Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew teaches The Wheel of Sharp Weapons as a guide to converting disappointment into practice. She walks through specific stanzas on failed plans: monks unable to become geshes despite effort, parents let down by children, business ventures that collapse. She addresses the paradox of creating merit through dharma practice while encountering ripening results of past karma, showing how both work together. She teaches tonglen meditation — taking suffering as black smoke into the heart, dissolving self-cherishing, and sending goodness outward — as the core transformative practice. She concludes with the guru-student relationship through the parable of three mangoes: students who appear rough but are sincere inside are trainable; those refined outside but deceitful inside are hopeless. For practitioners with dharma study and teacher relationships.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 SW 1999 03 18.mp3
UUID: fa951bdc-bfd8-42a4-80f7-f2dbe0c3eef7
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-03-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.8 minutes
Words: ~4,815
In our minds, when we encounter various different difficulties, various different problems, whether they’re external problems or internal problems, in our mind, we can encounter these problems and not be disturbed, but we can remain happy and not feel that these things are really a problem for us. And not only that, but by using circumstances that come along, these difficult circumstances, we can actually make use of them to enhance our Dharma practice. So we have to experience various different sufferings and problems. This is part of our life so as long as we’re in cyclic existence, as long as we’re in saṃsāra, we’re going to be encountering all these various different sufferings and problems and we have to expect this. But if we have the right way of approaching it then these problems don’t have to be really a suffering situation.
It doesn’t have to be really unpleasant. But instead of that, we can feel happy about encountering these difficulties. Really whether we’re happy or whether we’re unhappy depends on our minds. Whether it’s external circumstances or not that are involved in causing our suffering, still it really comes back to our minds and the way we respond to the various different circumstances. For instance, some people can have really good conditions and yet they’ll be miserable.
For some people, you could be really nice to them and they still find something to object to about you or whenever they encounter really nice situations, even if the weather’s beautiful and they have the best food and so on, they’re still going to go around finding all sorts of things to complain about. Other people seem to have a lot of problems and yet they seem to be able to keep happy and cheerful. This is just an indication that it’s really the state of mind of the person that’s relevant here. Through doing these thought training practices we can learn how to actually convert what would otherwise seem to be circumstances for suffering or unhappiness into circumstances where you can feel really happy. Not only that but in particular we are concerned with converting circumstances which would be detrimental to our Dharma practice into circumstances that are actually productive for our Dharma practice because our Dharma practice really means what we’re doing to advance our minds.
If we understand the right way of thinking, then any sort of circumstances can help us towards that or any sort of circumstances can be used for that. Sometimes we can have circumstances that seem to be unconducive, that seem to be a hindrance for us. For instance, we might have circumstances that prevent us from attending teachings. We might want to attend teachings but for some reason we can’t attend teachings or we can’t attend some particular teachings that we want to go to or we might have a special teacher but we’re not able to be near that special teacher or we might have the impulse to do some study or meditation, but there might be various factors that might prevent us from doing these sorts of practices. For example, we can be prevented from doing some of these things by being hard up so that we can’t afford to travel to work where there’s some sort of fantastic course on or to be with our special teacher or we might have to work so hard that we’re tired out so we don’t really manage to get into our meditation or we get sick so that somehow we find it too difficult to do these things.
We can all think of different circumstances that can prevent us. We might have obstructive family members that object to us doing these things and a lot of people feel very much hindered Dharma practice by the fact that it would upset other members of their family. So everybody’s story is different but we all have the experience of encountering various different problems as we try to go on in our path of Dharma practice. And this is really the usual experience because there are infinite possibilities for problems to arise and there’s only a narrow range of favorable circumstances. This is something that we learn in the teachings on the graduated path in the topic of the precious human rebirth.
So those of you who’ve been going along to the Tuesday night teachings or who have received these teachings at some other time know that this is explained in terms of the leisures and endowments that we need to find in order to have the conducive conditions for Dharma practice. So the good thing about the thought training teachings is that actually any circumstances can be conducive. So it’s not surprising when we find that we have these problems and so we need to know how to use them. Otherwise, we might find that we don’t really get very much opportunity to practice Dharma at all. But if we know how to practice the thought training then we can be practicing Dharma all the time.
