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 grounds Buddhist thought-training in Western psychology, drawing on Jungian concepts to explain why obstacles in daily life become spiritual material rather than hindrances. She begins by establishing why the Bodhisattva path toward Buddhahood surpasses individual liberation—Buddhas work for others without ceasing—before turning to the Wheel of Sharp Weapons practice. McAndrew shows how recognizing habitual mental patterns rooted in past karma transforms difficulty into opportunity. Through concrete examples—visualizing offerings, working with food attachment, understanding anger’s source—she teaches practitioners to use daily circumstances for spiritual development. She addresses a critical obstacle: the loss of enthusiasm when results lag and worldly distractions tempt. The talk equips practitioners to maintain steady effort despite the long-term nature of transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 23 SW 1999 04 29.mp3
UUID: a9550517-a4f1-4bd8-9e06-dc6bb6b110c9
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-04-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,483
It’s not enough to just attain our own individual liberation because the state of individual liberation of the Hīnayāna practitioner, the Arahant, doesn’t bring with it the full power to be able to help a countless number of others. It only brings a short and limited period of ability to lead others to liberation before that being passes from the body and enters nirvana. We need to look at the qualities of Buddhahood. Buddhas are continually working for others. Even when they show the sign of passing into nirvana, doesn’t end up working for others.
They actually have the quality of being able to continually manifest in countless forms, forms that we recognize as Buddhas and forms that we don’t recognize as Buddhas in countless worlds to understand the special needs of each individual sentient being and to help them in a way that’s going to be relevant and appropriate for that particular being through their many special powers and also the perfect compassion of Buddhas which extends to every single being without exception limitlessly. In this way we’ll be able to effectively help the others as the enlightened beings are helping us now. And so we set our mind on the attainment of this state of Buddhahood. So we’re going to do this Wheel of Sharp Weapons text as part of our practice on the path to enlightenment. So it’s a practice which enables us to use the events of daily life as material for our Dharma practice and in particular to be able to turn situations of suffering, difficulties and hardships which would seem like obstacles to us, that would seem like things that would cause a setback to our practice by interrupting us from doing other things that we think of being more the standard sort of Dharma practice such as meditation and study and so on.
We have many circumstances that prevent us from doing the kind of intensive study and meditation and work for others which is the ideal Dharma practice. So we need to be able to make use of the circumstances that we have got and with these thought training practices then whatever circumstances we have, whether it’s conducive or whether it’s something that’s very difficult for us, can actually be turned into helpful circumstances, be made use of in our Dharma practice. Those situations that seem like setbacks and obstacles to our practice are not actually so if we have the understanding that is given us through these thought training teachings. And if we understand the nature and cause of our problems and work with this awareness then we can actually, whatever circumstance comes to us, it can actually be helpful to us and we can go forward in our Dharma practice. In actual fact we can see these circumstances as being beneficial to us.
Sometimes what looks like these difficult circumstances can actually really be the material that we need to work with in order to get particular training that we’re in need of at this particular time under our particular circumstances. So we shouldn’t allow ourselves to feel discouraged or to become unhappy about difficult difficult circumstances, whatever they might be. Western psychology also accepts that some problems and difficulties can be beneficial to us if we are able to approach them in the right way. In Jungian psychology there’s a recognition that some states of depression are actually quite a positive thing. Some states of depression can be because our external circumstances are just too much for us or because of some sort of severe psychological problems that we have which are a bit beyond really working with in any sort of obvious way.
But some other states of depression or unhappiness and discontent seem to just arise without any obvious cause. But they seem to be more like a message from the subconscious. These states of depression are really from what Jung calls the self. This is a term that’s bit awkward for Buddhists because when we talk about the self we talk about it in quite different terms. Jung uses the word self to refer to, not to some sort of separate part of the person or to any sort of independently existing soul or whatever, but it’s just the term that he uses for a particular force or a particular tendency in people that tends towards integration and wholeness.
