Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 40-minute commentary, Ven Sangye Khadro explores how practitioners inadvertently accumulate serious karma within a Dharma community—not returning library books, forgetting to pay for phone use, misusing sacred objects. She explains why such misuse carries unusually heavy karmic weight, then addresses careful handling of Dharma-related money, distinguishing what it can support from worldly uses. She covers three types of karmic results: rebirth in specific realms, the tendency to repeat harmful actions, and environmental effects. Breaking spiritual vows proves far more serious than the actions themselves, manifesting as strokes, sudden illness, or compulsive repetition of harm. The teaching concludes with Tonglen practice as an antidote. Intended for practitioners with vows active in a Dharma community.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 The wheel of sharp weapons.mp3
UUID: 54143153-f11a-41cb-87eb-846249ca2f2d
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: 40.5 minutes
Words: ~4,630
This is quite a heavy form of karma because of the heaviness of the object. So generally, it’s explained in the graduated path teachings or in the teachings on karma that intention is the determining factor but here we’re concerned with very powerful objects then there can be an effect on the side of the object and so even if we’ve unconsciously used something that belonged to the Three Jewels of refuge, taking it for ourselves, we may not have been aware of what we were doing. Even so it can be something that brings us a bad karmic result because of the power of the object. So we need to be very very careful particularly in relation to the Three Jewels of refuge, to the kind of actions we do in relation to the Three Jewels. Perhaps before we became involved with the Dharma teachings and the Dharma centers that we might not have had so much opportunity for doing this kind of wrong action in this life but now because you’re involved with Buddha House it’s easy to accidentally create bad karma so heavy heavy karma of this kind.
So for instance, not returning Buddha House library books. So or perhaps not paying for using the phone or the photocopier for your personal use. So if you forget to put the money in the jar, then this could be bad karma and I’m sure that I’ve got some of this karma myself. So in actual fact Buddha House is naturally a central community as such but it’s related in a lesser way because it is a Dharma center and the people here are Dharma brothers and sisters and so we create a lot of strong karma by making mistakes with our karma in relation to the center. Does that make sense?
Generally, it’s our intention intention that determines whether we’ve created a negative action and how strong the negative action is. But with holy objects or with very strong objects such as our mom and dad, can create extra strong, we can create even without intention, thoughtlessly, without under or without knowing. For instance, if we were to make use of something that that we shouldn’t have made use of. There’s an example of a story about somebody who experienced a lot of bad karmic results from having been present at food he he was a monk and he was present at a dinner that was given by somebody who paid for the dinner by having sold Dharma texts, which is a negative karma to sell down the text and use that money for worldly purposes. So he ate some of this food and he didn’t know where it came from, where health was paid for, but he still had to experience bad karmic results from it.
Yes. That’s right. So the the person who actually sold the Dharma texts would have gone to hell. So this chap had to put up with a stomachache. Yes.
So so what we always do at the is keep the bookshop moneys in a separate account and keep very careful. So now you’re understanding why we do that. Yes. Yes. That’s right.
Yes. And so we want to keep track of what’s and that that can be used for things like buying more books or buying Buddha statues or for sponsoring the printing of books or sponsoring painting of thangkas. This kind of thing, you have to be very careful how you use it. Perhaps for the the upkeep of the library or the upkeep of the house or so on, but you can’t use it for just worldly purposes or for your personal things like that. Yes.
Well, the problem is that these people don’t understand these things. On the other hand, if they haven’t taken refuge, given Three Jewels of refuge, then for them, it’s not such a heavy thing. But there’s still some negativity there, which they don’t understand about. So on the other hand, there’s some benefit there because they’re making these books accessible to the public. So it might be six of one and half a dozen of the other.
I don’t know, but it’s difficult to say. No. There’s nothing wrong with us buying it. Yes. No, it’s the people who are selling it who are in a dicey position.
