Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew clarifies what renunciation means on the Graduated Path: shifting your internal focus so you no longer expect worldly things to bring lasting happiness, while still managing work and home. She traces saṃsāra’s self-perpetuating cycle—ignorance and afflictive emotions trigger actions that create karma, which reinforces those emotions. Through concrete examples (hunting karma, a cat’s ripening karma despite lower birth, the futility of sudden wealth), she shows how karma operates across lifetimes. She covers the three scopes of practice, dedication of merit, and working skillfully with anger rather than suppressing it. The session includes Q&A with newcomers and continuing practitioners, revisiting the six root afflictions (ignorance, attachment, anger) as the evening concludes. Pitched at practitioners at various levels of understanding.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 41 LR 1998 07 16.mp3
UUID: 1c72325b-830b-4734-88d9-d85bb358db19
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-07-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~5,452
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practising giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practising giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merit that I collect by practising giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I prostrate with body, speech and mind and faith, each and every offering I make, including those really performed and those mentally transformed. I confess every sin collected from the beginninglessness of samsaric life. I rejoice in all ordinary and noble beings’ actions. Please, Buddha, by living as our guide until saṃsāra ends, please reveal the teachings to sentient beings. I dedicate the virtues of myself and others to the great enlightenment.
In the Outer Mandala on page four. I think we’ll do it in Tibetan. Chant it. So before we start, we set our motivation. I think that we’re here, we’re going to be listening to and giving and discussing and thinking about the topics of the graduated path.
And we are doing this with the purpose of following the graduated path, which leads to enlightenment, understanding how to follow the graduated path. It’s important that we should not only just think that we are doing this for our own benefit, and in particular, are doing it for our own benefit not just to receive worldly benefit in this life, but to receive the understanding which will lead us towards liberation. And it’s not enough to be doing this for our own individual benefit. We should consider that there are countless living beings who are in the same situation as ourselves, in the sense that they are also subject to suffering. They are being reborn again and again, dying again and again, circling in saṃsāra.
And like us, they’re being thrown from one suffering situation to another. Their happiness that they do encounter never lasts. And this isn’t a satisfactory situation because we all, in our nature, desire to have lasting happiness and not to have even the slightest suffering. And so it’s not enough just to be following the path for ourselves, but we should particularly think that we’re doing it so as to be able to help all these other beings who don’t have the good fortune that we have at the moment to have found the path. In actual fact, I might be getting around to talking about the twelve links tonight, so maybe we could set up the thangka.
I should have come and done it earlier. But if we could have a chair and yes, that’s the idea. And if turn it around the other way, the chair, then I should have a ruler. I think that will do. Yes.
If we—okay. That should be good enough. Okay. I think—if I brought my ruler, it would have been handy. Don’t know whether I’ve got anything at hand that would do.
I can use this anyway. It’s not very—not very good. Not very long. We’ll manage. I should have thought about all these things before.
So anyway, we’re on the path of the—you won’t know what I’m pointing to, if I’m pointing today—the second or the fourth of the twelve links. So anyway, we’ve been going through the Graduated Path and we’ve been looking at the meditations on the medium scope. So just to fill you in, there are a few people here who perhaps haven’t been following through the Graduated Path teachings before, and so we’re halfway through the Graduated Path at the moment, more than halfway through, so you wouldn’t really be able to totally pick up on what we are talking about without having been introduced to the preliminary parts of it. Okay, well I’ll see if this is any good.
So we’ve been going through various topics on the graduated path, so if there’s some bits that don’t quite seem to fit in, just be patient and just learn what you can, and you’ll gradually get the picture. So we’ve been going through the meditation of the small scope, which have to do with—some of the old students will tell us this. Yes. Well, the person who’s concerned with the small scope practices—or I should say the small scope practice motivation—is concerned with avoiding lower rebirth, particularly understanding that if we don’t behave skillfully and make good use of our human rebirth this time, then we could slip back to the suffering realms. Once we slip back to the suffering realms, it’s very, very hard to get another fortunate rebirth, so we have to make good use of it.