So just as we have a healing system in our bodies so that if we get injured or if we catch an illness then there are these different forces in our bodies healing the damage. So we sustain psychological damage and traumas but there are also psychological forces within us to heal that damage and provided these forces are able to function then we’re able to heal our traumas and emotional difficulties and to actually progress in the direction of greater emotional wholeness. Sometimes we have to just recognize in order to get better to progress towards greater emotional wholeness and happiness. We just need to understand how it is that we are blocking the working of these energies within us and just allow them to work rather than getting in their way and then we can actually make positive progress. This seems to be very much related to the process that happens in Dharma practice and in meditation.
These depressions are often a sign simply that we are allowing ourselves to be blocked, that we’re stuck, that perhaps our present way of thinking, our lifestyle, our present goals and ambitions and so on are no longer satisfying us if we have a deep need within ourselves to do some more work, to go deeper and perhaps make some changes in ourselves. It might lead to some changes in our life that can lead to feeling greater wholeness to integrating some of our subconscious material that’s been buried and repressed and if we’re able to do this then we actually get the reward of a much greater feeling of happiness and emotional stability and this sense of integration which also brings with it more energy and more competence in daily life and in our relations with others. It’s all very related between what we achieve for ourselves and our relationship with others. Western psychology, particularly in Jungian psychology, there’s this recognition that the more we’re able to develop ourselves and heal ourselves and make ourselves whole, the more we’re actually able to interact with others in a positive way. That while we’re caught up in our own sufferings caused by our emotional disturbances, we’re going to find it difficult to have positive relationship.
So there’s also this recognition that if we want to help others we have to help ourselves. In the course of a person working through these things they can also come to the realization that if they want to help themselves they also have to help others. So it seems that somehow it’s very much related as our attitude towards others advances in the direction of more love, kindness, tolerance and compassion. We also find that we find more of this towards ourselves and also if we work on cultivating more wholeness within ourselves, of developing ourselves, we also find that we have more love and tolerance for others and this is something that is very much related. You really can’t separate the two.
So some people sometimes take the attitude that if you’re perhaps taking time off to do work on yourself, whether you’re talking about Dharma practice and meditation or whether you’re talking about some form of psychotherapy, they might say it’s selfish because you’re just being self centered and only thinking about yourself. But in actual fact, sometimes we need to do this and it actually leads us to being more positive for others. The more you go into yourself, the more you go deep within yourself and uncover what’s in there, the more you uncover the connectedness between beings. And this is something we’re always talking about in Dharma. And it’s not just sentimentality, it’s actually something that arises from a very profound realization of the nature of beings, that we are interconnected, that we do have this need to interact with others and that this interaction when it’s on a firm basis is a very positive thing.
While we are undeveloped we tend to hurt each other and damage each other and that’s because our undeveloped condition. And the more we develop, the more we have positive interactions and the more we gain from others and the more they gain from interacting with us. And so we don’t have to be afraid of taking time off for ourselves. This is something that’s really going to be beneficial for others as well. Does anybody have any questions or doubts or comments or anything of that nature?
Right. Yes. So that work ethic is an interesting point too. Thanks for bringing that up because I hadn’t thought of adding it to the work ethic, it’s actually a valid point that sometimes this accusation of selfishness and self absorption comes from the work ethic that it’s just the work that we do out in the world that can be perceived as being economically valuable that people value. In actual fact there are so many kinds of work.
There’s paid work, there’s voluntary work and there’s work that’s not even seen. There’s no reason why we should think that the work that is seen and appreciated is the only one that’s valuable. But we, you know, it takes quite a lot of development and insight before you start to really see that. So but the purpose of so the The purpose of doing the mind training isn’t just to avoid unhappiness or unpleasant thoughts. So when you first hear about this mind training, it might sound as if you’re just rejecting the thoughts and pushing them away and instead having some sort of nice thought to replace it with.
And it doesn’t sound as though it’s very psychological. But in actual fact, it’s based on a very deep understanding of our minds according to Buddhist psychology. So we do need to actually recognize our negative thoughts, our disturbing emotions and so on. And we also have to recognize that our disturbing are the result of bad or they are bad mental patterns. So our mental energy is always flowing.
