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The Body: Cave of Wonders - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 07, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

The Body: Cave of Wonders

Good morning. Continuing the themes from last Sunday, I want to talk more about the body and mindfulness of the body. It is surprising to me how much the Buddha emphasized the tremendous value of being present and attentive to our own bodies 2,500 years ago. There is a lot we can discover in our body; it provides tremendous support for being present and attentive to our lives and ourselves.

In these ancient teachings, the word most commonly used for "body" is Kaya¹. It has some of the same range of meanings as the English word "body," in that it doesn't just refer to a physical body but also to an assembly of things. We might talk about a "body of work" of an author, a "student body," or a "body of water." It implies that this body of ours is an assemblage of all kinds of different things coming together.

What gets even more interesting in these teachings is the understanding that the way we experience the body is variable. It is almost as if we have different bodies at different times. Some people talk about the "pain body," where the whole relationship to the body and how it feels becomes very dramatic due to pain. There is the "fear body"; when there is fear and anxiety, the physiology shifts and changes how our body feels. Perhaps part of the purpose of fear is to connect us to the body in a way that activates us to protect ourselves—to fight, hide, or do something.

There is also the "angry body." If you have ever been super-duper angry, you know the whole body can feel like it is on fire and tense. There are also things like the "bliss body," sometimes felt in meditation, where the whole experience of being in a body is saturated with a pervasive feeling of happiness or joy.

Some of these bodies we experience are an assemblage of psychological and physiological processes interacting. Sometimes this makes the body feel tight, with a narrowing focus on particular areas. At other times, the focus on the body becomes much more suffused and broad, and there is a feeling of having no sharp boundaries. The body feels porous.

In some schools of Buddhism, they talk about the Dharmakaya², or "Dharma body." People experience in meditation that their relationship to their body starts shifting. Even beginning meditators can feel this. If they are chronically tense and sit down to meditate, and their shoulders drop a millimeter or two, the experience of the body changes.

Spaciousness and Anatomy

For a while, tension that we have carried for a long time may disappear entirely in meditation. It certainly did for me. After some years of meditation, I discovered I held my belly chronically tight. When I sat down to meditate, I would relax it. That was successful for about a second, and then it would tighten up again. I didn't worry about it too much; I would just relax it a few times during the sitting and didn't make it a project. Then, after three or four years of regular practice, I noticed one day that it wasn't tightening up anymore. It just stayed relaxed the whole time. That affected my experience of the "breathing body"—how breathing felt through my body shifted because it wasn't being restricted by a tight belly.

For many years, I taught a chaplaincy training program. We would take the students to an anatomy lab at a community college. We had a wonderful professor who gave a respectful introduction to the people whose bodies were there for study. Chaplains often go into situations where dramatic things have happened to people's bodies—injury, death, and dying. They need to have some familiarity with that world to offer spiritual care with a degree of ease, or at least without being tense and reactive.

Part of chaplaincy training is discovering where you are going to be reactive before you go to offer care. It doesn't work if you are there to help someone and you faint or start grieving more than the person you are supposed to help. I remember one tough guy in the program—an inner-city guy who carried himself with a tough dialect—who was the one who fainted in the anatomy lab.

We would see these bodies used for teaching nurses and doctors. Every time we looked into a torso that had been opened up to reveal the organs, I was always surprised: there is no space in there. It is packed with kidneys, intestines, hearts, and all this stuff. I was surprised because when I sit and meditate, I have a lot of space inside. It feels really spacious. I wondered, "What is going on? Do I have tiny intestines?"

Probably it has something to do with the nerves. We don't have strong inner proprioception of the organs inside, so we aren't really aware of all that packed stuff. As I sit and meditate, it becomes more and more relaxed and open. Sometimes it feels like the inside of my body is bigger than the room—just so much space. To take that as literal truth is silly, but it speaks to a powerful spatial awareness we have.

Spatial awareness is partly constructed. When we close our eyes, we can imagine the size of a room or a route through a city. In meditation, when the mind is no longer preoccupied with concepts and concerns, awareness can take spatial awareness as an object. Since there are no objects in that spatial awareness, space becomes bigger and bigger. It can feel peaceful and broad. This provides a different reference point for what goes on in our minds.