A few nods. So even if we don’t have or if we don’t seem to have external difficulties and even if we seem to be one of the fortunate people who seem to have the most helpful circumstances, the most fortunate circumstances, even then it isn’t always plain sailing because then we seem to come up against even worse difficulties and that’s our negative mind. Sometimes we think of doing some sort of practice and then we find that when we go to do it, there’s some sort of mental hindrance. We can feel depressed and feel that, Oh, I can’t do this. I’m useless.
I’m hopeless. I’ll never be able to do it. So what’s the use of trying? Or we can feel bored. It just seems too much trouble and effort to sit down.
We lose, somehow we lose the inspiration or we can feel attracted by some sort of irresistible worldly involvement such as watching television or a whole range of other worldly attractions. So anyway, with all these different problems coming up from our negative mind, it all sometimes really seems impossible to really focus on Dharma practice. So maybe somebody would like to say something at this stage about their own experiences. Right, nobody wants to go first. Good.
They seem to be making a lot of noise over there. So, yeah, so anyway, all these problems are what’s called in this text the Wheel of Sharp Weapons. And the Wheel of Sharp Weapons is the image that’s used in this teaching for our past karma. So when we want to do some Dharma practice, first of all, we need to be realistic and not to expect too much of ourselves when we’re just starting off. We shouldn’t shouldn’t attempt to do what’s impossible and try to do some sort of fantastic intensive practice, huge amounts of this sort of intensive practice all at once.
The exception to that is when you do retreats or courses or whatever and doing this under the advice of your teacher or of the people at the Dharma center, you know, the Dharma friends. So there are circumstances when we can do more intensive practice, but we have to be realistic about what we can do on a day by day basis. But the important thing is to keep up steady practice, to set yourself a realistic amount but keep up a steady practice. This is talking about formal Dharma practice, of course, because really we should be trying to practice Dharma all the time as regards watching our minds, trying to direct our minds into virtuous channels. So what we have to do is to keep in mind that Dharma practice is all about transforming the mind and transforming the mind in a positive direction in the direction that leads to real happiness and undiluted happiness.
That when we want to do practices such as prostrations and mantras or whatever it might be. All of these things, all these practices are just skillful means for working on our mind, for directing our mind in a positive direction. But if we’re suffering adverse circumstances and find that it’s difficult because of that to do these kinds of practice as much as we would want to do, then we can actually use these adverse circumstances themselves by transforming them in the path and actually this is the most effective sort of practice. These kinds of practices, what’s called in Tibetan the lojong practice or the thought training or mind training practices, with these practices you don’t have to feel that there are any obstacles or obstructions to our practice because what we’re really on about is transforming the mind and as long as we’re using these circumstances in the way that’s taught in the lojong training practice, then we are working on the mind in a very powerful and very effective way. And we can be really happy because then we have such a great opportunity to be doing some sort of very effective practice because of this difficult circumstance.
There’s no time like the present time to be doing the practice. Experience was sometimes I’d go for long periods of time without being able to do much formal practice because I’d be sick and having to earn my living and so on. I get really annoyed with myself because of the fact that I wasn’t doing any practice. And then when I did have an opportunity to do some practice, then it would be really good because I would really be appreciating the opportunity. Whereas when I had long stretches of time when there didn’t seem to be any obstacles, then I would get very slack because I wouldn’t be appreciating my opportunities.
So in a way I could see that having these periods of time when I wasn’t able to do much, it really did make me understand how precious it is when you do have the right sort of conducive circumstances. Also you can see through these thought training practices you can convert these unconducive circumstances into something that’s really helpful for you. That’s right. Yes, the Marpa and Mary example is a good one and most of us are both Marpa and Mary but at different times. You give more emphasis to one than to another.
