Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching, Venerable Margaret McAndrew introduces thought training (Lojong), a Tibetan Buddhist practice for developing universal compassion by reversing habitual self-cherishing. She frames this as deeply practical—capable of sustaining Dharma practice in ordinary daily life and historically used to preserve spiritual faith under extreme hardship. McAndrew walks through the opening verses of the Eight Verses of Thought Training, explaining why sentient beings are precious objects of our practice and how to cultivate the counterintuitive attitude of viewing oneself as lowest and others as supreme. She addresses whether this demands passivity, clarifying that the practice targets inner attitude while allowing outer firmness when needed for others’ benefit. The session includes a detailed Chenrezig visualization through which practitioners absorb the realizations of each verse. Suited for those already familiar with the graduated path framework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 20 B & BL1999 10 28.mp3
UUID: 11ced9d6-68a3-4e19-a88a-dcd9f17c53d5
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-10-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.4 minutes
Words: ~4,514
So we start off. It’s got a red light on this. I guess that means that the battery’s going flat. Is there any is it is it okay? Is it working okay for the moment?
Yes. Yes. But, I mean, it should be okay for now, but maybe if the battery goes like maybe the other one has a maybe the other one has a spare battery in it. Anyway, not to worry. We just hope for the best.
Well, this one has got a battery in it. I don’t know how oh, yes. This one looks pretty good. Is there any one left? I think I no.
There’s only one in here, I think. I can’t get it out. Has anybody got oh, that’s it. No worries. Yeah.
Oh, right. Yes. I’ll just put in the other one. I’ll swap them out. I don’t think anybody I don’t think the other one’s got a very good.
Yes. That’s what I’m doing. Oh, okay. Yeah. You’ve got the green light, Margaret.
I’ll fix that later. Okay. Good. Alright. Alright.
Yes. We sometimes we we sort of need a a resident technician or something. First of all, we set our thoughts on the motivation for doing this practice tonight and we need to set the motivation of bodhicitta. That means if we think not only of our own welfare but of all the other countless sentient beings who are sharing this universe with us and we think that as we’re just one person and the others are so many, it’s incredibly more worthwhile to think of their welfare. If we were thinking basically of our own welfare, then with a lower understanding we would aim at achieving liberation as quickly as possible and entering the blissful peace of nirvana.
But the thought of helping others means developing love and compassion universally to all beings and then with that universal love and compassion, then not wanting to leave them behind but to continue working for their benefit. That means working for the fully accomplished state of enlightenment. Cultivate bodhicitta means that you have to focus not only on the thought of having love and compassion for others and wanting to help them, but also to understand the means for doing that and to think about acquiring the means and the means is to achieve Buddhahood or full enlightenment and so that’s the thought with which we’re going to study these teachings tonight. Particularly we’re studying the Mahāyāna teaching we’re at the present studying the teachings for cultivating bodhicitta. In relation to the graduated path, the topic tonight is the Eight Verses of Thought Training and this is something that’s taken in conjunction with the Graduated Path.
As you know, most of you have been here before. Are there any people present who haven’t been at all to basic teachings who are a bit out of contact with what the graduated path is and so on? Okay, right. It’s like like diving into the swimming pool, the deep end, because we’ve come to the end of a series of teachings. We’re right at the final end of it, so you’ll just have to try to pick up what you can and the rest will gradually come in due course.
We’ve been working through various stages and as the rest of you know, the small scope is concerned mainly with how to avoid lower rebirth and to continue to get good rebirth so to be able to go on with the practice. The medium scope is particularly concerned with achieving individual liberation and in the great scope, on the basis of those previous scopes, we look at helping others and all of these scopes as we’re studying the Mahāyāna teachings, we’re taught to bring all these scopes attitudes together. So we might be just starting out and we might feel that the practices that have the most relevance for us at present are things that have to do with the very basic things like reflecting on the preciousness of our human rebirth, reflecting on the qualities of the Three Jewels of Refuge and following their basic advice such as following right conduct and so on. These are things that we all have to place a lot of emphasis on, but we also need to start to cultivate this great scope motivation right from the start, the thought of bodhicitta, in other words cultivating great love and compassion and the thought of actually doing something, not just feeling love and compassion but feeling it in an inactive sort of way but what we have to do is work towards the point where we take on ourselves the responsibility of helping others and that means not necessarily trying to do things for them now.
