Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Margaret McAndrew uses the vivid peacock and crow metaphor to explore how self-cherishing becomes the root of all delusions. Bodhisattvas, like peacocks, thrive on the poison of worldly engagement, transforming it into spiritual growth; ordinary practitioners, like crows, must instead withdraw from dangerous circumstances. McAndrew traces how ego-grasping gives rise to self-cherishing, which spawns attachment, aversion, and confusion, generating harmful actions and karma that reinforce delusions and cycle us through saṃsāra. She carefully distinguishes self-cherishing from genuine self-respect, clarifying how even self-deprecation springs from the same self-centered root. The teaching points toward Lojong methods as practical techniques for reversing this energy and replacing self-cherishing with compassionate concern for others.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 SW 1999 02 18.mp3
UUID: f5f92468-1191-45a8-949d-3e3156cbeb61
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-02-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~5,243
On the previous on all of the previous Okay. If you’ve got some background in the Dharma teachings already, you won’t find it difficult. But anyway, just to fill you in, we’re studying this text which is by the Indian teacher, Dharmarakshita, and it was brought to Tibetan by a teacher, the great Indian scholar who came to Tibet. It’s been found by many great teachers subsequently to be extremely effective. It’s also very practical for those of us who are still just getting started on the thought training practices.
It’s very useful to us. And it’s training us in how to transform our deluded mental states into positive energy on the path to enlightenment. So, in the previous verses, the previous stanzas that we’ve been through, it’s been giving us the comparison between Bodhisattvas and peacocks. The analogy is that the Bodhisattva is like a peacock because the peacock is supposed to be able to thrive on poisonous plants. And bodhisattvas can live in the world, engage in worldly activities.
They don’t have to separate themselves and distance themselves from the objects, which in ordinary people would, be too dangerous in giving rise to the delusions such as attachment and anger, So because the bodhisattvas are very strong, because they’re very courageous, they’re able to not only encounter these things, but actually transform them and use them to make their practice even stronger. And that’s compared to the peacocks eating the poisonous plants and actually making the colors of their feathers more beautiful. And so we have to keep in mind that we’re not, presumably bodhisattvas yet. But, so there are other beings who are compared to crows. If the crows were to eat the poisonous plants, it would harm them and probably kill them.
And so those beings who are like crows and not like bodhisattvas have to be very very wary, they have to follow the practice of separating them selves from dangerous circumstances of going away perhaps into retreat or into monasteries and hiding themselves from situations that would give rise to their delusions. Particularly when they reach a certain level on the path, they go into solitary retreat. They keep away from other beings. They avoid any sort of circumstance that might be a distraction to their practice. Whereas the bodhisattvas actually seek out circumstances where they can help others because of their great love and compassion.
So we have to keep in mind that we might be perhaps more like crows at the moment, but at the same time we’re aspiring to be bodhisattvas. And so we have to engage in the practices that are going to help us to develop this capacity that the bodhisattvas have. And this text The Wheel of Sharp Weapons is very very helpful because it’s dealing at a very basic and practical level with transforming our minds, transforming our harmful circumstances into positive circumstances, and actually transforming our deluded mental states into positive energy on the path, which is generally thought of as being a Tantric practice. This isn’t a Tantric text, but it is a text which actually does begin to bring in this idea of actually transforming our negative mental energy into positive energy. So we can do this kind of thought training.
We might not be able to do the more advanced type of tantric practices such as meditating on Heruka or meditating on Guhyasamāja or whatever other practices. Maybe some of us are doing these practices, but we probably find that it’s very difficult to do these practices really well to really be doing them on the level of the, what’s called the development stage practices. So it’s something that we have to work towards gradually, but this text is something that’s very basic and practical for us. In order to overcome our delusions, it’s not enough to just space out and have some sort of positive thought about ourselves. For instance, we learn that it’s important to replace our negative self image with a positive self image, and this is the kind of practice we do when we do Tantric Meditation.
