Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a verse comparing samsaric existence to being storm-tossed in a vast ocean — waves of karma and delusion, crocodiles of the three kinds of suffering snapping from below — Geshe Pema Tsering unpacks the imagery before guiding a purification visualization in which light and nectar from the guru-deity clear obscurations and generate realisations in all beings. The remainder of this 26-minute Lamrim session is devoted to Q&A: he clarifies that attending another faith’s practice does not break Buddhist refuge unless you adopt their refuge object, then tackles why samsaric happiness is “sweet poison” — real in the moment but not happiness by nature. The philosophical centrepiece is his careful argument that ignorance is the single neutral root cause of both samsaric happiness and suffering, with craving arising from that same ignorance and carrying its own momentary pleasure along with it.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 SoP.mp3
UUID: f4bb2799-ee80-46f3-a2db-787888eae777
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 26.5 minutes
Words: ~2,106
I just saw the first line of the Tibetan and read out the wrong thing from here. Right? So the verse we are actually working with is not the one I just read, it’s the one previous which says: Violently tossed amidst waves of delusions and karma, plagued by hordes of water denizens, which are like the three kinds of suffering, we seek your blessing to develop an intense longing to be free from this monstrous ocean of boundless and vicious existence. Now what it’s talking about here is basically a metaphor when it says violently tossed amidst waves of delusion and karma. So what’s that referring to?
It’s like our suffering is like an ocean of suffering or experiencing being stuck in the middle of this huge ocean of samsaric suffering. In the same way that in the middle of a big ocean you get really big waves, in our samsaric existence because of delusions which are also called klesha or the negative aspects of mind. Those and the results of our negative karma are like big waves that push us around. In the same way that if we were stuck in the middle of a big ocean and big waves were tossing us around, in the same way the results of our negative karma and our afflictive minds toss us around a lot and create a lot of suffering for us. The next line it says: Plagued by hordes of watery denizens.
The thing that they’ve translated as water denizens is actually the same word they use for crocodiles. It’s basically saying that these three kinds of suffering that we experience manifest suffering, suffering of change in that all pleasures don’t last,, and all-pervasive suffering, suffering by the nature of the object, that these are like crocodiles that just keep biting at us in terms of our experience. Because this is our experience, we are tossed around by these big waves of suffering and have to keep getting chomped at by our three kinds of suffering, then what we need is a mind that we need to develop the thought to get out of that situation. And the problem is that we haven’t developed thought to get out of that situation. We haven’t even got the idea to seek liberation, let alone start striving towards it.
So because we haven’t developed that understanding, then we’re asking the blessings from the teachers to develop the understanding. So then, to continue on with our visualization that we are doing, in conjunction with this prayer, we imagine that the teacher inseparable from the meditational deity who is in front of us from their body comes light. It says light and nectar together, nectar that comes down our body in the bodies of all sentient beings, all beings who experience suffering. And it gets rid of all the obscurations, all of the afflictive ways of thinking or the negative ways of thinking that cause them to experience sufferings which is actually any grasping of inherent existence or any grasping of true existence gets rid of those completely and in their absence realizations especially those of bodhicitta developing insights into emptiness, these kinds of realizations are generated in the mind streams of these beings. This is the visualization that imagine or we visualize at the end of this.
So we’ve finished the. So if anyone has questions. Yeah. Can you tap me a pen? I have a question.
What’s that? Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot that I was in a room full of Buddhists. Okay.
See, normal people have pencil cases. Thanks. So sorry. Questions? Hang on one second.
Think Mr. Chen’s first.. Yeah. Was being right? Right.
They’re what? They’re Mahikari or something. That’s just it’s Japanese thing. Oh, okay. Light on you and stuff.
And I said, I just asked because they still haven’t phoned again and said, sure you don’t wanna come? We’ve had those come before. I said, well, I’ve taken refuge, so I’m not supposed to, but I’ll make sure whether if I can just go and sit in and just see what you do, if that’s alright. Sure. Okay.
He wants to know he said, what is do you think is their refuge? They get straight from ancestors. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay.
So it’s not a matter of going to do you don’t lose your refuge by going to do things with other people from different faiths. You lose your refuge by going to another objective refuge. So if you’re doing a meditation with them, it’s fine to do a meditation with them. Just don’t use your objective refuge as somebody else’s objective refuge. Okay?
So he said meditate within this by all means. It’s the only thing that is becomes an issue is if you personally choose to take refuge with them. Just sit there and go, yep. That’s nice. He said no, you can’t just go there and sit there because that’s just wasting time, alright?
If you go there and sit there and you have this idea of okay they’re doing their practice and you have something that you’re focusing on and you have your sense of refuge and do the same sort of practice then that’s a better use of your time. Yeah? I hope everybody said sorry before you ask the question. From that non virtue? Mhmm.
Yeah. Okay. I’ve got yes. Oh, okay. And then it says he’s nice.
So Okay. So it becomes about this way for a similar reason. If we were to eat sweet poison, it would still taste sweet. Yeah? Because we are focusing on what is happening to us in that very instant as opposed to the long term effects of that action that we’re engaged in.
