Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew walks through enthusiastic perseverance, the fifth of the six perfections in the bodhisattva path. She opens with bodhicitta motivation—attaining enlightenment for all beings—then briefly reviews the first four perfections before exploring perseverance in depth. She clarifies the crucial distinction between true perseverance (joyful, inspired effort) and forced willpower, which tends to backfire. She systematically addresses three forms of laziness blocking practice: sloth, craving for worldly distractions, and defeatism. She outlines three kinds of perseverance—armor-like resilience, collecting virtuous practices, and working for others’ benefit—with illustrative stories. She concludes with a brief introduction to concentration practice and why it requires wisdom to bring liberation. For practitioners engaged with the graduated path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 49 6P 1998 08 27.mp3
UUID: be445318-80c6-40a0-904e-82a1e98973d2
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-08-27
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,598
To get rid of it, and instead we should cultivate the positive motivation of bodhicitta. So we think that we’re engaging in this practice so as to be able to follow the graduated path, the path of Dharma. And we are following the Mahāyāna path and the goal of that path is to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. So by studying and meditating on the graduated path, we understand how we have to advance and we’re doing this not just to attain happiness for ourselves, but in particular not just having a limited thought of our own individual happiness. We expand our mind to include other living beings.
At the very least, we should think of those beings around us, those we have contact with. And we can even expand our minds beyond that to all beings, all beings in the universe, and think that the most worthwhile goal of our practice is to help them. We understand that the way we can bring that about is only attaining the fully accomplished state of enlightenment. So, we engage in this practice tonight with this motivation. Sorry about all the cushion adjusting noises.
At least I got the throat clearing done before I put on the mic this time. No doubt there’ll be more of that always seems to come along. So last week, we were talking about the practice of bodhisattvas. We’ve been going through the different stages of the path leading up to the cultivation of bodhicitta. We had to understand how to work on the practices of great love and great compassion.
And then having attained that great love and great compassion reflecting that if we want to carry out the goal of bringing about the welfare of sentient beings, which arises naturally when you have great love and compassion, you want to help others, you want to enable them to find happiness. This arises from the thought, first of all, of wanting to find happiness for ourselves. We understand that we’re caught up in a situation that isn’t really happy, that is very unsatisfactory in many ways. Think of finding real happiness lasting and secure happiness for ourselves and this leads to the understanding that it’s possible to attain a state of happiness which is not only lasting and secure and unchangeable but which is a state of bliss far beyond anything we can imagine in our present undeveloped state. Having thought about that for ourselves, understood our own suffering nature, we only have to look around us and see how other beings are of the same nature of ourselves.
They also want happiness and they want to be free from all suffering. They also have this same essential nature of ours which is capable of achieving these highest states. But what many of them lack that we have is that they haven’t got the method of achieving it. They’re following wrong methods. We ourselves have followed these wrong methods through our countless previous lifetimes and got nowhere.
Now we’ve found the right method and we’re able to advance. Our goal has to be to help other beings in the same way that we’ve been helped by the Buddha’s teachings and the teachers have conveyed these teachings to us. We want to be able to bring about this understanding of how to obtain the goal in others because this is the only really effective way to help them and in particular to achieve the higher states of the path so that we can guide others along the path not only in the initial stages but to be able to guide them to the end of the path and to achieve these high states of everlasting happiness we have to be able to progress to achieve these high states of happiness ourselves. We have to understand the whole path, then we can actually guide others. Our understanding of the Dharma isn’t just on the level of words, but it becomes on the level of experience.
In particular, there are two states that are possible to attain either the state of liberation from cyclic existence of oneself or the state of enlightenment fully accomplished Buddhahood. Buddhahood the person who achieves individual liberation can help a limited number of other people who are guided by that person in their lifetime to attain liberation also But still that’s limited help, a limited number of people who are helped. And whereas the capabilities of enlightened beings are unlimited and continual, don’t finish. We make this our goal. We understand that these fully enlightened beings have tremendous powers and capabilities also to help others.
