Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Margaret McAndrew teaches the six main delusions—ignorance, attachment, anger, pride, doubt, and mistaken views—that bind us to saṃsāra, with practical emphasis on recognizing them in your own mind. She distinguishes harmful from helpful versions of each: clinging attachment from genuine love, arrogant pride from healthy self-respect, paralyzing doubt from the investigative doubt that deepens understanding. She addresses critical mistaken views that obstruct progress, particularly denial of karma and belief in a permanent self, with group Q&A on working with doubts and finding reliable guidance. For practitioners with foundational Buddhist training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 GPK 1998 03 11.mp3
UUID: 87f1bda3-a64e-4cfd-82e6-815d766f74d4
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~5,769
Practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practising giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened, to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
I prostrate with body, speech and mind in faith, each and every offering I make, including those actually performed and those mentally transformed. I confess every sin collected from the beginninglessness of samsaric life. I rejoice in all ordinary and noble being’s actions. Please, Buddha, by living as our guard until saṃsāra ends. Reveal the teachings to sentient beings.
I dedicate the virtues of myself and others to the great enlightenment. So then on page four, the Idam Mandala. By the virtue of offering to your assembly of Buddhas visualized before me, this mandala built on a base resplendent with flowers, saffron water, incense, adorned with Mount Meru and the four continents, as well as with the sun and the moon. May all scented beings share in its good effects. So sometimes I forget to say what I’m supposed to announce at the end of a session, so I’ll just mention it now.
But Patrick’s mentioned that there’s going to be tea and cake available. Anyway, the suggestion is that we should so don’t be shy to go down there and get it, but the idea is that perhaps we could get it and bring some back here, and come back here and have a chat. If anybody wants to pick up any of the topics and discuss them a bit further, then we can do so. Excuse me. So last week, we were going through suffering and forming the idea of renunciation.
So just to go quickly through what we’ve been through before, We were talking about the preciousness of our human rebirth, the importance of realizing its value and not wasting it, and in particular realizing that if we don’t make good use of our precious human rebirth, at least to receive more human rebirths, at least to get good rebirths in our future lives and to continue on with our progress, then if we allow ourselves to fall back into the lower realms, then we’ll be in a situation where we won’t be in a position to be able to get another human rebirth. It will be very, very difficult to get back into the human realm again. So we have to make the most of our opportunity that we have now and realize its value so that we’d be motivated to make good use of it. And in order to do that, we have to reflect on the fact that this life is brief and we don’t know when we’re going to die anyway. So we have to be motivated to make good use of our life right away not to waste time but right away to embark on spiritual practice and to make good use of our life day by day it doesn’t mean that we have to do something fantastic, but it means that we have to be aware day by day, setting our mind in the right way, working with the dharma motivation day by day so that our ordinary mundane activities can become transformed into dharma by the motivation with which we’re doing these activities and so that we’re gradually bringing dharma into our lives more and more.
The next thing is to look at the suffering of the whole of cyclic existence. Before this, we were just focused on wanting to avoid rebirth into a suffering state, into the worst states of sufferings. But if we look at it and realize the fact that our present situation is unsatisfactory, we know that we’re going up and down all the time, that we have many problems, that even the best human life is like this. Also, it’s taught traditionally to look at the upper realms apart from the human realms, such as the god realms, and to see that their situation really isn’t so satisfactory either, because even though they have a very pleasurable situation, it doesn’t last forever. So when we’re talking about these worldly gods, they fall back into human rebirth or animal rebirth or whatever.
And so we have to realize that they have this situation they’re in the same situation that we are really. They’re not out of saṃsāra. So the only way to really be sure of being free from problems and suffering and the only way to find lasting happiness is to get out of saṃsāra, to get out of this cycle. And in particular, we should realize that the blissful peace of nirvana, the state of being liberated from saṃsāra, is a state of joy, of happiness, which is beyond anything that we can experience in our presently limited state. So it’s a goal that’s worthwhile working for, extremely worthwhile working for.
