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 addresses working with anger and habitual patterns in relationships, especially with people from our past. She walks through why anger is so hard to uproot—demonstrated with a vivid anecdote from her time as a cook—and presents multiple approaches: catching anger’s first stirrings before it erupts; Buddhist meditation on anger’s disadvantages; Western psychological methods including Jungian psychology; and physical outlets like jogging. She then frames this within the six root and twenty secondary afflictions, showing how Lojong (thought-training) and the Graduated Path teachings together form a complete Mahāyāna practice. Throughout, the core instruction is early intervention—recognizing the initial movement of anger—rather than managing it after the fact.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 73 DWNE 1998 12 03.mp3
UUID: 4fad04d9-c015-4d28-9c2f-a5a878c829be
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-12-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~5,619
Yes. I think it’s true. Yes. You can start to see a lot of as you say now, you start to see a lot of changes when you don’t when you when you do become more aware and don’t just follow the old patterns. But then you always find yourself getting into a situation where the old patterns are so strong.
Particularly with people that you have very strong karmic links with, such as our family or our marital partners and so on, perhaps can be a little bit harder because the patterning goes back very strongly. Sometimes you can see yourself, you can sort of partly stand back and see yourself following this pattern, but you don’t seem to be able to stop yourself and the other person is very much buying into this old pattern too, so they can’t If you don’t get into the habitual pattern, sometimes they can be quite resentful that you won’t get into it and so on. And it can be very hard, but through practice we So don’t expect it to always work just because you’ve got some more understanding, you know, some of it can go very deep. Even reincarnated lamas can have problems with their families, because of past karmic things that haven’t been fully worked out. And we can always learn something from these situations, but we can’t always expect it to be easy, and sometimes it’s going to take a while to work through some of these things.
But certainly we can start to behave a lot more skillfully and to learn how In fact, when we get into the really hard situations, it can be good for us, because then we can see how we do have more still to learn, and we can also see these as being opportunities to really practice. And also it points out to us where our weaknesses are, and where we do need to put in more effort. That comes with the thought training teachings, Lojong. For instance, Khensur Rinpoche taught this topic at the retreat, the three day retreat, which happened just recently. There are specific teachings, and actually in the next newsletter I’m planning to do the Wheel of Sharp Weapons in this Thursday night class, which is also another opportunity.
But perhaps, yes, if you feel that there’s a lack of this approach, perhaps I could do some more. Well, there won’t be time this year. But essentially what I’m trying to do with this topic is to point out where we need to meditate on various topics, to help us overcome, to point out the antidotes to these things. And basically, these antidotes are nearly always explained in the Graduated Path teachings. And if we understand the Graduated Path, then we have got the material that we need to And if you add to the graduated path, the Lojong teachings, which are the thought training teachings to help us to develop compassion and patience and love.
They’re specifically designed to overcome our negative attitudes and to develop patience and love and compassion at the Mahāyāna level. So if we have the graduated path with the addition of this Lojong teaching, which really can be considered as an adjunct to the graduated path, then we really have what we need for basic Mahāyāna practice. So it really does cover everything. Right. Well, of course this is where our own inner wisdom comes in and It comes from meditation.
It comes from meditation and also from self awareness. When you do, like as you say, you find yourself in and say, god, well perhaps before you wouldn’t have just said, god, I’m in it. Would have just gone ahead with your impulses. Yes. Yes.
Well, yeah. This is the We have That seems like the only way to learn this is the hard way. Of course, there are different ways. We can learn these things by talking to other people, perhaps by doing workshops and things like that. You can learn some good things not only from Buddhism too, but from other, perhaps workshops on the sort of psychological level perhaps, you know, people who are dealing with family relationships and that kind of thing.
And we try to have a number of workshops here, particularly dealing with people’s practical problems. We find that people are particularly interested in doing this kind of thing. We had a workshop recently that was more on theoretical things, and nobody came hardly anybody came to it. So that’s why I can really annoy the other person sometimes if they’re expecting to play out this particular game, but then on the other hand, you’re really concerned about them and really acting from compassion, then they’ll eventually relate to that. That’s right, yes.
