Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. This 45-minute session opens with Margaret McAndrew establishing how The Wheel of Sharp Weapons fits within the Graduated Path—explaining the three scopes (small, medium, great) as an integrated structure rather than sequential steps. She then works through specific stanzas (45–46) on a central suffering: when our kind or virtuous actions are misinterpreted by others or met with hostility. She traces the karma behind such reactions, uses bodhicitta and dependent arising to show how both the abuser and our hurt stem from delusion, and discusses the emotional tangles of giving and receiving gifts. She introduces Tonglen (giving-and-taking) practice as a means to work with this pain, illustrating how we fashion our own Wheel of Sharp Weapons through non-virtuous action. For practitioners with foundational Buddhist study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 25 SW 1999 05 06.mp3
UUID: 8a09d03b-ae17-41e1-a51c-53f086fb100e
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-05-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~4,827
Bring about the welfare of others. And the Mahāyāna mind includes not just a limited number of others, but it includes all others. So we have to, include all sentient beings in our scope and that means that we have to work towards attaining Buddhahood because only Buddhas have the perfect qualities, powers and the perfect insight, perfect omniscience of understanding to be able to help others without limit. All other beings, even great bodhisattvas, have certain limits on their activities. We aim at the attainment of enlightenment Buddhahood so as to be able to help others.
That’s the reason why we’re doing this practice tonight, this activity of studying the Wheel of Sharp Weapons text by the Indian pundit, Dharmarakshita. So Dharmarakshita was not only a pundit but also a yogi, which is significant. He had attained great meditational levels. And the thought training teachings and their practice with the Graduated Path. So everything that we’re taught in the Wheel of Sharp Weapons is based on the understandings that you acquire through studying graduated path.
Thanks. That’s good. Yes. So without the foundation of the graduated path teachings, the Lojong teachings wouldn’t really benefit us. So it’s the teachings of the three scopes that really show the whole path to enlightenment that we need to practice.
And then practices such as Lojong thought training are integrated into the graduated path outline or structure that we practice. So as you’re aware, the graduated path is divided into three scopes and although each scope is associated with a different level of motivation, for instance, the small scope practice are associated with the motivation of attaining security from rebirth in the lower realms and that includes the most basic practices meditating on the value of our human rebirth meditating on impermanence, meditating on the suffering of the lower realms and the taking of refuge and the avoiding the following of karma, the observing of karma and avoiding non virtuous actions, particularly the ten non virtuous actions which are explained in that sector. So these practices are absolutely basic to any form of Buddhist practice and you can go on from there and extend your level of motivation to the medium scope. In fact, a Buddhist practitioner really must extend their motivation either to the intermediate scope or the great scope because the small scope achieving rebirth in the upper realms doesn’t give any lasting security. It only gives temporal results.
So you have to look at finding liberation from this situation of being caught up in the wheel of Samsāra and the intermediate scope practices are all about that. On the understanding of that, then we go on to the great scope, the Mahāyāna scope, which involves, on the basis of that understanding, really just applying it to all sentient beings and that’s associated with the cultivation of love and compassion without exception to all living beings and the thought that if we’re going to help them then we have to actually aim at enlightenment. So this brings in the bodhicitta motivation. So how do you think we should actually practice these three scopes in our daily life? Yes.
Well, I mean, yes. Presumably, we all think of ourselves as being great scope practitioners. Yes? You worked on the lower one. Jolly good.
Yes. Right. So that’s good, yes. Then we need to really keep all the different scopes in mind and work on integrating them into the one sort of structure so that we understand that even though we might be mainly working on the lower scope, we’re still cultivating the thoughts, the understandings that lead to the motivation of the two following scopes. So if you’re very much working on the lower scope, which is really sound basic practice, then you still have to work on cultivating the thought of liberation from saṃsāra, wanting liberation from saṃsāra yourself, and also love and compassion for others wanting to liberate others.
