Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The question of what makes an aspiration “stainless” gives this 44-minute talk by Geshe Pema Tsering a practical edge from the outset. He opens with Lama Tsongkhapa’s teaching on securing precious human rebirth through three causes — ethics, the six perfections, and stainless aspiration — explaining why even one virtue falls short, and what “stainless” means at the Mahāyāna level: free from self-grasping, grounded in emptiness, and motivated by bodhicitta for all beings. The commentary then resumes the Seventy Topics series, working through the Four Noble Truths as objects of meditation: the truth of suffering (container and contents; four aspects), truth of origin (three types of karma; root and secondary afflictions), and truth of the path (only three of the five paths qualify as genuine). For practitioners already following this series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 ST3 2003 04 10.mp3
UUID: 1a1227a3-add3-404b-9a5f-df3ba6db717d
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Seventy Topics (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-04-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~3,093
Okay. So, Lama Tsongkhapa said, in order to complete the supreme path, you need to rely on you need a base that is fully qualified. Until you find such a base, no matter where you go, you should try and train in the causes for not getting not losing it or forgetting it. So what is referred to in the part where it says accomplishing the supreme path. The supreme path is the path to liberation the path to supreme liberation and the path to Buddhahood.
In order to accomplish these, you need something, a that is incredibly qualified to do that. What they mean by a base that is that is incredibly qualified to do this is a precious human rebirth with the eight freedoms and the ten endowments. If it is just any old rebirth, then you don’t have any chance of trying to accomplish either the complete Buddhahood or the great liberation. So, in order to get this rebirth of the Eight Freedoms and the Ten Endowments, we must train in its causes. Until we find it as we have this perfect Precious human Rebirth, we must train in its causes in order to get it again.
The causes for the process human rebirth are to practice virtue and to not practice non virtue. If you’re a beginner like us, then this should be your main practice. So the things that we need to train in are higher training of ethics and along with that as much as we can in the six perfections. The six perfections are things that need to be trained even by people who are still learning all the way up until the path of no more learning. So that is along the whole path something that needs to be trained in.
Okay, we also need to train our minds to keep repeating stainless aspirations for having a good human rebirth in the next life. So that adds up to three different practices. There is the practices of ethics, is trying to train in the six perfections and having stainless aspiration for having a good rebirth. If we practice these three different types of trainings, then we shouldn’t have any doubt that in the next life we will have a good human rebirth with the eight freedoms and ten endowments. If we don’t train in these things, then we shouldn’t have any doubt that we won’t.
So, the ten non-virtues are actually very powerful practices to abandon. So, even if we practice one of the ten virtues and abandon one of the ten non virtues, then this will be a cause for us to attain a human rebirth. But just practicing one of the ten virtues wouldn’t be a cause for gaining a full, precious human rebirth. Okay, so if we’re only practicing one of the virtues, and this becomes a cause for us to achieve a human rebirth, but not a precious human rebirth, in which we can practice properly, then it still acts as like a cause for us to go to the lower realms. Because even if in the next life we have a human rebirth, but it’s not a precious human rebirth, then that means that the life after that or the life after that, we will end up in the lower realms, because the karma for keeping on being a human will expire.
So, in order for something to be a supreme path and be something that’s going to lead us out of the lower realms for good, then it has to be something where we engage all of the ten virtues and abandon all the ten non-virtues. Unless we do something that’s going to be a cause for us to achieve liberation at the least or enlightenment at the best, then we are still creating the causes for continued suffering and we’re still creating the causes for, at some stage, being born into the lower realms. So, of this, we can’t call it a supreme path. A supreme path has to be something that will lead us completely out of suffering. So, what we need to be doing is creating the situations where in the next life we have a precious human rebirth with the Ten Endowments and the Eight Freedoms. It’s something that’s very difficult to obtain and when we do have it and we should use it to practice Dharma to the best of our ability.
We did something in our past lives that enabled us to have this precious human rebirth now. So while we’ve got it, we shouldn’t waste it. We should be trying to use it to practice Dharma and to practice the supreme path. So we should be thinking about how lucky our situation is at the moment that we actually have these eight freedoms and ten endowments of a precious human rebirth, and how this doesn’t happen very often and we are very fortunate to have this. We have the eight freedoms, we have the five endowments that are from our side and the five external endowments that enable us to practice the best type of Dharma and try and accomplish this best path.