You can’t be responsible for the other person’s game. Sometimes the fact that you’ve changed your response will change the other person’s response in a positive way, quite often does. And you can’t guarantee that it will, because in some cases the other people are so stuck in their particular state that they’re not ready to get out of it. So, you know, the thing is that you From your side, if we can stop putting in the negativity from our side, it’s That’s all we can really take responsibility for. We can’t take responsibility for whether the other person reciprocates reciprocates or not.
But you will find that when you stop putting in negativity from your own side, in very many instances, it will have that effect on the other person either in the short run or perhaps in a longer run. If they’re a reasonable sort of a person, then you can expect that it probably will have that effect on them. In any case, whether they respond or not, we can see that it’s our karma that if the other person doesn’t change, it’s because we have such a strong karmic sort of cause to be getting this sort of stuff from them. So really it comes back to us anyway. That’s right, yes.
And mental non virtues are definitely the hardest to overcome. It’s Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
That’s right, yes, it is difficult. Can fairly easily, if we’re serious about our vow practice, we can fairly easily stop ourselves in most cases from hitting or even speaking harsh words back. But to overcome the anger within ourselves is difficult. This is very difficult and it always emphasizes in the teachings that what we need to do is not get angry in the first place. In other words to practice mindfulness, be aware of the first stirrings of anger, and apply the antidote at that point.
And we can only do that by meditating preparing ourselves in advance, so we need to meditate on the disadvantages of anger, and we need to meditate on the antidotes to anger, and we also need to practice this mindfulness. And this is something that only comes with practice. I used to find that I used to get angry, and my anger would just take me unawares, partly because I went through a long stage of my life where I completely repressed my anger. I didn’t allow my anger to come up to the surface at all. And then when it did start coming up, it just came up, whoosh, you know.
I was working as a cook at this stage, and everybody knows that cooks tend to be a bit short on the fuse. And so I must have had something to work out with that job. And what would happen was that people would think that they’d have sort of brilliant ideas about how the how the situation might be improved, or then they would come up to me and complain or so on, and you’d have everybody sort of coming up and making these suggestions which in the particular situation were not practicable, and I’d explain very politely to two of the people why their suggestion wasn’t practicable, and then the third person would come along and make exactly the same complaint and say exactly the same thing, and I would just go whoosh, you know, and the person would have this astonished look on their face because they didn’t know what they’d done to set me off, and of course it wasn’t that person at all, it was the person the fact that they were the last straw after all these other people. And I started realizing, you know, that I was really just unloading my anger on these people and it wasn’t fair to them.
And the reason that my anger was taking me over like that was because I was actually getting angry all along, I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t spot it until it was so strong that it came out in words. And at that point, it was too late really, so I had to start developing awareness, and I found that then I could say, you know, if I was starting to get angry, could say to at least I could be sort of straightforward with the other person and say, look, know, I’m just really not in the mood to talk about this now, I’m sorry, but you know, something like that. And that way, at least it saves them from having to experience those sort of harsh words that I was coming out with. And I think as you practice The whole of Buddha’s teaching about dealing with anger is this point of catching it before it comes out.
Lama Yeshe said it’s like a tap when you turn on the tap before the water comes out, there’s a little bit of a movement there. I think this relates more to the taps in India, you sometimes have to wait for a long time, until you get a lot of air and not much water. But our anger is like that, that it doesn’t come from nowhere. There’s a gradual build up, and we can see it there. And quite often we’re simmering away underneath if we are irritable and short on fuses, because we’re simmering away underneath anyway, and we need to deal with the causes of our anger.
That might even be that we have some sort of psychological problems or neurosis or whatever that we could deal with through, like you know, Western psychological therapeutic methods, and for me this was quite helpful. At one stage I did some Jungian psychology and that helped me a lot to sort of bring up some stuff and understand some stuff. So I don’t think it’s necessarily always that we have to do that, but in some cases it can also be helpful. And also, I came across some very helpful techniques, which I thought were very complimentary to Buddhist techniques by a lady called Peace Pilgrim. I don’t know where any of you have heard of her.
