Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Venerable Margaret McAndrew explores Mahāyāna thought training—the practice of transforming obstacles and ordinary activities into powerful bodhicitta meditation. Drawing from the lineage of Geshe Langri Tangpa, she explains how to work with unfavorable circumstances, difficult emotions, and routine chores as opportunities to develop the enlightened mind of compassion. McAndrew covers the foundational graduated path understanding needed, discusses practical techniques like giving and taking and the Eight Verses of Thought Training, and walks through concrete examples: sweeping the house as mind purification, difficult colleagues as teachers. A Q&A session addresses common challenges—managing sadness when contemplating others’ suffering, and how bodhisattvas maintain joy while perceiving universal suffering. Suited for practitioners with basic Dharma knowledge seeking daily practice integration.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 31 MaTT 1998 05 29.mp3
UUID: a2f8e5ee-c21d-484f-bbc3-b2a5487df30f
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-05-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,824
Was just thinking it’s quite a small family tonight. We haven’t even got the cat. It looks a bit empty there in front of the radiator. I know. Yeah.
Well, no. I mean, I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking sort of the cat’s face there. It’s sort of a bit empty looking today. Yes.
I don’t know, but I would say that she’s probably found another warm radiator to curl up in front. Otherwise, she’d be here. So as far as the graduated path goes, we’re getting towards the end of the series of talks I’ve been giving on the graduated path, and I’m planning to finish it all off by the end of the month so that we can start on something different with the next newsletter. So we’ve been going through the great scope. We’ve been and you’re familiar with the three scopes the Most of you, anyway, have been through a lot of these teachings before.
The two earlier scopes, the small and the medium scope, we went through, and we’re in the middle of the great scope, which is on the basis of the attitudes that we developed in the sections on the small and medium scopes, wanting to avoid the sufferings of lower rebirth and wanting to attain the everlasting happiness of liberation, then we go on with the bodhicitta motivation and we’ve been going through the series of meditations for developing bodhicitta which is the mind of enlightenment the mind that takes on oneself the responsibility of working for full enlightenment, full Buddhahood, so as to be able to engage yourself in helping sentient beings by leading them on this path. And there are two traditions that we’ve looked at, and these were combined into one round of eleven meditations by Lama Tsongkhapa. And this included various meditations. The one series started off after having done the equanimity meditation to equalize our attitudes towards other beings. Then we went on to look at how all beings have been, our mothers, and to develop loving thoughts towards them on this basis, and then wanting to help them, thinking that we have to attain enlightenment to help them, and so on.
And the other series of meditations that we didn’t look into in so much detail is the practice of giving and taking, which is a very powerful practice that used to be transmitted secretly. So we did look in some detail at the practice of giving and taking, which comes from that tradition. And that is a very important and very powerful practice, which is very, very effective on the Mahāyāna path in developing the thought of bodhicitta. So another practice that comes from this secret tradition is the practice of Mahāyāna thought training. This also comes from this series of traditions of exchanging of self for others.
And this is something that I’m going to talk about tonight. It’s the practice of changing unfavorable circumstances into favorable ones, and in particular to use these what would seem like, unfavorable circumstances or unpleasant, unattractive situations as a means to develop bodhicitta. So this is a really important aspect of Tibetan Buddhism, practice. I think it’s something that’s really one of the most effective practices for us to deal with our everyday life. It’s something that we that we need to know about because it’s really just so helpful.
Even if you don’t have time to meditate, if you don’t have time to sit on a cushion and perhaps meditate on the graduated path or meditate on Tonglen or whatever, you can do a lot of this kind of practice just in your daily life. Of course, the catch is that if you don’t study and meditate on the graduated path, then you won’t have the background knowledge to do these practices. But at least if you have some background knowledge, then even if you’re busy and don’t have much time to meditate, you can find some really good opportunities to practice with this kind of thought training practice. And, in fact, the more you’re out there mixing with people, the more you’re out there busy in the world, the more opportunity you do have to practice, as a rule. So so busy people are the ones who maybe need to to have this practice.
So there’s there’s any number of these thought training practices, and and this is a sign, I think, of how effective they are because they’ve been found to be very, very effective. So various lamas have composed a number of different practices which work with the same basic elements and perhaps in inverse form sometimes gives the students a sort of outline or a sort of mnemonic device for the practice. So these are very useful to study. In fact, the Wednesday night group are going through one of these practices in detail. That’s the seven point thought transformation.
