Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute final talk of her graduated path series, Ven McAndrew teaches concentration and wisdom through the elephant chart—a classical metaphor where a wild elephant represents the undisciplined mind, progressively tamed over nine stages of Shamatha. She outlines prerequisites for retreat: quiet location, reliable supplies, experienced teacher, and genuine renunciation of sensory attachment. She details five obstacles encountered in practice (laziness, forgetting instruction, mental agitation paired with dullness, neglecting antidotes, unnecessary application) and their remedies. McAndrew explains the core method: visualizing a Buddha image to develop single-pointed focus, then integrating this stable concentration with analytical meditation on emptiness. She traces how practitioners alternate between Shamatha and Vipassana, deepening focus then probing insight, until both merge into Samādhi—the unified practice cutting through delusion. For practitioners engaged with the Lamrim teachings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 27 6P 1998 04 22.mp3
UUID: c63629b0-1c38-4153-b64e-9749ff6cf80c
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-04-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,564
Thinking that we’re here tonight not just to bring about our own welfare, but, in particular, thinking that we’re closely involved with all these other beings. We’re totally dependent on all these other beings in this world with us and we’re closely interrelated with them and have been through beginningless lives so we can’t just leave them to their plight while we seek our own freedom, own liberation, understanding that they have the same nature as ourselves of wanting to find happiness and that they don’t understand the way that they haven’t had the good fortune. So many of them don’t know the way to find real happiness and they’re following the wrong methods they’re pursuing mistaken means and only finding more suffering and so it’s up to us each of us as individuals, to make it our concern to take care of these beings and to think that we’re making our practice with the goal of bringing about their welfare and understanding that in order to do that at present we don’t have the means, we can’t really help them, we can give very little help to other beings and even that help doesn’t bring lasting results. So if we’re going to help them to find lasting happiness we have to follow the path to lasting happiness ourselves and especially we have to attain full Buddhahood we have to attain the great state of enlightenment so as to be able to have the means to help others effectively Can you you can all hear all right?
Actually tonight is the last talk in the series that I’ve been doing on the graduated path and over the next couple of months I’m going to be giving some one off talks are each on a separate topic and also I might mention now that I’m going to be away for one Thursday during September, so I think on that night maybe the Thursday night might be cancelled. You can check it up in your newsletter, but be on the watch out for that because Two? Two. Okay, right. Two cancelled.
I’m going to be away for ten days, so it’s going to cross two Thursdays. So we’ve been going through the graduated path, and we’ve gone through the three scopes. Over the last weeks, we’ve been discussing about the great scope, working towards enlightenment, and we’ve been talking about the path of a bodhisattva and how a bodhisattva works towards enlightenment. And so last week we were talking about how to practice on the path to enlightenment and this was in terms of the six perfections which is the practice of a bodhisattva. Before that we’d been discussing how to become a bodhisattva how to develop the great compassion and the sort of enlightenment which takes on the responsibility of working for sentient beings and having done that then as it set out in the teachings the next step is to practice the engagement in the path which actually leads to enlightenment and that’s explained in terms of the six perfections paramita and the practice is important to us even if we’re not bodhisattvas maybe there might be one or two people here who are not bodhisattvas yet so it’s important it’s important for all of us to to study this practice because although practicing the six perfections is a bodhisattva’s practice, we actually have to practice the same things and we just don’t call them perfections because we’re not that good yet.
So if we understand these things we’ll understand what sort of practice we need to do and we can become better. So we went through the first four last week. Has anybody here game to think what they are? No, we didn’t go through Wisdom last week. Wrong.
No minties for you. Right. Yes. Yes. Joy is something, isn’t it?
Generosity. Yes. Right. And joyous effort, if that’s right. And what comes in between?
The Both of those. Right. That’s right. So which comes you might not remember the order, that’s pretty good anyway. Generosity, then ethics conduct, then patience, and then enthusiastic perseverance, or joyous effort, as you called it.
