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 explores three of the six perfections—generosity, moral conduct, and patience—mapping their mental foundations and practical forms. She frames purity as an attitude, not externals, then explores generosity through the interdependence of giver, gift, and recipient, addressing the hidden pride that blocks receiving help. Moral conduct takes three forms: restraint from harm, gathering virtuous practice, and working for others’ welfare. The core focus is patience, which opposes anger’s destructive power—anger destroys accumulated merit and causes rebirth in lower states. She outlines patience’s three applications: not retaliating when harmed, enduring hardship during practice, and persisting through difficult meditation. Concrete examples anchor the teaching: the Vietnamese temple custom, the sore-legs training, the leather-sandal metaphor. Suited to practitioners with basic Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 48 6P 1998 08 20.mp3
UUID: d07bc57e-404f-4155-bc8f-14518a5ac398
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-08-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~4,436
I think, really, it’s just something you have to work out yourself whether you impose on the dog or not. Okay. That’d be interesting to to talk ask around and Yeah. Yeah. So you’re not actually getting involved in that team there.
Yes. But in any case, it’s not it’s not prohibited for us to even go out and find me, but we’re not allowed to order meat, kill for us, or to accept meat which we think has been killed for us even if we didn’t order it. But, yeah, but apart from that, there’s no prohibition in Buddhism to eat meat; it was permitted. On the other hand, just consider to be an extra virtue if you do want to take a resolution of being a vegetarian, but certainly not compulsory for the practice of the person. And in actual fact, I think in when Buddha made this decision, he was kind of thinking of the attitude of the Brahmins and the Indians who tend to look at these kinds of things in terms of purity and, you know, ritual pollution and so on, and he didn’t want people getting getting caught up in these sorts of things.
Yeah. Oh, guess, you know, sort of feeling that that that external things, that purity depends on externals and what you put into your body and so on. He was always making the point that purity is a state of mind. So, anyway, we’ve still got three to go. So with any of the six perfections, they can all of them be practiced with all of the six perfections.
So I’ll just go through this with generosity, and then you can get the idea of how it works for the other perfections. So with generosity, you can give with without thinking of of getting a return. So that’s practicing generosity with generosity. And the second one is generosity with mmoral conduct, and that is doing it with mental focus. I covered my own writing.
But my head wasn’t very focused. But anyway, I was sort of with with mental control and thinking I need the welfare of others. And then the third one is guard your mind. It’s guarding your mind from non-virtuous thoughts. The third one is patience, particularly with people who make persistent demands on you so on.
The fourth one is you can give with diligence or or with enthusiastic perseverance. The fifth one is giver and the recipient as being all interdependent in the one process, being the interdependence of the action. This is is actually when I was making my notes here, I thought it’s very interesting that it is only the word convey this idea of the interdependence. Because when you’re giving, then you become a giver. You’re being the giver depends on the action, and it depends on having a recipient for the gift.
The gift, the thing, whatever it is, you know, say it’s a piece of cake. The gift becomes a gift because you’re giving it and because there’s someone receiving it. And the recipient also becomes a recipient because there is you who has become the giver and the piece of cake which has become the gift. That is, it’s sitting at a table, but it becomes these three things all depend on the interaction, don’t they? The two people in the piece of cake become a giver, a a gift and recipient because of this interdependent relationship.
And Exactly. That’s right. Yes. If it was yes. Yes.
So we tend to think of ourselves as being a truly existing independently existing giver and a truly existing gift. And the piece of cake is being a truly existent gift and the recipient is being a truly existent recipient. But each of these things depends on the other two. Right. We don’t want to be like that.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t be afraid of accepting generosity from others either because by being the recipient of their generosity, then we’re helping them to give. So another thing is that we often have a pride about being on the receiving end. We often feel that we don’t want to accept help from others, we won’t accept charity. And of course sometimes this can be positive, but often it can be just pride on our And we shouldn’t let this sort of harmful pride interfere with letting somebody else create a positive action. Yes.
