Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew addresses a central frustration for busy practitioners: the Mahāyāna path appears to demand more time than ordinary life allows. Rather than despair, she introduces lojong (thought training), practices that transform obstacles into fuel for spiritual progress. The core principle: our mind’s interpretation of a situation, not the situation itself, determines whether it becomes a barrier or helper. Key topics include treating hardship as karma purification, cultivating equanimity, and the teaching “if you can solve a problem, do it; if you can’t, there’s no point in worrying.” She then studies the Eight Verses of Thought Training by Geshe Langri Tangpa, focusing on why cherishing sentient beings is the true source of merit. For practitioners familiar with the graduated path and seeking practical approaches to daily difficulties.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 43 BM 1998 08 06.mp3
UUID: 9270c316-5092-493a-b59b-9dce2dd49215
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-08-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,718
Bringing about the benefit of all sentient beings, not just our own individual liberation, but in particular thinking that we’re aiming to be able to bring about the everlasting happiness of all others. In order to do this we need to achieve the state of fully enlightened Buddhahood. Anyway, I thought tonight I’d talk about the practice of Mahāyāna thought transformation. So I’m sorry, perhaps some of you have been getting plenty of this already on the Tuesday night discussion. Anyway, it’s a very important part of the the Mahāyāna practice, and it’s actually it’s not something separate from the graduated path teachings but it’s actually something which comes in which is included in the graduated path.
We’ve actually been through the graduated path in the previous weeks. I’ve been going through the three scopes: the small scope and the medium scope and the great scope, the practices for developing love and compassion. Then when we look at the practices that have to be done by the beings who are on the medium scope and the great scope, when a being is on the medium scope, you remember what the medium scope is all about. Yeah, do you want to tell me? You’re putting yourself in for it if you’re not.
Right. Okay, and the great scope? Okay, so we looked at those scopes and it looked like when you want to achieve liberation from Samsāra then there’s a lot of work to be done and that’s explained in terms of the three higher trainings. There’s a tremendous lot to be accomplished in order to achieve liberation. Then when we looked at the Great Scope, that involves becoming a bodhisattva and then the bodhisattva has to keep on working to attain enlightenment so there’s first of all the work that you have to put into developing love and compassion in order to become a bodhisattva and then there’s the practice of the six perfections that comes following that so as to become fully enlightened.
So it looks as if there’s an awful lot of work to be done on the Mahāyāna path in the great scope, and you might think that there might be an easier way to do it. You might perhaps think of looking at the Tantric path that promises to be the quick path, so you might think, oh well, this sounds as though it’s a bit easier than practicing countless great eons. Anyway when you look at the Tantric path it’s also it might be quick but it doesn’t sound as though it’s terribly easy and it involves very intensive meditation so it looks as though you could spend all your time doing the practices all the time we’ve got in this life doing the practices that are involved in gaining any of these goals so it might look that even if we could manage to spend all our time on these things and go away perhaps and meditate in a cave, even then it might be a little bit too difficult for us. It might look as though we might not really perhaps be able to accomplish what we want to achieve. We have to have really tremendous determination and tremendous merit to do these kinds of practices.
So what do we do if we’re in the situation that most of us are in? We’ve got no time, we’re terribly busy, we have all sorts of commitments, we’ll have all sorts of responsibilities, we have families to look after and jobs and all sorts of other things and in addition to this we might have various forms of hindrances we might have illnesses we might have various different physical mental or psychological emotional problems to overcome which we feel might be something that makes it harder for us to practice than perhaps for some other people and all these things are very very common and most people have some of these things which get them from doing an awful lot of meditation so if we’re very enthusiastic about our practice if we have a great wish to achieve of the path but at the same time we recognize that we have these various different limitations on our achievements in this lifetime we might start to feel frustrated. Has anybody had that experience? Yes, okay. So what happens then?
We get frustrated. We might feel frustrated. I don’t know, maybe some people maybe some of you don’t feel frustrated. I know I used to get terribly frustrated. I suppose I still do sometimes.
