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 shows how thought-training practice transforms our most difficult emotions and experiences into tools for genuine growth. She opens by reframing Samsāra’s struggles not as obstacles to practice but as essential fuel for it, then works through specific stanzas exploring how karma shapes our appearance and capacities. She examines why anger creates ugliness, why patience creates an attractive form; the importance of carefully making Buddha images and tsatsas; and how attachment and anger manifest differently in each practitioner, each requiring its own remedy. Throughout, she emphasizes realistic expectations: steady, incremental progress rather than sudden realisation, and confidence that consistent practice yields measurable benefits even when distant goals seem far away. Suited to practitioners familiar with the graduated path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 21 SW 1999 04 22.mp3
UUID: 33468c17-9a89-4b07-8a87-e57e8d54dde2
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-04-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,357
Things and to contemplate on the meaning of the teachings and that in this way we’re going to be developing our minds along the Mahāyāna path. The whole purpose of that path is to able to enable ourselves to effectively work for others. We’re looking at the path that has the means for attaining infinite everlasting happiness for oneself in one’s own mental continuum by following the Dharma teachings. If we achieve this state of everlasting happiness and liberation then we attain that in our own mental continuum. So even Buddhas, even Arhats who have achieved these high states can’t transform other beings by magic or by their psychic powers into the state of everlasting happiness.
They can’t just transfer their own realizations or give them away to the others. Bodhisattvas and Buddhas would even give away their own happiness for the sake of others but they can’t do this. But it’s dependent on every being individually following the path and themselves accumulating the collection of merit and wisdom, doing the practices, achieving the realizations and purifying their mind stream of the cause of suffering and achieving the true cessation of suffering. We have to look at how we can effectively help these beings. We’re setting our minds on the thought of helping these others, realizing that we’re very closely connected with these others, that it’s not enough just to forget about them or place our own happiness first, but instead to make the welfare of other beings the goal of our practice.
In order to do that we have to be able to help them effectively. As it’s explained in the teachings, the arhats don’t have the means to help. They can only help a very limited number of beings to liberation. The great bodhisattvas can help a far greater number of beings, but the only beings who can help an infinite number of samsaric beings to everlasting happiness are the fully enlightened beings, Buddhas. And so we need to place our our efforts into becoming first of all Bodhisattvas and then working towards enlightenment for the sake of others. That’s the thought with which we do this practice tonight.
So I thought I’d start off with a misquoted quotation from Malcolm Fraser. Which is that Dharma practice wasn’t meant to be easy. So we’re in Samsāra. The whole point about being in Samsāra is that it isn’t easy. If Samsāra was nice and easy then we wouldn’t have to worry about it.
So the point of it is that it’s nasty and difficult and so we want to get out of Samsāra. Until we manage to do that while we’re still experiencing Samsāra then we have to expect difficulties if we expect them, then we’ll get what we expect. If we expect everything to be nice and beautiful, we will just be shocked when we get difficulties. Of course I’m not saying going around with a depressed state of mind, a lugubrious attitude. You know, we don’t have to be lugubrious.
Still, it’s just realistic to expect that these difficulties are going to come along and that we’re going to encounter them. That’s the nature of Samsāra. And if we’re expecting these things to happen, then we’ll be prepared for it. If we’re expecting everything to be perfect and wonderful, we’ll feel shocked and will be unprepared when things do become difficult. And so it will make it all that much harder to deal with these difficulties.
Also, if we remember all these difficulties and problems are a part of Samsāra. This is actually the first noble truth that Samsāra is in the nature of suffering, so we have to actually contemplate on these things and really imprint it on our mind that this is the nature of Samsāra. Otherwise it’s very easy to fall into the thing that comes easy for us which is just looking for worldly happiness and expecting to find worldly happiness through worldly means. If we understand that there is no lasting worldly happiness and that even our means of finding worldly happiness are dependent on our having the right sort of karma and that if we come across some sort of bad karmic result or if our good karma isn’t sufficient then we won’t experience the worldly, even the temporal worldly happiness that we try to achieve. So this is what we need to keep in mind and we need to think that we’re on the path to enlightenment.
So we’re not even just on the path to liberation, but we’re on the path to enlightenment. Whether we’re on the path to liberation or the path to enlightenment, these things are not easy to achieve. They are great goals that require tremendous effort, a long period of application, and they need a lot of determination to attain these things. So we have to expect to get these great things because even if we were to try to get a million dollars, we would expect to encounter a lot of difficulties in the way to getting a million dollars. And we understand that out of everybody who sits out to make a million dollars, only a proportion of them are going to get there.
