Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 38-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew introduces the graduated path (Lam Rim), Buddhism’s systematic framework for practice, then focuses on recognizing the preciousness of human rebirth. She opens by reframing suffering not as a problem to escape but as material for developing inner peace and wisdom. She then explains why human life uniquely suits practice by comparing it to other realms: lower realms lack freedom to practice, higher god realms trap beings in comfort, formless realms lead nowhere. She covers the eight freedoms and endowments of precious human rebirth, from intact faculties to access to living teachers and teachings. The meditation: recognize your birth as a beggar finding a precious jewel in garbage. Pitched at Buddhist newcomers and those beginning the Lam Rim.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 DwP 1998 02 11.mp3
UUID: 9905ce12-9f98-40ba-8bd9-ced267695469
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-02-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 38.7 minutes
Words: ~5,103
And that we’re looking in a spiritual direction for it. And we can see that when we look spiritual direction, this doesn’t promise immediate solving of all your present problems, but what it does is promise a gradual development of greater peace of mind, greater happiness. And in that process we actually find that our problems can become quite different, or rather that we can take quite a different attitude to our problems, so that rather than seeing them as something terrible that’s happening to us, can see them as being a means through which we can develop by dealing with these problems and gaining experience from them. Can actually develop ourselves and direct ourselves in the direction that we want to go towards happiness. And so we can in the short term accept these problems as being actually something that’s quite useful and quite beneficial for us.
So in actual fact, once we start taking this sort of attitude to our problems it really helps us a lot and we can immediately start to feel a lot happier in our lives. So external conditions that before used to be the cause of great unhappiness to us can now be something that we actually can welcome if we know how to to deal with these problems, if we know how to relate to them in a fruitful way. And this is what Buddha’s teachings show us. This is a very important aspect of Buddha’s teaching. So we’re not changing our outside conditions necessarily very much, but what we’re doing is changing what’s going on inside us.
So this week we’re going to look a bit more at the process of how we actually have to go about this and what Buddha’s taught us in order to go about this. So we saw last week that we actually have this really tremendous potential. Our minds, it’s explained in the teachings, are not one with the deluded mental states that causes all our problems. So we have these deluded mental states and they’re generally categorized into three main divisions of hatred or anger, clinging attachment and ignorance. And these are very much a part of our present situation, but they’re not part of the real nature of our minds, of the essential nature of our minds, and so we can actually get rid of them by following the right practice.
So there’s many different teachings in Buddhism that show us how to practice on the path. Buddha was enlightened, I think he was at the age of thirty two years old when he received enlightenment. And he was eighty when he passed away. And during that time he gave many many teachings, many of them have been written down. And so in addition to that, there’s been a lot of work done over the centuries.
There’s been many commentaries written. Many great teachers have thought about Buddha’s teachings and presented them in a form that was suitable for the disciples of their particular age. And then other teachers have come along and they’ve written commentaries on the commentaries and that process is still going on. And so there’s a very great body of literature that we can study, so it can look a bit confusing. And we’re very fortunate in this tradition that we have access to the teachings on the graduated path or Lam Rim.
So the way that this came about is that there was a very great teacher called Atisha who was invited from India to Tibet at a time when the Tibetans were only just getting off the ground with the practice of Buddhism and there was quite a bit of confusion as to how Buddhism should really be practiced. There were teachings that appeared to be contradictory, were actually claimed to be Buddhist teachings and which actually were Buddhist teachings, but which the people of the time saw as being contradictory and didn’t know how to put together. This produced a lot of confusion in people’s minds and it tended to work against the acceptance of the Buddhist teachings. So a teacher was brought to Tibet and that’s a whole story in itself, a very interesting story, a very inspiring story of how a teacher came to come to Tibet in the first place. And when he came to Tibet, he found that the people there lacked the basic knowledge of Buddhism that was more or less taken for granted in India.
In India it wasn’t felt so necessary to find some way of presenting the Dharma teaching systematically to people. Growing up in that society, being surrounded by Buddhist teachers, the people automatically got a broader overall picture of Buddhism and understood how to go about the basic practice. When he came to Tibet, Atisha found that he had to start off with the most basic things, and so he wrote quite a short text called Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. This proved to be so beneficial that it’s come to become the basis of our approach to practice. And it’s not just for people who are starting off, it’s for everybody.