That in itself isn’t enough. The small scope person realizes that eventually they will have to do the practices for cutting off the root of saṃsāra, but they are more concerned in the immediate term with just avoiding lower rebirth, avoiding the suffering of the lower realms. And that involves the practice of taking refuge in the Three Jewels—Buddha, Dharma and Sangha—and following the basic advice of the Three Jewels, which is observing karma, which tells us how to avoid the most harmful kind of actions, how to purify our negative karmas, how to accumulate merit. By following these practices, then we can ensure ourselves of a better rebirth, of a good rebirth next time, and to continue to progress on the path to Dharma. So then there are three scopes that have to be practiced: the small, medium and great.
So just to quickly mention that the medium scope is concerned with, first of all, developing renunciation, which doesn’t mean giving up everything, but it means seeing that worldly things, things of this life, have no essence, they can’t bring us lasting happiness, and that it’s a waste of energy to put our main energy into these things, but that our main focus should be on Dharma practice and on developing the thought of liberation, and as far as is possible for us at our present level, to do the practices that lead to liberation from saṃsāra. And then, in addition to that, in the Mahāyāna teachings, we have to bring in the great scope, which means that we’re not only thinking of ourselves but thinking of others, and that we’re developing ourselves not only to attain everlasting happiness for ourselves, but as there are so many others compared to just one of ourselves, seeing that the main gist of our practice is to work for others, and this means that we should be aiming to achieve not just liberation but full Buddhahood, which is a higher state than just liberation for oneself. And that’s because Buddhahood will give the powers to be able to help others effectively.
So there’s a lot that could be said about that. I won’t say it now. But we’re still dealing with medium scope, and last week, we were dealing with suffering. I think we were dealing with suffering last week, weren’t we? Yes?
We were meditating on suffering. Death and—okay, so the topic of death and impermanence really is something that comes into the small scope. Maybe I’ve missed something. I thought we were dealing with suffering. Oh, yes.
I must have just got onto the topic of death and dying last week, I think, yes, because we really were on the intermediate scope. Then I just got talking about death and dying again. So, yes, so really, the person who is trying to follow the graduated path in the section of the intermediate scope is concerned with developing this attitude of renunciation. To actually have realized this thought, it’s not enough just to have the thought intellectually. It has to be very, very heartfelt and you have to keep on developing it until it keeps on arising spontaneously.
So, for most of us, we’re only going to be able to develop it, first of all, in what’s called an artificial way. That means that we have to keep on working at it. If we allow ourselves to slack off, if we don’t keep up our meditation, if we don’t keep up studying the lamrim, then we’ll forget about it and we’ll slip back into worldly thoughts again. We can cultivate this artificial renunciation, but that’s a good start. So this would be enough to make us an intermediate path practitioner.
It doesn’t mean that we’ve realized the intermediate scope, because that comes when we really develop this full realization of renunciation. Renunciation, anyway, doesn’t mean giving up everything, but it just means having this mind that’s very strongly focused on liberation, that sees liberation as the only thing that’s really worth striving for. It doesn’t mean that we have to change our way of life, but it means that we have to change our focus, our internal focus, so that our actions, instead of being done with worldly motivation, are done with Dharma motivation. So any questions up to this point? Yes, well you have to work out each of these things for yourself, but if you look at it this way, is it going to be something that’s going to disturb your mind every time you look around your bedroom you’re going to see the paint looking all shabby. If it’s going to make you feel unpeaceful, there’s not much point in keeping it that way, is there?
Living simply is something that depends on the society you’re in. In our society, most people have their own home and they need to have a car and they need to have a computer and they need to keep up their house and so on. It’s just not seeing these things as being all that important and not feeling that you have to keep up with the Joneses and all this sort of thing. If you’re living the life of an ordinary householder, you do need to keep up with what’s expected of somebody in your position, and that’s not wrong.