For the others the difficulties are going to be too great. Making a million dollars is nothing compared to attaining liberation or attaining enlightenment. And so we just have to expect that we’re going to experience these difficulties. The difference is that we have many lives to do it, so we don’t have to feel disappointed if we experience setbacks even if we realize that we’re not going to get the final goal in this lifetime. We don’t have to feel that we’ve failed.
Instead we can feel glad that we’ve got this far along the path and we’ve got that much less work to do in our future lifetime. So actually we can really feel encouraged about every little bit of effort that we put into the path if we see it in the right way. So For instance, some of us have been reading the story about Tenzin Palmo in Cave in the Snow, and how she was prepared to put up with difficulties like cold and food shortages and various physical discomforts. For most of us the kind of difficulties that she was enduring would be beyond our scope. That’s alright, we’re not all expected to live like that.
But for most of us we can have a more comfortable sort of life, but we’ll still experience difficulties and we don’t have to go looking for them by going up into the mountains to a cave, but we’ll have plenty of difficulties coming along without that. You can be sure they will come. And they’ll be difficult, different kind of difficulties, know. They won’t all be physical difficulties, some of them will be emotional, they’ll be social and things to do with our attitudes, our reactions to things, position in life and these sorts of things. So there’ll be a lot of different things and we can learn from all of these things if we have some basic understanding.
If we’ve been looking at the graduated path as everybody here has, then you should have that basic understanding that would enable you to deal with these difficulties in a positive way. So it seems that when we’re experiencing difficulties, what really helps us to cope with these problems is to feel that it’s all worthwhile. If you can experience various different obstacles and setbacks and so on, but you can see them as being challenges or simply being some sort of thing that has to be overcome. Not seeing them as being defeats, seeing them as being too difficult, not seeing them as being something that causes us despair and to give up, but just see them as something that we can learn from. So then we don’t have to be made really unhappy by these things.
Of course, some of these things by their nature are things that will cause us some unhappiness. But if we have this long term view that these things are just temporal, they’re just passing, but we can also learn from them something that’s going to help us towards long term goal, then we won’t be thrown into despair and deep in our hearts we can feel some sort of happiness still about this situation. We can feel that there’s something worthwhile about and that we’re getting somewhere and the natural fact that these things that look like setbacks can really be part of the process that’s helping us to get there. Would you agree? Okay, maybe somebody wants to tell us some of their experiences or whatever.
No, think that’s true actually too. Does one of the thoughts that in general helps people to cope with their problems, seeing other people with worse problems. Particularly if you see that person is coping. Yes. Actually, sometimes when you’ve been practicing Dharma for a longer time, you can look back and see perhaps that the kind of difficulties that would have really upset you a few years back don’t seem so serious now when you encounter the same sort of thing.
You can still be thrown into emotional reactions by some of your difficulties, but it will take a lot more to do that than it used to. You can sort of say that, Oh, yes, a few years ago everything used to upset me and now I can look back and really see that there wasn’t so much need to be upset by these situations. Yes, that’s right. So it doesn’t seem to create such an intense agitation in the mind. Seems to calm down more quickly.
Yes, so you can see that when been going long enough to look back and see like that, as Hilary’s just testified, then you can It really helps you to have more confidence to keep on going with the practice because you know that it’s actually working. So we also come to understand as we go on that you have to let go a lot of your expectations for getting a lot of results in the short term because this is something that can be the case early on when you first get involved with the teachings. Rather expect of yourself that you’re going to do wonderful practice and gain all these realizations and so on very quickly. Sometimes this is totally unrealistic. At the beginning you might have felt that if you weren’t going to get all these things in the short term then what’s the point of it?
But as you gain more understanding you start to realize that there are a lot of benefits coming from your practice. Even if Samatha and all these things seem to be still way down the line and you don’t really seem to be much closer to them than you were, you still feel that you’ve gained a tremendous amount of benefit just in terms of emotional stability and a sense of happiness and peace in your mind in daily life and being able to cope with ups and downs better, all these kinds of things. They don’t sound very exciting to talk about but they are something that’s really rewarding and these are real benefits of Dharma practice and the other things will come in due course if you just keep on practicing steadily. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Yes. Yes, and other people might not notice but then somebody might, you know. Somebody might notice that you’re perhaps more comfortable to be around than you used to be or something like that. So we need to be able to deal with these situations and actually use them as something that helps us along the path, because at the moment we perhaps don’t have the capability to do the more advanced types of practices and we’re experiencing perhaps limited teachings and setbacks because of our situation. So we perhaps haven’t accumulated the sort of merit that you need to be able to go off and live in a cave in the snow and stay there and meditate for eight years or whatever it is.
