This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Composed and Oriented; Know for Yourself (1 of 5) Intro to Kalama Sutta. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Composed and Oriented; Know for Yourself (1 of 5) Intro to Kalama Sutta

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 06, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello and welcome. For many people in daily life, our capacity for awareness and attention is pulled around left and right, up and down, by whatever we're thinking about. Our capacity to be aware in a clear way is lost, absorbed into our thoughts. The mind can be a little bit like a popcorn machine, just popping up all kinds of thoughts, or like a blender that's spinning around all kinds of ingredients. The mind might not be very still; it might be somewhat agitated. The thinking mind might be chasing after thoughts, stories, and ideas. It might be jumping around a lot between themes or involved in multiple tracks of concerns at once. I met a man once who said that he had seven tracks of different themes going on in his thought stream all the time. I never quite understood how that could be, but that's what he said.

So, one of the tasks at the beginning of meditation is to settle that, to compose oneself, to orient oneself. It's not so different from how we would do that in a lot of different settings. We would prepare ourselves physically and psychologically for some kind of activity we're going to do. If you haven't thrown a basketball into a hoop for a long time, but it seems somewhat important to do it well, you might stand at the free-throw line and take a moment or two to orient yourself, to compose yourself, to gather yourself. You'd really be there in your body, take a deep breath or two, get yourself oriented, aim toward the basket, and really engage with your whole body and your whole mind, focused on and oriented towards that basket to shoot the basketball.

It might be that you have to give a speech, and before you get on stage, you orient yourself and compose yourself in a similar kind of way. It could be some kind of artwork or craft that you're doing at home, where it's not just a matter of sitting down and starting to do it, but you would kind of orient and compose yourself.

The art of composing one's mind—so the mind becomes oriented, quieter, less scattered, less jumping around, but here to be present—is an art that is really useful and can be done throughout the day. The more you become skilled at that, rather than giving free rein to the thinking mind to just pull us left and right, up and down, and to be lost in those currents of concerns, we kind of regain ourselves fully when we get composed and settled here, and the thinking mind doesn't predominate.

I'm also thinking about someone who does something like Aikido or a martial art, where maybe they would first get oriented, compose themselves, perhaps sitting on their knees with their hands on their thighs, and kind of gathering themselves together to be here for this activity.

Guided Meditation: Composed and Oriented (link)

So in that spirit, to begin by knowing what you're going to do is not let your thinking mind do whatever it wants to do. And hopefully, it comes along. But you're going to gather yourself, orient yourself, compose yourself to be here and now, settled. Not swept away in the thinking mind. Not that you're going to stop it, but not swept away. You're going to be oriented in the body, ready to be here with the body breathing.

This is why assuming the posture at the beginning of a meditation is important. Assuming a posture that is somewhat intentional, so you're kind of gathering your body so that the whole body supports being gathered, being here. So it's kind of intentional that the body is going to be composed here and now. Generally, it means if you're sitting, to sit a little bit more upright. If you're lying down, adjusting the spine and the shoulder blades, the head, in such a way that it's a little bit more alert, less casual, a little bit more intentional. So yes, I am here.

And to lower the gaze. Lowering the gaze is beginning to shift and change from a scattered mind to an oriented mind, where the thinking mind begins to settle and turn towards the present moment. Maybe gently closing your eyes and being somewhat definitive about orienting yourself to how and where you experience your breathing while you meditate.

Gently, in a relaxed way, gather yourself—your body, mind, heart—around the body's experience of breathing. And in a gentle, enjoyable way, like you're getting ready, preparing yourself, gathering yourself to throw a basketball or something, gently take some deeper, fuller breaths and exhale to let go of everything else.

And then letting your breathing return to normal. It is as if your body's experience of breathing is inviting you to be its partner, inviting you to be its companion in a dance or a walk.

Give yourself over to the experience of the body breathing. As if here, through your breathing, you're going to have a deeper encounter with yourself. You're going to listen, feel, sense deeper truths that are not accessible with a scattered, spinning, thinking mind. Here, composed, gathered, would be all you need to be your own teacher.

Being a partner, a companion to the movements of breathing, the changing sensations of breathing in your body, following the invitation to quiet the thinking mind so you're more able to sense and hear, to be available for what's deep in your experience. The path to greater stillness and peace.

From time to time during a meditation session, take care to reorient yourself or recompose yourself, to be established here. As if being mindful and aware here now is the most important thing to be doing.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, even now is a good time to compose oneself here and now again, to gather oneself together, rooted here in this place, this time. To gather oneself to be grounded in the body and your seat, to settle the thinking mind so there can be a greater focus here and now, to whatever task is at hand.

The task at the end of a sitting, if you'd like, is to consider how you've changed in the course of the meditation. Are you calmer, more grounded, more unified, settled, quieter, more open? With kindness and goodwill more accessible? Whatever way that you benefited, consider, imagine how that can be included in how you orient yourself to be with other people. To be oriented or collected in such a way that there's a respect and a care for others, a presence of mind and body that's ready to take in, invite the wholeness of another person into our attention.

And imagining how the benefits of this meditation can be used for simple benefits for others you encounter, maybe through acts of goodwill, attitudes of goodwill.

