Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening session, Ven Margaret McAndrew teaches the three scopes—the Buddhist framework progressing from securing good future rebirths, through individual liberation, to enlightenment for all beings. She stresses all three must be practiced together, grounding higher practice on the foundation. Meditation on impermanence and death is central: the antidote to worldly distraction and foundation of genuine motivation. McAndrew addresses questions about motivation and karma through anecdotes—Lama Zopa teaching while walking downhill, Australian doctors skeptical of the death process, Tibetan monks dying from unfamiliar diseases—showing how abstract doctrine applies to lived experience. For practitioners new to the Lamrim path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 38 3S 1998 06 25.mp3
UUID: 691490ab-ff7c-483d-a490-33aac431e827
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-06-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~4,599
So I’m not becoming a person sort of genuine like it is because you genuinely like other people and feel happier when you help them. Yeah. Well, that’s different, I think. That’s bringing in sort of kindness and compassion, is something else. But I I I sort of I sort of we’re being very technical here.
We’re just sort of focusing on the future lives. In actual fact, kindness and consideration rather is very much a Dharma action, but it doesn’t sort of focus on that here because we’re just looking from a small scope angle. Yes. You can’t see what people’s motivation is from the outside. Yeah.
On the on the one hand, you know, we can see people doing good actions, but we can’t see whether they’ve really we it’s good to give them the benefit of the doubt, and they go, yes. They’re doing this with a good heart, but you don’t really know. On the other hand, even when you see people doing what looks like a bad action for all, we know they might be bodhisattvas doing it for some very good reasons. So, of course, it doesn’t mean that you can’t try to put people straight if you think you can help them. But you still have to keep this idea in your heart that you can’t really judge other people from the from the outside.
Well, it’s not bad. It’s not good. It’s pointless. It’s worldly. Yes.
Yes. Some of the teachings on karma say that there’s some benefit from the object as well, and the needy are a particular object among those who are considered to be special objects of karma. It includes things like your father and mother and the Three Jewels of refuge, that you can accumulate more merit with them, but also the needy are special object. So there might be some good karma from the side of the object. But some of the teachings on karma just stress the fact that motivation is everything.
So it could be that there is there does be something from the object, but the main thing is from the motivation. That person isn’t getting much from their motivation at all. I met somebody like that once when it was back in the early seventies it would have been, when I was living in Melbourne and somebody came around the door knocking and this chap sort of got talking to us. He was an old fellow. He was absolutely disgusted because he was sure he was going to be on the honours list for all the money he collected.
He spent about half an hour ranting to us about how disgusted he was because he collected all this money over all the years. And he’d really been expecting to get an OBE or something, and I don’t know what he said, he was expecting to get something, and he’d been left off the honours list. I don’t know whether he was crazy or whether he was really definitely had some sort of chance of getting off it, but I thought what’s the point? Even back in those days, I hadn’t read the Dharma, but I thought, what’s the point? You know, he’s collected all this money for all these people.
Can’t he be glad of that? But there seems to seems that there are quite a lot of people who do a lot of, you know, what’s called good work, with this kind of motivation. And there’s a lot of people, perhaps, you know, who do do a lot of this kind of thing in order to get their name in the papers and be accepted in society and that sort of thing. You you can’t sort of look at them and say, they’re not they’re not doing it for any other reason because, for all you know, they might have, you know, wonderful I’m sure a lot of them do have, you know, a lot of real concern for the people they’re helping as well. You know what Teresa had an interesting comment to say about that?
She I read somewhere she said something like the poor don’t really want money. What they want is love. They don’t want your money, they want your love. Of course they desperately need money, but what they really need is respect and to be appreciated as human beings, not to be treated as objects of what’s charity. Yes.
No. I think a lot of them do that with good intentions. Oh, good intentions, yes. That’s the whole point. But of course a lot of people who are influenced by some of these people might perhaps be more overcome by their personality than by the thought of the good cause.