So then we come up to the point of view of thinking about taking refuge and observing karma. So we went through last week thinking about taking refuge and avoiding negative karma. So we realized the qualities of Buddhadharma and Sangha that they have the qualities needed to guide us. And then we can find a reliable guide out of the sufferings of saṃsāra, not only out of the sufferings of the lower realms, but out of whole of cyclic existence. And through observing karma, then we can avoid, the sufferings of lower rebirth.
And that that involves particularly avoiding the ten non virtuous actions, which are killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive words, harsh words, and idle gossip, and which are the ones of speech, body and speech. And then mind is malice, clinging attachment or craving and wrong views. So anyway, in terms of the three scopes, those were connected with the lower scope. Actually, whichever scope we’re working on, we have to consider the bodhicitta motivation, because we’re following the Mahāyāna tradition here and our ultimate goal is to work for the welfare of sentient beings. So we should just motivate ourselves at the beginning of the session to not only want to relieve ourselves of our own suffering, but to think of relieving all sentient beings from their suffering as well.
So in order to do that, we have to look at the attainment of full enlightenment. So thinking it’s not enough just to achieve our own welfare, because all sentient beings are suffering. And we’re very, very connected with these sentient beings. In our past lives, we’ve been in every possible relationship to them, so that means that they’ve all been our mothers time and time again. It isn’t something that we can just ignore.
We have these links, and we should be very, very concerned with the welfare of others. The only way that we can effectively bring about their welfare is by attaining Buddhahood, so we should make that our goal. So, anyway, last week, we got onto the topic of renunciation, thinking that we have to be finished with the whole of Samsāra, seeing that it’s suffering from top to bottom. There’s lighter suffering and there’s heavier suffering, but there’s always suffering. We looked at that in various ways, and one way of looking at it was through the three kinds of suffering.
That was, in brief, the suffering of suffering or the suffering of misery, which is just plain old ordinary suffering, which we can all recognize, and the suffering of change, which we see as pleasure, is the example is going from feeling cold, so going out into the sun, and before very long that feels like a wonderful relief from the cold, but before very long we feel too hot and we have to come in inside again and and then coming into the cool into the shade feels like pleasure. But before very long, you get cold. So in the same way, whichever situation we’re in, it feels like a pleasure because it’s a relief from a previous, state of suffering, but it’s not real pleasure because before very long you start to get discontented with that, and it becomes more and more uncomfortable until we finally get tired of that particular pleasure and want to go on to something else. So there’s nothing that brings real pleasure to us, nothing that brings real happiness because of this constant growth of discontent, because of the fact that the suffering inherent in our situation there. So we shouldn’t think that that the objects are wrong.
We we tend to label the external objects as being the cause of our happiness and suffering. In actual fact, it’s within ourselves that this process is going on all the time. And the the third kind of suffering is the suffering of pervasiveness, which is connected with having a a body, which acts a magnet for suffering. This is a very subtle kind of suffering which we can’t really identify at present because of our being obscured by the grosser forms of suffering, the the suffering of misery and the suffering of change. So the suffering of misery is very gross, it’s very easy to see.
The suffering of change is more subtle, but if we think about it, we can understand it fairly well. The suffering of pervasiveness is is difficult to see for ordinary people. But for those who have reached the state of an arhat, they can see it very, very clearly, and they’re very, very aware of it, and it motivates them to keep on working for liberation. So so somebody who’s reflected on these things can develop the the realization of renunciation, which is wanting to be done with cyclic existence. So somebody who’s achieved renunciation, they see cyclic existence of samsaras having no essence or meaning.
It doesn’t mean that they’ve overcome attachment to the things of cyclic existence, but they see through it. They see that these things, although they can give rise to attachment, don’t lead to happiness. And so they don’t have any inclination to follow their attachment. When they see attachment arising, they immediately see this this is leading to more suffering and more suffering. And so they don’t want to follow-up, but they want to be finished with it, and they want to work to to reach the goal of liberation.
They won’t be distracted from that practice. And so it’s like seeing cyclic existence as being a house on fire. So, you you might be in a part of the house that isn’t on fire at present. It might only be getting a little bit warm, but, you know it’s on fire, and so you don’t want to stay in it. You want to get out of it immediately.
