Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 43-minute teaching on stanzas 18-20 of The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, Ven Margaret McAndrew guides practitioners through four obstacles—false accusation, broken possessions, lost momentum, and mental fog—showing how each arises from our own karmic causes. She grounds the teaching in real contemporary cases: Lindy Chamberlain’s wrongful conviction and James Peng’s false imprisonment in China, illuminating how karma shapes what appears to be random injustice. For each obstacle, she traces the cause and teaches the practical antidote—maintaining respect in adversity, handling others’ possessions carefully, giving honest credit, sustaining steady practice through arid patches. A substantial portion addresses the subtle discernment required when choosing a spiritual guide, warning against hollow charisma and modeling her guidance on Atisha’s careful vetting of Dharmarakshita. She teaches tonglen (taking others’ suffering imaginatively) as a method for working with these obstacles. Aimed at practitioners with foundational understanding of karma and guru-disciple relationships.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 SW 1999 03 11.mp3
UUID: cdfacc0d-64af-463b-beb1-72af1e57e912
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-03-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.9 minutes
Words: ~4,695
Some of us Western students were there when he was teaching some of these young boys, and he suddenly sort of turned into this thunderstorm and sort of really went and cracked them and chased them all out of the room. And then he sort of turned around around to us, to Western students, and he just laughed. And he said, I don’t hit you people because you’re too big. But anyway, this particular person was one of the nuns. He actually did this to him.
That same day she was in an accident in the jeep and I rolled over and nobody else was injured but she had an injury to her back which was sort of had her bedridden for a few weeks and we all thought that the reason Lama Yeshe hit her before she went, you know, that happened was because he saw some sort of hindrance coming up and by hitting her he probably saved her from being, you know, becoming a quadriplegic or something like that. So there was some sort of real method in what he was doing. And because the Guru was such a powerful object and obviously he saw that he had enough faith to sort of handle it, he did this skillful action. And in actual fact, used to think, probably the reason why Lama Yeshe is always kind to me and never hits me is because my faith isn’t strong enough and I So he realizes that he has to be nice to me and I thought I’ll know that I’m getting somewhere when he gets tough with me. So, any anything to ask about that one?
Yes, well, Of course he never hurt anybody, but just the effect, you know, of being hit. Oh yes, well it used to be quite horrifying to me actually the way the teachers at the school did hit the boys and it wouldn’t be acceptable in particularly the teachers who taught the boys every day, I used to hit them with big heavy mallets and it was pretty gruesome. Because on the other hand it used to amaze me how the boys used to take it because they didn’t seem to be upset, you know, They just sort of maybe they’d cry for a few seconds or something and then they just sort of go off and start playing again and didn’t really seem to linger with them. And I said to somebody, are they really taking it so calmly or are they just sort of playing it hard? But they didn’t seem to be, you know, they didn’t seem to be just putting on a brave face.
And the general consensus seemed to be that they just sort of took it in their stride, know, they were used to that sort of thing, it was nothing unusual to them. They were treated like that at home, you know, and they it’s not that their parents were particularly strict or anything, it was just that culture. Their parents were very loving and their teachers at the school were very loving, so it didn’t seem to have that whole sort of emotional What I used to hate at school was the whole big emotional thing that teachers would put on you. I’m sorry if there are any teachers here, might think that I’m But there used to be this whole sort of emotional thing that the teachers would sort of create a big drama and song and dance about wrongdoings and sort of use that as a form of emotional manipulation. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. That’s right. Yes. Yes.
That’s right, yes. So anyway, yes, I’d just to say anyway that these boys would take it well, but as you say, in this society it wouldn’t go down well. Yes. Yes. So good anyway, yes.
So, maybe we’ll just do a meditation on that one, thinking that we can be perhaps we might not have this particular suffering at the moment, but we can think of other beings who are having this suffering. Some of us might perhaps have the suffering of not finding, looking for Guru and not having found one, or we might have the suffering of having found a Guru but having to be part of that Guru, not being able to be close to them physically, that kind of thing. Otherwise, we can just in our imagination think that there are many beings suffering in this way, or suffering from their relationship with their Guru not running on oiled wheels and this kind of thing. We just take on their suffering imaginatively by this Tonglen practice. So now stanza eighteen.
