Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew addresses stanza 32 of the Wheel of Sharp Weapons: why our rituals and prayers often fail. She teaches that such failure stems from karmic obstacles created by relying on worldly gods and spirits rather than the Three Jewels of Buddhist refuge. She distinguishes clearly between worldly deities—unreliable, limited beings like the Greek gods—and the Three Jewels, drawing on specific examples from Tibetan and East Asian Buddhist practice. She then teaches the Mahāyāna practice of Tonglen (giving and taking), applying it to this obstacle. A subtle but critical point emerges: cynicism and skepticism toward the Three Jewels are themselves powerful obstructions to receiving their help. Pitched at practitioners engaged in systematic study of this text.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 19 SW 1999 04 15.mp3
UUID: e6c08802-effd-4804-8d13-069d49d3ec82
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-04-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,623
Thirty two actually. I think. If anybody please correct me if I’m wrong. I wasn’t too sure actually when I looked whether we’d got through stanza thirty one or thirty two last week. I thought we might have.
We didn’t get on to thirty two, did we? So, we’ve been going through this text for a while, so some of you might have missed some of the earlier parts of it. But it’s basically taking us through thought training practice, how to convert our problems and sufferings and difficulties into helpful circumstances on the path so that whenever we have problems and so on, instead of feeling unhappy we’re going go, Oh great, this is really wonderful! So we can be happy. That’s the sight of somebody who’s really trained themselves well in the thought training when they can really say that, so maybe at the beginning it’s just something to work on, but it gives us something to work on.
We’ve been going for a couple of months now and we’ve been looking at various different verses which explain the karmic causes and effects. So basically it follows this approach of explaining the various different actions, the various different results that we are experiencing, various different sufferings and problems and then explaining what the karmic cause of these was, what we’ve done in our previous lives so that we know that we’ve done something wrong in our previous lives and we don’t have to be vague about what it was, but it tells us specifically the kind of wrong actions that lead to this kind of result. We understand the importance of avoiding these kinds of actions in the future. Then we use the Mahāyāna practice of Tonglen, of giving and taking, so we think that while we have to experience this particular suffering, can make good use of it by mentally taking on the sufferings of other beings who are having problems and giving them all our good things. And even though this is just a mental practice, it’s just a thought training, we can’t actually take the suffering off the other beings by doing it.
We have to do it in a heartfelt sort of way to try to get a feeling that we really are doing it. And then it becomes a very powerful practice and it prepares us to be able to take on all sorts of hardships and hard work for the sake of others as we develop in our practice. So, it’s important that we should put this teaching into practice and that it shouldn’t just be something that we do intellectually and not just come along here and listen to it and think that sounds very good and then just sort of go away and keep it in our heads, but we have to bring it into our lives and it must be something that becomes very meaningful for us so that we actually remember this kind of practice when we encounter the circumstances. So it’s not enough just to think this way when we’re here at Buddha House, but when we encounter problems, what it might be, such as somebody abusing us or being under the influence of illnesses or pains or whatever, then we have to be able to remember at that time to put this thought training technique to practice.
So we need to meditate on the verses and to cultivate mindfulness so that we start looking at things this way all the time. It seems to me that if you learn this kind of practice and then don’t actually put it into action when you encounter the circumstances, it’s like going shopping and leaving your money or your credit card at home. So you go out and you see things that you need to have and you can’t get them because you haven’t got the money with you. So it’s a bit like this, you know, that you need to have the practice in your mind so that when you encounter these different circumstances you can get the value out of the circumstances so that instead of being adverse circumstances they become something that’s helpful for you and that’s what we’re actually doing the practice for. So, of course, I’m talking about this but I always forget myself.
It’s really good for me to be going through this again because it brings it back into mind. We have to start to think that way and have that sort of readiness in our mind that when we encounter some sort of problem immediately we start thinking, Oh yes, this is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons! And it starts to become something that we really integrate it into just our daily everyday thinking. So we don’t want to just keep it between the covers of the book. So does anybody have anything they want to say or anything they want to ask?
