Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening session, Venerable Margaret McAndrew addresses three obstacles to genuine love: anger, attachment, and ignorance. She explains why anger seems protective but only produces unskillful actions, and how Buddhist practice can eradicate it through advance meditation and mindfulness. She shows how attachment masquerades as love while remaining self-centered desire—harming both self and others. Ignorance causes us to dismiss certain beings as unimportant. The core teaching introduces the equalizing meditation on friend, enemy, and stranger, revealing how these categories are unfixed and shift across a lifetime and across past lives. All beings have been our mothers countless times and are equally worthy of compassion. She guides the group through the meditation, cultivating first equality, then radiating loving-kindness to all sentient beings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 54 DLR 1998 10 01.mp3
UUID: 0abf6bc4-b8c2-46f0-acb7-75396cdd203e
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-10-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~5,180
You know, sort of express your anger and get it off your chest. Not in that sense, but in the sense of while you’re keeping it hidden from yourself and not acknowledging it, you can never overcome it. So the, the important thing, with the Buddhist teachings is that they do enable us to overcome these things. And it’s possible to really overcome this distorted state of mind of anger. So there are actually many methods explained in the graduated path, and particularly in the thought training teachings that do give us the techniques for dealing with anger.
And we’ve gone through these things in other teachings and other times. So maybe if we have a bit of time later on tonight, we can talk about these things if we want to. But it’s a huge topic to you can’t go through it all in a short time. But it is an extremely important practice. It’s one that we all need to do.
So basically, what we need to do is to recognize that that our anger is harming us. And we as Geshe Rinpoche was stressing the other day, he was talking about anger on Sunday, he was really stressing that to deal with anger, we have to deal with it before we get angry. We know that we have this tendency to anger. Once we’re angry, it’s such a distorted state of mind that we lose all interest in in counteracting it when we really are angry. So we have to be prepared for it.
We have to have done our preparation in advance. We have to have learned the techniques and meditated on it. And then when we go about our daily life, we have to be practicing mindfulness. In fact, we have to be practicing mindfulness in relation to all our harmful mental states, all our negative mental states. And then when we see them popping into our mind, as soon as they start to appear, before they get too strong, then we start to apply the antidote.
At the very least, we can walk away from the person that we’re starting to get a bit annoyed with. And we can use other techniques to bring our mind under control. And if we can do various meditations, then we can actually start to deal with our anger at its source so that we can gradually eradicate it. In order to do this, we really first of all have to start just seeing anger as being a disadvantage. And we have to really go through these points and assure ourselves of this so that we feel very strongly.
The trouble is that when we get angry, we see our anger as being something that helps us. And this is a totally wrong viewpoint. The only way that we can get over our anger is to see how anger is fooling us. Anger just makes a fool of us all the time and makes us act stupidly. It never it it only makes us do things that that are conducive to our own unhappiness and the unhappiness of others.
It never does anything that makes us happy. The trouble is that we can sometimes fall into thinking that that anger is actually protecting us, that it’s keeping us from being dominated by others or that it’s keeping us from that it’s enabling us to pay others back for wrongs they’ve done us, or we can we can have this righteous anger feeling that we can put right the wrongs in the world by getting angry. In actual fact, anger doesn’t help us with these things. And controlling anger, overcoming anger, doesn’t mean we have to be wishy washy. It doesn’t mean that we have to be pushed around and that we have to be spineless.
What it means is that we learn to gain a real strength, which is based on better understanding. And we can work much more effectively. Anger actually doesn’t help us. Anger just leads us to unskillful actions. We might act out of anger, but our actions are going to be unskillful.
If we can learn to overcome our anger, learn to practice, if we can develop real patience, then we can act very strongly. But we can act skillfully. We can act in a way that’s really effective. Whereas anger just leads us to being not effective. You can see that, for instance, with the green movement.
People have some sort of good cause such as protecting the environment, but then they go out and because they get angry, then they do stupid things and say and do extreme things which don’t help the cause. And this kind of thing happens all the time. It comes because of people acting out of anger and losing their sense of proportion. And quite often, if we could keep calm and talk to the other people in a reasonable sort of way, then we could sort things out by getting angry and yelling at them and saying unpleasant things or using an unpleasant tone of voice. We just drive them into a position where they feel obliged to oppose us.
