Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 42-minute teaching, Venerable Margaret McAndrew explores anger and inner enemies through the ‘Wheel of Sharp Weapons.’ She opens with a vivid example: in a busy kitchen, small complaints accumulate quietly until the fourth person complaining suddenly triggers explosive anger, revealing how repressed emotions build unnoticed. She distinguishes anger, which aims to harm others, from attachment, which can lead to positive actions but stems from expectation. The practical method: recognize anger’s early warning signs before it grows strong. She explains how we project true existence onto people we label enemies or friends, then blame them for our feelings—a delusion blocking freedom. The deeper solution is wisdom of emptiness: understanding that our inner enemies—ego-grasping and self-cherishing—are mental defilements lacking independent reality. For practitioners ready for both philosophical analysis and personal transformation work.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 36 SW 1999 06 24.mp3
UUID: 467f7f4f-e1d7-4715-89de-21351e383aa2
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-06-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.1 minutes
Words: ~4,413
Attachment doesn’t always cause us to create negativity, anger does. Yes. The very nature of anger is the feeling of wanting to hurt others. That is the nature of it, whereas attachment can lead you to doing nice things for others. It’s not necessarily bad in the actions that it leads you to, but it’s more difficult to Yes.
Yes, it comes from It comes from expectation, but I think from having trained ourselves to deal with our anger by repressing it so that you don’t see it. And then when it does come up, it comes up suddenly because you haven’t seen it. So you haven’t noticed the signs. I found this myself particularly when I was working in the kitchen. It’s a very good situation if you’re cooking for a lot of people, particularly at a Dharma center where everybody thinks that they have a right to come around and hassle you about things.
And yes, and it can be particularly annoying when they want to hassle you about something or other that is, you know, sort of bleeding obvious. And I used to find that everybody would sort of come and tell me some sort of problem with the cooking. You know, they might come and tell me that yesterday the lentils weren’t properly cooked or something, know. And somebody would come and tell me, I’d say, yes, look, I’m sorry. And then the second person would come along and I’d say, yes.
I know. I’m sorry. And the third person would come along and I’d say, yes. I know. And then the fourth the fourth person would come along and I’d suddenly find myself just losing my temper.
I said, get out of my kitchen right now. Don’t bother me. And then they wonder, you know, why is she so short temper? You know, all I did was come and say something and they they didn’t realize that they were the fourth or fifth person to have been telling me the same thing and you just get tired and sick of it. Yeah.
Well, the thing is that you don’t have to lose your temper. And you don’t have to let other people control you either. You know, we tend to feel that we’ve only got two choices, either to let the other person control us or to lose our temper. But in fact, we have a whole range of different options that we can take. Yes.
Yes. It’s being attached to some particular way of seeing yourself. Yes. Yes, there always comes a circumstance where you think that you think you’ve got some patience and then somebody will try you too far. Sorry.
Nick, yes? Of patience? Oh, oh, yeah. Well, any sort of strong emotion. Well, that’s alright.
Young fellows can have young lovers. That’s alright. One to time. Yes. As long as you treat them right.
Okay. Where was I up to? Next page. Yes. So think I have this ten again.
So anyway, yes, this is telling us how to study. And if we think that we can study without relying on a teacher, then this is mistaken. We need to rely on a teacher who can really teach us how to understand the text that we’re studying. If we just want to read texts and put our then there’s always a danger of putting our own own interpretations on them. And so it’s very important to understand all of these things thoroughly and following proper procedures, not just picking up on the things that we like and concentrating on those and leaving the other things aside, but Understanding the full teachings so for this reason we need to learn from qualified teachers and to study thoroughly not just the things that happen to interest us, but all the things that are important to understand and particularly in order to teach others we need to make proper preparation otherwise, this is my problem here, if we don’t make proper preparation we’re particularly going to confuse the students instead of helping them.
So I’m sorry. But anyway, you can make up for it by listening to Khensur Rinpoche and studying. Anyway, these two stanzas are actually the next one also, if you’d like to read that too, it’s on the same topic. Right. So yes, the three baskets means the whole whole of the teachings.
