Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 45-minute commentary with a disarming admission: even he, moments after resolving to do good today, finds himself racing after food and ordinary desires. That candid moment sets the tone for a close examination of karma — why it is so subtle and pervasive, why every thought, word, and action accumulates it without pause, and why self-grasping drives most of what we do toward further rebirth in saṃsāra. Geshe Pema then offers concrete daily practice: a morning intention on waking, periodic mid-day check-ins on motivation, and returning the mind repeatedly to bodhicitta, impermanence, and compassion. He draws on Milarepa and Lama Tsongkhapa to press home that liberation requires sustained effort — and that the effort, reliably, pays off.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 ST5 2003 06 12.mp3
UUID: 248ccb45-38a4-4b06-bfb7-12789da7c96d
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Seventy Topics (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-06-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~1,963
So the Buddha said that even in a hundred eons, karma doesn’t perish. When the circumstances and time arrive and circumstances and time arrive, then beings surely feel it. Once we’ve accumulated karma, it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s nowhere else for it to go. At some stage, we have to experience its results in the future so it may not be at the moment though there may be things the circumstances in the right time may not have arrived but we have to understand that if we have accumulated karma we will experience its results So we have accumulated countless and we continue to accumulate countless different types of karma.
Most of the time we divide karma into positive and negative karma, so that means that we will have to experience the results of all the karma that we have accumulated. Now, in terms of negative karma, there are ways that we can either get rid of having the karma for our negative karma to ripen or we can get rid of negative karma completely by seeing emptiness directly. So, we can stop karma from ripening by doing specific practices that stop it happening but we can’t get rid of it completely until we see emptiness directly seeing emptiness directly takes us out of the loop of what they have translated here as ‘being’. Therefore, we have to experience the results of all our karma. So we’re talking about experiencing the results for karma but it’s very difficult for us to understand what karma is.
We know that by the power of karma that we’ve taken rebirth and that by the power of our karma we continue to experience things but it’s very difficult for us understand what karma is it’s very subtle thing to understand the way that karma works karma isn’t something that’s manifest form it’s not like a bit of something it’s not a lump of something karma is it can be incredibly subtle we say that we’ve done something that’s strong karma we’ve done something that will have strong results but it’s very difficult for us to substantiate what strong means because it doesn’t manifest physically. Anything that we do, think or speak is karma. So, even if we have one thought that creates karma, if we have before we’ve formulated an idea, just the process of thinking is perpetually creating karma. The same is when we speak, when we go to speak even before we’ve spoken we’ve accumulated karma and then in the speaking we also accumulate a greater karma so if we say something good then we create positive karma, we create some merit and if we say something negative we’ve created negative karma and then also with actions of our body if we do something negative we’ve created negative karma if we do something positive we’ve created positive karma it works on all these different levels so it’s very difficult for us to understand the complexities of karma because it’s so momentary and so it becomes so complicated.
So because of this, because of the way that we accumulate karma and the way that it comes about through our body, speech and mind, there isn’t a single moment that we aren’t accumulating karma of some sort. So we could be accumulating positive, we could be accumulating negative, could be accumulating neutral, but there isn’t one moment when we’re not thinking, when we’re not doing something, it’s perpetually happening. And on top of that, we have so many minds or so many thoughts or so many states of mind that even if we’re trying to calculate the amount of karma that we’ve the different types of karma that we’ve accumulated in an hour, it would be impossible. Even with a computer, it would be impossible to calculate the different types of karma we have accumulated in one hour. If we get an idea about that we understand how complicated karma becomes.
So if we also watched if we also thought about what it was that we were thinking about for this one hour that we were unable to calculate the number of minds we have in, most of the thoughts that we’ve had, most of the things we do, we’ll see that they have been for our own benefit and therefore they’ve been negative karma because we’ve accumulated them, by the power of our grasping as self, like our self grasping, and self grasping leads us to accumulate all these different types of karma. We watch for an hour, most of the things that we’ve done have been to benefit ourselves, to make us feel better, to make ourselves feel more comfortable. There may be a little bit of things that we’ve done for other people, but most of the reason we have for doing things is for ourselves. So therefore, because most of the things that we’ve done have been by the power of self grasping and most of the things that we’ve done have been a cause for us to continue to be reborn into existence in saṃsāra. So self grasping itself which causes us to create karma is the cause for us to be reborn in saṃsāra. So everything we do, most of the things we do become a cause for us to be reborn in saṃsāra.