And we do this all the time, and it’s just so unhelpful because we don’t get what we want. And we can see it in ourselves. We see when other people attack us, or tackle us in this way. If they talk to us reasonably and with a sense that we might have our own point of view to express too, then we’re often quite ready to be reasonable. Whereas if they come at us trying to tell us what to do with an angry attitude, then we immediately put our backs up and it seems like we just feel like we have to do the opposite to what they want.
We’re forced to it. So maybe we need to work on that too, but basically, it’s when we’re dealing with others, we can recognize that it’s not skillful to bring about this reaction in others. And if we can stay calm and keep an attitude of kindness towards the other person, then we’re going to be much more effective. So one of the first things we have to do is to deal with our anger. And there are other attitudes.
We often don’t think of attachment as being something that disturbs our ability to love. But actually, attachment and self-cherishing are attitudes that are when we’re using this term attachment in the Buddhist sense, in the technical sense, as being an attitude of wanting our own happiness and not considering the welfare of others, the self centered form of attachment and desire, This actually can easily be mistaken for love, but it’s not love, and it’s actually an attitude that’s averse to love, that disturbs our love. And It disturbs our love because it comes from self centeredness and doesn’t consider the welfare of others. It even might lead to us wanting to be kind to others, but it’s looking at others from the point of view of our own self-cherishing, of seeing them from the point of view of how they contribute to our own happiness. And the funny thing is that while we’re at others, while we’re going around with this attitude of looking at our own happiness and how other beings and other objects contribute to our happiness, somehow this only leads to unhappiness.
It’s a state of mind that somehow it’s grasping, it’s increasing this tightness of the heart, and it doesn’t make for more happiness. It only disturbs our happiness and makes us agitated and unpeaceful. And it also leads us into doing actions, particular actions like stealing, cheating, manipulating others, and so on, which disturbs our relationships with others, it leads to bad karma, and so it brings unhappiness in this way too, and it causes problems for others. So these kinds of actions aren’t skillful, and so we have to overcome our attachment as well, and learn how to develop this real loving-kindness which is based on a genuine concern for others. This is more difficult because it’s a subtle thing.
We have to gradually learn how to discriminate. We’re not just acting from attachment. Although we have attachment and self-cherishing, we also have a capacity for genuine loving-kindness. And what we have to do is to set about learning to discriminate between when we’re acting out of attachment and self-cherishing and when we are acting out of genuine loving-kindness. As we become more discriminating, then we can weaken the attachment and strengthen the loving-kindness.
It’s just a gradual process. The more we try to do it, it really comes back to this mindfulness, watching our thoughts, watching our mental states, being aware all the time. The more we do it, the better we become at discriminating. And we can start to catch ourselves when we’re going off on the attachment track. We also start to see the more we think about it, the more we can start to see how attachment really does hurt us, and how it’s not something that we want to encourage.
We can really start to have this wish, this will to overcome attachment. It’s having interest, this real wish to overcome our harmful mental attitudes that really is the essential factor in doing it. Once we really want to get rid of our anger, once we really want to get rid of our attachment, then we can start to make progress. Until we’ve convinced ourselves of that point, while we’re still thinking, well, maybe, yes, but maybe anger’s good for me, or maybe attachment is helping me, then we won’t really be effective. But once we really feel in our hearts that this is hurting me, is destroying my happiness, then it’ll start to work and we’ll also start to put the antidotes into action more effectively.
And the other harmful mental state we have is ignorance. And this also disturbs our capacity to love, because it causes us to feel that certain sentient beings are simply of no importance to us. Some of you will be familiar with the meditation that we have, which is the first meditation that’s set out in the great scope. Before we start meditating on love and compassion, we have to do this equalizing meditation. We look at how our harmful mental states of anger and hatred, of attachment and ignorance, lead us to labelling other sentient beings.
So we can have these attitudes both toward other beings and towards inanimate objects. But where we’re concerned with living beings, it leads us to labeling these living beings from this viewpoint, and so we label them as being friend, enemy, and stranger. So when we’re talking about friend, enemy and stranger, the friend simply means all the beings that we’re attached to, our relatives, our dear ones, our lovers, our pets and so on. When we’re talking about enemies, it’s the things that we dislike, the ones that we feel are unpleasant, that give us a hard time. We wouldn’t necessarily go around saying, they’re my enemy.
I want to destroy them. But we we really dislike them. We we don’t want to have anything to do with them. We’d be quite happy to see them experiencing some sort of, at least, some sort of minor suffering. Because we can’t help having this sort of vengeful sort of attitude of mind towards them.
