Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute teaching, Ven Sanghy Khandro teaches stanzas 28 and 29 of the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, showing how difficulties in Dharma study are karmic results of disrespecting sacred texts. She grounds this in the larger framework: self-cherishing, not external enemies, is our only real adversary. When disturbing emotions (desire, hatred, ignorance) arise, they spring from self-cherishing—and this is where thought training (tonglen) becomes a weapon, allowing us to use our obstacles as fuel to overcome self-centeredness. Khandro covers the three stages of learning (listening, thinking, meditating), why Buddha’s speech is held highest among the Three Jewels of refuge, and practical ethics around handling and disposing of materials bearing printed Dharma words. Pitched at practitioners already engaged with this commentary text and familiar with tonglen practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 The wheel of sharp weapons.mp3
UUID: 18cc275b-a551-4900-a104-6fa056e6ccd9
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: ~5,519
Between last week and this week, we’ve been doing a course with Khensur Rinpoche, so bear with that anyway. Some the rest of you may not have had the good fortune to have been at this course But it was a quite an intensive situation. We had two hours of teaching from Khensur every day and it was quite a demanding sort of a teaching so it was very good and it was on the Four Noble Truths Khensur Rinpoche spent a lot of time explaining some of the technical points of how it is that we’re caught up in the cycle of suffering so we have two causes for our suffering: karma and disturbing emotions so particularly it’s because of the disturbing emotions and we need to understand these things so it was a good thing that some of us were able to take these teachings over the Easter break and for those of you who weren’t there you can study these things because there are books that explain these points about karma so it’s important to understand not only the heart practice but also the analytical practice and also of course Khensur Rinpoche said I should talk about Abhidharma aspect of karma on these Thursday nights as well so I’ll have to look at doing that before too long.
The major problem is our disturbing emotions and especially the self-cherishing which leads to the disturbing emotions. So disturbing emotions are three and that’s ignorance desire and hatred but self-cherishing is underlying all of these so it’s because we have self-cherishing that we then have these and so then we have these disturbing emotions because we’re attached to our own happiness we have self centered attachment to happiness for the self for the self that we view falsely and so then we have the hatred towards people who we perceive as disturbing our happiness so essentially the hatred comes from having the desire. So we have desire and hatred and the ignorance is also in a sense the main thing because we have the ignorance about the nature of the self and so coming from that we have the self-cherishing, have the attachment and then we have the hatred but all these if it wasn’t for the self-cherishing we wouldn’t have the desire and the hatred and so it’s like a king and two prime ministers. Khensur Rinpoche was saying, you know, essentially can say that the king is the leader. He’s the one who’s behind it all, but it’s the prime ministers that do all the work.
So they do the running around and do the actual carrying out of the activities and so although we have the ignorance which is like the king causing it all, we’ve got these other two the desire and hatred hatred which are really harming us and in particular desire is a really harmful thing because if we could get rid of the desire or the self centered attachment then we wouldn’t have hatred either. It’s because of having desire and attachment towards our own self centered happiness that we also have anger and frustration and so on. So we need to see how all of these things grow out of having this self-cherishing attitude. If we didn’t have self-cherishing in the first place then we wouldn’t have this attachment to happiness and all the other problems. So we can analyze in this way and see how these things arise from self-cherishing and through meditating on these things we can start to attack the different disturbing emotions but our disturbing emotions are really strong and so sometimes people find that it’s very hard to really overcome them by doing this kind of analytical meditation because it’s hard to get past the disturbing emotions to the state of focus and concentration that you need in order to really meditate effectively.
So the thought training process is really helpful here because it actually gives us a way of making use of the circumstances that might have been the thing that stimulated mental disturbance and instead of being upset instead of being agitated then we can actually make that our practice by understanding it coming to terms with it in the sense that’s explained in the thought training practice it actually becomes something that’s very helpful for our practice. So we can actually say that it’s good to encounter these kinds of problems because they enable us to overcome disturbing emotions and deal with harmful circumstances in a very powerful way. So when we do this it actually becomes a force. The thought training practice becomes a force directed against self-cherishing. So the first two lines of this text say it’s the name of the text is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons effectively striking the heart of the foe and the foe is self-cherishing and that’s our only real enemy.