Really what our mind, our consciousness consists of is just this flow of mental energy which goes from moment to moment, continually flowing and it can flow in positive or wholesome directions and it can also flow in negative or harmful directions. And the teaching of Buddhism is that over the course of our countless lives going back beginninglessly, we haven’t had understanding and insight. We’ve lacked wisdom and so very often our emotions, our thoughts, consciousness has flowed in the pattern of these disturbing emotions and as a result these patterns have just become intensified from life to life and they’re very deeply ingrained. And so they arise spontaneously in this lifetime when we encounter different objects, objects of our attachment and aversion. And also of our ignorance, confused states of mind.
So these mental patterns are not part of our mind’s real nature, not part of the deeper nature of our minds. So they are actually something that can be eliminated. They’re not really an essential part of ourselves. So the image that’s often used is like dirt on a mirror or like a storm on the surface of the ocean which whips up huge waves. But if you go deeper into the ocean, down into the depths of the ocean, then it’s very calm and undisturbed by all this fury and storm on the top of the water.
And so we’re just like that really and we can get in touch with this deeper self or this deeper nature of ourselves. But at the same time these disturbing emotions are something that are very real for us in the present and they are very powerful and it’s very difficult get through them, to get past them. Sometimes perhaps if we’ve been doing some meditation practice we might experience a short period where we feel very peaceful and tranquil in our meditation or perhaps when we’re around some holy being then the influence of his blissful energy can calm us down for a bit, so that we do get a little bit of a glimpse of what it might be like to get past these disturbing emotions, but in general we’re very much under the control of these disturbing emotions. It’s not easy for us to get into the deeper meditative states and to gain the insights that we need to gain in order to cut off these disturbing emotions at the root. So we have to find skillful means, first of all, of dealing with these disturbing emotions at the level that we’re at now and this is where the thought training comes in because it helps us to reduce these disturbing emotions to take the power away from them, to quiet them down so that we can be more calm and have more equanimity in day to day life and not become so agitated and upset by the ups and downs of life or on the other hand not be so clinging and grasping to the good things.
All of these things that disturb our Dharma practice. So this mental energy of the disturbing emotions is strongly connected to our karma. So we have good karma and bad karma and our positive actions lead to positive results of happiness and our bad actions hurting others leads to suffering that we have to experience. So we’re always under a certain degree of delusion because even our good actions are performed under the ignorance of the absolute truth, the understanding of emptiness. When we understand this then we can go beyond when we understand it thoroughly and directly then we can go beyond create in karma.
But while we’re still under the influence of this form of ignorance then we’re always going to be creating karma. But if we understand how karma works then we can avoid creating the bad karmas which drag us down and which intensify our negative disturbing emotions and which lead to suffering results and we can focus on creating good karma which supports our Dharma practice. By accumulating merit, making these good actions and making them with the motivation of Dharma and with the dedication to Dharma purposes, then we create the the accumulation of energy that’s going to support our Dharma practice and enable us to get the results that we want. So we have to have a positive future result in mind. karma is created by our volitional actions and the result of suffering or happiness according to whether we’ve created good or bad karma depends on these causes from past lives.
And even though we don’t remember these actions now, we still have to experience the results. So the these unpleasant results that we have to experience from our previous bad karmas from our previous bad actions, bad actions done with volition under the influence of our disturbing emotions bring us this result of suffering in the present. And because we don’t remember how this cause was created then we go on and make more karma, more bad karma. We become angry and upset at the suffering situations we experience. We blame others.
We retaliate and abuse or hurt others or do other wrong actions such as actions done out of greed like stealing and cheating and many other kinds of wrong actions that we do. And as we do these wrong actions under the force of our deluded emotions then these deluded emotions become stronger and we also accumulate more karma so the whole thing is intensified and we just keep on going more and more. So we’ve got more unpleasant results to experience. At the present most of us don’t have the merit to do the kind of intensive Dharma practice and achieve the meditative results that be engaged in by the great practitioners. So we need to have practices that we can do now that can help us to get to that point.