So the definition of anger in Buddhism is that it’s this wish to to see others suffer, this wish to harm others or to hurt them. If we have this thought in our minds, even if we don’t carry it out, then then we’re harboring the sort of anger. So we have this meditation, and it’s a very effective meditation. It’s something that we need to do as the first step, because we can’t develop love and compassion towards others without having equalized our attitude towards the friend, enemy and stranger. Particularly as we’re trying to cultivate equal love and compassion towards all.
So it’s easy to love some people. Some people are nice to us. Some people are pleasant and attractive. It’s easy to love some people. But we’re not really practicing love and compassion until we can also practice it towards the ones who are ugly, unattractive, irritating, and so forth.
And the ones that are nasty and unpleasant. So it’s this is why it’s difficult, because we’ve got a long way to go to be able to do this. But we can start to practice the first step, which is being more patient, and by equalizing our attitude towards others. So we can look at this in terms both of our past lives and also in this life. So maybe not everybody here feels convinced of past and future lives, but we can see that even in this lifetime, our attitudes towards others are constantly changing.
When we’re angry towards somebody, we feel that it’s a really fixed attitude. We feel that this person is just really bad, that there’s something about their nature that’s just essentially bad, that they’re like that, that that’s their real nature. That somehow they’re inherently bad, unpleasant, nasty, horrible. And when we look at somebody we like, we feel that they’re inherently lovely, sweet, agreeable, nice, and that somehow they have this inherent quality of being like this. It’s something we feel that it’s very fixed.
And when we look at a stranger, we just feel that they have neither of these qualities. They just don’t seem to be important. So what we have to do is look at how, in actual fact, there’s nothing fixed about this other person. First of all, if they were really like this nasty, horrible, and so on, then everybody would feel the same way about them. But of course, they have their friends and relatives who think they’re lovely and who think they’re nice people and who love them.
And on the other hand, the people that we like, our friends, are also greatly disliked by other people, so they’re not inherently sweet and lovely. We can also see that our own attitude towards them has changed in the course of this lifetime, that perhaps there was a time when we when when the enemy was our friend, or there was a time when we didn’t know them. If we’d met them, they wouldn’t have we would have totally felt that they weren’t of any importance to us. Then later on, it changes and they become the person that annoys us and that we don’t like. And in the same way, perhaps our friend, there might have been a time when we didn’t like them.
Then perhaps as we got to know them better, we came to appreciate their good qualities and came to regard them as a friend. Again, also, they could have been a stranger. These things can change in the future. The person who’s our friend now can in the future become our enemy, or we might lose track of them, and they become like a stranger to us. In the same way, the the enemy can become a friend or or can dwindle off to become a stranger.
And the people that we meet as strangers and think are not important to us can, in the future, become a very important friend or a very important enemy. And so if we stop to think of how these things have been changing all the time and how it continues to change, then we can stop having this fixed feeling. And if you think of how it would be if somebody was to perhaps give you a hundred dollars last week, and this week perhaps they punch you in the face. And then think of another person. Maybe this other person punched you in the face last week, and this week they give you a hundred dollars.
So which one is the friend and which one is the enemy? You’d have to say that they’re both equal, wouldn’t you? You might tend to like most the person who’s just given you the hundred dollars and forget that they punched you in the face. And the other person, you might forget that they’ve given you the hundred dollars and forget that you just disliked them because they’ve punched you. But if you think about it a little bit more and look over, reflect over what they’ve been doing, you can’t see any difference between the two of them.
You would have to feel equal towards them both. So in actual fact, we stand in this kind of relationship to all beings. And even if we look back over this life, we can’t see as much reason to label people in a fixed sort of way. And if we could see all our past lives, we could see we’ve been in every possible relationship to every sentient being. They’ve all been incredibly kind to us and again.
And also, we’ve been hurt by them, killed and beaten and so on by them. So there’s no reason to feel that some of them are incredibly kind with and not the others are not. Really, if we look at all of them and look at these beings, then we can start to feel that they’re all equal. And so what we do in this meditation, we just pick on three beings who exemplify these three states of mind, and we visualize them. We use the technique of visualizing.