It’s beneficial right from the moment you start your practice until the time you tackle the higher reaches of the path. But at the same time, it’s very useful for us Western students who are coming to the Buddhist teachings for the first time perhaps, are new to it, fairly new to it, and we feel that there’s this vast body of teachings, literature and we need a guide, we need a signpost to tell us where to go. And this is what the Lam Rim is. It’s something that gives us a guide through the Buddhist teachings. And I also heard it described by one student as being a roadmap to the mind.
And this is a very good description because as we understand the Buddhist teachings, we understand our mind, we understand our own nature and the Graduated Path gives us the guide to this. So there’s many many different texts on the Graduated Path and some of them are very elaborate and detailed, some of them are very short and brief, some of them are very technical, some of them are written in very simple straightforward language. So you can find the text that suits your particular need at a given time. Many of these texts were actually written as commentaries on the original text by Atisha, which is quite a short text, very simple, but because it’s so short, you need some more detailed commentary to really get into the teachings. And in actual fact, the whole of Buddha’s teachings can be fitted into the graduated path.
So, when we’re following the Graduated Path, it actually starts off with a section on how to find a Guru, how to find a spiritual guide, and how to follow him or her. Also it has a section on how the spiritual guide is to guide the student. Generally, we really don’t need to get into that teaching so much until we actually are in the position of wanting to make connection with the spiritual guide. But just to start off becoming familiar with Buddha’s teachings, we can pass over that section to start with. The next section, which is really the starting point that we’re getting into from a psychological basis, is becoming aware of the value of the human rebirth, of our present human rebirth.
So is it clear up to now what I’ve been saying? Okay, does anybody want to ask any questions? Okay, so according to the graduated path, the next step we have to do is to consider the value of our human rebirth, and this is a topic which is called the perfect human rebirth or the precious human rebirth. We don’t need to think that every human being has this. It’s only a certain number of human beings who can say that they actually have this perfect human rebirth, because as we look at it, we can see that there’s many, many human beings who don’t have the conditions that we need in order to follow the practice.
So, in actual fact, what we’re looking at here is not really so much the practice as preliminary contemplation that’s going to motivate us for the practice. So this is very important meditation actually and we should meditate on this topic and keep on meditating on it. We need to keep on meditating on it even when we’re getting very strongly into our practice. We need to keep on going back and reflecting on this meditation all the time. And it starts off by looking at our human rebirth as being one that has certain leisures and endowments.
So that’s gone into in quite a lot of detail in some of the books. I’m not giving a detail because I’m going over this in four weeks. I’m not going into all the details because you could talk all evening on the one topic and I want to get through several topics tonight. Some of you, no doubt, have already received teachings on this and the others of you will have the opportunity to receive more detailed teachings from other teachers, perhaps at other times, or to read the books. So basically what we do is start off by reflecting on the other realms that we might have been born into if we hadn’t been born as human beings.
This can be a little bit upsetting for people who are new to this thought and just thinking about it for the first time to hear that there’s so many other different states of rebirth that we could be born into and that a lot of them are states that are very unpleasant to be in. So, in actual fact, the scriptures go into details about various different kinds of hell states and hungry ghosts and so on. Also there are animal states which we can see around us. We can see the animals. We can feel that the animals aren’t so much different to ourselves.
It’s easy enough to imagine that we could have been an animal in the past. It’s not so difficult to imagine that we might easily be born as an animal in the future if we allow ourselves to sit back in our practice, in our observance of karma. So we have to think of it from the aspect, not just that these are unfortunate states to be in, but in particular from the aspect that while they’re in these states these beings don’t have the opportunity to practice Dharma. If you look at the animals, they don’t, although they might have quite a lot of intelligence, they don’t have the capacity to study and receive an education and to listen and understand the teachings on Dharma. You can talk about the ten non virtuous actions to a cat all day long and the cat would still go off and kill a mouse the moment it got the opportunity because they just wouldn’t understand.
While they’re in this animal state, while they’re in that animal body, they really can’t do very much to get themselves out of their suffering situation. They can’t aim to get out of cyclic existence. Of course, they still have the same potential that we have. The ultimate nature of their mind is the same, but they’ll have to wait until they can find a human body before they can start to realize that potential. And in the same way all the other lower realms, the other lower suffering realms are under the sway of various different kinds of sufferings and the beings in those realms don’t have the freedom to practice the Dharma and to be able to progress on the path.
