Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 58-minute closing session on joyous effort, Geshe Pema Tsering tackles the discouragement that arises when the path to Buddhahood seems impossibly long. His central argument: if we have spent countless lifetimes striving for ordinary happiness without success, why balk at equal effort toward something that genuinely works? He draws on the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life and Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland — including a striking image of bodhicitta as a horse that clears every obstacle — then likens the bodhisattva’s preparation to a king readying for war: cavalry, weapons, defenses, and the conviction to see it through. The talk closes with a Guru Puja verse on willingness to remain in hell realms for eons for even a single being, and a Q&A on why cultivating the wish to help is itself transformative, even when direct help is impossible.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 SoP 2005 05 08.mp3
UUID: 59d114e5-bafa-4aad-8a57-e52adf764534
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-05-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 58.3 minutes
Words: ~4,740
Sorry. I’m going to get Geshe-la’s glasses. So please, before you’re listening listen to this teaching on the graduated path from the Guru Puja, try and remember that just the same as you, all other sentient beings. Yeah. So maybe it’s just Yeah.
Take it down. I guess the last week, Geshe-la told me to put it on my lip. Maybe I need to do that. But if I do that, that’s really loud. Right.
So, before you listen to the teachings, try and remember that all sentient beings are exactly the same as you in that they don’t want to experience suffering and want to experience happiness. And because this is the case, because it’s just as important for other sentient beings to be free from suffering as it is for ourselves to be free from suffering then we really should try and do something that’s going to alleviate not only our own suffering but the suffering of all other sentient beings. The only thing that we can actually do that brings this about is to attain Buddhahood, to work towards Buddhahood because as Buddhahood we can lead other sentient beings out of suffering. We can show them the path to Buddhahood and the way to abandon suffering. So in order to bring that about we first need to become Buddhas ourselves.
So try and develop the motivation then that the reason that you’re here, reason that you’re listening to these teachings is in order to develop understanding that will inspire you to put the Buddha’s ideals into practice and by doing that attain Buddhahood yourself and therefore be able to lead all other beings out of suffering. Okay. So we were talking about joyous effort last week and because this is the last week of this text then we’re going to give an overview of the last three perfections. One we’re up to is joyous effort. So joyous effort to be brief is this idea that we need to have a strong conviction that what we’re doing is worthwhile doing and have joy in what we’re doing in order to be able to work as hard as we do, we need to do in order to become a Buddha.
So if you develop a bodhicitta, right, the idea of bodhicitta is that you will attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. This is a very noble idea. What happens after this however is that you have to think, you have to actually do it. You have to actually put in the effort to do it. And the things that you need to do in order to attain Buddhahood can be see can appear very overwhelming.
It can be it seem like it’s just too hard and we won’t be able to do it. Right? And this idea that something’s too hard and we won’t be able to do it is a form of laziness. Yeah. It’s a form of something similar to laziness that we don’t actually have a word for in English.
Anyway, but it’s this idea that well if I can’t do it why why should I bother trying? Why should I bother starting? Yeah? And and it’s not the case that you can’t do it, that we can’t do it, but we can sometimes use this as an excuse if it’s too hard not to do anything. Right?
So by thinking, well it’s difficult to attain Buddhahood, there’s all these things we need to do, we can become discouraged and think it’s too hard, I can’t do it and then get caught up in that lazy way of thinking. So what joyous effort is or what diligence is, is the mind or the way of thinking that is the antidote to that laziness. It’s the conviction that what we’re doing is worth while, the conviction that we can attain enlightenment and the conviction that the things that we need to do in order to reach that state are worthwhile and we should engage in them and we can engage in them. So this idea of that that we can’t do something is too hard, so why should we bother? And it’s described here as being, not very clever.
This is the says it’s a not skillful means, right? That’s not very well said. So, it’s the opposite of skillful means or the opposite of expertly dealing with a situation. The thing that the Bodhisattva needs to do or Bodhisattva needs to do is to turn that around, is to find some way to turn that laziness around so that they actually enjoy putting in effort in order to attain enlightenment. So if you enjoy doing something, then you’re not going to get to stages where it becomes too hard.
