Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Margaret McAndrew explores generosity and ethics—the first two of the six Buddhist perfections. She opens with Śāriputra’s tale: he cut off his hand for a wicked being, who insulted him for offering it with his left hand—shocked so deeply that he abandoned the Bodhisattva path. Her discussion of generosity is grounded and practical. She distinguishes three kinds (material, Dharmic, protection from fear) and addresses hard questions about what NOT to give (body parts before you’re a stable Bodhisattva, weapons, poisons). For ethics, she connects three vow types—individual liberation, Bodhisattva, and Tantric—clarifying that avoiding killing is already binding from the moment of taking refuge. She outlines eleven forms of social service, from helping the poor and sick to aiding prisoners and those threatened by danger. The session ends mid-topic, to resume next week.
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File metadata (for organising)
File: 23 B & BL1999 11 11.mp3
UUID: 8a812fdd-870f-44ca-bfd3-91af90af7cab
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-11-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~4,718
Yeah. The negative karma of of doing that action of killing and because he did it with such profound love and compassion, it actually turned out to be positive rather than negative and shortened his path. There’s some other stories like that too that he did a number of very powerful good actions. But in general it’s a long path and has to be accomplished gradually. So, perfection, first of all, perfection of giving or generosity.
So, there are three kinds of generosity. Essentially, the definition or the explanation is that it’s by nature the thought of wishing to give away one’s body possessions and root virtues. So it’s pretty full on. It’s not like putting something in the collecting tin when they come to your door. And to have this sort of attitude is really hard to accomplish because we have this natural miserliness and holding onto our possessions.
And so it’s really overcoming this miserly attitude, this grasping at our possessions and feeling joy in giving, feeling the wish to give. So, it’s explained as being not just the thought of wanting to Well, it’s not Achieve I’ve got it slightly wrong there. The accomplishment of the perfection of generosity doesn’t depend on relieving the poverty of all sentient beings, because this is something that’s impossible to accomplish. There have been many Buddhas but there are still sentient beings experiencing poverty. There are many bodhisattvas at this present time carrying out the perfection of generosity, but still sentient beings are experiencing poverty.
So it doesn’t depend on that. It also doesn’t depend on just overcoming miserliness in one’s own mind stream, because even arhats have overcome this miserliness. But it depends on giving from the depth of your heart without miserliness and accompanied by the thought of the benefits of giving and the disadvantages of not giving. So, there are three kinds of giving. And this is giving material things, giving dharma, generosity of giving dharma, and there’s the generosity of fearlessness or giving of fearlessness.
So, There are some some things that we shouldn’t give. For instance talking about giving our bodies, it’s said that Bodhisattvas will actually give parts of their body, that beings will ask them to give a hand or a foot or something and they’ll just immediately cut off whatever part of the body is asked for and give it to this other being. So it’s said that we shouldn’t give parts of our body until we are Bodhisattvas or until we are firmly established as Bodhisattvas. Even beginning Bodhisattvas shouldn’t give their body parts because this can be a hindrance to their practice. There’s a story of Śāriputra, Buddha’s great Arhat disciple who was actually a bodhisattva at one stage and in order to interfere with his practice a wicked being, saw that he was still a bit shaky and asked him to give a hand and so to give his right hand and so Śāriputra cut off his right hand and gave it to this being with his left hand and this wicked being said how rude of you to give it to me with your left hand!
Śāriputra immediately felt terribly shocked at the wickedness of these sentient beings and thought what is the use of trying to help such wicked beings? And so he gave up his bodhicitta and followed the Hīnayāna path and became an Arhat. So that was a great loss because he gave up the Bodhisattva path, so I said we shouldn’t risk our practice by doing such things. Well, think you can check up with modern science and so on. They wouldn’t do these things to you unless they could do it without harming you.
Well, in those days you couldn’t give your body part without harming yourself. But you’d still be missing your arm tremendously, wouldn’t you? Whereas if a kidney the doctors wouldn’t cut out somebody’s kidney unless the kidney is still able to do the double work and the doctors aren’t going to let you give your kidney if it’s going to be detrimental to you. Yes. I think that’s different.
That’s just my own viewpoint. Mean, a lot of people who aren’t even Bodhisattvas will do these things, particularly if it’s their own relatives. And they’re doing it out of love for somebody in their family. It’s just like they have a lot of love for this particular person. It’s not even necessarily universal love or whatever.