Well, each stanza is related to the Tonglen practice. So what we do is when we experience a particular problem which are listed in great detail in here, then we can think that this is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons of our karma coming back to us from wrong actions we’ve done. So if we study these verses we might actually remember the karmic cause or if some of these karmic causes are explained in the graduated path we might remember the specific karmic cause. If you don’t remember the specific karmic cause, you still understand that it’s due to your wrong actions. So instead of getting upset about it and blaming other people or blaming blaming your fate or bad luck or whatever or blaming God, then you understand that it’s just a karmic result and there’s no point in getting upset about it.
But then we do the practice of Tonglen which is the Mahāyāna of giving and taking, so that we can actually not only take it calmly, but actually turn it into a very powerful positive practice. So just remembering our karma and taking it calmly because we remember it as being our own karmic result is something that’s common to all kinds of Buddhism and it’s not specifically a Mahāyāna practice, but it’s a basic understanding that we have to have before we go on to do something further. So this is a very basic understanding that underlies all our thought training practice. Otherwise, if we didn’t think about this then we wouldn’t be able to carry it on to a more elevated level and think of taking on the suffering of others and so on. So it’s really important to have these basic understandings.
So last week we finished stanza thirty one, going on to stanza thirty two. When rites we perform never seem to be fruitful, this is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done. Till now we have relied on the gods of this world or our non skilful actions to bring us relief. Hereafter, let’s turn in another direction and leave our non virtuous actions behind. We didn’t do this one last week, did we?
No, okay. I wasn’t too sure really. So this stanza might perhaps seem a bit irrelevant to some people. They might think that they’re not in the habit of doing rites or doing these kinds of ritual practices in order to get the things they want. But it’s still very relevant in the East.
For instance in Taiwan people would do practices, have prayers or various practices done very much when they needed help with their practical problems and also the Tibetans of course, the Lamas have quite a range of different rituals they can perform that can be helpful to people. There are also quite a lot of people practicing various rituals. You might think it’s funny to talk about asking the worldly gods to help us, but in fact there are quite a lot of rituals current in some of these places which are not directed at the Three Jewels but are directed at worldly gods and spirits. When I was in Taiwan there was actually quite a lot of this with the local people they used to call the folk religion. Well, didn’t really have too much to do with it myself, but what I was given to understand by some of the Buddhist people there was that the folk religion included a lot of worshipping of local spirits and making offerings to local spirits and so on. Sometimes there would be a problem with people wondering what they should do in relation to these local spirits that were very much a part of sometimes of their families practice.
His Holiness Dalai Lama is also when he gives, for instance, the Kālacakra initiation or something like that where there’s a lot of Tibetan people together and they come from some of the more remote parts of Tibet or other neighboring countries, he would be telling them not to make offerings to these worldly gods because he knew that some of them were in the practice of actually doing these of these things. In actual fact the Lamas sometimes do certain practices with the worldly gods and that might seem a bit funny, but what we can ask the worldly gods to do sometimes is to help us with worldly things such as to help us with perhaps sicknesses or with wealth or something like that and it might seem a bit confusing because we can’t ask them for worldly help in the same way that we would ask a powerful human being to help us if we’re in some sort of difficulty. But we shouldn’t take refuge in these beings. We shouldn’t regard them as spiritual guides or pray to them in the way that we would pray to the Three Jewels as being ultimate guides. So it’s very important to keep that distinction.
And to remember that as they’re worldly beings, beings they’re totally unreliable, they’ll help you if they feel like it. They’re like us, you know, somebody might help us and one day we’ve got plenty of time and we’re in a good mood so we’ll say oh yes and another day we’ll say oh don’t bother me now because this is just the nature of worldly beings. Well, there are various different, for instance, nature spirits in different places. Also there are some beings which are not even gods but which actually belong to the hungry ghost realm but which are associated with various certain places. For instance I knew somebody who had a lot of sickness and there was a Lama at Kopan Monastery at the time who was well known for his psychic powers and for doing these kind of ritual practices.