And it’s good to do this sometimes with somebody who’s been disturbing us, and somebody who’s been kind to us that we like, and with somebody who we regard as unimportant to us. And I often suggest actually that when you’re just starting off doing this kind of meditation, if there’s somebody that you feel really really angry towards, who’s really hurt you and wronged you, it might be better not to start off with that person, but to start off with somebody that you feel a milder sort of anger towards. And then as you gradually become more skillful in the technique, you can start to apply it to the person that you really feel angry towards. Because if you start off, it might be that you would just feel too upset and be unable to proceed with with the meditation if if you chose the person that you’re really upset about. But the point is to eventually get to the point where we can deal with these difficult relationships in a more skillful way.
And so this equilibrium meditation is is one that does give us a basis for going on to do further practices. And we might actually have a go at that in a little while. And then we can go on with seeing sentient beings having done that sort of meditation and balance their mind out. That’s compared with leveling the ground before you plant a crop. If the ground’s full of bumps and rocks and things, then you you can’t sow the crop effectively.
So you do this leveling meditation first, and that gives us the basis to go on and actually see sentient beings as attractive, kind, and helpful to us. And there are various ways of doing this. The methods that set out in the graduated path, excuse me, I haven’t got time to really explain it in detail today, but just setting out the general idea of how we set about this. One way is by considering looking back over past lives, thinking about how we’ve been through all these past lives and how in many of these past lives without from the Buddhist point of view, we could have been born as human beings or as animals. And in these kinds of lives, we’ve had mothers.
And our lives go back countless. Of course, in some of our lives, we didn’t have mothers. There are certain kinds of lives where we get born without having where we come into existence in that realm without having to go through physical birth from the womb or from eggs, which involve having mothers. But if you count back, we’ve had these countless lives. So actually, all the sentient beings have been our mother at one time or another.
And if we and in fact, they’ve all been our mothers as human beings a number of times, a countless number of times. And by remembering this, we can remember also the kindness of mothers and, how mothers look after their little ones and so on, and get this feeling that we’ve been closely connected with these sentient beings. So of course, we’ve already looked at the fact that these beings have also hurt us, but here we’re actually focusing on the positive view. And there’s a good reason for this because in actual fact by focusing on the positive we get good results. And having balanced out our mind, evened our attitude towards others, then by focusing on seeing the kind side of them, we can actually bring about a development in our minds that will bring us much greater happiness and enable us to bring more happiness to others.
So this is something that’s really extremely worthwhile, and that’s what we’re trying to engage in. So does anybody want to ask any questions? Oh, she can be very funny sometimes. Oh, Moon too. We weren’t talking about She can be quite happy sometimes, but she’s got her reasons.
Yes. Yes, definitely. Yes. You can see how animals have the whole range of emotions just like we have. And it’s interesting to watch for instance, when when Elaine was away, her owner was away a couple of weeks ago, she went totally neurotic.
And she was definitely, like, playing for attention and just sort of like regressing to to kittenhood and kind of making everybody run around cleaning up her messages. You know, she’s very normally, she’s a very clean, very well trained cat, a very well mannered cat. Wouldn’t think of making a mess in the wrong place, but while her owner was the way she was doing it all the time and having everybody running around after her, and it was sort of like she she just had to sort of prove to herself that that that that she’d be looked after. Poor old thing. But she’s she’s yes.
Yes. So I mean, we don’t necessarily go and poo in the flower pots, but but she’s she’s she’s quite back to normal again now. Yes. Yes. So yes.
It was sort of like a an attention thing, I think. Yes. Yes. And also that this is sort of a punishing thing too. A friend of mine always used to claim that when she left her chihuahua too long alone, it would always make a mess in the house deliberately to punish her.
And I used to laugh at her and think, you know, it just sort of made a mistake. But actually, now I’ve come to realize that actually the little chihuahua actually was doing it on purpose to punish her because I’ve seen this one doing So another way we can think is to remember our dependency on other beings in general. How we are owe so much to others. That’s right, yes. Yes, so we’re totally dependent on others.
Get so many good things due to the kindness of others, and it doesn’t depend on them doing it out of the kindness of their hearts to us. Because in general, they’re just doing it because they want to make a profit, they want to make a living for themselves and so on. But the end result to us is that we get all these good things, our food, our clothing, houses, our entertainment, everything. So many good things that come to us from others. And it’s not just in the present, but it goes back right back to the fact that every time we eat a piece of toast, we’re owing a debt of gratitude to the first person who learned how to plant wheat and harvest it.