If you enjoy working for others, then when it gets too hard, you’re not going to think, oh, I don’t wanna do it anymore because you’re enjoying it. So you won’t wanna stop. Alright? So the idea is to turn around the way we think about, working hard especially for other beings and towards attaining enlightenment, so that we enjoy it so much that we’re not going to want to stop. So, the way that the body sufferers are told to look at it is that what they need to develop is mental strength.
If you develop mental strength then more difficult things become easier and easy things become effortless. We don’t have to even think about them. So we need to develop mental strength and the way that we develop mental strength is by looking at what we’re actually dealing with. So if we think about for a start all of the effort we’ve put into making ourselves happy not just in this lifetime but in many other previous lifetimes. All of the effort we’ve put into making ourselves happy that hasn’t worked, that we haven’t gotten anywhere with.
We’ve put in so much effort to make ourselves happy and we need to look are we always happy? And the answer is no. So if we’ve put in that much effort to do something that wasn’t worthwhile, why are we balking at putting in as much effort to do something that is worthwhile? Alright? And not only are we working towards something that’s making ourselves happy but we’re working towards something that’s making all sentient beings happy.
By becoming Buddhas we have the capacity to lead other sentient beings out of suffering, to show other sentient beings how not to suffer and by to influence and to influence them to influence them away from doing things that are going to harm themselves. So if we have been willing to put up with so much to achieve our own happiness and it hasn’t worked, why don’t we want to put in just as much, effort to attain happiness for all beings, to work for happiness not just for ourselves but to lead other beings out of suffering. Why does that seem more difficult than the effort we’ve put in to make ourselves miserable in the past? So if that’s the case then if we can start thinking about it like that then the idea of working towards enlightenment for others becomes something that we’re very convinced about, we’re very happy about. And if we are happy about it in this way then in fact anything that we experience that brings that about we won’t necessarily see it as suffering.
It may be that we’d experience it now as suffering but if we have that conviction, if we have that conviction, if we have that mental strength then anything that we do it will have changed from experience of suffering into being an experience of happiness. If we can understand the outcome clearly then anything that we have to go through to get to that outcome will be very, will be joyous about or think, oh, this is this is it. I’m gonna I I can by doing this, I’m reaching this, this end goal. So it means that our reaction to the hardships we have to undertake in order to become Buddhas even if that takes eons is going to be one of joy. It won’t be an unhappy experience for us to undergo those hardships.
So, in both the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life and the Precious Garland by Nāgārjuna. It backs up this idea in the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life it says that if you ride the horse of bodhicitta or having bodhicitta as being as No, it’s using the idea of riding a horse as being analogous with developing bodhicitta after you have it. And it says that if you do this, if you, are riding the horse of bodhicitta, you will be able to jump all obstacles without a problem. Happiness will lead on to happiness and our mind will become stronger and stronger. And, in the Precious Garland it says that, by developing bodhicitta, things that you had seen as being difficult become easy.
Things that you were unable to practice patience with become experiences of joy and it says this, If you have this idea of working towards enlightenment in order to bring happiness to all sentient beings, so that is such a vast idea. You’re doing things on such a vast scope. Your mind has become so wide that, if you encounter a small obstacle it’s not going to seem like much. If you compare the suffering of all beings with one obstacle that one person can encounter then the experiences is made small by comparison. Alright, so and then not only that but if you’re thinking I have to just go get over this small experience of suffering to, help all other sentient beings then the, the it would be a it would something that you’d undertake joyously.
So then it says given that this is the way your mind’s thinking when you’ve developed bodhicitta that no there wouldn’t even be any suffering of body and if there’s no suffering of body there’s no point saying there won’t be any suffering of mind because if you’ve managed to control your experience of suffering in the body then you’re not going to have any added mental suffering on that. So in this way because it’s talked about mental and physical suffering in this it’s worth pointing out that mental and physical suffering are so interlinked. If you have physical suffering it comes about because of karmic actions that you’ve performed based states of mind. So the source of your suffering is always, your mind. It’s always the things that your mind has got you to do.
