Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The striking opening of this 44-minute Lamrim commentary by Geshe Pema Tsering is a caution: merely studying the graduated path does not turn the study into Dharma — only the right motivation does. Geshe la then works through renunciation, the first of the three principal aspects of the path, beginning with why a precious human rebirth is so rare. He lists the eight freedoms and ten endowments that define it, explains the causes required — pure ethics, the six perfections, unmixed aspiration — using a seed-and-soil analogy, and counters the common fear that focusing on future lives means neglecting this one. The session closes on impermanence, the first of the four seals, and why moment-by-moment change exposes the illusion of a permanent self. Suited to practitioners starting systematic Lamrim study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 SoP 2004 05 15.mp3
UUID: 7bfe4922-df35-40cb-af5e-ddd4b2d7f78b
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~3,816
So today, we’re going to go through the the graduated path to enlightenment. Now although the graduated path to enlightenment may be something that is is a Dharma, is a is a, you know, teaching by its nature. It doesn’t necessarily follow that us studying it or listening to teachings on it will become Dharma. Whether something becomes Dharma or not depends on our motivation for doing something. So this means that before we listen to the teachings on the graduated path and before we try and retain them, then we should develop the right motivation.
Then we should develop the right motivation. Now the best motivation we can have for listening to these teachings is the motivation to seek enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, to to seek enlightenment in order to establish all sentient beings in a state beyond sorrow. And so that’s the motivation we should try and develop. Oh, yeah. Okay.
So sorry about that. Geshe la didn’t have the actual page we’d started on. He jumped ahead, and so I had to go and get for him. The yeah. We did a lot on the motivation last week, so try and remember what we talked about with the motivation last week.
So the Three Principal Aspects or the three principle things we need to focus on in terms of the path to liberation are said to be renunciation, the enlightened mind or the mind of bodhicitta, and then also the correct understanding or the view of emptiness. So this path, Lam Rim path is said to be a collection or the essence of all of those. And now, first of all, when we talk about developing renunciation, there’s said to be two two different aspects to this. That is developing renunciation from this life and developing renunciation from next life future lives. So then, first of all, to talk about how to turn our mind away from attachment to this life and renounce this attachment to this life, then there’s said to be two different ways to develop that understanding.
As it says in part of the reviewing of the stages of the path from the Lama Chöpa realizing how this body of liberties and endowments is found but once is difficult to obtain and is easily lost. We seek your blessings to partake of its essence make it worthwhile and not be distracted by the meaningless way affairs of this life. So what we’re talking about here is two different meditation techniques or two different ways of thinking that can develop this understanding and they’re said to be the focus on how difficult the human rebirth is the precious human rebirth is to attain and also on impermanence how it doesn’t last forever. So these two different meditation techniques are said to arise arouse renunciation from this lifetime. So the what’s called the precious human rebirth, the rebirth that is has certain endowments and certain freedoms.
So that means it has good things going up for it and negative things absent. This rebirth is kind of rebirth that we have now. It’s said to be incredibly difficult to find, and it was very rare to find. From beginning-less time up until now, we’ve had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, countless numbers of rebirths, and we’ve discarded countless numbers of bodies. But not many of them would have been a precious human rebirth. It’s a very, very difficult rebirth to accomplish or rebirth to find.
That is a rebirth that enables us to accomplish Dharma, that enables us to accomplish the path. So it’s difficult to find a human rebirth. It’s difficult to attain or to achieve a human rebirth. We can see this in our own experience when we see that there’s many more animals than there are humans. And then it says in scripture that there’s many more spirits than there are animals and many more beings in a hell state than there are spirits.
So in this way, the more refined a rebirth is, the less beings there are with that rebirth. So likewise, there’s many less people in bliss states or deities, or gods, sorry, than there are human beings. So the more refined the state, the more difficult it is to obtain. So even amongst people who achieve or get a human rebirth because of their positive karma that they’ve accumulated, there’s even less that are said to have a precious human rebirth. That is a human rebirth that has the eight freedoms and ten endowments.
