Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 30-minute teaching on The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, Ven Sanghy Khandro addresses obstacles that arise in sustained practice: dullness in study, sleepiness in meditation, the pull of worldly desire. She reframes these not as personal failures but as ripening karma, and shows how to transform them through tonglen. A major theme is pacing—she stresses the common mistake of practicing too hard, burning out (developing “lung,” a wind disorder in Tibetan medicine), and the need for gentle, steady effort instead. She explains how rough patches in practice, though disheartening, mark genuine progress and purification of past karma. For practitioners already struggling with obstacles in their own practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 The wheel of sharp weapons.mp3
UUID: 99090fde-94f9-486e-8983-9b9b20c3db77
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: 29.7 minutes
Words: ~3,115
One reason why we need to be careful with newspapers too because as well as having articles on crime and corruption and murders and war and so on. They also have quite a lot of mention of different religious things including nowadays more and more quite often you get mention of Buddhism in one form or another and of course quite a lot about other religions so, it’s something that, without intending to could be, something of a Dharma nature that you wouldn’t want to, treat with disrespect. Sometimes I, pull these things apart and tear them out so that I can dispose of them with my Dharma materials, but you don’t always spot them. Anyway, so we have this situation here if we find that we get dull and sleepy when we try to study then we can use this as a so the way we use this in the thought training is to use this situation to understand the karmic cause that brought about this result and because we don’t want to have this problem with dullness and sleepiness then we determine to watch our actions in future and try to avoid creating any more of this kind of karma and we do the Tonglen practice thinking of how many others experience this sort of problem of dullness and sleepiness and sinking that we’re experiencing it for them so we’ll just do that practice now for a minute meditating on that.
Next. You’ve got your glasses today, Betty, so you might as well could you? So what did you you’re right with that one. Here’s I’m running strongly towards delusion. Yeah.
So, yes. So when our mind runs strongly towards delusions and worldly activities, so this could be either sleeping all the time or attachment to desire objects. In general. Well, you know, including when we’re supposed to be meditating. Yes, particularly when we’re supposed to be doing, I mean particularly in a sense that distracts us from Dharma activities so of course you know worldly activities doesn’t mean that everything you do to be activity unless it’s formal meditation and so on but because you do have to do certain practical things to take care of your life and so on and but if you’re all your thoughts and aspirations and ambitions and so on run towards these things all the time if you feel constantly attracted towards delusion.
So as I said it could be sleeping all the time or it could be desire objects. So anyway whatever it might be so it could be something like being attached to cars or movies or whatever. So I thought maybe books. Not dharma books, other other books. Who knows about that because she has to drive me up to the library library every so often.
Yes. Or it could be rivalry and quarrelsomeness and sort of so there’s like different kinds of delusions because sleeping all the time would be from ignorance and attachment to cars and movies and things would be from desire and rivalry and quarrelsomeness would be a case of the delusion of anger and hatred. Of these things anyway they’re a result of not having meditated sufficiently in the topics of the graduated path from the small scope and intermediate scope. So if you’ve been studying your graduated path teachings you know that we have to base the Mahāyāna topics of the great scope and developing love and compassion and so on. That practice has to be based on the practices which are practiced in common with the beings of the small and medium scope and that includes the very basic practices like understanding impermanence and understanding suffering and if we don’t understand all these things we don’t have a strong practice.
We won’t have a strong practice because without these things we’ve got no foundation for the other things like trying to cultivate love and compassion to all sentient beings. You’re just sitting there thinking oh you know love love love but it doesn’t mean anything. So we have to understand these topics and so if we find that we’re getting caught up in delusion all the time this is because because of having in our previous lifetimes neglected these kinds of meditations but actually it also seems to be something that comes from this life because also if we meditate on these things thoroughly in this lifetime and understand them then it’s going to help us very much with these delusions. But in any case if you find that it’s a very strong impulse and that your meditations perhaps aren’t very readily overcoming these attractions towards delusion then it’s because you have followed those delusions in previous lifetimes and not done the remedies for the remedy to them. So we know what the remedy is and particularly relating to the last stanza we need to have acquired a good knowledge through study as it was explained before in the previous stanza.
