Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening session, Ven Margaret McAndrew explores the six primary afflictions that keep us cycling through suffering. She begins by establishing how mind and body connect—through subtle channels and wind energy—then walks through each affliction: ignorance of virtue and non-virtue; desire and attachment, which she compares to oil staining fabric, the hardest to eradicate; anger and hatred, the most destructive; pride and self-centeredness; doubt obstructing conviction; and false views about self and karma. Throughout, she emphasizes how all six stem from ignorance as the root cause. She concludes by noting that positive mental factors—love, compassion, patience, devotion—actually outnumber these afflictions, offering hope for transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 64 4NT 1998 11 05.mp3
UUID: d0c399d2-a629-4d24-a18c-8facdf3866b4
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-11-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,082
With something that is not physical, it’s formless. But it’s still associated with particular it’s it’s associated with a particular area of space, which is our body. And in particular, it seems to be focused at the heart and at the head. Although, our mind actually, it’s said it pervades a whole body except for the fingernails and the hairs, except for the roots of the fingernail. You know, even the roots of our fingernails and the roots of our hair are associated with the the mind, but the the the outgrown parts of them are not so that’s the only parts of our body that are not pervaded by mind.
And Yes. That’s right. Yes. So when they these yogis pass away into rainbow light, their body dissolves away into rainbow light, that their fingernails and toenails get get left behind in their hair, if they have any. Yes?
Yes. I’m not sure what things would be perceived in an imminent way? Yes. Is. Is.
Is this something like this is something like telepathy or reading other people’s minds or that sort of thing? Yes. I see. Because when we’re talking about karma, we’re talking about actually regaining memory, is just buried. Yes.
Yes. So if you perceive that it’s not perceived by the senses. Well, things if we remember now. If I remember my birthday party when I was five years old, is that phenomenal or noumenal? Right.
So memories are phenomenal. It doesn’t Yes. Well well, that refers we we just say it’s we’re not we’re not talking about heart in the sense we normally mean it. We’re talking about perception through the eyes. For instance, if I look at these balloons, there’s a sense perception, which is a nice sense perception.
Yes. But it’s it’s a primary consciousness, which is apparently at the heart. Whereas I had some sort of other mental factors associated with that. Example. Yes.
That’s stealing, probably. Yes. If you’re sort of looking at and feeling the beauty in it, that would be feeling. If you’re thinking about the rays of the atmosphere and that kind of thing, then that would be conceptualizing, and that would fall into a different kind of consciousness. We have consciousnesses but which are conceptual as well.
So it it divides up in a different way. So that there are many different kinds of conceptual consciousnesses. And even when you you look at the balloons for instance, your first moment is non conceptual, and then it goes on to being conceptual because you start to have conceptions about them. We can’t look at anything for very long without starting to have conceptions because we already have what’s called a generic image of balloons in our mind. And as soon as you look at balloons, your first perception is just pure perception, pure sense perception.
And then it gets caught up with this generic image of balloons in general and what they mean. Yes. It could be. Everybody has they’re sort of like general perceptions that are shared and other others that are individual, but we just have this idea in our minds of balloons. And and that’s in other words, it’s sort of like a categorization, and then then it gets mixed up with that.
So called subsequent perception. And it can still be valid in a sense, but it’s not bare awareness. Well, in a sense, you Buddhas only Buddhas can really do that. What we’re trying to do is to attain direct perceptual insight into emptiness. But even when we gain that, we’ll still come out of it and see ordinary phenomena in a dualistic way.
And Yes. Yes. So yes. Well, there’s nothing wrong with conceptions. I mean, we are we do we are trying to go beyond conceptions, but we’re not going to get there just by trying to see things without conception.
What we need to do is Yes. Well, eventually, yes. But to begin with, we just want to see how how our conceptions work. Yes. Yes.
We try to overcome our disturbing emotions. That doesn’t mean When you’re using the word emotion, have to be careful how you’re using it. In Buddhist terms, when we’re talking about the afflictions, it might be easy to talk about afflictions because we don’t want to give the idea that all emotions as is norm as the word is normally used in society are bad because the word emotions is used in a general sense in our society to cover all sorts of states, including good ones and bad ones. Whereas in Buddhism, what we’re concerned with is our disturbing emotions, which are involved with aversion and attachment. And we’ve also got positive emotions.
The ones we always mention of course is love and compassion. And there’s others like devotion to our teachers, devotion to the Three Jewels and to the path, and you know, gratitude to sentient beings, all sorts of other attitudes which are, you know, a wish to help others. All of these things come into positive attitudes. Tolerance, patience, all of these things are positive, you might call emotions, but they’re in a in a general sense, not in the in the Buddhist sense of disturbing mental states. Yes?
