Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew traces the wheel of life diagram to explain the twelve links of dependent origination, focusing on the moment of death—when craving and grasping activate the karmic imprint determining your next rebirth. She describes the signs appearing as consciousness leaves the body: heat patterns moving through the physical form, visions reflecting your actions in life, and experiences that indicate whether you’re heading toward fortunate or unfortunate rebirth. Through vivid examples—a Tibetan official experiencing visions of stolen tea bricks and Aldous Huxley’s sensations during dying—she shows how even small actions like killing a mosquito carry enough karmic weight to trigger lower rebirth. She emphasizes that while this danger is real, the remedy through the four opponent forces is always available to practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 D and K 1998 03 18.mp3
UUID: bbc05133-ecf1-40d9-9f51-dd8d7bc9e2b0
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~5,618
Following the outline of the graduated path and going through the various different topics of the graduated path. First of all, we dealt with some of the topics that come from the scope of the person of lowest motivation and then we started to bring in the motivation of the medium level. Does anybody remember what that was? Okay. There’s three scopes.
Right. Not sure if that’s the third one. Yes. Right. Does anybody remember what the third scope is?
Great scope? Mhmm. Anyway, Great scope’s bodhicitta, so anyway we can take this moment to set our motivations that we’re not just doing this practice for ourselves, but we’re also thinking of all the other sentient beings. And our goal should be to help them escape from suffering. The way to do that is to aim for the goal of Buddhahood so that we will have not only the power to escape from the suffering of saṃsāra and therefore know how it’s done, but also to have the particular qualities of Buddhahood which are so powerful that will enable us to be of benefit to countless other sentient beings.
Anyway, back to the medium scope, What we’re looking at now is looking a bit beyond the scope of somebody who is concerned just with the next rebirth, where it’s going to go, and they really want to get out of the whole thing. And we’ve talked about this before and we talked about how renunciation of cyclic existence saṃsāra which is the quality that we’re working on with the medium scope, is developed by contemplating on the general sufferings of Samsāra. This came up a couple of weeks ago. So the person of lower scope of smaller scope contemplates on the sufferings of the lower realms the three lower realms and is motivated to practice particularly the practice of observing karma so as to escape the unfortunate rebirth into the lower realms. The medium scope person realizes that the smaller scope person really has a long term view that eventually something will have to be done to get off the whole thing, the whole cycle.
But in the short term they don’t aspire to do any practice beyond what they need to do for avoiding lower rebirth. And the person of medium scope has developed their renunciation to the point where they’re much more interested in escaping from saṃsāra completely and they don’t want to wait till some future indefinite time to start practicing they want to start learning now about what they should do to do the practices on the medium scope, the practices for getting out of saṃsāra, and they learn that they have to develop this attitude of renunciation more strongly by meditating on the general sufferings of saṃsāra. So we went through that, by this meditating, you come to see that even when you’re experiencing a fortunate rebirth, that you’re still caught in the wheel of saṃsāra and that also whatever point of saṃsāra you’re in, you’re still subject to some sort of suffering. There’s no security. There’s no permanent happiness anywhere in saṃsāra.
It’s only by getting out of saṃsāra that we can find real, pure, and everlasting happiness. Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey says that in order to understand the cause of suffering more deeply, we have to not just take Buddha’s words about the cause of suffering, but we have meditate on it very deeply and take a personal interest in it. In order to really get this motivation of the medium scope, we have to keep on contemplating about the cause suffering, and this is something we have to keep up all the time, because it’s very difficult not to be seduced by the good things of saṃsāra, particularly if we’re in a fortunate situation, we don’t really want to think about suffering. While we are suffering, often we very desperately wish to get out of our suffering state, but as soon as things get better and we’re feeling happy, we don’t want to think about suffering anymore. This is just natural human tendency.
So to avoid this tendency to stop going ahead and to just fall back and just cruise along as soon as we feel good and as soon as we feel happy and comfortable with ourselves. We need to keep up this contemplating on suffering and to realize that even though we might be feeling good now, we’re not free, that suffering is just around the corner all the time. So we already went through all this in previous talks, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that. But it relates really very much to what we’re talking about tonight. He says we shouldn’t just accept Buddha’s words about suffering because this is not fruitful just to accept them unthinkingly.
