Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute session, Ven Sangye Khadro teaches how the practice of tonglen (exchanging self and other) and reframing those who harm us as puppets controlled by delusion breaks the cycle of retaliation. Drawing from the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, stanza 42 on harsh speech, she explores why insults hurt—we mistake anger-driven words for truth—and why we retaliate, perpetuating harm across lifetimes. She shows that compassion toward our attackers, not retaliation, is the answer. She stresses that mental intention, not mechanical action, drives Dharma: one sincere prostration outweighs a thousand done by rote. She also addresses stanza 15, explaining how habitual fault-finding in others creates the karmic conditions for an unpleasant environment. For practitioners familiar with the graduated path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 The wheel of sharp weapons.mp3
UUID: 107949c3-3d24-4897-b8b5-68ec437060a4
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons 42 – 154 (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1999 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.1 minutes
Words: ~5,242
So we’ve been studying this text for a few weeks now. The author of the text is Dharmakīrti who was a great Indian yogi and the text was brought to Tibet by Atisha who was also a great Indian yogi and pundit who came to Tibet and presumably it was actually translated by Atisha. At any rate, it was brought by Atisha to Tibet and translated into Tibetan and it has been considered to be extremely valuable by generations of Tibetan masters and it’s very practical for people who are just in the early stages of their practice. It’s particularly valuable for us because we need the kind of help that it can give us in training our minds particularly the training in converting difficult or adverse circumstances into opportunities to practice on the path. So we really need to know how to do this because we often do encounter adverse circumstances or what appears to be adverse circumstances.
We start practicing Dharma. We have an ideal of how Dharma should be practiced and we have an idea that we have to do so many different meditations, do so many kinds of practice, so many prostrations, recite so many mantras and do so much study and whatever and this isn’t always possible or it’s not always easy to manage to bring about this situation. We can encounter various different hindrances even if we’re able to engage in these sorts of practices we often find that our minds are like rock and all sorts of problems arise we don’t really seem to able to get a lot of result from our Dharma practice and we just have these disturbing emotions arising all the time and so it might be more appropriate to say that our mind is like a cyclone. So somehow we encounter all these different kinds of difficulties. We might have illnesses or we might have external problems that prevent us from that take up our time and prevent us from doing the practice we want to do.
So we can get quite depressed and frustrated if we have a fixed idea that this is the only way to do Dharma practice and that it has to be like this and that. So we need these thought training teachings because they give us the opportunity to use any kind of circumstances whether it seems good, whether it seems bad, we have the opportunity to use that as a circumstance for our practice to further our progress on the path. So it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not the number of prostrations we do for example that really matters. You can be doing thousands of prostrations and if you’re doing it without any sort of motivation, without any mindfulness, then you might as well be doing push ups or some other form of exercise, whatever is appropriate to your physical condition. So it’s not the action itself but it’s the thought behind the action that counts in all Dharma practice.
We could be offering thousands of water bowls but unless we’re offering them with heartfelt devotion to the Three Jewels and with an understanding of why we’re doing this practice then the results won’t be very effective. Whatever practice we’re doing it’s like this. It depends on our mind, on what’s the underlying thought and the motivation. So of course there’s a connection between these actions and the Dharma result that we’re to bring about. So for example when we’re making prostrations the fact of bending over and bowing down is an action that naturally connects with an attitude of respect and admiration towards the Three Jewels of refuge who are the objects to which we’re making these prostrations and so it becomes a very powerful action.
It helps to make our thoughts stronger by doing this physical action but still the point is that it’s the mental attitude rather than the physical action that really counts. These actions if they’re done with the right motivation can be extremely powerful in purifying our negative karma and accumulating a positive imprint which will enable us to gradually get together the understandings that we need, the insights that we need in our progress on the path. So in actual fact sometimes bad circumstances can really be the best thing that happened to us because they really force us to practice Dharma and sometimes when things are going really well and we’ve got good conditions and we have time to do meditation and prostrations and so on, if we’re at the beginning of the path and our minds are not very subdued then we can find that we get lazy and don’t do the practice or we just perhaps do the practice but we’re just going through the motions and we find it’s very very hard to focus our minds to really feel that motivation whereas sometimes when we encounter difficulties and bad circumstances it can really cause us to focus on our Dharma practice.
It can really somehow give us that incentive. Maybe some of you have had an experience like this. I think it’s pretty common to have this sort of experience. Probably everybody at one time or another finds this. So there can be times when because we’re going through difficulties we really feel strongly how necessary it is to do the work on our mind and we really feel motivated so it really helps us.
