Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 33.5-minute teaching on The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, Ven Margaret McAndrew anchors her instruction in the unexpected—the Sydney hailstorms that suddenly de-roofed houses—to illustrate why alertness and mindfulness matter in daily practice. She introduces the metaphor of sword and arrow as the two aspects of bodhicitta: relative bodhicitta (the heartfelt intention to attain enlightenment for others’ sake) and ultimate bodhicitta (understanding of emptiness). To ground this philosophically, she then outlines the Buddhist classification of minds and consciousnesses (Lorig), explaining the fifty-one mental factors that comprise our experience, especially the eleven virtuous factors—faith, shame, effort, conscientiousness—and their irreconcilable opposition to six primary non-virtuous factors. For practitioners with foundational Buddhist study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 26 SW 1999 05 06.mp3
UUID: d3736cc0-599e-46fa-b26b-4c4a212f3fa4
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-05-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 33.5 minutes
Words: ~3,165
Suddenly without warning. So Anyway, that’s perhaps not an important point. But the point is that we never expect disasters that they come and sometimes they come without any warning at all. Example that I used for that was the Sydney hailstorms because I’ve just been watching that on television when I was doing the notes for this stanza. So the people in Sydney weren’t expecting their houses to be de roofed by all these hailstorms.
That was probably the last thing on their minds and then all of a sudden crash. So then the stanza mentions two things that which are actually often mentioned in the scriptures as being qualities that we need to have in our day to day life so as to live our lives in Dharma practice and avoid non virtue. So, they’re translated in this stanza as care and awareness, but other translations call them alertness and mindfulness. So, probably alertness and mindfulness convey better the idea of what we need to practice. We need to have these qualities by watching our thoughts, being aware of our thoughts, being aware of what we’re thinking and doing and particularly aware of our thoughts whether our thoughts are being virtuous or non because it’s the thoughts that lead the activities of body, speech and mind.
And so we have to be on the watch and practice this alertness and mindfulness. Be aware of what we’re doing. And particularly, be aware immediately there’s the arising of any non virtuous thoughts, so that we can immediately put a stop to that non virtual mental attitude. So, any questions about that? Right.
Yes. Yes. I’ll bet you’ve been a I’ll bet you’ve been a blacksmith in a past life. Yes, yes, it’s true. If you’re doing if you’ve been making a sword in the old fashioned way, and in fact I suppose they still make swords that way because they’re not exactly a mascotous item nowadays, But they still make a few for ceremonial purposes in different countries.
So, yes, they would be very much a question of bringing the steel and heating it on the forge and doing all these things that need to be done. Can’t bring it. I think they have to talk cold water, don’t they? And then heat it again or do something. So yes.
So we we as you say, we put a lot of effort into acquiring all these non virtuous these actions for our own destruction. Yes. So then the next stanza follows on similarly. How about you, Diana? Would you like to read this one?
Alright. So this is using another example. There’s the example of the arrow maker who’s killed by his own arrows. And this particularly refers to the sufferings of our past lives in our rebirth states, as well as the lesser that still serious sufferings of dislike in the human realm and all our future lives in Samsāra. As long as we remain in Samsāra, we’re going to experience suffering.
Even if we manage to attain the rebirth, we’ll still be subject to suffering. And in fact, if we look at our past lives, most of our past lives were in lower realms, so the future sufferings should become lighter as we progress. If we continue to practice Dharma and progress towards enlightenment. We can hope that our future lives will have lighter sufferings and more happiness. But this shouldn’t be the objective in itself because as long as we’re in saṃsāra, we’re never safe.
So we need to place our our goal on getting out of Samsāra. And as long as we’re in Samsāra, our sufferings will be coming like rain or like a shower of arrows due to our previous non virtues. If we don’t want to continue to experience these suffering coming like arrows in our future lives, then we have to avoid creating these causes now. And again, we need to have these mental factors of alertness and mindfulness. So, these two weapons that have been mentioned in these two stanzas have their counterparts in Dharma practice.
So we need to have a sword and we need to have an arrow. Or we need to have the arrow and the sword of relative bodhicitta and ultimate bodhicitta. So the arrow is like the the sword is like ultimate bodhicitta. Do do you understand what ultimate bodhicitta means? No, not really.
It’s related, very related, but it’s not the same thing. Do you understand relative bodhicitta? Nobody’s going to make a stab at it? I didn’t mean that one. Relative body theatre, ultimate body theatre.
So, essentially, relative bodhicitta is what we generally mean as bodhicitta, and that is intention to attain enlightenment for the sake of others based on great love and compassion, the thought of attaining enlightenment. Of course, it’s really only bodhicitta when it’s been realized fully in the mind stream so that it becomes the thought that really possesses that person day and night, even while they’re sleeping. So that is the relative bodhicitta. And the ultimate bodhicitta is the understanding of emptiness in the mind of the Bodhisattva. So, of course, there are beings who are not Bodhisattvas who also have understanding of emptiness.
