Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew addresses a fundamental objection: that teachings on suffering make people miserable. She reframes meditation on suffering as necessary diagnosis rather than morbidity, using a medical-checkup analogy. She systematically teaches the eight sufferings of human life—birth, old age, sickness, death, separation from what we desire, meeting adversity, unfulfilled longing, and the burden of a conditioned body—with concrete examples from pregnancy trauma to modern disappointment. She moves through the six sufferings of saṃsāra (uncertainty, dissatisfaction, repeated death and rebirth, aloneness), then concludes with three types of suffering: gross suffering, suffering of change (pleasures that decay), and pervasive conditioning (subtle suffering from living under karma and delusion). For serious Dharma practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 S and S 1999 09 02.mp3
UUID: 791b2285-68c5-4549-bb67-449ab9ae7447
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-09-02
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~5,375
And so on. And this was something that Lama Zopa Rinpoche would always in particular, Lama Zopa Rinpoche would always find the opportunity to talk a lot about suffering. Because while he had us there, were more or less a captive audience and he wanted us to really accept certain things, to understand certain things before we went back into the world. And he would always talk at length about suffering, the samsaric nature of suffering. And I remember one day during our discussion group after lunch, when the Geshes and Lamas were there, it was a group that was being coordinated, it was a session that was being coordinated by one of the Western students.
And there was one Frenchman there and he was feeling very upset by all this talk about suffering. And he got up and really spoke his mind. Basically he just sort of said how terrible we were and what awful things were being taught there, and this, that and the other, and how it was making everybody miserable and so on. And he finished up his talk with a concluding thought. He said, I always thought I was happy until you told me I was suffering.
Now he said I was happy. I was happy until you told me that I was suffering. And that was the gist of his complaint that we made him feel unhappy by telling him all this about suffering. So in fact that’s what we like to think. We like to think that by putting suffering out of our minds that we’ll be happy.
And of course this doesn’t work. So essentially, we’re better off if we understand our situation, then we can do something really positive to bring about happiness. So if we we don’t want to be like somebody who might suspect that something’s wrong with their body, but they put it out of their mind and tell themselves that everything’s going to be alright, and so they don’t go along to the doctor to have a check up. And so by the time they really can’t avoid the thought that something’s wrong, it’s really too late for the medical treatment to be effective. So instead of that, we have to be like the person who goes along and gets a medical check up and finds out what’s wrong and takes the treatment.
So this is what meditation on suffering is really intended to do. So, there are different ways that we have to meditate on suffering. And one way is to meditate on the eight kinds of suffering of the human realm. And another way is to meditate on the six kinds of suffering of Samsāra in general, and specifically of the three upper realms. So these are the kinds of suffering that afflicts all beings and which afflicts even the what we call the worldly gods and demigods or asuras.
And there are also three kinds suffering that we have to look at. So I’ll mention these. So the some of these sufferings we’ve already had a look at in the small scope. So the eight sufferings particularly refer to human life, and some of them also refer, of course, to other beings who will experience these. So the first one is the suffering of birth.
And we don’t usually think of birth as being a suffering state, but according to the teachings of Buddha we’re born in suffering and we continue to suffer throughout our life. So suffering of birth is the first one, and there’s a detailed explanation given of the suffering of being in the womb and of being born. So when the child, the embryo, the fetus is in the womb, it actually is in a situation of a great deal of suffering. And this being is feeling cramped from being in there. There’s not much space.
It also experiences pain when the mother experiences heat or cold, or eats food that upsets her, or experiences indigestion, or various other physical sufferings. If she’s sick or whatever the child experiences, the physical suffering also is very connected with the mother’s body. The baby also is very aware of the the mother’s mental emotional state. When the mother’s upset or worried or unhappy then the unborn child also feels all of that. So all of these things are experienced during the time in the womb.