It’s just that you can’t give these things more importance than what they warrant, and particularly you don’t see them as being the source of happiness. If you really think that you’re going to be happy, for instance, you’re the person who has the most possessions, the most prestige, the one that everybody else admires and so on, or if you think you’re going to really enjoy having all these wonderful possessions and spending all your time sort of grooving around with your stereo or your computers or whatever, it doesn’t mean you can’t have these things, but you have to realise that they haven’t got a real essence, that the pleasure they give you might work today and not work tomorrow, because that’s the nature of things. Or you might have them one day and the next day your house might catch fire and you might lose the lot. Or somebody might break in, that happens all the time. So all these things are part of the nature of cyclic existence and if you understand that, then you’re not going to be so upset with all the ups and downs.
You know, if you win Tatts Lotto one day and you have everything stolen from you the next day, then the person who’s been meditating on renunciation is just going to say, oh, well, you know, that’s too bad. That’s how it’s going to be, I better get liberated, because, well, as long as I’m in saṃsāra, this sort of thing is going to happen to me. So, anyway, there’s two different levels of practice of people who are working on the intermediate scope or the medium scope and developing renunciation, developing the thought of getting out of saṃsāra. So everybody who is practising has to meditate on suffering as we did last week. We’ve been looking over the last couple of weeks at the general sufferings of saṃsāra, the sufferings of the human realm, the different kinds of birth, being born, getting sick, old age, death and various other sufferings that afflict you in the human realm, so that you don’t think that just receiving a fortunate rebirth is cause of happiness.
We also looked at the general sufferings that afflict even the beings in what’s called the worldly god realms and the fact that they don’t stay in these realms forever—they get reborn again in the human realm. That might be something we don’t think about very much in the West, but we’re taught that these other realms exist and that good karma that’s not dedicated for dharma purposes will lead to rebirth in these kinds of realms, either in the human realm or the demigods or the gods. And the reasons why we don’t want to aim for rebirth in these realms is because it’s still subject to samsaric suffering, even though it’s a lighter level of samsaric suffering, and also it’s something that doesn’t last. We’re looking for lasting happiness and we’re looking for a greater happiness, a really pure happiness uncontaminated by any obscurations, by any ignorance. And this is something that we can’t find within saṃsāra.
By meditating in this way, we can build up the thought of renouncing saṃsāra completely. And the person of the lesser intellectual faculty then has to just try to understand the causes of saṃsāra in terms of the general causes, which is delusion and karma, or disturbing mental factors and karma. Translation is afflictive mental states and karma. And so if we understand these, then we come to understand the process that’s keeping us bound in saṃsāra and we can begin to work to reverse the process. So, in general terms, the process that keeps us in saṃsāra is explained in terms of a wheel that keeps on turning.
There’s a mechanism involved that is self-perpetuating, so karma and delusion keep on reinforcing each other so that we have more and more rebirths in saṃsāra, and that’s why it’s explained in the form of a wheel. The term saṃsāra means circling. In Tibetan it’s called korwa, and the same word comes into when we talk about circumambulation, going around the stupa or going around some sort of holy object, we talk about—a lot of Westerners have picked up the term—they talk about doing korwa, because it’s this idea of circling. So we’re doing korwa in saṃsāra and that doesn’t help us, it’s something that’s only hurting us, so we have to stop that sort of circling. And this is what the person of sharper mental faculties has to contemplate on, is the details of this mechanism.
So I’ll get onto that later on. But it’s like a wheel of perpetual motion, it keeps on turning by itself, and it will just keep on turning until you actually put in some energy to stop it. But it can be stopped. This is the good news the Buddha gave us. So this is getting into the four noble truths, actually.
I’ll be talking a little bit about the four noble truths. Anyway, to get back to the person of lesser mental faculties and what they have to do, we have to understand how karma and afflictive mental states keep us in saṃsāra. These are the two causes of saṃsāra that are always working and always keeping us going around and around. So, as we have these afflictive mental states, this leads us into creating various actions under the force of these afflictive mental states, motivated by these afflictive mental states. These lead us into creating various karmas.
