Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A single verse on compassion — “unaffected compassion like that of a loving mother for a precious child” — anchors this 30-minute Q&A-style session from Geshe Pema Tsering’s Stages of the Path series. After explaining the accompanying visualization of light radiating outward to purify all surrounding sentient beings, he fields a sequence of probing questions: why Buddhist texts say “limitless” rather than “infinite” when describing past mothers; whether saṃsāra truly has no beginning yet does have an end in liberation; and how past, present, and future are mental labels rather than independently existing realities. The session closes on past-life regression, where Geshe Pema explains that genuine recall of previous lives requires the stable concentration of śamatha, and that tracing karmic consequences fully lies beyond ordinary minds — only Buddhas can do it.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 SoP 2004 05 23.mp3
UUID: 439aa0cc-b6a9-4a15-8a58-b1a449b4db5a
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-05-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.6 minutes
Words: ~2,149
Okay. Sorry. I’m really sorry because I was just I was looking on the other page because I thought that’s what we’re up to, but we aren’t. So it’s it’s the verse in the Requesting the Stages of the Path, it says, Having considered how all these mother beings have been our mother and have raised us in kindness again and again, we seek your blessing to develop unaffected compassion like that of a loving mother for a precious child. That’s what it says.
Okay, so this means that what we then think is that we are blessed, that we become blessed to understand that. That is, that we become inspired to understand this first. And Not only that, but when we’re doing this visualization, we have the idea that the visualization that’s in the Guru Puja, and we have the idea that all sentient beings are surrounding us. Then we think that light comes from the figure that we’re meditating on and pervades our body and the bodies of all sentient beings that are meditating next to us. We’re visualizing all sentient beings meditating next to us.
As the light pervades these beings, then all the obstacles, all of the things that may stop them understanding this are purified, and this understanding comes about in their mind stream and it’s developed in their mind stream. So we’re not only imagining that we ourselves develop this understanding, but that all sentient beings who are meditating with us develop that understanding. So if anyone has question? You have no questions? I didn’t say infinite sentient beings.
That we have limitless. Limit the this limitless and infinite is not the same because it’s like limit is a concept, infinite means it’s it’s a it is infinite. There’s no limitless, like, there’s a we have a concept that there’s a limitless, and so it’s like there’s it goes on and on. Infinite means that there is that that’s coming from the other side. Do you know what so so limit is like there is no end to it, but if it’s infinite, that means that there is a distinction between these words, but I cannot remember what it is.
It’s too early on Sunday morning. But, yeah, I think I can ask you from a point of view of limitless anyway, but there’s something wrong with infinite. I’ll get back to you on that. Okay. Is the hang on.
So, the idea of a limit is something imposed by the mind, right? So, from our perspective, there are limitless sentient beings. That was what why you can’t use it. But to say there’s infinite is something that is outside of our mind’s concept. It’s like saying that there’s a truth, so that’s why they don’t use that word.
Like, a limit is something that we come up with, so it’s inconceivable for us how many sentient beings there are. But to say it’s infinite gives the idea that it’s a truth outside of our perception does that make sense that’s why they don’t use that word okay but anyway so the the idea of limitless comes in terms of up until now we haven’t we have had limitless because we can’t conceive of them right births and therefore limitless mothers yeah there isn’t an end though they said that there’s no beginning to this process because we can’t conceive of it but there is an end to this process because there is liberation from saṃsāra, right? So if there’s liberation from saṃsāra, then there’s an end for being a sentient being. And that means that there’s an end for all beings because there’s a definite end to their existence. Existence.
So they say there’s two different limits. There’s a beginning limit, like the concept of where things come from, and there’s no limit there because there’s no definite beginning. Yeah? But there is a limit in terms of the end. So the borders, if you like, the first border, which was the beginning border, there’s no such thing.
It disappears beyond conceptuality. Right? And then but the end, in terms of achieving liberation, is an end. So there is an end for all sentient beings because every sentient being can achieve liberation, so will achieve liberation. This is a technical question, I hope.
So if we see people doing these things, if they’re behaving in this way, then we should think, oh, the poor things because they’re trying to be happy in that way. All beings are the same. Those doing their actions and those receiving the actions, all of them are trying be happy. They just don’t know what it is that they have to do to be happy, and they don’t understand karma. If they understood karma, they wouldn’t be behaving in this way.
So through their ignorance and their performing actions, it’s going to create intense suffering for them in the future, or they’re experiencing the results of intense of negative karma. So may I be able to do something that will enable them to be able to start doing positive things instead of negative things. May I may what I’m doing enable them to do positive things instead of negative things for all of them. Said that it’s not just like these sort of things that we’re talking about. Said that that we see television shows all the time where one animal is eating another animal all the time.
Constantly, we see these images of of hunt like one animal hunting another, and that’s the similar thing. They have a ignorant meaning that creatures are behaving in a certain way. I said, I didn’t think you were talking about animal shows. I thought you were talking about Iraq. He said, Well, it’s the same thing.
