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 introduces the Buddhist psychology of virtuous and non-virtuous mental states. She begins with bodhisattva motivation—seeking enlightenment for all beings—then reviews why no worldly circumstance brings lasting happiness: delusions and karma lock us in saṃsāra. She examines the three poisonous minds: attachment exaggerates good qualities, aversion exaggerates bad ones, ignorance roots both. Using concrete examples (chocolate, romantic partners, shopping), she shows how these delusions operate constantly and invisibly. The core is Buddhist philosophy (Lorig): the mind divides into primary consciousness and mental factors, and virtuous and non-virtuous mental factors cannot coexist. This means cultivating virtue automatically opposes delusion. McAndrew frames this as practical psychology, not mere philosophy—understanding the mind’s actual mechanics deepens practice and supports realizing selflessness. For practitioners familiar with basic Buddhist concepts and the graduated path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 D and K 1998 03 25.mp3
UUID: f4ae04b7-906b-4490-a25b-eae56d8f7068
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,295
Go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I prostrate with body, speech, and mind in faith. Each and every offering I make, including those actually performed and those mentally transformed. I confess every sin I collected from the beginninglessness of samsaric life. I rejoice in all ordinary and noble beings’ actions.
Please, Buddha, by living as our guard until saṃsāra ends, reveal the teachings to sentient beings. I dedicate the virtues of myself and others to the great enlightenment. I like doing them in Tibetan too. Maybe we can vary it and sometimes do English and sometimes do Tibetan so that we learn the Tibetan tunes because then when you do it together with other people in Tibetan, you can join in. Well, think of it too as there’s a Tārā puja on Saturday, I think on the fourth.
What’s today? Wednesday. That would be right. Yes. On Saturday night seven thirty.
It didn’t get into the calendar. So so you’ll have to remember that if you want to come. Attaining enlightenment? Well, it depends on the person and how ready they are. Well, in particular, Tārā helps us with all our needs on the path, so we can get in touch with Tārā’s very powerful and quick energy to help us to clear away obstacles that stand in the way of our practice and that can mean things like financial problems, family problems, whatever it might be as well as helping us with our gaining of realizations and helping us to meet our material needs and our various different needs on the path so whatever we want if we have a good reason for wanting it and it’s not contradictory to our Dharma practice but it’s something that can support us in our Dharma practice and we can ask Tārā to help us with these things whereas you know there are various different deities that can help you with certain things for instance Yamāntaka is very wrathful and is very effective to clear away obstacles, obscurations on the path and various deities can help you with long life and for instance Ganapati can help you with money and so on but Tārā can help us with everything she’s very powerful with all these things so whatever it is we can ask Tārā to help us.
There are actually sometimes you have a particular and you can ask a lama which practice is the most effective for you in that particular circumstance but generally Tārā is very effective with everything. So the topic tonight anyway is the virtuous and non virtuous mental states. So we start by setting our motivation and thinking that we’re going to be listening to this talk, engaging in this activity this evening for the sake of achieving the highest states we are capable of ourselves, achieving our full potential and working toward towards the everlasting happiness of liberation but not only should we be working for ourselves this isn’t enough just to think of our own happiness and freedom from suffering because there are countless living beings who are also in the same situation as ourselves like us they’re bound to cyclic existence and suffering various different kinds of sufferings again and again. These beings aren’t somebody something that we have nothing to do with. Each single one of them is very closely connected to us.
We’re very interconnected with all of these other beings and we’ve been in every conceivable relationship to them and in particular we focus on the fact that we’ve been their child many times that they’ve all been our mothers again and again and so in this way if we reflect on this we understand that we are very closely connected with them and that our karmas are the pattern of our lives is interrelated and we can’t just go off and leave them to continue suffering. This would be unfeeling. We can’t just aim for nirvana but we should aim to achieve the state of full and complete enlightenment so as to have the ability to be able to help all these in the most effective way. So tonight’s topic really is explained in detail in the in the philosophical teachings of Lorig, or mind and awareness. It usually gets explained briefly in graduated path texts because it’s helpful for us to have a little bit of knowledge about these topics even for basic practice.
And if you’re interested in learning more details, you will have to go to the Lorig teachings, the higher philosophical teachings. So this topic we’re talking about tonight is included in the intermediate scope or the medium scope practice in the graduated path. But in any case, we have to study these topics, both whether we’re practicing the intermediate scope, which leads to the goal of liberation or Mahāyāna leading to the goal of enlightenment. In either of those cases, we need to have a knowledge of these as you’re already aware, we’re looking at the medium scope and the practices associated with the medium scope and those presented in terms of a person whose goal is to attain liberation for themselves, in In actual fact, although we’re following the Mahāyāna path and we’re aspiring to the goal of full enlightenment, we need to make these intermediate scope motivations and practices part of our path. So the scope, the small scope and the intermediate scope have to be included in the great scope.
