Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew introduces the Wheel of Sharp Weapons through the peacock analogy: just as peacocks thrive on poisonous plants while crows cannot, bodhisattvas transform the sufferings and delusions that would overwhelm ordinary practitioners into fuel for enlightenment. She traces this Lo Jong (mind-training) text to the Indian master Dharma Rakshita, explaining how it overcomes self-cherishing—the fundamental obstacle to bodhicitta, the courageous motivation to attain enlightenment for all beings. She introduces Yamāntaka, the wrathful deity, and frames this teaching as providing the skillful weapons needed to strike at the enemy within.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 SW 1999 02 04.mp3
UUID: 7efd3b4c-f380-4f75-9464-329f3ec67e24
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-02-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.8 minutes
Words: ~5,270
To bring about enlightenment for the benefit of all. Our own enlightenment for the sake of, all sentient beings so as to be able to lead them to the state of everlasting happiness. So Last week I started talking last week, but there weren’t very many people here and also didn’t get taped. But it didn’t really matter very much because in actual fact we didn’t really get onto the topic of the actual text. We were just going through some sort of preliminary talk about the strength of mainly about the strength of our deluded mental states and how these keep us in suffering and how they keep us from achieving the state of enlightenment that we’re trying to attain for the welfare of sentient beings.
And so we need a really strong effective method to overcome these. And so we were talking about the Mahāyāna thought training practices and how we have these various practices that have come down to us from the great panditas of India and the great Tibetan lamas who have composed these teachings on the basis of Buddha’s Mahāyāna teachings so as to help us and these thought trainings are called Lo Jong in Tibetan and they go in conjunction with the graduated path so you need to have the graduated path understanding and it’s very very helpful to practice these Lo Jong teachings conjunction with the graduated path and they help us to overcome our deluded mental states and in particular they help us to cultivate love and compassion and the state of mind of bodhicitta. Who wants to explain what bodhicitta is and how it differs from love and compassion? Right. Because body really means more like awakening or enlightenment.
Yes. Cheetah is mind. So, the way it’s sometimes vary a little bit in the order of the four. But here it is: may all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness first. So, that’s love. Be free of suffering and the causes of suffering refers to that refers to the great love and great compassion.
And may all beings not suffer from suffering but know happiness. So that’s actually worldly nature but having the ultimate happiness, the liberation. So the thought of bodhicitta comes from combining this great love and compassion with the thought that I myself will bring that about. Sometimes you find, particularly when you’re doing Mandala practices, there’s a little prayer that we make where we actually say that I myself am going to bring this about. All sentient beings quickly, quickly achieve enlightenment and I myself am going to do it.
And it also has to involve the understanding that if you’re going to do this you have to attain enlightenment. So it’s the motivation of working for enlightenment. That’s why the word Bodhi comes into it because it’s the aspiration to attain enlightenment that it’s not thinking of your own welfare but thinking of the welfare of others. So this is the motivation for all these Mahāyāna teachings. And so we need something really powerful because although we have these thoughts, these aspirations, self-cherishing is really really strong and it’s very hard to overcome.
So self-cherishing and cherishing others are contradictory. You can’t have both of them in your mind stream at the same time. So we need we find that our self-cherishing keeps on arising spontaneously and prevents us from compassion. Although we do have love and compassion. We shouldn’t think we’re totally free of these qualities but our love and compassion is still limited and partial.
We have more towards some beings than towards others. And also it tends to fade out whenever self-cherishing becomes particularly strong. And so we have to overcome self-cherishing so that we can build on the love and compassion that we have now and develop the great pure love and compassion which are the basis for going on to develop bodhicitta. And so we have these various sort of trainings and there’s quite a number of them. The one that we’re dealing with at the moment is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons and I thought that might be an interesting one to go through.
And actually, Geshe-la apparently did teach this one a couple of years ago but I haven’t been able to find the tapes on it. Well, I did look in the library. Well, I’ll have to do some more research on that. Thanks. Maybe they haven’t been catalogued.
