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Guided Meditation: Blessing of Just Doing the Practice; Dharmette: Four Inspirational Blessings (5 of 5) Inspirational Blessings - Kim Allen

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

Guided Meditation: Blessing of Just Doing the Practice

Good day to all of you. For those of you who have been here for a few minutes and those that are just joining now, just settling in, welcome. We will go ahead and get started.

Find a posture for meditation. Maybe take a long, slow, deep breath, and slowly let it out. Just connect with being here, with your intention to do this sitting together. Close your eyes if it is comfortable to do so—that is encouraged—and just tune in to the sense of the body in the sitting posture, the meditation posture. Invite whatever ease is available to you right now in the body. Often there is more available than we think.

We can deliberately bring attention to areas that we tend to habitually hold and just soften. Softening the muscles of the face, around the eyes, around the forehead, the jaw, and all the little muscles on the scalp. Relax the eyes in the eye sockets, and then lower the attention down into the body. Often we keep our energy up high, so have a feeling of settling down into the shoulder area, chest, and back. Relaxing the arms.

On the in-breath, allow the back to straighten in a relaxed way. I find as the muscles of my back release, it actually wants to go upward, as if I were holding it in a slumped position. It takes effort to slump. Often the belly, down into the hips and the legs, and all the way to the feet, allowing the body to take the form of simply being here, however that looks and feels to you right now. There may be pain or tiredness in the body, and that is okay too; that is just part of the present moment, part of what we are present for.

I am going to invite just one brief reflection to bring in today, and that is to turn the attention deliberately to something that is inspiring or motivating for you related to your practice. Why do you practice? Why are we sitting? It could be just right now, today, or it could be something in the bigger picture, a larger, longer-term motivation. Whatever feels right is fine. Something that is somewhat inspiring. I know someone who imagines that by sitting, they are walking in the footsteps of the Buddha, doing what he did to walk the path to Awakening. Or it could be as simple as, "I am calming down so I can go to work with a good mindset today." Let that sense of what matters to you infuse your being in some way, perhaps breathing it in or just opening the mind to it. See what that does in the body.

Now, letting that deliberate reflection go and turning to practice. For today, I will invite you to tune into experience in some way that works for you. Do you usually use the breath, the body, an open kind of awareness, or metta¹? Sensing what practice will be most beneficial right now. I do recommend choosing something kind of simple, not one with a lot of steps that you go through. Perhaps the breath. If you are unsure, just settle on the breath.

The other invitation is to consider bringing in the inclination of mind that what you are doing in this simple practice is planting good seeds for the future. It is planting seeds for the very thing that is motivating and inspiring. There may not be an obvious connection between feeling the sensations of the breath right now and something larger for your life, but I am going to invite the trust that there is. The simple goodness of doing this practice does move us toward our deepest aspirations.

Sometimes we can move into a heaviness or obligation about practice—"got to do this"—or another extreme is that we grasp onto practice—"going to achieve something through doing this." In a totally different space is simply doing it out of its pure goodness and the inspiration, and really eventually knowledge, that it does move us in a good direction. There is a kind of blessing associated with just doing the practice simply. And we will feel that.

If the mind begins to slip away from practice, from the present moment, simply retune, realign. If it slips into doing too much or doing too little, re-evoke that sense of simple goodness and joy in just doing the practice. Just being here, knowing that it is the best thing to do with this moment.

Return to simplicity and the deep rest that is possible with a heart that is simple. Regardless of what is happening in the body, the mind, or the external world, there is a way that the heart can be simple, knowing that just meeting this moment is moving us along the path.

In the last few minutes of this meditation, perhaps reconnect with the body, the body in this space where you are sitting. Bringing in again the awareness of the place where you are, a sense of yourself in this meditation situated in time. There will be something after this. Just allowing the mind to bring in more normal elements of consciousness. As you do so, reconnecting with this sense of inspiration or aspiration, and the simple blessing of just doing the practice.

Is there a way in which being in touch with that simplicity and that truthfulness about your own spiritual practice can support you today going forward? This evening with the people that you are interacting with, with the things you need to do. If there might be challenges that are unexpected, could it be that just having some connection to this inspiration that you carry could give you more options in situations like that? It doesn't have to be something that we bring in like an identity, or that we are carrying it in a heavy way, but just maybe touching into it in our heart, even as most of our attention is on our life as it is. Only one more way that the practice supports others as well as ourselves.

Dharmette: Four Inspirational Blessings (5 of 5) Inspirational Blessings

There were only four items on our list for this week: not neglecting wisdom, preserving truth, cultivating relinquishment, and training for peace. What shall we talk about today?

Well, let's start with the story that frames the teaching where the Buddha names these four practices. It is from the Majjhima Nikaya number 140², and it features a monk named Pukkusāti³. The commentaries say that he was a king who gave up his kingdom in order to ordain and live a simple spiritual life, but even without that detail, it is an interesting story.

What it says in the sutta is that the Buddha is traveling, apparently by himself, and he asks a potter if he can spend the night in his workshop. The potter says, "It is not inconvenient for me, venerable sir, but there is a homeless one already staying there. If he agrees, then stay as long as you like." The one who is already there is Pukkusāti. So the Buddha goes to him and politely asks if it is okay to share the workshop for that night, and Pukkusāti says, "That will be fine."