But for instance you might feel okay about giving your kidney to your sister or your child or something like that, but you wouldn’t perhaps feel right about giving it to a stranger because you haven’t got that much love for that person. So you have to check on how you feel. I think from my point of view that’s quite valid. If you’re not yet of Bodhisattva, then you have to check whether you do feel like giving that risk. You wouldn’t give it for a stranger because you’re not yet mature enough in your practice of bodhicitta to care that much about a stranger.
Whereas for somebody in your family you might love them so much that you would gladly run a certain risk. So I think that’s something to take into consideration too. Yes. Yes, well you know, well I’m not saying it’s body Yes. I’m not saying it’s bodhicitta, I’m just saying it’s the sort of thing that a lot of people do.
Even without bodhicitta, lot of people simply because they love their family members they will know, sacrifice some part of their body, run a risk, take an operation and so on. My understanding is that they will only do this thing within the family anyway. That doesn’t hurt you to have a Yes. Right. I see.
I didn’t know they could give the I think yeah. They would never tell you anyway, would they, who received? So anyway, think, of course when people are dying and giving their parts, that’s a different method too, but why are still alive to give parts? I think nowadays it’s not in science. The doctors are certainly not going to do anything unless it can be done without serious harm to the person.
Of course having an operation in itself is a serious thing, know, having a kidney out, know, you’d be sick for weeks afterwards, wouldn’t you? But Still, you know, it’s something I think it’s not like what’s meant in this situation. So So anyway, other things that we shouldn’t give are things that harm others. So, we shouldn’t for instance give weapons or, poisons or things like that. Or, for instance books that that others would that would cause problems for others.
Well, that might be skillful action. You’d have to check up whether the person was going to have a problem with it or not. If you knew the person had a problem with alcohol then in general you wouldn’t give them alcohol. On the other hand you might think that if you take them a bottle of wine it’s going to help you to communicate with them and they might listen to your Dharma wisdom or something, but you have to be very careful about these things. You can’t just just give thoughtlessly.
So So anyway, yes So anyway, first thing is giving material things and this ranges from giving any kind of material things from just a bit of food or something like that right up to giving your body. So, it’s actually the Bodhisattva can do these things because apart from everything else they take a long term view. They’re looking at how many lives rewards they’ll get from this act of generosity, of being able to bring about good results in the future and being able to give more generosity in the future and so on. Also, Lama Yeshe always used to say that for a bodhisattva, they’re actually such bliss all the time that they actually don’t feel physical pain. Particularly somebody who has realised emptiness doesn’t feel physical pain at cutting off their body parts.
I always find this topic a bit gruesome actually. I think it’s hard for me to actually accept it as something that’s actually done. It seems to be more like an example of what would be done out of that person’s great love if there was an opportunity for it. What the bodhisattva is ready to do rather than what is actually done. I mean it is in the scriptures that bodhisattvas do these things so who am I to argue with the scriptures?
Well, that’s it. I think the idea was that they did believe that it was possible to, you know, replace your eye if you were blind, replace your eye with somebody else’s, even though they didn’t have the medical skills and this time they seemed to believe that there was somebody somewhere who did know how to do it. Sorry, what were going to say? No, no. They can’t so No, it’s only beginning bodhisattva.
Even before that stage actually. Somebody on the third path is somebody who has realised emptiness, so they can’t have disturbing emotions about it. In actual fact, by the time they get onto the second, if I remember rightly, it’s the second stage of the first part, it’s divided into three stages, and the bodhicitta becomes stable on the second stage of the first part, so that you can’t have a reversal of your bodhicitta after that. But during that first stage it’s still a bit shaky, and during that stage you’re not allowed to do anything that might threaten your bodhicitta. So it actually the stability of the bodhicitta comes before according to the classical setting out of the stages.
It comes before that. Yes. And that’s just because of the power of the person’s bodhicitta. It’s not looking at their power of emptiness. It’s looking at the power of their bodhicitta alone.
That is so powerful that the person can actually give parts of their hands. Once once they feel emptiness, they don’t even feel physical pain. Before they feel emptiness, they can feel physical pain, but the joy of giving is so great that it doesn’t disturb their mental joy. So anyway, so we can’t do that, but we can do things like giving our money and so on, giving food and clothing and what have you. And then there’s giving Dharma.