All the there’s all these different translations. And then we have the other two, which Heidi’s already mentioned, and that’s concentration and wisdom. So that’s what we’re talking about tonight. Heidi will be very happy that I get an opportunity to show you the elephant chart, which we blew up, which comes from her book, one of her books. So anyway, I want I have an idea.
She might be. Anyway, I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the elephant chart, and I’m just going to show it to you, just some look, show and tell. Anyway, it’s interesting to see, just in general terms, it shows the process of concentration starting off. The wild elephant represents the mind, and if you know anything about elephants at all, you’ll know that they have to catch them in the wild, then tame them. Generally they catch the young ones, but anyway, for the purpose of our concentration we just have to think that our minds like a wild elephant.
The wild elephants being led around by monkey and that’s our tendency to be all over the place. So the meditator is setting out to tame the mind and he has to have the equipment, so he’s got the hook and the rope, the lasso there. After he catches up with the elephant and actually gets the rope onto it, then he has to go through various different stages of taming it. Here we’re particularly talking about the process of gaining single pointed concentration, so it’s in relation to that. So it goes through various stages as we gain more and more ability to remain focused on a single object without the attention wavering, then the elephant becomes more and more subdued.
And also, it becomes purified of various obstacles, which means that the colour changes and also you get rid of the monkey and you get rid of the rabbit, which also appears along the way, which has various significances of scattering and sinking. And eventually, you get to the point where he he’s riding the elephant, and then he doesn’t even need the elephant anymore. He’s just soaring through the sky, and then he comes back again with with his sword of wisdom. So I rather like I rather like that soaring through the sky with this head. Think one of these days, maybe I’ll just see if I can do that, you know, just sort of take this off and jump off a cliff or something and see what happens.
Yes, well you can stand down at the bottom with a pile of mattresses. So So anyway, there’s an awful lot that could be said about concentration, and I can’t say terribly much in one night, and I’m not going to try to I want to get to talk about wisdom also tonight, and I think it’s important that we start to think about the topic of emptiness, and in particular, to get a bit of a grasp on the idea of discriminating between the conventional self and the false truly existent self. That can help us a lot if we can just think about that a bit as we go about our business. It will be quite helpful for us then eventually when we do have an opportunity to meditate, we’ll have some sort of idea about it. So it can be a tremendously complex topic to actually talk about how to go about gaining single pointed concentration.
Think I talked about it a little bit a few months ago, too, maybe a little bit more than I’m going to do tonight. Actually, a few years ago, when FPMT had its anniversary, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Geshe Tashi Tsering were both taking it in turns to talk on this topic, and they talked about it for between the two of them, they they taught for a whole month on this topic. So and and it was very interesting also. So I don’t know whether those teachings have been transcribed or not, but I imagine that they might have been. But anyway, the thing is that there is all this knowledge to be gained of the different points that we need to understand if we’re really going to be serious about doing this practice, such as the various obstacles that are to be encountered.
First of all, the causes and conditions that we need to gather together, and then the obstacles that we’re going to encounter, what we need to do actually when we do the practice, and the obstacles and the antidotes to the obstacles and the different stages that are attained and how you recognise the different stages and which obstacles are encountered on which stage and which antidotes you apply to which obstacle and so on So and that’s just the start of it. I mean, that that is a large part of it, but it’s not the whole. So the elephant chart is very interesting because it gives you that sort of vivid pictorial sort of imagery to go with the different stages that are involved with this process. There are actually nine stages to be attained in terms of gathering or gaining single point of concentration. That’s starting off right from our first attempt at meditation, where we first make the attempt to place our mind single pointedly on an object which usually is the breathing when we start off and we know that the mind doesn’t want to stay on the object it keeps on going off.
So then we have to find some sort of means of managing to develop our ability to remain focused on that object. And in order to even start doing this, we have to have had some teachings, some sort of explanation about how to meditate. Even if it’s just a few simple words of instruction, you need somebody to tell you what to do, what to focus on, how to practice improving the focus. So we don’t need to go into retreat to do this sort of practice, but it’s necessary to go into retreat to gain the higher levels of concentration. I was told by Geshe Ngawang Dhargye in a teaching many years ago that you can only attain the first few levels.
