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 grounds the development of bodhicitta—the aspiration to achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings—in concrete daily interdependence. She shows how every piece of clothing, meal, and shelter comes from countless workers across generations, making this practical recognition the foundation for genuine altruism rather than abstract compassion. She contrasts the Mahāyāna path, which takes on responsibility for others’ welfare, with the Hīnayāna approach of seeking personal liberation alone. She guides listeners through meditations on equanimity (equalizing attitudes toward friends, enemies, and strangers), remembering all beings as former mothers, and recognizing the fundamental equality of oneself and others. The session concludes with Q&A on whether enlightened beings lose individuality, spontaneous spiritual awakening, and how attachment shapes rebirth.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 B 1999 10 14.mp3
UUID: e2313e9b-71db-44cb-9699-b9ba5ee4c34e
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-10-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~5,759
So we start up by sitting on motivation and think that we’re not just engaging in this activity tonight for our own welfare, but we’re thinking of all the all the numberless sentient beings, sharing the universe with us, and thinking that we’re just one, and there’s so many. And so it’s not not just a decision of our own welfare. When we think of how all these sentient beings are the same as ourselves, they have the same nature of ourselves, wanting happiness, wanting to avoid suffering, and yet so many of them are experiencing great sufferings. And as sentient beings caught up in the cycle of saṃsāra, they haven’t found freedom. And so as we’re following the path to find liberation from suffering for ourselves, it’s not enough to just think of ourselves but to think of all these beings and think how connected we are with them, to think how we’ve been with each other, life after life, that we’re so interconnected and they are going to require help to find their path to liberation.
So the most worthwhile practice we can do is to make our aim the attainment of Buddhahood so as to be able to effectively help all these other beings. So we’re looking at the great practices now. Just start on the Great Scope. We started we really started on it last week, and so the emphasis the the focus in the the Great Scope is on this sort of bodhicitta, and we’ve essentially been going through the the small and medium scope teachings that explain to us the the whole background to what we’re trying to do now about our situation, our present situation, about the sufferings that we’re involved in as sentient beings caught up in the bondage of saṃsāra, as the causes of our suffering, the disturbing emotions or the deluded mental states and karma and how we work to overcome these. And first of all, looking at how to avoid taking lower rebirth in our next life so to be able to keep on practicing and then looking at how to practice to achieve liberation from Samsāra by cutting off the disturbing emotions which are the basic cause of our problems which involve the the trainings of of morality, concentration, and wisdom, which involve not only following right conduct but also following meditation practice.
Practice. And so then when we’re looking at the great scope, we’re looking at the bringing in of all these other sentient beings into the picture. So before we were only looking at the other sentient beings from the point of view that they were the objects of our karma. If we do wrong to other sentient beings, we create bad karma, and this bad karma throws us into suffering and acts as an obstacle to our attaining of liberation. And so we’ve been looking at it from that viewpoint that we have to avoid harm to others.
But now we’re looking at taking on the responsibility for the welfare of others. And this is the whole thought of the Great Scope practice and this is what distinguishes our practice from this is what makes our practice a Mahāyāna practice and distinguishes it from practice which would belong to the Hīnayāna path or which would simply involve the scopes that we’ve already been through without bringing in this great scope or this Mahāyāna thought. So this is clear, is it? So we start off by just focusing not so much on technical points anymore about the nature of existence and so on, but we just look at how we can cultivate this Mahāyāna thought and that’s where we start off within the great scope. And so what we’re trying to do is develop bodhicitta.
Does anybody remember what bodhicitta means? Yes. Yes. Well, how would you explain that? Yes.
It’s not that that would be the mind of a Buddha. When we’re talking about bodhicitta, it it really isn’t Buddha mind so much as enlightenment mind. So it refers to the the motivation of the person who’s trying to achieve Buddhahood or enlightenment. And that’s essentially the drift of it. And the whole purpose of achieving enlightenment is not just for our own purpose.