Not that everybody has to do that sort of thing in order to get enlightened, but that’s just an example. What we need to do is make use of our present situation as we are here and now to advance. For that reason we’ve got these thought training texts and the Wheel of Sharp Weapons is one of the very effective texts to help us to deal with these sorts of situations and to be happy. We don’t have to feel unhappy when we meet problems, in fact we can get some happiness out of the situation by seeing them as a valuable opportunity to practice. And in fact it is very valuable to have these opportunities to practice the different qualities that we have practice because without these problems and so on, if everything was easy we would probably not be getting anywhere and we certainly wouldn’t see the shortcomings in our practice.
So, in actual fact, what looks like difficulties can really be the best situation for us. So, who hasn’t read for a while? How about you Diana? You haven’t read a stanza lately? Stanza thirty eight?
So nobody here really has to worry about that one. Yeah. So these gorgeous film stars and so on. Yes, and in actual fact even these film sets probably don’t look all that marvelous when you see them in real life, when they’re not all made up and so on. I’ve heard that Marilyn Monroe used to put on a a scarf and a pair of dark glasses, she’d go out shopping and nobody would recognize her.
So she just looked like another housewife out shopping. So anyway, supposing that somebody was very ugly, then some people do have, some people are particularly unattractive looking or they have deformities. In actual fact, in this day and age deformities can often be fixed up with operations and so on. When I met the Tibetans who had just come out of Tibet, a lot of them had things like hare lips and funny teeth, and so on that you’d never see in our society. And I suppose a lot of people are born with these things and they just get them fixed up so that you don’t see them.
But when you do have the case of people having deformities or various ugly features, they always feel unhappy about being with other people. It makes them miserable to feel that they don’t look like other people, that they have this particular appearance which is below the required standard of appearance. They tend to be mocked and insulted by people. They, through no fault of their own as they can see it, they have to endure all this. Also if we’re ugly it means that we can’t positively influence others.
If a person who’s ugly or who has some sort of deformity, even if they have a lot of knowledge. If we happen to be in this situation, if we were like this, then even if we had a lot of knowledge we wouldn’t be able to benefit others because of our unattractive appearance. So it somehow keeps people from being able to people don’t want to come around you so they won’t be able to benefit from your understanding. In the teachings it’s said that practicing patience is the cause for a good appearance. If we want to have a good appearance in our future lives then we need to practice patience.
Of course we need to practice patience anyway, but one of the benefits from that is having a good appearance. This is important because it will mean that we can have a positive influence on others. It’s not that we’re thinking about it from a worldly point of view that we want the pleasure of having people admiring us, but because it makes it easier to connect with other people. So it mentions here that if we are ugly then it comes as a result of making ugly scenes. This is a cause for being ugly.
And this makes a lot lot of sense because when we’re angry, even if we’re normally a good looking person, the faces of an angry person becomes really ugly. A person who’s normally quite agreeable to look at when they’re angry that they become repellent. It’s really quite shocking sometimes to see the transformation that it brings about in a person. And if you ever happen to catch a glimpse of your own face in the mirror when you’re feeling angry then it can be sometimes quite a shock, quite a salutary shock if you realize that it makes you look like that. It makes sense that it would also be the cause of being born with ugly features in another lifetime.
Some of the other causes mentioned in that verse are making badly formed images of Buddhas. That’s getting results similar to the cause. It’s very good to make images of the Buddha, this is a cause of merit, but if you should make them badly and carelessly then you could be creating this sort of result for yourself. There’s a story actually I’ve come across somewhere about a monk who was very, very ugly and had a wonderful singing voice. I can’t remember who it was now, but some great holy being wondered what particularly interesting karma might be behind this.
And he did some checking and it turned out that this monk had in some previous life been building a stupa and he’d been one of the people who criticized making the stupa saying that there was no point in spending all that money on it and so on, and refused to give his approval. But then later on after the stupa had been built he had a change of mind and offered bells to it. As a consequence he had an ugly body because he opposed the building of the actual form of the stupa but then later on he offered bells so he got a beautiful voice. And so they used to apparently hide him away, put him in a position where his voice could be heard for the chanting. So this is another cause, behaving disrespectfully, criticizing and looking down on the form of Buddha, such as statues or thangkas or perhaps if you’re fortunate enough to be in the presence of the actual Buddha.
