This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Kindness in Silence; Udayi Sutta (4 of 5) Grounded in Kindness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Kindness in Silence; Dharmette: Udayi Sutta (4 of 5) Grounded in Kindness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 27, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Kindness in Silence

Hello everyone and welcome. Today the plan is to mostly have a silent meditation after very simply evoking a particular quality to include in your meditation, which I'll mostly just name. But since people are still arriving, I'll take one minute to say that I'll be here tomorrow, and then for the next four weeks I won't be here on YouTube. I'll be away and we have wonderful teachers coming to fill in while I'm gone. For three weeks, I'll be teaching this whole Insight approach to practice in the wilderness, camping and backpacking with people, and then the fourth week I'll be backpacking with my wife. So that's where I'll be, and you'll be really well attended by some of the teachers we've had before. I'm very happy that they're filling in.

So for this sitting, I want to evoke a particular quality that I'm not going to say much about or guide you into the meditation, but rather let each of you, if you're interested, find your own way, because each of you will have a different understanding of this concept, a different approach to it, a different way of living with it. But may it be that you keep this close—this concept, this quality, this human potential that we all have—that you keep it close in this meditation. It's a guide for the meditation, it's a reference point, it's an orientation through which to know and see and be mindful.

So with that, the quality is kindness, friendliness, goodwill, or perhaps positive regard. To gaze upon, to have one's gaze be a gaze of positive regard. Kindness for oneself, kindness for one's experience. Friendliness as almost a synonym of mindfulness. Goodwill, to be mindful through the lens of a positive regard.

So that is the orientation for this sitting, and I will leave it at that and leave you to settle in and find your way with these. I consider them extremely profound qualities, qualities that mature on this path of liberation. These are not kindergarten Buddhist qualities; these actually are the fruition of this practice.

As we come to the end of this sitting, once again tap into your capacity for kindness, for friendliness, for goodwill and positive regard. Perhaps thinking of anyone in the world that you have these feelings for, even if it's a pet or someone you don't know personally. I know some people think of some great spiritual leader. Remind yourself that you do have the capacity for kindness or friendliness at times, in certain contexts. Maybe when you're with a small child, maybe when you're at the bedside of someone who's dying, maybe you stop on the side of the road for someone who's been in an accident.

We all have some capacity for goodwill, positive regard, care, kindness, each person in their own way. It doesn't have to look the way other people have it. To have the occasion of meditation be a time, in the safety and quiet of meditation, at the very end of meditation, to spend a few moments reflecting, gazing, bringing to mind all beings everywhere. Or, said differently, bring up that kindness and see if for a few moments it can be there, directed to all beings, all people. A regular tapping into a universal goodwill.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Udayi Sutta (4 of 5) Grounded in Kindness

So hello and welcome to this fourth talk having to do with the Udayi Sutta.¹ I'll read it again to you, as I have at the beginning of each of these talks. The Buddha, talking to his disciple Ananda, his attendant monk:

It is not easy, Ananda, to teach the Dhamma² to others. The Dhamma should be taught to others when five qualities are established within oneself. Which five?

The Dhamma should be taught to others thinking, "I will speak step by step." The Dhamma should be taught to others thinking, "I will speak for practical reasons. I will speak with reasons." The Dhamma should be taught to others thinking, "I will speak grounded in kindness." The Dhamma should be taught to others thinking, "I will not speak for material reward." The Dhamma should be taught to others thinking, "I will speak without wounding myself or others."

As I've been saying, I believe that this teaching that applies to teaching the Dhamma, we can apply this to any way that we speak. Or if you're a teacher of any kind, it can be applied to teaching in any way. And so here today, I want to talk about, on this list, the third piece, which is kindness.

The word here is probably a Pāli word many of you don't know. It's anuddayā (a-n-u-d-d-a-y-a). Dayā also means kindness, so anu means with, or following, or directing kindness. Some people will have tried different ways because kindness is often associated with mettā.³ One of the challenges, when there are all these different words in Pāli that are related, having to do with our positive social emotions... and so some people have translated anuddayā as compassion, some people as tender kindness, sympathy. It's one of the wonderful, delightful challenges of translating Pāli into English, finding English words for these positive emotions. So for here, it's kindness today, anuddayā.⁴

And so this positive regard of others, and the reference point for me, a very important reference point for all the positive social care emotions—loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, kindness, friendliness, all these—is the way, when I started practicing Buddhism in my early 20s (I think I was 20 when I started), that these emotions of positive regard kind of found me. They arose as part of the meditation practice. They were not something that I tried to make happen. It wasn't something I was told, "You should do these things." They seemed to arise in the course of the practice.