Generally the learners seem to think that it’s quite okay to encourage general book shops to stock dharma books. So they must feel that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Also you’ve got the problem like for instance the people in wisdom publications were thrown into the position that they had to support themselves from the profit on the wisdom publication books. And otherwise, they would have had no roof over their heads or anything to eat. So, basically, yeah, had to pay themselves a a minimal salary out of the proceeds.
And, of course, they were devoting themselves, you know, not it was for them, it wasn’t just a job, but they were devoting themselves in their spare time as well as their work hours and all sorts of things. So, really, you know, it wasn’t as if they were just regarding it as a means of livelihood. They could have gone and worked for somebody else and had better pay and better working conditions and less work hours. So they just had to check the purity of their dedication to the cause, but they did have to work out how they stood in relation to that. And no doubt they talked to their lamas about it and so on, but it just wasn’t possible for them to earn their living somewhere else and still manage to keep Wisdom Publications going because it had to be a professionally run concern.
These things have to be worked out but it’s something that we have to keep in mind. And for instance, people earn their living by accepting sponsorship with painting thangkas but they have to consider how they’re doing it. In Tibet they used to accept commissions to paint thangkas so the person would support the thangka painter and the thangka painter would paint the thangka and then they wouldn’t ask for a price on the thangka but they would expect to be supported and they would expect to have a generous offering but they wouldn’t think of themselves as doing that for the money. So it’s sort of drawing a fine line. And where they actually paint thangkas for sale and put a price on it, it’s becoming much more dicey.
And that seems to be the way it it’s going a bit more in the modern world nowadays. There are less thangka painters who are able to always find commissions and sometimes they seem to have to paint stuff and then find a buyer for it, which puts them in a much more dicey position. So so if we don’t want to have to experience gout in our future lives Yes, I guess tendonitis is probably very related. If we don’t want to have to experience these kinds of things, we know that we have to avoid these kinds of actions so we make a determination not to do these actions in the future and instead to do the opposite thing by being conscientious about our moral conduct, using things that don’t belong to us, about taking things that don’t belong to us and about how we act in connection with the Three Jewels of refuge. And we’ll contemplate on that a little bit making that firm determination and then we’ll go on then to do the Tonglen practice taking on this suffering of gout.
We’ve got a couple of people present who we can think of in terms of gout and tendinitis and other sort of pains in the body and a lot of other people who perhaps haven’t told us but they are experiencing pains in their body also and many many other beings who experience these kinds of pains. We can take on that sort of pain. So I’ll just ring the gong in two or three minutes time and in the meantime we can do that practice of Tonglen. So by the way, when we’re learning about these karmic results that we’re experiencing in this text, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, the karmic results that it’s mentioning are the results that are being experienced in this human life. So with a serious karma, we would only be experiencing the tail end of that result in this human life and before that we might have experienced all sorts of horrific results in the lower realms.
So we might have had a number of lives in the lower realms using up the worst of the karma, using up the bulk of it and then when we finished up the karma that was keeping us in the lower realms and when we get a human rebirth then we might still have the last traces of this karma to work off as human beings. And in the graduated path it explains that there are various different kinds of karmic results From one karma from one karma we can experience various different kinds of result and that can be explained as being either three results or four results. It’s just the same because if you explain if the explanation is of three results then the second result is subdivided into sub divisions or that can be counted as four. So this is all explained in detail in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. If you want to check that up and get a detailed understanding of it then read that section on page four fifty four of Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.
But just in brief, there are three results which you can call the RIPENED results, the results congruent with the cause and the environmental results. So the results, the ripened results are are experienced in some specific realms. So if it’s a bad karma then that could send us to the lower realms. If it’s another of the teachings in karma explains that some karmas are complete and some karmas are incomplete and we need the various factors which Geshe-la already has explained to us that we need in order to have a complete karma and so we know what that is. So if we have these complete karmic that can send us to the lower realms or if it’s a good karma it can send us to a good rebirth such as a human rebirth.