So are there any questions before I go on? Do you want me to spell it in Tibetan? I’m not sure. In English, it’s usually spelled l o r i g. But you have to understand that that’s just a phonetical approximation of the Tibetan and that there would be an actual transliteration of the Tibetan also, which I’m not sure of.
You could ask Tenzin. He can tell you. So in previous talks, we were going through the the teachings about the mind’s nature and about how the mind’s intrinsic purity is obscured by delusions and karma. Most of you would have been here, most of you would have been through this topic in this series of talks or in some other talks. You’re familiar with the idea that our minds have this ultimate nature, this intrinsic nature which is pure and doesn’t doesn’t have any contamination and our minds are contaminated by the delusions by the various deluded mental states but these delusions are not intrinsic to the mind’s nature.
They’re not part of the mind’s real nature, but they’re adventitious. The simile that’s often used is dirt on a mirror so that the mirror has the dirt on it but the dirt is not mixed with the mirror, it’s not oneness with the mirror, so therefore it can be removed in the same way the delusions have the possibility of being removed and the mind’s purity can be attained or it can be brought out. So while we’re in this state of having these deluded mental states, we’re bound in cyclic existence. The mind actually is clouded or obscured by delusions and karma the delusions and karma are what keep us found in cyclic existence and they keep us circling there we keep on going round and round and round because of a chain reaction that involves these two things delusion and karma and while we’re in cyclic existence we experience different conditions we experience happiness as a result of our good karma and we experience suffering as a result of our bad karma so we go up and down all the time even within one lifetime particularly in the human realm we’re constantly gravitating between happiness and suffering.
But even though we experience some happiness, we’re never free. We’re always subject to this situation of being under the control of delusion and karma. We don’t have control over our own minds, don’t have control over our own mental state and our own state of being. We’re controlled by these delusions and karma and while we’re in this state we’re never as happy as we wish to be and we’re never safe from being thrown into further sufferings whatever situation of happiness we might be in we know it’s our own experience it’s our life experience that we go from one thing to another we can never guarantee that our happiness or our situation which we see is producing happiness is going to last and we can never really predict when things are going to change because although we can make an effort to predict certain things and to work towards certain ends and goals, there’s always a possibility of the unexpected happening. And we know that very often the unexpected does happen, particularly when we’re least expecting it.
So is the very nature of cyclic existence. So if we’ve thought about these things, it’s easy to see that we can never guarantee our situation simply by manipulating the external situation, by manipulating external conditions. Of course, it’s reasonable to take certain steps to try to ensure our well-being, but we can’t just sort of throw up our hands and be fatalistic and say it’s all due to karma and I don’t have to do anything. Of course, we have to look after our welfare in a reasonable sort of way. But the point is that if we put all our energy into these things, it’s not going to bring us any lasting results, it’s not going to bring us any uncontaminated happiness, and we can never be really secure even for a moment because there’s always the possibility of something coming along unexpectedly and disturbing all our plans.
As Robert Burns said, I can’t do the Scottish accent, but he said something like the best laid plans of mice men gang aft agley or something. I should have got Colin to teach me how to say it with the Scottish accent before I left Chenrezig Institute, because he’s got the beautiful Scottish accent. But anyway, I haven’t got the speech of my ancestors. But the point of that is that this quotation is very, very well known, of course, because it expresses a universal truth. So not only this, but we’ve been thrown again and again into the worst realms of suffering in the course of being born again and again and again.
The mechanism of this is quite complex, but the two main factors involve karma and deluded mental states, and each of these reinforce each other. So we’ve been looking at this in previous weeks. If anybody here has been coming for several of these talks, you would have heard all this talked about before. And we were looking at how it works and how to avoid negative karmas and purify the ones that we’ve created or the ones that we continue to create, while working at the practice of accumulating virtuous actions so as to have an accumulation of good karma. And as we’re involved here with the medium scope of practice, we have to also contemplate the second noble truth, which is the truth of the source of suffering.
You remember what the first noble truth was? Suffering. Right. Okay. So here we’re we’re involved with contemplating suffering and the source of suffering.
We’ve already looked at suffering from certain angles before and we’ve looked at how to work with the cause of suffering, which is delusion and karma, and to develop renunciation the attitude of wanting to escape from being bound in this cycle of death and rebirth into suffering, which is called saṃsāra or cyclic existence. And we’ve looked at that from different angles, and this week we’re going to continue looking at it. So our negative our karmas, especially our negative karmas and our delusions, are what keep us keep on reinforcing each other. Our delusions produce actions. Under the influence of the deluded mental states, we engage in actions which are produced under the influence of those delusions.