For them it doesn’t become Ultimate bodhicitta. But generally when we’re talking about Ultimate bodhicitta, we’re talking about the understanding of emptiness. And so we have to have this Ultimate bodhicitta which is like the sword which cuts off ego centeredness at the root. And we also have to have the arrow which destroys self-cherishing if it’s aimed at the right place. So for an arrow to be effective it has to hit the right spot.
And for that reason our relative bodhicitta has to be aimed at self-cherishing, to overcome self-cherishing. Stanza forty seven was talking about the sufferings that arise as a result of our non virtuous actions. And these non virtuous actions depend on mental attitudes, so I thought I’d take a diversion to talk a bit about some of the philosophy around these non virtuous actions from the Lorig studies. So, our virtuous attitudes, our non virtuous mental attitudes are classified in LORIG, and LORIG classifies consciousnesses. We have main consciousnesses which can be referred to as primary consciousnesses or primary minds.
Also we have mental factors which are like secondary aspect of these primary consciousnesses. It’s a bit awkward with consciousnesses. Too many s’s. Mind is formless and it doesn’t depend on any sort of physical organ. It doesn’t depend on the brain.
It doesn’t depend on the brain cells. It doesn’t depend on the electrical impulses and so on that happen in our brain cells. These things are certainly things that are connected with our thinking during the life of this body. But we have a non physical element of consciousness which is independent of this physical body and which will pass on at the end of this lifetime, go to another body. And so we have to understand that we’re talking about this formless consciousness.
We can divide our main consciousnesses into six primary consciousnesses, which are five physical sense cognitions of the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and tactile consciousness. We have all these other different mental factors that are associated with them and this is where the virtuous and non virtuous factors come in. It’s because I didn’t have I was in a bit of a hurry, I didn’t remember my pages. So I found it anyway. So these mental factors there are fifty one mental factors, and that isn’t really an exhaustive list of all our mental factors, but it’s just giving us some of the important categories.
But the ones that we’re particularly concerned with here are the eleven virtues and the six primary and twenty secondary non virtues. So these six primary non virtuous mental factors are the mental factors that we’re concerned with. And these aren’t to be confused with primary minds. They’re actually mental factors, so they’re secondary in terms of being consciousnesses. But they divide up into six primary ones and they further subdivided into twenty secondary non virtues.
It’s very helpful to have a look at these. I’ll go through the virtues first of all. We might not have time to go through all of these tonight. I might have to finish it off when I come back again. The six primary minds are visual consciousness, auditory consciousness, olfactory consciousness, gustatory consciousness.
Don’t have to write all this down, But anyway, tactile consciousness and mental consciousness. So you’ve got the five physical sense consciousnesses plus mental consciousness, and that includes all the primary minds. There’s a number of different secondary minds or mental factors and some of them are always present. There are some that are always present with every primary consciousness. There are some which are only present sometimes and there are some which are contradictory to others.
So some can only be present if their opposites are not present. This is particularly the case with the virtuous and non virtuous mental factors. You can’t have both virtuous and non virtuous mental factors present in the same consciousness, in the same mind, because they are contradicted to each other and exclude each other. So it’s possible to have more than one virtuous mental factor or more than one non virtuous mental factor at the same time, but they exclude their opposites. This is important, so as we understand this, we understand that if we cultivate virtuous mental factors then we’re keeping out the non virtuous ones.
For instance, we might have the virtuous mental factor of faith and the virtuous mental factor of effort in the same moment of consciousness. These two are not contradictory because they’re both virtuous, that we couldn’t have these virtuous matter factors along with a non virtuous factor such as pride, for example. So I’ll just start going through these virtuous ones. And there are eleven of those. The first one is faith.
There are three kinds of faith. There’s faith in the Three Jewels, the Triple Gem, Buddha Dharma and Sangha, which we need to have in order to engage in our practice. There’s also the wish to attain enlightenment and faith in the attainment of enlightenment, coupled with the faith that this is a realizable goal. This really includes faith in ourselves as well as faith in the path because we have to feel that we ourselves, as well as other beings, are capable of attaining enlightenment. It requires this sort of self confidence.
And also a third kind of faith is conviction in the truth of the doctrine of rebirth and the law of cause and effect. So we need to have faith in these things in order to be able to really engage in our practice. This explanation can be quite extensive and can be divided up into different degrees of faith and so on that we can acquire in these different objects. If we start off, we might start off just with a small amount of faith, just enough faith to start engaging in our practice and we don’t have full faith to begin with and our faith develops as we practice. As we gain more understanding and more results from our practice, we gain deeper and deeper conviction until, as we begin to gain realizations of the path, then our faith can become very heartfelt.
Faith has to be something that’s based on understanding, a kind of faith that’s just based on some kind of admiration for the Three Jewels and so on, but without much understanding it’s not very strong. It might be starting point that it’s not going to be strong enough unless we are able to cultivate it and make it become greater and greater as we go along. So, the second one is shame. This might be an awkward translation, another one might be awareness, but it’s a sort of internal feeling of awareness of of what is shameful, of of what is wrong, non virtuous. So it’s feeling this is a positive feeling.
It’s not to be confused with guilt. We often confuse shame with guilt. Guilt is a harmful action. It’s destructive to us. Guilt is a feeling that gets things out of proportion.
