Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Venerable Margaret McAndrew shows how to recognize what makes an action spiritual: the motivation behind it, not the deed itself. Washing dishes, driving to work, caring for family—all become enlightenment practice when animated by compassion and the wish to benefit all beings. She addresses Western practitioners directly, exploring how to use precious human rebirth and avoid lower realms through understanding saṃsāra’s six realms and the bardo state between rebirths. She contextualizes difficult teachings on hell and hungry ghosts for newcomers, illustrating with stories: a haunted house in Melbourne, Doctor Choedrak’s prison suffering, Viktor Frankl’s Holocaust testimony. These examples show how mental training determines whether suffering destroys or deepens practice. The talk concludes with refuge in the Three Jewels and Buddha nature.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 DwP 1998 02 18.mp3
UUID: 1392ecf7-fc80-4e36-aaa2-ae1ffe1d3c36
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-02-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~6,261
So last week I talked about the the meaning of human life, what a great opportunity it is to have human life now, and the fact that it won’t last forever and we know we’re going to die and we’re going to die we don’t know what it could be at any old time. And so we need to not only make good use of our precious human rebirth but we need to really think about starting right now and doing something energetic about it right now. Is there anybody here who’s really new who’s just starting off? Okay, right. Well, I’m sorry that you sort of missed out on the lead up to this but anyway that’s in general terms what it’s all about and we’ll be going on to the next topic which is how to go about using our life well.
So we actually talked about that a little bit last week because I talked about the eight worldly dharmas or the eight worldly concerns and what it really boiled down to was that anything that’s just done for short term gratification, just for the well-being of this life without sort of future lives or of liberation or enlightenment. Anything that’s just done for this life alone is worldly and it doesn’t depend on the thing itself. It doesn’t depend on the action itself. There’s a lot of very ordinary everyday actions that we do that can either be worldly actions, they can be negative if we do them with a negative state of mind, they can be positive if we do them with a positive state of mind, and we can make really good use of our day if we understand this and start to train our mind to take this positive attitude all the time so that when we’re doing ordinary activities such as washing the dishes and vacuuming the house and driving to work and this kind of thing. If we think that we’re doing this for a good purpose, particularly for a spiritual purpose and particularly with the thought of bodhicitta or working to attain enlightenment for the welfare of all other sentient beings, all other samsaric beings.
If we have this kind of a thought then these ordinary little activities can all become something that becomes a positive action, something in the path to enlightenment. We can think that we’re doing these actions we could always find some sort of positive slant on these everyday actions and we can think that we’re doing these ordinary things to maintain our bodies and so on so as to have healthy bodies so as to be able to practice the Dharma. We go off to work thinking that well we can think that we’re doing it so that we can earn a living so that we can survive and practice the Dharma. We can also think that in carrying out our responsibilities to our families that we’re actually training ourselves in thoughts like compassion and enthusiastic perseverance and so on which are very important qualities to develop on the path to enlightenment and the family is a an excellent training ground for all these kinds of qualities as anybody who has a family would tell you. I know I’m always being told by people who have families that it’s the greatest training ground for patience and practicing familial love and kindness because it’s the hardest situation.
So anyway, what we have to do we can think of ways of doing this ourselves. If we train our mind in Dharma practice and we start to see all different ways of looking at things, so that rather than thinking about just our own pleasure, our own gratification, we get this sort of long term spiritual outlook on things. This really transforms our mind so it’s not just something silly that I’m saying that this really produces long term results because you can see how it actually brings about a change in your attitude, a change in the way you look at things and it also brings about a lot more happiness in the mind because when we have our mind really fixed on a great goal, then we can be really happy. All these little things take on meaning. Whereas when we’re just when we have no long term goal and we’re just trying to find short term gratification, then we’re not happy.
We’re always discontented This is the nature of things. Anyway, that’s just saying a bit more about the eight worldly dharmas which really came from last week. Does anybody want to go through again what they were? Right. Anybody remember?
Does anybody want to say? Testing. Testing time. Yeah. Okay, did you all hear that?
It was pleasure and pain, gain and loss. How did you express it? Praise and blame, fame and notoriety. So there’s actually four categories in pairs of objects of our attachment and aversion. So what we can do is because what we’re trying to find is a balanced state of mind which is neither strongly attached nor feeling aversion or not feeling extreme aversion, can balance the two.