Does anybody know what they are? Yes. Sutras, Vinaya and Abhidharma. Yeah. So Abhidharma is sometimes it’s translated as metaphysics.
It has a lot to do with things like karma and origin of the world and things like that also come into the Abhidharma. But a lot of the technical things that we need to know, a lot of the Lorig, you know, the Mind and Awareness teachings are based on the Abhidharma texts. So, and the Sutras are mainly about meditation practice. Those are the discourses. Yes.
So the discourses or the sutras are the words of Buddha and then there seem to be two viewpoints about the Abhidharma. Some people say that it was spoken by Buddha himself and some pandits say that it was actually developed by later scholars on the basis of Buddha’s original teachings. But at any rate, it was written down by some great scholars on the basis of what Buddha taught. And Vinaya teachings or the teachings of moral conduct, particularly the individual liberation. Well, the lay precepts also come into that.
So in actual fact, you can only study the Vinaya according to your own particular level of ordination. So you can’t study the Vinaya in-depth unless you are a fully ordained monk. A fully ordained monk or a fully ordained nun, but in the Tibetan tradition they didn’t receive the full ordination. But some people nowadays go to China, mean, go to the Chinese for that. Okay, so the next one is eighty nine.
So this is showing us the is the importance of distinguishing between dharma and non dharma so one definition of dharma is what ever is motivated by by a wholesome attitude and what is motivated by an unwholesome attitude is not dharma. Of course, leaves you with the question of what is a wholesome attitude. In general, dharma means abstaining from negative actions, particularly actions harming others. So we need to look at our motivation. If we have a positive motivation, motivation of wanting to be beneficial to others, then we’ll engage in positive actions which will be dharma actions which will bring a result of happiness.
When our motivation turns negative and when we’re thinking of doing things which will harm others whether it’s out of ignorance or attachment or anger these are negative actions which will bring us a result of suffering. So we have to be careful to avoid these actions that harm others. So Geshe Tashi Tsering says: Debate is good. We have to learn to discriminate between Dharma and non Dharma harming others. So we don’t want to have a critical attitude towards the teachings.
We don’t want to have a negative attitude towards the teachings, but we do need to have a discriminating attitude to learn to distinguish, to understand what is Dharma and what is not Dharma and to learn to discriminate what is good and for this reason it’s good to debate and this increases our understanding and we can criticize negativity. There’s no harm in criticizing negativity because negativity is harmful. So we can also debate with others about other religions and so on. So this is alright because it increases our understanding, but this doesn’t indicate that because we debate that we’re having a critical attitude or a judgmental attitude. It simply indicates an attempt to get to the truth, to get to a deeper understanding.
So we need to respect other religions. We need to have a good understanding of our own religion and in regard to other religions we need to have an attitude of respect towards them because generally when we look at other religions we find that they have a lot of good in them and for that reason they actually include, in fact usually they include some things which are also in Buddhism and so we can’t just dismiss them wholesale. We have to have respect. Eighty. Ninety.
Not very well spelt there. Getting to the end of these specific negativities here and this stanza in particular, it comes from being being proud. We might be behaving with pride and arrogance and thinking that we’re all right. We think this is fine. We think this is all right.
In the meantime we’re doing harmful actions, insulting others, putting others down and so on. So this is something that we should be ashamed of. We shouldn’t think that this is an attitude that is okay, that we can be proud of at all. This is not a way to express our self respect. So if we want to respect ourselves, we should do this by behaving considerately towards others.
And we should actually behave respectfully towards everyone, even those who are not necessarily people who we would regard as being worthy of respect in the ordinary sense. But because they are human beings, sentient beings, it’s something we should try to have respect for all of them. And we could also never tell who was worthy of respect because a lot of people looked at Milarepa and saw him as this beggar going around, you know, not naked or or barely covered and looking completely decrepit and so on. They simply regard him as as a nobody, worse than nothing and in actual fact he was an enlightened being. So a lot of people really abused him and yet those who were a little bit more discerning recognized his great qualities.