That’s actually based on this tradition of the changing exchanging yourself for others. So it it really takes you through that whole practice. So it’s a very detailed teaching, and it’s something that’s very, very worthwhile to go through and and to learn. But there are quite a lot of shorter texts, there are a lot of practices which are more condensed. So some of these practices are quite long, some of them are very short.
For instance, The Wheel of Sharp Weapons is a very, very helpful text. It’s a little bit long, perhaps. Not many Westerners would perhaps care to memorize it, but just to read through it and get the general idea of it is very, very powerful. And this is a really nice practice. It’s very poetical.
I think one of these days, actually, we might go through that. I was thinking that perhaps when we get through some of the topics that I’m planning to talk about, we might perhaps create more of a discussion group type of situation here and go through that text or or some other similar text as a discussion practice rather than more more of a formal lecture type situation. Do do you think that would be a a good idea? Situation. Do do you think that would be a a good idea?
Do you that mean we fill out the book and Yes. We could get the book, and we could, yes. We could go through it and read through it first by first. And rather than me expounding on it, we could all expound a little bit from our experience, perhaps on on the topics in the book or something like that. Yes.
Anyway, that was just one thought I had of doing something a little bit different with these Thursday nights now that is giving the the formal teachings on Tuesdays, with these Thursday nights, I mean to say. It’s anyway, it’s just something that we could think about. But tonight, anyway so so some of these other practices that for instance, the thirty seven practices of a bodhisattva and so on, there’s quite a number of them. And tonight, I’m not going to talk on any particular practice. Recently, talked about the eight verses of thought training.
That’s quite a brief one, as as the title says, and it’s quite snappy. But if you go into it, there’s quite a lot of profundity in in those verses. But I thought tonight I’d just talk on some general points. Well, it’s actually based on the Seven Point Mind Training. It’s taking some, you might say, some salient points out of the Seven Point Mind Training.
And it comes from the same tradition, the same lamas from Geshe I think it came through Geshe Langri Tangpa and Geshe who was the next one? It was Geshe Chekawa, Geshe Potowa, I think. And then I should have brought the little book in with me, but I left it on my desk explaining the lineage. Maybe there are some people here who could tell me. I forget the names of the Geshe.
The story goes, anyway, with the eight verses of thought training, it was based on the seven point thought training, and it was composed by Geshe Langri Tangpa as a sort of very pithy and powerful sort of form of thought training. And in those days, this thought training practice was kept secret from the general public and only transmitted to a few selected people. But one person, I think it was Geshe Chekawa, overheard the anyway, this particular person overheard a a wandering sort of mendicant, you could say, somebody who used to wander from place to place and recite Dharma teachings for a living. And he heard him reciting this verse and oh, this this particular set of verses. And he wasn’t able to find anything out from this man except that the verses were composed by somebody called Geshe Langri Tangpa from a particular part of Tibet.
And this man couldn’t tell him anything more about it, but it really struck a note with him, and he thought he must seek out this Geshe Langri Tangpa. So he went journeying off to this part of Tibet. He got to Geshe Langri Tangpa’s place, and Geshe Langri Tangpa’s, he found he’d already died. So then he connected with Geshe Potowa, who was his chief disciple, and eventually persuaded Geshe Potowa to give him the teachings. And so it came down so he became the the lineage bearer who brought the teachings down to the present.
They came down through Atisha and came down to Lama Tsongkhapa. So, anyway, this is a very sorry. No. They didn’t come down. A a teacher brought them to Tibet in the first place, so I put a teacher in the wrong spot there.
So they came down to Lama Tsongkhapa from these through the lineage of these Geshis. And at some time, probably at Je Tsongkhapa time, they began to be taught more publicly. And Je Tsongkhapa was the one who actually taught how to combine them into That is the seven point, the you know, that tradition of exchanging self with others on which the Seven Point Mind Training is based. So anyway, that’s all a bit of a diversion, but it’s very good to know about these lineages and how they arose. And so, anyway, one of the things that comes into the advice on exchange of self with others is doing this kind of Mahāyāna mind training in your everyday life.