This is the motivation of a bodhisattva, although we’re not bodhisattvas yet. We’re trying to build up this motivation until it becomes very, very powerful, until it reaches the state that we call the realization of bodhicitta and the person who has achieved that level, whether or not they’ve achieved other higher realizations, when they achieve that realization of bodhicitta they become a bodhisattva. So, even if we’re not bodhisattvas yet, we’re going to be assuming that we’re going to continue with our Mahāyāna practice, then it’s all about becoming bodhisattvas. So, just for the future, but even for now, we have to try to practice in accordance with this bodhisattva thought, this bodhicitta motivation. So, last week, we went through some of the practices of a Bodhisattva.
Some of you were here last week and you know that we were supposed to have gone through four of the practices of a bodhisattva, but we really only got through three. Does anybody remember what the three were that we did get through? Yes? Yes. Yes!
Good! I couldn’t have imparted too much wisdom, couldn’t even remember! So, okay, right. So that’s right. So we were supposed to have got through enthusiastic perseverance last week, but we didn’t get up to that.
But we got through the other three. These, as you probably all know, come under the topic of the six perfections or the six paramita. Perfection isn’t really a very literal translation it conveys a general meaning, but a literal translation would be something like gone beyond, which would sound a bit awkward in English, but it really nicely conveys what these qualities are all about. When a bodhisattva is practicing generosity and patience and so forth, then they are practicing something that’s gone beyond the ordinary level. For us, it’s not something that’s gone beyond.
In particular, we’re talking about an ārya bodhisattva, one who has attained direct insight into emptiness and who is on the ten Bodhisattva grounds. They’re practicing these six perfections, which are sometimes counted as ten because the sixth one, Wisdom, can be divided into four and each of those corresponds to one of the grounds. Anyway, that’s not something we have to be so concerned about perhaps at the moment, but we can look at these practices and see that although we may not be ārya bodhisattvas, still there’s a lot that we can do to start to establish the practice of these qualities, and we’re practicing them as general virtues. We shouldn’t feel that because we may not be bodhisattvas yet, shouldn’t feel that we can’t start to engage in these practices, because in actual fact it’s very beneficial for us to engage in these practices and we need to engage in them. So it’s by engaging in these practices now that we can develop ourselves to the point where we actually do become capable of engaging in them on the bodhisattva level.
So, we might think that the first four, giving moral conduct are quite relevant to our present lives. We can see how these would be something that we can start to practice and that we can develop within ourselves. And the last two, concentration and wisdom, might seem more difficult. When we look at them, they look like very difficult practices. But it’s definitely worthwhile to start to learn a little bit about these things.
We don’t have to start by doing great things. We can just start with a little bit of study, little bit of understanding, a little bit of practice. And by doing this, then we can gradually gain more and more mastery of these topics. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says that if we engage in these practices, studying and meditating on these topics without expecting great results, but just trying to do our best, then maybe after a number of years, can be surprising what we might achieve. So if we don’t try, if we don’t make the effort, then there will be nothing gained.
At least we are going to be making a good imprint for our future lives. We can understand the importance of this. If we look at the people around us, if we look at our own experience, many of us have had some sort of experience when we first met the basic Dharma teachings. For some people, it was like that somehow they feel that they already knew this, that they’ve just made connection with the words that explained what they somehow at the back of their minds felt already. It’s like some sort of revelation that, Oh, I knew that I was looking for this all along.
Somehow I had a feeling that it was there and I just had to find it. Whereas other people can’t make that sort of connection at all. For other people, perhaps the Buddhist teachings might seem quite strange and something that they can’t connect with at all. It’s something that feels very remote to them. For these people, perhaps they might find that they connect in that strong way with something else.
Perhaps they might go and hear a Christian teacher preaching, for example, and connect very strongly with that. These things are because of what we’ve done in previous lives, because of our karmas, because of our previous actions. So, it’s definite that if we study and make an effort to learn, then even if we find it difficult, if it’s heavy going in this life time, it’s going to be that much easier the next time around. The reason why these things are difficult for us is because we haven’t familiarized ourselves in past lives. We’ve familiarized ourselves with the things that are the opposite to these teachings, with our ignorance and our deluded emotions.
Of course there has to be some work put into bringing about a different situation. Does anybody have anything to say about this? So anyway if we continue with this kind of experience and eventually we can have good results if we continue with this kind of practice eventually we can gain the experience we can have the understanding, even of very profound topics. It’s possible. You can’t really say.