And that’s something that we can all do. It doesn’t have to mean giving formal Dharma teachings. It can be just a few words of Dharma, even setting a good example to others. So this is the best form of Dharma, the best form of generosity. It’s greater than any other form of generosity.
And also, we can whatever our Dharma practice we’re doing is if we can convert it into the practice of generosity of Dharma, if we imagine ourselves to be surrounded by all sentient beings and that they’re listening to our Dharma practice, we could be reading Dharma texts or meditating, chanting or whatever. And if we imagine that all the sentient beings are around us and that we’re leading them and that they’re listening to us, then this is something that becomes a practice of I have to remember that, I always forget. Yes, it’s skill for means, yes. And just in general, directly or indirectly leading others in the path of Dharma. But it’s not enough to say, Oh well, you know, I’m giving Dharma.
I teach, I lead meditation teachings and I do this and that so I don’t have to worry about giving material generosity. Because if you have some money and material goods then you should practice generosity according to your means. And of course as we’re just beginning a Bodhisattva can give everything they have. We can’t do that because we would the problem is that we’d regret it afterwards. So we have to be sensible.
And Lama Yeshe used to say, know, shouldn’t just give everything we have away to others and then leave ourselves in difficulty. For instance, if you’re travelling around overseas, you shouldn’t give everything you have to somebody and then find that you have no money left to get yourself home. Because then you just become a problem for other people. If we were to give away everything, we have our house and our possessions and so on, then we’d end up becoming a burden to other people because then we’d to turn around to other people and ask them to help us and to rescue us from our own stupidity. So we do have to be sensible.
But we have to give what we can. Mother Teresa perhaps had a clue for us. She said that when we’re giving she said we shouldn’t just give out of our abundance but we should give until it hurts. And if you don’t give until it hurts then you don’t find out where your miserliness is. So it’s a means of identifying where we do have a problem.
Yes, that’s right, yes. Yes, I mean, you’re seeing a sense that’s only helping ourselves, but you think? Yes. But of course, if it hurts too much it might be a sign of giving away something that we need to keep. You know, for instance, if you give away your car and you need to drive yourself to work or something, you know, that’s just not practical.
For instance, you know, we’ve often had a generous impulse that will give away a large sum of money, but we have to check whether we can really afford to give that much. And maybe it’s just our that’s stopping us, you know it often is. On the other hand, some people are just some people more than others. Some people have a problem with miserliness, some people have a problem with selfishness and they’ll give everything away and not consider the effects on their lives and whether it might be a nuisance for their relatives and so on. Yes!
We should have our second thoughts before we give it because once you’ve given it you shouldn’t take it back. Oh, pride, yes. Of course, that’s a danger. We should. We should practice without pride.
That’s why we should try to remember emptiness with all of these things. Yes. And in actual fact, the Bodhisattva should be open in their giving. You know, Jesus said to not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, but Buddha said that Yes. Get it and go to Sunday School!
But Buddha said that the Bodhisattva should let others see his or her generosity so that they set an example. So it’s difficult sometimes to know what’s the best thing to do because it can be cause if you feel that it can be cause for pride for yourself then you do have to be careful. But on the other hand you have to think of the example for others. If you’re doing it for the reward, then it’s not genuine. But if you’re doing it to set an example, then it’s not only good for others, but also might lead to more benefits for the recipients because, you know, people are looking around other people to see what’s the appropriate amount to give, you know?
No way, sort of watching and say. And it’s not necessarily because you don’t want to be shown up either because you just like to know sometimes you just want to know what’s the right thing to do and you think, here it’s the right situation to give five dollars or there it’s the right situation to give twenty dollars or whatever. So if you see somebody else giving more you’ll give a bit more yourself and if it’s a charity or something then You wouldn’t want to be sitting next to him. That’s right. Yes.
That’s right. Yes. It can there’s this sort of social awkwardness. Yes, social awkwardness factor. And then there’s the sorry, and then the next kind of giving is the giving of fearlessness.
Well, it includes protection, yes. So, it includes a number of different things. So for instance by saving insects lives, taking them out of spider webs or whatever, or by liberating bristle worms, putting them into the water. You can be practising this generosity. It says like liberating prisoners for example, releasing prisoners.
