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 unpacks stanza seven of the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, showing how suffering arises from belief in a “truly existent self.” She opens with the striking image of a hermit yogi who learned to sleep without moving to avoid disturbing snakes—an illustration of mental discipline. McAndrew then lays out the causal chain: fundamental ignorance creates ego-grasping, which generates self-cherishing and uncontrolled wandering through saṃsāra. She distinguishes how Hīnayāna practitioners reject pride while Bodhisattvas accept respect specifically to serve others better. Through examples—a table reduced to its parts, a rope mistaken for a snake—she shows how we project true existence onto conventionally existing things. She navigates between two extremes: eternalism (false permanence) and nihilism (no self), finding the middle way. Practical methods like remembering impermanence and understanding karma provide foundations for eventually realizing emptiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 SW 1999 02 11.mp3
UUID: ab29883b-b6a2-4f29-95bb-24a1f36820e1
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-02-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~5,398
But during this time when he was living in the wilds, he found that he would shelter in sleep in caves or so on, and the snakes would just come up and curl up next to him for his body heat. So he had to learn how to sleep without moving all through the night until daylight, and not turn over in his sleep or anything. So he just had to develop this capacity to remain perfectly still while he was sleeping. And that really requires quite a lot of mental control. And he just did that out of sheer survival instinct.
Well, I guess it’s something to think about for yourself. So anyway, yes, it does make the point here that snakes, and tigers, and poisonous plants and so on are the ones that we have to contend with are our delusions of attachment. So we have plenty of those. So to give rise to pride is something that the Hīnayāna practitioner wants to avoid at all costs and they would prefer to go and associate with tigers. So the Bodhisattva, we go seeking things like pride, like the cause of pride, because we don’t realize how much it harms us.
We like to receive praise and compliments and to be respected by others and to be given a position where we’re paid attention to and considered to be superior and so on. So we like these things because we’re caught up in attachment. Not talking about you people, but this is worldly beings in general like these things. They seek them because it makes them feel good. Bodhisattvas and Hīnayāna practitioners understand the dangers of these things and so they don’t seek them for their own sake.
But a bodhisattva would accept the respect of others and would accept being invited to sit on a higher throne and so on, so as to be able to influence others, to be able to help others. And because they have this great love and cherishing of others, they’re able to accept this situation and any sort of attachment that might arise, are able to take in the path through transforming it, through the understanding that they have of how to do this, and through the fact that they’re protected by their love and compassion for others. Stanza seven. So, this verse really has a lot of material in it, because it’s explaining how all our problems and sufferings are caused by ego grasping. It’s explaining how it all comes about.
So in the previous verse, mentioned that our problems really come about from self-cherishing. First of all, we have these First of all, mentioned that our problems come about from the delusions, especially desire. But in general, the three delusions: desire, aversion and confusion. And these hurt us because of having self-cherishing, but it’s because of the ignorance of the actual ways that exist that we have these. It’s because of ego grasping that we have these problems, that we have this problem of self-cherishing.
And we have this problem of ego grasping because of our underlying ignorance of the actual way that things exist, including ourselves. So, there’s a whole series of processes going on here. So that was sort of like a backwards explanation. So explaining it in a forward way of how these things cause each other. There’s first of all, we have this ignorance of the actual way that things exist, which gives rise to a distorted view of the self, which is a distorted view of the self, there’s this sense of a truly existent self, which is basically synonymous with our ignorances to the way things really exist.
Because the way things really exist is lack of self existence, lack of truly existent self. But because of our ignorance of this, we see things as existing with a truly existent self. And particularly when we apply that to ourselves, it’s very damaging. It then causes us to have this self-cherishing. And then, because we this sense of self which needs to be protected, so it says: We grasp at egos as real.
Uncontrollable wandering through realms of existence is caused by our grasping at ego as real. So this translation uses the term ego. That could be an awkward translation because the word the connotation of ego isn’t exactly what the same as any term that’s used in Tibetan or in Sanskrit. But on the other hand, it’s very good in that it has that sense of self centeredness about it. So we have this sense of a truly existent self.
If we didn’t have a sense of truly existent self, then there would be nothing for a sense of self centeredness to gravitate around. But because we have that sense of a truly existent self, which is wrong, which is mistaken, then we have this egotistical feeling, this self centeredness. Just seeing everything is revolving around ourself. And then because of that, there’s also a feeling that ourself is vulnerable, that it needs protection. And as a result of this, then we want security for our ego.
So it says: This ignorant attitude heralds a demon of selfish concern for our welfare alone. We seek some security for our own egos. We want only pleasure and shun any pain. But now we must banish all selfish compulsion and gladly take hardship for all others sake. So, that’s a lot of teaching in one sense.