In this way our difficult circumstances really do help us on the path provided that we have enough understanding, enough Dharma wisdom gained through listening to the teachings and studying to be able to work with the mind and to engage in the practice of letting go of harmful attitudes that are holding us back and developing more Dharma wisdom. So actually if we can actually gain some of this from our bad circumstances, if we can gain some Dharma wisdom from our bad circumstances then that’s probably going to be more beneficial than doing a lot of prostrations if we’re not really during our practice coming to grips with our disturbing mental states. Texts like this one, The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, and a number of other thought training texts as well give us the methods to use these different circumstances in order to bring about the greatest benefit, the greatest progress in the Dharma. And as I’ve already said before in previous weeks, it’s necessary to have a good grounding in the graduated path teachings and then with that understanding that comes from having a good basic understanding of the graduated path then combining that with the thought training practices we really have the tools that we need for an effective Dharma practice and for a Dharma practice that can be carried out in any sort of circumstances.
So does anybody have anything to say at this point? Mhmm. So in this text it gives us a way of actually meditating, of using our unfortunate circumstances in a very profound way by the practice of doing the meditation on giving and taking which in Tibetan is called Tonglen. So we’re doing this practice. It’s actually explained in the graduated path.
We find this practice explained in the graduated path in the section on the great scope. Is there anybody here who hasn’t really had this sort of background teaching yet who doesn’t know the background? Okay, so not to worry. Just to understand that there is a context that all this fits into and it might seem a little bit perhaps difficult to see the point of some of the things we’re talking about until you understand is the meditations that lead up to this point. We’re dealing with something here that presupposes that we’ve done these other studies and this practice is a fairly advanced practice in the sense that it’s a practice that involves a readiness and understanding to be able to really do some work at overcoming ego and self-cherishing with a very strong motivation that this is something that we really want to do, that it’s something that’s holding us back, that loving and cherishing others is something that’s very much to be cultivated and whether it’s our own benefit that we want to bring about or the benefit of others we need to do this kind of practice and that it’s going to be extremely beneficial for us and it’s also going to enable us to be beneficial for others if we can practice in this way.
Does anybody maybe someone here would like to give a quick sketchy explanation of how they see the practice of giving and taking? One of the senior students. How about you Jane? You’ve had this haven’t you? No?
Giving and taking? Taking? You’ve had an explanation on that? I was just thinking Betty and David always answer all the questions so maybe somebody else. Okay.
Alright. Okay. Yes? Yes. That’s a a very brief way of explaining it.
Yes. Yes. So what it involves is the thought of great compassion and great love. Does anybody know how we define love and compassion? Right.
Okay, so can you go a bit further than that and say what’s the difference between love and compassion and great love and great compassion? Very good. Necessarily. No. That’s bodhicitta.
Okay. But yes, Mark was right. First of all, you have the sort of love and compassion and the great love and great compassion or Mahāyāna great love and compassion are extended to every single being without exception even the ones that we find irritating or difficult. So of course it’s difficult to cultivate this mental state but we can’t exclude any beings from our love and compassion if we’re going to attain enlightenment. So first of all there’s this sort of love compassion and that naturally leads to the thought of wanting to relieve the suffering of beings and to give them happiness.
So then if you combine that with the understanding that in order to do that we have to attain Buddhahood then you’ve got the thought of bodhicitta which was the motivation that we were developing at the beginning of the session. So it has to be based on this love and compassion and there’s a series of meditations explaining the graduated path and one of the final meditations in the series is the meditation on giving and taking. It comes after some other preliminary meditations that help us to develop love and compassion so we theoretically should have already cultivated the thought of wishing to develop these qualities, at least some sort of feeling for it. So Of course at this stage it’s just something that’s artificially produced. We have to keep on working on it.
We meditate for a while and we build up some sort of feeling for it and then we stop meditating, we go out and it gradually fades so we have to come back and keep on doing it again until it gets stronger and stronger and eventually becomes very stable. That takes a lot of work but at the beginning we’re just working with this artificially produced love and compassion but that’s where it has to start and then we do the giving and taking which is the thought of being willing to take on the sufferings of others and we imaginatively take their sufferings off them in the form of a black cloud or a black pollution which we breathe in and breathe out the white light of love and compassion and all goodness to them. We send them all happiness and good and particularly understanding on the path to Dharma so they can achieve lasting happiness. When you practice this a little bit you can actually combine it with every round of breath so that you just breathe in the suffering and out the happiness all the time and you just visualize that when you breathe in the suffering it blows up your self-cherishing.
