Guided Meditation: Stillness and Movements with the Breaths; Dharmette: The Story of Bhadda Kudalakesa The End of Debate

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Stillness and Movements with the Breath. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 08, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Stillness and Movements with the Breaths

And it's so good to be with you all this morning. I feel quite sweet and quiet. We'll begin momentarily. For those who have already joined, maybe find a sitting posture that allows you to settle in. It's almost like creating a virtual field, a virtual meditation field around the globe this way, while others join us.

So this week, we are meditating with the theme of stillness and movement. Yesterday we started with stillness and movement in the body, and today we'll stay with the territory of the body, but I will bring a bit more emphasis around the stillness and movement with the movements of the breath. So that's what we will be doing today. If you're ready, please join me and we'll begin.

Settle into a meditative posture. Whether you're sitting on cushions, sitting on chairs, lying down, or even standing, enter into the posture as if you're entering into an ancient temple: the temple of this body, this mind, and heart. Maybe just the word "temple" already evokes some felt sense^[1] in the body, in the heart. Maybe some reverence, tenderness, and quiet.

Making our seat right here and now, in this body, in this mind and heart. Our practice happens here and now, and our lives happen here and now.

Taking a few moments to have a global sense of the body, and a sense of this earthy body resting on Earth. Initial moments of a meditation may feel like a lot of things are moving. The energy in the body is still bouncy, and maybe the mind and thoughts are still bouncing around. No problem. Make space to allow the movements to move about and settle.

Tuning into the Earth element in the body. The felt sense is the solidity, the firmness of the bones, heaviness, the weight settling down naturally. Giving to the wonders of gravity. Nothing to do. Simply allowing. The Earth element is grounding, stable, somewhat still. The nature of the Earth element is to stabilize the body, and feel the whole body sitting like a mountain. Quiet and still.

And the stillness of the Earth element in the body naturally highlights the movements of the wind element: the chi, the breath^[2], the air moving as we breathe in and out. Open the field of awareness to receive the movements of the breath. Feel the movements, sense the movements in the body. The torso expands and contracts. The belly rises and falls.

You may also notice the broader field of movement in the body: vibrations, tingling in the hands, the legs. An alive body. Dropping out of the concepts and the stories, feeling and sensing the dance of the alive body. Feeling and sensing needs no words. There is an inner quiet simply staying with the flow of movements. Some stillness may still be palpable, pleasant. There is also the stillness in the knowing of the embodied experience. Silent, still knowing.

Notice the breath shifts and changes, and sensations shift and change. There is a stillness in the body, a stillness in the mind, and various movements in the body, and movements in the mind.

Different weather systems may come in. You know, strong energetic fields, emotions, thoughts. Receiving, receiving with kindness. A wide open, quiet field of awareness. Pleasant sensations, they're coming in. And this is a part of nature. Being available to our lived experiences with a kind of attention.

Sitting like a mountain. An alive mountain. Quiet, still, unmoving. While the sensations in the body come and dance. Maybe there is a sense of awe, a sense of openness. It's the very body's nature, simply resting in itself.

Dharmette: The Story of Bhadda Kudalakesa The End of Debate

I'm so happy, so happy to be with you. This week I've been reflecting on the great women disciples of the Buddha. We started yesterday with Patacara^[3], someone who I feel some kind of affinity with. And today I brought another great woman disciple of the Buddha, and she's very different from Patacara. Her name is Bhadda Kudalakesa^[4].

She's not particularly well-known, maybe, in our scene, but I found her story quite interesting, maybe fun. And so I thought I'd bring someone who's a little different today. Bhadda was this woman's birth name. Bhadda was also born into a somewhat wealthy family. This part of the story may be a little similar to Patacara: when she was young, she fell in love with a thief, maybe a very attractive thief, and she was said to be quite attractive as well. She fell in love with the Brahmin thief and insisted on marrying him. Even though they were in a lot of despair, the parents—I guess she was very stubborn—decided, "Okay, all right." And so they got married.

But not very long after the marriage, the thief husband's stealing habit came up again. He was scheming to try to steal all of the jewelry and valuables from Bhadda. Bhadda probably didn't realize this would happen; even though they married into a well-to-do family, there was no need to do that. But one day, the young man decided to take Bhadda out to the top of a mountain. His scheme was to rob all the jewelry from Bhadda and then push her down the mountain to kill her.

She didn't realize that, and so they went to the top of the mountain. But she was a very smart young lady. When they got to the top of the mountain, she realized something wasn't right, and she realized that her husband was going to murder her. She got to the edge of the mountain, and just before she handed off all the jewelry to her husband, she pushed him down the mountain and killed her husband.

