Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew teaches the great scope of the Lamrim—the Bodhisattva path to Buddhahood—following weeks of study on the small and medium scopes. She emphasizes that pursuing Buddhahood requires bodhicitta, the awakened heart of universal, disinterested compassion for all sentient beings, combined with the wisdom of emptiness: direct understanding that phenomena lack inherent existence. She illustrates how we grasp at apparent solidity using the image of a magician’s illusion, showing how even limited development of genuine compassion in this life creates real progress toward enlightenment. She stresses daily cultivation of bodhicitta from morning through evening while working through earlier practices, understanding that deepening insight into emptiness marks advancement on the path. For Mahāyāna practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 B & BL1999 10 21.mp3
UUID: 5552ad60-c646-476a-9b85-1fa6d106cb07
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-10-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~4,655
Here tonight to do this activity, studying the Dharma, learning about the path, and we hope that this will bring some real benefit to our own lives. We have the intention that worldly activities haven’t brought happiness. And so we are now turning our attention to the path of Dharma which takes us beyond worldly concerns, worldly results, and we’re looking at the path for attaining everlasting happiness. And so it’s not enough just to think of our own individual happiness but there are countless other sentient beings who are caught up in samsaric suffering. They don’t have the understanding that we’ve got so far.
We we’ve at least found the path of Dharma. We know the the path to follow, but so many of these beings don’t have that understanding and waiting for us to show them the path. So we need to be able to help all these other beings and motivation for practicing should be to be able to bring about the welfare of these others. And so we’re looking at the topic tonight. I think it was called Buddhahood and the Bodhisattvas path, something like that.
I didn’t write it down. Anyway, that’s the topic that I’m speaking on. So this is connected with the graduated path. We’ve been looking at the graduated path for a few months now going from the small scope through to the great scope through the medium scope. So we’ve been through the small scope, we’ve been through the medium scope and we’ve got onto the great scope which is all about attaining Buddhahood.
So in the small scope section we were looking at how to avoid lower rebirth. In the medium scope we were looking at first of all the sufferings of Samsāra, how to cultivate the motivation of becoming free from Samsāra or in other words of becoming free from all suffering first of all by meditating on suffering to develop that motivation which is called renunciation and then how to practice. We had a little bit of a look at how to practice it, at how we got up in saṃsāra because of the disturbing emotions or the delusions and under the great scope which is looking at other sentient beings and wanting to bring about their happiness. Essentially we have to be following those practices of the small and medium scope but all the time bringing in this great scope motivation. The topics that we studied first of all in the great scope were about that motivation and how to develop bodhicitta, the series of meditations for developing aspiring bodhicitta.
Do you remember what bodhicitta means? Awakened heart. Yes. That’s a a translation of it. Okay.
These things are all part of it, but there’s one major point. Yes. So we’ve we’ve more or less finished studying the cycle of saṃsāra now, and we’re looking at at at how to bring others into that practice. Oh, alright. I suppose I better.
Okay. So it Bodhi is sometimes translated as awakening. Sometimes it’s translated as enlightenment. So it’s connected to Buddha, the word Buddha. They both come from the same root.
The Buddha is the enlightened one or the awakened one. The mind of enlightenment is the mind which essentially aims at achieving Buddhahood or achieving enlightenment and this is connected with the love and compassion for others because that’s the motivation for attempting to or working to achieve Buddhahood. Because if we didn’t dedicate ourselves for the welfare of others, if we didn’t commit ourselves to bringing about the welfare of others, then we would go on the Hīnayāna path, which is to the Hīnayāna path to our own liberation as an arhat, bodhicitta implies or involves having great love and compassion universal love and compassion so that’s undiscriminating love and compassion which is equal towards all sentient beings so it’s totally disinterested compassion that isn’t involved at all with self-cherishing and it’s equal towards every single living being. We’re working first of all on cultivating that sort of love and compassion so we went through that in the last couple of weeks there’s quite a lot of meditations involved with that so we had a look at those meditations I didn’t quite finish that so there’s one meditation that we’ll do tonight sometime so we’re learning the Mahāyāna form of Buddhism here so we have to be concerned with bodhicitta and developing bodhicitta and presumably because we’ve got our connection with Buddha House you can’t say that for everybody but we can assume that for most of us here that we’re going to be doing Mahāyāna practice and that we have this connection with the Mahāyāna tradition and so we need to go on and work to develop bodhicitta and we need to understand the reasons behind that so essentially we’ve already studied the qualities of Buddhahood a little bit in the topic of refuge and we understand that Buddhahood is the state that gives the special qualities needed to be able to help others actually, there’s all sorts of quite lengthy texts written on the qualities of Buddhahood, and I was just having a quick study today before the talk, just preparing the talk and I thought, oh, I’m not even going to be able to condense all of this into one discourse, so I’ll have to just pick out a few aspects of it and let you do your own study on the other aspects of it.