Yes. In that sense. It’s interesting actually that that Vietnamese have a nice touch in this regard. When I was at Tārā Institute in in Melbourne many years ago, we used to make the house available to the Vietnamese people before they got their own temple, and some of them used to come around regularly. And one of the first occasions that they came around, they all rushed out into the backyard and climbed up our cumquat tree and started picking cumquats and taking the cumquats home.
And I thought that was a bit funny. And then somebody explained to me that it was a custom that they take something home from the temple, and I thought, oh, this must be something that they always do. So the next day that we were expecting them to come again, I made sure we had plenty of fruits laid out so that they had something to take home with them. And they didn’t take any of it. And then I found out that it was only on that one particular day that they have this custom.
But the custom dramatizes the fact that generally the laypeople come and give the offerings to the monks and nuns. And on this particular day, the laypeople come and the monks give something to them. And that symbolises the fact that the one who is on the receiving end is the one who is really the fortunate one. The one who is on the giving end is the one who is really fortunate. The one who is receiving is actually giving to the giver.
So, yes, I thought there was a beautiful sort of symbolism in that. And so if the achieving the perfection of generosity meant ridding all beings of poverty, then you’d have to say that that none of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas had ever attained this perfection. But in actual fact, that the Buddha’s and bodhisattvas have attained it because it doesn’t depend on the relief of poverty but on the attitude of the practitioner, the mental attitude. So the guide to the bodhisattva’s way of life says that mentally giving all your possessions and good karma and its result is the perfection of generosity. And so this mental attitude is the main thing that we have to give material things as well.
In actual fact, if we if we didn’t give if we didn’t give material things, then we couldn’t say that we were giving mentally because really we’d be at our particular level, we’d still be clinging on to to these things and we wouldn’t really be giving mentally. It wouldn’t be a real practice. There are also special objects of our giving if you want to make the result particularly powerful. These special objects can be ārya beings, sick people, people who are close to enlightenment and or a person teaching Dharma. And also the karmic results are worth thinking about, and the karmic result of generosity is achieving wealth in our future lives.
This is a good result because, first of all, of course, we need a certain level of material welfare in order to have the freedom to engage in Dharma practice. In addition to this, if we have great wealth, then if we’re practising as a bodhisattva, or if we’re practising on the bodhisattva path, then we can make great generosity. So it’s said that actually the first level, the first ground Bodhisattva often chooses to come back to be born as a person of wealth, as a lay person, rather than as a monk or a nun, because this person has the opportunity to work, whose main practice is practicing generosity as their main practice, and and as a wealthy lay person, they have the most opportunity to do that practice. I don’t know whether he was was he very generous? He he gave a letter yes.
Yes. Well, don’t know about Allan Bond. I won’t pass any opinion about Allan Bond. But obviously, what we’re talking here is giving we’re not talking about giving material wealth which has been gained through wrong methods. We’re talking about what has been gained by pure methods of obtaining wealth, which when you look around there don’t seem to be too many of those.
Okay. Yes. Oh, you’re you’re you’re saying this is an example of generosity. Yes. Okay.
So this is very good. Okay. So I’m not passing any opinions about any particular person, but, obviously, of course, the person who’s practicing generosity, the perfection of generosity, is also interested in practicing oral conduct. And it goes without saying that they wouldn’t be You often find in the world that some people who get ill-gotten gains can be quite generous. But this is worldly people, but we’re not talking about worldly people, no, we’re talking about people who are on the path to enlightenment.
Generally, would have great care for their moral conduct, which is the next perfection, which we haven’t got much time to talk about. If I don’t get through all of these tonight anyway, I’ll go on next week. So the essential moral conduct is giving up thoughts of harming others. So when we first studied moral conduct, we were talking about controlling the actions of body, speech and mind. And the emphasis was that even if you can’t control your mind, at least you can avoid actions of body and speech which express these harmful thoughts.