And they’re tremendously beneficial for us because then we’re enabled to keep on progressing even when we encounter circumstances that you’d normally think of as being unfavorable, as being difficulties. And we all have to encounter all these sorts of circumstances. And these days, most of us have busy lives. We’re engaged in all sorts of activities. Most of us don’t have a lot of time to meditate or to live in monasteries and spend our time in study.
And even those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to live in Dharma centers still find that we’re pretty busy and we have a lot of time we have to spend a lot of time on routine activities. We have various obstacles to our minds. We find that our minds, even when we have favorable circumstances to study and meditate, our minds are not cooperative. We have obstacles of mind, so our minds can’t really take in the study, or if we do take it in, just take it in on the intellectual level. And when we go to meditate, we find that we can’t concentrate or we get lax and all sorts of things go wrong.
And so we we need these kinds of practice to help us overcome these obstacles, and we don’t have to see them as obstacles. We can say, oh, wonderful. You know? I’ve got all these boring chores to do. Great.
You know? Wonderful opportunity for mind training. Oh, I’m feeling sick today, my mind’s really in a funny state, or I can’t concentrate. Oh, wonderful. You know?
This really gives me something to work with, the mind training. So I was really interested to see that Geshe la is Khensur Rinpoche is going to be teaching a a mind training practice. He’s going to be giving a teaching it in a retreat, I think, in October. And the flyers are already out, so if you have a look, you’ll be able to pick one up. And I’d definitely say well, I don’t have to tell you people anyway, but I’d say definitely try to get along to it if you can fit it in.
And this is really thorough this is going to be a really thorough introduction to this basic practice. But I was amused at the what do say? The advertisement. The little bit of information that says that it it shows us how to transform our problems into pure bliss. So, yeah, so that that really struck me.
So we we we’d all like to have a bit of pure bliss, wouldn’t we? I’m afraid that’s still coming, still somewhere up the track. But anyway, actually, this really is what thought training is all about. It’s producing this bliss in the mind. But I still think that for most of us, a more realistic short term approach might be to that we can expect, as we learn how to deal with our problem by means of this thought training, we can expect to develop more serenity and equanimity and take problems in our stride and have more emotional stability with relationship to these things at first.
And I think that’s a very realistic expectation if we take this thought training into practice. And then that’s only the start, of course, that’s step one, and then you keep on going, and eventually you get that pure bliss. But I think for a lot of us, when we’re starting off, we often you know, when we’re tearing our hair out, even just to think of being able to achieve equanimity and serenity would be a wonderful sort of thing to achieve. So I think that’s something we can really look forward to by doing this practice, and it shouldn’t take too long. Well, I think some of the students might like to have share some experiences with this.
Well, there was one poet who said, where ignorance is bliss, it’s folly to be wise. It was that was gray, wasn’t it? Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Yes. But, actually, that’s what the Buddhist point of view is that ignorance isn’t bliss.
Actually, yeah, eventually, we do get to the point where wisdom is bliss, but it takes, yes, a while getting to that point. Well, nobody has any sort of very profound remarks to make. In actual fact, the yes. I mean, it’s It’s your It’s your yes. It’s your greater awareness.
It’s your greater compassion starting to come up. But, you know, you’re just sort of starting to work with the practice. And do you feel like you get very agitated with this? Is it like a very painful feeling of sadness? Is do you get upset and agitated?
Yes. So I think that’s sort of part of the starting stages. And perhaps you need to perhaps emphasize more the sort of thoughts that make your mind happier if you get too down. We’re we’re taught to do this, to balance our minds and not to not to let our meditation get too sort of one-sided. But if you’re meditating on something that makes you too unhappy, whether it’s suffering or death lower realms or in your case, it’s the suffering of others, to uplift your mind by meditating on happy thoughts.
For instance, you could visualize have you have you tried the practice of giving and taking? Well, might be one to think about where you’ve visualized taking on the sufferings of others and giving out your happiness and good fortune to them. And perhaps in your case, it might be good sometimes to put more emphasis on the giving out of the good things. Well, you know, this is just suggestions, but you can find that there’s various different practices that can uplift your mind and make you feel happy, make you feel you’re doing something. Also sorry?
