Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute session, Ven Margaret McAndrew concludes a weekly teaching on the eleven virtuous mental factors, focusing on the final three: conscientiousness, equanimity, and non-harmfulness, situated within the Four Noble Truths. She walks through five ways to practice conscientiousness—from purifying past actions through physical, verbal, and mental methods to recognizing harmful tendencies in the moment—and explains four gateways of non-virtue and their remedies, drawing on a story about newly ordained monks and Lama Yeshe. Equanimity is presented as a specific quality for advanced Samatha meditation. The session culminates in non-harmfulness as compassion, emphasizing how patience and refraining from retaliation embody the core values of Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 72 DWNE 1998 12 03.mp3
UUID: 5ff2f22d-3330-436f-b46c-8b909681178a
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-12-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~5,374
Hello. We’re carrying on this week from where we’ve been going on the last few weeks. So for some of you who weren’t here before, I’m sorry, but we’re starting in the middle today. But, anyway, if you’ve got some general knowledge, you’ll have some idea of the topics already anyway. So, last week we were still going through the eleven virtuous mental factors, and we finished eight of those, so we’ve only got three to go.
And the three that we’re going to do this week are conscientiousness, equanimity and non harmfulness. So this is all in relation to the topic of Four Noble Truths, actually. It’s a little bit of a side diversion that we took from the topic of the Three Noble Truths. We were going through the Second Noble Truth, the source of suffering. And when we were going through that, we looked at the six root afflictions, which are mental factors.
So we went through the fact that there are virtuous and non virtuous mental factors, which are secondary aspects of mind, can accompany primary minds. And we can’t have both at the same time. It has to be either virtuous or non virtuous, or neutral. But if we have one of these virtuous or non virtuous secondary mental factors present, then it makes the primary mind or the this particular occasion of consciousness either virtuous or non virtuous as a whole. The color of the secondary mental factor affects the whole primary mind or the mental action that’s occurring.
And so, it’s very important for us to understand these different factors so that we can recognize them, and also to understand the antidotes to the non virtuous ones, and the particular meditations that help us to cultivate the virtuous ones. So, we went through those six non virtuous secondary mental factors, the six root afflictions, and then I thought it would be good to go through the virtuous ones, although strictly speaking they’re not related to the topic of the cause of suffering because they’re actually the opposite to that. They’re very interesting and helpful to know about. So, I’ll go on with the remaining virtuous mental factors. I’ll just read out the ones that we did study first of all.
We’ve been through faith, which Khen Rinpoche was also talking about the other night, for those of you who were present at his Tuesday night’s talk. I don’t know you, or won’t you, or anybody else? Anyway, this was a very interesting talk that Khen Rinpoche gave us the other night about faith. Then moral shame, consideration, those two very much go together. Moral shame is what helps us to avoid non virtue through self restraint, an inward sort of looking quality.
And consideration is similar, but it looks outward towards others, non hatred, non confusion. With all of these factors that are labeled non this, non that, They’re actually not just neutral or not just negations of the non virtuous factor, but they’re a positive mental state that avoids the non virtuous attitude. It’s important to keep that in mind that we’re talking here about positive virtuous mental states. Then effort, suppleness, which relates to mental and physical pliancy that is attained in the state of Samatha of calm abiding, so it has to do with advanced meditation states. Conscientiousness, then the three that So, that’s the three we’ve completed so far.
So, now we’re on to conscientiousness. So, conscientiousness is defined as a mental factor that keeps the mind from engaging in non virtuous activities. It goes on to explain: It holds the mind straight and prevents it from being controlled by the afflictions. So, we know the afflictions of those six minds that we studied before. And it maintains the mind within the three roots of virtue, which are non attachment, non hatred and non confusion.
Do you want me to repeat that definition? Conscientiousness is a mental factor that keeps the mind from engaging in non virtuous activities. So sometimes these terms can be a little bit misleading in that we use terms that we’re familiar with in English, such as conscientiousness and so on, but they have a particular technical meaning. So here we’re applying the term in this particular technical meaning, and sometimes we use the word conscientiousness quite loosely in English. We say, he’s conscientious at his work and so on.