We have to want to liberate ourselves, otherwise we can’t think of liberating others. And then the person who might think that they they are Great practitioners has to remember that they can’t just cultivate love and compassion and think that they’re doing great scope practice because that’s really not going to be any sort of practice unless it’s integrated with a good understanding of the lower and intermediate scope practices. So does anybody have any qualms about that? Enlightenment. Yes.
bodhicitta motivation, and the practices associated with that. Yes. Okay. So I mean, there might be some people who think perhaps they feel that since they’re on the path to enlightenment that you should be prepared to stay in Samsāra for as long as they’re a sentient beings and therefore it’s unworthy to think about attaining liberation or you might think that you’re aiming to be a bodhisattva and bodhisattvas are willing to go to the lower realms for the sake even of one suffering sentient being. So you might think that if you’re on the way to being a Bodhisattva, then you don’t need to worry about the practices for avoiding the lower realms because you want to go there anyway to liberate sentient beings.
Perhaps you might have that kind of a thought. Maybe nobody’s had that sort of thought. But these are the kinds of mistaken conceptions that could arise if you didn’t understand the structure and what we’re being told by the topics on each of these scopes and the necessity of integrating them all together, like if you’re going somewhere and there’s a couple of other places on the way. For instance, I’m going to Melbourne and I’m going to stop off at Bendigo and Torquay on the way. They’re not exactly on the way to Melbourne so I’m doing a bit of a diversion so that’s not exactly a good example.
Anyway, the point is that even if you’re only going part of the way, you’re still following the same path as somebody who’s going all the way, so it doesn’t mean that you ignore that part of the path. It means that you have to practice all of them together. So how do you think that Lojong training would fit in to this structure of the three scopes? Alright. So yes.
So you’re making the point that giving and taking really comes from the great scope of the graduated path. Is that what you’re saying, Betty? Right. Yes. That’s not yes.
That’s not strictly correct. I mean, I think you’re taking it in terms of the fact that if we want to go all the way to enlightenment, we have to work right from the start eliminating self-cherishing. But in actual fact the three scopes aren’t something that we practice one by one. We don’t first of all practice the small scope and then we practice the medium scope and then we practice the great scope. What we do is we integrate them all and at the beginning you would be practicing mainly the small scope practices, but you would still be bringing in the medium and great scope practice.
This practice of giving and taking does belong to the great scope. And if you’re doing it, it’s a great scope practice. But as I was saying already, we have to start integrating these things right from the beginning. Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult. It’s only going be more difficult.
It’ll take much longer to do the whole path. Basically, when you’re looking at the graduated path, although it’s divided up into these steps, you need to go through the whole structure again and again and familiarize yourself with the whole structure so that you understand the whole, the big picture. Even though you might feel that at this stage of your development that it’s the topics from the small scope that you need to spend most of time meditating on and thinking about, you need to do it in the light of some understanding of the topics that come later. This really illuminates the topics of the small scope so that you could be meditating, for instance, on the preciousness of the human rebirth, but you can be doing it with Mahāyāna motivation and also the motivation of the intermediate scope of wanting to attain liberation from Samsāra. This makes a big difference to the actual state of mind of somebody who’s meditating on these topics.
It’s not really meant for anybody to just meditate on small scope topics with small scope motivation. That’s just a way of presenting the subject. So is that clear? Basically as the Graduated Path is a Mahāyāna presentation, it’s really meant that we all do all the sort of Mahāyāna practices right from the start. But we need to build up this structure so that have a good grounding of the small and intermediate scope stage topics as well.
Anyway, these thought training topics come into the great scope. They’re Mahāyāna practices. They wouldn’t be done by somebody who is only concerned with individual liberation. Betty made a point there that people who are following intermediate and even small scope practices do need to work against their self-cherishing, but for those scopes it’s necessary to overcome the grosser levels of self-cherishing. It’s not necessary to totally overcome self-cherishing the way it is in the Mahāyāna scope.
It’s this kind of gross self-cherishing that would harm others in order to gain a temporal benefit for ourselves. It would be the obstruction in those levels, but there can be a certain amount of self-cherishing in the thought of attaining not enlightenment but individual liberation. It’s very subtle because when you understand emptiness it eliminates the gross self-cherishing and these practitioners have to eliminate, they have to understand emptiness very profoundly in order to attain liberation so it gets rid of all the gross delusions along the way. But still there can be this subtle self centeredness, I suppose you could say, which doesn’t have to be eliminated on the Hīnayāna path. It’s very difficult to get rid of.
