Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 39-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew begins with a vivid story: a cynical traveler who dislikes every place, never satisfied, never at ease—a portrait of the mundane view, the distorted perception that sees the world as faulty and imperfect. This habit of mind, she teaches, is the main obstacle that Tantric practice directly addresses. She contrasts it with how awakened beings perceive everything as pure and radiant, and presents the Tantric method: deity yoga, where practitioners visualize themselves as the meditational deity to replace mundane view with pure view, grounded in emptiness meditation. McAndrew explores the balance between cultivating positive perception and remaining realistically alert to harm, then teaches tonglen practice (taking in others’ suffering, sending out blessing) with deity visualization. Understanding emptiness, she emphasizes, makes this practice effective; the combined Sūtra and Tantra path, not Tantra alone, enables swift liberation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 SW 1999 03 04.mp3
UUID: 1590d6ca-5044-4bef-acd3-1a110844abf1
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-03-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 39.1 minutes
Words: ~4,699
Why? So when I was travelling in Southeast Asia many years ago, I was travelling in Thailand and going to some of the beautiful places that the tourists like to visit in Thailand, in the north of Thailand. And when I got back to Bangkok, got talking to another traveler who I met in a coffee shop and he’d been to the same place as well. Was saying, did you go to such and you know how travelers talk together? Saying to go to such and such a place.
That was beautiful, wasn’t it? And he’d say, didn’t like it. And I’d mention another place. And he’d say, well, that was a lovely place, wasn’t it? Didn’t like it.
So I started to realize that he just didn’t like anything anywhere. He just seemed to have this critical attitude towards everything and I thought, well he’s never going to be happy. What’s he travelling for? Because he’s never going to enjoy anything. So he might have thought I was being too, you know, goody goody, too much of a ray of sunlight about everything.
But at least I was enjoying myself. And he wasn’t, so it seemed to make sense. So, this habit then is the mundane view. We have this habit, actually, we have this distorted state of mind at a very deep level. And even though we’re here present in quite a good environment, still in a sense it’s a mundane environment.
It’s full of faults. That’s our reality at present. We could walk outside and trip over and break our leg or it might turn cold, too cold for us, or be too hot for us, or it might rain on us, or be too windy or whatever, too dusty. We might get hay fever from the pollen. So there’s plenty of things that we might not like about this environment.
And just in general, we don’t see it as being perfect. Sometimes we might be feeling depressed and when we’re depressed then the whole area just seems horrible no matter how pleasant it might be. Even if we haven’t been going past some nice gardens or something, it doesn’t really give us much pleasure. So it’s really because we’re under the influence of this mundane view. And for holy beings, this chap that I was talking about was a really extreme case, but to holy beings who have gained the pure view, everything is perfect and pure and radiantly beautiful.
And that means right here. They it means both places and people. They could look at us. We think about ourselves, we tend to see our own faults and weaknesses and uglinesses. And when we look at other people also, we often go looking for faults.
But when these holy beings look at us, see something pure and wonderful. Even though we know that we haven’t transcended our present condition, but they see us in a different way. They can see not only how we are at the present, our sufferings, but they can also see our ultimate nature which is pure and perfect. And so these holy beings don’t have to go to some pure land somewhere and they don’t have to wait until they die and get reborn in some sort of pure land. But this place right here now is a pure land to them.
So for instance to Khensur Rinpoche, it would be like that. When they look around them and see the environment, they see something totally different to what we see. And it’s our limited view that puts this either ugliness or simply mundane quality. We have some fortunate karma to be in this really pleasant place, but still we project something really mundane and ordinary onto it. It’s very limited.
It’s very insufficient. But if we could see the truth of our environment, then even if we were in some horrible slum somewhere, we would still be able to see it as radiant and beautiful because this I mean on the ultimate level, of course there is a relative truth about these things. There is a truth about our karma to be in a place like this, and this is truth about the result of bad karma being born in a very ugly and unpleasant place. But to somebody who’s gone beyond the relative, then everything is pure. And this simile that a glass of water for example To us this is a glass of water.