And so while they’re in these realms they’re unfortunate and they have to experience the sufferings of that realm and just wait until they are able to get a human body in some future lifetime, which is not an easy thing to attain. And also there are realms which are included among the higher realms, are actually much more enjoyable than the human realm. As we all know, the human realm, although it’s classed as being an upper realm, it has quite a lot of suffering that goes along with it, and some human beings experience a lot more suffering than others in the course of their lifetime. We can see that some human beings have horrific lives. Sometimes you have whole populations of human beings in certain countries experiencing all sorts of terrible sufferings.
And so we can see that while we’re in this human lifetime, we have a mixture of good and bad happening to us. But there are these beings, we call them the gods and the demigods or the suras and asuras or the devas and asuras. They have quite an enjoyable life, they have all sorts of good conditions. The asuras are said to spend a lot of their time fighting. They have quite an aggressive, quite militaristic sort of outlook.
They’re so busy with their wars that they’re not interested in Dharma practice. The Devas, the higher gods, are supposed to, in some respects, have a lot admiration for the Buddhas. But they’re having such a good time, they’re enjoying themselves so much with all their beautiful palaces and swimming pools and very refined enjoyments, beautiful music. They have this very refined, very lovely sort of life and they’re just not motivated to really practice. Sometimes it’s said that they’ll come along and listen to the Buddha’s teaching or to other great teachers, but then they just go away and really don’t build on it.
So it doesn’t really benefit them very much. There are also some gods who are described as being in the form and formless realms. In particular, the formless gods don’t really have any means of communication with other beings. They’re just kind of floating around, blissed out in meditation. But it’s a kind of meditation that doesn’t lead to liberation from Samsāra.
And they’re really just expending the kind of the very specific kind of karma that led them to be reborn in that realm. Once they’ve expended the karma to be in all of the formless realms, then they just take rebirth again in the realms where beings have an ordinary gross body. They could be born as human beings, they could be born as animals, and once they’ve done that then they just have to go through the whole process again. They’re back where they started. So that way it doesn’t lead out.
Any questions? Yes. I’m inclined to think they do exist. Sometimes the descriptions of them in palaces and dancing and singing and so on sounds a little bit too much like the best parts of the human realm. Perhaps you could take that as a metaphor, but I think in their own way they probably do these things.
Anyway, are certain gods that seem to be experienced by human beings because it’s said that nature spirits and tree spirits and so on are actually lesser members of the God class who actually live on this world around us. A lot of people seem to see these. I’ve known a number of different people myself who say that they see them, so I feel quite sure that they are telling the truth and that they actually do see these things. Certainly this class of beings seems to exist. Some of the other gods, of course, we just have to take them more or less on trust from the teachings.
Well, I’m inclined to do that myself. But if you want to take it as a metaphor, then you can. Film stars and high society people and this kind of thing perhaps are living a life which has some similarities to the life of these worldly gods. Generally, even these human beings who seem to have the most fortunate life generally have quite a lot of sufferings in their life at one time or another, even if they seem to be having everything fine this year, maybe next year, they’ll be having problems. So it’s not very settled for us in this lifetime and every human being really has the opportunity to learn about the truth of suffering.
So we can congratulate ourselves that we haven’t got these situations. In actual fact we can see that we are fortunate that we are living in a world where there is a combination of suffering and good fortune, because this is the best situation to get established in your practice. It’s said that there are some people who are actually practicing in the God Realms, but they became firmly established in their practice while they were in the human realms. Then when they happened to get reborn in the God realms, were able to keep on practicing. But we don’t aim to get reborn in the God realms because it’s not really the ideal situation for practice.
What we aim at is to be reborn as human beings again. Or the best thing to aim for really is to achieve liberation and enlightenment in this lifetime, because that is possible. Not many of us, to tell you the truth, not many of us are really going to make it in this lifetime. But we can certainly all establish a good sound Dharma practice and create the cause to be human beings again and to progress. So it’s something that we can certainly manage to bring about if we follow what Buddha taught.