So anyway, when I had the thought of doing this, I didn’t know Geshe-la thought, but I wouldn’t imagine that most of you would have been present at that teaching anyway. So it’s no problem then because it’s good to hear this. Of course, it would be better to hear it from Geshe-la, but in any case, you can listen to the tapes if we can manage to get them on deck. So it’s it’s a very powerful teaching. Title actually gives you that idea of the Wheel of Sharp Weapons.
It suggests that you’ve got something that’s pretty forceful and effective. And Wheel of Sharp Weapons is something which is being directed at self-cherishing. We have to see self-cherishing as the real enemy and strike at it with effective means. And this teaching gives us some good practices to help us to do that. Some good techniques.
Also, it has a lot to do with karma, which was one reason why I had the thought of using this particular text because some of the students last year were saying that they would like some more karmic information and particularly examples like the football coach in the football who had instant karma from speaking out of turn. Yes. Beautiful. He obviously I said was saying the other night actually yesterday, was saying to the people who were here yesterday, the lesson we can take a lesson from that and that is that you have to be very careful how you speak about karma to people who don’t accept karmic teachings. Particularly using the word punishment which is going to upset people anyway, it’s a very judgmental sort of a word and karma isn’t about punishment at all.
Also people who aren’t familiar with karma aren’t going to perhaps take very kindly. Even people who do accept karma, there’s a lot of people now with the new age movements and so on, there’s a lot of people around who do have some sort of acceptance of karma but they have also quite a few misleading ideas about the workings of karma. And so it’s always necessary when we’re talking about these things to people in general to be diplomatic, I suppose, the way we express ourselves. So the this is a a text by a pundit called Dharma Rakshita, who was one of Atisha’s teachers. So I don’t know whether you all heard the life story of Atisha.
I did talk about it last year, one of the Thursday night gatherings. But, anyway, Atisha was the great Indian teacher who came to Tibet and basically established the teachings firmly in Tibet and showed the Tibetans how it was possible to combine, to coordinate the teachings of Sūtra and Tantra, that they were not contradictory but needed to be practiced together. And he was very influential in establishing the correct Dharma teachers in Tibetans. Actual fact he composed first graduated past texts for the Tibetans because they had a great need to really have things explained at the most basic level. There’s been so much confusion caused by various misleading teachings at that time in Tibet.
So Dharmarakshita was one of Atisha’s Indian teachers. If you remember the life story of Atisha, he had I forget how many teachers, but over a hundred. And he was noted for his the the perfection of his of his correct guru devotion to each of his to all of his teachers. So it’s often said that because we don’t have a teacher’s qualities, we need to be careful how many Gurus we relate to and that we we’re wiser if we limit ourselves to a small number of gurus. Anyway, Dharmarakshita was this teacher and he gave this transmission of these teachings in the form of a text that he composed himself, but of course he didn’t invent the thought training.
This is something that goes back to Buddha, but he arranged it in the form of a teaching. And it was brought to Tibet by a teacher who passed on the lineage. And in this text we have a translation from the Tibetans. So it came in an Indian language which would have been Sanskrit or a related language, came to Tibet, and then it came from Tibetan to the English translation, which was this one was composed by the team of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharmasala. And so when he composed this teaching in Sanskrit, Dharmarakshita drew on teachings from all of his Gurus and from the teachings that he’d received in on on working with the mind, on training the mind in virtuous conduct and particularly in bodhicitta, then these very effective practices were put together in this text The Wheel of Sharp Weapons.
It’s important to remember that all of these texts authors of the text always stress the orthodox origins of the teachings. You’ll never find a true Buddhist teacher saying how original and new and creative their teachings are. They always make a point of saying how they have the correct lineage, how this is the true teachings of Buddha, and how it has been passed on down to them by their teachers. Of course, there is quite a lot of creativity in the way these different teachings are presented from one teacher to another, from one group of students to another, from country to country, there has been a lot of adjustment in the way the teachings are presented according to the needs of different people. But the basics are always the same.
