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 explores how breaking up harmonious relationships—friendships, families, partnerships—creates karma that produces future separation from loved ones and spiritual guides. Drawing on the Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Buddhist thought-training), she examines stanzas 16–17 through concrete examples: Tibetan prisoners who maintained equanimity under torture, Milarepa’s trials with Marpa, and Lama Yeshe’s wrathful displays illustrating how a guru’s harshness can serve as skillful means for purification. She teaches transforming suffering into practice through giving and taking meditation: imaginatively absorbing others’ pain while offering one’s happiness in return. For practitioners already familiar with graduated-path teachings and committed to Mahāyāna study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 SW 1999 03 11.mp3
UUID: 2650b463-fd67-4bbf-a2c5-9cbb28f89731
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-03-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~5,150
We can start with doing the prayers, starting with page one, to meet the Buddha’s teachings. Not only the Buddha’s teachings but the Mahāyāna teachings and to have made connection with great Mahāyāna teachers such as Khensur Rinpoche. We’re fortunate enough to be in this position now of having this perfect spiritual path. Particularly we’re gathered here at this particular time to engage in studying and looking at thinking about a Mahāyāna practice, the practice of Mahāyāna thought training and the particular practice of the Wheel of Sharp Weapons which was taught by Dharmarakshita. And so we’re doing this in order to gain the goal of the Mahāyāna path.
So in order to make this practice effective, we need to set our goal at the beginning of the Mahāyāna motivation. So we think that we’re not engaging in this practice just for our own welfare, not thinking of temporal welfare, not just thinking of short term welfare of this life because that would be a waste of our energy. We want to find something longer lasting than that. We want to find something which will bring not just a temporal but an ultimate goal so as to make the proper use of our present wonderful opportunity. Not only that but not just thinking about our own spiritual welfare, not just looking for our own individual liberation but looking at the thought of attaining enlightenment for the welfare of others.
So we set our motivation on this thought of having love and compassion for all other living beings, seeing how they’re caught up in suffering. Like ourselves, they have the same nature as ourselves. They don’t want to have any suffering. They only want to find happiness. All these beings we’re very closely connected with every time we engage in any sort of action towards other sentient beings.
Every time we even speak to them, every time we do them a good action or a bad action. We are, in actual fact, creating these karmic links and we’ve been very closely connected to them in life after life because they’ve all been our mothers and fathers again and again. Rather than thinking of our own liberation from suffering, we should want to help all these other beings. Thinking of the way to do that, we’re drawn to the conclusion that the only way to do it is by attaining Buddhahood Buddhahood so as to have the perfect skillful means to help all these beings to the state of everlasting happiness. So with that thought we do this study tonight.
There might be some people here who need the handout too. Yes, we’ve only got the new pages but we’re, I think we’re onto this new page by now. So, yes, we’re starting off with We finished stanza fifteen last week so we’re finished with the first sheet, the first handout sheet. Alright, thank you. Does anybody have anything they want to say before we start?
Oh, good. Okay. So Jerry’s testified. Thanks. So that’s good.
That’s really good because it’s encouraging when you hear somebody else’s positive experience. We’ve been going through this text and most of you of course have been along to previous sessions so you know what it’s all about. But it’s basically teaching us how some techniques for transforming our difficult or suffering or miserable or detrimental into the path of Dharma so that these circumstances don’t become a hindrance to us. But in actual fact they give us a really good opportunity to practice Dharma and in particular the Mahāyāna path so that when we have problems or when things are bad, instead of feeling unhappy we can think, Oh great, I’ve got all these problems now. I’ve really got some material for practicing Dharma so we can be happy whatever the external circumstances.
If we really get this thought training thoroughly integrated with our mind then we can be happy whatever the circumstances. So of course we start off by being able to successfully use it with the smaller sort of problems and by continuing practice then the kind of problems that we can manage to overcome in the sense that we won’t be overwhelmed by them, we’ll get more and more skillful so that we can eventually handle much more severe problems. For instance, some of the Tibetans were imprisoned in labor camps or political prisoner camps by the Chinese prison camps of various kinds and very ill treated, starved and beaten and subjected to various sorts of mental situations such as brainwashing and so on which amounted to mental torture. Some of these political prisoners were able to come through successfully. For instance, if you read the book of In Exile from the Land of Snows by Richard Avedon.
I think his name was Richard, wasn’t it Richard Avedon? Anyway, his name was Avedon something Avedon. It might have been John. Has somebody read Look Under A. Or Look Under In Exile.
