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Introduction

Good evening everyone. Welcome, it's nice to be here with you. My name is Mei Elliott, and I'm coming today from San Francisco Zen Center where I live and work, and I serve as director there. I spend a lot of time sitting vipassana despite living at a Zen Center, so I love this tradition, and I'm very glad to be here. If at any point in the talk you can't hear me, just do this and I'll raise my voice a bit.

I wanted to start with a very short poem about two very large beings by the great Sufi poet Rumi, and his title for the poem is "Two Giant Fat People." It goes like this:

God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.

I'll read it again.

God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.

Some of you may be familiar with Hotei^[1], sometimes known as the Laughing Buddha. You might have seen sculptures of him sometimes in gardens, and he's typically depicted as having this big belly and a huge smile. Sometimes his hands are up like this above his head, sometimes he rests in a resting posture. As it turns out, Hotei is actually the depiction of an old Chinese monk. As legend has it, Hotei was known for being so large because he would eat the suffering of others. He had this big belly because he consumed other people's problems, all the while being full of joy.

When I hear Rumi's poem, what I see are two Hoteis sitting in a tiny boat floating on the ocean of suffering, bumping into each other and having a great time. What I love about Hotei is that he shows us that joy helps us metabolize suffering. If we want to be resilient enough to face our own suffering, we need some joy. And if we want to be in service to others, if we want to meet the crises of gun violence, racism, or deadly earthquakes, then we need to be pretty well-resourced. Joy helps us be well-resourced.

The Buffet of Joy

That's what I'd like to talk about tonight: joy, the practice of joy. Specifically, I'm calling this talk "The Buffet of Joy: Cultivating Wholesome States."

Considering so much of human life is spent trying to obtain joy and avoid unpleasant experiences, it's kind of surprising that we don't talk about it more directly and more frequently. I became really interested in what Buddhism has to say about joy, what are reliable means of cultivating it, and whether joy can be available when circumstances are unfavorable. This is a relevant topic for me because I've spent much of the past fifteen years being really serious about practice, and there have been many parts of that time where the practice was not about joy. It was about suffering, renunciation, getting rid of my hobbies so I could meditate, and sacrificing time with loved ones for retreats. All of that has been a really powerful training, but I've learned over time that joy is severely underemphasized.

It's taken me a long time to realize that cultivating joy is a tremendously important part of the spiritual path. Joy is not an add-on. Some people feel like suffering is the meat of practice and joy is an accessory, but that's actually not the case. There's a reason that the Buddha was known as the "Happy One." Joy is found all over the place in the Buddhist teachings. If you're a list person, you might know that you can find it in the Seven Factors of Awakening, in the sixteen steps of Anapanasati^[2], in transcendental dependent arising, and sympathetic joy (mudita) is a brahma-vihara^[3]. It's all over the place; you don't have to go far to find it.

James Baraz^[4] is an Insight teacher who's probably best known for his teachings on joy. He actually wrote a book called Awakening Joy, so if you want a little more joy in your life, that's a good one. He says, "Gladness and delight do not merely balance out negative tendencies; they actually heal the aversive mind." I love that. Gladness and delight don't merely balance out negative tendencies, they actually heal the aversive mind.

The Gladness Pentad

One of the ways that I've learned to attune to joy is by getting to know the different flavors of joy. In the same way that one might be a connoisseur of fine cheeses, one can also be a connoisseur of joy. Here's a quote from the Dhammapada:

Tasting the flavor of solitude and peace, one becomes free of distress and evil. Drinking the flavor of Dharma joy, ah, so happily we live, we who have no attachments. We shall feast on joy as the radiant gods.

Sounds pretty good, right? I'm using joy as a more general, catch-all term tonight just to encompass all of these wholesome states. But there are actually very precise distinctions in the suttas about the different flavors of joy. There's a set of teachings that's known as the "gladness pentad" that actually goes through some of these flavors. I'm going to share them with you, as sometimes hearing distinctions helps wake us up to see those distinctions in our own life and to be more attuned to them.

The five parts of the gladness pentad are:

1. Gladness (pāmojja)
2. Joy (pīti)
3. Tranquility (passaddhi)
4. Happiness (sukha)
5. Concentration (samādhi)

In the suttas, this is presented as something that can naturally arise in the heart, and they unfold from one to the next. It's sequential.