So for instance, people who are in Yes, well I think you have to be careful about what sort of prisoners you let out, but for instance political prisoners, if you’re working for the release of political prisoners, by becoming a member of Amnesty International, That could be a way of practicing this form of generosity. Giving fearlessness. Because you’re saving them from their fear. Yes. Bit of protection from fear would perhaps convey the idea better.
But it’s Anyway, it’s called generosity of fearlessness in this text. Giving, it is fearlessness. Yes. Well, I mean, if you give dharma, that protects from mental fear, doesn’t it? That’s already covered in generosity of dharma.
But this is basically protecting people from dangerous situations or harmful situations. Although we can include in the first one. Yes, I mean you could look at it either way, but it’s anyway, yes, that third one is just a bit of an extra category because there are probably some things that don’t fit into the first two categories. So, anyway
The point is that by rescuing these insects, then you are creating this karma of this particular perfection and you can dedicate your merits to enlightenment. Okay, anyway, yes, we can think about that one a bit. So anyway, to go into ethics, I’m never going to get to four tonight, still on to number two. Ethics or morality. So we were looking at the small scope, we already looked at basic ethics in terms of avoiding the ten non virtuous actions.
Also in the medium scope we saw about taking vows. Essentially what we’re looking at in terms of the perfection of ethics is well, the whole range of ethics, but the example that’s given is the three types of vows. And the three types of vows being the Prātimokṣa, bodhicitta and Tantric vows. So what we’re doing here with these six perfections is carrying this practice of ethics to a higher degree. Also here it involves bodhicitta motivation.
So in Liberation in the Palm of One’s Hand it says that the perfection of ethics is to gain it quotes Bodhisattva’s path: They say the perfection of ethics is to gain the abandonment of certain thoughts. The explanation is that you reverse thoughts of harming others along with the basis of such thoughts. As ethics in Buddhism is always related back to this idea of what the effect is of our actions on others, avoiding harm to others. And we have to identify the actions that cause harm to others and abandon them and our vows are connected with that. So the basic morality is the Prātimokṣa vows, which is the vows of individual liberation, of which an example is the five lay vows of avoiding killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxicants.
So also the various vows of monks and nuns. And then there are other sets of vows. It’s said that order to the Prātimokṣa vows form the best basis for the other two kinds of vows. So, for example, the most beneficial basis for taking Bodhisattva vows is to have taken Prātimokṣa vows. But this isn’t compulsory because Pabongka Rinpoche says it’s possible to take the bodhisattva vows without having pratimoksha vows because he says there are some gods and nagas who take bodhisattva vows but they can’t take pratimoksha vows.
You have to be a human being to do that. Still the person with pratimoksha vows has the best basis And it is the same with the Tantric vows also. So that anyway was the first kind of ethics, the ethic of restraint from misdeeds. And that is those taking, holding vows. Does anybody else know the answer to this?
And then he has to go to hell in the daytime. Generally that vow is compulsory. Yes. It’s included in one of the three commitments of refuge, not to harm sentient beings. That’s already covered in refuge.
When you take refuge already, even before you take the Prātimokṣa vows, you’re taking a promise not to harm sentient beings. It’s one of the commitments of refuge. It’s already covered. There’s no choice. You have to take that first vow.
If you’re going to take any of the others, you have to take that first vow. It’s already covered in refuge, even if you haven’t taken the Prātimokṣa vows as such. You’ve already taken that vow just by taking refuge. Because one of the commitments of refuge is to avoid harming sentient beings, to avoid killing sentient beings. If explained it fully, they would say that you can have a choice about any of them except that first one.
Well, I think it’s just assumed that nobody’s going to have qualms about that first one. But there’s no choice, you have to take that first one. And you’ve already taken it anyway because it’s one of the commitments when you take that vow, it’s your commitment upon taking refuge in Buddha. If you take refuge in Buddha, then you don’t harm sentient beings. You have to take refuge.
Yes. Yes, you don’t have to take them. It’s not compulsory to take them but yes. There isn’t. There’s no question about that.
There isn’t a choice about that first one and in fact you have already taken that first one. That first one is included in refuge. So Yes, I suppose if you take it as a vow separate to your refuge then it’s stronger. You take it further. Take put more effort into avoiding harm, but it’s still covered.