And if we get frustrated this is just another obstacle. Frustration isn’t helping us at all, it’s just getting in our way, it’s interfering with our patience. Actually there’s no need for us to feel bad about all these things because, in actual fact, when we study the teachings thoroughly, when we encounter the thought training teachings, we learn that these things don’t have to be obstacles and that these various circumstances that seem to be a problem for us can really be helpful circumstances. We can use these circumstances, these difficulties or these limitations, as actually the situation that we use in our practice. Progress.
This is what we need to do, actually. In actual fact, we can feel really happy if we have all sorts of problems and all sorts of difficulties and all sorts of sufferings. We don’t have to feel unhappy about that we can feel really happy because we’ve got a lot of material to work with and when we’ve got the mind training practice then we can actually make good use of these circumstances and it can only make our practice stronger and stronger So we don’t have to feel despairing that we can’t make any progress in this lifetime because we can’t manage to accomplish a lot of meditation practice. Instead, we can feel that we’re really going to be able to develop ourselves and really cover some ground. Exactly working with what our situation is right now.
We don’t have to go looking for difficulties usually. You might think, oh, if difficulties are so great, perhaps we should go and look for more difficulties. Generally, most of us don’t have to do that. Generally, we can just wait and they’ll come along, and particularly when you start to try to practice Dharma earnestly, then it seems to be something that ripens the difficulties and you can practically guarantee that somebody who’s really sincerely trying to practice Dharma and really starting to purify their negative karmas will be encountering all sorts of difficulties and obstacles. One particular type of obstacle that often occurs under these circumstances is sickness and physical problems.
Often people who haven’t had these kinds of difficulties before often find that as a result of purifying negative karmas they seem to experience some sort of ripening result and this is actually something that we can feel glad of because when we’re experiencing the purification of our really bad negative karmas, often as we purify we just get some sort of small ripening result that we experience in this lifetime. It’s something that’s going to save us from having to experience that result as a rebirth in a suffering state in future lifetimes, which would bring us a whole lifetime of suffering. Instead of that, we get something like a headache or some sort of illness that passes off and we’ve got rid of that karma so it’s finished with. That’s actually one of the thought training practices to think this way you want to keep that in mind whenever you are experiencing these various sufferings. One thought that helps us to feel happy and to feel that we can make good use of these situations is to keep that thought in mind that by enduring these difficulties we’re actually wearing off our bad karma.
If we can handle it with patience and with a positive thought in our minds, we’re actually creating good karma. Patience, we’re developing all sorts of good qualities and so we’re getting good out of the bad situation. Techniques like these, there’s quite a number of different techniques, they can help us to deal with our difficulties and we’ve got to expect these difficulties to come along and we don’t have to go looking for them. There’ll be plenty of them and apart from physical problems, will be many other different kinds of problems coming along as a result of our past negative karmas. Although in the ordinary course of these things, might seem like something that’s obstructing our Dharma practice by using these mind training practices they become helpers.
Any questions? So, if we see these problems as being obstacles, then they are obstacles for us. They’re obstacles because we see them this way, and so it depends on our mind, it depends on the way we look at them. As long as we’re hum up on the thought that these are problems, that they’re going to block our progress and cause us all sorts of difficulties, then we’re just going to be stuck with that mental attitude. But through understanding the thought training, we can change the way we look at them.
By using this thought transformation process, then they actually do become transformed into helpers because we learn how to see them that way and we learn how to use them. So this mind training practice is called Lojong in Tibetan. Lojong. Lojong means mind. And so mind training or thought training might be another translation.
It’s learning to adapt our minds to the situation. So, of course, sometimes we find that we can change our situation, sometimes problems come along that we can solve. Quite often it happens this way. We find that if we take certain practical steps then we can ameliorate the situation or fix up the situation, and of course if we find that we can do this then we should do it. For instance, when we’re having problems with illness, we go along to see a doctor and take medicine or treatment or something like that.
If we’re having various other kinds of difficulties, for instance, if we’re having difficulties at work, it might be practical to find a different job, or there might be something we can do if we’re having relationship problems, we might be able to sort things out in various different ways. So, it doesn’t mean that we have to sit passively and accept everything that happens to us. But we’ll always find that because of our karma, there’ll be certain problems coming along that we might take reasonable steps to fix these problems and we might find that the steps that we try to take are not effective or that there just doesn’t seem to be anything we can do. We seem to be stuck with the situation and the only way really of handling it is just to put up with it. We’ll meet a lot of situations like this too.
