Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening from Candrakīrti’s claim that a bodhisattva requires great compassion, bodhicitta, and an understanding of emptiness, Geshe Pema Tsering devotes this 46-minute session to unpacking what “exchanging self and others” actually means — not swapping bodies or minds but replacing self-cherishing with cherishing others. He explains why bodhicitta motivation produces karma that persists until full Buddhahood, unlike dedication to lesser goals, which exhausts positive karma once those goals are reached. Moving through verses 92 and 94 of the Guru Puja, he traces self-cherishing as the root of samsaric suffering, draws on Śāntideva to contrast ordinary and awakened orientations, and introduces the Seven Points of Mind Training slogan “Drive all blames into one.” The session closes with an introduction to Tonglen — taking on others’ suffering and giving away one’s own happiness — leaving verse 95 for the following week.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 SoP 2004 07 25.mp3
UUID: f777abc9-d2c3-46e8-b63f-b2fe82e621a7
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-07-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.0 minutes
Words: ~3,928
Okay. In the entry to the middle way by Candrakīrti, He said that if we have bodhicitta, we have great compassion, have an understanding of emptiness, then we have the entry to the middle way. That’s how he defines it. So, in describing the basis for the text that he goes on to describe the philosophy of emptiness, he starts off by saying this. And so, what this is referring to is that even if we do develop a technical understanding of emptiness, if we don’t have the motivation to achieve enlightenment, then we can’t achieve enlightenment.
We need to have the intention to do something before we can do it, and this intention to achieve enlightenment is the intention of bodhicitta. So this is what we really need to focus our energy on, and this is what we really need to use as our motivation for anything we do, or anything beneficial that we do. We need to try and develop the motivation of bodhicitta. If we develop the motivation of bodhicitta, that we re doing whatever it is we re doing in order to achieve enlightenment, to benefit all sentient beings, then this positive action that we ve done, its result would be achieving enlightenment. If we dedicate something towards that and if we do something with motivation of achieving that, then that s what its end results are.
That means that that positive karma we ve accumulated to carry that around with us until we become a fully enlightened Buddha. On the other hand, if dedicate something positive we’ve done to achieving something in this life, achieving something in the next lifetime, achieving a good rebirth in the next lifetime, or even achieving personal liberation, when we’ve achieved that state, then the positive karma that we have accumulated is extinguished. It’s ripened and it’s gone. And so, if we can develop the motivation of working towards enlightenment, then that’s the strongest motivation we can have, and therefore it’s the strongest karmic imprint that we can put on our mind stream, and it’s something that won’t arrive and won’t evaporate before we become a Buddha. And so in this text, in this quote from this text, then Candrakīrti is saying this..
I am getting it wrong. There’s two of them that sound exactly the same. Anyway, Candrakīrti says that there are these three things we need to work on. We need to work on great compassion, we need to work on bodhicitta, and we need to work on emptiness. If we have these three things, then we are a bodhisattva.
If we don’t have these things, we can’t enter the middle way, can’t become a bodhisattva. Because if you have these things, then the focus for your work, what you’re working towards, is becoming a Buddha. If these aren’t in your mind stream, if you don’t have these developed, then you’re not working towards becoming a Buddha, so this is what we need to develop. So the root of all of these then, the root of compassion and the root of developing the causes for being able to perceive emptiness directly, is this great compassion. So, if we don’t have great compassion, we don’t have bodhicitta.
If we don’t have great compassion, we don’t create the causes for us to develop the insight into emptiness. So, in order for us to enter into the path of bodhisattvas, we have to start with great compassion. Now, great compassion is defined as the mind that leaves behind our own benefit and works for the benefit of all sentient beings, working for the benefit of them in terms of trying to establish them in a happiness that knows no sorrow. So, this is the definition of great compassion. That’s what we need to try and develop.
So, if we have this great compassion, then we’re able to develop the bodhicitta very easily from that. So, that’s what we need to work on first. But this means that on the basis of this idea of great compassion, that we should try and make our motivation for doing anything that we’re doing, it’s listening to teachings, trying to understand teachings, practicing in accordance with what we’ve learned or meditating. We need to do these with the motivation that we’re doing in order to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. So that’s enough meditating this morning.
We don’t need to meditate on bodhicitta now. You just have that motivation. Okay, so we’re still on the exchange of self and others, and we’ve come up to the part which explains the exchange of self and others. So, is in reference to verse ninety two, which says, The mind that cherishes all mother beings and will secure them in bliss is the gateway leading to infinite virtue. Seeing this, we seek your blessings to cherish these beings more than our lives, even though they should rise up as our enemies.