We can try to find a middle place in between them and that way we can have equanimity. So this is something that we have to be aiming for all the time. So We were talking about how to meditate on the precious human rebirth and we contemplated how fortunate we were not to have been born in various other realms and we went through a bit of a description of some of these realms upper realms where there’s a lot of pleasure and lower realms where there’s much more suffering than the human realm and so we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to practice Dharma in any of these realms. What comes next if you’re following the orthodox presentation of the graduated path, then the next step is to stimulate ourselves a bit further by really thinking about the suffering of the lower realms. The purpose of this is to stimulate our aversion to the lower realms because it’s all right to have aversion to the lower realms, that’s positive aversion.
So there are certain things that it’s right to have aversion to and there’s certain things that it’s right to have attachment to. So it’s if I can use those terms, perhaps it would be better to say to have an attraction to or to have a dislike towards. And so you can’t have too much dislike towards the lower realms because they’re a genuine object of suffering. They’re a genuine object of the mind not wanting to be reborn in these realms and if we have this sort of attitude then it will actually help us to practice Dharma so when we talk about not having attachment and aversion, it’s a state of mind that has an exaggerated just for ordinary purposes, in the ordinary everyday sense of talking about attachment and aversion, we’re talking about exaggerated states of mind that sees more good, more attraction in an attractive object and sees more badness in an unattractive object than the situation really warrants. So we have incredible attraction towards say for instance nice clothes or a wonderful car or something like that and we have incredible aversion towards perhaps people that we don’t like or towards having to go off to a job that we find dreary or all sorts of worldly things.
We spend our whole life worrying and getting emotional about these things which we can really take in our stride if we don’t let ourselves get upset and we can we can deal with these things. We don’t have to regard them as being a major problem but something in our mind exaggerates the situation. On the other hand, for instance, when it comes to creating virtuous karma, we can’t have too much attachment to that because that’s a very positive direction to be taking and that’s really going to help us. So that’s not really attachment. You sometimes get people asking this question, they say oh perhaps I shouldn’t be attached to my teacher, perhaps I shouldn’t be attached to the Dharma center, perhaps I shouldn’t be attached to Buddha.
All these things are positive so it’s good if we have these kinds of attachments, if I can use that word. So on the other hand, there are certain things that we have to be very averse to and that would include things like creating negative karma and falling under the power of deluded attitudes. So it’s very good to build up this picture of the lower realms and not wanting to have a rebirth there, not wanting to be born there. So we might think that this is unreal, that the descriptions of these are realms are unreal and too horrible to think about. So some of these realms are described as being hell like states, there’s hot and cold hells and there’s the hungry ghost realms.
So I think in Buddhism we have eight hot hells and eight cold hells and a number of of in between type hells and and some funny ones such as hell some people apparently in hell at night and not in the daytime or the other way around. So there’s all kinds of variety. Take your pick. So And also the hungry ghost realm. If you have any problem thinking about these things, at least you can look at the animal realm and think of suffering of the animals and we can see that animals really do exist, we know they exist, and we can see how it might be possible to be born as one.
So we can build up a thought of wanting to avoid that kind of a rebirth. But actually these contemplations have been the experience of holy beings of not just the Buddhist tradition but of many different religious traditions. They’re very helpful actually in keeping the mind stimulated and as being a spur to practice. For instance I came across a description by Saint Teresa of a vision she’d had. She had many different visions, had beautiful visions, but she had one vision of a hell like experience and she said that was the best vision she ever had because after that there was just no way that she would be slack in her religious practice.
So the good thing about Buddhist tales is that they don’t last forever, but the bad thing about them is that they do last for a long time. And while they do last, they’re just as nasty as Christian hells or any other hells, so you don’t want to go there. So actually contemplating on these topics in detail, if you’ve got confidence in the Three Jewels of refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and their power to guide, then it’s alright to do these kinds of meditation. It’s not a good idea to reflect too much on these things until you’ve built up some faith and confidence, I think. This is just perhaps something personal, because in the Graduated Path, it’s set out as a preliminary but that’s really talking to people who already had this faith when they started off even though they may not have had much knowledge of the practice in the East people would have faith before they start but here in the West, sometimes coming from a background of not really knowing terribly much at all about Buddhism and just learning about it, and if you’re in that situation, then it’s probably wise to check out the Dharma teachings as a whole and build up your faith in them and save these more intensive contemplations on these suffering states until you’ve really also got some confidence in the remedy.