So the skillful thing to do is to distinguish between them. There’s a verse in the bodhisattva’s way of life. It says something like, If you can solve a problem, then do it. And if you can’t solve the problem, then there’s no point in worrying. And so the whole point is that there’s really not much point in getting terribly upset and unhappy about any situation that comes to us.
Of course, some situations are very difficult. Some situations are bound to cause a certain amount of grief and suffering. But by using the thought transformation practice, then we can minimise the grief and suffering and we can bring something positive into it, Rather than being cast down and being overwhelmed by our difficulties, we can find the energy and the courage to keep on going and to find our way back to a happier state of mind and to get some sort of valuable lesson out of any particular experience. And of course, we’re going to encounter lots of small difficulties and small troubles as we go along day by day, and we can either let these small troubles really irk us and really get us irritated and troubled and depressed or we can really handle them in a positive way so that we can just not give them more weight than they’re worth, but manage to maintain a happy state of mind in the face of all these minor petty difficulties. Has anybody got any comments to make about this?
Maybe somebody has some experiences. Are you saying that there are so many different thought training approaches you might take that you don’t know which one? So do you think this is a positive state of yours that you sort of lot of times it’s confusing, actually. Yes. Right, that’s probably the key.
But there seems to be an important point in what you were saying, which is that really the way we look at a situation does really depend on the interpretation we choose to place on it. Often we get caught up in a situation because we’ve placed a particular interpretation on it and then we somehow feel that that interpretation is very real and concrete. If you look at the fact that there could be several different interpretations placed on the same situation and that perhaps all of these might be equally valid, then it perhaps makes the whole situation seem less concrete, less hard and fast. But also, the negative interpretations we tend to place on situations that cause us to interpret them in such a way that we feel upset and unhappy and that allows them to cause us so much suffering. By looking at the Dharma teachings, we can come to understand that generally these interpretations are less valid than the interpretations we can place on them that can help us to have an easy mind about them and to feel calm and balanced about it and even to feel happy about it.
So, in actual fact, because the interpretations on situations which come from the Dharma which help us to feel equanimity and happiness, peace of mind, are based on a valid foundation, then the more we think about it, the more these Dharma interpretations will outweigh the others, which are just instinctive and not sought out and which have no real basis, no valid basis in logic. So we have to learn to analyze the situation according to the Dharma. In this way, gradually, the validity of the dharma reasoning will overcome the other one. We can see that it’s stronger because it’s based on truth, on a more valid way of understanding. So it’s not a question of trying to put a false interpretation that’s it’s not a question of sort of pushing aside the way things really are and trying to put in some sort of nice false way of looking at it.
We do that all the time anyway and it doesn’t work, you know. A lot of the time we don’t want to really face nasty situations so we try to think of some sort of sugarcoating way of looking at it. It really doesn’t work because the sugarcoating way of looking at things isn’t based on reality either. Sometimes we get a hard jolt with some of the realities of the situation, but then we start, when we do get face to face with the realities of the situation and can’t avoid it, then we tend to fall into a really negative state of mind and feel really upset by these situations. Whereas, what we’re trying to do here with the mind training is to really look at the situation clearly and understand it, but understand it in a positive way.
Yes, think it is something that takes experience. Of course, we do make mistakes. It’s a learning process, so it’s not as though we’re giving you some technique that’s going to be very yes. Yes. Sometimes we do have to accept that the situation that’s coming along is very much not what we would choose.
But even so, if we can’t fix the situation up, if there’s nothing we can do to fix it, then there are ways that we can accept it and feel more at peace with the situation and use it to further our practice. This is what the thought training is about. To actually feel happy all the time with even the worst sorts of circumstances is really a very advanced level of thought training. Even at the beginning level, can at least learn to find something positive in every situation and to use it to develop ourselves. So we all need this Luo Jeong practice because we all have to encounter these various difficult circumstances, and these come about due to our bad karma created in the past and due to our lack of merit.
