Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. This 39-minute session clarifies a crucial Buddhist distinction: why emptiness of the self suffices for liberation, but emptiness of all phenomena is needed for enlightenment. Ven Margaret McAndrew contextualizes this within the full path from bodhisattva aspiration to Buddhahood, then uses concrete teaching examples—the rabbit’s horn, visualizing body interiors to overcome attachment, a chair and space—to show how realizing selflessness progressively removes delusions. She explains how different Buddhist schools approach this realization and traces the stages of delusion removal: first intellectually acquired wrong views absorbed in this lifetime, then innate habitual patterns rooted in countless past lives. For serious practitioners engaged in philosophical study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 4NT 1000 07 15.mp3
UUID: bb92774f-bdda-4f2e-9d64-2703e2b0ba2e
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Four Noble Truths (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 39.4 minutes
Words: ~4,467
Bodhisattvas help more and more beings at each stage of the path that they achieve. And, so, what the higher bodhisattvas can do what any bodhisattvas can do is pretty amazing from our point of view. What the higher bodhisattvas can do is really incredible, but it still has limitations. So Buddhas are unlimited in in what they’re able to carry out for the welfare of sentient beings. And so what we want to do is to attain these kinds of powers, and we have to be prepared to work for that.
And it’s obviously going to be something that takes a long, long time. So, of course, as I was saying before, at the moment we’re not even terribly sort of strong on our Mahāyāna motivation, let alone being bodhisattvas. And it’s quite realistic for us at this stage to be concerned with dealing with our own personal problems and just wanting to make our lives happier and making our lives better based on psychological understandings and so on. And we can this is something very realistic to expect to be able to achieve in this life.
So sometimes when you learn about all the wonderful things that we have to bring about and how many lives it takes and so on, you might start thinking, oh, it’s all too far off and too much hard work and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the here and now. And so this is we shouldn’t fall into this way of thinking because in actual fact, we really do get this tremendous transformation in our lives when we start practicing Dharma. And anybody who’s been practicing Dharma fairly sincerely or or fairly intensively for a few years will be able to tell you that it really does bring about this big change that’s based on very sound psychological principles of the basic Buddhist teachings. They’re very practical, and they bring about a tremendous difference in our lives just by putting them into practice. But also, there’s this other side of it, which is these transcendental attainments that are available to us.
That’s really what distinguishes Buddhism from other religions that we have to work for because these are the only things that are going to really put a final end to our suffering. It’s not enough just to get our life under a sound footing because we’re still subject to suffering. We still have to be born again and again, and we can always fall back again. So we have to also set our sights on these higher goals and the the true cessation, the attainment of the true cessation. So Buddhas, as well as having this great wisdom to be able to see the needs of all sentient beings, have perfect perception of emptiness.
And they have these things at the same time simultaneously. They don’t have to fluctuate between meditative equipoise on emptiness and the post meditative state of perception of conventional phenomena. So this is very special quality of the Buddha’s mind. So we need to understand all these different things. And in this way, we can be inspired by them and have interest in following the path to attain these things.
So it’s explained, particularly in the teaching on paths and grounds, it explains how you go through the different stages and how Buddhahood is attained by the bodhisattva stage by stage. And, also, it explains the path of individual liberation, the path to arhatship. So it’s very interesting to do these kinds of studies. And in this topic that we’re talking about tonight, we’re mainly focusing on liberation from the point of view of individual liberation. So what we’re wanting to be liberated from is from the disturbing emotions and karma, or what we want to get rid of is disturbing emotions and karma so that we can be liberated from all our suffering through being liberated from these things.
And, whether the goal is liberation or enlightenment, we have to understand, meditation on selflessness, emptiness or selflessness. So without attaining this understanding of selflessness, it’s impossible to remove the disturbing emotions totally. We can work on these things in other ways. We’re often taught different antidotes to the disturbing emotions. We’re taught how to overcome our greed and clinging attachment and our anger and so on.