Otherwise you might feel depressed or you might simply feel that you don’t like this particular religious path and that you’re going to leave it alone. And that could be a big mistake, so it’s better to take it in context. But I’m just presenting it now as it comes in the Orthodox presentation, and it’s explained in terms of how we stimulate ourselves to practice by these different contemplations on the perfect human rebirth, how to use it well and how to avoid falling into other realms. And then we meditate on death and the suffering of the lower realm so as to intensify that understanding. And then the next step is contemplating on the qualities of the Three Jewels of refuge and how they guide us.
And then the next step after that is looking at their advice and following it. So that’s why it comes in this particular section of the teachings and we go on after this to go through the stages of actual practice. So any questions up to this point? Well, is actually an incarnation of itself. Yes, it’s a particular realm of rebirth.
So in between incarnations we go through what’s called the bardo state, that means Tibetan for in between. We go into the Bardo state state for forty nine days or less and that can be a pretty unpleasant and confusing state but it only lasts for not more than forty nine days and then some other rebirth will take place after that, which could be in any of six realms. And so there’s three upper realms, three lower realms. The three upper realms are the worldly gods, the demigods and human beings. Were you here last week when I talked about that?
Yes. So they have a pretty good life, but they don’t the two the two god realms, the the world the gods and the demigods have a pretty good life but they’re still worldly beings like ourselves, they’re not transcendental beings and they’re still in saṃsāra, they’re still subject to delusion and karma. They’re experiencing the results of good karma but once they finish that they’re going to fall back into some other kind of rebirth again so they’re still cycling like us. We’ve been in their realm before and they’ve been they’ll be coming to our realm so it just keeps on going round and round Not exactly round and round but you can jump from one to the other. And in the same way we can fold to the lower realms, the beings in the lower realms can come to the upper realms and we’ve done all these things many times.
The lower realms are, as I mentioned before, the hell states which can be hot or cold and also have many other sort of horrific sufferings. A lot of people have trouble taking these sufferings must say myself sometimes I find it a little bit hard to actually take some of the details literally but I do feel that there are these states which are very much states of physical suffering. Whether we actually end up having, you know, guards with animal heads prodding us with spears or not, I’m not sure. But certainly I think we can get into states of gross physical and mental pain and suffering and this can be a state that our mind throws us into in which we’re unable to pull ourselves out of for a long long time. And the actual if you have some problem sort of accepting the possibility of this, it might help to think that in actual fact, also this human life of ours is something that is created by our mind.
That in actual fact we grasp at the human life that we’ve got now as being something that’s very concrete and real. But in actual fact it’s an illusory creation of our karma which springs from mind. In the same way our karma can create hell states, it can create hungry ghost states or it can create god states and we just go from one to the other. Each of these states has its own particular laws. They don’t necessarily have the same kind of gross physical bodies as we have, but they have physical bodies which operate according to the particular physical laws that operate in that particular realm, which might be, rather different to the ones that we’re experiencing in this realm.
Except for the animals, of course, we can say that definitely the animals are under the same sort of physical laws as we are. Seems that there are other beings such as even that are experienced by a lot of people, a lot of human beings such as clairvoyants or even people who are not normally clairvoyant sometimes just have these experiences of seeing various kinds of ghosts and nature spirits and so on. A lot of people have an awareness that apart from human beings and animals that we see around us with our gross physical vision that there’s actually all kinds of other lives around us which we can’t see as readily and which seems to be operating on a different physical level. Would anybody actually have anything to say about this? Maybe there’s some good stories.
No? Some questions okay too? Yes. Well, that’s what they say, actually. As we develop our meditative powers, we’ll actually become more aware of these other beings, particularly the hungry ghosts seem to be something which is not too removed from the human realms.
There seems to be quite a lot of them around and they often seem to be the same space with us and quite a lot of people seem to experience them, at least certain of them. It seems like some of the hungry ghosts perhaps have their own realm which is not with the human beings but there are others who share the human being realms and the same with the gods because the nature spirits are actually considered to be a kind of minor gods. They belong to the god realms rather than the ghost realms. I know quite a few people who have seen some of these different kinds of things and in particular I used to live at a house in Melbourne where it was said to be haunted and I never actually saw this chap myself but everybody else in the house seemed to see him from time to time and in particular he had a habit of I’m not sure if he actually woke up people from their sleep or whether he simply appeared to them when they happened to wake up, but a lot of people seemed to sort of see him they’d wake up from sleep and sort of see him in front of them and they all gave the same description so I said it seems reasonable to suppose that they really were seeing something.