Will try to help others as much as we can, but we may not have great potential for relieving a lot of suffering for many human beings even in this lifetime, let alone other beings. What we’re really thinking about is the long term and preparing ourselves in the long term to be able to help others by achieving the great state of enlightenment which really gives tremendous powerful means to help others. We have to start training ourselves in this thought. We have been through some meditation teachings already concerned with this. This week what we’re looking at is the thought training practice in Tibetan.
This is called Lojong. This means thought training or mind training and it’s particularly concerned with training the mind in bodhicitta and these practices are concerned with, in conjunction with the graduated path practices, strengthening that thought and enhancing our practice of bodhicitta. So it’s definitely a Mahāyāna practice. These practices don’t have relevance to the Hīnayāna practitioner. Although we might be at a very low level in the sense of just starting off our practice, we’re aspiring to the Mahāyāna goal of enlightenment and so we need to start to do these practices and These practices are also very beneficial for ourselves.
They enable us to find happiness and joy in everyday life and even to be happy about our problems and difficulties and suffering, So it’s very very practical for us and we really need to be able to have these kinds of understandings, these trainings, because we may not have perfect conditions, conducive conditions for our Dharma practice, but if we’ve had some sort of familiarity with the thought training practices then whatever conditions come to us we can make use of them and instead of these adverse conditions being a hindrance to our Dharma practice then whatever conditions occur to us can be something that enhances our Dharma practice so worry if we don’t have the circumstances for perhaps doing intensive study, intensive meditation at present. Whatever comes our way we can use it and even people who have been in really adverse sort of situations such as being in prison camps, for instance, practice where even saying a prayer or a mantra if they’d been seen with their lips moving they would have been immediately got into trouble. You can read about stories of this among the Tibetan refugees but just having the thought training practice in their hearts enabled some of these people to keep their practice going and essentially to overcome even the hardships of being nearly starved and being unfree and eventually to gain spiritual benefit from that.
This is something that’s extremely precious and really quite incredible. Most of us don’t have those kinds of problems but we do have lots of problems in our daily lives and we need to have some way of dealing with these things so that our minds remain positive, particularly if we go through a series of difficulties such as bad health or family problems and so on, it can get our mind down. People often find that they’re too busy to keep up a steady Dharma practice in the formal sense or they might find that for one reason or another they lose contact with the Dharma Centre, they lose contact with teachers and so on, but if we have thought training practice we can always keep up a practice that’s very beneficial to us because it doesn’t have to be done just when we’re sitting on a cushion but it’s something that we can do all the time as we go about our daily activities. Of course, we do need to meditate on these things sitting on our cushion because that’s how we familiarize ourselves with these thoughts so that when we do encounter difficult circumstances we are ready and prepared to meet them.
If we just listen to the teachings and think, oh yes, I’ll use that, when difficulties come up and then you go and forget about it for two or three months and then difficulties come along, you won’t even remember. Or you might think, oh yes, I was taught something about that once, now I wonder what it was, but you don’t have time to go and look up your books and try to remember it. So it has to be right there and in particular it’s not just an intellectual thing, it has to be a thing of the heart and it has to be very heartfelt and there has to be a sense of happiness about it, a sense that you really do have a practice that can bring you happiness in the face of your problems so that when a problem comes along, instead of thinking how terrible, oh yes, it’s really terrible, but still I must try to practice thought training, if you’ve really prepared for it, then you’ll think oh good, now this really gives me a chance to practice. And this is what brings about the change in our attitudes. Really, our problems are only problems because we label them as being problems, we perceive them that way.
