Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Geshe Sonam Rinchen guides students through a detailed contemplation of suffering within cyclic existence, moving beyond the abstract to concrete, visceral examples. He begins by establishing the preciousness of human rebirth and the certainty of loss at death, then systematically walks through the suffering inherent in birth itself—the womb as confinement, the newborn’s exquisite sensitivity to touch, the unavoidable pain of aging (hair loss, wrinkles, failing teeth), sickness, and separation from loved ones. He demonstrates through dialogue with the audience how mental consciousness alone generates pleasant and unpleasant sensations, drawing parallels to dream experience and deep sleep. He then broadens the scope to cyclic existence generally: the unpredictability of relationships across lifetimes (former enemies becoming loved ones, and vice versa), the insatiable dissatisfaction of saṃsāra despite endless consumption and pleasure, and the futile cycle of abandoning one body only to acquire another. Throughout, he emphasizes that recognizing these drawbacks is essential motivation for genuine spiritual practice, not grounds for despair. For practitioners with foundational Buddhist knowledge.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 CtM.mp3
UUID: 29aedd56-de54-46dc-9c00-68dccee2e3a7
Teacher: Geshe Sonam Rinchen
Collection: Calming of the Mind (Geshe Sonam Rinchen)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~3,708
We’ve been talking about how it’s really hard to come by a human life, how our human life is very precious and important, and that it doesn’t last for long. Once we die, we have to take birth again, but we have no control over that process at present. If we find ourselves in one of the lower states, it would be really terrifying. If we think about the suffering that rebirth of that kind entails, we’ll feel frightened and seek protection. That makes us turn towards the Three Jewels to find a new direction and to seek protection from them.
If we turn to the Three Jewels in this way and take sincere refuge in them and then abide by the law of cause and effect and try to establish good potential, good latencies, then there’s no doubt that we can find another human rebirth. Yeah. So the Buddha himself has said that if one behaves in this way, then it is possible for one to find a human rebirth. So now, if we do all this, it’s possible to attain a human rebirth of the kind that we have now with all the different assets that we enjoy. But actually that’s not enough because we still find ourselves caught within this kind of cyclic existence that we’re experiencing at present.
We actually enjoy the best kind of rebirth within cyclic existence and yet our existence is not free from suffering. Our existence is not free from suffering, not free from difficulties and problems. We know this from our own experience. If we imagine somebody who has committed a crime and who is in prison who is bound hand and foot, that person is experiencing suffering. So his position is basically a bad one and though his guards may be off duty at times, so they may not be tormenting him at times and sometimes he has visitors come to see him, so during those times his situation is a little bit better.
No matter how lenient they are with him at times, right? And no matter whether people come to visit him and he feels relaxed for a little while, As long as he’s in that prison, he’s going to be suffering, right? So eventually, and eventually as he’s been condemned to death, right, there’s nothing ahead of him but suffering even if he has a few short brief interludes of feeling a little better in the prison. Because he’s condemned to death, in the long run he’s going to have to suffer. So as soon as we are conceived in the womb, as soon as womb, we’ve entered the prison of birth.
Once you’re in that prison, once you’re imprisoned in that process that you are going to have to take birth and so on, then you are caught in suffering. So when we think about the womb itself, we’re confined in the womb for nine months, sometimes longer. Are confined within the womb. Actually, it’s a dark place, it’s an unpleasant place, and it’s not a very clean place. And while we’re in the womb, if our mother eats something which is very hot, then we feel we experience pain, we feel as if we’re being burned, and if she eats something very cold, then we’re very uncomfortable, it’s like suddenly a piece of ice is being placed on top of us.
And the child in the womb becomes extremely frightened and feels as if it’s going to fall off from a great height if its mother has to run at any point, you know, if the mother is running. Maybe you think this is all rubbish, you know, maybe you think this is not true. He says, But actually if there is consciousness there, if the child has consciousness, the child in the womb has consciousness, then it’s undoubtedly experiencing all sorts of things. Geshe Rinpoche says, From the very moment we take conception, from the moment we are conceived, mental consciousness is present. Where there is consciousness, there of course is an object of consciousness, something for that consciousness to apprehend.
