Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew addresses a central question for Western practitioners: how does rational Buddhist philosophy fit with elaborate rituals, deity visualizations, and colorful iconography? She explores why Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes ritual despite its emphasis on independent reasoning. Drawing on Jungian psychology and brain science, McAndrew explains how ritual accesses deeper psychological levels beyond intellect alone. She compares Tibetan Buddhism’s graduated approach with Zen’s more direct path, arguing that most practitioners need supporting practices to develop capacity for formless meditation on emptiness. The foundation of all these practices—the seven-limb structure of prostrations, offerings, confession, and rejoicing—serves to accumulate merit and purify obstacles to enlightenment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 58 RRTS 1998 10 09.mp3
UUID: 9cea77a9-3980-4d39-8320-4187b98541ff
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: ~5,373
Talking about what I’ve got on the paper here or not really, but in any case we can start off with that and if anybody wants to ask any questions or say anything then please put your oar in. Of course this is a topic that I’ve come up with myself because it’s not part of the normal Dharma teachings, but I thought it could make an interesting topic. So when Australians and other Westerners come in contact with Buddhism, usually are looking for probably, in most cases what they’re looking for might be meditation and the help that meditation can give to finding more peace, dealing with our lives better, calming the mind, having more harmonious relationships and generally coping with things better. And so this is often where people start off. And then also, and they do find this when they start to find the early meditation teachings, when they start to make contact with the meditation teachings that are taught in basic Buddhist teachings, they become interested in the potential that these meditation teachings have.
And also, people are often particularly impressed when they start to get an idea of the structure of the Buddhist teachings. And they find that here you’ve got a very clear explanation. You’ve got a system that’s well worked out, very thorough. It accounts for everything. It really explains about our minds, about our problems, about the cause of suffering and about the solution of suffering, how to find more happiness.
It gives a whole range of explanations which really seem to be very well thought out and obviously the fruit of a lot of experience by the Buddhist teachers of the past. And of course it also brings in the possibilities of attaining higher states which are something that are beyond our experience, but which we can imagine must be the experience of these past teachers. And the way to attain higher states is very clearly set out step by step. And so we see this very clear explanation, we see the depth of the psychology that’s being presented, and we see a lot of emphasis on reason. All of this is very logical.
It all emphasizes the fact that we have to use our own reason, our own intelligence, that we shouldn’t just take anything on faith, but that we have to come to an understanding of these topics ourselves and that we have to put in the work ourselves. So we can’t just be saved by somebody. So when you start to understand these things, it can also seem a bit contradictory to also perceive that there’s this emphasis on all sorts of colorful rituals. You come into the Gompa and you see all these paintings and things around. You see water bowls, you see the lamas ringing bells and playing these little hand drums, and you see plates of cakes being set out and all this sort of thing.
So then it might seem that the question might arise, how does all this get put together? And what does all this very logical structure have to do with paintings of deities with maybe four arms or maybe a thousand arms or waving weapons all over the place or engaging in sort of sexual activities that we wouldn’t do in public and this sort of thing. Does anybody want to say anything at this point? So you might think, what does it all have to do with this very logical system of spirituality? And why do we have to make prostrations?
And why do we have to light incense and do all of these things? And particularly, as a lot of people have already had experience with some other religions, which also use some similar sort of approaches that have ritual in them, and which perhaps have images and incense and whatever. And some of these other religions also might have failed to satisfy some of the people who come to Buddhism, and they might have felt that these religions just expected a compliance to a set of rules based on blind faith, and that the explanations weren’t given to satisfy their needs for real answers to the difficult questions of life. Some people have had some sort of experience like this, and so they might feel that almost like they’re taking a step forward and then they’re being asked to take another step backwards again into the dark ages or whatever. I’m not saying anything against other religions, obviously they all work within their own bounds, but often people find that Buddhism in some ways meets certain needs which some people feel and which they only find in Buddhism and not in certain other religions.
So obviously, you can see that ritual by itself isn’t enough, and at least not for some people. Generally the people who come to Buddhism aren’t just looking for more rituals because they can find that in other places if they want to, but they’re generally looking for some of the other aspects of Buddhism at first. So you come and you find that they’re obviously, it’s pretty clear that this ritual side of things is held to be very valuable, that it’s held to be important by these Lamas, and that we can see that these Lamas are so learned and highly developed beings who have all sorts of spiritual qualities and so on that are something that we admire and that we want to emulate. So you can see that these Lamas must have acquired their qualities, the qualities they have not only by studying the texts but also by following these kinds of ritual practices. And so if they found these things to be relevant, then they must be relevant for us too.