In the same way, wherever you are in cyclic existence, whether you’re in one of the better realms or in one of the worst realms, you’re still in this house that’s on fire. And even if you’re in one of the better situations, you’re in danger of of being burnt, so you want to get out of it. So So when we were looking at the small scope practitioner, that person was satisfied with doing some kind of very basic practice. Their main concern was to avoid suffering rebirth. Actually, within the three scopes, Buddhist practitioner is interested in achieving liberation or enlightenment as a long term goal, but the medium scope practitioner is only looking at that as some sort of far off aspiration, but they’re not really interested in working for it right away.
What they’re concerned for in the immediate present situation is to do what they can to avoid being reborn into the suffering realms, having a bad rebirth. They’re very worried about that. That’s their main concern, and they want to make sure that they get a human rebirth next time, they’re interested in the sort of practice that helps them avoid that. And so their main concern is the avoidance of bad karma through avoiding the ten non virtuous actions and accumulation of good karma. And we were talking a bit about that, and that involves both observing the ten virtuous actions, which means essentially avoiding the ten non virtuous various different other practices, such as the observance of vows, including the five lay precepts, and there are various other meritorious actions that can be done.
There are actions such as generosity and good works and so on that can be done to accumulate further good karma. So there’s also the practice of purifying the non virtues through the the four opponent forces and so on, which we talked about before. So these things all come into the scope of the person of small scope, and they’re very basic practices. And these practices are important to all of us, Even if we aspire to medium scope or great scope practices, we have to lay the foundation with these practices of the lower scope, which are having the attitude of refuge in the Three Jewels and observing karma in this way. And these things have to be carried right through the whole of our practice.
So, when we get to the medium scale practitioner, this person who realizes that the whole of Samsāra is like being in a house that’s on fire, then they have a very clear understanding. Also, having looked into these practices, they’ve come to a clear understanding that bondage to saṃsāra is being under the power of delusion and karma. So this practitioner has studied the four noble truths of suffering, and especially they’ve come to an understanding of the noble truths of suffering and the cause of suffering. So we’ve already been talking about suffering. So when we understand suffering, it’s necessary to then identify where this suffering is coming from, and we have to understand the cause of suffering.
And I mentioned in a previous talk about the three poisonous minds that the most the most basic way of talking about these causes of suffering is to see ourselves as being under the influence of the three poisonous minds. Does anybody remember what they are? Attachment. Aversion. Yes.
So that’s clinging attachment, aversion, which includes hatred, anger, all of these states of mind, and ignorance. So another way of looking at it, a more detailed way of looking at it, is to look at the the six main delusions. Or the another word another translation for these would be afflictions or or kleshas. Kleshas is the Sanskrit word. And are these actually, the three poisonous minds can be divided up into these six, so it’s a slightly more detailed way of looking at it.
And, actually, there are in the texts on Lorig, on on mind and awareness, the texts which explain the workings of the mind, there are actually six main delusions and twenty secondary delusions. So I’ll just go through the six main ones now. It’s important to understand these because then we can identify them. If we don’t understand how to identify them, we might make the mistake of not recognizing them or of thinking that they’re all right. Some of them can be a little bit confusing.
Some of them might be mistaken for more positive states of mind. Ignorance, there are different degrees of ignorance, but the one that we’re particularly concerned with here, the one that does us the most harm, is the ignorance of not understanding, being able to discriminate virtue and non virtue. So this is the most important form of ignorance that we have to overcome. Of course, we have many forms of ignorance, and some of them won’t make much difference to our spiritual practice. For instance, we might not know terribly much about higher mathematics or astrophysics or something like that.
Most of us are ignorant of these things, and it isn’t going to prevent us from having a sound spiritual practice. On the other hand, we all also have ignorance of absolute truth, probably. I can’t say for sure. There might be some bodhisattvas here who do understand the absolute truth. This is very important ignorance in that it’s the ignorance that that creates our bondage to saṃsāra.