We have to really find out the truth for ourselves, and this is true of all Buddha’s teachings, it’s what we make our own truth that really comes for us. We have to realize the truth of the origin of suffering. In the Four Noble Truths, you know, there’s four truths in relation to suffering there’s the truth of suffering the truth of the origin or cause of suffering the truth of the cessation of suffering and the truth of the path which leads to the cessation of suffering. So here we’re looking more deeply at the truth of origin because it’s through understanding the origin of suffering that we can cut the root of saṃsāra, we can cut the ties that bind us to saṃsāra. This is the thing that has to be done at this stage.
Any questions? So we’ve already also been looking at how the sufferings are caused by our root delusions and afflictions or kleshas or delusions, which produce karma, and we’ve already seen the idea that these things are the root of saṃsāra, the delusions or afflictions and the karma that comes out of them that we create under their influence. These things keep us cycling. So obviously if we’re going to get out of saṃsāra then we have to work at removing these afflictions and at removing karma. So, can work on removing these things by working away with the four opponent forces, which we’ve also mentioned in previous talks, in other words purifying our negative karmas through these actions of refuge and bodhicitta, of regretting action, of resolving not to do it again, and of carrying out a positive virtuous action as an antidote.
And if we keep on doing this, we can really work away at reducing our negative karmas and delusions, but we can’t totally cut them off at the root, because this process doesn’t cut them off at their root. The only thing that can cut them off at their root is meditating on emptiness, understanding emptiness or shunyata, the emptiness of true existence, of self and external phenomena. So what we’re going to have to do is to achieve the ability to do this kind of meditation. But in the meantime, we also need to understand our relative situation, our conventional situation, as beings in saṃsāra more accurately. So the person of lesser mental capacity who’s at the medium scope is contented with meditating on the Four Noble Truths and suffering in this way and cultivating their attitude of renunciation of cyclic existence.
But this is only part of it, and there’s more which can be done by the person of greater mental capacity, the person who has a greater capacity to understand the technicalities of the topic. So I think we’d all like to think of ourselves as being a person of greater mental capacity. You all agree? Or would some of you sort of take a more modest view of yourselves perhaps? Modesty is very good sometimes, but other times it’s handicapped.
We don’t want to have too much modesty about our mental capacity. So the person of greater mental capacity tries to understand how we circle in cyclic existence by studying the twelve links of dependent origination, which is on this diagram on this side, which is the oldest known flowchart. So, as they were still in the experimental stage with flowcharts in those days, they didn’t quite do everything the way it would be done by a modern flowchart designer. So it tries to put everything into the one chart, which can be a bit confusing, and you have to learn to study it and to understand how it all fits together. So anyway, it really conveys pictorially the whole situation that we’re in.
And it’s very vividly displayed by this chap who’s holding the whole circle, and that’s the Lord of Death. And that means that while we’re in saṃsāra, we’re always under the control of the Lord of Death, because whether we’re going to die in a few years’ time or whether we’re going to die right now, we’re always subject to death. And we keep on getting born and dying again, and that’s what the rest of the chart is about. No. Yama.
Yes. Anyway, I think it’s alright. Yes, I think it’s alright. Can probably see it better. If you push it back, some people won’t be able to see.
Dada can’t see, but he knows it already, so that’s alright. Okay. So right in the center, you’ve got a rooster. This one looks more like a duck or a goose or something, but it’s generally, it’s a rooster, and a pig, and a snake. So those are the three root delusions, the three primary delusions, or sometimes they’re the three poisonous minds.
Somebody might be able to tell us what they are. Ignorance. Ignorance. Yes, that’s right. So there’s three.
