This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Circles of Goodwill; Poems of the Nuns (5 of 5) Practicing with Friendship. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Circles of Goodwill; Dharmette: Poems of the Nuns (5 of 5) Practicing with Friendship - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 16, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to this meditation on Friday. There's a little story from the ancient text with the teachings of the Buddha where the Buddha talks about his own experience of going off to practice on retreat before he was enlightened. There were no retreat centers back then, so he was going into the forest. At the end of this teaching, he says he still goes into the forest to practice, even now that he's fully awakened. Some people might think that the Buddha does so because, in fact, he's not awakened fully and he needs to keep practicing. But it's not that way; he is fully awakened. He goes into the forest to practice for two reasons: for his own ease and well-being, and to be an example.

To be an encouragement, or what he actually says is out of compassion or care for future generations. This idea that the Buddha would go and meditate because he wants future generations to meditate—meaning us, to a great extent—we're continuing something the Buddha started. Without the Buddha starting his teaching, starting his own practice, becoming awakened, and teaching, there would be no Buddhism. This particular gathering and the teachings that we have would not exist in the way we know it now. It survives down through the generations because from time to time there are people like the Buddha who, out of their love, their care, their friendship, their companionship, are saying, "Meditate. It's good to meditate. It's for your own benefit and the benefit of the world to meditate." Go on retreat, go on a short retreat—a short retreat right now from your home on YouTube.

This idea that there are people in the world whose warmth, friendship, and care—maybe not thinking about each of you individually, they don't know you, maybe—but they're there around you, extended with this wish for others including you to please meditate. It's good. The call, the instructions, the suggestion—the thing that strikes me is that it's being offered with friendship, with friendliness, with goodwill. Not assertion, not demand, not expectation, but just out of a genuine kindness and care, compassion, a warmth. A warmth, perhaps, in sharing our common humanity and the challenges of it, and how to meet those challenges here, meditating.

Guided Meditation: Circles of Goodwill

For today in this meditation, I'd like to suggest, if this is available to you, that you meditate content, or happy, or inspired, or touched by the fact that this man, this teacher from 2,500 years ago, and many people down through the ages, and many people in the modern world—me, right now—who out of care, out of love, out of inspiration, out of wanting to address the suffering of this world, are in a supportive way saying, "Hey, we're with you. Please meditate. Let's meditate together. You're not doing it alone."

And maybe you, in your own way, your own example of meditating, are setting an example for the future. You'll come to the point where you recognize you're doing it for yourself, for your own ease and well-being, and also you're doing it to support future generations. The simplicity of your dedication and action of meditating, independent of how well you think you're meditating. You're meditating with a circle of support, and you are part of the circle to support future generations. May that idea, that image, support you to have a kind of inspired warmth or goodwill for being with yourself, being with your breath, being with your body, being here and now in this meditation. With that, the rest of this meditation will be silent.

As we come to the end of this sitting, imagine if you will that from the point of view, from the perspective of sitting quietly and calmly, that you can gaze upon the world kindly. That you can gaze upon the world with goodwill. And that for these few minutes, if you can, not be troubled by the world, because you have something phenomenally wonderful to offer, something very much needed in this troubled world: to offer your kindness, your goodwill, your care. To be able to accompany the world with good will, maybe so that it spreads into the world and into future generations—the human capacity for mettā¹, for kindness, for care.

May all beings know that others wish them to be happy. May all beings know that others wish them to be safe. May all beings know that there are people who wish them peace. May all beings know that there are people who wish them freedom. And may those people be us. May we go into the world wishing happiness and safety, peace and freedom. And may we contribute to that possibility.

Thank you all. And thank you for maybe your patience with the various technical difficulties we have with all the electronics we have here, but I think now we're set for the rest of the morning.

