Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening discussion, Ven Margaret McAndrew opens with a deceptively simple question: what distinguishes ritual from plain prayer? She establishes her core point—ritual must enhance genuine understanding, not replace it. She then walks through the structure of a deity meditation (using Chenrezig): visualization, offerings, purification, absorbing the deity into emptiness, arising as the transformed self. The four levels of Tantra progressively reduce reliance on external ritual; at the highest level, mind alone carries the practice. She explains the psychology of transformation—how tantric deities represent redirection of repressed energies (attachment becomes love, aggression becomes protective force). She closes with the symbolism of ritual implements (dorje and bell as method and wisdom) and mantra’s role with subtle energy channels. Conversational and practical throughout.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 57 RRTS 1998 10 09.mp3
UUID: 13670486-e947-4e0b-bae8-ae6b06d2fc1a
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-10-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,385
Well, we have all kinds of elaborate dedication of merits, I’m not quite sure whether you can say that specifically ritual. It’s hard actually to say what is ritual and what isn’t, isn’t it, when we get to prayers and things like this? You could, in a sense, consider that all prayers are, in a sense, a kind of ritual. I’m not sure, haven’t even defined the idea of ritual, but I’m thinking of it more in terms of anything that goes beyond the intellectual or the meaning content of the subject matter and brings in things such as what we would consider as being the artistic side of things. Does it would anybody disagree with that?
It does, doesn’t it? I mean, some people would sort of say that any kind of prayer is ritual. Other people would say that prayers are not ritual, but perhaps incantations, depending on where you come from. Yes. Yes.
So I think a prayer that is in the form of verse, and or chanted to a tune, is prayer which is at least ritualized. I think if it was not to be considered in any way to be ritual, it would have to be a very plain prose prayer. Or an extemporary prayer, I suppose. Perhaps, yes, which is, yes, extemporary, perhaps even a written down one, but which is very plain. So you wouldn’t find too many prayers of that nature in Tibetan Buddhism, really.
It’s very hard to say, because in some ways, you could say that ritual is any sort of formalised practice of religion. I think the Quakers probably went further than anybody else in trying to get rid of ritual. I don’t know terribly much about Quaker practice, except that they very much seem to rely on inspiration and spontaneity, and just sitting there quietly. But I’m sure that they have certain rituals in the sense that they have certain habitual patterns of behaviour and so on that they engage in in their chapels or whatever they call So you really can’t get away from it. It’s a necessary thing for our mindfulness.
It would be very, very hard to practice mindfulness without going through a few sort of formal actions, such as setting up your cushion, even if you don’t have an ulcer, setting up your cushion in a particular place, and finding a spot that’s quiet, and washing yourself before you engage in a religious practice, this kind of thing. These kinds of things are just things that could be described as being ritual, but they’re something that just sets the scene for going deeper within yourself, for calming the mind. Yes. Well, do use thing, isn’t Yes. They do use this word ritual, don’t they?
I suppose you could say that they’re just meaningless habits. Well we do have these other ritual things, yes, like not walking on the cracks. I was quite amused when I learned that other people did that as well. When I was a kid, I was very big on not walking on the cracks, and I used to go, I must be the only person who was so silly. But yes, to some extent, these kind of rituals are just habits that we learn, so as to save us having to think.
Yes. That’s right. Yes. But of course, can go through some people do go through religious rituals without any feeling of the meaning for them. So that in that case, that could be a hollow exercise.
So the whole point is that what we have to do is have the understanding, and then use the ritual to enhance that understanding. Yes. So we have to use our rituals mindfully, not mindlessly. You can’t use them as substitute for real spirituality. What we have to do is use them to promote the growth of our spirituality.
This is where Buddhism differs from Well, I shouldn’t say this because I don’t think Hindus nowadays are like this, but in Buddha’s time Actually, there could be still. I mean, I’m sure there are a lot of people who practice ritual in the Hindu religion without any deeper senses of meaning, just as there are in other religions, even in Buddhism. There was this strong emphasis on the ritual as being efficacious in itself in Hinduism, and the importance of things like bathing in the Ganga, and avoiding ritual pollution and so on. For instance, you know, if if you’re a caste person, then the the shadow of a lower caste person or of an outcast could be polluting polluting for you, and you’d have to do some sort of ritual to to purify it and so on. Yes?
