This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: A Lump of Foam; The Similes of the Five Aggregates (1 of 5): Material Form. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: A Lump of Foam; Dharmette: The Simile of the Five Aggregates (1 of 5): Material form as A Lump of Foam - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 08, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good day, everyone in the IMC 7 a.m. YouTube channel. I'm happy to spend this week with you. I'd like to offer just a few orienting words for this week, and then we'll begin our meditation and the dharmette.

This week, I wanted to share some reflections on the teachings of the Five Aggregates. Many of you may have heard this before, or if this is new, receive this as a new teaching for you. In particular, this week I'd like to share a sutta that has very vivid similes that describe these Five Aggregates. The Pali¹ term is khandhas², and I think Gil Fronsdal translates this as the "five bundles." Nowadays, it's a very central teaching in the Buddha Dharma. The reason I picked out the simile is because the Buddha seems to be quite a master at using similes to point at the felt sense of these five bundles of human processes. Similes are very visual, and we can potentially sense how it is in us.

The Buddha repeatedly pointed out that these Five Aggregates, or five bundles of human processes, are to be seen, to be felt clearly, to be known clearly for what they are. They're often called the Five Clinging Aggregates, or five clinging bundles, partly because this is where the clinging force tends to get involved. So it's important to see these processes just as they are, noticing how the clinging begins to come in, and learning to soften and relax the clinging.

So in these five days, each morning in the meditation, I will try my best to evoke some felt sense of what the similes are pointing to. Then in the dharmette, I'll elaborate some more using words. You can think of this week almost as if it's a longer, 45-minute meditation, where the meditation and the talks are very connected. My invitation is that I will still be ringing the bell at the half-an-hour mark and then transition to offer more words and elaborations about each of the similes, but maybe you can sit in your meditative bubble and receive the words almost as a continuation of a guided meditation. Maybe the teaching will settle into your system in a different way. That's an invitation; you don't have to, and if it feels like you want to switch the mode, feel free to do that. But that's an option I wanted to point out at the beginning of this week.

With that, we'll go into the meditation. Today we'll be working with the first aggregate, or the first bundle, for which the Buddha used a lump of foam. He was sitting by the river Ganges and he saw big lumps of foam floating on top of the river, and he's pointing out that this is how our material body is like. Look at this carefully, attentively, and see how this is for you.

Guided Meditation: A Lump of Foam

Settling in with the sound of the bell.

Maybe taking a few moments, imagine as if you're entering into the sacred temple within this body, mind, and heart.

If it's helpful, take a few long, deep breaths as you enter. As you breathe out, settle into the inner space. Maybe there is a felt sense of coming into the body, coming into the body sitting or lying down, or whatever posture you may be taking right now.

Gently, softly inviting mind and heart to enter with the body, and maybe through the body, becoming present. Present for this moment.

Maybe the sense of Here and Now becomes more obvious, foregrounded.

Being available to the present moment. The present moment is available to us, one moment at a time.

Maybe the sound, silence, temperature on different parts of the skin, and the breath.

The movement of the breath is available to us. Are you available to this life breath happening Here and Now?

The breath may have a sense of flow to it, a rhythm, a felt sense in different parts of the body. Expanding, contracting, belly rising and falling.

Allow these movements of the breath to be received in the open, kind, soft field of knowing. The movements of the breath may permeate throughout the whole body, enlivening.

The energetic flow of the breath animates the body. You may notice the dancing sensations, vibrations, pulses.

There is a river of life. We can feel the energetic formations of this body.

What's the felt sense for you? Maybe airy, light, a little bubbly. Like a lump of foam on the floating river.

Dancing sensations, maybe like soap bubbles. A layer of soap bubbles rising and bursting away.

Resting in the immediacy of your experience. Releasing ideas, conceptual overlays. Trusting your own felt sense.

Maybe this energetic, breathing body has a kind of foamy feeling to it. The sensations ever shifting and changing.

Relaxing, softening into the sea of the sensations of this body, the breathing chi body. Maybe a sense of the ephemeral, light, hollow, so the sensations are ever arising and bursting away.

I will now ring the bell in a moment, but if you'd like to stay in your felt-sense meditative bubble, please feel free to do so.