Now this word that is translated as freedom, then it’s in Tibetan, it means time to do things you want. So if we say the word that means this, which means kind of like a leisure, having leisure time or having sufficient time, there’s two different ways that you could explain what this free, what they’re talking about when it says freedom. So it’s actually like a freedom from having things that stop you from doing something. Right? So so in other way of talking about it would be free time or leisure.
So, we have this rebirth with the eight freedoms and the ten endowments. And so, we need to remember what they are so we can realize how precious the situation that we have at the moment is. So, that means we need to remember that we are free from being born as a long life god and being engaged in too much pleasure to practice Dharma. We’re free from being born as an animal or as a spirit or in a in a hell state. We’re free from being born as someone who can’t hear or doesn’t understand the Dharma.
We’re free from being born in a place where there is no no Buddhas have appeared so there’s no teachings we’re free from being born in a barbaric land land that isn’t conducive to practicing Dharma and when free from holding wrong views so having those eight freedoms is something that we should be very, very aware of, very grateful for, very, very pleased with the fact that we’ve been able to attain it. And then from amongst the what are called the ten endowments. So there’s ten things that we’ve got that make this a precious human rebirth or human rebirth we can use. They’re said to be five that depend on other beings and five that depend on ourselves. Now the five that depend on ourselves are that we are born as human, that we’re born in what’s called a central land, a land where there is the Buddhist teachings are available.
We have all of our senses. We’re free from extreme actions. Extreme actions are said are said to be the five heinous acts or the five acts with immediate consequences. And we also have faith in the Dharma. And the five endowments, it depends on others are a Buddha has appeared, so that depends on the Buddha having come, that the Buddha had not only appeared, but taught the Dharma.
And then after that, their teachings have flourished, that they’ve been the lineage has continued. There’s also people who follow the Buddha’s teachings, and then there’s those who have compassion enough that they will not only follow the Buddha’s teachings, but help other people who want to follow the Buddha’s teachings. So, have just established it. We’ve established that this precious human rebirth is difficult to attain, then we also have to understand that it doesn’t last forever, that it’s not a permanent thing. That it’s something that is said to be quite fleeting.
And if we look at the fact that most of us won’t be here in one hundred years, then we can see that this is actually true. Eighty to one hundred years is all we’ve got, so we need to use this eighty to one hundred years the best way we can. The other thing is that we may think that it’s fairly easy to get a precious human rebirth next time around, but we know that that is very difficult. In order for us to attain a precious human rebirth, then we need three things. We need to have good ethics as the base.
The main cause for attaining a good human rebirth, precious human rebirth with the endowments and leisures is that ethics is to have pure ethics or good ethics but on top of ethics we need to have helpers to this ethical base which is the six perfections the practice of the six perfections so this is generosity and patience and effort and so forth. So we need to have ethics and effort and along with that we need to have made pure prayers. We need to have had a very strong wish or a very strong prayer that was pure, that wasn’t tainted with other purposes. Then the result of all of that is to have a precious human rebirth. So because not many people are able to do that, not many people are able to practice ethics along with the six perfections, along with the having this aspiration to be born in this way, they’re having a pure aspiration to be born in this way, then that means that there isn’t many people who actually achieve that.
So in order for us according to how it’s explained in the in the Guru Puja, in order for us to achieve a precious human rebirth, we have to create the causes for having a precious human rebirth, and this is rather difficult. It’s a similar process of cause and effect that we need to understand. And we can understand it better by thinking about when we plant seeds. If we want to grow rice, then we need to plant the seeds for rice. Therefore, if we want to have positive outcome, we need to have positive seeds.
So if we want to grow rice and we plant apple seeds, then that’s not going to work. We need to have a seed that’s going to accord with the outcome we want. So we need to establish positive action in order to have a positive outcome. Because no matter how many apple seeds we plant, none of them are going to turn into rice. So it’s a similar thing if we wanna attain a rebirth that gives us the opportunity, the leisure and the endowments to be able to practice Dharma in the correct way.
We need to plant the seeds for that. We need to create the right causes for that. When we talk about the causes for a human rebirth, a precious human rebirth like this, then we talk about it in terms of a gross cause and the subtle cause. So the gross cause for us to attain a human body is our parents. The seeds from our parents.