For instance, if you’ve been around as a human being in Buddhist time, you might have criticized Buddha and said that you didn’t think much of him as thought that he must have been a peculiar looking person or something like that. Somebody wrote a book recently about Jesus saying that they thought he must have been a what was it? Female with some sort of Did anybody read that book review? A female with some sort of deforming, flat chested female anyway. I thought, you know, well probably running a risk there because it might be a similar comment to say things like that about Jesus.
Yes, something like that. That’s right. Could have been. So or another another similar thing could be damaging images of Buddha or scriptures. So if we’ve done these things in the past, then we could be experiencing the results by being ugly in this lifetime.
So, as I said, nobody here at the moment seems to have this problem. I’d have to say that anyway, wouldn’t I? Except for me. But anyway, instead of but in any case, we don’t want to have to experience this kind of thing in the future life and we don’t know, even if we’re not experiencing the result now, whether we might have that sort of karma in store for us. We do need to think of this.
For instance, it’s always possible we might have some sort of accident that could cause scarring or something, so some sort of karma could come up or there are diseases that cause distortion of the features. So even in this life we can’t be one hundred percent certain. So we have to think of this kind of karmic cause and avoid making these kinds of karmic mistakes so we won’t have to experience these karmic results in the future. Instead, it’s very beneficial if we make images of Buddha and copies of the scriptures which are well made, not badly made. If we do these kinds of actions it actually creates a very positive cause for the future.
In actual fact the main reason why we make these kinds of actions is to create the cause to have the Rūpakāya, the form body of Buddha in the future. But before we get to that point we could also experience the result of having better bodies in the human realm. So there’s different things that you can do if you know an artist or a sculptor. You can do things like making tsatsas with molds or also it’s possible to sponsor the making of these things. Particularly people who for one reason or another are unable to do it themselves can sponsor the making of these things.
Sometimes lamas will actually advise people to do a number of these images or to get them made by somebody else. This can be sometimes in response to a particular problem, to overcome a problem or just in general. One of the preliminary practices we do is to make one hundred thousand tsatsas. They used to make them with clay and nowadays some people make them with plaster. Mainly I think because it’s often hard to get the exact molds you need and the clay tsatsas need to be done with a brass mold or a metal mold.
But if you can get hold of a tsatsa, then you can use that to make a silicone mold, and then you can do plaster. So rather than having to get a brass mold made for you, which is really difficult, somebody over in Nepal or somewhere might have a brass mold and they’ve made some clay tsatsas and you just get hold of a perfectly made clay tsatsa and then you can get your own mold made over here. Little statues, we usually have some of them around somewhere. Yes, That’s right, yes. Although stupas would be an example, they were made with plaster from silicone molds and I think there are about six or seven different pieces which have to be assembled together after you’ve done it.
Anyway, this is one of the important meritorious actions that we can do because it’s creating many many imprints of the form of Buddha. But if we’re doing this kind of thing it’s really important to try to do it as well as possible. If we do paintings and things, not to do them carelessly. In particular, when you do paintings of Buddha you don’t do them freehand. There’s a particular grid that needs to be followed.
A lot of people who have been brought up in the Western art tradition think it’s a bit odd to have to follow exact proportions and exact grid. There’s a reason for all this because the form of Buddha is not just something that comes from our own fantasy, it’s something that is a tool for meditation and the exact proportions have been worked out by those who understand exactly what they’re about in creating these images. Anybody have any doubts about that? If we had a bigger crowd here we’d be sure to have some sort of modern artist who would object to such a limitation on your artistic creativity. There was actually an interesting article in one of the recent Mandalas by somebody who’s been studying Thangka painting which did go into that question.
Oh yes, Denise and Peter. Is it? Yes. Have to be really there’s a tremendous amount to learn about art, painting and statue making. The artists have to be very knowledgeable.
Anyway, we can think about these things and think of then we can do this practice of, even though we may not be ugly ourselves, can still think of the sufferings of those who are ugly. So we resolve not to create this course in the future and also we can do the Tonglen practice, taking on the suffering of ugliness in our imagination, thinking about taking it on for the sake of others and giving out our happiness and merit, particularly the happiness and merit of patience and other causes for having a good body and sending it out to the beings who need it. So we just do that practice for a little while. Jennifer, would you like to read the next one? Number thirty nine.
So this is mentioning the two harmful attitudes, attachment and anger. And when you check into the matter then it seems that they both arise from self-cherishing. So when we practice Dharma then we learn to recognize these as our problems. So it’s one thing to recognize them as being our problems, but then we find that it isn’t quite so easy to overcome them. Some people so basically we all have a problem with attachment.
