This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: Meditate like a mountain; Dharmette: Savoring Flavors of Refuge (1/5) Refuge in Sangha. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Meditate Like A Mountain; Dharmette: Savoring the Flavors of Refuge (1 of 5) Refuge in Sangha - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 26, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Good morning, good day everyone from all around the world. Here we are gathering again at this 7 a.m. Pacific time meditation. I just kind of feel a sense of warmth coming in, so maybe you feel that way too.

I want to orient ourselves a little bit for our meditation. For this week, I'd like to evoke a nature-based metaphor as we meditate. It builds up from one day to another, but it doesn't have to be that way, so if you join in between, it's not a problem. I'd like to start today with this metaphor or simile of sitting like a mountain. Maybe that evokes some kind of stability or other different associations you may have. I'll drop that in for meditation today, and then in the next few days, I will build up this metaphor. Here we go.

Guided Meditation: Meditate Like A Mountain

Start taking a few long, deep breaths. As you breathe out, arriving, arriving here and now. Maybe there is a kind of familiarity, a sense of coming home, coming home to ourselves. This moment, here, this place where we sit or stand or lie down.

Being patient to arrive, so we're not jerking our minds. Simple presence. Mindfulness front and center. Mindfulness all around. Mindfulness receiving, meeting what's here to be known. Maybe the overall sense of the body sitting, or a sense of the contact of the body with the Earth underneath.

Gently turn your attention to the contact between the body and the Earth underneath. Maybe you feel the weight settling down, the hardness of the sit bones, the stability of the pelvic floor. Softening and releasing the body towards the Earth. There is a natural relational pull of gravity. Allow this earthy body resting on Earth.

Sitting like a quiet mountain. Allow your attention to rest here if you like. Steady, still, connected with the Earth underneath.

In this last few minutes of the meditation together, allow yourself to feel and sense the community practicing together, like walking into a mountain range. Maybe you can feel the potency of the vast stillness and quiet. Maybe the stillness can expand to become vast. The silence can expand to become vast. A silence that includes the sounds all around, and a stillness that can include movements.

Feeling and sensing the goodness of practicing in community together, as if we're offering blessings and gifts to ourselves and to each other.

Maybe this bowing is an expression of gratitude to practice, gratitude to yourself to show up here in this way.

Dharmette: Savoring the Flavors of Refuge (1 of 5) Refuge in Sangha

With that, I'm going to transition. For this week's topic, I'd like to share some reflections about this word "refuge." Refuge is a prominent Buddhist concept since the days of the Buddha. The word itself may evoke different feelings for people, and I want to offer some different words that are also associated with this notion of refuge. I'm going to drop in some of those words: protection, shelter, sanctuary, safety. A refuge being a place to rest in or a safe container, a sense of home or a ground to rest on. All those words for me kind of evoke a sense of refuge in some way.

The resonance of refuge has grown more and more multi-dimensional and came alive over the years of practice and learning. I'd like to make an attempt to share some of these different dimensions, different aspects. I'm also calling it different flavors or textures of refuge for this week, touching into this sense of refuge in different ways.

Today, I kind of hinted towards the end of our meditation together, I'd like to start with refuge in Sangha¹. Sangha, this Pali term, means a community that practices and learns the Dharma together. Like how we've been doing in this 7 a.m. gatherings, we're forming a Sangha, even though it's in a virtual field, and we're practicing together.

I'd like to speak about Sangha first because for many people, Sangha is where we begin to find a sense of refuge, a spiritual home, a shelter, a protection, or a safe container, a sanctuary. And that's how I began. My first exposure to Buddhism and Buddhist practices was not based on books or doctrines or teachings. There was no YouTube back then, and I didn't know about the recordings. Some of this didn't even exist back then. For me, it began when I first encountered a group of Buddhists in my college time. When I met this group of people, I distinctly noticed something very different. This is a group of people that expressed qualities of generosity, kindness, and care in so many different ways that was quite intriguing for me, and I was drawn towards it immediately. That was the beginning of my Dharma journey.

Reflecting forward, all the way to this day, throughout my Dharma journey, Sangha has been a refuge for me, a potent force. In the realm of Buddha Dharma, Sangha specifically refers to the community that learns and practices Dharma. It's not just any social community, which has its own function, but the Sangha has a specific function and purpose. As Dharma practitioners, each person in the Sangha learns to cultivate wholesome qualities of heart, mind, and body in a way that supports well-being, a deeper care of ourselves, for each other, and for the whole world. That has been so for the generations of Sangha that came from ancient times all the way till now.

Reflecting on and observing this 7 a.m. Sangha over the past few years since the beginning of the pandemic, I'm feeling this growing sense of care, connectedness, and warmth, and a deeper kind of resonance with each other in some way. This collective force inspires, sustains, and supports us in our own Dharma journey and supports each other. Maybe what has been surprising for some of us is that somehow this virtual world would have this kind of palpable sense for us that I don't think I had imagined. No one probably could have imagined this some decades ago. How is this possible? In our meditation, the last few minutes of meditation, I invited us to kind of tune into some of this collective sense, a kind of field we're in, the field of practice together. Even though we're not physically together, we're quite geographically dispersed all over this planet, and yet we can have a sense, maybe a hint of it. Wow, we're together here practicing. That's truly something.

For a Sangha to be a refuge, a sanctuary, a home for each of us, I also wanted to say that it also had to go beyond being an external entity that we go to, whether it's virtual or not. One of the most important functions of a refuge in Sangha is that it helps each of us to turn inward, to look within. There is this "outside-in" kind of effect here. When we're affected by the Sangha, people who practice Dharma, we are changed by it. It invites us to touch inside, for us to feel and sense what is being affected and how it shapes and changes us from within. The Buddha said to his disciples that when you're with good companions, when they practice the Noble Eightfold Path², then you will do so too. So that's that outside-in kind of effect that I'm speaking about.

At the same time, there is also a kind of "inside-out" effect. When we are changed by the refuge in Sangha, our behavior, our heart, and mind learn to stay with what we aspire to cultivate. More and more, this has an effect on the broader world we live in. Maybe it starts with the environment we're in, maybe it has an effect on the people around you. In this way, practicing the refuge or savoring the refuge of Sangha has this kind of outside-in and inside-out kind of movements. Refuge in Sangha is not static; it's dynamic, alive, and kind of like a living stream. It has a constant effect coming all the way from 2,600 years ago all the way to the present, within and without.

So it's up to each of us to learn to turn into this inner-outer living dynamic, such that whatever goodness or challenges that arise within us, we leverage or incorporate this field of Sangha to allow us to move through and allow the goodness and the benefits to ripple out into the broader world, so that all beings have possibilities to live with goodness and to live with well-being. And that's the power of being in the refuge of Sangha.

I leave with you for the rest of the day to maybe do some reflections on your own spiritual journey. What are the roles of Sangha and the community? What has been changed? How are you shaped, and what is your relationship with Sangha? I'll end there.

Closing

Let's together, being in this Sangha, feel and savor a little the potency of Sangha in whatever way that it manifests for you.

May whatever goodness and benefits that arose out of us practicing together be shared with open hearts and open minds to beings around you and to all beings everywhere. May all beings find refuge. May all beings find a refuge that supports the onward leading towards freedom and liberation.

Thank you, everyone. Be well, and I'll see you tomorrow.