Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Margaret McAndrew opens this 48-minute evening session with the mechanics of karma—its undiminishing potency across lifetimes—before systematically teaching the ten non-virtuous actions of body, speech, and mind. The three of body are killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct; the four of speech are lying, divisive speech, harsh words, and idle gossip; the three of mind are craving, ill will, and wrong views. Throughout, she emphasizes that intention determines karmic weight: the same action carries graver consequences when driven by anger or attachment than when performed carelessly. Her examples anchor teaching in daily life—borrowing books without returning them, careless words that damage relationships, idle gossip that wastes spiritual practice time. The second half introduces the four opponent forces for purification: reliance on the Three Jewels and bodhicitta, regret, resolve not to repeat, and antidote practices. The session concludes with a guided meditation in which practitioners visualize Buddha radiating purifying white light. Practical and accessible for anyone seeking to build their practice on ethical foundation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 DwP 1998 02 25.mp3
UUID: af7f2f10-37ab-499d-92bc-0ba1c7f77b22
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-02-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 48.1 minutes
Words: ~4,935
Force, and that’s very much a result of our karma. And it seems like for these people, even though they got killed in an accident, still the the life force actually finished before the accident happened. And they were just sort of walking around and talking and doing normal things, and nobody was suspecting unless it was somebody who could see the aura, but, still, you know, it was finished for them. So that was the third factor. And the fourth one is that the karmic cause never loses its potency.
So it can be purified. I’m not talking about that, but unless something is done to purify karma, then its potency can remain for any given length of time. It doesn’t. It’s not like seed. karma’s often compared to seed, but whereas if you keep wheat, for example, for a few loses its potency and you won’t get it to germinate.
But karma can remain for millions of lifetimes, and it’s just as potent as it was to bring its result at the time it was imprinted. In fact, it can be expanded all that time. And so, this is something that that is quite important to remember. So understanding these factors, then we need a guide to actually how to put the observance of karma into action. And, it’s often said that Buddha didn’t lay down rules.
He didn’t lay down commandments. But, he did give advice, and and it’s up to us to follow his advice. So this isn’t some sort of arbitrary laying down of a law by some sort of a god or some sort of commanding sort of being, but it’s a an explanation to us of how to practically do what’s going to bring us the most benefit beneficial result. If we want to bring about happiness, for ourselves and if we want to avoid suffering, then there are some simple rules which we can follow, some simple rules of guidance. And nobody’s going to punish us, but it’s just explaining to us how to work with these natural laws.
And we do need some guidance for this. It’s possible to reach a level of development at which you don’t need these rules of guidance anymore. A higher Bodhisattva can follow their own judgment. Have clairvoyant powers. They can see what the results of any action will be, and they might do some actions which look quite strange to the ordinary person.
But to us ordinary people, these rules are generally true, and if we follow them, then they give us good guidance. And so, the basic guide to karma is to avoid the ten non virtuous actions of body, speech, and mind. So some of you have probably heard all these things before, but anyway, I’ll run through them because they’re very important. And if you don’t know anything else of Dharma, but if you know these, then your Dharma practice is going to be effective and worthwhile. Whereas if you know a lot of other things, if you know about gaining samadhi and all these other things, you don’t know about the ten non virtuous actions, then it’s not going to be of any help to you.
It’s interesting that these this explanation of the ten non virtuous actions is similar to the basic morality of other religions of a lot of other religions. And in actual fact, they would be, in accordance with basic ethics or basic morality. And so the main factor that’s concerned here is avoiding harm. The main thing that distinguishes a wrong action from a right action is this factor of avoiding harm to sentient beings, including ourselves. But particularly, we mainly focus on others because we’re mainly concerned with the kind of wrong actions that we do with other sentient beings.
And so when we look at the kind of actions that we do that can be harmful to others, then we can see that by avoiding them, we’re going to create we’re going to avoid creating actions that are going to cause suffering to others. And this is the main distinguishing factor that is distinguishing a bad karma from a good one. But as I said before, the intention has a lot to do with it. So if we harm others with a deluded intention, then we’re creating harmful karma. But, of course, there’s this factor that sometimes we have this that we might have harmful intention, and we might also create a harmful action.
