Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute commentary on the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, Ven Margaret McAndrew identifies self-cherishing as the only true enemy and shows how all disturbing emotions stem from it. Drawing from a recent intensive course on the Four Noble Truths, she explains how thought training practice (Tonglen)—breathing in others’ suffering and breathing out happiness—transforms ordinary obstacles into practice. The teaching covers combining study and meditation for genuine understanding rather than intellectual knowledge alone, maintaining steady practice despite karmic difficulties, and why the Buddha’s speech holds the highest place among the Three Jewels. She also provides concrete guidance on respectfully handling and disposing of Dharma texts, treating all printed matter conscientiously, and how to teach others about reverence for Dharma books without creating friction.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 SW 1999 04 08.mp3
UUID: 3e4a7f17-8519-4f83-954a-08490083eecb
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-04-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~5,427
Between last week and this week, we’ve been doing a course with Khensur Rinpoche. Well, Mark was at it anyway. The rest of you may not have had the good fortune to have been at this course, but it was quite an intensive situation. We had two hours of teaching from Khensur every day and it was quite a demanding sort of a teaching so it was very good and it was on the Four Noble Truths. Khensur Rinpoche was spending a lot of time explaining some of the technical points of how it is that we’re caught up in the cycle of suffering.
We have two causes for our suffering: karma and disturbing emotions. Particularly it’s because of the disturbing emotions. We need to understand these things. It’s a good thing that some of us were able to take these teachings over the Easter break. For those of you who weren’t there, you can study these things because there are books that explain these points about karma, so it’s important to understand not only the heart practice but also the analytical practice.
Also, of course, Khensur Rinpoche said that I should talk about the Abhidharma aspect of karma on these Thursday nights as well, so I’ll have to look at doing that before too long. The major problem is our disturbing emotions and especially the self-cherishing, which leads to the disturbing emotions. So disturbing emotions are three, and that’s ignorance, desire and hatred. But self-cherishing is underlying all of these. So it’s because we have self-cherishing that we then have these it follows, then we have disturbing emotions because we’re attached to our own happiness.
We have self centered attachment to happiness for the self that we view falsely and so then we have the hatred towards people who we perceive as disturbing our happiness. So essentially the hatred comes from having the desire. So we have desire hatred and the ignorance is also in a sense the main thing because we have the ignorance about the nature of the self and so coming from that we have the self-cherishing, we have the attachment and then we have the hatred. But all these if it wasn’t for the self-cherishing, we wouldn’t have the desire and the hatred. And so it’s like a king and two prime ministers, Khensur Rinpoche was saying.
Know, essentially you can say that the king is the leader, he’s the one who’s behind all, but it’s the prime ministers that do all the work. So they do the running around and do the actual carrying out of the activities. And so although we have the ignorance, which is like the king causing it all, we’ve got these other two, desire and hatred, are really harming us. And in particular desire is a really harmful thing because if we could get rid of the desire or the self centered attachment then we wouldn’t have the hatred either. It’s because of having desire and attachment towards our own self centered happiness that we also have anger and frustration and so on.
So, we need to see how all of these things grow out of this self-cherishing attitude. If we didn’t have self-cherishing in the first place then we wouldn’t have this attachment to happiness and all the other problems. So we can analyze in this way and see how these things arise from self-cherishing and through meditating on these things we can start to attack the different disturbing emotions. But our disturbing emotions are really strong and so sometimes people find that it’s very hard to really overcome them by doing this kind of analytical meditation because it’s hard to get past the disturbing emotions to the state of focus and concentration that you need in order to really meditate effectively. So, the thought training process is really helpful here because it actually gives us a way of making use of the circumstances that might have been the thing that stimulated our mental disturbance.
Instead of being upset, instead of being agitated, we can make that our practice by understanding it, coming to terms with it in the sense that’s explained in the thought training practice, it actually becomes something that’s very helpful for our practice. So we can actually say that it’s good to encounter these kinds of problems because they enable us to overcome disturbing emotions and help harmful circumstances in a very powerful way. So, when we do this, it actually becomes a force. The thought training practice becomes a force directed against self-cherishing. So the first two lines of this text say The name of the text is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons effectively striking the heart of the foe.
