Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 43-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew traces the foundational path: how knowledge grows and how to practice well. She begins with the three pots of poor listening — upside-down (learning nothing), leaking (forgetting quickly), unclean (mixing teachings with wrong views). She explores the mental factor of effort, defined as delight in virtue, through five types: armor-like, application, nondiscouragement, irreversible, and striving for more. The Milarepa story illustrates nondiscouragement: tower-building trials that led to enlightenment. A major theme is procrastination’s trap — the ease of complacency even while practicing virtue. She covers suppleness, a mental factor from advanced calm-abiding meditation. She closes with a guided meditation on non-hatred. For practitioners engaged in structured study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 71 VMF 1998 11 26.mp3
UUID: 84a21a75-a2be-4109-9f57-138e15dbdc6a
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-11-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.6 minutes
Words: ~3,830
But not the other way around. Yes. So it doesn’t pervade as as they say in the debating class. There’s a one way pervasion. So there are two types and one is spontaneously acquired, which is the one which is acquired at birth.
Some people have spontaneous qualities at birth and this the examples that Geshe Tekchok gives us things such as skill in painting music and so on, which could be acquired either due to being born in a specific place of rebirth, for instance, if you’re born in traditional Aboriginal society, would learn tracking. Or could become if result of skills acquired. In other words, you just get formed with these things spontaneously arising. Like the little boy I read about a few years ago, who was born in England, who by the age of five years old was an absolutely brilliant antique dealer who’d made a fortune already. So his dad was an antique dealer, but this little boy was so good at it before very long he was teaching his dad how to do it and things like that.
So then I think that the bit that really concerns us is the second kind which is acquired through effort, non confusion acquired through effort. And there are three types here arising as the results of listening, thinking and meditating. So through these three kinds of effort which follow one after the other, of course, then we can come to understand all the different teachings. The teachings on the different Dharma topics, the graduated path, all the teachings of the three baskets for the Tripitaka, the Vinaya, the Sūtra, and Abhidharma teachings. And we can come to understand how to meditate and gain single-pointed concentration and to gain the understanding of emptiness and to meditate on these things and gain the different stages and paths of the the teachings and so on.
So we can acquire all these good qualities through through this effort. So it’s said that the person who meditates without who tries to meditate without having listened to the teachings is like an armless rock climber. Armless. Not necessarily harmless. It’s like trying to climb a cliff without arms.
In other words, you’re just not equipped. So we need to says we need we need to understand these teachings and in order to be able to meditate properly, in order to remove to gain the knowledge that’s required in order to overcome and to totally remove the subtle obscurations, which are the the cause of our being in cyclic existence. So we have to overcome these gross obscurations such as attachment, anger, and hatred, and the the more subtle obscurations of knowledge, which prevent us from attaining enlightenment. And then we can attain all these good qualities on the path. So, it’s pretty clear there what we have to do.
We just had to start off by listening to the teachings and, then, thinking about what we’ve heard in the teachings. Geshe, as Khensur Rinpoche has been teaching us in the past few months, we don’t want to listen like a a pot that’s upside down. You know, if you if you don’t if you listen to the teachings, if you’re a student who listens like the pot that’s upside down, then you just don’t take any notice of any of it, it doesn’t go in. And you don’t want to be like a pot that’s got a hole in it because then it’s like what we would say going in one ear and out the other. The teachings go in, but they’re very soon forgotten.
And the other kind of pot is a pot that isn’t clean. It’s got some sort of dirt or bad smell in it. So the teaching gets mixed up with wrong viewpoints. So what we need to do is to listen carefully and then meditate on what we’ve heard, think about it. We go through this process of, first of all, listening, then thinking about it, which means going over it again, talking it over, reading more, debating, meditating on it analytically, and so on.
And then we we have to meditate. Here, generally, meditating has the the idea particularly of the kind of meditation which is focusing meditation, stabilizing meditation. So that’s what’s meant by acquiring nonconfusion through effort. And there’s a quotation from here here from Lama Tsongkhapa who said that first one must seek many teachings, listen well, reflect on the meaning, and then practice them day and night. So that’s what we have to do.
And then the next one, number seven, is effort. And effort is a mental factor that delights in virtue. That’s a nice definition, isn’t it? Sometimes we think of effort as being terribly dreary and drudgery and hard and unpleasant. So the mental factor of effort is one that delights in virtue.