So we have So the point is that the graduated path, gives us the structure but we need to understand other texts as well as we go on with our practice. It’s really important to understand the graduated path well because that gives us the basic structure for our everyday activities, our everyday and it also gives us the framework so that the other topics fit into place and it makes it easier to understand these other topics. So we have these Lejong teachings that come into the Great Scope practice which help us to achieve the realizations of love and compassion that we’re trying to attain with the Great Scope practices. There are other teachings that we need to study. For instance, we can study Tantra.
Do you know how how you could relate Tantra to the graduated path? Okay. Nobody wants to have a stab at that one? Okay. So basically, it’s said that when you do Tantric practice it should be based on a good understanding of the graduated path.
Sometimes Tantra is actually included in the graduated path in a general way. For instance, they talk about the path including Sūtra and Tantra. Of course, its teachings are quite complex so it is presented separately. There is actually a separate Tantric Graduated Path text which actually Khensur Rinpoche is planning to give some teachings on for those who took the Yamataka initiation initiations. But anyway, in a sense the Tantric teachings are in the graduated path in the sense that they are simply means for achieving the realizations more quickly, which we were actually taught in the topic of the Six Perfections.
So in the Six Perfections you’re taught about particularly wisdom. You need to, in order to gain the practice of the six perfections quickly and to gain the deep insight and so on, it’s very very much quicker if you can actually do these Tantric teachings. So it’s said that to attain Buddhahood according to the Sūtra path, I think it’s something like four countless great eons is the average, to attain Buddhahood. If you practiced unruhala, it can actually be possible to attain enlightenment in one lifetime. Also we need to study things like the philosophical texts on tenets and Lorig and so on.
These are important because they illuminate the basic topics and they give us an understanding of the mind, of consciousness and so on. The tenets give us an understanding of the different views of emptiness. It’s very important to study these different topics so as to acquire the wisdom of understanding emptiness. Although these topics are explained a little bit in the Graduated Path texts, particularly the more detailed Graduated Path texts, it’s difficult to understand these topics In order to meditate really well on these topics, then you need to go on and do these higher studies as well. So it’s not really something different to the graduated path but it is filling in the details.
When we talk about the graduated path, in a sense it’s not really the books, but it’s the path that we have to follow. It’s the practice we have to do. And the texts are just like the roadmap. So you can say that some things might not be explained in detail on the roadmap, but they’re still there. You still have to go through them.
And so When we’re talking about the graduated path, in a sense it’s our practice rather than the words in the books and the words in the books are just elucidating what this graduated path has to be for us And it’s just telling us how we have to go stage by stage. So it’s not just intellectual theory, it’s really important to understand these things. And the more deeply you understand them, the insight you can attain into your real nature and then the more effectively you can meditate. Of course, it doesn’t mean we’re all going to become great scholars and pundits and yogis in this lifetime, but this is what we’re going to have to do on our path to enlightenment. Actually emptiness isn’t all that complicated.
You can get the idea because there are all these different texts, all these different skills of tenets and so on that we have to study, but emptiness is very complicated. In actual fact, emptiness is incredibly simple. Lama Yeshe always used to say to us, Śūnyatā is so simple. Then he would tell us that it was because our minds were complicated that we needed to have these complicated teachings because we were simply incapable of perceiving this very simple truth. Our minds are very obscured by so many delusions and projections and These delusions and projections are very, very complicated and so we need all these complex teachings to enable us to see through them bit by bit.
It’s like having a mass of obstacles that we have to get through So we have to gradually work our way through all these different obstacles. And there are some people actually who seem to find it easier to just plunge straight through into this meditation on this simple truth. This seems to be the approach that’s taken by the Zen practitioners. Of course it’s not easy to say it’s simple is one thing, to say it’s easy is another thing. It’s not easy.
But for some people it seems to be more their natural approach to just leave aside all these complications and to just try to break through into this insight. Whereas some other people find that this just leaves them feeling totally lost and they don’t know what they should be doing. So people like this need to be guided step by step. I think that the great majority of people need this kind of step by step guidance. We’ve been given these graduated path teachings which actually enable us to go step by step and to feel that we’re being guided on the way and that we know as we take each step, each stage on the path that we’re doing what is required for that particular stage of the path and that it is leading us in the direction that we want to go in.
So, any comments? So, I think we finished stanza forty five last week. Does anybody we didn’t we didn’t do ten to forty five? No. I’m further behind than I thought I was.
So stanza forty five. Sloping sure we didn’t do that one. Does anybody else remember? Okay. Oh, we have to rely on Jill’s notes.
