Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A listener’s question about the five Mahāyāna paths opens this 15-minute session with Geshe Pema Tsering, prompting a concise map of how bodhicitta determines whether a practitioner is on the Hīnayāna or Mahāyāna route and where arhathood fits in relation to Buddhahood. Geshe Pema then returns to the Lamrim root text’s section on recognising all sentient beings as former mothers, clarifying that this doesn’t require treating strangers as one’s actual mother in this life — he notes with dry humour that “you don’t have to give them your car” — and addresses why the idea initially feels impossible to sustain. He closes by quoting Śāntideva’s teaching that the mind can habituate to anything, using the analogy of a child learning the alphabet to encourage persistent, incremental training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 SoP 2004 05 16.mp3
UUID: 9e510d82-80d2-495c-aa79-9f5abd8ff290
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 15.0 minutes
Words: ~1,062
I can ask a question. Okay. So there are what’s called five paths once you’ve developed bodhicitta. The path of accumulation, the path of preparation, the path of seeing, path of meditation, and the path of no more learning, which is being a Buddha, right? When you develop bodhicitta, you enter the path of accumulation in the Mahāyāna, right?
You become a first level bodhisattva when you develop the path of seeing. Okay? So, there’s a different level the bodhisattva from the path seeing up from the development of Bodhisattva. Yes. So it’s from the path of preparation no, sorry, from the path of accumulation that you become a So they have these also what’s called so we’re talking about different levels of realization.
Right? And you have the five level of realization that you can develop after achieving or developing renunciation. And you can go all the way through all those different levels of realization through the path of accumulation, which is like a level of realization, path preparation, path of seeing, path of meditation, and become an Arhat, which is being on the path of no more learning, and still not be a Mahāyānist because you haven’t developed bodhicitta. That’s in the Hīnayāna path. I keep saying things like Hīnayāna vehicle and stuff, and it’s just like saying Himalayan mountains is stupid.
Anyway, it’s like a tautology. Stupid. But anyway. Yes. We haven’t come back to a bit of the verse for, weeks.
We have because it’s like one verse and then a big explanation on the verse and then one verse and then a big explanation on the verse. Right? I don’t remember coming to a bit of the the root text in about because we were away for a month. I don’t think we’ve come to a bit of the root text in about a month and a half, two months. Did we?
Yeah. Yeah. Ninety two. I think. But it’s kind of like it seems that when we went through that bit last week, was like overviewing the whole of the bodhicitta section and then it’s going back and going through it in.
We haven’t finished all of it. I think it’s just the end of May. It’s the end of the calendar. It’s not the end of the world, just the end of the calendar. Yes, you sure can.
So what we’re actually dealing here is an idea, right? So we have this idea that because in Samsāra, we’ve been taking rebirth after rebirth after rebirth rebirth after rebirth, right? That means that we have countless rebirth. And that means that every being has been our mother at some stage because there’s countless beings, countless rebirths. When you deal with infinities, you have to have been someone’s mother at some stage, right?
Someone has to have been your mother at some stage. And not only that, but most beings have been your mother countless times because it’s countless. And then through this, we developed this idea of wanting to repay their kindness because in the past they have shown us this kindness. And we developed the idea of working for their benefit because at some stage they have been our mothers. It doesn’t mean that they become our mothers in this life, right?
Because we only have one mother in this life and we only have one person that we can see as a mother in this life. In this life. So we’re developing the idea in order to repay the kindness. It doesn’t mean we treat them all as if they are this life’s mother, if that makes sense. So you don’t have to give them your car.
Okay. So we’ve had all these different rebirths and every time we take a rebirth and we usually have a mother, right? So every time we have reborn to a situation or we find ourselves projected into a situation, we usually come into that experience through a mother that has given us birth and life and shown us great kindness. That isn’t to say that every time that we experience a rebirth or we come into a new existence we have a mother because in the hell realms and the god realms apparently, you don’t give birth through a mother. But there s still countless births.
We’ve had countless mothers. The I the result of the idea. Yeah. And then Okay. Situation we were at.
Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I just don’t know about it. A little bit of which, but, like, the actual result.
Okay. So it’s difficult for us to conceive of this at the moment that’s why we have to keep trying. Yeah? It’s a very subtle type of mind that we need to develop to develop that idea. So what happens is we think, okay, I’ll work on developing the idea of all sentient beings for a couple of days and then it gets hard and we think we can’t do it.
But it’s something that we need to keep persevering at and developing the idea of so we can eventually develop the concept of it. So we have to be persistent in things because if we’re a child, then we don’t know. I was gonna say you don’t know which is the first four letters of the Tibetan alphabet, you do know that now. So, okay. And when we’re a child, don’t know ABC properly.
And if we had to think about ABC then, it’d be impossible for us to think of it, right, because we don’t know it. We don’t understand it. But what you have to do is keep persisting at it until you it becomes easy to you. So once you don’t understand something, of course, it’s inconceivable you have to keep working on it. Of thinking, oh, yeah.
I’m gonna read the Bible or something, you know, all the contracted anger. Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna read the first quarter of a letter. Yeah.
And, you know, thinking, oh, you have to read all that. But the actual step is learning each. Okay, so it’s like Śāntideva said, There is nothing that the mind can’t get used to with familiarity. So, if we start with one idea then we train in this way of learning one thing first and then learning more and then understanding more. This one.
Is that okay?