And to a hungry ghost, this could be a container of pus. And to one of the devas of the desire realm, it could be a beautiful container of wonderful nectar. So it depends on the karmic propensity of the different beings to see this same object in different ways. And we can actually transform the way we see the world by changing our habitual thought patterns, by changing the way we look at things. And this is getting us into the level of Tantra.
This is something that becomes very very important in Tantric practice. So, according to Tantra, this mundane view that we have of ourselves and of other beings and of the environment the thing that keeps us in our suffering situation. It’s the main obstacle that we have to overcome. So, We’re at the present, we’re under this the control of this very limited point of view. Our state of mind is very limited and we tend to see things as being faulty, imperfect and It’s a habit.
It’s a mental habit and it’s one that goes very very deep because we’ve been thinking this way since beginningless time So it’s not something that we can just snap out of easily, but still it is due to our distorted mental state. It’s due to a false mental state. And in the Sūtra teachings we’re taught that the reason why we’re experiencing suffering and cycling from life to life experiencing suffering conditions and unsatisfactoriness is due to karma and disturbing emotions. So the Tantric teachings don’t disagree with this analysis, but it goes on to a more basic expression of the problem. You could say perhaps a deeper psychological analysis of what’s going on.
And it tells us that we’re habituated to operating on this mundane level, this limited miserable level, and so we continue operating in that way and we just can’t conceive operating in any other way. So what we have to do is to break out of that. And if we do it the Sūtra way, we will eventually evolve ourselves out of this mundane level, but it will take us eons and eons. As it explains in the teachings, takes many eons of practice. And the Tantric practice gives us a way of getting underneath that Switching the energy around so that we can do it quickly.
And so what we have to do is stop this habit and stop operating that way. And so we have to have practices that enable us to do this. So, the main practice that we have to do in the generation stage of Maha Anuttara Yoga Tantra is to practice replacing this mundane view with a pure view and we do this by meditating on ourselves, visualizing ourselves as being the meditational deity. We actually identify ourselves with a meditational deity. We also view other beings as being deities, as being enlightened beings.
And we visualise the environment and all the sense objects of the environment as being the mandala of the deity. So that’s why we have these deity yoga practices such as for instance Chenrezig or Tārā or Mañjuśrī or the higher practices such as Heruka or Yamāntaka, where we meditate on these deity practices and their mandalas. The lower schools have a slightly different explanation, the same underlying understanding. Mean they don’t have that division into the two stages, but they have a similar understanding that what we have to do is overcome this mundane view. So, if we have received an initiation into a tantric practice, this is the sort of practice that we can engage in.
And even if we haven’t got any initiation yet at any level of Tantra, but we can still practice looking for the beauty and good in the environment and in beings, particularly in the beings, because this is particularly fruitful and also in ourselves. It’s very very important to look for the good in ourselves and not just put ourselves down, not just see ourselves as being useless or stupid or negative, but to see our potential, to work on bringing out our potential. And we also should take that sort of view towards others. So does anybody have anything to say about this? So, of course then we also have to be realistic, So it doesn’t mean that we should be terribly idealistic and go out and think that everybody we meet is going to be wonderfully kind and charming and to be trusted perfectly and so on.
Because the reality of our present is that we are still experiencing these karmas and we are going to meet various dangers, various problems. There are people with harmful attitudes. There are things in the environment such as dirt and disease that can harm us. Traffic accidents, you know. So these things are the result of our mundane view, but we can’t overcome the mundane view very quickly.
We’re working on it, but we also have to be alert to the difficulties. What we’re doing is to start to cultivate this positive attitude, but also be realistic about it. So I asked Geshe Tashi Tsering once what we should do in this circumstance when we’re trying to the positive in other people, I said, but there are some people who might perhaps have very harmful attitudes. I said the expression I used was a bad person and he picked me up on that. He said we shouldn’t think of other people as being bad, but you can see them as having bad attitudes.