Well, you can sponsor them to do that. But but Like pay the money. Pay the money, yes. In in that case, you Yes. Instance, if if it’s An example of this is making tsatsas.
If some people have plenty of money but no time, and the lama suggests to them that they could purify some sort of problem or whatever by making a lot of tsatsas, if they can’t do the tsatsas themselves, they can pay somebody else to make the tsatsas. Tsatsas are little models of Buddha or whatever. They can be made out of clay or plaster or something like that. Sometimes people have to do a hundred thousand of them or whatever. Or I knew a chap who wanted to make his prostrations, but he’d had polio and his legs were no good, so he couldn’t make prostrations.
So he sponsored somebody to make the prostrations, and that’s actually double merit, because the person who makes the prostrations gets the merit, and the person who sponsors the other person to be able to do also gets the merit. So it’s actually skillful. And this is something that’s quite often done in Buddhism, particularly where people are used to this tradition. And then then there are quite a few religions that believe in creating merit for people who are dying, as well as can pay it on behalf of people who dying. Well, we try we do dedicate our merits for others, but it’s questionable how much gets gets to them.
In another sense, it could be that the prayers can just help them by connecting with their own merit, helping it to ripen at the appropriate time. There is actually, in in the scriptures, generally says that karma can’t be transferred to others. But there are exceptions to that, particularly in the guru disciple relationship. It seems like there can be exceptions where there’s a very close connection between the two people concerned, and the guru disciple relationship is one case where that does seem to happen, and that Gurus can actually transfer some of their merit to their disciples. And it seems that that’s probably how some of us are.
I often think when I get good results of any sort, it must be due to my teachers’ merit and not to my own merit. Well, you know, because how could we have ever got started from being grubs or whatever to to being human beings and to have made the connection with the Dharma and so on. So I think when I see him doing practices for the dogs and goats and so on, that he sort of has them as disciples in his next lifetime. So, yes, so these, particularly where you have these very highly advanced beings, Bodhisattvas and so on, they can sometimes share their merits or transfer their merits to another. But this is not the usual thing.
Generally, it’s taught in the teachings, and we have to take it pretty seriously that we can’t expect somebody else to give us their merit, but that we have to work on accumulating it ourselves. So what was I up to? I was up to rejoicing, dedication, did I? Dedication, yes. Sorry?
Yes, right. Right, yes. Anyway, it’s important in this process of accumulating merit and purification. And this is the thing that we really have to put the big emphasis on at the start. And we find that all our practices really seem to be revolving around this when we’re starting off.
And then beyond this, we’re going to have to gain the various different realisation of the various qualities of enlightenment. So when we’ve accumulated our merit, we’re going to have to work on actually producing these qualities in our mind stream. And so we find these qualities are being symbolized by the various different tantric deities, and that in tantra we receive initiation and then practice self identification with these particular deities that we’re practicing. And so, for instance, we’ve got Chenrezig, who is particularly associated with compassion. Mañjuśrī is particularly associated with wisdom.
Tārā is particularly associated with the female aspect of enlightenment. And as the female aspect, she has all the special qualities. In actual fact, all the deities have all the qualities, and it’s said that by meditating on Mañjuśrī, for example, you will also realize compassion and all the other qualities, as well as wisdom. But they are particularly associated with, in our minds, with particular qualities. Tārā is particularly associated with wisdom and also with the very effective fast answering of our prayers and helping us with our problems.
How many are there? There it is? Countless. There’s story about a particular lama who began to get a bit proud of his knowledge of tantras, because he knew so many different tantric practices. And one night he had a dream or a vision or something, where he saw all these thousands and thousands of different Tantric deities, and he didn’t know any of them.
They said to him, you think you know a lot about Tantra? Where are all the deities that are in the pure lands? Oh, there’s heaps, you know, there’s heaps. You couldn’t say because some of them are very esoteric and you wouldn’t even know about them. So I just have no idea.
