Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A vivid image — sitting unknowingly in a fire — anchors Geshe Pema Tsering’s account of how recognizing suffering generates genuine renunciation in this 42-minute meditation instruction. He opens with practical guidance for beginners: short, frequent sessions in a quiet place rather than long exhausting sittings. He traces the path from calm abiding (śamatha) — effortless focus paired with physical bliss and mental pliancy — to special insight (vipaśyanā), distinguishing placement from analytical meditation. A candid aside where he catches himself contradicting an opening Śāntideva quote adds warmth. The Q&A covers whether progress quickens after calm abiding, how to apply analysis to Tārā visualization, daily practice benefits short of full retreat, and mantra recitation — closing with an explanation of OM MANI PADME HUM and an oral transmission.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 HtM 2003 06 24.mp3
UUID: 36aeee60-0468-45e0-aa43-1a659d687991
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: z DB How to meditate (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-06-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.3 minutes
Words: ~3,329
Okay. So the other thing we can do is if we notice that our mind is sinking down, then we can concentrate on something that makes us happy, and that will lift the mind up. And so if we think about the qualities of the realizations we’re going to attain or something like that that’ll lift our mind up and we’ll be able to focus again on our meditation if we find our mind is getting excited then we have to push the mind down a little bit then we can do this by focusing on things like suffering which pull the mind down a little bit. So by thinking of different things, we can also control the tightness of the mind. So so when we start trying to do these meditations at the beginning, say for example, we had all day to spend on meditation.
If we did this at the beginning, wouldn’t want to spend all our time in meditation. At the beginning, we’d only be spending small amounts of time meditating fairly regularly. If we try and meditate for a long time at the beginning, we just get tired and we don’t concentrate and there’s no point to it. So if we’re trying to do meditation at the beginning, we should try and do lots of little meditation sessions and try and keep the mind happy so the idea is to sit down meditate a little bit then get up and relax then come back and meditate a little bit more then get up and relax so that the mind doesn’t get incredibly tired and that we still have an appreciation for it. So so the other thing is if we’re if we’re beginners like us and trying to meditate, then we need to go somewhere quiet.
If we’re trying to meditate or learn how to meditate at the beginning and we’re trying to do placement meditation then if there’s a lot of noise around we find it incredibly difficult to concentrate so the best place to go to try and develop calm abiding is somewhere where there’s not many people and not much noise somewhere where it’s very quiet In fact, it it said that trying to develop calm abiding in a place that’s noisy and there’s lots of people is a bit pointless. Okay, so it is said that if you keep meditating in this way in a quiet place keeping on focusing on one object that your mind will become quieter and quieter and it will your mind will become quieter and quieter and clearer and clearer your focus will become clearer. The time that you spend being able to focus on the object will become longer and longer and eventually you will achieve calm abiding, which is effortlessly focusing on this object. For us though, this is a bit tricky because we can’t go and spend six months, eight months, a year in a deserted place where there’s no other people and we have no distractions and the only time we don’t meditate is when we eat and when we go to the toilet.
We don’t have that situation in our lives so this placement meditation helps us but we can’t expect to develop calm abiding unless we get that kind of situation. We we come upon that kind of situation. So what happens after we have achieved calm abiding is not only are we able to focus on the thing that we’re trying to focus on for as long as we want without any effort we also get pliancy or flexibility of mind and body now what pliancy of body refers to is like bliss or extreme comfort in our bodies. What pliancy of mind is the ability to focus on any object of meditation we want to focus on. Okay, so the way that it actually happens in order though is first of all, the pliancy of the body is attained.