Other times, perhaps, we might be creating some sort of action that we think of as being perhaps not harmful, but because the action is harmful in itself, also it can be harmful to others. For instance, say sometimes we we say something which doesn’t really we don’t really mean anything by it, but we just haven’t been very considerate. And so if we we become a little bit more aware, we can see that actually we are harming other people by these kinds of actions also. But generally, when we do an action that hurts others, we generally have some sort of deluded intention. It goes together.
We don’t do harmful actions with a good motivation, and we don’t do good actions with a harmful motivation. But it’s the motivation that makes it stronger. So for instance, if we do a harmful action such as saying hurtful words, but we didn’t really have much intention to hurt the person, then that’s lighter. But if we say some hurtful word and we really did want to hurt that person and we really felt angry and we felt hatred to them and that was our intention to hurt, then that is a stronger non virtue. So is this distinction clear?
Okay. So, anyway, there’s four non virtues of body three non virtues of body, four non virtues of speech, and three non virtues of mind that we have to practice avoiding. And you probably might know them already, but the three of body are killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. The four of speech are lying, divisive speech, harsh words, and idle gossip.
And the three of mind are craving ill will and wrong views. So I’ll give a little bit of explanation. Actually, these topics are quite important and it can be beneficial to go into it in more detail, but there isn’t so much time tonight. But the three non virtues of body killing particularly refers to human life, but it also includes animal life. Stealing means taking anything of value, anything of more than trivial value that, belongs to other people.
That’s to say, not in not just in monetary terms, but anything which is valued by other people, and which belongs to them. It’s stealing if you take that. And for instance, if the great example is borrowing books. If we borrow something and don’t return it, deliberately don’t return it, it’s stealing, even if we’ve had it for years. If we consciously think, oh, well, I’ve had it for so long now that it’s really mine, there’s no point in returning it, then at that point it becomes stealing.
And it’s one that I think most readers are guilty of. And the other one is sexual misconduct. And for a layperson, that’s essentially, for practical purposes, it’s, avoiding sexual activities that, cause, suffering to others, such as, breaking up other people’s, relationships and so on. And the four of speech are lying. So that doesn’t mean what’s called little white lies, but, the more serious kind of lying, particularly when we lie in order to gain advantage for ourselves or in order to, cause problems for other people.
Divisive speech, that means going about saying bad things about one another person and, generally, what we usually refer to as trouble making, going about and deliberately causing, rifts between people. Harsh words, that’s pretty obvious. Saying hurtful things to people, angry words, and idle gossip. Everybody always gets upset when they hear that idle gossip is one of the non virtues. It’s the lightest of the non virtues, but it’s still one that we have to watch out for because we do it all the time, and we waste a lot of time on it.
And it doesn’t mean that any sort of casual chat or conversation is idle gossip, but when we indulge in it more than is beneficial for us. So it we do need to relax sometimes. We do need to keep in touch with what’s going on and to keep maintain contact with people and so on. And and conversation plays a role in this, and that’s not negative. But if we just keep on talking all the time and waste our time talking, then it detracts from our Dharma practice.
It detracts from doing other useful things that we could be doing. And when we become aware that we’re doing this, then we know that we’re engaging in idle gossip. We need to cultivate mindfulness because at first, before we cultivate mindfulness about it, we’re doing it all the time and don’t realize. And as we become more aware of wanting to put our energy into Dharma practice, then we become more aware of when our useful chat and gossip turns into negative time wasting. That’s right.
Yes. And what is knowing Yes. Affect something with the I think if it Yeah. If it was me, I would, yeah, I would think that in that case, you would obviously tell the lie. It’s it’s common sense in that sort of case.
Yes. There are always situations where it can be more dubious. For instance, do you tell a lie in order to be able to extend your visa so as to attend the teachings, that kind of thing, you know? I think sometimes we we can rationalize it too easily. But also, there’s the situations when somebody comes along and says, oh, how do you like my new dress?
And you say, oh, it’s awful. Or do you say, oh, what a pretty color. It really suits you. You know? And Geshe, Tashi Tsering, recently talked about this, and it was very interesting.
He said, you know, you shouldn’t hurt people’s feelings. It’s better to better to say something nice than to tell them the truth that’s going to hurt them. And so yeah. So, really, with this, you have to balance one thing against another, and there’s no simple answer. But if you develop the attitude of really not wanting to lie, then you won’t lie too easily.
