This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Opening to the nature within – Grounding; Dharmette: SN 22.101 Sutta overview. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided meditation: Opening to the nature within – Grounding; Dharmette: Teachings of the ancient similes (1 of 5) SN 22.101 Sutta overview - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 20, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided meditation: Opening to the nature within – Grounding

All right, good morning, good day. It's great to see the chat messages flowing in and feel a sense of connection with you all. So this week I will be with you for this 7 a.m. sit.

I want to say a few words about the theme I have in mind for this week's meditation and Dharmette. I'll speak about the Dharmette later on, but I want to offer some guiding words about the meditation this morning. Some of you may have been on the two-week retreat that just finished where we were exploring the breath. This week, I wanted to expand our meditation by exploring the overall inner dynamics or inner dimensions of our being.

The metaphor I use is as if we're exploring nature, opening to the nature within ourselves that's embodied, that involves various aspects of mind and heart. I might be using some nature metaphors for us to explore this. We'll be starting with the first quality, and that's embodied, that has a sense of grounding for us. We will build a progression over the course of the week. Hopefully, we'll be able to discover something within—this nature within ourselves.

So let's begin. I'm going to start with the sound of a bell. Riding along with the sound of a bell to arrive.

Arriving... arriving here. Opening to the felt sense of arriving here. Maybe the sense of space is palpable—the outer space and the inner space. And arriving now, this moment.

I'm reminded that in Chinese, often "here and now" has an emphatic expression: This place. This moment.

Arriving at where we are and how we are, without demanding things to be otherwise. Maybe feeling and sensing the overall sense of the body sitting, lying down, or whatever posture you're taking right now. Inviting a few long, deep breaths allows for a deeper sense of arriving and connecting with here and now. Inviting a few long, deep breaths, and as you breathe out, settle down here.

Deepening a sense of mindfulness may become a little more continuous with moment-to-moment meeting with our experience. And there may be a sense of heartfulness, whatever this word might mean to you. You don't have to figure it out. For me, there is just a sense of opening and easing up in the heart space—maybe the chest, torso—becoming available.

The momentary experiences are always available to us. Are you available to the moment? What's the felt sense of being available to you? There may be a global sense of relaxation and ease. The sense of a body resting down or resting back.

Gently turn your attention to the lower half of the body. If you're sitting, maybe feeling and sensing the pelvic floor connecting with the earth underneath, chairs, couch. And if you're lying down or standing, gently turn the attention to where the body makes contact with the earth underneath. Sensing the firmness of the bones in this body. There is an earth element in the body that is firm, solid, heavy. Like the sit bones rooted on earth.

Feeling and sensing this earthy body resting on earth, like boulders in the riverbed. What's the felt sense of the earthy body for you? You don't need to think about it. Trusting your own felt sense. Maybe it's silent. The earth element in the body is relatively steady, still, and quiet. Releasing the momentum to try to figure it out. Trusting your felt sense.

Sitting like a mountain within. There may be a sense of grounding—grounding in the earth element in the body. So fortunate that this body naturally can ground. Releasing the body to the gift of gravity. Sitting like a mountain.

[Silence]

Dharmette: Teachings of the ancient similes (1 of 5) SN 22.101 Sutta overview

So thank you everyone for your practice. I feel the kind of quiet and silence here, and it's nice. I want to offer a few words about what I was thinking about sharing this week in terms of a Dharmette.

There is a short sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya¹, the Pali Canon, that has been rather alive in me. This is SN 22.101. For those of you who are interested in looking it up, the sutta has a few very interesting similes that the Buddha used to describe some of the overarching characteristics of how we cultivate and develop various capacities and skills.

Like many of the short suttas—the Samyutta Nikaya suttas usually are rather short—they often start with quite a dramatic or emphatic statement. This sutta also started out with an emphatic statement about the destruction of the taints². Some of you may have heard this phrase, which often is related to Awakening, Liberation, ending dukkha³. Gil [Fronsdal], on this retreat that just finished, also used the word "sting"—removing of a sting in the mind that blocks us to see things clearly.

It opened up with this statement: "I say that the destruction of the taints is for one who knows and sees, not for one who does not know and does not see."