I think it might be only the first three levels, I’m not sure but anyway, only the first, it might be the first five, but anyway, only the first few levels without going into retreat. And after that, then you really need to go into retreat in order to gain this. And before you can even seriously think about going into a Shamatha retreat, a retreat with the purpose of gaining single pointed concentration, then you have to gather various causes and conditions together. Just to mention these briefly, without going into a lot of details: First of all, you have to have a suitable place. It needs to be a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, where your practice won’t be interrupted.
Even for ordinary meditation, it’s better to have a quiet place. But when you’re going into single pointed concentration, it’s absolutely essential. Otherwise, if you get interrupted too frequently, then your mind starts to expect an interruption. When you’re trying to get into deep meditation and some sort of loud noise or something disturbs you, then it’s a bit of a jolt to the mind. After a while, if this happens too often, then the mind actually starts expecting something to happen and it just doesn’t want to go into the deeper meditation.
So it’s a real obstacle and you have to be somewhere where you can feel secure that this sort of thing isn’t going to happen to you. Then also you have to be sure that your needs for food and water can be met. For the Tibetans, they would go into something like a cave or a retreat hut up in the mountains, which would fulfil the requirements of silence and isolation. Sometimes they might have difficulties getting food and they would also have to be sure that they were near water and they would have to make arrangements to be sure that their food supply would be provided. In the same way, we would have to arrange for all this.
If we were going to go into a serious Shinay retreat somewhere, then we’d have to go somewhere where our material needs would be taken care of, where people would do our shopping for us and perhaps cook our food for us and bring it at a regular time and so on. Certainly, we’d need to make sure that we were financially taken care of, that we weren’t going to run out of money and that people weren’t going to cut off our food supply because of shortage of funds or something like this, so all these things have to be arranged one way or another, either you have to have the money or you have to have a patron or something like this. So don’t think this is easy. This kind of thing can be incredibly difficult to get together. I’ve known people who have gone around for years from one place to another, gone from one person to another requesting them to help, and somehow it’s never really come together.
I’ve almost come to the conclusion that it’s a kind of purification process that you have to go through before you can actually do the retreat. When you’re actually mentally prepared and have sort of purified your mind enough and showed enough determination, then somehow everything just seems to happen by magic. But in the meantime, there can be all sorts of obstacles and setbacks before you get to that point. So that’s just my own personal observation, but certainly it looks that way to me. Also it needs to be somewhere where you have an experienced meditation teacher at hand, because when you start to do this kind of intensive meditation there can be obstacles, all sorts of problems arising.
You might need advice about these things. Also, of course, you need to receive the teachings. There’s apparently two ways that this can be done. One way is that you receive all the teachings beforehand and study them and familiarise yourself with a thorough knowledge of the different aspects of this teaching before you go into retreat. Another way is that the student is doing a retreat close to where the teacher lives and the teacher will just give a part of the instruction to the student, the student will go into retreat and gain the attainment of that particular portion of the instruction and then the teacher will give the next portion of the instruction like that.
So that would be a really nice way to do it because you would really have your teacher’s guidance and care of you over each section of the process. Then other things that we need to have are internal things, which are even harder to gain, and that is having limited desires and a lack of attachment of to the objects of the five senses, the five physical senses. We need to have this renunciation of attachment to these things if we’re going to be happy in retreat, otherwise our minds will be always going off to the things that we can’t have while we’re in retreat and this is a major obstacle So usual anyway, once we get all these things together, particularly the renunciation, then gaining Samatha wouldn’t necessarily be so difficult. It’s said that generally when meditators go into retreat and they have all these conditions gathered together, then it only takes three months or maybe six months or a year to gain a single point of concentration, which might sound like a fairly long retreat, but it’s really a very short period of time in comparison to the amount of time that some meditators spend in retreat doing their various practices and it’s really a very powerful advance in your meditative ability from not having this single pointed concentration up to having calm abiding or shinne.