The subtle cause for us to attain a human body is to have ethics, to have had ethics in the previous life. So that’s the subtle cause for us to achieve a human rebirth. But in the same way that seeds come into become plants, not just on the basis of the seed, but also on the basis of the causes and conditions around the seed, like the right temperature, having water, having sunlight, and so forth. This seed that we planted in terms of ethics can only come into fruition as a precious human rebirth dependent on the conditions of practicing generosity and patience and so forth. And also this prayer that we are to be reborn with a precious human rebirth.
So even within those who have that practice ethics and have this idea of practicing generosity, practicing patience, and all these sort of things, then there is relatively few amongst those that do so with the motivation to benefit at least the next their next life or to try and achieve liberation or complete Buddhahood. So there’s many people that practice Dharma in the world or practice truth in the world. There’s not only Buddhist, but there’s Christians and Hindu and and Islamic people. They’re all practicing And there’s lots of Islamic people, and they’re and they’re all practicing they’re all practicing their their religion. They’re all practicing their faith.
But from amongst those, then the ones that are actually practicing in order to attain a a good rebirth, at least, they’re very very little. There’s most of the time when we will even watch our own motivation. So whether we’re talking about a Buddhist here, whether we’re talking about a person or a Christian, anything like that, then we can say that their their main motivation for doing it is this lifetime. And anytime someone does something for this lifetime, even though it may be religious practice, it’s not fully qualified religious practice. For an order for something to be fully qualified religious practice, then it needs to have as its motivation at least good rebirth.
So therefore, we can see that even from amongst those who are practicing religion or Dharma of some kind, there is even fewer who actually have the right motivation for doing it for for their action to become fully qualified Dharma. So we can see that there’s many people in the world that practice generosity, that practice patience and so forth, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that their motivation will make their actions fully qualified Dharma. No. So this means that whatever we do that’s positive, whether it’s practicing generosity, whether it’s practicing patience, whether it’s our positive effort, the diligence that we put into doing positive things, whether it’s meditating, it’s studying, whether it’s trying to practice kindness. Any of these things that we do, then it’s very important for us to do them with the right motivation.
That is, it’s very important for us to do them with the motivation that that action becomes a cause for us to achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. It’s a cause for us to achieve Buddhahood so that we can lead all sentient beings or all beings to a state beyond sorrow. So this is a motivation that we really need to focus on, that we really need to develop in order to turn our positive actions into to turn our positive actions into the best type of dharma that we can turn them into. It’s kind of difficult for us to try and establish the causes to achieve this kind of rebirth, And we can see that from the way that our mind works. If we watch the way that our mind works, then we’ll see that most of the thoughts that we have, most of the things that we think about is how to make ourselves feel better in this lifetime.
We’ll see that we want ourselves to be richer or healthier or happier or have less emotional troubles. We concentrate mainly on developing those ideas or those things in our lifetime. That’s what our mind naturally goes towards. We don’t have to work really hard in order to develop those kind of thoughts. They naturally come about.
And Geshe la said that at least that’s what he sees in his mind. So he thinks that maybe you’re having the same experience. So it means that we don’t have to put in any effort to get these kind of thoughts happening. They come about naturally. We have the idea of trying to make ourselves richer, healthier, happier.
The reason that these come about naturally is because we have habituated ourselves towards these thoughts since time immemorial. We’ve always had this idea of making ourselves feel better. And because we have such strong habits, because we have such strong tendencies towards that way of thinking, that it’s very hard for us to change the way we think and stop thinking about that. We have this idea that if we stop thinking about that, then this lifetime is going to be really poor and we’re gonna face a lot of difficulties and we have a sense of a fear that that’s going to be very difficult and we don’t want that to happen. But there’s really no reason to be afraid of that kind of thing because it’s not not having that.
That’s the problem. It’s the grasping attitude towards these things. So we should the reason that we really don’t have any reason to fear this is because if we are focused on achieving a good human rebirth in the next life, that will enable us to practice Dharma and practice positively. Or if we are dedicating and motivating our motivation is to achieve liberation, or it is in order to achieve complete enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, then that is a much stronger cause or a much stronger action than if we’re just focusing on this life. So any positive action we do with that motivation will bring benefits in this lifetime as well, will bring positive benefits in this lifetime as well.