Dharmette: Poems of the Nuns (5 of 5) Practicing with Friendship

In this fifth talk, I'm finishing the series on the poems of the Elder Nuns, the poems that are preserved that are attributed to the first generations. I say it in plural because it's often said to be the first generation of female disciples of the Buddha, but I think they were probably composed over a longer period of time, maybe several hundred years. So, those first generations. Today, I want to begin by reading a little bit more from the introductory words I've written about these poems that I've translated, and then I'll read some of the poems that, for me, touch the warmth and friendliness and support with which the ancient nuns provided themselves or experienced that allowed them to do their practice.

The enlightened women who are featured in the Therīgāthā² represent the first generations of female Buddhists who contributed to establishing the spiritual foundation for succeeding generations of Buddhists of all genders. With few other surviving records of the first Buddhist women, the Therīgāthā provides an invaluable window into the lives and religious experience of these pioneers. Prior to becoming nuns, many had been wives and mothers. Some were widows, some were mothers who had had children, and one was a widow who had lost both her children, Patacara³. A few of the nuns had been prostitutes and courtesans. Some had been poor, others had been wealthy daughters of royalty and high-ranking families. Some were old and weak, others were young in the prime of their lives. Two had already been contemplative renunciants before encountering the Buddhist teachings.

No matter what their background, most of these women attained the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path. In fact, the attainment of full spiritual liberation is a predominant theme of the Therīgāthā. The importance of this experience, popularly known in English as Enlightenment, is evidenced by the 40 different synonyms and descriptive words used to describe it. The most frequently used are words having to do with freedom—that is, words that can be translated into English as being freed, well-freed, released, liberated, fully released, emancipated, set free, attaining liberation, and being untied, unfettered.

For many of the women in the Therīgāthā, being a nun included valued connections with other nuns. They had more senior nuns as their teachers to receive teachings. Venerable Uttama and an unnamed nun approach a nun they trust. Venerable Vira, when she had no control of her mind, respectfully questioned a fellow nun for teachings. Venerable Canda refers to the kindness of Venerable Patacara, allowing her to go forth as a nun. Thirty nuns, who seem to be a group practicing together, express their lifelong honoring and respect to Venerable Patacara for her liberating teachings. Venerable Sundari refers to her monastic teacher as "the light of the Sangha" and states that she has attained awakening in dependence on her teacher. Having left domestic and family life behind, these nuns had community with each other.

This idea of warmth, kindness, and mutual respect of practicing together is one of the characteristics that I see when I read these texts. This stands out most prominently in the first chapter. The book is organized in chapters with increasingly longer verses or poems, and the first chapter is poems that are of one verse. One of the characteristics of these poems is that there's a wordplay in the verse itself that plays with the meaning of the nun's name. But through these, literally in the poem, the woman is addressed directly in the second person. The question is, who's addressing the nun? The most common theory is she's speaking to herself in the second person. Another theory is that it's actually the Buddha speaking to her. The third theory is that it's a fellow nun who's teaching or encouraging her. But whatever it is, to me, there's a feeling of this warmth and care and kindness that comes through it.

It starts from the first verse, with a woman, an Elder Nun who has attained peace from all passion, from all lust. And then she's told: "Sleep at ease, dear Elder, wrapped in the robe you made." Just encouraging her, "Sleep well, now you've done your work, you've become free. So now sleep at ease." Very simple, ordinary, but an expression of warmth and kindness.

The second poem addresses Mutta, whose name means "freed": "Mutta, be freed from bondage, as the moon from an eclipse. With a mind set free, enjoy your food debt-free." The idea of enjoying your food debt-free for a monastic is that they receive alms; they only eat what's given to them by the laity. So they're a little bit in debt; they have something to return, and what they return is their practice. They practice to the point of enlightenment, at which case we can enjoy debt-free.

Then there's Punna, which means "full": "Punna, be full of good states, like the moon on a full moon night. Full with insight, shatter the mass of darkness." So, "Please practice," but for me, there's this warmth that's playing with her name. "Your name is freed, be freed, please."

Here is one whose name is Mitta. Mitta means "friend": "Mitta, having gone forth out of faith, delight in friends by cultivating skillful states. Attain peace from bondage, from attachment." So here again is explicit: delight in friends, the spiritual friendships that we can have.