And the way to deal with that suffering again is through your mind. So, whether you experience suffering or not, whether you’re able to cope with suffering or not depends on your mind. So, it’s saying that if you don’t even if you’re not even distracted or you’re not even worried with thoughts of physical suffering then you’ve controlled your the result of control your mind enough so there’s no point saying that you won’t experience mental suffering either because it’s a given. So not only this, not only is it possible to experience hang on. I’m saying it the wrong way.
So it says that not yeah. We start off with this having to put in hard work to bring this about. In order to train our minds so that we’re not thinking about ourselves, we’re thinking about all sentient beings. And in to train our minds that we are not looking for temporary happiness but we’re striving for the ability to control our minds in order to attain enlightenment and liberation. In order to bring all this about we have to do a lot of work.
The way that our minds work at the moment we’re constantly looking for temporary satisfaction and we’re constantly looking for things that we think will bring us happiness that won’t. So to train our minds so that we’re not thinking like that, to train our minds so that we are wishing to attain enlightenment to be of benefit to sentient beings and that’s our overriding motivation for doing things. We have to put in a lot of work that takes a lot of effort a lot of concentrated focus on what we’re thinking and what we’re doing. But once we have developed that way of thinking, once we have changed the way we think from focusing on, our own temporary satisfaction to focusing on the true happiness of all sentient beings, then everything becomes really easy. Alright?
We’re not we don’t have to keep working at something that we’ve already developed. And not only that, this is where I got to the not only that part, not only that, but if we use that basis to look at emptiness, to look at the lack of inherent nature of all phenomenon, it means that we recognize that there is no being that’s grasping onto something else, alright? There is no, there is no self that needs to be, satiated by these, temporary measures and in that case, once we’ve figured that out, then we perceive all things as being a cause for joy. So with that, if figured out the lack of inherent existence of things, if we figured out that, things don’t have an independent nature then we’re going to the idea of working towards enlightenment which we see as being not inherently existent by ourselves who we see as not being inherently existent becomes an experience of bliss, an experience of happiness. Whatever happens to beings who have that understanding is experienced as happiness.
There’s no distinction in their mind between something as being suffering and something as being happiness. Alright, so if we can keep thinking like this, if we can develop our capacity to put in effort, if we can develop our capacity to enjoy doing these things, then we come to develop an armour like effort that isn’t, dented or isn’t discouraged by any experience that we may have. And so, this ability to keep going to work towards Buddhahood is something that we really need to develop, because of all the things that can come up, of the things that we need to do in order to become a Buddha, there are said to be many different meditation practices, different austerities that we need to undertake in order to bring this about. So, what we need to do in order to bring that about is to develop a mental state in which we can handle everything. Alright?
So, if we’re experiencing everything as joy, it’s not gonna matter what we’re doing. It’s not gonna matter to us what, meditation or austerities we need to undergo in order to become a Buddha because we’re happy about it. So this effort is said to be this is taking joy in effort sorry, it’s supposed to be, it’s so important as one of the perfections because it’s a key ingredient to being able to follow the path to Buddhahood. So it’s said to be a key to achieving Buddhahood as getting all the parts, of the path together in order to become a Buddha. So if we don’t have effort, if we don’t put in the effort to try and understand things, to try and, change our minds then we’re said to be like someone who is trying to attain Buddhahood by sitting down and thinking or by merely thinking, I can just be a good person or I can just have a good mind.
Alright. So you you may have this idea I’m I’m just going to be a good person but if you don’t know how to become a good person, if you don’t know how to have a good mind, you’re not gonna get there. Alright. So it’s not good enough. It it can’t work, sorry, if we just think I’m going to be a good person.
We have to know how to become a good person. We have to have if we wanna meditate, we need to know how to meditate. If we wanna change our mind, we need to know how to change our mind. If we want to if we wanna understand emptiness we need to develop an understanding of that. If we want to develop compassion we need to know why we should be compassionate.
So there’s all these different parts that we need to have an understanding of that we need to know in order to be able to practice. Just sitting there thinking I’m going to be a good person is not going to work. We need to know what we’re doing. You can’t meditate on something if you don’t understand what you’re doing. Right, so, it’s the same, this effort is said to have the same kind of effect.