So, we contemplate on leisures and endowments. I’ve just been talking about the leisures, or freedoms, which are freedoms from these unfortunate states in other realms, and then there are other freedoms, that’s counted as four actually, we can say that we’re free from the three lower realms and from the God realms. Then we can say that we’re also free from some other obstacles which we can experience as human beings. And well we can look at our life and see whether we really are free from these, but generally even if we’re not free from all of them, we can be free of most of them and we can work on perhaps achieving freedom from some of the others. So one of these is being very attached to wrong views, which would hinder our Dharma practice.
So if we’re attached to views which are in opposition to the views of Dharma practice, particularly if we were to hold such views as to say that there’s no such thing as karma and no such thing as future lives in which we experience the results of karma. Or if we were to say that there is wrong practices which bring about good result, such as, for instance, thinking that animal sacrifice is good, as the example they always use in the scriptures. Probably not many people in this country are likely to think that way, but certainly there are a lot of people in some parts of the world who believe that animal sacrifice is the right action. If we were to hold to that wrong view, it would be a hindrance to us. We can think of more subtle examples perhaps some people that we meet in society have all sorts of views and some of these views might be mistaken and they would be an obstacle in that person’s spiritual path.
For instance, a lot of people seem to feel that hanging is a good thing. Possibly that might be an example. I’m not sure about that. But anyway But yes, this is mainly to do with wrong views relating to spiritual practice. So if we hold these wrong views then it can be an obstacle to us.
Also a lot of scientific views might be an obstacle to us in certain ways. For instance, if you were to believe that the only concrete reality is what we can actually see and measure, then that would mean that you would then be incapable of really wanting to follow a spiritual path because you wouldn’t believe that there was any other sort of factor to a human being apart from their body and brain, which end at the death time. So you wouldn’t be able to believe that there was some sort of subtle energy that passes on to the next lifetime, subtle mental energy that continues after the death of the body. So that kind of view also is a hindrance to spiritual practice, and it’s a very common view. So does anybody have any any questions at this point?
So then another obstacle, being born as a barbarian in a country the term they use in the scriptures is barbarian. What it means is in a country where the Dharma teachings don’t exist. When I first went to Nepal and did a meditation course about twenty four years ago, it was very amusing for me at that stage to discover that the people in Nepal considered Australia to be a barbarian country. Because Australians tended to think that India and the Asian countries like that, that had a lot of poverty, must be somewhat barbaric, because they were sort of backwards technologically. And it was interesting to find when I got over there that we were the barbarians from their point of view, because we didn’t have the Buddhist teachings.
But that’s changed since then. I don’t really in this world, no technological reason that would prevent anybody from being able to meet the teachings anymore, although there might be some people who might be in countries where it’s politically impossible or where poverty or whatever might prevent them from being in touch with the Buddhist teachings, so there could be still pockets where this situation exists. There are also other worlds where there wouldn’t be the existence of Buddha’s teachings. So we can say that we’re very fortunate that we weren’t born into one of these pockets where we wouldn’t have the opportunity of receiving the teachings. Also, another obstacle could be to be in a world where there is no descent of a Buddha in that particular age.
So it’s said that in this world there have been Buddhas in the past and there will be other Buddhas in the future. And that’s just in this world age, there’s going to be a thousand Buddhas in this world age, which is an incredibly long time. There have been other world ages, but universe comes into existence according to the explanation in the scriptures. human beings appear on at a certain stage and then it goes through these cycles of evolution and devolution. That happens over and over again a number of times.
The Buddhas only appear to us at a particular stage during the degeneration process. human beings are very highly evolved and have very happy lives, are a little bit similar to the worldly gods of saṃsāra. They have very happy lives and they are naturally good, but they are not really susceptible to receiving the Buddha’s teachings because they don’t experience much suffering. And so the Buddha waits until the time when the degeneration of the age brings more suffering and the human beings are more aware and then it’s necessary for this stage to be reached that the Buddhas can then be listened to. And so we’re in that particular stage of this process.
Now this doesn’t really seem to fit the process that’s been discovered by excavating the ancient remains of human beings and so on. But anyway, think you can take it in a general sense as being that, in any case we could have been born in a time when there was no existence of the teachings of Buddha and we are born into a time when these teachings do exist, so we’re fortunate. So then another obstacle would be if we were to have mental or physical incapacity to being able to listen to or understand the teachings or to put them into practice. So as we’ve got normal bodies, normal intelligence, we’re in this fortunate position that we’re able to listen to the teachings and understand them and to put them in practice in our lives. We can see that there are people in this world, we can see that there are people around us who don’t have this situation.