In addition to that, it was important to practice the effort of controlling harmful thoughts. So the real morality of the real perfection of moral conduct is actually giving up these thoughts of harming others. Also translated as ethics. I’m not sure which is the best translation. To me, ethics sounds a bit of weak, you know.
Anyway, morality can be of three kinds. There’s morality of restraint and misdeeds, and this particularly refers to maintaining vows. And these vows, as we’re talking here about Mahāyāna practice, it involves not only the Prātimokṣa vows but also the Bodhisattva and tantric vows, if you have them. So if you well, it’s assumed here, I suppose, that person would have the Bodhisattva vows if you’re talking about perfections. But for those of us who are interested in seeing how we can practice at our level these practices, then we might not necessarily have these vows at this stage.
So the Prātimokṣa vows, you know what the Prātimokṣa vows refers to? It translates as individual liberation. So you know what that means? What what what fells would come under that category? No.
Prātimokṣa. No? That’s right. Yes. So it it refers to the the five lay precepts also to the vows of novice monks and nuns and and so on.
There’s seven actual sets of Prātimokṣa vows. And it’s, of course, advisable because of the tremendous amount of benefits of taking these vows. It’s advised that you at least take the Five Lay Precepts or if you feel that you can’t handle all five, then to take some of them. If you haven’t taken any of these Pratyamoksha vows, you can still practice moral conduct because then the practice of moral conduct is restrained from the ten non virtuous actions. And in addition to this, if you’ve received the Bodhisattva and the tantric vows, attempting to maintain those as well.
They’re not difficult. They’re not easy to keep purely, but trying to do them according to the best of your ability. Then the second kind of moral conduct or ethics is gathering virtuous dharmas. And this includes making offerings and prostrations to the Three Jewels of refuge, venerating various holy objects, offering respect and service to to the to holy beings and so on, meditating, studying on on Dharma topics, teaching or listening to Dharma. So really, it it includes any kind of Dharma practice.
So when these kinds of actions are done while holding bodhisattva vows, it becomes the practice of the perfection of moral conduct. Morality. And the third one is the morality of working for the sake of sentient beings. So there’s actually eleven different kinds of morality of working for the sake of sentient beings. I thought I wouldn’t go into all of those, but it involves practices of gathering and teaching disciples and also of helping sentient beings, helping those who are, for instance, who are needy or who are oppressed or overburdened in any way, who are poor, homeless, or handicapped, or endangered, or miserable, and, in fact, helping things in general who need help in any way and particularly with their Dharma practice.
So this kind of morality is the third kind. And result of moral conduct is that of avoiding lower rebirth. Certainly without moral conduct, you might get reborn. They say that the result of that is to be reborn as as a as a a snake. And these snake rebirths have been said to Oh, we’ll have to carry on.
Think we have got any. Gone green. Yep. Yes. When did that happen?
Just then. Maybe the Nagas didn’t want that bit recorded. They can be very touchy. Okay, so then the next perfection is patience. This is very important.
Practice. A few years ago in Melbourne, when I was living in Melbourne, Geshe Doga went overseas for a while and the practice he left us to do while he was gone was to read through, discuss and meditate on the Patience Chapter in the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. So he obviously felt that this practice of patience was the one that we should focus on in particular. Yes, Sunday week. Saturday yes.
Well, we’ll be talking about that a bit now anyway. But I think we’d all agree with you that there are some people who do drive you up the wall and that practicing patience with them is very hard. Yes, well my mother used to have an expression these things are said to try us. My mother always used to have these little expressions and when I was young I used to think, oh know, I get sick and tired of you saying these things. I think often they’re very trite and people say them without really understanding the meaning and that tends to annoy us.
Often there’s a grain of meaning there. Of course I wouldn’t necessarily say these things are always sent to try us, but we can take it in that way and use them to practice and that can be very helpful for us. So, anyway, the the first thing to do is to just consider the disadvantages of anger. If we really consider the disadvantages of of anger, then we will feel motivated to try not to get angry. It’s really necessary to feel this motivation.