So we can recognise that some people are perhaps likely to give us problems or perhaps even hurt other people. So if we recognise somebody as being somebody like that, then certainly, I said, if we only see the good in people, then one of these people might perhaps hurt our friends because we didn’t warn our friends. And I was thinking of an actual situation that I knew of. And he said that, yes of course we should keep in mind that there are some people who do have very harmful attitudes, who are still under the control of harmful emotions, and of course we should be realistic about that, do what’s necessary to protect ourselves and others, might even amount to having to get somebody put in jail or whatever. But at the same time we’re trying to see their potential, They have Buddha nature, do have good qualities, everybody has good qualities.
If we can see their basic The value of their basic human nature and also understand that no matter what bad things they have in them, also have some good qualities and try to see their good qualities, that will actually be positive for that person. It will help them to cultivate their own good qualities and perhaps give them more pride and more confidence in themselves which might lead to quite a change of attitude in them if they feel that somebody else can see them that way. Yes. Yes, it’s true. Often we sort of go off before we meet the We sort of get so habituated to a particular situation that we go off before it’s actually done to us.
So, yes, that’s just an example of the kind of mundane view that we have. It’s quite true. That’s right, true, yes. On the other hand, of course, if you know that a person is a habitual robber then you don’t leave your goods around. At the same time, if you do have to have dealings with this particular person then you just sort of keep in mind that you don’t just reject them.
That you sort of have, you try to cultivate the the actually that basically you reject their actions. You don’t like their their actions, but the person you separate the actions from the person themselves. And you try to see the action the person themselves as somebody who’s worthy of your love and compassion. As we do in the meditation on the friend enemy and stranger, and most of you probably know that one. We overcome this attitude that just rejects the enemy and the stranger out of hand.
Instead of that we try to see them as beings who basically are in need of love and respect. There’s always something respect in others, even if it’s just their basic human nature, even if we can’t see very much in the way they behave. They have this basic human nature which or not just even human nature, but all beings have this Buddha nature which is capable of being enlightened, they’re all actually future Buddhas. Yes? Have a go at that?
Yes, yes, it’s sort of karmic results in a way, because even though we’re trying to do things better, we’re acting with better intentions. We’re still experiencing karma from our past unskillful actions, we have to expect that we’re going to encounter disasters and disappointments. It’s just the nature of things. Also, it’s lack of skills sometimes. We’re just starting to polish our skills, so we can’t expect to be perfectly skillful.
Yet. Mhmm, yes. Right. Did you all hear that? Mhmm.
Yes, good. Yes, I think that’s true. That’s very true. And of course it’s hard to keep the ego out of it, so we’re not expecting that we can be unself centered to begin with. What we are doing is just cultivating this capacity.
Sometimes you might have an experience where you do in some action, in some encounter with others, that you do find yourself for once acting less egotistically, more from concern for others. And yes, then you can get an idea that often you’re more effective. And when you recognize that your basic motivation was concern for yourself, how that tends to result in something that in an action that’s not so skillful. Can be somehow we seem to act more spontaneously and skillfully when we can put the ego aside. Everybody knows about the well meaning do gooder who goes around trying to help other people and you know, just annoying them.
And not seeming to be very effective. It’s well recognized that that person is really acting out of their own need. And when we’re really acting out of a response to others then we tend to, perhaps even without thinking about it so much, but it tends to work a lot better, things it goes more smoothly. Is that what you meant? Yes.
Well I think until we started to have some Dharma awareness we often tended to think we were acting from good motivations when really it was egotistical. So what the Dharma teachings do is to give us the means to discriminate. So it just takes practice really. So this also relates to emptiness. This practice of overcoming the mundane view very much relates to understanding of emptiness.
And as we come to understand emptiness better, then we can also come to understand how it is that we’re going about all the time creating this false, wretched outlook. Phenomena can appear to us in purity, whether it’s external objects, sense objects, or whether it’s internal objects, mental objects. These can appear to us in purity when we have a greater understanding of the innate purity of the mind. When we begin to understand the process by which constructing this distorted view. So this is something that doesn’t come easily.
It’s something that takes a long term practice. But when we have some idea of how this works, then we can understand how this Tantric practice is going to work. This Tantric practice of replacing the mundane view with the pure view. We understand that it’s based on valid reasons. At first it sounds as if it’s some sort of imaginative fantasy.
