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 centers on the remarkable story of Atisha’s journey to Sumatra to study with Serlingpa, tracing how two major lineages of bodhicitta teaching developed in Tibetan Buddhism. She explains why both renunciation and bodhicitta must be cultivated together, then teaches Lama Tsongkhapa’s combined eleven-step method: beginning with equanimity (seeing friend, enemy, and stranger as equal), moving to visualizing all beings as your mother and cherishing others above the self. Throughout, she emphasizes how thought training practices—especially the exchange of self with others—transform hindering circumstances into powerful aids for practice. It concludes with a guided meditation on equanimity for serious practitioners engaged with Mahāyāna teachings.
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File: 23 BaB 1998 04 08.mp3
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Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-04-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~5,291
It’s kind of a funny sort of sort of sideline to the to the teachings really is the the project of Maitreya. So He was a future Buddha, obviously. You’ve asked him to.. So anyway yeah. So, anyway, if we want to become Buddhas, we have to follow the Mahāyāna practice.
And if we want to follow the Mahāyāna practice, then we have to start off by developing love and compassion, in conjunction of course with all the other qualities that we’ve been talking about, which were explained in terms of the small and medium scopes. So now that we’re looking at the great scope practice, it’s mainly looking at at the developing of the qualities of love and compassion, and then how to attain enlightenment through the practice of the six perfections. So if we want to do this, then we have to start now. Otherwise, if we start achieving direct insight into emptiness and all these other qualities, then we might find that we get sort of sidetracked into the Hīnayāna stream, and and it’s too late to keep ourselves from getting into the Hīnayāna state of the blissful peace of nirvana. In actual fact, Buddhas also entered nirvana, but their nirvana is different.
It’s called parinirvana. That means that they’re able to continue to work for sentient beings while their mind is in this state of nirvana. So when we talk about nirvana generally, we’re talking about this state of abiding nirvana, where the arhats are cut off from being able to communicate with other beings. So we have to develop renunciation, and we have to develop the thought of bodhicitta at the same time. So without developing renunciation of our own sufferings, we can’t have that attitude of compassion towards others.
It’s necessary to work on these things together. So there are explanations on how we So we’ve already had the explanation anyway on how to develop renunciation, so now we’re looking at explanations on how to develop bodhicitta. And there are two main traditions that are taught in Tibetan Buddhism. I’m not going to have a lot of time to explain all these in detail tonight, so I’ll just be skimming through them. So one tradition passed down in India, and it came from great teachers Nāgārjuna and Śāntideva, particularly in connection with this tradition, and it came down to the present in that way.
The other tradition has a particularly interesting story connected with it because it was lost at some point in India and preserved in in Sumatra. And it was brought back from Sumatra by Atisha, the great teacher who came to Tibet. And the the story of Atisha is a a very remarkable story. And one of the remarkable events of his life was he’s going to Sumatra by ship and making contact with Serlingpa, who was the chief exponent at the time of that particular lineage of teachings of how to develop bodhicitta. So actually, a teacher was considered to be a great yogi before he left India for Sumatra.
And he’d achieved many realizations, but he felt that his bodhicitta was not sufficiently strong. And he felt that the bodhicitta teachings weren’t working terribly well for him, the ones that he had access to. And he heard somehow of this other lineage that existed in Sumatra, and he had an instinctive feeling that this other lineage would be helpful for him. I think there was a story of his being told by Tārā. Do you remember that?
Had a. Mhmm. So, anyway, Tārā told him that he should go and seek out these other teachings. And he went there and, first of all, said that he didn’t rush up to Serlingpa and immediately request the teachings, but he showed the example that we should all follow when we’re wanting to make connections with the guru, which was that he waited for a while, you know, went to the monastery and stayed there for a while and checked him out very thoroughly first. And then having decided that he could confide his development safely to this Lama, that it was a suitable person to be a spiritual guide to him, then he requested received the teachings, the lineage from Serlingpa.
And he found that this teaching was very, very effective for his mind, and he brought this lineage back to India with him. And, of course, then later on when he was invited to Tibet and came to Tibet, then he brought the lineage with him to Tibet. And so these lineages continued to be taught. And in actual fact, Lama Tsongkhapa combines the two methods into a way of practicing, which combines the essential points from both the traditions. Really, you have a choice nowadays.
You can either practice one of the methods or you could practice the other. If you find that one of them is more suitable to you than the other, then you can practice the one that’s most suitable, or you can practice the combined system. So anyway, I won’t be going through all the details of the two methods, but I’ll go briefly through the combined system which combines the the main points. So, first point to begin with is developing equanimity. And this means a state of mind which regards others in an equal way, in an unbiased way, in an impartial way.