So it’s a related idea, but we have to be clear about exactly what we’re talking about when we use this term in this Buddhist context. So, there’s five different ways in which we can practice conscientiousness. And some of these relate to past, present, and future. So conscientiousness related to previous activity is awareness of past non virtuous actions, and acting to confess and purify them. And so, we’ve learned about this topic when we were studying the topic of karma in the graduated path, and learning about the four opponent forces, and how we can apply appropriate remedies to our wrongdoings.
And by this, we can stop the increase of the karma, and we can purify the effects so that we don’t have to experience the ripening effect of the non virtuous actions. And also, we can gradually eliminate the obstacle, which the imprint of these non virtuous actions, these non virtuous karmas is creating to our Dharma practice. So it’s very important in Dharma practice to practice purification. And this isn’t only just because we don’t want to have to experience the suffering results, it’s also because it acts as an obstacle to our Dharma practice to have these non virtuous imprints on our consciousness. And by purifying them, through these four opponent forces, we can eliminate these obstacles gradually.
So it’s important to remember that we’ve got a lot of non virtuous imprints from our previous lifetimes as well, so as well as this lifetime. So we have to keep on working at this. So we have physical, verbal and mental non virtues, and there are appropriate methods for purifying each of these. So physical non virtues are purified by physical activities such as making prostrations and by circumambulation. We haven’t got a stupa here to circumambulate.
If you like, you can circumambulate Buddha House. It’s easy for me. I’m living out in the backyard, so every time I have to go out, I go around this side, and when I come back, I go around that side. And then without going to any special effort, I’ve made a circumambulation of all the holy objects in Buddha House, all the Dharma books and statues and so on. And the Tibetans are very conscious of this.
They take every opportunity for making circumambulations, and they have stupas near where they live. And they also up in the mountains and so on, and in Tibet, they used to build what they call mani walls. So it just carved mantras on stones. And often those areas where people go on foot, they place these things in the center of the path, so the path divides around them, and then people would go always keeping their right side towards us. So it means they would go to the left side, and that meant that by going one way on the way out and another way on the way back, they would have completed a circumambulation by the time they get home again.
So maybe we should apply to the robes department to be able to to put some holy objects in the middle of the nature strips on some of the big highways. Grandfest. Yes. Yes. That’d be great.
Yes. There’s there’s all kinds of skillful ways that you can force people to create merit without them knowing about it. At Tārā Institute, actually, there was a park just opposite the house, and in the park there’s a duck pond which was apparently built by the American forces during the war when the war was over while they were waiting to be demobilized, they were looking for things to do. So they they built this pond, and there’s a lot of ducks in it. So one night somebody swam over to a little island in the center of the pond and placed a a miniature stupa there and among all the shrubbery, so that the ducks and also the people who come there to feed the ducks could have the the benefit of they they reason that by the swimming around all the time, the ducks must frequently circumambulate, and you’ve also got all these people walking around and riding around on bicycles and so on and so Circular navigate.
Yes. Circular navigate. Yes. Exactly. So that’s physical purifies physical negative karma.
And we can purify negative karma related to verbal activities by reciting prayers and mantras. And mental non virtues are purified by determining not to repeat such thoughts in the future. Easier thought than done. But still but by practicing this way, we we can gradually gain some sort of advance in these practices. And so also there are practices to help us purify negative karma that we’ve accumulated through tantric practice.
And for this we have to receive an initiation or do self initiation, and there are also practices like Vajrasattva. And if we’ve broken the bodhisattva vows and accumulated negative karma associated with bodhisattva vows, we need to recite the Thirty-five Buddhas practice. And also, if we’ve taken pratimoksha vows, particularly monks and nuns, there are particular practices for the monks and nuns to engage in and so on. So so that’s the first one, conscientiousness related to previous activity. I had somebody ask me the other day, this person was quite sort of, I suppose you could say, feeling concerned about something that he’d done in the path, which at the time he’d thought nothing of.