So it’s actually a happy mental state. All of these virtuous mental states are really happy mental states. So it functions to increase the entity of virtue within oneself, to initiate the creation of new virtue and to overcome laziness. So what we’re talking about here do you want that repeated again? So if it is a mental factor that delights in virtue, that’s the definition.
These definitions are really good because then you really have a precise understanding of what we’re talking about. Then the explanation, it functions to increase the entity of virtue within oneself, to initiate the creation of new virtue, and to overcome laziness. So what what’s being talked about here is effort, which is concerned with virtue. So we’re not concerned with other kinds of effort. And in fact, some kinds of what we would think of as strenuous activity are by definition one of the forms of laziness.
If you study laziness, I think I’ll go through the secondary mental non-virtuous mental factors after I’ve done this, so we can go through laziness in detail. But for instance, from the Buddhist point of view, to put a lot of effort into making a million dollars is really a form of laziness if you’re just doing it out of self-cherishing and regard for this life. Of course, if you’re making a million dollars for a dharma purpose, that’s a different thing. But in general, what we’re concerned with is virtuous effort and it’s a lot of things that we consider as being hard work or or, being good and not being lazy, would not fall into this definition of effort because, from the Dharma point of view, their object is not the suitable one. So, effort that’s put in the worldly goals just for the sake of the worldly goals themselves, just for the sake of worldly benefit without any sort of Dharma motivation is something that is not considered to be this kind of virtuous effort.
So there are five types of effort. The first one is armor like effort. Armor like. You know, like knights in armor. So, this is before we engage in a virtuous action.
We have to set the mind to do the virtuous action to ensure that there’s no hesitation while doing the action. And I think we can think of lots of examples where we need to cultivate this in daily life. The example here is the great mind of one who decides to undergo the suffering of the hell of increasing torment for the sake of just one other being. So this is a really tremendously advanced stage of armour like effort. But this is what a Bodhisattva thinks.
But we can think we can cultivate or attempt to cultivate some armour like effort in our Dharma practice. So the next one is the effort of application, which is to engage in an action with delight, to take on sufferings with enthusiasm and pleasure in being able to help others. And the third one is nondiscouragement, the effort of nondiscouragement. And this is to delight in doing virtuous action without being discouraged. So this is pretty relevant.
I think for anybody. It’s to be able to pursue a virtuous activity to its completion without giving up. So when we start on something and we find it a bit difficult then to to be able to keep on going, to keep on persisting through the difficulties. So, Geshe Tekchok says that Buddha says we shouldn’t give in to discouragement because discouragement only brings unhappiness and destroys us. And it’s better if we’ve embarked on a virtuous activity we’ve chosen, it’s better to continue on and not be discouraged rather than to give up when we find it’s getting too difficult.
So if we can cultivate this virtuous virtuous attitude, then at this particular kind of, effort, then it’s going to, enable us to do that. And the way we do it is by thinking about contemplating on the the previous holy beings, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who’ve attained their realizations through persisting in their practice against very difficult circumstances. So we can find plenty of examples in the stories of the great beings such as Milarepa. Milarepa is one of the people following Tibetan Buddhism, I find it very inspiring because if you know his story, he’d done a lot of wrong things. He killed people through black magic and done a lot of other harm through black magic.
And so when he then wanted to practice Dharma and to avoid being born in the lower realms because of his wicked actions, he went to Marpa. And Marpa saw that the the best way to help him purify his wrong actions was to put him through all these trials. And so Marpa set him to build a tower. And, of course, in Tibet, they used to build with clay and stones. And he had to carry all the stones and rocks to to the place and build up this tower with and carry all the clay there and build it all made made him do it all alone by himself.
Nobody was to help him. And once when some of the others helped him carry some rocks, had him pull out those rocks and carry them back to where he found them and then carry them back again. And then finally, he got it built. And just as he was getting it finished, now that made him tear it down again right to the bottom, carry all the stones again back to where he got them, and then start another tower somewhere else. And then after he’d done it three times, he was so sort of at the point of despair.
But finally, Marpa gave him the teachings because Milarepa just tried so hard and kept on obeying him, doing whatever he was told. And, eventually, he he actually became enlightened in that lifetime because of the perfect way that he’d follow followed his teacher, Marpa. So then Geshe Tekchok makes a really important point here, which is that by practicing we can and developing this effort, we can increase our virtue limitlessly because virtue has the nature to increase limitlessly. There is no limit to the the degree to which virtue can be developed. Whereas non virtue can be has the nature that it can be destroyed and abandoned by virtue.