When we hear this kind of practice described it sounds as if we’re just going off into dreamland and ignoring reality. In actual fact what we’re in now is dreamland except that often it’s more like a nightmare. And the pure view, seeing of the environment as a pure and perfect place or situation and seeing the beings in it as being perfect and pure is not some sort of fantasy, but it’s actually a more realistic view, an undistorted view. And this is something that we just have to train ourselves out of because we’re very much bogged down in this distorted view. But we have to understand that it is distorted.
We have to understand that it is realistic to overcome it. And we have to do the studying and the analysis that will help us to get the grounding on which this understanding is based. So we can’t just go off and do Tantric practice, we also have to gain the general underlying philosophical practices that Tantric practices are based on. But if we do that, if we have the combined path of Sūtra and Tantra, then we can get the results very quickly because this is what we’ve promised that through this Tantric practice we can gain enlightenment very quickly. We don’t have to wait for eons.
It’s even possible in one lifetime. If not in one lifetime, then in a few lifetimes. And so this is something that’s a very effective way of practice by dissolving away ordinary appearances. So it all has to be based on this understanding of the emptiness of true existence, the fact that things are not as they appear to to us as existing from their own sides, but they exist as being merely labeled onto the object, onto the base. The object appears as merely labeled on the base and nothing has inherent existence.
Nothing has concrete existence. So these appearances do exist as appearances, but they have a kind of illusory nature and their underlying appearance of inherent existence is just a false view. So in Tantric practice we always begin by meditating on emptiness. First of all we do a little meditation perhaps on the mantra Om Svabhava Shuddha Sarva Dharma Svabhava Shuddho Ham All phenomena are perfectly pure and I myself are perfectly pure or something like that. And by remembering this we remember the ultimate nature of all phenomena including our self as being free of this projected inherent existence that we tend to, that we do project onto every object of our consciousness, but which is a false projection.
We see things as being concretely existing from their own side, but there’s nothing like that. And then you meditate on space like emptiness dissolving away your body, your dualistic view, the environment, everything just gets dissolved away into a space like meditation on emptiness. And then out of that space like meditation on emptiness you arise in the aspect of the meditational deity and also all the other objects, the other beings arise deities, the mandala, the environment, everything is generated out of that space like emptiness. And so this emptiness has to be the starting point. We can’t just transform in our meditation straight from mundane, deluded, ordinary conventional view, not even conventional reality, but conventional falsity.
We can’t go from that mundane view straight into the pure view. We do it through emptiness. First of all, the space like emptiness just dissolving away all the mundane view, all duality, and then out of that we can’t remain in the non dual state for very long, so then when we again arise in a dualistic view, when duality again appears, we replace, we make it a pure view. And we meditate that way, and the practitioner has to try to keep that going, keep that pure view of the deity and the mandalas going in the between the in the time between the sessions as well. That’s really hard because while you’re sitting there on your cushion, at least you remember that you’re supposed to be trying to meditate and trying to concentrate, but when you’re up making yourself a cup of tea and going to the bathroom and so on, you forget all about it.
So what we have to do, the real practitioner is the one who can manage to keep that going all the time and really keep that awareness. And this is the major practice that you have to do during the generation or the development stage, which is the first stage of the Anuttara Yoga Tantra practice. And it’s not until that’s been thoroughly achieved that the person can go on to these fantastic yogas you hear about. I mean you can practice those yogas, but you don’t practice them at full intensity until you’ve got that stage under your belt first. So this is something that is really an important practice.
And it seems difficult to us because we don’t have that understanding of emptiness, but Lama Yeshe used to tell us when you understand emptiness, we find it difficult to visualize. We find it very difficult to hold that. But Lama Yeshe said that when you understand emptiness, visualizing is so easy. He basically said that when you have a good understanding of emptiness, even if you haven’t had that direct experience, but just a good conceptual experience of emptiness, it makes arising as the deity in this Tantric practice so easy. Because you don’t have that same clinging to the mundane view.
And it’s that mundane view that makes us miserable, so it’s really worth getting rid of it. So is that making sense? So this text is kind of in a way occupying a middle ground between Sūtra and Tantra practice because although it’s mainly giving us a Sūtra way of practicing, every once in a while it brings in something from the Tantric side. So it’s something that can give us a bit of an idea of some of the important practices that we are going to be engaging in when we get into the Tantric side of it. And there’s no contradiction.