Also at birth we can see that this is obviously a really horrible experience for the child. In fact nowadays a lot of psychologists are looking at birth trauma as being one factor in quite a range of emotional problems. So the baby is squeezed through this opening that’s too small for it and then it comes out into the world, has all these sudden sense impressions, bright lights, loud sounds, and its skin is extremely sensitive so even when it’s wrapped in a very soft cloth it feels as if it’s being wrapped in thorns and all of these things are really traumatic. Suddenly it’s just thrown from a sort of world of largely very of sensory deprivation almost into this world where it’s experiencing a totally different set of experiences which are quite shocking to it. So that’s the suffering of birth.
And if we think about it, this isn’t just something that we’ve experienced once. It’s something we’ve experienced again and again. And it’s something that we’re going to have to experience again and again in the future until we manage to liberate ourselves from saṃsāra. So it’s not something that we find very agreeable. Also, a baby is not a very agreeable state.
We’re very hopeless, totally dependent on our parents to take care of us. And we know that babies do a lot of crying. The reasons why they do that is because they’re not feeling very happy. That’s right. Yes.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. But how did the baby end up in the end, did it? Yes, yes. So you can imagine the effect that that would have, you know, the tremendous imprint.
It could make even the you know, we don’t remember these things that happen to us when we’re very small, but we know that they’ve influenced us. That’s right. Yes. Lovers are always a bit shocked when they hear that the first thing that the doctors do when the baby is born is to slap it. Lovers have even said, when I was born nobody slapped me but I still breathed all right.
There seems to be a lack of appreciation of the fact that there’s this very sensitive little being. The water birth type of birth does sound like an improvement here. So then there’s the suffering of old age. And if you’re getting old yourself, then you don’t have to check whether there’s any truth in this. Even if you haven’t experienced this for yourself in this life, most people feel quite convinced of it.
Nobody wants to grow old. We only have to look around us to see others, and we can see these sufferings. It’s said that if we turned old overnight, if our hair turned round, our face wrinkled and our body became decrepit overnight, we’d die of shock. So it’s just because it comes on us gradually that we’re able to bear it. So in any case, it’s pretty hard to bear.
See there’s various different sufferings of age. We lose our strength, our body becomes ugly, our legs become weak and wobbly. It’s hard to it’s hard to get down and it’s hard to get up. It’s said that when when we get once we get old and when we sit down, it’s like a a sack of grain dropping down. When we get up, it’s like trying to pull up ten pegs.
So also our mental powers fade. We lose our memory. We might lose our sort of reasoning powers. And we maybe not. Well, this is another point.
We think that aging means becoming seventy or eighty. In fact, we start aging from the time we’re born. Yes, from the time we’re conceived. So of course we do go through this process where we generally reach our prime and then start to lose that. It’s not as though we sort of get younger.
We’re not getting any younger. Right from the start time we’re born, our lifespan is ticking away. And another one is that we also begin to realize that we don’t have long to live. So in actual fact, of us, we don’t know when we’re going to die anyway. Even if we’re young, we’ve got no guarantee that we’re going to live until tomorrow even.
When you get old, mostly we put that out of our minds, when we get old then you can’t totally ignore the fact that you really can’t go on much longer. It becomes obvious. So fear of death is another suffering. And the third one is the suffering of sickness, and we know that that’s a great suffering. We have the physical sufferings of pain and weakness and this is often connected with various kinds of mental sufferings, particularly if our sickness goes on and on.
Then we have various sufferings such as fearing that we won’t get better, such as losing our jobs, perhaps losing our friends and family and so on because of not being able to keep up our physical activities. These things can be very disruptive to our life. We have to experience various unpleasant medical treatments and so on. So all of these things make sickness a great suffering, financial problems, we have to spend a lot of money on our medical treatments. All of these things can cause us a lot of worry, anxiety and unhappiness.
And then we have the suffering of death. And this is something that we all recognize as being suffering. Nobody wants to die. This is something that all beings fear and try to avoid as much as possible. As well as the various physical sufferings that we have to experience around the time of dying, we also have to experience fear and anxiety.