I don’t know whether anybody has ever even tried to count them. And then you’ve got different deities in the different traditions. And then some of them are aspects of each other and so on, so it becomes very complicated. So anyway, practicing on these deities, we have to overcome this limited perception of ourselves. So we have this idea that we’re just this ordinary person with all these faults, with all these inadequacies, who’s done all these stupid things and wrong things and so on, and who’s not really capable of very much.
And in actual fact, according to Tantra, this is really what’s stopping us from attaining enlightenment. If we could overcome this limited thinking then, and see ourselves in a pure way, then this would enable us to attain, and this would enable us to get in touch with our ultimate nature, with the pure nature of our minds, and to be enlightened. So it’s really the obscurations that are caused by this false identification of ourselves that we have to overcome. And this is the big practice that we have to do, particularly in the earlier stages of practicing Tantra. And this really isn’t something different, I think, to the practice of accumulating merit and purifying our obscurations, but it goes along with it.
And by doing it in the Tantric way with the self identification of the deity, it makes the accumulation of merit and the purification of negativities much swifter and much more powerful, because we’re purifying our mundane view, and we’re accumulating merit by imagining ourselves engaging in the actions of an enlightened being, which is one of the practices you do in Tantra. So, first of all, you receive the initiation, and then you have to engage in this sort of practice of identification with the deity. And to start off with, the main thing that you’re going to be bringing about is feeling closer and closer to the deity, gaining deity’s blessing. And you start to feel this very, very great closeness to your particular meditational deity, or deities, whichever one you’re practising most. Also, doing the self identification, you become less and less hum up on this particular identification of yourself as this sort of mundane person.
And in the stage of the development stage of Tantra, you’re doing this kind of practice, until eventually the meditator gets to the point where they become totally identified with the deity and everything around them seems to be identified with the body, speech and mind of the deity. All the sounds become mantra and so on. All living beings around are seen as being emanations of the deity and the environment becomes the deity’s mandala and so on. So when the person has attained this, they’ve attained the realization of the generation stage or the development stage of Maha Anuttara Yoga Tantra. And so then they have to go on and practice the completion stage, which involves various different yogic practices.
And through doing this, they attain the, eventually, the unification of great bliss and the wisdom understanding emptiness. And this unification is the tantric level explanation of the meaning of method and wisdom, which we’re already talking about before. So it’s carrying this through on this very high tantric level. And eventually, the meditator gets to the point where they have to cease relying on external rituals, and they’re just relying on the power of the mind. And this is signified by the relative importance that’s given to externals in the four different levels of Tantra.
So for Kriyā Tantra, there’s a great deal of importance given to external rituals. There’s a great deal of importance given to things such as bathing yourself regularly, to not eating various kinds of polluting foods and so on while you’re doing this kind of practice intensively. And also, there’s a lot of emphasis given to things like external offerings and so on. This becomes reduced for each level of tantra till you get to the Maha Anuttara Yoga Tantra level, the highest Yoga Tantra level, where the mind is the all important thing, and that the visualization practice is what matters, the external things can be disregarded if the visualization is powerful enough. Yes.
That’s true, and it’s about the fact that you can perform, so can act as if. That’s true, except that, you know, it’s not that easy. And the fact that these methods can be quite effective. I just sort of happened by accident on a sort of psychological seminar then. One chap was quite interesting about programming yourself by saying some sort of repetitious affirmation, yes.
And he sort of said that this really works on a subconscious level, and you’ve got to be really careful how you express the affirmation, because Yes. Yes. But there was some sort of trick to it too, like your mind takes it very literally, and it was sort of like, if you’re going to say something like, I You have sort of something like, I am I can’t remember what it was now, but I You sort of have to say sort of like I am, not I will, because if you say I will, you’re sort of like saying I will tomorrow, and it keeps on getting put off to the future and it will never work, whereas if you say I am and then it’s going to work. It was something like that, forget exactly what it was, but it was very interesting in the way he said that it works with the mind. Apparently this subconscious part of the mind that accepts these affirmations doesn’t take the meaning, it takes the words.