So, of course, this is something that’s very different to our ordinary way of looking at others. And what we do now is to look at others with our partial minds, from the point of view of our self-cherishing. We look at others and view them as being either helpful to us or as hurting us or as being of no importance to us. And if we see them as being helpful to us, if we see them as making us feel good or as being able to give us some sort of benefit that’s gratifying to our ego, then we label them as being our friend, and we develop clinging attachment towards this person. If we see them as being harmful to us, as hurting us, as hindering us, we feel anger and aversion towards them, and we label them as the enemy.
If we think that they’re of no importance to us in either of these two ways, then we label them as the stranger and we feel that we can ignore them, that they’re of no importance. All of these are mistaken attitudes. So we can actually use our anger and our clinging attachment to balance each other out, so that we can have a more equal mind towards the friend and the enemy. And then we can also bring the stranger into the thought and just try to have an openness, a receptivity towards these beings, an awareness of them in their own right, rather than from our perspective just seeing how they just just looking at them from the point of view of of how we can benefit from their from what they do to us. Instead of just looking at them from the point of view of our own benefit of whether they harm us or hurt us, we can look at them from their point of view, be open to their needs and their situation.
So to begin with, we start by visualizing them in front of us, and we visualize we can visualize all sentient beings, we really focus on three people, and this is somebody that we feel clinging attachment towards, somebody that we strongly dislike, and somebody that we that we feel indifferent towards. And so that’s we can visualize the friend to the left of us, the enemy to the right, and the stranger in the center, and then we should look at them. And one way to think of these things is that all beings are equal because all beings have the same basic psychology. We all desire happiness, and we all desire not to experience any suffering. And in in this sense, we’re really all the same.
So we can think that way and look at these three beings and feel that this is their basic nature and that their basic nature is just the same as mine, and so it’s wrong to discriminate them as friend, enemy, and stranger. Also, we can look at it in terms of how things change, how it’s always changing, even in this life experience speaking. We know the same people are not always in the same relation to us, that a friend can change to an enemy, that an enemy can change to a stranger, a stranger can change to a friend or enemy, enemies can become friends. We know that these things can change. And over the course of our lives, in the past, they’ve been in every conceivable relationship to us.
So every single one of them has been about an equal amount of times friendly to us and enemy to us. This, of course, has nothing to do with their attitudes towards us. At present, of course, some beings might have an attitude of wanting to harm harm us, and some might have an attitude of wanting to help us. We can’t really We can’t necessarily change that, but what we can change is the way we respond to them, the way we view them. And if we see that some of them have helped us harmed us equally, that all of them have equally helped us and harmed us in the past, whether it’s a friend, enemy, or stranger we’re looking at, then we can feel that we should have an equal attitude towards each of them.
And we can look at each one of them in turn and, first of all, let the feeling that we have towards them now arise. So this is one time when it’s allowed to feel anger because we’re allowing anger to I mean, it’s one time when it’s allowed to actually deliberately produce anger in ourselves because we’re producing it in order to do away with it. And if we don’t let it arise, we won’t be able to work so effectively with it. So we can do this meditation and see how we feel anger towards this person that we label as the enemy, and then reason with ourselves how this person has been our friend and been kind to us, us, been our mother, been our father, done everything. So many different times they’ve been in all these different relationships to us.
In the same way the person that we have clinging attachment for, we should look at and feel this clinging attachment, and then reason about how they haven’t always been in this relationship to us, but they’ve been in so many different relationships in the past. And also, of course, think how it can change again in the future. And the same with a stranger. And we should we shouldn’t just leave this until we meet the person because then it’s too late, we’re just going to get angry. Particularly, we’re going to get angry with the enemy, and we’re also going to have the clinging attachment to the friend and so on.
So we have to practice it at home first and visualize these people and then try not to forget it at the end of the meditation session, but to keep that attitude in our mind as we go about our daily business. So maybe if we have time, we’ll do that meditation later on. So, anyway, it’s compared to leveling the ground before you plant a crop. So if the ground’s rough, you can’t you can’t cultivate it. You can’t plant the crop, so you have to cultivate it and make it smooth and and then the crop of loving-kindness and compassion can grow.
Then the steps that have to follow after equanimity the development of love and compassion and producing greater and greater love and compassion until we reach a thought of a very powerful love and compassion. So we have to achieve this great love and compassion. And then that’s the basis for developing bodhicitta. So that, on the basis of great love and compassion as the first step, then we can go on to consider how we’re going to effectively help these other beings. When we develop great love and compassion, it automatically brings the thought of helping others, of wanting to help others, of wanting to do what we can to help them.