For instance, by meditating on the insides of the body. One great method to overcome attachment is visualizing, taking off the the skin of the body and looking inside and seeing all the different the muscles and sinews and organs, bones, marrow, blood, all the different things, you know, just taking yourself apart. And also if you’re attracted in a way that’s causing you problems of attachment to other beings, particularly in a sexual way. This is particularly for the monks, of course, but also lay people sometimes need to do this kind of practice. So you can also look at other people that way and strip them apart.
Yes. Yes. You could say that. It’s not meant to create aversion. The point is if we’re if we’re feeling strong aversion already, then this kind of meditation might only make us feel depressed and feel that life is just hideous and they’re all sentient beings are awful.
And so in that case, you’re better off to meditate on the preciousness of the human rebirth. That is to get a balance. So when we’re very much caught up in attraction to physical attractiveness, then this kind of meditation gives you a very powerful means to use one delusion against another, basically. So in other there are other ways that we can do this too. We can often use one to balance another.
And the whole point of it is not to go too far either way, but to hit this sort of balance point where we have this state of equanimity. No, no, I think that only makes them more attached. Otherwise, there’s nothing that attracts a crowd of men. I was going to say nothing, perhaps you can’t say that perhaps an attractive female form might attract a crowd of men. But also, if there’s one man looking under the bonnet of the car, it’s never very long before you’ve got a whole crowd there.
So presumably the insides of the car are more attractive than human insides. But yes, they say beauty is only skin deep, and it’s true because we get very, very drawn to this very attractive surface, and it’s really got nothing to do with what’s really all inside there. So anyway, these are just examples. So we have these methods. These kinds of methods just help us to deal with deluded mental states to to get them under control, to reduce them so that they’re not causing us such problems in life.
But they can’t eradicate them totally. This kind of, meditation can never totally eradicate the deluded mental states. Only seeing through the, wrong view of, true existence can do that. And, so we have to meditate on selflessness. So here we’re talking about meditation on selflessness specifically.
Talking about meditation on emptiness is the view of the higher schools. So Geshe Khensar Rinpoche actually said at the course on the Four Noble Truths he taught recently that it’s not necessary in order to attain liberation to realize, emptiness of phenomena. So generally, term emptiness refers to the emptiness of inherent existence of self and phenomena, whereas selflessness refers to the emptiness of inherent existence of the self, of the person. In other words, oneself. To all phenomena.
Both the self and external phenomena. The self refers to one’s own sense of self, self identity. Yes. It includes all the others. Whereas this is the now there’s, different schools that have different views on these things.
All the schools present selflessness, but emptiness is mainly associated with the Mādhyamika — Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika. How do you translate that? Mādhyamika is middle path. Prāsaṇgika. Prasungika.
Get how you translate that. It’s anyway, not to worry. Yes. So, yes, so all schools present selflessness. And apparently, the not just the Mind Only school have a presentation of emptiness, but the it’s different to the presentation of the Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika School, which we’re following, which is regarded as being the highest school by our teachers.
And so we are looking anyway here mainly at the at the understanding of selflessness, which is what is needed in order to attain true cessation of the, the cause of suffering and true cessation of suffering because, this is the, what we’re focusing on here from the point of view of individual liberation. So this can liberate us from the disturbing emotions and karma. But in order to be liberated from the subtle obscurations of true existence, you have to actually meditate, the subtle obscurations, which prevent omniscience. You have to meditate on both the selflessness of persons and of of the person or the self and of phenomena. So in order to attain enlightenment, in other words, you have to meditate on the selflessness of phenomena as well as on the selflessness of the person or the eye.
But to become liberated, apparently, it’s sufficient to realize the selflessness of the eye. So, this what we have to do is to, gain this direct insight into emptiness. And this removes disturbing emotions totally like a fire, which burns things away completely and totally ends our bondage to karma and delusions that tie us in saṃsāra. So by realizing this selflessness, we can, achieve this. It can it has to be realized, first of all, conceptually and then directly by, direct insight in meditation.
And it’s only the direct insight in meditative equipoise that actually removes the, the disturbing emotions. So this is yes. So the what we what we have to realize is the lack or the emptiness of a truly existent self, which is labeled on the five aggregates. You know what the five aggregates are? No.