So it’s a very good book. Don’t actually seem to have it in the bookshop, maybe it’s out of print, but it’s a very good book and it does give a very good description of the experience of a lot of different Tibetans from different walks of life, from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama to quite ordinary Tibetan exiles. And you can see, particularly the story that particularly made an impression on me was that of the Tibetan doctor, like a monk who was also a doctor. He told us the Dalai Lama’s doctor. He was imprisoned and he told the story of his experiences.
He was able to basically retain his equanimity through the whole experience as a result of his Dharma practice. He said at the end that he wasn’t so unhappy while he was in prison and he wasn’t so happy when he came out. In other words, he wasn’t sort of overjoyed or elated to be coming out of prison, but instead he managed to keep this even mind all the way through. In order to benefit from these thought training stanzas, first of all, we need to have a good grasp of the graduated path teachings and, in general, the basic philosophical teachings of the Dharma so as to understand the theory behind what we’re doing, how we’re working with the mind. So if we don’t understand this theory, if we haven’t got the structure, if we haven’t got the understanding, then it might seem as if this teaching is just some sort of fantasy or superstition or some sort of new agey thing like just think nice thoughts and everything will turn out lovely.
Or if you think positively then you’re going to have all sorts of positive things coming to you. I’m not saying that this is totally unrealistic, but there’s going to be times when you’re bound to be disappointed if you think it’s just going to be a question of thinking positively and everything works out alright. But the point is that if we understand how the mind works, then it’s not just fantasy or superstition to think that we can change our reality from a miserable reality to a happy one by just altering our thought patterns. If we go about this skillfully, then we can do it. And in order to do it, in order to feel confidence in being able to do it, in order to go about doing it skillfully and effectively, we have to understand the theory and the practice.
So this book basically is giving us the practice and to go to the theory we have to go to the graduated path and also to some other philosophical teachings which perhaps are explained briefly in the graduated path. If we want to get them explained a bit more fully we would need to go to some other teachings. These are the kinds of teachings that are being given at Buddha House. If you have the opportunity then it’s good to learn as much as you can. Bit by bit, of course.
Don’t be frightened off by the amount that there is to learn because, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Underlying the whole process of changing the mind is the understanding that we create our own reality anyway. But at the moment we’re doing it in an uncontrolled way. We don’t understand the process and we’ve got no control over the results that come out of the process. So we get exactly what it was that we wanted to avoid, which is problems and suffering and unhappiness.
And of course we don’t always get that. Sometimes we get some good conditions and fortunate circumstances and happiness as well because we have done some things right. But without understanding, we’ll make mistakes and we’ll do the wrong things and we’ll get this result of suffering because if we don’t understand the process, we’ll be looking at the external situation all the time and seeing our problems coming from external things. Whereas what Dharma teaches us is that our happiness and suffering both really come from within ourselves, from the way we react to the external situation. Of course, there is a connection there, some external situations, naturally ones which are going to stimulate a response of unhappiness in us and others will stimulate a response of happiness.
But all this comes about through karma and karma is created through our mind, through our motivation, so we have to understand the underlying cause and effect aspect of it. Through understanding this and working with our mind, with these natural laws of the mind, can learn to navigate skillfully over the ocean of Samsāra. Otherwise, if we don’t know how to navigate, then we’ll just be tossed around and drowning. So this is the old analogy. In the long term, anyway, we have to understand the nature of things, of all phenomena, as being empty of true existence.
And that includes our minds, ourselves and our bodies and minds and the I that we label on our body and our mind. And also the external phenomena have this empty nature and we have to understand the conventional phenomena as existing like illusions. And through this we can attain liberation from saṃsāra. But in the meanwhile, in the short term, we need to start working on reducing the power of the cause of suffering that we create through not understanding. We have to understand how we’re always creating the cause of suffering through following our deluded mental states and creating karma.
Due to this, we create karmic imprints on our mind stream which will bring us results. Generally, when we’re following the deluded mental states, we tend to create bad karma and as a result of this we’re going to experience the result of suffering. And also our bad karma and our following of these deluded mental states and the following actions performed under their power leads to creating, to intensifying our deluded state. So it results in more delusion and that creates more disturbance in our mind which then leads us on to creating more bad karma. For example, if we act out of anger repeatedly, every time we act out of anger, we’re actually strengthening our tendency to get angry.
