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Guided Meditation: Beauty; Dharmette: Ten Protectors (3 of 10) Good Spiritual Friends - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 04, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Beauty

Hello everyone, and welcome.

I feel quite fortunate at the moment that we get to sit here in meditation. I get to talk about meditation a little bit, and as I give these morning guidances, I'm also guiding myself. Doing these guided meditations is an opportunity for me to drop into my connection to meditation and my inner life—an inner life that has become much richer through meditation practice.

The topic I want to introduce today is ethics. It is sometimes known that ethics in Buddhism are not meant to be a set of rules that we are obligated to adhere to. They are trainings that we engage in for our own benefit, and they are gifts of safety that we give to the world. They are trainings for ourselves to tap into, support, and discover something really valuable within, so that our ethical behavior is not a commandment, but is inspired by our inner state of heart, our inner state of mind, and the quality of our inner being.

There is a word in Pali that means beautiful: kalyāṇa¹. One dictionary also provides the word "charming" or "auspicious," but it also has a meaning of virtue or having an ethical quality. Someone who has this kalyāṇa, this beauty, is also someone who has ethical virtue or an ethical position on the inside. To connect beauty and ethics is, I think, quite profound—that it's our inner beauty that we discover, cultivate, and evoke that is the source of living an ethical life.

Inner beauty, what is it?

To begin with, assume a posture. A meditation posture is a posture that allows or begins a process of connecting to our inner life. Assume a posture that allows there to be some degree—a small degree maybe—of confidence manifested through the body. A posture that provides some stability, where your weight is firmly against whatever supports it: the floor, a chair, a bed. A posture that begins to provide us with some inner stability, a place that's stable, maybe that's deeper or lower in your torso than where there might be anxiety or agitation.

Lowering the gaze, gently closing the eyes.

In a way that is in harmony with something gentle or beautiful within, take some deeper breaths. Smooth, slow. Not so deep that it's a challenge, but deep enough to feel your torso more fully. Have a little longer exhale. The longer period of exhaling gives a bigger chance to let go and settle in. Let the weight of your body settle into whatever supports it.

Let your breathing return to normal. With a normal breath moving through your body, on the exhale, see if there are places of softening. Relaxing the muscles around the eyes, the face, the shoulders, or the belly.

As you exhale, maybe you can also relax your thinking mind. Soften it. Let there be a quieting of your thinking. As the thinking mind relaxes, allow yourself to settle into your body breathing.

See if you can find a place within that you associate with an inner goodness, an inner sense of ethical integrity, or beauty. Underneath any place of agitation or recrimination, deep inside, where do you associate, feel, or sense the source of goodness might be?

If there is such a place, breathe with that, as if your breathing moves through it like a gentle wind, or your breathing begins and ends in that place.

Coming to the end of this sitting, take a few moments to see where inside you associate with inner goodness. Maybe a place of love and kindness. A place where there is a desire not to cause harm in this world. Maybe a place of care for this world.

If there is such a place, even without feeling those things now, associate with them. Let your inner eye gaze upon the world. The whole world, leaving no one out, considering all of humanity our family.

May all people have opportunities for great happiness. May all people have safety in how they live their lives and go about their every day. May all people know peace and wake up to a peaceful world without conflict and war. May all people be free. Free of oppression and poverty, and free of inner turmoil, attachments, and challenges. May all beings be happy.

May we consider the small and the big ways that we can contribute to that.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Ten Protectors (3 of 10) Good Spiritual Friends

So, we come to the third talk on the ten protectors, the ten supports, or the ten helpers, depending on how we translate the Pali word nātha². This is a teaching coming from the Buddha that appears in the Numerical Discourses, in the tenth chapter (Discourse 17)³. What's provided is a list without much discussion about them, but it's a wonderful list, and in other places these qualities are discussed in different ways.

Today, the protector is having good spiritual friends. The first was our own virtue, the second yesterday was... well, sometimes my mind doesn't work so fast sitting here and my mind is already going with the next thing. But anyway, today it is kalyāṇa-mittatā⁴.

The word kalyāṇa can mean "beautiful," which is usually the first dictionary definition. But it also refers to the kind of inner beauty from which virtue and ethical integrity arise, from which the disposition to be honest and truthful appears. Someone who is a good spiritual friend, a kalyāṇa-mitta, is someone who is honest, someone who has a virtuous behavior and life. It is also meant to refer to someone who is a spiritual teacher. The Buddha was considered to be the great kalyāṇa-mitta—someone who opens the door to a spiritual life, a life on the path to liberation, someone who knows it and supports others in doing this.