So you have to exactly express the words right. Yes. Yes. So I guess what that’s really getting to is the same point that you have with these other approaches that say don’t get distracted by ritual, but go straight for the core of the thing. With Tibetan Buddhism, you have this eventual point where you don’t have the reliance on ritual anyway.
At that stage, it would be a distraction for the meditator to place too much emphasis on external ritual because what they’re doing at that stage is going beyond it. So we have to say that ritual is something to be gone beyond. And I think actually Buddha said he listed reliance on ritual as one of the obstacles to meditation. And sometimes people from other Buddhist traditions can sort of point the finger at Tibetan Buddhism and say, oh look, this is the opposite to what Buddha taught because he told us not to use ritual. But it’s understood in this sense that it’s not to be relied on beyond the point to which it can take us.
And so in meditation, we use ritual and we used to get up to a certain point and then it has to be gone beyond. And also when we’re practicing the various sadhana, for instance, if you’ve been engaged in the Chenrezig practice or in the Buddha Śākyamūni practice, which is not tantric but is similar in the way it’s set out, you understand that we begin by practicing the In these particular practice, we actually begin by visualizing the deity in front of us, which is a way that it’s sometimes done in tantric rituals. In some tantric rituals, we begin by visualizing the deity in front, and then later on take on the self identification. In other practices, you might start the self identification from the beginning. But just take these practices for an example.
You start off by visualising the deity in front of you. You make offerings and you do the seven-limb practice and so on, and you make the requests. And then you recite the mantra and you visualize receiving purifying rays of light. It might be divided up into sections where you first of all receive purifying rays of light, you concentrate on purifying your negativities, and then you request to receive the good qualities of the Buddha’s body, speech and mind, and then you spend some time visualizing and receiving rays of yellow light, represent the good qualities that we want to receive. And we visualize these filling our bodies and driving out all the energy of our bad qualities that we want to get rid of and so on.
Having done these meditations, we’re really feeling if we’ve been having good meditation, good concentration, then by the time we’ve done this for a while, we’ll be feeling pretty light and pretty concentrated, hopefully. And we’ll have already gone some some distance away from our normal mundane scattered, unconcentrated, un peaceful state of mind that we’re more normally in. And so we hope that by this stage, we’ll be in a reasonable sort of state of meditative awareness. And then at this point, we make requests to the sometimes we make a request in prayer, sometimes we don’t, but then we visualize the Buddha or Chenrezig or whatever coming above the crown of our heads. Or we might have actually started off with Chenrezig, we start off with Chenrezig above the crown of our heads, so it doesn’t really matter.
It can be either way. But then we would visualize that the Buddha or Chenrezig melts into light and gets absorbed down through the crown of our heads. At that point, we meditate on emptiness and dissolve away all our conceptuality of who we are, what we are, of the environment and everything. We have this sort of space like emptiness meditation at this point. So the space like image is something that helps us.
At this point, we’ve already gone some way towards bringing our mind into a space that’s gone beyond the ordinary reality because we’ve been focusing on this beautiful visualized image, which is something that’s much more subtle than the external world. And then we, through the mantra and the visualization, we work on that for a while. And then we go into this, then we absorb this visualization. Absorbing this beautiful visualization helps us to go further step in opening up the energies. It’s often quite a blissful experience when you do this absorption and you can feel concentration becoming more blissful and lighter and so on.
And then you can take the next step more easily into the meditation on emptiness. So we have these various different steps actually in the practice, going from the grosser to the more subtle and taking us in steps to the most subtle type of meditation that we’re trying to achieve, which is this meditation on the clear light or the space like it on emptiness. And then having gone into that, you try to stay with it as long as you can, which may only be a couple of minutes. Generally, don’t try to stay in that meditation very long because it’s considered to be not very easy to do. As you practice it more, you can manage to stay in it a little bit longer.
