Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Margaret McAndrew shifts from examining karmic results to their underlying causes in this 45-minute session on The Wheel of Sharp Weapons. She investigates the harmful actions we perform daily, using a concrete question to clarify how karma works: if you kill a germ, do you create karma? This leads into the five poisons—attachment, hatred, aversion, ignorance, pride, jealousy—depicted as quicksand that traps us in saṃsāra. McAndrew traces these to their root: ego-grasping and self-cherishing, the two delusions that Yamāntaka (wrathful wisdom) is invoked to cut. In the final stanzas, she examines how self-cherishing, though instinctive, sabotages our most important relationships—one of life’s deepest sources of happiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 29 SW 1999 06 03.mp3
UUID: 640c6390-e797-40bc-a90d-1fa31c37fa24
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-06-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.7 minutes
Words: ~4,991
So we begin by setting up motivation, thinking that we’re not just here for our own individual benefit but we think of all the countless suffering beings that exist and how many of them there are compared to the few people who are practicing a spiritual path. So we need to make a good use of this life, first of all, for our own spiritual benefit so as to progress on the path and not to fall back suffering. But we need to think of all these countless beings and think how closely connected to them we are and how we’ve been connected with them in life after life in various different ways as friends, enemies and strangers and particularly as their children. They’ve been our mothers and fathers over and over again and cared for us with all the love and devotion that many kinds of beings put into caring for their young. So we’ve had this very, very close connection with them and it wouldn’t be suitable to just ignore their plight and only consider our own situation.
That would be like ignoring our mother if she was in trouble and only trying to help ourselves. So this is the goal of the Mahāyāna path, to be able to help these others. In order to help them effectively we have to be able to show them the path. In order to do that we need to follow the path ourselves and to gain an understanding of it. Not only the path to individual liberation but the Mahāyāna path to enlightenment.
So we have to set our goal right from the beginning on the attainment of enlightenment for the sake of all these sentient beings who are, if we thought about it, we would see as being very dear to us and who are suffering so much and that need us to help them. So In order to do this we have to attain full enlightenment so as to have the special qualities of an enlightened being to be able to help others. We set our thought on the attainment of that at the beginning of this I think we’ve been through the first section of the text which was concerned with experiencing unpleasant results which are symbolized by the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, which is the symbol for our karmic returns from bad actions. In that section we looked at a lot of different negative karmas and they’re in a detailed way at the kind of results they bring. In that way we can understand that if we don’t want to experience these results in the future then we have to avoid the causes.
We have to watch our actions and watch our intentions towards others. Because in order to experience the result we need to have created the cause. But as we have got these karmic karmic imprints on our mind streams from past experiences, then we need to be able to transform the difficult circumstances they produce from being hindrances to our practice to being helpful on the path. So we learned to use the practice of giving and taking in regard to these various sufferings. If we’re suffering, then we think that many other beings are suffering in the same way.
We imaginatively take on the suffering ourselves, think that we’re bearing this suffering for the sake of the others and we give out our good things, all our happiness, all our good conditions, all our progress on the path, cause of happiness in the future, good karma. All of these things we give out to others. In the meditation practice that was associated with each stanza. So we finished that section and then we came onto the section that we’re on now where we’re taking a more detailed look, not at the results but at the causes, at the many harmful activities we tend to engage in from day to day. So we have to recognize these.
We have to recognize them as being harmful and avoid them. So we ask Yamāntaka a few stances back. We actually asked Yamāntaka, the wrathful aspect of Mañjuśrī, to help us. Yamāntaka is the helper against the external hindrances such as death. His name is the opponent of the Lord of Death.
Untimely death would be a big hindrance to our practice. Also, the internal hindrances, our disturbing emotions. We particularly ask Yamāntaka to help us overcome these kinds of hindrances. And so Yamāntaka is actually our own wisdom, our own inner wisdom, which can be developed through following the practice of Dharma as we’re taught it by the spiritual masters. By hearing, contemplating and meditating on the teachings, then we can acquire this transcendental wisdom which is symbolized by Mañjuśrī.