So that represents anger, the snake represents anger, rooster represents attachment, because they’re very lustful creatures, as you’ll ever know if you’ve observed them, and pigs represent ignorance. So we often think that pigs represent attachment also, but in this particular diagram the pig represents ignorance, which is a bit funny when you think about it because pigs are considered to be highly intelligent animals. But then when you look at them, actually they are a good example because they have all this intelligence and yet they seem to like to hang out in the muddiest places and eat the most filthy food and behave in a particularly gross manner if they have the opportunity. And I’m not putting pigs down, but if we behave like that, then we’re certainly not using our intelligence. So in the next circle around, you’ve just got a picture of well dressed people going, sort of walking up a staircase made of clouds, and and on the other side, you have pathetic looking people falling downwards, tumbling down downwards.
And this indicates that we go around from the upper realms good rebirths, and we’re always cycling around and going from good rebirth to bad and then we manage to get up into another good rebirth and then we fall down again it doesn’t follow any particular cycle but we can be down in the lower rebirth for a while, then we manage to get up again, eventually we’ll fall down again. Beyond that, there are the six realms of sentient beings in saṃsāra. Does anybody know what those six realms are? Animals? People?
Gods? Demigods. Demigods? hungry ghosts? Hell realms.
Okay, right. So none of those is everlasting. We get born into them for whatever period of time is appropriate for the particular realm and the karmic tendencies that took us there and so on. And, eventually, that life comes to an end, and the being takes another rebirth perhaps in a different realm. So those are illustrated by lots of quite detailed little pictures there.
It’s quite interesting to get up close to these pictures and have a good look at them. So what we’re really concerned with tonight is the the twelve outer links and the twelve outer pictures in the outside circle. And this is called the twelve links of interdependent origination. And this whole diagram is called the wheel of life sometimes, or in English actually, more accurate name would be the wheel of saṃsāra, which is what they call it in Sanskrit. Yes, anyway, what these do is explain the whole technical process of being born and dying and being born again in saṃsāra, and how it all happens.
So it’s a pretty technical process, but it’s also extremely interesting, I think. So we’re with going over what happens again when we approach death. I talked about this last week, actually, so I won’t go into a lot of details about the experiences that we’re having internally as we approach death this time, but now we’re looking at it more from the point of view of how it all happens. Before, we were looking at what we experience, what happens to us, and how we experience it. And now we’re looking at what brings all this about, what’s the underlying cause, what’s the process, what’s the mechanism.
So, as we talked about before, there are many factors that lead to death that can cause death for us, but we know that sooner or later that we’re going to meet these causes of death. Either we meet something that brings about an untimely death or we run out of life force, and we’re eventually going to encounter this experience at the end of this life. And we know also that we have quite a limited lifespan. We know that very few human beings live to being much over one hundred years. In this day and age, perhaps the majority of us might make the 80s.
A couple of generations ago, not many people could expect to make it to seventy. But still, that’s only a few extra years and we know that it’s not going to be infinitely extendable, we’re going to experience it. Lot of people do get sick in the 70s and 80s. Yes. It’s often very fragile to remember.
That’s right, yes, it can be. Certainly, anyway, we know that the body’s wearing out and it can’t go on much longer. Even if you manage to have an active old age, you know that it’s getting closer and closer. So, anyway, assuming that the person’s dying and that they’re dying in a comparatively slow sort of way, we already talked about this last week, Actually, all these things happen just the same in a fast death, but it’s easy to explain it in terms of being extended over a period of time. So as you get close to your death, what happens is that you’re going to activate a karmic imprint.
A karmic imprint which has been carried on the consciousness at the time of death, is going to be activated, and this will be a projecting karma. We were talking about how some kinds of karma can actually bring a rebirth, and these are called projecting karmas. And so, as we get close to death, and the karma for this life is finishing up, we start to activate this projecting karma for the next life, and it will only be one karma. And, of course, the one that gets activated depends on the whole pattern of our lives and of our other karmas, but still it’s only one karma that’s going to be activated. But, of course, can’t live a bad life and then expect that you’re going to be able to have good thoughts at death time and then make sure that you activate a good karma for the next life.
So if you live a good life, it greatly increases your chances of activating good karma. What about people who repent at the end of their lives? Truly repent? What would you say about that? Well, it depends on what sort of it is.