He said that there was this particularly powerful spirit in her area and she offended him by walking around. He was actually on her piece of land or near her piece of land and she offended him by walking around there. So he’d done something to make her sick, so he did lots of practices for her. In actual fact she showed a lot of improvement after that. This lady actually was a bit clever in herself, so she was actually seeing all sorts of funny things while this was going on.
It was quite interesting really. Also, a very Buddhist viewpoint, he said that he wouldn’t do an exorcism and send the spirit away because the spirit was actually like the ruler of the other local spirits in that area. He was a good ruler, so it wouldn’t be appropriate to send him away, so he was going to make offerings and ask him to leave her alone, to get on the side of him. Geshe Lama Konchog. Yeah.
Oh, you’ve probably met Oh, you’re right. So, so we have to be careful to always rely on the Three Jewels. And sometimes we might for instance have serious illnesses or persistent illnesses that could be helped by doing rituals such as offerings to the Three Jewels or making requests to various tantric deities and so on. Sometimes we’re sick and we try all sorts of medicines and things but they don’t help and we might try to have various ritual practices done for us by Lamas or by the monks or do it ourselves. It still doesn’t seem to help.
These practices are very powerful, so when we find that we have problems that can’t be helped, then we can understand that this is a result of, in the past, having relied on what Geshe Ngawang Dakpa called Black Side Teachers. In other words, people who were teaching some sort of practice to the spirits rather than relying on ultimate guides, the Three Jewels. So, placing our reliance on these worldly spirits and gods. And there are people in our society who might think this is just something weird from the East, but there are people in our society too who are doing things like holding seances and in some respects seem to be quite often relying on these kinds of spirits, making contact with these kinds of spirits and regarding these kinds of spirits as spiritual guides. Some of them actually seem to, particularly from the hungry ghost realm, of them are quite mischievous and they seem to take a pleasure in presenting themselves to people through seances and this kind of thing as being spiritual guides and they can talk a lot of garbage that’s very high sounding and sounds very impressive to people who are easily impressed by this sort of thing.
And it isn’t really they might have got hold of a few nice words from somewhere but they haven’t got any power to help others and it can be quite harmful getting caught up with these kinds of things that can lead to all sorts of problems in the long run. So with the Three Jewels of refuge, they have great power to help us, but it depends on our side not having obstacles to their helping us, coming with obstacles from the past. So if we’ve been in the past, in our past relying on inappropriate beings or on these worldly beings or if we’ve been cultivating another thing it could be if we’ve been cultivating an attitude of scepticism towards the Three Jewels. I think that really comes into the next verse. So, the future anyway, we should cultivate appreciation of the qualities of the Three Jewels and rely on the Buddha and on the Dharma and on the Sangha as the true spiritual guides.
And we should understand that Buddha was the the leader, the the teacher who showed the the true path or was the propounder of the path. The Dharma is the actual path, the real object of refuge that takes us to liberation and the Sangha is the helper. This is particularly referring to the Ārya Sangha, the beings who have achieved through their meditation achieved direct insight into emptiness. So they have actually followed the path quite a long way. They have achieved the higher levels of the path and they can guide us on the path for that reason.
We remember then thinking of the common causes that we must have created in the past, we just make a resolution that in future we won’t rely on worldly spirits and gods, but we’ll place our reliance firmly on the Three Jewels of refuge. Then in the future we won’t have this kind of problem. We think of other beings who are having these kinds of difficulties and sufferings. We do the Tonglen practice, taking on their sufferings, particularly the suffering of not finding ritual practices effective when they seek help through these ritual practices and prayers to the Three Jewels and not finding these practices effective. We take that on in the practice of Tonglen and give out all our good karma to them and think that we’re sending them all the realizations and help on the path liberation.
So we’ll just do that for a short time. That that was stanza thirty two. So now we’re It seems here to be specifically talking about these worldly spirits. There are we have plenty of other stanzas where we’re warned about placing our interest in other worldly things, worldly pursuits. Maybe you’d like to read stanza thirty three, Helen.