And after practicing Dharma for a bit, he’d come to realize that this was a negative action and he was starting to feel bad about it. He was saying, Is this like what happens to you when you practice diamond? Do you just have more and more things to feel bad about? And I said, Well, it is a bit like that. But I said, It’s important not to get depressed about this.
When we realize Of course, we realize that we’ve done these things before, weren’t concerned about them because of our lack of knowledge and awareness. As we develop more awareness, we start to realize more and more things that we remember from earlier in this life and start to feel regret for them. So that’s a positive thing, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become depressed about it because that’s, again, to be an obstacle for us. But just to see it as being a positive sign, a sign that we are actually improving ourselves with our practice. And of course, we should engage in the four opponent forces with these actions, but not to get hung up on them.
Of course, if it’s something that we can make some sort of what’s the word? Not retribution, reparation for, then that might be good too. But sometimes we can’t do anything like that. Sometimes it’s that happened in the past and it’s too late to make actual reparation to the person that we’ve hurt or whatever, but we can purify it and determine not to do those things again and it’s good then to sort of consciously tell ourselves to let go of it and and not to feel that we’re a bad person because we realize that we’ve made these mistakes. So the next one is conscientiousness related to future activity.
And this is awareness not to commit unwholesome actions in the future, and the intention to purify any that we may commit. I like that little escape clause there. I’m not going to do it again, but if I do, I’m going to purify it. It’s it’s very realistic. But, you know, on the whole, if we make a determination that we’re not going to do these unwholesome actions in the future, and if we’re sincere about it, then we’ll be doing much less, and all the time learning how to avoid these things more and more.
The third one, conscientiousness related to the present activity, It is to be alert to avoid present unwholesome activities and to immediately purify any that are committed. So it seems to me that this in particular is the one that we need to put a lot of emphasis on because there is a lot of actions that we do that are not so good. Perhaps they’re not so bad, but they’re not so good either. And we do these just without thinking in everyday life, and if we develop this conscientiousness and awareness and mindfulness of what we’re doing, then we’ll be more alert to the fact that we’re drifting into negative territory and we won’t want to do that. We won’t do that so much.
The fourth one is conscientiousness of concordant behavior. This is to maintain the mind on a virtuous activity that you have been doing for some time so that unwholesome actions do not arise. So we have to continue what we’re continue the virtuous train of action or whatever we’re engaged in. And conscientiousness of prior behavior is the mind that wishes to engage in the best way of abiding on the virtuous object and purifying negativities, thinking how wonderful if in the past I had always abided in virtue and purification of non virtue. Is this thought?
Yes. Is it just a gift that Yes. It’s conscientiousness It’s getting very sort of finely detailed now. Conscientiousness of prior behavior. It’s the mind that we used to engage in the best way of abiding on a virtuous object and purifying negativities, thinking how wonderful if in the past I’d always abided in virtue and purification of non virtue.
In other words, it’s sort of looking back and seeing how we’ve haven’t haven’t abided in virtue in the past and thinking that it would be wishing that we had and thinking that we will from now on. So it’s getting a bit complicated now. It’s yes. It is. It’s very it’s this is very subtle.
Yes. So the other one is just seems to be just purifying your non virtues of the past. And this one is kind of thinking, I wish that I had engaged in virtue in the past. And I’ll you know, we’ll do so in the I will continue to do these things in the future. Yes.
Yes. It’s sort of a bit different because one of them is looking back at the past seeing that you have non virtues and purifying them, and the other one is looking back and thinking, oh, wouldn’t it been a lot better if I’d never done these things in the first place? So it is getting a bit finely detailed at this point. So So that’s the five anyway. And then it mentions four gateways of non virtue.