Of course, some things are very difficult to see as anything but problems, but with sufficient training even this can come. I read the story of one Tibetan monk who was in one of these prison camps and he said he eventually reached the stage where whatever happened to him, whether it was good or bad, he didn’t feel either happy at the good things or bad at the bad things, but he just felt very even about everything. We can reach that state. Although he expressed it in those terms, in actual fact what he was expressing was that there is an inner peace and an inner joy that is not dependent on outer circumstances and that that can be achieved. In actual fact, the best way to achieve it is by practising in circumstances that force us to do our practice and to check how we’re going along.
If we didn’t have any problems, we’d probably never achieve these results. It’s by having the problems and overcoming that we actually go forward. Any questions? There’s quite a number of these Lo Jong trainings in Tibetan Buddhism and some of them are quite extensive and lengthy tonight I’m going to talk about one of the short ones it’s a very short one it’s called the thought training in eight verses and we’ve actually got a copy of it in our red books so it will help if you look at that as we go along. Thought transformation, in eight stanzas, page eleven.
So if we have these sorts of teachings and put them into practice, practice, and we don’t have to really feel down because of not being able to do the kind of practice that we might want to do, and we don’t have to get into a guilt trip because of not doing practice because we can actually be doing practice all the time in our everyday occupation. Even this short practice could be taught very very extensively. For example, Lama Zopa Rinpoche taught on these eight verses at Kopan once and I can’t remember exactly how long it went on but it went on for quite some time and he was teaching for a couple of hours every day. Obviously I’m not going to be able to go into it in-depth tonight even if I did have that sort of knowledge. I’m just going to go through it quickly but it’s a very beneficial practice.
Particularly for people who aren’t familiar yet with the teachings, some of these stanzas might seem a bit tough, they might seem a bit heavy, you might think that some of them are extreme. It’s really necessary to understand the context that these stanzas come in. We’re really focus here on hitting our self-cherishing because we’ve already come to the understanding that it’s our self-cherishing that hurts us and is the cause of all our problems. Overcoming our self-cherishing doesn’t mean not taking care of ourselves, giving up on ourselves, it means not being centred around our own welfare, not being just totally under the influence of self concern, but engaging in the practice of exchanging ourselves for others in other words, exchanging the central place which, since beginningless time, we’ve given to ourselves and instead of that having more concern for others. This is actually something that’s extremely beneficial to ourselves because it’s that self centered concern, as we learn in the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, for those of you who went along when I was talking about the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, it causes this self-centered butcher is thought to be our chance for final release.
That was one of the lines in the Wheel of Sharp Weapons. So that’s cherishing. That’s what our self-cherishing does to us and has been doing since beginningless time. We’ve always been following self-cherishing and we’re still in saṃsāra, still caught up even though we’ve got a relatively good position at the present. There’s no security for the future and we also know that we experience a lot of dissatisfaction, lot of problems and unhappiness even in our present human life.
So this is where our self-cherishing has brought us, whereas cherishing others, it was due to actions having consideration for others, the following of moral conduct having consideration for others that enabled us to get this precious human rebirth. By giving up self-cherishing and developing concern for others, we can achieve all sorts of good things, everlasting happiness. So it’s extremely worthwhile. This is why some of these verses seem to be a bit extreme because they’re really emphasizing the overcoming of the self-cherishing. We’re not trying to hurt ourselves or put ourselves down, but we’re trying to hurt our self-cherishing and to destroy the influence that our self-cherishing has over us.
So we do have to take this in context, and we often do have to take care of ourselves on a practical level and that can mean sticking up for ourselves, asserting ourselves, being firm with others. Sometimes for the good of others also we have to do something which they might not like. Sometimes we have to be firm with others, we might even have to be forceful with others, and we can use our wisdom in these circumstances. But in these verses, we’re particularly just looking at our inner attitude and that’s why we find a lot of emphasis on giving way to others, on cherishing others and considering the benefit of others over ourselves, because this is the inner attitude that we’re cultivating and which is actually the most beneficial thing for ourselves as well as others. The state of mind that cherishes others is by itself a happy, peaceful state of mind and self-cherishing is by itself an unhappy, tense state of mind.
