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Dharmette: Udayi Sutta (1 of 5)

Guided Meditation

Hello everyone on this Monday, and beginning of a new theme as we move through these five days of the workweek, the meditation week together.

We can begin maybe to have a little longer sitting than usual. Assume kindly, lovingly, a meditation posture that has the balance between being alert and relaxed. Alert in the body, relaxed in the mind. Alert in the mind and relaxed in the body. If you're comfortable closing your eyes or lowering your gaze, gently feeling your body. As if your attention is a gentle breeze, allow your attention to blow through your body, the arms, the legs, the back, the torso. Checking in, gently touching into how your body is right now.

Let the breath of awareness find its way to the body's experience of breathing. Feel the rhythm, the massage of breathing in, breathing out, as the torso expands and contracts. Then slightly, with not too much effort, take somewhat deeper inhales, fuller inhales, and longer exhales, relaxing as you exhale.

Let your breathing return to normal, with the exhales softening in your body. Whatever is not soft, whatever is tense, soften around it. Almost as if there's a light touch surrounding what is uncomfortable.

As you exhale, softening in the mind, a softening that helps the mind settle, relax. A softening by which your mind is more awake, more available for your present moment experience here and now, in this body and mind. Then settling in, settling into the body's experience of breathing, where breathing is a gentle rhythm inviting you here, now, into the experience of breathing, into the experience of being present here and now.

And as you exhale, follow the exhale all the way to the end as a way to settle yourself all the way down to a grounded, settled place in your body. Following the exhale to the end, gently, without any force, allow the exhale to be a little fuller than usual, following the movements and sensations in the body as you exhale.

The more you think, the less you can feel the body breathing. The quieter the thinking becomes, the more attention is available for the body sensing the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, check in again with yourself. The gentle wind of awareness, let it blow softly through the body, heart, and mind to know yourself. In the knowing, the way you know, there's a gentleness, a kindness, a care, and acceptance.

As you check in with yourself, imagine or feel and see if how you're feeling right now could be a beneficial reference point for protecting you from ways of thinking, ways of speaking, ways of acting which cause harm to yourself or to others. Might there be a way that you're settled or calm or more sensitive at the end of a sitting? A sensitivity that gives you heightened care to not harm self or other, to not easily succumb to stressful activity. A sensitivity for which it might be easier to be kind and compassionate toward self and all beings.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And as each of you is part of the group of all beings, may it be that your happiness is a source of care for everyone else.

Thank you.

Dharma Talk

Hello and welcome to this Monday as we begin the week with a new theme of teaching. There's a discourse of the Buddha—a sutta^[1]—called the Udayi Sutta^[2]. It has the Buddha list five qualities that are to be established when one teaches the Dharma. Hopefully, these are established in me as I teach now.

These five are also interesting because they make an interesting reference point for anytime we're speaking with others: are these five qualities established in ourselves when we're speaking? Some of them might be a little bit of a stretch for ordinary speaking, but I think they're valuable reference points. They are certainly valuable reference points for being your own teacher in the Dharma, in how we navigate and find our own way through practice. These are included when I teach people to become Dharma teachers. I want them to be familiar with these five qualities, and some of them I put greater importance on than others.

I'll read the discourse to you, the core of it. There's a context for it. Ananda^[3], one of the Buddha's main disciples and his main attendant, is in town for something, and he sees that there's a monk named Udayi who is surrounded by a large number of laypeople, teaching them the Dharma. We're not sure who this Udayi is, but there is someone else with more or less that name elsewhere in the suttas—possibly it's the same person—who is one of the most misbehaving monks in the suttas. He breaks the monastic rules and seems to be filled with greed, wanting things from people. So he's not necessarily an exemplar of a good monk. This maybe explains a little bit why Ananda went back to the Buddha and said Udayi is sitting in town, surrounded by laypeople, teaching them.

The Buddha neither approves nor disapproves of what he hears. But when the Buddha neither approves nor disapproves, sometimes that is actually a sign that he's not so happy; he would clearly approve of someone's teaching if he agreed, as he does at times. So the Buddha then offered five qualities that are to be established in oneself if one is to teach the Dharma. This is how it goes:

The Dharma should be taught to others thinking:

1. I will speak step by step.
2. I will speak for practical reasons.
3. I will speak grounded in kindness.
4. I will not speak for material reward.
5. I will speak without wounding myself or others.

So these are five, and I like when there are five qualities because we have these five days of the workweek together. I'll go through them, but I'd like to go through them in a different order than they appear because I'd like to connect them lightly to the themes of the last two weeks. Those were the foundational teachings that underlie what I teach when I teach the Dharma. The last few weeks have been the what. Just as important as what we teach is how we teach—the manner in which we teach.