Some people vary. Some people have have a habit of lying, which is hard to break, and they find, you know, that they sit very easily into telling lies at the least opportunity. But with mindfulness, we can cultivate this feeling that we don’t want to be lying and that we’re on the watch for lies. And then when we do tell a lie, it will be mindful. The lamas say that it’s very good to understand dharma because it helps us to make our non virtues very light and our virtues very, very strong.
And in fact, when we understand these things, then even even if we do tell a lie, there might be a little bit of negativity in telling a lie, but there’s a lot of virtue in not wanting to hurt somebody’s feelings, and the one balances out the other. So it’s not saying that there’s no negativity, but it’s saying that the negativity is very, very small, and the good is big, and so you can make your choice on those grounds. So Telling the truth. Well, that can be true too, of course, particularly with other Dharma students. Or for instance, if you think this person really has awful dress sense, and it might be hard for them to, you know, to do well in their job because they don’t know how to dress themselves and present themselves well, you know, then there might be a case, perhaps not just when they’ve turned up in their new dress and they’re all excited about it, but sort of at some time you might talk to them and say, look, you know, your dress sense really might be having a bad effect on your career, and it might be a good idea to get some advice on shopping or something.
Definitely, you know, you have to think about these things too. I mean, is sort of common sense and consideration. So we’re not supposed to abandon our common sense. As I said before, Bodhisattvas can actually do without these rules. We need to use them, but they’re not a hundred percent black and white.
But they are guidance for us, they’re pretty good guidance. So generally, we should try to follow them as much as we can. But but we’re not supposed to just give up our our thinking because in Buddhism, you do have to think all the time. You have to develop your own discrimination. In order to become a bodhisattva, we have to go through the steps of developing our discriminating mind more and more.
So then the three of mind, craving, that’s very, very strong attachment. It can either be to something that we haven’t got and want to possess, or it can be to some something that we’ve already got, but we feel a very strong attachment to it, we want to hold on to it. And because that mind is so powerful, it has a negative effect on us, and so it’s considered to be a non virtuous mind just in itself without, necessarily carrying out an action. Just that mind itself is powerful enough and creating a powerful enough imprint to be, considered, as a non virtue. Also, ill will is a very, very powerful non virtue, and, wrong views also are considered non virtue because they’re so harmful to us.
And this particularly relates to such wrong views as believing that there’s, no such thing as past and future lives and no common cause and result or believing that wrong actions are actually good actions, such as believing that animal sacrifice is a good action. So if we’ve got wrong views about karma, this is the kind of wrong views that’s being referred to here. Yes. Doubt is good because well, there’s different kinds of doubt. And if it’s the kind of doubt that wants to investigate further and is open minded, then that’s alright.
And if it’s a kind of doubt that’s inclined to towards accepting karma, then that’s actually a positive doubt. By following it further and clearing away various different sort of, well, queries that the person has in their mind about karma, but clearing up their questions, then it can actually be something that leads to a firm decision about karma. And, in fact, most of us would be in this situation of having some doubts about karma. Some of us might have gone further towards accepting it than others, but, just to have an open mind about it is is not wrong view at all. The wrong view is having this very fixed closed mind that’s not open to learning.
That’s why it is a wrong view because it blocks us off from finding out the the facts about karma because it doesn’t allow us to to accept the the teaching on karma. So getting a bit close to the time. I don’t think I have time to really talk about the, effects of karma, but, we can learn about this anyway from, or maybe I can run through it very quickly. There’s four effects, and, these include the main effect, the the effect which is similar to its cause, which has two parts. First of all, the one which means receiving something similar happening to yourself, and the other one is a tendency to repeat the action.
And, this second one is very important. It’s something that we need to understand. And the third one is the environmental effect, which is an effect that, influences so the main effect is a kind of rebirth that we receive. Then we can get born in various different realms as a result of karma. Then after having expended that kind of rebirth, we might get born in the human realms, and in that human realm, we would experience these other results.
And that includes the environmental effect, which means being born in a particular kind of situation, according to our karma of that action which we did in the first place. So so that means that we’re experiencing results not just in one life, but over several lives from this one action. So the first result could be a a throwing karma in which we get, for instance, a result of being, say, of killing. Let’s say, let’s say that we were, a butcher, for slaughter man, working in an abattoir, then we could have got born in the hells as a result of that. That would be the a throwing karma, and that would be the the main result in this particular instance.
