Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 28-minute teaching on The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, Ven Margaret McAndrew shows how to transform the obstacles that naturally arise in practice—dullness, worldly distraction, the sense that Dharma work is harder than everyday life—into invitations for real learning. The method: understand the karmic cause behind each obstacle and do tonglen, taking on others’ suffering in that form. But none of this works without foundation, she emphasizes repeatedly. Basic teachings like impermanence and karma have to be studied and felt deeply; without them, even sincere practice becomes hollow. She also tackles a pitfall common among eager beginners: trying to do too much too fast. Pacing yourself steadily through a daily practice, she explains, is itself the skillful path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 SW 1999 04 08.mp3
UUID: b8acc4f9-fc43-4927-9dfe-1e4fa2925409
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-04-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 28.9 minutes
Words: ~3,075
One reason why we need to be careful with newspapers too because as well as having articles on crime and corruption and murders and wars and so on, they also have quite a lot of mention of different religious things, including nowadays more and more, quite often you get mention of Buddhism in one form or another, and of course quite a lot about other religions. So, it’s something that without intending to could be something of a Dharma nature that you wouldn’t want to treat with disrespect. Sometimes I pull these things and tear them out so that I can dispose of them with my Dharma materials, but you don’t always spot them. So anyway, so we have this situation here. If we find that we get dull and sleepy when we try to study, then we can use this as a So the way we use this in the thought training is to use this situation to understand the karmic cause that brought about this result.
And because we don’t want to have this problem with dullness and sleepiness, then we determine to watch our actions in the future and try to avoid creating any more of this kind of karma. And we do the Tonglen practice thinking of how many others experience this sort of problem of dullness and sleepiness and sinking that we’re experiencing it for them. So, we’ll just do that practice now for a minute meditating on that. I’m running strongly towards delusion. So, yes, so when our mind runs strongly towards delusions and worldly activities, So, this could be either sleeping all the time or attachment to desire objects.
In general. Well, you know, including when we’re supposed to be meditating. Yes, particularly when we’re supposed to be doing I mean particularly in a sense that distracts us from Dharma activities. So, of course, know, worldly activities doesn’t mean that everything you do has to be a worldly activity unless it’s formal meditation and so on, because you do have to do certain practical things to take care of your life and so on. But if you all your thoughts and aspirations and ambitions and so on run towards these things all the time, if you feel constantly attracted towards delusion.
So Geshe-la says it could be sleeping all the time or it could be desire objects. So anyway, whatever it might be. So it could be something like being attached to cars or movies or whatever. So I thought maybe books. Not diamond books, other books.
Who knows about that because she has to drop me off to the library every so often. Yes. Or it could be towards rivalry and quarrels and this and sort of So so there’s like different kinds of delusions because they’re sleeping all the time would be from ignorance and attachment to cars and movies and things would be from desire and rivalry and quarrelsomeness would be a case of the delusion of anger and hatred. So all of these things anyway, they’re a result of not having meditated sufficiently in the topics of the Graduated Path from the small scope and intermediate scope. So if been studying your Graduated Path teachings, you know that we have to base the Mahāyāna topics of the Great Scope and developing Love and Compassion and so on.
That practice has to be based on the practices which are practiced in common with the beings of the small and medium scope. And that includes the very basic practices like understanding impermanence and understanding suffering. And if we don’t understand all these things, we don’t have a strong practice. We won’t have a strong practice because without these things we’ve got no foundation for the other things like trying to cultivate love and compassion to all sentient beings. You’re just sitting there thinking Oh, know, love, love, love, but it doesn’t mean anything!
So, we have to understand these topics. And so if we find that we’re getting caught up in delusion all the time, this is because of having in our previous lifetimes neglected these kinds of meditations. But actually it also seems to be something that comes from this life because also if we meditate on these things thoroughly in this lifetime and understand them, it’s going to help us very much with these delusions. But in any case, if you find that it’s a very strong impulse and that your meditations perhaps aren’t very readily overcoming these attractions towards delusion and it’s because you have followed those delusions in previous lifetimes and not done the remedies, the meditations are for the remedy to them. So we know what the remedy is.
Particularly relating to the last stanza, we need to to acquire a good knowledge through study, as it was explained before in the previous stanza. So then if we’ve done good study and gained good understanding that way, we can have effective meditation that will really change our mind. And if we practice these things now, then even if we might have difficulty in if we’ve got a very strong imprint of delusion from our previous lifetimes, we can understand that comes from having run after these things all the time and not practiced the antidote overcoming them. So if we practice these things now, can understand that we’re laying down cause to not have these kinds of problems in the future lifetimes. So it will get easier and easier.