This is one of the things, in a way, that I also had reinforced by the Jungian psychology that I was doing. It’s sort of one of the things that came up in our work with imagery and so on was that a lot of us seem to be going through different stages and the chap who was running these courses pointed out that we go through stages in developing ourselves when what we need to do is internalize and work on our internal energies, but other times we need to be more outgoing and that you actually get this signal from within yourself which you need to just learn to relate to that these inner signals can be telling you that you’re needing to go in a particular direction. One of the classic dreams actually that tells you when you need to do more internalizing is quite funny. You’re trying to to the lavatory and people keep on sort of bursting in the door. That’s a dream that a lot of people seem to have.
It keeps on coming up, I suppose, particularly when you’re practicing Dharma. It’s sort of like a sign that you need to doing some strong purification. In order to do that you need to get away by yourself and have a bit of of private space to work on yourself and you might be circumstances where there are too many people around and you have too many obligations to other people and so on and that’s sort of symbolized by all these people who keep on bursting in the door and won’t let you be private. But anyway, yes, to get away from that, from this ridiculous and sublime, some of our imagery can be quite down to earth. But if you know what it means, it can be quite significant.
Yes. I’m sort of just about to find the place. Sorry about that. So, just the other little comment I had at the end of that paragraph is that all of these practices are particularly concerned with removing self-cherishing and building up cherishing for others. This is being done as a basis for cultivating bodhicitta which, as you know, is the thought of attaining enlightenment in order to be able to bring about the welfare of others.
And all the great teachers agree that whether we’re concerned with the happiness of others or whether we’re concerned with our own happiness, what we have to do is build up our capacity for cherishing others because this is the greatest source of happiness for ourselves and for others. So to get on to the text, we’re up to stanza twenty one. Somebody like to read this one? Okay. In the notes that I took from Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden’s course, one example that he gave for this could be a monk who starts off wishing to become a Geshe but he’s very enthusiastic but doesn’t have success with his studies and in spite of working hard, in spite of doing a lot of study and hard work, he doesn’t seem to have much success and might eventually become disappointed and give up his vows.
He’d feel disappointed himself and there might also be Other people might also feel disappointed. For instance, he might have a patron or friends and family and teachers and so on who placed expectations on him to be successful. So maybe some of them would be feeling let down by the fact that they’d had these expectations and these expectations weren’t fulfilled. So another example he used was parents whose children turned out to be no good. And so the parents are very disappointed because they placed a lot of expectation on their youngster and the young one doesn’t live up to it.
And so they’d worked for many years, brought him brought her up and expected that they’d turn out well and then they turn out to be a disappointment to their parents. Or we have many other different kinds of plans. For instance, people go into business and they expect to make a lot of money and perhaps instead their business might fail to make a profit or they might go bankrupt. So we can think of lots of different examples about this because we’re doing it all the time. We’re always making plans and we’re always building up expectations.
And quite often we don’t realize our plans. For instance, we might want to build a house but we can’t get the finance. We might decide to plant a garden but the weeds grow instead. So we’re liable to all sorts of frustrations and disappointments and our expectations and plans often seem to fail to bear fruit. This seems to happen to some people more than others.
So there are some people who seem to get whatever they want very easily and for others it seems to be always out of reach. And then of course it can be extremely frustrating when you look around at some of these other people and see how they’re getting everything that they go for and you think how do they do it and why couldn’t it be me and so on. So some people So particularly So this just ceased with the way it is and some people do just seem to be always unlucky. Mean this is an acknowledged fact that some people are just unlucky. And particularly in our Dharma practice, if we’re engaging in virtuous activities, we often experience frustrations and this can often be the case even if we were one of those people who enjoyed worldly success, if we were getting everything we wanted relatively easily in the worldly sense, then quite often it might be the first time in our lives really when we start to practice Dharma that we have to encounter all of these frustrations and setbacks.
And this is natural because we need much more merit to get where we’re trying to go in our Dharma practice than we do in worldly things. And in actual fact, sometimes it can be an advantage in your Dharma practice. This is just my personal idea but if you’ve had a lot of setbacks and difficulties in your life after then it can make it easier in your Dharma practice because then it just seems natural. Whereas if you’re one of these people expect to have everything right away, then it might just seem too hard, too much of a shock when you do find that you’re coming up against all of these difficulties. So you might think, well, but doesn’t Dharma practice create merit?