The basic underlying problem is this sense of a truly existent I, and truly existent self of all phenomena. So, this really has two main objects: The self which is our internal sense of our self and the external sense of a truly existent self of phenomena, which includes other people. We include other people in that category of external phenomena. And the internal sense of self is our own sense of I. Yes, emptiness is the way things really exist.
The lack of this truly existent self. Yes, emptiness, voidness, lack of truly true existence, lack of inherent existence. It means nothing, no. I’ll go on about that a bit. Yes, well I haven’t got a lot of time to go on about it tonight.
But anyway, this is a really important topic, and it’s very important for this group, I think, to start to think about these things because you’re basically getting to the point where you know enough about some of the basic topics to be able to go on to some of these more difficult topics. So at least to start looking into them. So, it’s very important that we should start to examine into these things, and to at least begin the process of getting a feel for them. These expressions about self, about ego, about the I, about lack of self existence, lack of true existence, It all seems very confusing. We have to familiarise ourselves and to understand what they mean.
You might have the thought arising, what’s wrong with having a sense of self? You might think I’m saying there’s something wrong with having a sense of self. You might say what’s wrong with taking care of myself because if I don’t, nobody else will. That’s very true. Yes.
Yes. No, I think that’s a very good question. I think these curly ones are By looking into these curly ones, it’s how we start to get a fix on what it really means. Yes. But the thing is that you’re Yes.
What do you think? What does somebody else think about that? Okay, it’s important to realise that we do exist. And when we talk about lack of Yes. Yes, even I heard to a certain extent still have a certain amount of self grasping.
Although it’s very subtle in them compared to what we have. They Yes. Yes. Well, We’re getting a lot of different questions now. I think I’ll go back to Helena’s.
When you’re talking about having compassion and love for others, of course, the Hīnayāna practitioners do attain liberation from saṃsāra. And they do also have love and compassion for others, but not much as a bodhisattva. It’s not a major facet of their practice. But they do cultivate it. They do think it’s important.
But it’s I don’t know that it’s I’m not sure that it’s necessary to achieve liberation on the Hīnayāna path. But to achieve enlightenment, love and compassion is necessary and it’s also tremendously helpful. It makes it a lot easier to overcome the self grasping. To attain enlightenment, we have to put ourselves at the service of others. There’s no other way.
But it is possible to achieve liberation without having the motivation. In fact, if you have the motivation of just wanting to help others and putting your whole being at the service of others, then you would have to you would not be able to achieve the liberation of the Hīnayāna path. You would have to achieve enlightenment. Whereas the Hīnayāna this is a technical point, so maybe we can leave that at the moment. I think we don’t need to go on and on about that.
It’s a bit technical. But it it seemed to come up there. But you said something about narcissism. Yes. That’s very true.
Yes, it’s the attitude with which we do it that comes. If we But basically in Mahāyāna teachings, it actually does tell us to eventually put others ahead of you, yourself. But it also teaches you that that’s the best welfare for yourself. You can get up in the morning and think, can bring your whole day into the Mahāyāna practice by getting up in the morning, setting your motivation first thing in the morning, thinking, may I spend this whole day working for the welfare of sentient beings? And then you just try to bring the various events of the day into the Dharma practice.
When you’re doing something like eating your breakfast, just while you offer your food to the Three Jewels to accumulate merit and you dedicate that merit for the welfare of sentient beings and then you eat your breakfast and you think that you’re eating it to strengthen your body so as to be able to bring about the welfare of sentient beings and then you go off to work and you think that you’re earning your living so as to have the material needs you need so that you can sustain this life so as to be able to continue your Dharma practice and so on and so forth. You know, there’s just no end to it. So it doesn’t have to be done in a self centered way. Can So that’s why we do these thought training practices. It teaches us how to reverse our self centered attitude.
And we’re going to learn various techniques which give us ways of thinking that we can bring into our daily life so that whenever something happens, we understand how we can bring it into the path. And that’s the path to enlightenment. Yes. Well, we do there’s always this tendency for our ego to take over anything we’re doing. But if we take our Dharma teachings and studies seriously and earnestly, and understand and check our minds the way we’re taught to, then we work to overcome that.
So of course, if we start helping people, then we’re going to think we’re The thought’s going to rise in our minds that maybe we’re pretty good. It’s natural. And you have to be aware when you see that coming up. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help others. But also sometimes it means we don’t have to be going around helping others.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to right now start running around helping others. We might not have the skillful means. But we can be working for others in our daily lives just by bringing the sort of enlightenment into it all the time. So it’s a bit like somebody who’s training to be a doctor, you know. You don’t say that they’re selfish because they’re not running around helping people, they’re trying to cure people because they go off to medical college and do their training, because obviously they have to have the capacity before they can do it.