When I came across her book, I thought she should be better known because actually what she has to say is wonderful and it’s very down to earth. And she actually has some useful instructions for dealing with anger energy, and she particularly deals with how to deal with anger when you do get angry, and how people can turn their anger and energy into a positive direction. And so she suggests a few things like chopping wood and cleaning the house and so on when you get angry. And I haven’t got it here to read out with me, I like to read it out actually because she’s an interesting lady because she didn’t actually follow any particular path, she just seemed to develop her own realizations. And she was very much like Saint Francis and Jesus and Buddha and some of these other people, and the monks of Thailand, who when they’ve reached a certain level Also the old Hindu idea that after you’ve reached a certain level of development, you take up wandering life.
So she just reached a certain level of development, and then she decided that she was going to walk for peace. And she started off by counting the miles and walking up and down the United States, talking to people just as she met them, and some of her friends after she died collected a whole lot of her talks and writings and put them together in this book, which is very practical, I find it’s particularly helpful for working with people who haven’t sort of committed themselves to the Buddhist path, because she’s talking from an everyday sort of viewpoint. She suggests things like also going jogging and so on, she told some stories. She told this story, particularly one I like, is the mother who had three small children. She said, well, you know, I’d like to go jogging, it would be good, but I’ve got these three children, I can’t leave them.
What happens then is that I take out my anger on them. And so Peace said, well how about jogging on the spot? And after a few years, she wrote back to her and she said, Peace, it works wonderfully. Not only does it get rid of my anger, but the children find it very amusing as well. But the point she made was that people who did use, sort of divert this anger energy into some sort of physical activity, eventually found that their anger got less and less, and they had more and more sort of control over it.
But this doesn’t do away with the Buddhist viewpoint, which is that really need to catch the anger before it becomes explosive. Because the trouble is that once we really become angry, then we get all sorts of chemicals and things in our body. It’s definitely a physiological thing. It’s not just mental, but our bodies and minds are very related together, and then we get all this adrenaline and stuff. And once you get that, then you have to do something with it.
I think one reason why sometimes we do tend to simmer and feel our anger for a long time is because the adrenaline or whatever, these other chemicals still in our system. And one way, if this does happen, perhaps can be a good way to deal with it by doing something physical to burn off that energy. Yeah. I think you need to cultivate a virtuous action for doing the prostrations, but I think prostrations is very good, and particularly for people who have a lot of physical energy to burn off, it can be very good. It says here specifically, prostrations is a remedy for physical negativity, but it’s also good for transforming our physical tension into positive action.
It is a remedy for physical karma, non virtuous physical karma. Yes. I think you need to check on that. It might be better to go for a jog and then do it, or something like that. You know, I think you can check that out for yourself.
Yes. That’s right, yes. And I think that’s Yeah. That’s been quite a realization when you suddenly see that your behavior is a bit childish or something. It can really It’s like, in a sense, a kind of realization, in that you do suddenly sort of see it in a more realistic sort of way.
And the whole point about Buddhism, about these teachings, is that these are distorted views, distorted attitudes. They’re based on distorted views. And the way that we overcome them is by better understanding, by knowledge. So it’s not just a question of saying, it would be nice if you were compassionate and peaceful and calm and so on, so we’ll practice that. It’s more a question of saying these attitudes such as compassion, love, patience, and so on, are based on actually correct understanding.
And correct understanding always, because it’s truth, drives out untruths, drives out distorted false views, which On which our anger and so on are based. And there’s so many different levels of false views in which our anger is based, and of course ultimately it’s based on the false view of truly existent self, but that’s not easy to understand, but it’s also based on so many misreadings of the situation. It can be based on misreading of the other person’s intention, it’s based on putting the blame on the other person when really the blame lies on our own karma. It’s it’s putting the blame on the other person when really the blame is on ourselves choosing to react in that way, when we don’t have to choose to react in that way, and that was what you saw there, Hillary, wasn’t it? Yes.