And we might practice Chenrezig and visualize ourselves after having received the initiation, visualize ourselves in the form of Chenrezig or Yamāntaka or whatever other Tantric deity we might be practicing. And in this way we’re replacing the mundane, the low view that we have of ourselves, the idea that we have of ourselves as being inferior, as being limited, as being full of problems and sufferings with a a pure, perfect view of ourselves. But it’s not enough to just space out and visualize ourselves as Chenrezig or Yamataka or whatever. We have to thoroughly understand the nature of the delusions. And these things are explained in the Graduated Path and in the philosophical teachings.
And last week we were going through stanza seven and this was explaining how wandering in saṃsāra, going from life to life, going from being born through life, dying, being born again, and always encountering different kinds of sufferings. All of this is brought about by our ego grasping. Out of this ego grasping, there then arises self-cherishing and other delusions. Does anybody want to ask any questions about this? Okay.
So, in actual fact the self-cherishing itself is not so harmful, but what is harmful is the states that come out of it. And that’s why self-cherishing is given such a bad name here in this text. Because in actual fact, it’s possible even with still having some self-cherishing if it’s combined with wisdom, it’s possible to attain nirvana. But it’s the underlying condition of all our other delusions. If we can overcome self-cherishing, then we can very effectively change all these other deluded attitudes that we have.
Then we’ll be able to really advance in our Dharma practice. If we’re able to do away with self-cherishing, then we’ll be able to do away with all the obstacles to our practice. We’ll be able to really quickly accumulate the cause to make progress, to reach a state which is a state of happiness for ourselves and which is beneficial for others. So we can really create cause for our own happiness and create the cause to be beneficial for others through cutting off self-cherishing. So what we have to do is to replace self-cherishing with cherishing others.
So what this means is that we have this energy within ourselves, which at the moment is directed towards cherishing ourselves. And what we’re trying to do is to swing that energy around so that it’s going in a different direction. Instead of going inwards towards ourselves cherishing ourselves, it’s going to go towards others cherishing Somebody might think: Isn’t it supposed to be good to love yourself? To take care of yourself? To have a positive attitude towards yourself?
Is anybody thinking about this? Yeah, did we? Okay, what did we Sorry, sometimes I forget when we talked about these things. What did we conclude? Mhmm.
Right. So, yes, the point is that when we’re self-cherishing, it’s a deluded kind of attitude. So it’s possible to is necessary actually to have positive self respect and a kind of love for ourselves which is a genuine love, wanting ourselves to have the best. Not this sort of self-cherishing that’s always putting ourselves first and not caring about others that just wants to grab everything for ourselves, that just wants to perhaps push other people out of the way, even if it means hurting them, if that’s what we feel we need. So it’s a very limited sort of attitude and it’s based on the distorted view of self grasping, grasping at a truly existent self.
So, positive love for ourselves is something quite different. It’s important to learn to distinguish between this negative self-cherishing, which is just what we mean generally when we talk about being selfish or being egotistical. We all recognize the syndrome. Mhmm. Yes, that’s very true, yes.
When we have this real true love for ourselves, and we won’t fall into that negative putting ourselves down either. In fact, this translation uses a very good term which is selfish concern. And you can say that whether we’re boosting our egos and being arrogant and proud or whether we’re or being just totally self centered, or whether we’re being depressive about ourselves and seeing ourselves as being the most helpless person in the world and totally bad and all this kind of thing. It’s just two different manifestations of the same problem which is this self-cherishing, this selfish concern or this self centeredness. It takes different manifestations, maybe in the same person at different times.
But it all comes from this deluded attitude which is based on self grasping and then the self-cherishing arising out of the self grasping and then on the basis of that we have these other deluded attitudes. So it’s a mistake to think that putting yourself down is the opposite to self-cherishing. In actual fact it’s very much related to self-cherishing. Anytime we feel bad about ourselves, and also anytime we find ourselves grasping at the idea of wanting to think of ourselves as being superior to others or more important than others. All of these things really come from self-cherishing.
