Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew shows why good karma alone cannot free us from saṃsāra—wisdom must accompany it. She opens by setting motivation for enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings, then explores the origin of suffering, showing how karma intertwines with delusion. Even worldly pleasures, she explains, are forms of suffering because they inevitably change and fade. A story of Vajrayoginī carrying a disciple to the Pure Land illustrates that Buddhas can only guide; we must do our own work. She outlines practical karma-work: avoiding harmful actions, taking vows that generate continuous merit, and rejoicing in others’ virtue. Finally, she introduces Buddhist mind analysis—six primary consciousnesses and fifty-one mental factors—demonstrating how ignorance, attachment, and aversion perpetuate suffering through distorted perception.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 67 4NT 1998 11 18.mp3
UUID: f84d8168-fcae-4e2e-87c5-27dfe752dd2d
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-11-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,415
Oh dear, I’ve got all the blank pages and left behind There you go, my first page of notes. Oh, sorry, I’ll have to dash out and get it after all that. Ready at last. So we just set our motivation before we begin thinking we’re here, not just for some sort of short term purpose, not just to get some sort of benefit that’s going to help us in this life, but to study on the path to liberation, to gain the knowledge, to be able to follow the path, to be able to completely achieve true cessation of the cause of suffering, and to be liberated from cyclic existence, from saṃsāra. And so it’s not enough.
This is a wonderful goal in itself, but it’s not enough because we’re just one person, and there are countless beings, countless sentient beings still suffering in saṃsāra. And so it’s far more worthwhile to make our goal to be able to help them. And in order to understand our own suffering. We have to understand how to put an end to the cause of our own suffering, and we also need to be able to show this to others. And in order to do this in the most effective way for the most enormous number of sentient beings, the only beings who really have the power to help countless sentient beings in the most perfect way are fully enlightened beings.
So we need to set our goal as the attainment of the fully perfected state of enlightenment. Even though we’re only beginning now, even though we’re only just starting off with some of the basics, we need to start right from the beginning to set our mind in that direction. And so we motivate that this practice we’re doing today will be for the attainment of full enlightenment. So last week we went through the first noble truths, the noble truth of suffering. There are four noble truths.
And as I was saying last week, you can include all of Buddha’s teachings in the four noble truths because all he taught was to understand the truth of suffering, to understand the origin of suffering, to understand cessation of suffering and the path to cessation, the means of attaining the cessation of suffering. So all this dwelling on suffering might sound a bit grim. If you look at it from another point of view, it’s really about happiness because suffering and happiness are opposites to each other. And if we get rid of suffering, we’re not going to attain some sort of neutral state. We’re going to attain a state of tremendous tremendous happiness without any disturbance.
And this is something that we would all like to achieve. I don’t think you could find anybody who could truthfully truthfully say that they don’t want to be happy or that they’re happy to go on suffering, that they don’t mind going on suffering. That would be stupid because by definition happiness is what we want to achieve and suffering is what we want to avoid. And this is just built into our natures. It’s also the nature of every single living being.
We have different ideas of how to attain happiness and what we saw last week was that although we’ve been trying by all sorts of means to attain happiness, it hasn’t worked. And if you take the Buddhist viewpoint that we’ve been coming back again and again for countless previous lives and we’re still, in all of those previous lives, we’ve been encountering suffering and we’re still encountering suffering. There’s something wrong with the means we’ve been following. They might have brought us some sort of short lived happiness now and then, but it hasn’t brought us any real happiness. We haven’t really got any closer to understanding how to produce happiness for ourselves.
So many times things go wrong. We can see that animals and other beings are also doing their best to attain happiness, but like us, they’re still caught up in all sorts of problems. So of Buddha was that we have to understand the source of suffering or the origin of suffering in order to develop the means that really will enable us to attain happiness. And as long as we’re caught up in this state that we call saṃsāra, or cyclic existence, we’re going to be involved with suffering. So this will just go on and on and endlessly unless we actually manage to bring about an end to this situation, unless we manage to put a stop to cyclic existence. It has some qualifying factors and one of them is impermanence and uncertainty.