Dharmette: The Simile of the Five Aggregates (1 of 5): Material form as A Lump of Foam

I'd like to offer some reflections about these Five Aggregates, and the first one that we started with: the simile of a lump of foam that's used to point to this felt sense of our material body, material form. I'd like to read this part of the sutta for you. Since you're in a meditative space right now, maybe this simile as offered in the sutta has a certain flavor for you.

This is in Samyutta Nikaya³ 22.95. It says that the Buddha was staying on the bank of the Ganges river. So, imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a flowing river. Now, maybe he's sitting there, surveying the scene right there, and he said this to them:

"Practitioners, suppose this Ganges River was carrying along a big lump of foam. A person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examine it carefully. And it would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. For what substance would there be in a lump of foam? In the same way, a practitioner sees and contemplates any kind of form at all—this is the material form of this body—past, future, or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, inferior or superior, near or far. They examine it carefully, and it appears to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. For what substance would there be in the material form?"

In the immediacy of our experience, we can feel and sense what this material body is. Can I imagine this lump of foam floating on a flowing river? The foams are light, hollow. They are gathered from different little pieces of foam, and they're formed, and they get dispersed as they traverse downstream. Maybe small lumps of foam grow bigger and they gather with each other, and their shapes would shift and change as they float along, and eventually they get dispersed. The image is quite evocative and vivid.

Just like this, the Buddha is pointing out, this is how our material form is. The material form that we embody or inhabit, it's like this lump of foam floating on the river of life: past and future, present, coarse or fine. This keeps on changing, as some of you may have experienced in the meditation. Sometimes I would imagine little kids when they were born, like a small lump of foam, and they grow as they become bigger physically, and then eventually they stabilize, but the physical form still keeps on changing. And eventually, they fall apart. This is what a material form is like. That's one way to relate to this simile, maybe on the larger time span of our lives.

There's also a scientific way of relating to this simile. We all know that our bodies on the cellular level are ever shifting and changing. I read recently that the mass of cells that we lose every year through normal cell death is close to the entire body weight. For me, that was kind of amazing, isn't it? We are basically a different person physically each year, but we don't feel that way. We feel like it's the same person, somehow. But the Buddha is pointing at this: look at this carefully. The way we imagine this body is based on a conceptual overlay, and we can grasp on it and create a sense of self on it. This is what the Buddha was often pointing to in this Five Aggregate teaching, or five bundles teaching. This is where we tend to exert a sense of self: "I, me, mine... my body, my thoughts, my perceptions."

But in the immediacy of our experience, we ourselves can feel and sense in this embodied experience. In our meditation, we can drop into this microscopic level of sensations and energetic feeling that's also present, that we can know for ourselves. It's like the bubbles in the foam that arise and burst away. I know for me, I've heard people reporting how in their meditative practice, when we're immersing ourselves in this energetic Chi body (the Chinese word for energy), it literally feels like the whole body melted into a thick layer of soap bubbles. The Buddha is pointing at a very felt-sense way of knowing this material body.

When we are able to experience this for ourselves directly, we can begin to question the usual ways of how we relate to this body, which usually can be a rather persistent and permanent thing. We can misappropriate it as "my body, I, me, mine... I am this." There is a real cost to this kind of misappropriation or misperception, because there can be dukkha⁴ arising out of this conceptual overlay that we put on top of the ever-changing, shifting experience. It obscures the reality, the changing nature, and we can end up grasping and clinging to things that are not actually graspable. How can we grasp the empty foam? And yet we do. We do when we're constructing this conceptual layer that we feel is more persistent or more permanent.

Through the direct experience of our material form, without the stirring of the grasping force, we have an opportunity to offer our deep respect and gratitude and care for this material form to be just what it is. So like the lumps of foam on the floating river, it's a wondrous formation. A wondrous formation of nature, coming and going, offering whatever they may offer to this world. We can have a different relationship to this material form just as it is. It's a wondrous formation that's ever-changing, has its own beauty, has its own shifting and changing sense. When we bow to this, maybe that actually offers a kind of nourishing feeling to our heart and mind, a kind of freeing feeling to our heart and mind, rather than this graspy feeling.

So my invitation for the rest of today is, as you go about the day, maybe feel and sense the "foaminess" of this material body and see what you discover. Allow a shift of perception to come forth, a shift of relationship to this form. May that all offer nourishment, care, and freedom to our heart and mind.

Thank you, everyone. We'll continue tomorrow to expand into the second aggregate. Be well, everyone, and we'll see you soon.