This all happened in such a short few minutes, and it was shocking. She didn't expect that she would kill anybody, let alone her own husband. This was too much. She didn't know how to hold this, and the burden of killing someone was way too much. She felt like she couldn't go back to her lay life anymore, and she couldn't go back to her family.

So she decided the only way she might find peace was to join a spiritual community, and she became a wandering ascetic. In those days, there was a wandering ascetic order called the Jains^[5]—this tradition is still alive in India—and she became a wandering ascetic in this order.

Because this was an ascetic order, people lived in ways that could be challenging. When she first got ordained into this order, she actually pulled all her hair from the root. As the new hair grew, it was very curly. So this word that she's known by means "curly hair," and she is known as the Bhadda who had very curly hair.

As a very intelligent woman, she spent the next 50 years or so wandering around the country as an ascetic, visiting other spiritual leaders, learning about philosophies, and gaining a lot of knowledge. In those days, when one gained knowledge, they would begin to engage in debates. She was very well known; apparently, she won a lot of debates. She became, in some ways, a spiritual leader in that she was knowledgeable and was able to conduct and win a lot of debates.

One day, she was wandering around a place where the Buddhist community was staying, and she met Sariputta^[6]. Sariputta was a chief disciple of the Buddha who was known to have a very analytical mind, which probably means that he was good at debates, too. They got into a debate. During this debate, Bhadda asked all her questions to Sariputta, and Sariputta was able to answer all of them. She ran out of questions to ask in the end. This was kind of unheard of for her, and she didn't know what to do.

Sariputta decided, "I'm going to ask her a question." And so Sariputta asked her this question: "What is the One?" I suppose this is one of those quite philosophical and abstract questions. Somehow, she had a sense that she knew the standard answers—like God, the infinite, the Brahma—but she knew they just wouldn't cut it. She didn't have the answer. Yet through this question, she had a sense that Sariputta might be the one who knows.

At this time, it was clear that even with all her 50 years of wandering around, being famous, and being able to debate a lot of people, she still hadn't really found complete peace in her heart. So she asked Sariputta whether he would be her teacher. Sariputta pointed her to the Buddha instead. So she went to see the Buddha, and the Buddha preached the Dharma to her.

In the recounting of this part of the story in the Legends of the Theris^[7] that I began to read yesterday, and about Kudalakesa^[8], it says: "The Buddha preached Dharma to me: the aggregates, the sense fields, and elements. The Buddha taught unpleasantness, impermanence, Dukkha^[9], and not-self."

It was asserted that Bhadda, just like the other wandering ascetic known as Bahiya^[10]—who was the foremost among the monks who were able to get the Buddha's teachings very quickly—was the foremost among the female disciples with the same kind of quality. Just with this teaching, she was able to understand something deeply and very quickly.

At the end of this encounter with the Buddha, the Buddha concluded their conversation with these verses. He said:

"Though a thousand verses are made of meaningless lines, better the single meaningful line be heard by which one is at peace."

So that was the end of Kudalakesa's^[11] debate career. She realized with all this knowledge she had, and all the debates she engaged in, those were really not that meaningful anymore. So she went forth to join the Buddha to become a disciple of the Buddha.

This teaching reminds me that so often we can miss that the teachings of the Buddha are not found in the stacks of books, the analysis, debates, or incessant thinking about them, the concepts, the ideas, or the stories that we tell ourselves. Instead, the teachings point at the immediacy of our lived experience here and now. The Dharma is visible here and now, immediate, inviting to be seen for oneself, onward-leading, and to be personally experienced by the wise.

And so she recounted her awakening through these lines upon being fully ordained into the Buddhist monastic order: "I saw a little bit of water cleaning my feet, discerning that some water splashed up, some spilled down. Then at that time I realized all conditioned things are like that. Then my heart was liberated altogether without clinging^[12]. Then the Buddha appointed me^[13] foremost of those with quick intuition."

I love this word "intuition." It has a kind of rawness in it. It's not based on some kind of speculative views or ideas. Each of us, being human, has this kind of intuitive capacity to know things simply, intimately, and deeply. And this is where Dhamma becomes visible. This kind of intuitive knowing is only possible when we drop out of the layers of concepts and ideas, and all of our clingings to them.

May this story inspire us to live simply, immediately, with the rawness of our life here and now. Thank you, everyone, for your attention, and we will regroup tomorrow. Deep bows to you all.