If we can just develop bodhicitta and the thought of cherishing others, then this by itself will make us so much happier. It’s really worthwhile. So, in these eight stanzas we’re looking at some situations that bring up our self-cherishing very strongly and it’s very good if we see these circumstances because it enables us to identify our self-cherishing and to practice overcoming it. It gives us an opportunity to tackle it. While we’re in circumstances that don’t bring up our self-cherishing very strongly, we can’t see it very clearly, and then it’s hard for us to tackle it.
So we have to attack our self-cherishing and these situations enable us to do it. By doing that, we can replace self-cherishing with cherishing others. So, the first stanza is being determined to accomplish the highest welfare for all beings who excel the wish fulfilling gem, I shall constantly hold them dear. So we regard sentient beings as being very precious in this context because they’re the objects of our practice. So this practice starts with observing karmic conduct.
As you know, in the Teaching on a Graduated Path, the first practice if we actually learn, the first practice that we need to concern ourselves with after having taken refuge, we took refuge or we take refuge in the Three Jewels of refuge in order to bring about our welfare particularly considering how we can avoid the rebirth in the lower realms and achieve human rebirth in the future so as to be able to continue with our development. The first thing that we have to practice is avoiding harm to others. This isn’t just a negative virtue but it’s a positive virtue. By avoiding harm to others we’re actually accumulating good karma, we’re accumulating merit and this is something that’s very, very positive. So this is the most basic practice and this depends on these other living beings.
They’re the object of our most basic practice which is observing right conduct such as avoiding killing and stealing and so on. Particularly with the small scope we were concerned with that and then with the medium scope we’re concerned with attaining our own individual liberation and with the medium scope the practice of observing moral conduct or ethics is taken to a higher level and this also has the same basis of avoiding harm to living beings. Practice and then in the great scope, the living beings are completely the object of our concern and our practice, beginning with cultivating the thought of bodhicitta of helping these other beings, so we have to consider their suffering and consider that they need our help in order to cultivate bodhicitta. From then on we can go on to practice the six perfections and also in order to practice some of the six perfections we need the living beings as our object. We need them as our object generosity, for the practice of moral conduct, for the practice of patience and also they’re involved in the practice of enthusiastic perseverance.
So particularly for patience, we really need these beings, particularly we need the most difficult and the ones who are the most unpleasant and give us the most difficult times. This is particularly useful to us because in order to cultivate bodhicitta and go on from there, then we need to have universal love and compassion, not just love and compassion toward all beings, some beings or even most beings, but towards every single being without exception. This is the definition of universal love and compassion and that means that we have to include the nasty ones. What? Or what do you think yourself?
I do, but I can’t remember the exact word. It would have been Yes. Very firm, even tough, even forceful sometimes. Oh, yeah. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. I was just going to say, yes, you never felt a dharma sense where you didn’t have heated meetings. Well, really depends a lot on the person who you are interacting with and with some people just a word or two will be enough whereas others, you know, you might have to call the police and get them taken away or whatever.
Yes. That’s yeah. Yes. I used to see the young monks at the monastery. They’d really get Wacked.
Like, whacked hard. And I never saw them show any resentment. And I used to think why is it? But I came to the conclusion that they the end accepted that the Lamas did it out, know, first of all there was a sense of justice about it and then that the Lamas were doing it to help them and not out of personal anger. Yes.
That’s right. It looks terrible. Well, I didn’t yeah. I used to see the boys at Kopan being hit with a big heavy wooden mallet and I’m sure that hurt. Yes.
But I also heard this story about this young monk who’d been the disciplinarian for a while. I think they were taking a three month turn at it. Apparently on the day when he handed over to his successor he went around and hugged all the little monks and said I’m so happy I don’t have to hit you anymore. So that was the attitude behind it. So anyway, this is get getting back to it.