So then if we’ve done good study and gained good understanding that way then we can have effective meditation that will really change our mind and if we practice these things now then we might have difficulty in if we’ve got a very strong imprint of delusion from our previous lifetimes we can understand that comes from having run after these things all the time and not practiced the antidote overcoming them. So if we practice these things now we can understand that we’re laying down cause to not have these kinds of problems in the future lifetimes so it’ll get easier and easier. Even in this lifetime we can expect to see things getting easier as we go along if we put in the practice definitely in our future lifetimes will be easier so we can then find that in our Dharma practice that we can be directed with joyful single mindedness towards Dharma practice rather than finding something that seems like something that we feel reluctant to do when we feel that we’d rather be following all these delusions the Dharma practice will seem the most attractive and interesting thing for us and that is the result that will come about in future lives from just making a steady effort not forcing ourselves too much that wouldn’t be skillful but just setting yourself a reasonable goal and then being steady about it this is what is skillful practice Any questions about this?
Yes, so it’s like what I was saying before about the tulkus, you know how their study comes easily so meditation and all these other things and just just having the mind going in a virtuous direction naturally are things that don’t come easily to us now but the more we keep up a steady practice the more it’s going to come easily in the future. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that’s that’s not skillful. That’s the mistake that quite a lot of us make when we first start off Dharma practice.
If you’re particularly enthusiastic, you often want to do everything all at once. And of course, it’s easy to fall into because the Dharma teachings are so fascinating. You know, there’s so many interesting things you can do and you read all these teachings about gaining single point of concentration and gaining physical and mental pliancy and the tantric meditations and the deity practices and so on and it’s all so know great and then you know you might think you want to study all the philosophical teachings and understand lo rig and understand emptiness and all of this and they’re all extremely valuable goals you know extremely precious things to do and the point is that if you go at it too hard you just end up sort of exhausting yourself and you can get burned out and it makes it that much harder to carry on so you have to learn to phase yourself and I think that’s one of the hardest things to do really because when you’re all enthused about it you want to do you want to do it too yes you want to do it all all yesterday and then you end up getting lung you know you get sort of like a wind disorder in the heart or various other different kinds of physical problems and you really can’t do anything and then you don’t want to do anything at all and you just want to sit around watching television lying back in an armchair and you know drinking soft drinks all day long or whatever or what your particular delusion might be.
Which can be sometimes good, you know. I have a friend who says you just need to veg out and it’s quite true, so vegging out occasionally isn’t necessarily contradictory to Dharma practice. It can be actually part of your Dharma practice to allow yourself to veg out or to do some sort of agreeable activity as a sort of refreshment for your mind or so on. So all of these things are part of your Dharma practice, you’re understanding that you’re doing these things with that thought in mind to help yourself along and you might get eventually to the stage where you don’t need to have so many diversions but in the meantime you have to understand what your body and mind need and they say we have to treat our mind like a child if you try to force it too hard then it’s just going to rebel against you or to be not able to produce so what we have to do is sort of encourage ourselves along gently. So that was number thirty, and we’ll do a little meditation on that so we can determine not to not to be slack in regard to Meditating on the small medium scopes or the topics related to basic Dharma topics and gaining aversion to the negative karmas and that would lead to lower rebirth and also to the whole of cyclic existence and bringing about within ourselves a very powerful desire to attain liberation from cyclic existence through these meditations of the small and medium scopes so we determined to put proper effort into these basic teachings as well as into the practices of the great scope.
And thinking of the difficulties that come into our life and into our practice through having neglected these practices in the past we determine we then think of how many others are experiencing these kinds of sufferings and we can take on the suffering of the others, of the other Dharma practitioners and think that we’re experiencing this situation and relieve the others of it at the same time. The text extends to verse thirty one. Mhmm. And so this verse refers to both spiritual and worldly endeavors and according to our karma we might have problems with one of those areas or we might have problems with both of those areas. So some people find that in worldly life I mentioned this earlier actually everything goes like a dream so they don’t seem to have any problems and they get on well in life and then they expect their Dharma practice to be similar but what happens instead they find that as soon as they really start trying to practice Dharma earnestly they come across all sorts of obstacles and I see a few nods.
This is actually related to purification when you start doing Dharma practice and purifying your negative karmas. Often as your negative karmas are purified they will also ripen a little and you have to experience a little result in this lifetime. It doesn’t mention particularly this practice but it’s one of the ways that we’re taught to think when we have these difficulties that we’re actually able to rejoice about these difficulties because they are a ripening and experiencing in a lesser form of some other serious some serious karma which might have taken us to some sort of really bad or some sort of very bad result if we’d not been doing this purification practice. So particularly if you’re doing purification practice such as Vajrasattva practice or doing thirty five Buddhas or something every day or doing it quite intensively then you find these things tend to happen. But in any case when you try to practice Dharma it takes a lot of merit to get results in your Dharma practice.
