Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute final session on The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, Ven Margaret McAndrew addresses six stanzas on the relationship habits that harm others and ourselves: betraying confidences, mocking weaknesses, impatience with friends’ moods, passive-aggressive sabotage, dropping friends for more impressive companions, and false claims of clairvoyance. She traces each to attachment and self-cherishing, and explores how anger at others usually reflects our own projections. A core teaching: the hardest practice ground lies closest at hand—family members and daily companions test our patience far more than abstract meditations on distant sentient beings. She stresses the importance of thorough study before meditation, and identifies patience as the direct antidote to anger. Pitched at practitioners already familiar with dharma thought training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 35 SW 1999 06 24.mp3
UUID: 21db6ff8-b09e-47e8-aa95-072d5734ea06
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-06-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~4,820
So, this is the last night that we’re on the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, and we’re not going to finish the whole thing. But I hope by going through it fairly quickly tonight we can at least finish the section that we’re on and get to the last section. And going through the section that has to do with our negativities and getting onto the section where Yamāntaka comes back again with another weapon. So we’re up to stanza seventy eight. Would you like to start with that Diana?
Seventy eight? Oh, did we do seventy eight last week? I think oh, no. We didn’t do seventy eight last week, but I haven’t given you the I haven’t brushed gin. So if you haven’t got it with you, then you haven’t got it.
Okay. Yes. Good. Okay. So we don’t need to spend lot of time on this one because we can see that this isn’t good behavior.
So, for example, if somebody is telling us for our own good in confidence not to spend so much time with this particular person, because they’re not a good influence on us, and then we might instead of that, we go and tell the other person, no, he or she said this and that about you and told me that I shouldn’t see you and this kind of thing, you know. So we need to watch out for this kind of thing. Also picking on other people’s weak points to make fun of them. So it seems to me that men particularly seems to do this. It’s sort of like a particular kind of humor that they have.
And maybe women sort of don’t quite understand this kind of male humor so much, but, you know, it’s it can be a good joke, but if you carry it too far and it hurts the person, then it’s not so good. So we need to be careful not to take these kinds of jokes too comments? Yes, so that’s what it said in the first thing, yes. Right. Yes, so if other people have told us their secrets, secrets, that was sort of like an example of it.
If somebody’s told us something in confidence, then you go and repeat it to somebody else. So then spans a seventy nine, So Okay. So, yes. So again we can say that we want to avoid this sort of behaviour. We don’t like this sort thing in others, so we can see that it’s not very good to be like this ourselves.
But we sometimes tend to feel that we don’t want to put up with this sort of thing from others, but when it’s our turn then it’s alright. Geshe Tashi Tsering says we like our friends to be always pleasant and respectful to us. And then one day they’re a bit moody or they’re not feeling very good or they want to be quiet and by themselves and so we feel hurt. So we need to make allowances for this and we need to make allowances for the fact that our friends can make mistakes, can make blunders. So sometimes they might say something stupid, don’t really stop to consider and they might say something that hurts us.
And instead of just seeing it as a passing stupidity on their part, we make some sort of big thing of it and then no matter how much they apologise, we won’t listen to them. So this isn’t good on our part and it’s silly because it just means that we lose a good friendship that might have been able to be maintained. So we need to make allowances and we need to practice patience and comhatred towards our friends when they do these stupid things. And for instance, if they don’t feel like talking to us one day and put us off and sort of make it clear that they’ve had enough of having us around for the moment, then we don’t have to take it personally, but we can just understand that that’s the mood that that person’s in at the moment. And instead of that, we make something bigger between our minds, go away and then go, he doesn’t like me anymore.
And we project all sorts of things onto the situation which aren’t really there. And so we need to practice patience. And compassion can take us a long way. And usually when we have quarrels and upsets with our friends or family, if you look into the matter, you can usually see that there’s a lot of projection taking place on both sides. And if all the projections could be cleared away, usually the actual bone of contention is quite small if it could only be sorted out.
Any comments? Geshe Tashi Tsering pointed out that compassion is something that has to be based on valid understanding. It’s not enough we talk about developing compassion all the time. It’s not enough to just wish that we had compassion or to think it would be good to have compassion. So we can’t just say, Oh definitely, yeah, now onwards I’m going to be more compassionate.