I'm going to pause, let the words settle. I'm going to read this again, just feel the effect of this statement for you: "I say that the destruction of the taints is for one who knows and sees, not for one who does not know and does not see."

I kind of feel the power of this statement. Sometimes I would get goosebumps reading it; I didn't have it today.

And then, like many of these short suttas, it follows on by saying what is it that one sees and knows that leads to this way of being. And so it is seeing the arising and passing away of the five aggregates⁴. So this week I won't talk about the five aggregates, because this is quite a teaching in its own right. I will offer just a few words about this, but focus on the cultivation and development aspect of what the sutta is talking about.

Five aggregates are ways that the Buddha is pointing at how some of these major humanly processes that are in the body, mind, and heart—that we tend to get entangled in. The Buddha is inviting us to really know and see these humanly processes in the way they are: that they are impermanent and they're not something for us to grasp or cling to.

But just knowing this logically or intellectually—it's not so hard to understand. We all know our body changes, our mind changes, and we have all these different processes constantly changing. But just knowing this doesn't always seem to take us out from our clinging to these humanly processes.

So I want to pause right now to reflect back: what is this knowing and seeing? In the meditation this morning, I was using a phrase again and again: "felt sense," or "feeling and sensing our way in." For me, this phrase often points to the aspect of dropping out of conceptual overlays, our ideas about what our experiences are, but rather letting this embody a capacity to feel and sense what's here. Maybe in fact we kind of release a lot of these layers of ideas and conceptual overlays. And yet, this kind of knowing and seeing are not always easily available to us.

I was flying home this last weekend from a training retreat and I was sitting in the airplane in the evening time. The flight was taking off and I was wearing sunglasses. After a while, I noticed just right around the wing outside the window formed this rainbow color layer. It was quite miraculous, just seeing it and being with it. It was very beautiful. I was just kind of paying attention to this for quite a long while.

And then at some point I realized, "Oh, I was wearing sunglasses." So I took my sunglasses off. Oh, it was kind of brown and gray. All of a sudden, the whole rainbow color layer just disappeared. That was a little moment of disappointment. [Laughter]

But this is kind of the way that oftentimes, without cultivation and development of our heart and mind, we can be related to our world through a lot of different kind of filters—concepts, ideas, views, beliefs that may be formed over decades or lifetimes—not realizing that we're seeing and knowing through this. And so this felt sense allows us to drop in, in a much deeper immediacy of knowing and feeling our way.

In the sutta, the Buddha went on by saying that this kind of knowing and seeing will become available through wholehearted and proper cultivation and development. Without cultivation and development, we will operate in habitual ways of relating to our experiences through these kind of filters that distort the reality.

So in this sutta, the Buddha took a turn. He did not elaborate on the five aggregates, but he pointed out how we may have to really give ourselves to cultivation and development. The cultivation and development that the Buddha points out in the sutta is the 37 Wings of Awakening⁵. Some of you would know it includes the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Four Right Efforts... dot dot dot... all the way to Seven Factors of Awakening and the Noble Eightfold Path.

So it's through this cultivation. And again, this week we're not going to elaborate on these 37 Wings of Awakening. Many of you know various aspects of this. I take it that the Buddha wasn't saying that you have to just do all of this, but there is a set of specific cultivation that we must engage in for us to begin to open up to this different way of seeing and knowing.

In fact, in the sutta the Buddha said if someone develops their mind and heart in this way—one of the 37 Wings of Awakening—even if they didn't have the wish to awaken, it will happen. Because it's the nature of this cultivation and development. It's very natural for this way of knowing and seeing that is undistorted to become accessible and available. So this is very kind of... you don't have to wish that we will destruct the taints, but instead, if we give ourselves over to the cultivation in the proper way, this will happen. That's very different from a goal or result-oriented culture.

And then in the rest of the sutta—I'll give you a teaser right now—the Buddha used three different similes to highlight some different aspects of how we cultivate. He used the simile of a chicken and eggs. The second simile is using the holding of an adze⁶, and the last simile is this rope used to anchor a ship. We'll unpack these similes for the rest of the week.

I think you have a little overview for the sutta today, and we'll end right here. So thank you everyone for your practice and sharing this precious practice space. May you all have a wonderful rest of the day.