As your concentration becomes more extended, you can extend the time that you stay in this kind of meditation. When you’re doing it at home by yourself, you can stay in it for as long as it seems to be working. And then when your mind gets scattered and dualistic thoughts start to come back again, it’s at that point that you then arise in the actual visualized form of yourself as the deity. As you know, in the Chenrezig practice, you visualize yourself in the aspect of Chenrezig’s body, speech and mind, thinking that your body is the body of Chenrezig, your mind is Chenrezig’s mind and the speech is Chenrezig’s mantra. And also projecting that awareness on the environment around you, seeing all beings as Chenrezig, all sounds as Chenrezig’s mantra, and all the environment as being also Chenrezig’s pure land.
And so we can then, in that particular practice, finish off at that point and just dedicate our merits. So you can try to maintain that awareness. Having gained that awareness through this meditation, just try to keep it going. Of course, what happens is you go outside the meditation room and immediately start talking and it all fizzles away again. At least, you know, that little while you’ve been practicing like that, and that’s very powerful.
And when you do a retreat, you can really try to maintain the power of that session in between. So this kind of practice in Tantra also involves the transformation of our negative energies into the path. So we can see that all this negative energy we’ve got has to be dealt with. And the tantric way of dealing with it is very fast, because it involves transforming rather than trying to gradually eradicate this negative energy, we can actually transform it in the path of enlightenment. And I think in psychological terms, that can be understood that the negativity consists of not the energy itself, but the direction that energy takes.
So we have all this raw energy in ourselves, this just basic primal energy that’s a part of ourselves, which in psychological terms could be called our instinctive drives. And it’s just raw energy. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just something that we can use in various different ways, which can be either bad or good. And I think an example that you can use is electricity.
It can either kill you or it can cook your food, depends how you use it. So what happens psychologically is that we repress a lot of our energy. We repress our instinctive energy, our basic drives, because we mistake the energy for the negative direction it takes. Because our instinctive drives get expressed in ways like anger and lust and so on, in ways that can be quite harmful and various other kinds of self centered, know, grabbing at whatever we want and pushing other people around in this kind of thing. We can see that these things are harmful, understand as we’re growing up, our parents teach us various kinds of behavior are unacceptable, and so we tend to deal with this by repressing this energy.
And cause this energy is very powerful, it takes a lot of extra energy to repress it, and in the end, a lot of our energy gets tied up with these repressions, and it’s not accessible to us. So we lose energy, and we’re functioning on a pretty superficial level, because our basic drives are all tied up. Not only that, but it doesn’t really work, because they tend to break out once in a while, and we do things that we recognize afterwards as being not good. So we don’t have that much control over the process. So what we have to do is deal with this.
When we understand this, we have to gradually get in touch with this negative energy, and integrate it. We have to get in touch with this energy, stop letting it take a negative direction, but integrated with the positive side of our psyche which we’re trying to develop. And in this way, we can attain wholeness. And this can be done through psychological methods, at least on the basic level that we’re starting off with. And I think that the same thing’s happening in Tantra, and it’s being done through this meditation on these various deities, which represent this transformation process.
So for instance, in the deities such as Heruka and Vajrayoginī, you’ve got attachment being transformed into love. And in various you’ve also got these various different wrathful deities. Apparently, it’s not correct to say that anger can be transformed because anger is always harmful. But what you’re having is the anger the energy which could be being expressed in anger is being redirected into force, for positive energy that we need to help us. We need really This energy gives us power on the path to enlightenment.
It gives us the energy we need to complete the path to enlightenment. And also, it can be something that we can use to help others. To Sometimes others need this kind of very forceful sort of energy. Sometimes others need to be, for their own good, they need to be subdued by forceful energy, which anger. You can see it in the ilamas, sometimes they can be quite wrathful.
And also parents, of course, need to be sometimes tough with their children and so on. So this kind of energy is sometimes beneficial in working with others. And so this is an important aspect of Tantra too, this drawing together of all these energies in a positive way. So, does anybody have anything to say about that? Good.
Yes. So Yes. Yeah, Yamāntaka is the one I was going to mention as the good example of the wrathful deity. Alright. Yes.