For our own purpose, it’s enough to achieve liberation. The person who’s only thinking of escaping suffering and achieving the state of everlasting happiness on the Hīnayāna path is satisfied once they’ve achieved liberation. They remain in this marvelously blissful, liberated state of single pointed concentration on or this meditative equipoise on emptiness. Once particularly once they’ve left their body, they don’t take rebirth again but remain in this meditative equipoise and their consciousness remains. The consciousness doesn’t need a body at that stage because we only need bodies because we’re samsaric beings continually grasping at taking another body and then another body.
Whereas the liberated being the Arhat, once they die, they don’t need to come back again. They say that eventually the Buddhas will wake them up out of their meditation and they will come back again to to practice, to attain full enlightenment, but that’s that that that’s a long way down the track from the time that they achieved their liberation. It’s many eons and so we’re advised to develop this bodhicitta motivation right from the beginning so that it becomes very very powerful. Before we have any question of being able to leave Samsāra, we have to have developed this love and compassion so strongly that it won’t allow us to to pass into that peace of nirvana. Any questions about that?
We usually use the word enlightenment to mean Buddhahood in in this tradition. You might have heard it. It’s often used very loosely in a general sort of way in society. Sometimes enlightenment can mean like the sort of in the eighteenth century, you know, the kind of reliance on reason. They had what called enlightened despots, like Catherine the Great of Russia.
They were a great improvement on just ordinary despots, but they weren’t Buddhist as far as I know. They may have been, but they probably weren’t. So is it’s called it means mind of enlightenment. Yes. It no.
It’s a it’s a motivation. Buddha this this term Buddha mind, I don’t know that it’s a technical term, but I I guess you’re using it in the sense of the mind of of an enlightened being. Yes. There’s also what’s called Buddha nature, which we all have. Buddha nature means our potential to become Buddha.
It doesn’t mean that we’re Buddha now or that there’s some sort of little Buddha within us. It means that we have the potential to become enlightened. In other words, that the essential nature of our mind isn’t isn’t oneness with the disturbing emotions. The disturbing emotions are there, but they’re you could say they’re not mixed or they’re not completely identical in oneness with the with the nature of our mind, the disturbing emotions can be eradicated and the purity of the mind can be brought out. So what we have to do is to meditate on a series of topics which enable us to achieve this motivation of bodhicitta.
So we haven’t achieved bodhicitta. We’ve done a little bit of meditation and developed a warm feeling for sentient beings and thought how great it would be if we were able to help them all to achieve enlightenment. This is very good but that’s not bodhicitta because as soon as we go away and get distracted by something then the thought will fade again. If we’ve had a good meditation then it might remain something that’s, you know, still influential to some extent. But if we don’t work on it, it will eventually go away completely.
So we have to keep on working on it. So we’ve only actually realized bodhicitta when this thought becomes very, very stable and irreversible and becomes completely a part of our consciousness, an intrinsic part of our consciousness so that it doesn’t need to be always being built up and it’s always functioning day and night, even when we’re sleeping, even when we’re engaged in some other sort of activity that might be taking up all our attention, most of our attention, still the bodhicitta thought is always there in the bodhisattva. So the person who has achieved this the realization of bodhicitta is a bodhisattva and to become a bodhisattva is really something quite special. And so we have to do quite a lot of work and development in order to reach that stage. But we have to understand the meditations and do these meditations in order to bring about this realization of bodhicitta.
Also, we have to understand the practice of a Bodhisattva because although we may not be a Bodhisattva yet, we still have to try to do these practices as well as we can at our own particular level. And so that’s why we, after studying these meditations for cultivating bodhicitta, we’ll have a look at the six perfections, which is the way a bodhisattva practices in order to attain Buddhahood. And then after that, we’ll have a look at combining the practices of Sūtra and Tantra so that we can look how to do it quickly instead of taking countless great eons to do it. So it’s good to know if we we haven’t got the courage to think of taking countless great eons to the practice, it’s good to think that we can do it a little bit quicker, but we actually need to have the same sort of courage anyway. So anyway, what what we’re trying to do is start off by cultivating universal love and compassion.