Anyway, that’s all beside the point. It’s good if people are doing these good things. And you can’t tell from the outside what their motivation is, what their thought is. Anyway, getting us to the consideration of the three scopes. So if we want to practice the Dharma, then there’s the three scopes to be considered.
This is dealing with the small scope, just having this concern with the future lifetime. And then, as you all know, I’ve got no doubt, medium scope is the person who aims for their own individual liberation. They understand that just achieving future rebirth isn’t enough, that while it while we’re still under the force of delusion and karma going from life to life being thrown always without control from one situation to another. We’re never really happy and also we’re always liable to fall back to the lower suffering realms again if we start to slip up. It’s necessary to work to achieve of this situation, to achieve the cessation of suffering and to achieve liberation.
So this person who has this medium scope motivation, they’re building up the sort of renunciation. When renunciation is really realised, that person actually enters the path. But just to be focused on that thought, to be focused on the thought of attaining liberation and putting their energy into that as being of the medium scope. And they’re trying to develop the sort of renunciation more and more by meditating not just on the suffering of the lower realms, but the general suffering of saṃsāra. They meditate on the lower realms’ sufferings and they meditate on the general sufferings of the higher realms as well because they want to be done with the whole thing.
Also they, at this stage, they’re very interested in doing the practices that have to be done to get you out of saṃsāra. So they’re more interested in meditation, want to practice not only observing karma but also concentration and wisdom, and in this way liberate themselves from saṃsāra. So the and, of course, the great scope brings in the thought of doing this for the welfare of others, not just working for individual liberation but really making your practice something that is done for the welfare of others and that involves the sort of attaining enlightenment not just liberation but full enlightenment So that’s just a very brief run through of the three scopes. The person who’s on the great scope also, they’re very interested in attaining liberation, but they see it as being a means of developing their ability to guide others. They want to be able to guide others to liberation.
So they achieve to retain full Buddhahood so that they can continue to help others. And that involves, from the start, that has a lot to do with practicing love and compassion. So in fact we have to practice all these three scopes, and they can be practiced together. So the person who only has the first scope practice is just focused on attaining fortunate rebirth for themselves, but the person who is practicing medium scope has to combine that with the first scope source. So those two scopes are put together.
And then the person who aspires to the third scope level of attainment has to put that together with the small and medium scopes. So it’s called the common path of the three scopes and of course we’re following the Mahāyāna teachings, we’re aspiring to follow the third scope practice. But we have to base our third scope practice on the other two scopes, the paths of the other two scopes. The importance of the small scope is that that involves some of really basic practices. You can’t do the other two scopes without getting these really basic practices well established.
Went through, in a previous week, went through following the spiritual guide. And so after that we’re looking at how the spiritual guide leads us. We get to the training how the spiritual guide trains you in the path and the first part of that is looking at what in the Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand is translated as the optimum human rebirth. I find that word optimum a rather clumsy one. But sometimes it’s called the precious human rebirth or the perfect human rebirth.
So this isn’t just any human rebirth, as you know, it’s the human rebirth that has all the qualities, all the particular aspects brought together that we need in order to practice Dharma. It needs various different attributes, which are explained in terms of eight freedoms and ten endowments. And somebody who has that particular kind of human rebirth is somebody who has what they need to practice Dharma. So, that looks at identifying this precious human rebirth, seeing that we have got it, that we have the situation here, all the causes and conditions brought together to practice Dharma, and then understanding its rarity, and understanding its usefulness, what we can achieve with it, and then understanding its rarity, thinking how difficult it was to have got it in the first place, and how difficult it would be to get it again if we were to not make good use of it, but to lose it and get born without this kind of rebirth next time around. Very difficult to come back to another precious human rebirth again.
And so then we have to think of how to use it well, how to extract the essence, is the term that’s used. That involves the graduated path and then that leads on to the next step which is the three scopes. Then we look at these three scopes and think about following them, starting off of course with the small scope. With the small scope practice, the first thing we have to do is just think about avoiding wasting our life on worldly things. We have to be able to identify what’s worldly and what isn’t.
