Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Margaret McAndrew uses Buddha’s own journey—from ordinary sentient being through hell states to enlightenment—as a teaching tool for this 45-minute session on wisdom and Buddhahood. She opens with this story to dispel discouragement about the path. She then outlines the six perfections, emphasizing single-pointed concentration and its effects, before turning to wisdom’s core: understanding the emptiness of the inherently existent self. Using multiple analytical methods, she deconstructs what we mean by “I,” showing how we instinctively grasp at a concrete, independent self that cannot be located in body or mind. This false grasping is the root of saṃsāra. She carefully navigates between eternalism (belief in essence) and nihilism (denial of existence).
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 BH 1999 11 25.mp3
UUID: ba8c1988-56f1-4458-828a-53869ce09ea7
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Buddhahood (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-11-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,143
Well, I didn’t really say anything apart from motivation, of course. I don’t think we need to repeat that. Okay. So it’s whizzing around and doing all the wrappings. Yes.
So, so last week I didn’t, get around to talking about the sixth perfection which is wisdom. I finished with concentration. So this week I’ll try to cover wisdom and I’ve also got to talk about Buddhahood. So those are actually huge topics. You can’t really cover them in an hour and a half, but just to fill in some general outlines.
So anyway, there’s a connection between these two topics. Topic of wisdom really leads to considering Buddhahood because it’s the practice of wisdom that really brings about enlightenment. We have to practice the six perfections in order to achieve enlightenment, but it’s really the practice of wisdom that brings about the actual attainment of enlightenment. But we, in order to practice wisdom effectively, we also need to engage in the other five perfections. So, if we’re going to be inspired to practice in order to achieve Buddhahood, helps if we understand something about the qualities of Buddhahood.
It helps you to understand what it is that you’re wanting to attain, why you’re trying to achieve this goal so as to be inspired to practice. Otherwise, we talk about enlightenment, we talk about Buddhahood, but it can seem just like a lot of hard work. So it might seem hard to really think of attaining Buddhahood. Whereas if you think of, for instance, eliminating suffering, that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. It’s something we can see in our daily lives.
We can see if we just spend a little bit of time reflecting and checking what Buddha had to say about suffering. It’s easy to see that if Buddha’s teachings about overcoming suffering are valid, then it’s worthwhile to do that. But then what’s all this about Buddhahood? So we need to understand that a little bit. And it can seem that well, we can’t really it’s impossible to really comprehend the qualities of Buddhahood because a Buddha’s mind is so far removed from our present mental state that it’s beyond our imagining at the present.
But still we can begin to learn about these qualities and begin to have some sort of a grasp, at least as much as we’re able to at present, of what these qualities are. And we need to keep in mind that we all have Buddha nature and we all have the capacity to achieve enlightenment through doing the appropriate practices. The only thing that separates us from the state of the Buddha is that Buddha has gone through this practice. Buddha has purified his mind and achieved all the perfect qualities, whereas we haven’t done that yet. But Buddha started off just like us, as an ordinary sentient being.
In fact, started off the first story that we have of Buddha, he was far worse off than we are because the first story that we have about Buddha was about his past lives, before he was Buddha, of course, long before he was Buddha, even before he was a bodhisattva. He was a being in the hills as a result of bad karma. Through giving rise to a thought of compassion while he was in the hell states, then he finished with the hell states and took a higher rebirth and continued on from there to progress life by life and met one of the previous Buddhas and made a vow to achieve enlightenment for the welfare of others, became a bodhisattva, and eventually became the Buddha, the historical Buddha, whose teachings we’re following. So there’s nothing here that is beyond our own reach. There’s nowhere better to start off from in the practice of achieving Buddhahood than where we are now.
We shouldn’t feel discouraged and want to give up or feel that we shouldn’t undertake this practice. Instead, we just need to start from where we are and do what we can. We shouldn’t expect to be able to do wonderful things at first. This would be unrealistic. We just need to make a start and to be happy to be doing what we can do and to be making imprints for the future.
And so there’s all sorts of great qualities that are explained in the teachings. And in this explanation of the six perfections, you can start to feel that some of these great qualities are really so incredible that we can’t really quite imagine achieving some of these things. It’s hard to imagine achieving bodhicitta, even achieving single pointed concentration. Sometimes we can get all excited about these things and we try to achieve them quickly and then we come a cropper and then we might get discouraged. But we don’t have to achieve these things to feel that we’re getting somewhere.