Form. Yes. Okay. Yes. You you’ve more or less got it, but it’s body basically, body and mind or the physical and mental components of our being.
And so, anyway, the the self is merely labeled on these five aggregates. So what the Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika School teaches is this the emptiness of this self and of phenomena. And we can overcome the obscurations by this. And this is what we need in order to achieve Buddhahood. For the to achieve liberation, the first can just the meditator can just focus on the lack of true existence of this self that is labeled on the five aggregates.
In either case, we start off with that. Whether you’re following the Mādhyamika school or the other schools, it’s necessary to begin with the self begin with the self or the I because it’s, difficult to to first realize the selflessness of phenomena. It’s once you’ve it’s it’s easier to realize the selflessness of the person. And once that’s realized, then it isn’t so difficult for the meditator to go on and realize the selflessness of phenomena. But the the starting point is the the person or the eye.
They are not. So true cessation, or the truth of cessation, has four characteristics. We see all of each of the four noble truths has four characteristics. And the four characteristics of true cessation are, first of all, that it’s cessation because it has abandoned or ceased all sufferings from the root. And secondly, it’s secondly, it’s pacification or peace.
Because having ceased all sufferings, then this is what is realized. This doesn’t mean some sort of neutral, bland sort of a state. There’s no such thing. In fact, one’s suffering is removed, then a a very joyful, very blissful state is is realized. Then, thirdly, excellence or high auspiciousness or his holiness the Dalai Lama’s translator said benefit and pleasure. And then definite emergence. So definite emergence means that the suffering can’t return. So once we’ve attained true cessation, then we’ve got it forever. We’ll never fall back into saṃsāra, which is very nice.
So there might be a lot of hard work to get there, but once you’ve attained it then all your work is finished. Except that if you’re a bodhisattva then you have to keep on working endlessly for sentient beings. But then once you attain Buddhahood, then the work becomes effortless. So I suppose if it’s effortless, then it’s not really work. So Buddhas just help spontaneously without any effort at all.
It’s said to be like the sun shining on the earth then reflects in all these different puddles and lakes and oceans and so on. And it doesn’t the sun doesn’t have to make any effort to do that. It’s just doing its thing and sort of spontaneously all these reflections appear. Yes. I can remember when I was a little girl and the first probably the first time I’d been out driving at night.
Because dad didn’t have a car then, so he was in somebody else’s car and I must have been very small. I saw the moon was following us along and I said, oh, the moon goes everywhere I go, the moon goes with me. The moon’s always following me, you know, and I thought I must be really special because the moon always went with me. It didn’t go with the other people. Well, you can see that I wasn’t sure of an ego.
Yes. Well, I might have thought those men on the moon are out to get me if I’ve been paranoid. So a realization. Okay. So, we’ve got so what we have is, now is two levels of truth.
What we have to understand is that there are are two levels of truth. Does anybody remember what they are? Okay. What’s the other one? Okay.
And what’s the ultimate truth? Okay. So when we’re talking about the ultimate truth, we’re talking about emptiness or selflessness. So particularly, this is in terms of the Prāsaṇgika School, we’d be talking about emptiness of inherent existence as the ultimate truth. So and then there’s also the conventional truth, which is the way things appear.
So I’ve got a question here. Does a a rabbit’s horn have true existence, or does it have emptiness? Does it have the nature of emptiness? A rabbit’s horn. A rabbit’s horn.
Well, you know what a horn is? You know what a rabbit is? So you got okay. So if there was a rabbit with a horn, does it okay. No.
Okay. So the point here. Okay. So Rather, does it have emptiness? Less than emptiness.
That’s a double negation. Okay. So a rabbit’s is a nonexistent phenomenon. Right? You’ve already come to that conclusion.
