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Guided Meditation: The Finer Things; Dharmette: Buddha's Smile (2 of 5) Awareness of the Spiritual - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 15, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Welcome, everyone. Today we will continue where we left off yesterday. I want to give thanks to Julie and Kevin, and the other wonderful people who support these morning community gatherings from behind the scenes.

They tell me it is not too late to change the name of this week’s teaching to "The Buddha’s Smile," and I am going to double down on that today. I will even show some images of the Buddha smiling in meditation. It is interesting; for some time, I’ve noticed the Buddha’s smile in meditation and wondered to myself: What is he smiling about? What does he know? What contentment is being experienced?

In our practice and in these teachings that come down to us, things are never one-dimensional. I’ve come to understand that these representations—and I’ll show a few over the next few days—are actually an instruction. Almost any Buddha you look at in meditation is smiling. I take this to be a meditation instruction: to smile when we meditate. Outwardly, perhaps, but inwardly most certainly, there is contentment to be found. As we explored yesterday, the pleasantness and the pleasure of meditation can be leaned into, supported, and cultivated as part of the path. The Buddha’s smile in meditation points us in that direction.

Today’s focus is the second knowledge that arises in meditation, which may give rise to this kind of smile: "This meditation practice is noble and onward leading."¹

Guided Meditation: The Finer Things

Let’s bring our attention inward. I invite you to close your eyes if that is a comfortable part of the meditation for you. I like to think of bringing the attention both inward and downward—inward in a gesture toward seclusion, and downward into the body to bring our attention to the embodied aspect of the experience. The settling of the body, the weight, the slow pace, and the simplicity of the body’s experience can be places where we first rest our attention in a way that opens up to greater ease in the mind.

As we settle in today, maybe we can think about letting a smile play over our features. This can be internal or external, but it can be quite instructive to give a little smile to the features. If you ever do this in a mirror with your eyes open, you'll notice that frequently, when we smile inwardly, it doesn’t even register on our features before we crack a wide grin. There is a very gentle uplifting that, for our meditation today, can be an expression of any greater ease that comes with the practice.

Settling in with the breath, the body, and the simple knowing of experience, we can bring our attention to greater ease. The profound message of today’s teaching is that as ease in body and mind begins to arise, we notice that the meditation is noble and onward leading. The meditation itself generates a knowing that the mind likes to be oriented toward freedom.

We don’t have to create anything or make anything up. A knowledge arises all by itself—inwardly, as a beneficial side effect of the meditation—that the mind wants to be free. We can lean into this wholesome wanting to be free as a way to deepen and strengthen our practice.

We are all familiar with how the mind gets entangled. It gets caught up in things and tightens around thoughts of the future, the past, other people, or ourselves. In meditation practice, when we notice this—when we wake up to this—we bring our attention back to center. We open back up to the "here and now," knowing what is going on without adding anything, without judging, just being here.

Every time this happens, far from being a source of frustration or agitation, it is an opportunity to notice that with that return home, we can touch base with the mind’s desire to be free. This wholesome orientation toward freedom is what is meant by this second knowledge: touching in with the knowing that this meditation experience points toward freedom.

[Silence for meditation]

As we start to come to the end of this sit, let’s reorient our attention again to what we might call "the finer things." The meditation suggests that the mind wants to be free, and for that reason, it brings our attention to subtler and subtler ways of meeting experience—ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of meeting our experience.

The finer things of life, the meditation suggests, aren’t "things." We can keep tuning into this direction: an orientation toward peace, toward ease, and toward a presence in our lives that is unmediated by projection or clinging.

This orientation toward freedom is something we can bring with us into the world of interaction and our daily rounds. Yesterday, we talked about meeting experience with greater ease. Today, we can also think about meeting the world with the orientation toward freedom that meditation suggests. Who knows what that means when we meet a particular situation? That is to be discovered. Meditation provides the potential, the propensity, and the momentum.

Dharmette: Buddha's Smile (2 of 5) Awareness of the Spiritual

Welcome back, or welcome if you are just joining now. As I said as we began, I want to keep going in this vein of exploring the Buddha’s smile by bringing forward these five knowledges or understandings that emerge in meditation. These emerge as a product of the deepening of the meditation without our having to exert effort, except the effort of paying attention to our experience.