Everything is changing. There’s nothing that’s guaranteed, nothing that’s sure, nothing that can be relied on. So we can’t get out of this. How are we going to get out of this situation and attain the state that’s called liberation? It’s not just going to happen by itself.
If it was going to happen by itself, it would have happened already. There’s never been any sentient being. We’ve been born for so many lives. There’s never been any sentient being that got liberated just by accident. It doesn’t happen randomly.
It’s only brought about by cultivating the causes with knowledge. And we can’t just be saved by somebody. The Buddhas have got out of cyclic existence. Arhats have got out of cyclic existence. None of these beings can just save us.
Even the Buddhas, they would be very willing They would be very willing to help us in that way if they could. If they could just lift us out of cyclic existence and place us in a pure land or place us in nirvana, they would be very happy to do that. Although they have incredible powers from their own side to do whatever needs to be done, being liberated depends on the karma of the sentient beings, depends on the effort of the sentient beings. And the Buddhas can only help us by providing guidance and inspiration. They can do this in a countless number of different ways.
And they are, in fact, guiding us and inspiring us in any number of ways, ways that we recognize, ways that we don’t recognize. But it comes down to the fact that we have to get involved in the process and do the the work ourselves. Otherwise, there’s nothing that can be accomplished. So there’s a quotation from Śāntideva. It goes something like I didn’t look it up, but it goes something like the Buddhas can’t just transfer their realizations to us, and they can’t just remove our cause of suffering.
They can’t just take our sufferings away. But so we have to gain wisdom, and then we can understand and carry out the actions that are necessary. Does anybody have any questions about this? Did you think if you were a good girl, the Buddha might just come down and lift you up and go away with you? Actually, there are stories of, for instance, Vajrayoginī carrying beings off to the Pure Land, but they had to have got to that state of readiness first.
In fact, quite beside the point, I might tell you a story about that. There was a I think the story went something like a tantric master and one of his best disciples were walking in the countryside, gone their way somewhere, and they came to a river. It was fairly deep. These two men were big enough to ford it, but there was a frail looking old leper woman on the bank and she asked them to carry her across. And the master was a bit fazed and he sort of ignored her, but the disciple felt a lot of compassion, and so he picked her up and started to carry her across the river.
And when the master got to the other side, he looked behind him to see how the disciple was coming along with the old lady and he saw that she turned into Vajrayoginī and she was flying off to the Pure Land with the disciple. Yes. So the he missed his chance. Yes. So, anyway, we need to start working with our own energies, with our own abilities that we have.
And we Last week we were just looking at the fact of suffering, understanding how, while in cyclic existence, we are caught up in all these different forms of unsatisfactoriness. And in order to take the next step, we have to understand how this situation comes about. And this is what Buddha explained in the second noble truth, the origin of suffering. Last week I actually read that quotation, which just explained in a very few words. The amazing thing was that in Buddha’s time, his first disciples were so receptive that they only needed a few words to get the point of what he was saying and to be already strongly established on the path just by those few words.
So, for us, we need a lot of words because it doesn’t really penetrate. So we have to think about it and meditate. But we’re fortunate because it does penetrate with us to a certain degree. It doesn’t penetrate as much as it did with those great beings of the path, but we’re fortunate that we do hear the Dharma words, we do see meaning in them, and we’re incredibly lucky in this respect. One reason why takes a long time for us to understand the different topics is because we haven’t studied these things very much before.
If it has some resonance with us, it shows that we’ve studied it before. But we haven’t studied it enough to gain a deep understanding easily and so we need to go to work on that and then as we go on to our future lives we can expect that it’s going to be a lot easier. And this is not just talking about the intellectual understanding but also the experiential insight. Talking about the origin of suffering, It has four aspects. I’ll look that up in the book because I didn’t write it down.