We experience the suffering of loss and grief, of leaving behind our objects of attachment, all our loved ones and situation in life, our home perhaps, whatever we’ve put our energy into in this life. And we have to go off to a new life. We don’t know where we’re going to be reborn. We could be reborn into suffering. And then we have to go through the different stages of death, the various visionary experiences of going through the absorption of the elements that are explained to us in the teachings on death, and eventually leaving the body experiencing the in between state or the Bardo state, which is explained as being a very confused state, a state of great mental suffering because of the being’s fear and confusion, and then going on to whatever rebirth we’re led to by our karma.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes.
I’ll I’ll I’ll talk about those three. That comes at the end of the talk. Getting ahead of things. Yes. So then the fifth is the suffering of being separated from what we desire or are attached to, including the fear of losing these things.
So we can see that this is something that causes a lot of worry and unhappiness and regrets and so on in our life. We’ve all experienced this kind of thing again and again in our lifetime, whether what we lose is perhaps we’ve lost money, perhaps we’ve lost a job, we’ve lost people who are dear to us through death, We’ve lost relationships through parting and friends. There are various different events in our life. Some of us perhaps might have lost the country that we grew up in and had to come across to another country. So there’s all kinds of losses that occur in our life.
And this is just the nature of saṃsāra. While we’re in saṃsāra, we’re always going to be subject to these things. We can never create for ourselves a situation where we can be secure from losing these things that we want to hold on to, that we want to be with. Also, there’s the suffering of meeting with undesirable events, and we meet with all sorts of undesirable events in our life. And these can be all kinds of different events. They can be really severe external events such as being involved in wars and conflicts and places where there are droughts and famines and so on.
In this country, we’ve been fortunate enough to be free of these kinds of really extreme suffering, such as the earthquake in Turkey, for example. Those people just had no choice but to experience that earthquake. So have also we can’t be sure that we won’t be experiencing some sort of disaster like that even here at some time in the future. Also, we experience things in our life such as unpleasant situations at work, unpleasant situations at home. We meet with accidents.
We meet with all kinds of unpleasant situations such as being abused by others, such as being having to encounter various different kinds of situations that we wouldn’t choose at all. And we know that these things we can’t predict when they’re going to happen. They just seem to come up out of nowhere. Sometimes just when everything seems to be most perfect, and as they say, there’s always a fly in the ointment. So this is the nature of saṃsāra.
And then the suffering of not finding the happiness and pleasures of life that we seek, that’s the seventh one. And we know that this is also a great suffering. We set our minds on something. We set our hearts on something. We pursue it.
We we put all our energy in trying to get it. It might be a job or it might be promotion at work, something like that. It might be a relationship, somebody that we feel we want to marry or have as our partner that we can’t impress enough. So all of these things, you know, social success, all of these kinds of things that we see as being good in life, maybe sporting success. A lot of things that we put energy into, we’ve tried to achieve, perhaps we’ve really put all we had into trying to get this thing that doesn’t work.
And so we experience disappointment, we experience frustration. Sometimes this can lead to depression, to feeling that we’re no good, to maybe anger towards others, to various kinds of disturbed emotions, perhaps even to suicide. So all of these things cause a lot of unhappiness. And basically, we’ve put a lot of energy into these things in our life and this is just samsaric desire. It doesn’t it doesn’t always bring its result.
If we put our energy into Dharma practice, that always brings its result. So the eighth is the suffering of having a body, And as long as we have a samsaric body, that’s going to act as a magnet to suffering of different kinds of suffering. And so I’ll be mentioning that a bit more later on. So the point is that wherever we migrate within the six realms of suffering, we’re going to experience suffering because of having this body. All these other sufferings we’ve been talking about come about because of having this body, And this is the body that is taken under the force of karma and delusion.