And the foe is self-cherishing. And that’s our only real enemy. If we can understand self-cherishing to be our real enemy, then we’ll understand that there isn’t any other real enemy and when we manage to overcome self-cherishing within ourselves, then we don’t have any external enemies. Everything just becomes a helper to us. And so all that external forces can do to us is to give us some harm in the short term, but they can’t give us long term harm and they can’t prevent us, they can’t affect the way we get reborn, they can’t affect our karmic tendencies, but they’re only acting as the agent for our own previous karma.
So really the harm comes from within ourselves and not from the external enemies. And this all comes from self-cherishing and it’s been self-cherishing has been doing this to us since beginningless time. It will keep on doing it if we continue to protect our self-cherishing and regard it as a friend, which we have been doing since beginningless time. As long as we don’t recognize self-cherishing, can’t put a stop to it. So if we can recognize self-cherishing as being the real enemy, then we can gradually put a stop to it.
Any questions? So, Here we are with this text. So last week, we were about to on stanza twenty eight. Now who hasn’t had a turn at reading the Sue, you haven’t Jennifer. Sorry.
Where can I go, sir? Jennifer. Yeah. Well, not not recently, I think. Okay.
Yes. Mhmm. Alright. Thanks. Does anybody particularly relate to that one?
Anybody have a particular you’re grinning. Mike, any experiences you want tell us about? Oh, right. Uh-huh. Yeah.
Particularly done in the study, yes. I suppose you could relate it to other forms of study as well. Yes, if you’re having problems with anything that you want to do it relates to some form of negative karma, but particularly when we experience difficulty in studying the Dharma, it’s due to lack of respect for Dharma teachings. This is more like the results, yes, according to the cause rather than the tendency. The tendency would be to keep on doing the same things, like throwing your Dharma books around and sitting on them and so on and thinking it didn’t matter, and even if people told you that it wasn’t a good thing to do, you wouldn’t listen to them and that kind of thing, you know.
But, yes, it’s a kind of related result. Khensur Rinpoche translated that as result according with the cause. Anyway, I’ll be going through that’ll come up a bit later on, so I’ll go into that a bit. I won’t When I studied this first, I related pretty strongly to that myself because I’ve had a lot of problems in that direction. In fact, at one stage I couldn’t study anything that was really scholarly.
I couldn’t study Lorig, Mind and Awareness and all those things. Just had to absent myself from those kinds of teachings. I used to feel a bit bad about it because I thought that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be studying all these things and learning them. But it would just make me feel absolutely sick to have to sit there and think about it.
Mean it literally, you know, that I somehow didn’t have karma to be in those teachings so I would really get sick. Still happens, but at least I can do some study. So anyway, it’s been yes, sometimes you just have You can be fortunate enough to receive teachings and to be in there, but to really get it into your head to understand it can be a real struggle. So these sorts of things are the karmic results from these kinds of actions that we’ve done before in our previous lives of disrespecting the disrespecting the text that the Dharma books are written on. So it’s interesting to know that because we often have troubles studying, particularly studying Dharma teachings, and this can be a bit of a surprise to some people who are actually quite clever normally and feel that they don’t normally have a lot of trouble studying and still when they come to study Dharma material they often find that they simply can’t take it in at all.
It can be very, very hard to absorb and they wonder why that is. So this is the explanation that in previous lifetimes we’ve shown disrespect for the books. In fact, the Tibetan lay people who couldn’t read and write used to like to show respect to the books in different forms so as to create the sort of karma that would help them in future lives to understand it. They would, for instance, pay somebody to read the sutras out aloud in their house or something like that. There’s different things that they would do or people would pay to get books printed.