They have to be the first steps. Before we can cultivate the thought of working, dedicating ourselves to achieving the welfare of others, we have to have this universal love and compassion, which is the thought that that’s based on. Then having developed universal love and compassion then we cultivate the thought of actually devoting ourselves to bringing about the welfare of others in an active way and that leads to the thought that if we’re going to do that then we have to attain enlightenment. Otherwise we won’t be able to accomplish that means we won’t be able to accomplish that goal without that means. And so those things go together and these are the stages that we have to go through in our thinking and that’s why it’s called bodhicitta because the motivation is to help all others out of love and compassion but the means to achieve that is to become an enlightened being so as to have the skills to help the others, to help all these other living beings.
It’s like anything, know, before you can do the job you have to be able to prepare yourself by achieving the proper education, the proper qualifications. So we’ll have a bit of a look at the qualifications of a Buddha too. We went a little bit through that last week and also we looked at this when we were looking at the topic of refuge, the qualities of Buddha. So I’ll go into that in a bit more technical detail before we finish the series of talks. But it’s enough just to start off with the thought that Buddhas do have these incredible qualities that enable them to be very, very effective in helping others.
So, anyway, developing bodhicitta can’t happen all at once. We have to work on it stage by stage gradually. And we, first of all have to start with this great love and compassion and it’s not enough just to think oh, love and compassion is great, having love and compassion for all living beings is wonderful and then of course we go outside and we meet somebody who we don’t like and they annoy us and immediately there’s one sentient being that’s excluded from our love and compassion and that immediately means that we haven’t got universal love and compassion. So until we can have compassion, equal love and compassion for every single living being, no matter what they’re like, whether they’re ugly or beautiful, whether they’re nice to us or unpleasant to us or nice to other people or unpleasant to other people or whatever, that we have to be able to have this love and compassion that’s not based on any of these discriminating ideas, but that’s just based on perceiving them in their nature as sentient beings, in their basic nature. So we can’t just set aside our disturbing emotions and the prejudices and so on that cause us to have this partial attitude towards others.
We have to work on that. So we have to start with the equilibrium meditation which I explained last week, where you focus on the friend enemy and stranger and equalize your attitude to them through reasoning how your partiality is mistaken. Then also last week we went on to the meditations of how all beings have been our mothers in the past and then remembering their kindness when they were our mothers and wishing and making a determination to repay their kindness, which leads to the conclusion that we have to achieve enlightenment in order to be able to do this. So these meditations came from the first series of meditations that I talked about, which is the the seven Mahāyāna cause and effect meditations. And there’s another series of meditations also, which is called exchanging oneself with others.
And so I’m actually presenting these topics from the the way that they can be combined together into the one series of meditations and I’m following Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s book, the Wish-Fulfilling Golden Sun, which isn’t available. If you’re lucky enough to have a copy, you probably have to be around twenty years ago or something to to have got hold of a copy of of this book. But Doc was going to do a printout of his copy and put it in the office or put it somewhere. But anyway, I’ll be following this presentation that Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave us, and it’s based on what other great teachers have presented. So the it gives you a way of putting all these meditations into one round.
They they can also be presented as separate rounds of meditation. So, you can really choose yourself, particularly as Khensur Rinpoche is teaching these things on Tuesday evenings, can really choose for yourself what’s the most effective way to meditate. So the key to, anyway, to developing universal love is to be able to see all beings in a positive light. And that was why we had to start off by developing equanimity or an equal-minded wellbeing because we have to basically overcome our clinging attachment and our hatred towards sentient beings and also our ignorant indifference towards the beings that we regard as being strangers. And that leaves the way clear to be able to develop love and compassion and we have to be able to see beings in a sympathetic light or a positive light.
So there are different meditations to help us do this, not in a self centered way, thinking of how we can expect them to be helpful to us in the future in some sort of way that gratifies ourselves cherishing, but just looking at how they’re already kind to us, how they’ve been kind to us in the past and how they are being kind to us so many ways in the present and thinking they’ve done so much for us already. So one way that we’ve already looked at is seeing how they’ve all been our mothers But we can also look at how they’re being kind to us in an everyday sort of way. And this doesn’t have to depend on their intention. It just looks at the effect that it has on us. For instance, every day in countless different ways we’re dependent on the work of other sentient beings for everything that we enjoy.