Yeah, well I’ll be talking about, yeah, yeah, I’ll be talking about that. Right, yes, actually, when I was young, went to an Anglican church, and the Anglican church in those days was pretty much in the midst of a big, I suppose you call it dispute, I’m not sure whether dispute is the word, but between high church and low church. It was very much this issue of whether rituals should be promoted or minimized. And as far as I can judge, they just solved the problem by leaving it up to the individual ministers. And I think it was quite nice that we had a minister in our church who was very high church and did all these things.
He used to chant the services and wear all the vestments and all that kind of thing. It was quite very attractive. And at that stage, I didn’t really understand the point of it all. They didn’t see much point to me apart from the fact that it looked pretty and sounded nice. But then you can see that it did connect with an aspect of ourselves.
So anyway, obviously ritual isn’t enough by itself, but also it can be something that’s very meaningful. So we have to look at the point of all this ritual. So in order to progress all the way to enlightenment, we need to harness all our energies. It’s not something that we can just do with half our energy. And so it’s not enough to just have an intellectual understanding of the path to enlightenment, but we have to we have to manage to draw every aspect of our being.
All our potential energies have to be drawn into following the path to enlightenment. It has to involve all these energies. And it has to be not just changing in a superficial way, but it has to be changing at the deepest level of our psyche and at a very fundamental level. So what we’re trying to do is to bring about this really fundamental change to starting off with an intellectual understanding to get through, not just keeping it on the surface, but to get through to these deeper layers. And this is obviously something that we have to do through meditation.
Meditation is the tool that’s used for accomplishing this. And so here in Tibetan Buddhism, use a meditation system that as you get involved in it more comes to involve a lot of ritual. But you see that there are some meditative systems that follow an approach that seems to be aiming to simplify and minimize the amount of ritual that’s surrounding the practice. So the example that a lot of people use is Zen. You can see that Theravadan Buddhism also seems to have a fairly simple approach to meditation.
It has some rituals, but it doesn’t seem to use anything like the amount of ritual that you find in Tibetan Buddhism. It would be more similar to Zen in its approach to ritual. And it’s not that Zen Buddhism and Theravadan Buddhism are totally without ritual. In fact, it seems like you can’t totally remove ritual from religious practice. Every religion has some sort of ritual involved.
And in Zen practice, have rituals like bowing and chanting and quite formalised behaviour in the Zen Do and that of thing. But it’s still very different from the devotional and the very complex approach of Tibetan Buddhism and the way it uses ritual. So then the question might arise, why is there this difference? Is one way right? Is another way wrong?
Is it necessary to have ritual, or is it perhaps something that’s unnecessary that we should clear away? So when you look at Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, it seems, I haven’t actually practiced Zen Buddhism myself, I don’t know that much about it, but it seems very clear that both these approaches are very effective, and that they’re considered to be means that can very effectively bring about enlightenment. So both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism aim to bring about full enlightenment are found to be very powerful methods. And quick. They both emphasize the quick approach.
So we can see that these are very effective means these two schools have been considered very effective for very quickly bringing enlightenment. And from what I can see about Zen, it requires quite a heroic approach. It’s a very demanding sort of approach. It seems to require a fairly Some people might have more experience than me, you might actually have more knowledge than I do of how it works. But it seems to require a lot of application, a lot of overcoming of physical weakness and any sort of distractions to practice, a lot of great determination and commitment.
And I’ve come across the comparison that it can be compared to scaling the face of the mountain peak. So the Zen practitioner just attempts to go right into the practice. Of course they have to start off from where they’re at. But they learn this method of meditation, this Zen approach, which helps the person to cut off the wandering thoughts, conceptualisation, and to penetrate through to the reality of the nature of the mind and the nature of all existence. And that they just put their effort into doing this kind of meditation, which is a very straightforward approach.
To succeed in doing this, it seems that the person really needs a tremendous amount of willpower, a tremendous amount of effort. For some people this is suited to their temperament, and it’s the most effective approach. And for somebody who has this kind of temperament, it might just seem a diversion to ask them to do a lot of these other practices. But you can see that even in countries where Zen Buddhism, or Chan Buddhism it’s called in China, in countries where this kind of meditation flourished, it wasn’t the approach that was used by the great majority of people. Would find that the more numerous amount of people would be following the sūtra approach and the Pure Land sort of practice, and that these were predominant in those areas.
Maybe somebody knows more about these things and would like to correct me if I’m wrong or add something. So this shows that most people have a need for a practice that gives them more support in the practice. So this could be compared to following a winding path up the mountain instead of trying to go straight up the summit directly. So to achieve enlightenment is going to require a heroic effort from all of us. Whatever kind of Buddhist practice we’re doing, whether we’re going to follow the Mahāyāna path to enlightenment or the Hīnayāna path to liberation, It requires heroic effort, it requires tremendous determination and all sorts of other qualities.