So the more we practice virtue, the more we can increase our virtue and decrease the non virtue. And the point will be reached eventually where all the non virtue is stopped. But in order to bring this about, we need to have the right method. So we need to understand how to do this. Any questions?
Okay. So that was the third type of effort. And the fourth type is irreversible effort, irreversible, and which is such that when we’re performing a virtuous action, our mind cannot change, and there are no external circumstances that can hinder the completion of our action. And so, yeah, that’s it essentially. So Buddhas have cultivated this kind of irreversible effort, and by that they managed to attain their Buddhahood and Bodhisattvas to cultivating it achieve Buddhahood.
So they they understand the importance of this type of effort and cultivates as the antidote to laziness. And so we need to cultivate it as well. So actually put quite a lot of effort sometimes. Some people put an awful lot of effort into worldly activities. Some put an amazing amount of effort into worldly activities.
And when I think of an example, Yasser Arafat comes to mind because he’s put so much effort into politics and internationalism and so on. You don’t always admire his methods. He’s done some incredibly negative activities. But you can see the incredible effort that he’s put into setting his goal and working towards his goal. And we can see that if that’s possible to people living in worldly things, then it’s possible to cultivate this sort of effort in dharma activities, in attaining enlightenment.
And it’s something that can be increased from life to life. Even if we tend to have a lot of laziness in this lifetime, if we start to cultivate effort and overcome laziness, then in our future lives, we can be better at it. It just goes on and on. So we don’t have to give up just at the thought that life enlightenment’s going to be hard to achieve and we won’t be able to get it in this lifetime. Instead, we can be prepared to start to do the work.
It’s going to prepared to work even if it takes us eons. And if we can cultivate that attitude that even if it takes us eons of work, we can achieve it. Then says then we might actually find ourselves achieving it a lot sooner than we thought. So the fifth one is the effort of not being satisfied. And this is not to settle for small achievements in our virtuous actions, whatever they might be, study, doing meditation, doing practices for the accumulation of merit, whatever it might happen to be that we’re engaged in as our particular sort of Dharma practice, perhaps helping out of Buddha house.
I’m not accusing anybody here because there are some people here who do a lot of help for Buddha house. So maybe they’re not engaged maybe they don’t need to apply this sort of laziness to that sort of situation. But, anyway, we we shouldn’t settle for small achievements, but we want to try to make our achievements big ones. And Geshe Tekchok says the biggest obstacle in any on any path of virtue is laziness, particularly or especially laziness of procrastination. Yes.
So we got into talking about procrastination last week. So it’s a problem and it tends to be we all tend to have it, some people perhaps have it more than others, but Geshe Tekchok says it is is a particular problem because it occurs in virtuous situations when we become complacent. So if we’re trying to follow activity, we’re not so likely to perhaps get caught up in non virtue. Our minds are not so likely to be falling into being drawn into non virtuous actions. But it’s very easy to get drawn into laziness because we’re we get complacent and we feel that we’re doing some sort of virtuous action.
And so we get into caught up into this procrastination of not doing more of it of of missing opportunities to do virtuous action, basically, of letting opportunities pass us by when we could be doing more, when we could be doing better, when when we could so he said in if we’re in this sort of situate if we’re practicing well, then in a non in a situation where the opportunity to act non virtuously is seen, it it will be avoided without hesitation. But the laziness of procrastination is very easy to fall into in this situation. I mean, is it very it’s much easy for us to fall into in situations where we see an opportunity of acting virtuously, but don’t take it up. So he mentions the adjectives to that. So what do you think those would be?
Yes. Well, enthusiastic effort is what you get by overcoming this laziness. But how do you get this enthusiastic effort? Yes? Yes.
That’s right. Yes. There’s one other that gets mentioned actually here too. Do you know what the other one might be? Often goes together with the meditation on death.
P? Yes. Perfect, oh, precious. I’ll I’ll accept that. Actually, Geshe Tekchok says precious.
That’s probably a more literal translation of the Tibetan. Actually, they often use the term fully endowed or actually the the term means endow leisure and endowments, having having me eight leisures and the ten endowments. But, anyway, those those are the meditations that we have to do. And as you know, they come from the small scope, but, they’re important all the way through. All of these small scope meditations are important all the way through.