Now, what this is actually describing, and this verse is describing, is a process of exchanging self and others. And we need to look at what that actually means. Because if we have this idea that exchanging self and others means taking on someone else s body and giving them our body, or taking on their mind and giving them our mind, that isn t exactly what it means because A) that s not possible, and B) it wouldn t help anything. So we need to look at actually what we need to do in order to manufacture the exchange of self and And what the exchange of self and other actually refers to is the exchange of cherishing self for cherishing others. So, it it’s not changing body or mind, it’s changing this cherishing that we have of our self and starting to cherish others.
Now, this self-cherishing that we carry around with us manifests in our mind stream all the time. If we watch them, we’ll see how much of our thoughts are focused on our own sense of our cherishing self. Even in our dreams, this is the case. If we watch our dreams, then we’ll notice that all our dreams revolve around what is making us happy. So this sense of self-cherishing is something that’s very strong in our mind stream.
So, this process that we’re talking about here, the exchange of self and others, actually includes two aspects. The first aspect is getting rid of our own self-cherishing, The second aspect is starting to cherish others. This idea of getting rid of self-cherishing and cherishing others may seem difficult for us, but if we want to look at the benefits of this process, then in brief, we need to note that there is no way that we can become a compassionate teacher, a compassionate Buddha, without doing this process, without starting to think of others and getting rid of our self-cherishing. There s no way that we can become a Buddha and therefore have all of the excellent things that come about with being a Buddha if we don t engage in this. So if we become a Buddha, there s all these qualities that we can develop, and there s all these ways that we can help others.
And this is just not possible if we continue to think of ourselves and cherish ourselves. And because we re cherishing ourselves, we re not able to cherish others. So, this means that for us who haven’t gotten rid of our self-cherishing and started to cherish others, we have to look at the situation that we are in now. The situation that we’re in now is the same one that we’ve been in since beginningless time, in saṃsāra. We are in Samsāra, continually cycling through different rebirths and creating all these causes for suffering with our body suffering of the body, suffering of the mind. And the reason for this is because we haven’t gotten rid of our self-cherishing and we haven’t started to cherish others.
Buddhas and bodhisattvas were in exactly the same situation as we are in now, but there was one thing they changed. They stopped focusing on themselves. They stopped focusing on their own goals and started focusing on the goals of others, started thinking about cherishing others. So if we want to behave or we want to become like the Buddhas of the past, and the people who have achieved Buddhahood and become bodhisattvas in the past, then we need to engage in this exchange of self-cherishing for other cherishing. In order to do this, because this is the Guru Puja practice, we then visualize that the teacher, inseparable from the Deity, is blessing us with the ability to do that.
And while we’re visualizing that the teacher inseparable from the Deity is blessing us with the ability to do that, we then focus on the next verse, which says, In brief, infantile beings labor only for their own end, while Buddhas work solely for the welfare of others. With a mind understanding the distinctions between the failings of one and the advantages of the other, we seek your blessings to enable us to equalize and exchange ourselves for others. So then after this, in the visualization process that goes along with this prayer, we imagine that different colored lights come from the imagined aspect of the teacher inseparable from the deity that we’re visualizing in front of us. And these different colored lights come the five different colored lights come into our body. Also they permeate the bodies of all sentient beings who are meditating with us, and we visualize them meditating with us.
And then by going through, entering the minds and the bodies of all sentient beings, then all sentient beings and ourselves have any obstacles or any hang ups that they may have that will stop them from working for the benefit of others, cherishing others instead of themselves. We imagine that all of that is purified by these lights that are penetrating them. And after these lights have purified all of their obstacles to the development of this mind cherishing others, they then develop this idea in their mind stream. So then the next thing that we need to look at is the way that we start to practice exchanging self for others. And first of all, to describe this we find a quote from the Bodhicaryāvatāra by Śāntideva.
And in this it says that any of the pleasures of this world that we may experience come about in dependence on other beings. And any of the sufferings of this world that we may experience come about because of wanting to please ourselves or wanting to make ourselves happy. So, therefore, he doesn’t need to say that much about it. Infantile beings and understanding beings work toward their own benefit. And the Munis or the Buddhas or the intelligent ones work for the benefit of others.