It takes a lot more merit than it does to get worldly success so people who are expecting their Dharma practice to come easily similarly to their worldly life up to that point then instead of that they find endless obstacles. So that can seem a bit frustrating. So sometimes you get the impression that in your spiritual life that you’re not getting anywhere and you just seem to be stuck or even going backwards. So for instance if you’re trying to work on the mind, work on controlling the mind, calming the mind then it becomes very very difficult and it seems like you’re going backwards and on the surface there might even be something in this point of view in that for a time your mind might become very uncontrolled emotions your emotions might become uncontrolled we might feel that we’re becoming crazy or we might feel very very discouraged and depressed or be afflicted with very strong attraction to worldly objects that would be something that’s a very strong distraction to us in some way or another and so these things because of this kind of karma that we’re experiencing from having ignored cause and effect in previous lifetimes.
So any comments? So that’s in Dharma practice and in worldly life there could be lack of success in worldly things this can take many different forms such as failing to make a profit in business or if you’re a farmer then not being able to harvest good crops so all of these things also in the worldly side of life are due to cause and effect. There’s a cause for all of these results and they result from our old non virtuous actions and particularly repeated ones, ones that we perform over and over again. If we perform a similar action over and over again for instance frequently killing animals then you’re going to have result, this kind of experience. And because these imprints become very strong, very powerful, it takes a long time to wear them out of our systems.
So this is something that Geshe-la was talking about at the course about how we have these various different kinds of karmic results to experience and some of these results are similar to the causes that we created. So if we’ve been creating repetitive actions in particular and accumulating some strong karma in that regard then we have to experience a kind of result that’s similar to the action we did to others and if we’re if for instance if we’ve in the past stolen or destroyed other people’s wealth then in this lifetime we can expect to have the same thing happen to us that we will fail to prosper. These all come as a result of the actions that we’ve done in our past lifetimes. We’ve all done heaps of these actions before because it goes way back. It’s not just one life but it’s countless different lifetimes that these things have been done and we’ve tended to do the same sorts of things again and again, life after life and to have very strong non virtuous imprints so we have to expect that we’re going to get these kinds of setbacks and we shouldn’t feel that there’s something wrong with ourselves if we do have these setbacks if we do seem to be sometimes struggling and not getting anywhere so we shouldn’t think that there’s something wrong with ourselves that we’re not good enough that we can’t do the practice or we shouldn’t think that there’s something wrong with the teachings that they don’t work.
Instead we just recognize that this is something that was inevitable that’s bound to happen and if we’ve been doing appropriate practices for the level that we’re at then we shouldn’t worry, shouldn’t feel inclined to give up but just continue steadily cultivating patience and determination in keeping up this daily practice and just eventually working through this rough patch. So in actual fact people have been practicing Dharma well seems to be the universal experience that when they’re experiencing the rough patches that they say afterwards that it’s the rough patches that they really learn from. It seems to follow the cycle you seem to have a sort of really smooth phase where everything goes well you don’t have major problems and your practice seems to go fairly steadily and so on and then for some reason that you can’t sometimes you can see some sort of external cause such as for instance getting sick but other times it just seems to come from within yourself that for some reason things become very difficult and for a while you can feel really overwhelmed with the difficulty of the whole thing and in the middle of it you can’t see any good in it but when you’ve worked through it you can actually see that you’ve worked through some sort of important you’ve reached some new level of understanding that you’ve perhaps left behind some sort of particular level of delusion or something through this experience so in actual fact these situations can be very helpful to us.
And if we’re if we have the thought training practice and we can use this situation by understanding the karmic cause behind it and making a resolution not to belittle or ignore cause and effect in future in other words karma, karmic cause and effect but we can endure whatever hardships might come along rather than taking the easy way out and doing things which we know are karmically undesirable we can endure the hardships and follow the right actions which are necessary for our practice and we can make this determination and then we also take on the sufferings of other beings who are experiencing this particular kind of problem. So we’ll do that meditation now. So it’s past nine. Will I do another verse or just finish off now? Finish off now.
Yeah. Okay. So we can just well, does anybody have anything to say before we finish? Any comments, questions or stories? Sorry, I shouldn’t wearing this.
So we can dedicate our merits with the prayers on page five. May I quickly become an awakened spirit?