So it’s this transcendental wisdom that cuts off the disturbing emotions, disturbing mental states. Because of that, we have this dual quality of Yamāntaka, his being Mañjuśrī, the wisdom cutting off the internal disturbances, especially in the context of this text described as being ego grasping and self-cherishing. We also have the wrathful energy to use against other hindrances, including things such as untimely death which would interfere with our practice from a material viewpoint. So Yamāntaka is very powerful and we have the Wheel of Sharp Weapons of good actions which is wielded by Yamataka to offset the Wheel of Sharp Weapons of bad actions which we experience from our karmic causes. So I’m getting a bit of an experience at the moment of the Wheel of Sharp Weapons from having probably caused sentient beings to have to endure cold, put them out in the cold or failed to relieve their cold when I had responsibility for them, something like that, no doubt.
So, is the cold the Wheel of Sharp Weapons? You could say that, I think. It’s really, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons is really the karmic cause of the cold, I think. So to experience the result, we have to have a cause. So would you say that the germ was the cause?
The The germ is the result of the cause. So it’s the germ’s karma, not my karma. Actually that raises the question of whether germs are actually sentient beings and that seems to be a dubious point. Nobody seems to be certain of that. Yes.
Yes. Well, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of clear statement on that apart from the fact that Buddha had the monks strain water through a fine strainer and he said it was all right to drink it if they had strained it in that way. But whether that was simply sort of accepting the realities of what could be filtered out of water at that stage in ancient India or whether it was actually making a statement, that’s not so clear. But a lot of people sort of take it as indicating that there’s no karmic result from swallowing or in other ways destroying microscopic creatures. That’s not really clear.
It’s not clearly set out in the scriptures and the Lama’s, no doubt they have their insights about these things but they’re not sort of stating it so maybe if we knew the truth we’d be horrified or something. I don’t know. Yes. Well, it’s quite likely the case that some of these forms of life are just too lowly to support a mind stream of consciousness. In the same way, we know that plants don’t support life.
Plants are not sentient beings. It seems quite, there’s no particular reason why microbes should be regarded as being sentient beings just because western scientists have classified them as being of the animal side of things. That’s a classification that’s pretty shaky in the smaller sort of single cell type of creatures anyway. So I think anyway, for practical purposes, we can just perhaps follow the usual solution which is to regard a fine strainer or something of that nature, a filter, as being adequate adequate to sort of get out the things that we don’t need to worry about. So most people worry a lot about most dumb practitioners worry if they’ve got worms, they worry about having to destroy the worms, but they don’t worry so much if they’ve got a cold or something like that.
So it’s always very tricky. There’s always Does anybody want to answer that one? Consciousness, yes, not necessarily intellect, for instance, an earthworm probably doesn’t have much intellect but they have consciousness. So, yes. Well, actually, the the definition of a sentient being is that it’s, well, a sentient being has to be a non enlightened being.
But it’s generally, just in a general sense, it’s taken to be a being in the association of mind and consciousness and physical body. There are some sentient beings that don’t have a physical body. But in general, it’s association of the body and the being that determine, and that particularly, for samsaric beings, apart from a few formless gods, all samsaric beings have a body. And the realm that they’re in is determined by the body generally. But these are quite technical matters.
But generally a sentient being is a being who is not enlightened but who has consciousness. So plants and any other forms of life that don’t have association with consciousness are not sentient beings. And you know what consciousness is? Yes, that might be Awareness. Awareness, yes.
Well, you wouldn’t think so. But, yes, yes. Yes, they have their own way of doing it. So do plants. Yes.
Plants are terribly important to us, but we don’t consider them to be sentient beings because they don’t have a consciousness. Consciousness is something that goes from life to life and it gets associated with various different bodies. And plants simply don’t form the body for a consciousness to associate with. And probably microbes don’t either but as I said before, we don’t have a clear statement on that, at what point of smallness being stopped having consciousness. There’s no clear ruling on it.
But we just deal with the situation as best we can. Well, no, because there are oysters, for example, during the No, it’s just a question of this formless consciousness being associated with the body which has come from previous lives and which will go on to future lives. So it has nothing to do with intelligence because some sentient beings have the power to be very stupid and unintelligent for that lifetime but they have the potential for intelligence when they associate with the right kind of body. But it could that while they’re in that particular body that they don’t have much Well, I suppose you could say, it always makes a decision to close its shell if you come too close, doesn’t it? It’s got nothing to do with that.
We know that somebody, a human being, for instance, be comatose, they can be in a coma. At that stage they don’t really know what’s going on and they can’t make decisions and so on. They might be totally unconscious. Although often it’s said that in people who appear to be unconscious there’s often more awareness than we give them credit for, but still. So the point is that the mind is associated with the body.