So it becomes easier and easier for us to become angry and our anger becomes more and more overpowering. And so by following anger, we’re making sure that we’ll have more anger in the future and also we’re going to have to experience the suffering results of all the things that we do under the control of that anger. The actions of body, speech and mind. Saying bad things to people may be hurting people. The bad mental thoughts that we harbor in our mind under the influence of anger.
And so we’re going to have to this just creates a vicious circle that just keeps on going and going. And so what we have to do is try to lessen the power of this chain reaction and start to reverse the process. And instead we have to try to create this kind of circle or chain reaction with good attitudes. Another result also of following anger is that we’ll be, as well as having to experience suffering situations in the future such as being the object of other people’s anger, also be likely to be brought into situations that will tend to enhance our anger. So as well as having this natural tendency to anger in the future, we could be born in a culture that, for instance, encourages us to take revenge and to fight express violence.
So all of these things come about as a result of letting ourselves go down this path of following anger. And if instead of that, we try to cultivate such things as patience, love, compassion, equanimity, wisdom and so on, then we’re going to experience good karmic imprints and we’re going to find that these types of attitudes will start to come more easily and start to arise spontaneously and that we will have less tendency towards anger and the other sorts of bad tendencies such as attachment, pride and ignorance and so on. So does anybody have any questions about that? So this is really basic to what we’re trying to do and we need to be looking at our future lives and when we experience these bad results from our past lives then we have to understand that’s where it’s coming from. By understanding that then we understand the necessity of doing the right sort of practice and then we won’t have these problems in the future.
As well as creating these positive actions which will lay down positive karmic imprints and bring about a result of happiness, we need to motivate ourselves and dedicate our merits. And in particular, of course, as we learn in the Mahāyāna path, we motivate and dedicate for the attainment of enlightenment for the welfare of others. In this way, we’re making sure that all this merit that we’re creating becomes a support for our Dharma practice. So it doesn’t just result in some sort of short term temporal happiness, but it results in Dharma progress, the increase of Dharma happiness and the increase of Dharma realization. It acts as a support to our Dharma practice such as study and meditation so that it counteracts the obstacles that we’re going to encounter as we go along the path.
So this is the sort of practice we need to do. The Wheel of Sharp Weapons is giving us some skillful methods to do this, to transform our consciousness. Last week we finished with stanza fifteen, so this week we’re going on to stanza sixteen. Would somebody like to read that? Any yes, Helena?
That made me think of what they nowadays call headhunting. So it seems to be quite a big thing at the moment. So anyway, because I think partly this mention of servants comes from the Eastern culture, the traditional culture, maybe it was similar in our culture a few generations ago, that servants were part part of the family and there was a very strong sort of loyalty and appreciation between the servants and the families that they were serving. So it wasn’t just an employee, you know, just a sort of formal employer employee sort of relationship as it tends to be nowadays. But there are a lot of different relationships that we experience and if we’re experiencing distress and loneliness because we’ve been parted from our loved ones, this is the result of having parted people before who had loving relationships.
And it’s quite interesting in Tibet that servants are very respected people. We seem to have this idea, perhaps sort of going back to the Victorian era, of servants as being below stairs and that kind of thing. You have this sort of picture of servants as being a kind of lowly sort of occupation. But you see that when the Tibetan families have servants, the servants are often quite respected people and it’s considered to be quite a respectable profession or quite a respectable trade, to be a domestic servant to a might be socially superior, many cases they’re very reliant on their servants and they don’t just rely on them physically but emotionally. It’s a sort of very trusting sort of relationship.
So if somebody was to lure away a trusted old servant, then it could cause a lot of upset to the family that the servant left. So I think it’s different now and I don’t think that these things are necessarily wrong, provided we’re acting honestly and ethically. But perhaps in situations in which this teaching arose in that sort of society, then it would have caused a lot of distress when this kind of thing was done. Does anybody have anything say about that? Yes, Yes, think that also happens.
And also from the other point of view, the romantic partner often wants to come between the person and their old friends too. I used to find regularly in my younger days that my boyfriends never used to like me having all my old friends. Maybe it’s different nowadays but in the old days. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t seem to work both ways. The girls seemed to accept the boyfriends having their mates and so on and would be quite happy to socialize with the mates and the mate’s girlfriends but the boyfriends would never socialize with their girlfriends’ friends and their sort of social circle.