And that doesn’t depend on the external object, it depends on our mental state. But still the external things are involved, because they’re the objects of our harmful mental states. We’re particularly concerned here with attachment and aversion. Sometimes we look at our harmful mental states in terms of three: attachment, aversion and ignorance. Here we’re particularly focusing on attachment and aversion.
We’re particularly attached to experiencing pleasures or happiness and to avoiding the experience of suffering, and we focus on various objects which, when we make contact with them, produce as a result of the contact of our sense organs with this object, our karma produces various different experiences of happiness and suffering. And so then we develop either strong clinging attachment to the objects that produce this pleasurable result, or to the are the condition for producing this pleasurable result, or we develop aversion, anger, hatred towards objects that cause us suffering or an unhappy mental state. And we’re always encountering all these different objects all the time. We can’t avoid these different objects. Actually, it is skillful to try to avoid these objects, to try to control our minds and also to control our situations so that we don’t go into situations that really arouse our most extreme sort of clinging attachment.
So you can imagine particularly things that are going to cause us severe problems. For instance, it might be an idea not to hang around casinos too much and that kind of thing. You know, you get the idea. If you’re a monk or a nun, of course, you’ve sort of got more objects to guard against. That that’s the reason for becoming monks and nuns because the discipline of keeping the vows keeps you from while while you’re still in this vulnerable state.
Higher bodhisattvas don’t have to be monks or nuns. They can be laypeople. The expression that’s used is that they can be like peacocks. Peacocks can eat plants that are poisonous to human beings and thrive on them. So the bodhisattva can go out into the world and encounter all these objects of attachment and aversion and because of their great love and compassion their mind isn’t going to be harmed by it.
The person, particularly the person who is on the path of individual liberation and the person who simply hasn’t developed that great love and compassion, has to be very careful to guard the mind. And so we do have to be careful of the object. But the main thing we have to watch is the mind itself. And we can learn to balance our clinging attachment and our aversion to find a state of equanimity, which isn’t always fluctuating between these two extremes. So the worldly objects are explained in terms of four pairs of opposites that we have to guard our minds against.
And as I said before, not all of these things are bad in themselves, but it’s the fact that they stimulate our attachment and aversion that we have to guard against. You all know the four pairs of opposites, no doubt. Yes. I always think infamous means sometimes it’s translated as infamous. Oh, think that’s too extreme a word.
You don’t say somebody’s infamous unless they’ve really got a stinking reputation. Whereas we’re just sort of attached to people saying anything bad about us, even mild of yes. That’s right. Okay. So we’ve got two in that.
No. You’ve got it. Fame, good reputation and bad reputation. Fame and blame. We’re going backwards, actually.
But the orders are sometimes different anyway. Okay, so there’s gain and loss. So there’s gain or there’s loss or failure to gain, and then there’s pleasure pain or pleasure and sort of unpleasant experiences, praise and blame, good reputation and bad reputation. Course, some of these things are good in themselves and some of them are bad, but they’re things of this life. If we make these our goal then we’re going to be not really doing anything worthwhile with our life and if we ignore the laws of karma then we’re going to get into difficulties so if we want to really find happiness and avoid suffering then we have to follow the dharma which is the opposite to following the eight worldly dharmas with a small d, or the eight worldly concerns.
They don’t have small d’s and big d’s in Sanskrit, by the way. It’s interesting, but it comes in handy in English sometimes. So What the dharma in in a small little remedy? I think this time, a poetic one, a very Yes. So, well, it means avoiding the eight worldly.
It means working for future lives, and of course it goes on to mean working with karma and so on, but that later on we’ve taken refuge, you see, so we have to but it means making use of this life to do something useful for our future lives. So working with karma can’t be we can’t expect to get the so much result in this lifetime, but it will come in time. So if we’re with karma, then we’re actually really practicing Dharma because we’re preparing for our future lifetimes. And whereas if we’re pursuing worldly goals, it won’t work unless we’ve already got the karma to get that particular goal, and in any case, it’s karma that brings about the goal, not our effort. And we waste our lives tearing after one thing after another just for limited benefits that are soon lost.