I've known people who taught in a manner that seemed so much about themselves. It was almost like they were praising themselves or building themselves up to the audience. It didn't feel like they were teaching the Dharma; how they were teaching wasn't conveying what the Dharma was. Their words might have been good teaching, but the how was not a teaching for people.

How we teach matters. So I would like to start with the fifth quality: "I will speak without wounding myself or others," or without harming myself or others. That lightly connects to the last two weeks. The first foundation of my core teachings is suffering and the end of suffering—heightening sensitivity to all the things that cause suffering, stress, harm, or tension within us.

If we use the word dukkha^[4], translated as suffering too much, some people interpret it to be suffering as the big, catastrophic challenges of our life. But in the Dharma, the word dukkha applies to the whole range, from the lightest little extra tension or stress that we unnecessarily add to our situation, to the full-blown existential challenges of being human.

The focal point of the Dharma is not exactly being offended, hurt, or made uncomfortable by reality, but being harmed by it, being wounded by it. That distinction is a very interesting distinction to look into because some people are confused by it, and so their response to others is confused.

There's a distinction between being harmed and being offended. Being offended doesn't mean that we're harmed in any way; maybe we just feel disrespected or feel very uncomfortable in a certain way. We might feel hurt, meaning we feel an ache, or feel somehow deflated or discouraged, but we have the resilience and capacity to just go with that, not hold on to it, and not be caught in it. Harm is when we harm ourselves or others by causing lasting damage, a wound that lasts for a long time and is not easily let go of or falls away easily.

So, to teach the Dharma without harming self or others. When teaching people to be teachers, it's that quality that becomes crucial: don't teach the Dharma in such a way that you harm yourself. One of the reasons I emphasize that to new teachers is that how we are is a big part of what we teach. If you're harming yourself, you're teaching harming yourself. If you're teaching caring for yourself, then you're teaching the Dharma.

For example, when I'm teaching with other teachers on retreat and they get sick, I tell them, "Please rest, take care of yourself, because that's how you're going to teach the Dharma." If you have challenges of any kind that require you to take care of yourself, you actually teach something very profound by doing that. Even though you're scheduled to give the Dharma talk and feel the responsibility to show up because everybody is expecting it, if you show up and override the self-care that's needed, you're not conveying the kind of inner care that we want everyone to be involved in through the Dharma. Part of what Dharma practice is for everyone is to understand that things are constantly shifting and changing, and becoming not what we expected, not what the schedule was. Then everyone practices with that.

So, in ordinary life as well, speak without wounding oneself or others. Be in conversations without harming the relationship. With the heightened sensitivity that can come with something like mindfulness or a regular meditation practice, we can feel and sense when what we say shifts the dynamics between self and others. We can see people flinch or shut down. I've been in conversations where people said something to me that just felt like they closed the door to the conversation. They said something definitively, declaratively, and we're no longer in a conversation or a discussion. In my mind, I think, "The door's been closed. Now there's something in the relationship temporarily or in this conversation that is shut down. We're not in relationship anymore." That's a kind of interpersonal harm that's caused, a loss of connectivity.

Anger creates a real divide between people. Hostility, sarcasm, and sometimes cynicism do too. If we spend a lot of time complaining, what is the effect on other people? People who complain a lot are generally very self-focused and not as tuned into how it is for other people as they could be. Maybe we're not harming other people, but we are harming the relationship between two people. Sometimes what we say is offensive, and we don't even know we're offending someone. But if we're attentive, we can watch and feel and see their posture shift, their eyes move away, the smile they had drop away, or some energetic quality of their body slump or settle. What's the effect that we have on others?

With the orientation from the last two weeks—the focus on suffering and the end of suffering—that can translate intimately to how we are in relationship with other people. The Dharma is not only something private and personal. The sensitivity that awakens within us puts us into a mindfulness field with others as well. It becomes natural to be sensitive and caring for others and oneself, so we're not harming either self or others.

For some people, it's the self that they don't pay enough attention to. There are plenty of people who harm themselves in relationships: they sacrifice themselves, put themselves down, limit themselves, excuse themselves, or apologize too much. These are ways—which may be very subtle—of self-harm. When we speak, when we're in relationships, can we avoid harming ourselves, and can we avoid harming others?

I think this is a phenomenal guide for living a wise life, and for the theme of the sutta, it's a phenomenally important orientation for teaching the Dharma. Maybe most of you are not Dharma teachers, but you might have occasion to want to tell someone something about the Buddhist teachings you're learning. Be careful how you say it. Tell other people in a way that you don't harm them or harm yourself in doing it. I've certainly harmed others—or at least harmed the relationship between self and others—when I was too caught up in the teachings, too enamored with it, and maybe even a little bit too dogmatic. I was so excited about teaching it and speaking it that I lost touch with the person I was speaking with.

Thank you very much, and I hope that as we go through these Udayi qualities, you find ways that are meaningful for yourself. Thank you.