You imagine that’s in your heart center in the middle of your chest and it just blows that up so you’re not really attacking yourself. You’re not really putting all this suffering onto yourself but onto your self-cherishing which is the real enemy. So with this text here, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, it goes stanza by stanza giving us some specific sufferings and how to deal with them and then we practice this giving and taking in relation to that particular suffering that we might be experiencing at the present such as pain or such as some sort of emotional problem, whatever it might be. It’s something that we think of bearing for the sake of others. Think that we imagine it’s just an imaginative practice but it’s a very powerful one.
We engage in the imaginative practice that by experiencing this suffering ourselves we can take it off others and we do this Tonglen practice and then we imagine that we’re giving out the opposite to this suffering to the sentient beings. We’re giving them happiness of various different kinds. So any questions about this? So there’s actually a series of processes that we go through in relation to these stanzas and first of all we remember that this specific suffering is a result of our bad karma. In other words, it comes about because of actions bad actions that we’ve done before, actions that were harmful to others.
We may not remember having done these actions in this lifetime but it more likely comes from our previous lifetimes and in our previous lifetimes we’ve done all sorts of bad actions so even if we’re not experiencing a specific karmic result at the moment we’ve probably still got some karmic seeds that we haven’t yet worked off. So we have to consider that we have to purify and prepare to possibly experience any of these kinds of results at some time in the future. And so when we remember that sufferings, our difficulties, whatever it is that we’re experiencing, that it’s the result of our own actions, it’s the result of our karma, then we don’t blame other people and we don’t blame God or we don’t blame fate whatever, but we can feel calm about this. If we’re blaming anybody whether it’s other people or whether it’s God or even if we’re blaming ourselves in the sense that we might think we’ve done something stupid that we wouldn’t be experiencing this particular suffering, for example, if we hadn’t made a particular choice. You might think you might lose your job and you might think if I’d taken the other job I’d still be employed or something like that.
For example, you can get really annoyed with yourself and that’s negative too because it’s not helpful. If we realize that these things are karmic results then we don’t get upset but we can stay calm and then our mental state will be a lot better and we won’t be so unhappy. Then we consider how we created these actions which brought about this result and we determined not to repeat such actions in future, actions that have caused problems for other beings. Make having this understanding now we make a strong determination that we’ll avoid these kinds of actions and then in the future we won’t have to experience these bad conditions. And then after that we do the practice of giving and taking imagining that we relieve the other beings of this specific suffering by ourselves, taking it onto our own present suffering.
So these stanzas go into detailed explanations of the various wrong actions that cause the various unpleasant karma that we have to experience. So it’s a very useful text because it gives us lot of information about karma cause and result and if we’ve studied this text then we’re pretty sure that whatever we do experience in terms of unpleasant results that we have some idea of what sort of karma brought that about and that makes our avoidance of these negative karmas much more effective. It makes us less likely to fall into the temptation of doing something negative to make things easier for ourselves in the short term if we realize how many problems we’re laying up for the future. So any questions about this? Last week we were looking at some stanzas that explained physical results of karma such as results of having beaten and killed people and other beings, animals and so on.
Now we’re up to stanza forty-two which deals with speech. So there were some people who were looking forward to this first last week, this stanza. So they seem to find something very interesting about abusive language. I don’t know whether they like hearing it or whether they like I’m sure nobody likes doing it. None of the students here.
But anyway, yeah, there seems to be something interesting about that topic. So we’re up to this stanza, stanza forty-two, which is the the last stanza on the first sheet there that you’ve got there. Does would somebody like to read that? Who hasn’t had a turn at reading yet in previous weeks? Have you?
Mhmm. Anyway, this is definitely something that that’s very practical for us from day to day because we all hate to be on the receiving end of verbal abuse. It’s something that’s very unpleasant and we know that it hurts and that it can go on hurting a long time after the incident’s finished. For instance if somebody beats us then provided that we haven’t had any serious damage then it’ll stop hurting after a while. But if somebody said something cutting then we might still be remembering it years after it from time to time and it might still have the power to cause pain.
