Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Margaret McAndrew offers a detailed 43-minute commentary on the twelve links of dependent origination—the Buddhist map of how suffering cycles through rebirth. She unpacks each link (consciousness, name-form, sense faculties, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, aging, and death), anchoring them with traditional imagery: a monkey grabbing fruit, an arrow striking the eye, couples in intimate contact. McAndrew emphasizes that ignorance and craving are the hidden hinges of the cycle, explores how the links unfold across multiple lifetimes, and teaches meditation forwards, backwards, and by categorical grouping. She closes by invoking the prison metaphor—see saṃsāra as a prison and crave freedom from it—and adds a Mahāyāna note: you need not renounce worldly things, only attachment. For practitioners with foundational Buddhist training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 40 LR 1998 07 09.mp3
UUID: 18b560ca-6c46-4c2c-9458-b9e3c480c5b9
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-07-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.5 minutes
Words: ~4,611
From when I was, you know, a kid, but not That’s what you’re asking. Yes. Yes. Well, sometimes, seems to come up spontaneously in a situation like that. But if you try to make make memories come up, you can meditate back to that period and see if they’ll come up.
But when you I think you can’t always guarantee it until you get the single point of concentration, then you can remember everything. Then you’ll have the power to remember this life, how it was, this life. Back when you were a baby, when you were born, all these things. Impossible. Yeah.
Yeah. I think she sits too close to the phone. That’s good. I know. Don’t know we understand anything.
She’ll probably just come and bang on the door in a little while, but that’s alright if she’s had a drink. So yes. Because she’s getting quite cheeky now. She hooks right up on her shoulder. She doesn’t just doesn’t just put her feet up on it.
Doesn’t just put her front feet up. So okay. Anyway, this is we’re up to consciousness. So that’s clear enough. And then we’ve got and then and form.
It’s name and form. So this is the the six six faculties. It’s like the development of the sense faculties, but they haven’t yet fully developed yet. But the four name refers to the five mental the five mental faculties. The four mental faculties.
Sorry. And the four mental aggregates, not faculties, aggregates. So the form refers to the four mental aggregates? Name refers to the four mental aggregates. I’m telling you everything all wrong.
So and the form refers to the body, and what this refers to the beginning process after conception takes place, beginning of the development of the body. So that the the organs are beginning to develop, but they’re not fully developed yet. It’s just the beginning of the process. It’s actually combination of the egg and the consciousness, the fertilized egg and the consciousness. It’s this very early embryonic stage, where the being is still not receiving sense impressions and responding and so on.
But these things are still there in a latent form. Well, they’re really in a developing form. They’re starting to develop. But it’s still in a very early stage. Also the mental aggregates are still there, but in an unmanifested state.
So then as the process goes on, you get to number five, and that’s the sixth sense organ. That’s symbolised by an empty house with six windows, six empty windows. And this refers to the sixth senses. So these senses are starting to develop now. It’s development of these in other words development of the body, the physical senses and the mental sense which were previously just in a latent state and now they’re starting to become actually formed.
And then The next thing that happens having got so the empty house and the empty windows means that the sensors are ready to receive impressions. The next step is that the impressions are received. There’s the contact with the object. Through the gradual development of these same organs such as the eyes, the ears, the nose, tongue and so forth, as the little child develops, assuming if we’re talking about a human being here, as the fetus develops, you start to have contact being made with these sense organs. Even in the womb this starts to happen, know, the baby can hear things and experiencing various impressions.
And this is the link of contact. This is six, and that’s symbolised by well, in this book it’s a couple cuddling. Can you see what they’re doing there? So anyway, they’re just intimate. They’re just sort of Yes, because we’re not up to that point yet, that comes later.
So, at this stage, they’re just cuddling. Anyway, making contact. So this is symbolized by this touching, this physical contact. And because we have the contact between the object and the sense organ, and the sense faculty, which is the mental faculty, we have all these things coming together and working together. There’s experienced a sense perception.
Lorig has a lot to say about this. If you want to understand more about these things, you have to study Lorig, particularly about the sense consciousnesses and so on, and how they relate to the organs. So anyway, what happens is that through the contact with the sense organ and the object and the consciousness, there is an experience of some sort of sense impression. This gives rise to a feeling, which is symbolized by somebody with an arrow in his eye. Because the this is this symbolizes this very strong impact on the sense organ.