No, you can’t. No, no, no choice. That one is basic. Buddha said that anybody who doesn’t want to at least avoid harming sentient beings, and who doesn’t want to at least try to avoid harming sentient beings, particularly avoiding killing, and at least who isn’t prepared to give up taking human life, such a person can’t consider themselves his follower. If you’re going to be a follower of Buddha, the very least you can do is to avoid killing human taking human life.
Well, that’s a tricky one because sometimes, you know, they do have to try to make a choice and they might in their hearts feel that they’re Buddhist but they also might feel and this situation arose in Tibet. But still outside the context of war, they would still be trying to observe this one. That’s a very difficult one because In fact, John Blofeld wrote about that because he became a Buddhist before the Second World War and then he felt compelled to sign up when Hitler invaded Poland. And that he said that although he felt that he was engaged in a righteous war, that there was no doubt that the soldiers life was coarsening and destructive to the finer instincts. And so because of his strong Buddhist tendencies, you know, he observed that in himself and did see what engaging in war was doing to him.
Actual words, although he decided that this war was righteous, at the same time he felt that it was also dragging him down. And it does, you know, that’s the whole nature of war. In that case he simply made that choice himself and he felt that it was a choice he had to make, but whether he was right or wrong, you know, who knows, there’s probably something to be said on both sides. Yes. That’s right.
But there were in in Tibet and in India there were people who would be brought up. That was their caste. They would be brought up as butchers. They would perhaps have no other way to make a living. But still, you know, if they really wanted to, they could make the choice to not be butchers.
So that’s a difficult one. And of course, you know, farmers and so on have to learn. That’s a very difficult one. Okay, so anyway I’ll try to finish ethics. So We’ve got to get through concentration and wisdom next week.
That’s a tall order in itself. Yes, patience, patience. I’ve got to get patience. So the next one is gathering virtuous Dharma and that essentially means making offerings and prostrations and so on. Dharma practice in other words, studying, meditation, teaching Dharma, helping with Buddha House.
So these are creating merits that can be dedicated on the path to enlightenment. So we have to engage in this. The first one was essentially avoidance of non virtuous actions and now what we’re looking at is accumulating merit. They go together, these things. So it’s effort with your three doors to perform virtue while having the bodhicitta vows and practicing the six perfections.
Pabongka Rinpoche says in general the entire Lam Rim serves to increase these three types of ethics. So the third type is the ethics of working for the sake of sentient beings. Consists consists of four ways of gathering disciples which I’ll just read out quickly because it’s interesting to know about these. And these are so if you have disciples you have to practice these. If you haven’t got disciples yet then we can start to practice these because we can have a positive influence on other people even if we’re not actually interested in gathering them as disciples yet.
And this is material generosity with the idea of helping them so as to influence them in a positive way. So it’s not just to relieve their needs but to give them something so that they’ll like us and feel that we’re good people so that they’ll be influenced by us. This is not out of pride but it’s out of concern for the person. So, secondly speaking sweetly Thirdly, working for their benefit and fourthly practicing what you preach. And then the eleven I’ll read up these eleven ways of working for the sake of others because these are very practical things that are useful for us and it’s interesting because you don’t very often in Buddhism come across lists of what we can engage in in terms of social work but this is a list of different kinds of social work that we can do and we shouldn’t do them just for the immediate benefit to others but for the long term effect of accumulating merits particularly accumulating the practice of the perfection of ethics so as to achieve enlightenment, so as to be able to benefit these in an ultimate way in the long run.
So first of all, so ten of these are relevant for us now and the eleventh we might think is sort of a bit out of the scope at the moment. So the first one is helping those who toil and those who suffer. Secondly, working for the sake of those blind to the right methods. Thirdly, don’t try to write them all down because you can look up the book at page six thirty four. Thirdly, working for the sake of people by benefiting them.
Fourthly, working for the sake of those threatened by danger. Fifthly, working for the sake of those afflicted with miseries. Sixth, working for the sake of the deserted. Is working for the sake of the homeless. Eighth working for the sake of those without like minded people.
Nine working for the sake of those on the right path. Tenth working for the sake of those on the wrong path. Eleven, working for the sake of all these people through miracles. Okay. So, yes, in general working for people who are sick and helpless and so on is a particularly good practice.
These people are a particularly good object of our help. So we’ll finish there Be patient, you’ll have to wait until next week. You’ll have to be patient until next week.