Isn’t it all about creating merit? Has somebody had that thought? Yeah. Is anybody else? Yes, that’s true.
In actual fact, yes, this idea that if you think positive thoughts, think positive things are going to happen to you. It’s not totally a mistake. There can be something in it. But it’s very simplistic because it doesn’t really look at cause and effect. Certainly by putting out the right sort of positive energy, we can often attract positive events to us.
But also it’s all tied up with karma and cause and effect from way back, as Diana was saying. So what we’re really working at is the cause and effect and also we’re trying to cultivate positive mind but we have to be looking at it in the long term. And in the long term we will get these positive results back. It’s certainly true that if we go around putting out negative energy all the time, we’re tending to attract negative energy towards us and if we can manage to work on that negative energy and reduce that and put some positive energy out instead, then it can have a very positive effect on what happens to us as well as on our own feeling about ourselves. Part of that is being prepared to make take the rough and the smooth and the ups and the downs.
Does that make sense? About the merit or the good karma that we’re creating, Of course, when we’re practicing Dharma, particularly if we’re doing it skillfully according to the way we’re taught by setting our motivation at the beginning of every day, dedicating our merits at the end of the day and also doing these things at the beginning of we’re doing Dharma practice such as studying or meditating. Then when we do these things we are creating large amounts of merit. We’re probably creating more positive merit than we’ve been able to create in any of our previous lives. But as Dana said, it’s not ready to ripen yet.
And so we might have to wait some time for it to actually ripen. And in the meantime, we might actually be experiencing the ripening result of quite a lot of negative actions. And one of the things we’re taught in some of the thought training teachings is that we should actually rejoice when we experience these ripening results because they could be results that would lead us to the lower realms if we hadn’t been purifying them. But as we’re purifying them, sometimes we just have to experience some sort of short term result in this life such as sickness or pain or some sort of unconducive circumstance, some sort of problem. These things are going to happen, but we don’t have to let them be a drawback to our practice.
So The way we The way we use these kinds of situations to enhance our practice particularly as explained in this thought training teaching that we’re looking at tonight, we first of all reflect on the karmic cause and effect we consider about how we are experiencing the karmic results of our past actions and this helps us to understand our action and not to blame other people or to blame the external circumstances, but instead of that we understand where the cause comes from so we can feel, instead of getting angry or frustrated or upset, can feel calm about that. And we then make a firm resolve that in future we’ll work on avoiding these kinds of actions so as not to have to experience these sorts of results in the future. And not only that, but then we do the practice of giving and taking. And so we do the imaginative practice of thinking that if we have to put up with this sort of suffering result now, if we’re going to have to experience this anyway, then we can think that we’re taking it on for others, that we’re relieving others of the same suffering. We think of the other beings who would be suffering in this way and think that we’re relieving them of this suffering by enduring it ourselves.
And we practice this by thinking of the suffering in the form of black smoke that we draw in from the other beings that comes from them and we draw it in, breathe it in ourselves and we put it on the self-cherishing hard lump at our hearts in the center of our chest and blow it up. And then we send out the good things, the opposite to the things that we’re taking on all our good conditions, all our happiness to others instead. So we can think when we blow up that lump of self-cherishing, we can actually meditate on emptiness. And then if you can manage to think of all these things, you can think that after a very brief meditation on emptiness then you can arise either as Śākyamūni Buddha or if you have initiation into some Tantric deities such as Chenrezig or Tārā, then you could visualize yourself in that aspect and you send out the rays of light which contain all the good things and particularly the understandings on the path to enlightenment and finding everlasting happiness to all these other beings. So we do that when you get accustomed to that practice, do it one round of breathing.