That’s right. Yes. Yes. You tend to think that you what you’re doing is alright because you’re under the Yes, right. Yes, so I think anyway there’s sort of a kind of arrogance in your attitude mixed in with your But as you say, can be other disturbing emotions besides pride that can cause us to behave in this way.
Me oh, particularly respecting others who might be lowly people. So we think it would be a shame to be say it respectfully to somebody, for instance, who’s perhaps we don’t have to think about it so much in our society, but particularly in societies where you have the caste system, which is which this teaching comes from, or in Tibet social divisions were very powerful. So, you know, if you were seen to going out of your way to be nice to somebody who was below you in social status, then you might be losing prestige, you know. An example of this that just occurs to me is that I was in a taxi that broke down or had to stop sort of halfway up the road to Copan once in Nepal and there was about a dozen sort of Nepalese young men all came around and I thought, oh no problems, I’ll soon find somebody to carry my luggage because you know Nepalese are always, you know, the local sort of farm people are always anxious to earn a rupee or two. So I started asking these people if somebody would carry my luggage.
And it seemed like they were the wrong people to ask to do something like that because in Nepal, know, either you’ll carry something for somebody or you won’t, you know. And there’s just no way if somebody belongs to the caste that doesn’t work as coolies, then there’s no way they’d be seen carrying somebody’s luggage. You know, there’s no way that they would you know, I was offering to pay and so on, but there was just no way. They were just sort of giving me really dirty looks and taking themselves off very rapidly. So I did I said I was just standing there wondering how on earth am I going to get up the hill with all this heavy stuff.
And then along it came a Tibetan monk and immediately said, alright, ani-la, I’ll help you. Well, know, think it was a prestige thing for them. It wasn’t a question of helping me or not, know, they just didn’t want to be seen carrying my luggage because then everybody else would have thought that they’d done it for money even if they were just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. So there’s no way they would do it because they just have this very rigid system. Oh.
Yeah. Oh, yes. They had to yeah, all sort of mix with their own group. Yes. Well, can’t eat together, you know.
They say that in actual fact, a lot of Brahmins get jobs as cooks because everybody can eat food that’s being cooked by a Brahmin. Yes. It’s a really funny system, but you can say that at least it’s been stable because the country’s been running that way for yonks, you know, and that’s been much more stable than our system because until the British took over, the Indians had a very very stable social system. But it was very hard on the people at the bottom of the pile, of course. It did have some interesting features.
One thing we think about being low status is that there’s one law for the rich and another for the poor. But in India, in actual fact, the law was much harsher on the upper caste people than it was on the lower caste people. The penalties for a Brahmin, for instance, who stole or cheated, who would have to experience a much harder, a much harsher penalty than a low caste person who did the same thing because the attitude was, well, what else would you expect of a low caste person, whereas a lot more was expected of a Brahmin and a very high standard of public morality was expected of the Brahmins and to a slightly lesser extent of the Kshatriyas and so on. So it wasn’t quite the way you think of it as being like our social system that we got from England, you know, where you have the upper class who are just always oppressing the poor and getting away with it completely. What?
Why Mighty Python? Yeah, I mean it’s a fact, you know, that there was one more for the rich and another for the poor in the English system and it’s still very much that way in Australia nowadays. And if you look at how many Aborigines are in jail and how many rich men’s sons are in jail. Get guns. Exactly, that’s the point I’m making.
Yes. I mean, many rich people’s sons take drugs and do all these kinds of things and they get out of it and get into fights and all these things? Of course, the other side of it is that there’s comes a point when everybody’s really glad to see them put away. Like Alan Bond, you know. While he was riding high, everybody knew it was up to apparently all his colleagues and so on knew he was up to all sorts of tricks, but nobody wanted to challenge him.