So here, we’re considering them in the context of the, these things would really be, what you would consider medium scope application because we’re concerned with the the four noble truths getting out of Samsāra. So that essentially finishes off the topic of the of effort. And now we’re onto the eighth one, and I think we’ll just go through that because that’s that shouldn’t take so long. The next the eighth one is suppleness. Suppleness.
Suppleness. Yes. Yes. Suppleness. Suppleness is a mental factor that has abandoned inflexibility of body and mind and has the ability to put the body and mind into virtuous activity for as long as one wishes.
I’ll repeat that. Suppleness is a mental factor that has abandoned inflexibility of body and mind and has the ability to put the body and mind into virtuous activity, into virtuous activity for as long as one wishes. Suppleness is of two types. Physical suppleness and mental suppleness. Now the physical suppleness really isn’t a mental factor.
The the real mental factor is the mental suppleness. So so what we’re really talking about here is something that is attained through meditation. We attain these when we attain calm abiding. We actually go through the nine stages of calm abiding, the nine stages of attaining single point of concentration. And when you’ve reached that ninth stage some of you might have been here when I talked about this one night.
When you’ve reached the ninth stage of concentration on calm abiding, on single pointed concentration I should say, you still haven’t attained calm abiding, you have to continue to increase the power of your single pointed concentration until you attain mental and physical suppleness and the mental and physical ecstasy. And then you have this calm abiding. So it’s the attainment of this physical and mental suppleness which is also accompanied by ecstasy. That is the actual mental factor we’re talking about here. So it’s a mental factor that we don’t have until we get to that point.
Some of these mental factors we might have already to some degree. But this one we can’t have until we attain this kind of abiding. So it’s it’s very interesting, but I think not so much to worry about. Even after we’ve attained that, we still have to go on and increase our concentration even more. So it’s very important because it helps us to enhance our meditation.
When we’ve gained that physical ecstasy and mental suppleness, it makes meditation become very very powerful and it eases the way to gain the even more intense, even more powerful concentration which leads to Shamatha and Vipashyana meditation which is single pointed meditation on emptiness. So then we have I think we’ll stop there. We’ve got two more to go. Do you want to ask any questions or? Yes.
Mental flexibility. Yes. I mean, sometimes we can use the word flexibility in a in different ways just to be flexible in our attitudes. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily a virtuous mental factor, but it can be very skillful to be flexible in the right sort of situation. I think flexibility would be a neutral if it’s a mental factor, then it if it’s a mental factor, then it would have to be neutral because it depends on the circumstances.
But when we list the mental factors, I think there’s about I forget how many fifty seven or something, but they’re not absolutely exhaustive. It’s just to give an idea of them. So do you want me to go on and do another point or where we just sort of finish off and or do a meditation or something? Do a little. Well, what what would you like to do?
Meditation. Okay. What will we meditate on? Equanimity? No.
That’s next. We haven’t done that yet. That’s next week. Maybe on non hatred. So we could just set our motivation.
We’re doing this as we motivate you at the beginning for the wealth of all sentient beings, and then focus our minds just for very brief few breaths on on the breathing breathing awareness. So we can think that non hatred is a virtuous mental factor that we need to cultivate. Its meaning is lack of intention to cause harm to others, and it acts as the opponent to hatred. Hatred is a state of mind that’s very disturbed to us very disturbing to ourselves. A painful, uncomfortable feeling, which causes unhappiness deep in our hearts directed towards other beings or towards objects.
And hatred is very harmful, destructive mental state, which leads us to committing the worst kinds of negative, as leading to the most suffering states of rebirth. So it’s immensely worthwhile while we have this opportunity in this life to cultivate nonhatred. So we cultivate non hatred by the four virtuous methods. First of all, not to blame others when they blame us. Secondly, not to strike others when they strike us.
Thirdly, not to be angry with others who are angry with us. For us not to criticize others who criticize us. So if we can train in these ways, we’ll have much greater happiness and peace of mind, and we’ll be able to progress towards liberation from the suffering of cyclic existence. Always think of something Lama Zopa Rinpoche said to us once about patience. He said that something like if we only knew the happiness that the patience brings in your mind when you have patience, then you’d really want to cultivate it.
And I always think Lama Zopa Rinpoche is perfectly named because his name means patience. And he has a really perfected patience. When when you know that he’s really patience personified. So whoever gave him the name really, really knew of what was the the appropriate one. So, anyway, we can dedicate our merits.
Page five. You you can turn that off, Paul.