Atisha practiced these teachings himself and found them to be especially effective. And so he transmitted them in turn to his chief disciple, Dromtonpa, who is interesting for being the only layperson in the Kadam lineage. So Dromtonpa passed these teachings on in turn to various to his own students who passed the teachings down, and they’ve come down and they were considered to be especially valuable. A teacher particularly transmitted them to Dromtonpa so that he would have this means to pacify the minds of the Tibetans who were difficult to tame. So the Tibetans had this reputation of being particularly difficult at that time.
So if they could help the Tibetans, then they might even work for us Aussies. So I think our minds are very difficult to tame. Certainly, if you compare it to the Tibetans nowadays, we’re difficult to tame. But the the Tibetans in Atisha’s time might have been perhaps pretty wild. Oh, well, I think perhaps in terms of, finding it difficult to understand and yes, they simply were starting off from scratch.
They didn’t have a background of having been brought They’re very like us now in a sense. They didn’t have a great background of being brought up with Buddhism and they didn’t have a training in Buddhism. Such training in Buddhism as they did have had been very confusing and had perhaps led to a lot of skepticism among some and a lot of partisanship and a bad feeling of sectarianism among others. And so it was a pretty sad situation at that time. And this this just reminds me of a little conversation I had with Lama Zopa Rinpoche when I’d been in Taiwan.
He was asking me which students I thought were the better, the Australians and or the Chinese and I kind of come in the heart of it, it was very difficult to say really because they’re different, you know. The Australians are good in one way and the Chinese are good in another, and he kept on pushing me. I said, well, if I really had to make a choice, I’d have to say the Chinese. And he agreed with that. And he said the when he was teaching the Chinese, they he only had to tell them that such and such was in the scriptures and has been said by such and such as a guru, such and such a teacher, and they would accept it.
Whereas the Australians or the Westerners would have to they they would accept it if they liked it. It would have to be something that they liked. And so he obviously found that the the Chinese were easier, more receptive. But then it’s it’s natural because the Chinese do have that background of growing up with Buddhism. So the the full title of the text is a Mahāyāna mind training, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons.
And the word mind training in Tibetan is Lo Jong. So it’s in Tibetan, it’s called a Lo Jong teaching. So we we go to the first verse. That’s the title. And then we go to the first verse, which is really not verse one, but a a preliminary verse, which is the author’s homage.
And he actually gives the title again in a slightly different form. He says, the name of this work is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons effectively striking the heart of the foe. So, then he goes on, I pay heartfelt homage to you, Yamāntaka. Your wrath is opposed to the great lord of death. So this homage is to the wrathful deity Yamāntaka.
Apparently the reason why Dharmarakshita made the homage particularly to Yamāntaka is because this was Dharmarakshita’s special deity. But it’s also appropriate because we have to transform our anger and hatred into the path to enlightenment. And Yamāntaka represents this transformation, the transformation of anger and hatred into this wrathful form of practice on the path to enlightenment. So we’ll be hearing a bit more about Yamāntaka as we go through this text. And so I thought it would be an idea to have a picture of Yamāntaka because you were bound to ask me what Yamāntaka was like.
If I didn’t have a picture to show you, I’d be caught out. So I tried to find a picture. I couldn’t find a really good picture and Oh yes, very scary. So Yamāntaka basically means overcoming the lord of death. And we’ve got two pictures in here.
There’s this one and then there’s another one a couple of pages on. And I’ve also got a color picture here. And Tony says that there is a color picture in one of the books, but the books out. So maybe another time we might be able to find it. Oh, well, would you like to run and get it?
Yes. Great. So I’ll pass that around. Yes. So anyway, you see he has what is it?
I think sixteen something like sixteen arms nine faces, sixteen arms, I think it is, thirty two legs. Is it fourteen arms, think, or something like that? Sixteen, no, sixteen I think. Yes. Lot of legs and very very fierce looking.
And his main face is a buffalo, buffalo’s head. Yes. Yes. Well, that’s a really beautiful picture though, and it gives you the colors. Yes.