This is the important understanding that Atisha brought to Tibet when he came to Tibet. As I mentioned before, it was a teacher who brought this particular text to Tibet. Atisha was particularly concerned with overcoming a very serious mistaken viewpoint, which was prevalent in Tibet at the time, and that was the dispute that was going on between practitioners of Sūtra and practitioners of Tantra, the practitioners of Sūtra put down the Tantric practice and said this is all wrong, it’s only delusion and only leads you into wrong actions, into following your negative mind. Whereas the Tantric practitioners said if you’re practicing Tantra then you can transform your negative attitudes and you can transform desire so on, so you don’t need to do these sūtra practices which are only for the inferior beings who can’t do tantric practice. Atisha pointed out that both those viewpoints were mistaken and in actual fact we can get the best results by combining the practice of Sūtra and Tantra.
As I mentioned before, the practice of Sūtra without Tantra takes an incredibly long time. The practice of Tantra without Sūtra just leads to the lower realms. So we need to have this combined practice and then it can be extremely effective. So any questions? So, When we do this Tonglen practice, this giving and taking practice, on this particular thought of the environment, impure environment, then we can actually do as we did before.
We remember our negative karmas, remember how our experiencing unpleasantness in the environment is a result of negative karma, and particularly of projecting negativity onto others. And if we’re experiencing negativity coming back at us from other people or from material circumstances around us, it’s because we’ve done this in our past lives. So we make up our mind to, instead of this, to look for the positive in other people, in other beings, to try to put out good energy to others. And also towards the environment practice, understanding that our perceptions of unpleasantness, of things that we don’t like in the environment as being the result of a mundane view. Understanding that if we purify our view, then we will experience this environment quite differently.
And we can also bring in a practice which is explained in some of the graduated path texts, but which I don’t think I explained in previous weeks, and that is that when we bring the negative karma, the suffering of other beings, particularly the suffering of unpurified environments onto ourselves, onto our self-cherishing. We think that we can endure it for the sake of others and that by doing this we’re relieving them of this suffering and we take it in the form of black smoke, we put it onto the self-cherishing at our hearts which is like a black spot in the middle of our chest and when it reaches that it just dissolves away immediately or blows up as if an explosion had taken place in our chest. So we just feel this clearness in our body. And at that stage we can do a brief meditation on emptiness, on space like emptiness. And thinking that everything dissolves away, our body, our mind, our dualistic mind, our view of everything as being concrete and truly existent, all vanishes away, the environment, everything dissolves away in this state of space like empty space which has the nature of bliss and fullness of true existence.
Then out of that we can arise in the form of Buddha or if you have a meditational if you’ve had initiation into a meditational deity such as Chenrezig or Tārā or some other deity, then you could arise as your meditational deity and in that form you send out the blissful light to the sentient beings. Giving them all the good things they want and especially beautiful, blissful, peaceful environments which will help them in their Dharma practice. Any questions about that? Okay, so we’ll do a little bit of practice like that. I don’t think I need to actually describe the practice.
You know the practice, you know that it just means breathing in the suffering, particularly environmental sufferings of others, bringing it onto the self-cherishing, blow up the self-cherishing, meditation on space like emptiness, the purity of the mind, and then arising out of that again in conventional form, but this time it’s the pure form of the deity. And then having sent out the good things to the others, you can let go of that because we need to do the practice again. So then you can just let yourself back into your ordinary everyday form again as whoever you are. And then you do the whole thing over and over again. If you’re able to do it then just combine it with each series of in and out breaths.
If that’s a bit too much to think about then take a few breaths, take your time until you feel familiar with the practice. Okay, so we’ll do that for ten minutes. So did anybody have any questions before we finish? Okay, then we’ll just dedicate our merits then. Page five.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher, and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow. May that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more. Then His Holiness, Dalai Lama’s prayer on page ten: In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good. All powerful generosity, Tenzin Gyatso, please remain until cyclic existence has ended.
Alright, thank you.