Let's zoom in now on a couple of these, because gladness, joy, and happiness seem like they'd be synonymous, but they're actually not. I'd say most people are familiar with tranquility. Tranquility has a slightly different flavor: calm, or the stilling and collecting of the mind. But gladness, joy, and happiness seem pretty similar, so those are the ones that I'll unpack for you.

Gladness (Pāmojja) This state is actually more evaluative in nature. That is to say, it's often evoked by a mental catalyst. I'm glad about something. Gladness arises when we evaluate a situation; it might happen in a split second, and we go, "Oh, this is pretty great." Often gratitude has this quality of gladness because it comes from reflection. Like, "Oh, I'm so glad that that meeting at work went well today," or, "Oh, I'm so glad that I have this cozy blanket for my bed." It has a mental catalyst for it.

Joy (Pīti) Joy, or pīti, on the other hand, does not rely on a mental catalyst. It doesn't need any sort of mental stimulus for it to happen. Instead, it's more physical, very energized, uplifting, and often it comes forth from wholehearted engagement in an activity. Meditative joy is sometimes translated as rapture, because as the mind really begins to collect a lot of energy, joy can come forth physically in the body.

Happiness (Sukha) Then we have tranquility, and then happiness (sukha). Happiness is considered the most subtle of the three. It's more subdued, relaxed, calm, satiated, and contented. It happens as we continue to become more collected, more immersed in wholehearted engagement with the task at hand.

The Oasis Analogy To share an analogy for these three similar states, there's an analogy in the commentaries to the Abhidhamma^[5] that does a nice job of describing how joy and happiness are different, and I think it actually explains gladness, too.

Imagine for a moment that you are out in a desert and you are parched. It's been a long time since you've had anything to drink. You happen to hear from someone that there's an oasis nearby. You can imagine that upon hearing this news, the mind becomes very glad. It's really glad about the fact that there's an oasis there. There's that gladdening in the heart.

When you start traveling to the oasis, you can imagine there's a lot of energy, excitement, and joy. That's pīti.

Once you get to the oasis and you drink water to your heart's content, bathe in the waters, notice the birds and lotuses, and rest back in the shade—you're satiated and content. That is sukha.

So pīti is the excitement of going to the oasis, and sukha is that satiation, thirst quenched. These are the three flavors of Dharma joy. Hopefully, you can start to feel into those in your own life and practice, so you can develop a palette for them.

What's so wonderful about them is that they happen naturally. They are not willed into being by the practitioner; rather, the practitioner just puts in place the conditions for the gladness pentad to occur. We can think about it a little bit like growing a garden. We're not in charge of when the seed actually sprouts. We can provide good soil, make sure it's in a place where it has plenty of sunlight, and we can water it regularly, but we don't control when the seed sprouts. Similarly, we can put conditions in place for the gladness pentad, but we can't force it to happen.

What I like about this analogy of the seed growing is that when a seed sprouts, the little seedlings have leaves that unfold, one and then the other. That's how the gladness pentad can unfold, too. It can be gladness—one leaf—then the next leaf unfurls, which is joy, then tranquility, etc. Our job is just to create favorable conditions.

Favorable Conditions for Joy

The next question might be: what are the favorable conditions? That's what I'd like to spend the rest of the talk discussing. What are favorable conditions for the arising of the gladness pentad? Specifically, I want to focus on some lesser-known ones. I think all of you probably have some wonderful ways of cultivating joy in your own life. People love spending time in nature, with people they care about, and they have wonderful hobbies. That is all fabulous. Sometimes it can be helpful to have some lesser-known modes of bringing joy into one's life.

The three that I'm going to share with you are all noted in the suttas as conditions for the arising of the gladness pentad:

1. Ethical conduct (sīla), or virtue.
2. Generosity (dāna).
3. Faith (saddhā).

Ethical Conduct (Sīla) Some of you may be familiar with the term "the bliss of blamelessness." This refers to the lightness of being when we're not guilty of causing harm, and when we're not weighed down with the burden of unskillful actions. We're not killing, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, lying, etc. You might be able to feel into this in your own life, just connecting with the difference between feeling guilty and non-guilt. Feeling sneaky is no fun. States of non-guilt are lighter.

