Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 21.5-minute session, Ven Margaret McAndrew explores three of the seven limbs of the graduated path — offerings, confession, and rejoicing — with particular focus on rejoicing as an antidote to jealousy and Western practitioners’ struggles with competitive insecurity. She explains how offerings purify miserliness and bring psychic powers; confession through the Four Opponent Forces (taking refuge, cultivating regret, restraining from misdeeds, and performing virtuous action as antidote); and rejoicing as a core Bodhisattva practice that dissolves ego boundaries and accumulates tremendous merit without physical effort or expense. McAndrew directly addresses the Western tendency toward feelings of inadequacy, using the metaphor of being halfway up the mountain toward enlightenment. Pitched at practitioners developing their Dharma practice beyond intellectual understanding.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 P P P 1998 03 28.mp3
UUID: 76b1b799-090a-4727-8162-d2e97b46786b
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Prayers, Prostrations and Preliminaries (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 21.5 minutes
Words: ~3,143
Doing this this practice every day so many times, and he probably I think he probably had to use some sort of sand or earth or something as a substance. And so his his arm got quite scarred from doing this, or calloused. And on the other hand, if you’re if you happen to be able to afford it, then it’s alright to use gold or silver or to use jewels and precious stones in the and the whatever you use for the filling. And so if if you’re somewhere in the middle, then perhaps you can use something a little bit more ordinary. But whatever it is, you you just use whatever you should use should be as nice as you can manage to get according to your circumstances.
So offerings are particularly beneficial as what they’re an antidote to, the obscuration that they’re an antidote to is miserliness. They help us to overcome this particular obscuration and they also bring particular benefits apart from this accumulation of merit, they bring us the benefits to receive the Citadel of Space-like wealth which seems to be a psychic power which gives you the ability to emanate wealth, to manifest wealth magically. So the next of the seven limbs is Confession. You’ve probably already heard this talked about in terms of the Four Opponent Forces. This often comes into the topic of karma.
So our wrong actions and the obscurations caused by our negative karmas prevent realizations and they cause the degeneration of realizations that we’ve already achieved. So sometimes we think that realization means something very big. We hear about the realizations of renunciation and the realizations of bodhicitta and the realizations of emptiness and various other big realizations. But I think it also refers to whatever Dharma understanding we’ve developed, whatever level of Dharma understanding we have generated up to this point. For instance, if we felt able to take refuge from the heart then I think this is a realization up to a certain point.
And all of us have some sort of level of Dharma understanding, some sort of level of intellectual understanding, some sort of level of heart heartfelt realization of the meaning of these teachings. And we we want to keep on working on that, want to keep on intensifying if we don’t want to lose it. And so we need to do this practice of confessing, of purifying our obstructions so that this practice can continue to develop rather than being lost. So of course our negative karmas also are going to cause us suffering if we haven’t purified them and this is a very good reason for wanting to purify our negative actions. I think when you first start off, perhaps the thought of wanting to not have to experience the suffering results of these actions might be the main motivating force in doing the action of purifying with confession.
I think as you continue with the Dharma practice, you become more aware of this more subtle aspect of wanting to get rid of the obscurations of your Dharma practice. It becomes something that becomes something you become more and more aware of, something that you feel more strongly, and which can become a very strong motivating force as your practice goes on. So if we don’t purify negative karma, if we don’t at least stop them increasing, then they double every day. And a small negative karma such as killing an insect can for a long range cases killing a mouse, can double every day until after fifteen days, it becomes equal to killing a human being. So what we have to do is at least stop this increasing effect, and the thing that stops that is regret.
So if we feel that the action was a good one and we don’t regret it, it’s it’s something that keeps on increasing. Regret at least stops that increasing factor. The degree of purification depends on the power with which you perform the four opponent forces, and that depends on the amount of mental energy you put into it. And so at the very least we can do is stop our negative karma increasing. And with the medium effect of having more mental energy than we can do at least partial purification of the negative karma.
And if we have very, very strong mental energy in performing the four opponent forces, then we can totally purify and not have to experience the results of this negative karma. So what the four opponent forces are the power of the basis. You’ve probably heard all this before a number of times, so I won’t go into a lot of details over it. And, of course, it’s something we do need to know thoroughly, and it’s to be found in the book. And, in fact, all books on the graduated path explain the four opponent forces because it’s a very important practice.
The power of the basis, this is refuge and bodhicitta. In actual fact, the basis is the Buddhas and bodhisattvas in sentient beings. And by taking refuge in the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, we purify the negative karmas that we’ve done to them. Three objects of refuge are the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and also the other jewels of refuge, the Dharma, which is the main jewel of refuge, and the Sangha and the Ārya Sangha. So then by taking refuge in those, we can purify.