Of course, you can’t always tell by looking because we can’t see the mind. It’s formless. So it’s not always possible to tell clearly what’s a sentient being and what isn’t. So I said, we just generally try to deal with the situation in the best way we can. No, I mean the fundamentalists tend to think that it’s against the will of God, don’t they, to interfere with nature in that way?
No, actually Buddhism, because it teaches the middle path, it tries to avoid extreme positions like that and that’s a really extreme position. Well, as I said before, we don’t consider microbes to be sentient beings in the general sense. Nobody in Western seems to be concerned about germs. In fact, they didn’t know about germs until recently so that wasn’t an issue. But there have been some, like when it comes to worms and things which are accepted as being sentient beings, then there have been some great practitioners of the past who wouldn’t kill them because they preferred to endure them than to have to create the karma.
Yes, yes. You get plenty of them in India. Are But on the other hand, the lamas always tell us if we get worms we should expel them. We should take the medicine to expel them because our precious human bodies are too valuable to be weighted equally with a few worms. We have the opportunity to practice Dharma and if we’re making good use of our precious lifetime we should take the worm medicine and purify it by making prostrations to the thirty five Buddhas and so on and pray for the worm’s rebirth.
But we shouldn’t allow the worms to cause us to die or to get so sick that we can’t practice because that would be just stupid. So the whole thing about Buddhism is not being extreme, not taking rigid standpoints but, on the other hand, not to think that it’s all right, that it doesn’t matter. If you were to kill these worms, oh, it doesn’t matter because I’m a human being and so I’m more important and so it doesn’t matter at all that I kill these worms, that would also be a mistake because that would be failing to recognize the negative karma and that way you wouldn’t be purifying it. But if you have regret, if you feel bad about killing the worms and if you only do it because there doesn’t seem to be any other alternative, then that considerably lessens the bad karma. Geshe-la Tashi Tsering said recently that if you’re a Dharma practitioner and you understand the Dharma teachings well then you know how to make your negative karma very light.
So it’s not question of rigid rules but it’s a question of understanding how karma works and how to work with it in the best way. About the germ, is that the cause of the cold? Good, yes, right. Good, Jennifer, she’s very scholastic, this one. That’s right.
So in actual fact, we have to have cause and conditions. So we get the cold by encountering the conditions and that looks as though it’s being the cause. So in this case it could be catching, picking up a germ from somebody else who’s got a cold and also perhaps being chilled or being run down or something which makes your immune system more vulnerable, less able to fight off the germ. So all these things are conditions and they are important in the process But the actual cause is the karma. And if we didn’t have the cause in our consciousness then we wouldn’t experience the result.
And it would have to be a cause that’s ready to ripen. So we wouldn’t be getting that result unless we had a a ripening cause, which was in a state of readiness to ripen and bring that sort of a result. So we know that some people, you know, we can all be in the same room together with somebody who’s got a cold and some people will pick it up and some people won’t. For some reason they weren’t in the right kind of situation to get that cold at that time. We never know what karmas we have.
We can actually influence situation by avoiding the wrong sort of conditions as well. So, for instance, if you observe ordinary hygiene and so on, all know that that lessens your chance of getting a disease. But the point is that if the karma is strong enough and ready enough to ripen then somehow it will manifest. It will find some way to manifest no matter what you do. So, for instance, I saw a good example of this when I lived at a commune many years ago and there was a family of kittens.
There was one kitten that was just weak. It wasn’t strong like the other kittens. And so we used to have to feed it and we’d have to feed it separately from the other kittens because they would push it away from the bowl. Everybody went to great lot of trouble to feed this little kitten. And then I think it got sick or something so they gave it some medicine.
I can’t remember what happened but it just sort of had one situation after another where it nearly died and we had to rescue it. And eventually it got thirsty and fell into the water jar trying to get water out of one of these tall water jars. So it just seemed like that kitten just had to die, you know, and we were just trying to interfere with its conditions for dying but eventually something happened. So we can see that sort of situation. If we watch karma with an understanding that these things happen then you can see examples of it happening all the time.
For instance, science has managed to get rid of so many diseases in this world, eradicate so many germs that were causing diseases. What’s happened now is that we just have a lot of new diseases appearing. Yes. Yes. Well, if you had clairvoyant powers, could look back and see exactly what the cause was.