So I actually came across a book by Loden which is based on a teaching that Geshe Loden gave based on several of the important Mahāyāna texts about Buddhahood. I can’t actually remember the title of the book, but it’s pretty comprehensive if you want to study it. There’s also a very good section in here which is less detailed than Geshe Loden’s text. Geshe Loden obviously must have spoken over a number of different teachings on the topic. So even though we might be just beginning from the beginning, if we’re connected with this Mahāyāna practice then we need to at least study the meditations about cultivating love and compassion and do these meditations so even if we’re rank beginners and consider that we’re really putting our main practice into the small scope still we need to be cultivating bodhicitta so as to be able to cultivate that thought along with our small scope practices and then after some time when you feel well trained in the small scope then you can start training in the medium scope but still you need to be cultivating the bodhicitta along with that because all of these things need to be cultivated together so even while we’re mainly putting our energy into the small scope we still need to be looking at the medium scope and the great scope and in particular with bodhicitta we need to be cultivating it every day and first in the morning we need to get up and set our mind on bodhicitta think that we’re engaging in the practice during that day everything that we do is to be brought into the practice of bodhicitta just like we do at the beginning of the session we need to think that way at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day dedicate our merits and that way excuse me that way we accumulate a lot of merit that supports practice on the path to enlightenment even if our days spend in quite ordinary sort of activities so even if we can just develop a certain amount of this love and compassion and overcome our self-cherishing and our partial mind to a certain extent this is really fantastic and it’s a great start if we can do that much in this life then if we have a just a degree of more disinterested love and compassion than we had before this is really terrific because it’s a move in the right direction and even if we don’t become bodhisattvas or attain enlightenment in this lifetime then we have a good start and we can go on and achieve these things in future lives so it’s also helpful to study the more advanced stages and from doing this we gain inspiration and we gain an understanding of what we’re trying to achieve of where we’re going and why we’re doing these practices and so it’s something that helps us even if we can’t actually achieve Buddhahood just yet we might be able to you don’t know who’s going to be able to achieve Buddhahood in this lifetime so we can try it’s certainly been done and even if we can’t achieve Buddhahood in this lifetime, we we can perhaps develop bodhicitta and become a bodhisattva.
Even when we can’t become a bodhisattva in this lifetime, we can make a good start in our practice and this is the main thing. So we’ll be looking at this tonight and some aspects of the topic are a bit technical. Tonight we’re not really focusing so much on our everyday practice but on things that we’re going to try to achieve in the future which are quite fantastic and a bit perhaps out of our ordinary everyday scope but it’s very interesting to learn about these things and it is practical for us to know about these things because it gives us a lot of energy and inspiration. So in order to attain Buddhahood, it’s not enough just to have bodhicitta. So bodhicitta is the thing that gives the energy and gives the drive to achieve Buddhahood.
But what enables the person to actually attain the different stages to remove the different obstacles to achieving Buddhahood is the wisdom of emptiness understanding the emptiness of inherent existence. So in order to achieve Buddhahood we have to realize the two truths. Does anybody have an idea of what the two truths are? No? I haven’t heard of this one before.
Mhmm. Yes. It’s you can’t think of the word you can’t think of the words for it. I know I think you know what I’m talking about. Yes.
Okay. What yes. Yes. It’s void. It’s void.
It’s empty. It’s Everything they please. Okay. Which is never no. No.
If you’re talking about our our delusions then that that that will well all these things are vaguely connected but no I think Sue knows what I’m saying, but you can’t think of the words. Yes. A lot of you also say, oh, yes. Yes. I’ve I knew that.
Yes. So no. That’s okay. There’s two levels of truth or two truths. No.
Yes. Phenomenal. Well yes. Well, quarter maybe. Okay.
