Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 41-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew opens with cosmology—comparing Buddhist accounts of multiple universes with Big Bang theory—to establish a fundamental question: how does beginningless consciousness bind us to saṃsāra? She walks through the wheel of life and the three main afflictions (anger, desire, ignorance) that perpetuate rebirth, then explores group karma and shared past lives, using the Cathars as a detailed example. She outlines the path to liberation: ethical conduct as the foundation (without it, concentration is impossible), concentration as the support, and direct insight into emptiness as the only antidote to the root delusion of perceiving inherent existence. She closes by reflecting on why Buddhism uniquely presents the complete path, noting that Jesus may have been enlightened but Christianity lacks this comprehensive framework. For practitioners already familiar with the graduated path and core Buddhist concepts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 52 Sam 1998 09 03.mp3
UUID: a766f92d-df28-4e60-868f-0a8786254edc
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-09-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 41.7 minutes
Words: ~5,033
Now did have a start. We know that the astronomers and so on are starting to tell us about these things now, but it’s already been explained in the teachings that there was a time when this universe didn’t exist, and then it came into being. And it came into being because of the karma of we or us sentient beings who have to live in it. But the continuity of our consciousness didn’t come into existence at that time. The continuity of our consciousness came from somewhere else.
And before this universe, there were other universes. There are other universes now. We’re not the only universe. There are countless other universes. These universes are coming into being.
They’re existing, and then they pass out of existence. They have a limited lifespan. But before that, there were others. So I don’t know what they’re working out about the Big Bang theory and so on, but whether they decide that this universe eventually sort of turns around and starts going back again into the primal atom or or whether it keeps on expanding outwards, that doesn’t matter. But in the teachings, it says that there have been other universes before, and that these universes all had their period of existence and eventually ceased to exist.
If the population of the world, the human world, is increasing and at an alarming rate, where all these where is the consciousness human rebirths? The karma? Somehow they’ve created that karma. Somehow there’s more beings that have lived karma for human beings in this universe just now, particularly Indian human beings. Not always a big step up from the animal realm, if you look at the beggars in the gutters in places like Patna and so on.
Well, one one point of view seems to be that it’s actually infinite. The other seems to be that it’s just countless. I’m not quite sure which is right. No, because all of these sentient beings didn’t come from anywhere. They only came from the continuity of their past consciousness.
And if this sounds a bit mind bending, actually it might help to keep in mind that the three times, past, present and future, are just a relative concept. And the ultimate truth is beyond these three times, as a sort of timeless state. A genuine concept anyway. Yes. It’s sort of like a reality of our present situation, that we all came from somewhere our minds have endless backwards continuity, and we’ll have an endless forward continuity.
But what is this continuity? You know, there’s really only the present moment, and yet the past is terribly important because it influences us. But in another sense, it’s unreal. It’s a bit mind bending when you really start to think about these concepts. The Buddhas understand these things perfectly.
They have this sort of direct experience of the Absolute Truth. I think this understanding of what the three times really is, is one of the things that comes to you when you gain that understanding. So, but at the present anyway, we’re in this situation, we have to work with it. We can’t just say all the three times don’t exist. There’s really no such thing as the past and future.
There’s only the present, be here now, that sort of thing. It doesn’t work. We have to deal with our past and we have to prepare for our future. Then we can gradually sort of train ourselves so that we can actually have that experience of living in the moment, but we have to go through the process first. They said that all sentient beings will eventually be enlightened.
Even they’re There are countless Buddhas helping them. The thing is that each individual universe seems to have a finite number of beings in it. But there seems to be an infinite number of universes. So I don’t know about that. Science will never be able to tell us.
So someone like the Buddha sat there and these are the sorts of things that he saw. Yes. Yes. The omniscient mind sees absolutely everything. He must have had a very high IQ as well, I’d say.
Well, he did. Yes. But still, the realization of Buddhahood is not so much a matter of IQ. It’s a question of bringing out the inner potential, removing the obscurations for our inner potential, so we all have this inner potential of Buddhahood. If we could just throw away our obscurations right away, then we would all have this incredible understanding.
Buddha’s understanding is not conceptual. It’s not intellectual. It’s direct. Oh, alright. Buddha doesn’t have to think about anything.
Of course, when he was prince in the palace and so on, he was learning. He learned these different things. He had a high IQ, but then he just went beyond IQ. Doesn’t matter. So a handicapped person can also come afford it?
I’m not so sure about that because it would be a handicap to their training. But it wouldn’t stop them from making progress. I think some handicapped some mentally handicapped people actually seem to me to have a, in some ways, purer state of mind than some very intelligent people. Like Colin does that do? Any of you know Colin Crosby at Chenrezig Institute?