Negative karmas that we’ve created with these objects. This is also sometimes called the power of reliance. And, also, by generating bodhicitta, then we have created actually an awful lot of bad karma with other sentient beings. And by cultivating this thought of wanting to save them from suffering, then we’re making up for the negative karma we’ve created towards them, so this purifies our negative karma towards sentient beings. Then we have the power of repudiation or regret.
And this is based on an understanding of cause and effect. It’s it’s a rational understanding, a rational regret, not not an emotional feeling that we’re terrible and that we’ve done these awful things and so we are awful people, but just understanding that we’ve made a mistake, that this mistake has created a negative imprint on our consciousness which will bring us a suffering result and which will act as an obscuration, obscuration, which will hinder our Dharma practice, and therefore that we need to take action to counteract that effect. The third is restraining from misdeeds, and that means that we make a resolution not to do this action again, if possible, not to do it again for the rest of our life. And if we can’t make that resolution for the rest of our life, then perhaps for twenty four hours or for one hour, whatever we feel we’re capable of keeping. The fourth is the primary antidote, and that involves doing some sort of virtuous action.
So it can be various actions such as we’ve already mentioned, such as doing prostrations, such as making offerings to the merit field. There are special practices such as making prostrations to the thirty five Buddhas and reciting the Sūtra of the Three Heaps, the names of the thirty five Buddhas and the Sūtra of the Three Heaps, and reciting the Vajrasattva mantra. There are various other practices, such as making tsa-tsas or doing the Vajrasattva meditation. There’s various different practices which connect as antidotes to specific negative karmas. Any virtuous action that we engage in can be the antidote if we actually consciously apply it as the antidote.
It’s necessary to have that attitude of consciously taking it as the antidote and applying it to purify our specific negative karmas. So we have to be aware of the negative karmas that we’ve created. In specific terms, we know what negative karmas we’ve created in this life. And in general terms, we know by looking at the teaching on the ten non virtuous actions what sort of negative karmas we’ve created in past lifetimes, and we can think that we’re applying these actions at the antidote to all of these. So I think the next one is rejoicing.
So it actually says in the Buddha’s teaching that this is a Bodhisattva’s practice. It’s difficult to do whole heartedly, as I mentioned already. So this is because for us sentient beings, our ego gets in the way. But it’s very important for us to try to practice rejoicing, because it actually helps us to break down these ego boundaries. And we tend to place ourselves at the center of everything and see ourselves as being the most important, and want to have all the good things for ourselves, and want to be the best person ourselves at everything.
We want to feel superior. This makes it very hard for us to rejoice in the good things that are being experienced by others. And it’s also hard for us to rejoice in the virtuous actions of others, because we want to feel that we’re the best, and that we’re the best dharma practitioner, and so on. And we feel jealous of others also. Also, and so it’s very difficult for us to overcome this feeling of wanting to have the things that other people have, and to be able to just rejoice wholeheartedly in the fact that they’re experiencing something good, that they might have good possessions, that they might perhaps have good relationships with others, that they might perhaps be doing well in their careers.
Whatever we want to experience ourselves, we can rejoice when we see others having it. And if we can practice this all the time, it will help to break down this feeling of jealousy and this feeling of ego boundaries and wanting to put ourselves at the center. So it’s not saying that it’s easy to do in that sense. It’s it’s very difficult to do it wholeheartedly. But the more we do it, the more we practice it, the easier it becomes.
The more we start to see the pettiness of our own attitude, and the more we start to see how petty our own attitude is, then the less we get carried away by it. And so it has this quality of being the antidote, particularly to jealousy. It’s it’s an incredible accumulation of merit without having to make, like, any specific physical effort or without having to spend a lot of money or a lot of time. We can just rejoice as we go about our daily activities. And just one moment of wholehearted rejoicing just brings this open feeling into your heart, which is tremendously powerful for cutting away this ego boundary that we put around ourselves.
And this is tremendously important because it’s going to help us to realise selflessness. As long as we have this tight ego boundary, we’re not going to be able to have a direct realisation of selflessness. As long as we have that, we’re not going to be able to understand the emptiness of this truly existent feeling of self that we have. We’re not going to be able to see it for the illusion that it is. And so, in actual fact, this is a tremendously helpful practice.
And we’re not going to be able to accumulate merit of giving wholeheartedly to others because of our ego boundaries. So if we can help to if we can rejoice in the good of others, then it’s going to be tremendously helpful for us to do all these other practices. It’s going to help us to develop loving kindness and compassion, because our jealousy and wanting to have everything for ourselves is a tremendous blockage to our developing pure loving kindness and compassion toward others. So this practice is going to be able to help us with all our other practices. And we can rejoice in the merit of others, not only of other sentient beings, but of also the actions of holy beings.