Link between the mind and the body, it operates on different levels. It operates really on an intensely subtle level. There is this a system of channels and energy centers throughout the body, which are not something we can see. They are channels through which the very, very subtle wind energy circulates, which carries the mind. The mind This is more from the Tantra teachings, really.
Sūtra teachings don’t go into it much. Chakras are clusters of channels which occur at certain points where the channels come into sort of a Chakra means wheels. Means the channels radiate out from the main three main channels that go up and down the body. Many subchannels go out at these certain points, like spokes on a wheel or like branches on a tree, on the sort of tree where all the branches are at the same point. And, yes, these are it’s through these and then from these major channels that go out, they have sub branches, and it divides and divides until there’s about sixty four thousand tiny minor subsidiary channels, which go to every part of the body.
And the subtle wind vibrates in those channels, and it’s at this junction of subtle wind and subtle mind that the connection takes place. They say the mind mind, although it’s formless, rides on the subtle wind like a rider on a horse. And that’s why when you’re meditating, you try to work with the winds and the mind. Because by controlling the winds, we can have more control over the mind but also we control the winds by directing the mind. So when you direct the attention to a particular part of the body, then you’re also concentrating the wind energy at that point.
Then concentrating the wind energy at that point. So there are six primary kleshas or afflictions. This word kleshas is the Sanskrit word. It might be useful to know it because you you often hear it used, particularly Theravāda Buddhists often don’t translate it. So the six primary kleshas or afflictions result in us in continued wandering in Samsāra.
And when we’re talking about the primary afflictions, we’re not talking about primary consciousnesses. These are secondary mental factors, secondary consciousnesses or mental factors. So we just have to be clear about that, that we don’t get mixed up between the two different kinds of primary things. Here we’re just dividing it up into six main categories, then we have some subdivisions, but they’re mental factors. So the first one is ignorance.
Particularly ignorance of the difference between virtue and nonvirtue. So this is really important because we can’t begin to make the first step in our practice of virtue unless we know how to discriminate. And it’s also something that we can do something practical about because we can study and learn these things. So some of the other non-virtuous primary kleshas are are more difficult to to deal with, but we can sort of see how this we can it’s pretty clear to see how how to go about dealing with this one anyway. So what we need to do is rely on Buddha’s teachings.
Trying to find the page. Page thirty six. Mhmm. Yeah. So then the the next one so anyway, that’s we already really been through that.
We’re talking about following on from karma. So the second one is desire and attachment. So In ordinary life, we don’t think of desire and attachment attachment as being harmful. But they’re very clearly here listed among the non virtuous factors. And so in actual fact, when we have very strong desire and attachment, attachment, it leads to a mental state of craving and clinging to objects which is which is harmful to our mind and so it’s a a non virtuous factor.
And they say this is the hardest one to overcome because it really it penetrates our our whole consciousness. We we find it very difficult to just to really discriminate or to distinguish desire and attachment because it’s so pervading. It so much involves all of our thinking, all of our attitudes, our whole our whole mental patterning. And we can see it when it’s very very strong, but actually we’re constantly following desire attachment all day long. All day long, we we think of how to make ourselves more comfortable, how to make ourselves more happy, how to get what we want.
It can be just little things like making ourselves a cup of tea, or scratching an itch when we’re itchy, putting on warm clothes when we feel a bit cold and so on. So these things, of course, there’s nothing wrong with these things. Even holy beings who have gone beyond attachment still do these kinds of activities. But the point is that we’re really caught up with this attachment all the time with the desire, the craving to to be feeling more physical pleasure, to be free of physical discomfort, and also other kinds of pleasures and discomforts, as well as the physical. And so we’re just constantly engaged in these things, it’s very, very difficult for us to sort out our desire and attachment from our more positive attitudes, our love and compassion, and our our aspiration for dharma progress and so on.
We just find it incredibly difficult to really apply the antidote to attachment because it’s so all pervading. So in a sense, aversion is more harmful to us but it’s also easier to identify. We can see identify. We can see we can see our anger and hatred, and it’s it’s easy to see that they harm us if we think about it. Whereas attachment is very difficult to see as a an enemy.
It really presents itself to us as our friend, as our as our best helper, as the thing that gives us all our pleasures. In actual fact, the pleasure doesn’t come from our attachment. The pleasure comes from our karma and it also comes from the contact of our senses with the object of pleasure. And these things are not harmful. But they stimulate attachment and for this reason they can be dangerous to us because they enable the attachment to rise up and increase.