And so these kinds of karmic results can then in the case of a non virtuous action send us to the states where we have to experience all the different sufferings of that various realms such as being in the hells or being an animal, then having experienced that, then getting born as a human being. We still have to experience the other two kinds of results and these include the results congruent with the cause and the environmental results. So the results congruent with the cause involves two subdivisions and that is the experience congruent with the cause and action congruent with the cause. So the result congruent with the cause means that we have to experience something that’s similar to the action that we did to others. So whatever we did to others we have to get it back again.
That’s pretty simple and that’s the kind of thing that the Wheel of Sharp Weapons is telling us about quite a lot. And so for instance if we’ve killed others, killed other beings, would have to experience a short lifespan and perhaps being killed by others and perhaps having sudden illnesses and so on. So these are similar to the harm that we did to others. The action congruent with the cause is very important because this means that we have a tendency to get drawn into doing actions of the same type again. This is a very karmic aspect that has a strong effect on our future and so it means that if for instance if we’ve engaged in killing then we’ll have a tendency to react with wanting to kill.
For instance, we were killed out of anger then if we get angry again our first off will be wanting to kill somebody or kill that being. Or if we’ve killed animals out of attachment to eating their meat then we’ll have a strong tendency to want to engage in hunting or other actions of killing animals in order to satisfy our appetite or our attachment. Also, that will come from within ourselves that tendency and also from our external we also tend to find ourselves getting drawn into situations where we’ll naturally be led into doing these kinds of actions such as being conscripted to go off to war or being among people who will lead us in the way of killing. And so that’s the action congruent with the cause. And this is very very important because it leads us to this chain of cause and result in future lives so that there will be more killing, more bad karma, more killing.
And of course we’ll have to experience the other bad karmic results such as experiencing suffering from that in life after life. So that’s where we have to step in and try to overcome this karmic cause and result by not letting ourselves be led on by this action congruent with the result with the cause. And then the third one, the environmental result means that we have to experience an environment which is related to our actions. So bad actions relate to having to experience bad environments. So the example that the Pabongka Rinpoche uses in the Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.
It’s interesting for us in this age. Soil erosion. He said that the soil used to be good and then it was becoming eroded into gullies and that kind of thing. So we can see that there’s a lot of this happening in our country at the present and this is an environmental result of our bad karma. So here anyway we’re dealing with the last three of these causes if you look at it as being four.
So we don’t know what sort of karmic results we might have already experienced in the lower realms, but we’re seeing the experiences that we’re having to deal with in the present in our human life. Also of course certain karmas are not strong enough to bring about a rebirth but these are called ripening karmas because they’re not projecting karmas that bring about a rebirth but they’re ripening karmas which bring about a result during the course of our lifetime. So we could be experiencing these ripening karmas from some of our lighter non virtues also as well as the finishing off of these complete karmas that I just talked about. So is this clear? Uh-huh.
So, Well, Buddhists don’t have to experience karma. But that’s a they Buddhas create what’s called in Tibetan tinle, which it translates as cloud of action. The word lei, action, it can be translated it’s actually karma. Often translated as karma, it means action. karma means action too, it’s a little translation.
So it’s a particular kind of action. They don’t have to experience cause and effect. They simply do these virtuous actions. They’ve already got the result. There’s no more result for the Buddhas.
They’ve got everything, so there’s no more to attain. So they simply engage in these virtuous actions for others. And they have this ability. But their own virtuous actions are ceaseless and infinite, but it’s not karma in the sense. So as being we start to work with karma and to make it work for us instead of against us.
And particularly in terms of purifying our bad actions and accumulating merit. So we have to have this vast accumulation of merit and if you’ve heard about the teachings on this, you know that we have to have two collections of merit and wisdom. So wisdom is a particular kind of karmic result associated with the practice of wisdom, of understanding emptiness and meditating on emptiness. And the rest of it goes into the basket of merit. So our practices of, like, virtue and generosity and so on, all of these things go into merit.