You can be sure that self-cherishing is in there. And when we’re working from a genuine, a positive attitude, then it makes the person feel calm. So if we’re feeling agitated or unhappy or over excited or have any sort of deluded emotion then we can be sure that there’s some sort of self centeredness at work underlying this attitude. Yes. Yes.
Actually, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes, I think that’s quite true.
Actually Western psychology seems to recognize that and also of course religions do. They may not actually spell it out in so many words, but it’s a sort of mechanism within us that somehow the way we treat ourselves reflects on the way we treat others, and the way we treat others reflects on the way we treat ourselves. Or a bit more accurate to say the way we feel about others. Our attitude towards others very much reflects on our attitude towards ourselves. If we go around being arrogant and putting others down, then deep within ourselves we’re going to feel terribly insecure and uncertain about ourselves.
Also if we have this sort of uncertainty about ourselves, are going to, no matter how much we try to be good to other people, we’ll find that sometimes we’ll be acting out of that arrogance. So as we learn to appreciate ourselves better, we also find that we see more to appreciate in other people. And also if we look outside ourselves and learn to appreciate other people better, we suddenly find that there’s a lot more to appreciate in ourselves. So it really works together. If you’re wondering which you should give more emphasis to, it seems like you get the inner signal from yourself which you need to be working on.
Sometimes we go through phases where we need to be working on our inner being, working introspectively. This might go on for quite some time. And at other times we seem to need to be working more extrovertedly, working, connecting with others. And you do get these messages if you learn to recognize the signals. I think everybody who’s been practicing Dharma for a while sometimes gets the feeling Oh I really need to get away and do a retreat or do a weekend with Geshe-la or something like that, you know.
And it’s not just an idea that this would be very good for your Dharma practice, but it’s like a really heartfelt feeling that this is the way, this is really what you need to do, the way you need a vitamin or something, you know, in your food. You know how it is if you’re not getting enough vitamins and you start really getting drawn towards foods that have the right vitamins in them. The same way in your Dharma practice you you get this feeling that you need to do certain things. You might get the feeling that you really need to do a retreat or to go over to India to spend more time to be with your teacher or whatever. On the other hand sometimes you really get the feeling that you’ve been doing too much concentration on yourself and you really need to be getting out there and doing something practical.
And that’s the other side of the equation. Maybe somebody has some sort of story they could tell us about this sort of Yes, so I think there’s a lot in that. I think that was supposed to be like a way of getting results without having to spend a lot of time in psychotherapy, wasn’t it? Like to give people a technique for dealing with their dealing with their lives. Anyway, certainly it seemed to have a lot of truth in it, yes.
Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, seems to me to be really the illness of our society. Because it’s so competitive, everybody really feels that they have to be competing with other people all the time, and that means that they automatically want to put other people down. And what that means psychologically is that at the same time this inner mechanism means that you’re putting yourself down at the same time and you can never feel really comfortable with yourself.
Whereas some other societies where people respect others, then you can see that not only does it have that kickback mechanism itself, but also that without having to go through a lot of effort, you you are sort of receiving respect and love and considerate from other people because everybody’s giving it to everybody else. Whereas in our society it’s kind of like if you give respect to somebody, it’s like you’re taking it away from yourself. Isn’t it? We sort of feel in a way that in a sense we’re reluctant to give respect to somebody unless we really it’s like we’re challenging that person to earn my respect and we make them earn it really hard because we have this sort of feeling that we’re taking something away from ourselves by giving respect to another. Whereas in other societies and also religious, you know, people who’ve really got into their religion, whether it’s Christianity or whatever, they see something to respect in everybody, even the most lowly person, even the most, you might say, sinful person.
But they see in their inner nature something that’s worthy of respect, and so they go treating everybody with respect. And that was what people saw in Mother Teresa. It wasn’t because she was helping these poor people in Calcutta. I mean some commentators have pointed out that probably she could have helped them more effectively in some ways by having more up to date medical techniques and so on, but that wasn’t what she was after. She was wanting to give them love.