And there was people there was one woman in particular who was more clairvoyant than the average person and she used to see him all the time. There were a couple of people actually who used to be able to see him a lot of the time, whereas other people used to just see him when they woke up, if they just woke up suddenly. He seemed to be actually trying to make contact, maybe that was why he woke people up because he might have thought that that was when they’d be likely see him. Anyway, something to think about. Well, that was his rebirth.
He would have been in the hungry ghost realm because they say that the ghosts that haunt houses are often hungry of the hungry ghost realm. I’m not sure that every kind of ghost is because there seems to be some funny ghosts like the ones that sometimes you hear of where people see a ghost that invariably just keeps on doing the same thing over and over again and in that case it might be that that’s more just like some sort of imprint or impression that’s not actually a being but just some sort of picture like a the analogy would be sort of like a movie or something that just keeps on playing over and over because something very powerful perhaps happened in that spot at one time and the impression hasn’t totally faded away so people sort of pick up on that and sort of see a replay of it. There sometimes seem to be those kinds of experiences too, which would also be labelled ghosts by the ordinary people, but there’s also some ghosts which actually seem to be living beings in their own right and who do different kinds of activities and don’t just always repeat the same action over and over, but are actually of living some kind of life in their realm.
Ghosts that haunt houses are often people who lived in the house before, previous owners of the house or previous residents of the house who were very attached to the house and because they didn’t want to leave it. Perhaps they felt very strongly when they died or during the period before they died of wanting to stay with the house and not wanting to leave it. Then they get born there again, haunting it. Well, at least he wasn’t a thirsty ghost. Or maybe he was trying to drink it and couldn’t.
I don’t know, that’s really interesting. Yeah, a regular. Yes, it’s hard to say because if he’d only died about a month ago, might have possibly still been in the bardo state and they say that the bardo beings often hang around their old locality for a period of time, at least for a few days it’s quite normal for them to hang around. There’s a state of confusion where beings often don’t understand they’re dead and they don’t understand what sort of world they’ve got into in the in between state and so they’re still trying to be around their old places and make contact with the people who were close to them before and that kind of thing and then generally after a little while, it seems to dawn on them that they’re no longer in the human realm and then they go off to their sort of next lot of experiences, whatever that might be. But it is possible that that he might have also been born into the hungry ghost realm but haunting his old pub.
If he was a regular who was more attached to the pub than he was to his home, then he could have easily been born in the pub. And I’ve also heard stories of a nurse, an old nun who was a nurse who used to hold the hospital wards and she’d come around at night and visit the beds for all the patients and check up on them, but because they’d put in a new floor six inches higher than the old one, she had no feet. Because she was still walking on the old floor. Yes. Yes.
Well yes. Yes, I think that the Buddhists wouldn’t disagree with that point of view, particularly as regards to Bardo state, even with the hungry ghost state sometimes it can be that they’re perhaps so much attached to their previous human experience that their hungry ghost experience consists of perhaps more a sort of reliving of their memories of their human experience than of anything that might be surrounding them in the hungry ghost realm. Yeah. So actually, I’ve heard stories of lamas doing pujas for these kinds of beings so as to enable them to get unstuck and and go on to a human life. So So it’s very helpful to remember that actually all our human sufferings, even our physical sufferings, are actually brought about by our mental state.
If we have a developed mental state, then we aren’t going to be nearly so affected by physical sufferings. In fact, it’s possible to go right beyond any sort of susceptibility to physical pain and suffering, and of course to go beyond mental pain and suffering. A good example of that would be that of Doctor. Choedrak, if anybody’s read In Exile from the Land of Snows, one section on that is of this Tibetan doctor, Doctor Choedrak, who was actually a monk at the time he was imprisoned and he was taken to a prison camp where they experienced horrific suffering, starvation, kinds of mistreatment.
He was beaten so badly that his eye was turned around in his head and all sorts of awful things happened. Was able to rise above the because of his training in the Dharma, he was able to rise above that situation and eventually things got better and he was eventually able to practice medicine in the prison and eventually through having helped the family of one of his one of the officials there, he was able to be released. And after he’d been released, he actually stated that he’d found out that to him it didn’t really matter whether conditions were good, whether conditions were bad, he would feel the same. He developed this equanimity so that he felt the same whether he was experiencing these really extreme bad conditions or the good conditions of being at home with his family. This of course was something that he didn’t have at first when he went there, it was something that he cultivated during his years of suffering until he did manage to rise above it.