They seemed to want to try to get you away from it and if you involve them in too many sort of social events with your friends, then they’d start jacking up. So it did have that tendency that if you were really seriously involved with a boy tended to separate you from your old friends. And then, of course, when it all broke up, you’d be sort of running back to your old friends for consolation again. But it did seem a pity sometimes that the girls would seem to get of weaned away from their circle of friends and become a bit isolated in society. I’m sort of saying this because some chaps might not realize what they’re doing but it sort of happens.
But anyway, yeah. Yes. That that kind of thing often seems yes. Yes. Sometimes there’s an understanding between girls that if the if they get asked out by a boy, it’s something that girls have to allow one another to do, too, in the big sort of manhunt.
But also there is this thing, yes, can be letting your friends down by accepting, so you have to keep that in mind and suss out the situation. I think consider the effect on other people. Just pay a serious consideration on how it’s going to affect the other person. Maybe even ring them up and say, Is it going to throw you off? Or I’m terribly sorry but this guy’s so gorgeous I just couldn’t risk making him wait another week or whatever.
But, you know what I mean. At least consider the other person’s feelings. Yes, well this is sort of ancient history now. Well, I’m sure they can put their sort of They can probably look at it from their point of view too. It probably works both ways.
I don’t know, maybe the fellows never let their mates down to go out with a girl. But anyway, yes. So all these things, yes, so we often do find ourselves in situations where you have to, where you’re tempted to let one person down in order to get what you want, in order to do what you, yeah, in order to get what you want. So we do have to consider the feelings of others. So And then it goes on to say that sixteen, seventeen, sixteen.
Yes, sorry, I’m lost. So particularly where we see there are happy relationships, if we deliberately break up happy friendships, as you mentioned, Hillary, or partnerships or families out of selfish motivation, then this is highly negative and it’s going to bring this kind of result to us in the future. We see that harmony between friends, good relationships between friends, families, partners and so on is one of the most important things to people. It’s one of the things that’s most conducive to happiness in ordinary society. And so to break these kinds of things up is a bad negative action.
It mentions the possibility of being parted from our gurus. Geshe Ngawang Dargyey, I think, mentioned in his commentary the possibility of being parted from our gurus. This could be due to the same sort of cause, having parted other people from the ones that were dear to them. It often happens to us that we can’t stay with our holy teachers. Determine then, looking at these things, when we experience these kinds of problems ourselves, we can see how it must have been caused and that makes us determine that in future we won’t separate friends, but instead we’ll try to make harmony between others.
We’ll try to do what we can when the opportunity arises to create harmony, to mend breaches, to act as mediators and so on to help others to restore harmony. Through this way, we’re creating the right sort of karma which we want to experience in the future. And then, as you know, if you’ve been attending these Thursday nights before, the practice that we have to do is the giving and taking practice. And we think of taking on this suffering and giving away our happiness to others. In the context of this thought training practice, do each of these specific sufferings in turn.
We can think about these things while we’re sitting in meditation. We can also keep them in mind so that when we are experiencing these things in general, for instance if we’re feeling sad and hurt because we’ve been parted from a friend, then instead of blaming other people, we can understand the problem is ours and then we can think that we’re taking on this suffering. Many people have to experience this sort of suffering of being parted from their loved ones. By experiencing this suffering ourselves we can imaginatively take on the suffering of others who are experiencing the same kind of suffering and think that we’re relieving them of this suffering through doing this practice. And in this way we really cultivate this thought, this compassionate thought of taking on the suffering of others which is one of the important practices in the generation of love and we give away our happiness to them.
Would you like to do that practice now before we go on to the next stanza? Okay, so we just imagine we’re particularly taking on the suffering of being parted from friends and loved ones. We think of that suffering in the form of black smoke. We think of the many beings who are experiencing that kind of suffering at the moment. The suffering is in the form of black smoke in their bodies and we can breathe it in.
You can think of it coming in through the right nostril. It comes down, blows up the self-cherishing at our heart and then we think that we send out our happiness, our self-cherishing is completely gone and we send out love and kindness to these beings and happiness. Then we go on to stanza seventeen. Who hasn’t had a turn yet? So I thought it might perhaps be a little difficult for some students to relate to all this talk about Gurus.
Maybe most of the students here might not have actually formed a relationship with a guru as a guru-disciple relationship. But for those who have formed this sort of relationship, it doesn’t always turn out to be comfortable. Sometimes the guru will show displeasure. Sometimes happen that your guru can seem to be quite tough and to be wrathful towards the student. So there are many stories about this.