And she actually said that the poor people don’t need your charity. What they need is, you know, they need to be appreciated. They need to really feel real love and to feel this sort of connectedness. And so it’s quite amazing when you do meet somebody who operates from that energy. Oh, oh, yes, not only the back of your head, sometimes.
Sometimes the front of your head, the top of your head. Can be, yes. So, you know, we make mistakes and we learn from our mistakes. But all the time you’re developing this inner wisdom. We have to learn to get in touch with our inner wisdom.
It’s an absolute part of the path. We don’t get to enlightenment just by relying on the words of our teachers. No matter how wise our teachers are, words are only a means to help us to make contact with our own inner wisdom. The more skillful a teacher is, the more skillful they are at helping us to get in contact with our inner wisdom. They don’t want us just going around and mechanically obeying them.
That’s not terribly useful. I think it can be very helpful. Yes. Yes, I think there’s a lot of that. Some people I know tend to blame the whole of Western society’s tendency to put ourselves down on that, perhaps because they had that kind of upbringing themselves.
But myself, looking around, I’m inclined to think that there’s more in it than that now. I’m inclined to think that the society is at least an equally strong influence as the hangover of the Judeo Christian thing. And of course in Christianity, although a superficial understanding of it tended to produce that, know, that mea culpa sort of thing, a deeper understanding and tuning into the love of Jesus and so on, tended to counteract that. It really was the difference between people who really had Christianity in their hearts, suppose you could say, and people who were just going through the motions. But certainly some of the stuff that came from the pulpits tended to fortify the impression.
So anyway Doesn’t really matter how it all started really, does it? The main thing is to get to the underlying cause, because all these things are still superficial, all these historical practices and so on are still really what we call conditions. They’re not causes. The causes are our karma and how we’ve behaved ourselves, what we’ve done in our previous lives, how we’ve developed our minds, how we’ve behaved towards others. So, that’s what we have to put right.
So anyway, to get back to this transforming of our energies, so what we have to do is to replace self-cherishing with cherishing others. So we have this energy and we have to reverse the direction of the energy. So it’s not just a question of stopping that energy or cutting it off, but of finding a positive direction to flow in. And this is what you do in Tantra. So when you get the the Sūtra teachings, it tends to be presented in terms of like cleaning the dirt off a mirror.
You just take the dirt and throw it away and it’s not there anymore. Whereas in Tantra we’re dealing with energies and these underlying energies don’t go away. What we have to do is change the direction from a positive to a from a negative to a positive direction. So we’re dealing with energies of body and mind and at the level at which they’re very connected. And they can’t be just switched off because they’re just basic physical and mental energy which has, since beginningless time, been flowing in these negative directions and thus creating saṃsāra for us.
But there’s no reason if we know how to go about it that we can’t switch them into a positive direction if we’re prepared to do the work and if we have the right guidance. So we actually need to do this because we need all our energies to attain enlightenment. So it strikes me that it’s a bit like being in a motor car, that you realize you’ve been driving in the wrong direction, so you don’t just switch off the ignition and sit there. You find out which way you should have gone and then you find out to get back there and you turn around and go off in the right direction. Yes.
Yes. So in in the Sūtra teachings, you just regard all that as dirt that has to be thrown away. Whereas in the Tantra teachings, it’s more like you’ve got it as an energy, a basic raw energy which has been going in the wrong direction and needs to be redirected, Which is actually very psychological. So Anyway, if anybody’s interested in understanding some of these things before I recommended Jeffrey Hopkins book Tantric Distinctions, which I read for the first time while I was in retreat. Actually I was quite impressed with the way he explained some of these concepts in very clear language, particularly in the earlier chapters.