Even these great practitioners avoid disturbing objects that are going to stimulate their disturbing emotions such as clinging attachment and anger and so on. But for most of us that really isn’t a practical proposition. We really don’t even have that much merit to be able to get away from these disturbing objects. So what we have to do is to be able to use them. So we’re fortunate that we have these practices such as the verses of this text The Wheel of Sharp Weapons.
Mhmm. Yes. Yes. Actions that are motivated motivated by various delusions. Well, you know what you’re doing.
You may not understand the consequences. If you understand the consequences, then you’ll be careful. Yes. So you know that you’re stealing the flowers. You may even not recognize it as stealing.
Some people don’t it doesn’t require that you should recognize it as being stealing or a bad action. Simply recognizes that it is a volitional action, that you have attachment and you grab something. You know that it belongs to somebody else. You have that understanding it belongs to somebody else. It’s an action of will.
Yes. And you take it, and it’s negative whether you understand whether you’ve actually been told that stealing or or not, it still has that result that you understand it’s something that somebody else owns and you’re taking it. You’d have to look at every second’s consciousness and see how much of it was actually engaged in this or that. Because we actually do perform neutral actions as well when we’re not particularly thinking of anything, not not particularly under the form of any either any of the three disturbing emotions. They say that the example of things that you do when you’re in deep sleep are an example of neutral action.
I’m not sure whether you can actually perform neutral. I’m not sure whether there are neutral moments in between our disturbed moments or not. Really, these are the sort of things that that’s attachment. If you’re drinking a tea with attachment, then you’re mind you, it’s a minor karma, but it’s still attachment. It’s still strengthening your attachment.
And so if you can actually dedicate that tea and then drink it mindfully being aware and making an offering of it as you’re drinking it, then that reduces the creates merit. That reduces attachment and it creates positive merit. So we’re told to do these things and of course if we did them properly, then we’d be creating merit all the time. Yeah. It’s true, actually.
Yes. Mindful. I’m going to getting onto mindfulness a bit later on too. That’s a good point that that came up because it’s a really good example and I hadn’t really thought of any good examples of mindfulness but that’s one that the way you drink your cup of tea makes all the difference between whether it’s increasing delusion or whether it’s creating positive energy. When you say that after, that happens around the go through the other day.
Well, yes, generally we do this practice, actually that’s a good point, I should When you offer tea, you can actually visualize Buddha at your heart and that you’re offering the tea to him and then when you drink it you can visualize that the tea is of course first of all you do that practice Om Ah Hum, bless it three times with Om Ah Hum and do that offering practice prayer particularly if you’re alone by yourself or if you’re in public you can do it very quietly under your breath. Sometimes Sometimes it’s difficult when other people are talking to you but at least to under your breath at least, even if you are other people, bless your food and drinks with Om Ah Hum three times before you take them, also medicine, anything like that, think that you’re offering it to Buddha or to a particular Meditation Deity that you might have received initiation for. If you have a Guru, then you think that Buddha of Meditational Deity is actually your Guru taking that form and think that the food or drink is transformed into transcendental nectar and that it brings bliss to the minds of the Buddha.
Sometimes you need to do a little meditation on the food before you start eating it, particularly if it’s something that you’re really attached to. I don’t know whether I should tell you some of the meditations. Lama Zopa suggested. Well, one of the meditations is to think of it as what Lama Zopa calls kaka. So if you’re very, very attached and really caught up in this attraction, attachment to this gorgeous food, then to just of change its aspect, mentally change its aspect think of it as being caca and then eat it, and then transform it into this nectar of course and eat it.
But just to bring yourself down a bit. At one of our Kopan courses once, Doctor Nick was talking about this, he was leading the discussion group or something, and when he got to this point somebody said, Do you mind? And he said, well it’s tomorrow’s lunch that I’m talking about. They said, do you mind you spoiling our lunch? And he said, yesterday’s lunch I’m talking about.