Then from that follows on the thought of checking how to effectively help others and the conclusion that having considered the great qualities of Buddhahood that that we should work to attain Buddhahood if we really want to help others there’s a series of so then by focusing on that thought of wanting to help others through the attainment of Buddhahood, this is the development of bodhicitta. So there’s a series of steps that lead to that conclusion. And in terms of Lama Tsongkhapa’s combined method, the first step, as I already explained, is equanimity. Then the second step is reflecting that all these sentient beings have been our mothers. Or we can think how they’ve been our fathers and other kinds of beings who stood in a kind relationship to us, that the Tibetans had a very strong regard for the idea of the kindness, for the kindness of the mother towards the child.
In general, you can say that this is the most intensive relationship, the most powerful love that’s experienced on the ordinary level. We’re not talking now about Buddhas and bodhisattvas, but we’re talking about ordinary people, that the strongest love that’s found in ordinary society is the love of the mother for the child. Of course, some people might say that they felt that their mother didn’t love them or that their mother was unkind to them. So there’s sometimes a problem there, but in general we can see that when mother love works as it should, then it’s a very powerful emotion, it’s a very compelling emotion, And mothers who have had children always say that there’s nothing so powerful as the feeling that a mother has for her children. It’s a totally overwhelming sort of emotion, this very protective feeling that the mother has for the children.
And that we’ve stood in this relationship to all these beings because we’ve been born again and again in the human realm and in the animal realm, we’ve had mothers. And this has happened so many times that every single sentient being has been a mother again and again, in human form and in various animal forms. And so if we look at the care of human mothers for their babies, and the care of animal mothers for their babies, and even if we don’t feel that our own particular mother was necessarily a good example, we can always see plenty of good examples around us. Even if you look at cats with kittens or nowadays people don’t have chooks in their backyards, but in the old days people used to have chooks and then the chooks would go clucky and hatch out the eggs and the eggs would hatch into chickens and you’d see how the hen would go around with the chickens, fuss over them and protect them and so on. So you can see all these examples of the mother’s care for the child and think of how we’ve been protected by these beings in this way.
And so of course there’s the other side of it too, that they’ve been our enemies, but at this point we’re focusing on the kindness. We’re putting aside the consideration of the times they’ve been unkind to us, and we’re just focusing on the times that they’ve been kind to us. And we’re doing this deliberately because we want to produce this attitude of appreciation for them. So having they say this is a very hard meditation to achieve. It’s very hard to realize, to realize that all beings have been your mother.
To look at you’ve realized this meditation when you look at any other being and immediately sort of feel mother. And it’s not an easy one to achieve. But when it is achieved, or at least when you achieve some sort of feeling for this meditation, then the next step is to remember their kindness. First of all, just seeing them as having been your mother, and then the next step is reflecting on their kindness to you while they were a mother. And also other meditations that can come in here which are not concerned with the kindness of other beings while there were our mothers, but just remembering their kindness in general.
And we should remember how kind other beings are to us all the time. And this doesn’t mean that they necessarily meant to be kind, but just that this is the effect it has. So for instance, everything that we enjoy in our life, the houses we live in, the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, all these things come to us through the kindness of other beings, and it doesn’t mean that they are particularly meant to benefit us because they might have just been thinking of earning their living. In most cases, probably they were not particularly thinking that they were going to benefit the particular person, you, who is enjoying these benefits, they were just thinking of how they were going to go out and make a living. But still the effect that comes to us is that we enjoy these benefits.
And not only from the living beings now, but this goes back through generation before generation of all beings who passed on the knowledge of how to make all these things and who passed on the crops that have been produced year after year and the seeds that have come down to us, all these things. So really, all these beings have been kind to us in so many different ways that we can’t even begin to count them. And so after having remembered their kindness, then we can think of repaying their kindness. When we think how kind they are, it’s then natural to feel a spontaneous wish to do something kind for them in return. So we don’t have to put a lot of analysis into some of these meditations, but a lot of them is just a question of having a feeling and focusing on it.
And so there’s not really terribly much to think about in terms of repaying their kindness, except just these very thoughts. We want to repay their kindness and we just focus on that. Then the fifth one is thinking of cherishing others above the self. So we think that all beings like ourselves seek happiness and we just focus on cherishing them, cherishing others above ourselves. And we can think that there are so many others, we’re just one and there are so many others.