It doesn’t work like that. We have to develop compassion and we have to start by understanding the reasons and the knowledge of how to develop compassion and put these understandings into practice. So compassion is based on a valid understanding of the situation, of understanding the way our own minds work, of understanding the minds of ourselves and others. And when we understand this and when we understand our suffering and the suffering of others in particular, and how this suffering is brought about, and how we understand that the projections that we put onto others as the objects of our anger and impatience are not valid, then we can really develop compassion. So, stanza eighty.
Nick? So, these kinds of attitudes are also harmful. I’m not saying that anybody is doing this kind of thing, but I think sometimes you can do this kind of thing, for instance in a situation where somebody is wanting us to do something, we might dislike the fact that this person seems to be making some sort of claims on us. We think perhaps that they’re asking too much of us, or we might feel that they’re trying to impose their will on us, they’re trying to boss us around. So in these sorts of situations sometimes we don’t actually come out with our feelings, but instead we undermine the person’s projects in a quiet, sneaky sort of way.
We don’t we let them think we behave nicely and pleasant towards them. We think we let them think that we’re going to do what they want, but then we find some way to not do the thing. And as a result, the person’s project or what they wanted to bring about gets undermined and we spoil their plans. So we don’t we might not like what it is they want us to do. We might feel that they want us to do something that we don’t want done that we think is the wrong way to go about it.
So instead of coming out in the open about our views of this particular plan, we can again take these sneaky ways, these devious ways of undermining the thing. We just don’t turn up when we’re supposed to be helping or something like that. So all of these things are bad behavior on our part. And we need to look into when we’re doing these kinds of actions and why we’re doing them. And on the other hand, when we when it comes to a case of wanting others to do what we want, then we don’t mind imposing our will on others and being pushy.
Sometimes we haven’t got any hesitation about that. Okay. Any remarks? Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Just push more. We we just act argumentatively. Yes.
Yes. Yes. That’s really annoying actually when when you’ve agreed with somebody when they’ve made a good point. Particularly if they criticize and you would say, yes, yes, that’s very true. And instead of accepting that you’ve acquiesced, they’ll go on and on and give you a whole lecture.
That’s very very frustrating. In the end, you feel like turning around and fighting with them just out of the, you know, sheer annoyance with the way they’ve gone on and on about even though their original point was quite good. So actually, yes, it’s what what’s the word? It’s kind of anti what’s the word? Anyway, it doesn’t bring its results.
Counterproductive. Counterproductive, exactly. Yes. But that’s not the point it’s making here. The point it’s making here is that it’s actually negative behavior on our heart part which comes from self-cherishing which actually creates negativity to be experienced in the future.
So as well as being counterproductive in the short term, it’s also very counterproductive in the long term. Yes. Yes, it’s a great ego thing. You know, you just want to, yes, you just want to be argumentative. Particularly when people are drunk, they carry on like that.
It’s another good reason for avoiding alcohol. Eighty two. Is it? Eighty two. Eighty one.
Sorry. Yes. Yes. Yes. So that’s why we have these texts because we, sometimes see our reflections.
Actually, it’s it’s yes. It said that in general, the teachings are like a mirror that we can see the spots on our face in. Yes. So, in fact actually this is what Geshe Tashi Tsering was saying, not in that stanza. Think it was actually in the next one.
But he actually used that analogy of the mirror. You can check your mind like you check your face. So, anyway, stanza eighty one. All all of these qualities come from being self centered in our actions. They’re actions that come from self centeredness.
I don’t know whether anybody here is in the habit of spending all their time lusting after young love. So you don’t have to confess to that one if you don’t want to do it. The main thing is if you if you can see it yourself anyway. So Yeah. Well, doesn’t say in the past.
Holding grudges is going back into the past. So anyway, the thing is that they all come from self-cherishing. And we may find that it’s not easy to overcome self-cherishing easily. self-cherishing is very deep and hard to overcome. But these qualities, these bad, annoying actions also come from not practicing consideration for others, which comes from self-cherishing, of course.
But we can make an effort in our interactions with others to act less from self-cherishing and to have more consideration for others. And then gradually we can reduce our self-cherishing. But we can also just increase the sensitivity to others, which is not as difficult to do as actually overcoming the self-cherishing which is underlying it. And holding grudges is particularly dangerous for ourselves because this is a bad mind towards others which really harms ourselves and which increases our negativities. So we need to understand where these things come from.