Also doing things like the meditation on Śākyamūni Buddha, you know, where you can visualize yourself as Buddha, sending out rays of light to all this. First of all, you know, you receive the inspiration yourself, and then you can visualize yourself being Buddha and sending out the purifying rays of light to other beings and so on. So it’s a question of getting the right balance in your practice and finding out for yourself what’s good. Also, sometimes it can be good to ask for an appointment with Geshe-la to get some personal advice on your practice if you feel that you’re at a stage where you need to get some personal input from a meditation master. Yes.
God. Yes. That’s really good. Yes. Rejoicing in your own ability merits and also in the good work of others.
I think a lot of this we when we get down because we see the suffering of others, it’s often because we want to relieve their suffering and we feel helpless. We feel we can’t do anything. So, really, what we have to do in the practice here is sort of accept that we can’t do anything now, but at the same time, if we can if we can practice the Mahāyāna path, then every day, we’re actually doing something in the sense of preparing ourselves of the working on the the path towards enlightenment. If you can really feel convinced that that in the future, you’re going to be able to attain Buddhahood and that what you’re doing now is progress on that path, then that sort of gives you the feeling that you are doing something for others even though you might not be able to actually go out and, excuse me, take away their sufferings right now. So I asked Geshe Tashi Tsering once or yeah.
Anyway, asked Geshe-la once about and this is a question that actually often comes up as to whether bodhisattvas why it is that they don’t we learn in the teachings that bodhisattvas always feel joyful, that they don’t feel sad and unhappy. And yet we know that they have great compassion and that they also have tremendous sort of telepathic powers and so on to see the suffering of others. So you think because they’re always aware of the suffering of so many others, surely they must be sad. Surely it must make them feel unhappy. Geshe-la’s sense was that the bodhisattvas don’t feel downcast or unhappy about all this because at the same time as they’re practicing compassion, they’re also practicing bliss.
They actually practice meditations that produce bliss in the mental continuum, and that sort of kind of balances the suffering. I’m not sure what would have said, but Lama Yeshe used to always talk about how bodhicitta is a blissful feeling. It’s an opening of the heart and this outflowing attitude that is totally the opposite. What makes us feel unhappy is a closed feeling in our hearts. And when the heart’s open and the energy’s flowing up, it’s a really very joyful feeling.
And bodhisattvas have that all the time. So maybe that’s another way of saying what Geshe la was saying. But in any way, what it what it boils down to anyway is that bodhisattva is always blissful. So So anyway, what it means is that when we encounter these unfavorable circumstances or when we just have to engage in routine activities, then instead of just being wasted time, this can become Dharma practice. And not just Dharma practice, but a very powerful practice of bodhicitta by bringing in the bodhicitta motivation.
And so for this reason, we all need to know about this practice. And so when we encounter all these various different obstacles in our practice, then instead of worrying or instead of becoming despondent, we can actually see some reason to at least see the positive side of it. We could always find the bright side to look at. So this is where we have one famous quotation from Śāntideva, and this is in the Bodhisattva’s way of life: If something can be put right, why be unhappy? If a thing cannot be put right, what good in being unhappy?
So in other words, we don’t just have to accept everything bad that happens to us and just sort of sit there and do nothing about it. If we see a difficulty or a bad situation coming up and there’s something we can do, like moving away or, you know, doing something helpful to stop the situation. If we if we see somebody coming who we know is going to be very, very unpleasant to us, maybe we can just walk out of their way. You know? We don’t have to sit there and wait for it and say, oh, what wonderful thought training training practice.
Maybe that would be good if we were really serious about our thought training. But if we can’t get away from that person, then we can bring the thought training into it. And, for instance, if we lose our job or something like that, then we don’t just sort of have to sit around saying, I’m unemployed. We could go out and try to find another job. But if we can’t find another job, then we can see a way to find something positive in the situation by using the thought training teaching.
Yes. Well, I think, really, grieving is something we need to do. The great problem is getting stuck in it. That’s why it is recognised that people need to grieve. And that it’s the ones who aren’t able to grieve properly who do get stuck in it.
Somehow, Dharma practice helps you to get your grieving out of the way quickly and to just go on with things. And this is it’s a real experience of people who’ve been practicing Dharma that when they, for instance, lose dear ones, they of course, they grieve. Of course, they miss them, but it doesn’t seem to wreck their whole life. They’ve got something to do with their life, and they, you know, they they sort of move on to the next thing. Not like Ms.
