Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 11-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew provides a systematic overview of virtuous mental factors in Buddhist psychology, the inner resources that protect us from delusions. She begins with how we create suffering by building mythology around external objects, then moves directly into eleven key mental factors: faith in refuge and enlightenment, internal shame (a sense of personal integrity), embarrassment or social restraint (caring what respected others think), non-attachment, freedom from anger and ignorance, enthusiastic perseverance in practice, mental and physical pliancy attained through deep meditation, carefulness or mindfulness as alertness to non-virtue, equanimity, and compassion. She illustrates how these work together in real moments, and concludes with resource recommendations for deeper study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 21 VNV M States 1998 04 01.mp3
UUID: 6db3411b-dde7-4d50-ae7c-708a9b91e116
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-04-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.2 minutes
Words: ~1,064
That that we’re just under the control of these delusions. This will help us to cut us cut it off. And it’s not that there’s nothing there at all, bad or good in the object, but we’ve built up this whole sort of mythology around it. And if we can stop doing that, it will help us tremendously. And another thing that helps us is to reflect on the drawbacks of delusions by understanding their drawbacks, understanding how our delusions are our real enemies and harm us so much, thinking of all the different ways in which they do us harm.
Then it will help us to have the energy to put these other antidotes into practice. So, I haven’t got time to go into detail over the virtuous mental factors, but I’ll just go through them very quickly. So, faith. First of all, in the Three Jewels of refuge. Secondly, the kind of faith which is the wish to attain enlightenment combined with faith that it can be achieved.
So this is really kind of faith in ourselves. And the third one is conviction in the truth of rebirth and cause and effect. That always comes into it. And so then there’s awareness. Sometimes it’s translated differently.
I can’t remember now. This means a sort of, within yourself, a sense of shame to do what’s wrong. So it means that within yourself you feel ashamed yourself to do what’s wrong. And sometimes that’s translated as shame. Yes, but that’s terrific because then you haven’t accumulated that karma.
No, but then you brought in the antidote, so that’s really good. You had regret, yes, yes, you had this attitude of shame, so that’s a really good example. And then the next one is embarrassment, and this is an external attitude. Don’t think embarrassment is a terribly good term, but it’s hard to think of another term that would really fit more appropriately. But it means that we don’t want to, in front of other people, don’t want to do wrong actions because of what they would think of us.
This also helps us, because we might think it’s a fairly inferior attitude, but it does work for us when all else fails. We refrain from doing wrong actions, because we know that other people, particularly other people that we respect for their virtuous attitudes, would not think well of us if they saw us doing this. And these two attitudes, if we’re keeping good company, then this this attitude also is very powerful to help us to to avoid doing wrong actions. And these two together, awareness or shame and embarrassment, are factors that are very helpful for us to avoid wrong actions. Then non attachment is the fourth.
The fifth is freedom from anger. The sixth is freedom from ignorance. The seventh is enthusiastic perseverance in virtuous actions and in Dharma practice. The eighth is control over the mind and body, or sometimes it’s called mental and physical pliancy. It’s referring to practice of single pointed concentration and reaching the stage in the practice of single pointed concentration, or Samatha, where you attain this mental and physical pliancy, which produces mental ecstasy.
So that’s a mental factor that only arises in people who’ve reached this level of meditation. We don’t have that, unless there’s anybody here who’s reached that level of meditation. The ninth one is carefulness. This is something that’s very important for us to cultivate. It’s alertness for non virtuous actions.
Sometimes it can be called mindfulness, but it’s a particular form of mindfulness which is always on the lookout for the mind tending towards non virtue and avoiding that. So that’s what’s happened with Helen and the pen today. That is this mental factor of carefulness manifesting also. And then I think it’s related to we see our minds sort of going off in a bad direction and something in our mind immediately alerts us to it. And then there’s equanimity, is the tenth, and the eleventh is not being able to endure others suffering.
And so that’s it. And it’s probably a little bit late to do meditation now, so I think we’ll just finish off there. And you can meditate on these things when you go home. Or if you don’t meditate on them tonight, can meditate tomorrow. And this book has the six non virtues in it.
In Geshe Ngawang Dakye’s book, there’s an explanation of both the virtuous and the non virtuous mental factors in the Tibetan tradition of mental development. That’s in brief. If you want more detailed explanations, you’d have to go to the books on Lorik. I’m not quite sure which to recommend. I think probably Meditation on Emptiness by Jeffrey Hopkins probably has some material on this.
It’s not in the library at the moment, so I wasn’t able to check it out. There’s various texts on the library, some of them go into it and some of them don’t. I couldn’t come across one in the library that went into it in any detail, but there is one, particularly one that’s based on it, that was brought out by Geshe Rabten’s students. Does that have I don’t think that has terribly much on me. Mind training. It’s got the three different texts there.
Can I have a look at that? Yes. That has the virtuous and non virtuous mental factors in it, does it? This is a new version. Just thought transformation.
Seven points thought transformation. Yes. Seven points of transformation. Yes, this is on thought training. Yes, it’s not on the positive and the virtuous and non virtuous mental factors, it’s on thought transformation, which is very, very helpful practice, of course, for bringing the mind into a positive state.
But there are various texts that do expound on these things. So I’ll finish there anyway, and we can dedicate our merits. The book that I found had a very helpful explanation of them is published in Rigpa, and it’s not terribly easy to get hold of it now. I’m sorry, I gave my copy away, I at the time, I thought that it was easy enough to get hold of it, and I found since it’s no longer available, that’s always a a danger. So page four page five, anyway.
And then page ten. You’re welcome. Thank you all.