Could have been. On the other hand, you can’t deny that perhaps Christianity Christianity can produce its saints. I don’t know what her level of realization was. She was obviously a very good person. She obviously had a lot of loving kindness.
I’ve been reading her biography and she certainly had enthusiastic perseverance. It was quite amazing to hear of how she had to cope with all these wild Irishmen, all these priests. When I was just reading of the The powers go. Yes, the powers go. The things that these men were saying were so outrageous that I just thought, oh, they were just really wild Irishmen.
But, yes, I think she had incredible patience and incredible perseverance. And, yes, it’s inspiring to read about these kinds of life stories. Going on with perseverance, So definition that’s given of perseverance is that it’s delight in virtue. So we have develop this quality of perseverance gradually, and we have to gain an enthusiastic energy for Dharma practice. Because we’re not talking about enthusiastic perseverance in something like making a lot of money or being very famous or being queen of society.
But we’re talking about enthusiastic perseverance in attaining the stages and paths towards enlightenment. And this is something that’s going to take tremendous perseverance. It’s something that it’s a very demanding goal. Not easy to attain or we would have attained it already. We’ve had all these things before in our previous lives.
We’ve all been millionaires and so on, but we’ve never attained enlightenment before because if we had attained enlightenment we would be enlightened now. As we’re still in Samsāra we haven’t attained either enlightenment or liberation. So we’re going to need tremendous endurance, tremendous energy to get there and this is where we have to develop this quality of perseverance. And it doesn’t mean something like willpower, forcing yourself to do things. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking we have to Well, I suppose it depends how you look at the term willpower, but not that forced sort of willpower.
It’s the kind of willpower which comes with joy, which comes from being inspired and taking delight in the effort involved, Not from feeling that we have to do something, that it’s something that’s a real chore, we have to sort of wind ourselves up to do. This isn’t what’s meant by enthusiastic perseverance. That kind of mentally forcing yourself, mentally squeezing yourself, pushing yourself too hard is a mistaken attitude. And if we’re doing this in our practice it tends to backfire on you. You do it for a while and then when you don’t get the results that you’re expecting then you tend to get disgusted that it all just seems so unpleasant that you feel like giving up.
So if you’re feeling that your practice is unpleasant and that you’re forcing yourself into it then there’s some sort of mistake there in attitude and you need to look at what you’re doing. So what we’re trying to do is cultivate this enthusiasm, this joy, this feeling of always being inspired to do our practice, of not being obstructed by any feeling of laziness or slackness or wanting to stop. So there’s three kinds of laziness that we have to overcome. I’m not going into a lot of detail about these. There is an awful lot of detail actually in some of the texts, But just going through it quickly.
So the first kind of laziness is the laziness of sloth, which is pretty easy to understand. We’re all familiar with this kind of laziness. We all recognize it ourselves, and we’re all pretty good at pointing it out in other people. But that’s not the point, because when we look at other people, we can’t really say whether they’re being lazy or whether they’re having difficulties that we can’t understand. But when we look at ourselves, we can see whether we’re just succumbing to sloth or whether we really could be capable of doing more.
That just brings a thought to my mind, is rather amusing, when Phra Khantipalo was setting up Wiseman’s Ferry in New South Wales. He set up a little centre there, and he had some laypeople there. One of the major teachings he gave them was avoiding sloth and torpor. So, there wasn’t terribly much in the way of facilities there at that time and they found that they had a place for meditation, had a place for cooking and eating and so on, they found that they needed a place where they could relax a bit and hang out, so they put up another tent there and they called it the S and T tent. So that they could relax a bit.
So that kind of relaxation isn’t sloth and torpor, that’s just it’s valid relaxation. Unless, of course, you sit around too much and waste too much time chatting, then it becomes one of these forms of laziness. So another form of laziness is the laziness of craving evil pursuits. So that word evil sounds a bit heavy, I just took that literally out of the book, but some of these things don’t really sound too evil to us, and they’re not really evil in themselves. What’s evil about them is if we let them distract us from a worthwhile goal.