We have that effort then that changes us from being just wanting to be a good person, wanting to have a good mind to actually bringing it into effect. The effort enables us to put in us to put in the time and the energy into developing the qualities that we need in order to become a good person or in order to have a good mind. Alright, so we can look at developing joyous effort as being like preparation for working towards enlightenment. So in order for us to attain enlightenment we need a whole different arsenal of abilities. So we need the ability to have the aspiration to attain enlightenment.
We need to have this overwhelming aspiration or wish to attain enlightenment. We need to have a stable mind. We need to have the idea of liking sentient beings, liking the idea of attaining enlightenment, liking sentient beings. We need to have the antidotes to the afflictive emotions that will come up, right? Said here it likens this to a preparation for war, right?
So if someone if it because it’s an old text. So it says if there’s a king who’s going into war with another country, they need, cavalry. They need, weapons. Alright? They need, a plan of attack.
And not only that, but they need defenses. They need things to protect them from the onslaught of the opposing forces. Alright? So they have all of these things coming together and the way that we put and then they need to have a conviction that they will see it through. Yes.
This is the things that someone who is going into war needs and it said that this working towards Buddhahood we have to be as prepared. Alright. So we need a stable mind in order not to be to shirk from what we’re going experience. We need to have a mind of love and compassion so that we’re motivated to bring about the victory that we’re looking for. We need a power of we need the power of antidotes.
So if experience negative emotions that we have a response to those negative emotions that we understand where they’re coming from and we can apply antidotes to them. So this is like our defenses. And we need have an overwhelming sense of compassion as our motivating force because if we have this compassion then any of the hardships that we experience will be subsumed by that compassion. So in the same way that in a worldly sense that her king will prepare for war, we need to prepare ourselves for what is going to come apart prepare ourselves to be able to deal with the problems of ego and the hardships that we can encounter on the way to Buddhahood. So that part of that preparation is obviously this idea of armor.
Right? And then and then in the old days they were put on armor in order to to not only to have a feeling of invincibility but also to give them strength to go through whatever happens. So in that way if we look at the way to Buddhahood as being through this analogy then the idea of effort is like our armor. It’s a thing that stops us from being hit by the problems that come up and enables us to keep going. So then it says, as we’re going through this prayer from the Guru Puja, having thought about all this, having thought about what joyous effort is, then visualize the Guru inseparable from the deity that we’re meditating on and then we imagine that there’s light coming down from the Guru inseparable from the deity and the visualization and we imagine that as that enters our bodies and the bodies of all other sentient beings that the obstacles to developing this strength of mind are purified and that they have developed this strength of mind.
And while we’re visualizing that we say the next verse from the prayer which is to say, even if we must remain for an ocean of eons in the fiery hells of Avici even for the sake of one sentient being, we seek your blessings to complete the perfection of joyous effort, to strive with compassion for supreme enlightenment and not be discouraged. Alright, with these two we’re gonna leave this text here and we haven’t got to the last two perfections which was the perfection of meditation and the perfection of emptiness. But next week we start on a text called the seven points of mind training and that has these ideas in it. It has developing a stable mind. It definitely focuses on the perfection of wisdom.
So that will come in that text. We say, we’ll just get up to effort there and then move on to mind training next week. Yeah, because Geshe-la said that we had to guess how many days it was going to take to finish this and we got it wrong by two days. So there’s an advertisement up there and everything. He said, but it doesn’t matter because it’ll come within the next text anyway.
So if you have any questions. Uh-huh. Sorry. We’re just having a discussion about a word that anyway, it doesn’t matter. Because I was trying to say fresh in a philosophical way, guess it’s like, are you talking about?
Okay, yeah, that’s mindfulness. This idea of remembering. Mindfulness and remembering are the same word in Tibetan. So it’s got, so it’s this idea of remembering the things you think are going to make you happy aren’t. And remembering what the capacity of Buddhas is.
There. Definitely. Yes? Okay. I think I get the idea.
I have to translate it before I forget. Alright. Okay, so He said, so let me get it straight. No, he said, so he’s been coming to teachings to listen to the Buddhist things, yeah? And we keep talking about, you have to wanna help others to help others to help others, right?