Yes. Yes. That’s right. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. So it’s like you have these little flashes sometimes. You just suddenly see, yes, I’ve been sort of getting myself into this whole story, but I didn’t have to. The reason I’m getting so upset is because I’m building up this whole story about the whole thing, but you suddenly see through that. You see it from a different perspective.
Yeah. And that’s definitely the working of dharma. So anyway, I was going to go through those three very quickly, then I was going to go on to some other things. And there’s not a lot of time, but I’ll go on anyway. So that was non harmfulness anyway, and that’s something that you can’t spend too much time thinking about and going over.
So then what I thought was that having dealt with the virtues, I might go back to the non virtues again. And these are We’ve been through the six major ones. Where did I write that down? Here we are. So we’ve been through the six major or root afflictions, and I’ll just read those out to you again.
And those are attachment, hatred, pride, ignorance, doubt, and afflicted views. But there are also twenty secondary afflictions, and those are really interesting to look at as well. And it’s helped us look at these things because then we can it helps us to be able to recognize them and to understand which antidotes we need to apply. So in actual fact, even dividing them into twenty doesn’t cover all the subdivisions because actually there are eighty four thousand. But I don’t think they’ve ever been listed as eighty four thousand, but I think that’s just a generalization.
But definitely, we can make our own sort of subdivisions and categories and so on, that if we understand these twenty headings, it can give us more insight into the complications of these non virtues. So, page ninety five. So, these secondary root afflictions are all branches of the six root afflictions that we’ve been through, and in actual fact, they can all be treated as branches of the three main afflictions or the three poisoned minds, the three poisonous minds, aversion, attachment and ignorance. Some of them actually relate to more than one of those root afflictions. Others can be related to just one of them.
So the first one is belligerence. Well, that’s the translation that’s used here. It’s possible that quite a number of other different terms could be used to translate that, but I like that term anyway. It’s a mental factor that renders the mind un peaceful and close to a harmful object, and it’s related to hatred towards a harmful condition, for instance, an enemy or a weapon. It’s a mental factor that renders the mind unpeaceful when close to a harmful object.
So it’s related to hatred, but there’s a difference here. It says that hatred disturbs the mind by thinking about the three causes of harm, sentient beings, suffering, and inanimate causes of suffering. But belligerence is an intense attitude wanting to inflict harm. So it seems like in a way it follows on from the first attitude. We have hatred directed towards the object of our dislike, whether that’s a sentient being or some sort of inanimate object or our own suffering.
And then the belligerence is wanting to inflict harm arising from that hatred. So it says that hatred is more extensive and belligerence is directed towards a specific target that’s close by. So I suppose this is why sometimes we feel angry in general, and then we’ll do something like kicking the dog or or saying something nasty to our workmate or something, which doesn’t really strike the cause of our anger, but it’s striking out. We just feel this need to strike out. In fact, it seems to relate here to physical striking out, physical action.
Then there’s resentment, second one. This is continuation of anger, so it’s holding a grudge. And it says here it’s a lasting belligerence. So we can become belligerent when we’re close to somebody who’s the object of our hatred, and we might strike out, but then the anger can remain in our mind again for months or years. And then if we meet that person again, after all that time, we might strike out again.
If we’ve been if we’ve been harboring this belligerence or this resentment, holding this grudge. It’s due to this mental factor of resentment. So these are all related to hatred. Then, next one is concealment. And this is related particularly to ignorance.
In some other texts, it says it’s also related to hatred and attachment. But in this text that Geshe Tekchok was following, he particularly relates it to ignorance. And it’s the mental factor that seeks to hide one’s faults. So, it says that in general we should try to avoid negative actions, but if we do make them we should declare them to others and not conceal them. So the opposite to concealment is confession.
So sometimes it’s not practical to actually relate all our faults and wrongdoings to all in sundry. But It could be a bad habit, and often they don’t understand. So often it’s not really wise anyway. Often if people are just going to react negatively, then it’s better to be wise. But we can if we feel that it’s going to be helpful for our well-being, we could for our practice, we could confess them to to a trusted Dharma practitioner or to our guru.