You also can find other accounts, for instance I read a rather similar account by a doctor Viktor Frankl who was in the Nazi camps during World War two. Maybe somebody else might have read some of his books. A really wonderful person, I’ve only read one of his books, I’d love to come across more of them actually, but so much insight. After he was released, he dedicated his life to helping other people deal with the problem of suffering, because he felt that having learnt so much about himself, psychiatrist and he was in a position to help people with that, to come to terms with it. So he took quite a different approach to the average psychiatrist, who sort of sees suffering as a problem to be got rid of.
His approach rather was to see it as being something to come to terms with. He tried to help people to come to terms with their suffering in a positive way, and when they could come to terms with it in a positive way, then it would actually cease to be suffering because they would feel glad of it. He actually reported one woman who he was working with, who was dying of some terribly painful disease. She was experiencing all this suffering and she said I’m so happy now that I’m experiencing all this suffering because she said I’ve had a very happy life, I’ve only had good things happen to me, I haven’t experienced the sufferings that other people have and now I’m experiencing suffering, now I’m feeling, now I know what the rest of humanity is suffering And so she was happy because of that. And so it might be a little bit sometimes hard to imagine how people could feel this way, but it’s possible to actually come to terms with these kinds of situations and and actually feel joy about whatever situation might come to us.
And So, mind that’s So anyway, a mind that’s feeling this way, even if it’s experiencing all sorts of physical problems, a mind which is advanced in this way is feeling joy. It’s a joyful mind. Whereas a mind which is totally under the control of anger and self grasping is in a hellish state, even if it’s experiencing even if the person is experiencing what appears to be very good conditions in this life. And we know this. We know that when we’re really angry, it’s such an unpleasant feeling.
It’s worse than any kind of physical problem, isn’t it? It’s really horrible. So, anyway, the purpose of doing that kind of meditation is to is to it’s to reinforce the strength of the attitude with which we take refuge. So when we take refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, we need to have two motivations. So where the Three Jewels of refuge, you’re probably familiar with the the term Buddha.
I’ll be talking a little bit more about Buddha. And Dharma is generally, it actually has very profound meaning, but generally taken to mean the teachings of Buddha. And the Sangha, there’s actually two types of Sangha. You’ve probably heard of the monks and nuns wearing maroon robes or saffron robes being called the Sangha. That’s the ordinary everyday meaning of the word but the actual refuge of Sangha is the Ārya Sangha which means those beings they’re monks and nuns or lay people, who have reached the path of seeing, who have gained direct insight into emptiness.
When they attain that realization they become the Ārya Sangha, they become capable of guiding us to that realization, which is the realization which when fully developed will liberate us from all our suffering, from our deluded mental states and karma. And so when we understand that, then we can understand that these Three Jewels are what is going to give us the guidance that we need to attain the state of liberation from suffering ourselves. So, there’s and in order to take refuge, we have to have two motivations. One is the fear of suffering of saṃsāra, especially the lower realms of rebirth. So to really feel inspired to take refuge from the heart, it’s not just enough to want to escape the sufferings of the human realm because we’re not developed enough yet to have real aversion to that suffering.
That’s a higher realization. At the moment, if we’re ordinary people, most of us are at the level where we’re still very careful of falling into being deluded by the attractions of the pleasures of the human realms. And so this can be a big distraction to our practice and so we need to remember that we can so easily fall into these lower states where the sufferings are much worse and that we’re actually in the very much in the minority in the human realms that if we fall into the lower realms we’re more likely to stay there for a long time than we are to come back into the human realm again. We want to make good use of the human rebirth that we’ve got and not risk this not risk this slipping back at all. And the other motivation is confidence in the qualities of the Three Jewels to guide us in this way.
So it wouldn’t be enough just to to fear the sufferings of cyclic existence and especially the lower realms unless we really felt confident that the Three Jewels did have this power to save us. Otherwise, if we didn’t have that confidence, we might feel well we’re in a bad jam, but there’s nothing that we can do about this, nobody can help us, and so we might as well enjoy ourselves as much as we can. And in fact many people do take this attitude. So we’re not in this situation. If we look at the qualities of the Three Jewels, can see that actually there is guidance, there is true guidance.