So it’s possible to have a pure body which is not subject to samsaric suffering. But at the present, we have this contaminated body taken under the force of delusion and karma and delusion, which is subject to suffering, and this is the nature of saṃsāra. So then, I’ll just briefly go through the six kinds of suffering. So, these are uncertainty, and this is, within Samsāra, there’s no fixed or unchanging state, and there’s always the possibility of when you’re in a good situation, there’s always the possibility of being thrown into a worse situation. And you won’t have to look at Ellen Bond to see how you can change within this life.
So he’s been right at the peak, then he was sort of thrown down into the lowest situation being in jail, and now it looks like he’s on the way up again. So this is a good example. Not only within this life, but over the course of various lifetimes, we go up and down all the time. We have good lives. We’ve gone to the very peak of saṃsāra and then been thrown down into the the lowest of rebirth again and again.
So the second suffering is the suffering of not getting enough or dissatisfaction. No matter how much we possess, we can never be satisfied because we have this greed. And the more we have, the greedier we become, so we have more and more dissatisfaction. Thirdly, having to abandon our body again and again. So not only having to die and leave our body, we’re always attached to our body, and we have to leave our body again and again, life after life.
So we’ve gone through this so many times in the past. Fourthly, the entering so being conceived again and again, the entering of the consciousness into into the union of semen and blood at conception. So in other words, we’ve had to be conceived and born again and again and again. And so this gets really boring if you think about it. We’ve had we’ve been born again and again.
We’ve had so many mothers give birth to us. It just goes on and on. The fifth one is the uncertain level, in other words, the total uncertainty of saṃsāra and the uncertainty of where we’re going to take rebirth. We can’t guarantee that we’re going to take a good rebirth again. Even if we manage to gain a good rebirth next life, there’s no guarantee that that will continue.
It’s only by escaping saṃsāra that we can have this sort of certainty. The sixth one is lack of friends or companionship. Basically, there are certain things that we just have to go through alone. Sometimes in this life we feel very alone, at other times we feel that we have friends around us, but when we die, we have to die alone. Nobody can go with us.
Even if our friends and family are all around us wanting to relieve our suffering, wanting to save us from having to die, they can’t save us from having to die. We have to die. We have to go through death alone. We have to go through the intermediate state alone through the Bardo, and we we’re born alone, and we have to experience the suffering if we take an unfortunate rebirth state, then we have to experience that suffering alone. There’s no one who we can call to to help save us from that suffering.
And so this is the suffering of being alone. And the that is the six sufferings. So then the three kinds of suffering that we have to experience are the sufferings do you want to somebody want to tell us what the three are? You already mentioned them, really, didn’t you? No.
Mhmm. Okay. Do you remember the middle one? Yes. Okay.
So the sufferings of sometimes called the suffering of misery. Actually, literally, it’s the suffering of suffering. That sounds a bit funny, so you can say the suffering of misery. So that’s just basically ordinary gross suffering. Khensur Rinpoche was teaching about this on Tuesday night.
It was really, really very interesting teaching. So then the suffering so you understand what that is. That’s just what we normally label as suffering. And Khensur Rinpoche said that that this isn’t the noble truth of suffering because anybody can understand this kind of suffering. We don’t have to be told that, for instance, if we’re sick or if we’ve broken our leg or something like that, we don’t have to be told that that’s suffering or, you know, if if we’re suffering from unrequited love or something like that, you know, we know that that’s suffering.
Nobody has to tell us. Secondly, the suffering of change, and this is what we generally consider to be happiness. So this kind of suffering is just the basic nature even of samsaric happiness. It’s due to the impermanence of all things in saṃsāra and for example the example that’s given is that you can be out in the sun or as Diana said too close to the heater and so you begin to feel hot so you move into the shade or you move away from the heater and then you start to feel cold. First of you experience the suffering of heat so when you move away it’s a pleasure to feel cool again.
And then after being in the shade for a while, you start to feel too cold, so that’s suffering. So then you move into the sun again and you feel the pleasure of being warm until you get too hot again. Basically our samsaric pleasures are like this. They’re continually really all they are is just a relief from some sort of suffering, so we experience this sensation that we label as pleasure. But it’s not real happiness, it’s not real pleasure, because if it was real pleasure then it would last, it wouldn’t change.