And also our meditation practice, if it’s meditating on things like impermanence, love and compassion and so on. On the conventional side of it, that all goes into the basket of merit and then the basket of wisdom is concerned with the practice of emptiness. It includes meditation on emptiness and some some of the well, I have had to explain it. Some of our concentration practice also goes into that, but mostly emptiness practice. So we have a lot of that to accumulate.
And Bodhisattvas who get to the eighth level, eighth level Bodhisattvas, they’re also not accumulating worldly karma. They’ve gone beyond karma. So they’re also accumulating this kind of transcendental action. But they still they still have to accumulate a lot more before they can get enlightened. So so I think that’s yeah.
So here we’re anyway, we’re dealing with this kind of karma these karmic results. And so what we need is to be determined to overcome particularly this kind of tendency to follow these habitual imprints towards non virtue. So when we understand this teaching on karma we understand why it is that it’s so easy to go in the path of non virtue and why it’s so difficult to go in the path of virtue and that’s because we’ve created so many non virtues in the past and we have this kind of result coming to us and because we haven’t created such a lot of virtue in the past we haven’t got the kind of result that makes it easy and natural for us to go in the path of virtue. So it’s just a question of changing this and not letting ourselves follow this tendency towards non virtue but instead creating virtuous imprints and if we understand this then it gives us the incentive and we need to be very determined about overcoming this harmful habitual tendency and the Wheel of Sharp Weapons practice by teaching us about these karmic results is very helpful for us to bring this So stanza twenty seven.
Michael. So somebody might have an association of words of honor with tantric practices. Usually when you come across this kind of expression we think of it as referring to Tantra, Tantric vows and Commitments. So anyway here any kind of spiritual commitment such as the Upāsaka vows, the layperson’s vows is included in this in this kind of karma. So for instance, if you’ve at some time taken the five Upāsaka vows, somebody wants to tell us what the five Upāsaka vows are or layperson’s vows.
Okay. What did you say about sex? No. Improper. Right.
So yes. That’s right. Yes. Yeah. So that’s right.
So a person who’s taken these five has taken a commitment to keep keep them and then if they break them, so for instance if they then go and steal something or they tell serious lies that are covered by these vows or if you take it a vow not to take intoxicants and then you go and take these intoxicants then if you break these and then if not purified then you have acquired a serious negativity. This is much worse than if you actually engage in these actions without having taken these vows. It’s the fact that you’re breaking the vows that makes it so serious. Of course, such killing is a serious action anyway. It becomes infinitely worse if you’ve taken a vows.
Taking of intoxicants generally isn’t regarded as being negative in itself but it’s a dangerous activity to engage in because it destroys our mindfulness and causes us to engage in negativity and so it is given to us as a vow and if we break it then because we’re breaking the vow then we’re acquiring the negativity of breaking the vow which is a strong negativity. So we need to be very conscientious about these things. Also there are other vows such as the Bodhisattva vows. So if we’ve taken the Bodhisattva vows and we have quite a lot of those which we need to observe and if we take the attitude that these vows don’t matter and if we break them carelessly then this becomes a serious negativity which is much worse than the breaking of the Prātimokṣa vows for example. So then it helps us to keep in mind the importance of maintaining our vows if we do keep in mind the karmic results.
And it mentions here strokes and sudden diseases striking without warning. So whether we’ve had these results or not at the present, there’s we can never feel safe that we won’t have to experience them in the future. So does anybody want say anything about this? Really? Is there a medical explanation, or is it just a diagnosis?
Diagnosis? Do you think it’s Yes. Of course, if we have a lifestyle that brings on stroke, that’s a chronic result too so it’s all related. So that’s interesting because you wouldn’t think that the general you think that this was more likely a result that’s going to affect people who are practicing Dharma but in fact we have all had vows of this kind, even people who are not practicing Dharma have had countless lives before and in some of those lives they have encountered the Dharma and perhaps one reason why they are not encountering it in this lifetime is because they have created the cause to be separated from it breaking their vows with negative mind which could be a cause to not encounter. If you break your vows but don’t give rise to negative mind or wrong views about it, then even if you have to experience lower realm rebirth, you can come back to the dharma again.
