Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 6-minute session from the Stages of the Path series, Geshe Pema Tsering uses a student’s cup of tea to make self-cherishing immediately concrete. He asks the audience to examine their own minds: is your thinking oriented toward your own benefit or toward others’? Self-cherishing, he explains, is the root cause of repeated rebirth in saṃsāra; the Buddhas attained enlightenment precisely by abandoning selfish aims in favour of altruism. The session closes with a light exchange: a student’s simple desire for tea is identified as textbook self-cherishing, though Geshe Pema Tsering notes that even drinking tea can become a well-motivated act if done to nourish the body for the sake of others.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 SoP 2004 06 20.mp3
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-06-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~401
To others or you’re looking to yourself so you need to investigate your mind and see what your mind’s doing does your mind focus on others or does it focus on self do you think about your own benefit or do you think about others benefit and so when there’s no sense of own benefit and everything’s for others benefit then you’ve this mind. So it’s a matter of investigating to see what you’re thinking. So up until this stage we’ve been cycling in saṃsāra because or being reborn and reborn in saṃsāra because we’ve been cherishing self. And it’s brought us this experience of suffering. The Buddhas got rid of their cherishing of self and start cherishing others and they become Buddhas because of that, because of giving up on selfish aims and focusing on altruistic ones.
We can also see from our situation, are we becoming enlightened? And if we are, then we’re cherishing others. Okay. Yes. Yeah.
Of course. Thank you, buddy. So you said now you know. Now you’re an expert. He doesn’t believe you, Joe.
He said he’s probably got lots of questions. I guess I’ll say, oh, no. I said, well, if there’s no questions, we can’t. She goes, I haven’t finished my teeth. He’s got he’s got nice teeth.
He said definitely. He’s thinking about his own benefit and and, yes, and how how is how he is enjoying the tea. So, yes. self-cherishing. Oh, that is?
He said it is possible to turn drinking tea into being a well motivated action. So if you think you’re drinking tea or you’re eating food or whatever it is you’re doing, you’re doing it to nourish your body in order to be of benefit to others, then drinking tea doesn’t have to be self-cherishing. But Yashila said, But that’s not what he did. He thought, I want some tea. So his drinking tea was definitely self-cherishing.