Yes, yes, particularly refers to I’m just playing which of course is even harder to take than, well not always, is it? Sometimes it’s harder when somebody really does sort of, yeah, does hit the nail on the head with our faults. But yes, can be very difficult when we get blamed for things that we haven’t done or for things that we get accused of wrongdoing when we actually haven’t done wrong. So sometimes it can be that we get blame to our faces, sometimes people direct and criticize us directly and other times they might be nice to our faces and go around saying bad things behind our backs to other people. So, but in either case when this happens it’s due to our own activities of having done this sort of thing in the past.
So Geshe-la said an arrow needs a feather to make it go straight. He seemed to be quoting some sort of Tibetan proverb there and the explanation he gave was that you have to put your own feather on the arrow. Apparently you could get the arrows and then you’d have to put your own feather on it. So it’s like you’re putting your own contribution to the situation and if you’re being sort of struck by these results like arrows, then it’s because of your own of input into the situation by having created the cause for that in past lifetimes. Which book did you say that?
Is that in the Tibetan tradition of mental development? Well, my copy isn’t blue and yellow, but it’s probably the same one. But, yes, I yeah. That’s a good example too. Right.
Probably more more clear to people than this one about the feather and the arrow, which doesn’t really yes. Yes. Mhmm. That’s right. So yes, so we put our own feathers on our arrows.
And for instance, in the past we might have engaged in such actions as falsely accusing or maliciously denigrating other people. And sometimes we might try to please our employers, but our colleagues might conspire to denigrate us behind our backs, and to present us in a bad light to our employer so that the employer will promote them instead of ourselves. These kind of things happen in the workplace, has been known to happen. So, I know some people have a lot of problems with this kind of situation going on with workplace conspiracies, workplace politics and so on. So, if we’re in this sort of situation, it’s because we’ve done these kinds of things.
We’ve blamed people falsely before and so on in our past lives. Or we might be actually accused of things falsely by people who actually sincerely believe that we’re guilty guilty of what we were supposed to have done, even though we’re actually not guilty. For example, Lyndy Chamberlain. Know, when you look at that situation there, it’s just the most incredible collection of circumstances that lead to her being thought guilty of killing her baby. You can’t really believe looking back on it that people were silly enough to entertain the thought even for a moment, and yet somehow her karma came together in such a way that the whole country thought it.
Yes. That’s right, yes. And the baby was attacked by a dingo just recently on Fraser Island or somewhere. What does he think Yeah. Well, yes, that’s certainly a case for this kind of thing.
And of course, in a case like that where where there’s a big public outcry, police are under pressure to put somebody in jail and they may not be so careful. But certainly these are examples of the kind of thing where you see that karma must be operating because there really doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the amount of public blindness that seems to go on. And of course sometimes people are framed. So, this can be a result of having falsely accused other people. So for example in totalitarian countries, people not often resort to falsely accusing other people just as a method of control, to get the political opposition out of the way, or to frighten them, or to shut them up.
Or in corrupt society, sometimes people will do things like this to get money. For instance, the case of James Peng in China. Has anybody been following that case? It actually came up a few years ago, but I saw a reference to it recently. But this chap was an Australian citizen of Chinese origin and he got involved in a business deal over in mainland China with Ben’s daughter.
And he apparently wasn’t prepared to pay her the amount of bribe money that she wanted, which was something like, you know, hundreds of thousands of American dollars. So he So she actually had him falsely accused of something or other which was quite ridiculous, but because she had all the political connections she was able to do it and he’s still in jail. The Australian government made some representations but wasn’t really able to do much. Apparently he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d followed all the laws and everything, but it wasn’t enough to save.
In that case, it’s one of these instances of Wheel of Sharp Weapons coming back. Well, he does too, but apparently he had himself well covered from every direction. But it wasn’t enough for him when he took on the establishment. Yes. Overconfidence, I suppose.
But then these people who go out and do big business tend to be confident types. And I suppose he thought he knew the society. I mean, he’s he’s working on the inside, he probably thought he had it all sewn up, but it didn’t work for him. In the past we might have framed somebody for our own ends, and so we could be having this sort of result coming. So, the text also makes the point that we might have denigrated our Gurus or passed on malicious gossip about them, and as our Gurus are the heaviest object, then this can bring a very strong karmic result.
