Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew explores how visualization and deep meditation shift the mind toward direct insight into emptiness. She opens with Buddha visualization—consciously constructing the image yet experiencing it as vividly external naturally weakens dualistic perception. She then explores Shamatha states: the physical and mental bliss arising through concentration, and how these combine with analytical meditation on emptiness to generate superior bliss. The core examines the false view of a truly existent, independent self—how it generates all suffering and disturbing emotions, and why direct meditative insight into emptiness alone can permanently eradicate rather than suppress them. She walks through both Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna paths, the nine-level purification process, and offers concrete methods for identifying and investigating the illusion of a solid “I.” For practitioners with foundational study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 28 6P1998 04 22.mp3
UUID: 7ec62264-98da-44d3-a7ae-35c8464d5c64
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-04-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,727
You can actually spend quite a lot of time just trying to visualize one detail clearly, then you can go on to the next detail and so on. But at first, won’t be able to get the whole thing clearly, so you need to alternate looking at the details and trying to hold the big picture. Well, haven’t gone beyond duality, but you wouldn’t be thinking about yourself, because your mind would be all tied up in the image. But still, somewhere in your mind to begin with, there would be this concept of Buddha as being something separate to yourself. There’s that duality of subject and object.
But you wouldn’t be sort of analysing that conceptually. But later on, of course, when you’re getting into the meditation on emptiness, that has to go. Yes. Of course, it’s on a different level to the way we see ourselves in everyday life, the way we see things, in everyday life, the way we see other people and so on. It wouldn’t be like that.
Of course, a visualised image of Buddha, which you build up in your own mind, is going to be much less of another sort of self, another type of object than somebody that you meet when you’re walking around. It’s going to appear less that way to you. In actual reality, the objects that we the people that we meet when we’re walking around are non dualistic also, but we it’s very hard for us to see that. Whereas with the visualisation of Buddha, I think it would tend to lessen your dualism, your dualistic view a bit. And that might be, I think, one reason why visualisation is quite a powerful tool.
It makes it easier for you to make that jump from dualistic to non dualistic thinking, because you start to see that you can actually build up a picture in your mind, and then that picture can actually become something tremendously vivid and powerful. And at the same time, you know that it’s something that you sort of consciously build up yourself, starts to shift and yet you end up with this Buddha in front of you, who would seem to be, you know, an external object Buddha. So you start to see that the dualistic sort of view of this is really not valid. You start to see that this dualistic labelling is just a label and not something that’s really there in the situation. So I don’t know, because I haven’t done this myself, you know, but I’m just supposing that this is the way it would happen.
That one reason why visualisation is a helpful step for us is because it gets our thinking onto a much more subtle plane. Our dualistic view would be still there, but wouldn’t be nearly as gross as it is under ordinary circumstances. And so then the next step is to go beyond that dualistic view. Well, because calm abiding is a little bit a step beyond single pointed concentration when you gain the physical and mental pliancy and ecstasy. Well, you do come back.
I mean, you can’t maintain it for more than a certain period of time. There are some meditators who can sort of stay in these states for months and years, but they’ve been working at it for a long time, you know. But it is quite a remarkable state, they talk about what they call the food of Samādhi. I’ll be talking about Samādhi in a minute. The meditators who get to these really high states gain what they call the food of Samādhi, which means that they don’t need to eat.
They actually are able to take energy from the environment while they’re in this meditative state, and so they’re able to stay that way for as long as they like. But generally, you can’t stay for all that long. The person might stay for a few hours, perhaps something like that. Well, it’s just that they’re I don’t really understand, but I suppose eventually perhaps their mind sort of triggers it off, or something in their mind triggers off waking out of the it’s the same way we wake up from sleep perhaps, you know, you just sort of come out of it after a while. And I suppose sometimes perhaps they might have even set their mind that they would come out of it after a certain period of time or something like that.
There’s a story about one great lama of the past who went visiting some chap who was a very powerful meditator, but didn’t sort of have perhaps some of his other priorities right. He went over to visit him, and he saw that his altar was very dusty and dirty and his water bowls hadn’t been changed and so on. He said, Oh, you know, your altar sends a real message. He said, Oh, well, that’s because I was in deep Samādhi and remained in this meditative contemplation for about forty eight hours or something, so I’ve only just come out of it, so I haven’t done my alter yet. And this chap said, Oh, you know, that’s really no excuse for not making your offerings every day.