If it’s a scared sort of repentance, it really makes it harder for them. Whereas if they simply sort of let go of all that stuff and identify with a different sort of potentiality in themselves, that could be very positive. In Buddhism, we tend not to place too much reliance on deathbed repentance. We always emphasize that it’s important to live your life in the right way. There is the story of Devadatta.
You know who Devadatta was? He was Buddha’s cousin and he was the one who competed with Buddha the whole time and caused a lot of trouble. He did lots of things like he committed some of the extreme negative actions such as causing a schism in the Sangha and drawing the blood of Buddha because he tried to kill Buddha. Apparently, he arranged he set up the arrangement when somebody tried to kill Buddha with a big boulder, and the boulder just, split in half, and the each side rolled off to one side so the Buddha wasn’t harmed, but a small chip flew off apparently and caused him to bleed a little and apparently drawing the blood of a Tathagatas is one of five heinous crimes. Anyway, he had all this heavy karma on his I was going to say conscience, but that’s not really a Buddhist concept, on his stream of consciousness.
At the time of his death, he apparently suddenly realized his mistake and took refuge in the Buddha. It was too late to prevent him falling into lower rebirth. The Buddha said that because of having taken refuge, he would eventually get out of that lower rebirth and practice the path. So it’s not wasted. Even if it isn’t timely enough to save the person from a lower rebirth, any good thought is not wasted.
So anyway, the thoughts that we’re thinking as This activation can happen while the person is still quite conscious, still aware, their mind is functioning in the normal way that it functions during the lifetime. So the dying thoughts, the thoughts that the person is having and the atmosphere that surrounds them and the words of the people around them and the things they see and so on can be very influential at this time because it’s the thoughts that the person’s having which determine what karma gets activated. And, of course, that depends on the whole setup, how the person’s lived their life and also what their situation is at the death time, what sort of people are surrounding them, and whether prayers are being said for them and all these sort of things. This is a very sensitive time. At this time, you can be very helpful to the person who’s dying by helping them to have good thoughts at the death time.
Later on into the death process, then the ability to recognize, to discriminate between virtuous and non virtuous sort of subsides. The person is no longer able to make that distinction and their thoughts just become neutral and they’re just sort of getting carried away with experiencing the things that happen to them at death time without being so much of an active participant at that stage. That later on they won’t have much control but at this particular point when the karma is being activated this is the crucial time and while the person can be still quite lively. In fact they’re able to speak and to communicate their experiences and so on. So what activates the karma is craving and grasping.
So when the person feels that they’re separating from their body, they’re craving and grasping at some sort of experience. So for instance, if the karma that’s being activated would be one to be born in the hells, they might feel cold and crave for heat and grasp at heat. And this craving and grasping is going to be what takes them to the hell realms. But you have to realize that this grasping at heat isn’t the cause of being born in the hells. It just connects with other karmas which create the karmic cause, and this helps to activate it.
So it’s something connects there with the karma. So at this stage, the person is capable of being helped. Later on, of course, are still things you can do to help the person during the whole dying process and also during the bardo, but it’s at this particular stage it’s most sensitive. If the person gets it right at this stage, then they can more or less cruise through the rest of it. So there will be various signs that the person’s, as they die, the heat could be leaving from their body in various different ways, which can indicate what sort of a rebirth they’re likely to have.
If the heat is leaving from the lower body and gathering at the heart, so if the lower body goes cold first, that’s a good sign. Indicates that the consciousness is going to exit from one of the upper apertures and take a fortunate rebirth, either as a human being or in the gods or demigods realms. If it goes the other way, if the heat leaves the head and the upper part of the body first and comes down towards the heart, then that’s a bad sign. It indicates lower rebirth in one of the three lower realms. It’s interesting that apparently when Aldous Huxley was dying and described the experiences he was going through, through.
Was under the actually he’d taken LSD which isn’t something that’s recommended but he said that he felt his feet were getting cold and that the coldness was coming up his body from the feet which seemed to indicate that he was going off to a good rebirth. So another sign is that the person might be having hallucinations or visions at this stage, and sometimes people describe these things or talk about them as they’re experiencing them. For instance, Bokar Rinpoche in this book, are many, many stories of these. Every lama has many stories from their own experience and if you ask any group of people they’ll always be able to tell you of somebody they know who’s died and had similar experiences while they were dying. In this book, he tells the story of a man who’d been a government official who had something to do with the plantations in Darjeeling or somewhere and who had stopped no, no, sorry.