The person goes into retreat, and the way that it’s usually explained is that the object of meditation is some sort of visualized object, and the example that’s used is an image of Buddha. There’s a reason for that, rather than focusing on some sort of neutral or meaningless object such as a candle flame. It would be possible to gain single pointed concentration by focusing on some other object, but it doesn’t have any particular meaning in itself, whereas you focus on an image of Buddha, then it becomes something that has a very powerful effect on your mind. It’s very helpful for developing the qualities Buddha has. For that reason, we choose an image like that to focus on.
The explanation is in terms of this image. Actually, there are some people who don’t go so well with visualized image and do better on some sort of formless meditation, such as the nature of the mind. But generally, it’s explained as being a visualized image. So the person goes into retreat, they get their retreat place set up, they have all the proper cushions and altar and so on, and they have their image of Buddha in there with them whether it’s a statue or a thangka. They first of all of course have to familiarize themselves with this image by looking at it and learn all the details, know exactly what the posture is, the face, the colours, everything and just get that clear in the mind.
And then the person has to stop looking at the image and they have to start to recreate this image in their mind and at first when you start doing this you do it analytically you go over the whole image and recall the different parts one by one and try to get them clear and to remember them and then after some time having gone over it analytically you would focus and try to hold the image clear for a while and then after a while at first that’s difficult to do, so at first you spend more time on the analytical process of going over it part by part, remembering all the details, and every now and then stopping to try to hold the whole image focused. As you develop more familiarity with the image, you can start to hold the whole image a little bit more clearly and you can try to hold it for longer periods. Then the person can start to try to lengthen the period of time, the length of time at which they can hold this image. While they’re doing this, they start to develop more single pointed concentration, deeper single pointed concentration, and as their length of time gets longer they also start to experience the different objects, the different obstacles.
And so there are five interruptions or obstacles that are going to be encountered. Some of them we don’t have to worry about until we get well into the practice, but some of them are important at the beginning. So the first obstacle is laziness. And that’s just the state of mind that doesn’t want to do the work, that doesn’t want to make the effort, that might think it’s easier to go off and do something like talking to your friends or going around and enjoying yourself or just sort of engaging in worldly activities Or perhaps even just the person might have reached the point where they’ve got it together to have the conditions necessary to gain single pointed concentration. At that point, if they put off going into the retreat and um, hum around doing the same sort of Dharma practice that they had been doing, then at that stage that would be a kind of laziness too because they’re avoiding putting in the extra effort that’s needed for this kind of achievement.
It’s a very important achievement to get where we’re trying to go, so we need to do it. The antidotes to this obstacle of laziness are four. There are eight antidotes and four of them are to the first one. So it seems like we have to put a lot of effort into this one laziness, overcoming it. The first one is having conviction and faith in the value of doing this practice.
And that would come from having learned about it, having developed an interest in doing this practice of gaining single pointed concentration and Shine. And then, having got this, then you have to keep on contemplating on the value of this meditation until you start wishing, and develop this state of mind of wishing to attain single pointed concentration. That’s the second antidote. The third antidote is by wishing, by building up this state of wishing more and more, you develop enthusiastic perseverance in practicing single point and concentration. And the fourth antidote is that you contemplate what is achieved by gaining Shamatha, or Shinay, the realisations which come at the end, which is the mental and physical ecstasy of the single pointed concentration.
So that’s the first one, laziness. And then the second one is forgetting the instruction and the details of the meditation object. This makes it difficult to do your meditation session effectively. So the remedy to that is memory. Being able to remember these things, committing them to memory.
The third obstacle is mental agitation and dullness. You might think these are two things and they are actually opposite to each other, but they are counted as one because they tend to go together, they tend to alternate in the person’s mind, and you get rid of them together and they both have the same remedy. There’s coarse and subtle mental agitation and dullness. We don’t have to worry about these when we’re just starting off. These are obstacles that we encounter when we get further into the practice, when you’ve achieved the first few stages.
