Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 5-minute session, Geshe Pema Tsering addresses a common misreading of mind training: caring for yourself is not contrary to Buddhist practice. Lojong texts actually demand close attention to your own body and mind — but with a crucial shift in motivation. Rather than eating or staying healthy for your own comfort or for family and friends, the training asks you to extend that motivation to all sentient beings, including countless insects underfoot. He illustrates the principle through the concrete example of eating: self-cherishing treats food as personal pleasure; mind training reframes each meal as fuel for serving others. The paradox, he notes, is that focusing entirely on others is the only path to your own ultimate benefit. Suited to practitioners already familiar with lojong principles.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 SoP 2004 09 19.mp3
UUID: c052aaf2-b3f1-465d-9ca0-2a2ca8514072
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-09-19
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 5.3 minutes
Words: ~690
Okay. He’s drinking tea. It’s safe. So the Geshe-la says the mind training doesn’t say ignore yourself in fact it’s saying pay a lot of attention to yourself pay a lot of attention to the way you think and why you’re doing things right so this includes things of like you need to make sure that you’re sustained physically right you need to make sure that you’ve got the right food, that you’re healthy, that your mind is happy. In fact, it says to maintain a happy mind all of these things.
The that it differs in is that says that you should do this for the benefit of others, so you don’t think ‘I need to keep a happy body so I’m happy’ you think ‘I need to keep a happy healthy body and mind so I can help others’ so anyway so he’s saying that if you think I’m taking this food I’m eating this food and I’ve got a nice place yes hang on hang on I’ve got to finish otherwise I’ll forget okay so I’ve got to take the food and I’ve got to I’m eating food and I’m staying in this place and I’m keeping looking after myself so I can be a benefit to others and he said the thing is though that what we tend to do is we tend to think I am looking after myself so I can benefit the people I need to benefit I can look after my family I can look after my friends and everything he said the mind training that these these mind training texts actually teach us that every time we take food every time every time we eat food every time we eat food every time that we look after ourselves whatever we do that we don’t do it just in order to help people we need to help but we do it in order to benefit all sentient beings even the countless numbers of bugs that may be living underneath where we go.
Countless little numbers of bugs have this idea of wanting to be happy. They do things to make themselves happy. So all beings have this sense of wanting to be happy. So the idea is to train yourself so that everything that you do, every time that you look after yourself, everything you do for yourself to maintain your body is in order to be of benefit to all sentient beings. Pardon?
But hang on, that was the last bit. And in being of benefit to all sentient beings, your own benefits your own if you’re able to focus on others and not yourself in actual fact the paradox is that you achieve everything for yourself all right but the only way to achieve everything for yourself is actually focus on others Yeah. If you focus on yourself, you can’t achieve your own ultimate benefit. So for example, if we are the the way that we usually eat if we take eating, for example, is we think is it from the point of view of self-cherishing is to think, I want this food. This food’s yum.
I’m hungry. I need it. If I eat it, I’ll feel good, and and I’m looking for something that tastes the best for me, and so on. This is the way that we eat self-cherishing usually relates to food. If we were going to try and train our minds to be thinking of others all the time then the way that we would approach food would be okay so my self-cherishing attitude wants this food because it’s yum and so forth but I’m not going to let it get away with that I’m going to take I’m going to eat this food so I can maintain my body so I can stay strong I can stay healthy, so I can benefit others.
I’m not going to take it, but I’m not going to eat this food, so I develop more desires. I’m gonna eat it in order to benefit others. Time for more questions, isn’t it? Okay. There’s no other quest questions?
Sounds alright?