It was in Tibet. So he must have had to do with the, you know, like, the government stores or something like that. And he used to steal tea. And at the time of his death, he told people that he was being crushed by bricks of tea, loads of tea bricks. You know, if you’ve ever seen Tibetan tea, it comes in pressed into bricks.
So he had this sort of horrific experience which was very much related to the kind of actions he’d done in his lifetime. And in particular, as it had been a habitual action, it became very, very strong. And there are many similar stories. Similarly, people who’ve had a good life often describe beautiful experience as they’re dying. So these things can also be an indication of the kind of rebirth that we can expect they’re going off to.
And then after this, then the person goes through various different absorptions of the elements and the absorption of the five aggregates and so on that we talked about last week, and they experience the seven visions associated with the death process and they go into the clear light and then the consciousness leaves the body and enters the Bardo, the in between state. So we talked about all this last week. And then the being eventually gets reborn. After by forty nine days, then they would have finished with this Bardo period. It could be shorter, any multiple of seven days.
So talking about how all this happens So now I’m going to get technical about all this, and particularly what keeps it keeping on, what makes it keeping on happening. So these twelve links, another. If you have the idea that each of these links is like a link in a chain, each one just leads on to the next one, you’ve finished with the first one, and then you’ve got the second one, then you’ve got the third one. It’s not quite as simple as that, and I think if somebody was designing this chart nowadays, they’d probably try to put it all onto several different charts rather than trying to put it all into one chart. And you can draw your own charts if you find that’s helpful for you.
So the first link is ignorance. So yes, you have to sort of give up this idea of thinking that all the links are happening in a time sequence, because you’ll find that some of these links are involved in a time sequence and some of them are just in a causative sequence, which is not necessarily a time sequence. So the first link, for example, is ignorance. And this ignorance actually is sequence, it’s just in a causative sequence, because as far as time goes, ignorance continues right through the whole process. It’s always there.
But it’s the first link because it’s what keeps the whole thing turning, and so it’s the causation of the rest of it. So there is the first link in the causative sense. So there are two kinds of ignorance that we’re concerned about. There’s the ignorance of emptiness or the ignorance of the lack of true existence, and there is ignorance of cause and effect. Here we’re particularly concerned with the first ignorance.
They’re both relevant here, but in particular, the ignorance cause and effect or lack of true sorry, the ignorance of emptiness or of lack of true existence is the ignorance that keeps the whole thing going. So then following that, we’ve got compositional factors. Link two. So the first link, I can’t see what it is here, it’s usually a blind man. I’ll look at my book here.
If you found the place, you can all see it. Right. He’s walking with a stick. Okay. That’s a good symbol for ignorance because he doesn’t know where he’s going.
So the next one is compositional factors, and that’s usually represented by potter, and that represents the creating of karmas. The laying down of karmic imprints through our actions. Our actions can be good or they can be bad. We make virtuous and non virtuous karmas and under the influence of different delusions, under the influence of clinging attachment and hatred and anger and so on, we create a lot of bad karmas. But not all our karmas are bad, we also create good karmas, but even our good karmas are under the influence of this ignorance of emptiness or lack of true existence, selflessness.
And so it’s still samsaric karma, and it still keeps us cycling. So, motivated by these ignorance, these two kinds of ignorance, we have two results. So the ignorance of the emptiness of true existence or selflessness keeps us in saṃsāra, and the ignorance of cause and effect sends us to the lower realms. Is this clear? Yeah.
Mhmm. Then the third one is consciousness, and that’s indicated by a monkey jumping from one branch to another. So this is talking about the general stream of consciousness which carries the karmic imprints. So this is another link that doesn’t just happen in a particular temporal sequence. In fact, we have the consciousness with us all the time.