From the time we get up in the morning and put our clothes on and eat our breakfast and go off to work either in a car that’s been made by some other being or by getting public transport that’s been put together by other beings and driven by a being and all our food’s been grown by all the farmers and processed by the factory workers and brought to us by the shop keepers. Our clothes have been made for us by the workers and the wool or cotton was grown by the farmers and the designs were developed by the fashion designers. All of these things. There’s not one thing we can enjoy unless we perhaps happen to find a mushroom growing on our back lawn or something. Everything comes to us from the kindness of all of these sentient beings and it’s not just the present ones but it goes back countless generations to the first people who experimented with farming and growing crops and the first people who learned how to make clothes and build houses and do all of these things.
It all includes an incredible large number of human beings and of course that’s not including all the animals and so on who have been used in this process. And then besides this, we can also think that our Dharma practice depends on all of these sentient beings and that we wouldn’t have any of these benefits that we’re enjoying through our good karma if it wasn’t being able to practice with the help of other sentient beings. For instance, our most basic practice to enable us to receive a human rebirth. The fact that we’ve got a human rebirth depends on the kindness of these sentient beings because that comes mainly from the practice of moral conduct. The practice of moral conduct is directed mainly towards other sentient beings, avoiding harm to other sentient beings even at the most basic level.
Then the good things that we have in this life, being in a prosperous society, having plenty of the things that we need and so on, comes from generosity towards other beings in our past lives. Having good bodies comes from practicing patience towards other beings and so on. So there’s nowhere to the benefits that we’ve got in this way from these other beings. So we can think in this way and see them as having been very, very kind to us and how we’re totally really dependent on them, interlinked with them. Our lives are so meshed in together with the lives of these other beings.
And if we just look at it in so many ways, we need to have other beings around us. We’re never happy if we’re totally alone, not unless we’re really good meditators. And even then we’ve only reached that stage through having connected with other beings to learn, to work together, to practice together. We have so much dependency on others for our daily needs, emotional as well as physical as well as material. So many things come to us from these other beings.
We tend to sometimes forget that and feel that we can be independent little units but we’re very, very linked with all these beings as they are with us and these are our karmic connections. So if we look at it in that way, these other beings are so good to us because they enable us to have this fortunate human life that we’re enjoying day by day and even if we feel that perhaps our life isn’t always happy, as human beings we have so much, so many good things, so many positive elements in our life that we can focus on and think how we rely on the other beings for this. That’s right. I think that’s true in a way. On the other hand, in, like, more traditional societies, although they may have depended on a smaller number of beings in a local context, were incredibly dependent.
You know, you just sort of think it’s a local blacksmith or whatever, you know. So that they were yes. Yes. That they were they had some sort of yes. There was always some sort of dependency there.
The family dependencies and so on are always very, very crucial because people would have to rely on these other people for all of their of their needs and security. But we can see how perhaps we’re involved with a much greater number. I think that does help us to think wider, to have a broader scope. It is easier for us, I think, in this day and age because we’re less focused on the extended family and we can see more of the interactions occurring over the whole world and there’s a lot more concerns about world peace and world equity and world pollution and all of these things. We can see how we affect one another.
For instance, you know, somebody using greenhouse gases in the United States or Europe or something that’s causing global warming and people who are using various other things in the Northern Hemisphere are upsetting our ozone in the southern hemisphere and causing us to receive ultraviolet and all that sort of thing. So it’s very clear now. I think we have the knowledge now of how we affect each other continually in these ways. Of course, it’s not always positive, but what we’re trying do is look at these things in a positive way because this is something that’s very helpful for us. You might think, why just focus on the positive side?
Why not look on the other side and see how these people are harming us in a lot of ways by polluting our world and all this sort of thing. But in fact, it’s very positive to look on the sentient beings as being kind and helpful to us because that only helps us and it helps these other beings. Whereas since beginningless time we’ve been looking at sentient beings in a negative way, becoming angry with them, retaliating and harming them and fighting them and being aggressive and so on. We’ve never achieved enlightenment or liberation through any of these things and all that’s happened to us is that we’ve achieved all sorts of different sufferings. It’s only through developing positive feelings towards other beings and developing kindness and love and compassion and helpful actions that we’ve got our precious human rebirth and that we can go on to achieve all these other great things such as enlightenment.