He said, so then you go home and you’re thinking, okay, I wanna help others, alright? I’m going to do what I can to help others. The next lesson to learn is that you can’t always help others. Alright? You can’t always help because, the idea that we’re trying to put forward is that you have the mind that wants to help.
You have the idea of wanting to help. You also have to learn that you can’t always do that. Alright? And this is why you wanna become a Buddha because you can’t always help beings at the moment, alright? So by becoming a Buddha, then you can always help, yeah?
So then, the idea that he’s trying I guess I said the idea I’m trying to get across is that you always protect protect this mind that wants to help. That you always protect the thought of helping others. You can’t always help others, alright? You can you but it’s most important to keep thinking you want to help others, okay? Whether you can do that or not depends on their circumstances, alright?
And then the other thing is too, if you try really hard to help someone and you can’t help them, you’re trying but you can’t do it, you keep holding onto that mind wishing to help or wanting to help because that’s the key. That mind of wanting to help is what develops you as a person. It’s what leads you to becoming a Buddha and you can think even if I can’t help them now, may I be able to help them in the future. Because you have Buddha nature. Okay.
There is no sentient being without Buddha nature. So before you came here, didn’t know about bodhicitta. Now you know about bodhicitta. So yeah? So So, not knowing something, then you know something, right?
You continue that process and eventually, there’s nothing left to know and you have perfected compassion and wisdom and you’re a Buddha. So it’s a very gradual process. You’re gradually coming to understand things that you didn’t understand and you’re gradually getting rid of negative states of mind that you did have and you’re working this gradual, gradual way and you come to know one thing and then you come to know the next thing and you put that into practice. There’s this path that the Buddha laid out and then that said eventually by following that path, become a Buddha. Yeah, thank you.
Having the mind that wishes to help is helping. So that’s a really good thought. Mind, keep reminding yourself, right? Not only is this person suffering that I want to help, but every single other being, yeah? Every single other being is just like me in that they want to be happy and they don’t want to experience suffering.
So I can keep If you keep reminding yourself of that, keep training yourself in that as being the motive for whatever you do, then that’s developing the mind of enlightenment. Right? So then you’re working for all sentient beings and you want to help all sentient beings. Yeah? So it’s a matter of working with your mind, training your mind.
Yeah? Uh-uh. So So he says that if you can Okay, so if we keep training our minds, right, to be thinking of working for the happiness of others, working for the happiness of others, then this idea of working towards enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings will come up spontaneously in our mind as wanting to eat does at the moment. Wanting to eat. Geshe-la said, we don’t have to sit there thinking, now I have to make myself hungry, The idea spontaneously comes up.
We think, I want food. Yeah? I’m hungry, I want food. It’s a spontaneous thought for us to think. If we train our mind well enough, then this idea of working towards enlightenment for the benefit of all beings will be, no, will be like wanting, will be like hunger.
It will come up so spontaneously in our mind as when we’re hungry wanting to eat. That’s spontaneously. Yes? Text? It’s the text.
It’s a text. Name of a text. And, yeah, he said it’s a text, and Khensur Rinpoche is starting to give teachings on a Wednesday night too. So, yeah, it’s it’s it’s the name of a text that Nāgārjuna wrote, called The Precious Garland and its main focus is said to be eventually on emptiness but the way that he explains it is similar to what we’ve gone through talking about bodhicitta and all of those things. Yeah.
That’s probably why I couldn’t find it anyway. Tell me tell me that I suffered so much before, and I It’s really helping. Okay. Okay. So Geshe said he would generally think that medicine was supposed to be helping your body.
And that if you wanted to help your mind, you would study Dharma and practice Dharma. But he said generally because there are some illnesses that are brain illnesses that you need that affect your mind. And so but in in actual fact, our experience of suffering and experience of, experience of suffering and our experience of happiness depend on our mind. They don’t depend on anything else. So if we fix our mind, then all our experiences can be changed.
So we need to do stuff for our mind. Oh. I thought he was gonna keep going. Time’s up.