But it’s something which we can’t really address very effectively at the moment. Also, we can develop a sound spiritual practice even with this ignorance. We have to develop a sound spiritual practice first before we can get rid of this ignorance. What we have to be concerned with at the present, in particular, is understanding how to identify the difference between virtue and non virtue. We were talking about that last week in terms of understanding the ten non virtuous actions and how to recognize them and how to avoid them.
If we have this understanding of the ten non virtuous actions, what they are, it doesn’t totally cover all non virtues, it doesn’t totally give us the whole picture, but it’s a very good starting point. We can start off with a sound ethical practice through understanding these points. And then the next next of the six delusions is desire or attachment. This is a little bit more confusing. Sometimes, we think that attachment is good.
So the word attachment is, being used here in a technical sense, and it’s not being used in the everyday sense. In the everyday sense, in the English language, we use attachment to mean our feelings for our loved ones and so on and so forth, which we feel is something good. We feel that family affection and love and so on are good things. So what we have to do here is to learn to discriminate between harmful attachment and positive love. There is a very positive attitude of love that we have to others.
And in our present undeveloped state, we we’re not totally bad. We we’re not just under the control of attachment, but we also have positive feelings. But we have to learn to discriminate between love and clinging attachment. So our clinging attachment is self centered, and and and it’s possessive and based on wanting to receive gratification for ourselves, whereas love wants the, the welfare of the other person. The more we follow clinging attachment, the more we’ll be building up an unpeaceful mental state agitation, and it leads to more and more unhappiness, unhappiness.
Whereas love leads to a peaceful sort of mind, an open heart, a feeling of relaxation in the mind, and it leads to more and more happiness. And it also brings more happiness to the others that we love, whereas our clinging attachment brings problems to others as well as to ourselves. So clinging attachment is harmful, and love is helpful. Any questions about that? Maybe somebody has some, something they can share with us, some understanding or some experience that they can tell us about.
So, the next one is anger or hatred. This is easy to recognize, so we don’t have to go on very much about how to recognize our anger or our hatred. It’s a very, very harmful, very, very negative state of mind. It’s very destructive. And it’s the that’s actually the worst it’s the worst of our afflictions because it does the the most harm to us.
We create so much negative karma. Makes us do things like hurting other people physically, even killing. It also leads to hurting ourselves or committing suicide or to doing all sorts of other harmful actions such as speaking harsh words. Sometimes we break things or smash things that are valuable to ourselves or other people because of our anger. So it’s we can see that it’s a destructive emotion, and and it’s very easy to want to get rid of anger even if even if you don’t have this understanding of the the harm that it brings to us in future lives through the negative karma that it creates.
It’s easy to understand how it hurts us in this life, in the present. So it’s something we can understand readily, but still it takes a lot of energy to overcome it, to develop patience. Then the fourth one is pride. Now a lot of people will say when they hear this, surely pride is a good thing. So this is another, I think, of these English terms that can be confusing because in English we use the same word for a whole range of different feelings.
And I I would prefer to use the term self respect for the for the positive aspect. And here we’re using pride for the negative, the harmful aspect of it, the kind of point of view which wants to build yourself up higher than others and wants to put others down, and different forms of arrogance and lack of consideration for others. So it’s this kind of pride of wanting to see yourself as being better than others or or as being equal to others who are, in actual fact, better than yourself. These kinds of pride are always harmful. Again, it comes out of self grasping and out of this sort of wanting short term gratification, whereas a positive attitude of pride just comes out of having a relaxed attitude about yourself, of realizing your ultimate value as a human being, like all other human beings and realizing that all human beings, all living beings have this Buddha nature which is worthy of respect and therefore all living beings are very valuable.
You give yourself that same value. And, this is a very relaxed and very open sort of attitude. Any questions about this? So the the fifth one is doubting what is true. So, of course, we all have doubts about, what we’re taught in the, the Dharma teachings.
If we, this kind of doubt isn’t harmful if we can resolve our doubts, if we can take an interest in the teachings and follow them through and eventually, through investigation, get these doubts resolved. But it’s it’s harmful if it leads us to to feel that there’s no point in following these teachings. If we have so much doubt, if our doubt is so so strong that it, makes us feel that really there’s probably nothing in it, then, then it discourages us. It can be very it can be a very discouraging attitude, and so it’s harmful. So we have to, try to work to overcome it.