Yes. So, anyway, what I was getting at is that we speak about the two levels of truth as being the conventional and the absolute. And and the absolute truth I think you’ve been trying to tell us what the absolute truth is anyway the absolute truth is the emptiness of inherent existence of all phenomena and the conventional truth is the conventional existence of phenomena. No. It’s as the Buddha sees it.
So we don’t even see the conventional truth. All we see is conventional falsity. Absolute. Yes. So a Buddhist sees conventional truth as being conventionally existing without the slightest trace of true existence or inherent existence whereas we look at something and we immediately perceive inherent existence which isn’t there but We grasp at it very strongly.
It’s something that comes automatically to us and we can’t help it until we’ve at least realized emptiness and we gradually start to reduce this grasp of true existence but there are still some slight traces of it right up until Buddhahood is realized. Just to give you an example, one famous example is of the magician who creates illusions by hypnotizing the audience. There’s some magicians in India apparently who are able to do this very skillfully so that they could convince everybody that, say, a box was an elephant, and they’d convincingly produce this illusion of an elephant on the stage. And the point was that if somebody came in after the magician had gone through his rip and roll, they’d only see the box. So, essentially, the person the ordinary person is like the person who looks and sees elephant and completely believes that there’s an elephant there in the arena or on the stage or wherever it is that the magician’s doing his his thing.
That’s the like the ordinary person who is taken in by the the the convention by the deceptive appearance. And then there’s so in a sense, the conventional truth is deceptive because it it’s conventional appearance but a Buddha isn’t deceived by the appearance and then there’s the magician himself sees the elephant but he knows that there’s no elephant there but in order to hypnotize the people he has to see the elephant himself he’s also under the illusion but he knows that it’s an illusion and this is like the Ārya being who has realized emptiness and then having penetrated through to the direct insight into emptiness in meditative equipoise, when that person arises from meditative equipoise, he or she recognizes that this object lacks true existence but there’s still an appearance of true existence. The appearance is still there. It looks as though it’s truly existent to that person but they know better than to be taken in by the appearance. Then there’s the enlightened being who doesn’t even have the appearance of true existence.
So that’s like the person who came in late. There’s still a chair. Yes. Because you’re not inherently existing either. So you so you’re you’re illusion.
So you got an illusion. Money’s a good example why do we think money’s we grasp money if we have a like a large sort of note or something immediately grasp that as being something incredibly valuable but it’s only value it’s only valuable because we agree on it and we place we place a projection on that bit of paper which is of no use to whatsoever, except that we can take it down to the shop and change it for things that we can eat or wear or whatever. So it’s just labeled fifty dollars, and then it becomes immediately valuable. And Doc was telling me today that once Lama Zopa, him, held up a a fifty dollar note and burst in front of him and said, money is only a unit of energy. And he said that was at a time when when he was practically freaked out because he thought Buddha House was going to go bust.
He sent it to go down the gurgler. Yes. That’s right. You know, they probably would have killed each other for cauliflowers. Yeah.
That’s right. Yes. Like when I was young nobody sort of regarded items as machinery as being particularly valuable. Nobody sort of collecting old bits of machinery except a few weirdos and then since then there’s been quite a move to collect antique machinery so it really all depends on the perception and on you say people placing value and so on. And the old masters, know, I mean their beautiful paintings and so on but it’s sort of like it’s because they’ve been given a certain value that then a lot of people just sort of think they’re so wonderful.
Yes. People who know who haven’t got a clue about what’s really beautiful and so on. Blue poles. Yes. What was it?
Irises or something? The one that Bondi. Bondi. Yes. So the absolute truth is the emptiness of inherent existence or true existence, and I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about that because that comes in a couple of weeks time when we do wisdom, when we do the six perfections.
Essentially, yes, so that’s the absolute truth is the emptiness of inherent existence of all phenomena, and the conventional truth is the conventional existence of phenomena just labeled on the base, merely labeled. And that includes two kinds of phenomena. Does anybody remember what the two kinds of phenomena are of conventional phenomena? No. No.
That’s alright. Essentially, there’s self and external phenomena. No. The duality is seeing things as being truly existent and having self existence. No.
Because this we also have a dualistic viewpoint towards us ourself and that we don’t see the emptiness of it. I think So that was conventional? I think so. I’m not sure about that, but I think the term duality applies to oneself as well as to others. Isn’t that what you have to use?
Yes. The the self and others. Separate the strong Yes. But, I mean, you’re seeing that self as being part that duality, aren’t you? Thank you Jesus.