We all have a problem with anger and we have to deal with these things. Well when I say we all if we’re ordinary samsaric beings, so there might be somebody here who’s a bodhisattva, who’s overcome these things, I can’t see that. But anyway, we’re working on the assumption that we might still need to be working with these things. Some people might find that their anger is worse and they don’t seem to have so much problem with attachment as they do with anger. And other people seem to have less anger, but they seem to have more problems with attachment.
So it seems that some people are more one way or the other. I know myself I always used to have a big problem with anger and when I looked back on it I could see that all the major problems in my life seemed to be revolving around anger or resentment and so on. I’ve had some friends were the other way who were always getting into one problem after another with attachment. I used to think, can’t they see the problems that they’re going to get into if they follow this attachment? How is it that they’re so silly every time to get into situations?
But then I’d see that these same friends would be incredibly forbearing and tolerant in situations where I would have been angry and nasty and so on. I used to think how can they be so good, how can they be so patient? So it’s a question of what you’ve been working on. It’s a sign that perhaps this person has been working more on one thing than the other in their past lives. And so perhaps they’ve been following one more than the other.
So that the delusion that you’ve been working on more is less of a problem and perhaps you’ve still been following the other one and not overcome it as much. So it seems like some people seem to relate to this. Maybe somebody wants to tell us their stories again. Your stories are always good, Hills. It’s different to knitting with needles then because you don’t get angry when you’re knitting with needles, you you just cast on and edge off and knit.
Oh, we better all go out and get knitting machines. Yes. That’s right, yes. When you live in shared accommodation you always know it’s going to be like that, yes. Sometimes there’s just one person who kind of doesn’t pull their weight with the rest.
If it’s a group of people, there’s always one person who doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do and lets other people do all the work and so on. It can be very annoying. And suppose it is a learning situation and you also provide the others with a learning situation in dealing with your shortcomings. So you’re really helping them. Doing your best.
Yes. Jealousy, yes, it comes from attachment. I think jealousy is interesting. I haven’t come across an exact explanation of jealousy in the teachings. I mean, it is explained.
It is one of the non virtues. But as to which one it falls into, I think it falls into both. Both aversion and attachment. I think there’s elements of both. I think that’s what distinguishes jealousy is that you don’t simply feel attachment but you also hate the other person for having what you want.
Yes. So you feel anger, feel some sort of resentment. So it’s a very complex sort of emotion. And jealousy is one thing that’s I actually have this in my notes about pride and jealousy too because it seems like sometimes people can not just only go more towards anger or more towards attachment, but also they can be particularly strong on some of the other sort of subdivisions such as pride or jealousy. Some people have a tremendous problem with jealousy and it’s the particular thing that they have to work on.
Other people have a tremendous problem with pride. And I suppose some of the other perhaps wrong views or something like that might also be some people’s major problem. So they do go together with anger and attachment, it’s taking this particular manifestation. It’s because we’ve followed these things in our past lives and we haven’t worked to overcome them or we haven’t done enough work. If we recognize that we’re just starting out, sometimes it can seem just really difficult to overcome these things and it can seem discouraging.
You might start to feel what’s the use, you might start to feel this doesn’t work, I’m not getting anywhere with this. This is a mistake and if we recognize that we may be just starting out that this might be the first lifetime in which we’ve really tried to overcome this disturbing emotion, then it makes sense that it’s not going to be easy and it’s going to be something that’s it’s going to be like a dead weight at first and at first it’s going to seem too strong for us, but that’s only just something that’s a temporary situation and if we keep on working then it’s going to get easier and we have to take a long term view, not expect too much all at once. But if we keep it up steadily, don’t expect too much all at once, but just keep up a steady practice, then it’s going to get easy, then we can expect it to get easier as we go along. And if we understand that and feel confident about that, then it’s going to give us courage to keep on going. What I used to think a lot was that you had to keep on practicing and keep on going on because if you don’t start now, you’re only going to have to start later on and then it’s going to take you that much longer before you get the result.
It’s like there’s some sort of saying about journey of a hundred miles starts with a single step. So you’re still going to have to go all that way, but if you push it off then it’s going to take you longer to get there. Yes, put off the start, yes. Not to mention all this business about the precious human rebirth and that if you don’t start practicing now you might lose your opportunity and so on, which is really an important consideration. So we can expect even in this lifetime if we keep it up, we’ll definitely, as we were discussing before, start to see some results.
Certainly in our future lives then we’ll find it easier from the start.