So it’s something that we know can hurt and we also have this power to hurt other people with our speech in that way ourselves and perhaps sometimes we might be hurting other people without realizing how much we’re hurting. Sometimes we just let words fly because we feel angry and we just want to get back at somebody and because we don’t stop and think we can say something really cutting and afterwards it’s maybe something that we don’t really mean even at the time or it might be something that just out of our anger. If we’d reflected when we were calm we wouldn’t have said such a thing. So it’s really a pity when we say these things and they cause then a coldness or an anger between ourselves and other people and also we have to deal with the karmic results in the future that we’re going to have to endure these kinds of words being said to us. And so we let these things happen when our emotions get out of control.
So it’s something that we need to have to deal with on the emotional level not just holding back the words. Of course, if we can at least even if we get angry want to say these words at least we can try not to let the words go but when we’re under the control of anger or some other extremely powerful negative emotion then it’s very easy to let these words come out and we don’t have very much control because we’re not acting rationally at that time. We’re acting under the control. We’re like puppets being controlled by our anger so it’s better to deal with the anger and also as you learn in the graduated path, the anger itself is a negative emotion. In itself it’s negative and while we’re being controlled by anger we’re creating negative karma mentally so we need to work at the basic level of trying to reduce our level of anger at trying to overcome anger but the very least we can do while we’re working at gradually gaining more control over our anger at least we can avoid if possible letting these words fly and I had a thought here that quite often we say harsh words because somebody has said something to us and we return these harsh words.
We retaliate and one person’s verbal abuse or cutting words leads to another and from the other person we return something back to them and it turns into a nasty interaction and the reason we do that is because we get hurt by the person, by what the person says and I had the thought that the reason why I get hurt when people say something unpleasant to me is I tend to have this reaction Oh, what he really thinks of me. Now he’s telling the truth. When he’s being polite and nice then that’s just sort cover up of what he or she really thinks and now they’re really saying what they really feel, what they really think of me. So that’s why you get hurt and feel that you have to defend yourself. In actual fact when we look at these situations with deeper understanding, we understand that when people are angry and saying these things they’re actually not expressing what they really think except when they are under the control of anger.
In other words, they’re deluded by their anger. Their anger is controlling them. They’re not really acting under the control of their mind and it’s quite possible that the same person when they’re feeling calm and rational would not be feeling this way about you at all. So There’s really not so much reason to feel hurt about it. There are also many other reasons of course but they might actually be just trying to hurt us because they want to hurt us and they think of anything they can say just to hurt.
So the general teachings tell us to reflect on how this person is under the control of their delusion. So they’re like a stick being used to beat you. If somebody’s hold a stick and beating you with it then you don’t blame the stick. You don’t see the stickers responsible for the harm that you receive but you understand that it’s being wielded by somebody. In this the analogy here is that the person is being wielded by their anger, they’re being controlled by their anger and the real enemy is that person’s anger, their deluded mental state which is not the person themselves but it’s simply something that’s happening in that person’s mind.
So the person is actually an object for our compassion. The best way if we want to at all blame anything external then we can blame that person’s anger and if we want to harm that person’s anger then the best thing we can do is to show that person example of patience by by being calm about the whole situation and not retaliating. Of course, we don’t have to stand there and let ourselves be abused in a lot of circumstances. We don’t always have to stay there. Depends of course who’s doing it.
If it’s your boss it might be difficult to walk away but quite often we can remove ourselves physically from situation so we don’t have to continue putting up with it and that’s quite okay. We don’t have to put ourselves into these situations deliberately but if we can just walk away calmly without retaliating or if we can just keep our mouth shut and keep calm then that’s stopping this karmic chain going on which would lead to sometime in the future having to receive more harsh words from that person or another person and retaliating again more anger more harsh words it goes on forever. This is what keeps the wheel turning. The wheel up there, the wheel of being reborn again and again into suffering. So by practicing patience and not retaliating we’re actually making an important move in putting a stop to this process.
So any questions? So we think of the other person’s bad karma, what they would be experiencing in the future as a result of saying these harsh words to us and then we can feel compassionate towards them and also of course remembering our own past karma then we determine not to engage in these sorts of actions in the future. So some people have to endure a lot of this sort of verbal abuse. It varies a lot from one person to another. Some people seem to be always around pleasant people who speak to them nicely.
They are respected by others. They don’t really seem to have to experience a lot of this kind of thing whereas other people it just seems to be their lot in life to be always being criticized, be always on the receiving end of anger and it somehow seems to be something that they can’t escape. This is a result of them engaged in this sort of action themselves. Particularly sometimes you can see that people don’t really seem to deserve this kind of thing, it just comes to them. They might be quite meek and inoffensive themselves but other people are always slamming into them and this is because they have created this kind of karma in previous lifetimes.