So that duality comes out of not seeing the emptiness. And then you label things as self and other. You have that sort of duality. But when you perceive the emptiness of inherent existence then things perceived as being in unity. There isn’t that barrier.
There’s still a self, there’s still others, but there’s not that big barrier that we put between them. Yes. Doing meditative equipoise is just oneness. Everything’s oneness, you know, and then except that you can’t even say oneness because that’s an assertion and you can’t make any assertions about but it’s it’s sort of like, yes. This this all all this dualistic view that sees self and others as being separate, that sees things as being concrete and and fixed.
When you see the emptiness, then you simply see everything as being part of one you know, as as being essentially part of one, yes, whole thing. Yes. Unity. Yes. That’s right.
It applies to time as well as to everything else. So it’s a a state that can only be described in terms of negation of non affirming negations. So I won’t talk about non affirming negations just at the moment. Yes. They’re thinking I should I should I should try to talk to you about tenets, but I’m not game.
I don’t I’m not good enough. So yes. But these things are very interesting to study. Yes. Anyway, we know we’re heading for Buddhahood, and so we have to cultivate these two things, the bodhicitta, which is essentially love and compassion combined with this taking on yourself the responsibility and understanding that you have to achieve Buddhahood in order to carry out that responsibility so it’s often used as a shorthand term for the like, we often just sort of focus on love and compassion when we’re talking about bodhicitta, but it does also include that taking on the responsibility and that determination to achieve Buddhahood.
But it’s always based on love and compassion. There’s no other motivation for aspiring to achieve Buddhahood. That’s right. Sometimes alt altruistic intention is based based on based on love and compassion. You you cultivate anyway, I’ll be talking about that a bit.
I think I wrote about that sort of if I if I if I didn’t write about here, then I’ll I’ll put it in. So, anyway but I think I did. I was going to. So, anyway, in relation to maybe I didn’t, so I’ll do it now. And if I come to it later on again, I’ll try to remember to skip it instead of giving it to you twice.
So, essentially, bodhicitta is the sort of help of helping all other sentient beings to achieve enlightenment, to to be relieved from their suffering. So that’s based on the altruistic thought which takes on yourself responsibility having that altruistic thought of taking on yourself responsibility then the next step is to understand the means for achieving that which is Buddhahood and that leads to the attainment of bodhicitta, the thought of achieving Buddhahood in order to help others. That altruistic thought has to be based on love and compassion. You work on love and compassion together. They come together.
So first of all, there’s the love and compassion. And then there’s the altruistic thought. And then there’s bodhicitta. There’s also two types of bodhicitta that we talk about sometimes and that is conventional and absolute bodhicitta. Does anybody have an idea what that is?
Have you studied this before? I think Geshe-la must have taught all this — aspiring bodhicitta and absolute bodhicitta. Mhmm. Conventional body chitta is essentially what we’ve just been talking about, this aspiration to attain enlightenment so as to be able to help others. Actually, it’s not only an aspiration.
There is one kind of bodhicitta that’s called aspiring bodhicitta and there’s another kind that’s called engaging bodhicitta. The engaging bodhicitta is more than aspiration. It’s actually committing yourself to doing practices, which is the six perfections. We’ll be looking at those next week. What I’m talking about here, the conventional and absolute bodhicitta.
The conventional bodhicitta is what we’ve been looking at the determination to help others and working to achieve enlightenment so as to be able to do that. The absolute bodhicitta is, as I remember it, the definition is the understanding of emptiness in the mental continuum of an Aria bodhisattva. It’s essentially understanding of emptiness. So when you learn about absolute bodhicitta, you’re eventually you’re essentially learning about emptiness. You’re studying emptiness.
So in that case, does an arhat have absolute bodhicitta? No. Why? Well, they have an under The The arhat under but he understands emptiness, doesn’t he? Completely.
He’s a direct insight into into emptiness and eradicated the the delusions. But Okay. So he’s not a bodhisattva, so he doesn’t fit that definition. So, essentially, there isn’t really much difference between the understanding of emptiness of an Ārya being on the Hīnayāna path and the understanding of emptiness of an Ārya being on the Mahāyāna path except that one of them has body cheater in their mental continuum and the other one doesn’t and that’s what makes it conventional — I mean absolute — bodhicitta. So you can can understand emptiness and understand emptiness and not necessarily combine it with bodhicitta.