The Ballad of Liberation

We discover this when we are not completely full of waves of agitation. It is like having a quiet, still body of water. If a little fish comes up, it makes rings, and you realize, "Oh, there is life in there." You wouldn't have seen it if the water was full of waves.

This is a long introduction to read you a poem, titled "The Ballad of Liberation from the Khandhas" by Ajahn Mun³. Ajahn Mun was an extremely important teacher in the 20th century in Thailand. He is attributed as the reviver of the Thai Forest Tradition and of the experiential understanding of how far the path of awakening can go—that one can become fully awakened. He spent decades living in the forest.

One of his students was Ajahn Chah⁴, the teacher of Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Sumedho, and Ajahn Pasanno. In some ways, the Insight Meditation Center is partly a continuation of the momentum created by Ajahn Mun. Ajahn Chah walked for months looking for Ajahn Mun. When he finally found him, he spent three days with him, and those three days transformed him.

Ajahn Mun didn't write much, so we mostly have stories, but we do have this ballad. I have adjusted it slightly to make the interpretation clearer.

Once there was a man who loved himself and feared distress. He wanted happiness beyond the reach of danger. So he wandered endlessly. Wherever people said that happiness was found, he longed to go. But wandering took a long, long time.

He was the sort of man who loved himself and really dreaded death. He truly wanted release from aging and mortality. Then one day, he came to know the truth. Abandoning the cause of suffering, He found a Cave of Wonders of endless happiness: The Body.

As he gazed throughout the Cave of Wonders, His suffering was destroyed, his fears appeased. He gazed and gazed around the mountainside, Experiencing unbounded peace.

But then there were others, afraid of death, Their hearts all withered and discouraged. They came to me and spoke frankly, in a pitiful way. They said: "You've made an effort at your meditation for a long time now. Have you seen it yet? The true Dharma of your dreams?"

They asked to stay with me, so I agreed. And I said to them: "I'll take you to a massive mountain with a Cave of Wonders, Free from suffering and stress. Mindfulness immersed in the body. You can view it at your leisure, To cool your heart and end your troubles. This is the path of the Noble Lineage. It's up to you to go or not."

Entering the Cave

"The Cave of Wonders." Isn't that a delightful expression for your body? Is your body a Cave of Wonders, or just a cave? Or just a sack full of intestines and spleens?

Some people have complicated relationships with their bodies—hate, shame, judgment. These are all ways of relating to the body as an object from the outside in. What is being talked about here is a deep subjective experience of the body, freed from objectification, judgments, and comparisons.

This happens in meditation. The mind becomes quieter, and we stop being hijacked by our thoughts. It is not an easy switch to make because we are so used to "business as usual"—thinking, planning, worrying. We take it for granted that this is just how things are. When we meditate, we realize, "No, I don't have to do that."

Some people have never learned this. They think chasing their thoughts—or being chased by them—is the only way to be. We are blinded by our thoughts. To allow the mind to quiet down is to find the Cave of Wonders.

I read this poem last week and sat down to meditate. I thought, "Yeah, that's a Cave of Wonders in there. Pretty cool." The next day I sat down: "Nope." It felt like the door was closed. I had been living a day full of activities and was a little tense. So I just sat at the door. I stood where the tension was, where the resistance was. I was content to do that. I just sat there breathing, and after a while, the door opened, and I was invited in.

Seeing Without Filters

In this spacious, open place, the eyes of the mind see differently. How we see the world depends on the filters through which we see.

• If we see through aversion, a lot of things in the world seem "wrong."
• If we see through desire, we divide the world into what satisfies us and what doesn't.
• If we see through fear, we see danger.
• If we see through conceit, we might get depressed ("everything is bad about me") or hyped up ("I'm the hottest Cave of Wonders in town").

What happens when we don't have these filters? Things get simpler. We start seeing the wonders that exist within us. We have the capacity for love, peace, calm, equanimity, kindness, and wisdom. These amazing capacities thrive when we are not limiting ourselves through unfortunate lenses.