So, it seems like, you know, you can sort of decide how long you’re going to stay in your trances. I don’t know very much about that, but Oh, no, you don’t need to. When you’re in these states, you don’t Yes. Even if somebody hasn’t quite got to that point where they have the food of Samādhi, those meditators have the food of Samādhi, they don’t need to eat. They can stay in their caves and not eat, even though they’re not always in deep meditation, but they get enough energy during their meditation to keep them going.
But the other thing is that just while you’re in the meditation, you’re not going to be disturbed by bodily needs. Particularly when you go in this physical physical and mental pliancy. It’s apparently a really marvellous state where the body just feels really light and pliant and comfortable, and people who have reached this state apparently find that, you know, chronic illnesses and so on naturally and everything just seems to come together. You don’t have any more aches and pains from sitting and that sort of thing. So, it’s very nice.
That ecstasy of Shamatha, the mental and physical ecstasy, is really quite special, because even before they get to the point the person is actually experiencing, you know, quite very pleasant mental states, quite a lot of joy and, you know, enjoyable sort of mental states even before they get to that point. But that’s not the end of it. It gets a lot better after that. So the next thing is to develop and when they develop Vipassana and combine the Shamatha and the analytical meditation on emptiness, they say that that’s actually a superior bliss. And then the person just goes on developing.
So we’re talking here about bodhisattvas, but it’s not only bodhisattvas who do this kind of practice, it also has to be done by Hīnayāna practitioners. So, the person’s on the Hīnayāna path or whether they’re on the Mahāyāna path, they have to practice concentration and wisdom, and they have to gain this insight. And this is the means by which the mind is purified of the disturbing emotions and karma which hold us in saṃsāra. And so, what happens is that the person has gained this Vipassana meditation, and at this stage they haven’t yet gained direct insight into emptiness. It’s still conceptual.
And when they’ve got this stable meditation, they keep on meditating. And as I said before, in between the sessions, they look at conventional objects as illusory until they reach the point where they gain the direct insight into emptiness. And that’s called the third path. It’s the path of of seeing. All of these different developments are related to the different paths that the practitioner has to go through.
There are five paths. I’ve talked about this before. Some of you might remember some mention of the five paths. The bodhisattva entered the first path when bodhicitta and renunciation were attained. And the Hīnayāna practitioner entered the first path when he or she attained renunciation without bodhicitta.
And then they go on and do these practices, and when they get up to attaining direct insight, that’s the third path, the path of seeing. So, then they continue on, and having gained direct insight into emptiness, at this stage the person is starting to burn up or to sever the root of saṃsāra, starting to actually eliminate the disturbing emotions and the karmas. They start to be eliminated at this point, and the person is progressively attaining various true cessations of these disturbing emotions and getting rid of the qualities of anger and clinging attachment and ignorance, and gradually removing these in such a way that they’re totally eliminated and won’t ever return. So they’re not just subdued, they’re not just sort of made non manifest, but they’re actually totally eradicated together with their seeds. So it’s not just like pulling a plant up but it’s left lots of seed behind, but it’s like you sort of get all the seeds and everything and burn the whole lot, so that nothing can come back again.
So this is the only way that this can be done. When we do other practices, antidotes to anger and so on, they’re actually working at reducing and diminishing the power that these disturbing emotions have over us. But they can never totally eradicate these disturbing emotions and the seeds. It always leaves something that can come back again, until you get to this point where you can meditate, go into meditative equipoise on emptiness, with direct insight, the direct experience of emptiness. And that has this effect.
As it becomes deeper and deeper, then more and more of these obstacles to liberation are removed. And so the person finally gets to the point where they’ve removed all of these delusions, all of these kleśas or afflictions. And when this point is reached, the person has actually gained liberation. But we are talking about a bodhisattva. So on the path of the Hīnayāna practitioner, this is what they were aiming for, this is the end of the road.