She’s a very good note taker. It’s okay. So I’ll have to go back to stanza forty five. Hope I haven’t lost it. Forty three.
Forty four. Here we are. Yes. Okay. Fung, would you like to have I pronounced the phrase that is?
Fung, yes. Would you like to read for us? Good. Okay. So this is pretty straightforward really, isn’t it?
It can just sometimes that when we do these well meant actions we always expect to be appreciated by others. We always expect that our actions will be appreciated and that we’ll get some gratitude or at least the people will understand that we’re doing something to help them. In particular, it’s really shocking and upsetting when people place some sort of twisted interpretation on your actions seem to feel that you must be doing whatever it is you’re doing, not to help them, but with some sort of devious, unpleasant motivation of your own. So they might react with hostility and perhaps abuse us or say something unkind to us. It seems very unfair and we feel that it’s natural under those circumstances to be indignant about it.
We can get very very hurt and worked up about this. So, in fact, when this sort of thing happens, we need to remember that this is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons from doing these kinds of things ourselves before in past lives from having reacted in this way before when other people were kind to us or from having been ungrateful and having reacted with malice towards them, although they did good things towards us, although they were kind to us. Or perhaps even not only in past lives, but in this life we might remember some instances where we might have behaved this way. Perhaps if we had come for some reason to feel that everybody was always working against us. Sometimes you can get this feeling if you have experiences perhaps early in life that people are always down on you, you can start to feel that everybody is always going to be down on you and working against you and you don’t really believe when somebody does something nice, you really think they must have some sort of ulterior motive.
So it can give us an idea of how we’ve created this sort of karma. We remember this, then it won’t be so upsetting when people react this way to our kind actions. And if we do this contemplation on bodhicitta, remembering the different topics of developing love and compassion towards others, then we can understand that all beings have in their past lives, in our past lives, been very kind to us as mothers, that all of these beings have been our mothers again and again. And so even though we might be receiving a little bit of abuse now from one of them, it’s not so much compared to all the good they’ve done for us. So this helps us to not place too much seriousness on these kinds of experiences and not to react too much and also if we consider that this person is under the control of their own delusions.
So the reason that they are abusing us and not appreciating our good kind actions is because of their confusion and their own distorted mental states. So they’re under the control of these things. Also, the reason why we’re feeling hurt is because of the self-cherishing in our own heart which is causing us confusion. So really it’s our own confusion which is causing us to react with this painful feeling and if we didn’t have this self-cherishing, if we didn’t have this deluded mental state within ourselves, wouldn’t be experiencing this particular suffering that we’re feeling now. And so we identify the delusions as being a real problem.
Any questions about that? Would that be because you feel that an inappropriately generous present is putting you under an obligation? Yes. Yes. I’m not sure you see how the translation should really go.
These translations are a bit loose sometimes. But, yes, sometimes it could be ill will, but sometimes yes. I mean yes. It’s just simply yes. I’m skillful and yes.
So yes. Insensitive perhaps. So yes. Yes. Yes.
So that’s not so negative, but still, yes, you could have, as you say, you unintentionally hurt that person. Yes. I think it’s easy to do sometimes under some circumstances. Yes, sometimes you do have it does come from sort of an underlying distrust of people’s motivations and why they’re doing these things. And I know I myself always feel very strongly wary of being put under an obligation.
It can seem like a burden if somebody does something for you. And that can, I think, lead me to sometimes being a bit ungracious or a bit very reluctant to accept something from other people? Maybe sometimes there is a reality in that, in that sometimes you do need to just make it clear to the person that you don’t want to feel under an obligation and maybe it’s just necessary to come out into the open with it about your feelings and so on. Perhaps other times it’s just better to consider the person’s feelings. They’ve gone to all this trouble to get you something and they’re expecting that you’re going to be pleased so it’s probably better to to be nice about it.
Yes. I think that’s the that’s that’s the circle of interdependence. That’s something a bit different. It’s as the giver, the receiver, and the act of giving. That’s more that’s more emptiness of the it’s just one way of looking at emptiness.
For instance, if somebody gives you something, that’s an example of how all these things are really dependent. Because when we, for instance, give a present to somebody, then we’re the giver and the person is the receiver and there’s also the gift. And these things are all labelled and we feel that they have some sort of independent self sufficient existence, that I am self sufficiently and independently a giver and the other person is independently and self sufficiently a recipient and that this present is independently and self sufficiently a present. But in actual fact, without any one of these three things there could not be the other two. And this is just a very good example of this kind of thing that’s going on all the time.