So anyway, I mean that’s the point is that it gets If we could — Lama Zopa always says, even if we put the food in our mouth and then take it take it out of our mouth again, we wouldn’t want to put it back into our mouth again. You know, because somehow we sort of see our bodies as being unclean like this. So it might be enough just to think of something neutral. One person said that what they found very helpful was to always transform any very attractive food into cold mashed potatoes because they said cold mashed potatoes were something that you could eat if you were starving, you know, but you couldn’t get any enjoyment out of it. But anyway, yes, so there are these techniques.
There are many different techniques that we learn just to help us to counteract whatever particular disturbing emotion is really strong. And in the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, we’re particularly learning about anger and resentment and so on towards others. We’re learning lots of techniques in here. Actually. So when when we’re practicing Buddhist psychology, it really is some some of these things sound a bit funny, but it’s really all to make us happy.
If we really put all these things into practice and train our minds in them, we’ll really actually be a lot happier because actually when we get caught up in clinging attachment to food and to different things, it doesn’t really it seems like we’re happy in the enjoyment of that item but in actual fact it doesn’t make us happy in the long run. Increases our unhappiness and discontent because the pleasure never lasts and we’re only increasing our attachment all the time and we’ll either get to the point where the object itself ceases to bring us as much pleasure and we want more and more or perhaps we’ll be separated from the object of our attachment. This is the nature of Samsāra that it always in fact, we had an example of drinking salty water. That was when was that? That was in Khensur Rinpoche’s teaching, I think.
Was it the example of salty water? It wasn’t in this text, was it? Anyway, it was an example that came up recently in in something or other about how drinking salty water makes us go on being thirstier and thirstier. So, anyway, the one of the things that really helps us to to be happy about our problems in Buddhist psychology is understanding karma, understanding the way that karma works and understanding that all these things are are karmic results. So understanding where these things come from and knowing how to to prevent them in future makes us feel a lot just automatically makes us feel a lot calmer about our problems and suffering.
So it’s really very helpful. And this text actually explains all these karmic results in detail. So to go to stanza forty two, who hasn’t had it done in it for a while, how about you Helen? Reading? I haven’t even given up the pages yet either.
Oh, thanks, Hills. Yes. Okay. It’s all mixed up. There’s there’s two pages there.
So I thought when I was looking at this stanza, how this text really seems to cover all the psychological problems that we encounter in our practice. So, this is talking about some of the problems that occur when we’re doing virtuous actions. When we’re doing Dharma practice we meet the teachings and we might have a burst of enthusiasm. And then after a while we don’t see ourselves getting any results very quickly so then we lose enthusiasm and we feel an inclination to give up. It’s a kind of unstable, changeable mind that can’t apply itself very long if it doesn’t receive some sort of immediate gratification for its efforts.
So this is a serious obstacle to getting anywhere in Dharma practice because in Dharma practice we don’t always see results in the short term. It’s very much a long term thing. In the short term you might actually experience various sufferings, you encounter problems. There tends to be this sort of up and downness about it, particularly when you’re first starting off and once that first burst of enthusiasm has worn off, but before you start to harvest the long term results, then you can go through rocky patches. So you really need to have a sort of mental stability that’s going to keep persisting with the Dharma practice and which can really just stick to the practice through whatever happens that doesn’t get deterred or discouraged.
Yes, well it depends from one person to another. It might be physical, it might be mental, it might be emotional, it might be family circumstances, it might be career, it might be But it’s a state of mind, I mean, the trigger for these things can be anything, but it’s a state of mind that gets discouraged and that’s ready to give up. That’s the problem. And it might even be something pleasant in a sense like there’s too many distractions, too many pleasures, too many worldly attractions. But you start to feel what’s the point of doing all this hard slog of Dharma practice, what’s the point of trying to keep up this meditation every day or going along to Buddha’s Buddha house to the teachings every week or whatever.