Some of these actions, because the delusions tend to cause us to produce negative actions, a lot of our actions under their influence are going to be deluded negative actions, harmful actions, which then create karmas that bring about a result of suffering. These negative karmas, in particular, reinforce the mistaken mental states or the deluded mental states, cause us to create more karma. The whole thing just keeps on going and it operates through a fairly complex series of chain reactions to produce rebirths again and again, which we went through last week, the twelve links of dependent origination. So without delusion, without these delusion mental states, then karma can’t operate. So we need to work on dealing with the delusions.
So in previous talks, we’ve been talking about delusions in terms of the three poisonous minds. And last week, we saw how they actually are located at the center of the wheel and keep the whole thing turning. Right in the middle of the wheel you’ve got symbols representing the three deluded mental states. These three are referred to sometimes as the three poisonous minds, and these are aversion, attachment, and ignorance. So how do you understand attachment?
What do you understand attachment as naming? Cringing. Yes. You want things you think these things can make you happy? Yes.
You think they’ll bring you happiness? Permanent happiness. Permanent happiness. Bring containment for a while, can’t they? Yes, yes.
And is that a reasonable attitude? Yes, that is reasonable. We do accept that there are certain things that are good in themselves and that are harmful in themselves. Definitely, you don’t put your hand in the fire and then say, Oh, that’s my karma because I got burned. Because you know that the fire is going to burn you and you know that certain kinds of food are nutritious and good for your body and other kinds of food are not going to be so helpful to your body and will give you spots and rot your teeth and so on.
All these things are valid understandings. If you like chocolate, then when you eat chocolate you are going to experience pleasure. So there is something in that. But we’re looking at we’re looking deeper into the nature of things. We know perfectly well that no matter how much chocolate we have, we’re not going to continue getting pleasure out of that chocolate if we keep on eating it.
After a little while, our pleasure is going to turn to suffering. And you might think that that’s a particularly gross example because our stomachs are obviously going to get full, and we might think that, for instance, if we could find for our partner the most beautiful and charming person that we can imagine then we would find a source of everlasting happiness in that but we know that the people who are married to these beautiful and charming people aren’t always happily married and you know that the marriages don’t always turn out so we know that really none of the things that we looked for to give us happiness are really reliable it’s not to say that there is no happiness to be found by encountering with these objects but it’s an unreliable happiness and it’s bound to be disturbed in various different ways whatever situation we have even if it’s a good situation it’s going to have its ups and downs for instance it’s good to have enough material needs for life sustenance and comfort. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good to have pleasant, good looking surroundings. These can be conducive to having a calmer mental state of mind.
But still, we’re going to find that even if we have a beautiful house and a beautiful garden and beautiful scenery and so on we’re not going to be able to maintain a state of mental tranquility we’re still going to encounter disturbances and some of these disturbances will arise even if we don’t encounter other people they just arise from within ourselves it’s the nature of our being that we’re like that. So can you be attached to Buddha? Yes. You’re sort of attached to Buddha. Can you be attached to Buddha?
Yeah. Buddha is ultimately the focus Yes, that comes from a Zen teaching. I’ll put that aside for the moment, because Zen people take a really different tack and it might confuse us if we try to reconcile the two approaches. Aside. But I’m just trying to make it clear what approach we’re coming from here now.
We’re coming from the basic sūtra approach, which is dealing with attachment just on the ordinary level. So what we’re talking about now here is something that’s fairly gross and we’re not talking about subtle things here. We’re talking about something that’s pretty clear and obvious. And what attachment is, is the mind which overestimates the good qualities of its object, which gets stuck on the object because, in a deluded way, it sees some good qualities that are really there, but it exaggerates and builds up and overestimates these good qualities, and then becomes fixated on that object. So according to that definition, we can’t feel attachment to Buddha because attachment is an exaggerated state of mind, you can’t exaggerate Buddha’s good qualities, because Buddha’s good qualities are infinite.
Therefore, it’s impossible to overestimate them. The same thing with the Dharma and with certain virtuous objects. For instance, you can’t you can’t be attached to following virtuous conduct because it’s impossible to exaggerate the the good qualities of following virtuous conduct. All of these things are dharma things which simply the word attachment doesn’t apply to them. And this can lead to confusion because in English we use the word attachment often to mean just something that we love or that we’re fond of.