He’s got a a young lad. He’s got a a mental handicap, but he seems to be sort of like a an incredibly happy person. He’s always laughing. When you look at him, he could he’s sort silly. He doesn’t seem to have any worries and just sort of goes through life texting.
He says they come every everything seems to make him laugh. Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course, he’s got an incredible intellect, but I don’t know about his his his his understanding in other respects. In fact, often people who have these incredibly powerful, very one directional type of intellects often make a real mess of their personal lives because they simply don’t seem to be able to apply their brains to dealing with everyday life, if you know what I mean.
And this is kind of almost a truism. It’s not true of all of them, but it’s very it’s very frequently noted. So yes. So, anyway, we go through some siren. We’re experiencing all these things life after life.
And then the question is that why is all this happening? And we’re taught in the teachings that the ultimate nature of our minds is pure clarity and knowing, and Buddha nature and contaminated by the cause of suffering. So why is it that we’re not able to experience the bliss and the peace of mind that experienced by these and enlightened beings and bodhisattvas and so on? Why are we stuck in bogged down in our problems, basically? So the the explanation for this is that there wasn’t a time when this started.
There never has been a time when our minds were pure and free from these problems. Although we have this ultimate nature of purity, we also have these obscurations, and we’ve had them since beginningless time. We have and there’s two things that cause us to be caught in saṃsāra. And these two things reinforce each other and keep the process going. And does anybody want to tell me what the two things are?
Yeah. Right. Yes. Well, they’re involved in it. But it’s basically delusion and karma are the two main factors that keep us in saṃsāra, and they reinforce each other.
So we have these disturbed mental states, or sometimes translated as afflictions or delusions, distorted mental states, and karma. So we know karma. So the afflicted mental states fall into three main categories, which are symbolized by those three animals right in the center of the wheel, because they’re the energy that keeps the whole thing going. They’re like the motor of the car. And that’s Is that right?
Good. Yes. One one. Yes. They’re chicks dancing, though.
People are doing it. Yes. And as I say, they’re very intelligent. But in ancient India, they had a very low idea of pigs. They still do.
And if you saw the Indian pigs, they’re amazing. You know, they’re totally prehistoric looking. And only the lowest class people would. Yeah. No.
I believe it. Yes. Well well, yes. Well, that’s why George Orwell made them the the leaders of the revolution. Okay.
So anyway, they they fall into the three main categories of hatred or anger and aversion, generally, attachment, desire, generally, and ignorance. Mhmm. So it doesn’t really matter. The snake is anger. Angry.
Angry. Because they and snakes face very angry sort of animals. And then under their roosters are very lustful. As you would know if you’ve ever kept chooks. I used when I was going, I used to wonder why the roosters were always chasing the hens around.
And I used to wonder why the hens were always running away. So and then there was a lot of dust flying up. So under their influence, we create various different intentional actions, which deposit karmic imprints on our consciousness to be carried from life to life, and eventually ripen in some sort of appropriate result. And as you all know, the most basic thing about karma that we have to know is that good actions bring a result of happiness within saṃsāra, and bad actions bring a good result a result of unhappiness, a suffering result. And as I already mentioned, there are two kinds of karma.
There’s projecting karma and completing karma. Projecting karma brings a rebirth, which would be one of the six realms of saṃsāra. And then the completing result is the experience that you have during that lifetime. Yes. Well, won’t go into that tonight.
It’s a very detailed teaching. But all of these things, anyway, they’re all explained in the graduated path. If you want to understand all these things in detail, you have to basically go through the whole graduated path. Even then, you probably want to go in and study Abhidharma and Lorig and all of these things, especially Abhidharma. You find all these things explained in the Abhidharma.
So a more detailed explanation is given in the twelve links of how the process goes, and it’s depicted around the edge of the wheel with the twelve little pictures there. And I’m not going to explain that tonight, and I’ve explained it before about how each rebirth and the life that follows, it is created by karma. And during that life, more karma is created, and that leads to more rebirths. And process also shows about how attachment and craving ripens the karmic seeds and leads to the rebirth and so on. So this means that the person keeps or the being keeps on getting reborn again and again into the six realms.
That’s also in the form of a circle because one set of twelve links leads to another set of twelve links, and it just keeps on going around. So you might wonder where do these six realms come from? We’ve just been talking about the universe. Where do these six realms come from that we get born into? Particularly our human and animal realm that we share together and also share with some other spirit beings and so on that we can’t see.