And because that’s the way that we are, we have to actually work at creating positive karma, creating something that will that result will be happiness. So, what we should be trying to do is when we first wake up in the morning, the first thing in the morning, we should be thinking, may I do good things today, may I try and create positive karma and may I refrain from doing negative things and then during the day we should check on ourselves to see what we’re thinking and see what our motivations for doing things are and try and bring ourselves back on track. If we keep doing this, then we will start slowly, slowly doing more positive things and slowly, slowly stop doing as many negative things. We’ll be able to see the change if we keep working at it. So it’s it’s it’s something that we need to work at in order for us to achieve liberation.
We have to stop doing negative things and start doing positive things. It’s fairly simple formula, but it’s very difficult for us to put into practice on a day in a day to day way this idea of doing good things and refraining from doing negative things. Geshe la says that sometimes he wakes up and sometimes remembers to think that first thing in the morning but it doesn’t take him very long before he’s under the control of his karma and delusions and he’s racing after his the things that he wants. It’s sometimes translated as laziness but it means chasing after things that are worldly. So, it doesn’t take him very long to switch from this idea of I’m trying to be good today to running after his desires for food and so forth.
So he said it’s difficult for us to do it, but we should keep trying to do it. We should keep working at it. Even if it seems difficult, we should keep working at it because apart from doing this, there’s no way out of saṃsāra. The other thing that we tend to do is to think, yeah, I know that I have to start doing good things and try to stop doing negative things, but today I have to actually go and do something else, so I’ll do it tomorrow. And so then we say I’ll do it tomorrow, and we’ll do it tomorrow, and I’ll do it tomorrow, and then we end up dying and we haven’t started doing it tomorrow.
That’s part of the process that we go through. It’s not something that we can put aside for long. It’s something that we need to start working at now. So we we don’t have that much time. It’s not like our time is limit is is unlimited in this life, so we should be starting to think about this as as as soon as possible.
If if we can’t do it all at once, then from time to time, we should in a day, from time to time, we should bring our mind back to bodhicitta and impermanence and the shortcomings of saṃsāra and death and the way that karma works and and compassion. We should try and bring our mind back to these things from time to time in the day. And then if we keep doing this, it’ll be of of enormous benefit to us. So at the beginning, this may be difficult. Maybe we may have to put in a lot of effort in in order to to keep reminding ourselves of this thing these things.
We may have to keep pressing ourselves, and it may be difficult. But if we keep doing it, then the the the difficult aspect will get less and less. It will become easier and easier for us to accomplish this. So we have to start it it seems like hard work to keep bringing our mind back into this and working working working and trying to change the way our mind works because it’s so it’s so easy for us to think in in ways that are gonna create negative karma. But the the the sad or the hard fact is that achieving Buddhahood is hard and achieving achieving becoming an arhat is hard.
Becoming an Ārya is hard. If we want to become an Ārya, an arhat, or a Buddha, we have to put in hard work. We have to keep working at it and working at it and working at it. If we don’t work hard, there’s no way we can achieve it. If if we look at all the stories of the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas of all the different times, then they all worked hard.
It wasn’t like they they just became a Buddha without working at it. We think about Milarepa, Lama Tsongkhapa, all these people, they put in a lot of hard work and the results of their hard work was that they had changed these states of mind. So we have to be prepared to work hard if we want the results of Buddhahood or liberation or any of these things. So if if we do put in this hard work if we do put in this hard work, then we will achieve the results. It’s not as if if we put in the hard work, we may or may not receive the results.
They will come about. There’s no doubt about that. And the thing that we can use to inspire us to do it is the fact that if we put in this hard work, at the end of it, we won’t experience any more suffering. So that should be, like, an inspiration for us to keep working along these lines. So the the main the main the core of this of this practice that we should be doing is our development of bodhicitta.
So what that means is that every single thing we do, every time we try and work hard at something, then we should be doing it for the purpose of achieving Buddhahood quickly for the benefit of all sentient beings. This should be our motivation for doing anything. So likewise now, we do this study, we should be thinking, may this be a cause for me to achieve Buddhahood quickly to benefit all sentient beings, and on that thought, we should meditate. If there is great compassion, of course, of of great compassion in one’s mind.