When we feel this pleasure, our attachment increases. We have this clinging to the object that we see as being the cause of attachment and that makes our attachment grow stronger and stronger and we have this clinging, this craving. And and it’s that that’s the problem. If we can enjoy our pleasures without attachment, then it’s wonderful. So in actual fact, if we can’t do that, then we might need to limit ourselves and not and to to use some sort of self discipline in terms of limiting our involvement with pleasurable objects of the senses.
Involvement with pleasurable objects of the senses. Actually, in the Vajrayāna tradition, we can train ourselves to actually use the pleasurable objects of the senses in a way that enhances enhances our practice. So if we can practice in this way, Lama Yeshe used to say that the more we enjoy pleasures, the better. But still, we also have to be aware of So we need to train ourselves really in that way, we also need to be aware of this, you might say, more basic Hīnayāna practice where we Although we understand that the objects of the senses themselves are not the problem, and the pleasure itself is not the problem, still while we’re caught up with attachment and craving, we do need to exercise self discipline. So does anybody want to say anything?
Mhmm. So the next one is anger and hatred, which very much go together. And we we all know what these are and what a problem they are. They’re actually the worst problem, the one that sends us to the worst of the lower realms and causes the most suffering result and causes us to engage again and again in actions that harm others. So when we’re working under influence of desire and attachment, we don’t always hurt others.
We can be drawn by desire and attachment into harmful actions that hurt others, but we can also create some good actions under the influence of desire and attachment, but they’re weakened by the fact that they are under the influence of this deluded mental state. But still, it’s the main problem with desire and attachment is that it’s so pervasive and so difficult to eradicate, that it isn’t necessarily as directly harmful to us as anger and hatred. But anger and hatred are extremely destructive. And it’s said that anger not only causes us to commit non virtues of body, speech, mind, but it also destroys our accumulation of virtue. So that is one major reason why we have to dedicate our our virtue, our our merit, so as to safeguard it against anger.
But even when we have dedicated our merits, although they can’t be destroyed by anger, the effect of anger makes it very difficult for this merit to ripen. It obstructs the ripening of the merit. And so we have to make a really serious effort to overcome our anger and hatred. And fortunately, we can do this. We have to train ourselves in the practice.
I’m not much of a computer buff. Alright. So either it can be easy to get out or you can do something to it that makes it hard to find. Is that what they say when they said the computer’s gone down on them or something? Something like that?
Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I don’t know the exact computer analogy, but some of the computer geniuses can work that out. But the point is that it it makes a sort of a barrier around the the dedication makes sort of a barrier around our our merit that protects us from the anger, but the anger somehow blocks us from getting the ripening result. And what I was going to say something else here.
I can’t remember what I was going to say, but anyway, very important. So, anyway, yes, it it it acts as a big obstacle in our in our progress, and it’s something that we definitely have to deal with. And I think I was gonna say something more about attachment, that attachment is very, very hard to eradicate because it is oh, yes. That’s right. It’s the analogy that guess, that that — the lamas don’t know where it came from, but a scriptural quotation that while the other attachments are sort of like dirt that you could wipe off.
But attachment is like oil. It’s this would be like oil spilled on a hard surface like this table, you know, you can wipe it off. But attachment is like spilling oil on paper. It goes right into the grain of the paper. And it’s it’s Or into a piece of cloth, you know, how difficult it is to wash an oil stain out.
And so attachment is like that. It’s really it really gets into the grain of our mind, into the grain of our thinking, and we have to do a lot of work to get it out. So so then the next one so that’s three. One, ignorance, attachment, and anger, hatred. The fourth one is pride.
Attachment is like You went back to them. Yes. Yes. So anger is very destructive. It’s the the one that does us the most harm.
It’s the worst one, but it’s not the hardest to get rid of. And one one reason why it’s easy to get rid of is because it’s easy to identify and it’s easier to see as being a problem. And it’s also a sort of secondary to attachment because attachment underlies anger. If we didn’t have It’s because we have attachment that we get anger. Our desires are frustrated and we don’t get what we want and then we blame other people or we blame ourselves or we blame the situation or we blame God or something that we have this tendency to to place blame when we feel frustrated.
And then then that from that, we have this tendency to want to hurt. So anger the definition of anger is wanting to hurt somebody or some some being. Or sometimes sometimes it’s just what an inanimate object, if we want to hurt the object. So it can be, you know, even we might want to smash something or whatever. But we get angry and we place that anger on onto an object and we want to hurt that object.