Sometimes it’s explained in the teachings and the explanation about Mount Meru and the four continents and seven rings of golden mountains and seven seas and so on, and we know that it’s not really like that because the astronomers have been kind enough to tell us about galaxies and all these things. But basically, anyway, they all agree on the point that our Earth didn’t always exist and that it came into being. So who created it? And the astronomers don’t know about that. So, of course, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that there must have been a god that created it.
And the Buddhist answer is that there isn’t actually any creator god, that these things arise that these worlds arise spontaneously out of the basic level of physical energy in accordance with the karma of beings to live there. And it’s basically the karma of the beings that creates the situation, that creates a world that will provide a suitable environment for the beings to live there and experience the karma that they’ve the results of the karma that they’ve created. So for for one of these universes to come into being, there has to be beings, there needs to be beings with that kind of karma. And perhaps these beings might be living in another universe that’s wearing out and coming to the end of its period of existence. And they’re creating karma.
They still have to go on being born into a human realm, into an animal realm, into hungry ghosts and whatever. So, apparently, even the hell seems to be associated with the universe that we’re in. It’s actually explained in the teachings that there are I forget how many yojanas underneath the the ground of Bodh Gaya. And somebody did a calculation and worked out that if you went that many yojanas down under the ground, you would end up in outer space on the other side of the southern Atlantic. So it didn’t really work out.
But anyway, somehow it seems that we share these these different realms, but the vibrational level or something is different so that we don’t really see these other realms experiencing their different kind of lifestyles. But they’re still there in association with the world that we experience every day. Yes. Consciousness. He talked about racial consciousness and these different things.
I think some of these things that Jung talked about really have a lot in them. Other things, I’m not so sure. I think other of them, he may have simply come up with them as the best way he could come at it at that particular time of explaining certain things. He he had a sort of incredible awareness of what was going on under the surface in people’s minds. And this racial consciousness, he tended to put down to ancestry, whereas from the Buddhist point of view, we put it down to shared karma.
We would say that ancestry wouldn’t be so likely to come for it because there’s no reason why we would have been although it’s always possible that we might have been born in the same family or the same race a few times, and these things certainly do happen. So that could be a partial explanation for it, but it’s also really the it all boils down to karma anyway when you take to the full analysis that we experience at at various different times. We’ve got together with other beings to create various kinds of karma, and then we have to get together again to experience the ripening result. That’s what’s called group karma. And when we feel a very strong sort of group affinity with other members of our particular ethnic group or race or clan or whatever it might be, this is because of our karmic.
We’ve been born together like that. And sometimes these things seem to form chains and links that seem to go on for a number of different lifetimes. And even if we get bought as animals and some, we can sort of get bought as animals in the same family. And it it it seems like through I’m just talking from the point of view of people who’ve done research into past lives and so on, but it it often seems that they do things like tracing links of people back through a number of lifetimes and see it’s a group of people being linked together for a number of centuries. For instance, there was a book on I think it was Reincarnation of the Cathars or something like that?
Yes. Was that the name of Cathars. Cattars. Cattars. A t h a r s.
I think I’m not quite sure if that was exactly the title, but it was something like that. Anyway, it was a book that came out in the seventies, and I read it, I thought, oh, what a lot of silly nonsense. I was in working in a library in those days, and I thought, he’s making all this up. You know, it couldn’t be true. And then a few years later, I got into Buddhism, I began to see how all this sort of and actually, have been not only but anyway, to explain this book, you might wonder what I’m yapping about.
He he was a psychiatrist, and he started treating this woman who was having spontaneous recollection of past lives, where she was burnt to death as a heretic by the the Inquisition in France. And she belonged to this group of people called the Cattars, who were a heretical group in the south of France, and a lot of the other people who were around in that life. And this woman was quite an ordinary housewife in that lifetime, but she remembered all these things, and so she came for treatment. And as soon as she saw him, she recognized him as being her psychiatrist as being her past lover, and she also started recognizing a lot of other people around her and so on. She eventually convinced him, and he started doing some research into these things and so on, was quite impressed some of the findings that he came up with about the historical veracity of some of the things she was telling him.
He seemed to be deliberately standing aside and taking a noncommittal sort of scientific outlook. Yes. Yes. There’s there’s some fascinating research into some of these things. Yeah.
I think someone made a movie called Béziers Again. No. Didn’t. Well, that’s exactly the same thing that the Dharma teachings teach us, and it explains why we why we often have very sort of uneasy relationship with the because actually, whether we do bad karmas or good karmas, it seems to draw us together with the same people again. And this is this is incredible force of attraction, whether it’s good karma or bad karma.