It's actually very hard for the mind to settle when you've done something unethical. I know people whose meditation has been really haunted by the unwholesome actions of their past. So it's actually a really supportive condition, not just for gladness, but for the settling of the mind, to engage in wholesome activity and be upright in one's actions.

At Zen Center some time ago, there was a very charming new student who was just starting to take up precept practice. She was engaging with it in her life to try to get a sense of how the precepts were helpful, did they bring forth joy, and what this is all about. She told a story about a time she went to the grocery store. She went to the clerk, purchased her items, and as she was about to leave, she realized that the clerk gave her too much change. Practicing her precepts—not taking what's not freely given—she went back and said, "Oh, excuse me. I think you gave me more change than you intended," and handed it back. As she was about to leave, she noticed the person next to her in line, who was about to check out themselves. They just looked astonished and said, "Whoa, that just restored my faith in humanity." This new student was like, "Wow, not so bad, huh? Restored somebody's faith in humanity. How's that for cultivating joy?"

We never know how our upright actions, our sīla, will impact others and the ways that it will brighten the heart. There's such a joy in being able to do what's honest. I can think of a few times myself when I was torn between a decision, and one just didn't feel quite as ethically upright. In choosing the one that felt cleaner, it was like a little sparkle of gladness arose in the heart. That's that fruiting of the gladness pentad. There's a joy of freedom, an inner relaxation when we're not in conflict about the right thing to do. So that's number one: sīla.

Generosity (Dāna) Generosity can occur in so many ways: material gifts, giving time, giving attention, giving an apology. Giving the gift of fearlessness (abhaya-dāna) is talked about in the Buddhist tradition, meaning that when we live ethically, we're not a source of danger for others. There are so many ways that we can be generous.

For years, I kept a gratitude list every night. In addition to writing down what I was grateful for that day, I would also include any gifts that I had given that day. It might not necessarily be a material gift, but maybe the gift of my listening, or any gifts that I gave that day. I noticed how much it gladdened the mind to recall those at the end of the day, to actually feel them again. What I noticed was that if I was able to give on any given day, that was a good day, and it became much less important whether that day was pleasant or unpleasant. What if we based our happiness on what we give rather than what we get? It's a different way of relating to the world.

If you do give a gift, don't miss it. If you give a gift and you feel that little bit of joy in the heart, really be present for that. Don't miss that moment. Almost like you're a sponge soaking it up, really let your mindfulness register what that feels like in the body.

There's a Native American ceremony where parents give their children an abundance of food and gifts, and then they step away and cry out, "I'm hungry, I'm thirsty!" Then the children get to give to them from a place of abundance. That's a training in dāna. It's a training in generosity.

I was reading the news some time ago, and I came across a story of generosity about a four-year-old boy named Nolan. Nolan had a rare form of lymphoma, and he was in the hospital. Nolan, more than anything, wanted to be a firefighter. The local fire department got word of this, and they decided to go visit Nolan. As it happens, it was during the height of the COVID pandemic, so they couldn't actually go into his hospital room to visit him, but they did something better. They drove the fire truck to the hospital, and they extended the ladder all the way up to the fifth floor where they greeted Nolan.

You can just imagine what it was like to be that first firefighter up that ladder to meet that little boy. You might even feel it in your heart now just imagining that. You might even go inside and connect with whether you feel any gladness in the heart imagining that. And if you do, that's the arising of the gladness pentad. That's generosity as a condition for gladness. That's the fruiting of this teaching in your own heart.

Faith (Saddhā) How does faith lead to gladness? I want to note that faith is not a word that works for everyone. For some people, the word confidence or trust feels more resonant. And faith in what? Of course, in the Dharma. Faith in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Faith in our own capacity for awakening, in these teachings, in the community of spiritual practitioners. That's the sort of faith that we're talking about, the sort of confidence that I'm referencing.

It might be hard to understand how faith can lead to gladness. One way we can think about this is to realize that when we understand there's an alternative to suffering, that is very good news. To realize that I can actually be free regardless of whether circumstances are favorable—that's very good news. Who wouldn't be happy when they learned that there's an alternative to suffering? That's the thread that takes us from faith to gladness: "Oh, there is another way!" What joy! There's so much joy in that.

In order to grow faith, it requires you to expose yourself to the teachings. By coming to this talk tonight, you are putting the conditions in place for gladness. You're providing the sun, the soil, the water just in doing this. Listening to the Dharma cultivates faith, spending time with Dharma friends cultivates faith, studying cultivates faith.