But here we’re using it in a specific way. In the ordinary sense, attachment in English doesn’t always mean something bad, it usually means something quite neutral or even positive. But what we’re talking about now here is a harmful state of the mind which gets stuck on the object, which clings to the object, as Josie was saying, and in that way harms itself. We’re using it in that technical way, and if that’s clear, then there won’t be any confusion. Well, yes.
Yes, they all arise out of that. So anyway, I’ll be mentioning that a bit further on, but we’re really here talking about the coarser level of looking at these things, we’re not talking about the subtle level. Aversion has a similarity to attachment, in that it distorts and exaggerates. And in the case of aversion, it exaggerates the bad qualities of the object. So we know, actually, our experience, if we see somebody that we don’t like, we only want to see their bad qualities and we won’t acknowledge to ourselves, even if we know that they have good qualities, don’t like to admit it to ourselves.
And this is aversion in action. It has this quality of just focusing on and exaggerating the person’s bad qualities, we just can’t see anything at all good in them while we’re under the influence of this aversion, whether it’s a material object, an inanimate object, or a person, or a situation. Our mind gets stuck on it in the sense of wanting to be away from that object, of wanting to give harm or to separate yourself from that object which you see as being unpleasant and giving you suffering, giving you unpleasant feelings. So we’re just talking about the conventional nature of things here. Of course, their ultimate nature, it goes beyond labelling things dualistically as good and bad.
But on the conventional level, there is a valid way of looking at things as being good or bad, harmful or helpful. But what we’re talking about is the state of mind that really exaggerates and gets stuck on things. And this is happening all the time, It’s very strong with us. We don’t notice it. We’re not aware of it.
What happens is that our mind looks at an object which could be a valid object that could be helpful to us, can give us some sort of pleasant experience, but then we feel that we have to be with that object all the time, that we don’t want to let go of it. We don’t recognise that this object came to us because of our previous good karma, but we feel that somehow the qualities are in that external object to such a degree that we have to hold on to it. We’re always doing this. If we start to become aware, if we start to look out for this happening in our lives, we can start to get a feeling for the strength of it and see how it’s operating. Otherwise, we just take it for granted.
Otherwise, we just assume that the way we see the object is correct and we don’t start to have any doubts about this way of looking at things. So we have to cultivate this awareness, have to build up mindfulness as we go about. For instance, if you go somewhere where there are a lot of attractive objects, such as on a shopping trip, it can be a good opportunity for doing this sort of meditation, to see how the mind sort of gravitates to one thing after another and clings to it and says, oh, I must have that. Maybe that’s not everybody’s problem, but some people find that when they go shopping. With other people, might be something else, you know?
So say, for some of the men, it might be if they go to a car show or something. So, anyway, yes, just learning to recognize this quality and being aware of it will give us much more insight. So it’s easy enough to see the harm that gets caused by hatred and anger, but it’s not so easy to see the harm that attachment does to us. But if we can learn to understand, if we can start to look more deeply into things, then we can see that it actually is doing us a lot of harm. So then both of these tendencies of ours to exaggerate the good qualities and the bad qualities comes from having ignorance.
So this is a prerequisite for having the other delusions. So ignorance of seeing the self as truly existent is the root of saṃsāra, and eventually, we have to to cut this off. But this week, we’re going to look more closely at the deluded mental states in general, because it’s going to be a long time before we can get to the point of cutting off the root of cyclic existence, And we’re going to have to deal with these deluded mental states on a more everyday sort of level first. And also, we’re going to have a look at the wholesome or virtuous mental states because it’s very helpful to understand these as well. So any questions?
So, anyway, in Buddhist philosophy, in Lorig, or mind and awareness, the mind is divided up in various different ways. It’s a complex topic, and we’re just going to look at one small bit from it tonight. But it starts off with one basic division, which is dividing the mind into primary mind or consciousness and secondary mind or mental factors. So I’ll be talking about I think I’ll be using the terms primary mind and mental factors tonight because if we talk about consciousness and secondary minds and so on it gets very confusing. Perhaps primary consciousness or consciousness, I think I’ll use the term consciousness.
But we’re talking here about different aspects of mind. Sometimes we use the term consciousness or mind to mean the mind stream, the stream of consciousness, which is a continual sort of arising and passing away and arising again of different kinds of consciousness. Whenever we have a particular mental consciousness and that doesn’t last for terribly long, but then finishes, but something else arises in its place, so there’s our stream of consciousness doesn’t end, it never ends. It had no beginning and it has no end. But there is this continual process of one state of mental consciousness going and another state of mental consciousness coming into being.