So when we’re looking at this wheel, we’re looking at a particular karma in its we’re following a particular karma through its whole process, from being laid down to the time it brings its result. So in terms of this particular karma, there’s you can divide the consciousness into two aspects or two periods of time. And one is at the time of the cause. And at this time, the consciousness receives the imprint of the karmic latency, which is laid down by our actions, by our volitional actions of body, speech and mind. And it continues to carry this imprint until it comes to the time of the result, at which time the karma ripens and the consciousness has to experience the result.
Could you give some examples of that? Yes. So for instance, first of all, let’s say that you kill a mosquito, And at the time of killing the mosquito, your well, there’ll be more about it anyway. But at the time you kill it, your stream of consciousness receives the imprint of the act of killing, and it continues to let’s say you don’t purify it, it continues to carry that imprint, which simply remains there, being potent to produce its cause, until the right circumstances come along. Now, let’s say that this is quite a very strong act.
Kill a lot of mosquitoes and you don’t regret it and all the rest of it, And it’s quite a strong action, it has the power to be a throwing karma to produce a rebirth. And then at the time of death, whether of the same life or or some future life, then you will experience this karma ripening at death time and being the karma that throws another existence, which in this instance could, for instance, be one of the lower realms. And then you would go to that lower realm, whether it was the hell realm or the animal realm or something. And during that so that’s the the first part of it. The part that carries the the part at the time of cause is from the time you lay that karmic imprint down right up to before it starts to ripen.
And then the second part, the time of the result, is when it starts to ripen and brings about this result of rebirth in lower realms and during the time that you’re experiencing that rebirth, until that karma is all used up and all expended, you’re in the time of the result. That makes sense to me, but surely it wouldn’t just be something like killing in your time with the mosquitoes. Do do you think that it would build up? Because you were insensitive to killing, then you’d be insensitive to a whole range of other things, or is it simply, you know, those small actions? Yes.
Well I wanna know how big it has to be. And then you rejoice. You go, oh, great. I killed a mosquito. It did death.
So every every karma, I think, has those four legs. And so you can look in your own consciousness and say, well, how many times did I do that? And then every I think it’s fifteen days. Is it? That your karma doubles every fifteen days.
I can’t remember now, and I haven’t been able to find where to look it up. Ten, sixteen days. Okay, we’re not talking about the four opponent forces, but just keep in mind not to be frightened because we can deal with all this stuff with the four opponent forces. Actual fact, killing a mosquito is lighter than killing a big animal, but even killing a mosquito is enough to throw us into a lower rebirth. We never run short of karma to get reborn.
You know, there’s in one day, we can create so many different karmas that have the power to to throw a rebirth, to to to be projecting karmas for a new rebirth. So we we carry a lot of these imprints and which one of them ripens at the death time depends on various factors, but only one can actually ripen as our projecting karma for the next rebirth. This sounds terrible. Don’t be frightened. You’ve got the remedy here.
Anyway, that’s the consciousness link. Of course, we always have consciousness, but in talking about this particular karma, then it has these two particular periods of time, the time of the cause and the time of the result. And when that’s finished, then we finish with that particular karma and we’ll be experiencing other karmic results. So the next link so the monkey is consciousness is represented by the monkey because the monkey jumps from one tree to another or from one branch to another, and in the same way the consciousness carries this karma and it carries it from life to life. Then the next one is name and form, and that’s represented by a boat, usually.
So what this means is simply the five aggregates. There’s four mental aggregates and form. The form aggregate. You know there’s five aggregates. Form is the physical aggregate and the other four aggregates are mental.
And these simply are what is taking place now. So at this point, we’re assuming that the being has been conceived, the consciousness has gone from one life to the next entered the assuming that it’s a human rebirth or it would be the same for an animal rebirth where the animal is born by, you know, by fertilization of two parents, you know, the fertilized ovum. Then you’ve got these four mental aggregates, and they connect with the fertilized ovum of the parents, or as is explained in the Buddhist texts, the blood and semen. And these are just in the very early stages of development now, right from the moment of conception onwards. Name and form represents this first stage of development.
Really these five aggregates are really in a more of a latent state than actually being in an activated state at this stage.