But for the bodhisattva, it’s not the end of the road. Because the bodhisattva has to also deal with the obscurations to omniscience, which are much more subtle. A bodhisattva has got to this point, is sometimes referred to as a higher bodhisattva, has actually gone past the point that the Arhat has reached. From now on he’s coming back voluntarily because of the force of compassion. Every time this bodhisattva dies and comes back again and takes rebirth again, this is no longer under the force of karma.
This bodhisattva has got rid of karma, and so the only thing that brings them back again is the force of their compassion. So they don’t even have to worry about good karma anymore. They’re just working for others all the time, and they’re not thinking about what they can attain for themselves, but they are concerned with attaining enlightenment because this would benefit others. And then they gradually deal with these subtle obscurations, which are standing between the higher bodhisattva and full Buddhahood. And this process just continues until the last tiny obscuration is removed.
And when that is gone, then the bodhisattvas actually attain Buddhahood. So that’s the end of the process. There’s nothing further that can be attained. This is explained in the topic of the Paths and Stages, and the obscurations that the bodhisattva has to remove start off by being they divide into nine. First of all, there is the big of the big, and there’s the medium of the big, and then there’s the small of the big, and then there’s the big of the medium, and it goes on like that.
It’s easy to remember because it all just sort of progresses on like that, and you finally get to the small of the small. And when the small of the small is gone, then there’s nothing. That person what’s the sign of obscure? Obscurations, yes, to omniscience. So that person has got rid of it all, and they’ve attained Buddhahood.
And there’s not the slightest trace of any obscuration there, and so that person then has attained full omniscience and all the other qualities of Buddhahood. So, anyway, to talk a little bit about what the practice of wisdom is, it’s a very vast topic, even vaster than the topic on concentration, which I said the Lamas talked about for a month. Well, when you look at wisdom, the monks who are doing the Geshe training course study these kinds of topics for years and years and years, and there’s a lot of different texts that they study, and there’s a lot of commentaries, a lot of debate. So it’s a very complex path. But we don’t have to worry too much about all of these complexities, really, unless we’re interested.
It can be very interesting to study topics like logic and tenets and so on, and the Prajñāpāramitā texts, all of these things, they can be very fascinating. And there’s actually three different kinds of wisdom. There’s the wisdom of the conventional level of existence, there’s the wisdom of ultimate truth, and there’s the wisdom of how to benefit sentient beings with appropriate means. But generally, when we talk about wisdom, we’re talking about this wisdom of the ultimate truth, understanding the ultimate level, understanding emptiness. And this, as I mentioned already, has to start off with intellectual study, and then, after that, establishing the combination of the understanding gained with meditation.
And the person has to gain an understanding of what’s called shunyata, or emptiness of true existence of the self and of all phenomena. Emptiness means this emptiness of true existence or inherent existence. True existence is a broader term. It’s slightly grosser or coarser. And emptiness of inherent existence is more subtle.
So when it’s presented in the tenets, you find that most of the schools talk about true existence, and the Mādhyamika schools talk about inherent existence. It’s difficult to understand the Mādhyamika viewpoint unless you study the other schools, the other tenets, and then the subtle Mādhyamika view is just focusing in on a much more subtle presentation of the general understanding of true existence that’s set out in the other tenets. And it’s advised to study the tenets of these lower schools as well, so as to be able to understand clearly what it is that Mādhyamika tenets are pointing out. So if you’re interested in reading about some of these things, a good simple introduction is the book, it’s called Practice and Theory of Tibetan Buddhism. Actually, that’s the older edition.
I think there might be a newer edition with a different title, I can’t remember. But it’s by Geshe Lhundup Sopa and Jeffrey Hopkins. Oh, I think it’s called Cutting Through Appearances as the new I can hardly read my own writing here, but I’ve got it written down. The newer edition is called Cutting Through Appearances, but it’s the same old book. Well, I mean, revised.
Okay, so that’s a good starting point if you want to read something on But I’m not going to go into a lot of technical points on tenets tonight. I’m just going to talk a little bit about the general way of getting an idea of true existence and how to recognize our false view of the truly existent self. So the main thing that we have to look for is to get a fix on how we do view the truly existent self. So there’s actually two objects for our examination. There’s true existence of self, and there’s the true existence of phenomena.