But still, we do have some merit. In fact, we have a lot of merit because we’ve been fortunate enough to meet the Buddha’s teachings and the Graduated Path teachings and thought training teachings, the Lojong teachings. So Because we’ve had that good fortune, then really there’s nothing that can hold us back. We can go ahead by using these practices, whatever obstacles might arise in our path. We have to expect that we’re going to encounter all sorts of obstacles it’s part of the nature of Dharma practice.
In fact, even the very advanced practitioners experience various obstacles, and so we have to have means of dealing with these obstacles and managing to make use of them as helpers in the path. So it’s a bit like some sort of one of these martial arts practices like Aikido or something like this, where you actually use the opponent’s strength to overcome him. So what we’re doing is actually using these bad circumstances, which could have been an obstacle to our Dharma practice, to actually energize our Dharma practice. So the main tool that we have to use for transforming our minds is the lamrim, the graduated path. And so we have to have a good solid grounding in the graduated path teaching.
So I’m always giving the graduated path a plug. Anyway, this has to be the first step really, because all the techniques that help us with our mind training depend on a basic understanding of the graduated path and having confidence in the teachings that are presented to us in the graduated path. Then the Lojong practices really select some of these points and present them to us in a way which we can use particularly in this context of overcoming difficulties. We can be glad of our problems because we learn to look at them in a different way on the basis of this understanding. We can train our mind to be happy in all sorts of circumstances.
As you know, the graduated path really is very much about how to find happiness, how to overcome suffering and how to find happiness, and emphasising that it all depends on the mind, that the mind is the source of all these experiences of happiness and of unhappiness, and that the way to overcome them is not by trying to control external circumstances, but by trying to work with the mind. So what we have to work for really is to have a sort of an equal mind. When things are going extra well, we have a tendency to feel elated and our mind gets blown up and we have a sort of an excited type of feeling, which we think of as being happiness. But in actual fact, this isn’t real happiness, it’s a kind of stressed out, stressed sort of happiness. It’s really more of a relief from the unhappiness and sufferings that we were having before, and it tends to bring a sort of stress with it because we cling to the objects which which have brought this temporary happiness, this temporary elation, and we we fear to lose them.
And then when things are going badly, we we become very upset and unhappy. So the first idea really is to have a sort of equal feeling about these different situations, to try to have a balanced state of mind under all circumstances and not to be elated or cast down by the things that happen to us, but to remain calm and to deal calmly with all the different circumstances as they arise. And we can take the attitude that all these pleasant things that happen to us, all the things that we desire, are things that are going to distract us from our Dharma practice. They’re likely to act as temptations and distractions. Really, they’re nothing to be excited about because they’re only a brief passing pleasure or happiness, and they tend to distract us from bringing about the great good that can come about in the future from our practice.
On the other hand, the bad happenings generally are something that are not going to distract us from our Dharma, practice, but something which can help us to feel motivated, they can empower our Dharma practice, they can help us to feel renunciation towards the things of this life and to understand that we need to put our energy into the practice of Dharma and doing things that are going to bring about our future welfare and particularly for future lives. So, if we can get this sort of equal frame of mind, then gradually we can actually enhance our level of happiness, of real happiness, of contentment, and with further practice this level of happiness will be enhanced more and more. But we have to first of all balance, we have to try to find this balance first of all and not to let ourselves be fluctuating and swinging up and down emotionally. So, these thought training texts are Mahāyāna practice and their purpose is to help us with the development of love and compassion and bodhicitta. They’re all about working to attain enlightenment for the sake of others, the thought of achieving Buddhahood.
And the thought is not to achieve Buddhahood for our own welfare, but for the welfare of others. Buddhahood can only be attained with the bodhicitta thought, the sort of attaining it for the welfare of others. The person who is seeking everlasting happiness for themselves is the person who is following the path of individual liberation, and this leads to nirvana. It doesn’t lead to full enlightenment. The way to attain full enlightenment has to be through having this tremendous love and compassion so that the bodhisattva keeps on, after having, even after having achieved the level at which they could enter nirvana, they keep on coming back and being born again and again out of their love and compassion for others and finally attain full enlightenment.