In fact, the more we experienced that situation, the more pleasure we would get from it. So for example, when we’re hungry and then we go and eat some sort of fantastic Indian, go to an Indian restaurant and have some fantastic curry and rice and papadums and all the rest of it, know, then you have so much pleasure eating that delicious food. And if the pleasure if the food was really in the nature of happiness, then eating that food was in the nature of happiness, the more you eat, the more happy you would feel. But you know that the greatest happiness is the first few mouthfuls, and then it sort of becomes slightly less fantastic until finally you feel quite full. And by this stage, maybe you’ve had so much chilli that your mouth’s also starting to feel quite sore.
Also you start to feel quite full so that you really don’t want to eat anymore. Then if anybody was to force you to eat more, it would start to be real suffering. In fact, sometimes we get so fixed on the object that when we have some sort of food that we have labelled in our mind very strongly as being some sort of fantastic food such as chocolate, then we want to keep on eating it even when we’ve got past that point of diminishing returns. And you go on eating it even though it’s making you feel absolutely sick because you think that maybe you’ll get some sort of pleasure if you keep on eating it. That’s real suffering because you eventually make yourself feel really disgustingly ill.
There you can see the suffering of change. And if we think about it, all our pleasures are really a just some relief of some sort of suffering. For instance, you know, you go out dancing and listening to fantastic music and so on, but it’s sort of like a relief from the sort of boring life that we have normally. We don’t want to go on all our lives just dancing to, you know, to to a rock band or something because if we did, we wouldn’t keep on enjoying it. Our bodies would get tired.
We’d start to feel bored even with that sort of pleasure, so we have to go and take a break and do something else. Then next Saturday night we can go off and enjoy ourselves again. Does anybody disagree? And then the other one is the suffering of pervasive conditioning. So the point of this suffering of change is that even when we’re experiencing happiness, that happiness has the seed of suffering in it, and that’s why it’s able to change from suffering happiness to suffering.
And of course, also has the nature of change so that it can change to happiness. But there’s always it’s only samsaric suffering and it’s only samsaric happiness, and so it always has that seed of suffering within it. And this is the nature of saṃsāra, there’s always that element of suffering. So we can experience pure uncontaminated happiness, and that can only be experienced when we’ve freed ourselves from the state of saṃsāra. So the third, so these beings who’ve had even a taste of the higher type of happiness can be experienced, regard this, what we consider to be samsaric happiness, they can only see it as being in the nature of suffering.
These superior beings or higher beings who’ve had direct insight into emptiness, When they come out of their meditation and experience these more ordinary experiences, they recognize them as just being in the nature of suffering. Also, there’s the suffering of extensiveness or pervading suffering, sometimes it’s called. Actually, the other night used an interesting translation, which is the suffering of pervasive conditioning, which I think well, I’ll talk about that. But, basically, I think the suffering of pervasive conditioning, although it’s quite a mouthful, it’s a good term because it gives a clear idea of what is meant by this kind of suffering. So this kind of suffering is what we is very, very subtle, and it’s essentially due to having a body, which is why it’s sometimes called the suffering of extensiveness because the extensiveness refers to the body.
It it’s a suffering that is found on all levels of samsaric existence, and it’s this quality of the body of acting like like a magnet which attracts suffering. And it’s a very subtle level of suffering. And so while we’re experiencing this level of suffering, of ordinary gross suffering, we don’t recognize at all this very subtle suffering of pervasive conditioning. Although, of course, we’re experiencing it all the time, all beings are experiencing it. We’re distracted by the gross levels of suffering that prevent us from seeing the subtler level.
Also, we can see the suffering of change by thinking about it. But it’s much more difficult to actually become aware of this pervasive suffering. And it’s simply this suffering of being under the control of karma and delusion, and being having this body which was taken under the control of these things. So it’s not a free body. We’re not free.