I’ll be talking about that a bit more anyway. It’s actually very, if we go into the reason behind it, it’s very rational to look at it in this way and the more we understand, the more we actually see that this is a valid way of looking. The highly evolved beings see more and more clearly how other beings really are kind to them. And as I said already, it’s not depending on the other being’s motivation. People don’t go off to work in a clothing factory or whatever so necessarily thinking of how we’re going to be kept warm and good looking because of their clothes.
Perhaps they’re just thinking of how they’re going to earn their crust. They may even feel reluctant about it, but the fact is that we’re getting the benefits of this work. So, We can also develop our compassion by thinking about how all of these beings are caught up in Samsāra like we are and experiencing various different sufferings. And if we have thought about our own sufferings then we can think of other sentient beings’ sufferings and also of course we’ve already been looking at the different kinds of suffering in the small and medium scope so we’re already very familiar with that topic and in fact, as I mentioned last week, it’s by meditating on our own suffering that we develop renunciation of Samsāra. And in fact, you can’t develop bodhicitta before you develop renunciation.
The person who’s practicing on the Mahāyāna path from the beginning develops renunciation and bodhicitta simultaneously. Essentially, the renunciation of your own suffering, an awareness of your own suffering state and compassion for the suffering state of others comes at the same time so that you get these two realizations together. Because without renunciation of your own suffering, it’s impossible to have that feeling for the suffering of others. So they’re looking at the meditations from the point where we left off last week of thinking of repaying the Mother’s kindness, the kindness of all our mothers, then the next meditation that we can do in this presentation which combines the approach from the two different traditions, next one is meditating on the equality of self and others. So it’s not meant to be such an analytical meditation as the previous meditations, but just focusing on the essential equality of all beings.
How the oh Yes. You’re thinking of the equilibrium meditation. That’s equalizing your attitude towards a friend, enemy, and stranger. This is just seeing the equality of self and others. Before we were looking at the three different kinds of beings, of external beings, that we weren’t equalizing ourselves.
We weren’t bringing ourselves into the picture at that point. We were just seeing how all the other beings should how we should see the other beings as being equal to each other. Now we’re seeing how we can see them as being equal to ourselves. Well, this is following the the putting them together. Yes.
Well, this isn’t exactly following the sevenfold cause and effect jumping. Some of the steps in that seven fold cause and effect have been jumped in this presentation because they more or less get covered by the meditations that come in from the other tradition. So it’s not following the exact outline of the sevenfold cause and effect. Like I said, know, it takes some meditations from one and some meditations from the other and combines them into a series of contemplations. So I’m not going through the two different traditions separately.
I’m just going through the combined presentation. Yes. Well, it’s also very good to study them separately. I think I might have gone through them separately last year actually. But, anyway, up.
You can read this book. And there’s quite a number of other good graduated path books that explain one or both of the different traditions. So it’s not difficult to look it up. So by meditating on this equality of self and others, we just focus on how there’s no reason to put ourselves before others. Of course this is hard to do because it’s just instinctive in us to put ourselves first because it just seems natural so we have to just see how there’s no real reason to do this because we have exactly the same nature as all these other beings.
We have this wish our essential nature or our essential psychology is that we we wish to have not even the slightest suffering and we’re never satisfied with the amount of happiness that we receive. And all you want to have a feel with the light and see whether is anybody wanting it to light? Yes. They can yes. I thought somebody might be needing it for their writing.
Okay. So, yes, essentially, our individual nature is that we want to have this we want to have nothing but happiness and we’re never satisfied with the happiness we receive and we don’t want to have the slightest bit of suffering but we’re continually being connected with various different kinds of and problems and so on. Every living being has that basic nature. No matter what different directions their karma, their psychological development might take in their basic nature, we’re all equal like that. And of course these differences between us just arise out of our karma, but we all have the same basic nature and as we become enlightened and all these sort of karmic peculiarities get sorted out then we’ll sort of realise the same essential nature in Buddhahood.