It’s the state of full Buddhahood that has the real power to help others. So I went through all that in previous weeks anyway. So the Lojong texts have to be based on this motivation of bodhicitta, and they help us to develop bodhicitta. And because they have this motivation, they’re based on this thought, the effect is very, very powerful. So there’s several well known texts that teach this thought training practice, and some of them are very lengthy, and some of them are very they’re all extremely beneficial, extremely powerful.
For instance, one of the important thoughts that can help us with our thought training is to remember that karma is the underlying cause of all our problems. Whether we’re experiencing good things or bad things, it’s the result of our past karmas and it’s a passing result that just comes, the karma is finished and we really need to be more concerned about what the actions we’re doing now are going to bring about for us in the future. In particular, we shouldn’t blame others or become upset or angry with them when they harm us because they’re really acting as the agents for our karma, our own karma. And one text in particular, The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, is very interesting because it details all the different karmas and the results. It goes through a whole list of suffering results that we experience and points out the kinds of karmas that we’ve created in order to be experiencing these suffering results.
And it tells us that the karmic cause of these problems is our own actions, and so the way to deal with them is not to become upset, not to become angry and retaliate, but to think how we’ve hurt others in past lives. And as a result of that, we’re experiencing these things now. And we can use this situation to strengthen our determination not to hurt others in the future, but instead to practice love and compassion for them and the thought of bodhicitta. Maybe some of you have studied that text. So, another very well known text is the Eight Verses of Thought Training.
I’m sure some of you have already been through this one before, so long we tumble, yes. So I thought I’d go through that tonight anyway. I’m sorry, because most of you are probably old students. I thought perhaps there might have been a few new people who wouldn’t have heard it before. There might be perhaps a couple of you who haven’t been through it anyway, a couple.
This is very difficult because, you know, when you look at that, you can ask questions and discuss it as we go along, and it might clarify some of those things. It’s not really an easy text, although it’s very brief and appears simple on the surface. It’s very profound and it’s really based on the seven point thought training. That’s what you’re studying on the Tuesday nights, isn’t it? Advice from a spiritual friend.
But they’re in three Yes. In the Yes. The eight Yes. It’s the eight verses, but that’s this here. The verses are in there, but there’s no commentary in there.
I know, because I just checked to see if there was any commentary that would help me preparing for this, and there wasn’t. But it does have commentary on the seven point mind training and also I think it’s on the thirty seven practices of a bodhisattva, or something like that. Anyway, one of the other well known thought trainings. So there’s quite a number of these, actually, and they do get taught from time to time. And I thought I’d go through these eight verses anyway.
And they are very profound, and it’s not something that’s very easy to accomplish, but it’s very worthwhile thinking about them and even taking a little bit of it on board with your practice. So I haven’t got time tonight to go into a lot of detail anyway, but these verses were taught they were written by one of the Kadampa Geshis. You might have heard about the Kadampa Geshis. Nowadays, when we talk about a Geshe, it means somebody who has studied at one of the great monastic colleges and passed the exams in philosophy. But these Kadampa Geshe — it was just the name that was given to the leaders, you know, the great practitioners of the Kadampa tradition and didn’t necessarily make a statement about which exams they’d passed.
But one of the great teachers of the Kadampa tradition, a tradition which was the forerunner of the present Gelugpa and Kagyu traditions, both arose from the Kadampa tradition. And so one of the great Geshe’s was Lanri Tungpa, and he wrote this text. And this was taking some important points from the seven point mind training, and later on it was taught widely by Geshe Chekawa. There’s a story of how Geshe Chekawa actually sought for this and learned it from Langri. He sought for this teaching and found that Geshe Langri Tangpa had already passed away and he eventually managed to receive the teaching from Geshe Sharawa, who was Geshe Langri Tangpa’s direct student. Geshe Chekawa was the one who taught it widely.
And so you’ll find this on page eleven anyway. So, the first verse is Being determined to accomplish the highest welfare for all beings who excel the wish fulfilling gem, I shall constantly hold them dear. So you can see that this practice really contains a series of very high thoughts, and it doesn’t really go into a lot of logics or explanations, but it simply presents these thoughts to us as something to reflect on and to hold in our minds. So, the thought of accomplishing the highest welfare for all beings we understand that what we want to do is to help them to find the state of everlasting happiness, and this thought comes about because of holding them dear. Through holding sentient beings dear, we can attain the greatest benefits for ourselves and others.