And then the the next one would be the effect similar to its cause, and that would be even after experiencing perhaps a number of lifetimes in hell states, being born as a human being, but in that that life would be a short one. We would perhaps get killed or we would be harmed by, sentient beings. As a result, still the last bit of that karma still being worked out. We would have to experience these kinds of things. And the other one, which I mentioned, similar to the other result similar to its cause, which is very, very important, is that we would have a tendency to continue killing.
This is the one that we really have to watch out for because it leads to the ongoing, repeated cause and effect. It’s very much related to our continuing in saṃsāra and continuing in, being reborn again and again in suffering states, because the this tendency to repeat the same sort of actions again and again is actually a karmic result, and it leads us to not only to suffer a suffering result, but to create more cause to suffer again, and so it goes on and on and on. So we have to make a conscious effort to stop that. And by observing these ten non virtuous actions, then we can be basically stopping most of the bad karmas. There are still some bad karmas that won’t be covered by these ten non virtuous actions.
It doesn’t cover the whole field, but it gives us a pretty good basic morality. And by following them, then we’re, pretty well taking care of ourselves. And the third one is the environmental result, which could be, for instance, being born in a in an environment where we have to experience illnesses, bad climate, poor food, all sorts of unconducive conditions, and we might get sick and the medicine is not effective for us. If we’re if we for instance, if we have all sorts of illnesses and medicines that generally work for other people don’t seem to work for us, then that can be a karmic result of killing. If we keep these things in mind, it helps to for us to not get depressed, but to understand our situation, to understand how we’ve created these karmas in the past, and how we have to go to work to make sure we don’t have to experience these kinds of karma in the future.
So in this way, experiencing bad conditions can actually be a good spur to our Dharma practice. If we understand that we’re experiencing a particular kind of karmic result, then we really don’t want to go on doing that sort of thing again. So I’ve got to the point here. I was going to talk about karma. I think I’ll have to talk about virtuous karma next week.
It’s very important to realize that there’s always a positive side as well. But I’ll just run very quickly through the four opponent forces, and I might talk about those a little bit more next week too. But we might like to meditate a little bit tonight. So, actually, if we have the four opponent forces in our mindset, we can actually do the four opponent forces, at the end. So there’s four forces.
The first one is the force of reliance, and this this has two parts. The main part is refuge, having trust in the Three Jewels of refuge, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, believing that they have the the right method to help us escape the results of our negative karma, that that with their guidance we can escape our negative karma. And the second one is the thought of bodhicitta, which is it’s possible to actually do without bodhicitta, but it makes our reliance so much stronger because our actions our wrong actions are done either towards the Three Jewels of refuge, such as damaging Buddha statues and so on, or towards sentient beings. And so, in particular, the great bulk of our wrong actions are done towards sentient beings. And so if we build up this motivation of bodhicitta wanting to help others, then that does a tremendous amount to offset our negative karma towards sentient beings, and it’s very, very helpful.
Then the second one is regret. The importance of that is obvious. Regretting understand it doesn’t mean an emotional guilt feeling. What it means is understanding, having a rational understanding that we’ve done a an action that’s going to bring us harm in the future, and realizing that we have to do something to put an an end to, bringing about that result. So, if we understand that it’s like having accidentally taken poison, not realizing that it was poison, and then immediately wanting to seek a proper remedy, this is the sort of attitude that we should have.
And the, the third one is the resolve not to repeat the action again. This is important. And if we can’t make a resolve never to do it again, then we can take the resolve for a day or an hour or a or whatever we feel we can handle. And then perhaps at the end of that time, we can renew our resolve for a little bit longer. And the fourth one is the antidote.
And so this means doing some sort of virtuous action which we consciously offset against the, the negative action. So any virtuous action will do, but there’s some actions that are particularly skillful and that are particularly taught as being actions that we can carry out as antidotes. That includes such things as doing prostrations to the thirty five Buddhas or doing the Vajrasattva practice. And we can learn as we become familiar with the teachings. We can learn these different activities and put them into action.
So anyway, tonight we can do a little bit of purification. And for the antidote we can just visualize Buddha in front of us and recite the mantra a few times while visualizing purifying rays of white light coming to us. And we’ll just do that shortly. I mean, we’ll just do that briefly when we get to that point. So we can meditate on the ten non virtuous actions, thinking about it, thinking about how we’ve done these actions.