I promised that I would share some pictures of the Buddha’s smile. This is an interesting book called Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia.² It covers a period of time where there was a combination of Buddhist and Hindu imagery and iconography. Throughout here, from the little Buddha on the top of the big Buddha’s head, you can see this lovely little smile that plays over the features in meditation. Almost every image of the Buddha in meditation in this book shows this.

I encourage you to look around and notice that Buddha images frequently—not always—have this subtle "Mona Lisa smile." It can be supportive of practice to take that in and perhaps recall these five knowings that come up in meditation. As I suggested, we can take this smile as an instruction: bring a smile into your meditation. This experience and the pleasantness of it are to be enjoyed. When we enjoy it, we cultivate it, make it stronger, and enhance the propensity to move forward with that internal contentment and ease that is so useful when we meet the world.

The understanding that arises today—again, being creative with the translation—comes from a sutta where the Buddha says to cultivate the meditation practice and exert appropriate effort to deepen it. As one does so, five knowledges arise.³ The first, which we discussed yesterday, is that the pleasure in meditation is to be cultivated, not feared, as it is part of the path. Today’s knowledge is that this meditation experience is noble and onward leading.

The technical term—which I’m going to unpack in a moment—is that it is "not of the flesh" or "not of the world."⁴ I like to think of this as an awareness that the mind seeks profound relief, profound ease, and profound release. Being aware of this knowing is really useful. The meditation suggests that the mind wants to be free, and when we notice that wholesome desire, it strengthens that momentum and creates direction in our practice.

This is not a "noun" but a "verb"—a creating of momentum. It is something in the meditation that is onward leading, orienting us toward freedom again and again. Each time we return to the breath, there is an opportunity to notice that ease. The simplicity of experience and the slower pace of the body are hints that the practice leads toward peace, and that there is a desire in the mind for peace.

Yesterday, I introduced the possibly radical notion that the pleasure of meditation is to be cultivated. Today, I find myself using the language of desire—a "wholesome desire." This, too, is in the teachings. The mind’s seeking of freedom may be felt as a wanting or a desire. We can recognize, "Oh, this is a wholesome one." Because we often have the idea that desire is something to be let go of, it can be helpful to think of this orientation toward freedom as an aspiration.

In the Satipatthana Sutta⁵—the discourse on the establishing of mindfulness—there is a similar distinction between things that are noble and onward leading and things that tie us to the worldly or physical aspects of experience. It is a turning from entanglement with the world and an orientation toward the mind and the knowing that is an effortless part of our experience.

This distinction is sometimes a tricky one. I’ll mention the Pali terms sāmisa and nirāmisa⁶ because they are frequently translated in challenging ways. Sometimes they are presented as "of the flesh" and "not of the flesh," or "worldly" and "unworldly." Gil Fronsdal has sometimes talked about the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" as we refine our mindfulness. In each mindfulness practice, there is a movement from entanglement with the world to a free knowing of the phenomena of experience—a movement from entanglement with objects and "signs" toward the knowing of experience itself.

In meditation, we have the opportunity to rest in this knowing. With repeated returning, the mind becomes increasingly comfortable resting at ease in the flow of experience without grasping, entanglement, or projection. As we notice that, we develop momentum and receive this orientation toward freedom—a natural urge and aspiration toward being more awake.

I am aware that these things may seem esoteric or abstract, so I want to return to the very visceral knowing that emerges in the meditation. Even now, as I speak, it brings a smile to my features. This smile—the Buddha’s smile—comes when we acknowledge and rest in the desire of the mind to be free. It can bring great joy to our practice and our lives.

I’ll take this opportunity to dedicate the merit of our practice. May we feel these knowledges arising all by themselves as we bring our attention back to the here and now. Over time, we get rid of the frustration of "losing track." Instead, we notice that returning to the here and now feels good, and it points onward.

May we bring that momentum toward freedom into our actions and interactions today in a way that benefits others. This is a sweet thing for ourselves that generates an internal smile, but it also benefits others. Freedom is possible; meditation makes that clear. Freedom is a direction the mind moves in if we allow it and provide the conditions for it.

In closing, bring a smile to the practice. When you see a Buddha image this week, notice that smile and take it as an instruction. Share it with the idea that it benefits not just ourselves, but all beings.

May all beings know this contentment. May all beings find this path to freedom. May all beings know happiness, be free of suffering, and be free.

Thank you very much.