Here's an analogy about faith from James Baraz. He says that learning to have faith in the Dharma is a little bit like learning to swim. At first, we get in the pool and we're kind of thrashing around and doggy paddling. We don't feel so supported, we're a little out of control, we don't trust the water to hold us yet. But as we spend some more time in the pool, we might learn to tread water a bit. We start to trust that the water is starting to hold us a little bit more. This is like when we start to practice and gain a little trust in the teachings. We see, "Okay, this is working a bit. I'm starting to have a little bit of confidence here."

Over time, as we continue to practice, our faith becomes verified. Our faith can become radiant. We really trust the Dharma, and that's like when we learn that we can just lay back on the water and float, and that the Dharma can support us, and that it was there to hold us all along.

It's a joyful experience to go from frantically doggy paddling to resting on the surface of the water fully supported. That's the joy, that's the gladness that can become possible when we have faith, when we have confidence in the teachings. Just like two people in a boat floating on the ocean of suffering, bumping into each other and laughing.

When we put the appropriate conditions in place—when we provide conditions like virtue, generosity, and faith—we create those conditions for gladness. That's our soil, our sunlight, our water. Try these out in your life. You probably already are, and you might just see the relationship between those activities and gladness, between those activities and joy. In doing so, may you taste all of the flavors of Dharma joy, experiencing the full buffet.

I'll close with a poem. This is by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer^[6], and it's a very joyful poem:

Right now, there are Tibetan Buddhist monks in a temple in the Himalayas endlessly reciting mantras for the cessation of your suffering and for the flourishing of your happiness. Someone you haven't met yet is already dreaming of adoring you. Someone is writing a book that you will read in the next two years that will change how you look at life. Nuns in the Alps are in endless vigil, praying for the Holy Spirit to alight the heart of all of God's children. A farmer is looking at his organic crops and whispering, "Nourish them." Someone wants to kiss you, to hold you, to make tea for you. Someone is willing to lend you money, wants to know what your favorite food is, and treat you to a movie. Someone in your orbit has something immensely valuable to give you, for free. Something is being invented this year that will change how your generation lives, communicates, heals, and passes on. The next great song is being rehearsed. Thousands of people are in yoga classes right now intentionally sending light out from their heart chakras and wrapping it around the Earth. Millions of children are assuming that everything is amazing and will always be that way. Someone is in profound pain, and a few months from now they'll be thriving like never before. From where they are, they just can't see it. Someone has recently cracked open their joyous, genuine nature because they did the hard work of hauling years of oppression off of their psyche. This luminous juju is floating in the ether and is accessible to you. Someone just this second wished for world peace, in earnest. Someone is dedicating their days to protecting your civil liberties and clean drinking water. Someone is regaining their sanity. Someone is coming back from the dead. Someone is genuinely forgiving the seemingly unforgivable. Someone is curing the incurable. You, me, someone. Now.

Thank you very much. Let's sit for a moment.

(Meditation bell rings)

Thank you all for your kind attention.

Q&A

Mei Elliott: We have a little time now for any questions or comments, any reflections. Maybe anything about your own practice of joy or your own reflection on these topics, that's welcome also. And your comments don't have to be genius. Sometimes I think in a group there's this sense that if we say something it has to be genius. It's not true. Just say your name before you speak, if you don't mind.

Mike: You distinguished three things in the pentad. How would you distinguish tranquility from concentration?

Mei Elliott: Sure, yeah. They both feed each other, so often they're occurring at the same time. That's a really good question because often concentration brings forth tranquility, and tranquility feeds concentration. Tranquility, or passaddhi, is really that state of calm, and it can be both physical and mental. But they don't necessarily need to happen at the same time. There have been times where I've had a lot of physical tranquility but the mind was not all that tranquil. You may have had the experience of having a really good day of exercise and the body is so calm in the evening, but the mind is not concentrated. There are also times where the mind has felt somewhat tranquil, but it's not particularly concentrated or focused. It has a subdued quality, but it might have some stray thoughts.

Concentration (samādhi), on the other hand, is the collecting of the mind. It's when the mind collects into the present moment and is willing to rest on whatever object we put it on. It's very well behaved. There's a reason that concentration meditations are often called samatha, which means calm abiding, because they're so interlinked that those meditations bring forth calm. Concentration quite naturally brings that forth. Great question.