So when we’re talking about the self, we’re talking about our own selves. And when we’re talking about phenomena, we’re talking about everything else, including other people, external things. So when we’re talking about the self, we are talking about the internal self. And we have to understand that both the self and phenomena lack true existence, but we start off by looking at the self, because this is easier. And then when we can understand the lack of true existence of the self, then we can apply that understanding to phenomena, and then that will be easier.
So the problem with our sense of having a truly existent self, is then it leads to self grasping. And because of the self grasping, then we find that we have a clinging to a belief in independent self existence. Existence. And that leads on to other problems, such as self-cherishing. And then, because of self-cherishing, putting ourselves first, thinking about our own importance, wanting to gain happiness for ourselves, having attachment to our own self happiness, and this leads to other things such as clinging attachment to objects of our desire, and to anger and hatred to things that disturb us, and to pride and jealousy and all the different forms of disturbing emotions.
So all of these things arise from our basic problem of the false view of the truly existent self. And this is why, when we are able to attain direct insight into emptiness of the self, it cuts off the self grasping, and then that’s the way that it cuts off all our other disturbing emotions and karmas. Because all of our disturbing emotions and karmas arise out of this self grasping. And by cutting off the idea of the truly existing self, we cut that off at the root. We will one day.
So, one method of meditating on emptiness that we sometimes do is engaging in space like contemplation on the non true existence in a meditative session. And we do this sometimes, for instance, when we meditate on Buddha or on Tantra practice. We have a point in the practice where we meditate on this space like emptiness. We have some idea of what emptiness means, and then we just try to stop conceptualizing and just let the mind be oneness with this sort of emptiness like space. And this kind of meditation it may not fit the actual experience, but it’s one way of getting closer to that actual experience.
And another way is meditating analytically. So we actually need to take both approaches. But some people find that one comes easier to them than the other. Some people find that they can get very easily into this space like meditation, Mahāmudrā meditation, or this clear light meditation that we do in the Tantras, and they find it’s difficult to think about emptiness analytically. Other people find that they have a natural bent for thinking about emptiness and understanding it conceptually, but they might find it harder to do that other kind of meditation, where you just have to practice letting go of concepts.
But we need to try to come at it from both angles. So it’s important to understand when we’re talking about refuting true existence, we’re not refuting the existence. We’re not refuting the existence of self, and we’re not refuting the existence of phenomena. But we’re refuting a wrong view of the way that these things exist. And so, these things exist, but they exist like illusions.
That’s why the practitioner meditates on the illusory nature of existence in the post meditative period, which just means the post meditative equipoise period. It can include other kinds of meditation periods. And the person has to contemplate, in their other meditations, when they’re going around, they contemplate on everything they see as being illusory. But these illusions do exist. It’s not saying they don’t exist.
They exist like illusions. So we’re not refuting the existence of things, but we’re refuting the idea that they exist in the way that we see them existing, in the mistaken way that we see them as existing. And we have this false concept of true existence, that these things exist truly, that they exist in a concrete sort of way, that they exist without depending on anything else, that they exist from their own side. Things don’t exist in this way at all. Things exist lacking true existence.
They exist depending on other things. They exist without this sort of concreteness. And they don’t exist from their own side. They’re not established by themselves. They have to be established in relationship to other things.
So, for instance, one way looking at things is to see that many phenomena are dependent on their parts. In fact, all phenomena are dependent on their parts. And we can see that when we’re talking about concrete phenomena such as a table, we label something as a table. But then we have this sort of fixed idea that there’s something here that’s table, and there’s some sort of essence about it. We feel that there’s some sort of essence about it being a table.
Yet when you think about it, there’s no essence. Where is this essence? The essence isn’t in the legs. It’s not on the top. It’s not in the paint.
It’s not in the wood. This is a really simple example. If you were to take one leg off and throw the leg over there, then you couldn’t say you had a table. Why not? You’ve still got all the different bits.
But somehow the essence can’t be found. But still, we keep on seeing things and having this essence. We somehow feel it’s there. We feel that we could if only we tried a bit harder, we could grab hold of it. And we feel this particularly when we look at ourselves.