And quite often people are drawn together into love affairs by bad rather than good karmas. And then they just hurt each other. So, you know, when you experience this love at first sight kind of thing, you know, people tend to think, it’s sent by heaven, but it’s not always. Yes. But it explains a lot of these things.
So anyway, to get on with the things I won’t finish it’s getting on if we’re gonna watch that movie more video. But, anyway, we we have these different experiences because of our karma. And so what we’re trying to do is to to aim how to to get out of all this this sort of thing. So how do we get out of it? It’s all depending on mind.
We’ve been getting born again and again in saṃsāra, and it’s all activated by mind. But if we don’t control the process, we don’t have any conscious knowledge of the way it’s happening, it all happens beyond our understanding. Because we certainly wouldn’t be choosing to create a situation for suffering for ourselves, but that’s what we’re doing. So the question is, how do we get out of this situation? And, of course, this is all explained in the graduated path which we’ve been through in the small and medium scope.
We understand, first of all, in the teachings on the small scope, meditate on the suffering of the lower realms, and in the medium scope we meditate on general suffering. And we also understand that the first step we have to take is, which is explained in the small scope, is taking refuge in the Three Jewels and observing karma, which boils down to avoiding wrong actions, harmful actions to others, purifying our negative karmas with opponent forces, and accumulating virtuous karma. But this still results in samsaric rebirth, so we experience more happiness. We’re aiming at this point higher rebirth in order to avoid the worst sufferings of the lower realms, and to provide opportunity for further Dharma practice, so as to be able to continue to progress and to get off the wheel. So to attain real everlasting happiness and to be safe from the sufferings of saṃsāra, we have to practice the path that’s taught in the intermediate scope and to find liberation by purifying the mind totally of the karmic imprints and the afflictions.
So that there can’t be any return of these distorted mental states. And these distorted mental states can actually be also divided in to six primary kleshas, which are ignorance, which is particularly referring to ignorance of virtue and non-virtue, or ignorance about karma, desire attachment, anger hatred, pride, doubting what is true, and false views. So what eradicates all these? How can we totally eradicate them and sever the root of saṃsāra? There are many antidotes to each of these afflictions, but most of these antidotes only help us to decrease their power.
And we can actually make progress and reduce the power they have over us. But if we stop doing that, if we stop practicing that, they’ll come back like weeds. So what we have to do is sever them at the root. The only way to do that is by gaining direct insight into emptiness and meditating on this until the mind is totally purified. So it’s this insight into the absolute truth, into the emptiness of inherent existence or true existence, which is the real antidote to the false view of true existence, on which all the other delusions depend.
If we can eliminate this false view, this distorted view, which we all have, we don’t have to be taught this distorted view, it’s something that we’re born with, it comes to us from beginningless time. It comes along with our consciousness from our past lives. And all our other distorted views, self grasping, our self-cherishing, and our attachment, and anger, and hatred, and so on, all come from this basic distorted view. And so we have to overcome it by this insight, direct insight, in deep meditative equipoise, which has to be attained. So in order to gain this, we have to practice the three higher trainings.
Right. Conduct, actually. It’s called conduct, or sometimes yes. You can call it ethics. It boils down to same thing.
So conduct, concentration, and wisdom. So I’ve talked about this before, and I explained the the practice anyway in the six perfections. The person needs to practice conduct as the most basic practice in order to gain mental calm and stability without the emotional disturbances that are brought on by wrong conduct. So without right conduct we haven’t got any hope of gaining single pointed concentration. And then also an accumulation of merit is needed in order to support your practice.
So we have to engage in virtuous actions. So this practice of conduct is really essential, and then the practice of concentration can be attained. And we talked about that last week in the Six Perfections. So it’s attained and then combined with meditation on emptiness, and that’s wisdom. That’s the practice of wisdom.
And through this practice, eventually the person can attain deeper and deeper meditative equipoise Vipassana meditation until they achieve the actual direct insight. And by continuing with this practice, can eventually It doesn’t matter whether they’re following Hīnayāna or Mahāyāna practice, it’s the same practice here. They go on and remove all these distorted mental states, these kleshas or afflictions, and the karma together, the karmic imprints and seeds, so that they’re totally eradicated. Now, on the Hīnayāna path, when that is attained, when when these true cessation of these karmic seeds and these kleshas are attained, then that person has attained liberation, becomes an arhat. The bodhisattva still has to go on to remove the subtle obscurations in order to attain Buddhahood.