So that means bliss or happy feeling of the body is attained and then mental pliancy is attained and when those two things are attained that is the definition of what calm abiding is so they come about at the same moment as we achieve calm abiding. What this also means when we achieve calm abiding, means that our mind is no longer what’s called a desire realm mind, but there’s a meditative states in other realms called the form and the formless realm. And once we achieve calm abiding, then our mind is a what’s called a form realm mind. So once we’ve achieved this, we’ve achieved what’s called the lowest of the preparations of the first concentration of the form realm, which basically means that we’re a calm abiding beginner. So by achieving this first preparation of first concentration level of calm abiding, that means that whatever we start meditating on defines what our type is or what type of vehicle we’re following.
So if we start meditating then on renunciation compassion or bodhicitta and emptiness then we’re going to follow the Mahāyāna path. If we start just meditating on renunciation then we’re following the the hearer path depending on what our objective negation is whether it’s the hearer path or solitary realizers path And if we have refuge, then that means that any of these paths is a Buddhist path. If we don’t have refuge, then we’ve got a non-Buddhist meditation meditative state. We’ve achieved a non-Buddhist meditative state. Okay.
So after this, after we’ve attained this pliancy of mind and pliancy of body, or body then mind, and then we can concentrate single pointedly on whatever we want concentrate on and we’ve achieved we’ve become beginner calm abiders. If we then start using analysis to analyse what it is that we were meditating on the object that we’re meditating on that we use as a meditative focus to achieve calm abiding then the analysis by analyzing that object we then achieve special insight. The Sanskrit word you may have heard for both the Sanskrit word for calm abiding is śamatha the Sanskrit word for for special insight is vipaśyanā. So calm abiding is we’ve said is a placement meditation but special insight or vipaśyanā isn’t a calm abiding meditation. It’s an analytical meditation.
So it’s called analytical meditation because it comes about after a process of analysis and not a process of placement. So even though the two things are often talked about together, that doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing because in fact one is placement meditation and the other is analytical meditation. So there’s two different types of this special insight of a they’re said to be what’s called mundane or worldly special insight and super mundane or non mundane special insight. So the mundane special insight is the fact that by achieving the lowest level of the form realm concentration that we’re able to get rid of the grossest aspects of the desire realm. The gross aspects of desire that we experience now have been gotten rid of.
And now and super mundane special insight refers to the insight into emptiness, insight into renunciation and turning away from saṃsāra and the mind striving towards liberation or enlightenment. So that’s the way that you achieve calm abiding and do placement meditation. Meditation. The thing is that now it would be probably very difficult, Geshe-la says, for someone like him to be able to achieve calm abiding because he doesn’t have six months to a year to go and spend by himself in a very isolated place and do nothing all day except for go to sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, and meditate. He doesn’t have that kind of opportunity.
So it would be very difficult, he says, for him to achieve calm abiding. So if we want to do some kind of meditation that we can fit into our the rest of our life and be that we can fit in with families and with work commitments and so forth then perhaps analytical meditation will be better if we started focusing on the impermanence and the three different types of suffering and trying to achieve renunciation and bodhicitta then focusing on these analytical types of meditation will help us to want to practice a Dharma more and try practice it better so they may be of more benefit to us than trying to develop calm abiding in our present situation Geshe-la said, Oh, I’ve done something wrong now because I started off the teaching by saying thinking we can’t achieve enlightenment is a type of laziness. And now I’ve said it ought to be difficult for us to achieve calm abiding. So I’ve contradicted what I said at the beginning or what Śāntideva, the quote from Śāntideva at the beginning. Because calm abiding is is one of the things that we need in order to achieve enlightenment.
So we can achieve calm abiding. If we have this, if we try and develop bodhicitta and focus on bodhicitta a lot, then that makes us incredibly brave. And if we’re incredibly brave, then we think we can do anything. And he said, and I obviously haven’t got that yet. He said he can’t say what’s in your minds.
That’s just what he’s working with. Yeah. Yeah. And then, Tanja, so, yeah, so we’ll stop there. And if anyone has any questions.
Yeah, Anila. This question must become a baby karma guide. Uh-huh. Become quicker. For everybody else, once we’ve achieved calm abiding, does the rest of our path come quicker than the actual first achieving?
