Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A cup of tea sitting on the table in front of him becomes the starting point: Geshe Pema Tsering traces, step by step, every farmer, harvester, factory worker, and buyer whose effort brought that single cup into being. In this 6.6-minute excerpt from his Lamrim series, he applies the same logic to food and housing, building to the point that even in one lifetime each of us has been benefited by hundreds of thousands of beings. He then connects this reflection directly to Tonglen practice — explaining that genuinely feeling the weight of that kindness is what makes it possible to visualize taking on others’ suffering and offering them our happiness in return. Brief and accessible, suitable for practitioners at any stage of Lamrim study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 SoP 2005 02 13.mp3
UUID: 9188f060-9f34-49db-977b-13b90f7dd275
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-02-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 6.6 minutes
Words: ~631
Someone has harvested it, someone has prepared it, someone has packaged it, someone has brought it to us in order for us to be able to eat. So every mouthful of food that we take, it depends on the kindness of other things, depends on other things doing things for us. The houses that we live in were built by others. We didn’t build the houses by ourselves. And even if we did build the houses by ourselves, then we had to gather materials for the house through someone else.
So all of our comfortable house, our beds, everything that we have, it depends on other people’s work, depends on other people giving. So Geshe-la said that if he takes himself, for example, and if he counted up every being that has benefited him in some way since he was a child until now, there would be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different beings who have helped him in some way or another, in just in this one lifetime. So even if we can’t focus on the idea of past lives, even if we just focus on the idea of this life, then we have been benefited by many beings even in this Take for example his cup of tea now. In order for him to have his cup of tea here in front of him, a whole process of and hundreds of people have worked hard to bring this about. For starters the tea didn’t just appear in a container, it came from a field and in order to get the tea from the field, barriers were killed in order to stop them eating all the tea.
Then there were beings who actually lost their lives to bring this tea. And then there were those who worked really hard to harvest the tea because a tea doesn’t find its way into factories, it has to be harvested. And then those beings who were going to dry it and sort it in the factories had to work hard. Then they had to package it and then people had to send it here and then someone had to buy it and in order to buy it they had to accumulate the money to buy the tea. So then it had to be made and then it shows up in a cup of tea in front of him.
So if he thinks about the tea, there’s been many, many beings who have contributed to him getting the tea, and that’s just one instance. That’s just one thing that’s happened to him that’s come from the kindness of sentient beings. He said now he has to try and remember that when he drinks tea because our natural tendency is to go, it’s my tea, I am drinking it and not to reflect on how many people helped us get that cup of tea, how many people many beings contributed to the cup of tea. We try and think about that in every instant, beings are so kind to us in so many different ways. So if we have if we first of all, think about the think about beings all wanting to experience happiness and experiencing suffering and then think about the kindness of all those beings that they are experiencing suffering, want to experience happiness and not only that but they have done something for us at some stage even in this lifetime then the idea of taking on their suffering and giving them our happiness, which is the practice of Tonglen visualizing this, will come about easier.
Okay? Okay, let’s stop. Oh, yeah. So unless anyone’s got any other pressing questions, we can finish. Alright.
So I think it’s page Thank you. Twenty six in the morning prayer section.