We’re always encountering different objects and situations which we perceive as being independently having some sort of self identity which is independent and self sufficient and not dependent on the associated circumstances. But in actual fact, if we look at it, everything is always dependent on other factors. There is nothing that isn’t dependent on other factors. When we understand that thoroughly, it becomes easier to understand emptiness. This is the other side of emptiness.
This is the way things conventionally exist. This is dependent arising of these conventional phenomena. And when we understand how they are dependent arising, can also understand how their nature is empty. Yes. Well, yes, I’m not sure about that.
But anyway, we do tend to have a lot of hang ups about about it. Yes. That’s right. Yes. Yes.
I think that’s true. Some people give gifts very easily just as little appreciation token of their appreciation or something and other people feel that it’s some kind of big they have some sort of emotional associations with it. Yeah. Not necessarily. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s right.
Yes. Yes. There’s always this feeling, oh, you know, they’re giving me this marvelous present. Now I’ll have to do something for them, you know, even though they might not be expecting it to sort of feel that there is this moral obligation to do something. And there are some people who are very hum up.
I mean, some people will give you something and then ten years later you do something they don’t like and they’ll say, look I did all this for you. I mean some people will, you know. I’ve had it happen to me a number of times. They thought, look I did this for you all these years ago and look at what you’re doing now or you won’t do anything for me now. And Sometimes it is awkward to accept things because you can’t be sure whether the person who’s giving it to you is the kind of person who will sort of store it up in their memory and bring it up against you at some time.
So so I think this is anyway, it is a gift giving and receiving is a situation that’s that’s loaded with potential with with emotional meanings. Yes. So we need to learn to give and let go of our gifts when we give them and not hold them as being something that we’ve given out expecting to get something back because that’s not a real gift. Also, we need to realize that if we accept gifts, we’re allowing the other person to make some merit. Particularly if it’s a gift that’s given to us to help us with our Dharma practice.
For instance, if somebody knew that you wanted to go on a particular retreat or do a course and you couldn’t afford to do it and they said, Look here, I’ll pay for you, or something like that, that could be quite a lot of money. If they’re doing that to help you with your Dharma practice then that would be a very meritorious action on that person’s part. If you were to say, Oh no, I don’t like accepting these kinds of things, then you’re really preventing that person from being able to accumulate that sort of merit. The Vietnamese have a custom, don’t they, because one day some of the Vietnamese people in Melbourne used to come to our center. One day they all came and started picking fruit from the loquat tree in our backyard.
They explained that it was the custom for the temple to actually give fruit to the people who visited on that day and it symbolized that generally the lay people give to the monks and nuns. On this particular day, monks and nuns or the laypeople come along to the temple and the monks and nuns give fruit to them and it symbolizes that the fruit is like the rewards of the merit of giving to the monks and nuns and to the temple. Have I got it right? Yes. So it’s it’s saying that it’s like a two way interaction.
Yes. We’re it’s sort of anyway, I thought that was beautiful because it symbolizes the the interaction between the the monks and nuns and the lay people. So stanza forty six. Where am I up to? I think I’m not up to there yet anyway.
We’ll do a little bit of meditation first. We’re doing a Tonglen practice on this suffering of being abused or not having our good actions appreciated when we try to do good or kind actions. Maybe Jane, how would you like to read the next one? So, we’ve actually finished the, the section dealing more generally with our everyday actions and attitudes. So I thought probably this smith might refer to some Tibetan story, but in any case the example is clear that somehow he has been killed by his own sword that he made himself.
This is the illustration for the way we’ve fashioned our own Wheel of Sharp Weapons with non virtuous actions. So Mhmm. Well, we create our yes. We do. All of those things.
We’re particularly focusing on karma here. I can’t read my own writing here. It looks like thunder, but it can’t be but, anyway, it’s better than just oh, yes. Thunder. Yes.
It is thunder. Yes. I should have, yes, should have put that in inverted commas. That would have made more sense. So this is a poetical a translation.
It’s not a literal translation. The English translators thought that thunder would fit in well there, but it doesn’t say thunder in Tibetan. It just says