It’s better to work for a lasting goal. If we could see all the work we’ve done in all our past lives for all these worldly things again and again and again, here we are now, you know, none of us are are chakravartin monarchs or anything. So so better to work for something that brings a lasting goal. So and results that will keep on growing. So we have to look at giving our perfect human rebirth a meaning, and gaining at least the very least we can achieve in this life is to gain another perfect human rebirth next time, gain more good rebirths and continue to progress from life to life.
We might actually manage, we shouldn’t particularly if you’re young and energetic, you shouldn’t give up on the idea of achieving liberation and enlightenment in this lifetime or perhaps if you can’t do that you might become bodhisattvas if you’re not bodhisattvas already you probably already are so there’s so you know all these things we learned about in the usefulness of the precious human rebirth if we don’t achieve the actual end goals, we can achieve the realizations on the path. If we don’t actually manage to achieve even the lesser realizations on the path, such as attaining Samatha and then attaining bodhicitta renunciation and so on. But we can still make good progress because we can still make big strides with purifying our negative karma and accumulating merit and really working on ourselves and making a good start for our next lifetime and so it’d be so much easier. We’ll be so much that far ahead next time in our next life if we do well in this lifetime. Perhaps even at the time of death, we might be able to get reborn in a pure land.
That would be something to really aim for. So, to avoid getting caught up in worldly goals, what is the best way to avoid getting caught up in worldly goals? Okay, so what’s the best antidote to worldly goals? Being caught up in worldly concerns? There’s a specific antidote that’s particularly This one should be easy.
How do we avoid spending all our energy on things of this life and think more about the future life? What makes us think about that? Meditation, on what? Yeah, right. Good.
Two hints. Yes. Okay. So and of course I haven’t got time to talk about meditating on death this week, so we’re going to talk about meditating on death next week but we have to be very aware of the many benefits of remembering death, of keeping death in mind. It helps us with so many aspects of our practice.
It helps us with all the aspects of our practice, not just with renunciation, not just with avoiding the eight worldly dharmas, but really every aspect. Lama Zopa says he had a dream once. When Lama Zopa talks about his dreams, he can be sure that his dreams are real Dharma teachings. He had a dream that somebody told him, If you want to develop bodhicitta, meditate on impermanence and death. Lama Zopa always said, you know, he thought, oh, that’s very funny, know, if you want to develop bodhicitta, meditate on impermanence and death.
And the more he thought about it, the more he saw the meaning in it, that to attain all these realizations including bodhicitta the meditation on impermanence and death is so important and Lama Zopa whenever he never misses an opportunity to remind you about death and impermanence I remember one time at Tuśita retreat centre he was leaving Tuśita retreat centre and we were all out there to help carry his bags and things down the hill this was before they got the jeep and I wasn’t actually carrying it down but there were a few sort of strong people there with Lama Zopa’s bags to walk down to the bus or whatever Lama Zopa was saying we should consider how fortunate we are that we still have our that we can still go with our bodies and carry loads because you know death is coming any moment. Anyway, if we do think about this and keep it in mind, then it ensures that we don’t get too caught up in the things of this life and that we do see the importance of working for the future life. And the whole point of the whole thing is that if we spend our life remembering our death, then we’ll the time we’ll spend our life well, and at the time of death, we’ll be happy.
So we don’t have to, you know, we don’t really have to worry so much. So it’s not the point isn’t to make you unhappy or worried, but it’s just to be prepared. And if we spend our lives remembering death, then we can actually be happy in this life because it will make our lives meaningful. Whereas if we don’t remember death, then we’ll spend our lives in a meaningless way. We won’t be happy in our life, and at the time of death, we’ll die with regrets.
So there’s six benefits of remembering death. Actually, Geshe-la says, at the time, you you can imagine what it’s like when you’re dying. Your body as you’re dying and your body’s losing your warmth, you have trouble breathing and your skin pales. Death comes as a reality on a specific day, and then it’s too late to alter your course or correct your actions. After death, this body is simply a corpse which is feared and cast aside by those still living.