We really feel that there’s some essence in there that we can grab hold of. We feel that it’s I. We also feel it when we look at other people. Look at David, you know, and we feel that there’s some sort of Davidness about him, you know, that there’s some sort of essence there that you can grab hold of. So it’s easy to look at yourself and Where is this person?
Where is this eye? Is it in the body? When we look at another person, see the body, and we see that that person is being the body, because we can’t actually see their mind. So we relate to them as being the body. And when we’re talking about that person, it’s really their body we’re talking about.
Of course, we understand that there’s mental factors that go along with that body. And with ourselves, we can see both our body and our mental processes. And we can see Sometimes we think that our body sometimes we relate to our self as being our body. So, for instance, we might say that my mind’s in a bad state today. We’re talking about a mind as if it’s something that’s possessed by the body, and the body is the I.
Other times we might say, Oh, my body’s in a bad state today. So then we’re talking about the body as if the mind is the I and it’s the mind that possesses the body. So we switch backwards and forwards like this all the time. The way we view ourselves varies all the time. So it can’t be either in the body or in the mind that we have this essential eye, or we wouldn’t be able to switch around like that in the way we look at it.
Does this make sense? So if you think about it, this proves that there’s no essence there, but still we feel it’s there, and we feel that we can get a grasp on it. So what we have to do is keep on trying to get a grip on it, trying to see how it is. And if we keep on doing this, keep on analyzing in various different ways, we’ll come to see eventually how it’ll eventually just dawn on us that there isn’t this truly existent I. But it has to dawn on us, you know, the penny has to drop.
It’s not enough just to know the words. We have to actually have that experience of understanding it, of actually seeing it. Of course, conceptually, we’re still talking about a conceptual seeing, but there’ll be a point where it’s not just vague ideas that we’re talking about without really seeing. But it’s like when we really get the idea and really see how it works. Even for a person to get that is very, very powerful.
And it’s expected that it’s going to take a lot of study and a lot of thinking and a lot of analysis and a lot of contemplation and inwards looking. So we have to be prepared to do all these things. But what we’re doing, first of all, the first step to take, and the lamas say that even if this is the only step we take for the whole of this life, if we could spend the whole of our life just doing this, it will be a life well spent. And that is trying to identify the object of refutation. So the object of refutation is this truly existent I that doesn’t exist.
It’s like something we project onto the conventional I that does exist, which is just a function. We can talk about ourselves, we can say my body, my mind, I have a body, I have a mind. Everybody understands what we’re talking about. We’re talking sense, this is the conventional I. But the sense that we have is something really concrete and solid there, existing from its own side, not depending on the body or on the mind, but somehow existing by itself, is the I that we have to refute.
This is a difficult topic. Do you want to ask any questions? It’s just a question really of thinking about it, keeping on looking for it until you get more and more clear. So anyway, we’ve had this instinctive automatic feeling since beginningless time that we have this self that’s solid, concrete, unchanging, eternal, permanent, existing by itself, and independent of anything else. And we’ve been acting since our beginning of this lifetime as if we did have such a self.
So it’s really going to be It’s going to take a bit of doing to change that way of thinking. It’s very strongly imprinted on us. And so we have this idea that we do have this truly existent I, and then we have all these deluded mental states arising from that. So we have to start to just analyze and understand how we view this self, and to try to get a sight of it, try catch sight of the way we really do see it. And then we can start to refute it.
We start off by feeling that there’s something solid there that we could pin down. And it’s only by trying and trying to pin it down that we eventually start to see that we can’t pin it down. It keeps on shifting ground. And so, by thinking this way, for instance, seeing how it shifts from being our body to being our mind, then thinking that our mind has all these different aspects, We we sometimes we identify with our feelings, with our intellect, with our consciousness and so on. None of these things are the essential I.
The I depends on all of these things. The conventional I is just something that’s labeled on the basis of the five aggregates. We have five aggregates. You know the five aggregates? Form, feeling, recognition, karmic formations, and consciousness.
Sometimes the fourth one has a different sometimes it’s called compounded phenomena. So anyway, we we just have all these different what it means is we just have all these different elements that go to make up a human being. And then on top of that, we we label self, we label I, me, and the five aggregates just make a functioning basis on which we place that label. And that’s all that it is. It’s just a label placed on these five functioning aggregates.