Since I was practicing Zen at the beginning, there was a big emphasis on emptiness. And certainly in Zen, we were not supposed to be, in Zen meditation, trying to cultivate or develop anything. It was really kind of just sitting completely with the truth, with no gaining idea, just with the present moment in a full, accepting, a thoroughgoing acceptance of the present moment. And in that, there arose in me compassion. First, I think it was because I suffered so much that this thorough acceptance of the present moment—accepting suffering, not fighting it, not struggling against it, not trying to fix it—it made room for something to soften in me. It made room for something new to appear that I never had before, or not had in any kind of significant way. And there was the arising of compassion. Because it didn't seem to have a source in me, it just seemed to arise in the emptiness that was there with this thoroughgoing acceptance of the present moment, I came to the conclusion that emptiness, in a certain way, is not exactly synonymous with compassion, but emptiness contains compassion, something like that. There's a natural function that arises that doesn't have to have a reason exactly, or it's not engineered or made to happen.

And then as the practice continued to develop over the years, and with Vipassanā,⁵ the same thing happened with loving-kindness, with mettā. Then it's evolved more with this more profound thing, I think, or related thing called anukampā.⁶ I translate it as care. Friendliness has become more and more something that I was oriented towards.

I say all this to talk about that the social care, the social positive emotions we have for others, they are part of the fruition of practice, part of the fruit of doing this practice itself. Because a lot of what the practice is about is getting out of the way of what wants to arise in us naturally. Now, it can feel very natural to be angry and hostile. It can be very natural to be greedy and want things and be afraid. And of course, in some ways it is natural. It's a part of our being. But it's this, as I said last few weeks, it's a very different operating system that is operating within us. And it's the operating system which, in a sense, is more synthetic. It's more something that the engineering mind, the constructing mind, the survival mind kind of operates under, and tends to have a strong orientation towards the contraction of tension, of stress, which in all kinds of ways becomes the focal point or the organizing principle for our more attached ideas of self, of me, myself, and mine.

Sometimes the very feeling we have of "am-ness," "I am," in a certain way, is really the place where the subtlest little tension, pressure, gathering together, coagulation of these kind of muscles and tensions in the mind come together. And it feels like just what is, is just an "am-ness," "I am," but it's actually a manifestation of very subtle, or maybe not so subtle, tension. And that tension then gives rise to emotions that arise out of this kind of constructed part of the self, the survival part. As that survival part is not needing to operate so much, as we relax all the tension we have, it gives room for something else to arise. That's something that doesn't seem to be connected to self, is not synthetic, it's not an artifact of the mind's making things up, making ideas up of self, others, and futures and pasts and all kinds of things. And so that I call the more naturalistic. Part of this naturalistic movement within us is these social care emotions, these positive regard emotions.

One of the really wonderful pieces of modern psychology was the lessons many of us learned from Carl Rogers, who was an American psychologist who taught us the tremendous value of looking at people, being with people with unconditional positive regard. He did that in psychotherapy while really listening carefully to people. People really felt listened to by him because when they spoke, he would repeat back to them what they said, maybe in slightly different words. The combination of being listened to, being heard, hearing their own ideas being spoken in a little different way, and this positive regard, caring for them, allowed something to shift and change. If you can watch some of the, probably on YouTube, videos of Carl Rogers with his sessions and watch how people transform... I call it this naturalistic transformation that can happen to people when we're listened to carefully, when there's a kind regard for ourselves, when there's a kind of a presence that we get out of the way and allow people to be who they are, to be heard, to be seen, to be understood, without allowing them to harm us or harm anyone. But we step forward and hold what's there in positive regard. This is a remarkable thing.

So here in the teachings from the Udayi Sutta, the Buddha says to speak grounded in kindness. It's possible to do this, to speak with care, to speak with positive regard. And it doesn't have to be, certainly shouldn't be, saccharine, it shouldn't be forced. But a lot of it comes from making space, making room. A wonderful American theologian named Henri Nouwen⁷ talked about making "empty, friendly space to receive the stranger." So an empty space makes room for people to be who they are, but that space is friendly. And for him, it's to receive the stranger, not just our friends.

To speak grounded in kindness, this is at least the Buddha's instruction for Buddhist teachers. So may you, on this day—it's good for every day—to ground ourselves in kindness, in positive regard. But there are times when it's really difficult. And in some of those difficult times, it doesn't have to be difficult. Some of the times, those are the times when this practice of ours comes really alive. Don't succumb to despair. Don't succumb to helplessness. Don't succumb to hostility and anger. Rather, see if you can find a positive regard through which, by which, you can address the problems of this world. Kindness is not an avoidance, but it's a means that carries with it a profound message of respect and positive regard for everyone, even those people who are considered our enemies.

So thank you very much, and tomorrow will be the last in this series, and I look forward to being back here.