In actual fact, the Lamas tell us that we’re halfway to enlightenment already just by having a perfect human rebirth, by having an interest in Dharma practice and by having achieved this human body which has the causes and conditions that enable us to practice Dharma and particularly having met the Mahāyāna teachings which explain the whole path to full enlightenment, then we can have these attainments in due course. So it’s compared to somebody who’s It’s so difficult to get this precious human rebirth and we’ve done so much work already that we can’t remember, but in our past lives we’ve done a lot of work to get to this point where we are now. So it’s compared to being like somebody who’s rolled a big boulder halfway up a steep mountain. And so there’s been such a lot of work getting it up to there and if we stop rolling it’s going to fall all the way back again. And so we have to keep on pushing away and we’ll eventually get there.
So if you feel discouraged, just keep that in mind that we’re halfway there already. It’s like when you go on a long, long bushwalk maybe for a week or something, you know, and when you’re halfway there, it seems like you’ve done a lot of walking and you’ve got blisters all over your feet and you might if you’re thinking how far there still is to go, you might think that you’re never going to get there. So if you think how far you’ve come already, then you have a different perspective on it. Also, the bushwalkers don’t think about how far they have to go. They think how far they have to go to the next camp.
That way you really feel satisfied because when you get there at the end of the day and you relax and sit around the fire and have something to eat, then you have this real feeling of getting somewhere. So we have lots of of marks on the way, lots of marking points on the way. They’re not exactly camps because you can’t stop, but they’re sort of marker points on the path. So I might mention some of these. I’m not actually going to give a specific explanation of the grounds and paths tonight because there’s not enough time for that, but I’ll be mentioning some of the paths and the grounds as we go along, just to give an idea of how the practice is divided up into these paths and grounds.
So, anyway, the six perfections are the practice of a bodhisattva, but although we may not be bodhisattvas yet, we may not have yet generated bodhicitta, but we can practice the perfections according to our present ability. To some extent, we can practice all of these perfections and we need to put a bit of energy at least into practicing what we can according to our capabilities. So last week we were going through concentration and learning a bit about the stages of concentration and so on. So to actually achieve single pointed concentration and to achieve Samatha, which is actually a step further on than just single pointed concentration, it’s really a very powerful state of mind. Single pointed concentration doesn’t just mean having unwavering attention on the object, it goes much further than that.
It’s taking the mind to a degree concentration that’s completely focused on the object so that the whole power of the mind is concentrated on the object of focus. This really gives tremendous mental power. In fact, to somebody who’s achieved this level of single pointed concentration and Samatha, as well as experiencing mental and physical ecstasy or flexibility at this stage. They also get all sorts of psychic powers just because of the single pointed concentration. And this is something that’s shared with other practitioners from other religious traditions.
It’s not unique to Buddhism. Other religions, specifically Hinduism, Hindu yogis also practice this kind of concentration and achieve these kinds of psychic powers. They’re what’s called mundane or ordinary powerful attainments. I can’t remember all of them but it refers to things like being able to walk on water and walking through walls and having clairvoyant powers and this kind of thing. So they’re considered to be mundane because they don’t really help you to get out of saṃsāra, but they can be useful in other ways.
You’re not supposed to use these powers except to help others, but they can be useful. But anyway, you’re not particularly aiming at getting them, but they do come to somebody who can achieve these kinds of concentrations. So, we’re more concerned with achieving wisdom through the combining of the practice of single- pointed concentration and meditation on emptiness. So The practice of concentration can be applied to all sorts of meditation. For instance, to meditating on impermanence, to meditating on bodhicitta.
When we’ve achieved this Samatha, this stabilizing meditation, calm abiding, then this kind of meditation will enable us to achieve realization of all of these different points that need to be realized on the path. But it’s usually explained particularly with relationship to the practice of wisdom. And it’s explained I think I mentioned this last week actually, that the yogi attains Samatha and then applies that Samatha meditation to meditation on emptiness. So when we’re talking about wisdom here, there are different kinds of wisdom. And here, wisdom essentially is referring to the wisdom that understands the emptiness of inherent existence.
So I’ll be explaining that. I’ll be trying to explain it. I’ll be attempting to explain it. At least to explain a little bit of it. So it doesn’t mean that we have to wait until we’ve achieved Samatha before we study emptiness.
We don’t want to do that. In fact, we need to study emptiness from the early stages because it takes a lot of study. It takes quite a bit of effort to come to the preliminary understanding that we need to have in order to meditate effectively. So it’s necessary to have this intellectual approach and also the meditative approach. So these two approaches then have to come together.