We want to destroy it or cause it harm in some way. But if we didn’t have attachment, we’d have no reason to get angry. We couldn’t possibly get angry if we didn’t have attachment. And of course, it all comes from ignorance anyway. So if we can get rid of that ignorance, then we get rid of the whole lot, and that’s what we do eventually work on.
But we have to start off by reducing the power of these disturbing emotions. So it’s like cutting down a tree. We have to get at the root of saṃsāra, sever the root of cyclic existence. And these six kleshas are like the branches of the tree. So while we’re working on these, we’re just working on the branches.
We’re not severing the root. But we we have to get the branches out of the way before we can get at the root. At the moment, we we don’t have that we’ve got so much we’re so much obstructed by these disturbing emotions, but and by the results of these disturbing emotions, the karmic obstacles and so on, that we need to deal with those. We can’t just go direct to the point. So then the next one, the fourth, is pride.
What do you think? Mhmm. It arises from attachment. Yes. I’ll see yes.
It definitely falls into the category of attachment. As I said before, sometimes we just divide these things three things into three, attachment, aversion, and ignorance. And it definitely falls into the attachment category, but it’s a major mental factor in itself. A major To the ego. Yes.
So anyway, yes. It’s it’s putting yourself first, really. Yes. Yes. This is essentially placing yourself as being more important.
So, we use this In English, we use this word pride in a lot of different ways, and some of the ways in which we use it are quite positive. It can be like a sort of synonym for self respect. But we’re talking here about the harmful kinds of pride and arrogance and the self centeredness and so on. So it’s a mental factor anyway. It’s a mental factor that I’ll give you the definition.
It’s a mental factor that arises from the view of the transitory collection as a real I and mine. You know what the transitory collection is? Okay. It’s referring to our five aggregates, the body and mind. So anyway, this but anyway, don’t worry about that first bit of the definition, but the next bit is what we’re getting at, and it has the aspect of feeling higher than others.
The particular function of pride is to be disrespectful to others because one considers oneself superior, and it brings unhappiness to oneself. So there’s different kinds of pride. For instance, sometimes we don’t feel superior to others, but we feel that we’re almost as good as somebody who is really actually very, very superior to us. So to say that, you know, I’m almost as learned as Khensur Rinpoche, you know, or something like that, you know. But but then we start to feel this good feeling.
I suppose in a sense because because of that, then we’re thinking we’re superior to all these other people who are not as learned as we are. So, yes, there’s a lot of different kinds of pride. I won’t go into all that. But, yes, it’s pride that is, you know, considering yourself to be better than others, and pride that considers yourselves to belong to the most superior group. Even if you Well, you might, of course.
That’s possible. But the idea here. Yes. But you don’t need to dwell on it. In In fact, there Yes.
Yes. So that’s a subtle distinction. We can rejoice in our good deeds, but we shouldn’t feel superior. And the You don’t expect others to rejoice. Especially we shouldn’t expect others to see us.
But the antidote to pride is actually to contemplate on the good qualities of others. Because no matter how good you think you are, you can always find others who know more than you do, who are better than you in various different ways. And it’s silly to dwell on our own superiority because that doesn’t help us to If we think we’re good, then we lose incentive to keep trying. And whereas if we dwell on This is when we get proud When we feel proud, of course. At other times, we can rejoice in our good qualities and it helps us to overcome our sense of inadequacy, which is another big obstacle, which is actually a form of laziness.
But which is one of the subdivisions of these. But you look puzzled, Sue. Well, we’re saying here that they are delusions. To feel proud about these things a deluded mental state. Yes.
Well, Khensur Rinpoche wouldn’t be because he’s gone past that. But say, you know, somebody here might have a BA and somebody might not have it, and that person clearly knows more about that particular field of study than the person who doesn’t. We’re just talking in terms of superior in that sense. But some people have superior knowledge or perhaps they might have superior physical abilities. They might be stronger or more agile or something than another person.
So in all of these ways, we’re different. We all have equal potential to attain Buddhahood. It doesn’t mean we’re equal now in worldly terms. It doesn’t mean In non worldly terms? In non worldly terms, we have the same essential nature.
It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re equal because some have progressed further than others along the path. But this is nothing to feel proud about. If a person The whole point we’re making here is that if a person starts to feel that they’re doing better than other people, this is the time for them to really take stock and look at their inadequacies. Because if you start to feel you’re doing alright, then you start to feel complacent. Then you get lazy.