Don’t Even if we haven’t got a Guru now, it doesn’t mean that we’ve never had one in our past lives, so we might have this sort of karma on our mind stream. So we might have to deal with this sort of situation in the future. Yes, particularly if we want to have a Gurus, if we’re looking for one. Some people seem to go looking for Gurus, really want to find one, but they don’t seem to find one. And this can be because of that.
In actual fact, we all have connections with Gurus. We’ve all made kind of connections with Bodhisattvas and Buddhas and holy beings in our past lifetimes, but maybe these karmas aren’t ready to ripen yet. But in the case of if we have related to a Guru, then that would be an an obstacle to us actually making that connection, even though we might be right in other ways. So that would be a real problem for us. These karmic connections that have with Gurus, it’s just from our side that they haven’t ripened, because from the Guru’s side they’re always looking after us and watching over us and doing what they can to ripen in our mind streams in ways that we don’t recognize.
And then when we’re ready for it, they’ll actually be manifesting to us as Gurus. So we’re actually in the fortunate position of being here at this Dharma Center and receiving teachings. All of us would have made connection with Khensur Rinpoche, so we have received some sort of karmic imprint, at least of this sort of karma. But of course there are degrees and some people might connect more strongly Rinpoche as a spiritual guide than others. For some of you you might have some stronger connection with some other person who you haven’t yet met to be a closely connected spiritual guide.
Yes, well I’m not qualified as a Of course, you know when you receive Dharma teachings from anybody, it’s good for your own mind, for your own practice to treat that person with respect and I’ve got no complaints in that respect. But generally you’re not expected to teach to regard everybody, particularly on the Sūtra level, you know. But when you make a strong connection with somebody who has a with whom you have a kind of connection and who is a qualified spiritual guide, you can make that very strong connection. And you are supposed to check it out very, very thoroughly. So before you think about connecting with anybody, you should check out what it has to say on the subject, Lamrim and the Guru Puja.
And you should be very, very careful that the person you choose is worthy, is probably careful, has the right qualities, because once you are committed then it’s a bit too late to change your mind and say that you don’t think this person is suitable to be a spiritual guide. At the very least you have to maintain your respect for them. Even if you don’t you don’t always have to stay with that spiritual guide, you can go to another spiritual guide, but you have to maintain that attitude of respect for that person and still try to see them as being representing the Buddha and that what would appear to be bad qualities in them would be the aspect they’re showing for some purpose because of your karma. So, of course it’s better if you to somebody who shows good qualities and who is easy to respect and who is easy to trust and rely on. Who you can feel confident in trusting and relying on.
Particularly, you know, they should have good ethics and at least good intellectual understanding of the path. And you should look for somebody who has not just intellectual understanding but realizations. It’s hard to judge the person’s realizations but they should show kindness and patience with their disciples and they should seem to show some sort of higher level of wisdom. But in particular, they should have at least more knowledge and understanding than you have so that they can teach you. And they should follow what they teach themselves, you don’t want somebody who says one thing but does another.
So you’re looking for somebody with very high standards. And you also of course look at their other students. So if their students seem to be benefiting, then you can feel more confident, whereas if you think that their students are sort of pretty neurotic or something, then you would definitely want to take care. Of course you’re going to find neurotic students around any Dharma Centre, so that doesn’t prove anything that it You’d want to look at the older students who’ve been around for a while, and if they haven’t seemed to work up some sort of advancement or development, you would be wary. It’s easy to be taken in, particularly when you’re inexperienced, because people can seem charismatic, but it might be a hollow sort of charisma that hasn’t got any sort of substance behind So you have to take your time and check carefully.
And there’s a story about Atisha going to Sumatra to check out to ask teachings from Dharmarakshita, the thought training teachings. And when he got to Sumatra, instead of immediately throwing himself at Dharmarakshita’s feet and asking for the teachings, he hung around on the fringes of the community for a while and talked to Dharmarakshita’s students and got a general idea of the quality of his teachings before he went to him and requested the transmission of this thought training teaching. And this is the example that we should follow. Alright. So and the next So then that was stanza eighteen.