You’re not necessarily interested in Tantra as such, you don’t have to read the chapters about Tantra, but preliminary chapters explaining the general path and leading up to his explanations on Tantra are very clear and very interesting. So as I said, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons is not a Tantric teaching, but it has a connection with Tantra has a connection with Tantric methods. So anyway, we went through stanza seven and saw how self-cherishing is based on the wrong conception of a truly existent self or ego. And this isn’t to say that we don’t have a self, we do have a conventional self. But on that conventional self, we label another concrete, much more sort of limiting sense of self which is false, which is what we call the truly existent self, because it isn’t truly existent.
Because it doesn’t exist. That we have this feeling that it does exist in a very very concrete way, in a very fixed way, in an unchanging way, which comes from its own side and is not dependent on other phenomena. Whereas when we examine into the way the self really does exist, we see it’s constantly changing, it’s not fixed, it’s not some kind of soul or essence, but it’s simply an ever changing continuum. And this is also very dependent on various other phenomena. I won’t go into all the details about all that, it’s very complicated teaching, but we have to see through this idea of this truly existent fixed self or ego, which is really the cause of all our problems.
Because since we have this very very strong idea, this strong instinctive idea which is mistaken, that we have this fixed ego or self, then because of that we have ego grasping. This gives rise to ego grasping. And because we have this ego grasping, then we have a desire for ego security. And because of that then self-cherishing arises, and because of our self-cherishing then we have all the other delusions like desire, greed, attachment, all the different kinds of attachment, pride, jealousy and so on. We have anger towards those we see as hurting us.
We have hatred. We have all of these different kinds of delusions. So all of these are basically caused or arise out of the fact that we have this wrong concept of the truly existent self. And it comes out of that concept of the truly existent self because of the fact that the self-cherishing arises that allows us to have all these other delusions. That’s really the wrong conception of mistaking the self for being the body.
So, now I have to find the stanza that I was at. So I’m looking for stanza eight, and it’s just over the page. No, here we are. So now we’re doing stanza eight. How would one of the students like to read it?
So, this is going on a bit. Last week we were learning about how the self came up. Out of this self-cherishing, then arises the three delusions of attachment, aversion and confusion. But it’s not to be confused with the ignorance of seeing a truly existent self. It’s to do with the kinds of ignorance such as ignorance of the past and future lives.
Not understanding that we have past and future lives. Not understanding karma. Not understanding the difference between right and wrong conduct. So we’re confused about all of these things. And as a consequence we have these delusions in our mind and we act out of them.
And we perform actions of body, speech and mind. And under the influence of these deluded mental states creating these actions, then we create karmic imprints which bring suffering. We create negative karma, which bring a result of suffering. Also the actions that we perform under the influence of these delusions, deluded mental states, they also reinforce our delusions. So when we act out of delusion, we create karma and we also reinforce delusion.
When we act out of anger, if we get angry and hit somebody, then that’s, not only going to mean that we get the negative karma, the negative karmic result, of being in some way harmed ourselves as a result of this action, but it also means that our anger gets stronger and stronger every time we act out of anger, and it becomes more and more difficult for us to control our anger when certain circumstances arise, such as meeting an irritating person. These things are mutually reinforcing. We create more and more karma and our delusions get stronger and stronger. This is why we keep on cycling in saṃsāra and suffering all the time, creating more and more cause of suffering. It’s mutually reinforcing all the time.
saṃsāra means circling, sometimes it’s translated as cyclic existence. And it has this machinery that keeps it going. That’s why when you look at the picture of the Wheel of Life, have the three animals in the center. The pig, the rooster and the snake. So that represents greed, hatred and ignorance or greed, hatred and confusion.
And they keep us going around and around. Sometimes going into the upper realm but never staying there, always going back to more suffering states again. And that’s the situation that we’re in. And it can be stopped, but the only way we can stop it is by understanding. So what we need to do is to have the correct knowledge.