We can clearly see the difference between these and how working for our own benefit creates suffering and working for the benefits of others doesn’t create suffering. And also, if we keep working for our own benefit, then we can’t achieve Buddhahood and we have to stay in saṃsāra where there is no true happiness. So, the reason for this is that there’s no way that we can develop great compassion or bodhicitta if we don’t get rid of our focusing on ourselves, that we need to stop focusing on ourselves and don’t develop compassion for all sentient beings. So this shows us this this quote shows us the benefits of cherishing others and the down fall of cherishing self. Because if we cherish others, which create other causes for working towards Buddhahood.
And if we keep cherishing ourselves and creating karma based on that self-cherishing, then we continue into saṃsāra. So, once we’ve understood the benefits of cherishing others and the downfalls of cherishing self, then this whole idea of exchanging our own cherishing for other cherishing should be something that we’re pretty happy about. It’s something that we should do with a sense of joy, strong sense of joy, because this is what we can do to truly make ourselves happy instead of making ourselves miserable anymore. Once we’ve meditated on this idea, now, and it’s difficult because the word for meditating in Tibetan is actually a derivation of the word familiarize, right? So it says, you having meditated, you gain firm familiarization.
It’s like having familiarized yourself properly, which is the process of meditation. Your familiarization becomes very firm and steady. Once this happens, then this idea of cherishing others will be something that we will see the benefits of so clearly that we won’t want to slip back into cherishing ourselves. And so once we have this idea of this happiness about working towards that goal of seeing how important it is to work for others. And then the process that’s described in our Guru Puja is that we then imagine our Lama inseparable from the Deity arising from space in front of us.
And we think that we really don’t want to experience suffering, and we do want to experience happiness. But all of the suffering that we have experienced has actually come about from our grasping our self-cherishing. Grasping at self, which has led us to self-cherishing. And all of the qualities that we have, all the happiness that we have comes about in dependence on other beings, whether they’ve given us something or given us a chance to create positive causes to experience happiness. Samten?
Agree. You actually keep being ready to say the next thing. All right. So having seen this, then from our hearts, we need to think that what we we need to keep meditating on what we need to do, which is to get rid of all of our self grasping, to get rid of all of our self-cherishing. In the same way that beforehand, if we look at it, we’ll see that any moment of cherishing others tends to get squashed by this self-cherishing that comes up so strongly in our mind stream.
And if we start focusing on that more and more though, then the self, the cherishing others will squash or get rid of this cherishing of self that we have. So these two things cancel each other out. We can’t be thinking of others working for the benefit of others if we’re working for the benefit of ourselves. If we’re just thinking about ourselves, we’re not focusing on others. If we’re focusing on others, we’re not focusing on ourselves.
So by working with these things, we can get rid of self-cherishing. So then what we’re thinking is that cherishing sentient beings who are our old mothers is much more beneficial to our mind. So we need to develop that where it isn’t developed, this idea of cherishing others, and where it has developed, we need to strengthen it. In doing so, it will get stronger and stronger and get rid of all of the self-cherishing that we have in our mind stream. So we need to see the reasons for doing this, the benefits of doing it, and then focus on developing this idea with regards to all sentient beings who have been our mothers.
So having meditated in this way, then we imagine that there’s teacher inseparable from the deity, is that we visualize them before us, and then we meditate on this verse, which is verse number ninety four from the Offering to the Spiritual Guide. It says, since cherishing ourselves is the doorway to all torment, while cherishing our mothers is the foundation of all that is good, we seek your blessings to make our core practice the yoga of exchanging self for others. So, this is what we are praying on when we’re visualizing the deity and the Lama inseparable from the deity in front of us. And then, as with the previous verse, we imagine that five different kinds of light come out of the body of the Deity inseparable from the Deity, and they pervade our bodies and the bodies of all sentient beings who are meditating with us. In doing this, they get rid of all obstacles that anyone may have to being able to perceive the truth of this verse, and also any suffering that they may be experiencing that stops them from perceiving this truth.
And so, in a moment then, all beings, including ourselves, are able to perceive it. We visualize it s happening. This idea of working for the benefit of others and the So the next thing we need to then focus on is the way that we’re able to meditate on the mind training. Other words, the way we can convince ourselves or the way we see the benefits of of this exchange itself in others. The the way that we meditate on this, or we familiarize ourselves with these ideas is in accordance with a quote from the Seven Points of Mind Training, which says, Drive all blames into one, and meditate on the kindness of all.