Breathing suffering as black smoke and pollution, then blowing up the self-cherishing, then feeling that lump all gone, feels light and clear at the heart and then we meditate on emptiness dissolving away our self identity and our body and the external environment and then we again arise out of that in the purified form and send all our merit of understanding all the good things to these other beings. So if that sounds too difficult, just concentrate on taking on the suffering of others and sending out the good things. So we’ll do a little bit of that practice on that particular suffering, the suffering of feeling frustrations and disappointment when our plans and hopes don’t get realized the way we wish. So we just We could just do a little bit of a very brief focusing on the breathing first and then transform into the meditation on the practice of giving and taking. We had this problem of I see.
I thought it was all happening at this end. But you see it’s the technicians. Yes, you’re saying probably need a good mic. So we had this problem of not pleasing the Guru before in one of the previous stanzas in stanza seventeen. And that was relating to the cause of birth.
In that stanza it was explained that sometimes we have to experience the results of our Guru never being pleased with us even though we try hard to please him or her and that’s related to the cause of having followed misleading friends in previous lives and non virtuous actions. So this is another cause in this stanza which has deteriorated our relationships with our guru and this causes hypocrisy and deceptive behavior to the Guru. So, as I was saying in the previous week, some people seem to Some people find it easy to please their Guru without effort, while other students, it’s the opposite. No matter how hard they try their guru, always seems to be displeased with them, always seems to be giving them a hard time. So this is something that perhaps we might think doesn’t concern us so much at the present if we haven’t got a Guru, but we have to keep in mind that we’re going to have Gurus in the future.
We actually have got Gurus now and we don’t know it. But the Gurus know it. So you don’t have to worry about that. So we do need to keep in mind the sort of actions that are going to help us in the long term to have good relationships with them. At least we need to know what these sorts of actions are so that when we do if it happens in this lifetime that we do establish this sort of relationship, then we’ll have some idea of how to go about it.
So we need to practice virtue and to follow our Guru’s instructions if we have one, to be careful about following the instructions that we’re given and to be sincere and not hypocritical to our gurus. Geshe-la included a little explanation here about the three types of disciples which also comes in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. So some of you might have come across this explanation before about the three kinds of mangoes. Do know that simile? There’s this is he said that there are three three types of disciples or students that are can be likened to three different kinds of mangoes.
So some mangoes look green on the outside, but they’re ripe inside and some mangoes look lovely and they’re lovely inside as well. And some mangoes look ripe on the outside but they’re actually still sour and green inside. So the one that’s nice on the outside and inside is the best kind. But the one that’s rough on the outside and looks green but is lovely and sweet inside is also alright because they can be be trained and they can be taught to improve their external manners. Whereas the one that looks ripe is green inside, that one is no use at all because this means that the disciple is deceitful and insincere.
They’re putting on a show, but in reality they’re not following the teacher properly and they’re following non virtuous actions. Geshe-la used the example of a Tibetan story about a cat who pretended to have taken and vowed not to take life. By pretending this, it was able to kill the rat and eat it. So that cat was not behaving sincerely. It was pretending to be virtuous.
So anyway, that’s stanza. Maybe we can just do a brief meditation on that particular suffering, the suffering result that can be experienced from that feeling that your teacher doesn’t appreciate your efforts, that your teacher is not pleased with you. We may not necessarily be experiencing this in the present but we can think that many other beings are and that we don’t want to bring about the cause for this and we don’t want to so we imagine that we’re taking on this cause from others. So first of all, resolve not to do these kinds of actions. We’ll try to be like the ripe mango with the good outside if possible and if not, at least be like the green mango that’s ripe inside.
That way we can create the cause to have good relationships with perfect teachers in the future. And then having contemplated on that, then we do the practice of taking on this suffering and giving away our merits, our good things, particularly this particular good thing of a good relationship with the teacher to the other beings. And stanza twenty three. Somebody in the back. Yes.
Mhmm. So stanza twenty three. When we found that we’re being blamed and criticized by everybody in spite of relying on our best efforts, then this is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons of our past karma. And as it says in the result of having not considered others, having behaved in a way which others found offensive, which others found disturbing. So, of course, when we find ourselves being blamed and criticized by everybody, we might need to look at what it is that’s actually annoying them and maybe it’s something we can put right.
Perhaps we can learn where we’re going wrong and improve our performance so that we’re not annoying them but