So, if we meditate on emptiness according to our understanding, then we’ll gain a little bit more insight through that meditation. And then by doing some more studying, we’ll gain a little bit more insight. But So we need to start off by studying and we also need to do some meditation on emptiness. We need to practice this meditation on emptiness. So the presentation of emptiness or selflessness that we follow is according to in our tradition according to the Prasanga Mādhyamika school or the middle way consequence school.
And there’s a number of schools of tenets and it’s taught that the in our tradition that the middle way school is the highest or the school which presents the best presentation, the clearest, the most reliable presentation of emptiness because it’s more subtle than the other schools. And there are two middle way schools. So the one that we follow, the middle way consequence school, is the one that has the best best presentation of emptiness, the one that we need to rely on in order to realize emptiness. So, the Middle Way philosophy asserts that all phenomena, external and internal phenomena, lack inherent existence. So, all Buddhist schools accept selflessness of phenomena, or I should say selflessness anyway, not necessarily selfless of phenomena.
All Buddhist schools accept selflessness or non self. The lower schools focus on the selflessness of the person, and so the Madhya Mika focuses on both the asserts both selflessness of the person and also selflessness of phenomena. So in order to understand the Madhya Mika school, it’s explained that we should study the lower schools and then by understanding the presentation of selflessness according to the lower schools, and then also the logics that explain why the Madhya Mika presentation is superior to that of the lower schools, then you gradually come to a greater and greater understanding of the Madhya Mika School of Tenets. So it’s necessary to actually understand, to study all of these schools philosophy. If we could actually understand selflessness according to one of the lower schools, that would be really fantastic because it’s not easy to understand selflessness even according to the lower schools.
And we have a lot of barriers to overcome before we can even achieve that much. And then the Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika view, the middle way consequence view is very subtle. And it’s necessary to eventually understand all those subtleties because the actual understanding of emptiness is a very subtle state of mind. It’s something which is very easy to go off the middle way. It’s called the middle way because it’s really steering across between two extremes of what’s called eternalism and nihilism.
The extreme of eternalism is basically the ordinary view that we fall into automatically unless we’re trained otherwise, which is that just believing that there is some sort of concrete essence or self. And the other one is to fall into the opposite extreme which is to deny any sort of existence, to refute the existence of the self, of the I, of the person and of other phenomena as functioning entities. So what we’re concerned is when we say non self, we’re not denying the existence of a self or I, but we’re denying the or we’re refuting the existence of this inherently existent or truly existent self or I. Most of the schools talk about refuting true existence. And when the term selflessness or non self is used, it’s explained as meaning the refutation of the truly existent self, which is a concrete, substantial, eternal, unchanging essence or self which we instinctively feel to be existing within us.
And also the Middle Way School asserts the emptiness of inherent existence. And so the term emptiness comes from the Middle Way School and it refers to this emptiness of inherent existence which is a subtler presentation. So I think if we just look at this truly existent self and how to try to identify the truly existent self, that will be a good start. So how we understand the emptiness of the self? We have to understand first of all what we’re meaning by the self.
So there’s actually two kinds of self that we’re concerned with. Does anybody want to explain about this? Do you know what the two kinds of self are that no. They’re not actually kinds of self. They’re just yeah.
I mean, there’s, like, two kinds of self that we’re concerned within in the terms of that there’s a false view of the self, and then there’s the conventional self. Yes. Yes. Well, there’s the conventional self and there’s also the false self. So the no self is no the nonexistence of this false self, But we feel that the false self is there.
We tend to believe it’s there. Some schools of thought actually have asserted this truly existent self. Not Buddhist schools, but some other schools. That’s where the term Ātman, the Hindu term Ātman, is usually translated as self. It could also be understood as meaning soul.
It has this connotation of a permanent substance. Buddha taught about anatman or non self. What’s the Tibetan term? I can’t exactly remember now. Anyway, that’s the Sanskrit.
And or in Pali, it’s Anatta. So we have to remember that this is the term that was used by the Hindus, and there probably isn’t an exact equivalent in English, but self or soul is often used seems to be used Yes. I don’t yes. I don’t really know much about what Christians have taught specifically about the soul, but they seem to accept that there’s some sort of unchanging substance there. I’m not sure whether they’ve actually said that in so many words, but there seems to be some sort of connotation of that.
But still you have to keep in mind that perhaps some the ideas that we have about what soul means tend to come to us from Christianity and that here we’re looking at it from the point of view of what’s asserted in other religions. But when it comes down to it, the main problem that has to be overcome is not this learned view of the self or soul that we may perhaps have held at some time, but the main thing that we have to overcome is the instinctive sense of a truly existent self that we’re born with. And everybody has this: babies have it, animals have it, all sentient beings have it, except for a few sentient beings who are well on their way out of Samsāra. So we have this instinctively because we’re just conditioned to this from previous lives. We’ve always had it.