There’s the cause of suffering. In the arising of suffering, there are four things or four aspects: the cause of suffering, the source of suffering, the circumstances of suffering and the violent development or growth of suffering. Then looking at the cause of suffering in general, in the most simple terms, there are two causes. Some of you might know what these are. You’ve heard it before.
Oh, you can put It doesn’t matter which one comes first. It’s like the chicken and the egg. Oh, that’s part of it. Yes, part of it. Ignorance.
Ignorance, yes, ignorance is very important. There’s a general term. Right. Yes. Very good.
Right. Okay. So sometimes these refer to as afflictions or they can be referred to as deluded mental states. These are the two things that keep us cycling. They’re like the chicken and the egg, they produce each other.
Second thing We’ve got these two things, karma and delusion. When it comes to karma, you might have a question about that. You might think, well, isn’t good karma a cause of happiness? Just to say karma in general is a cause of suffering. What does that mean?
Okay. So good karma doesn’t Right. Anybody else have anything to say? Well, we’ve just gone through the two causes of suffering being karma and deluded mental states, and yet we learned that good karma is a cause of happiness. So what does it mean here to just say karma?
Cause of Yes, well it doesn’t specifically say negative karma, says karma. Good karma wears out, yes. Needs to be topped up, yes. Mhmm. Right.
That’s a really important point there, yes. So the point is that even while we’re experiencing good karma There are those two points. First of all, that the result of good karma only lasts for a given amount of time and then it passes and gives way to something else, which could be an unhappy result of a bad karma. And the other thing is that while we’re under the influence of karma, as Paul says, we’re still experiencing cyclic existence and we’re not free. So basically we’re always in a situation of suffering and even our samsaric happiness is a form of suffering.
So we went through that last week actually. We went through the three kinds of suffering. You remember the three kinds? There’s suffering of suffering, suffering of change, pervasive suffering, or suffering of extensiveness. And we saw that suffering of suffering or suffering of misery, if you like, is what we normally consider to be suffering.
But what we normally consider to be happiness, such as eating chocolate cake or going from the cold into the warm sunshine, all these things we think of as being pleasures, but they are actually in the nature of suffering because they actually change. They don’t bring continuing happiness but they actually change to suffering. Even if we were able to go on eating chocolate cake for as long as we liked, we would not keep on enjoying it. The enjoyment would soon turn to suffering. And Also if we’re able to stay out in the sun we soon get too hot, so that’s another kind of suffering of change.
If you look at all of our pleasures are like this, they start off being very intense, but if we continue doing the same thing or continue being with the same object for too long, then no matter how attached we are to that object, in some way or another, the pleasure goes off. We might be able to sort of go off for a while and then come back again and enjoy it again later, but that’s not the same as saying that we can always get more and more pleasure the more we are with it. In fact, it’s more that if you enjoy your pleasures with moderation, you’re actually going to enjoy your pleasures better, and this is something that’s understood even in worldly wisdom. So this is the suffering of change, and then there’s also the suffering of extensiveness, which is very subtle and which pervades the whole of cyclic existence. Even the gods of the form and formless realms, who don’t have these grosser forms of suffering, to experience this suffering of extensiveness.
They say that it’s too subtle for us to be aware of, but an ārya being is very aware of it and is very motivated by this suffering of extensiveness or pervading suffering to get out of cyclic existence. So they say for us it’s like having a hair on the palm of your hand, you can hardly feel it, but for these ārya beings it’s like having a hair in the eye. When you have an eyelash or something in your eye, you just want to get it out quickly. So that’s, anyway, the kinds of suffering. Some of these kinds of suffering are samsaric happiness, which are the results of good karma.
So it’s contradictory. In fact, we do want good karma. karma is going to help us get out of saṃsāra if we use it properly, but we’re using it to get beyond karma. So we have to use our understanding of karma in order to get beyond karma. So So can’t get beyond saṃsāra just by accumulating good karma alone.
This, by itself, isn’t enough. We could accumulate immense amount of good karma and if that was all we did, all it would do would be to take us to rebirth as worldly gods, which is a situation that eventually finishes. So it leads to us for rebirth, it leads to happy experiences, but it doesn’t lead out of saṃsāra. So what we need is to develop wisdom. We need to acquire wisdom.