Yamāntaka is actually the wrathful aspect of Mañjuśrī. So Mañjuśrī is associated with wisdom, and so Yamāntaka is a particularly a wrathful form of the transcendental wisdom. So actually, when you meditate on Yamāntaka, also meditate on Mañjuśrī at Yamāntaka’s heart, because there is that connection there. And Yamāntaka is also called that because Yama is the lord of death. So Yamataka is the one who overcomes the lord of death, the opponent of the lord of death.
Death is something we have to experience while we’re ordinary beings. We have uncontrolled death. We have no control over the process. Through meditating on Yamāntaka, we can gain control over the death process, and we don’t have to fear the Lord of Death anymore. Of course, the same thing could be said for the other higher tantric practices, but this is the particular thing that’s been expressed in the name of Yamāntaka.
So I think we’ll finish there. If anybody has anything to say, we can have a bit more discussion. Oh, bells and all that. Yes. Well, they relate to method and wisdom.
I could have I should have perhaps mentioned that at that point. The bell and the dorje are symbolic of method and wisdom. The dorje symbolizes the male aspect quality of wisdom of that method, and the bell symbolizes the female aspect quality of wisdom. And you also find the same thing when you have the two deities embracing the male. Deity represents method and the female.
Deity represents wisdom. You have the I’m not sure if the Damaru represents, particularly, I think, emptiness, the wisdom of emptiness. What was that? The damaru. Emptiness?
It’s the drum. Yes. But it’s the bell and dorje together that are the most significant I think one reason why we have the damaru is because it sounds good too. And it’s fun. But, of course, it has a lot of ritual significance that I’m not perhaps all that well informed of.
But the Bell and Dorje in particular are the important symbols of Tantra. They’re the central symbols. In sense, vajra is the central symbol of tantra as a thing in itself. It represents what’s what’s the the word? Unchangeableness.
Something like unchangeableness. Anyway, yeah. Yes. So it’s symbolizes sort of diamond, adamantine quality. So it’s it’s this sort of unchangeability or the the unshakableness of enlightenment.
And particularly when you see the double vajra, like the one on the throne. That that represents the diamond throne or the vajra throne that Buddha sat on when he attained his enlightenment. And it was something that his meditation was totally unshakable, that all force all the forces of Mara couldn’t disturb his meditation during that night. He attained enlightenment through that. So it’s a particular quality of enlightenment.
And when you have the vajra and the bell together, it has this particular connotation of method and wisdom, which is a very important symbolic idea that goes right through Tantra. It comes up again and again. It’s always being emphasized. And it also has to do with the energies within our body, not only the grosser energies that I was talking about before, like our left and right hand, or our left and right brain and so on, but the subtle energies, the channels, we’ve got the three channels, the central channel, and the left and the right channel. And at the moment, the central channel is blocked off, and all our energies go through the left and right channel.
Our subtle energies flow through the left right channel. And that’s why we have this duality. To overcome it, we have to get the central channel open to loosen the blockages, and to bring the energies from the side channel into the central channel. And this is what the yogic practices of the highest Yoga Tantra are particularly concerned with doing. It has to be done through various, what you might call yogas, breathing exercises and so on.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Good thing. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, this thing’s very powerful, and all the mantras are specifically designed to produce a particular vibration, and they’re having quite, you might not always notice it, but sometimes it’s very noticeable that the effect these vibrations can have on the subtle nervous system. To actually get the central channel open as the last step in the process.
But there’s a lot of clearing of the channels that has to be done prior to that, and we can sort be doing that all the time really. It’s when you get They say that it’s only when you get to the final stage of the completion stage that you can really Or the higher beings anyway, I’m not sure at what stage, but the higher beings can really understand this science of mantric sound. And they can really see how it how it works. It it’s something that’s apparently difficult to explain theoretically to ordinary people. But yeah.
But it’s something that’s very important. Yes? Just on that subject. Apparently, the army Oh, I don’t like the sound of that. Yes, that certainly is, yeah.
Okay, well, I think we’ll finish on that note. I guess it gives us something to think about. Yeah, I didn’t