So this just means mundane activities such as entertainments and putting too much energy into making money, this sort of thing. All sorts of worldly activities. It doesn’t mean that we can’t engage in them, but we have to find a balance. If you try to squeeze your mind into too much Dharma practice and just start to feel frustrated with your Dharma practice, it’s better to go off and relax a bit, go dancing or whatever if you’re a lay person. In that way you get some good exercise and you let off steam and then you come back fresh to your Dharma practice.
Whereas if you make these kinds of things your main purpose in life, if you see them as being an end in themselves, that’s where the problem comes in. Any questions? I’m not sure. Does somebody know? Yes.
I’m I’m not sure because that was per account of Thalo’s term, and possibly would have come from the Theravadin teachings. He was a Theravadin at that time. I’m not sure whether it equates to what we’re going to talk about as mental and physical, you know, dullness or whatever. But I really don’t know there. But I think just in general, you get the picture.
So the second one is the laziness of craving evil pursuits. The third one is the laziness of defeatism. And I think this is one that we to be particularly on the watch out for. It’s easy enough to recognize the first one. And with the second one, we have to learn to discriminate between where it’s valid to pursue these things and where it becomes a form of laziness.
It’s interesting here the definition of laziness because really some of these things are things into which we put quite a lot of energy. So it’s not necessarily a question just sitting around doing nothing that defines laziness. But sometimes it’s easier to distract yourself with entertainment than to buckle down to the real Dharma practice. And it’s not physical effort that’s involved here, it can be physical effort sometimes if it’s something like prostrations, but even just sitting to meditate it looks as if you’re not doing anything but it can be quite hard to make that effort to try to concentrate the mind and sometimes there’s a temptation to let yourself be distracted by doing some sort of mundane activity so that you have an excuse for not sitting down to meditate or sitting down to study or whatever. So the third one is the laziness of defeatism and this means thinking that you’re not good enough or you’re not clever enough to attain Buddhahood or to do some particular sort of Dharma practice.
And We might think that we can never achieve anything that’s for other people and we’re too stupid. If we think that way, it’s a wrong way of thinking and it’s going to hinder us from being able to achieve things on the path. It’s a big obstacle to our Dharma practice, and so we have to overcome this sort of attitude. And it’s one that can be very discouraging to us. So, what we have to do is to develop within ourselves the thought that we can be prepared to spend even our whole life just understanding one little bit of Dharma, even if it was just understanding the meditation on the preciousness of the human rebirth, then that would be something which is extremely worthwhile if we really have a good understanding of that topic by the end of our lifetime.
That’s just the first topic in the graduated path, but it’s an immensely valuable understanding. And if we have this kind of long term big mind about our Dharma practice, then it will definitely bring us results. And there’s three kinds of perseverance. There’s armor like perseverance, and this is the kind of perseverance which is prepared to endure all sorts of hardships and difficulties, even to the extent of staying in the hells for the sake of sentient beings. It was it last week I was telling the story about how the lamas prayed to be reborn in the hells?
This topic somehow came up recently. Anyway, we were just making the point that Bodhisattvas, although they don’t have the karma to be born in the hells, they wish to be born in the hells so as to help others. They pray to be born in the hells, but when their time of death comes, they have so much good karma that they can’t actually be born there. There’s a story of one lama who started groaning as he was dying, his disciples were very upset because he’d lived such a wonderful life, so they thought he must be going to a very good rebirth. This sounded as if he wasn’t happy about where he saw himself going.
So they said to him, What’s the matter? And he said, Oh, I’ve just seen a vision of where I’m going to be born. I’m going to be in the Pure Land and I’ve been praying all my life to go to the Hells to benefit sentient beings there, so I’m very disappointed. This is the kind of attitude we have. The point is that bodhisattva really has that attitude very strongly, strongly and we might not find it easy to cultivate this thought at our level, but we can start by building it up in relation to the difficulties of everyday life and the difficulties of pursuing our Dharma practice.
Then the second one is the perseverance to collect virtuous dharmas. This is Dharma with a small d, which just means things or phenomena. It’s referring to virtuous practices or Dharma practice, in other words. And the person who has great enthusiastic perseverance wishing to help others will also have enthusiastic perseverance to engage in these virtuous actions, which are the means of helping others. So it refers to practices of collecting merit, all kinds of Dharma practice, purifying one’s negativities, performing the practice of the six perfections and so on.