That’s another way that’s very good for accumulating merit with the Scriptures. Just studying the Scriptures, if you studied them before then it becomes a lot easier next lifetime. So this is really important. You find that some of the monks at the monasteries would be able to really understand a lot of things very well and others would have more trouble. Even yourself, you’re going to have some sort of experiences with certain things you’ll study and read it all just seems to be like coming clear to you as something that you’ve learned before and you think it’s just sort of being, you know, that you knew it all along, that it’s just sort of brought to the front of your mind.
And other things just seem incredibly hard and you think I’ll never get around this. And it’s probably because we’ve studied some of these things before and not others. Maybe somebody’s had that experience. That’s right. Yes.
Some things you might have to go over and over again. Yes. Yes. Oh, that always happens. Always think you’ve got and then you find that that’s only one level and then you have to go deeper and deeper.
But, you know, sometimes you find that something just seems like you come along to a Dharma teaching, particularly when you first go along to the Dharma teachings and you have been along to other spiritual teachings and didn’t really connect with them. Then you go along to a particular teaching, maybe Tibetan Buddhism or something, and when you hear those teachings being expressed it’s like, oh yes, somewhere deep inside myself I knew all this and yet I didn’t know it because otherwise I would have been living my life better sort of thing, but still it makes some connection that when you hear it, it just hangs together. Yes, whereas some other aspects of the teachings, you really have to hard to make them hang together and that’s good you haven’t put in that work before. Yes. Oh, yes.
Yes. So but there was one I was just thinking of this story of this young particularly the young Rinpoche, the young Tulkus usually learn that the monks have to memorize at the monasteries. And the texts that they’ve learned before in their previous lives, the young Tulkus managed to memorize very, very quickly. It’s just like they have to sort of reacquaint themselves with it really and the young Tulkus will sort of go through pages and pages in a day while the other monks, little monks are just learning a few verses and so they really very quickly get through a whole text. And there was one when I was there, Yongzin Rinpoche, he’s quite grown up now, but when I was there he was just a little boy at Kopan.
And One night we walked past where he was staying, you could hear him talking in his sleep and somebody said, Oh, he’s debating in his sleep. So he’d been studying the debating topics in the class not long before and apparently he was just so caught up with it all that it was all sort of coming back to him and he was doing it in his sleep. Some of us debating isn’t so familiar that we could do it in our sleep. Quite the opposite. We might find it very hard to assimilate even some very basic teachings.
This is really a sign of what people have been studying before and particularly the teachings on emptiness can be very difficult to some people and other people so some people when they hear the teachings on emptiness they just think, oh this is all too much and they just don’t really go for it at all. Other people just feel an incredible sort of gravitation towards magnetism towards that sort of topic, you know, even if it’s difficult to understand at first, they really feel that there’s something there and they feel an incredible fascination by the topic and they just can’t wait until they learn more about it. This would be a sign of that person having put a considerable amount of effort into studying the topic before. So it’s good to do these things and also make prayers and dedications to be able to understand these topics in the future. Geshe-la was saying that in order to fully grasp a topic we need to have three stages of study.
And of course you find this in the Graduated texts in, I think it’s explained in Liberation in the Palm of the Hand. First, there’s listening, second, sinking and third, meditating. So we have to do all of these different steps in order to get a good, firm understanding of the teachings. And if we just study on the intellectual only, that isn’t enough because it just remains on the intellectual level and it’s not really going to change our life if it only remains on the intellectual level. We have to let it make an impact at a deeper level.
For that reason we have to understand it thoroughly and meditate on it. We need to put some time into analytical meditation. And I think actually in this context it really refers to focusing meditation. Single pointed meditation. Analytical meditation considered to be an aspect of studying checking meditation and when you actually then having thoroughly checked out the topic then come to a conclusion about the topic, come to a certain understanding and focus single pointedly as much as you have the capacity to do to remain focused on that conclusion.