Well, the thing is that he was doing all these things all along and people knew he was doing it and they had a responsibility to have pulled him up short, but instead they encouraged him until he went too far and crashed and then nobody wanted to to have anything to do with him. Oh, you can’t you can say that for that decade, I mean the laws weren’t any different than to what they are now. Maybe some of them were. Yes. I think it’s the same anytime somebody’s being successful then people just want to ride on his coattails.
They Yes. And then when they Yes. Yes. Yes, and what about this chap, Coles, or whatever his name is, with the Olympics? Yeah, there must have been lots of people who knew what he was doing, and if they’d been his real friends, they would have said, had a quiet word to him and said, look, you know, cut it out before you get into trouble.
But instead they let him do all these things, get the Sydney Olympics and then get into trouble for it. You know, I mean I’m not approving of what these people do at all, apart from it. But I also think that a lot of these people were encouraged by others who don’t get into trouble at all. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Okay. So anyway, it’s nearly nine o’clock, but I think we’ll just go on to another couple of verses quickly and then we’ll finish off. But there’s a I’d like to get up to the last stanza. And so we’ll leave Allan Bond to his sentence.
So I want to get up to ninety two, which is the next one actually. Whose turn is it? Fung, I think. Ninety Ninety Okay. Yes.
Okay. Okay, so I think we’ve done ninety one. Yeah, I think the thing is that, yes, improper behaviour Yeah, if we’re mindful then We can turn all our time into proper behavior. A lot of what’s improper behavior, because we do it with self-cherishing attitude, can be quite neutral if we just look at the action itself, and if we do it with a positive attitude, then it becomes positive. So I’m not the one to talk about this.
I’m the worst offender, but if we remember to keep a positive attitude all the time and all these actions can be quite positive and just sort of our daily activities, taking care of ourselves and so on, even looking after your own comfort and so on. We do need to look after our own well-being, our physical well-being. And if we set our motivation first thing in the morning, then that helps keep our whole day in a positive attitude. So ninety two ninety two, please. And I think you can read the next one too or Elena can read it.
I think we’ll do those two together. Yes. Okay. So we’ll finish there. So you’ll see that Yamāntaka actually has a third weapon now because before he had the the Wheel of Sharp Weapons and he also had a bow and arrow, didn’t he?
Back in the earlier stanzas? Yes! So now he’s got his skull-headed bludgeon as well and this is another of the things that he’s carrying with thirty four arms. So this is now attacking the In actual fact, this self-cherishing in the last line of verse ninety three, is apparently mistranslation. It should be self grasping mind.
You might see that in paint pencil there. It’s come out not very clearly, think in the copy. But it’s not the self-cherishing but self grasping that’s being referred to here. And so What this Skull Club refers to, the Skull Club of Wisdom, is referring to the wisdom of bliss and emptiness. This is a Tantric explanation.
In Sūtra we say method and wisdom and in Tantra we say bliss and wisdom or bliss and emptiness. Particular they have to be united. But we’re particularly focusing here on the emptiness, the wisdom of understanding emptiness. And to overcome our real enemies, So it mentions swinging it around three times. This up till now we’ve been looking at two enemies.
So I went to the back of the book to see what the third one was. It has a little number there to tell us to go to the back of the book. So the third one is the defiled body or the contaminated body of delusion which is produced by the other two enemies. So you’ll remember what the other two enemies were? No, that’s related but no, that’s not it.
Yes, right, yes, that’s one of them. No, no. Oh, you’re thinking of the three. No, You’re thinking of self-cherishing. The ego grasps and self-cherishing actually, but self-cherishing, which leads to attachment.
Yes, so I’ve told you now. Ego grasping self-cherishing and then this contaminated or deluded body which is produced by these two, in other words, samsaric body. In actual fact, when meditators achieve great realization sometimes their bodies become totally changed into a different substance and then when they die their bodies just melt away into rainbow light. Yes, not rainbow light, is it? No.
Yes. It’s horrible watching what happens. You’ve probably been watching about the Kosovo discoveries, mass graves. Yes, it’s terribly upsetting. Yes, so Just to finish off, so Our inner enemies can be summed up as being our mental defilements.