How do we know what is an unfortunate lens? Not by having a policy about it, but by getting quiet enough to experience it. We can see, "This activity is extra. It's not useful."

Take fear, for example. I've had anxiety where clear mindfulness showed me it had no reality; it was built on quicksand. I could just settle out of it. I've had other fears where I thought, "This is reasonable." Then fear becomes my friend; I have a friendly relationship with it. I have a little fear when I'm driving, and as I get older, I think I have a little more. I suspect it is because my reaction time is slower, so my system knows I need to be more attentive. It is wise to have a little fear.

As we live in this Cave of Wonders—a place of peace and spaciousness—it provides a powerful reference point. We can see the details of our operating systems in a fresh way. But the cost is to temporarily stop investing so much value and urgency in our thoughts. We have to calm down the world-creating, the "cathedrals of constructed thought."

Disinvesting from Thoughts

I remember a story from about 30 years ago. I thought it would be nice to watch football on TV. The 49ers were doing well then. I found myself pulled into the world of the game. I thought I enjoyed it, but when it was over, I felt miserable. I felt agitated, tight, and had a headache. I had gotten too invested. I wasn't attentive to myself to see the cost of how I was watching until it was over.

We often don't understand the cost of how we run our lives. We need to disinvest enough to calm down and center ourselves in the body. Mindfulness gives space to our experience. If we have pain, we make room for it. If we have tension, we make room for it. Things that are there because of clinging tend to unwind when given space. Things that are there because of wisdom and goodness tend to spread and suffuse us when given space.

Ajahn Mun traveled all over Thailand to find the answer to happiness. In the end, he found it in himself, in his own Cave of Wonders. And that is what he taught: you each have a Cave of Wonders within.

Q&A

Question: I’d like to argue that it’s not fear that makes you drive differently as you get older, but caution and wisdom. I know I don’t have the capacities I had 20 years ago, so I’m more cautious, but I don’t feel fear.

Gil: I appreciate that distinction. It is fascinating how different people have different reference points for words. Words don't have clearly defined meanings; they are just sounds we make. For me, I think of caution as a sub-category of fear. But I am not saying I am right and you are wrong. Your distinction might help people see more clearly what is happening inside of them.

Question: Could you speak more about the Sambhogakaya⁵ or "Bliss Body"?

Gil: In the Mahayana tradition, they have the idea of the Trikaya or "Three Bodies of the Buddha": Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Dharmakaya.

• Nirmanakaya is the ordinary body. For many of us, we can call it the "karmic body"—the product of a lifetime of choices, attachments, and attitudes. I read once that Abraham Lincoln said by the time a person is 50, they are responsible for their face. Our consistent attitudes affect our micro-muscles.
• Sambhogakaya is the "Bliss Body" or body of enjoyment. As meditation deepens, there is an experience of the body being filled with enjoyment. It can be quite remarkable to feel every cell dripping with happiness or joy.
• Dharmakaya is the "Dharma Body" or body of freedom. When we have really let go of clinging, there is no more resistance or preoccupation. It is a very different experience—not blissful in the conventional sense, but a tremendous ease and peace of being free.

Question: Can you share wisdom on how to distinguish useful aversion from hostility? Sometimes when I make an effort to prevent something, am I just running away or attacking the circumstance?

Gil: That is a very important question. "Aversion" comes from the Latin avertere, meaning "to turn away." There are times it is appropriate to turn away. If you put your hand on a hot stove, it is appropriate to avert! You don't sit there asking, "Is this hostility?" You move your hand. Averting from danger or unethical actions is healthy.

However, in Buddhist English, we often use "aversion" to imply a mixture of averting and hostility. There is judgment—"this is wrong," "that's terrible." It feels like having darts in our eyes. Hostility means we want to hurt someone, destroy them, or throw them away. We might jab them with verbal daggers.

You can ask: Is there anger without hostility? Can you say "No" with a certain ferocity because something needs to stop, but without wanting to harm the person? Perhaps you even have love or care for them. Too often, anger is a kind of hostility where we want to cause harm.