In particular, the negative karmas that we create under their influence result in suffering. So we also create some virtuous karma, but even our virtuous karma is under the influence of a certain degree of ignorance, which is still under the influence of the afflictive mental states. So even this positive karma is still cause for saṃsāra. It’s a fortunate kind of result because it leads to happiness and to rebirth in the upper realms. But still, it doesn’t lead to liberation unless it’s actually directed to liberation or enlightenment and directed towards the path of Dharma.
And who can tell us how we do that? Dedication is one. Yes, right. So yes, there’s two main things. Motivation and prayer.
I think prayer and motivation really come together there. The main difference seems to be that you can pray at any time, whereas motivation is something you do specifically at the start of virtuous action when you’re planning to create some merit. We also were told to motivate each day, to set our motivation first thing in the morning. And on the Mahāyāna path, we’re advised to make our motivation bodhicitta. So as we did before the start of this session, also at the start of each day, we set our motivation in that way.
And at night, at the end of the day, we should check up what we’ve done through the day and purify our negative karmas, rejoice in our positive virtues or merits, and dedicate them for enlightenment. We can also dedicate the merits of others. This can help them, particularly there are others who don’t know enough to be dedicating their own merits. So if we dedicate their merits for them, and in a general way we can dedicate the merits of all beings. This is something that’s going to be helpful for them. Did I get the merit or do you?
Well, I think generally—I have never heard a technical explanation about dedicating merits of others, but we’ve been told to do it. So obviously it does have some sort of influence. I would imagine that when you dedicate your own merits, it’s much more powerful than when you dedicate the merits of somebody else who isn’t dedicating themselves. But there’s still some influence there. Of course, you get some merit also for the virtuous thought of wanting to dedicate others’ merits.
That’s a virtuous thought. So you would also receive some merit for that. But it seems like there is some influence there which can have some influence in causing their merits to be directed towards enlightenment. I think if it wasn’t for others dedicating the merits, particularly Buddhas and bodhisattvas, but also anybody who has that virtuous thought dedicating the merits of others, perhaps they would never be able to get onto the path of enlightenment in the first place. It must be things like this that enabled us to get a start, because you wonder how you could manage to get a start otherwise.
Can you do that for someone who’s dead? Sure, yes. Yes, because they’re still in some other form of life somewhere else. And particularly if your parents or relatives have died or somebody that you know, then I think it’s a very positive thing. Oh, I think there could be.
I have never actually heard it explained that way. I’m just guessing that I imagine that there could be. Yes. It’s a pity you never met her, but no doubt you will in the future. You might be her grandmother next time.
Yes. It’s better to become enlightened. And then—because we can have karmic connections with all sorts of beings, and then these karmic connections if we pray for beings too, that helps to create connections. And these connections become very positive because even if it’s just from our side, even if the person from their side has negative feelings, still when you become a bodhisattva, that connection can be transformed into something positive. The Buddha, one time or other, he was surrounded by these five beings that were eating him alive, and he made the dedication.
Maybe that is why they had to practice all that asceticism and starve themselves to work off the karma of eating him. So anyway—so anyway, talking about these delusions, afflictive mental states, and karma. So we create these actions, and these actions create an imprint. So when the action is created, then there’s a sort of an impression carried on the consciousness, which then acts like a sort of seed to produce a result in the future. So it’s actually—it’s called action or karma because it’s created by an action and it brings about a result.
And it carries this result, as we learned in the section on karma, it can carry this result for a long time until the result gets experienced, or we can purify it. The only way to totally purify karmic impressions is through meditating, direct insight in meditation into emptiness. But we can purify with the four opponent forces, which we’ve also learned about, which can prevent us having to receive the result of suffering and experiencing lower rebirths. So as we learned in the section on karma also, there are two categories of karma. One category is called projecting karma, which brings about a rebirth.