But the point is that for most of us, we’re not heroes yet, And we want to start now. And we need to be able to show, we need to be shown a way to develop these heroic qualities, starting off with our particular present situation. And in actual fact, the end practice in Tibetan Buddhism, the practices that are done by a practitioner who is well on the way to the path to enlightenment, the practices of meditating on emptiness are very similar, whether you’re doing Zen or Tibetan Buddhism of the different schools. A lot of effort has to be put into a meditation that’s formless and non conceptual. For example, in our tradition we’re taught the Mahāmudrā meditation and in some of the other schools they’re taught Dzogchen or similar practices.
And so these practices are very important and are actually what we’re aiming for, what we’re aiming to be able to do. We’re aiming to be able to do these practices effectively. But we might find that it’s difficult to just sit down and do this kind of practice. Sometimes we actually do this kind of practice. We might be meditating on the clear light or meditating on the nature of the mind.
We might learn some meditation teachings which explain to us how to do this, and we sit down and try to do it according to the best of our ability and understanding. But we find our mind slips off very, very quickly and wanders away. And so it’s not easy to fall into this kind of meditation. Of course, mind wanders off any way, no matter what we try to do. But this particular kind of meditation is particularly hard to get a feel for and hard to stay with, unless you manage to work up to it by gradual stages.
So we need other means to help us to develop our minds to the stage of being able to engage in these kinds of practice of meditating on emptiness. And one of the things that’s very important in Tibetan Buddhism is practicing deity meditation to help us with these things. So you already know we have some kinds of meditations which are not involved with symbolic objects and so on. We meditate on the graduated path. We have these analytical meditation teachings, these contemplations on various different topics.
And these are very important in developing ourselves. But these are working still on the analytical level. So what we need to do is also get in touch with other aspects of ourselves. So we have these ritual practices, and these are actually very involved with tantric practice. Although not all ritual has to be tantric ritual, but you find that when you get into tantra, the ritual is very rich.
And the ritual practices actually go right across Sūtra and Tantra. But using these ritual practices means that we can use to really make contact with areas of our mind that we cannot contact through the intellect. And it’s a very powerful way to access the deeper levels of the psyche. So we know that we can be reached by things such as beautiful art and music, drama, poetry. All of these things make a tremendous impact on us that we can’t really explain, and yet we know that it’s very real and that it’s very strong with us.
Poetry is a good example. You could express the same thought in ordinary mundane language, and it makes quite a different effect on us to the same intellectual content explained in poetical language. And I can remember when I was studying at school, was an example of this was that the person who wrote a particular book on English literature put the poem, a verse by Keats, into just changed some of the words. Instead of using these words with poetical associations, he used just ordinary mundane sort of words. So for instance, instead of talking about Madeleine’s bare breast, he talked about Jane’s uncoloured chest.
The effect really amusing how the same meaning came across, but the effect was so different. Instead of being something beautiful and sort of set of all kinds of beautiful associations. It was just something that was really flattened and absurd. So we can see that using all these beautiful visualised images and using mantras, which are, I think, very much related to poetry, It’s the sound, it’s the vibration of the words, as well as the meaning. So you’ve got the dramatic aspects, the symbolism and so on.
All of these things are utilised, particularly in deity meditation, in meditation teachings which involve the practice of visualisation, which is basically what’s at the centre of all the ritual that we’re doing in the Tibetan Buddhist system. Generally, you’re seeing on the surface, you get to look into the meaning of it, you can generally say that it’s associated with the practice of visualisation, visualising of deities of the enlightened beings and the gurus, the lineage and so on. So there’s many different practices. They vary a bit, but they have some things in common. And they all have this function of working not only with the intellect, but with these different aspects, and particularly with the other aspects of ourselves, the side that has feelings, emotions, imagination, the side that our imagination and all these other qualities come from.
So some scientists talk about the way our minds function in terms of left brain and right brain nowadays. And it seems that there’s actually something in this. And I think it’s not contradictory to the way that’s explained in terms of Buddhism, and particularly Tantra, of the importance of method and wisdom. And so it’s stressed in Tantra that we’re working with our human bodies, and that in animals and in the gods, we can say, of course, that the animals don’t have the intelligence. The gods are quite intelligent, but they don’t have the possibility of doing tantric practice because they have the wrong kinds of bodies.