For instance, you might have read the story of Milarepa. And if you’ve read that story, you know that Milarepa followed Marpa perfectly for quite a number of years. And during that time, Marpa never gave Milarepa any teachings but only ordered him to build houses and then to pull them down again and take all the rocks back where he got them from and then he’d have to start building another place somewhere else. He was always giving Milarepa a hard time. And Milarepa got very depressed because he felt that he was never going to be able to please Marpa and no matter how hard he did, Marpa only showed this wrathful aspect.
So in actual fact that was Marpa’s skillful means to purify Milarepa of the negative karma that he created by killing a lot of people with black magic and sending hailstorms to destroy crops and so on in revenge against the wrongs that had been done to his family. So this was something that, in actual fact, it appeared that Marpa was being wrathful and being hard to please. In actual fact, Marpa was very pleased with his practice, with the way he was following him, but he never let Milarepa know it. So we have to expect that if we have a perfect Guru with skillful understanding of the means to guide the disciples, that can include wrathful means. Sometimes we’re going to have to experience this sort of wrathful treatment.
I’ve seen it happening myself to some students and it can be a bit intimidating, even if you’re not the one who’s receiving it yourself. Just to see somebody else getting this wrathful treatment can be a bit intimidating is the only word I can think of. Sometimes you can see that there are one or more students. This teacher might be incredibly nice, incredibly kind and loving and delightful to be with for the majority of their students, but there will be one or two students who can’t do anything right and just get nothing but criticism. I remember Lama Yeshe was giving a teaching once and during the teaching this alarm clock started going.
I had a little alarm clock on his table and the alarm clock went off and he looked at one of the students and said, This is better than you. It was just like that, you know, he was just kind of criticizing this particular person all the time and really giving him a hard time. Obviously he knew just what he was doing that for this person it was just the right thing. The person gets all these constant reprimands, never seems to be able to please their guru and they might even get beaten. If you haven’t been able to meet a spiritual teacher, if you want to meet a spiritual teacher and you’ve been searching for one and you haven’t been able to meet one, or if you do meet one and make that connection but then he’s never pleased with you or she is never pleased with you, it’s due to this Wheel of Sharp Weapons that in the past we’ve done these kinds of wrong actions disrupting relationships.
And so as a result, we have to experience this disruption of the relationships that we want to have ourselves. Once we have formed a heart relationship with a guru, we shouldn’t see his faults. So if he or she appears to be angry or harsh, you shouldn’t just point to their faults and say, oh, I got a bad tempered guru. You know, my guru is cranky. But you have to try to check where you’re going wrong.
It could be that the actions you’re doing now are displeasing to your guru. If you’re doing things that your guru doesn’t approve of, then if you’re being too strong headed or whatever in not following his guidance, then this could be where the problem is. But it might be that it may be that at some time in the past we met a teacher but due to bad imprints we left him and followed bad company. In other words, people who would distract us away from following that teacher. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean that they’re bad people.
They might be quite respectable, but they might put out a sort of negative energy about the practice you’re doing and say, Oh, how can you believe all that stuff? And if you’re around these kind of people, it can really bring you down and destroy your confidence in what you’re doing in your chosen path. So you need to avoid this kind of input. And these kind of misleading influences which would distract us away from what we really know in our hearts to be the right path. Otherwise, if we’ve done this in the past, we might have created this sort of karma to be experiencing this problem with our spiritual guide now.
When our Guru shows this display of being apparently angry, it’s to guide us and to purify our negativities because if we receive a beating or a tongue lashing from our teacher, it’s really purifying our negativities. And it might not even have so much to do with our present actions. It might have something to do with our Guru’s clairvoyant powers that we need to experience this so as to purify a particular karma which otherwise would lead us to the lower realms. For instance, I know of somebody else who was more or less beaten or or hit by Lama Yeshe, and this particular person was, I think the same day or the next day, riding in the jeep. This was at Kopan.
I don’t want to give the impression that was this sort of fierce person, you know? Sometimes people are quite shocked when they hear that Lama Yeshe would hit people or do these things, but he because he some people who only saw him in his gentle aspect, he was always so beautifully kind, unbelievably kind. Sometimes people would be quite shocked to hear that he could show this tough aspect. But I’ve seen, as I said, I’ve seen him showing this tough aspect to other people and it would be just awe inspiring. He would just sort of change in a flash into this sort of wrathful, terrifying manifestation that was totally awe inspiring.
Then he’d just sort of turn back again, sometimes in a flash, because it wasn’t something from his own side. It was just an aspect he was putting on. I’ve seen him doing it with the Tibetan and the Sherpa boys particularly. One time