Now, Pukkusāti was a follower of the Buddha, but he had never met the Buddha and he didn't recognize him. Remember, in this era there were no videos, no Zoom, no YouTube, no pictures even to look at. If you hadn't met somebody in person, you didn't know what they looked like. So they are both there at opposite ends of the potter's workshop, and the Buddha spends most of the night sitting in meditation, and Pukkusāti does that also.

The Buddha notices, and he has the thought, "Oh, this clansman conducts himself in a way that inspires confidence. Suppose I were to question him." So he asks Pukkusāti who his teacher is, and Pukkusāti says it is the Buddha. The Buddha asks him if he has ever met this person that he follows or if he would recognize him, and Pukkusāti says no. So the Buddha thinks, "Hmm, this clansman has gone forth from the home life into homelessness under me. Suppose I were to teach him the Dharma." I think it is kind of nice that the Buddha didn't try to teach him until he knew that he was a follower first; he asks that.

So then, now that he has decided, "All right, Pukkusāti is a follower, I am going to teach him the Dharma," he gives a long Dharma talk that includes the teaching on these four foundations that support an awakened person. He goes on for a long, long time. He is very detailed and he speaks quite profoundly; he is actually speaking about Nibbāna⁴ some of the time. I am imagining this now—it doesn't quite say this in the sutta—but I am imagining Pukkusāti's eyes getting bigger and bigger, and he realizes, "Oh my gosh, this is the Buddha."

When the teaching is over, he bows deeply and he says—I am paraphrasing what he says—"I am so sorry I didn't recognize you." And so then they have this nice connection. Of course, it also says that the Buddha realized that Pukkusāti had a very mature mind and could understand a teaching like that, and sure enough, he has some awakening from that.

That is the part I wanted to share, because maybe one way to read this story, or understand the relevance of this story, is that we don't always recognize the Dharma. Things come up in our practice, and we may not see what a great blessing they are. Or we may not see how they are actually the fruit of our own wholesomeness, or that they are supporting the deepening of our goodness. We don't always know what is going on in our practice while it is happening.

I want to mention then another teaching that includes these same four items, and this is the teaching that is called the "Four Inspirational Blessings," which is the title of this week's series, even though those words are not in the sutta that we are talking about. There is another Buddhist teaching where the earliest version of it we have is in Sanskrit, and then it was later translated into Tibetan, so it is still used in the Tibetan tradition. It describes what gives rise to helpful or wholesome actions in our lives—that is what the teaching is about—and it calls those things that give rise to helpful actions in our lives the "Four Inspirational Blessings." They are: the blessing of Truth, the blessing of Letting Go, the blessing of utter Peace, and the blessing of Wisdom.

When I heard that teaching, something tripped in my mind and I kept lingering with it. Then I realized, oh, that is the same set of four from the Pali Canon, from Majjhima Nikaya 140. We talked about these in a different order—I have talked about them in the order they are in MN 140, which is Wisdom, Truth, Letting Go, and Peace. Here they have just taken Wisdom and stuck it on the end: Truth, Letting Go, Peace, and Wisdom. But it is the same list.

This other teaching is about things that give rise to helpful or wholesome actions in our lives, and so they are called blessings. Seeing how this list of four has persisted across Buddhist history, even when they are given a somewhat different context, gives me some real inspiration and respect for this set of four. For me, this says it is an important teaching.

In my own practice, I have considered these four quite deeply. I remember one retreat where I just wrote down the phrases: "Not neglect wisdom," "Preserve truth," "Cultivate relinquishment," and "Train for peace." I put it out on the table where I could see it regularly, and I just let them infuse the retreat and deepen on their own. I found that in so many cases, one or the other of them was really relevant or was coming up.

Returning to Pukkusāti in the Pali story, and the fact that he didn't recognize the Buddha: We may not recognize certain aspects of the Dharma until we have already experienced them. So maybe there is one more blessing, which is the blessing of just doing the practice. Just doing it. We just do it sincerely as best we can, and someday we may find ourselves in the presence of the Buddha. We discover that he is right there sharing the potter's workshop with us, very close by.

How did these four speak to your practice? Or how are they living in you after talking through them this week, doing practices that relate to them or invoke each one? It is not that there needs to be any huge, profound realization or shift, but just an invitation to let them keep living in your heart, and to trust that whichever one sort of sticks in your mind, that is probably the one that is important for you right now. You don't have to figure it out; you don't even have to understand exactly how it is all working. Part of the beauty and trust of the path is that the mind is attuned to what it needs, and that things will self-correct over time and new things will come in at the right time.

This path somehow moves between activity and passivity—the good side of both of those. Sometimes we need to do things, and sometimes it is better if we don't. So just check in among these four: Truth, Letting Go, Peace, and Wisdom. Which one is speaking to you at this moment?

It feels complete. Thank you for this week, and may your practice continue to evolve in a beautiful way. Just keep sitting in the Potter's Workshop. Thank you.