Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 30-minute Lamrim commentary with a wry, grounding image: everyone loves a cute baby, but from age fifteen onward “it’s all downhill” — a vivid illustration of aging’s faults that anchors his teaching on impermanence. He explains why Lama Tsongkhapa pairs the contemplation of impermanence with the preciousness of human rebirth as a combined practice, citing Nāgārjuna and Śāntideva as precedents, and how holding both together generates genuine renunciation rather than abstract theory. A Q&A covers three distinct questions: what happens to Buddhas once all beings are enlightened (a lively philosophical debate without a tidy answer); how to enjoy pleasure without creating negative karma, drawing practical methods such as dedicating happiness to all beings or offering it to the Three Jewels; and whether non-Buddhist altruistic actions can function as Dharma.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 SoP 2004 05 15.mp3
UUID: ef4dec13-7b1e-4df1-8f79-b82dec8c10e7
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.8 minutes
Words: ~2,136
To believe that it’s not happening in an everyday process, we think it’s something that will happen in the future. So what happens then is that we’re born and when we’re born we’re very cute. Know, people say, oh, very cute baby, and we can hold them we can hold babies in our hands, and they’re very lovely. Right? And then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until they hit about about fifteen.
And then it’s kind of all downhill from there. There. So they go from they can maybe arrive from about fifteen to twenty. From about fifteen to twenty, you’re still everything’s processing properly. But from twenty until you die, it’s all downhill.
If we think about it a lot, we’re gonna get really scared and we’re going to get a bit anxious as well because it’s not something that we can stop. It’s not something that we can say, Okay, I am a permanent entity, even though that’s the way we like to think, and I’m not going to get old because we are going to get old. If the aging that we go through in the course of a lifetime were to happen in one day, we would get completely terrified. So we have to think about this situation, think about the fact that we are changing in a moment to moment basis. So, yeah, we can’t stop ourselves from getting older and there isn’t many people that wanna get older.
If they had the choice, most people wouldn’t wanna get older and die. It’s not something that we’ve been able to necessarily choose. So it’s something that’s said to be a fault of aging. And there’s also another fault of aging is that people don’t like you as much anymore. Most people like little children.
So you have one little child and most people will like that little child. But let’s say think about the qualities of old people, most people don’t oogle or say, oh, how cute over old people. Yeah. So they not that nobody will like them, the amount of people that like them becomes less and less and less the older you get. Alright.
So it’s there’s an expression by a rather eccentric Tibetan saint called Aku Tonpa who said old dogs no. Old people, old horses, and old dogs are the same. Everybody would rather see a new one or everybody would rather see or would rather have a new one. So it’s like as when we get older people, then we become like old dogs or old horses that people really don’t want that much to do with there. They see them as even if they care for them, see them as a lot of hard work that they have to look after them because they’re always sick and they can’t look after themselves.
So and and the the the that’s another fault that we can say that’s part of old age. It’s something we have to accept because we have we’re getting older, but it’s another fault of old age. So there there’s also this thing that we have this idea we wanna live for a really long time. But if it comes down to it, do we wanna really wanna live for a really long time as a really old person? Living for a really long time as a really old person is very difficult.
You can’t go anywhere, you can’t sit anywhere, you can’t do anything. You’re always feeling having illness of some kind or another. So this aging process is something that we can’t stop, but it’s something that we don’t necessarily wanna stay as or abide in for a long time. So the other thing is even though we we may get to a stage where we’re clinging to this life and want to live a long time as an old person, but that doesn’t happen because we get older and older until we eventually become a corpse, and our body and our mind have to separate. And at that stage, we have to have hoped that we have established the causes in the previous life to be reborn in a precious human rebirth in the future life.
So we have to establish the right causes in order to get the right rebirth after that stage, after we become our mind and body separated and our body becomes a corpse. So this means that in order not to waste the opportunity that we have now, which is based on all our previous hard work of ethics and generosity and patience and effort, we need to do these things again so we have the right cause for us to achieve a good rebirth in the next life. So then it says in the in the text that if we focus on these two things, if we focus on how difficult it is for us to attain a situation like this, difficult it is for us to be reborn in a body like this with the endowments and leisures that we have in our present situation, focus on how difficult that is and how impermanent that is, how quickly that is gonna come to an end and how we’re going to be we’re going to end up dead, then that gives us the motivation for taking the most out of this lifetime, and it also stops us or creates a renunciation in us towards this lifetime, towards the things that maybe we may consider important in this lifetime.
So these two things help to develop renunciation from this we consider important in this lifetime. Okay. So, it then goes on to explain that in a lot of different texts, they separate the practice of impermanence from the practice of focusing on their precious human rebirth. But there is actually a source in Indian shastras or commentaries for the combination of these two in that both Nāgārjuna and Śāntideva both spoke of these things together spoke of doing these two practices together. So that means that Lama Tsongkhapa’s adaptation of these two practices together wasn’t something that contradicted the earlier works of Buddhist saints.