In the same way we have to train ourselves, but that training, that development is is really helping others, because we’re doing it to prepare ourselves to be able to do that effectively. So, Talking about self-cherishing and cherishing others, and how this relates to our ego grasping and sense of self. We have to understand that the basic cause of our problems is the mistaken sense of a truly existent self, or an inherently existent self. These are similar terms. Talking about inherently The lack of an inherently existent self is the Nagarjunian explanation of emptiness.
Whereas truly existent is the lower schools. So talking about inherent existence is more subtle than true existence. But if we can gain an understanding of what true existence means, and what lack of true existence means, then we’re doing pretty well. So we want to gain an understanding of these things. And I feel that this group really is ready to start to examine some of these concepts.
And I actually came across what I thought was quite a good explanation for people who starting off in a book by Jeffrey Hopkins, which is called the Tantric Distinctions. It has a very good explanation of some of these things, and also quite a lot about bodhicitta. And you don’t have to be thinking of starting Tantric practice to have a look at that book. It’s got a lot of things which are very helpful to the general practitioner. So I’d suggest that that might be a good one to have a look at.
Jeffrey, with a J, Hopkins. A well known scholar. Most of his books are very technical, but he also has got quite a talent for explaining things at a basic level. And in this book he’s explaining, it’s based on some talks that he gave to people who were starting off at a basic level. So we need to study the topic of emptiness and try to gain some conceptual understanding of what emptiness means.
You probably all know, or most of you would know, that we eventually have to understand emptiness at a non conceptual level. The real understanding of emptiness is the non conceptual awareness of the emptiness of true existence, which has to be attained in deep meditation. And it’s an experience of meditative insight, is gained in single pointed concentration, and which is an extremely powerful awareness which cuts away the false view. But before we can gain that, we have to understand what it is that we’re meditating on, and so we have to study and we have to gain a conceptual awareness of this lack of of true existence. And in order to do that, first of all, have to understand what is we’re refuting.
It’s very difficult because we’re so caught up in this false view that we can’t see how it is that we have this false view. It’s very difficult. Lovers can talk and talk about what it means, but we’re so habituated to this false view that we can, that we keep on seeing it. It’s just habitual to us and it keeps on arising, and it’s just there. And it’s very hard for us to see how we’re seeing things wrong, until somehow a little bit of a glimmer of insight starts to come in through our listening to the Lamas, through studying.
It’s particularly good if we can listen to high Lamas explaining these things, because somehow their presence has some sort of power about it. But if we can just start to think about these things beforehand, then we’ll be a little bit more prepared to get that glimmer when we do encounter a lama. So it’s good to study and it’s good to try to get a feeling for what it is we’re trying to refute. And we need to get a lot of reasonings, a lot of different reasonings, lot of different ways of looking at the problem. Because in this way, it’s like getting a sight on something from different angles.
If you want to find out where something is, if you look at it from different angles. For instance, if you’re trying to get radar on it, can get radar from different angles and find out where it is. I’m not sure whether that’s a good analogy, I might have my radar wrong, but basically yes, or if they want to find out where a star is, have to get a parallax on it, you know. So then you can find out exactly where it is. So we have to sort of look at it from different ways and we can start to identify it and see where it’s where we’re going wrong.
And eventually we can start to identify this false view of true existence. We can get the idea, because we have all these complicated reasonings, we can get the idea that emptiness is terribly complicated. And in actual fact, emptiness is not complicated. It’s something very simple. Lama Yeshe used to tell us, he used to say, when you realize emptiness, emptiness is so simple, Śūnyatā is so simple.
And he said, you people, you make it complicated because your minds are so complicated. So you can’t see it because it’s so simple that you just can’t see it. So Lama Yeshe, of course, could see it. So the fact is that we have to start off from where we’re at. But when these Yogis do realise emptiness, it’s kind of like stunning to them because they realise how simple it is, and it’s just been right there in front of them all the time and they couldn’t see it because they were looking in the wrong place.
So we have to distinguish between what is to be refuted and what’s actually there. And lack of true existence doesn’t mean that there’s no self. So the middle way school, we have to find the middle way. And there’s always these two extremes that have to be avoided. So I’ve been talking about the false sense of true existence.
And that is the extreme of eternalism. They refer to that as the extreme of eternalism. And that’s the one that we instinctively fall into and that we tend to have all the time. But then when we start to learn about all these things, we might start to think perhaps this means that there’s no self. Thinking that way Thinking that there is no self is the other extreme, that’s the extreme of nihilism.