And sometimes there’s only a very small change so that we can continue a particular sort of mental state for example for a period of time and then perhaps there becomes quite a big change so we might go from feeling happy to feeling suffering because of a change that comes about in our mind. But even during the time we were feeling happy, there would have been this constant subtle change going on, And then, because this change is going on, then it gives the possibility for quite a different kind of mental state to come into being. So, when we’re talking about primary minds, does anybody know how many primary minds or consciousnesses there are? I’ll give you a clue. There’s six.
Do you know what they are? No. I’m not looking at it from that point of view. Probably that could be another way of dividing it up. What we’re talking about here is the five physical sense consciousnesses of seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting and bodily consciousness, and there’s also mental consciousness.
All these are primary, or they’re main minds. These in themselves have a number of subdivisions, which are explained in terms of mental factors associated with the primary mind. In actual fact, the primary mind is made up of various subdivisions, and these subdivisions are called the mental factors. Anyway, any particular type of consciousness or primary mind has a number of these mental factors. And the primary minds are neither virtuous nor non virtuous in themselves.
But some of these mental factors can be either virtuous or nonvirtuous or neutral. So when mind is associated when the primary consciousness is associated with virtuous mental factors, then the whole consciousness becomes virtuous. It takes on the virtuous aspect of that mental factor. And when it’s associated with a non virtuous mental factor, then it becomes non virtuous. And when it’s associated a neutral mental without either virtuous or non virtuous, but only neutral mental factors, then it’s going to be neutral.
Could you give us an example of that? What sort of motivation is it that you’re talking about? It’s like a mental state. Any mental state, whether it’s a cognition or a perception or Yes. So it’s explained in a lot of detail in Lorig.
So for instance, if you if you look at something, you have a first moment of primary cognition where you first see the object, and then you have subsequent cognition where the mind recognizes the object in a different way because it’s no longer fresh, then you have various different mental thoughts and, you know, awarenesses, memories. We have correct mental states and we have mistaken mental states. There’s a vast way of classifying them. But we’re always, during our moments of awareness, experiencing these various different kinds of mental states. Even when we’re in deep sleep or unconscious, I suppose these kinds the the mind’s still going on, but that’s a very neutral sort of mental state then.
When we’re in deep sleep, that’s ethically neutral. So there are many with one primary consciousness, there are many mental factors. In Lorig, there are fifty one mental factors counted, and these divided into six groups. And I’m not going to go through all of those tonight, so don’t worry. It’s very interesting, actually, to study these things.
So some of these mental factors are always present with any primary consciousness, and some of these are not necessarily present at any given time. And we can’t, in particular, if we have a virtuous mental factor present, then we can’t have a non virtuous factor present at the same time. And the same thing in reverse. If we have a non virtuous mental factor present, then we can’t have a virtuous mental factor at the same time. So one excludes the other.
So you can see because of this that if we cultivate virtuous states of mind, it’s going to act as an opponent to non virtuous states of mind because it’s impossible to have these both at the same time. You might say that sometimes you do feel that you’re hovering in between, say, a virtuous sort and a non virtuous sort, but in actual fact it’s more a question of gravitating backwards and forwards between the two, rather sometimes you have one and the other, and there’s sort of this struggle going on as to which one is eventually going to predominate. But it’s not the case that they’re both actually present at the same time. Any questions about this? Yes.
Yes, that’s right. First of all, you just look at the object and see it as being pleasant or unpleasant, and then other thoughts start to come in as well. So it’s very interesting to to study these things in detail and really get an idea of how the mind works. It’s a kind of Buddhist psychology. And of course, it’s helpful for us to although it’s not directly concerned with the topic of emptiness, it’s concerned with conventional perception.
It’s by understanding how our mind works on the conventional level that we can start to understand. It supports the understanding of selflessness, because somehow when you get down to seeing how the mind really works, how it has all these different factors operating, it tends to sort of do away with this attitude that there is some sort of solid, independently existing, eternal sort of self in there behind all this. You can see how what the mind is is just these various consciousness and mental factors, and they are constantly changing, and one’s giving rise to another. And this taken altogether, these these make up our our mental consciousness as a whole, and there’s nothing in there but what what we see happening there, just these just these various different kinds of valid and mistaken and different kinds of mental awareness. So, anyway, one of the one of the six divisions of the mental factors is one of the six groups is the non virtuous mental factors.
Another group is the virtuous mental factors. And there are eleven virtuous mental factors and six major non-virtuous mental factors and also twenty secondary. In actual fact, you could count many more than that, but these are just the major categories. Actually, there are eighty four thousand deluded mental states possible. Anyway, when I talk about the six major and twenty secondary non virtuous mental factors, don’t another word for these is klesas, is the Sanskrit word.
Don’t get mixed up with the primary minds and