This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Ethics Bathing; Poems of the Nuns (1 of 5) Punna and Ethics. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Ethics Bathing; Dharmette: Poems of the Nuns (1 of 5) Punna and Ethics - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 12, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello, and on this Monday, I'm happy to be sitting here and considering some Dharma topics to share with you.

Sometimes when people sit down to meditate, they're supported by the idea that how lucky they are to not have to do anything for a few moments. Maybe life is filled with responsibilities, things to do, places to go, and for a few minutes to be able to sit and not be so busy. It can be a phenomenal thing just to appreciate that, to take that in. The appreciation of that can be enough for some people to settle them and help them just relax and let go of everything.

I'd like to offer you another understanding of sitting down to meditate that I'm hoping might have a similar effect on you, maybe even a better effect. Similar to the idea of forest bathing, which is a common enough idea now that comes from Japan, is this idea that we spend time in the forest to be nourished by the atmosphere of the forest. All the different qualities that come through the forest, we can almost take in as a bath that nourishes us. So meditation can be an ethics bath.

A very traditional idea in Buddhism is to appreciate being ethical when we are. When we're sitting and meditating, even if you live an unethical life at other times and are maybe even troubled by that, when you sit down to meditate, it's a time when we are ethical. We are adhering, whether we know it or not, to the five ethical precepts. While we're meditating, we're not killing anyone, hurting anyone. We're not stealing, we're not engaged in sexual misconduct, we're not lying to others, at least, and we're not taking intoxicants.

I think most people don't orient themselves that way when they meditate. If a person is unethical, they might be carrying with them the guilt, the heaviness, the fear, preoccupation, and the self-criticism that that might entail. But the encouragement in Buddhism is to appreciate that for these minutes, we are living a good life. My teacher in Burma, and a number of teachers in Asia, loved to talk about how sitting in meditation fulfilled the precepts.

So as we sit today, you might consider your good fortune that for these minutes you are being ethical, even if it's just a pause in a more difficult life. Consider yourself so fortunate that for these minutes, you're not going to actively, intentionally be involved in harming anyone. Let that be a forest bathing. There's something that's possible to take in and appreciate and feel some joy or something that's very settling. Ah, this is good.

Guided Meditation: Ethics Bathing

So, to assume a meditation posture. One way I like to think of the posture in meditation—whether it's walking, standing, sitting, or lying down—is, one way or the other, to assume a posture of dignity, or a posture that you're allowed to exist. You're allowed to show up, you're allowed to be here in a full way. And certainly, there's no need for these minutes to diminish yourself.

Gently closing your eyes and taking some long, slow, deep breaths to appreciate this moment, this time, this opportunity to be here and present. And to become settled with the good fortune of being able to meditate, of spending these minutes being ethical, even if you're not intending to.

Relaxing as you exhale.

Relaxing the body.

Relaxing the heart.

Relaxing the mind.

Letting your breathing be normal, simple, and relaxing the thinking mind. Relaxing that part of the mind that has any force in it to be involved in the past or the future, to keep you in your thoughts. Relaxing the thinking mind.

And like forest bathing, where we're not thinking and analyzing and justifying the effect that the forest has on all our senses—we just take it in as a path—maybe there's a way for you to do ethics bathing where there's no need to justify it or question it. Just the radical simplicity of sitting meditating fulfills the precepts. And to let that bathe you, let that fill you, let that settle something in you.

Settling any doubts or criticism you have of yourself. We are phenomenally lucky to have these minutes of not being involved in any intentional forms of harm.

Breathing, sitting with our ethics for these minutes, and appreciating that. Bathing in that.

Be careful as you meditate that you're not allowing yourself to bathe in harmful thoughts, in thinking that does not have a good effect on you. Relax the thinking mind.

And instead, bathe in the absence of unethical behavior.

As we come to the end of this sitting, to be able to better appreciate the ethics, the good ethics of sitting and meditating, it's good to remember or to know that the five precepts, as ethical precepts, concern behavior—how we behave, the actions that we do with body and speech.

It's easy enough to conclude that some of our thoughts might be unethical. Maybe we harm ourselves with them, but that's not seen so much as an ethical issue as an issue of the lack of wisdom. For behavior, we want to change the behavior to stop harming. For thoughts in the mind, we want to see it with wisdom. And one way to see with wisdom is to see, understand, have confidence that at least our behavior is not causing harm.

And may it be that this meditation session reveals to us how to live with ethical behavior, how ethical behavior nourishes us, and maybe nourishes others. And maybe that behavior supports us then to cultivate wisdom about ourselves.

May all beings benefit from our ethical behavior. May all beings be happier, safer, more peaceful, and freer that we behave according to the five precepts. And meditation teaches us that there's freedom for us in not picking up and engaging in unethical behavior. It's not so much we have to do something; it's mostly we don't do something.

May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Poems of the Nuns (1 of 5) Punna and Ethics

So hello on this Monday, and I'd like to do a new series, a new theme for this week and maybe for the first days of next week as well. One of the activities I've been involved in for this month of August is continuing with the ongoing project I have of translating and then writing commentary or introduction to the ancient verses of the nuns. In Pali, it's called the Therigatha.¹ People say it might be the earliest religious poetry that we know by women. It's reported to be the poetry of the direct disciples of the Buddha, though I think some of them were written later, maybe by nuns in the centuries after the Buddha as well.

It's a remarkable collection of Buddhist poems for many reasons. One of them is the tremendous confidence of these women. They describe some of the tremendous difficulties that they go through—life difficulties, the death of their children, the death of their family, and the challenges of abusive marriages and all kinds of challenges that they have. And somehow they make their way through it. They practice, they become nuns, and they confidently live in the world, and they confidently live recognizing and proclaiming their full awakening. That full awakening is possible. This text is a celebration of people who are celebrating not only their potential for awakening but their actual attainment of it. And it has greater value when contrasted with the very difficult lives some of them lived before they became nuns.