So we have to avoid that extreme also. And there is a self, there’s a functional conventional self, but it’s not truly existent in the sense that It’s middle way. So we have to find out what these two extremes are and steer the course between them. So we have to understand what is is it that we’re refuting, and we’re refuting these two wrong views. And if we fall into either of them then we’ve gone too far in one direction.
Particularly looking within ourselves. We start off by looking at our own self or I. And there’s a false assumption of a concrete, permanent, truly existent self. This what’s meant by the truly existent self, it’s something that doesn’t change and something which exists from its own side, which exists without dependence, without depending on anything else. So we One of the most important logics is to examine the dependence of phenomena, and seeing whether the phenomena that we’re viewing as being truly existent is dependent on something else.
So a favorite example, of course, is a table. And you look at the table and you can see that the table depends, for one thing, it depends on its parts. It depends on having a top and having legs or whatever you call the sides of this thing. And if you were to take it apart, then where’s the table? You can see that if you took this table apart, you’d only have some pieces of wood.
But when you put them together, there’s a table. So you can see that that table is just labeled on these parts. But at the same time, we have this feeling, this instinctive feeling. We don’t have to be taught it, it just arises from the time a baby is crawling around examining the furniture in the house. It feels that there’s some sort of truly existent item there, even though it might not have the name table to put on it, there’s this sort of label of a thing that has a particular form of existence, and that form of existence is a truly existent object.
As soon as we put the pieces of wood together, then we’ve got a truly existent table, and we somehow feel that that table has always been there, it’s always existed as a table. We don’t have that feeling of it being dependent. I suppose it’s related to karma. It’s related to our conditioning from beginningless time. A cat would identify as being truly existent, a truly existent thing to sit on.
Or a truly existent thing on which its food has been placed so that it can’t get at it easily, or something like that. Yeah. So definitely animals have a sense of true existence. They can’t think about it philosophically. We can have a level of philosophy.
We can have learned wrong views, which reinforce our instinctive ones. But we still have The animals still have the instinctive ones. The newborn baby has the instinctive mistaken view. It immediately starts screaming for food and it feels that its mother’s breast is truly existent. And its hunger is truly existent.
And everything is truly existent, but it’s capable of observing. There’s a lot of logics about true and independent existence. Only highly realized beings, only what they call ārya beings can recognize lack of true existence directly. Directly. And even for the Ārya being, when they come out of meditation, although they know they’re not taken in by the appearance of true existence, they still see that appearance.
So it’s the They come out of meditation. Yes, but they know that the cup of tea has no true existence, so they can put it on a non truly existent table. But the appearance of true existence still arises for them, until they’re back in meditation again. They have to gravitate between these two states. Yes.
That reinforces the process, but it doesn’t cause it because it’s there from birth. It’s there from last life and back beginninglessly, never started. If we’d ever been free of this, we’d never have had delusions arising. Once we’re totally free of the concept of true existence, we can never have any delusions again. Yes, isn’t it lovely?
But there’s only enlightened beings can be engaging in activities on the conventional plane, and at the same time be fully aware of the ultimate truth of lack of true existence. But the example I was thinking of in relation to the person who comes out of meditation is that they It’s like magicians in India. So in India, have these magicians who are not like our magicians who pull something out of the hat and it’s all sleight of hand. But they have magicians who can create hypnotic illusions. And for instance, they can have a box and they can make the box seem like, say, a cow.
And everybody thinks that there’s a cow there or an elephant. Say it’s an elephant, the magician has some means, through mantra or some such means, of casting a hypnotic spell on the audience to see this box as an elephant. But in order for that to work, the magician himself also sees the box as being an elephant. But the magician himself knows that it’s a box. So he sees the elephant, but he’s not taken in by it.
So then another person could come along late after the spell has been cast and sees a box, not under the spell. So basically, we’re like the audience who see an elephant and we’re completely taken in by it. We think that there’s really an elephant there. So we see true existence and we think that there’s really true existence there. Is it like western culture or It’s not just western culture, all cultures have this.
You could say Western culture hasn’t examined deeply into these things, whereas Eastern culture has, but it’s only the serious religious practitioners who understand these things in the East. The average person wouldn’t have any more idea of it than than the average westerner. So then the Ārya being who has experienced emptiness during their meditation, direct insight into their emptiness during their meditation, and then comes out of it. It’s like the magician who sees the elephant, but knows that it’s just a box. They’re not taken in by it, but still they see it.