Here, this woman's name is Bhadda, and that means "blessing": "Bhadda, having gone forth out of faith, delight in blessings by cultivating skillful states. Attain unsurpassed peace from bondage."

Here's another one whose name is Mutta, "freed," and now she's speaking directly for herself: "Well freed, very well freed I am, freed from three crooked things: from mortar, pestle, and crooked husband. I am freed from birth and death. What leads to becoming has been pulled out." Marriage and family life, being a wife and mother, was not necessarily a good thing in the ancient world. It was a lot of work, and sometimes it was kind of like servitude, very different from our understanding of marriage in the modern world. So she's celebrating being freed from maybe a very difficult husband.

Here's one, this one doesn't necessarily have a direct wordplay with her name, but Uttara means "supreme": "Controlled in body, speech, and mind, having pulled out craving at its root, I've become calm, released, quenched."

And this woman's name is Dhamma: "Weak, leaning on a stick, wandering for alms, limbs trembling." You know, there was no medicine that we have today, no Social Security, no retirement homes. People who were monastics maybe had a monastery to live in, but they still had to go out and get food every day. "So, weak, leaning on a stick, wandering for alms, limbs trembling, I fell to the ground right here. In seeing the drawbacks of the body, my mind was liberated." So here, old age, challenges, not strong enough to stand up for herself—something about falling, she could let go, maybe not depend on the body, maybe find an alternative even in her old age, and something in her mind got liberated.

This one is another woman who— I'll skip it for the sake of time. Here's another woman, it's almost the same, there's two verses, now we're in chapter two. Her name is Citta, and Citta in this context means shining, bright, or beautiful. It seems to refer to the idea of a monastic turning over her bowl. A monastic can go out with their bowl for food, but if they turn over their bowl like this, they can't receive any offerings. It's like refusing something, "no more of that." In 2007, when the monastics in Burma stood up against the government, they walked through the streets with their bowls turned up so that the government officials, the military, couldn't make merit by making offerings to the monks. It was their protest. She refers to this in her poem, perhaps as a kind of metaphor. A number of these things might be metaphors. In this poem, she also talks about ascending the mountain, and I don't know about the ancient world, but in some later Buddhism, ascending the mountain is also kind of going up on the path of practice to the top.

"Though quite emaciated, sick and weak, I, walking leaning on a stick, have ascended the mountain. Having laid down my upper robe, turning over my bowl and resting on a rock, the mass of darkness shattered." Here, turning over the bowl, I think is a metaphor for no longer taking in the bait of the world, the temptations of the world. No longer maybe taking in or receiving her own attachments, her own clinging, her own delusions. No more. Something inside of her turned over, and some people experience enlightenment with a kind of feeling like something flips in the mind, something switches very quickly. Something may be turns over, the bowl and the mind turn over, and all the attachments drain out.

There's one more here, time to stop. Her name is Sama, meaning peaceful. "Not attaining mental peace, and with no control of my mind, four or five times I left my hut. But then, eight nights ago, craving was abolished by being devoted to vigilance in regard to all suffering states. By being mindful of all suffering states, I reached the destruction of craving and accomplished the Buddha's teachings."

These poems, over and over again, show that these women in the ancient world could accomplish what the Buddha taught. You can also. You can also practice. And you have the warmth of community. Even the ones you don't know. The nuns of the ancient world, they practiced for you as well. They're there. The ancient nun teachers are still here—their momentum, their memory, through these ancient texts. What survives of them, through these verses, they're saying you can do it. Practice, and come and rest at ease. Find your peace, find your freedom.

Announcements

Thank you very much. One announcement is that I'll be gone for the next two weeks. I'm going back to Norway for a little bit. My parents died in the last couple of years, and I'm bringing some of their ashes back home, so it'll be a touching visit. I will be back in two weeks. Next week, Nikki Mirpuri will speak, and the following week, Ying Chen. Two wonderful teachers, and you'll be in good hands. Thank you.