Of course, sometimes this is things that we like. Because we have these experiences, then we can discriminate pleasant and unpleasant and neutral objects. So as a result of this contact, then we have the feeling. We experience this sense impression as producing a feeling within us. And this feeling is of three types.
There are feelings of happiness, feelings of suffering, and neutral feelings. So any particular sense impression is going to produce a feeling of one of those particular types. Doesn’t aversion attached to a societal fear strongly for strongly against and Yes, but that’s the next link. This is the next link. Yes.
So first of all, you have the feeling. Okay. So then the next link is craving, and that’s usually represented by somebody drinking alcohol. Yes. So, I think that’s it anyway.
Yes, I think he’s being served his chang by a lady. In Tibet, it’s chang, in Australia, It’s a beer or McLaren Vale whatever, or whatever you like. Oh, it’s good, but you’re learning the distance. Yes, is it, Barossa Valley?
Yeah! Yes, so anyway, so the result of this feeling is that we so the feeling doesn’t harm us, but the craving is very destructive. And the problem is that once we have this feeling, then we start to crave, and what we crave is wanting not to be separated from happy feelings, and wanting to be separated from unhappy feelings, or wanting to be separated from suffering, or we can also crave that our equanimity or neutral feeling doesn’t decline, because we don’t want to experience suffering. Generally we’re very attached to happy feelings, but maybe if we’ve been feeling very unhappy for a while and then we find ourselves feeling neutral, then we might feel very strongly that we don’t want to go back into feeling unhappy again. So we have all these cravings and of course we also crave for the objects that produce these feelings in us.
So if we have ignorance present, then our feelings serve to produce craving. If we don’t have ignorance, then we have feelings, but we don’t have craving. So this is the difference between ourselves and highly realized beings. Where ignorance is present, then feelings give rise to craving. They serve as a subsidiary cause for the development of craving.
Where there is no ignorance, feelings are still experienced, but craving doesn’t develop. So the craving is the problem. So that’s why it says in the teachings that somebody who has got rid of ignorance can still enjoy things they can experience various different sense objects and enjoy the various sense objects there’s also the of course different kinds of sense objects pleasant and unpleasant but the person doesn’t just accepts them as they come, doesn’t crave to be free of the unpleasant ones or to experience to be always associated with the pleasant ones. Presumably, when the pleasant ones are impermanent, then that’s not a worry? That’s not a worry.
Things just come and go. Yes. So they just accept the whole flow of experience without labelling good or bad or indifferent. Yes, it is pretty amazing! Don’t you?
Not me! Yes, think sometimes when you’re doing that kind of meditation, particularly if you’ve done Vipassana and Goenkaji is telling you to label, but just experience the feelings in your body, sometimes you can sort of get into it for a little while, but to really have completely developed that attitude that just as you go about your business, you don’t have that grasping, That’s really something special. But, however, it’s possible. And I think the more we meditate on renunciation, the more we it helps us to give up this grasping. We also, meditating on impermanence is very important.
But it’s meditating on emptiness that really helps us to give up grasping because that’s what cuts off the ignorance we can’t really give up grasping until we’ve got rid of that ignorance Yes. Yes. Yes. I think that’s a good demonstration. Of course, they didn’t have movies when these texts were being written, but they used some analogies that are a bit similar to that, like an illusory show, a magician’s illusion, and various different things or a rainbow.
Just becomes easy, I think. That’s right, yes. This is an ongoing process, as you say, and we have to develop ourselves in this way. We can’t even realise emptiness until we’ve developed a fair degree of renunciation, because otherwise, if you go into retreat but your mind’s always going off to worldly things, then you won’t be able to even develop single-pointed concentration, let alone insight into emptiness. So, that’s up to the eighth link, and that’s craving.
And then the ninth link is grasping. So, as our craving increases, and of course fixated on this particular object, we grasp for the object. And that’s usually a monkey reaching for fruit. Yes, and that’s number nine. And there’s different kinds of grasping but we’re always doing it and these are the links that cause us a lot of trouble the craving and the grasping are the ones that are the real problems along with ignorance So then we’ve got becoming.
