Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A vivid image anchors this 45-minute Lamrim commentary by Geshe Pema Tsering: self-grasping as a demon that has set up house in the mind since beginningless time, making us mistake an interdependently arising self for a solid, autonomous I. He opens by grounding all practice in refuge and bodhicitta, then draws on Śāntideva to outline three benefits of suffering — it dissolves pride, kindles compassion, and steers the mind away from negative karma. A television-show analogy then illustrates how we mistake dependently originated phenomena for solid reality. A Pänchen Lama verse describes direct perception of emptiness and, extending into tantra, the union of bliss and emptiness. The session closes with the practical point that any experience — praise, blame, wealth, poverty — can be taken as the teacher’s blessing and transformed into the Mahāyāna path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 SoP 2004 08 29.mp3
UUID: 15e64dd4-34fd-4b23-a249-e7af5629d0a2
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Stages of the Path (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2004-08-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~3,326
So this person who was from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery a long time ago I didn’t watch one, don’t I? Oh, jeez. Good Sunday morning. So a student of one of the Pänchen Lamas, the fourth Pänchen Lama, who his name is, like, Kashi. Yeah.
Kachi Kachi. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, he was a student of the one of the Pänchen Lamas. Oh, and he wrote this.
Yes. So the person who wrote this commentary, whose name I didn’t know. Anyway, so he was a student of the Okay. Now from establishing who this person is, we can find out which Pänchen Lama he was a student of. It was the first one, the one who wrote the Guru Puja.
So the man who wrote the Guru Puja’s student wrote this commentary that we’ve been working from, and he also said, in another text, because he apparently wrote many texts, he said, To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I always go for refuge. Anything that I may attain, any true happiness and pleasure I may attain will come about as a result of bodhicitta. So what this is talking about is that he starts off his text in this manner and it shows what are the most important parts of his practice. Anything that he does, anything for it to become a Buddhist action, anything for it to become an action that lead to nirvana or Buddhahood has to be premised or has to be based upon this idea of refuge in bodhicitta. So in in brief, what this is referring to, these are two different ways of thinking.
The first of these is the is the thought of refuge. And what refuge refers to is the idea of our mind or our thoughts going towards the way of the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha from now until we become enlightened. That means that we constantly keep the Three Jewels in mind and try and perform all actions in accordance the instructions of the Dharma. So in accordance with the instructions of the Dharma that came through the Buddha and the help of the Sangha. So if we do this, then that means that we have to keep reminding ourselves of the Three Jewels.
We have to keep reminding ourselves to follow the precepts and the instructions. So for example, before we eat, then we make a small offering to the Three Jewels and remind ourselves through prayers in the daytime and the nighttime. Through doing this, you can stop yourself from creating negative karma that you have to experience results of. The reason that you go for refuge to the Buddha’s Dhamma and the Sangha, the reason that you are constantly directing your mind in that direction, or that we are directing your mind in that direction, is to achieve enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings. By becoming Buddhas, we are able to show all other sentient beings how not to experience suffering and show sentient beings how not to experience suffering and lead them out of saṃsāra.
This is the mind of bodhicitta. The refuge is the way, the focus that we have, and bodhicitta is the aspiration or the reason for that focus. So what he was saying in this quote is that if we are able to do to have these two things, we are able to have the motivation of bodhicitta and the base of a refuge before we do any positive actions, that positive action that we do doesn’t just have limited outcome, it becomes a cause for us to achieve Buddhahood. It’s a practice of the Mahāyāna Dharma. This is the motivation and the focus that we should have for doing any virtuous thing.
Today we’re going to listen to the teaching on the Lam Rim and then from any other study we do, any other understanding that we develop, we should try and do that with a motivation to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings and base that motivation on refuge. So where we’ve arrived to in the text is to apparently there was a section back pages ago that divided the next few verses that we’re going through into the development of bodhicitta, the view of bodhicitta and the practice of bodhicitta. Apparently, because I completely forgot, we are up to the second part of this, which is the view of bodhicitta, which is basically that we need to remind ourselves that the practice of of working towards Buddhahood and developing bodhicitta is all done within a sphere of emptiness. So with reference to this, there is a quote from Śāntideva’s text, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, that starts off by saying: up until this point in the commentary, you’ve been describing how suffering can actually be a cause for us to develop good qualities. This quote from the Bodhicaryāvatāra starts off by saying: Apart from that, suffering has quality.
So the the qualities or the the positive qualities of suffering are said to be as follows. First suffering enables us to get rid of pride. If we don’t experience suffering it’s very difficult for us to get rid of our sense of self importance and arrogance. But if someone suffering, is very difficult for them to be arrogant or prideful at the same time. Another good quality of suffering is that it enables us to develop compassion for those in saṃsāra, for all other beings who are suffering.