And they say that the dogs around monasteries are often monks who have broken their vows in their past lifetime, but at least they didn’t give rise to negativity such as thinking it doesn’t matter or thinking the Dharma is all wrong anyway, it’s all mistaken teachings. If you give rise to that sort of thought then that creates a barrier to coming back to the Dharma. So these dogs fortunate in the sense that they are working off this bad karma but they are around the monastery and receiving good imprints. And probably in their next lifetime, they’ll become monks again. Yes.
So Lama Yeshe had to had a little dog, a little female Pekingese, and she was obviously very lonely. So she was being cared for by one of the nuns, and she was lonely. So this nun wrote a a little letter in the dog’s words to Lama Yeshe while he was away saying, please, Lama Yeshe, I’m very lonely. Can you find me a husband? So Lama Yeshe found her a husband, and she was very attached to him and she was always trying to seduce him, but he just wouldn’t be seduced.
He was just totally totally uninterested, you know. And they got on well enough together, but whenever she was really in the mood and was rubbing up against him and really trying to make him respond, then he get really fed up with her and he just sort of push off and go off by himself. No. So so the lama said that I must have been a a monk before. And so he he was sort of like in the habit of maintaining at least the vows that he broke probably wasn’t that vows.
Or at least at least whatever it was, he was had a very strong imprint for not breaking it even as a dog. So that’s that’s interesting. And another monk told us about his monastery that there were a lot of dogs around the monastery and, of course, they did what dogs do and most of them. But there was one particular dog who would never engage in sexual intercourse. And not only that, but he whenever a a pair of dogs were engaged in sexual intercourse, he’d lead all the other dogs in barking at them as if he was telling them off.
So, you know, quite interesting, some of these stories. I don’t know how I got on to all this. Yeah. Some of these things might sound a bit strange, but in actual fact, it’s interesting sometimes to look at past lives and how sometimes people do seem to experience things in this life than what they have done in past lives. Although course looking at past lives is very unreliable because the causes can go way back beyond anything that can be seen in just a few lifetimes.
In fact Buddha cautioned against that, he even cautioned his arhats that they couldn’t always see the cause of certain results and they could see back a long time they had quite considerable psychic powers but only Buddhas had the perfect psychic powers to go back no matter how many lifetimes, infinite lifetimes and see karmic seeds from long, long, long ago and how that could be resulting in the present. The one story I came across was Edgar Cayce. You might have heard of Edgar Casey. He used to give past life readings, and there was one story, for some reason, struck me of a young lad who had trouble wetting the bed. I mean, he was way past the age at which somebody should have gained control of their bladder.
So it was causing him great distress and also his family were quite concerned about it. And so his mother wrote off to Edgar Cayce and Edgar Cayce said in his last lifetime or in one of his previous lifetimes, he lived in ancient Egypt, and he was what well, what what in Australia we call the water bailiff. And he was responsible for the irrigation, you know, who who was getting irrigation water and he took bribes. And as a as a result, he’s sort of experiencing a a result of trouble with his waterworks. So it seemed highly appropriate and he was advised to think his mother was to help him make positive thoughts about it because he was subconsciously punishing himself for his wrongdoing so he had to put all that in the past and see himself as being a positive person in his lifetime in order to overcome the problem.
So that very much relates to what we are doing here. So will just do a little on that and then we will finish. So meditate on keeping we may not have vows and commitments to keep in the present but even so we might have in the future in this life time and certainly we could very well have the karma from broken commitments in the past on our mind streams. So we make our mind up to be conscientious in future about vows and commitments and not to be unhappy if we have to experience these kinds of karmic results such as strokes and diseases striking us without warning. When these things come to us, we will try to keep a positive attitude and we do the practice of giving and taking, taking these kinds of results from others giving them out happiness and good conditions, especially good health and physical conditions for their practice.