And the third one is perseverance in working for the sake of sentient beings. And this relates to virtuous actions of helping others, and in the practice of the ethics or the morality of working for the sake of sentient beings, which was one of the kinds of moral conduct or ethical conduct that we talked about last week. And so the difference here is that what makes it come under the perfection of perseverance rather than perfection of morality is that here it’s talking about persevering and rejoicing in these actions. It’s not so much the performance of the actions themselves as the persevering in them and rejoicing in them, and persevering in the rejoicing. And if we see these practices as being something if we see carrying out these various different Dharma activities as being something that’s a chore and a burden to us, then we haven’t got this quality of perseverance.
So any questions about this? So the next topic is I don’t know whether I’ll get through it all tonight, but if we don’t finish tonight, I’ll go on next week. So anyway, that deals with the first four perfections, and we can, through practicing these first four, you can see that we can advance spiritually, but in order to reach enlightenment or even just to reach liberation, we need to have the next two, which is concentration and wisdom. So the fifth practice, the fifth perfection concentration, is a practice that’s shared with non Buddhists. It’s not only Buddhists who engage in this.
Although, of course, for the non Buddhists, it wouldn’t be a perfection. But the attainment of concentration is something which is practiced by other traditions, in particular the Hindu yogis understand how to attain the state of concentration. Also, the gods of the form and formless realms understand these practices. I’ll be saying a bit more about that. When it’s conjoined with wisdom, then this practice can bring liberation or enlightenment.
But when it’s practiced alone by itself, without being conjoined with wisdom, then it doesn’t bring this goal. So whether it brings liberation or whether it brings enlightenment depends on what goal you set for yourself in the first place and on what your motivation is. We talked about this previously when we were talking about the medium scope. Do you remember that? Yes.
And I said then that I wouldn’t be explaining concentration and wisdom because they came into the three higher trainings, but the medium scope practitioner has to practice these qualities in order to attain liberation. So non Buddhists practice concentration and attain the four levels of the form and formless god realms, and this relates to four different levels of concentration which are associated with the realm of subtle form beyond the desire realm. The beings who are in this form realm have very, very subtle minds and they still have very subtle bodies, which are still physical bodies, and they engage in these levels of concentration. So each level of concentration leads to the next. And in order to attain the first of the form realms, the or the being has to have practiced this sort of meditative absorption in a previous lifetime.
Whether they did that in the human realm or perhaps in one of the other god realms, they attained this level of concentration and created karma to be reborn in this form realm where they remain in this concentration all the time. Through practicing that way in that form they advance their concentration to a higher level and then they get reborn at the next level. So they keep on going up through the four levels of the form realm. Finally, then they go from the highest level of the form realm into the formless realm. They continue to go up through these four levels of the formless realms, each level becoming more subtle.
During these concentrations, deluded mental states cease to function. These concentrations are without delusion, they’re without non virtue, but it hasn’t been destroyed, it’s simply latent. So it’s removed temporarily from the person’s consciousness, but it’s not permanently removed. It’s only while they remain in these concentrations that they are free from these deluded mental states. And as they reach the higher mental states, highest levels of these states, they think that they’ve attained liberation, but in actual fact they haven’t attained liberation.
They’re simply experiencing the results of their karma. So these are very specific kinds of karma that can only bring this particular result of existence in this particular kind of realm. On the last level, they don’t create any karma at all, so they simply use up their previously created karma and they continue for eons and eons meditating in this realm but eventually it just all gets used up and they fall back again into the lower states of cyclic existence such as being born again as an animal. So it’s not something to be aimed for and it doesn’t bring liberation. This is because they’re practicing concentration alone without wisdom.
So in order to be liberated from our deluded mental states, in order to cut them off at the root, to cut off the root of saṃsāra, we have to have concentration combined with insight. Concentration for developing other qualities. It brings realization of other meditation topics. For example, if we can develop concentration and use it to meditate on the precious human rebirth, if we can use it to meditate on impermanence, or meditating on overcoming attachment to the body by meditating on the parts of the body. We can attain realizations of all these qualities which are important things for us to understand and realize.