Their bodies are not made of gross matter, and so they don’t have these six elements that we have which are necessary for tantric practice. So I didn’t look them up, but I think they’re bones, bone marrow and semen from the father, and blood, flesh and something else from the mother. Anyway, have these elements and they are what enable us to be able to actually put these tantric practices into operation, because we’re actually working with the energies of our body, because we have this particular kind of body with this particular kind of structure. And there is this aspect of the duality which runs through our body and our minds, and which has to be combined in practice. This duality can be explained in terms of male and female, but this doesn’t mean specifically men and women.
What it’s talking about is the two areas of, you could say, tendencies that we have within us, which we all have the two sides. Whatever qualities we have within us, we also tend to have the opposite to that. And so we divide these qualities in ourselves across a dividing line, which we then sort of label. It doesn’t have to be intellectual labeled, we just automatically label these things as being more male or more female. And the reason for this is because generally men predominate more in one direction and women predominate more in another direction.
And we know we do this all the time. We say that perhaps men are perhaps more aggressive and women are more nurturing. We say that men are good at maths and women are good at language things, and we say that men are like this and women are like that, boys are like this and girls are like that and so on. So we tend to divide all these things. We say that it’s not masculine to be too interested in pretty things, whereas it’s very feminine.
Men shouldn’t be too much worried, men should be tough, whereas girls can be interested in being pretty and beautiful. Men have to look as if they’re more interested in being tough and strong and so on. So all of these things, there is this duality. And this labelling tends to blind us to the fact that we actually have the whole range of possibilities within us. And we tend to lose track of that by developing and acknowledging and accepting those parts of ourselves that are acceptable, rejecting and suppressing the parts of us that are not acceptable.
When I’m talking about these things, I’m talking from the perspective of Jungian psychology, which some of you might have recognized already. Jung is very interesting because a lot of his ideas are very interesting when you look at it from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism. He seems to have come up with some ideas that can very much be related to the way Tibetan Buddhism uses symbolism. So we have this duality that goes through our bodies and our minds in terms of our left and right brain. The left brain is supposed to be concerned with the feelings and so on, and the right brain with sort of intellectual functions with controlling our for instance, the right hand the brain does a crossover so that the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body.
And most of us are right handed, we can’t use our left handers skillfully because the right brain has that sort of skillful controlling power. And it’s the reasoning and the side that has a lot to do with learning, whereas the right side has to do with intuition, with emotions, with instincts, imagination, and so on. So if we’re only working from one side of our brain, we’re not working so well because we can get more benefit out of using the both sides. That’s the scientific explanation. So we have the, through our bodies, have this sort of left handedness and right handedness.
I mean we have this sort of right and left side and we have the different qualities in ourselves that we think of as being more masculine or more feminine. And this is something that’s very pervasive in our subconscious thinking. And in Jungian terms, this relates to two major archetypes, which the anima and animus. So if anybody here has studied Jungian psychology at all, you’ll know that the anima is the repressed female side of the man, and the animus is the repressed male side of the woman. And the purpose of doing Jungian therapy is to get these various different repressed aspects of the psyche, and start, generally these aspects of it are a very important part of it.
To get in touch with these aspects, and rather than having them repressed and functioning within the person in a negative way, they can be brought into the person’s consciousness and integrated. Jung also pointed out the necessity of achieving this integration for the attainment of the wholeness of the being. And so this is something that is possible to be brought about through psychology, through various psychological practices. So Buddhism takes us a lot further than this, and the imagery of this male and female sides, method and wisdom goes beyond just achieving ordinary psychological wholeness. It takes us to the supreme state of enlightenment.
And the actual final attainment of the integration of method and wisdom is something that is attained at the stage of enlightenment. So, anyway, any questions? So when we’re starting out, main concern in Buddhism, of course we’re interested in attaining the Unity of Method and Wisdom, but we have to start where we’re at now. And our main concern is the accumulation of merit and the purification of obstacles to enlightenment, which is our negative karma and our disturbing emotions. So, ritual practices here are very important, and a lot of the ritual that we do is very much centered around this necessity for accumulating merit and purification, purifying our negative karmas.
So we could say that it’s possible to accumulate merit and to purify without doing ritual. We could, for instance, accumulate merit by doing good works and by meditating on forms of meditation that don’t require ritual practices and so on. And we could purify our negative karmas with the four opponent forces, perhaps without just by understanding these four forces without necessarily resorting to various ritual practices that we do to purify. But, so the main thing would be the forces such as reliance on the objects of refuge, Buddha Dharma and Sangha, and on cultivating bodhicitta, the attitude which makes up to the sentient beings for our having done wrong towards them. And then by regretting our wrong actions, by determining not to repeat them again, and by accumulating some sort of meritorious action which would be an antidote to the wrong actions we’ve done.