So when we’re looking at all of these virtues, it always gives us the meditations that we need to practice this virtue, to cultivate this virtue, and to overcome the opposites to these virtues. So what we’ve got here is these four gateways of non virtue and each of them has its own specific remedy. So the first one the first one is lack of conscientiousness. The first gateway of non virtue is lack of conscientiousness. And the remedy for that Would you like to have a guess at what that would be?
Well, no, not exactly. No. Anyway, conscientiousness is it says here it’s the wish to remain in the present way of virtue and to never be separated from virtue in the future. Because if we’re not conscientious, there’ll be a gap through which we can fall and then we’ll commit non virtues. So we have to this is obviously an important area where we have to prepare ourselves not to fall into non virtues.
And it says that the best way to do this is to meditate on the shortness of life, the speed with which death is coming. In other words, yes, death and impermanence, and what’s going to happen to us after death comes. In other words, we have to prepare for our next life. And by meditating in this way, then we’ll be very conscientious if we really have this meditation done well. And, of course, bringing into mind that when we die, we’re going to have to experience the fruits of our karma, so also meditating on karmic results.
And so as it says in the the verse of the graduated path that’s in here somewhere anyway, I won’t I’m not sure of the page. But roughly, it says something like that that this life is like a water bubble, and after I die, the results of my black and white karma will follow me like a shadow follows the body. So all of these things we need to meditate. We it’s no use waiting until we’re in the situation. We have to meditate in advance, then we’re prepared when we encounter the different situations where our negativities might arise.
So for this reason, it’s important to keep up a practice of meditating on the graduated path. So, the next gateway for non virtue is not knowing one’s vows. If you’ve taken vows of any sort, whether it’s the five lay people’s vows or bodhisattva vows or whatever, it’s important to know them because if we don’t know them and understand them thoroughly, then we’ll be likely to fall into making mistakes about them. So, obviously, the remedy to that is to to know them. The next one is excess having excessive excessive afflictions.
So, when our afflictions or disturbing emotions are excessive, they gain control of our behavior of body, speech and mind, and it’s very difficult to remain in virtuous action. And so we have to work on gaining control and being conscientious about our worst afflictions. For instance, for some of us anger might be our worst affliction, for some of us it might be attachment or pride. But whatever it is, we have to be particularly conscious of our worst afflictions, the ones that are most likely to gain control of us and lead us into harmful actions. And the fourth gateway is lacking respect for our vows.
Says lacking respect for our vows is to have wrong information about karma and vows and to think that small vows do not matter and can be broken. This is very easy to do when you’ve got a lot of vows to take for instance when you take monks and nuns vows even if you just take the thirty-six Getsul vows some of them are fairly minor and they can seem as though it would be not very important to break them. And it’s very easy to do this. In fact, do it every day because one of the vows is not to eat after lunch and I do it I do this almost every day. So sometimes you decide that you’re going to do it for some reason or another, but it’s very important to be conscientious about things and particularly not to think that this doesn’t matter.
At least if you’re aware that you’re breaking your vows and if you do have the attitude that it matters, then even if you feel that you have to infringe some of these minor vows for some reason, such as perhaps your health or something like this, then it’s important to purify it, to go through the various actions and so on. And in this way, you can stop the negativity growing. And in particular, can stop the development of this state of mind that sees that first of all this small vow isn’t very important, so maybe then there’s another one that’s just slightly more serious and you think perhaps that’s not so important either and you can end up hardly thinking any of them are worthwhile worrying about. So it’s quite serious. I remember Lama Yeshe once talking to us when we just newly become ordained, a whole batch of us, about twelve of us got ordained about that time.
And before that, there had only been four or five monks, western monks around Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa. And at this time, there was suddenly a whole lot more of us. Actually, would might have been a few more than that, but suddenly the number just increased about double. Lama Yeshe was very concerned about our training with all these new monks and nuns coming along, and he was giving us a talk and he told us this story that was in one of the old scriptures about a king who had several dreams. I can’t remember all the dreams, but one of the dreams was about seeing an elephant going through a hole in the wall, and the elephant got its whole body through the wall, through this big big gap in the wall, and then it got caught by the the tip of its tiny skinny little tail.