He says definitely sensations, pleasant and unpleasant sensations. So it’s alright, you may think, okay, there’s mental consciousness. You said there’s mental consciousness, but the sense consciousnesses themselves, like visual and auditory, eye, ear consciousness and the tactile consciousness, ability to experience touch and all that haven’t developed at that point. So how can there be pleasant and unpleasant sensations? But then when we are sound asleep, when we are deeply asleep, our sense consciousnesses are not functioning at that time either.
Nevertheless, we have all sorts of experiences. Experience that we are seeing things and we experience that we are touching things and we can be very frightened by what we see and touch in our dream. So even when only mental consciousness is functioning, we can experience sensations of pleasure and pain. So there are all sorts of experiences of this kind which a fetus can have because consciousness is there right from the beginning. So it can feel, it can experience heat and it can experience cold and it can experience a sensation as if it were being thrown off a cliff.
So do you think yes or no? And what do you think when we’re fast asleep? When we’re fast asleep, our sense consciousness is functioning, our visual consciousness, our tactile consciousness. Are these consciousnesses functioning at that time or not? What’s happening?
When you’re fast asleep, do you hear what what people say? Then they’re not sleeping deeply if they carry you. If you Gensis, when people are asleep, first when you call to them, like say they are sleeping deeply, first when you call them they don’t hear. When they hear, then they are already nearly awake. Right?
They they they come out of deep sleep. Yeah. Apparently it’s similar when we enter deep meditative equipoise on emptiness. If we’re having a direct experience of emptiness and are deeply absorbed in that direct experience, our sense consciousnesses don’t function either at such a time. So it’s like that anyway when we’re in the womb and then we actually have to take birth and taking birth is like coming through a very, very narrow passage.
It’s extremely unpleasant. When we’re born, then our mothers touch us very, very gently and place us on the softest coverlet and yet it feels like sandpaper. Really hurts and rasps against our skin. Yeah, So it hurts as much as when you’ve got had a wound and it’s just healed over. There’s just a little thin layer of skin and then something were to bite that sting you there.
So it would be very, very sore. We see children do an awful lot of crying because they are experiencing something unpleasant. Then as soon as we’re born, as soon as we come into the world, then everything unpleasant starts to happen. And because we have got a body, then we have to experience experience sickness, we have to experience aging and finally we have to experience death. And in relation to this body of ours, there are all sorts of negative emotions that also arise.
So what happens is that in relation to this body which is actually the product of our parents sperm and ovum. In relation to this body which is made of flesh and blood and bones, we develop a strong concept of the self. We think about my body. We possess it very strongly. We think of my body.
On the basis of this strong attachment that we have to our body, we generate all sorts of negative emotions both desire and lust attachment and aggression and anger on the other hand and do all sorts of things in relation to it in order to give ourselves comfort and well-being. Each time we generate those negative emotions, they leave behind an imprint. And so we accumulate, we acquire a habit of those emotions. We’re completely habituated to them so they arise very, very easily. They trigger off the action and the actions produce suffering and then we generate the emotions again and so it goes on.
We’re not able to escape from the problems and suffering which they cause. Once we have this body, then there are all sorts of sicknesses that we are prone to get. We know that there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. We’re constantly involved in that as well. So not only is it a fact that as soon as we have this kind of body, we experience all kinds of sickness, that it’s always ready to fall ill in one way or another and that that of course plunges us into all sorts of problems and suffering.
But then also, as soon as this body is born, it begins to age. What happens as we age, we become uglier, we no longer look so attractive and our hair begins to fall out and changes color. Even if you had the most beautiful blonde hair, eventually it won’t look so lovely anymore and your face will get all wrinkly. We know nobody wants to get old. We can tell nobody likes the process of aging because they are always busy trying to dye their hair and to disguise the marks of age.
You have to have all sorts of operations done to remove the wrinkles and you pull your skin this way and that way and apply all sorts of ointments to try and disguise the fact that you’re getting older. And then our teeth begin to fall out. As we lose our teeth, then our speech becomes less distinct. And then we can’t eat the way we used to, and we have to be careful what we eat and if we try to bite things hard then it hurts. So it’s a good job that we get old slowly because if all those changes took place overnight, we would die of shock.