Shame is simply a balanced awareness of our non virtuous actions and which wants to avoid these non virtuous actions, seeing the harm that they do to us. So with shame, it seems to me that the difference is that with shame we don’t identify ourselves with our non virtues and with our mistakes and failings, but rather we identify ourselves with our potential, which we want to realize. So we want to distance ourselves from non virtue and from wrong actions and wrong thoughts and to avoid them. Whereas with guilt, we start thinking that we’re bad and then we feel that it’s hopeless for ourselves to try to be better. Feel that we identify ourselves as being bad and feel that that is how we are, that we can’t become better.
That holds us back. Shame actually stimulates us to do better. Shame is very important and it’s an internalized thought which isn’t looking outwards at the opinion of others but which is simply looking at ourselves. That’s the second virtuous mental factor. The third is very similar, but it is looking outward.
This is called embarrassment. Again, we can get confused with some kinds of embarrassment embarrassment which are merely social when we’re using the word in a general sense. Here we’re using the word in a specific way to mean a sense of awkwardness about our non virtuous actions being perceived by others. So, it’s a reluctance to have our wrong actions be viewed by others. It keeps us from doing these actions.
It’s a very positive thought because through consideration of the opinion others will have of us, particularly others whose qualities we respect, we don’t want to be viewed by them in a bad way so we avoid doing negative actions. This is a very strong factor to enable us to maintain pure virtue. So the fourth is non attachment. Attachment. The fifth is non hatred.
The sixth is non ignorance. So it’s important to understand that all these non this and non that, we’re not just talking about neutral states of being free from these non virtues, but not having anything positive to put in their place. We’re talking about positive opposites of these non virtues. So it’s a very positive mental factor which cultivates elimination of hatred, elimination of ignorance, elimination of attachment. So, then number seven is effort, virtuous effort.
Effort in self motivated, enthusiastic perseverance in following virtuous conduct. And this is opposite to laziness. So, the eighth is pliancy. And this is a virtuous mental factor which really only comes into action when we are achieving Samatha, calm abiding. So it’s something that we achieve through gaining higher states of meditative concentration.
It’s not something that we’re going to experience if we haven’t achieved the higher levels of the stages towards Samatha. It comes with single pointed concentration. First of all, we attain single pointed concentration and then as we cultivate our single pointed concentration towards the actual achievement of calm abiding, then we acquire these qualities of mental and physical pliancy. This is the eighth mental factor. It’s actually a new mental factor that will come into our mind then.
The ninth one is very important, conscientiousness. Is alertness for non virtuous deeds enabling us to keep our vows purely. The tenth is equanimity or even mindedness. And the eleventh is non harmfulness, not being able to bear the suffering of others. So that’s another one of those sort of non negative, non negative, but it’s actually a very positive mental state.
So any questions about those? And the six major non virtuous mental factors are, first of all, desire or attachment. Secondly, Secondly, anger. Third, pride. Fourth, ignorance. Fifth, doubt — doubting that which is true, ignorance, to go back to ignorance, it specifically refers to not understanding the difference between virtue and non virtue.
There are many kinds of ignorance, but this is the one that harms us the most. And the sixth one is afflicted views. So there are some examples given of false views that are the the problem here. For instance, grasping the self as being permanent and self existent. Another one is the view that all phenomena inherently exist.
And another one which is very important is the belief that there is no karma or rebirth or cause and effect. So if you were to hold to these views, it would be a major obstacle to our practice because these views are contradictory to the teachings of Dharma. So there are also two other views. One of them is clinging to these views as being ultimate, and another one is believing in wrong practices — samsaric practices such as idol worship or asceticism — have ultimate significance. So these are practices which don’t lead to liberation — which a person might have been taught do lead to liberation and the person would be following a person might have been taught do lead to liberation and the person would be following these practices and their energy would be going into something which doesn’t bring an ultimate result.
So any questions about these things? Yes. Well, I didn’t go into much detail. In fact, talked in more detail about some of these things in past talks last last year, and I might actually go into more detail about them sometime in the future. But, anyway, I thought it would be good just to bring them up as a reminder of the of the theoretical structure underlying these topics.
For instance, if you look at pride, there’s quite a number of different divisions of pride that we can go into. If we look at the secondary mental factors, these things are much discussed in much detail. For instance, there’s a number of kinds of laziness. It’s interesting to look at all of these different things and see, then you can see how they’re actually operating. You can start to identify them.
Okay then, So that finishes tonight’s discussion, and we can go on. And we’re we’re going to be meeting Yamāntaka again soon in the verses that are coming up. So what what stanza was that? That was forty seven, wasn’t it? We didn’t actually get on to any any other stanzas.
So we’ve basically finished with those stanzas where we were doing the Tonglen practice on the different sufferings. And then we’ll be going on to some stanzas that describe very vividly our different wrong actions and confusions and non virtues and so on that it’s very easy to fall into day by day. So next, well, maybe I’ll do the dedication. It will be we can do the dedication first, and then I’ll tell you what’s happening next week.