And we need to accumulate this karma and dedicate it for the attainment of the goal it becomes our collection of merit which is motivated and dedicated for the attainment of the goal. In this instance, we’re talking about the goal of liberation. Of course, being Mahāyāna practitioners, actually dedicate it for the attainment of enlightenment. In the context of this teaching on the Four Noble Truths, we’re specifically concerned with the attainment of the cessation of suffering. So, whether we’re following the Hīnayāna path or the Mahāyāna path, we have to accumulate this merit.
We have to motivate ourselves towards the goal we want to attain, and we have to dedicate for that purpose. We need to cultivate wisdom, and this accumulation of merit supports our development of wisdom. In actual fact, to be a Mahāyāna practitioner, you need to accumulate much more merit. The henayana practitioner who wants to attain liberation needs a lesser They still need to accumulate a collection of merit, but it doesn’t need to be as great an accumulation of merit as what is needed to attain enlightenment. So they put a lot of emphasis on the attainment of wisdom.
So what we have to do is work on this accumulation of wisdom. But while we’re looking at karma, we might as well look at how to work with it. So does anybody remember? We went through all this in the small scope. Can you say some things about how we work with karma?
Right, so you’re saying we need to be able to differentiate between the different kinds of karma. Yes, that’s certainly true. Yes. Well that’s one aspect of not reacting to our karmic results, whether we’re having good or bad Yes. I mean, in terms of aversion and attachment.
Yes, these are things that we can practice. These are helpful practices. I was getting down, in a way, to something a bit more basic than that. This not reacting is particularly important. Not reacting with deluded emotions is particularly important, yes.
When we were going through the small scope section, do you remember what we were studying there when on the topic of karma? Right, yes. So we went through the ten non virtuous actions and avoiding the ten non virtuous actions. So we have to, first of all, just engage in this practice of avoiding creating harmful karmas. Also we have to deal with the ones that we do create created in the path, and so we have to do the practice of purifying.
And in that context we learned about the four opponent forces. Also vows would come into this context that it’s helpful to take vows. vows actually come into both dealing with bad karma and accumulating good karma because, in a sense it’s more a question of accumulating good karma. You can avoid bad karma simply by avoiding the ten non virtuous actions, but you’re not accumulating good karma that way. But you accumulate good karma when you take vows and make this promise that you’re never going to do this action, then you’re accumulating, or even if you just take it for twenty four hours, like the Eight Mahāyāna precepts, for whatever period of time you take that vow, for whatever period of time that vow is operational, providing that you’re not infringing the vows, then you’re actually accumulating good karma all the time.
So, vows are particularly involved with this creation of good karma. And of course there are many other positive actions that we can do as well to create good karma. Six things. Now you’ve got something to tell me about. I’ve forgotten about that.
Did I ever mention those or to somebody else? Oh, mean the six perfections? That’s six things. Well, yes, a lot of the things that we could do to create good karma could be listed in the Six Perfections if we are practicing it that way because they would come into the idea of generosity of helping others or of other virtuous actions such as doing meditational practice of different kinds and so on. They didn’t come into generosity, they might come into patience or enthusiastic perseverance or something.
These things can be done. It can be things like making offerings on your altar, working for other people, all kinds of actions we do that are good actions. Also, rejoicing is an important practice for increasing our accumulation of good karma, of merit, because we can rejoice in our own actions and we can rejoice in others’ good actions. All of these things bring us a lot more good result. It’s a lot yes.
Well, it is, yes. Sometimes I bring up this point that we have to be realistic about other people and you have to be careful of the fact that other people do have bad tendencies as well. But you don’t want to dwell on that, but you can be reasonable about it and take safeguards when necessary, but you can always see people doing things and just rejoice that they’re doing it. It’s said that if the person, you know, if they are on the same level as you are, then you get an equal amount of merit. If you are a more advanced practitioner and they are less advanced, then you can get double the amount of merit by rejoicing in their actions.