You’d be a good debater Hilary. You never lose the thread. Thinking about these things, we make up our mind, we make a determination not to do these kinds of actions and to give credit where it’s due. So, this is nice because if we want to create the sort of karma where we receive credit ourselves for our genuinely deserved work and efforts, then the way to do it is to do the same thing to others. And this is good, I think, because we often tend to resent other people’s successes and so on, and to we’re a bit grudging about giving praise and credit, particularly about giving credit to other people, you know, like passing it on to a third person.
So it’s actually very good karma for us to do this, let our boss know how well another worker is performing because the boss might not have such a clear view of it as we do ourselves, this kind of thing. So we can do these kind of actions when we see the opportunity coming up. It’s a very good antidote for our self-cherishing. It’s a very good antidote for this self-cherishing attitude that doesn’t want to do that. So we determine to act in way and then we do the Tonglen practice.
So we can just do a little bit of concentration on this Tonglen practice of taking on this particular kind of suffering from others. The suffering particularly of being accused or abused or criticized unfairly. Next. That’s turned around, is it? Uh-huh.
Good. Oh, it does it five. It does it automatically. Oh, good. Right.
Fair enough. So we can go on to the next stanza because I think this one won’t take so long to go through. Stanza nineteen, would somebody like to read that? Carol. So that’s pretty clear.
If you buy a lemon, then it’s your own fault. Yes. Well, think if it falls apart after a reasonable lifetime, it’s not really so much a matter of a complaint, but if it falls But if they fall apart too soon, if they’re not well made, or if they go off when they shouldn’t go off or whatever, then it’s because we’ve been careless ourselves in past lifetimes in our workmanship, in our work for others, you know, work that we’ve done for others, in making things and so on, we’ve been guilty of being sloppy and not taking proper care. So if our possessions don’t last or if they’re damaged by others using them carelessly, then there’s no point in getting upset about it. So instead, we can make this determination that in future we’ll act responsibly towards the possessions of others, whether it’s something that we’re making that we, you know, for instance if we work in a factory or a workshop or somewhere, we’re making things for other people to use, then we’re responsible for what other people are going to receive.
And if we’re using somebody else’s possessions such as their car or their machine tools or something, you know, we take good care of it. So, then in the future we won’t have to experience this sort of return coming to us. Does anybody have anything to say about that? And if we find that other people don’t return our books when they borrow them, that’s because we haven’t returned books that we borrowed in the past. You’ve got every cardboard box back.
Yes, Hilary always likes to keep cardboard box in her car and sometimes I carry the shopping in in it from the car, you see. And then sometimes I forget to empty the box on the spot and take it back, so she never lets me forget it. So that’s some sort of awful karma, isn’t it? I better do something very serious about purifying that. Okay, so anyway, we can just think about taking on that suffering from others.
We might think of the small thing, we’re laughing and joking about this, but to some people who are hard up and who don’t have many possessions, it can be a very serious problem if what they do have falls apart or gets spoiled in some way. Will I go on to the next stanza or will we finish at this point? Let’s have a show of hands. Will I go on? There’s one or two people look a bit tired.
I think maybe we should finish. Alright, it won’t take very long. So this is stanza twenty. Does somebody want to read that? Okay.
I think this is an important one for us, because this is a major obstacle to Dharma practice and it’s something that we probably all will experience at one time or another. Everybody who’s practicing Dharma seems to come across this particular kind of situation. Sometimes you start off with a lot of enthusiasm and everything goes well for a while and then you seem to strike a dry patch. And sometimes this can be more of an obstacle for a Dharma practice than what might seem to be worse suffering situations. For instance when we’re sick physically or if experiencing various external problems such as problems with our work or problems with our family or problems with financial difficulties or whatever it might be, then it’s not so difficult to keep your mind on your Dharma practice through all that.