And as your meditation prowess increases then you can spend more time on that actual single pointed focusing. You don’t need to spend as much time on the analysis. And this is what makes the topic very powerful. For instance, it might be the preciousness of the human rebirth. So as long as we’re thinking about intellectually checking it over, this can be very effective up to a certain degree but to really imprint it on the consciousness of the practitioner who has the ability to stay in single pointed concentration for a while will develop that conclusion which is like having found a diamond in a garbage heap and dwells on that for a while.
And it really becomes something that becomes a part of that person. On the other hand, we might think it’s a good idea to just meditate all the time. We might just want to sit and practice mindfulness of the breathing or some other kind of meditation that feels good and that we feel that our meditation is going well and we feel that study is difficult. For some people it’s like that. For some people meditation comes more easily than studying and for some people study comes more easily than meditation.
So we all need to do both and if you’re the person who would like to meditate a lot, you need to make sure that you do a good practice of study because without having this study then there’s not an understanding of what we’re trying to do with the meditation and it won’t really get us anywhere if we’re not meditating with a good understanding of the philosophical background to what we’re doing. So we have to have both aspects, like two legs, walking with two legs, you know, you can’t get very far just hopping along. So, according to our situation and whichever one might be a little bit more powerful than the other for us, So we need to do these sorts of practices according to our situation, however much time we’ve got, however much opportunity we have to listen to teachings and so on. Some people have more opportunity to spend more on these things than others according to their situation in life, but it’s we should try to make time for this in our lives and then if our efforts meet obstacles, that’s something that’s only to be expected because for sure we’ve been doing all sorts of negative karmas in our previous lifetimes and we’ve been slack and lazy in our past lifetimes, if not in this one.
So if we hadn’t if we’d been perfect practitioners in our previous lifetimes then we’d be enlightened already. So we should think that it’s perfectly natural that we’re going to encounter obstacles and that our Dharma progress isn’t always going to go smoothly, and we shouldn’t be sort of shocked or surprised when this happens. So we shouldn’t feel that there’s something terribly wrong with ourselves. We just have to expect these kinds of things and when they come along just realize that this is natural. So what we have to do is just continue to make a steady effort and particularly if you’re trying to understand emptiness, that really requires a very big collection of merit to understand emptiness thoroughly.
And you’ll probably encounter a lot of obstacles trying to understand emptiness. So, compared to other things, you might think that other things have come to you easily. So you might not have had to put out so much effort. You might not have met so many obstacles with other things such as, for instance, trying to earn a living. Some people find that they can earn a living very easily, they get good jobs, they get well paid, they’re appreciated at their place of work and so on.
And they don’t seem to encounter a lot of obstacles in getting that situation together. And then when they come to study, particularly studying the topic of emptiness, then they suddenly find that they encounter all sorts of difficulties. Or perhaps trying to meditate, encounter all sorts of difficulties. So this is a time when we have to be prepared to just keep up a steady practice and not expect to get everything all at once. Look, take a long term view and see that whatever we’re doing now is going to bring results in future lives.
We won’t necessarily see big results in the short term. We’re not doing it as short term thing, we’re not doing it for the short term benefits, we’re doing it for the long term benefits. And if we can just take this long term view and be patient and steady in our practice, then we’ll be definitely going ahead even though you can’t see what’s happening, it’s really doing something and it’s creating cause. It’s building up this energy that’s going to bring the result in future lifetimes. So we shouldn’t get frustrated by our shortcomings because this is just something that isn’t going to be Any shortcomings, any sort of lack of ability to understand and so on if we have it present.
It’s not really an essential part of ourselves, but it’s just this obstacle coming up because of our previous karma. And if we keep on, then we’ll eventually get past it, and we’ll eventually get the understanding that we’re looking for. So does anybody want to say anything? No? Good news.
Yes, that’s good news. So there’s bad news and good news. So we can actually use these to help us, as it says, we can remember that these things are a result of our negative karmas and that makes us understand the necessity of avoiding these kinds of negative karmas again. We have to particularly avoid being slack and careless about our dharma studies, giving up too easily or being distracted by pleasures and so on too easily and instead continue to make this steady effort and that’s really what’s creating the cause to be able to achieve what we want to in the future lives. That makes sense really, doesn’t it?