Getting off the topic a bit but on to the karma physical beating, there was an Italian monk who didn’t speak English but somebody who spoke Italian. He was speaking to this nun and she was telling me afterwards the story of his life and he just seemed to have the karma to be beaten all the time. When he was a little boy his mother used to beat him and then he became a street kid and the sort of rival gang used to beat him and then he went over to Morocco or somewhere and used to get beaten up by criminals and then just seemed to spend his life getting beaten and then he got married and his wife used to beat him. So it just seemed like he had all this karma to be beaten and he’d endured quite a lot of it. And I sort of got the impression that he wasn’t terribly good at sticking up for himself physically.
He just seemed to have to put up with it and this kind of thing is the karmic result of having engaged in these sort of actions before. Similarly with speech we have to experience the results which are similar to the action that we created in the first place. So we decided to abandon all these non virtues of speech. So it’s mentioning harsh words here but we want to avoid all the non virtues of speech. So does somebody want to tell us what the other non virtues of speech are?
Lying. Right? Yes. Gossip, that’s right. Divisive speech.
Right. Okay. So these are the kind of results that we want to avoid from having engaged in these non virtues of speech. You might wonder how gossip is a result. I think mainly in having your time wasted by people who want to spend time gossiping with you when you don’t want to do it.
I don’t know about that one but certainly yes if we gossip, if we spend a lot of time wasting our time, it doesn’t mean that every time we relax and chat a bit that we’re engaging in the non virtue of gossip but if we continually waste our time gossiping then when we do want to have time for Dharma practice we’re going to find it hard one way or another to find the time. There’s going to be all sorts of unwanted distractions and interruptions to our practice. So that’s fourteen. Does anybody want to say anything more about that? That’s right.
Actually that was the point I should have made after this too because after reflecting on the non virtues then we do this practice of Tonglen. So I thought we might do a little meditation on that before we go any further anyway. So We think we’ve all had to experience the results of the non virtue of harsh speech, of having to endure harsh words, verbal abuse, criticism made with a negative mind out of anger. So So creating non virtuous actions of speech towards others especially harsh speech, divisive speech, slander, all of these things when we’ve done these we created the negative karma of non virtue of speech and now we have to experience the result. So we shouldn’t blame others.
We shouldn’t feel angry towards others because we’re just experiencing the result of our own karmic cause. And we should determine very strongly to avoid all of all of these non virtues of speech in the future. Also, to take what opportunity offers to speak kind and supportive words to others. So then we can imagine taking on this suffering from other beings. We can imagine that we’re taking on the suffering of being on the receiving end of harsh speech and unpleasant words in the form of black smoke we’re taking it in, we put it on our self-cherishing.
Our self-cherishing dissolves away as if it’s been blown up by an explosion. And then we breathe out happiness, peace, and contentment to all the beings in the form of white light. So now we’re on to stanza fifteen. Maybe you might like to read this stanza. Would you read it?
This is quite an interesting verse actually. If we find our environment is full of unpleasantness then this is really due to our impure view. Maybe we have a reasonably pure view living in Adelaide. It’s not bad as environments go. It’s one of the better ones.
Anyway, have some sort of karma to be here but the point is that while we’re in saṃsāra, while we’re caught up in worldly view of things then we will always be experiencing various different unpleasantnesses in the environment such as bad weather, bad, you know, mud on the ground, pollution, whatever. Anything that we don’t like about our environment. Maybe we think that it’s ugly or not as beautiful as it should be or whatever or maybe it hasn’t got enough of the things that we need such as maybe it’s too dry, maybe there might be a shortage of various different needs and requisites. So this stanza tells us that this is the karmic result of criticizing and looking for the faults of others and just in general looking around and seeing fault everywhere. This can be a mental habit and you can get into this habit.
We can easily see how it’s possible to have a mental habit of looking at other people and looking for their faults, trying to see something in people’s criticise. We can see that some people have a very strong habit of doing this. Maybe we see that some people perhaps might do it more than we ourselves do. If we look at ourselves we can see that perhaps we ourselves sometimes also act in this way. So, we can also turn this habit of looking for something to criticize on the environment and be always finding fault and seeing something negative around us.
So if we make a habit of this and it just tends to distort our view and even when things are reasonably good we can see