At the beginning, we don’t say we have mental agitation and dullness, we just say that our mind is wandering all over the place and that we’re always just going completely dull. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Here we’re talking about a kind of obstacle that arises when you’re already beginning to have a little bit of focus on the object. It doesn’t mean that you’re totally wandering off the object, but that there are distractions coming in that keep you from really staying with it. Vigilance.
The coarse mental agitation and coarse dullness are easy enough to recognise, but after the practitioner has dealt with those, then there is a subtle level of dullness and mental agitation that has to be dealt with. That takes quite a long time, it takes a lot of effort and persistence to overcome. It can be difficult to recognise. The practitioner might think that they’ve actually gone a long way, that they’ve actually got very close to it, or that they’ve got there, but in actual fact they could be experiencing this subtle dullness. Because you get to a point where the mind actually remains on the object, it doesn’t wander off, but there’s a sort of dullness and lack of clarity there.
The mental agitation when it becomes subtle is compared to being like water flowing under ice. So you can’t really see it, but there is still a movement there. So the remedy to that is mental alertness or vigilance. So that’s the sixth remedy. The third obstacle and the sixth remedy.
Then the fourth one is relevant to somebody who is up to this level neglecting to apply the remedies, that is not getting rid of the dullness and agitation. The remedy to that is to apply these remedies. The antidote to that is applying these remedies. For example, to deal with dullness, topics that stimulate your mind, as contemplating the preciousness of the human rebirth, or the qualities of the Three Jewels of refuge, or there are certain visualisations that can be done to brighten up the mind. Or if necessary, the person can stop and walk around a little bit and splash water on their face and go outside and look at the scenery and so on, and then come back inside again.
For excitement, the person has to contemplate on some topic that will deflate their agitation and excitement. Topics such as thinking about impermanence and death and suffering of the lower realms and the general sufferings of saṃsāra are all the kind of topics that counteract this kind of excitement. Or it might be effective to return to watching the breath and counting the number of breaths that the person can remain concentrated on while they’re counting. You see how many breaths you can before you lose concentration. That kind of going back to some really basic concentration practice might be necessary here.
And another point that’s important is that the session shouldn’t be made too long. This is a useful point, because we need to keep this in mind when we’re doing retreat. If we’re doing some other kind of retreat also, we need to make sessions of a suitable length. If our sessions are too long, then we’ll feel fed up before the session’s over, and we won’t want to come back and do the next session. So it’s important to stop while we’re still happy.
The fifth one is unnecessary application, and you don’t have to worry about that until you’re getting very close to achieving the full single point of concentration. At that stage, the person doesn’t need to keep on applying the antidotes. If they are being applied unnecessarily, they actually act as a disturbance to the mind. You have to recognise the right point to stop and not to stop too soon, but not to keep on applying them when they’re not needed. So then the meditation doesn’t stop at the ninth stage either.
At that point, the person has attained single pointed concentration, and it’s a very sharp state of mind. It might interest you to know that you actually gain unwavering focus on the object at about the fifth stage. And that doesn’t mean that you’ve gained single pointed concentration, because at that stage it’s not powerful enough, it’s not clear enough, and it hasn’t gathered to itself the whole power of the mind. So what we have to do is keep on working and building up the focus of the mind, getting more and more of the mind’s full power onto the object, and that means that we have to go right on until the ninth stage is reached. And then when the ninth stage is reached, that’s not calm abiding yet, because the person still has to go on and continue with this single pointed concentration, developing it deeper and deeper, until they attain mental and physical pliancy and ecstasy, which is the experience that comes with Samatha, the actual Samatha or Shine.
Shine is the Tibetan term. So the calm abiding is attained at that stage, and then the purpose of attaining calm abiding is to go on and apply it to meditation on emptiness. It’s also applied to many other kinds of meditations. You can gain realization of all the different topics on the graduated path by gaining Shinay and then meditating on topics like impermanence and love and compassion and all the rest of it. But in particular here it’s being explained in terms of applying it to gaining an understanding of emptiness.