We have to think about it before we get angry because once we get angry, we lose all control and we just go crazy. We go temporarily insane. So the obvious disadvantages of anger is that when we get angry, we make ourselves unhappy and we make others unhappy. We know that anger is an unhappy state of mind, we also know that angry people are very, very unpleasant to be around, and that angry people make us unhappy. Perhaps they make us angry in turn, and they cause suffering to others.
We know that when we’re angry ourselves that we do the things that make others unhappy and that we very much regret later on. We also do stupid things like breaking our possessions and saying things that we wish we could recall and completely going insane in the short term. And it destroys our wisdom, destroys our discrimination. We can’t see things clearly, see things in a deluded way. It’s not very difficult.
Once we’ve got over our anger, it’s not very difficult to see how deluded we have been while we’ve been under the control of anger. So this is not something subtle, it’s something quite gross. But while we’re under the control of anger, we can’t see it at all because that’s the nature of anger. And the unseen results of anger is that it produces rebirth in the lower states. While we’re under the control of anger, we create bad karma.
Anger itself is in a non virtuous state of mind which produces non virtue just in itself, but also causes us to create actions of body and speech which are non virtuous and which harm others and which produce lower rebirth. It’s it’s the the strongest non virtue, the strongest mental attitude, which, which brings about non virtuous karma. Also another very serious result of anger is that it destroys our accumulation of merits. So if we dedicate our merits, it prevents this destruction. It guards our merits against this destruction.
If we haven’t dedicated our merits, then at a moment anger can destroy eons of accumulation of merit. So it’s a very dangerous mental state. Even if we’ve dedicated our merits towards enlightenment so that they can’t be destroyed, the anger can prevent their ripening readily and so it’s something which is still having a very harmful effect on our practice, on our progress. Yes, that’s the kind of thing we do, unfortunately. We can see that anger causes all these problems, whereas patience, which is the reverse of anger and the antidote to anger, brings about peace of mind and it brings a happy state of mind to ourselves.
We also produce happiness for others. We know ourselves that when we’re happy, then we can have a happy influence on others. We know that people who are in a happy state of mind can produce happiness in us. So this is something that spreads around and is very beneficial. Also, of course, if we have this happy state of mind, then it can help us to not be affected by all sorts of external problems.
Another quotation from the bodhisattva’s way of life says something like, to read it out: How could you find enough leather to cover the ground? Having leather on the soles of your sandals is the same as covering the whole earth. So what that means is if you’re walking around barefoot, you’re going to hurt your feet on all kinds of rocks and bits of glass and thorns and things. You can’t possibly cover the whole world with leather, it’s enough to just put on a pair of sandals. Similarly, if we want to protect ourselves from being hurt or bothered by external circumstances, there’s no way that we can control external circumstances to avoid meeting any circumstances that are going to bring us suffering.
But if we have mental if our mind is pacified and in a happy state, if we have this mental control, that has the same effect as we were able to have control over the whole universe. So there’s three kinds of patience. There’s the patience of not retaliating. So, as Günther says, some people can drive us up the wall. And what we can do with these people is see that these are actually under the control of their own deluded mental states.
These people do these things under the control of their ignorance of their negative mental states and so on. So they’re controlled by these harmful mental states. If we were being beaten by somebody with a stick, we wouldn’t blame the stick, but we would blame the person who was wielding the stick. In the same way, when somebody is harming us in whatever way, we can see that this person themselves is just acting as the agent of their own deluded mental states. So rather than being angry with the person, we can put the blame on that person’s deluded mental states.
And of course, if we want to harm that person’s deluded mental states, then we won’t want to hurt the person themselves. We want to set them a good example and, if possible, help them to overcome those delusional mental states. So in this way we don’t get angry. Then the second kind of patience is the patience of voluntarily enduring suffering and hardship. It doesn’t mean that we have to go and engage in all sorts of austere practices which are going to be harmful to us.