If your clairvoyant powers were great enough, some of the causes go back a long, long way. These explanations are just general. To say what the specific cause was in a specific instance is not possible unless you have these kinds of clairvoyant powers but we’re given some general instances of the results. For instance, if we have our possessions stolen, it’s because we were thieves ourselves in past lives and so on. There’s a relationship, there’s a similarity of some sort between the cause and the result.
Because of the increase, yes. Of course we might have experienced results already before in the health states and so on. On the other hand, they might have done equally violent crimes themselves and experienced most of the result in the hells and then got born as human beings but still had something more to work off. Yes, yes, yes. It keeps on increasing until it ripens and gets experienced.
After that it’s finished. Once Yes, sometimes it can be experienced in more than one life. For instance, if you had created a really bad karma, might have to be born a number of times in the hell states and then you might eventually get a human rebirth but you would still be experiencing some kind of still sort of tail end of these effects in that human life. So it’s a very complex subject and it’s really important to study it and to understand as much as you can about it so that you can conform your actions to it. And that point that Donna made is very important about karma increasing.
If we regret our non virtuous actions then we stop that increase. It’s important to regret them in particular and to do the Four Opponent Forces. You all know about the four opponent forces. Does somebody want to tell us? Right, yes, so that’s reliance.
Regret, yes. Yes. Good. Right. Yes.
Yeah. Everybody’s they’re really students are really bright tonight. Yes. So anyway, we asked Yamāntaka to All of these suffering results come from our harmful actions and the harmful actions come from deluded mental states. Those include clinging attachment and hatred, anger and ignorance.
But it’s all coming out of these two things which we’re asking Yamataka to attack, which is ego grasping and self-cherishing. So, we’re on to stanza, I think, seven? Fifty five. Oh, fifty five. Oh, all right.
I am afraid not. You’ll have to look on with somebody. So would you like to read that Anne, stanza fifty five? Oh, you haven’t got the right page. Bottom.
Page, no, you haven’t got page seventeen. Okay, somebody Have you got it? Entreaties. Yes, So this is Dharma Rakshita, the author of this text, who was a great Indian yogi. So he’s already, in the previous days, been asking Yamāntaka to do various things, batter him, batter him, you know, tie him up, trample him, trample him and all that.
We went through that last week, this treacherous concept of selfish concern. Then now he’s asking him to do still more. So he’s not going to let him get away that easily. So in the stanza, cyclic existence, saṃsāra is compared to a swamp. And a swamp is difficult to get across.
If you’ve got dry ground, you can walk across easily. And if you’ve got water, then you can swim across or you can get a boat across. But if you’re in a swamp, you might get stuck. So here it says quicksand. Very similar.
So it’s a bit like that. We’re always getting stuck in our delusions, in the conditions of cyclic existence. So if we want to be able to get across this swamp or the quicksand of cyclic existence and to find liberation, then what we need is to be light and unencumbered so that we won’t sink into the quicksand. But instead of that, we’re weighed down with a massive load of delusions. That’s referring to these five poisons.
And these refer to attachment, longing desire, hatred, aversion, ignorance, pride and jealousy. These are the main causes of our sufferings and problems. Problems. These are the main categories of our deluded mental states and then we can subdivide them into many other subdivisions. These are the things problems that are causing us to remain stuck in cyclic existence and to have to experience all the sufferings of cyclic existence.
It’s due to these five poisons that we’ve been experiencing, all sorts of suffering since beginningless time. There isn’t one kind of suffering that we haven’t experienced at one time or another, again and again. We’ll continue to do so as long as we’re still under the influence of these five poisons. Can’t understand why I’m writing. Yes, they’re weighing on us.
So they’re weighing us down because of having been placed there by these two things, ego grasping and self-cherishing. So the real cause of our problem is the ego grasping and self-cherishing. If we can destroy those two then we won’t have to be troubled by those five poisons. Dharma Rakshita is realizing his situation. Most of us, in actual fact, Dharma Rakshita was a great being.
He felt this situation so strongly because of his understanding, because of his insight. Actually, we would have a much worse problem with these five poisons than Dharma Rakshita would have had. But we don’t worry about it because we don’t understand our situation. So what we need to do is understand our situation and then we’ll want to take the steps to overcome these two. So Dharma Rakshita realizes how these five poisons are dragging us down and he requests Yamataka to use his wrathful power to help with the overcoming of these things, to cut off this burden.