Quicker or easier? Or easier. Is it easier to achieve the rest of the paths? So once we’ve achieved calm abiding, then anything that we want to, we can focus on single pointedly. So if we choose to focus on suffering or if we choose to focus on renunciation or bodhicitta, any of these things, can focus on single pointedly.
So it’s much easier for us to progress on the path after we’ve achieved pliancy of body. Because when you achieve calm abiding, have this what we talked about this pliancy, this comfort or happiness or bliss of body and mind. So that means that you’re happy. Not only can you stay in meditation on anything, but you’re really happy to do it. So because you’re really happy to be doing it, it’s a much easier thing to do.
And if you can achieve it, that’s like a really good quality. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Did everybody hear that?
No? Yes? Yes. I just don’t know if I had to repeat. So you both know it and then and you experience it.
So if you familiarize yourself with these two different types of suffering, then you realize that your whole existence is suffering and has been since beginningless time unless you and unless you do something about it and work towards liberation, you’re going to continually be experiencing those sufferings. So your mind both first of all understands it and then experiencing this experiences the different types of suffering. And because of that, it develops the wish to get out of the Samsāra. So by the potential stuff you mean like the suffering of change? Type of suffering.
Uh-huh. No idea. Okay. So do you mean can you try again? He’s saying, hang on.
I’ve got something else to say anyway. Maybe this will help. So at the moment we know we experience the suffering of suffering and we don’t know that we experience that our whole experience is all pervasive suffering and that our pleasurable experiences of the suffering of change right? So we don’t know those two different types of suffering properly. If we did know those two different types of suffering, it would be a similar to experience to if we were sitting in the middle of a fire, right?
But we didn’t realize it, Yeah. That would be like if we only until sometimes it got hot and sometimes it didn’t. When it got hot, we realized it was it was it was harming us. And when it wasn’t hot, then we didn’t think anything that there was any suffering. We thought it was fine.
But realizing that we have that we experience the suffering of change and all pervasive suffering is like realizing that we’re sitting in the middle of a fire and if we don’t get out of it, then we’re going to suffer more and so we wanna get out of it, right? So we realize we’re in a fire and then we wanna get out of it. That’s what realizing suffering is and then once we’ve realized suffering properly, the mind of renunciation comes about. Okay, so it’s not that we experience more suffering, it’s that we realize how much we’re suffering now and once we realize how much we’re suffering now then we do everything we can to get out of our situation Yeah. I’m following up.
Yeah. So so, basically, once we attain this pliancy of body and mind, it gives us bliss Yeah. We then also experience more suffering because we realize that we realize all pervasive suffering and we realize the suffering of change and we actually realize that we’re in a fire. So once we get to the point. So do we get calm abiding real and get all, have this pliancy, this bliss and then realize that we’re suffering more, is that?
And so we suffer more. And then do we suffer more even though we’ve got all this bliss? It’s not that we experience more suffering, we just realize how much we’re suffering now. So it’s not that our suffering becomes greater and we experience it more greater. It’s just that we develop this mind thinking I want to get out of here.
I don’t want to experience this. Now oh, hang on. She was up last time. One second. I remember.
Yep. He’s laughing at someone, I don’t know. Yeah. Okay. So did you hear?
No. So if we’re doing placement meditation on Tārā, for example, how would we apply analytical meditation to that placement meditation? So you’re talking about special insight? Okay so for starters when we’re doing calm abiding meditation we’ve been focusing on for example Tārā for a long time. We can sit in a meditative equipoise on Tārā, image of Tārā for days, weeks, months if we want to without losing it.
So whatever we did, we will be able to focus on this one image. So we don’t lose the image. Now in order to bring in analytical meditation to that calm abiding experience, we could first of all start thinking Tārā has all these qualities I need to achieve these qualities in order for me to help sent ient beings, and that establishes, my bodhicitta motivation. Then we can start thinking, okay, this image of Tārā is impermanent. It’s changing in every moment.