Lost my place now. I don’t know where I am. I don’t think I was anywhere anyway. Anyway, these living beings of the Course, they’re the objects for our receiving good rebirth and liberation and enlightenment and of course bodhicitta which we need to have before we achieve enlightenment so all of these wonderful things come from these living beings, that’s why they’re considered to be dear and precious. So and we’ve been going over in the last few weeks the different ways of seeing these living beings this dear by reflections like seeing that they’ve been our mothers and that they’ve been kind to us in many many past lives as our mothers, each one of them, and also that they’re very kind to us in the present in that we receive so many benefits from other sentient beings around us that everything we enjoy really comes to us from other beings.
If we focus on these aspects then we’re focusing on the lovable qualities of the sentient beings and in this way it’s possible to develop this love. If we focus on the unlovable qualities it doesn’t help us but it only helps to keep us in saṃsāra, in suffering. We’re focusing on the positive aspect because this is helpful and brings benefit. This is a valid way to look at the situation. This doesn’t mean we should be unrealistic about the present potential for these beings because we looking at them as having been so kind and having been our mothers in the past and so it doesn’t mean we can expect them to behave like our mothers all the time you know some of them will try to harm us or do things that we wouldn’t like so we have to keep practical.
We have to be realistic about this, but if we look back past this or if we look past this to their potential for enlightenment, the Buddha nature that all of these beings possess, then we can see that they’re objects for our love and compassion and that their basic human qualities and their potential as possessing Buddha nature is something really very wonderful and that we can have admiration and which have admiration for and which can lead us to feeling love and compassion towards these beings. Any questions about that, the first stanza? We could meditate on this stanza by stanza or leave it all to the end. I think I’ll leave it till the end because then perhaps if we have time we can do it with the visualization of Chenrezig. It might be better to meditate on each stanza anyway.
I’ll just briefly explain the visualization. This is a meditation that was put together by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, it’s a very good practice to do, actually, and it helps us to remember these thought trainings. And also to prepare ourselves to be able to actually put these good thoughts into action, thinking Studying them is one thing being able to think this way is quite another thing when you get into the actual situation. What we do is we visualize Chenrezig in front of us. This is usually done with the thousand arm Chenrezig but if you’re more familiar with the four-arm Chenrezig you might prefer to visualize the four-arm Chenrezig who is up there and you visualize Chenrezig We think of this visualisation as being the level of your forehead a body’s length away.
We visualized Avalokiteśvara, the Buddha of Compassion, with a body of pure white light and radiating rainbow light of five colors. And he has a very gentle beautiful smile and he’s very beautiful and is looking at us at you and at all other beings with eyes of compassion, of great compassion. He has four arms, first two hands are together at his heart and holding a precious jewel, the wish fulfilling jewel, and the second right hand is holding a crystal rosary and his second left hand is holding the stem of a white lotus and he’s seated in the vajra posture or what we sometimes call the full lotus position and seated on a lotus and moon disc seat and we think that the whole visualization is made of radiant light not solid matter not like a statue or even like a body made of flesh and blood but of radiant light and he’s wearing exquisite silk clothes, precious jeweled ornaments with an antelope skin covering his left shoulder and breast. So I’ll just give you a moment to focus on that visualization. And so while we read the first verse, then we visualize that from Avalokiteśvara’s heart from the seed syllable Hrīḥ at his heart center which is right in the middle of his chest there comes a stream of blissful radiant nectar which comes out from his heart and fills our body through the crown of the head or if you find it easier just think of radiant white light and it fills you completely and purifies all negativities and in particular removes the negativities mentioned in this verse and brings the realizations mentioned in this verse so we can think this way while we’re reading the verse.
With the thought of attaining enlightenment for the welfare of all beings who are more precious than wish fulfilling jewels, I will constantly practice holding them dear. So it the the nectar and light purifies the self-cherishing thought and bestows realization of cherishing others more than oneself. So then going on to the next stanza. When accompanying anyone, I shall view myself as the lowest of all, and in the depths of my heart shall hold dearly others as supreme. So this is difficult because particularly if the others challenge us or if they seem arrogant, then it’s just natural to want to take them down a peg or two.
Then the question arises, should we always give way to others and let them have their way? What do you think?