Any questions about this? I think that’s all right because that’s what I do myself. Yes. There are certainly some things that are harder to come to grips than others. I think some things you can you shouldn’t put them on the shelf forever, but you can put them on the shelf for a while, I think, and then come back to them later because, you can waste too much energy trying to resolve all your doubts in the short term, whereas the way to resolve them is to just keep on working with the things that you can work with.
And you might find that through your progress, through the clarification that comes with progress, that the doubts will get resolved gradually as you go along. So it’s a mistake to, I think, to put too much weight onto some of these doubts, and it’s better to work with positive things. But, on the other hand, you should realize that, that through further investigation, you will be able to resolve these doubts eventually. Does anybody else have anything to say about that? Yes.
In particular, sometimes you might get the opportunity to, check your doubts out with with lamas who have deeper understanding of these matters and and so on. In fact, the whole process of developing is a a process of bringing up your doubts and getting them more and more refined, getting them more clearer making your understanding clearer and clearer and the doubts becoming more and more resolved. So that’s why the monks in the monasteries do so much debating. It’s just a question of bringing up one doubt after another. Or as Geshe-la used the term qualms.
When when you’re debating, you have to bring up these doubts or qualms all the time about the technical points of the teachings and debate on them until you until you have the clear view. So you couldn’t do any debating unless you had these doubts, they they’re actually, it’s it’s through the resolving of the doubts that that progress happens, so we shouldn’t feel that doubts are a a harmful thing at all. But it’s this particular kind of doubt, the kind of doubt that makes the person discouraged, that makes them uninterested in their practice, that is the harmful doubt. Yes. Well, there is this process that you go through where you find what’s right for you.
There is this seeking process. Yes. Yes. And that’s something that that is actually a positive process of resolving your doubts. It’s not leaving your it’s not just giving up the whole show.
You do feel convinced that there is a path that’s going to be the one that will work for you. And that’s that’s really positive, except that perhaps some people might take it to an extreme and feel that they can’t do any practice until they find some sort of guru who’s going to make them feel wonderful or something like that you know which is a mistake because it’s it means that they might be ignoring a lot of good teachings and a lot of teachers who can guide them until they find one that that’s going to be absolutely wonderful for them. And they might never, in that lifetime, find that teacher. In the meantime, they’ve lost the opportunity of developing themselves. So actually, often, it’s a question of finding what we’ve got at the moment and working with that, and at the same time, being alert to further possibilities.
I don’t think any of the people here have that problem probably or you wouldn’t be here, but you do in India meet certain people who go around from you know, they go around to all the Hindu gurus, and they go around to all the Tibetan lamas, and they go around to the Sufis, they go here, and they go there, and they never settle down to anything. They’re they’re always looking for the big buzz, and really, it seems like they’ve done all this spiritual searching, they’ve they’ve really ended up with nothing out of it all, which is which is a tremendous pity because they’ve they’ve all all of these teachers have had so much of value to teach them. Off down to the The The mosque? Yeah. Oh, what’s happening at the mosque?
There must be something interesting there. Great Sufi, Yes. Well, that’s alright then, as long as you as long as you’ve got somebody good at the mosque. You know, you have to use your your discriminating awareness, and nobody but yourself can really make the final decision as to what you’re going to follow. So okay.
So that was doubting what is true. And the sixth is mistaken views. Now these are pretty harmful because they stop us from following right views. Mistaken views are really the most harmful thing because if you can if you accept these mistaken views, they’re going to stop you from looking at any other views. At least the person who has doubts has some possibility of examining different views, but the person with mistaken views isn’t going to think of looking at other views.