Havisham. Right. Yes. Ms. Havisham is the perfect example of the the how how not to go about it.
David Copperfield. Sorry, Great Expectations. Sorry, yes, Dickens anyway. Here. That’s right, Great expectations.
That’s right. What was his name? Pip. Pip. Yeah.
She Yes. Yes. Yes. Making life miserable for everybody else. Yes.
Yeah. Because of her misfortune. So So I don’t I I didn’t oh, here. Mhmm. So there’s also another quotation, which is also very famous, also from Śāntideva, also also from the Bodhisattva’s way of life.
How could you find enough leather to cover the ground or to cover the earth, but having leather on the soles of your sandals is the same as covering the whole earth? And so the significance of that is that we’re always trying to change outward circumstances. We’re always trying to we’re always turning outwards and trying to secure our happiness and comfort by manipulating the external circumstances by external actions. But we can’t always be successful this way. And if we just rely on these kinds of methods to ensure our happiness and comfort, then we’re bound to encounter a lot of disappointments, a lot of a lot of bad situations, because the the real problem is within us in our minds.
And by training our minds, then we can overcome the cause of suffering and learn how to experience happiness and experience serenity and not be at the mercy of external circumstances. And these thought training teachings are very, very effective. They’re very, very powerful with this. The reason why they’re very, very powerful is because they’re actually more based on truth than our present ordinary everyday view, which is distorted. Our these thought training teachings are actually by showing us a positive way of looking at things, they’re actually showing us the correct way to look at things, whereas our distorted view that sees problems everywhere that create suffering for ourselves is based on various different distorted viewpoints.
And it’s distorted views that labels these situations as being problems and troubles and unpleasant circumstances and so forth. And so one of the means that we can take to deal with these situations is by learning to see them from the positive point of view and from the point of view that’s not only positive in seeing something helpful in the situation, but particularly in help hopeful for this development of bodhicitta, which is so important to develop as I was talking about in the last couple of weeks. If we can develop bodhicitta, it’s such a powerful virtuous mind, such a powerful mind directing us towards good that it brings happiness for ourselves. It’s a tremendous creator of merit to have this bodhicitta attitude. Even if it’s something that we’re just producing artificially, which is how we have to start off, even that is tremendously powerful.
Of course, that’s not saying anything about the real bodhicitta, which comes later. So So as the lamas are always telling us, if we if we want to even if we want to be self-cherishing, even if we want to look after our own happiness rather than thinking about the happiness of others. If we really want to be happy, if we want to have the greatest happiness, they say we should think big and really think about the greatest happiness we can have, and that involves giving up self-cherishing and cherishing others, because that’s the state of mind that produces the greatest happiness. And this kind of practice really helps us to overcome the obstacles in our path. And if we can start to feel happiness, if we can start to feel joy and satisfaction in our minds, then we have no reason to feel mental states of mind such as anger and jealousy or what other whatever.
If we’re happy in our minds, we won’t care if somebody else seems to have the biggest house or the finest car or or the best good fortune or whatever. We won’t be disturbed by these things that won’t matter to us. I’m not suggesting that all you people are terribly materialistic. These are gross viewpoints, gross examples, but you can apply them to your own lives and see that we sometimes feel unhappy for various reasons, and that whatever these reasons are, if we have the cause of happiness within us, then we don’t have to be giving rise to these various different disturbed mental states. So to get on to some of the anyway, does anybody want to say anything before I go on to the next part?
We couldn’t do that. Meals on Wheels to take us to the shops on Fridays. So So do this thought training practice, it really has to be combined with the practice of mindfulness, because it’s no good reading a book on thought training or listening to a teaching on thought training or something, and then we go and forget all about it and forget to put it into practice. That’s not going to be any good to us. We have to remember to practice it.
And we really need to keep it in mind, not just waiting until some really trying circumstance comes along. Because if we wait for that, then we won’t think of it when that time comes along. We have to be practicing it with all the little things. And then when big things come along, we’re all trained and ready to deal with it, hopefully. So we have to practice mindfulness, and that means bringing the practice of mind training into our daily lives and having an attitude that’s aware and always looking out for situations where the mind training comes into action.