So it’s going to happen to all of us. There are six benefits to keeping that in mind. There are six disadvantages to not keeping it in mind. The first is that if we don’t remember death then we won’t remember to practice the Dharma. The second one is that even if we remember to practice Dharma, we don’t practice it intensively.
And the third one is that even if you practice and attain some realization or achieve some attainment of Dharma understanding, it won’t be pure because it will be mixed with the eight worldly dharmas. And the fourth well, it sounds a bit similar to the third one. I think with the to the second one, it’s that your practice won’t be intensive I think the second one means that you won’t attain really the second one is more focused on the attainment that you won’t achieve much with your Dharma practice and the fourth one is that your Dharma practice will lack application. So the fifth one is that you make yourself it says here, you’re making yourself unworthy of human existence. Another text that I read said it made made you unworthy of something else I can’t remember what so I thought I’ll look this up I’ll look up the Tibetan and see what the Tibetan says and the Tibetan says that it means making oneself unworthy So the interpretation that Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey’s is that it’s making yourself unworthy of human existence.
And the sixth one is that you will have regret at the time of death. Doesn’t it? Well, the whole point is that the reason you regret at the time of death is because you see that you’re going to get a you see that you’re going to get a bad one. Maybe you know you have this You have a vision. Isn’t that like if you feel cold and want warmth, you’re gonna go to the hot dog.
Well, his consciousness might not have left probably hadn’t left his body. In that case, he was just unconscious even if he was clinically dead. Because the doctor wasn’t deliberately doing it, he was trying to help these people. It’s certainly not a bad could be unskillful, that’s the worst. But it’s nothing like it’s not it’s not a serious bad karma.
You haven’t got all the you know? Yes. Yes. That’s in a way, it’s their own karma anyway if they are in that situation. But, of course, if you understand more about the death process, then you can try to do things skillfully.
Basically, it still comes back to the person’s karma. The first course I went to at Copan, there were these three Australian doctors sitting up across the front. Was Doctor Nick, who was a monk. He was already sort of familiar with these things there was Doctor Adrian and he was still a layperson then and there was Doris, Tilden, Doris, and there was Dorian, Doctor Dorian Nick’s brother so this was in seventy four ‘seventy four, March ‘seventy four. At the end of it, after Lama Zopa got up to the section on the death process, he gave a lot of detail on the whole death process in that course.
And at the end of one of these sessions, I remember Yeshe speaking up and saying, Do you mean to tell me that I’ve been certifying all these people dead for all these years when they’re not really dead? Well, that was quite funny, really, because there were these three Australian doctors were really trying to give Lama Zopa a hard time challenging him on everything he said practically and he just was totally unphased, unshaken, unperturbed by the whole thing. Still, I think there’s something in what you say that they died in they died like flies when they came into India. Yes. But it seems like in Tibet there was quite a high infant death rate which would have made the lifespan look pretty short but in actual fact probably a lot of the adults lived fairly long life if they survived infancy.
So it was a fairly healthy climate there, probably healthier than Nepal. When I first went to Nepal somebody commented to me, You never see a Nepali with grey hair. I hadn’t thought about it until that time and I looked around me, was true, you didn’t see a Nepali with grey hair anywhere. They must have all died before they went grey. Well nowadays when you go to Kathmandu you see plenty of people with grey hair, so it’s changed a lot.
But the Tibetans came from that rather cold climate, very cold climate that was sort of in yes. Well, anyway, a lot of diseases didn’t have as much effect up there as they did when they came down into the lowlands, particularly intestinal disease and so on. They got really sick from these things and a lot of them died. At that stage, they weren’t getting much medical treatment, they didn’t get much help at all. But that’s calmer.
But that’s causes and conditions, you see. It’s a connection between the cause and conditions. You to have the karma, but also the karma can’t take effect until it meets the conditions, but the conditions are also a karmic result, so the whole thing is very interconnected. It was their karma that caused them to have to come down out of Tibet into that situation where they met these germs. They didn’t, of course, all die.
Some survived. Well, it’s just very hard for me to come to terms with that.