And that’s the the process, basically. Well, it would seem, wouldn’t it? I mean, you know, you would basically, you would have to be following the Dharma path. Now it doesn’t seem that anybody has taught this path in this world except Buddha. Of course, there are other worlds with other Buddhas.
So it it doesn’t depend on the name Buddha. It depends on the wisdom. I think some other religions or philosophies may They don’t teach. May have they may have a lot of insight, but I don’t know that they have a presentation of the whole path. But it’s possible, for instance, with Christianity, you might say that Jesus might have been an enlightened being or a great bodhisattva, and he would have a pure land somewhere.
And he’s taught people right conduct and love and compassion and devotion to him and to pray to him to be born in his heaven, you know, to be born near him. And so by by the power of this right conduct and prayer and faith and so on, they could be born and then continue the process. But you couldn’t say that Christian that the Christian philosophy has the whole path in the present because it doesn’t seem to. Although there seem do seem to be some mystical teachings, which in the Christian tradition, which do seem to lead to some high levels of insight. But I’m not sure whether whether they don’t have to do quite a bit of sort of struggling for themselves in some aspects because of the fact that in some areas the Christian philosophy actually seems to almost repress the understanding of the meditators.
It’s almost like they have a real struggle to come to terms with the difference between what they’re experiencing and what they’re taught, and they have to find some way to reconcile the two. Yes. Yes. Well, they have possibly been practical Buddha. Perhaps they gained insight for themselves but couldn’t communicate it.
But the special thing about Buddha was that he did have this power of communication. From what I can gather, it’s incredibly difficult to communicate from the higher levels of experience back to the ordinary level. But people who do achieve these high levels of experience find that they’re almost they just don’t speak the same language. The language of ordinary everyday existence just doesn’t really suffice to express what they experience, and they have to try to find some way. It’s like they sort of go off to another country and learn new customs and a different language and forget the old language, and then they have to try to come back and try to remember the old language and communicate with us again.
Buddha seems to have done this in the most brilliant way, which is quite amazing. Whereas incredible. Yes. Whereas many other beings have achieved very high levels of realization, but simply haven’t been able to convey their realization to others. Samādhi is meditation where the person has combined direct insight — oh, no, sorry — single-pointed śamatha and vipaśyanā.
It’s not necessarily direct insight. If not, it leads to direct insight. So at the third path, becomes direct insight. And that’s when it becomes the ārya path of seeing, when it gets direct insight? Yes.
So at that stage, she hasn’t surpassed the ārya path of seeing yet. Wondering why the term is attached to, say, the dedication community of the arhat. Oh, that’s a term of praise. It means something like noble. Yeah.
So it’s yeah. I think it’s used in a slightly different sense there. Of course, Tārā and these various other deities, they do have all these insights. Tārā is a Buddha, of course. An Ārya being is any being who has reached that level.
So it includes, you know, any being from the third path onwards to arhats and Buddhas. They’re all Ārya’s. So I think we’ll stop at that point. It’s actually a bit later than I meant it to be, but we can go and watch the video. So we’ll just dedicate our merits.
Page ten is on the Samantabhādra, this long last prayer. And then I better look at the announcements book. It’s got the White Tārā meditation day on Saturday. And I’ll just point out to you that if you want to come back, you don’t have to come all day. You can come to one session or two sessions or whatever you like.
One before lunch? Yes, there’s one before I think two before lunch and two after lunch. And oh, I’m not sure how it works, but we haven’t really worked out the sessions yet. Anyway yeah. Yes.
Yes. I think there’ll be two before lunch. Quiz night on the twelfth of September. What about this thing at Riverbend place on Sunday? No.
I don’t know anything about that. Yeah. Know about that. That’s Australian Tibet Council. Oh.
Yeah. That’s members of I’ve had members of Australian Tibet Council holding a bazaar. It’s called nineteen McPherson’s. It’s a really Yeah. It’s a really important thing because, you know, the Tibetan refugees are really struggling.
And you can find out that sponsorship with children. And my mom has just got through to Dharamsala, and I had a wonderful letter of support that left the band at Dharamsala the other day. Right. Then recitation for Tibetan classes with Jampa Nyam, if you want to. Mhmm.
Do you think they might be ongoing? Because I don’t think I should take on something else at this stage of until next year. Oh, this took five years. Something like that. Yes.
Yes. Okay. And then going yes. Okay. So working backwards, the raffle for the umbrella club is still going, and the tickets are in the office.
And request for contribution sending Sangha and SPC, which is Becky,, to Trinity Regional Education Meeting to cover airfares. Right. Woah. I’ve been around the