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 session by confronting the discouragement familiar to long-term meditators — the thought that enlightenment is simply out of reach. Citing Śāntideva and the logic that if insects can attain Buddhahood then humans surely can, he frames despondency as a form of laziness to abandon. He then lays out the three-step ladder: study, contemplation, meditation — insisting that without clear understanding there can be no genuine realization. As the year-long Seventy Topics series concludes, he explains how studying Maitreya’s text plants imprints that position practitioners to receive his teachings when he appears as a future Buddha. The session closes with a doctrinal survey of the six extraordinary knowledges, four specific perfect understandings, four purities, and ten sovereign powers of a fully awakened Buddha.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 ST10 2003 11 13.mp3
UUID: 72fa2dc5-cb94-4db1-bc5b-50304a7f6f48
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Seventy Topics (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-11-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~3,783
Enthusiasm, that sort of guides to the Bodhisattva way of life, it says that one should never indulge in despondency by entertaining such thoughts as how shall I ever awaken? But that the Buddhas only speak what is true, have access to this truth. That is that we are able to reach enlightenment. And so what this means is this despondency is thinking. I can’t can’t achieve enlightenment.
I can’t no matter how much effort I put in, I won’t be able to achieve enlightenment. That that despondency, that sense of mental sinking, the it’s it’s we is a form of laziness, is a form of neurotic thought, therefore, that needs to be abandoned. The Buddhas said that if we work hard at it, we can achieve enlightenment. And the Buddhas the Buddhas don’t tell lies. Geshe la actually used a different word in that instance, but because Judy’s here, I’m not gonna translate it directly.
The Buddhas don’t tell lies. They only say what is completely true. So it means that if we can if bugs and things like flies, mosquitoes can attain enlightenment, then it’s the the fact that human beings can attain enlightenment is said to be obvious. It doesn’t need to be spoken. The Buddha said that we can attain enlightenment.
All we have to do is to put in the effort to to do what they did, put in effort, put in, well, put in the the hard work and don’t get discouraged thinking we’re not we’re not going to be able to do it. So this despondency is something that we have to be very careful of because it’s something that can come up in our minds a lot. We can get very despondent and think that we can’t achieve enlightenment. There’s no way we can do it. And we can start to think this if we’ve put in some effort and if we haven’t seen any results.
For all of this, this idea of giving up can happen, so we have to guard against giving up, especially if people have been meditating, say, then they think, Well, I’ve been doing this for a year and I still haven’t achieved any realisations. I still haven’t achieved any subtler understanding, so what’s the point? So they think there’s no point. They can’t do it, and so they stop meditating and they chuck their practice. Now by dropping their practice not only do they stop themselves from being able to progress further but by throwing their effort away they’ve wasted all the effort that they’ve put in already.
So because of this, because we don’t wanna waste the effort we’ve put in and because it’s easy to get despondent when we’re trying to do something so difficult, then it it means that we have to just keep watching and keep being vigilant against despondency. So it’s very difficult for us to attain realizations quickly. It’s very difficult for anyone to attain realizations quickly. We haven’t really done that much meditation in this life, comparatively speaking, and we don’t know what we did in previous lives. So it takes a lot of meditation in many lives in order to be able to achieve realizations.
So we shouldn’t get despondent when it doesn’t happen quickly. We look at other things we can do, like our ability to write and read easily. The reason that we’re able to write and read easily is because since we were children, we put in a lot of effort and a lot of work to develop that facility, to develop our ability to read and write. By putting in this amount of work, however much work we put in, we’re able to do it however easily we are. It’s the same with meditation.
We need to put in extraordinary amounts of effort and keep at it until we develop understandings and develop our our realizations become subtler or our understanding become subtler. So it takes a lot of years and a lot of hard work to develop that idea. But as we can see from our experience with writing, our understanding understandings have gotten subtler. Our ability has gotten better. So in the same way, the meditation, if we keep working at it, our understandings will become greater and sorry, subtler, and that we will eventually be able to achieve realizations.
So this means that we have to put in a lot of effort. And at the beginning, it means we have to put in a lot of effort with regards to study, with regards to listening to their teachings, with regards to reading lots of books and texts, anything that we can get our hands on to develop our understanding. We need to be able to do this as much as we can to develop the clarity of our understanding. Once we’ve developed a clear understanding, then we can contemplate that. With this contemplation, our understanding becomes deeper.
