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Guided Meditation: Opening to the Nature Within; Expanding; Dharmette: Teachings of the Ancient Similes (4 of 5); The Simile of the Ship Rope - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 23, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Opening to the Nature Within; Expanding

So here we are, at the fourth step and fourth movement of this week's series. Today we're going to move through the grounding, enlivening, enriching, and then today we'll be adding a component which is expanding. I will be using the metaphor of the Inner Mountain to expand a bit more, and that's what we will be doing together.

So we'll start with the sound of a bell.

[Bell rings]

Arriving here and now. Taking a few long, deep breaths. As you breathe out, settling down, maybe resting down towards Earth. Mindfulness front and center, and maybe all the way around. And heartfulness maybe here too. And the body fullness. Sensing this body sitting. Releasing the weight of the body towards Earth. Allow this earthy body resting on Earth.

Sensing ground underneath. Steadying, grounding. Releasing preoccupations, plans. Let yourself be grounded. Sitting like a mountain. An alive Mountain Within. Quiet, still, and steady.

The movements of the breath may naturally come forth like a breeze in the mountain. Sensing aliveness. The breath flows throughout the body, enlivening the Inner Mountain. You feel the sensations on the feet, relax hands. Shivering, swaying, gentleness.

Receiving the felt sense of alive breath coursing through the whole body.

Waves of emotions may come in. Thoughts. A rich part of being human. Just simply open to receive the felt sense of emotions and texture of the thoughts, like the weather systems in the mountain.

Expanding the field of awareness around the edges of the body, and open to include the space all around. Just like the mountain surrounded, imbued by the spaciousness all around. And you expand to include the spaciousness that's right here.

A spaciousness that can hold sensations in the body, movements in the mind. Nothing is excluded. There is room for everything.

Resting in a spacious field of knowing. A spaciousness can hold conflict, disagreement. And we may say it's a kind space.

[Silence]

Sensing and feeling the movements of the breath. When returning to the grounded place through the body, maybe the sense of earthy body resting on Earth.

[Bell rings]

Dharmette: Teachings of the Ancient Similes (4 of 5); The Simile of the Ship Rope

Thank you, everyone. I feel like I'm navigating this YouTube world a little bit because the video for me is a bit frozen, but I feel a little relief to see some chat messages from you all. Hopefully, it all has been going okay.

I'm going to switch gears and offer the third simile in this sutta that I've been sharing this past week, Samyutta Nikaya 22.101¹. This last couple of similes—the chicken and eggs, and the adze handle²—offered some different aspects of how we practice. This last simile is that of the rope that ties the ship—kind of docking the ship or something. It's got yet another different flavor.

Let me read this simile to you first:

"Suppose there was a seafaring ship bound together with ropes. For six months they deteriorated in the water. Then in the cold season, it was hauled up on dry land where the ropes were weathered by wind and sun. When the clouds soaked it with rain, the ropes would readily collapse and rot away. In the same way, when a practitioner is committed to development, their fetters³—or you can say defilements—their taints⁴ readily collapse and rot away."

This is a very vivid simile. You know, these ropes tying the ship, and the ropes soaked in the water for a long time. And then in the cold season when the ship is not going, they're hauled up in dry land and the ropes are under the weather, in the sun, in the wind. And then the rain clouds soaked the ropes more, and then eventually the ropes readily collapse and rot away. In the same way, when we develop as practitioners, the taints fade away in this way.

For me, it has a very different flavor that this simile captures when we compare it to the previous two similes. With the simile of the eggs and the chicken, one way to understand it is that it highlights that one would need to practice with sincerity and properly, and when the hearts and minds are cultivated that way, the chicks would hatch. The second simile, the simile of the adze handle—the carpenter⁵ holding the handle for a long time—highlights that the release of the strong, deep tendencies of grasping is not to be measured or evaluated, but we stay cultivating.

Now with this simile, first just feel that sense of the ropes being soaked in this weather, different weathers in different times of the day. The sense I have is that in the long arc of our practice journey, we will surely go through all kinds of seasons and meet all kinds of human conditions: the gains and the loss. The gains of different kinds—material, immaterial—and the loss of all kinds: loss of loved ones, loss of physical or mental capacities, unfortunate events, experiencing things that are individually to us and collectively. And so it's like these different weather systems, different phases of our lives, whether we prefer them or not.

But the practice continues no matter what the conditions and situations we're in. Kind of like the ropes, keep on getting soaked in all the different conditions. Our willingness and the dedication to stay in the practice field, in the practice stream, no matter what situation we're in, is how our practice matures.

And this is certainly not easy to do. And not just not easy, but at times it can feel really, really difficult. Through the practice, we learn to gradually, little by little—whether it's in the difficult situations or in comfortable situations—we learn to choose whether to become reactive, which leads to more stress and dukkha⁶, or we choose something that is a kind of release of reactivity and not add more to it. For me, a lot of our reactivity feels more like tying knots on the rope, rather than releasing the rope, letting the ropes loosen up and soften. Let the thread be softened, kind of released and not tied up, but the reactivity gets us knotted up.

This particular simile reminded me of a teaching that Ajahn Sumedho⁷ sometimes would say: that in our practice we choose to "stand under" dukkha. We choose to stand under dukkha. We're not running away from different situations and conditions in our lives, but rather we choose to stand under dukkha. We learn from it, we meet it, we explore it, we understand it. And then over time, we learn how to empower ourselves to choose not to add more stress.

Since we've done all three similes in this sequence, I wanted to just summarize a little bit the overarching flavor of these three similes. I was struck by the fact that all of these similes together, if you feel into it, there is no sense of a kind of brute force of pushing our way through in the cultivation process. First, we don't tinker with the eggs to somehow break the shells prematurely. Nor do we try to do something crazy about the adze handle by force; we just kind of keep holding it and keep working with it.

There is a kind of timelessness in the practice. In this simile, nowhere in the sutta does it say, "Oh, let's cut the rope up." It doesn't work like that. But rather we let ourselves meet the situations of life as they are, and the rope kind of rots on its own naturally.

In this way, maybe we can say that we are being practiced by the forces of our lives. By including all parts of one's life in the practice field, gradually freedom is born. Our freedom naturally comes forth. Notions like shortcuts, efficiency, speed—those are not the orientation of the Dharma practice. So this kind of patiently showing up, but being really curious to learn in all the situations, there is a compassionate and kind attitude to build in here. You may be able to feel this right there.

I wanted to read from Gil's new book, Everything is Practice, even though it's speaking about retreat practice, but I would say it can be extended to practicing in our life in general. In the foreword of this book, Ines [Freedman]⁸, one of our IMC teachers, said this:

"Gil points to mature practice that includes every aspect of ourselves with nothing left out, fostering a deep sense of self-acceptance and understanding. A practice that both provides for the solitude of deep meditation and the connection of a practice in community with others. He emphasizes a practice that points to freedom possible in every aspect of our lives, including in our wider world."

So may that be an aspiration to all of us. Thank you everyone, have a wonderful rest of the day. May you all be well.