And this so essentially, the nature of this body we we see it as ordinary beings. We tend to see our body as being pure, as being happiness, and as being very stable, when in actual fact, our body has the nature of being impure, of being suffering, and of being impermanent. And as Khensur Rinpoche was teaching us the other night, this view of the body being impure, suffering, and impermanent is the view that is held by the superior beings. They actually see this. They don’t just hold the view, but they actually perceive the body this way.
And by having this view, then they’re enabled to actually abandon the causes of suffering and attain everlasting happiness. Whereas by holding the opposite view, ordinary beings only chase deceptive samsaric pleasures, and as a result of this, then they then we are always being cast into various forms of suffering. And so that’s essentially the topic of suffering of general suffering of saṃsāra. So is that do you do you feel clear about what I was saying there? I know it’s not easy.
You have to think about these things. You have to take it away and continue to check these things and then gradually, through meditation, you can start to have more of a clear idea. And in fact, this pervasive suffering or suffering of pervasive conditioning is very, very difficult to to really understand clearly. Yes? I think Buddha said that no.
Okay. No. That’s a different thing. I’m thinking of the way Buddha said we should check things. Buddha gave three ways of checking things, you know, by I think essentially by reasoning and through your own experience.
And what was the other one? I experience of others, like, by the I’m not sure of that anyway. But we’re taught to to study these things, so we have to continue to go into these things in some detail and study the various books, the text take teachings when we have the opportunity and so on, and to meditate on them. Yes. Yes.
Well, you have to continue to check that through study and meditation. And eventually, gradually, it will start to become more clear. A lot of these things are very interconnected. For instance, as you study emptiness more, then you’ll also understand pervasive suffering more, and so on. So all of these things reinforce each other as you as you go into it.
It’s said that yeah. The first time the first time somebody realizes emptiness, it’s said to produce fear. Yes. Until they get over that fear through further meditation and then becomes blissful. Whereas some people experience their first insight into emptiness.
This is talking about the intellectual realization of emptiness rather than the meditative insight, when the penny drops, you know. Some people experience that in that particular life without experiencing any fear, and that’s a sign that they’ve actually had that insight previously and just regained it. So when you get it for the first time ever, you’re going to feel frightened. It’s going to come as a bit of a shock to you. As I say, it’s like somebody who comes home, opens their door, and find that thieves have been in and ransacked the house.
Everything’s gone. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Right.
And then you sort of gradually start to realize that actually, yeah, nobody took it away. It just never was there in first place. Yes. Totally. So it’s time to stop here, so I don’t really have time for meditation tonight.
So, anyway, you can meditate on these things at home. It’s very straightforward, and you have the books that can help you. So, basically, sometimes you can meditate on the eight sufferings, and sometimes you can meditate on the six sufferings. The eight sufferings, I think, are the ones that we particularly meditate on to convince ourselves of the reality of suffering, because they’re things that are easy to see in our day to day life. And also another meditation that comes into this section that I won’t go into in detail is meditating on the sufferings of the the upper realms of cyclic existence, on the sufferings of the the god the the deva realms and the the asura realms and the human realm because, well, this covers the suffering of the human realms, the eight, so you have to remember that the god realms also have their sufferings.
So I think perhaps most of us Westerners don’t really aspire to be reborn in the Deva realms, but if you were to take a trip there and see them, which you can’t do by taking a rocket or anything, but if you were actually to for instance, sometimes people in meditation go to these realms, you might come back feeling very differently about it and you wouldn’t be able to wait to go there in your next lifetime. You have to meditate on these realms also as not being the ultimate goal. Also have to remember to dedicate our merits for the ultimate goal. If we don’t dedicate our merits, then we can go off to these other states of upper rebirth without actually having intended it. The results of a good karma could be to go there.
So we want to dedicate our merits to make sure that we direct ourselves where we want to go, which is, in the short term, more fortunate human rebirth.