Wonderful. Yes. So anyway, Geshe-la is planning to give this initiation sometime in the new year, sometime this year. So this is the is the deity that will be involved. So we’ll be hearing anyway, we’ll be looking more at Yamāntaka as we go through the text.
Yes. Okay. You can all see that there. Might be an idea perhaps to put a chair. Oh, I think that’ll be okay.
So Yamataka anyway is the slayer of the lord of death because by achieving enlightenment, we defeat the lord of death. If we’re and enlightened beings have power over death. They basically, they’ve gone beyond death. Death is meaningless to them. They might share the aspect of of casting out of their bodies, but for them there’s no actual death.
So having to die and be born again and again is the mark of saṃsāra. This is the situation of all of us and the bodhisattvas take birth again and again from choice. Not the lower Bodhisattvas still haven’t managed to get off the wheel but the higher Bodhisattvas have actually gone past the need or the nothing so much the need, compulsion to be born again and again under the influence of karma and delusion. So these two things, karma and deluded mental states, as we learn in Graduated Path teachings that keep us in bondage, that keep us cycling in saṃsāra. And Bodhisattvas reach a level where they are beyond that.
But they don’t then just remain in nirvana like a Hīnayāna practitioner would at that stage. But they keep on taking birth again and again compassion to keep on working for sentient beings and to keep on working towards complete enlightenment where they will have the perfect powers to help sentient beings. But these bodhisattvas are not experiencing suffering because their minds have actually transcended the state of bondage to saṃsāra. So although they’re experiencing the physical aspect of death, although they’re going through this aspect of dying, there’s for us that’s a suffering. For us that’s one of the great sufferings.
But for the Bodhisattva, it’s there’s no suffering. And they do it voluntarily and they do they do these things with great joy. They encounter all the different experiences that the beings encountering worldly existence with great joy because they’re doing it for the sake of others and because they’ve transcended within their own mind streams the cause of suffering. So they don’t experience any sort of suffering whatsoever. These greater bodhisattvas don’t.
The lower bodhisattvas do still experience suffering but they never really feel unhappy because their minds are in a state of happiness because of their joy at working for others and because they’re bearing these hardships for the sake of others. And so a Bodhisattva, even the lowest Bodhisattvas are experiencing continual happy mental states. Yamāntaka is carrying a lot of weapons. He’s holding a lot of weapons. And although in the pictures that I was looking at it was hard to see very clearly, but he’s got thirty four hands, sorry, Thirty four hands and sixteen legs.
I was getting a bit mixed up there, which is I’ve got no excuse for that because I knew perfectly well. But okay. So he has thirty four hands and sixteen legs. But that know, he doesn’t really need to worry about all these things unless you take them initiation, then you’ll be told to visualize these things. But he has oh, by the way, that picture I can’t see.
Is that the solitary hero, Yamāntaka, or does he have a consort? Yes. So usually the one that we visualize is the solitary hero, the one that doesn’t have a consort. But all these pictures, all the pictures I managed to find except for the tiny one are all with consort, but the tiny one on the postcard is solitary hero. That’s the initiation that’s given most frequently.
So, anyway, to get back to Yamāntaka, he has in one of his thirty four hands, is actually holding one of these weapons. And this weapon is something that they used to use in India, in ancient India. I said something about that in my notes somewhere, but I seem to have lost the track. Oh, I did talk about that. Okay.
It’s in the notes that I went through last week. So it’s like a little little circle, a little disc with blades around the edge. Maybe three something like that. And they were thrown when you got into closer combat, when you started to get a bit closer to the enemies, then you would throw one of these things at them before coming to your hand to hand combat with swords or whatever. And so this I’ve actually seen some of these, I think, in the Kathmandu Museum and they look pretty nasty.
And these so apparently Yamāntaka is holding one of these and it’s being it’s being used here as the example of a weapon that we have to use to attack self-cherishing. And we’re going to be dealing with two wheels of sharp weapons. One is our karma, which brings the result of our wrong actions on us. So that’s what we’re experiencing every time we experience suffering, every time we experience problems, bad conditions, whatever. This is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons.