This means that this is why I’m saying it’s not like just sort of what you would expect in a normal flowchart, just dealing with one process, because becoming actually means that then you take a rebirth, you’ve create the craving and grasping have strengthened the the karmic imprint so that it produces a rebirth or another life. And so in in actual fact, if you follow the links around from one to twelve, you’re really going through two lives, explained in different ways. So what you’ve got here is the life coming into being, and then you’ve got the next link, which is the actual rebirth. So that the rebirth, the link before is becoming, is actually the activating of the karma to bring the rebirth. The next link is the rebirth itself, which is either sometimes it shows a couple having sexual intercourse, sometimes it shows a woman giving birth, or sometimes it actually becoming is symbolised by a pregnant woman.
Or I think there it might be a couple. Can you see what it is? It could be the couple conceiving the child. They’re in a tent. Yes.
They’re in the tent. Yes. That’s right. They’re camping. Yes, they’re camping.
And the child is being conceived. This is ten, so we’re back to becoming. So it can be a pregnant woman or it can be a couple. So it’s the conception of the child. But it’s really, that’s the symbol, but what it really means is the karmic link, ripening.
And then the next step is the rebirth, which is symbolized by a baby being born. And the next link after that is what just follows on, which is aging and death. Yes, so having been born, we’re going to die, and if we don’t die while we’re still young, then we’re going to age. In actual fact, aging starts from the moment we’re born, the process of aging, because it refers to the whole development process and the whole course of our life going from being a newly conceived embryo right through to being born and to having the development of the child and the adolescent and the fully developed adult then declining into old age, which some of us know all about, or something some of us are starting to perhaps don’t know all about, starting to learn about anyway. And then the the death.
The picture is dead body. Yes. In in my book, it shows the the person who’s responsible for dispersing of the dead bodies carrying the bundle on his back to the place where the vultures are waiting. If you saw Kundun, saw a very graphic acting out of that one. So, yes That’s the whole renunciation thing, yes, realizing that there’s no point in it.
You know? Yeah, so you’re young for a little one, while you’re young you think you’ve got the whole of life ahead of you, and then you do have the whole of life, and you start to realize that there’s not that much point to it. The worst thing is that if you don’t get what you want, then you start to see that there’s not much point to it. Even if you do get what you want, you see Ross, that there’s not much point to it. If you get Well, yes, but at our level we shouldn’t worry about that sort of excitement because we’re doing something positive and that’s the main thing.
I mean, you know, you can be aware, can practice mindfulness, but if we’re doing good actions, then we shouldn’t feel, you know, that we have to be terribly unemotional and so on we can rejoice, yes but of course if we’re getting excited and all sort of fluttery and so on, then it’s a sign that there’s a bit of ego attachment as well. But it’s much better to be attached to doing good actions than to be attached to harmful actions, or things that will hurt us. So, anyway, that’s the the twelve links which we are very much caught up in. So then there’s still various things that we need to understand about the twelve links. It’s a very complicated topic, and one way of looking at it is to divide the twelve links up into the various different categories.
So you can divide them up into four groups: groups A, B, C and D, for convenience. Group A are the propulsive causes, and these are ignorance, throwing karma, and half of consciousness. So the the the first two two and a half links. So the first half of consciousness is the consciousness which happens at the time of the cause. In other words, at the time when we create an action and the karmic link is created and placed as a latency on our consciousness.
So Vasubandhu says that it’s something like oil going into paper. This impression is sort of absorbed by the conscious, which is of course not something physical, it’s mental energy, it’s formless. And the impression that is received is a formless impression, but it remains, it’s a sort of vibration or some sort of energy which remains as a latency in our consciousness and is carried in that way. And so then the second group is the causes of existence, which is three and a half links. It’s the second half of consciousness, which is the consciousness at the time of result, when it starts to bring its result, when it starts to roughly produce a result, and leading to craving, grasping and existence.