If we can understand self-cherishing to be our real enemy then we’ll understand that there isn’t any other real enemy and when we manage to overcome self-cherishing within ourselves then we don’t have any external enemies. Everything just becomes a helper to us and so all that external forces can do to us is to give us some harm in the short term but they can’t give us long term harm and they can’t prevent us they can’t affect the way we get reborn, they can’t affect our karmic tendencies but they’re only acting as the agent for our own previous karma so really the harm comes from within ourselves and not from the external enemies and this all comes from self-cherishing and it’s been self-cherishing has been doing this to us since beginningless time and it’ll keep on doing it if we continue to protect our self-cherishing and regard it as a friend which we have been doing since beginningless time and, as long as we don’t recognize self-cherishing we can’t put a stop to it. So if we can recognize self-cherishing as being the real enemy then we can, gradually put a stop to it.
Questions? So Here we are with this text so last week, we were about to start on stanza twenty eight. Now, who hasn’t had a turn at reading the so you haven’t Jennifer. Sorry. Where can I go, sir Jennifer?
Well, not not recently. Okay. Yes. Mhmm. Alright.
Thanks. Does anybody particularly relate to that one? Anybody have a particular you’re you’re grinning like any experiences you wanna tell us about? Oh, right. Uh-huh.
Yeah. So we’ll have Particularly done the study. Yes. I suppose you could relate it to other forms of study as well. Yes.
If you’re having problems with anything that you want to do it relates to some form of negative karma, particularly when we experience difficulty in studying the Dharma, it’s due to lack of respect for Dharma teachings. This is more like the results, yes, according to the cause rather than the tendency. The tendency would be to keep on doing the same things like throwing your Dharma books around and sitting on them and so on and thinking it didn’t matter. And even if people told you that it wasn’t a good thing to do, you wouldn’t listen listen to them and that kind of thing you know. But yes it’s a kind of related result.
Khensur Rinpoche said Gungthangpa translated that as result according with the cause. Anyway, be going through that’ll come up a bit later on, so I’ll go into that a bit. I won’t worry now. So it mentioned yes. So yeah anyway I’ve had a when I studied this first I related pretty strongly to that myself because I’ve had a lot of problems in that direction and in fact at one stage I couldn’t study anything that was really scholarly.
I couldn’t study Lorig, Mind and Awareness and all those things. Just had to absent myself from those kinds of teachings and I used to feel a bit bad about it because I thought that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be studying all these things and learning them. But it would make me feel absolutely sick to have to, sit there and think about it. So, I mean, I mean that literally, you know, that I somehow didn’t have the karma to be in those teachings so I would really get sick.
Still happens but at least I can do some study. So anyway, it’s been yes sometimes you just have a you can be fortunate enough to receive teachings and to be in there but to really get it into your head to understand it can be a real struggle so these sorts of things are the karmic results from these kinds of actions that we’ve done before in our previous lives of disrespecting the disrespecting the text that the Dharma books are written on so it’s interesting to know that because we often have troubles studying particularly studying Dharma teachings and this can be a bit of surprise to some people who are actually quite clever normally and feel that they don’t normally have a lot of trouble studying and still when they come to study Dharma material they often find that they simply can’t take it in at all. It can be very very hard to absorb and they wonder why that is. So this is the explanation that in previous lifetimes we’ve shown disrespect for the books and in fact the Tibetan lay people who couldn’t read and write used like to show respect to the books in different forms so as to create the sort of karma that would help them in future lives to understand it.