If we manage to totally get rid of this sense of a truly existent self, which is substantial and concrete and eternal, then we would not have the problems that we have. In fact, we wouldn’t be in Samsāra. So once you’ve overcome this sense of the self, then you’ve overcome the root of Samsāra. This is what binds us in Samsāra. So it’s obviously very basic.
Yes. No. It’s enough to have the conventional sense of self. But this false sense of self is different than the conventional sense of self. Okay.
Yes. So when you’ve realized the emptiness of the truly existent self of the inherently existent self sorry, I’m getting my terminology confused there. Then you have you haven’t removed the conventional eye, which is merely labeled on the aggregates on the five aggregates. It’s very related to karma. It’s not consciousness.
Consciousness is what carries it. Yes. Yes. Consciousness is the bus. Yes.
Yes. Yes, I think all of these different analogies are helpful because they help us to get a bit of an angle on it. Yes. So essentially, the conventional is merely labeled on the aggregates and we have five aggregates. So one of them is form and the other four are mental aggregates.
And the one that Carol has just mentioned is consciousness, which is the mental aggregate that actually travels from life to life and carries the imprints. So the other mental aggregates, feeling, recognition and what’s the other one? Volition. Well, sometimes it’s called karmic formation. It’s a bit more volition, it’s often called, or compounded phenomena is another term.
So, yes, those three mental aggregates So the form aggregate, of course, ceases ceases to function as part of the person at the time of death, it gets left behind. And the other mental aggregates also sort of subside or, etc, that they absorb at the death time into the consciousness. And the gross consciousness also absorbs, so you’ve got a more subtle kind of consciousness that the imprints are carried so that when the next conception in terms of, say, taking conception as a human being or an animal, then there’s conception that takes place. And then the other aggregates then again start to arise and function again in the next life. And of course, the new form is taken at that time of conception.
So these things sort of take on a different aspect from life to life but there’s always that connecting link of the consciousness and that carries these imprints. So the imprints of self grasping and of the sense of the truly existent self is one of the things that comes with our luggage, as Carol said. We carry a lot of past luggage with us and this is one of the heaviest. In fact, it’s the heaviest thing we carry with us that sort of makes all the other stuff come along as well. So, basically, we have this inherent sense of being inherently existing, and this leads to this sort of self grasping.
So then because we’ve got self grasping, then there’s this sort of grasping at the self, then because of that, then there’s also self-cherishing. And because we have self-cherishing, then there comes attachment to the well-being of the eye, of the person. And there comes like fear of harm to the person and anger because of seeing our pleasures being interrupted and all of these different things. So as a result of this, have all the disturbing emotions arising. And so this sense of the truly existent I is the basic ignorance.
So this because of this, then you have all the other disturbing emotions, including the other forms of ignorance such as ignorance, of karma, right and wrong actions and so on, all come along to disturb us because of this. So from this we go on to creating karmas, particularly bad karmas causes suffering. We have the whole cause of suffering and of cycling in Samsāra. So this is the root of Samsāra. And to cut off Samsāra at the root, have to cut off the false view of inherent existent or the truly existent I or self.
If we can cut that off, then we cut off the whole thing. Until we can cut that off, then we can’t cut off the whole thing completely. No matter how much we work to overcome our anger attachment and ignorance, we can’t completely cut off the seed that could grow back again until we can actually completely cut off this false view of the inherent, existent self. When we can cut that off, then it can never come back again. These things can never come back again.
So there’s a number of different ways to analyze, and I won’t go into detail on all these analyses tonight. But there’s some if I’ve got time, I might actually go through one of them. So, anyway, Jeffrey Hopkins has a good explanation in the book on the Tantric Distinctions. Actually, in the first part of the book, which is not on Tantra but on the general path, he explains why it’s necessary to go through so many different analyses. So we have many different analyses that we have to learn.
We have to study the Madhya Mika viewpoint, the middle way school. Well, as I said, we have to study all the different schools of tenets. We have to learn different ways of analyzing and meditating according to those schools of tenets and we have to learn other approaches. We have to study lorig, mind and awareness, and other various different philosophical topics and all kinds of different approaches to trying to understand there’s a number of different approaches by which We can analyze them according to the different kinds of consciousness and so on, primary and secondary kinds of consciousness. We can analyze according to the primary minds and mental factors and so on.
All of these things are explained in lorig, mind and awareness. And just by studying all of these different things, we’re gradually whittling away at the grasping that we have at this inherently existing I which is unchanging and eternal and substantial and independently existing. We somehow feel that there’s something independently existing there which is neither our mind or our body but is some sort of essence of our self. This is the thing. We feel there’s some sort of essence that’s I, that’s me.