We need to practice mindfulness and see where we have these harmful attitudes and we need to practice the antidote which is having compassion for others. Holding grudges is past wrongs, yes. So, you know, it can be really hard to let go of things and not allow them to sort of smolder and pester. But we need to do this. And so we need to practice these thought trainings and put into practice the antidotes that we learn in the thought training practice and in the graduated path, of course, where we learn to understand the fact that these actions done by others come from their own delusions.
So we really need to, rather than wanting to hurt the other person, understand that their bad actions are like hating others for their bad actions or being angry with others for their bad actions is like being angry with the stick, wanting to harm the stick that somebody’s beating us with. So the person is being controlled by their delusions, their disturbing emotions and it’s the other person’s disturbing emotions that we really need to blame rather than the person themselves. If we understand that they’re under the control, they’re not really under their own control, but under the control of their disturbing emotions, which is actually that person’s enemy, just as our own disturbing emotions are our own enemy, then we feel differently towards the person. We can have compassion and patience. Okay.
So eighty two. Oh, sorry. That’s the one we’ve just done. Oh, I jumped ahead. Sorry.
Was looking at the wrong commentary. Yes. That’s right. Yes. Yes.
I’m sorry. Was jumping ahead there. That one about young loves. It wasn’t in stanza eighty one. I was looking at the wrong bit of my notes.
Yes. So Okay. So, anyway, running after worldly prominence and worldly worldly benefits and so on, all sorts of things, status, advantages. Instead of that, so we tend to want to have, you know, we tend to look around us and see other people who have great status and great success and so on. And we want to have these things.
And so we put our energy into trying to attain these kinds of things, and then we neglect to follow the teachers who can guide us towards liberation. So what we really should be putting our energy into is into finding holy gurus and following them and trying to attain their qualities. So nowadays the things that that appealed to us might be things like seeing the latest well known TV star or whatever. In the old days it might have been seeing somebody who perhaps was local successful person that the local, for instance in Tibet, you know, local person who was a member of the aristocracy or whatever, and we feel jealousy of the people who had those kinds of benefits if we lived in that sort of society. And nowadays we have our equivalents because we don’t have the aristocracy and but we have politicians who are successful, we have business people, we have you know, sports stars.
And we sort of we want to emulate these things. So that’s alright to it’s alright to have worldly success in these things, but if we make that our goal or whatever, it means that our life gets wasted if we only pursue these things. And particularly if we have jealousy towards the people who possess these good worldly qualities, then it’s very destructive for us because jealousy is an extremely destructive emotion. And if we can see things clearly, we would see that we’re very fortunate having met the teachings, having our precious human rebirth. We’re incredibly fortunate there’s no cause for us to have any jealousy towards others just for their worldly success because these worldly things are only fleeting.
They don’t have any real meaning. We might think we’d like to have them, but, they can’t bring us any real happiness. They can bring us a fleet ing good feeling and then it just goes. So we might have wealth or success or attractive friends. These things are not harmful in them selves.
They can make us feel good for a little while, but this isn’t a goal that can bring any lasting happiness. The good feeling passes, something else comes along, we we have some sort of, we lose our object of attachment or we get bored or we get discontented or something interrupts our enjoyment. So then the object of our attachment can no longer bring us pleasure and then we look for some other pleasure, we look for some other goal to chase after and the same thing happens again and again and so on and so forth. So we need to put our main energy into lasting things, which is the dharma. So eighty three.
Oh, sorry. Hills. Yes. So these are more actions done out of self-cherishing mind and lack of consideration for others. And so we always tend to blame others if we’re not if there’s some sort of little upset in our friendships we tend to blame the other person all the time and we never think of looking at our own behaviour whether we’re perhaps at fault or whether we’re being too intolerant.
And we also drop our friends carelessly, not thinking that if we do this we might hurt the other person. So there might be times when we actually do realise that in a friendship with somebody else that we’ve diverged, that we’ve become different, that we no longer share the same things that we used to share and the relationship isn’t the same as it used to be. But we need to be considerate and to remember always the kindness of sentient beings and that they’ve been very very kind to us as our mothers again and again and always try to consider their feelings and in particular not just regard friendships as something that you can easily drop when another perhaps more impressive person comes along. So if we’re always trying to impress new friends and perhaps trying to advance ourselves socially by making up to somebody who’s a little bit more prestigious than the last friend. This is just a shallow basis for a relationship and it’s not very satisfactory.