So when we’re talking about emptiness and about relative truth, when we’re talking about the two levels of truth, we’re dealing with objects of knowledge. So a rabbit’s horn is not an object of knowledge. If the genetic engineers come up with a rabbit with horns, then a rabbit’s horn will then become an object of knowledge. But in the meantime, it’s a nonexistent object because nobody as yet has come up with a rabbit’s horn. So this is you find that when you start to study debating, rabbit’s horns come up regularly.
It’s one of these things like pillars and vases that they’re sort of the standard debate examples. So we can speak about these things as so these objects of knowledge as things that we can speak of as having some level of truth or existence. And so there are these two levels of truth, relative and absolute, that can be said to be objects of knowledge. So absolute truth is an object of knowledge. Relative truths are an object of knowledge.
And it’s important to understand that these two levels are not contradictory. Although they’re not the same thing, they’re different. They’re non contradictory and they’re mutually supporting. And in a sense, they are the one thing. You can say, in a sense, they’re two aspects of the one thing.
So realizing emptiness doesn’t negate the relative existence of the object. When we understand the emptiness, for instance, of the chair, we don’t negate the chair at all. When we when we realize the emptiness of the person, when we realize our own selflessness, it doesn’t mean that we realize that we don’t exist. We do exist, but we don’t exist in the way that we’ve been thinking that we exist. We what we do is we see through this falsity, the mistake.
There is still a self. There is still a person. But we remove a layer of heavy delusion about the way we’ve been viewing this self. So realizing emptiness doesn’t mean that negation of the object, but it negates the wrong view about the object. And, also, it’s only on the base of the object that you can assert emptiness.
There has to be an object for the assertion of emptiness. It doesn’t negate the relative object. It only negates the false sort of construction that we placed on the base of the relative object. So when we haven’t realized emptiness, Yeah. Also, you have the you when you have to when you look for emptiness, it has to be on the basis of something.
Yes. Emptiness isn’t something that exists off somewhere else all by itself. It’s something that exists in the objects of our perception. Yes. Well, in actual fact, even when we think of space, we tend to think of space as being truly existent.
There’s truly existent empty space. But space is often used as the example, but that’s not to say that emptiness is space. We can still see we can still think of space as being something that is truly existent. It’s a negation, but we still think of it as a concept. The con this concept we have is space.
We still see it as being truly existent. We think there’s truly existent space out there. And it’s something that we can talk about because it’s something that has certain qualities. It has directions. It’s non obstructing.
So we we can’t experience space directly, but we can comprehend it indirectly through analysis of these points. But we phenomena that we are exposed? No, space exists. We can know it by deduction. But if there’s something in it, it’s like, is it?
That’s that’s what it is. It’s a negation. It’s a negation of obstructiveness. No. A rabbit’s horn doesn’t exist.
Space can be an object of knowledge. It’s not an object of direct perception, but it is an object of knowledge through valid sort of cognition. Well So it’s a deductive knowledge. It can be it’s a deductive cognition. It’s not a direct perception, perception, but it’s something we can know through reasoning.
Yes, okay, we won’t go into that tonight. That’s a very interesting topic. Obviously, people who like to discuss these kinds of things are people who’ve got intelligence studying mind and awareness, all these different things. What is philosophy? So you should go on to study the highest higher philosophy, and it’s quite fascinating.
But anyway, we won’t get caught up in space. We won’t get lost in space. Sorry, Hills. Yes, we’re not talking about outer space. We’re talking about space.
Okay, Well, we’re just talking about space here. Space means, by definition, is lack of obstruction. So if it wasn’t for space, we wouldn’t be able to walk from one end of this room to the other. Even if this room was packed with things so that we couldn’t walk from one end of the room to the other, there’d still be the space. But we would have this concept that we could remove all those things, and then we’d be able to do it.
So anyway, that’s beside the point. But, well, anyway, what we’re talking about is that we have to realize the ultimate nature of things and the relative nature are not contradictory. And the ultimate nature of the object is emptiness of true existence. And this has to be, first of all, understood conceptually, and then it has to be understood directly. So when we haven’t realized emptiness, we haven’t perceived the relative truth of the object.