Then you stop doing anything, and you slide backwards. On the other hand, if you dwell too much on your inferiorities and inadequacies, if you’re a person who tends to feel unsure of their capabilities, you might get depressed and feel incapable. This is another problem that can happen to us. This is why I brought the the point up. You might feel, regardless of how how good you are, how capable you are or not, some people tend to go more into the the direction of pride and other people tend to go more in feeling not good enough.
Whichever one you fall into, and we all do both from time to time, we all have both of these tendencies, and we have to identify them and apply the appropriate antidote. So when we feel proud, we have to apply the antidote of thinking that we’re not as good as some other people. On the other hand, when we’re feeling depressed because we’re not good enough, this is another thing that makes us stop trying. It’s actually classified as a form of laziness. And we need to overcome that by stimulating ourselves by thinking about our potentialities.
So oh, I was going to tell you Okay. I’ll tell you the next couple too which won’t take as long. So that is doubting what is true. And this is obviously a problem. We need to overcome doubt.
There’s different kinds of doubt and it’s right that we should not just take everything on trust but that we should check things out. But if we were to have too much doubt then we wouldn’t be able to conviction. So it can be a problem for us. And we we need to overcome our doubts. This is only concerned with doubting what is true in terms of Dharma topics and virtuous pursuits.
It doesn’t matter so much. We’re not so much concerned if we doubt other things, you know, worldly things. We’re concerned with the path. Of course, we all have doubts. There’s doubt which is tending towards the truth.
There’s doubt which tends away from the truth, there’s equal doubt. So doubt which tends towards the truth is positive because by continuing to investigate, we’ll eventually gain conviction. Doubt which tends away from the truth is harmful. And equal doubt, we we have to sort of convert that into doubt which tends towards the truth. So, anyway, here we’re here we’re concerned with the with the harmful doubt which which prevent which blocks us from gaining conviction.
Conviction. So in another sense, doubt is just a mental factor which can be either neutral or harmful or positive. But here we’re dealing with it as a as a harmful tendency, which is an obstacle for us. They could reinforce each other. Yes.
Yes. That’s true. Yes. You do see you do see some people who see well, I think that’s more closed mindedness really, rather than actual doubt. Maybe it’s related.
But I see what you’re getting at. Yes. Yes. I think in that case, it’s closed mindedness, and in that case, it’s more ignorance than well, it goes with the pride, but rather than being doubt, I think it’s more just, you know, ignorance in the sense of just that mind that doesn’t consider the topic at all. The person might be appearing to or pretending to consider the topic, but deep in their heart, they’re not even entertaining it because they because their pride is getting in the way, I think.
But I mean, you know, I haven’t really ever thought about it from that angle. So anyway, I think, anyway, the point is that we can think about these things and see the subtleties in them, but we we need to understand these main categories. So it’s time I stopped. The other one is false views. And you might think this is strange as a as a non virtuous mental state, but it is a problem if we hold to false views that are contradictory to Dharma understanding, then they’re going to be a a great obstacle to us.
So I could, if you like, give you a bit of an idea of what’s meant by these false views. Yes. Actually, Geshe Teckchok translated it as ignorance. Anyway, yes, it’s about this view of the transitory. Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey says it’s false views which arise from delusion.
So, anyway, it it has to do with the view of the self. And a lot of it has to with view the self, seeing the truly existent self, seeing grasping the self as permanent self existence. It also includes false views about karma, believing that there’s no karmic result, cause and effect. And this is So there’s actually five different categories there, but you could boil it down to these two main areas. Areas to do with ignorance as to the true nature of existence, and the area to do with karma and rebirth.
And these are the two main areas that we need to clear up our ignorance in regard to. And particularly to start off with, we definitely need to clear up our ignorance with regard to karma, right actions, so on, and to think about the topic of rebirth. Although we can’t gain perhaps total conviction until we gain these psychic powers and so on, we can gain a sufficient degree of conviction which can enable practice. So, I was intending to get around to talking about the virtuous factors, although they don’t actually come into the truth of cause of suffering. I thought it would be very interesting in relation to this.
So maybe I’ll mention them next week. And I thought we’ve been getting all the bad news, so you might like to get the good news. And the good news is that there’s more virtuous mental factors than there are non virtuous ones. So I suppose logically, you ought to say that they ought to win out in the end. There’s eleven of them.
So there’s six six of the others. But of course, the the six have twenty subdivisions. And I think they actually have eighty four thousand subdivisions. I don’t know that anybody’s ever actually listed the eighty four thousand, but that said how many there are. Well, I hope your doubt will be resolved in a positive direction.
Think so because all this comes from the Abhidharma.