Yes. The the questions. Yeah. The stanzas, no. They probably aren’t being picked up.
Might be a good idea. Yes. I think we’ve already gone through thirty three stanzas and missed most of them, so perhaps it’s a bit late to worry now. I think anybody who’s going to look at that might have to get hold of the book. Going back to the worldly gods again, in case, is there anybody here who isn’t too sure about how the worldly gods fit in?
Do you all know about the worldly gods? You’ve had the explanation of the six realms of worldly beings and you know the difference between worldly gods and for instance the Christian idea of God as the universal creator or whatever. It’s not talking about that kind of God, it’s more like perhaps the Greek idea of the Greek gods. They had certain powers but they were pretty limited. But they were immortals, so these gods are not immortal either.
They have a limited lifespan like ourselves. They live in a better realm and have all sorts of good things. Most of them don’t have much to do with human beings, but there’s a few of them who of connect a lot with this world. Some people have come to regard them as being ultimate beings but they’re not ultimate. Yes.
Well, if the clairvoyant is actually relying on a worldly god to give them their messages, then that would be this kind of reliance. If the clairvoyant is just relying on their own clairvoyant powers, then I don’t think it’s similar, but I don’t think that’s what’s meant here. Yes. Yes. Yes.
It’s more like, you know, sometimes you can rely on the gods to do certain things for you. They have certain powers such as perhaps being able to perhaps sometimes make your crops better or make your wealth better or something like that. Or they have the power on the other hand, some of them are a bit like stand over men. You give them praise and attention then they can harm you. This is for the problem in Tibet that some of these people have started, their families have been doing things like making prostrations to the worldly spirits and the worldly spirits then expect it and they come to feel that they have rights to this kind of tribute from these families and if they don’t get it then they will actually do them harm.
Yes. Yes. No. We we call yeah. They call those the, you know, like the the good things of the world.
But when we talk about worldly gods, they literally mean worldly gods. And there are a lot of people in the world still worship worldly gods. And particularly in these traditional societies where they don’t have as much access to modern benefits as we do. Also, as I said, even in our society you have people who are sort of playing games at least and making contact with these beings and perhaps some of them come to rely on them. In fact I’ve known of cases, it was a bit like you were talking about, people sort of holding seances and so on and they were making contact with this being who was giving them spiritual advice.
Lama Yeshe checked into that and said, it was near Kopan Monastery and all the students from Kopan Institute used to be going along to these seances and coming back and saying how wonderful this lady was who was talking to this being called Sempica. Lovely she said the students here are not to go to this lady because this being is a preta, a hungry ghost. It’s one of these hungry ghosts who enjoy having a human following. So That’s right, yes. That’s right, yes.
And this stuff, it’s all very high sounding stuff that all sounded very good, but when you put it all together it didn’t really give you much yeah. It didn’t have any real solidity in it. It was all sort of waffly. You know? Why is it when you start off?
You know? From the other side? Oh, yes. That’s right. There was about somebody who who was thinking of making investments because his uncle Fred had advised him a seance to do certain investments.
Who was it? Somebody was it I can’t remember who it was, but anyway he was asking somebody for advice and this person said, Well was your uncle Fred a skillful investor when he was alive? He said, No, was always making disastrous investments. And he said, Well why do you think he’d know more if he didn’t know anything about when he was alive, why do you think he’d know more about it now he’s dead? Let’s talk about the preta of Shang Kei Nee.
So was that Preta. He was speaking through a medium. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you can see them. Like the one in the house where I lived in St Kilda in Victoria at one stage. I never used to see him but other people used to see him sometimes, particularly if they woke up in the middle of the night.
But he was just an ordinary of haunted house type of ghost, but he wasn’t trying to tell us what to do or anything. There are these ones who do seem to try to get involved with people. Normally they say they belong to the hungry ghost realm and they get reborn in that form because they’re attached to the place or the family that they lived within their previous life. Going on from the anyway, that first, that previous stanza. So instead of relying on wrong spiritual leaders or worldly beings, then we need to place our reliance on the Three Jewels of refuge.