It’s like that’s a very limited incidence of something that happens in so many different ways in saṃsāra all the time. That’s just one little instance of it, and that’s only a human way of doing something. So there’s many more grotesque things that can be done in other realms. So it’s a very limited idea of how negative things happen. So, for example, the way that animals continue killing each other, or playing with things before they kill them and so forth.
What’s happening there is horrible, and people doing it are going to experience suffering from what they’re doing, and the people who are receiving it are at risk experiencing suffering now. But happens in Samsāra in many more grotesque forms all the time. Yes? Yes? Okay.
In time, we have three different concepts. We have the past, we have the present, and we have the future, yeah? Now, the past is, by definition, anything that happens before now. And the future is, by definition, anything that happens after now. Right?
And the present is the moment we exist in at the moment. So this is the way we define things, yeah? So when we talk about saṃsāra not having a beginning, it’s our mind stream doesn’t have a beginning okay and our mind stream doesn’t have an end because saṃsāra has an end but our mind stream doesn’t have an end yeah because it continues on after we achieve liberation, so the idea of time exists, but it exists in relation to what we’re experiencing now. So, there’s only ever the past, the present, and the future. Therefore, the past is a label, the present is a label, and the future is a label, and it time relates to our experience now.
So time if time is a label and there is the past, there can’t be any definitive first moment of the past. This? So it’s labeled by us. The concepts of time are something that we label. We come up with the idea of.
They don’t exist. Time doesn’t exist from its own side. It exists from the way we perceive it. Yeah? So if we try and look for it, it’s not there.
We can’t find now. Yeah. And, yeah, we can’t find past because it’s relation it’s it’s it’s a dependent origination. Past depends on now. Future, it depends on now, and now can’t be found.
I yeah. Like, it wasn’t a particular time, or did it just arise? Do you know what? I’ve done one. Well, you’re gonna have to help me out a bit more than that because I didn’t get that.
It’s like, if you go it’s just a thought I had. If you look back into your past, if you had, you know, beginnings and rebirth, then, like, say, time is labeled by the mind. Mhmm. That time is labeled by the mind into past, present, and future. Yeah.
So was the past the past? When you were experiencing it. Okay. So That is. So it doesn’t even I don’t know if this helps.
But Geshe la said that it’s not even like this lifetime that we experience totally. Right? About this lifetime, we only experience certain things. We don’t experience we don’t remember everything from this lifetime. We remember things that have happened in the last few years very clearly.
We don’t remember things from when we were very young very clearly, and if we do, then there’s very few memories that we hold on to from there. The whole idea of lifetimes we don’t even need to do it in this lifetime we’re experiencing it at this moment, and we remember the previous moments, but we don’t carry as much from our early years with us, in terms of memories, as we do from the last few weeks. So we experience what we’re experiencing now, but the previous things that we’ve experienced, they’re the past because we don’t know them as well. It’s not just in previous lifetimes. So if we actually think about it, what we experience and what we have is very limited.
What we experience is very limited. What we remember is very limited, even in terms of this. So today is the twenty third of May two thousand and four. Do you know what you were doing on the twenty third of May two thousand and three? So we know what we’re experiencing now.
Don’t know in the same way what we’re doing a year ago even. You’re the last question speaking in time. Now, Oh, I see. So if you can find out what the negative things you’ve done, you can find that. What is the truth behind in today’s science, we do a lot of like hypnotists for past life Mhmm.
Mhmm. Past life regression. But but when we say past life regression in today’s world, we don’t talk so much about past life and that what happened to a kid like maybe ten years ago was something Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So how do we train our minds to develop that sort of insight? Why are we training our minds to develop that insight so we can know better how to remedy the negative things we’ve done in the past? Okay. Okay. So if you are able to develop śamatha, calm abiding, śamatha, if you’re able to develop that, then in dependence on that, you’re able to remember the moment before the moment before the moment before the moment and go back through lifetimes to find out what you’ve done but you can’t necessarily understand what the karmic repercussions of that are going to be the only people who can understand the karmic repercussions of something are Buddhas because it’s extremely subtle okay that’s That’s the first bit.
Right? So you wanna know what people are remembering and what’s going on there with the, you know, like hypnotists and stuff. Right? And we’ll pass that. So Geshe-la said that he thinks that it may be very difficult without developing these meditational qualities to go back and remember previous lifetimes and even things that when you’re really young, And he said that the thing is he doesn’t think people who have very traumatic experiences, which seems to be what this is bringing up actually forget those traumatic experiences they just block them yeah so he said that for example his mother died when he was seven and there’s no way that he’s going to forget that because it was traumatic experience, you don’t forget those things.
These experiences of people I remember aren’t actually things they’ve forgotten. They’re just not consciously remembering. He said, But there are beings who are really young that actually do remember life experiences as well, and that’s a different instance. They’ve, like, for some reason, remembered things about their past life.
But he doesn’t know if they can do some things with computers because he doesn’t know anything about computers. He said that he doesn’t know because he thinks computers are very strange. Doesn’t know what they can do. Okay.