So we need to be understanding of the friends that we do have and be aware of the fact that everybody has faults and mistakes and we can’t expect our friends to be perfect. We need to be tolerant of these mistakes when we do encounter them and in this way we can have really solid lasting friendships. As lasting as Samsāra things can be of course because in Samsāra even our friendships won’t last but if it’s based on a good basis then we can have satisfying friendships. I used to when I was little, my mom and dad used to have a picture on the wall of a dog waiting outside the house, obviously waiting for its owner to come home. And there was a little verse underneath that said, a friend is not a fellow who is taken in by sham.
A friend is one who knows our faults and doesn’t give a damn. I’d rather like that. I don’t know if it’s one of the texts that you should be quoting, but Probably comes from Burns or somebody like that. Nobody knows that one. Hills, you don’t know where that one came from?
I think that one, yes, might have come from yes, yes. I think it comes from somewhere. Yes. Okay. Helena, number eighty five.
Yes, so I don’t suppose anybody here is in the habit of claiming clairvoyance, but anyway it’s something that we do need to be very careful of. It’s claiming clairvoyance falsely is a particularly harmful negativity. And then the other one I thought, I don’t know about others, I thought this is one of the spots that I saw in the mirror on my own face. It can be a tendency that we have particularly to those who are near to us. It seems that we often behave worse to those who are near to us and those are the ones that we need to have the most patience towards.
So we meditate on having compassion. We think lovely thoughts about having compassion and kindness and patience towards all sentient beings and working for their benefit and so on. Then Thank you. And then we And then we immediately get, yes. Yes.
Of course, our yes. Our families are usually the most annoying. Yeah. Well, sounds like there’s some things going on from his side too. So Yeah.
I mean, you can’t always if somebody’s behaving like that, you can’t always reclaim the friendship, suppose, but you can, in your mind, be understanding. Because it sounds like I mean, it’s not just your projection, but from the other person’s side too. So so, anyway, the yes. Does anybody have any Oh, that would just help. Yes.
That’s funny. Since Richard Gere became a Buddhist, everybody sort of wants to claim that they know Richard Gere. You know, they they met him in Dharamsala somewhere or they were at the at a Puja with his host, and I love Richard Gere attended or they they know they know somebody that who knows somebody who had a cup of tea with him. Yes. Well, actually I was quite impressed.
Read an article that he wrote for Buddhist magazine, Tricycle, I think it was about his practice. Actually it sounded so he was actually a very good practitioner, much better than me. Which proves, you know, something. Well, could probably afford to. Yes.
So again, jealousy, down with jealousy. Trouble and trembling. Yes. Don’t particularly feel jealous of somebody having that sort of status because I feel that the attention that you get would be really annoying. But the thought of being able to retire early and have a comfortable income is rather appealing.
But yes, giving up your privacy would certainly not be worth it. No. I feel actually when I I read about the people who have to go around with security guards and all that sort of thing, think, oh, you know, thank goodness I haven’t got that sort of a life. It seems an awful pity because these people usually just start off trying to pursue their careers, you know, to do a good job. And the sort of consequences of their success is that they have to put up with all this stuff.
They end up being a sort of industry for a whole lot of other people. I was reading somewhere how successful film stars aren’t allowed to take a break or even take a long holiday because they just, you know, they have such a whole lot of people depending on them for their livelihood. They have a whole sort of team, and then I suppose the whole team should go on holidays at the same time. That’s the only way to do it. Yes.
Anyway, we have to have the understanding of the faults of others, and particularly those who are near us. We need to start with the ones who are near us, who are usually the hardest. In fact, I sometimes think that by the time we’ve managed to practice compassion and patience and tolerance towards those who are really close to us, our family members in particular. By the time we’ve managed to get that on a solid basis, we’ve got the whole thing stitched up. Even Bodhisattvas have problems with their family members.
So, eighty four eighty five? Sorry, yes. We back to again? Is it Helen? Jerry.
Sorry. Jerry. No. This is the one we shouldn’t have compassion for. Yes.