So for this reason, the sentient beings are compared to the wish fulfilling gem. And the reason why they’re more precious than a wish fulfilling gem There’s many old stories in India about these wish fulfilling gems, and I suppose they’re a bit similar to the fairy stories that we have in our society about wish fulfilling rings and so on. I remember when I was a kid, the handsome princes were always managing to find a ring that would give them three wishes. So these wish fulfilling gems are apparently better than that because they are not limited to three wishes. You can ask them for as many things as you like, and they can give you all the worldly things that you ask for: boundless wealth, boundless material goods.
So the thing that these wish fulfilling jewels couldn’t bestow was the state of liberation from suffering. So, through holding sentient beings dear, we can attain the blissful, everlasting state of enlightenment. And the thought of benefiting them, even with the thought of benefiting all these sentient beings, with the attitude of holding them dear and thinking of benefiting them, then every virtuous action that we do becomes a source of immense merit. So why would this be particularly so because of holding sentient beings dear? Well, I’ve often thought that, I thought if we’re all going to be enlightened, then there has to be a stage at which there’s one last sentient being who who hasn’t got any sentient beings to work on.
We certainly don’t have to worry about that. I think that’s one of these funny questions that really comes from not really understanding the true nature of things. Yes, I used to think perhaps I’m the last sentient being and all these other beings are really Buddhas showing this aspect so as to help me in my practice. I think that’s not a bad way to think, because actually to look at other beings as being Buddhas is helpful for your practice. So anyway, it sounds a bit funny, but by holding sentient beings dear and wanting to benefit them, we are actually benefiting ourselves, because what we have to do is achieve the state of enlightenment in order to benefit them, and of course we’re benefiting ourselves.
So all good things for ourselves, even if we’re just thinking of our own welfare, the good things that we want for ourselves really come from setting aside self-cherishing and cherishing others. Sentient beings are the field of our merit. That’s why Dharmarakshita said that without them we couldn’t attain enlightenment. Particularly if we’re acting with a sort of benefiting all sentient beings, then that is a limitless thought because there is a limitless number of sentient beings. We don’t really know how many there are, but there’s an absolutely countless number.
Sometimes it’s said that they’re infinite, countless or infinite. Yes, so they’re all going to be enlightened eventually, but anyway, they’re uncountable. And so if we think of benefiting every one of them, if we really sincerely have that sort of wanting to bring all of them to happiness, then that’s an immensely powerful thought because the object is not just one sentient being or a small number of sentient beings, but all sentient beings, and so it’s multiplied by the number of sentient beings who are the object of our thought, and that becomes immense. And so that’s why bodhicitta is such a powerful thought and why it is powerful enough to enable us to achieve the accumulation of merit that we need in order to attain enlightenment. So also with this thought, then we are able to develop all good qualities and bring about all these tremendous benefits to ourselves and to others, because by developing these good qualities, by becoming bodhisattvas, having all the love and compassion and abilities of a bodhisattva, can benefit so many beings.
As we pass along the different stages, become more and more capable of benefiting more and more beings. Eventually, enlightenment is attained with all the tremendous powers of enlightenment to benefit sentient beings. And so it brings all this good along with it. And just the thought of benefiting others is a happy thought, because it’s a thought that relieves the unhappiness and the tightness of our self-cherishing. When we have a sort of love and compassion for others, if we can develop that sort of bodhicitta sincerely in our hearts, then even if we can only hold that thought for a little while, while it’s there, it doesn’t leave any room for self-cherishing, it doesn’t leave any room for that tightness and unhappiness that comes from the self centered attitude.
bodhicitta is, by its nature, a happy state of mind. Lama Yeshe used to say, bodhicitta means totally open. And he used to explain how it meant that it’s this open feeling in the heart, the relief of the squeezing sort of attitude that comes when we’re unhappy and that is brought about as a result of our self centeredness. So it it relieves this it opens up our heart and relieves this tight self centered squeezing feeling. So the second verse is when accompanying anyone.