So just imagine if you went to bed looking young and lovely and then you woke up next morning all wrinkly and you know, grey haired and disgusting looking. Again, says that right now we are not suffering from the signs of extreme old age, but we can see them on other people. We can see what other people look like when they are old and what their problems are. He says, We are in the same position. We’re going to have to face that at some point if we live long enough.
And then the next thing that happens is death. Everything that we acquired with so much effort, everything that we’ve done so much for, maybe done so many unwholesome things to acquire and to attain, all those things have to be left behind. All the people that you’re closest to, maybe your parents and your wife or husband, your lover, your children, whoever they may relatives. You have to leave them whether you want to or not. And even this body which we’ve cherished so much since our birth which we’ve looked after all these years, that too we have to leave behind or we don’t want to.
All these disasters in a way are the result of the mere fact of taking birth. Because of birth, all this follows. We are always meeting people who we don’t want to meet. Never mind if you’re outside, if you go outside to your work and places like that. Not outside, even in your very house, you come across people and things that you don’t want to meet, that you don’t want to encounter.
So we’re constantly meeting people and situations that we don’t want to meet and at the same time we’re constantly being separated from people we love and whom we can’t bear to be separated from. And moreover, we also can’t get the things that we want. And there are lots of things that we want, we can’t get them. I mean, a farmer wants to have a good harvest but often his harvest fails. Business man wants to have a good profit and he can’t get the good profit that he was looking for and so on in hundreds of different ways.
So we have these different kinds of problems. Then statesmen can’t hang on to the nation or state that they’re governing and can’t protect it from enemies and they can’t look after their own side. Find all these sort of problems constantly coming up. People are not getting what they want. That’s basically what it’s about.
There are hundreds of ways in which we don’t get what we want. People trying to study for something and they can’t make it. They can’t get the knowledge that they need and then there are other people who are able to understand what they are trying to study but then they can’t remember it. You have lots and lots of ways in which we experience this constantly. Ordained people, monks and nuns who can’t manage to keep their vows or who can’t find an opportunity to listen to teachings contemplate cultivate them, cultivate the insights based on these teachings.
Constantly we’re not getting what we want. And then for lay people, boys not finding the girls they want and girls not finding the boys they want and so on. So we all know about that. So the very fact of having taken birth means that all these various things that we don’t want happen to us. The important thing for us is not just to get miserable and depressed about it, but we need to see, to recognize what kind of a situation we find ourselves in.
We need to recognize what it is like, what our existence really is like instead of being blind to it. And we need to feel fed up with this kind of existence. So this is what it’s all about. That’s why you have to think about all these things to make yourself feel thoroughly fed up with it. We’ve been born in this situation, in this kind of situation because of previous actions and the emotions which have given rise to those actions, contaminated actions.
And that’s why we find ourselves in this position. We can’t deny any of those sufferings which have been described, any of those problems or difficulties which have been described. We experience them all. If we don’t want to keep facing the same problems, same suffering, if we want to break out of this, then we have to get rid of the causes for rebirth in such a state of existence. We have to do away with the contaminated actions and their causes, which make us take birth in this kind of existence.
The great Nāgārjuna, who is an Indian scholar and practitioner, said that even if your head and your clothes had caught fire, you shouldn’t worry about that. Your main concern should be to get rid of these contaminated actions and the emotions that underlie them, which cause our rebirth into this kind of existence. Since there is nothing which is more essential, nothing could be more important than that. So we have to try and recognize the importance of that for ourselves. So if we say that we would like to get free from cyclic existence, free from the kind of existence that we have at present, if we say that, then we should look to see what the drawbacks of this existence are.
We should try to recognize what the drawbacks are and then we can do something to get rid of them. We should recognize what the drawbacks are, what the problems that cyclic existence faces us with are and feel fed up with them. And there are many different kinds of problems, not only the ones that are faced by human beings, but also the ones that apply to any kind of existence in of this kind and any existence within this circle as it were. So when we think about cyclic existence in general, so there are all these six states of existence, three lower rebirths and then are called the fortunate rebirths and the unfortunate rebirth. So the first general suffering is that we never know where we’re going to be reborn.