You can’t the realization of these two levels of truth comes together. So we if we haven’t realized emptiness, we also haven’t realized relative truth. All we’ve realized is relative falsity. Yes. So that’s not to say that everything we see is completely wrong.
So for instance, if we see a blue chair with four legs, that’s fair enough. That’s there is some truth in that. If somebody was to look over there and say that they were looking at, say, a boxer dog, and what it really is is a blue chair with four legs, then we’d say that that person was totally hallucinating. A giraffe, you know. There’s no giraffe in this room.
But we know that there’s chairs in description. So this is a fair enough conventional perception. But when we look at that chair, we see this chair as being truly existent from its own side, concretely existent, substantially existent. And so what we say when we say that we see see it falsely, is that we see it in this way when in actual fact, how it exists is like an illusion, like a rainbow, like an image in a dream. And this is the way that it’s seen by somebody who has experienced empty — direct insight into emptiness.
They know that that is how it exists. Even if they don’t actually experience it that way because they still have this view arising, They know that it exists that way. And the more they go into this meditation on emptiness, the more they go into this direct meditative equipoise on emptiness, the less concretely existing from its own side, is the object that they see in the post meditative period. The more they become aware of it as simply existing like an illusion. It’s because of this that these beings are able to do things like walk on water and walk through walls and all that.
We can’t do that because for us these things are real and solid and concrete. So somebody who really understands this has these powers, there’s nothing special about it. It’s just that they’re not under the power of these mistaken concepts. So the ultimate nature of the object is emptiness of true existence. And this has to be attained first as a conceptual awareness and then as a non conceptual awareness in meditative equipoise.
So we have a lot of work to be done in order to attain this and put it all together. And then eventually, we will be able to, first of all, achieve the conceptual understanding. And then first and this has to be done through a lot of study debate and so forth. And also the attainment of of Samatha, this single pointed concentration, calm abiding, and then putting them together so that the meditation on emptiness and the mental single-pointed concentration are practiced together. And then gradually, the meditation on emptiness approaches the direct insight into emptiness.
And then when that’s finally when the person first attains that realizes direct insight into emptiness, that will bring about a series of true cessations as they go deeper and deeper into this direct experience of emptiness. So first of all, the first true cessation that is attained is of the intellectually acquired delusions, and that is things which are acquired in this life through wrong views, through wrong philosophical attitudes and so on. And these are removed with that direct insight, and this also brings about a true cessation of rebirth in the lower realms. So somebody who has attained that insight will also never have to experience rebirth in the lower realms again. So even though they may have to be born again, continue to be reborn within Samsāra, they will never have to take rebirth in the lower suffering states, but they will only have fortunate rebirths.
So that’s something pretty worthwhile. Once you gain true cessation of the intellectual delusions, the intellectually acquired delusions, Well, these are distinguished from the innate delusions, which are instincts. When we talk about instincts, we’re talking about ways of thinking which are embedded in us from countless past lives, and so arise spontaneously without training in this life. And the intellectually acquired delusions are trainings and ideas, philosophies, viewpoints and so on that we have acquired mainly in this lifetime. We might have had them in previous lives, but they have been things that we have picked up in this lifetime rather than things that have come to us spontaneously.
And they are lighter, easier, removed. That’s why they are the first to go. They are sort of like the superficial layer. Then having abandoned the intellectually acquired delusions, then we have to deal with the innate delusions and these are removed progressively until you attain liberation. So I think I’ll leave at that point.
I was going to talk a bit about the Bodhisattva, but we’ll leave that now because it’s so late already. And next week we will be dealing with the path and I will be talking a little bit about what the Bodhisattvas have to practice and what the person on the path to becoming an Arahat has to practice how to do it. Yes. So we’ll drop it there and we won’t even have time to meditate. So you’ll have to I was going to do some meditation on emptiness from this book, you will have to go home and meditate.
I suppose you have all got the book. So you will have to do this before next Thursday night. And we will do the dedication prayers on 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 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 cyclic existence is ended. Alright. Thanks. So tomorrow morning, of course, there is a Mandala offering.
So if any of you are going to stay