And also because we have a very, very ingrained, very strong habit towards searching for samsaric happiness and we’re not habituated towards true happiness. It means that we are conditioned into thinking that samsaric pleasure is true pleasure. So we do things for a temporary reward, a temporary result of that happiness. Although that happiness may appear to us as being happiness, it isn’t by its nature happiness, it’s just like sweet poison. In a temporary instance, it creates happiness but by its nature it’s not happiness because it doesn’t last as happiness and it creates a situation for us to experience suffering in the future because we’ve done a negative action.
Yeah. Yeah. Something positive. Yeah. Right.
Okay. Happiness that’s a samsaric happiness isn’t happiness. It may be the result of a virtuous action but it’s the result of a contaminated virtuous action. So therefore by its nature it is the truth of suffering even though we may experience it as happiness. So what’s happening in this instance is that we have a negative emotion or a negative mind or negative thought such as a desire or attachment that is causing us to behave in a way to get a temporary result which is a temporary happiness that is contaminated happiness and comes about through negative mind states in itself, right?
So happiness and suffering in saṃsāra are both the truth of suffering. Neither of them are true happiness. So they’re both Okay. I have to say it fast so I forget it, right? Get the tape.
Okay. You the cause for both of these experiences is first of all ignorance. And because we have ignorance or because we grasp inherent existence of things, then we’re grasping at things as being inherently happiness or inherently pleasure when they’re not inherently pleasure. So from this negative understanding or this incorrect understanding of reality, right, then we create karma. No, sorry.
I missed the link. Because of our incorrect perception of reality, we develop negative emotions like desire, like anger, like pride and so forth. Yeah? And from those negative emotions, we then do negative actions. Now whether we’re doing a negative a a something that is sorry.
By those negative emotions, we then do impure actions. Right? Now if those those impure actions can be of two two types. They can be positive and negative impure actions. They can be actions that still have as their result happiness or they can be samsaric happiness or they can be impure actions that have as their result suffering.
But they’re still the truth of suffering. They’re still by their nature suffering because they come about from an ignorant point of view. So this means that we have this desire that manifests and we’re searching for some temporary happiness that we view as happiness that isn’t. So therefore searching for that happiness, striving for that happiness as result will be that happiness. But it’s not by its nature happiness.
It’s samsaric happiness. Okay. So, you’re talking about three different things here, of happiness and suffering, and a cause for that experience of happiness and suffering in the saṃsāra context which is self grasping or grasping at things as being inherently existent which is ignorance. Now that ignorance isn’t actually positive or negative, isn’t actually happiness or suffering, it is neutral. Ignorance is neutral.
From this neutral ignorance, we split off into different experiences of so called happiness and so called suffering but both of those experiences of so called happiness and suffering come about from that ignorance and so therefore the cause of that both of those is ignorance The true cause of both of those is ignorance. I said I think he’s getting more and more confused, and Geshe was like, no. It’s supposed to be getting clearer and clearer. Did did you understand that? Yeah.
The reason they come at the same time is because they come from the same cause. So it’s the ignorance that brings about this idea of something being happiness and then striving for that happiness. So the cause for both of those is ignorance. Because they have the same cause, they come about one after the other. So, So therefore, from one cause, there is two different results.
So the cause of ignorance, you have two different results. You have the mind that thinks, I want that, which is negative by its nature, and what it gets when it desires that, which is samsaric happiness by its nature. But both of those things come about from ignorance. And so the other thing is that to think that there’s this idea of, okay, from a negative mind of attachment or the negative mind of desire then there comes about happiness through that action. That’s not the way that it works.
There’s never ever one instance of something happening and then the result of that being a certain. There’s always many different causes and many different results happening to create one situation. It’s a combination of many different causes and conditions that bring about one situation. So to say that one situation’s result is this one thing, like the one situation’s of happiness’s cause is this desirous mind. Doesn’t make sense.
So Geshe la said that even in the action of developing desire or developing attachment or developing craving, perhaps is their word, developing craving for an object, there is a happiness that comes along with that craving. If you see the qualities of something that you desire, then that makes you happy in a way, right? So along with this craving negative mind, comes happiness in a way, because you’ve seen the qualities of something. So, we can see that even in the development of that negative mind, is the negative state of mind, there is some results of positive actions and some results of negative actions. Okay.
So if we can see the way that desire works in this way then, if we’re we’re focusing on three people, we see three people coming towards us, and one of those people is someone that we’re very friendly towards or have very warm feeling towards, yeah, then when we see three people coming towards us, the thing that we will notice is the one person. Right? We’ll see three people, we’ll notice one. The main focus of our attention will be drawn to the person that we have the closeness with. Yeah.
Like this one. Is that okay? Okay. So the it’s probably lunchtime. So if anyone has any questions, then tell us.
But if you don’t, we’ll stop. Two questions in one. In one. Yeah? Yeah.
Is negative. Yeah. So what are we talking about when we’re talking about positive and negative? Positive and negative actions or results? Yeah.
No. In general. So because if we talk about this two different Okay. Yeah.