If we didn’t have an experience of suffering, it would be very difficult for us to have empathy with others who are suffering. The third good quality of suffering is that through experiencing suffering, we’re going to want to turn away from the causes of suffering, that is creating negative karma, and we’re going to want to create the causes not to suffer, which is to perform positive actions. So if we didn’t experience suffering, we wouldn’t be able to do any of these things. If we just experienced happiness all the time, then actually eliminating pride, developing compassion, and not wanting to create the causes for suffering would be very difficult. So if we think about this again and again again, then we’ll develop an understanding of how to turn negative situations into helpers on the path to enlightenment.
We can do this because if we are able to perceive suffering, we’re able to perceive situations that may be difficult in this way, and we think about how they can be helpful again and again and again, then they cease to actually be problems in their own right, but become friends that can help us to develop as beings. Okay. So if once we’re we’re doing this practice, we also have to be aware, as we were talking about earlier, of the view with which we’re doing this. Now to describe the view with which we should be doing these practices, the author of the commentary has a quote from Pänchen Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen, who’s the fourth Pänchen Lama. And he says, since beginningless time until now.
So as saṃsāra has no beginning, it means that, like, since beyond the concept of time until now, we’ve been experiencing saṃsāra. And then it says, as from then until now, at our heart there has been a demon or a ghost abiding. So Geshe la says, there’s like this ghost that set up house in our mind, or a demon that’s it’s made itself comfortable there and it’s difficult to chuck out. What this ghost or what this demon’s up to is that it’s trying to convince us that something that’s selfless is actually a self. So it’s trying to convince us that it has convinced us that we are an inherently existent self when we’re actually not.
The way that it works, the way that it does this, is to trick us or to make our perception foggy, so that it seems to us that it will actually benefit us in the short term to do what it says, this self-cherishing, self grasping attitude. But to this fog making ghost, we’ve actually had to experience countless eons in hell before and had all these amazing amounts of suffering. Experienced all these different suffering different existences that were full of suffering. So if we think about it, then this is actually situation that we’re in, and we can see how that works in our mind even now. We can see the way that we it’s like we’re slightly possessed and think that we are something that we’re not.
That is, we think we’re an inherently existent object, and we have a self-cherishing, grasping is itself present in our mind stream. It’s something that we think about all the time. We’re constantly thinking, I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me. It’s not just that there’s a general idea of self there, we also this self wants stuff. This self wants certain things and doesn’t want other things.
It wants things that make it happy, and it doesn’t want other things that things will create suffering. We’re constantly driven by desires for things this self or this I wants or this me wants, and we’re constantly trying to avoid other things that this me doesn’t want. Through this, through being thrown around by our desires and through hatred towards the things that we don’t like, then we’ve created all this enormous amount of negative karma, which in the past and different existences have led us into creating the causes to be born in hellish states where we experience immense suffering. So we we’ve got this So this is the this this this mind is this this problem is a this demon that’s in our mind stream is a what it is is actually the thought that grasps that inherent existence as being as inherent existence at the idea of an inherently independent eye that we need to look after. Now, this is the way we perceive it to be, but this is a mistake.
We’re not an independent I. We are actually a label that we’ve given to a collection of causes and conditions and think that we’re an inherently independent I. On the basis of this idea of an inherently I, we go about making all sorts of mistakes. The way that we actually exist and the way that all phenomena actually exist isn’t as solid independent entities. All phenomena, including ourselves, exist as interdependently originated phenomena.
We don’t exist really solidly the way we think we the way that we appear to exist to ourselves. Phenomena in ourselves don’t appear the way they don’t exist the way they appear to us. And it’s a bit like we’re watching if we’re taking everything on a television set that we see or everything in a show we see to be for real. When we’re watching television, may we get or when we’re watching a show, we may get caught up in the show and start believing that it’s real, but we know eventually that it’s not. It’s the same sort of thing that we do in reality.
We look through thinking that everything’s real, and we have these reactions to this, and we these reactions to that, and then we carry on as if everything is real and create all this negative karma. But it’s the same sort of thing that’s going on in our reality as is going on when we get caught up in a show or when we caught up in a movie. Because if we get caught up in a movie, what’s happening is we’re seeing the coming together of all of these preparations that went into making a movie, It appears to us to be real for a certain amount of time. We see the acting that’s being engaged in there. People who are doing the acting have to rely on certain resources to put across emotions to pretend to be someone else.
They’ve had to bring all of these conditions together to make this show appear for us. That’s kind of what happens in reality. All these conditions come together and they present a show for us. But the difference is that when we’re watching something in a show or a play or a movie, we recognize that someone has put all these things together and it presenting itself as being real, but it’s not. But when in our day to day lives, we don’t recognize that everything comes into being based on causes and conditions, and all of these things have come together to bring a certain instance or a certain phenomena into being, and we think that those things exist by themselves without any of these causes and conditions.
So so what happens there? The because we’ve mistaken this show for being reality, being a solid existence with phenomena, existing independently, that we need certain things and don’t need certain things. What happens then is that we, perceiving ourselves to be an independent and solidly existent autonomous thing, start doing things. We start reacting to desire and aversion and do negative things, or we may even start to try and do positive things. We may think, I’m going to try and be kind to people, I’m going to practice meditation, I’m going to study religion, or any of these things.