If we haven’t done them in this life, then we’ve certainly done them in previous lifetimes, and we can think how we have these unpurified karmas on our mind stream, and how these karmas can bring us lower rebirths. They can bring us suffering in the human realm, and they’re an obstacle to our Dharma practice. They create an obscuration on our mind stream, which interferes with our developing realizations, interferes with our developing meditative powers. Powers. And so we want to, remove that obstacle.
So the the best way to purify the very best way to purify these negative karmas is meditation on emptiness. Particularly direct insight into emptiness, powerfully eradicates all our negative karmas and the seed so they can never return. But we we can’t do that if we haven’t achieved that realization. So we have to start off by purifying with the four opponent forces, and these are very powerful to they can’t remove the seed of these negative karmas, but they can remove the ripening result and purify the, the the obscuration on our mind. And in this way, we can progress.
So the first non virtuous action is killing, and we should think that we’ve created the action of killing many times through the course of our previous lives and that it’s very serious negative karma and that we we need to purify it. Also, There are many different kind kinds of stealing with engaged in large scale stealing, petty stealing. It’s all been something that’s detrimental to our minds and needs to be purified. Also, misconduct, we’ve created this many times in our past lives. Possibly in this life, we’ve through craving and attachment, we’ve followed our desire and created suffering for others.
Also, with speech, the non virtues of speech, we’ve created lying, all different kinds of lies. Some forms of lying are very serious, particularly if we’ve, in past lives perhaps lied pretending to have psychic powers which we didn’t have and which we knew we didn’t have. Also, divisive speech creates a great deal of suffering to others. Harsh words. It’s so easy to let them off, but they create so much suffering to others.
idle gossip. We waste so much time. Then the, three non virtues of mind, craving this very attached attitude, focusing on desirable objects so that the mind really gets stuck on them. Ill will, wanting to hurt others. Just having that thought even if we don’t carry it out into action, just having that thought is so harmful.
Mistaken views. Even if we don’t hold these mistaken views now, we’d hold them in our past lives, and the imprint might still be there. So we should want to purify this so that it doesn’t arise again and cause problems for our Dharma practice. So we should think we want to purify all these imprints, the ones we’ve created in this life, the ones we’ve created, through many previous lives, the ones we’ve created today. So we can visualize Buddha in front of us appearing as in the statue and thangka in front of the people now, in front of the group.
And we should have the attitude of refuge, refuge in the Three Jewels, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, thinking that these have the perfect qualities to guide us. And also the attitude of bodhicitta wanting to work to attain enlightenment for the welfare of all the sentient beings who are suffering in cyclic existence. Also, feeling regret, understanding not with emotional feelings and guilt, but understanding, from the heart, wishing that we would, not do this action wishing that we had not done this action and understanding that we should do something to purify it. Understanding that we harm ourselves through these actions, and also making the resolve that we won’t do this action again. So some of these actions, we can resolve never to do again.
At least we should resolve not to take human life, never to take human life. And other actions we might feel are very difficult to avoid, and it’s very difficult to make a resolve that we can keep. So we should just make a resolve for as long as we feel reasonable, perhaps for the next twenty four hours, perhaps just tonight until we wake up in the morning. We won’t engage in these negative actions. And now we can carry out the antidote.
So feeling that Buddha is really there in front of us. It’s not just something that we’re imagining, but Buddha is there. So the mind of Buddha is everywhere. The dharmakaya pervades all the universe. And so when we visualize the form of Buddha in front of us, we should think that that’s really Buddha there.
And Buddha is, regarding us, looking at us with a very peaceful, very loving expression, very pleased because we want to stop creating these negative actions and purify our negative karmas. And from the seed syllable HUM at Buddha’s heart, which is on a lotus and moon disc, from that seed syllable and from the whole of Buddha’s body, white light rays radiate out and come to us. And, our body is not obstructive to these light rays, but they enter through our body and, illuminate our whole body. And our body is filled with the light rays. We can visualize that they come through our crown point or through the crown of our head and fill our whole body from top to toe and particularly around the heart.
And all the blackness, the darkness, shadows of our negative karma are totally eliminated. And while we visualize this way, we can recite the mantra. So we recite a few times together, and then we can keep on saying it, quietly to ourselves. Om Mani Padme Hum.
So now we just feel we focus on this feeling of being totally purified, filled with this blissful white light, the light of wisdom and compassion and love and total purity. And so we can dedicate the merits now. Page five.