The other category is called ripening karma, and it brings about an experience that’s experienced during the lifetime. So one projecting karma will determine whether we have a fortunate or an unfortunate rebirth. It’s only one karma, but it’s also influenced by the whole pattern of karma. There are certain factors that determine which karma will ripen, and that’s influenced by the whole karmic pattern. And so it’s possible to have a good or a bad rebirth, but to have different kinds of karma experienced during a lifetime.
We know that in human lifetime, we can experience both good and bad results of ripening karma. Being born human is a good result of the projecting karma. But then we have to experience all this ripening karma, some of it’s going to be bad. That’s why we sometimes experience happiness, sometimes we experience suffering. Some people have more good karma, some people have more bad karma.
You can also see with animals—being born as an animal is bad karma. It’s a bad projecting karma, but you get some animals like this cat here who seems to have lots of good ripening karma. But she has to experience some bad karma sometimes because the cat next door jumps on her and frightens her. So she doesn’t like that. We were sitting out the back there the other day, Moontoo—Jack, no.
Jack’s a boy. Jack’s a boy. Yes. But she’s a girl. But the funny thing is that she can look after herself pretty well, actually.
But anyway, she certainly doesn’t like Jack. And yes. So yes. So goodness knows what sort of karma she’s creating by drinking water out of the water bowls. But anyway, she’s doing pretty well at the moment.
So changed into nectar. Yes. We hope so. Yeah. So she’s drinking what we call nectar.
Yes. Maybe she drinks so much. Maybe, well, you know, she might be a bodhisattva. So anyway, this is just some general ideas of how karma is working. There’s a lot of different factors in karma.
One of the things that’s important about karma is that when we create a particular kind of karma, it doesn’t just bring us the result of happiness or suffering, but it also brings another result, which is a tendency to be caught up again in the same kind of action. So for instance, if we’ve done a lot of killing of animals, for instance, in this lifetime, then we’ll get drawn in our future lifetimes into more killing of animals. We might get born in a society where we’re encouraged to kill animals, where people think it’s good to kill animals. We might find that we have no choice to earn a living except by killing animals, and all these kinds of things are part of the karmic result. And also to have a natural liking and a natural interest in this sort of activity.
So somebody who’s very enthusiastic about hunting, for instance, who might take an interest in hunting from an early age. This would be a karmic result of having killed animals in previous lifetimes. Well, that’s the royal family, isn’t it? Yes. Well, I don’t know about Prince Charles.
He seems to have—I’m not sure. He seems to have his doubts about it. He plays polo. He works off the energy playing polo. I don’t know.
But, anyway, yes. Yes. Certainly, the English upper classes have had a lot of interest in hunting. A lot of Australians too. So you keep on—anyway, then—so one effect of these actions also is that when we act out these various afflictive emotions in the form of these actions of body, speech, and mind, that also strengthens the afflictive emotions.
So every time we act out of anger for instance, whether it means killing, beating, or actions of speech such as abusing other people verbally, or whether we just keep our anger in our hearts but we hang on to it and brood over it, all of these actions strengthen our anger, and so this is not only going to bring us karmic results, but it’s also going to mean that this anger is going to come up again in our next lifetime. So we have this sort of ongoing result of karma and afflictive emotions strengthening each other all the time. So you have more afflictive emotions, more action, or more karma, resulting in more afflictive emotions and more karma, more cause for rebirth, on and on. And this just keeps the whole thing going.
So it just goes on and on. And obviously, as a lot of this involves negative karma, it’s going to lead to rebirth again and again in the lower realms. If we’re doing it without control, without understanding. If we meet the Dharma teachings and understand the teachings on karma and try to create virtuous karma, then we can purify and eliminate—we can reduce the causes for lower rebirth and bring about causes for upper rebirth, and thus we can create causes to be born in the upper realms—particularly, we aim to get another human rebirth. There’s reasons why we don’t want to be born in the god realms.