So I've translated this some years ago, and it's been sitting on the shelf for some time, and now I'm writing introductions to it. So I hope at some point to be able to publish it as a book. But I delight in some of these poems, and so I wanted to share some of them with you and talk with you about them. This one that I'll read, you'll see that there's a connection to the guided meditation we just did, for those of you who were there for it.

There's nothing in the poem that says the woman is a nun. It's a story from earlier in her life, and probably she became a nun later. It's also not clear that she's the one who wrote it. But it's a dialogue between a young woman named Punna, and Punna is a servant of a mistress who is maybe quite abusive, or seemingly quite ready to punish her for not doing her job well. As a servant, what she does is she's a water carrier. There was no running water, and so if there was a need for a household, especially a wealthy household, to have a lot of water, it was someone's job to go down to the river and pick up the water and carry it back. And maybe that had to happen many times during the day.

It's not clear how far she had to carry it, and in this poem, she's going down to the river at a time of the year when the water is quite cold. And even then, she had to step into the cold, cold water to scoop up the cold water and carry it back. She runs into a Brahman,² who is down there. A Brahman is a kind of priest of the Brahmanical religion, and one of the central rituals of Brahman priests is to go down to sacred rivers and bathe. The ritual bathing in the river was understood to be a purification, that all the bad karma that they had built up, somehow if you go into a sacred river and bathe in it, you can purify yourself of that bad karma. So that's kind of the background for this poem.

So she's speaking to this Brahman. She says:

I am a water carrier. When it is cold, I always have to go down to get water. I am terrified of punishment from my mistress. I am terrified of angry words. But Brahman, what do you fear that you always go down to the water, with limbs trembling, experiencing sharp cold?

The Brahman replies to her, somewhat politely:

Certainly, lady Punna, you know the answer to what you're asking. I am doing wholesome Karma and preventing the consequences of evil deeds. Whether young or old, whoever does evil karma is freed of evil karma through purification by water.

Then Punna replies to the Brahman, and this is where the poem becomes for me quite delightful, and an expression of a woman of confidence speaking to a Brahman. She's a servant woman, and in ancient India there was quite a status differentiation. More than just status, the servants were often considered almost impure by the nature of being servants and shouldn't interact with Brahmans who are trying to be pure. But she speaks confidently and clearly and directly to this man, this Brahman. So these are her words. He just told her what he's doing, going to the river to purify his evil actions. She says:

What know-nothing told a know-nothing that one is freed of evil karma through purification in water? Frogs and turtles, water snakes, crocodiles, and other water dwellers—will they go to heaven? Those who butcher sheep and pigs, those who fish and hunt, thieves, executioners, and others who do evil—would they also be freed of evil karma through purification in water?

If this river carries away the evil you have done, then it would also carry away your good merit, and you would then be out of both. What you do that brings you fear, that brings you down to the water for purification, Brahman, don't do it then. Cold water won't shock your skin.

I love this verse: "just don't do it." So whatever you need to be purified from, if you do that, you feel you have to be purified because of doing this evil thing—don't do it. Then you don't have to purify yourself in the river. And the Brahman replies, because now he's seeing the light:

I entered a bad path. You've led me to the Noble Path, dear lady. I offer you my purification cloak.

And she says:

Keep it for yourself. I do not want the cloak. If you fear suffering, if you dislike suffering, don't do evil actions, either openly or secretly. If you've done or will do an evil action, there will be no liberation, even if you run away.

If you fear suffering, if you dislike suffering, go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma,³ and the Sangha,⁴ and keep the ethical precepts. This will be for your benefit.

And the Brahman says:

I go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. I will keep the ethical precepts. This will be for my benefit. Formerly, I was a descendant of the God Brahma—this is a belief of Brahmans, that they are direct descendants of this highest God in heaven—but today I have become a true Brahman. I am now a person of wisdom, learning, and the three knowledges. Now I have truly bathed.

He's saying now he didn't become a real Brahman by learning the three Brahmanical knowledges and a lot of Brahmanical learning, and he didn't become a true Brahman by bathing in the river physically, but by going for refuge and living ethically. And that was the message of Punna to the Brahman: living ethically and not giving cause to needing to do purification. This is the way. And this is the way to be bathed. He understands that, and he takes his bathing in the river that he does and metaphorically applies this idea to bathing in ethics.

So it's a wonderful little story, maybe a little fable, but I just love this directness in which Punna talks to him: "just don't do it." And may that inspire all of you to bathe in the good ethics of "don't do it." Don't be involved in breaking the precepts, and nourish yourself, feed yourself, bathe yourself in your ethical behavior.

Partly because we live in a Western culture that's so deeply affected by Freud and Jung and psychotherapy, where we keep looking and studying and analyzing ourselves so much internally, it's almost second nature for people in the West sometimes to then apply the precepts to their minds, to what they're thinking, and find that they're unethical there too. I think that isn't the orientation of Buddhism. The ethics has to do with the behavior in the world we do and speak. And there's not looking at our mind in this kind of unethical way; we're rather looking at it through the lens of wisdom and sometimes recognizing that maybe we're a bit foolish in the mind, there's not enough wisdom there sometimes. The issue there is to become wise about our thoughts, our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and rather than undermining ourselves or criticizing ourselves or having cause to feel like we're a bad person just because of the thoughts we have. They might be foolish thoughts, but let's become wise, and then we can also bathe in wisdom.

So this is the first poem and commentary about it for this week, and I hope that you enjoy and appreciate these poems that I have given myself over to for a good number of years. I've been living in these poems and thinking about them, translating them. So thank you very much.