Even in this lifetime we can expect to see things getting easier as we go along if we put in the practice. Definitely in our future lifetimes will be easier. So we can then find that our in our Dharma practice, that we can be directed with joyful single mindedness towards Dharma practice rather than finding something that seems like hard slogs, something that we feel reluctant to do when we feel that we’d rather be following all these delusions. The Dharma practice will seem the most attractive and interesting thing for us and that is the result that will come about in future lives from just making a steady effort. Not forcing ourselves too much, that wouldn’t be skillful, but just setting yourself a reasonable goal and then being steady about it.
This is what is skillful practice. Any questions about this? Yes, so it’s like what I was saying before about the tulkus, you know, how their study comes easily. So meditation and all these other things and just having the mind going in a virtuous direction naturally are things that don’t come easily to us now, but the more we keep up a steady practice, the more it’s going to come in the future. Yes.
Yeah, that’s not skillful. That’s the mistake that quite a lot of us make when we first start off Dharma practice, if you’re particularly enthusiastic, you often want to do everything all at once. And of course it’s easy to fall into because the Dharma teachings are so fascinating. There’s so many interesting things you can do, and you read all these teachings about gaining single point concentration, gaining physical and mental pliancy, and Tantric meditations, and the Deity practices and so on, and it’s all so great. Then you might think you want to study all the philosophical teachings and understand logic and understand emptiness and all of this.
They’re all, you know, extremely valuable goals, you know, extremely precious things to do. And the point is that if you go at it too hard to just end up sort of exhausting yourself, can get burned out and makes it that much harder to carry on. So you have to learn to phase yourself, and I think that’s one of the hardest things to do really. Because when you’re all enthused about it, you want to do You want to do it too Yes, you want to do it all yes, and then you end up getting room, you know, you get sort of a pain in the heart or various other different kinds of physical problems and you really can’t do anything. And then you don’t want to do anything at all, you just want to sit around watching television, lying back in an armchair and know, drinking soft drinks all day long or whatever.
So or whatever your particular delusion might be. Which can be sometimes good, you know. I have a friend who said sometimes you just need to veg out, and it’s quite true. So vegging out occasionally isn’t necessarily contradictory to Dharma practice. It can be actually part of your Dharma practice to allow yourself to veg out or to do some sort of agreeable activity as a sort of a refreshment for your mind or so on.
So all of these things are part of your Dharma practice, your understanding that you’re doing these things with that thought in mind to help yourself along. And you might get eventually to the stage where you don’t need to have so many diversions. But in the meantime you have to understand what your body and mind need and they say we have to treat our mind like a child. If you try to force it too hard then it’s just going to rebel against you or to be not able to produce. So what we have to do is, you know, sort of encourage ourselves along gently.
So, that was number thirty. And we haven’t So we We’ll do a little meditation on that, so we can determine not to be slack in regard to meditating on the small and medium scopes or the topics related to basic Dharma topics and gaining aversion towards the negative karma and that would lead to lower rebirth and also to the whole of cyclic existence and bringing about within ourselves a very powerful desire to attain liberation from cyclic existence through these meditations of these small and medium scopes. So we determined to put proper effort into these basic teachings, as well as into the practices of the Great Scope. thinking of the difficulties that come into our life and into our practice through having the effect of these practices in the path, determine we then think of how many others are experiencing these kinds of sufferings. And we can take on the suffering of the others, of the other Dharma practitioners and think that we’re experiencing this situation and relieving the others of it at the same time.
Uh-huh. She’s after eight ten to thirty one. And so this verse refers to both spiritual and worldly endeavors. And according to our karma, we might have problems with one of those areas or we might have problems with both of those areas. So some people find that in worldly life, I mentioned this earlier, everything goes like a dream, so they don’t seem to have any problems and they get on well in life.
And then they expect their Dharma practice to be similar, but what happens instead, they find that as soon as they really start trying to practice Dharma earnestly, they come across all sorts of obstacles. And I see a few nods! So, yes, this is actually related to purification, when you start doing Dharma practice and purifying your negative karmas. Often as your negative karmas are purified, they will also ripen a little and you experience a little result in this lifetime. So it doesn’t mention that particularly in this practice, but it’s one of the ways that we’re taught to think when we have these difficulties that we’re actually able to rejoice about these difficulties because they are a ripening and experiencing in a lesser form of some serious karma which might have taken us to some sort of really bad rebirth or some sort of very bad result if we’d not been doing this purification practice.