But we can always confess them to Buddha and Bodhisattvas. So we have this practice of confession. As you know, we have the four opponent forces and What’s the word? Forces and what’s the word? Anyway Can’t think of the word, but anyway, it’s the opposite to concealment.
Ment. Confessing, anyway. There’s another word, but I can’t think of it. It’s one of the four r’s, I think. But so it’s anyway, at least, really what it seems to boil down to is that if we try to conceal our things, we don’t really admit them even to ourselves.
But if we at least reveal them and open ourselves up to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, then we face them ourselves. And of course the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas know what we do anyway, whether we tell them or not. But it’s very important, this business of confessing, of opening up and admitting to the wrongdoing, admitting it to ourselves that we’ve done wrong. And it’s important that we can’t psychologically let go of our wrongdoing until we’ve opened up and admitted it. And I think psychologically speaking, it’s as much this admitting to ourselves that really matters because the Buddha’s bodhisattvas know about it anyway, and it’s more the fact that we’re opening it up, opening ourselves up and not concealing anymore.
But for particularly for serious non virtues, perhaps those that we’ve done in the past, but particularly if we should happen to do a serious non virtue in the present, as Dharma practitioners, is important then perhaps that we should go to somebody and talk it over, because it really helps with the purification process. Particularly if we have a teacher, then it could almost be a breach of our devotion if we have a personal relationship to a Guru, or could be like a breach of our devotion if we really have engaged in some sort of serious wrong, and don’t talk to him about it, him or her, if we have the opportunity. Yes. It’s well, regret, it relates. Yes, it’s really the repudiation of the action, I think, promising not to do it again.
It’s part of the It’s probably more of the antidote force. Comes, I think it comes a little bit into regret, recognizing that you’ve done this wrong action, and partly into the antidote. But that’s just my own view of the matter. So, anyway Yes. So we we we need to confess our negative karmas so as to not create more negative karma.
If we don’t If we confess immediately, then we immediately stop this increasing of the negative karma. The longer we take to confess it, the the heavier it becomes. It increases day by day. So that point definitely seems to relate to the force of regret, because regret it’s stated in the Graduated Path teachings that regret regretting our negative actions is the force that stops the increase of this calmer day by day. And here, confession is also being considered in those terms.
So, we don’t immediately confess that the karma becomes twice as heavy, if we don’t confess that the next day the karma is four times as heavy, on the third day it’s eight times as heavy. So with that sort of arithmetic, you you want to do it. So actually, that’s why it said that we should actually do the thirty five Buddha’s confession twice a day, morning and night, And by doing it in the evening, confess the wrongdoings. Of course, we have to do it mindfully and not just blah blah blah as an automatic sort of action. But if we remember our negativities, mentally regret them and then do this practice, then we can purify the non virtues that we’ve committed during the day and we also commit non virtues during our sleep.
So it’s a good idea to in our dreams. In our dreams. It’s the ones that we do in our dreams are not as bad as the ones we do in waking because we don’t have the completion of the action. For instance, if you visualize doing killing somebody or doing all sorts of other interesting things that we can do in our dreams, the Yeah. We don’t have the completion of the action.
In actual fact, if you understand how to interpret dreams, there’s Sometimes these things that we dream about can have quite dharmic meaning, so but anyway, there’s always a possibility that they might have been involved with non virtue, so by confessing them and doing this practice, we can overcome that. Yes. Actually, I’ve been very interested in Jungian psychology too, and I did some work with a Jungian psychologist, and it was very interesting actually to see that some of the dreams which looked like sometimes interpretations can be quite mistaken from the point of view of the psychological meaning behind the dreams. And sometimes I would interpret a dream as having quite a bad meaning, but it would actually turn out be something quite positive. So that’s why I put that little proviso in that sometimes when you interpret dreams, they can have quite a good meaning because actually this is recognized also in Tibetan Buddhism and there’s a story about Milarepa asking his four chief disciples to tell him the dreams.