Because really whatever we want in life, if it’s something that’s worth working for, then we have to make a steady effort. You can’t most worthwhile things you can’t get just by making a brief burst of effort. You usually have to lay a long term plan and keep on working towards it gradually. Determining to not be easily discouraged, but instead to continue to make a steady effort. We also do this practice of Tonglen, so we think that we’re not the only beings in this situation.
There are many people who are trying to understand the Dharma and who are having difficulties with various sorts of understanding because they are having a similar sort of karma. So we think that we can take on this karma for the sake of these other beings. Instead of feeling how bad it is to meet these obstacles, we think how wonderful it would be if by having this problem ourselves, we were able to take it off others. And so this is just an imaginative practice but it’s a very important practice to do because it really hits our self-cherishing. So most of you would have had this explanation of how we actually do the Tonglen practice the breath, taking it off.
Does anybody not know about the I think you all know about the practice, don’t you? There’s nobody here who hasn’t encountered that. So you just breathe breathe in the problems, this particular problem from these other beings and put it on your own self-cherishing and send out your good karma and happiness and Dharma understanding to these other beings. So, we’ll just do a little bit of that practice now. Breathing in difficulties of understanding.
Breathing out all the happiness realizations and understanding, intelligent understanding of the Dharma. Next stanza. Would excuse me. I’ve got my. Darn.
Yes. Would you like to read it? Thirty what is it? Twenty nine. Alright.
Alright, so if you fall asleep while you’re meditating or studying, that’s what’s behind it all. So it’s a little bit similar to the previous verse. Some sort of problems that we encounter while we’re doing our Dharma practice. It’s really emphasizing the importance of treating these symbolic Dharma objects properly. So by showing respect to the Dharma texts we create cause for understanding and by treating them disrespectfully, it has the opposite result.
I think actually I got onto that in the last verse when I was supposed to be talking more about I was looking ahead. I was looking at the wrong verse. But anyway, yes, it’s always very, very strongly emphasized how respectfully we should treat the Dharma texts. We should treat the Dharma texts. And we might think that they’re just pieces of paper with some marks on them made with black ink, but they symbolically represent the word the speech of Buddha and the the words that they contain are the words of Buddha or of the great panditas who follow Buddha.
And so they represent the living tradition of the teaching and they are the tools for our practice towards enlightenment. So the books are always held to be the most important among the symbolic representations of the Three Jewels of refuge. The speech of Buddha is considered to be the most important and always placed in the highest place so we always, if we have books on our altar, never place the books in a lower position than the Buddha statues or other things on the altar. But for instance, if you had two shelves, would put the the books on the top shelf and then the statues and things would have to go lower. And you should never, for instance, a Dharma book as something to prop up a Buddha statue or something like that.
So this is because it’s the speech that Does anybody remember why it’s the speech that we have the most regard for? Yes. Why do we hold the the Dharma to be more The the speech of the Buddha should be more important than the Buddha’s body and mind? Yes. So the the reason we actually give the highest regard to the speech over the body and mind of the Buddha is the speech is the one that the one that gave us that helps us the most.
So if we’d had Buddha’s body, his physical form appear in the world but not not teaching, then wouldn’t have got much benefit from it. His attaining enlightenment of mind wouldn’t have given us much benefit at all if we hadn’t received the speech And just some Buddhas don’t teach, they just appear in a particular world so the beings can see them and make connection with them and make some offerings and so on and in that way accumulate merit but they don’t teach so those beings only get a limited amount of benefit from that. Whereas in the fortunate worlds where the Buddhas teach then it’s really very great because we able to learn the whole path and follow it and attain liberation and enlightenment. Oh, it’s a bit more straightforward than that. Yes, it’s the it’s the communication of the which which caused things to happen.