So particularly if you’re doing purification practice such as Vajrasattva practice or doing thirty five Buddhas or something every day, or doing it quite intensively, then you find these things tend to happen. But in any case, when you try to practice Dharma, it takes a lot of merit to get results in your Dharma practice. It takes a lot more merit than it does to get worldly success, so people who are expecting their Dharma practice to come easily similarly to their worldly life after that point, still then instead of that they find endless obstacles. So that can seem a bit frustrating. So sometimes you get the impression that in your spiritual life that you’re not getting anywhere and you just seem to be stuck or even going backwards.
So for instance if you’re trying to work on the mind, working on controlling the mind, calming the mind, it becomes very very difficult and it seems like you’re going backwards and on the surface there might even be something in this point of view in that for a time your mind might become very uncontrolled, emotions might become uncontrolled. We might feel that we’re becoming crazy or we might feel very very discouraged and depressed or be afflicted with very strong attraction to worldly objects that would be something that’s a very strong distraction to us in some way or another. And so these things because of this kind of karma that we’re experiencing from having ignored cause and effect in previous lifetimes. So, any comments? So that’s in Dharma practice and in worldly life, could be lack of success in worldly things.
This can take many different forms such as failing to make a profit in business or if you’re a farmer then not being able to harvest good crops. So all of these things, also in the worldly side of life, are due to cause and effect. There’s a cause for all of these results and they result from our old non virtuous actions and particularly repeated ones, ones that we perform over and over again. If we perform a similar action over and over again, for instance frequently killing animals, then you’re going to have this kind of result, this kind of experience. And because these imprints become very strong, very powerful, it takes a long time to wear them out.
A long time to get the result out of our systems. So this is something that Geshe-la was talking about at the course, about how we have these various different kinds of chronic results to experience. And some of these results are similar to the causes that we created.
So if we’ve been creating repetitive repetitive actions in particular accumulating some strong karma in that regard, we had to experience a kind of result similar to the action we did to others. And if we’re for instance if we’ve in the past stolen or destroyed other people’s wealth, then in this lifetime we can expect to have the same thing happen to us that fail to prosper. And these all come as a result of the actions that we’ve done in our past lifetimes. So, we’ve all done heaps of these actions before because it goes way back. It’s not just one life, but it’s countless different lifetimes that these things have been done and we’ve tended to do the same sorts of things again and again, life after life and to have very strong non virtuous imprints.
So we have to expect that we’re going to get these kinds of setbacks and we shouldn’t feel that there’s something wrong with ourselves if we do have these setbacks, we do seem to be sometimes struggling and not getting anywhere. So we shouldn’t think that there’s something wrong with ourselves, that we’re not good enough, that we can’t do the practice, or we shouldn’t think that there’s something wrong with the teachings, that they don’t work. Instead we just recognize that this is something that was inevitable that’s bound to happen and if we’ve been doing appropriate practices for the level that we’re at, then we shouldn’t worry, shouldn’t feel inclined to give up, but just continue steadily cultivating patience and determination in keeping up this daily practice and just Eventually working through this rough patch. So In actual fact, people have been practicing Dharma well. Seems to the universal experience that when they’re experiencing the rough patches, say afterwards that it’s the rough patches that they really learn from.
It seems to follow a cycle. You seem to have a sort of really smooth phase where everything goes well, you don’t have major problems and your practice seems to go fairly steadily and so on. Then for some reason that you can’t Sometimes you can see some sort of external cause, such as for instance getting sick, but other times it just seems to come from within yourself that for some reason things become very difficult. And for a while you can feel really overwhelmed with the difficulty of the whole thing. And in the middle of it you can’t see any good in it.
But when you’ve worked through it, can actually see that you’ve worked through some sort of important You’ve reached some new level of understanding that you’ve perhaps left behind some sort of particular level of delusion or something through this experience. So, in actual fact these situations can be very helpful to us. And if we have the thought training practice, then we can use situation by understanding the karmic cause behind it and making a resolution not to belittle or ignore cause and effect in future. In other words, karma. karma, cause and effect.
But we can endure whatever hardships might come along rather than taking the easy way out and doing things which we know are karmically undesirable. We can endure the hardships and follow the right actions which are necessary for our practice. And we can make this determination and then we also take on the sufferings of other beings who are experiencing this particular kind of problem. So we’ll do that meditation now. So it’s past nine.
Will I do another verse or just finish off now? Finish off now here. Okay, so we can just well does anybody have anything to say before we finish? Any comments, questions or stories? Sorry, I shouldn’t be wearing this.
So we can dedicate our merits with the prayers on page five. May I quickly become an awakened spirit?