So we need, first of all, to have some basic graduated path understanding. And the graduated path teachings tell us how to cultivate this mindfulness with, first of all, in the small scope we cultivate mindfulness in respect to whether we’re engaging in virtuous or non virtuous actions of body, speech and mind. And this is the most basic practice. So if we’ve been following graduated path teachings, we should be getting into this habit of watching what our mind’s at, keeping this check on our minds. And this is something that becomes habitual should be becoming habitual.
Of course, we all slip up. But the more we practice, the more we should be becoming aware that we start to realize when our mind drifts off into something non virtuous, you start to pick up on it and to realize that you have to apply the antidote. And you get into the habit of identifying and counteracting these kinds of deluded mental states. And of course, by controlling the thoughts, that also helps us to control our actions of speech and body, and to lessen the amount of non virtue that we engage in. So here we are also considering not only virtue and non virtue, but how every situation can help us to develop bodhicitta if it’s looked at from that perspective.
So if we’re becoming aware that we’re feeling upset about some situation, or that we’re disappointed or frustrated or that in some way we find some situation that’s coming up is one that we see as being problem for us, then we can start to look for a way to use this situation positively. And there are a number of different techniques that are explained in the teachings to apply to different kinds of situations. We can use one of these techniques or we can perhaps use our imagination on the basis of the techniques we’ve learned already. We can use something similar. So in addition to this, if we find that we are engaging in some sort of ordinary mundane activity with some sort of worldly motivation, such as just thinking of our own well-being, or just doing something because it has to be done, we sort of feel like we just have to do this, then we can see this as being an attitude that’s harmful or not helpful to us, and we can transform this situation.
So an example for this is that we have to spend a lot of time cleaning our houses, and we tend to do this for a variety of worldly motivations, so that people will be impressed or so that they won’t criticize us, or because we like being comfortable in a nice clean bright sparkling house. And so all of these worldly sort of thoughts, we just sort of get having to go, the house is dirty, now it’s time to clean it again without any particular sort of thought, perhaps out of habit, because you do it every day, you start cleaning. So all these things really are just wasted time because we are not doing anything for our Dharma practice. But instead of that, we can bring in some sort of Dharma thought and bodhicitta. So we can think that we are purifying our minds.
Some of you might have learnt this technique. You might have heard the story of Chudapanthaka, who became an Arhat through doing this practice. When he realized that what he was really purifying was not dirt on not the floor not removing the dirt from the floor, but removing the dust, the stains and obscurations from the mind. So we can think this way that while we’re sweeping, we’re purifying our minds, and or we’re vacuuming, bringing it up to date. And can bring in the vacuuming should be good really, because vacuum cleaners are quite powerful, so it should make our meditation powerful.
We can think we have all that electric power instead of just, you know, a broom that sort of leaves half the dirt behind. We’ve got to vacuum cleaners that kick it all and puts a lot of force into it. It takes the curtains and everything. So then we can also bring the thought of bodhicitta into it. So we think that we can think that we are purifying the minds of others as well.
Or we can think that we are purifying our own minds so as to be able to progress on the path to enlightenment for the benefit of others. And thinking in this way brings in the bodhicitta motivation and makes it very, very powerful. So the big catch to this, of course, is remembering To think this way, keeping up the mindfulness. But the more we practice it, the more we’ll find that we can remember. In the old days, some people used to make their main practice doing this kind of thing while they were working.
I think it’s harder nowadays, because most people nowadays have jobs where you need to be thinking about what you’re doing. You don’t have so many of the routine jobs where you are not thinking. But for those people who are doing those kinds of jobs, this kind of practice could really help to get through the day instead of being totally bored with the job. So whatever our problem is, it helps us. The next point is remembering karma.
It really helps us to remember that everything we experience is the result of our karma. And this really, I think, is one of the basic points. It’s probably the basic point that we have to start off from, and then from that point we can go on and consider other aspects of the thought training as well. But in particular, just remembering that whenever we encounter problems, obstacles, difficulties, people being unkind to us, people causing us problems, It always comes about as a result of our previous actions. And so there’s no point in blaming others.
And we can see that if we understand these causes, we can avoid creating the causes in future. And so this is actually helping us in our present situation. And in our present situation, while we’re experiencing this problem, we can think that we’re actually purifying this negative karma, that we’re experiencing it and getting it out of the way. It’s getting a negative karma out of the way if we don’t sort of react and create some sort of negative karma in trying to deal with it, then it’s just done with.