These are the causes of existence. So you’ll see that it’s not following a time sequence here, because it jumps straight from consciousness to craving. So it jumps from three right to eight, Number eight, which is craving. So this is explaining how the causes, which were laid down under the influence of ignorance, throwing karma is created, is imprinted on the consciousness. Later on, at the end of a particular life, when the person is dying, these links start to manifest, these impressions start to manifest, and you have the result consciousness starting to ripen, and as it comes up, it is strengthened by craving and grasping.
These act like fertilizer and the conditions that cause this karma to ripen and to become strong, powerful and to become capable of bringing about a result and you have existence coming about and these are the causes of existence or becoming sorry I’m looking at different translations here so it gets a bit confusing so becoming then you have becoming coming about and this becoming as I said before is the link actually becoming capable of producing the next life. Then you have the next group, which is the results of propulsive causes. And this is group c, which is birth or rebirth, which is number eleven. And then you’ve also got name and form coming in here. So we’re back again to number four.
So first of all you have the conception, which is what is called the rebirth link, number eleven. And then you have the from that point on, have the development of the name and form, which is number four. As we saw before, that’s the developing body and mental aggregates. And as that process continues, then you get the product of the six senses. Then, as a result of that coming about, then you have contact and feeling.
The sense organs make contact with the outside objects, or with various objects. You have the contact, then you have the feeling being produced, and as we saw before, that leads to the craving and grasping. But here, we count the craving and grasping in this group. The birth, name and form, sixth sense organs, contact and feeling are counted together as the results of propulsive causes. So they come about as a result of the propulsive causes, having a birth or rebirth, then you get this whole system of development.
Child develops and the sense organs develop, and as a result of that there is contact and feeling. The child is experiencing these things. Well it starts off there, but of course it continues through the person’s life. Well it could be a result of something going wrong in the development process of course that would be a karmic result in itself but certainly things can go wrong in the womb physically, yes and these things have a big influence on us for instance people can be born without some of their organs or without functioning organs, some malfunctioning organs So this is definitely part of the possibilities of samsaric rebirth. And of course these things can have an influence on how we react and on what happens to us in our life.
They can influence our minds. Our bodies and our minds are very linked together. What happens to our bodies can influence our psychology. So this is certainly important, because while we’re in this body, what happens with our brain is important, because our brain is something that’s it’s physical, it’s not mind, but it’s very much connected with the workings of our mind while we’re in this particular body. Yes.
We’d say that’s karma, yes. To have that sort of medical treatment. That’s right, yes. So anyway, then the last group is just one link, that’s old age and death. Aging and death.
Not just old age, but aging. So, that also comes about, of course, as a result of the birth. So you’ve probably got completely confused by now, I’m sure I find it’s hard to remember all these things. But Anyway, you have propulsive causes, you have causes of existence, you have the results of the propulsive causes, you have you have propulsive causes, you have causes of existence, you have the results of propulsive causes, and you have the results of existence. If you want to look it up again, it’s explained in here.
What is interesting is to see how these come about over the course of our lives. So the least amount of time that we can experience a set of twelve links is over two lifetimes. It can go over any number of lifetimes. The least is that we lay down the causes, the karmic imprints in this lifetime. At the end of the lifetime, the craving and grasping and becoming of that particular propulsive karma will ripen and lead to another rebirth in which we will experience the rest of the links.
So that’s explained as being three delusion links, which is ignorance, craving and grasping, two karmic links, which is compositional factors and becoming, and all the rest is suffering experience. And so we experience the suffering experience all over the course of that next life. Another way is to explain it in terms of three lifetimes in which these links are operating, but there can be in between the first lifetime in which the propulsive causes are laid down, and the lifetime in which they ripen, the second lifetime, there can be any number of intervening lifetimes, there can be a thousand lifetimes in between, but in the first lifetime these propulsive causes are laid down, at the end of that lifetime this particular set of twelve links doesn’t ripen. Another karma ripens. So this continues to be carried on the consciousness.