And we need look to our teachers for long term benefit for future lives. So we’re really placing our main goal on liberation and enlightenment. We’re placing our sights on the goal of liberation and enlightenment. Then we may also find that sometimes we need to ask for help with worldly needs. We can ask the Three Jewels to help us with our worldly needs also.
For example, at the Tārā Pujas in particular, we often ask Tārā to help us with our worldly things because Tārā is particularly good at helping us, particularly quick and powerful to help us with our needs. Things like sickness or material needs, money problems, if you need a job or if you want to have children then Tārā can help you with these things. But these things are secondary needs and in general we have to take care of these material needs so that we have the freedom and leisure for our Dharma practice. But we shouldn’t think of these things as being ends in themselves. In our society most of us probably look to science first, so if we’re sick we’ll go to a doctor rather than rituals.
Or if we have some sort of various problems, we tend to try to look for the scientific cause of these problems and try to look for some sort of scientific remedy. Whereas in ancient India and Tibet, they didn’t have so much scientific knowledge and so they would tend to rely rituals very much more perhaps than we would. But there comes times for us that when modern science doesn’t have the answers and when scientific methods fail. At these times sometimes rituals can be very helpful for us. Well, for example, myself one time I needed money badly and I was in a situation where I wasn’t in a situation of being able to make much money.
I was needing the money to go over to the Dharma celebration and I felt that it was something I very much needed to do for my Dharma practice so I felt that it was a situation that warranted making prayers to a particular aspect, to a particular deity, who was particularly concerned with helping us with money. So I made this first, yes. Well his name is Ganapati, or perhaps the Hindus know him as Ganesh. I didn’t even have his initiation at this stage, but I knew that Lama Yeshe had recommended him to the people of the the dharma center organizers, to make prayers to him if they were in need of money. So I thought, oh well, that’s what I’ll do.
And I didn’t even know the proper rituals or anything, so he’s holding a cake in one hand, so thought, Oh, he likes cake, so I’ll offer him a cake. So I offered a cake and some incense. It was quite magical. I’d been trying for months to put out an appeal to have some help with my expenses and really all I got was a few dollars. Then within three days after making this prayer, it all came.
One person sent me a note saying they’d cover my accommodation expenses over there and another person sent me a note saying that they would lend me a certain amount of money and somebody else offered me a job which was the only job that I could have done without having to leave where I was. Somebody else offered me a loan, which I had pay back when I got back and all this kind of thing. It sort of worked out exactly. It seemed like I was given as much, like I had to do as much from my side as I could to get it together, but what I wasn’t capable of doing was just sort of fell into my lap sort of thing and it just worked out exactly right. So I thought, oh this is really no coincidence.
This is just an example of the kind of thing that really help us at appropriate times. They’re not a substitute for karma. So if we haven’t got the karma to receive this kind of help, then we can’t receive this kind of help. But sometimes we have the karma on our mind stream, but these practices can bring it to fruition. Or perhaps if you’re experiencing the result of a bad karma, they can block that.
So if it’s not effective, if we do these rituals and make these prayers and so on and we don’t get any results, then we have to recognize that the faults with our karma and it’s because we’ve relied on the worldly gods in the past instead of on the Three Jewels and so now the Three Jewels can’t help us because of our not having relied on them in the past we haven’t got a sufficiently strong there for us. Instead of relying on them with real trust, then we’ve cultivated a skeptical attitude. Sometimes we can think this is very clever, know, to go around saying cynical things and being smart and so on. It’s alright to do this with politicians maybe, but when it comes to the Three Jewels, it’s just blocking yourself from their help because it’s through opening ourselves up and trusting them that they can help us. So if we’ve cultivated this attitude of being skeptical and having a critical and negative attitude towards the Three Jewels then we could be experiencing this result now even when we do try to rely on them that somehow our connection isn’t strong enough yet for us to really get the full benefit from the help.