And we can’t really pin it down to being either our body or our mind. If we think that it’s our consciousness that came from past previous lives, we still have to look at the many different elements of our consciousness and see which one it is. And if we keep on analyzing, we can’t find it in any part of our consciousness. We can’t find it in our body. We know that our body finishes at the end of this life.
But if we look for our sense of self as being located in the body, sometimes we feel it’s located in the body, sometimes we feel it’s located in the consciousness. It keeps on fluctuating. When you try to pin it down, it keeps on shifting away. But when we don’t look at it, we feel that it’s there very strongly. As soon as you start to really look for it, it starts to fragment and break up and slip away from you.
But still, as soon as we stop concentrating on analyzing its method of existence, its mode of existence, it comes back very strong again and we feel that it’s there very substantial. So there’s a lot of little tricks that we can use to try to understand it. For instance, if we think, is the I my body? We can say, Oh, my body’s not well today. My body isn’t feeling very good today.
When we’re saying that we feel that the self is the mind, the consciousness, because we’re talking about the consciousness as if it owns the body. But sometimes we’ll come along and we say, Oh, my mind’s in a terrible state today. So then it’s as if we’re talking about the body owning the mind. Or then sometimes we can say, Oh, my mind, my body are both terrible. Know, so it’s like we’re then you can really see how we feel that there’s some sort of independent eye that’s neither the mind nor the body.
And yet you can’t pin it down to anything that is aside. Is it outside our body? Is it outside our mind? You can’t find anything outside the body or the mind that experiences our different perceptions and so on through the day. What is it that experiences our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our memories and our plans and so on?
It’s not outside our body. It’s right there with our body and mind. So where is it? What is it? So then you can start to think that there is no I.
You can start to say, oh, the whole thing is just an illusion. There’s all these little events, there’s these physical events and there’s these mental events and so on, but there’s nothing really there because there’s no essence to it. Well, is no essence to it, but that’s to say then that it doesn’t exist is to go to the other extreme, the extreme of nihilism. So we have to understand the Mādhyamika viewpoint properly. It actually you know, it it actually validates the conventional eye.
Lama Yeshe was very interested in Kirlian photography.
But there will be a lot of things that we can see in the future that we can’t see yet. Yes. A lot of people already say that they see auras. This is a pretty wide experience. A lot of people with sort of minor clairvoyance can see auras.
It’s not at all uncommon. I see no reason why science may already be taking some steps towards this. Probably the main thing that stops us is the scepticism as a scientist, think. Otherwise they probably would have already perhaps found some of these things. Lama Yeshe was very interested in Kirlian photography.
When in the early days when it was just starting to be talked about, somebody showed a lot of slides of it at Kopan and Lama Yeshe was very interested and said that this would sort of probably in the future show a lot of things that the Yogis have always asserted. But these things are still physical. They are not mind, which is non-form. But these things act the subtler levels of form and the mind go together. So this thing that was leaving the body might be something like what some people call the astral body.
I mean, I’m not talking about what Buddhism says now about these things so much as what Western occultists or whatever talk about. They talk about astral bodies and so on. There is some sort of subtle energy. In Buddhism it is said that the mind is accompanied by subtle form or subtle wind energy. The mind is always accompanied by this wind energy and never separates from it.
You don’t find that in all the teachings, but certainly in the Tantric teachings it’s said that the mind is always accompanied by this subtle wind. That’s right, yes. That’s one of the most important logics for analysis, that compounded phenomena are dependent on causes and conditions. So one of our assumptions about the false I is that it’s independent of causes and conditions. If you really analyze that causes and conditions one, then you are undercutting this independence of the there are many different kinds of dependence.
Dependence on causes and conditions is an important one, also depending on the base that it’s labelled on and so on. That’s another important one. And are labelled on the base of the five aggregates. And we I mean, the eye, the mere eye is merely labelled or imputed on the five aggregates. In other words, it’s just these five aggregates and eye is just the label we put on these five aggregates, sort of coming together and functioning together, constantly changing.
This is another thing. The impermanence is another thing. We are constantly changing so we are not permanent. There is no sort of element in our mind or body that’s permanent and unchanging. So there are many different analyses that we have to do and as Jeffrey Hopkins points out and as the Lamas always tell us, we have to do many different kinds of analyses because it’s so hard to overcome this false view that just doing one kind of analysis isn’t enough.
We have to keep on looking at it from different ways. And by continuing to do this