It could be carried on to the following lifetime and then ripen in the second lifetime, or it could be that there’s ten or a thousand lifetimes in between, but then another lifetime will come up in which this propulsive karma is the one that ripens. And then this particular set of twelve links continues turning, and you get the craving and grasping and so on. You have the ignorance, the craving, and the grasping manifesting and bringing about the ripening of this karmic result at the death time, and that will lead to the next immediate life after that, which is when you’ll experience all the other links, all the suffering results. Well it could have been two lifetimes ago, it could have been a hundred lifetimes ago, but if you’re looking at a particular set of twelve links of cause and result, that one particular karma can either it has to go through this whole process of twelve links to bring its result, and it can either bring those twelve results over two lifetimes, which will be two consecutive lifetimes, or it can be over three lifetimes. And if it’s over three lifetimes, then we’re talking about three lifetimes in which these twelve things are actually doing things so there could be a whole lot of lifetimes in between the first one and the second one in which which it’s not doing anything but just remaining as a latency other things are working, yes so there’s other karma’s other sets of twelve things happening all the time but this one particular set of twelve things that we’re looking at say killing the insect that can be laid down in this lifetime.
Nothing happens at the end of this life. You experience some other good results, say to go to the God realms, and then eventually, after many lifetimes, this insect killing karma is going to come up at the death time, and you’re going to experience those links of craving, grasping and becoming and you’re going to the link of grasping here particularly has to do with grasping at the time of death of course we’re craving and grasping all the time but here we’re particularly talking about grasping at the time of death when the person is dying and they’re sort of grasping at life that’s why it’s very important to be peaceful at death time, because at least then we have more opportunity of grasping at a good life if we’re very disturbed at the time of death, we’ll grasp at anything so the whole thing is that at the time of death these further links take place which lead to the next life which is just the result links. So the causal links are taking place over perhaps a couple of lives which are widely separated but once you get these the grasping the craving and grasping stimulating the becoming once the becoming is happening then you’re all set it’s all rolling and you go on to the next life does that that make sense?
So if we think about these things anyway, we can see really why it’s very desirable to get off the whole process. Apparently, craving and grasping are the key links, well, ignorance really is the key link, because craving and grasping are the ones that we really have to stop, but if we want to stop them, then we have to deal with the ignorance, which is the thing that keeps the whole thing happening. And so if we look at it in this way, it stimulates us to deal with our ignorance. So I’m trying to look for a quotation. I think is somewhere here.
You can also meditate on these backwards too, this is another thing. So if you meditate on backwards, seeing how old age, aging and death are caused by rebirth, and rebirth is caused by becoming, and becoming is caused by craving, and so on, this is a very good way to get a very strong feeling for the whole process. So you meditate on it forwards and backwards, and also by looking at it in terms of these different groupings. So you can spend a lot of time on this topic. So there’s a quotation that I want to read to you just to finish off with.
Pabongka Rinpoche says: You have developed renunciation when, as a result of your meditation on the general suffering of Samsāra and the twelve interdependent links, you yearn to be liberated from Samsāra as a prisoner yearns to be freed from prison. You will then want to train in a path leading to freedom. So that’s really the the moral of the whole thing. That’s the mental state that we’re trying to develop. This is the whole gist of the teachings of the medium scope, leading to this attitude of renunciation of the whole of Samsāra.
In other words, just having this mind fixed on liberation, seeing Samsāra as a prison, no matter what part of Samsāra we’re in, no matter what we’re experiencing at this particular stage of Samsāra, not losing sight of the fact that the whole the whole idea of the thing is to to get free from saṃsāra. So you can imagine if you were in prison and somebody brought you a good meal and at the same time you saw that the door had been left open, you wouldn’t stay and eat the meal, you’d head straight out the door. And that’s the sort of the way we if we really think about Samsāra, we’ll be like that when we encounter these Samsāra pleasures. We won’t be drawn in by them. So anyway, we dedicate our merits for enlightenment.
Page five. Can dedicate our merits if we quickly realise renunciation, realise the three principles of the path: renunciation, bodhicitta, and the right view of emptiness, and attain enlightenment quickly. And then the prayers on page five: May I oh, all of those are meant to be in again. Also, if you’re serious about renunciation, if you’re following Mahāyāna practice, you don’t have to give up samsaric good things, because you can transform them into the path through the Mahāyāna thought training. All you have to give up is your attachment.
It’s easy, isn’t it? Sorry.