And that we we could do an analytical meditation on that. We could do an analytical meditation on the selflessness of Tārā. We could do an analytical meditation on the emptiness of Tārā. We could do an analytical meditation on how Tārā achieved enlightenment. So all of these are different analytical meditations .
Once we understand those, once we understand the object we’re meditating on, that’s when we attain special insight. So once we’ve achieved calm abiding by focusing on Tārā, then we can also anything else we wish to focus on, we can focus on single pointedly. So for example, if we wanted to focus on emptiness single pointedly, we could as well. Now yes. Doing placement meditation?
Or Doing placement meditation. All that towards calm abiding. Right, okay. So are there any small gains that we can make by doing placement meditation and working towards calm abiding even though we may not necessarily achieve it if we don’t get a month off, I mean a year off. Yes, it’s really beneficial for us to try and do placement meditations and teachings.
For a start, we’re doing placement, trying to do placement meditation for say half an hour or an hour then we’re not doing something negative that we could be doing with that half an hour or an hour. That’s the first thing. The other thing is by doing placement meditation and trying to focus on something positive then we’re creating a lot of merit by doing that meditation. Apart from that we are calming our mind, we are getting control of our mind by trying to do these meditations and also if we keep doing it say between twenty minutes to an hour every day trying trying to do these meditations then we will notice even if we haven’t achieved calm abiding we will notice that we’ll be able to stay more focused on the object a little bit more after say a month, or after two months, we’ll be able to know we we will notice we can stay focused on the object a little bit longer. Yeah.
Can you just sort of talk about mantra recitation? Haven’t said anything about it at this point. Is that As a meditation. Meditation. As a meditation.
So can Geshe-la talk are you guys off? Did you guys hear that? We could go on for a while. Yeah. Did did can Geshe-la talk about mantra recitation as a mode of meditation?
And ask to do the the Mani thing. So the way that we use mantra a meditation practice is for example if we were going to use the Mani, or the OM MANI PADME HUM mantra which is Chenrezig’s mantra, that first of all we would try and visualize Chenrezig in front of us. We would once we visualize Chenrezig, try and imagine Chenrezig clearly in our mind, then we would try and develop the idea that in order to benefit all sentient beings we want to become like Chenrezig. So we’ve been trying to do analytical meditation on bodhicitta after we’ve done that if we imagine that the words we’re saying are like the verbal manifestation of Chenrezig so we are working with our mind concentrating on Chenrezig and our mouth or our speech is concentrating on Chenrezig as well then this becomes an incredibly beneficial type of meditation. So we visualize them then we start saying the OM MANI PADME HUMs as much as we can after first of all establishing a bodhicitta motivation through analysis.
So Geshe says there’s a lot you can say about the Mani or OM MANI PADME HUM. He said, it’s like I said over on Kangaroo Island, remember? We did it for about a couple of hours. And I was like, yeah, but these guys didn’t hear it. So he said, so to say in brief, what we can say Om Mani means is that the Mani and the Padme refer to the method and wisdom of the path and we could also say that because it’s six syllables that each syllable can refer to perfections and one of the six perfections.
So if we have those two thoughts in mind, then that’s a brief way to remember what the OM MANI PADME HUM means. Saying OM MANI PADME HUM is of enormous benefit. So Geshe-la said he’s going to say the mantra and he wants everyone to repeat it after him. So if you don’t repeat it, there’s no benefit. There’s no transmission happening.
If you can say it after him, would be good. Yeah. So please say after him. Okay. So you said there you go.
That was the oral transmission. Oh, yeah. And everyone’s willing to come and talk to somebody to practice. He said that’s a good idea. Yeah.
I’m very good. I’ll do this one. So is that okay? Can you do as well? Please.
Thank you. Oh, yeah. Dedication.