What it means is that we are going to encounter various different sufferings and hardships in our lives and in particular if we get engaged in the practice of Dharma then sometimes we might have to encounter difficulties in the course of carrying out Dharma practice and we can rather than being upset by these circumstances, we can accept them calmly and be glad of them as training in our patience. So rather than seeing these things as being a nuisance, as being a problem, regard them as a helpful circumstance. Being like unpleasant medicine, if we have to take nasty medicine in order to get over an illness, we accept that we have to take it so as to get over this physical problem. In the same way, we can accept such things as sore legs while we’re meditating. Rather than getting upset about having sore legs, we can think, Oh good, now I have this opportunity to practice patience with my sore legs.
Or, for instance, if we’re trying to make a lot of prostrations and we get a lot of aches and pains and tiredness from doing prostrations, then we can accept this as something positive, that we’re not only practicing patience but also purifying our negative karma by experiencing these comparatively small physical troubles. We have to experience these various different kinds of problems so we can make them a positive experience. The third one is the patience of accepting hardships in Dharma practice. The explanation of this is that it refers to the mental effort that’s needed to understand difficult teachings and particularly to achieve not only the understanding of the words, but to achieve the intuitive understanding of the meaning which has to be done through intensive meditation. So the patience to engage in meditation and to keep on working away until we achieve this intuitive meaning of the different topics that we have to gain an understanding of, whether it’s the importance of the precious human rebirth or whether it’s direct insight into the nature of emptiness, the empty nature of self and phenomena.
We have to do a lot of meditation and if we expect to get results right away we’re going to experience frustrations and we’re going to get sick of our practice and we’re going to want to give up so we have to realize that it’s going to take a lot of work and feel that we have the patience, that we can endure the long extent of work that’s going to be involved in gaining these realizations, that we’re prepared to have this sort of patience to carry on and not want to give up. So there’s different kinds of patience, of course. It involves tolerance, the sort of tolerance that is patient with situations that make us angry, and it can also mean patience that’s tolerant of the frustration of not seeming to get anywhere in a hurry and having to be prepared to take a long time going about things. So I think I’ll stop at that point. We’ve still got perseverance to talk about, and, we’ll perhaps talk about that next week.
Do you want to do a little bit of meditation before we finish? Okay. We can think that in order to attain enlightenment, we have to, first of all, achieve the we have to carry out the practice of the six perfections. And the first three of these perfections are generosity, moral conduct, and patience. Think about each of these in turn: generosity, overcoming stinginess, having the mental attitude of wishing to give, of from the heart being willing to give up your possessions, your good karma, your virtuous karma, and also the results of that virtuous karma, the happiness and good things that come to us, being willing to give these up for the welfare of sentient beings.
And secondly, the practice of ethics or moral conduct. This essentially means giving up all sorts of harming others. And the third perfection is patience. This means overcoming all anger and frustration, all sorts of harming others, all sorts of not having the patience required to engage in our virtuous actions of practicing the Dharma. So the practice of these perfections is not easy but by beginning to practice now we can begin to bring tremendous benefits into our lives.
We can begin to overcome the difficulties in our path. We can begin to attain results in our Dharma practice. We can become less stingy. We can become more aware of the effect our actions have on others so that we avoid doing actions that bring about harm to others and even overcome the mental thought of wanting to harm others. We can develop patience, we can have more tolerance of others, we can see others as being our helpers when they give us a difficult time.
Bringing about this change in our consciousness is incredibly beneficial. We shouldn’t be discouraged but continue working, continue developing these qualities according to our abilities. In this way, we will be definitely progressing on the path to enlightenment. And so we can dedicate the merits for the attainment of enlightenment. So prayers on page five.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more. And then, page ten. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good, all powerful Chen-rezig, Tenzin Gyatso. Please remain until cyclic existence is ended.