And if they are more advanced than you are, then you get half the amount of merit. So I think that’s incredible. That way, if rejoiced twice in some advanced beings’ actions, then you should theoretically be able to get as much merit as what they get from that action. Well, the thing is that, yes, it sounds a bit funny when it’s explained in these ways sometimes, but the point is that I don’t think you have to be too literal about the calculations, but the point is that it is a very, very powerful action and it overcomes our own small mindedness and jealousy and pettiness and it has this very transforming effect on our mind if we can rejoice from the heart. Of course, this is something that we have to practice.
They say that rejoicing is a good action to do because it’s one that you can do without a lot of effort. It’s not like making prostrations or other activities that involve a lot of strenuousness or a lot of, perhaps, lot of money and expense or whatever, like doing burning offerings can sometimes be expensive, whatever, but with this, you can do it lying down. You can do it anytime, but basically the thing is that you have to do it from the heart and the thing is we have to train ourselves to do it, so it’s not as easy as all that. But by training ourselves to do it, we can become more and more habituated. Yes, does, yes, very much.
Of course, we also rejoice in our own good actions, but this is okay because our good actions are also it’s not self-cherishing, because our good actions are ones which are also breaking down our self-cherishing and our harmful attachments. So it’s actually good to rejoice. Sometimes feel inhibited about rejoicing in our own good actions because we think, oh, that’s like pride. So it’s different to pride. If we feel pride, that’s not good.
But if we feel this rejoicing, it’s just like a heartfelt gladness if we’ve been able to carry out these virtuous actions. Because before we’ve been doing things that were going to cause us more and more suffering and now we’ve found, identified the cause for happiness. And if we’re on the Mahāyāna path, then we’re also working for others. So we can rejoice if we’ve done these actions that are going to support us on the path. So we can actually make it a rejoicing for the sake of others, even if it’s our own virtue that we’re rejoicing in.
And it increases, it multiplies our virtues. The opposite to this, of course, is rejoicing in our bad actions. And so we have to be careful not to do that. One of the four opponent forces is regret. So we know that we need to regret our bad actions and not feel good about them.
And of course, we also need to try to avoid regretting our good actions if we’ve done them. It’s easy to do this sometimes, particularly if it’s something like generosity, might think that you’ve given money rather foolishly, perhaps that it’s been used badly or something like that. And then you might regret having given it. But it’s better to keep it in mind that it was a virtuous action anyway, whether the other person that you gave it to used it well or not, that it’s still been a good action from your side and it’s still going to accumulate merit for you, which will be support on the path and will eventually lead to helping countless others. So anyway, that’s that.
And so that’s karma and working with karma. Does anybody have anything to say about karma before we go on to the other topic? That’s right, yes. Well, can be actually when you achieve single pointed concentration Meditative? Yes, when you achieve meditative powers then you can see your previous existences.
No. I think it’s good that we can’t see them now. Well, it might be good in a way because it would help us to avoid these things. On the other hand, we’d probably remember so many unhappy and tragic and upsetting things that we wouldn’t be able to We have enough often from this life to handle without having to remember a lot of undoubtedly all of us would have very unhappy circumstance to remember from past lives. Of course, it’s good to know we just more or less have to take it on trust really at present.
This is one of the things that isn’t just accessible through reason. It’s one of the things we have to take on trust from the Buddha’s teachings until we do acquire these powers. We can know that it wasn’t just Buddha, but his realization has been reinforced by other great yogis. None of the great yogis have ever contradicted Buddha’s teachings on this matter. They only say that the more they study, the more insight they get in the meditation, the more clear it appears to them and the more valid Buddhist teachings are perceived to be.
So then, at the deluded mental states, which is the other half of the picture, Sometimes we look at these distorted mental states in terms of the three poisonous minds: aversion, attachment and ignorance. This is a very simple categorization of the three mental of the distorted mental states. We need to go into it a bit deeper, in fact a lot deeper, to understand it. We need to engage in studying and analyzing the different kinds of mental states. We need to look at the mind and its workings.