That’s not to say that we won’t have our individual personalities. Enlightened beings have extremely powerful individual personalities but the essential nature of Buddhahood is they all have these tremendous great qualities of the enlightened being of perfect love and compassion, a skillful means and power and so on. That reminds me of a story. Max Redlich had this thought when he when he heard about first started hearing about the qualities of enlightened beings and great beings and so on, he had this thought that they might be boringly all the same. And so he said to Lama when he had an opportunity to ask a question, he asked Lama Yeshe, doesn’t that mean that enlightened beings become rather boring and bland and rather I think it was Max Redlich, anyway.
This person, he said that Lama Yeshe just sort of leaned forward towards him and sort of opened his eyes wide, sort of popped them open. Lama Yeshe did one of his very sort of expressions and Lama Yeshe said I say no! And of course at the time he thought oh that’s a pretty poor sort of answer, it doesn’t really answer my question but then later on he came to realize that Lama Yeshe himself was the answer to that question Yes. Certainly do. Because, they have greatly enhanced awareness and you couldn’t know you couldn’t know something like that without you couldn’t achieve something like that without knowing it.
They say that there’s an earthquake in the Buddha realms. Yes. Well, actually that’s that’s a tricky question because I mean sometimes on the surface of things they might seem not to know but they somewhere deep in their being they do know. Have you read Reborn in the West? No, not Cave in the Snow, well the other one Reborn in the West.
It tells the story of Detsunma Akhön and that’s very interesting because it actually describes this lady who was born in the United States and essentially just seemed to spontaneously develop all these different sort of meditations and insights and so on, and she began to gather a group of disciples around her and so on and to start to teach these meditations. She had no conscious connection with Buddhism or any other spiritual path but it’s quite amazing because the things she was saying were exactly what’s set out in the graduated path put into her own words but it’s unbelievably sort of essentially sort of a literal translation of all these different points and she eventually found out that she was actually a reincarnated bodhisattva and she was recognized by one of the great Tibetan lamas and he sort of basically told her you’re this person and you’ve done such and such and so on but you know you sort of need to do a bit more training but essentially you’ve sort of remembered all this from your past incarnations. There would have been a reason why she chose to be born in that particular place and family.
And in fact Yes. Yes. Yes. And her stepfather was something else, Jewish or something. So it was all very international.
And all yes. Also, sort of like something that would give her a lot of insight into the, you know, the sort of background of her own disciples, I suppose. And also, I suppose you can’t think of anything more reassuring to to people about the validity of what she was teaching and the fact that she sort of remembered it all herself from her past lives before having it sort of confirmed. You know, a lot of people in the rest really need very strong reassurance that there is something in all these things that is not just some sort of weird mumbo jumbo from eastern religions. And this is these kinds of stories are sort of evidence.
Oh, yes. So I mean yeah. Well, I don’t know because, I mean, they do sort of say that there are some incarnations who don’t seem to be very active in that particular incarnation, but you can’t say they’re not active because if they’re not doing much on the material level, they might be quietly meditating away to themselves doing all sorts of psychic things that you can’t see. But he he was but he was still educating himself. Yes.
So you can’t say, I mean, he chose to go up in a different direction than the one set out for him by his former sort of tradition and so on. But there I mean, there’s lots of people who sort of take different paths for themselves, but they’re still doing it for others and in the long run. Yes. That was the funny thing. Yes.
You know, I mean, there’s so much you’d have to know everybody’s karma in order to understand why some of these things are the way they are. But, anyway, yeah, good karma. Yes. I’m just wondering what what did you do to Lani if she said it Lama Yeshe said it was from attachment to a female body, and all men started looking terribly worried because they were sort of they thought it they thought they thought he meant, you know but then Lama Yeshe said, not that sort of attachment. He said sort of like he said, for instance, if you thought, well, you know, women are lovely and kind and gentle and men are, you know, men are sort of rough and, you know, and I’d I’d much rather be a woman.
Yeah. He said, if you thought like that, then you’re creating cause to be a woman. You can think yeah. Can you sort of think like perhaps perhaps you might think, well, you know, if I’m born as a a man, I might be called up into the army and have to go and fight or something. I don’t want to do that, so I’d rather be born as a woman or something like that.
Know? So it could be lots of thoughts like that that could lead to that sort of a rebirth. I wouldn’t say that. We can Oh, I think, yeah, we we try, but we’re still, you know, you know, sort of shuffled off.