So, in order to sustain this precious human rebirth and have a precious human rebirth in the future, then we have to go back to these three things that we need to focus on. We need to focus on training in ethics, we need to focus on the six perfections, and we need to focus on a stainless aspiration for our future lives. Okay, so what we mean by when we say stainless aspiration, stainless aspiration is one that is free from different kinds of stains. If you’re on the higher vehicle, that is the Mahāyāna path, then a stain would be focusing on self, doing it for one’s own purpose. When you’re in the higher vehicle, this becomes a stain.
But for any vehicle, having the idea that this purpose is in order to satisfy some sense of self grasping, then that’s also a stain. Also, the antidote to that stain is to see that the path and the striving are all empty of inherent existence and empty of existing from their own side. So, this is the antidote that we should apply when we try and get caught up in our self grasping with regard to our aspiration prayers for our future lives. This is also something that we should try and apply when we’re thinking about the six perfections and we’re thinking about the training in ethics as well. So we have to see the supreme path, we have to see the liberation and ourselves are all free from being inherently existent, empty of inherent existence when we’re doing these practices, and then the practice becomes stainless.
So, also, if we are trying to be a Mahāyāna practitioner, then the idea that we are doing it for our own purpose is also a stain that we need to get rid of. If we are a Mahāyāna practitioner, then any practice that we engage in, any of these trainings that we try and do, should be done for the benefit of all sentient beings in order for us to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Doing something for our own purpose becomes a mind that we have to get rid of. When we have this mind, we should try and abandon it because we’re trying to follow the Mahāyāna path. So when we’re doing these practices, we should be thinking, I’m doing this for the benefit of all sentient beings.
I’m not doing it for my own benefit because there is no difference between me and other sentient beings in terms of wanting suffering sorry, not wanting suffering and wanting to be happy. So there is this purpose behind it every time that we are doing practice, every time that we are doing something, we should have this mind in our thoughts. This is before we start practicing or what we are doing of trying to practice the six perfections, trying to practice ethics, or as well as doing aspirational prayers. So, what we should be thinking is, May I quickly achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings without exception? What am I going to use as the cause for achieving this enlightenment?
May that be all the merits of all the five different types of beings, from Buddhas and bodhisattvas and arhats and Pratyekabuddhas and Shravakas. And when we’re meditating, that mind itself is the thing that we should be meditating. That thought itself is the thing that we should be focusing on. And thinking on this, then we should try and meditate. So now we’re doing seventy topics.
Yeah. Okay, so we were on the precepts section from the seventy topics first and we had gone through way in the precepts are divided by way of entity, precepts instructing on Mahāyāna and precepts of subsequent Mahāyāna teachings and then we started on when the precepts when divided by modes instruction. And we’ve done the precepts which instruct on the achievers, its own entity. And we’re up to precepts which instruct on the objects of observation, the four truths. So when we’re talking about precepts which instruct instruct on each achieving its own entity, what the achieving themselves were was the Mahāyāna paths, the Mahāyāna minds of people on the path, and that’s what the actual achievers were.
Now, what objects of observations were, were the things that they concentrate on, the objects of their meditation, in order to achieve the achieving. So, things that they’re concentrating on are the four truths. So, what is concentrated on by these achievings, which are the minds of people on the path, what is concentrated on is the four truths, that is, the truth of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the truth of cessation, and the truth of the path. Now the actual word that they’re translating here is precepts. In Tibetan literally means the words that bind.
The reason that they’re called literally words, and there’s different words for words in Tibetan. The reason that it’s used this word word is because it’s words that came from the mouth of the Buddha. So that’s what the the words aspect of that means. So the Buddha actually taught these four noble truths: the truth of suffering, origin, cessation, and the path. And when we were referring to the nature of these truths, because we were talking about the entity of the precepts which instructs on achieving.
So this is the focus, the entity of the focus during meditation on the second one. The entity entity of the focus is of the truth of suffering is divided into four. There is impermanence, misery or suffering manifest, emptiness, and selflessness. So, the truth of suffering or something else we could define as the truth of suffering is our five aggregates because we haven’t seen the true nature of reality and achieve the path of seeing and we are still ordinary beings, then our five aggregates are also called the truth of suffering. Not only our aggregates are called the truth of suffering, but also the things that we possess, the things that we use in everyday life, these things are also called truth of suffering.
My and mine are considered the things that we define in this way are considered the the truth of suffering also. Okay, so there’s another way of dividing the truth of suffering into the container and the things that are contained in it. For example, the container that we experience is the world, all the elements that we experience, fire and the earth and all the countries in the oceans and everything, that’s called the container. And the contents of the container things like humans, ourselves, animals, other spirits that may inhabit the place they’re all called their contents aspect of the truth of suffering. So, because those things are aspects of the truth of suffering, they also have the qualities of the truth of suffering that we mentioned before, that is, they are impermanent, they are suffering, they are emptiness, and they are selfless.