When we put all these things together, we can see that actually the bulk of people in this world don’t really have the perfect human rebirth because really most people have one of these obstacles or another. And then when we get to the endowments, then this is just another way of looking at it. Before we’ve been looking at the freedom from the negative aspects, now we’re looking at the positive aspects of what we have got. So there’s a little bit of overlap. It’s really two different teachings that have been put together.
So our endowments include having a human body and being born in a central country where the teachings are existing and having intact sense organs. We’ve actually mentioned these points before. Another one is having freedom from having committed the five heinous crimes. Might think not many people would have committed these, but some people in this world might have committed some of them. They include having killed your father or mother, or having killed an Arhat, a liberated being.
These are that these are crimes that could have still been committed by people in this age. The other two, drawing the blood of a Tathāgata or creating a schism in the Sangha, we can’t actually create at the present because these can only be created when Buddha is actually existing in a physical body in this world. So these are so serious that they create a great obstacle to practice. Then there’s another one is that we are having respect for the Buddhist scriptures. Well, some of us might not know much about the Buddhist scriptures, but at least we have the potential to develop respect for them.
Another one is the presence of the Buddha in the world. Well, we haven’t actually got the living presence of Buddha now, but we are in an age in which his teachings are flourishing. So we’re fortunate to have come along at that time after the actual presence of Buddha, but during which we’re still able to have access to the teachings. We have the presence of the Dharma teachings, Because we could have been born in a world in which Buddha hadn’t descended, we wouldn’t have had any opportunity to receive the teachings. Another one is the practice of the living tradition of the Dharma teachings.
That’s the actual practice, the realization. So it’s not enough just to hear the words. We need guidance of experienced teachers, teachers who have achieved various levels of the path. Because these teachers are existing in this world now, then we are able to receive the benefit of their guidance. And the teachings of Buddha are not just words, but they’re a living experience that has to be passed on from teacher to disciple in a living tradition, and this living tradition is continuing right down to the present, so we’re very fortunate to be having access to that.
We also need help on the path, so we need the existence of the Sangha, which means the Ārya Sangha, the holy beings who have gone as far as achieving the path of seeing, which is reached when that meditator achieves direct insight into emptiness. So, being an Ārya Sangha, whether they are monks or nuns or lay people, the Ārya Sangha is the ones who have this realization of emptiness. Existing and we also have the relative Sangha, the Robed Sangha who are the ones who sort of specialize and as a community carry the responsibility for maintaining the transmission of the teachings. So we’re able to find teachers in this age. So then, having thought about our good fortune, we’re supposed to meditate on this and keep on reflecting on these points over and over and seeing how not just thinking about them in general, but really applying them to ourselves so we get a feeling for it.
And when we meditate on it, we’re supposed to meditate until we produce within ourselves a feeling that we’re like a beggar who has been rummaging through a garbage heap looking for anything that he can find that’s useful or that might be worth something and he comes across an incredibly precious jewel in the garbage. And This is an interesting image because if the beggar doesn’t know the jewel, if he doesn’t recognise it for what it is, then he can’t cash it in. So it’s no use to him, he still remains a beggar. But as soon as he realizes that this isn’t just an old bit of glass that he’s got, but it’s a diamond, then he becomes a rich man and immediately he ceases to be an unfortunate beggar, but he becomes an extremely fortunate person. And in the same way, if we don’t recognize we’ve got the precious human rebirth, we can’t take advantage of it.
But as soon as we recognize our opportunity, then we can really make good use of it. And so in actual fact, the beggar just found something that can help him in this lifetime, but we found something that’s going to benefit us in all our future lifetimes. So something that’s incredibly more valuable. So any questions about that? So then going on reflecting about it, to understand why it’s valuable, have to understand what it can do for us.
And it can do that’s explained in terms of three things. So its temporal value or short term value is that we can gain another human rebirth. So by practicing Dharma in this lifetime, we can bring about the cause to be reborn human again. The ultimate value is to attain enlightenment. In actual fact, another option would be to attain liberation, but here we’re focusing on enlightenment because we’re following the Mahāyāna teachings.
So is there anybody who’s not clear about the difference between liberation and enlightenment? Okay. I wonder if anybody would like to any of the older students might like to explain how they see it. Any older students who might have a a slant on this. Yes.