You actually can feel stimulated to pay more attention to your Dharma practice because of the difficulties that you’re having in your life. But when the problem comes from the mind itself, and when the mind becomes unclear and depressed, then it’s easy to lose that incentive to lose interest in the Dharma practice. Geshe-la says that the mind feels dark, like having a pot over the head. So it’s quite dangerous to our practice because we just lose enthusiasm and it’s necessary to have a firm reliance on the teachings and to keep in mind that this is a passing phase. To remember that our lack of enthusiasm isn’t due to some sort of lack of interest in the Dharma itself, but it’s due to the ripening of our previous karma.
So it’s due to our following selfish concern, and repeatedly following non virtues, and particularly leading others into non virtue. And so, when we hit this sort of situation, the worst thing we can do is to give up our Dharma practice. And instead we should determine not to follow these kinds of actions, but to instead of that set motivation to follow the path of virtue and to continue our Dharma practice, to continue a steady Dharma practice. At a time like this it might not be the time for trying to do some sort of super energetic Dharma practice, but it’s the time to keep up a steady regular practice and just be consistent and to determine in the future that we won’t lead sentient beings to create negative actions. But instead, we’ll try to help them to create positive actions and to lead them in the path of virtue.
So there’s a prayer by Śāntideva that by becoming a Bodhisattva, that any beings just looking at him should give rise to positive thoughts. And by setting our mind mind on the thought of becoming Bodhisattvas and following the path to enlightenment, then we’re actually going to be beneficial to beings just in this way. Does anybody have anything to say about this stanza? Maybe Maybe somebody’s had some sort of experience about these kinds of difficult states themselves and they might have some advice to others as to how they worked through them. I think it sort of corresponds to what I think the Christians called or something like that.
You heard that term? Acedia? Acedia. Yeah, got no zest. I’m pronouncing it wrong.
See, it’s probably Latin. Yes. But anyway, yes, they have a name for it because they recognize it as being a situation. I think the dark night of the soul maybe is something different that comes further along in the path, whereas this is something that we can experience in the early stages. Yes, it’s That’s right.
Yes. Yes. You go stale? Yes. Yes.
Stale patches. And and I think yes. I think that’s a good point actually, that often when you have worked through these bad patches, you actually sort of find that you’ve perhaps gone a little bit deeper. That in actual fact working through the bad patch was, know, sort of like, in a sense what you had to do in order to progress a bit. Yes.
I think it’s more like when you just feel bored, it seems monotonous doing the same thing again and again every day and you feel like you’d like to switch on the television or just go out and rage or whatever it is that you might do. And I mean, not that these things are wrong in themselves, but you find that instead of settling down to your regular Dharma practice, it’s so easy to go and do something else instead. Maybe, you know, if you’re doing some sort of work, you go and do more work instead of setting time aside for your Dharma practice. It could be anything, but it’s a form of distraction. And this is something that’s really It’s harder in a sense to keep your mind on the Dharma practice because it’s your attitude to the Dharma practice itself that is the problem, whereas when you are, for instance, extremely unhappy or experiencing physical pain or something like that, sometimes you really turn to the Dharma to help you to deal with it.
In this particular situation it’s like you’re not feeling the Dharma energizing you anymore and you just have to Yeah, you’re not getting that buzz out of it and you just have to somehow find the confidence somewhere, the faith in your Dharma practice to keep on going and eventually sort of come out the other side of that patch. Because if you let yourself go, it’s going to be that much harder to start off from scratch again. So I think we’ll finish there, and I’ll just finish by reading this dedication prayer which is relevant, which is one of the dedication prayers we used to say every day at Kopan and at Kopan and at Nālānda Institute and Lama, so Rinpoche told us to say. That is: Due to all the merit accumulated by myself and others, may any being, just by seeing, hearing, remembering, touching and talking to me, be freed in that very second from all their negativities and abide in happiness forever. So, we might think it’s a bit funny to be praying for all sentient beings just, you know, if they see me walking around the street that they’re going to be so happy that they’ll be happy forever.
So, it’s talking about when we become Bodhisattvas and Bodhisattvas just by seeing a Bodhisattva, the Being forms a connection to be guided by that Bodhisattva in the future, that eventually they will connect with that Bodhisattva as a student and they will be guided by them. We’re praying that we’ll that all the beings who we have any connection in any way whatsoever with, at some time in the future when we become great Bodhisattvas that will be guiding them along the path to enlightenment. Then we’ll do the dedication prayers on page five.