So it’s obviously, once we get this feeling that other beings are equal to ourselves and that other beings are kind, and that we can see them in this way, rather than being closed off to their feelings, but being open to the way they feel, it starts to seem logical that the happiness of so many others is something that is more important than our own happiness, and that cherishing others is something which becomes which comes to seem more natural than cherishing yourself. But we can then we go on to reinforce this thought, because after all, does go against the grain with us the way that we’ve been conditioned over our past lifetimes. So we reinforce this thought by contemplating on the disadvantages of cherishing ourselves more than others, and the advantages of cherishing others more than ourselves. And there are some analysis to go through in this respect. There’s quite a lot of things to think about in terms of the disadvantages of self-cherishing, how much self-cherishing harms us.
When we think about this, we can see that all our problems, all our sufferings, all our cycling in saṃsāra and all the troubles that come out of that, come out of this self-cherishing thought, and the fact that we failed to get out of saṃsāra, the fact that we failed to attain enlightenment, the fact that we’re still stuck here, the fact that we have obstacles in our practice, that our practice is difficult, all these things come out of the self-cherishing thought. So if we can get rid of the self-cherishing thought, then it’s going to just dispose of all these problems. And the advantages of cherishing others more than ourselves is that it brings all these benefits. Even if we’re just looking at benefits to ourselves, pays to cherish others. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and the other Lamas always say, if you want to be selfish and self-cherishing, then do it in a big way by cherishing others.
Because if you want to be really happy, the way to be really happy is to cherish others more than yourself. And sounds funny, but it’s based on very sound psychological principles. There, that will come back to. Yes. If we well, just in itself, just the thought of cherishing others more than yourself Makes you happy.
Makes you happy. It’s a happy thought at the heart. All our suffering was really caused by our self-cherishing, this sort of closed feeling in our heart that comes from our self centeredness and our thoughts spiraling in us, whereas the cherishing of others more than self. Actually, there are various different thoughts that tend to reverse this very close and very short term sort of focus on the self, which causes all our troubles. There’s different degrees of changing it.
For instance, when we just focus on future lives rather than this life, this relieves a lot of this pressure from the self-cherishing because it gives us a broader perspective. Even though we’re still thinking of ourselves, it somehow gives us a big view rather than a small view and it opens up the heart. It opens up the mind. But to really open the heart is to cherish others more than the self and this is tremendously powerful. So it just brings this open heart and this shift of perspective.
So really, it’s our own troubles that really weigh on us. By seeing them in perspective and taking more concern for others, then our own troubles just start to seem petty and unimportant. They can even seem beneficial to us because they give us a means for working. So for One of the practices we have to achieve is patience. At the moment, we’ve just been looking at seeing other beings as equal, but eventually we come to see the enemy as our best helper because our enemy gives us the chance to practice patience.
And when we see the qualities of patience, then we see the person who helps us is who who helps us to develop that is doing us a big favor. So then the next step is the fact that having seen that then that follows on the practice of giving and taking or Tonglen. If you you’ve heard of that? Anyway, there isn’t time to describe that tonight, but basically it means meditating on a willingness to relieve the sufferings of others by taking it on yourself and to give away your virtues and happiness to others. And this is very, very powerful, and it’s it’s a well, tremendously effective antidote to self-cherishing.
And so having gone through these different steps for developing love and compassion, and the thought of cherishing others, and taking on their sufferings and giving out your goodness to them. Then the next step is the that’s counted as two steps in this so there’s actually eleven steps in Lama Tsongkhapa’s method. So the the tenth step is the pure wish to take on the Can’t read my own writing. So I think it means, anyway, to take on responsibility for others and to take to take so to take on the the responsibility on yourself anyway to to bring about the the welfare of others. And this means their ultimate welfare, their liberation, and and enlightenment.
And this is called the pure wish. And the eleventh step which follows on from that is the actual development of bodhicitta, which is the actual decision to seek enlightenment for the benefit of all. And again, there isn’t really terribly much to think about. You’ve gone through all those other steps to develop the thoughts leading up to it, and you’ve understood the qualities focus on that thought of attaining enlightenment and make a very firm decision in your mind to do that. So then what follows after that is the actual taking of the bodhisattva vows, having done all these contemplations and repeated them again and again and developed a pretty strong feeling for it.
So it doesn’t mean that you have to actually have realized bodhicitta because the that’s something that doesn’t come easily. That’s quite difficult to actually gain the realization of bodhicitta. But we can develop this artificial bodhicitta that is by working at it, can develop the thought within ourselves. If we don’t keep on working at it, it’s going to fade away again. And we’re constantly going to be encountering situations that are going to bring up thoughts in us that are going to interfere with our bodhicitta.