So they would for instance pay somebody to read the sutras out loud in their house or something like that and there’s different things that they would do or people would pay to get books printed. That’s another way that’s very good for accumulating merit with the scriptures And just studying just studying the scriptures, if you studied them before then it becomes a lot easier next lifetime. So this is really important. You you find that some of the monks at the monasteries would be able to really understand a lot of things very well and others would have more trouble. And even, you know, yourself you’re gonna have some sort of experiences at certain things you’ll study and read it all just seems to be like coming clear to you or something that you’ve learned before and you think it’s just sort of being, you know, that you knew it all along and it’s just sort of being brought to the front of your mind.
And other things just seem incredibly hard and you think, I’ll never get around this. And it’s probably because we’ve studied some of these things before and not others. Maybe somebody’s had that experience. That’s right. Yes.
Some things you might have to go over and over again. Yes. Yes. Oh, that always happens. Yeah.
I always think you’ve got it and then you find that that’s only one level and then you have to go deeper and deeper but you know sometimes you find that something just seems like you come along to a Dharma teaching particularly when you first go along to the Dharma teachings and you might have been along to other spiritual teachings and didn’t really connect with them and then you go along to a particular teaching maybe know Tibetan Buddhism or something and when you hear those teachings being expressed it’s just like oh yes, somehow I somewhere deep inside myself I knew all this and yet I didn’t know it because I would have been living my life better sort of thing but still it makes some sort of connection that when you hear it it just all hangs together. Yes, as some other aspects of the teachings, you know, you just really have to work hard to make them hang together and that’s good you haven’t put in that that work before. Yes. Oh yes, yes. So there was one story of this young, particularly young Rinpoche’s usual the young Tulku’s usually learn that the monks have to memorize at the monasteries.
And the the text that they’ve learned before in their previous lives, the young Tulku’s managed to memorize very, very quickly. It’s just like they have to reacquaint themselves with it really and the young Tulkus will sort of go through pages and pages in a day while the other monks, little monks are just learning a few verses and so they really very quickly get a whole text. And there was one when I was there, Yongdzin Rinpoche, he’s quite grown up now, but when I was there he was just a little boy at Kopan and he one night we walked past where he was staying you could hear him talking in his sleep and somebody said oh he’s debating in his sleep. So he’d been studying the debating topics in the class not long before and apparently he just sort of so caught up with all that it was all sort of coming back to him and he was doing it in his sleep. Some of us debating isn’t so familiar that we could do it in our sleep.
Quite the opposite. We might find it very hard to assimilate even some very basic teachings. So this is really a sign of what people have been studying before and particularly the teachings on emptiness can be very difficult to some people and other other people so some people when they hear the teachings on emptiness they just think oh this is all too much and they just don’t really go for it at all and other people just feel an incredible sort of gravitation towards magnetism towards that sort of topic, you know, even if it’s difficult to understand at first, really feel that there’s something there and they they feel an incredible fascination by the topic and they just can’t wait until they learn more about it. So this would be a sign of that person having put a considerable amount of effort into studying the topic before. So it’s good to do these things and also make prayers and dedications to be able to understand these topics in the future.
Geshe-la Ngawang Drakpa was saying that in order to fully grasp a topic we need to have three stages of study and of course you find this in the graduated path texts in I think it’s explained in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. First there’s listening, second thinking and third meditating. So we have to do all three of these different steps in order to get a good firm understanding of the teachings and if we just study on the intellectual level only that isn’t enough because it just remains on the intellectual level and it’s not really going to change our life if it only remains on the intellectual level so we have to let it make an impact at a deeper level so for that reason we have to understand it thoroughly and meditate on it so what we need to put some time into analytical meditation and I think actually in this context it really refers to focusing meditation. So single pointed meditation, the analytical meditation really is considered to be an aspect of studying, checking meditation and when you actually then having thoroughly checked out the topic then come to a conclusion about the topic come to a certain understanding and focus single pointedly as much as you have the capacity to do to remain focused on that conclusion and as your meditation prowess increases then you can spend more time on that actual single pointed focusing.