He told them to do a particular practice and then report their dreams back to him the next day and he would interpret their potential. Three of the disciples reported lovely dreams, and the fourth one, Rechungpa, had some sort of dream of having killed a countless number of sentient beings. Milarepa gave favorable interpretations to all the dreams, but he said that Rechungpa was very upset about his dream and felt that the others had good auspicious dreams, but he had a really wicked dream. But Milarepa pointed out that actually Rachumpa’s dream was the most auspicious of all and that he would attain enlightenment the most quickly of all his disciples and help the greatest number of sentient beings very very quickly in the next lifetime. Whereas, some of the other disciples had to wait several lifetimes before they reached that state of enlightenment.
But, you know, suppose that you Yes. Suppose that you imagine that you stole, say, diamond necklace and brought it home and hid it in your room. When you wake up, you’re not going to find the diamond necklace in your room. So there is this difference between a dream and waking. I think Lama, yes, she said that you can or anyway, it’s in the script that you can dream that you have an elephant in your room, but you you might dream that you you have a very small room, you might dream that you have an elephant in your room which is bigger than the room.
But when you wake up you’re not going to find that you’ve got an elephant there which is bigger than the room could hold. So this is something that we can sort of feel comfortable about in our dreams, because we know that sometimes we do things like killing people in our dreams, and also all sorts of other things, some of which are interesting, but others are quite horrible, and also we have things done to us in our dreams. Perhaps we might have dreamt that we were killed ourselves, but we wake up and we find we’re still alive or something like that. And sometimes we can wake up, dream in our dream that we’re in some sort of horrible situation. You you dream perhaps that you’ve done something.
I had a dream myself actually that I did something wrong. Don’t remember what it was, but I was feeling quite guilty about it, and then I woke up and found that I hadn’t done it at all. So I’d made some sort of disastrous mistake, caused some sort of problem for other people, and then it was quite a relief to wake up and find that that I actually hadn’t done it. All these dreams, you know, where you find wake up where you dream that you’re going around naked in public and feeling terribly embarrassed, but then you wake up and find that you’re really back in bed. So, it’s a sort of tremendous relief.
Oh, thank goodness, I didn’t really do that. Oh dear. So, we can have all sorts of funny dreams. So I think I won’t go on to the next one. The next one is ignorance, think.
Sorry. What do I have to? No. I’ve lost the place. So the next one, yes, so concealment.
So we finished that, and that’s an important one. So I’ll leave it at there. It’s ten past now. Will we finish at this point? Okay then.
So we’ll dedicate our merits. I was actually going to finish all of those tonight. Maybe I’ll have to try to get moving next week and going a bit faster through those if I’m going to finish the four noble truths before the year ends. But anyway, I think just next week. Yes, just next week.
You can’t leave Saturday, do you? I’m going to stay. No, no. Yes, we’re going to bring out another newsletter, so I was going to start off something else in the next newsletter. So, anyway, going on with the prayers, page five.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more. And then his Holiness, the Dalai Lama’s prayer on page ten. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good, all powerful Tenzin Gyatso. Please remain until samsaric existence is ended.
So we’ve got laziness coming up as one of these factors too, and that’s something has a lot of explanation that we can talk about. Okay then, and as for the well, we’ve got the picnic coming up on Sunday twelve thirty in the botanical park, just opposite the botanic gardens. And And Khensur Rinpoche is going to be there of course. And then we’ve got the video night coming up on the following Friday and that’s going to be a tape by Sogyal Rinpoche, I think, talking about comparisons between Buddhism and Christianity, which could be a very interesting tape. Although I understand the quality of the video isn’t so good.
I mean the actual technical quality. And the offering for the Ganden Ngamchö is coming up soon. Think that’s the thirteenth, isn’t it right? Yes. Yes, Also, Rinpoche is coming to that, it would be the last opportunity to have Rinpoche here at Buddha, House, I think, because he won’t be giving any more teachings after that.
Also, of course, it’s one of the big events of the year and it’s nice because we offer a lot of lights and do a lot of chanting on that occasion. So that would be also a good thing to come to if you can manage it. And that’s about all I think. Right, thank you.