So we need these two things: study and contemplation. Study and contemplation at the beginning are the most important things, and we need to keep doing this until our understanding becomes clear. If our understanding is not clear, we can’t meditate. If we don’t understand what we’re meditating on, we can’t meditate on it. First, we need study, and if we study well, then we will be able to contemplate.
So if we understand through studying, our contemplations will be correct, and if we contemplate well, then we’ll be able to meditate. Without studying, there is no contemplation. Without contemplation, there is no meditation. And without meditation, there is no realization. So we need to do things in this order.
We need to develop an understanding through studying, then an understanding through contemplation, and then finally through meditation. So we need to study. For Geshe-la said, from his point of view, that is a really important thing for us to do, is to develop understanding through study, to put the ideas in our head and solidify them in our head. We study things so much until they become second nature so we don’t have to process or think about them anymore. By doing this, we will be able to contemplate properly and then after that we will be able to meditate.
We may think that we are coming to the end of the seventy topics, and this is the last bit of the seventy topics, but in actual fact, we’ve only skimmed the surface of a text like this. When you’re studying, the more you study, the more you realize it’s out there and the more that you need to know. The continual process is such a deep thing that studying is very important because it’s such a vast topic that in order to even get a glimpse of an understanding of it, you have to do a lot of study. Now when we’re talking about something like the seventy topics, we may think that we’ve finished it, and we have done a lot of listening, and I guess, as said, he’s done a lot of teaching on it this year that we’ve gone through the seventy Topics. The seventy Topics is such a vast text because it describes all of the different minds that you need in order to attain enlightenment.
So it’s so vast that you could spend ages on just one single tiny bit of it. So we should think that, okay, this is good for putting imprints on our mind. The study that we’ve done will give us familiar will familiarize us with the text. And if we keep working at it, then we’ll be able to develop a clearer understanding of this text. So so we may think, okay.
This is really difficult, and it’s very hard for us to get our heads around. But by studying in this way, then we’re planting the seeds, we’re putting down the imprints in our mind, that when we are able to be in a situation to achieve realizations, that all of this will come back to us, and we will have deeper understand ings of what it is we’re doing in meditation. Specifically, considering that this text, the Seventy Topics, taught by Maitreya, and if we keep studying it now, then when Maitreya actually comes, we’ll be in the perfect position to be able to develop Realization through his inspiration and teaching. The reason that he taught this text into this world was that people in this age, by studying it and reflecting on it, would prepare themselves for him when he comes to earth as a Buddha. So if we’re studying it and we think of this and we have this aspirational prayer that, this studying this text may this be a cause for me to be a student of Maitreya.
And by by studying this text may that be a cause for me to be taught these instructions in a meditational way by Maitreya, then that will go a long way to giving us the ability to be students of Maitreya, that prayer, those kind of prayers, especially considering we’re studying a text that was actually written by Maitreya. So, if we do this, then it services us or gives us the opportunity to become a student of Maitreya. When a fully realized Buddha manifests as a fully realized Buddha on earth, so for example, Buddha Śākyamūni or Maitreya, that means that a lot of people who are in the vicinity of them, a lot of people who have faith in them or students of them achieve realizations fairly quickly. This happened with Buddha Śākyamūni, and it will happen with Maitreya too. So if we do this with the aspiration that this will enable us to become students of Maitreya, then that in that way, when Maitreya comes, we’ll have a perfect opportunity to develop realizations and achieve liberation or Buddhahood.
Okay. Now this text, the Clear Ornament of Realization, is said to be included within the teachings on Prajñāpāramitā or the wisdom perfection of wisdom. What the perfection of wisdom literally means is the establishment on the other side, which means the view of emptiness, seeing things from the point of view of a Buddha, seeing things as being not inherently existent. Now there’s five different texts that are included within are called the five different not five different texts, sorry, five different areas of study, which are said to be the foundation for our understanding and knowledge. They are said to be pramāna or valid cognition, Madhyamaka the middle way, the Prajñāpāramitā teachings, Vinaya, and Abhidharma.