And the king was quite worried about these dreams because he felt they were inauspicious for his kingdom and he couldn’t find anybody to interpret them until Buddha came along. And then Buddha said, you don’t need to worry about your kingdom because these dreams actually have to do with the like the long distant future of of my Sangha and not not about your kingdom. And he interpret these various dreams as having to do with things that would occur when the decline of the the dharma came into being. He said that when the dharma goes into decline, then the monks will be the monks and nuns will trip up not over their big vows, but over the little ones. So this is something that has to be maintained with care, with conscientiousness.
So then the next So Yeah, so The next one is the tenth one of these eleven virtuous mental factors is equanimity. Equanimity is here not referring to equanimity in the ordinary sense. It’s referring to a particular quality that we need when we’re practicing Samatha. Again, it’s one of these qualities that’s related to higher states of meditation. It’s related to the fact that when we’re cultivating single- pointed concentration, if we’re cultivating single- pointed concentration, the yogi who is engaged in this practice, or the meditator who is engaged in this practice, to overcome some disturbing obstacles to this practice, to gaining this practice, which are sometimes called sinking and scattering.
And these sinking and scattering have to be overcome by various appropriate antidotes. And when the person has reached the stage where they have overcome sinking and scattering, they don’t need to apply the antidotes anymore. But there’s a tendency to keep on applying them because it’s become habitual to apply them, and if the practitioner doesn’t recognize that they’ve reached the point where they can stop applying these antidotes, then the actual application of the antidotes becomes an obstacle to progressing on to the next stage because what is being aimed at is to draw the whole energy of the mind into this single pointed calm abiding on the object without any sort of any other sort of even slight distraction from the object. Normally, we think we’re being looking at something in a focused sort of way, they can there’s sort of underlying currents in the mind that are focused on something else. But in single pointed concentration, meditative single pointed concentration, the whole of the mind, the whole of the consciousness is drawn into the object.
And if a part of the mind is still applying these remedies to overcome the sinking and scattering, then this prevents this from happening. And so what is needed is this particular form of equanimity which is letting go of applying the remedies and letting the whole mind get absorbed into the object of this mind. There’s no danger of the mind being going off into dullness or distraction and so there’s no need for the remedies to be applied. And so we don’t need to worry about this so much. It’s not so relevant not so relevant for us unless we’re actually engaging in this sort of action, but it’s still interesting to learn about these things.
So here, it’s being distinguished from the equanimity which which we do need to cultivate, which is the equanimity mentioned in the the four immeasurable thoughts. We pray may all sentient beings have equanimity free from aversion to some and attachment to others, And we need to cultivate this equanimity within ourselves, and this is virtuous, but it’s it doesn’t seem to be listed as one of these virtuous mental factors. It seems to be just a general sort of a virtue. You can see that in general there are a lot of virtues that are or a lot of desirable, anyway, qualities that are not specifically listed under these eleven headings. But if we cultivate these eleven headings, then we would certainly find ourselves acquiring these other virtues as well.
So these are just general headings. So the eleventh one is non harmfulness. And this is again one of these other ones that sounds as though it’s just a neutral or negative attitude, but in actual fact it’s a positive virtuous factor. And this is a mental factor acquired through removing hatred. So hatred is obviously one of the non virtues.
It’s one of the worst non virtues. And the it says here the explanation is that the entity of non harmfulness is compassion, and its function is not to have the wish to inflict harm upon others, and it enables us to tolerate pain caused by others. So it’s not just tolerance of harm, it’s not just tolerance of harm caused by others, but also wishing all sentient beings to be free from suffering. So it’s tolerance of harm in this context of compassion for others, wishing them to be free from suffering. That is the definition of compassion, wishing others to be free from suffering.