Does anybody have anything to say about that? Right. So yes, it’s very subtle Ego grasping is much more subtle than self-cherishing. We have actually the basic ignorance underlying all this is the ignorance seeing the self as being truly existent when in actual fact the self is not truly existent. The self lacks inherent existence.
But we project this truly existent concrete self. And as a result of that, because we have a false view, a deluded view of there being this truly existent self or ego, then we have grasping at it. In actual fact, if we could see the truth of the way our self exists, then we wouldn’t have grasping because we would see that the true way that our self exists is something that’s very light and intangible and doesn’t need to be protected. It’s just something that’s always going on and on. It can’t be destroyed, it can’t be harmed.
We don’t need to worry about it. But we have this instinctive idea that there is some sort of self there which needs to be protected, which needs to be looked after, which needs to be in various ways protected from harsh blows and so on. We have this ego grasping at the existence of this ego and then we have self-cherishing which is the sort of attitude that is focused on the ego and wants to look after it. And it’s this self-cherishing that makes us do things, that makes us feel for instance that our own welfare is more important than others, that makes us grab what we want rather than considering others, that makes us, for instance, feel hurt when others criticize us and so on. Because all of these things just come from self-cherishing.
If we didn’t have self-cherishing then these things would not, there would be no basis for these things to occur. And it’s because of these things that we have negative karmas, get angry and perform actions out of greed and anger. And so the ego grasping is a stage based on the view of the truly existent ego. It’s a stage of relating to that truly existent ego which doesn’t exist, which then leads on to self-cherishing. Does that make sense?
I mean it’s very difficult to see, it’s difficult to understand, you have to do a lot of Yes. Of course, actually, first in terms of the process. In actual fact, there’s never been a time when we didn’t have any of these things. We’ve always had them all since beginninglessness but they’re sort of constantly causing each other. Anyway, these are very difficult things to understand.
We have to do a lot of studying and analysis and meditation to really get a grasp of it. Then fifty six, would you read that John? Okay. So I think in actual fact I forgot to write up notes on that particular stanza. But in general it’s clear that our It’s very much following on from the previous stanza.
That we are always creating the cause of sufferings because we don’t understand these causes and we’re seeking happiness ourselves but we seek it in the wrong way by doing wrong actions, self centered actions which are actually going to be the cause of our sufferings. And so we do these actions again and again and we suffer again and again but we never see the connection. And so that’s why we go on doing these actions. So what we have to do now is see the connection, understand the connection, understand that it’s our self-cherishing and selfish concern leading to these actions that are detrimental to others, done out of our own greed and anger and so forth, that lead to our suffering and cyclic existence. And when we’ve seen this very clearly, then we’ll only want to do the practices of good actions which are going to be the cause of happiness.
Any questions about that? self-cherishing means thinking that our happiness is more important than the happiness of others. Yes, yes. And we do it all the time instinctively, even if we accept that in general we have to have concern for others and so on. We still have this instinctive concern, sort of very strong grasping at our own welfare.
Some people have it more than others, of course, and they’re the kinds of people who really get into extremely bad actions and don’t care at all about others, whereas most of us have gone through a civilizing process due to the kindness of our parents, is, of course, we had good karma to be born to those parents, so we learn at a fairly early age that you can’t grab other children’s toys and you shouldn’t grab the biggest piece of cake and all of these things. And you do sort of learn some consideration for others. And hopefully you might learn that actually there’s a lot more satisfaction to be found in being helpful to others and in relating to others in a kind way than there is in always just getting immediate gratification of your own wants. People who don’t ever learn that are very unhappy people. Actually this is something that most people have to learn in our society in order for the even just to get the ordinary benefits of society.
But it goes a lot beyond that because, in actual fact, we still do have that self-cherishing and self-grasping in us and it still comes out all the time. Although we may not express it in really gross ways, it still has a lot of influence on our daily life and we have to learn to really identify it and to eradicate it. For instance, it can really spoil our relationships. If our relationships are really based on pure love and pure consideration for others, then we won’t get into these sort of situations of jealousy and anger and so on towards the people that we have relationships with, whether it’s partnerships or in the family or whatever, or friendships or at work. But it’s very hard to get to this stage because the self-cherishing and the selfish concern is very strong.
So we do get into these situations where we have all sort of power struggles and jealousy and anger and hurt and all of these things that really are destructive to our relationships. Unhappy because good relationships with others is one of the best happinesses in this life, one of the best of worldly things. If we don’t have it, then it