are trying to work towards.
It’s very important for us to develop some kind of understanding of those if we ever want to achieve those different types of minds. More than that even, the seventy topics is a description of the Clear Ornament of Realization, which is the essence of all the Buddha’s teachings on emptiness. It shows the path of the Bodhisattva teachings on emptiness. So because it is this representation or presentation of how to understand emptiness and the paths related to that, then it becomes an incredibly important text from that perspective as well. So we should be thinking, these seventy topics, which is the teachings from the Abhisamayālamkāra — the Clear Ornament of Realization — that I’m studying and listening to.
May that be cause for me to attain enlightenment. May it create imprints and be a cause for me to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings as quickly as possible, and we should try and concentrate and meditate on that thought for a few minutes. So Geshe la said, okay. Seventy topics. Okay.
Where are we up to? And then he said, this is hard, this trying to understand the seventy topics. It’s hard. It’s it’s it’s it’s kind of the word he uses, like, thick, dense. It’s difficult to get into your head.
It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard. Okay. So we were up to number two of the nine topics of knower of bases.
Have you guys got both translations there? Can you check-in the other one? The if if it says knower of paths or knower of bases? Okay. Because, yeah, in the in the text that we’ve got here, it according to Geshe la, they’re both bases.
You see, might because there’s a misprint, I think I’m allowed to say that, in the in the ACIP text, so that’s probably where it came from. Okay. So they’re both the first and the second one are now three point one and three point two. That was right. Three point one and three yeah.
We’re up to three point two, but three point one and three point two are both base is not part, as it says in the Jampagindra translation. Right? Okay. So up to knower of bases not abiding in peace through compassion. Now the this the definition says, a Mahāyāna superior’s exalted knower abiding in a type of realizer that ceases the extreme of peace relative to a conventional base.
Now the reason that is what relative to a conventional base means is that it isn’t a mind concentrating on emptiness. If it was relative to an ultimate base, that would be the mind trying to look at the true nature of reality, which is emptiness. Because this is relative to a conventional base, that puts it within the scope of method and means that it’s talking here about great compassion and bodhicitta and those relative things. The the compassion is the mind that stops the superior beings on the Mahāyāna path from abiding in the extreme of peace, which is nirvana. So they stopped from going into nirvana because of the conventional base, which is great compassion.
Okay. So the next is that it is a Mahāyāna superior’s exalted knower abiding in a type of realizer of special method and mutually inclusive. Now special method method is a a method as in wisdom and method. It’s that method. Special means that it has it is conjoined with great compassion.
So there’s the methods of great compassion that we’re talking about here. Now, abiding in a type of realizer means it is the type of mind that is specific to the continuum of Mahāyāna superiors, or more specifically, it’s a mind that has great compassion conjoined with it. So is therefore a Mahāyāna superior’s mind. So it’s the type of mind that is is a Mahāyāna superior’s mind or an exalted knower. Exalted knower is a synonym of mind.
So that makes therefore, you can say, Mahāyāna superior is also knower abiding in a type of realizer of special method is another way of saying a knower of base is not abiding in peace through compassion, where here, the special method refers to compassion. The special method refers to the compassion. He spent — Geshe-la spent — heaps of time explaining abiding in a type. He goes, okay. Abiding in a type.
Abiding in a type. But it’s not really abiding in a type. It’s a term that’s been that’s just not in English. So I was like, no idea. Get that across.
He goes, that means this. And I was like, well, it means nothing in English. So the when divided, there’s three, the the Mahāyāna paths of seeing, meditation, and more learning in a type of see, it’s got that inner type of Mahāyāna realization again, which reason I never quite got across. Oh, yeah. So, basically, what this inner type of Mahāyāna realization or abiding in a type of realizing means is like So it means it’s it’s we’re talking about types.
Okay. So, yeah, I just asked if I could say this because it what basically they’re talking about by abiding in a type of realizer is sets. You know, when in school you do sets, like subsets, and the two things cross over? Sometimes they crossover and sometimes they don’t. So I just asked Geshe-la if I could use an example.
So this is that’s what these types are like. So you you have a a circle with one or one different types of things in it, sometimes they crossover and there’s an intersection and everything. Right? So a set. This is what they’re called in this is vague memory of maths in year nine.
But yeah. So that we’re talking about a set of different things. So when it says abiding in a type of realizer, we can say belonging to a set or belonging to a circle with things in it that cross over. Yeah. So basically, the type is referring to — so Geshe-la said the type is referring to the there’s certain characteristics that are similar within everything in that set.
But depending on the different characteristic you’re talking about, something can abide in one set for one thing and in another set for another thing, depending on what characteristic you’re defining it by. So here, we’re talking about the set of talking about the set of Mahāyāna realizations. So everything that is a Mahāyāna realization included within that group. Its boundaries exist from the Mahāyāna path of seeing through to the Buddha ground. It doesn’t exist on the path preparation or the path of accumulation.
Okay. So these exist only in the minds exist only in the continuum of those that have experienced the selflessness of a person directly. So in actual fact, if someone is on the path of preparation or the path of seeing of the Mahāyāna path and they’ve already achieved an arhatship on the paths of the Hīnayāna scope and then they come back to do the Mahāyāna paths, then they do have these knowers of bases within their continuum. But in that case, they’re referred to by their Hīnayāna realizations as opposed to what they’re doing when they’re on the Mahāyāna path. So you need to have an experience realizing the selflessness of persons in order to have a knower of bases.