Now, all of these things take as their base or take as their root the prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom, because all of them are trying to point out a way to develop understanding of the perfection of wisdom. He’s looking at me like, What are you saying? And I was like, Is that right? He said, I don’t know. And I was like, Anyway, they’re all based in, they’re all taken as their source of prajnaparamita, this perfection of wisdom, because all of the Buddha’s teachings are taught in order for us to develop an understanding of this, because developing a view of this is a way out of suffering.
Therefore, when we have a valid cognition or pramāna texts, that pramāna is studied, it’s in order for us to establish what it is we need to learn. The Mādhyamika is the view of emptiness, so the Mādhyamika philosophy is another way of explaining emptiness. The Abhidharma describes the practices that people need to engage in, in order to develop these understandings, and the Vinaya practices that monks and nuns need to engage in, in order to develop these understandings. So all of these different types of teachings take as their base the wisdom text or the perfection of wisdom text, which is what the Clear Ornament of Realization is describing, the methods and the practices that develop wisdom. In the Clear Realization, we have the description of wisdom and the practices that are done in order to develop that understanding.
So in this way, this text is is like the the core or the heart of all of the different trainings and studies that are engaged in. So in this way, the clear ornament of realization is said to be incredibly important. There’s two different types of texts that are said to describe the describe emptiness. Now the Mādhyamika text, the entry to the entry to the middle way, the Madhyamakāvatāra, is said to be a description of emptiness from the point of view of the middle way school. So it describes clearly what emptiness is.
And in this way, it’s said to be a to give the definite meaning of emptiness, to give a clear perspective on what emptiness actually is. The Clear Ornament of Realization, on the other hand, is said to describe the secret or the hidden meaning of emptiness. What it means when we say the hidden meaning of emptiness is that it describes the actions that need to be engaged in in order to develop understanding of wisdom for bodhisattvas to engage in. In this way, the it is incredibly important because it’s not just a description of emptiness, but how we actually develop this understanding. So in this way then we should try after we’ve studied this text, we’re finishing up studying this text, we should also try and meditate on it a little bit.
Now it’s not absolutely necessary that we develop realizations of this text, know, that we develop these kind of minds as described in the text in order to get benefit from the text, because just by thinking on it, just by putting those thoughts into our head, then we’re developing the imprints, or we’re developing the tendencies towards these understandings, so we’re training our mind in order to be able to accept or in order to understand the points in the text. So, it’s good for us to go over again what we’ve studied to develop a deeper understanding of it and to familiarize ourselves with it. Now, what we need in order to be able to practice what’s in the text, what we need in order to develop the understandings that’s described in the text is bodhicitta. So the the other thing that’s very important for us to do is to keep thinking about bodhicitta in any time that we have. It’s good for us to meditate on bodhicitta, sit down and meditate on bodhicitta, but it’s also good to remind ourselves of bodhicitta when we’re just strolling around, we’re just doing anything.
If there’s any time that we have where we have a few minutes spare or we’re not fully engaged with work, then we should try and think about bodhicitta, try and think about attaining enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, remind ourselves of that. If we develop in this way, if we keep thinking about bodhicitta in this way, it’s very important. So so in that hope because of that, then we should also try and meditate on bodhicitta for a few moments now. Okay. So we were going through the twenty one divisions of the uncontaminated, exalted wisdom of the Buddha ground.
Alright? And we’re up to number seven, and which is concentration free of delusions. Yeah? It does not. Now what this means is, when beings who have faith and are not overcome by wrong view come into the presence or perceive a Buddha or an arhat or someone of equal kind of power, like a a high level bodhisattva, they don’t develop negative views or anger or anything like that.
If they don’t have faith, this happens, but if they do have faith, they find getting around or being in the presence of a being like this means that all their negative views subside. And this is what concentration free of delusions refers from. Okay. So the next one, knowledge of one’s own objective. This means that you understand is the is the understanding of what’s being worked towards. In this case, it’s the understanding of Buddhahood.
So this understanding of Buddhahood, or if someone’s a lower vehicle practitioner, the understanding of Arhatship is known by some bodhisattvas and some beings on the path, and everybody has a slight understanding on it who has belief, but it’s not perfected until you become a Buddha because when you’re a Buddha, then your understanding of Buddhahood is perfected. Okay. So just briefly, the the next of the list is the six extrasensory perceptions — or perhaps better than clairvoyance — the six extraordinary knowledges.