It just starts it’s a real bore because they’re always asking us to volunteer to do this and that, you know. Yes. Yes. Well, that’s part of our Dharma practice too, helping others, being pleasant, being considerate and so on. The emphasis here seems seems to be that we get distracted away by worldly things.
It’s talking about the difficulty of keeping up this hard slog of Dharma practice in the face of all, the fact that it’s just so easy sometimes to turn around and do something that’s just agreeable and pleasant, watching television, going out, gazing or reading a book, wasting our time and idle gossip. So these things aren’t wrong in this this themselves. We the our present psychological reality is that we can’t always be serious and we need to relax a bit and unwind a bit and have a bit of fun and so on. So The point is to be judicious about the whole process and if you get too intense and uptight about your Dharma practice, that’s an obstacle too. So you need to allow yourself to relax a bit and unwind in harmless ways.
This can actually be seen as being something that we are doing for our Dharma practice if we recognize that it’s something we need to do for our mental equilibrium and well-being. It’s really the attitude with which we do it and also not overdoing it, not just wasting time and frittering away time when we could very well be doing some sort of Dharma practice or virtuous action or there’s something, some very important, very beneficial opportunity at the moment to be doing some sort of Dharma action such as going along to do things at Buddha House on one of the special days when our merits are multiplied many times, for example, and we might think, I just can’t be bothered, know, I’d rather have a good time. If there’s no particular reason why you shouldn’t do it except that you just can’t be bothered, this is or you just feel distracted by some sort of unimportant worldly activity, then this kind of thing becomes an obstacle to getting the full benefits from our Dharma practice. And, well, it does arise from ignorance, yes. If we really understood the benefits and if we really had that insight and understood it from the heart, then there’s no way you wouldn’t do these things.
But the point is that at the beginning we do, we don’t have that sort of understanding and confidence and we do get very distracted. So this is the sort of mental state that’s really focused on worldly goals. If we feel that this problem is one that’s affecting our Dharma practice quite a bit, then shows this mental state that is focused on worldly goals which in other words means short term happiness. And it comes from putting worldly things first in previous lives. And so even though we’re trying to put our mind into Dharma practice and long term goals, we find it difficult.
Our mind just isn’t flexible enough to respond. In a sense there’s a part of our mind that accepts the importance of the long term goals but the habitual patterning doesn’t go along with that. We have this obstacle to really getting focused on these long term goals and there’s this tendency to always give up and run after some sort of new sensation or new pleasure or so on. And this can take the form even in your Dharma practice. It can get mixed up with these kinds of worldly things.
Always running after some sort of new meditation practice or chasing after some new guru even though you’ve found a very good guru already and then disparaging the previous one to the new one and so on. So if we find ourselves getting caught up in this sort of fickleness unstable sort of practice and this is a result of our past following of worldly goals and it’s causing these kinds of things which are serious obstacles to our practice to arise now. So we have to recognize these things as being obstacles. Not to say that you can’t go different teachers, but you have to When you’ve created a connection with a particular teacher then you have to respect that teacher and not just drop them, not just dump them for a new one every time you feel like it, but recognize the obligation that exists between the teacher and the student. So remedy to this is to do steady practice at an appropriate level for ourselves.
So we shouldn’t take on too much all at once. We should recognize that if we’re going to have difficulty keeping it up, it’s wiser not to take on too much in the first place. And yes. Yes. So Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey says we should we should respect our teacher’s instructions and try to put them into action.
But he says if your Guru says to meditate on voidness and you find that it’s beyond you, that it’s too difficult, then he said you should do a little bit so as to fulfill your obligation to follow your Guru’s instructions. But then you can go back to doing meditation that is more at your level, graduated path meditations and so on. So there is this recognition that we do have some scope to exercise our own judgment. So as as we’re taught to do with these problems, we in the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, we overcome these problems by, first of all, recognizing the the sufferings that they’re causing us and therefore determining not to create the cause of these sufferings anymore. We decided in future we won’t engage in these sorts of actions.
So in future we’ll try to avoid