And sometimes this might be easy. We tend to measure ourselves up against other sentient beings, against our friends and colleagues and so on. So it’s hard to really rejoice in their welfare. I think it’s easier to feel well, it’s natural for Buddhas to be doing tremendous, great activities. It’s natural for people who we respect and regard as being superior beings to rejoice in their activities.
So at least we can rejoice wholeheartedly in the actions of those holy beings and great beings if we see doing wonderful things. And at least we get a little fraction of that merit. I think Geshe-la mentioned something like a small percentage. But anyway, because their actions are so tremendous, so vast, even a small fraction of that is something very, very beneficial to us.
And if we can rejoice in the actions of other ordinary beings, then if that person is more advanced than us, we get half as much merit as they do. And if they’re exactly at the same level as ourselves, we get an equal amount of merit. And if they’re less advanced than we are, then we get twice as much merit as they do when we rejoice in their actions, in their virtuous actions. So this is very, very powerful powerful for us. And we can also rejoice in our own virtue, and this is very, very beneficial.
We can rejoice in the merits of our past lives, which we can’t remember, but which we know we must have created because here we are as human beings. We have a perfect human rebirth. We’ve met the teachings. We have an interest in following the teachings. So we must have done a lot of work in our past lives to get to this point, and we have to feel really, really fortunate about this.
The lamas sometimes quote a saying that says that we’re like somebody who’s pushed a boulder halfway up a mountain and has to push it all the way up to the top. And if we stop rolling it, we’re going to it’s going to slide backwards. So we should realize that we’re halfway up the mountain already. And if we realize this, then we won’t want to stop working on it. So we’re actually halfway to enlightenment.
We tend to think we’re just at the beginning, we’re just starting out. In one sense, this is true, but in another sense, we’re already halfway there. So this is something really fantastic. We’ve done so much work already to get to this point, and we can rejoice in this. And also, in this life, as we do virtuous actions day by day, we should rejoice in them because this makes them so much more powerful, so much more potent.
If we do these actions but just forget about them, perhaps we dedicate the merit but then we forget about them. This doesn’t leave much of an imprint but if we feel very glad about doing these actions, at the end of the day when we dedicate our merits, we also remember to rejoice in them this increases the merit very much and if we can particularly look back and rejoice in the in the dharma activities and other major virtuous actions that we’ve done during our lifetime then we can keep on drawing interest on this merit on this virtuous action and so we we really you can say we really exploit it for all it’s worth and that’s that’s really good that that form of exploitation is really good and that form of capitalism is a really good form of capitalism. So it’s being good and being happy that you’ve been good. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
And I think we need to do a lot of this because somehow I think a particular problem with Westerners is that we tend to feel that we’re no good. I think it comes out of our competitive society. But a lot of people actually, you do see people who are going around being very arrogant, but even these people underneath, they’re very insecure. They they feel that there’s always somebody going to come along and knock them off their pedestal and so they’re very defensive and other people who haven’t got that kind of arrogant attitude just feel inferior and I think it’s because we’ve been going through this competitive society all our lives we’ve been measuring ourselves up against other people and no matter how successful we are even if we’ve had a reasonable amount of success and there’s no logical reason for us to feel that we’re failures we still feel that we’re not as good as we ought to be we still feel that we haven’t measured up we have this insecurity all the time. We just feel that we’re not good enough as human beings, and this is something that we really have to address.
And if we’ve been unfortunate enough to not be successful in worldly terms, then it’s even worse. We tend to feel that we’re totally hopeless and total failures and that we’re no good at all and that we’re not really fit to be in this world and blah blah blah, you know, we have this whole story that a little voice within us is telling us all the time and this little voice is just telling us a whole pack of lies that we have to be able to see that this is a pack of lies and get over it and so it’s very important to do practices like this rejoicing in our good actions and seeing ourselves as being a good being and of course this relates to the teaching also on the precious human rebirth and our opportunity and as I mentioned before this illustration of the stone being rolled up a mountain comes into the precious human rebirth teaching it’s an illustration of how fortunate we are to have this precious human rebirth which means not just any human rebirth but one which has an interest spiritual activities we’re actually halfway to enlightenment and we should really feel rejoicing in our hearts if we’re at this level and we can look around and see other people who are practicing our friends our Dharma colleagues and see that they’re practicing and feel rejoicing in our hearts that these people also have reached the point of being halfway to enlightenment because this is really great.
Right. So so that’s it for this session, think, lunchtime. So now we can dedicate our merits. We can rejoice in our merits. First of all, I think, at this point, we can take a couple of minutes and just rejoice in in our merits as we’ve been thinking, even if it makes us a bit late for lunch.