So this stanza is showing the importance of proper study. So, it is we’re meditating on, whether it’s really complex topics like emptiness or whether it’s things like compassion. We might think that compassion is easy enough to understand so we can just go and meditate on love and compassion. But if we haven’t understood the topic, if we haven’t done proper study, then it’s difficult meditate on these things successfully. We do need to do thorough study and understand how to go about these meditations and then our meditation can be successful.
Geshe Tashi Tsering he gives the analogy of a surgeon. He says the surgeon always makes sure that he or she has all the instruments ready before the operation or prepared and doesn’t go looking for the scalpel or whatever it is in the middle of the operation. You you imagine, oh, know, cut a blood vessel, where’s the clamps? Oh, I better go on a hunt throughout the hospital for a you know. So we have to be like that.
We have to make all our preparations first, have everything ready. And then we don’t have any doubts about how to proceed with meditation due to lack of knowledge. So our doubts arise because of lack of knowledge and then if we have these doubts they can be very confusing for us. So the way to clear up these doubts is by gaining knowledge through study and listening to teachings. Anything to say about that?
My turn I think. Eighty six: By making a habit of anger and passion, we come to despise everyone that we meet. And by making a habit of jealous resentment, we ascribe faults to others, disclaiming their worth. Trample him, trample him, dance on the head of this treacherous concept of selfish concern. Tear out the heart of this self centered butcher whose thought is our chance to gain final release.
So these again are bad qualities that we have to avoid when we’re relating with others. Yes. Yes. That’s right. Yes.
So, That’s right, yes. I don’t know, it could sort of come out of a sort of self protective attitude in a way. You think by putting others down you can build yourself up and you feel that by focusing on other people’s bad qualities that you look better yourself and you can end up by getting very angry. Yes, just by having sort of attitude. You can build up this frame of mind that just goes around looking at other people in this way as a habitual attitude.
And you always it always comes from projecting your faults onto others. You don’t like to see yourself that this is the way you’re looking at others. Rather you think others are also bad. Everywhere I go I meet nasty people with all these bad qualities. And you don’t look inwards and see that it’s yourself who is looking out through this particular sort of attitude.
So sometimes they say that we shouldn’t have rose colored glasses but this is the opposite of looking through sort of distorting lenses. Yes. Through a glass darkly. Yes. Yeah.
Good story. Yes, so the anger of Actually, if we get Getting angry with our relatives to go back, Geshe Tashi Tsering said, when we get angry with our children or so on, it’s actually a sign of attachment. So when we get angry with others, it really comes from attachment. There’s some sort of attachment, whether it’s attachment to the person themselves or attachment to some idea we have of what they should do. If we have some sort of projection about that person, that they should behave in a certain way, that they should make us feel good, that they should do nice things for us, then we get angry when the person disturbs our expectations.
So anger, we sometimes think of as being opposite to attachment, but it also comes from attachment. If we didn’t have attachment, then the anger wouldn’t arise. So need to But anger is very harmful. We need to actually practice the antidote for anger. So the antidote for anger is patience.
I suppose the only good thing you can say about anger is that it’s considered to be easier to overcome than attachment. Yes. Because it’s said that anger is like spilling oil on a hard surface that you can wipe off, whereas attachment is like oil spills onto cloth or paper that really soaks in. So you know that if you get oil on your good clothes that you have to really wash and scrub and it’s really hard to get out and even then there’s still usually some sort of a stain left. So it’s really deeply ingrained and it’s harder to identify.
We can usually see our anger and hatred. It’s easy to distinguish, to discriminate, to identify, whereas our attachment tends to get mixed up with good qualities to such an extent that it’s quite difficult job to discriminate our attachment from our good qualities. For instance, we often think that we’re being patient and tolerant when all that is is that we’re in a good mood and we’re pleased because things have been going our way and as soon as things go against us, then, then we immediately become intolerant. Yes, they always say wait until the child is twenty. Actually, think even by eighteen they’ve usually improved considerably.
Yes, I mean sixteen, think what fourteen to sixteen is usually the really difficult age. Although it doesn’t always stop then, I know that because although I haven’t got any children myself, I know other people who do have. Anyway, your point that anger is very dangerous is really true. Anger is the worst. It’s the worst in the sense that it’s the most harmful.
It causes the most harm to it.