The idea here is that they are a kalyāṇa. They possess a certain kind of inner beauty and ethical beauty that is part of what they are pointing to as a possibility for you, for everyone else. To have a few kalyāṇa-mittas, to have a few of these beautiful spiritual friendships, is a great support for ourselves, and it's also a protection.

To have good spiritual friends to whom you are a little bit accountable means that when you are about to do something you don't quite feel good about, you remember your good spiritual friends. Would you want to tell them about what you are doing? Would you like them to know about it? If the answer is no, then you will probably be careful not to do it. It's not that these good spiritual friends are policing you, watching you, and judging you if you do something that is not quite coming from this beautiful, ethical place within. Rather, in the teachings of the Buddha, he assumes that people have a natural desire not to do something that these good spiritual friends would disapprove of. There would be a certain degree of awkwardness, regret, or not feeling good about oneself if we are doing something that our good spiritual friends would disapprove of.

So, some of this is finding and having good spiritual friends. Having those who can not only be someone that we trust and someone we think is wise, but also someone maybe who could encourage the practice and bring out the best qualities we have. In the Buddhist teachings, a good spiritual friend is someone who supports us to develop the Seven Factors of Awakening⁵. These are some of the most beautiful qualities of heart that come out of deep Dharma practice: the cultivation or development of present moment awareness (mindfulness), investigation, a delightful and wholesome effort and engagement in the practice, joy, tranquility, samādhi⁶, and equanimity.

The Buddha gave a beautiful teaching where he said, just as the dawn is the precursor to the rising sun, so externally, the precursor heralding forth our own awakening is a good spiritual friend. Externally it is good spiritual friends, and internally it is our capacity to have a deep, profound form of contemplation and attention to our inner life.

This profound contemplation speaks to the fact that we can have this inner beauty. This is one of the wordplays around the term kalyāṇa-mitta. Usually, it means the good spiritual friends we have externally, but it also can mean friendship with our own beauty, our own ethical integrity. Our own inner beauty can be a protection for us. If we stay close to our own sense of ethical sensibility, that supports us. It protects us from doing things that we later regret. It protects us from being mean to people or hostile. It prevents us from actions that harm other people that we would somehow later regret. There is a kind of guidance that we can receive internally if we are settled in ourselves, relaxed, and connected to this soft or quiet place inside that offers clear guidance in living well—living out of a sense of goodness, compassion, and care.

When I was a new student in Buddhism, I was fortunate to have good spiritual teachers who I didn't talk to regularly, but I saw them regularly. Just the fact that they were around, or that I went to their talks, I felt, "Oh, this is a support for me. This reminds me to practice and really live from the best places from inside."

To have good spiritual friends externally, and then to discover in yourself a friendship with what is beautiful within, and to protect that, is a great support. It will protect you, guide you, and keep you close to what's really valuable and important. It probably makes life a lot simpler. Living unethically—lying, for example, and stealing, and doing things which are ethically questionable—tends to create a more complicated life. The little saying is that it's better to be honest because then there's less you have to remember. If we start lying, then it's important to remember the lies to keep them going. But when you're being honest, you don't necessarily have to remember what you said because there's no need to keep the lie going. It's a simpler life.

An inner simplicity of being, an inner joy of being, an inner beauty of being. This kalyāṇa-mitta externally and internally is one of the great supports. When we don't have it internally, then it can be really useful to have it externally—to have Sangha members, other practitioners, other people who you feel are virtuous and have this inner beauty. To spend time with them, to be around them, and to be reminded by them that it is possible to be that way ourselves. To be around them enough to be inspired by them so that we can say, "Yes, this is who I feel like I am when I am most myself. This is where I want to come from."

May you consider both the topic of your inner beauty and also who the people are in your life who live in such a way that it inspires your beauty inside. Who is truthful? Who is ethically virtuous? Who has some quality of goodness that inspires you? They don't have to be a Buddhist, but stay close to them. Let your familiarity and contact with them protect what is maybe most valuable in yourself.

Thank you very much, and we will continue tomorrow.

Oh yes, the second quality we talked about yesterday was learning much⁷. Learning about the Dharma, learning about goodness through study. So: virtue, learning and applying what we learn, and then today is good spiritual friends.

Thank you.