And against that, we have to offset Yamāntaka’s wheel of skillful actions destroying self-cherishing. And so this is what this teaching is going to help us to do. So any questions up to this point? So that concludes the first verse and that’s the homage which is actually not numbered. And then we get on to the actual first stanza, stanza one.
In jungles of poisonous plants strut the peacocks, the medicine gardens of beauty lie near. The masses of peacocks do not find gardens pleasant but thrive on the essence of poisonous plants. So I’ll go on for a few more stanzas, the brave bodhisattvas remain in the jungle of worldly concern. No matter how joyful this world’s pleasure gardens, these brave ones are never attracted to pleasures, but thrive in the jungle of suffering and pain. We spend our whole life in the search for enjoyment yet tremble with fear at the mere thought of pain.
Thus, since we are cowards, we are miserable still. But the brave Bodhisattvas accept suffering gladly and gain from their courage a true lasting joy. Now desire is a jungle of poisonous plants here. Only brave ones like peacocks can thrive on such fare. If cowardly beings like crows were to try it because they are greedy, they might lose their lives.
So this is a famous analogy from this text. The analogy of the peacocks. We used to have peacocks at Chenrezig Institute and they would eat all sorts of things. So I used to think when I used to see them going around and pecking at all the different kinds of grasses and plants that probably there are some plants that they can eat that are poisonous to perhaps human beings or to stock that or maybe to crows and that the Indians would have noticed this, observed this, and taken this analogy from that fact. So it’s said that the poison actually made their colors more beautiful.
Instead of being poisoned to the peacocks, they could digest it and it would actually not only be food for them, but it would enhance their beauty. So the peacocks would actually prefer the poisonous plants and they wouldn’t be interested in the other plants which are considered to be medicinal or harmless because these plants wouldn’t have the same effect of enhancing their beauty so they choose to stay in the poisonous gardens, in the poisonous pastures or whatever. So the bodhisattvas compared to the peacock because he or she can remain without danger among the various sufferings of saṃsāra and the various circumstances, the various conditions which in ordinary people stimulate delusion, give rise to delusion. And so the bodhisattva not only can remain safe among these circumstances which would be too dangerous for others. But they can actually use these circumstances to enhance their practice.
So in other words, they can use these circumstances in the path. They, being in contact with the circumstances that normally in sentient beings give rise cause them to give rise to anger or attachment, desire or aversion. They the Bodhisattvas, instead of that actually are able to make their practice stronger and they’re actually able to advance on the path through these circumstances. So they’re able to do this, they’re strong enough to do this because they’ve generated bodhicitta. And they have this mind which is really glad, really happy to take on the sufferings, various sufferings for the sake of sentient beings.
So, for this reason, they’re referred to as being brave or dauntless is another translation. So they’re referred to as being the brave bodhisattvas. And this is actually a reference to the Tibetan word for bodhisattva. So, or actually, also the Sanskrit word Bodhisattvas are not so good on the Sanskrit, but it seems to have a similar connotation. So, in Tibetan it’s called Jangchub Sempa. You know a lot of Tibetan words end in pa and it just indicates a noun, a masculine noun.
But this is a different pa. It’s spelled differently and it’s actually pronounced differently to the Tibetans. It wouldn’t sound the same. It’s a stronger, longer vowel sound. So this Jangchub Sempa has the the pa comes from pawo, which means hero or or brave being.
So you come across this when we do the Guru Puja, you know, we do, you know, the the verse or invited all the Tathagatas and the heroes and heroines to come and partake in the feast of the torma. So it invites the pawos that you get the heroes to to come along with all the other holy beings who are being invited. It’s it’s this word, pawo. And here they’ve taken that syllable, the first syllable from their pa, having the meaning of being brave. And you find the same pa in Vajrasattva, Dorje Sempa.
It means vajra heroic mind. So it’s not the ordinary pa, it’s this pa meaning brave. And so we ‘re talking about these Bodhisattvas who have this very brave mind, this heroic mind. And you find that some translators like to translate the the term Bodhisattva as awakening warrior, which I think is a horrible translation. But it does convey that idea of of courage.