And so what this is referring to, the first one, driving all blames into one. What that means is, if we want to see what the fault for anything is, then we look to our self-cherishing. If we want to see why we’re in a difficult situation, it’s our self-cherishing. That’s the problem because of the karma it’s created or it’s grasping onto that situation. And if we want to know why we are experiencing any happiness, then we have to look towards the kindness of other sentient beings.
This is what was explained in the previous section. If we keep thinking on this, then that means that our cherishing of our old mother sentient beings will increase. And if it is there before, then it will grow sorry, it will generate when it wasn’t there before. If it is there it will grow stronger and stronger. And not only will it grow stronger, but it will become solid.
It will become stable. It won’t be something that fluctuates. And then from that stable base, it can extend out to focusing more and more beings in more and more situations. So, if we look at the horrible situation of all of these beings in saṃsāra, then this is the way that we first develop this strong sense of compassion for all sentient beings. Right.
Now, Tibetan texts have this way of starting at the end and moving back to the beginning. So you have to bear with me with this because that was just describing this idea of saying that all blame should be driven into one. All blame should be placed firmly. If we want to blame anything, we blame self grasping. And if we want to think of anyone’s kindness to us, it has to be all sentient beings, not ourselves.
Then we have a coming along with this idea, this, that we want to make our focus on others because they are the people that have shown us great kindness stronger and our self grasping weaker because that’s what shows the problem. Yeah. So then, way that we develop this idea, the way that we develop this idea that we develop this longing in ourselves is through doing a meditation practice or familiarizing ourselves with the idea that, first of all, all sentient beings have shown us great kindness. We owe them all something. All our problems stem from this idea that we’re grasping at our inherent sense of self and thinking that that’s important and cherishing that.
So this is what the lines from the mind training refer to. Then if we want to change that around, then we first of all need to develop this idea in our head that all these sentient beings, these ones that have shown us a great kindness are suffering and think about the different ways that they’re suffering. Thinking about how through their grasping at self, they have developed all these different situations for themselves which are incredibly painful and have sense of compassion for that. And we develop a sense of compassion for that. And then we also need to think about how difficult it is for the sentient beings to get out of that situation.
How difficult it is for even for them to develop an idea of liberation, let alone to actually follow the path of liberation and get out of saṃsāra. So, if that’s the case and we actually have the ability to think about liberation, to work towards liberation, and we know that the only way we can get to liberation is by taking on the sufferings of sentient beings. And it’s very difficult for them to work towards liberation. And we start to practice this process of Tonglen, which is taking and giving. And we imagine ourselves taking on the suffering of all sentient beings and giving away all our happiness.
Sentient beings can’t, if they don’t have the circumstances, can’t get out of saṃsāra themselves. So we take on their suffering. We visualize ourselves taking on their suffering so they are liberated. And then, because we have this notion of liberation in our head, and the only way for us to achieve that liberation we know is to get rid of self grasping, then we’re taking on all of their suffering stops our self grasping. So we have this idea then, So, if this is the situation, if the situation is that sentient beings don’t necessarily have the means to get rid of their suffering, and we know that the only way that we’re going to get rid of our suffering and get out of saṃsāra is to start thinking of sentient beings as opposed to ourselves.
And then the practice that makes sense to do then is to take is one where we take on the sufferings of other sentient beings which gets rid of our self-cherishing. And we give away all our happiness to them because they have a difficult time trying to find happiness in saṃsāra. And so we keep doing this practice. The idea of this practice then leads us to the next verse, which we will go through next week. But it’s the of the practice of taking and giving.
And we imagine that the teacher is in front of us, and thinking about how this situation is, what the situation is that sentient beings don’t know how to get out suffering, we can’t get out of suffering until we start thinking of others, then we start practicing the Tonglen practice. And we finish there and we’ll go through the verse Yeah. Verse ninety five next week. Are you tired? He said.
So he said you got up really early and you did a long meditation, so your knees are gonna hurt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Geshe-la said it’s really funny because sits on the chair all the time.
Yeah. And it’s more comfortable for you to sit on the chair all the time. But if Geshe la has to sit on a chair for more than ten minutes, it really hurts. So, yeah, he said that if he sits on the chair for a long time, his knees are going to hurt. So it definitely habits.
If anyone has any questions. It’s a strange explanation of the Tonglen practice because you start at the end and went backwards. It’s, what?