And sometimes, really, it goes with the mental aggregates because sometimes there are certain beings that don’t have a body. But anyway, generally, it’s the five aggregates. And that’s all it is. There’s nothing more than that. But we keep on making something more.
On top of that, we put something else that’s really solid. And it’s just something else that we project, which causes our problems. So a problems. So a way to understand this is to think how it is if we’re just walking along, feeling comfortable and relaxed and not worried about anything. This is more or less like the just the functional I, the conventional I.
And then somebody comes up and calls us a thief, and immediately we have some sort of extremely strong emotional reaction. And there’s sort of a feeling of grasping. We feel that we’re being attacked, and there’s this sort of tight feeling in the chest. And the person who’s having this experience starts to have all kinds of reactions, coming from the idea that their I, ego is being attacked. And this gives an idea of how the false I operates.
So actually, when we’re experiencing various different emotions, this can be a good time to look for this false I, because we can see how it’s really unnecessary, but it springs up automatically from nowhere. Sometimes it seems as it’s not there at all. Of course, it’s really there because if we ever got rid of it, would never come back again. But sometimes it’s just lying latent, and sometimes it’s not functioning very strongly. And so it’s as if we can sort of just see the conventional I functioning for a while, and then all of a sudden this truly existent I springs up very strong and concretely again when something happens to stimulate it.
Does this make sense? That’s right. Yes. So if it was truly existed, it would be unchanging. Of course, there is a conventional I and the mind stream is the basis the mind stream plus the body that the mind stream is connected with is the basis on which the conventional I is labeled.
I already talked about why the mind stream isn’t the I, because you can’t find it in any of those you can’t sort of break down the different elements of the mind and say the I is this one, that’s the essence, that’s the I. They all have to be there functioning together. So the truly existent I would have to be partless and permanent and unchanging. So you just have to think about all these things. It’s something that takes quite a lot of thinking about.
So people can’t really think it away? That’s what you’re doing? Yes, that’s only Yes. Yes, you get a glimpse of it. Get a glimpse of it through thinking, through analyzing.
And then when you’ve analyzed enough, you suddenly see that something that you’ve been looking for isn’t there after all. That’s sort of like this just sort of awareness, something that you always thought was there. It’s like, they say it’s like when you come home to your house and open the door and you find the thieves have been in there and stripped out the whole house, taken all your possessions. It’s like that. Something that you always thought was there.
You’re just used to it being there. It’s just part of your everyday reality, and suddenly it’s just not there anymore. And when you have that experience, then then you need to bring that into your meditation. And that understanding, it has to meditate on so that it becomes deeper and deeper. That’s conceptual at that point.
It doesn’t become direct insight at that stage. But after some time, it actually becomes direct insight. But even the conceptual understanding is very powerful. When we talk about conceptual understanding, it doesn’t it means actually like a conceptual negation. It’s not actually an affirming conception, but it’s a negation of something.
It’s it’s called a non affirming negation. There are some negations that are affirming negations. The example of that is a place without mountains. That’s affirming a plane. But if you’re affirming when you’re talking about emptiness, you just negate everything that emptiness isn’t until you’re left with this non affirming negation, which is just emptiness.
So anyway, it’s time we stopped. But it’s very interesting to think about these things. And the reason why we have to think about them so much, and why we have make it so complicated is because our minds are complicated. Lama used to say, shunyata is so simple. He said, but you people make things complicated.
Your minds are so complicated. So we have to because our minds are complicated, we have to find a complicated means of dealing with the complications. So when Buddha taught his first disciples, it said that there were some people he found there were some people who had very, very little dust on their minds. And so he was only needed to give a very simple teaching, just a few words. And for some of these people, that was enough.
Some of them just needed a little more. But Buddha’s original teachings were pretty simple and straightforward. And as a result, we find some of them quite mystifying nowadays. And so out of their kindness, the great teachers, the great pundits of the past have written various commentaries. And as each few generations go on and our minds become more and more complicated, then more pundits have come along to to make more commentaries for us because we’ve needed these elaborations.
You know the story of Asaṇga, how Asaṇga found that in his time, the teachings were no longer clearly understood, so he had to meditate on Maitreya Buddha and was taken by Maitreya Buddha to to