Actually, reminds me of another story. If I was to tell you the whole of this story from the beginning to end, it would tell take me the whole session because it was everybody who’s traveled has their worst their worst journey story, their worst traveling story. This is my worst traveling story. Seems like everything went wrong on this journey that could have possibly gone wrong. And it started off with our bus breaking down in the bus station before it even got going.
And then it went further with us almost being left behind at a river, we left behind by the bus when we stopped for lunch because we managed to find it again because it had gone down to wait at the river for the ferry. And then it went on a bit further with us actually breaking down we were breaking down all the time, like you, regularly all along the road. It finally broke down permanently when we’re in the middle of Bihar, just coming on dark in the middle of this remote piece of country infested with dacoits. And then somehow we managed to get ourselves to the nearest town by hitching a ride on a bus which was also very tremendously crowded. And then we managed to get our train and then somehow we managed to not be informed that we that the train didn’t go all the way to Pathankot and we had to get off at a previous station a few kilometers outside Pathankot.
So we didn’t get off at the right station and then we suddenly realized that we were being carried on and the train was sort of instead of going on to Pitancot and it suddenly took a left turn and we were heading off to Kashmir. And so we got carried off to Jammu. And then we had to get get out at Jammu and catch the male train back again. And while we were on the so I’m sorry about all diversion, but I couldn’t resist telling you the story. And by the time we got back to Pathankot on the mail train, it was too late to catch the bus up, so we had to spend a night in Pathankot and then catch our bus the next day.
But while we were on the mail train, there were all these drunken soldiers on board, or at least the officer was drunk, and he got talking to us. And there were two of us. There was a nun from New Zealand and myself, and he was saying, oh, see you ladies carry your own packs. He said, you’re soldiers. He said, I’m a soldier, you’re a soldier.
Soldiers always carry their own packs. And so in a way, just sort of struck a note with us that there was that similar similarity that in a way you’re not although you’re not fighting the external enemies, you need a lot of the same qualities that applied yes, internally. But you you still need to have all that sort of determination and courage and also skillful means because no matter how determined and brave the soldiers are, if they if they have inferior weapons, they’re going to be shot to pieces. So we have to have good weapons and that’s why we have to be presented by these lineage gurus with these teachings such as this one, Wheel of Sharp Weapons, which give us the effective weapons to to handle the the enemy, which has some pretty good weapons of its own. That’s right, yes.
Yes, you have to have your equipment. Yes, you have to have everything, yes. Okay, so that’s right. We do need to have a good range of equipment so that we can sort of handle all different situations of combat that are likely to be occurring. So that’s another that’s a good point.
So the bodhisattva is the heroic being who can handle all of these situations and those who are not bodhisattvas are compared to crows who can’t handle these poisons. So they’re referred to as being cowards. But actually, it’s it’s not meant to be a challenge to rush out and eat the poisons, but it’s meant to recognize your situation. And if if you recognize yourself as being a crow, then you you have to take what’s appropriate for a crow. That’s right.
Yes. So there’s a warning in there too. So at at at various stages of practice. Yes. So I have to recognize what’s appropriate at this stage of practice and we also hope to develop.
So because we’re not bodhisattvas, I’m not really talking about anybody here because you could all be Bodhisattvas as far as I know, but I’m just working on the assumption that if you come along here to listen to these teachings, that most likely you’re you’re not quite which could be quite wrong because somebody might be showing the aspect to for some particular reason to help us. So But anyway, because we’re not bodhisattvas, we’re endangered by the external factors that are the conditions that give rise to attachment and aversion. And of course, we know worldly life is full of these circumstances. We’re continually encountering circumstances to give rise to attachment and aversion. And as it says in the verses, we fear sufferings and hardships arising in the course of our Dharma practice.
So that’s one part of it. And also we’re tempted by by meaningless samsaric pleasures. So it’s very hard for us to resist an opportunity to enjoy