And so, you know, it goes back for generations. So really, we have so much dependence on others that if we think that we can just be an element independent by ourselves, it’s it’s totally unrealistic. So it makes much more sense to acknowledge them and and have this feeling of appreciation towards others. So maybe we can does anybody before we go on to do the meditation, does anybody have anything you want to say or ask or share or or tell us? So we can start off by just watching our breath for a little while, just placing the mindfulness on the breathing.
Is there anybody who who hasn’t learned any sort of breathing awareness, meditation? Have you have you all meditated before? You yes. So just place the mindfulness on the breathing and just get the mind focused. We’ll just do that for a short time.
So we can begin by visualizing in front of us three people. To our left, we visualize somebody that we like. Somebody that’s kind to us. In the center, somebody who we regard as a stranger, we don’t feel is somebody who we know but don’t have any particular strong feelings about, somebody who we don’t feel as important to us, either as an object of liking or dislike. And on the right, in front of us, somebody who disturbs our mind, who who we dislike, who who causes us problems of one kind and another.
So first of all, we just start off by looking at each of these people, Thinking how we like the friend. Just look at the friend and get a feeling of how we like them. Look at the stranger and get a feeling of how we feel indifferent to them. And it’s not simple neutrality, but it’s a feeling of not wanting to be bothered with them. And look at the enemy and feel how we actually have this anger and dislike arising.
So normally we try not to let anger arise. But in this meditation, we can let our anger arise because we’re going to use this opportunity to deal with it. So actually feel these emotions and be aware of them. Experience them. So then looking at the friend, we can think how this friend hasn’t always been my friend.
In this lifetime, it’s changed. They’ve been in some other relation to me as stranger or as enemy, in the future also, it can change again. Also, look at the stranger. Think how they could have at the past in the past had some other relationship to us. Perhaps at one time, we knew them better and regarded them as a friend.
Perhaps we haven’t known them better, but in the future, we might come to know them better, and they might become either a person we like or a person we dislike. So there’s nothing fixed about this relationship even in this life. Looking at the enemy. Maybe there’s been a time in this life when we loved them or when we didn’t know them and didn’t care about them much one way or the other. In the future also, this can change again.
There’s nothing fixed about this person’s situation. Also, looking back over past lives, they’ve all been in every conceivable relationship to me in the past over the course of previous lives. They’ve been kind friends, parents, helpers. They’ve helped me when I was in trouble. They’ve been enemies who hurt and destroyed me.
Also many, many lives, they’ve simply been strangers to me. So just go from one person to the other and gain a feeling that they’re all equal. Gain an equal feeling towards each of them. And when we’ve gained some sort of feeling of equalization of these three people, then we can stop thinking about it and focus single pointedly for a little bit on this feeling of equality, imprinting it more deeply on our mind. And then we can think that all living beings surrounding surrounding us, as well as these three people in front of us, they are all living beings surrounding us in every direction.
All these beings have been kind to us in countless lives. They’ve been kind to us as mothers. They’ve been kind to us in countless different ways. And in this life now also, we’re extremely dependent on their kindness. So we should think that we want to send out love, send out good vibrations from our heart to all these beings.
If you like, you can think of it in the form of white light going out from a small point of true love and compassion at the very center of your chest and radiating up through your body to all these beings. Or you can just think of it as an energy like electricity going out, like radio waves going out to all these beings. Wishing them to be happy, wishing them to be free from suffering. So does anybody have anything you want to say before we finish? Okay, so we can dedicate our merits.
Prayers are on page five. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient beings 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 the prayer of his holiness, Dalai Lama, on page ten. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good.
All powerful Chenrezig, Tenzin Gyatso, please remain until cyclic existence is ended. And then we’ve got the book. I don’t know that there’s anything much I don’t know whether it’s up to date. Registrations for Tibetan classes — no. Oh, that’s out of date.
What’s that? Do you want get the timetable for the office door? Oh, well, think everybody can have a look at that. If it’s on the timetable, then you can find it out for yourself. I don’t think there’s anything much to be announced apart from the weekend course, which is already booked out apparently.
Oh, good. Yes. Thanks. Retreat, I should say. And there’s probably all sorts of things happening next week, but I don’t know about them.
Be on the notice board or whatever. Anybody who’s here for the first time, we have tea making equipment out in the kitchen. Can go out and get yourself a cup of tea and generally there’s one or two people stay around so you can have a bit of a chat and tea or coffee or whatever. And I think that’s about it. Oh yes, you just pop some money in the jar there.
Thank you.