You don’t need to spend as much time on the analysis and this is what makes the the topic very very powerful. For instance, it might be the the preciousness of the human rebirth. So as long as we’re thinking about intellectually checking it over, this can be very effective up to a certain degree that to really imprint it on the consciousness of the practitioner who has the ability to stay in single point of concentration for a while will develop that conclusion which is like having found a diamond in a garbage heap and dwells on that for a while and it really becomes something that becomes a part of that person. So on the other hand, we might think it’s a good idea to just meditate all the time. We might just want to sit and practice mindfulness of the breathing or some some other kind of meditation that feels good and that we feel that our meditation is going well and we feel that study is difficult.
For some people it’s like that, for some people meditation comes more easily than studying and for some people study comes more easily than meditation so we all need to do both and if you’re the person who would like to meditate a lot you may need to make sure that you do a good practice of study because without having study then there’s not an understanding of what we’re trying to do with the meditation and it won’t really get us anywhere if we’re not meditating with a good understanding of the philosophical background to what we’re doing so we have to have both aspects like two legs, walking with two legs you know you can’t get very far just hopping along. So according to our situation and whichever one might be a little bit more powerful than the other for us. So we need to do these sorts of practices according to our situation however much time we’ve got however much opportunity we have to listen to teachings and so on. Some people have more opportunity to spend more time on these things than others according to their situation in life but it’s we should try to make time for this in our lives and then if our efforts meet obstacles that’s something that’s only to be expected because for sure we’ve been doing all sorts of negative karmas in our previous lifetimes and we’ve been slack and lazy in our past lifetimes if not in this one.
So if we hadn’t if we’d been perfect practitioners in our previous lifetimes then we’d be enlightened already. So we should think that it’s perfectly natural that we’re going to encounter obstacles and that our Dharma progress isn’t always going to go smoothly and we shouldn’t be sort of shocked or surprised when this happens. So we shouldn’t feel that there’s something terribly wrong with ourselves. We just have to expect these kinds of things and when they come along just realize that this is natural. So what we have to do is just continue to make a steady effort and particularly if you’re trying to understand emptiness that really requires a very big collection of merit to understand emptiness thoroughly and you’ll probably encounter a lot of obstacles trying to understand emptiness.
Compared to other things you might think that other things have come to you easily so you might not have had to put out so much effort you might not have met so many obstacles with other things such as for instance trying to earn a living some people find that they can earn a living very easily they get good jobs they get well paid are appreciated at their place of work and so on and they don’t of they don’t seem to encounter a lot of obstacles in getting that situation together and then when they come to study, particularly studying the topic of emptiness, they suddenly find that they encounter all sorts of difficulties or perhaps trying to meditate they encounter all sorts of difficulties. So this is a time when we have to be prepared to just keep up a steady practice and not expect to get everything all at once. Take a long term view and see that whatever we’re doing now is going to bring results in future lives. We won’t necessarily see big results in the short term. We’re not doing it as long as a short term thing.
We’re not doing it for the short benefits we’re doing it for the long term benefits and if we can just take this long term view and be patient and steady in our practice then we’ll be definitely going ahead even though even though you can’t see what’s happening it’s really doing something and it’s creating cause it’s building up this energy that’s going to bring result in future lifetimes. So we shouldn’t get frustrated by our shortcomings because this is just something that isn’t going to be any shortcomings any sort of lack of ability to understand and so on that we have at present. It’s not really an essential part of ourselves, but it’s just this obstacle coming up because of our negative karma and if we keep on then we’ll eventually get past it and we’ll eventually get the understanding that we’re looking for. So does anybody want to say anything? No?