There’s no certainty. There’s no certainty. We’ve been wandering in cyclic existence since beginningless time, forever wandering in cyclic existence, and forever we’ve loved our parents and our children. We’ve had these close, these very strong bonds, which we’ve held with great attachment. Though we have these very strong attachments in this life, in the next life those relationships may be completely different and those very people whom we are so attached to now, we may be beating or they may be beating us, they may be devouring us, we may be devouring them.
Yeah. So we may consider them our worst enemies in the very next life. And yet, on the other hand, the people whom we dislike most in this life, the people whom we consider our most bitter enemies in this life may turn out to be closely related to us in the very next life. In another life, they may be in a very, very close relationship to us. We may love them, be devoted to them, attached to them and want to give them everything that we possess.
So there is absolutely no certainty about the relationships that we have. And even in one life, even in this present life, the people whom we dearly love now may at some time be our enemies. We may at one time see them as our enemies and the people whom we now dislike and can’t bear to be with later in our life we might become friendly with. I mean relationships can really undergo very radical changes. And even in one day you see people falling out, having a quarrel, saying really nasty things to each other and by evening they’ve made it up again.
So they’ve gone through those different positions even in a single day. So the thing is, it’s like this because this is part of cyclic existence. Everything that is part of cyclic existence is un trustworthy and unstable. Right? It’s in flux.
It’s in flux. It’s unstable. It’s untrustworthy. So we should recognize it for what it is. So we should recognize these things as untrustworthy, as unreliable and we should feel fed up with them and want something other, something better.
The only thing that we can trust that is really reliable is the Dharma, are the insights which we can generate in relation to the teachings based on the teachings and supreme among those is the altruistic attitude, the wish to attain enlightenment for the sake of all living creatures which is something truly reliable and trustworthy. So now, we’re talking about the suffering or problems connected with cyclic existence in general, not just human life. Those were the ones we described before. The first of these now was this uncertainty. And now the second one is the dissatisfaction.
If we think about the number of times we’ve taken birth in cyclic existence so endlessly. We’ve had mothers and then we’ve drunk their milk. The amount of milk we’ve drunk is like an ocean. We’ve drunk an ocean of milk. And we’ve had so many different Right?
All living beings have at some point or other been our mothers. And we’ve drunk all that milk and we still are unsatisfied. We still we still haven’t been satiated. And just think of the clothes that we’ve worn. If you were to pile up all the clothes we’ve worn throughout all those lives, there wouldn’t be a place in the world left to put them.
Every corner of the world would be full of our clothes And still we want more. Still we haven’t had enough. And during all those different lives that we’ve taken, during all those countless lives. We’ve experienced every type of pleasure there is. Every every type of worldly pleasure that can be experienced, we have at some time experienced.
And still we long for more and more pleasure and our thirst for pleasure is like the thirst that someone would have if they’ve drunk salty water. Mean there’s absolutely no way that their thirst would be satisfied. In fact it would just get worse. So that’s the position we’re in. So if we think of that tremendous suffering, that no matter how much you get, you still want more.
We always want more, more and more of everything. We have this this tremendous insatiable appetite and that in itself is suffering. So we should realize that none of these things can satisfy us, that we won’t find satisfaction in the things that we seek satisfaction from. They aren’t able to give us satisfaction because of their nature and because of our nature. The only thing that we can find satisfaction in are the teachings and the insights which grow from those teachings which we can generate.
So we should feel fed up with our search for pleasure among worldly things and turn our minds towards the practice of the teachings. Then yet another problem that we face again and again in cyclic existence. We have to leave one body and take on another body. So we go from body to body. We’ve been taking birth in cyclic existence for so long and there isn’t any kind of birth we can identify and say we haven’t taken birth as such and such a creature.
So we’ve had countless bodies, countless bodies and all of them we’ve wasted. Just imagine what we’ve been doing. We’ve taken birth, been really attached to our body, gone through our life, being really attached to our body, had to give it up, then acquired a new body, then gone through the whole thing again, being attached to it, done all sorts of things to keep it going. Same process, again we die, again we have to leave the body, again we have to take up a new body. It’s been that process.