So the idea that we can’t think about the future lives because we have to focus on this life doesn’t doesn’t really hold up. It doesn’t doesn’t really make sense. And so this means that we need to think about this idea of attaining a precious human rebirth in the next life, of attaining liberation, of attaining Buddhahood. We need to think about these things for a very long time and habituate ourselves into those thoughts. Because if we don’t habituate ourselves into those thoughts, then any actions that we do, like practicing generosity and so forth, won’t have the desired outcome.
They won’t give us the opportunity to attain this precious human rebirth, attain liberation or attain Buddhahood. So we need to habituate ourselves into those. We need to think about them for a long time in order to achieve that outcome. So this means that, for example, if we are concentrating our aspirational prayers on achieving something in this life, so for example getting healthier or richer or happier, and then we do prayers to say ten or some meditational deity like this, then that means that those prayers are not going to achieve their greatest benefit. So it means, for example, that if we’re focusing on getting better, then that’s all that’s gonna happen.
We’re just gonna get better, and it’s not gonna benefit us in longer term. If we focus, however, on achieving enlightenment, then that will help us get better. But the vastness of the motivation means the vastness of the result will be much greater. So if we’re focusing just on the outcome, that’s how something can help us in this lifetime, then that means the prayers won’t reach their full potential. They won’t won’t have as much strength as they would have if if our motivation was different.
So that explains why their precious human rebirth is difficult to find. The other thing we need to remember about this precious human rebirth is that that it doesn’t last very long. It doesn’t continue on at some stage we have to die. The length of time of the life that we put in so much effort in order to achieve isn’t that long. So we worked very hard in our past lives developing ethics, practicing patience and practicing generosity and so forth.
And the result of that is the human rebirth that we have at the moment. But this human rebirth doesn’t last that long. So what we need to be doing in this lifetime is to be planting the causes or accumulating or developing the causes for us to achieve a precious human rebirth in the next life or to attain liberation or to attain Buddhahood. So we need to continually keep developing the causes because the results of our previous positive karma aren’t gonna last forever. I forgot something.
Sorry. And and so the other thing we need to remember is that even though we said we may have this idea that we’re going to live for a certain amount of years, If someone says, can you definitely guarantee that you will be alive today or tomorrow? Then you have to say no. You have to say, don’t know. It’s something that we can’t guarantee.
It’s something that we can’t be absolutely certain about. We have to remember that we don’t know if we’re going to live for a certain amount of years or die today or tomorrow. Okay. So the first of what’s called the four seals, which define a a philosophy or an idea system as being Buddhist or not, is that all compounded phenomena are impermanent. So this is this means that if we think about it that everything is changing in every moment.
So in every moment, there is a consistent process of change going on that we don’t necessarily realize, especially considering ourselves. If we start considering ourselves, we think that we are the same person or we are the same, we are a continuation of the same situation that existed yesterday or the day before, and we will continue to exist in that way tomorrow and the next day and so on. So we have this idea that there’s a solid eye that is continually existing. Now, the reason that we have an idea that there’s a solid eye that’s continually existing is because we have this habit since time immemorial of grasping at ourself, It’s truly existing. This idea of self grasping at a as grasping at a self.
So we grasp at this idea of self, and we’ve made a habit of that that’s so strong that we come up with this idea that we exist as an independent entity that’s going to keep existing that isn’t impermanent. But if we look at this, then we can see that in actual fact, in every moment, there is disintegration and regeneration. And it means that in the process of birth, there is a process of disintegration. So compounded phenomena need to come apart. So therefore, if we have birth by the the very nature of birth, that brings about death or just or or this cessation of existing in that way.
So we need to concentrate on this concept of impermanence. We need to think about this concept of how things are constantly changing, even though we can’t recognize it and we start thinking of ourselves as being this unchanging, permanent thing of self. But if we look at the situation, that’s not the way it is. Things are changing in every moment. It’s just that we don’t recognize they’re changing in every moment.
So we choose to believe that we’re not changing. We choose to believe that we’re not growing old. Right? So we can’t stop ourselves from growing old.