We can be sure that the Three Jewels from their side will always be ready to help us. There’s no doubt about that. So from our side we have to be able to receive that help. So it’s one thing to check things out carefully. We’re often told that we shouldn’t have blind faith, that we should check carefully.
It’s important that we should check out things that we’re taught carefully and not just take them on blind trust. But what we need to do is to have an open mind and to check thoroughly and assure ourselves of the qualities of the Three Jewels, of the reliability of Buddha and his teachings. Through doing this we gain more and more understanding and particularly as we put it into practice and start to feel the results coming to fruit in our lives, then we develop stronger and stronger faith. It’s this kind of faith and trust that we should have which comes from really checking it out and putting it into practice. And if we simply take this cynical attitude and don’t see any good at all in what the Three Jewels has to teach us, then we won’t bother to do the practices and that way we’ll never start to experience the result of practice.
So this is a real obstacle to gaining happiness, to gaining the results of Dharma practice because it stops us from really practicing from the heart and it means that we might make a bit of an effort and then we just feel like giving up and we don’t see any point in going on because we have this sort of skepticism coming up all the time too strongly. So this is a real problem and even in worldly things we can’t be helped by the Three Jewels because we haven’t created the cause in the path. It applies even more when it comes to asking for progress in the Dharma. So this is the main thing we have to ask for and this is what we’re doing every day when we do things like the Guru Puja or do other practices. Even when we just recite the seven limb practice and do the Mandala offering, we’re asking for realizations on the path and we’re doing practices of making praise and offering to the Three Jewels so as to create a store of merit with the Three Jewels and at the same time we make requests and dedicating our merits for the important things, which is the stages of the path.
We want to achieve these realizations. We need to do the work from our side, we need to do the study and the meditation and we also need to receive inspiration from the Three Jewels. We can’t receive inspiration from the Three Jewels unless we are open to receiving that inspiration. And by making prayers and requests, this is the way that we open ourselves up. But if we’ve created the wrong sort of karma in the past, then it’s going to be hard for us to receive this inspiration from the Three Jewels to achieve these realizations and it’s not because the Three Jewels lack power, but because there is this obstacle, there’s this lack of karma, of the right kind and there’s this non virtuous karma that’s in the way from having followed wrong paths and wrong teachers.
So we have to practice relying on the Three Jewels and meditate on their qualities, understand the validity of what Buddha taught and then make requests with real faith. And in this way we’ll eventually receive these realizations through the connection with the Three Jewels. Any questions there? That’s right. That’s right, yes.
In actual fact when you fix your mind on these worldly things they seem to come fairly easily. Like for instance with my money thing, that all seemed to come fairly easily, but some other things don’t come so easily. And when you’re praying for realizations, that seems to be really hard. Yes. That’s right.
Obstacles that are created by having relied on worldly gods before. Yes. It’s saying remove them by relying on the Three Jewels. They might, of course, you’re having these kinds of obstacles, might want to check up if there are some specific purification practices you might do. I mean, you know, we do all these Mandala practices, the thirty five Buddhas and Vajrasattva and so on, they can remove these various obstacles.
But in this particular context it’s just talking in a general way. We can do this Tonglen practice. We first of all think that we won’t rely on worldly gods. If any of you were thinking of doing that, you’d better not. As I said, sometimes it can be appropriate to ask worldly gods to help you in various ways, but you have to understand that you’re not relying on them as refuge objects.
It’s more like saying, you know, please sort of don’t interfere with my being able to do this or that. So we’re going to do the practice of taking on this suffering of not being able to have help through rituals, not being able to have rituals be effective when we need help with such things as sickness or material needs or particularly when we’re praying for realizations. When our rituals don’t bring results, it’s because we’ve done these things in the past. Many other beings have these kinds of obstacles as well. So we’re taking them on as we think of the suffering we’re experiencing ourselves or imagine that we’re just taking it off others.
If it’s something we don’t feel we’re experiencing it ourselves, then we take it off others..