By having this single pointed concentration on the topic we can attain this meditation much more easily than if we didn’t have concentration. Another thing that we gain from having single pointed concentration is psychic powers. We don’t want these psychic powers for their own sake, but bodhisattvas welcome them in order to help others. And in any case, whether we want them or not, they do come with the development of single pointed concentration. Pabongka Rinpoche says that mental quiescence can be gained either before or after gaining bodhicitta.
So, it’s not necessary according to Pabongka Rinpoche to have mental quiescence, to have single pointed concentration in order to attain bodhicitta, but it’s very helpful. If we can gain this single pointed concentration, then it will very much enhance our development of bodhicitta. So it’s not always gained in the order that it set out in the Graduated Path, because in the Graduated Path, as you know, we’re taught how to develop bodhicitta first and then it’s explained that having gained bodhicitta you go on to practice the six perfections and concentration is explained as one of the six perfections but this is simply a way of setting up the practice and it doesn’t have to follow that order, that strict order. In fact, I was told once by Khensur Rinpoche, Khensur, I should say, that the way of developing bodhicitta is first to attain single pointed concentration. I thought at the time that he was saying that it’s always necessary to have single-pointed concentration first, but Pabongka Rinpoche specifically says that it can happen either way, so either I misunderstood what Khensur Rinpoche was saying, or perhaps he was quoting a different text.
But at any rate, it’s an interesting thing to realize that although there is this explanation of concentration as being something that you practice after you’ve become a bodhisattva, that in actual fact we can gain it now and then become bodhisattvas. When I say gain it now, mean to say we can gain it before we become bodhisattvas. Perhaps we can gain it now. Perhaps there’s some people here who are going to gain single pointed concentration very soon, if they haven’t done it already. So, in actual fact, for people who have got all the causes and conditions together of single-pointed concentration, when they actually embark intensively on the practice, it can happen within a few weeks.
It doesn’t have to take that long, say three months. Concentrating on what, though? Well, I’ll be talking about that. Really, can be anything. What’s quickest someone could do with three months?
Three months is it can mean, say three months, which is only twelve weeks. Yeah. Yeah, which is quite amazing when you think of it. That is assuming that the person already has got all the groundwork together. We tend to look at concentration in terms applying it to meditation on emptiness, but it does have all these other uses as well.
It has many applications. So it’s a really fast topic. And a while ago, a couple of years ago, about three years ago, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Geshe Tashi Tsering taught for four weeks. Between the two of them, they were teaching every day for four weeks on these topics of Samatha and Vipassana. Of course I’m not going to be able to go through everything tonight that they were teaching us on.
It’s a very complex topic. Was that October last year when the nuns were doing that? No, it was the year of the Dharma of the twentieth anniversary of Chenrezig Institute when Lama Zopa was out. So last year the nuns were studying with Jampa Gendun and studying debate topics and that was related to various tenets and so on to do with these topics. It had more to do, not so much with the topic of emptiness, but to do with the topic of the conventional level of things, how how things exist, the nature of of our perceptions and so on.
Of our mental, you know, our mental states. To be sidetracked, the classical way that you start off debating is debating about color and form. Have any of you done that debating with Jampa Gendun? No. Well, they usually start you off with the text that the young monks start off on.
You start off learning how to debate by debating on the topic of the meaning of form, it starts off with color and shape. Really, there’s quite a lot of Of course, that’s just a preliminary topic, but there’s quite a lot. You start off actually by dividing everything into subdivisions, and you start off with dharmas. There’s a bit of dispute about the terms, but you start off with dharma. So dharma simply means anything that can be discussed or thought about.
So dharmas can be divided into two, which is existence and non existence. And then you have further subdivisions. You can’t say very much about non existence, but existence can be divided into further subdivisions such as permanence and impermanence and so on, and you just go from there. And then permanence can be divided into certain categories and impermanence can be divided into other categories such as objects of the six senses you know the five physical senses and the mental sense and then the objects of the eye sense can be divided into form and colour and so on. Yes.
Yes. So this is so