These kinds of views might be something that they’ve grown up with or something perhaps that they’ve worked out for themselves, but if they hold it very, very rigidly we all know people who hold very rigidly to some sort of viewpoint. For instance, at at Chenrezig Institute, when we used to go out shopping, we come back and one of the nuns, Deki, always used to want to stop for petrol at a particular place where she had this sort of ongoing debate with this chap who was an old communist. And he was a Marxist from, you know he was a Marxist of all the Marxists, and they used to they used to really appreciate each other’s sort of convictions and have a good old debate, but he was very fixed in his Marxist viewpoint and there was no way that he’d accept any of these other views because he had that so fixed in his mind. So, you know, it might be different religious views or it might be atheism or anything, but Some people vote like that. They vote because their parents voted that way.
Yes. Sometimes we might be just as right voting that way as any other way, I don’t know. But we are supposed to use discriminating awareness in these things. Anyway, these are a problem, and there are some particular kinds of views that are particularly harmful to us. And I’ll just I won’t mention all of them because some of them are a little bit sort of remote from what we’re likely to be holding.
But some of the views are such as holding the the self as being permanent self self existent. Now we all tend to have this instinctive feeling that the self is permanent and self existent. Now I won’t go into a lot of detail as to what that means because that’ll come later. But if you hold a view that, an intellectual view that reinforces that, then it stops you from questioning whether the self really is permanent and self existent or not. As long as you hold this philosophical view that the self is permanent and self existent, then you can never question it.
And if you never question it, then you can never come to the conclusion that the self is not permanent and self existent, which is the the the true view, the the view which we have to come to hold. So any questions about this? It’s this is very profound philosophy, philosophy, and it’s not something that that that can be understood easily. But anyway, the point is that on top of the instinctive view that we hold, we can also hold philosophical wrong views which reinforce that one. And it’s the philosophical one wrong views that we’re talking about here as mistaken views.
We’re not talking about the instinctive attitude. And there are religions that that hold that viewpoint. There are philosophical viewpoints that hold that viewpoint. So another one would be to see all phenomena as inherently existent. And, before we were talking about the self, now we’re talking about all inherent all phenomena, both the self and and other phenomena.
And inherent existence is a more subtle view than than self existent. And another one, which is probably the most important and relevant to us in our present situation, is the view that there is no such thing as or rebirth or cause and effect on the karmic level. So if we hold these viewpoints, it makes it very difficult for us to even do the most basic practice of observing karma and doing the practices which lead to a fortunate rebirth in our future lifetimes. So this kind of viewpoint would be a very bad one. I don’t know whether there are any important religions that really hold this well, some religions, of course, would say that there is no karma.
Most religions do seem to hold that there is a future life, a rebirth. I’m not sure that Judaism holds this. It seems to be a little bit unclear what Judaism does hold about The way I understand it, there doesn’t seem to be any terribly clear statement in in Judaism as to whether there really is a life after this one or not, which is interesting. To me that looked like reincarnation, but at a lower level. And then you want to get past the level.
Mhmm. He Yes. Yes. That’s interesting. In actual fact, they seem to think now that that Jesus was one of the Essenes, that he was an Essene teacher, and that the the Jews of his time actually accepted him as a great teacher and that they saw nothing contradictory in what he was teaching at that time.
But Paul and some of the other disciples carried his teachings beyond the Jewish community to non Jews. And, eventually, there was a sort of a split between the Jewish followers and the the non Jewish followers of Jesus. So it’s it seems that what Jesus actually taught basically was not at all contradicted to to what was held by the Jews of his time. But, anyway, we don’t know very much about that. It’s difficult to say nowadays.
But at at any rate, the great religions of the world seem to revolve around the idea generally that there is something beyond this life, whether they have some sort of very clear statement about what it is or whether they just have some sort of generalized idea. They seem to have some idea that there is some sort of continuity of consciousness beyond this life, and that how we conduct ourselves in this life has a lot to do with how we go on in future lives, and that we have a responsibility to others, and that we have a responsibility to a higher spiritual aspects of our being, whether we call that god or something else. And so all these things seem to be basic to all religions, and any viewpoint which holds that there is no such thing as karma and no future life and no retribution from wrong actions and so on. There might be such points of view, but they they couldn’t be called a religious viewpoint, really. And so these things are terribly basic.
For instance, in in Christianity, although they don’t teach karma, the there is a a basic morality, a basic system of ethics, which is which is pretty effective, apart from the fact that it seems