So we’re going to have clinging attachment and thoughts of anger. All these things are going to disturb our bodhicitta thought. But at least we can keep on coming back to it again and again and working on it all the time. And if we have this thought, if we have this intention, then we can take the bodhisattva vows. And there are two levels of the of bodhicitta aspiration.
There’s the aspiring bodhicitta and there’s the engaging bodhicitta. And there are vows connected with each of these levels. So if you take the the aspiring bodhicitta is having the wish to actual to help sentient beings, to gain enlightenment in order to help sentient beings. The engaging bodhicitta is actually taking on a commitment to do practices connected with gaining this result. So it’s it’s a bigger commitment.
And the the vows connected with that help us in our practice of the six perfections, which is the practice that you that you have to carry out. In actual fact, the the six perfections only become the practice of the six perfections when the being is a bodhisattva. And when we’re not a bodhisattva, then we’re not really practicing the six perfections,, but we can be practicing these qualities. Does anybody know what the six perfections are? Sure.
Mhmm. Yes. That’s the final one. Yes. We call that concentration.
Okay. So it’s generosity, moral conduct or ethics, patience, enthusiastic perseverance, concentration, and wisdom. Anyway, we have to be cultivating these things even though we can’t say we’re practicing the six perfection yet. We do have to be cultivating these six qualities. Enthusiastic perseverance or diligence.
Yes. Yes. It doesn’t mean making a million dollars. But that’s a form of Yes. Well, I mean, if you weed your garden and you’re bored with the weeding, but you can see it say, well, you know, I have to weed this garden so I can use this as means to develop my enthusiastic perseverance.
And and you can think that, you know, while while I’m weeding this garden, I’m cleaning the the delusions out of my mind. And you can think I’m I’m also, like, strengthening my enthusiastic perseverance for doing unpleasant jobs so that I can become a bodhisattva and have this great enthusiastic perseverance. So then it becomes a Dharma practice, a Mahāyāna practice. This is the actually, this kind of practice comes very much into these mind training practices and particularly into the exchange of self for others practice, which Atisha brought back from Sumatra. So maybe there’ll be some opportunity to talk about these things at a future talk.
But all these things are something that are very conducive to our to the development of our our Mahāyāna practice. So yes. So actually, yes. That’s my last paragraph. That that that the the practice of the Mahāyāna thought training is is a very important aspect of this practice and that this is a particularly prominent feature, particularly of that exchange of self with others practice.
And the and and this is the can this involves the conversion of hindering circumstances. So it’s very useful to us because of course we encounter a lot of hindering circumstances. And if we think of these things as being hindering circumstances, then it’s going to make our practice difficult. But if we can take a different attitude through having learned the thought training and can see these circumstances as being helpful, our practice can just zoom ahead. So there’s different practices that are explained to help us to do this.
The shortest one that everybody knows generally is the Eight Verses of Thought Training by Langri Tangpa. You’ve probably had teachings on that. Generally, if you’re on the Mahāyāna teachings, this gets taught quite frequently. And other teachings that are very powerful include the Wheel of Sharp Weapons and the seven point thought transformation, and suppose there are quite a number of others. So That concludes it.
So do you want to do some meditation or do you want to finish? If if anybody we’re already past the time. So if anybody wants to go home, then then just go. There’s try out there. Yes.
Is it is it hot? Yes. Yes. Maybe if somebody wants to go, they can take a a cookie before they go. But, anyway so we’ll just do a brief meditation on equanimity.
So I don’t really need to explain the game, but just visualize the friend, enemy, and stranger in front of you surrounded by all sentient beings, and just focus on them and think of how you feel about them, and Then try to reason yourself out of those feelings by understanding that this is a mistaken viewpoint. In actual fact, all these things are equal to us, first of all, because they have the same nature as ourselves, desiring happiness, desiring to be free of suffering. And in addition, they’ve all been equally kind to us and all been equally harmful to us over the course of all their previous lives and also the way in which they relate to us now is bound to change again in the future. So now at this point, hopefully, we’ve developed a little bit of equality in our attitude towards these three beings. So now we can send out love to them by thinking that at our heart there appears a small image of Chenrezig or just a point of white light, which is the nature of Chenrezig’s mind, and that this is also the ultimate nature of our own mind when it becomes perfected and purified.
And we can think that this from this rays of white light emanate out and go through our body and out through our body to all the sentient beings. And that we’re sending out love and blissful thoughts that they should blissful thoughts, wisdom thoughts, that they should attain every happiness, and especially the happiness of the stages of the path to enlightenment.