So if we simply wish others to be free from suffering, that’s compassion. And non harmfulness is also having the ability to tolerate the burden of that compassion. So, in other words, if others do harm us, then we have the ability to not get angry, to not retaliate. It doesn’t mean we have to hang around and let them keep on hurting us. If somebody decides to beat us, it’s quite a good idea to run away or to take some other sort of evasive action.
But if we can’t escape it, then rather than retaliating or allowing ourselves to feel angry and revengeful, to to accept that with compassion for the person who’s doing it to us. So Buddha said that if we have a harmful attitude towards others, then we’re not a disciple of his. So it’s important if we’re going to be Buddhists to realize that when we’re harboring harmful attitudes to others, this is the direct opposite to the most core, the most essential feature of Buddhism. And so we, of course, we have have this tendency. We all have this tendency because it’s something that’s strongly ingrained in us from past lives.
But we can recognize that it’s harmful, we can recognize that it’s contradictory to what we’re trying to achieve and to what Buddha taught and to work to overcome these things. Because if we we harbor these things and don’t recognize it as being a mistake and think it’s good to feel resentment and grudges and wanting to hurt others and wanting to retaliate and have our revenge and so on This is actually really working it’s really working against the most essential feature of our practice of Buddhism. And of course in all the vows, the sets of Prātimokṣa vows we take with the lay peoples or monks and nuns, the first vows that we have to take is to avoid killing and also to avoid harming others. So Geshe Tegchok makes the point that we need to practice patience. And there are certain practices that we can do in order to cultivate patience.
These get taught in the graduated path and the Lojong, the mind training teachings. And also, Geshe Tegchok mentions four types of virtuous cultivations that can be practiced, which are to not blame others when oneself is blamed. To not criticize others when oneself is criticized. Not so easy, is it? To not strike to not strike others when oneself is struck, and to not be angry at others when others are angry at us.
So I think actually this is very similar to the idea that Jesus had of turning the other cheek and this kind thing. Actually Jesus took it a bit further because I think if he said if somebody hits you on the one cheek, then turn the other cheek. And if somebody makes you carry a load for a mile, then you have to carry it two miles. So Buddha didn’t actually say that. Although, you know, it might be definitely considered as being something that could be encouraged by Buddha.
He doesn’t actually say we have to do it. But we have to at least be if somebody hits us on one cheek, we have to at least not hit the other person back on on one cheek in retaliation. So but just to to remain calm about it. And so these things, it seems difficult for us. That’s because we’re not used to practising this way.
And really, the only way that we can start to develop this kind of patience and tolerance is by just starting where we’re at now, recognizing how our tendency to get angry, to retaliate, to harm others and blame others and so on, is really harming ourselves and isn’t bringing us the happiness that we want. And if we can think in this way, then gradually we can practice and through habituation we can reach the state where anger, where patience and tolerance arise in us as easily as anger and resentment and so on arise in us now. We don’t have to put any energy into these things because we’ve habituated ourselves to these attitudes over past lives again and again and again. And we’ve never habituated ourselves to patience and tolerance and compassion. But if we habituate ourselves to these attitudes, they will come more easily in future lives and it will go on and on becoming greater and greater.
And the more we these things are opposites. So where we have compassion and tolerance and patience, there’s no room for hatred and anger. So the more we cultivate these attitudes, the less the other opposites will arise. Does anybody have any stories they’d like to tell in relation to this? Maybe somebody’s had some experience with their practice maybe.
Good. Really good. Yes. So it was sort of like a a moment of openness really. Something.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s right.
Yes. And then she gets into her pattern and then you get into your pattern again and yeah. Pretty soon the doors are banging. Yes. What’s the best way that is for poker season?
Not to blame others when oneself is blamed. So, yes, I think Yes, that’s really good. And one thing is because we tend to take these things to heart and feel if somebody blames us, it’s like somebody, you know, like we’re having a knife into us or something, but it’s just purely our own choice really to take it in that way, and we can learn to not not so much to shrug it off, but just to, you know, just to see that it’s our ego that’s being attacked rather than our true being, and not to not to take it as to how not to to react in that way. Yes. Yes.
Yes.