So the next base that we come across is the knower of bases distant from the resultant mother, the definition of which is a knower of bases devoid of great compassion and bound by the conception of true existence. The resultant mother is the achieving of omniscience or the achieving of knower of all aspects. So what this is talking about is someone that has not developed great compassion within their continuum and is not on the Mahāyāna path, not on the Mahāyāna path. And because they’re not on the Mahāyāna path, they’re considered to be a long way from achieving omniscience or knower of all aspects because that is result of following the Mahāyāna path. That’s why they’re called the knower distant from the resultant mother.
The other thing that they have in their continuum is conception of true existence. What that means is that if they examine things it’s not just the naturally occurring conception of true existence but if they examine things and they say, Does that truly exist or doesn’t truly exist? Then they actually think, No, that truly exists, which is referring which is referring to their gross nominal existence of phenomena because they have only realized the selflessness of the person in this instance. So when these two things come together, when they have a conception of true existence and no great compassion, then that’s known as knower of bases distant from the resultant mother. So the knower of bases of the discordant class, which are also Hīnayāna paths, are mutually inclusive, and its boundary is that it exists from the Hīnayāna path of seeing through to the Hīnayāna path of no more learning learning.
Okay. Who wants to know why you’re laughing? And you’re not doing. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So so what we’re talking about here what we’re talking about here is ideas of the beings of the solitary realizer and hearer vehicles because beings of the solitary realizer and hearer vehicles have neither great compassion nor an understanding of emptiness. So this knower of bases not close to the resultant mother is is referring to the people on those paths. Okay.
So the the next definition is the definition of a knower of bases close to the resultant mother. Definition is an exalted knower in the continuum of a Mahāyāna superior abiding in a type of Hīnayāna realizer conjoined with great compassion and the wisdom directly realizing emptiness. Now this is talking about the continuum of Mahāyāna beings, which have in their continuum both an understanding of emptiness and great compassion. But the actual mind that we’re talking about here, the knower of bases, is a Hīnayāna mind. Anyone who has the understanding of selflessness in their mind stream has knower of bases, and the understanding of selflessness is a Hīnayāna mind.
Therefore, even though we are talking here about the minds in minds in the mind stream of man Mahāyāna superiors, the type of mind that we’re talking about is a Hīnayāna mind. So its boundaries are that it exists from the Hīnayāna path of seeing through to the Hīnayāna path of no more learning. Mhmm. So we’re not we have to exclude here any of the knower of bases that are referring to the Hīnayāna path, that is any beings on the Hīnayāna path do not have this knower of bases close to the resultant mother, and the path of preparation and the path of accumulation are also excluded from its boundaries. So the the next one, the knower of bases, that is of the discordant class.
Its definition is a knower of bases devoid of special method and wisdom. This is the same as number three, which was a knower of bases distant from the resultant mother. So they they are the same thing. They’re the understandings of selflessness and other Hīnayāna minds. In this case, in the continuum of Hīnayāna superiors only or Hīnayāna superiors. All right.
Okay. So this knower of bases that is of the discordant class is mutually inclusive with a knower of bases in the continuum of a Hīnayāna superior that is bound by the conception of true existence. Or it’s mutually inclusive. So what this is referring to is Hīnayāna superiors usually don’t have an understanding of emptiness. Now that isn’t to say that all Hīnayāna superiors don’t understand emptiness because some Hīnayāna superiors do understand emptiness.
And although it’s not their main object of concentration or meditation, there are some Hīnayāna superiors that have an understanding of emptiness. But there’s only a few. It’s not a usual thing for people on the Hīnayāna path to understand emptiness. But this knower of bases that is of the discordant class is not including them. Because it doesn’t they may not have the special method that they have the wisdom in that case.
So in order to be a knower of bases of the discordant class, you’re not necessarily a Hīnayāna. It’s not synonymous with a Hīnayāna class because some some Hīnayāna people understand emptiness, and this is talking about people who completely don’t understand emptiness. Set. Okay. So the boundaries that exist from the Hīnayāna path of seeing through to the Hīnayāna path of no more.
So the next one is knower of bases of the antidote class. The definition of knower of bases of the antidote class is an exalted wisdom in the continuum of a Mahāyāna superior abiding in a type of Hīnayāna realizer that is conjoined with the two special methods and wisdom. Now what this means is when they refer to Geshe la does it from one from the bottom end back, and I’m trying to turn it around with my hands, so it’s easier for you if I it gets a bit confusing. So an exalted wisdom in the continuum of Mahāyāna superior means that we’re talking about the continuums of people on the Mahāyāna path. Abiding in a type of Hīnayāna realizer that is realizer means that this specific mind in the continuum of the Mahāyāna being is a Hīnayāna mind.
It’s a mind focusing on the objects of concentration of those on the path. Conjoined with the two, special method and wisdom means that in the mind stream of this Mahāyāna person, along with these Hīnayāna minds or Hīnayāna types of thought, comes special method — which is great compassion or bodhicitta — and wisdom, which is the wisdom understanding emptiness. So these beings have both the direct realization of emptiness and the great compassion and bodhicitta in their mind streams because they’re on the Mahāyāna path. That’s what the definition means. It and the knower of bases in the continuum of a Mahāyāna superior are mutually inclusive, means that we’re basically talking about the Hīnayāna minds in the Hīnayāna types of thinking in the mind.