So the person has to start to practice analytical meditation on emptiness together with this calm abiding. So that the person before this has been practising analytical meditation on emptiness. It starts off with studying. The person has to study the teachings. They have to think about it, debate, ask questions, get their doubts resolved and so on, go through this whole process and develop some sort of understanding of the process of meditation and what it is that they’re trying to understand, and they meditate on this.
But at this stage, they don’t try to do that single pointedly, and they work on their calm abiding separately to that. When the calm abiding is attained, when the person really attained Shinay, then they try to apply to this analytical meditation on emptiness. This is where it starts to become the practice of wisdom. In actual fact, all this study and meditation on emptiness was the practice of wisdom, but at this stage, a single pointed concentration is being brought into it. At first, the person can’t do this.
It doesn’t really work very well, but they have to bring the two together, and when you bring the two together, that’s called Vipassana. The person finds that as they meditate analytically they start to lose the power of their single- concentration. So then they have to go back to their work on single-pointed concentration on Shinay and enhance their Shine meditation again by visualising Buddha. Then they go back again and apply it to meditation on emptiness until they, by continually doing this alternating between Shinay visualising Buddha and the Vipassana meditation on emptiness, then they eventually reach a point where they are able to maintain the single-pointed concentration, the Shinay, and at the same time apply it to Vipassana meditation. So, when they reach this point, when it becomes stable, then it’s called Samādhi.
When they’ve reached the point where they can maintain stability Samatha and this meditation on emptiness. So they meditate this way during their session, on the emptiness of true existence, and then in between the sessions, when they come out of that meditation, in between sessions, the practitioner has to meditate on, or has to contemplate on seeing conventional objects as being illusory, which is the conventional reality. So they’re meditating on the two aspects of truth, the ultimate truth and the conventional truth. We don’t see either of them at the moment. We see things in a distorted way.
We can’t see the truth either of the ultimate nature of things or of conventionalities. So this practitioner is learning gradually to see these two truths. So does anybody have any questions about this? Yes. When you’re meditating on Buddha, you mean?
Or when you’re doing the meditation on emptiness? Just meditating on Buddha, so it’s little bit concentration. All that you’re focusing on is just this visualization, this image of Buddha. It would become very, very real. As you became more focused, would seem like Buddha was really there, not just an image of Buddha, but the actual Buddha was there, all made of light.
You would see all the details. It would become more and more clear and detailed as you went on, and the light would become more and more radiant. Somebody who did this retreat, he didn’t actually attain it, he spent quite a lot of time meditating, developing, trying to develop this meditation. He said that it was like as if you could see the whole of Buddha, the front, the back, everything all at once, even though you’re sort of meditating as if you were looking at an image from the front view. It’s a different state of mind to just looking at something with your eyes.
You’re seeing with your mind, so you can actually see the whole thing at once. Well, we don’t have terribly much time when we do the Tārā meditation. So, I usually give you a little bit of time after we have done the first prayers, after we have established the visualisation, after we’ve recited the description of the visualisation, I used to give a little bit of time to establish the visualisation. In that stage there, you would be going over the details and building up a clear idea of all the different details. And then I think by the end of that, you would want to just get a general idea and try to remain focused on that general visualisation while you’re doing the mantras and so on, because while you’re saying the mantras, you can’t really have enough spare mental energy to keep on going over the details as well, I wouldn’t think.
Maybe some people could. But on the other hand, you might sometimes feel that you have recited enough mantras and you want to just do a little bit of contemplative meditation for a while. So then if you chose, you might decide that you’re going to go back and start looking at the visualisation again, and you might decide then you’d go over the different parts, and then you might decide to perhaps do a bit of stabilizing meditation just on whole image. So you could do whatever. But you need to start off with the sort of analytical meditation of the parts before you try to get the whole picture, yes.
Otherwise you just won’t be able to get the details at all in the whole picture. Yes. Well, yes, you can you can