So this is the way that the truth of suffering is explained, that it has contents and it has a container and contents, and that both the container and the contents, that is both phenomena and self of persons, all impermanent, suffering manifest, empty and selfless. So there’s also a slight difference between the truth of suffering and suffering itself. Suffering itself is usually something we describe as a consciousness or a mental state, whereas the truth of suffering takes into account of all different kinds of phenomena. So from amongst the three different types of suffering, from amongst the three things that we divide suffering into, then suffering of suffering and suffering of change are both considered to be consciousness or mental factors, but all pervasive suffering is not necessarily a mental factor. So we won’t go much more into the truth of suffering because we already talked about this in previous weeks and it’s something that’s often repeated in different teachings.
So, in the truth of the origin of suffering, that’s again divided into four. It’s divided into cause, origin, conditions, and strong production. There is two different aspects to the truth of the origin of suffering. They are karma and afflictive emotions. Once again, karma and afflictive emotions are said to have these four aspects as their aspects.
So one of the main divisions of the karma aspect of the truth of origin is divided into throwing karma, accomplishing karma, and completing karma. So completion karma is very complicated and and comes in all different manifestations. But it follows a simple rule rule that if something positive is done, then something that’s pleasurable results. And if something negative is done, then something that’s, in the nature of suffering results. Okay, so her accomplishing karma is usually associated with grasping and desire.
It’s the thing that actually establishes us in our next life and established us in this life. The throwing karma is the thing that projects us into that life, but the thing that actually accomplishes it or not solidify, that actually makes it come into being is the accomplishing karma. There is also another way of dividing karma into virtuous karma, non virtuous karma and neutral karma that is based on what is going to cause suffering and what is going to cause happiness. Now, this division of karma into virtuous, non virtuous and neutral karma is a division that takes into account all different types of karma. There isn’t any type of karma that doesn’t fit into one of these categories.
Either it’s virtuous, it’s non-virtuous, or it’s neutral. There’s not something else it can be. So then, in terms of the other aspect of the truth of the origin of suffering, that is afflictive emotions. The main two divisions of afflictive emotions are the six root afflictive emotions and the twenty near or twenty secondary afflictive emotions. And we went through these the last time.
So so the next one is the truth of the path. The truth of the path has four aspects also. The path itself, the suitability of the path, or the type of the path. Then the third one is achievement, and the fourth one is deliverance. So if we talk about the truth of the path, the way it’s divided in terms of different types, then there s either five things that are generally called the truth of the path, or it is divided into three things that are the actual truth of the path, and two things that are facsimiles to the truth of the path.
So that means that the general division would be the path of accumulation, the path of preparation, the path of seeing, the path of meditation, and the path of no more learning. But in actual fact, only the last three of those are the truth of the path, and the first two are facsimiles to the truth of the path. So, the actual truth of the path, actual things that we can say is what we’re talking about here and not just facsimiles of it, are only the path of seeing, the path of meditation, and the path of no more learning. So at the moment, that’s things that we look at from a long way away. Yeah.
It’s a long way away. And in actual fact, perhaps the path of preparation and the path of accumulation, which are the first two going in ascending order, are also a long way away. But it doesn’t matter how far they are away. How far they are away actually depends on if we’re working towards them or not. It doesn’t matter how far things are away, we can still get there because they still exist.
So, it’s not so important how far they are away or not, it’s whether we’re going to get there or not. It’s us getting there, it’s more important. So, we may think that it’s a long way to get to America, for example, but if we put our minds to it, then we find a way to get there, and so the fact that it’s a long way away doesn’t stop us from getting there. It’s just that we have to find a way to get there. So, this also said that the realm that is at the peak of Samsāra, the highest of the god realms, is supposed to be a long way away.
It’s the thing that’s at the top of all the different god realms, the highest point you can reach in Samsāra, and it’s a long way away, but in actual fact we can get there in a minute. So, yeah, all we’d have to do to get to the highest point is die first, but with the other ones, we just we could also get there very quickly, even though they’re a long way away by doing the practices and putting in the effort. Okay. So the moment that we achieve bodhicitta and the Once we achieve complete renunciation or we achieve bodhicitta, then we directly enter the first of the paths, the path of accumulation.
If we don’t have renunciation, we don’t have real bodhicitta, and if we develop real bodhicitta, then we automatically have renunciation. But it has to be noncontrived, naturally occurring bodhicitta.