Speaker 2: One of the things that you said, Mei, about floating on your back in the water, triggered a memory that I had when I was a kid. I was actually very skinny, and my swimming teachers would tell me, "All you have to do is float on your back, move your head back, and you'll float." I could never float on my back, and it was hard not to take that personally. Like, I should be able to float on the water! It wasn't until I was much older, and somewhat more rotund, that floating came naturally. It made me think: do you have any thoughts about how one develops that trust to float when it just doesn't seem possible right now?

Mei Elliott: When you were a kid, maybe you just needed to eat more suffering like Hotei. [Laughter] One of the five hindrances is doubt. Doubt is one of the most common things that plagues the mind, and the antidote to doubt is faith. It's really helpful to find a way to answer the question you're asking: how do we develop faith when it just doesn't seem possible, when we want to float but that's not what's happening?

For many people, it's finding the Dharma that works for them and exposing oneself to it. If Tibetan Buddhism is really the type of Dharma that does it for you, go for that. Or if there's a particular teacher that really inspires you, listen to that teacher's teaching. Whatever helps stoke the fire, expose yourself to that. Also, spending time with Dharma friends. You might not have any Dharma friends, and that's fine, but that's why you can come to places like this and strike up a conversation with someone. These are different things that can help cultivate faith.

There's also this idea of leaning on the faith of a teacher. Maybe you don't have faith, but you see a teacher, somebody who's a more experienced Dharma practitioner than yourself, and it seems like the Dharma is working for them. You may not have felt it in your own life yet—which I know isn't the case for you, but for some people—they can see it's working for this other person. Sometimes that's talked about as leaning on the faith of another. You say, "Okay, I haven't felt it for myself, but I'm going to trust this because I see it's working for someone else." Those are a few different access points.

Speaker 3: I guess as far as joy that I've been feeling, it's just coming here and practicing, and then seeing it translate little by little in life outside of here. So I'm definitely feeling grateful for that. Thank you to Insight Meditation Center for that.

Mei Elliott: Thanks for sharing. I appreciate what you said about coming to practice here and then seeing it change your life outside of here. That can be a continuation of our garden analogy where we plant a seed, give it good conditions, but then we don't control when it sends up a shoot. I often think of that in terms of meditation practice. Every time we bring the mind back, it's like planting a seed. Every time we cultivate loving-kindness, it's like planting a seed. Then you go out in your life, and lo and behold, maybe you're having a difficult interaction with a friend, and one of those seeds sprouts at that moment. You say the kind thing rather than the harmful thing. Or there's a moment of frustration, and one of those seeds sprouts, and you're able to be mindful of the frustration rather than just acting on it mindlessly.

There's a really sweet way that doing this practice sprouts in our life when we leave here, and it's very faith-building to get to see in one's own life how the Dharma is working. That can be another source of faith: reflecting on times that the Dharma has been helpful and reminding ourselves of those times.

Speaker 4: I think I also wanted to add, if I may, I noticed that if I don't feel very hopeful in the moment, it seems like simply by participating with a teacher or with the Sangha, we can access hope by leaning. I think that maybe takes some of the pressure off of, "Oh, is there something wrong with me because I'm worrying so much about tomorrow, or thinking certain pessimistic thoughts?" With an ongoing practice, we can kind of access this hope in a more simplistic way. Does that go off of what you're sharing?

Mei Elliott: I think totally. If you come in here and your mind's going a mile a minute, you're feeling hopeless, or there's tons of discursive thought and you wonder, "Will this ever work for me?"—just exposing yourself to this environment means your mind is absorbing some really helpful conditions, and that can take somebody really far. You don't have to worry too much about what the mind's doing in any given moment. That's just the fruiting of past karma, and you just meet that with mindfulness. Thanks for sharing.

All right, we should probably wrap it up because it's nine, but you're welcome to come say hi after if you'd like. For anybody who's interested, I have a mailing list of different Dharma activities, talks, and classes that I offer. I put a sign-up sheet on the table in the lobby if you're interested. It's a shared Google group between me and my partner Kodo Conlon, and we send out one email a month sharing what we're up to.

Thanks so much everyone, really good to see you tonight. Take care.