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

And may I be nourished in having goodwill for all beings that I encounter.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Know for Yourself (1 of 5) Intro to Kalama Sutta (link)

Warm greetings from the beginning of this week, Monday in Redwood City, California, at the Insight Meditation Center. I'm delighted to be here with you in this way on YouTube. The topic for this week is a particular teaching the Buddha gave. The title of the discourse is called the Discourse to the Kalamas, the Kalama Sutta.¹ This particular teaching is very much referred to and very important in Western Buddhism, maybe because it's so clearly anti-dogmatic. It's so clearly an alternative to blindly accepting religious beliefs based on external sources, where there's maybe even no real experiential evaluation or confirmation of these teachings.

What the Buddha offers in the course of it is, in a sense, how to become your own teacher. How for you to discover the ability to find what is most needed for the Dharma path, for this Buddhist spiritual path. In offering that, he offers five criteria for how you can know for yourself. These five criteria work very well for walking the Dharma path, for how to live an ethical life—a life where we live without harming self or others—and it works very well just for a basic, healthy orientation to finding a way in this difficult life that we have.

The story goes that the Buddha came to this town of the Kalamas, and there were apparently many spiritual teachers who came through town. So when the Buddha came, he was just one more spiritual teacher. The people of the town were somewhat clever and discerning. They came to the Buddha and said, "Many spiritual teachers come here, and they all teach that they have the truth and the others are wrong. How are we supposed to discover what is true? How are we supposed to discern which one of them is right and which one of them is wrong?"

In a way, this is also a modern dilemma. There are lots and lots of spiritual teachings that go on in our world—books, movies, TV shows, and YouTube, like this one here—of spiritual teachers teaching. How do you find your way with all of them? Who's right, or who has something that has integrity to it and is truthful enough that it feels right to listen?

When the Buddha answers the Kalamas, he actually doesn't answer their questions directly. He doesn't tell them who has the truth and who doesn't. He does something different. It's a little bit similar to the little folktale whose punchline is something like, "Rather than feeding people, teach them how to farm." It's beneficial to feed people, and sometimes it's essential. But if all you do is feed people, then you can make them dependent on getting fed, and they have to keep depending on others. But if you teach them how to farm, then they can grow their own food and become self-reliant. Rather than giving people money to get by, making them dependent on you, you support and train them to be able to work, and then that lasts for a lifetime.

In that kind of spirit, the Buddha turns it around. Before he offers people how to grow their own understanding of what's valuable and true as a basis for a wise life, he first makes a phenomenally powerful statement that is maybe very difficult to hear. He tells them not to rely on certain sources for the truth, for their understanding. These sources are things that people commonly take as being true. It's kind of pulling the rug from underneath a lot of the basis by which people think they know what's true.

He tells the Kalamas: Do not go by oral tradition. Do not go by what the tradition writes or speaks or says. Do not go because it belongs to a particular teaching lineage, denomination, or religion that has been passed on and has the authority of antiquity. Do not go by common talk, just because people say it's true. Do not rely on scripture, on the sacred texts in and of themselves. Do not rely on your logic. Logic can be illogical; it can lead to the wrong conclusions. Do not go by inference or intuition. Do not go by reasoning. Do not go by having thought about it yourself. Do not go because of the competence of the speaker. Right now, I'm the speaker. If some of you might think I have some competence or authority, don't rely on that. Just because it comes from someone like me doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. And do not go because this person is one's teacher. Even if we take the Buddha as our teacher, don't believe it just because the Buddha says it.

So this is a powerful statement. What's left? What's left is to know for yourself.

But many people stop reading this sutta at this moment. They hear, "The Buddha says know for yourself," but they don't stay and read the rest of it, where the Buddha offers criteria by which we could know for ourselves. A simple idea that you should know things by yourself doesn't give us the tools, the orientation, the skills, or the approach that allows us to be a good teacher for ourselves. It just kind of leaves us to our own devices, and we might have the wrong priorities or belief systems that just keep us in the world of suffering.

So we have to go on into the text to really see what the Buddha says. He's saying, "I'm going to teach you now something, and this is how you can know for yourself." Is he now becoming an authority figure? In a certain kind of way, we have to rely on these teachings that teachers like the Buddha give, not because they're doctrinally true, but rather because they might be pragmatically, practically true. The way to discover whether they're practically true is by putting them into practice. See if this offers you an orientation, a way of looking at your life, a way of considering and focusing on what's happening that allows you to move towards freedom from suffering. It allows you to go in a healthy direction rather than an unhealthy one.

In the process of it, the Buddha offers five different criteria or frames of reference by which we look at ourselves and our world. These are the things we can know for ourselves. These are the areas of life, the ways of experiencing life, that are most productive and useful to really know for yourself. And so that's what we'll talk about over these next four days: reviewing these five criteria and considering how they might be helpful for us, not as a way of accepting any teachings as being true, but rather as the things that we can learn for ourselves and become our own teacher in a way that is beneficial.

So, as a kind of homework before tomorrow, if you're interested, is to consider what sources you rely on for the truth—for what you think is spiritually true, existentially true, for how you see the world and yourselves. Where is it derived from? How do you know your beliefs that you do have? Are they traditional? Is it because of a teaching lineage or a particular teacher? Is it a common belief you grew up with? Is it in your scriptures? Is it logic, intuition, inference, or reasoning? Is it because you've thought it all out carefully for yourself? Is it because you think someone is competent or enlightened in some way, and so therefore it must be true?

Consider these things, and then tomorrow we'll start. The text is called the Kalama Sutta. Someone has put it into the chat: K-A-L-A-M-A. It should be relatively easy to find the whole text on the web if you type "Kalama Sutta." It might be a little bit more interesting to read it after I've talked about it because then you'll really understand how to get into it. But certainly, read it if you find it.

Thank you, and I'll be back here tomorrow.