It has that appearance of true existence. So to them, they come out, they see other people, they see their own self, they see their own personal identity, they see other things, inanimate objects, and they know that these things don’t have true existence. They’re not taken in by it, they’re not deceived by it, but at the same time, the appearance arises. And the enlightened being is like the person who comes along at the later on in the middle and just sees the box. In other words, they they don’t even have an appearance of true existence.
The Buddhas do have an appearance of conventional existence, but they know that there’s not the slightest trace of true existence in that conventional existence. Attachment arises because of us seeing true existence, where it doesn’t exist. This is the important point. Once we don’t Once we get over this tendency to see true existence, once we see the reality of emptiness of true existence, we’ll never be attached. Will never have aversion.
Will never have self-cherishing. All these things arise because of the sense of true existence. No. You can’t the analogy breaks down there, but the the Buddha so when when we’re talking about the elephant, we’re talking about true existence. That that’s the analogy for true existence is the illusory elephant.
We have this illusion that there is true existence, but there is no such thing. So it can be a confusing analogy because the the teaching of the conventional truth says that things exist like an illusion. But in this analogy, it’s a bit different. We’re not using the elephant as an illusion. We’re using the elephant as just the example.
The The box is the example of conventional existence, and the elephant is the example for true existence, which doesn’t really exist at all. Seeing something that doesn’t We’re seeing something all the time that doesn’t exist. Another analogy that might make it a bit more clear is the striped rope and the snake. I think this is a good one, because it’s a bit closer to what we’re actually seeing. We see the We come home in the dark and outside our house we see what looks like a snake.
And so we immediately become very frightened and perhaps we run off. And then we start to wonder that perhaps we’ve been mistaken, so we might come back and examine it more closely. And when we come back, we find that it wasn’t a snake, it was a striped rope coiled up on the path. So basically, our conventional existence That’s the example for our conventional existence, the striped rope. And seeing it as a snake is the way we project true existence onto the snake, onto the striped rope, onto the We project snake onto the striped rope.
And that’s the example of how we project true existence onto just a conventionally existing object, such as various pieces of wood which we label table. And then on the basis of having labelled as table, we project all sorts of things. We project it as being truly existent, and then we project it as being a desirable object. We want to have it, we have attachment. Somebody won’t let us have it, so we have anger.
Then we hate that person, then we have a feud, then we create negative karma. And this is the example of how we carry on in life. So basically, if we are taught how to examine these things, we can understand how we are projecting. So there’s nothing on that rope to create fear, there’s no snake there at all. And so there’s nothing to There’s no need to have that emotional reaction.
Yes. We do. In the long term, we have to I better finish up now. So anyway So basically, this is how Once we can realize emptiness, it’s going to solve all our problems. But it’s hard to realize emptiness, it’s not easy to understand.
So we have to work with methods that are going to make it easier for us in the earlier stages. And that’s why we need to have some powerful methods which are easy to understand. And these include such things as remembering impermanence, remembering death, remembering that we’re going to die. Remembering our remembering that our problems don’t come about because of the person, but because of our karmic results. So that when we blame the person, we’re blaming the wrong thing.
We should be blaming our own karma. These are easy to understand, these things, and we can put them into practice and they can be powerful for us. By advancing in our practice that way, then we can accumulate the causes and conditions to be able to realize, understand and realize emptiness. And also these short thought training practices that we’ll be learning in this text, The Wheel of Sharp Weapons. They give us all sorts of It will give us various powerful techniques to be able to transform situations that could have caused us to be angry and to create negative karma, or situations that could have caused us to give rise to attachment and to create negative karma that way.
Instead of that, we can be given techniques that are practical for us to put into practice now, techniques that are easy for us to understand and that can help us to transform our problems into helpful circumstances for our Dharma practice. Okay, but we have to bring in emptiness there because that’s It’s important to understand that that’s the underlying Yes, it’s the underlying thing that makes all the rest of it work. If we didn’t understand that there is this emptiness of true existence, then we wouldn’t understand that it was possible to get rid of our delusions. So we have to understand that that is what we’re eventually trying to bring about. Yes, well.
Yes, so if anybody there has very powerful previous existing impressions or latencies on their consciousness, then that could happen. Oh, yes. The the first patient, then the first person. Yes. First.
Yes. Yes. So what about Mephistopheles? He’s he’s the example for self-cherishing. That’s right.
Yes, found that in actual fact by following all by getting what he wanted, following all of his attachments, he actually created more suffering for himself and other people. Yes. Yes. So there’s a moral in that, that sometimes we’re fortunate that we don’t have too much good conditions, too much power, too much wealth, too much pleasure. We’re better off safer having to battle out with a few difficulties and a few sort of ego crushing experiences.
Okay. Maybe I have time to stop. Page five. Next, after that. 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.