Well, that’s considered to be an example of bodhicitta. I assume that an an arhat wouldn’t do that. Arhats are very compassionate. While they’re still alive and functioning, do a lot to help others. They will work themselves very hard, experience all sorts of austerities to help others, but I think giving their body is one thing that arhat would not do.
That’s always considered to be a bodhisattva’s action to give one’s body. Well, possibly it was his understanding of emptiness that helped him to do it, but I’m not sure of that. It’s generally just given us an example of love and compassion. That is just it was just his overpowering love and compassion, which is the conventional bodhicitta. I’ve never heard that story connected to understanding of emptiness.
On the other hand, in a general way, it’s said that bodhisattvas who are Ārya bodhisattvas who have achieved that direct insight into emptiness can give their bodies without even a moment’s hesitation because they don’t experience even the slightest of sufferings. But it’s said also that even lesser bodhisattvas can give their bodies and do these things because even though they don’t have that direct understanding of emptiness, their love and compassion is so powerful that even though they might perhaps feel some pain, it’s completely offset by the the joy and happiness they feel by giving. So yes. Well, Jesus was probably a bodhisattva. So the lamb was sent to think he was a bodhisattva.
And in fact, because he re what’s the word? Resurrected. Resurrected his own dead body. Apparently, I think I forget now. At one stage I was studying the psychic powers that come at different levels and only very high bodhisattva — I think maybe ninth level bodhisattva or something like that can actually resurrect their own dead body So that’s that seemed to indicate that if he was not fully enlightened, then he was close to it.
But, anyway, these things are all off a sort of bit of a side issue, really. But, essentially, anyway, a bodhisattva does have to develop this understanding of emptiness. They can start off without having this direct understanding of emptiness and they have to work and enhance their understanding of emptiness in order to achieve Buddhahood. They have to work through various stages and those stages are mainly marked not by the growth of love and compassion but by the growth of this understanding of emptiness just as the stages on the Hīnayāna path are marked by that understanding. Of course, the bodhisattva is also increasing his love and compassion all the time too, but essentially it’s the emptiness that marks the progress.
It’s this realization of emptiness that eradicates the various delusions. The bodhisattva practices to remove the delusions or the disturbing emotions. We looked at these quite a bit when we were looking at the medium scope. Saw that the disturbing emotions are what keep us in saṃsāra caught up in bondage of saṃsāra and going from life to life in suffering. So the arhat has to remove those in order to achieve liberation, in order to become an arhat.
So the Hīnayāna practitioner has to remove the delusions in order to purify the mind and achieve liberation. A bodhisattva also has to remove the subtle obscurations. The bodhisattva works to remove both the delusions and the subtle obscurations because in order to attain Buddhahood it’s necessary to achieve the mind that is totally purified and totally unobscured with relation to both these levels of truth. This means omniscient, so a Buddha is omniscient. And Buddhas don’t understand conventionalities conceptually.
So we know things conceptually. We do have some direct perceptions but our direct perceptions are very brief and soon get caught up with conception. For instance if you look at something for a moment you’re having a direct perception of some sort of sight object, but the next moment you’re say it’s a curtain, but the next moment your direct conception gives way to a sort of conceptual awareness of the curtain. You might be still looking at it but that first moment of bare awareness has passed and the conceptualization has come into it. Yes, well for a moment you just looked at a curtain.
There’s that bare awareness of curtain but that’s just an instant but next moment well it’s not labeling a curtain because you can label a curtain apparently and that’s still a direct perception but you’re not projecting anything else onto it I mean in terms of conceptuality of ideas about what curtains are what they’re for how valuable they are how beautiful they are and all this kind of thing you know you’re just sort of perceiving it but apparently I have told I have heard a lot of say that if you look at a curtain and see it as being a curtain it’s still a direct perception of a curtain so it’s not not necessarily just sort of seeing the shape and form there can also be this recognition but there’s still but there’s another degree of conception that goes beyond just recognizing it as a curtain and when that comes in then you’ve gone into the subsequent awareness or subsequent perception and so it’s no longer just bare awareness but it’s mixed up with this conceptuality and we’re doing this all the time and we function that way but Buddhas don’t function that way — they have bare awareness and perceive directly.
And this makes their thinking much more effective and it’s not mixed up with confusion and so on as our thinking is. So and they also know everything. Okay. So that’s what Bodhisattvas are trying to achieve.