We want to be born in the human realm so as to keep on practicing. And we keep on doing this but it’s not safe. Unless we progress and get right out of saṃsāra, we’re not safe. That’s why even the person of the small scope has to have this understanding that eventually they have to do the practice to get out of saṃsāra, but they’re more focused at that point on just avoiding the lower rebirth. So in order to get focused on liberation, on getting out of saṃsāra, you have to do this meditation on suffering and also meditate on this cause of saṃsāra, the bondage to—our being under the situation of bondage to karma and delusion.
So has anybody got any questions about that? Also, the Buddhist point of view, if you take your anger out on—yes. I mean, you know, there are certain situations, like, for instance, when people are doing psychotherapy, sometimes they’re encouraged to beat a cushion and sort of get in touch with the various events in this life that might have led to a lot of frustration and anger, and that can be a positive process. I think if the person’s doing it with the guidance of a skillful therapist, and they’re doing it in order to gain more deeper understanding, from the Buddha’s point of view, that doesn’t really go far enough because it doesn’t really get to the root of anger, but it can still be very helpful, particularly if you’ve got so much anger that it’s causing you, you know, psychological problems in this life. So definitely, I wouldn’t discourage somebody who felt like getting involved in some sort of therapy.
I’d definitely say, well, see if it helps you. And from the point of view of Buddhism, you have to go a lot deeper than that. But we certainly don’t think it’s a good idea to just take out your anger by going and telling people what you think of them or even just smashing the china. That’s better than beating somebody, but it’s not much better because you’re still acting out your anger. Does anybody here want to say anything about that?
Well, I understand that from the point of view of therapy, you might sometimes have to do that. Has anybody done that? Right. Okay. All that terminology of anger there, perhaps we might use the terminology and define it a bit differently in Buddhism.
But in actual fact, it’s like anger and hatred. So if you hang on to it, I suppose it’s more like hatred or resentment or frustration or something like that. But just in general terms, sometimes we refer to it as anger. But yes, that’s interesting. I mean, I do know that therapists don’t encourage you to hold on to anger towards a person, even if they encourage you to express how you feel.
I know they don’t encourage you to keep on sort of hating your parents or whoever, they do want you to get to the point where you can forgive them, because this is something that’s necessary for psychological healing. So that’s interesting actually to know that. And certainly in Buddhism, we teach that we have to understand our anger. It’s not good to repress it, it’s not good to act it out. Both of those are mistakes.
What does cure us of our anger is understanding, acknowledging it, seeing it, and understanding it. Right. So with Buddhism, the thing is we take it a step further and see how it doesn’t just come from this life, but it comes from way back from past lives. And also, I don’t think Western psychologists would agree that you could totally eradicate anger, whereas in Buddhism, it’s taught that you can totally eradicate it. And, of course, in the short term, you can’t expect to do that, but we do aim to do it in the long term.
So we want to get rid of these afflictive mental states. And we actually started these a few months ago. We went through these six. So the first one is ignorance. And this particularly refers to the ignorance of—there are different degrees of ignorance, actually, but the one that concerns us most in the immediate term is just not understanding the difference between virtue and non-virtue.
This is the thing that damages us the most because it leads us into creating non-virtuous actions and having to experience suffering results from that. Then desire-attachment. In Tibetan, actually, is those two words. It’s I think dö chag. Anyway, that means desire-attachment.
And neither of those words really translates adequately by themselves. Attachment perhaps would be the best translation if you want a single word, but it includes a whole range of feelings in that category. So somebody’s probably wondering what’s wrong with attachment. Isn’t it good to love your friends and family and so on? Has anybody got this doubt?
Now you all understand what’s meant by the Buddhist term of attachment. So this is something that’s to be distinguished from pure love, which is a very positive attitude. And this refers to any sort of self-centered attachment or desire for things of this world, which includes relationships which are looked at from a self-cherishing viewpoint. The third one is, you could call it anger or hatred or aversion. Particularly, the anger and hatred, I think, the more stronger forms of