Good news. Yes, that’s a good news. So there’s bad news and good news. So, we can actually use these difficulties to help us as it says we can remember that these things are a result of our negative karmas and that makes us understand the necessity of avoiding these kinds of negative karmas again and so we have to particularly avoid being slack and careless about our Dharma studies, giving up too easily or being distracted by pleasures and so on too easily and instead continue to make this steady effort and that’s really what’s creating the cause to be able to achieve what we want to in the future lives and that makes sense really doesn’t it because really whatever we want in life if it’s if it’s something that that’s worth working for then we have to make a steady effort you can’t most You can’t just by making a brief burst of effort. You usually have to lay a long term plan and keep on working towards it gradually.
Determining to not be easily discouraged but instead to continue to make a steady effort. We also do this practice of Tonglen so we think that we’re not the only beings in this situation. There are many people who are trying to understand the Dharma and who are having difficulties of various sorts of understanding because they have a similar sort of karma. So we think that we can take on this karma for the sake of these other beings. Instead of feeling how bad it is to meet these obstacles we think how wonderful it would be if by having this problem ourselves we were able to take it off others and so this is just an imaginative practice but it’s a very important practice to do because it really hits our self-cherishing and so most of you would have had this explanation of how we actually do the Tonglen practice with the breath taking it off.
Does anybody not know about that? I think you all know about the practice don’t you? There’s nobody here who hasn’t encountered that so you just take breathe breathe in the problems this particular problem from these other beings and put it on your own self-cherishing and send out your good karma and happiness and Dharma understanding to these other beings. So we’ll just do little bit of that practice now. Breathing in difficulties of understanding, breathing out all the happiness realizations and understanding intelligent understanding of the Dharma.
Next stanza. Would excuse me. Would you like to read it? Thirty what is it? Twenty nine.
Alright. Alright. So if you fall asleep while you’re meditating or studying, that’s what’s behind it all. So So it’s a little bit similar to the previous verse. Some sort of problems that we encounter while we’re doing our Dharma practice and it’s really emphasizing the importance of treating these symbolic Dharma objects properly.
So by showing respect to the Dharma texts we create cause for understanding and by treating them disrespectfully it has the opposite result. I think actually I got onto that in the last verse when I was supposed to be talking more about it — I was looking ahead, I was looking at the wrong verse but anyway yes there’s it’s always very very strongly emphasized how respectfully we should treat the Dharma texts and we might think that they’re just pieces of paper with some marks on them made with black ink but they symbolically represent the speech of Buddha and the words that they contain are the words of Buddha or of the great pandits who followed Buddha. And so they represent the living tradition of the teaching and they are the tools for our practice towards enlightenment. The books are always held to be the most important among the symbolic representations of the of the Three Jewels of refuge the speech of Buddha is considered to be the most important and always placed in the highest place so we always if we have books on our altar we never place the books in a lower position than the the Buddha statues or other things on the altar but for instance if you had two shelves you would put the books on the top shelf and then the statues and things would have to go lower and you should never for instance use a Dharma book has something to prop up a Buddha statue or something like that so this is because it’s the speech that does anybody remember why it’s the speech that we have the most regard for?
Yes. Why do we hold the the Dharma to be more the the speech of the Buddha to be more important than the Buddha’s body and mind. Yes. So the the reason we actually give the highest regard to the speech over the body and mind of the Buddha is the the speech is the one that the one that gave us that helps us the most so if we’d had Buddha’s body his physical form appear in the world but not not teaching then we wouldn’t have got much benefit from it and his attaining enlightenment of mind wouldn’t have given us much benefit at all if we hadn’t received the speech and some Buddhas don’t teach they just appear in a particular world so the beings can see them and make connection with them and make some offerings and so on and in that way accumulate merit but they don’t teach so those beings only get a limited amount of benefit from that whereas in the fortunate world where the Buddhas teach then it’s really very great because we’re able to learn the whole path and follow it and attain liberation and enlightenment. Oh, it’s a bit more straightforward than that.
Yes. It’s the it’s the communication of the which which causes things to happen. Yes. Yes. Yes.