This is why we’re fortunate to be in our present situation of having access to the knowledge that has been passed on by Buddha down through the lineage down to the present. So when we receive this knowledge and we can come to understand the causes that are keeping us in saṃsāra, that are keeping us in suffering, and we can understand how to go about bringing about a change in this process, how to bring about an end to this process. And when we study these causes, we also come to understand how much of a part self-cherishing plays in this process. And so then we can see, we can really have a clear idea of how beneficial it would be to be able to overcome self-cherishing and to replace it with cherishing others. Lama Yeshe always used to emphasize how the mind that cherishes others is a really happy mind.
How the mind that cherishes ourselves is a tight mind. When we cherish ourselves, when we’re caught up in self-cherishing, just regardless of all the other things that come from this self-cherishing, just the feeling of self-cherishing, the feeling of being centered on ourselves is a painful feeling, it’s an uncomfortable feeling, it’s a squeezing feeling in the chest. When we feel unselfish concern for others, when we reverse the self centeredness and feel some genuine caring, love, compassion for others, it’s an opening up feeling, it’s an outward flowing which is very comfortable, when it becomes strong is blissful. It’s a very light feeling, whereas self-cherishing is heavy. So even just to have this feeling in our hearts brings a tremendous reversal in the way we feel about ourselves, just in the way we feel in our state of happiness.
Of course we’re so habituated to self-cherishing, we might have some sort of pure love for a little while, pure compassion, and we might be feeling good and we think oh good, now I know what it’s like now, I’m going to do this all the time. And you know, well the Christians also have a very good saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, you know? I always remember when I was going to the Anglican church, our minister once preached a whole sermon on that. And I went out of church with very strong intention, good intention to never make any more good intentions. But it’s not the good intentions that are wrong, it’s just that it’s so difficult to keep it up.
In Buddhism it’s explained that this is because of our habituation since the beginningless time. That we’ve been following habitual actions of following the deluded mental states. We’ve been following these deluded mental states and really strongly habituated ourselves life after life. It comes naturally to us to keep on doing that. It requires a considerable effort to bring about any sort of noticeable change in that.
But it’s definitely worthwhile to embark on this sort of practice and to keep on habituating ourselves in this way. And eventually the positive attitudes will come as easily and spontaneously to us as anger and all the other harmful mental states do now. Anyway, this isn’t so easy to do, but we do have methods. We have been given methods to help us to do these things. Particularly these Lojong teachings are a very helpful method in conjunction with the Graduated Path teachings.
We need to have the understanding which comes from the graduated path and in conjunction with these the Lojong teachings give us some very powerful techniques and particularly in this age where it’s difficult to go off alone and to do these kinds of strong practice, then we need powerful methods that can enable us to be engaging in ordinary everyday activities and bringing these into our Dharma practice. To actually use our circumstances, whatever they might be, in our training. So the whole thing anyway has to be based on this idea of exchanging self for others. That means is we exchange the place that we’ve always given ourselves, putting ourselves first, and instead we direct our concern towards others and ourselves to put others first. If we want to take care of our own happiness, this is the best way to do it.
All the lamas, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Lama Yeshe, all the lamas always emphasise if you want to be self-cherishing then you should be self-cherishing in a really big way and practise cherishing others more than yourself because this is the surest course to bring about the most happiness for yourself. As well of course as being becoming beneficial for others. So, if we’re going to be able to do this, we have to want to do it. We have to be motivated. So we have to understand the disadvantages of cherishing ourselves and the advantages of cherishing others.
These are set out in the Graduated Path, in the meditation on bodhicitta, the Great Scope Meditation. So if you’ve been through the Graduated Paths you’ll know about these meditations. In actual fact, some people have been asking me how they can know how to meditate on the Graduated Path. In actual fact there is a book now available by Karin Valham, one of our nuns, which is like an outline on graduated path meditations. That would probably be quite helpful to people who are serious about meditating on the graduated path and need a bit of help in getting the structure right.
So that book’s out there in the bookshop. In the passageway, actually. Anyway, we need to know these meditations and understand these topics. And then we