Really, to understand this thoroughly, you need to study topics such as Lorig, mind and awareness and understand how the mind is operating. So I’m not going to give you a teaching on Lorig tonight but I’m going to take some some of the things I’m talking about actually do come from that topic. It’s a very interesting study, but it’s also very complicated. But what we have to look at is the teachings on the different kinds of primary mind and secondary mental factors. And the teachings on the root and secondary afflictions comes under that topic.
So in L’Arruk you have an incredible number of different minds or consciousnesses being described. And when we’re talking about minds or consciousness es in this context, we’re not talking about the mind stream as a whole, as a continuity. What we’re talking about is a particular instance of mental action. A particular moment in time when the mind is engaged in one particular kind of action. And the this is divided into the six primary minds and fifty one mental factors.
So the six primary minds are the five sense consciousnesses. So you have a primary mind that’s associated with the perception of the eye, visible objects, for sounds, smells, tastes. So you’ve got sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tangible objects, which are the objects of our five senses. And each of those senses, when a sense contact takes place and there is a sense sort of awareness transmitted by the sense organ to a consciousness, to the mind, to the consciousness, and there then arises a consciousness which is a sense consciousness and that sense consciousness is the first awareness of that particular object. So for instance, if you were to look at these balloons here, then at the first moment of seeing those, you have a sight perception, which is a fresh perception of those balloons.
And then you go on from that to a subsequent perception in which you have some sort of concept So the first moment is non conceptual, it’s just perception. And then you go on to having a conceptual awareness about the balloons So it’s no longer that fresh sense consciousness. But we have these five sense consciousnesses, we also have mental consciousness. So those are the six primary consciousnesses. And then we have these various secondary consciousnesses and mental factors.
Mental factors. Mental factors are sort of subcategories of different kinds of things that can be going on in our mind, basically. These are all just things that can be going on in our mind. And there’s fifty one of these, and I’m not going to go into fifty one of them tonight, so don’t worry. And In fact, some of these are always associated with the primary consciousnesses and the others arise sometimes.
They arise with certain primary minds and not with others. So I refer to these as mental factors because that’s less confusing than referring to them as minds. So I keep the term minds for the primary consciousnesses and the secondary ones we can call mental factors. Anyway, some of them are always present and some are only present from time to time. So for instance, there’s mental factor that directs you to the object of attention.
That’s one of the always present ones. Won’t go into details about those. They’re quite technical. There are Some of them are neutral or changeable, so they’re not necessarily either virtuous or non virtuous. But what we’re particularly concerned with are the ones that are virtuous or non virtuous.
The primary minds in themselves are neutral, but they can be associated with mental factors that can be either virtuous or non virtuous. You can’t have both at the same time. It’s either a virtuous mental factor or a non virtuous mental factor, but that influences the primary mind. The primary mind takes on coloration, you could say, of that particular virtuous or non virtuous mental factor. And therefore, this imprint is received on the consciousness which becomes a karmic imprint.
Under the influence of these virtues or non virtues, we carry out various actions. And so we create karmas, which can be the cause. If we create non virtuous actions, they can be the cause for the lower realms. Geshe Ngawang Dakpa has something to say in his book which is very interesting in this regard, which I haven’t sort of heard expounded on by any of the lamas I’ve received teachings from. It occurred to me that I thought I’d read this book very thoroughly, but I’d sort of overlooked this point and never thought of questioning it until I was studying for this talk.
But what he says is that the primary mind is situated near the heart and it understands directly, and the mental factors. I’ll actually read to you exactly what he says, page thirty two. To me, this was very, very interesting. The primary mind, situated near the heart, understands directly, whereas the secondary mind, which is his term for the mental factors, situated in the head, with its discriminating differentiating power, understands through reasoning. You could say that, but that’s still concerned with the head.
That’s the brain cells. But in actual fact, the mind itself what we’re dealing here with something which is formless. So mind means It’s really important to understand that we’re not dealing with a physical organ.