So in actual fact when when it comes to refer to respecting Dharma teachings. Yes, so anything that carries the words of Buddha, any sort of anything that has Dharma words on it, if it’s just a few letters, for instance, if it’s an envelope addressed to Buddha house, all of these things should be treated respectfully and disposed of if they need to be disposed of in a suitable way. What we should not do is dump the material. In Tibet they didn’t have terribly much printed matter so they put it in caves and places like that but for us that’s not a practical proposition so the Lamas say that we can burn it and while we’re burning it we should recite the mantra Om Ah Hum all the time the Dharma material is burning and even ordinary papers with ordinary printed words we’re told to treat them with respect and this is terribly hard in our society because everything’s got printing on it even you know the plastic bags and things that you buy food in at the supermarket is all covered in printing and if you’re not supposed to throw printed matter into the garbage then what do we do with these plastic bags?
So it’s really difficult but at least you can try to do what you can. So shouldn’t just throw even newspapers and things or ordinary things into the into the ordinary dirty garbage. So it’s alright to recycle them or to use them as mulch on the garden. Not dharma material, but just ordinary printed material. So direct dharma material should be burned and other stuff like newspapers and so on you can recycle.
That’s okay. That’s fine. Or if you can recycle it, you can use it as mulch or something but you shouldn’t just apparently throw it in the garbage bin with other stuff. It can be very difficult sometimes. Some stuff you can’t recycle so you just have to try to work it out as best you can.
But anyway this is the advice we have to avoid creating the wrong sort of karma with printed matter. Yes. You can burn it in a fireplace or you you can do yeah. Usually, you can have a little you don’t have to do it in a big container. You can do it quietly and discreetly with a small fire in your backyard, and people aren’t going to notice it or make much fuss.
You know? But well, they might think it’s a barbecue. But yes, an indoor fireplace is always a suitable solution for those who have them and in Adelaide there’s plenty of those generally. On our home, standing for the Buddha’s body, speech, mind. So yes.
So we shouldn’t step over down the books or put them under our seats or put other things on top of them. So this is something that we have to try to be careful about. And another thing that we need to be careful about too is when we tell other people not to do these things we have to be careful how we do it because apparently there’s been some complaints about people in Buddha House, you know, all the students sort of jumping on people who do these things. They see somebody for instance putting their Dharma books on their floor and they say don’t do that or something like that you know I make them feel bad so we have to be careful how we tell other people about it but on the other hand when you get used to always respecting your Dharma books it’s terribly difficult to just sit around and let somebody else put their Dharma books on the floor and do all these things without saying something to them, and of course you know that it’s not good for their karmic imprints so you do feel that you must say something to them so trying to do it in as pleasant a way as possible is something that we have to work on.
So Yes. Certainly. Yeah. I mean, it’s like a misuse of, you know, the the benefits of printing. So they didn’t have these problems in Tibet and ancient India where these rules came from.
The printing was mainly used for Dharma material and not much used for other things. Well, I did mention that it’s yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Well, yes, as I said, you know, it’s difficult nowadays and you just have to try to work it out the best, but it is important to try because if you don’t try it’s like breaking this accumulating this kind of karma. I think as long as you’re really making a sincere effort then you’re not going to be accumulating this kind of karma whereas if you start saying oh it’s so difficult so I’m going to not worry about it I’m just going to throw it around and do what I like then you are going to be accumulating this kind of karma because the letters of the alphabet are the means by which the reason for this is because these letters are the means by which we acquire wisdom, dharma wisdom. And so even the letters themselves in a sense become sacred and even the fact that they’ve been cheapened in our modern society, there’s still that connection there. Tricky one, we don’t want to have I mean the reason why we’re having this problem in this life and the reason why we do find ourselves in a sea of garbage printed matter that’s very hard for us to deal with is because we’ve misused it in the past.
This is a karmic result in itself. If we’ve misused printed matter in the past that’s why we’re having to experience a problem in relating to it now. That’s right.