Such as, for instance, saving the lives of animals could be one example. So these practices don’t have to be ritual, but they can be connected very powerfully to our psychology through the use of ritual. And also these rituals are set up to make sure that we cover all the important areas in our practice and that we do things that we might otherwise miss out on. So we have these practices that are set up very skillfully for our benefit. And the basic practice that we have to use for collecting merit and purifying our negativities, as you’ll know if you’ve been coming along to the Tuesday evening teachings with Khensur Rinpoche, he’s been teaching on the seven limb practice.
And this is the basic practice that all our meditation practices are based on, that are built around, whether we’re doing sūtra practice or tantra practice. We find the seven limb practice is the starting point. And that this can be either something that’s very simple or quite complex. So we add, when we’re doing some of these practices, might add in a few extra things. We add in recitation of mantras, and can add in various yogic practices and so on into the sadhanas that we’re doing.
But you find that the basic arrangement is the same that when you start to do one of these practices, you find that as it’s set out in some of the more detailed graduated path texts, for instance, with Pabongka Rinpoche’s book Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, then you find that the first thing that you do is taking refuge and generating bodhicitta. And then there’s the accumulation of merit and purification of negativities by means of the seven limb practice. And sometimes that’s just seven lines, like the one that we do before the teachings, you know, there’s one line for each of the seven limbs. Or it can be very very elaborate. So for example, when we’re doing the Guru Puja, some parts of the seven limbs in particular are very detailed and very much elaborated on.
So for example, you’ve got quite a large offering there with different kinds of offerings. So then we do this seven limb practice, and then we request the blessings of the holy beings for success in our practice and whatever other virtuous purpose we’re concerned with. And we dedicate our merits and so on. Do all these other practices like reciting mantras and so on. So all these things are something that just follow on from the seven limb practice and at the end we dedicate our merits.
So I’m not going to go into the seven limb practice in detail. Khensur Rinpoche is doing that. And also I’ve gone through it in some workshops that we’ve done where we’ve been practicing the prostrations and that kind of thing. So it’s really good to know these things. It is the important practice that if we’re looking at having a daily practice or a regular practice of some sort, then these are the things that we’ll be doing.
And if we understand why we’re doing them, it makes it all that much more effective. So anyway, to go through it in brief, the seven practices are homage or prostrations. And you know that we have a particular way of doing prostrations, and also that the prostrations can involve the or the homage involves body, speech and mind. Then secondly, there’s offerings. So there’s various rituals that can be involved with these practices.
There are ritual ways of doing prostrations. There are offerings that can be very much elaborated into various different kinds of rituals. There’s a ritual of just setting out the water bowls, the way of filling them, the way of actually offering them when we do the practice. Then we have other kinds of offerings like mandala offerings. In tantric practices you have all sorts of elaborate offerings such as the outer offerings, which is the tantric way of offering the water bowls.
You have inner offerings. You have the secret offerings. So these things are very much connected with the Tantric approach, is to have levels and levels of meaning for everything. So whereas with the Sūtra you stay with the outer level of meaning, and for instance when you offer the water bowls you’re just offering water bowls, when you offer a candle you’re just offering a candle and so on. With Tantra you have the outer offering and you have the inner offering and you have the secret offering, which are different levels of meaning.
The same thing can be offered on all these different levels. And you have other kinds of offerings such as the tsog offerings that we do with the puja and all sorts of other kinds of offerings, so it becomes very elaborate. And this is because Tantra is taking you into deeper and deeper levels. And you can go through all these different levels in the various different kinds of practice. So that was the second limb.
And then with the third limb you have confession. And this is involved with the four opponent forces that I already mentioned. And we have various rituals involved with this, such as the different practices of confession. We have the Thirty-Five Buddhas practice which involves confession and purification of our negative karmas. That’s a very popular one and that would be probably the most frequently used one in this tradition.
And we have other practices such as Vajrasattva practice, particularly in Tantra. The Vajrasattva practice is the one that’s particularly emphasized. And we have other practices such as Damtsig Dorje and so on. So there’s lots of different ways of bringing in the various different ritual practices here. These are something that’s very, very beneficial for us to do.
And then when we get to the fourth limb, rejoicing. As far as I know, there are no special rituals for rejoicing, you just have to do it. There might be some that I don’t know about. The requesting of the teachers to the Gurus to live long lives. And In the Guru Puja, this comes sixth, but it’s generally listed as the fifth.
This one something which often accompanied by a particular kind of mandala offering. And the sixth one, the requesting of teachings, requesting the teachers to turn the wheel of Dharma. This is also one that can be accompanied by a particular kind of offering.