And these, even though they are positive actions, if they’re motivated from a sense of self that’s a mistaken sense of self, mistaken sense of self in that we perceive that self that is doing these things to be an autonomous individual that is inherently existent, then those actions that we’re doing, while they may be positive and lead to an outcome that is pleasurable, are still causes for saṃsāra. Within saṃsāra, saṃsāra is created by us grasping onto this idea of an inherently existent self and inherently existent phenomena. If we’re working from this basis, from this idea, and then do something positive or do something negative, then the results of that action is still going to be saṃsāra, whether it’s happiness in saṃsāra, whether it’s suffering in saṃsāra. This is what we’ve been constantly doing. We’ve been constantly in saṃsāra because we’ve been constantly holding onto this idea of our self an inherently existing independent thing.
This in the past, because we’ve done many negative things for the self, led us to experience many rebirths in hell. Okay. So within this the the fourth Pänchen Lama, Pänchen Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen, is but today, I’m a very lucky person because thanks to the kindness of my teacher, I’ve been able to see what the real problem is. I’ve been able to see that the the my real enemy is this state of grasping an inherent existence, state of self grasping, self-cherishing. Through the kindness of the teacher pointing out the true reality as opposed to this mistake I’ve been making, then I have been able to perceive the natural state of the my unmistaken of my this I’ve I’ve seen the mistake of self grasping.
I’ve seen the mistake of thinking I am inherently existent. And in the same way as a son comes from the mother, I have been able to develop I have been able to develop a mind perceiving the the clear light nature of of of mind. I’ve been able to perceive the the clear light nature of reality. And so seeing the object is the light nature that is the dharmata and that the being that is perceiving this has the same nature, I am then able to perceive the self arising wisdom that sees these to be inseparable. So if it this is actually explaining emptiness from the point of view of tantra.
From the point of view of a sūtra, the way that it would be explained is that one is able to perceive this that Pänchen Lama is saying is perceived the lack of inherent existence of objects and therefore developed an understanding of emptiness, perceived emptiness directly. And from his perception of emptiness directly, he has eliminated self-cherishing and self grasping. So that’s the way that he is presented from the point of view of the sutras. But in the tantras, it goes one step further and says that mind that is experiencing this emptiness, which is in a state of great bliss because there is no suffering to be had when you perceive that there is no self to suffer, and the object that it is focusing on, which is clear light, inseparable. So this is what is referred to as the union of bliss and emptiness, which is the tantric view of emptiness.
So, basically, what we have to take away from this is that all phenomena come into existence on the basis of causes and conditions. Are what’s called dependently originated, in that they don’t exist by themselves. Everything is interdependent. And as everything is interdependent, it lacks inherent existence.
So this means that the way that things play out in front of us is actually all a combination of interdependence and causes and conditions. It’s not as it appears to us to be inherently existent phenomena existing independently. What we need to remember is that all of the things that are happening to us, all of the experiences that we have are not truly existent the way that we think they are. They are actually like an illusion, and if we are able to perceive that all things that appear to us we are able to sorry, we have to remind ourselves that all things that happen to us and all appearances are actually dependently originated. And if we do so, then this means that our practice of taking things into the path is a lot clearer.
Right. So in brief, the Pänchen Lama. So in brief, the Pänchen Lama describes this as whatever happens to us, whether we are alive or whether we die, whether we are happy or whether we are sad, whether we get wealth or whether we lack wealth, whatever happiness or suffering we experience, what praise or blame is aimed at us, whatever pleasant or unpleasant experiences we have, whatever arises we can take as the blessings of the teacher and and have a mind of happiness or be happy about that. So it’s been it says a la la, which is the opposite of a ka ka. Akaka is bad. Ala la is good.
So the description of this is whatever negative the description of this or the commentary to this quote is that whatever negative experience that we may have, if we are practicing the mind training, that negative experience can be a cause or an inspiration for us to be able to achieve the Dharma or to achieve what we set out to do with our Dharma practice. So therefore it becomes a friend for us to carry on to the path. If we know this and we practice this, then there will be no negative experience that we can’t we don’t have the ability to carry onto the path of. We don’t have the ability to transform into a Mahāyāna practice. In fact, sorry, there’s one more bullet.
And in fact, they will enable us to develop realizations of the Mahāyāna path quicker. Okay. So now if if you have any questions. Okay. Sorry.
I’m I’ve never I was just saying to Geshe-la, so I’m relieved because I’ve never had to translate the tantric view of emptiness from this school’s position before, so I was worried I made a mistake. Was teasing me and saying, I couldn’t you couldn’t possibly do that, he said. But that was he was joking, so I probably did. Yep. Uh-huh.
Yeah. I want your. Oh. That’s because you can’t understand my mistakes. From your mind.