So, in order to overcome these inner enemies, we need this wisdom of selflessness, which is being symbolized here by the skull headed bludgeon. So this is directed towards our inner enemy and towards that we have to be absolutely ruthless. Whereas towards outer people, we need to have compassion and not to label them as enemies. So our inner enemies we have to harm and destroy completely. Our problem is that we see the objects of our attachment and anger as truly existent and real and concrete.
So we label these things as, for instance, people we label as enemies if they’re the objects of our anger or we label them as friends if they’re the object of our attachment. When we say friend here, we’re talking about them in the attached sense. Of course, we also can have real genuine love and compassion for others, but this self grasping attitude that labels them as my friend is the problem here. So we focus on the object and we see this is a real enemy, this is a real friend, my real friend. And we get, in the case of the enemy, we get angry seeing this person as the real cause of our anger.
And so we don’t focus on the anger, but we focus on the object. So instead of seeing where the anger really comes from, by focusing on the object we see it as being truly existent and then we feel that this person really caused my anger. They really harmed me. They really did me wrong. They really did this and that.
And then we get really angry. And this is mistaken, it’s deluded, it’s not valid. And therefore we need to look at the valid reasons underlying the way that we see these things. The reason why we can overcome our disturbing emotions and replace them with positive emotions is because our disturbing emotions are always based on invalid reasoning, whereas our positive qualities are always based on valid attitudes. We don’t understand that we’re reasoning, but we carry out a kind of reasoning which is instinctive whenever we look at an object of our anger or attachment.
And so we need to overcome this and understand the delusion that our attitudes are based on. This understanding is the wisdom of selflessness. We need to understand how all our projections are not based on valid understanding. So, When we understand that the object of our attachment and anger lacks true existence, that it’s not this solid concrete real independently existing from its own side object that we’re seeing it as being, but instead that it lacks true existence, when we realize that we won’t get angry. So in the meantime, we have to practice patience and to learn to stop our anger And in relation to what Sue was saying before, we need to learn to recognize our anger before it gets strong.
Once it gets really strong, we can’t stop it. So we have to learn to recognize the early signs while it’s still small. Lama Yeshe used to say, this is a good example in India, in fact not so good in Australia, he’d say when you turn on the tap before the water comes out, there’s some sort of movement in the pipe, some sort of air coming out. Nothing like that in India. Sometimes you get not much water and a lot of air coming out of the pipes.
Although we seem to sometimes lose our temper suddenly, it’s not really sudden. We have warning signals and we just need to recognize these. And it’s the same with hatred and with jealousy. Geshe Tashi Tsering says jealousy is a form of hatred. We need to recognize that when we’re jealous, we’re jealous of the other person’s good qualities, we hate the other person having those good qualities.
So it’s very interesting here. He actually says jealousy is different to envy because envy is wishing to have the other person’s good qualities and it can actually be a positive thing to be envious if it leads us to doing good actions. Jealousy is harmful because it makes us hate the other person for having good qualities and wanting to harm this person. So all of these things we need to stop by And the real method to stop them is by understanding emptiness. Until we can understand emptiness, then we need to practice the thought trainings to over the antidotes to these things.
And eventually we can make an effort to understand emptiness and particularly, the best starting point is just learning to distinguish, to discriminate, the conventional I and the false I. To learn to see where it is that we’re making this projection of the truly existent I on the basis of the conventional I which is merely labeled on the five aggregates. So if we can do that then we’ll really be able to overcome all our ego grasping and self-cherishing and all the other disturbing emotions that arise from that. So I’ll finish there and I think it’s time to stop now so we haven’t got time to meditate tonight. There’s quite a few more stanzas.
It will be quite good to read through those to get the book out of the library or to buy it if it’s in the bookshop. I know we have a couple of copies in the library. And we can go on and Most of the stanzas that follow are about aspirations for the future. So we can can set our aspirations on dedication of our merits for enlightenment, and we can do that now.