Yes. Yes. Yes. So, in actual fact, when when it comes to refer to respecting Dharma teachings yes, so anything that carries the words of Buddha, anything that has Dharma words on it, even if it’s just a few letters, for instance if it’s an envelope addressed to Buddha house. All of these things should be treated respectfully and disposed of if they need to be disposed of in a suitable way.
So what we should do is Dharma material. In Tibet, they didn’t have terribly much printed matter, so they would put it in caves and places like that. But for us, that’s not a practical proposition, so the Lamas say that we can burn it. And while we’re burning it, should recite the mantra Om Ah Hung all the time while the Dharma material is burning. And even ordinary papers, with ordinary printed words, we’re told to treat them with respect.
And this is terribly hard in our society because everything’s got printing on it even, you know, the plastic bags and things that you buy food in at the supermarket is all covered in printing. And if you’re not supposed to throw printed matter into the garbage, then what do you do with these plastic bags? So it’s really difficult, but at least can try to do what you can. So shouldn’t just throw even newspapers and things or ordinary things into the just into the ordinary dirty garbage. So it’s alright to recycle them or to use them as mulch on the garden.
Not Dharma material, but just ordinary printed material. Dharma material should be burned and other stuff like newspapers and so on you can recycle. That’s okay. That’s fine. Or if you can’t recycle it, you can use it as mulch or something, but you shouldn’t throw it in the garbage bin with other dirty stuff.
It can be very difficult sometimes. Some stuff you can’t recycle, so you just have to try to work it out as best you can. But anyway, this is the advice we have to avoid creating the wrong sort of karma with printed matter. Yes, you can burn it in a fireplace or can do it. Yes, usually you can have a little You don’t have to do it in a big container, you can do it quietly discreetly with a small fire in your backyard and people aren’t going to notice it or make much fuss, you know.
Well, might think it’s a barbecue. But yes, an indoor fireplace is always a suitable solution for those who have them and in Adelaide there’s plenty of those, generally. Om Ah Hung, standing for the Buddha’s body, speech and mind. So Yes. So we shouldn’t step out of the Dharma books or put them under our seats or put other things on top of them.
So, this is something that we have to try to be careful about. And another thing that we need to be careful about too is when we tell other people not to do these things, have to be careful how we do it. Because apparently there’s been some complaints about people in Buddha House, know, all the students sort of jumping on people who do these things. They they see somebody, for instance, putting their book on their thigh and they say, don’t do that. Or something like that, you know, and make them feel bad.
So we have to be careful how we tell other people about it, but on the other hand, when you get used to always respecting your Dharma books, terribly difficult to just sit around and let somebody else put their Dharma books on the floor and do all these things without saying something to them. And of course you know that it’s not good for their karmic imprints, so you do feel that you must say something to them. So trying to do it in as pleasant a way as possible is something that we have to work on. Yes. Certainly.
Yeah. I mean, it’s like a misuse of, you know, the benefits of printing. So they didn’t have these problems in Tibet and ancient India where these rules came from. The printing was mainly used for Dharma material and not much used for other things. Well, I did mention that it’s yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, well, yes, as I said, you know it’s difficult nowadays and you just have to try to work it out the best, but it is important to try, because if you don’t try it’s like breaking this accumulating this kind of karma. I think as long as you’re really making a sincere effort, then you’re not going to be accumulating this kind of karma. Whereas if you start saying Oh, it’s so difficult, you know, so I’m going to not worry about it, I’m just going to throw it around and do what I like, then you are going to be accumulating this kind of karma. Because the letters of the alphabet are the means by which the reason for this is because these letters are the means by which we acquire wisdom, Dharma wisdom.
And even the letters themselves, in a sense, become sacred. And even the fact that they’ve been cheapened in our modern society, there’s still that connection there. So, tricky one, we don’t want to have I mean, the reason why we’re having this problem in this life, and reason why we do find ourselves in a sea of garbage printed matter that’s very hard for us to deal with is because we’ve misused it in the past. This is a karmic result in itself. If we’ve misused printed matter in the past, that’s why we’re having to experience a problem in relating to it now.