And the knowledge the first one of these is the knowledge of miracles, the knowledge of the divine eye, the knowledge of the divine ear, the knowledge of other thoughts is four. Five is recollecting past lives, and six, knowledge of the extinction of contamination. Gosh. We did these before. The the six extraordinary knowledges or six extraordinary perceptions come in all different sorts of things, but they are definitely in the higher paths.
And it’s They went through we went I guess, they went through that all of them. Okay. So the next the next one is the four specific perfect understandings, or the four individual understandings that figure things out individually. Right? The first of these is said to be the specific perfect understanding of dharma.
The dharma in this instance being phenomena. Yeah. That’s one of the meanings of Dharma. So that means a specific understanding of each individual Dharma, which is a or an individual phenomenon, which is unique to a Buddha. The second one is a specific perfect understanding of meaning.
So this means hang on a second. Yes. So this the Dharma here could be many different things. It can be all phenomena. It can also be another way of saying the emptiness of all phenomena.
Alright. And a specific perfect understanding number two, which is a specific perfect understanding of meaning. So that means understanding the meaning of all that has been taught, understanding emptiness, understanding the meaning. The third is said to be the specific perfect understanding of definitive words. So that means having a perfect understanding of every single thing that has been written in texts or described as described by the Buddha and his disciples.
The fourth one is the specific perfect understanding which engenders confidence. It says of confidence here, but that doesn’t make any sense. So specific perfect understanding. So specific You know when you’re distinguishing this from that, this from that, this and this. Okay?
So this word that they’ve described as specific and specific perfect understanding is the ability to distinguish one thing from another. Right? And so if you have the ability to distinguish one from another from another, that that develops a confidence, and this confidence is what the Buddhas have. Not only do they know one thing from another, they know they know one thing from another, and they have a confidence from that. Different words of discrimination.
Discrimination is like it’s similar. It it means being able to specifically identify individual things. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that that you discernment and discrimination are usually other usually, when they translate other words, you use discrimination and discernment, which are very similar.
It’s just that in this this I mean, if I literally translate, it would be each individual perfect understanding, but it doesn’t mean that’s like the way the words are, but it means like a a perfect understanding of each individual thing. Yeah. Okay. So this is sorry you said. So so it means, for example, with the with the specific perfect understanding of definitive words.
Alright. I thought the moon two burped. Oh, alright. Thought it was her burping. I was very confused.
Okay. For example, with it says specific perfect understanding of definitive words. It means that the this it’s the specific understanding with relation to bodhicitta. Right? So bodhicitta is perfectly understood, and then emptiness is perfectly understood.
And then the the impermanence is perfectly understood individually. Each one is understood individually. It’s not a general understanding of all. It’s a specific individual understanding of each, which leads to discrimination, being able to distinguish between them, just discriminate between the two and understand the characteristics, but it’s not that discriminational, yeah, discernment. It’s the specific understanding of each.
So this this this, yeah, specific understanding or yeah. Of each means that they understand all things. It’s not just a blanket understanding of things. It’s a specific understanding of each individual thing, so a specific understanding of each individual dharma, word, etcetera. So then it refers to the four purities the next one.
Sorry. Number eleven, number twenty one thingies, is the four purities. Yeah? The first is the purity of bases or bodies, which means there is no defilements in the body. The the second one is the purity of objects or possessions.
That means that the perceived objects or possessions are said to be pure. And then the third one is pure compassion. And the fourth one is pure wisdom. Now what this is referring to is when these things are perceived from the point of view of emptiness, they are said to be pure and not having any stains of defilement. This one.
The next one, which is number twelve of these twenty one, is the ten sovereign qualities, or the ten powers. This refers to these the things that Buddhas have power over. The first of this is life, meaning that they can die whenever they want and and able to be born whenever they want. Second thing is thought, which means they can think whatever they want.
The requisites for life, the things they need, anything that they want to get, they can have. karma, they have the power to create any karma they want, that is that they never create negative karma, always create positive karma. They have the power over birth. Whenever they they wish to be born, they can be. The power of their aspiration.
They have the power over special insight or, yeah, the special insight or universal responsibility. That is that they always have this idea of working for the benefit of others. They have the power over miracles, power over wisdom, and the power of phenomena. Is that okay? Okay.
So the next thing that they have, which is number thirteen in the list of twenty one, is the ten powers. The first of the ten powers of a Buddha is the power of knowing right from wrong.