So we’ve stopped there for today if anyone has any questions. Okay. Would the Buddha still return when everyone’s enlightened? He said there is no sentient beings. Someone said,, but, Geshe la, you can’t have Buddhas without Buddhas. Yes.
Buddhas without sentient beings because a Buddha is defined by whether they by not being a sentient being. So if you don’t have sentient beings, you don’t have Buddhas. And he goes, well, what happens to them? And I said, I don’t know. But they wouldn’t be called sent Buddhas anymore because only sentient beings say something.
He said, no, you’re not thinking about it straight. What happens to them? There has to be Buddhas. They’re just not doing anything. Okay.
That was some debate that I didn’t understand. Something about Samsāra if if there’s no if you have all beings are Buddhas, that means that there’s no sentient beings and there’s no Bodhisattvas. That means that there is no Samsāra. Mhmm. Okay.
So then there’s still Nirvāṇa and there’s still Samsāra. Okay. So all sentient beings have become Buddhas, therefore, no sentient beings, but that doesn’t mean the Buddha disappear. But he said there’s heaps of debates about what happens to Buddhas when there’s no sentient beings. So there’s yeah.
So sometimes they they cease to exist, sometimes they do. You know? But if Buddha’s if if everyone becomes a Buddha, then that doesn’t mean the Buddha disappear. But it means that their prayers have been accomplished. Okay.
So, no, that’s not gonna happen because a Buddha is a fully perfected being. So there’s nowhere to go from that. So it doesn’t mean that they have to go around and become sentient beings again or in in some other form because there’s nowhere to go from being a Buddha. It’s it’s the definition of perfection. So you can’t go anywhere from there.
So it but he said, but everything’s okay then. Don’t have to worry. Yeah. Uh-huh. Did everyone hear that?
Yeah. Anyway, how to enjoy pleasure without creating how to enjoy pleasure without creating negative karma. Why did you turn that off? Oh, sorry. I’m just like, I’ll speak louder, I promise.
Okay. So in actual fact, the way that we look at happiness or pleasure or or something in in this in this lifetime is in itself a non virtue. So in actual fact, to say how do we enjoy pleasures without avoiding attachment, having attachment is not possible, right? Because by enjoying pleasures, you’re attached. And by being attached to pleasures, you’re going to achieve, you’re going to establish the causes for suffering, right?
So there’s, it’s always a situation where if you’re thinking I need to have enjoyment, then you’re creating the causes for suffering. Because you look at the situation, what is it that you need? We think, okay, I don’t wanna not be happy. So by the thought of not wanting not to be happy, then we are setting ourselves up for a situation where we can experience suffering. So being attached to having a happy situation or being attached to having pleasures and happiness in this lifetime is in itself going to create a pattern where we need that.
Therefore, it’s a non virtuous action, right? It’s non virtuous by its nature. Okay. So what we need to do is to So if we look at it from this situation, it means If we look at it from this situation, it means that we can’t it seems like we can’t experience any happiness. Right?
So what we need to do is to find ways to transform that experience. So it’s not that we’re dependent on being happy by external factors or happy by pleasant situations, that we have a means for using that or incorporating happy experiences into the path. So if we think by me having this happy experience may all beings have this happy experience, may this be a cause for all beings to have this experience. So not just make it about ourselves, wish that all beings have the same happiness that we’re experiencing. Or if we think may make an offering of the happiness that we have, we think in our heads, oh, this is a really good experience.
I’ll make an offering of this experience to the Three Jewels. So in either of these ways, we’re not making it about ourselves. We’re either sharing the experience or making an offering of this experience so we’re not grasping it at it. Or we can think this experience of happiness is a result of something positive I did in past so we can rejoice in that virtue that we did in the past. So in this way, when we have a pleasant experience, then we’re able to transform it, so it doesn’t it doesn’t involve so much grasping at the experience.
Yeah. Well, and the other thing is to remind ourselves that it’s not true happiness. So, yes, so there’s many different ways that we can approach it and other ways to keep just remind ourselves, okay, not to get too caught up in the experience because it’s not true happiness. It’s not permanent. And it’s it’s not going to it’s not going to be something that we can rely on.
Yeah. Okay. So whether something is Dharma or not doesn’t depend on whether it’s Buddhist or not. You can have any practice that is focusing on the next life, whether in whatever form that takes is said to be a Dharma practice or a religious practice. But for something to become a Dharma practice, there needs to be that focus on the next life along with a sense of refuge in the Three Jewels, if it’s a Buddhist practice.
So anytime that someone does something with a motivation to benefit their next life, whether it’s through their belief in the Christian tradition or in a Hindu tradition, and it’s a positive action, then becomes a positive result to that in their future lives as a positive rebirth. If someone’s doing an action for the benefit of others without any religious affiliation, then it also becomes a very positive action that can act as a cause for them to achieve a precious or not a precious human rebirth, but a good human rebirth. That’s not rebirth? I guess it’s the same thing. They’re still accepting a continuation after the after death.
They’re still accepting a type of rebirth after death. So just because it isn’t in the same technical way as we do, as Buddhist do, then doesn’t mean that it’s not accepting future lives. So