It’s also important that we shouldn’t think that we’re just helpless and calling on the Three Jewels to save us, to rescue us. It’s not like that. What we’re doing is recognizing that we do need help, we need guidance. But on our own, we’re lost and we can’t get anywhere. But on the other hand, we can see the qualities of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and realize that they have the power to guide us correctly.
But from our side, we’re not helpless. We have the power to follow their guidance. We have to put in energy from our side. We can’t just sit back and wait to be rescued because that never will happen because the only way that the Three Jewels of Refuge can help is by showing us the way and we have to follow that. We have to follow the instruction.
And we do have this power within ourselves. We have the potential within ourselves to achieve liberation, to achieve Buddhahood. So I was saying the first time I was talking here about the true nature of our mind. Does anybody remember that? Anybody want to say something about it?
I think actually also Venerable Dendrub was saying something about it last night too. So somebody do you want to say something, Mark? The the yes. Why the nature of our mind is such that it enables us to achieve liberation. What is it?
Well, suppose that’s a good reason for practicing. If we wanted suffering, then we wouldn’t have to practice. Dendrub, I think, made the point that our minds are actually capable of being purified, that although we have deluded mental states, our deluded mental states are not the true nature of our mind. The true nature of our mind is like a mirror which might have dirt. He he used the expression that might be dirty and I think he said wobbly, I think was the term he used.
But anyway, the mirror might, at the present, be covered with a thick layer of dirt and dust and so on so that it obscures the clear reflection of reality and that’s similar to our minds which at the moment are very obscured by the disturbing mental states such as anger, aversion, hatred, greed and clinging attachment, jealousy, harmful pride and ignorance which is the most important one because ignorance is the one that brings about all the others. But we can we can get rid of all of these because they’re not part of the true nature of mind. They’re not the real nature of our mind. And we have what’s called Buddha nature, which means that we have potential to become totally purified to attain Buddhahood. It doesn’t mean that we have a a little Buddha within us.
Some sometimes you hear people say, oh, we’re really Buddha, but we just don’t know it. But actually that’s that’s a mistake to say that because Buddha means purified. The Sanskrit word Buddha means something like awakened or enlightened. The Tibetan word means part of the word has the meaning of being purified. And that relates to the fact that Buddha has totally eradicated all totally every last trace, not only of these harmful mental states, but even the more subtle levels of ignorance and attained full omniscience.
So the mind is capable of attaining that. We all start off from the same sort of condition. In the story of Buddha’s past lives, the earliest description of his past lives is that of having been a hell being. So he actually started off worse than we are now and from there he was able to progress through life after life and become Buddha. So we’re already a lot better off than than that.
So in actual fact, we have just the same nature as Śākyamūni Buddha and all the other Buddhas had and they attained enlightenment. We have that potential within us. All beings have animals, mosquitoes, they have it within them. Mosquitoes don’t have the potential potential to work with it now but in a future lifetime if they can attain a human life then they can work with it. We do have that potential to work with it now.
We even might have the possibility of attaining enlightenment even within this lifetime because it’s possible within a human lifetime to attain full enlightenment. So it’s a good opportunity. It’s really important that we should understand to feel confident in our own potential. So this is a kind of refuge. So there’s there’s cause refuge and resolve refuge.
When we take cause refuge, we take refuge in the Buddha. We take refuge in Śākyamūni Buddha and in other Buddhas such as Maitreya Buddha, the future Buddha or in perhaps Chenrezig and Tārā and so on. We have well, actually, they’re Yidams rather than Buddhas, but they represent the qualities of Buddhahood. We have if we take refuge in the Dharma, we think that we’re taking refuge in what Buddha taught and in the path that he showed. And when we take refuge in the Sangha, we think we’re taking refuge in the Ārya Sangha and also in the robed Sangha as a symbol of that.
But when we take results refuge, then we’re taking refuge in our own being, having the potential to become all these things. We have the potential to become Buddha. We have the potential for our mind to become one with the Dharma and for our for ourselves also, of course, to become Sangha. Because becoming Ārya Sangha is a state that is attained on the way to Buddhahood anyway. So in actual fact we could expect that we would become Sangha along the path to Buddhahood.
So any questions about these points? Buddha attained he was able to totally purify his mind, attained omniscience, and all sorts of other wonderful qualities. He attained everlasting blissful peace, the highest state of bliss that’s attainable. Had perfect compassion towards all sentient beings and and tremendous powers. So although we sometimes talk about Śākyamūni Buddha as though he passed away, it