Guided Meditation: Mindful Body, Right View; Social & Communal Harmony (1 of 5) Right View is the Forerunner to Harmony

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The following talk was given by Kodo Conlin at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 17, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Mindful Body, Right View

Hello, good day everyone. Hope this is audible. I'm sure the chat will let me know one way or another. So nice to be back with you. It's been a bit. Seeing all the smiles, bows, and hearts is a fabulous way to start a Monday.

The topic I have in mind for the week is the Buddha's teachings on social and communal harmony, which I'm relating to as a sort of complement to Meg Gawler's^[1] teachings last week on the training in emptiness.

So let's start with a sitting. Let's find our way into our familiar, upright, steady meditation posture.

Let's start with a few deep breaths, connecting deliberately with this body. A few deep breaths, feeling our way into alignment and feeling our way into relaxation.

And with this connection with the breathing as our basis, let's begin this process of steadying our attention with the body here and now. Breath by breath, with a steady attention, sensing the particulars: warmth and coolness, stillness, trembling. Steadily, moment after moment, breath after breath, tuning in to those inner senses. Those inner senses that are knowing, moment by moment, what's happening in this body.

Now, if it's available within this field of the body and mind, staying sensitive, I'd invite you to give a little bit of attention to the arising of any impulse at all. Any impulse. The intention arises to scratch an itch, move the body, and deliberately take up a thought pattern—it could be anything.

Mentally sensitive to this body, and gently monitoring for any impulse that arises. Right there at the impulse, is there a sense or feeling of its quality? Is it moving us toward wholesome, beneficial action, or is there a quality to the impulse of unwholesomeness? Not to judge, but just to see. What's the quality of this impulse as it comes and inevitably goes?

Sensitive to this body and mind, mindful as impulses arise, mindful as impulses pass away, sensing their quality. This is one way into wise view.

Social & Communal Harmony (1 of 5) Right View is the Forerunner to Harmony

So, hello again. Whenever we do this on a Monday morning, I sense this wonderful kind of coalescing of the group, the Sangha^[2] coming together, and also this feeling of embarking on something. Quite a feeling for a Monday.

The theme for today is the Buddha's teaching on social and communal harmony. It's something I'd like to explore this week with you in these five sessions. There's a way that Ajahn Sumedho^[3] talks about the qualities of the Dharma^[4] that I think is so apparent when we consider the teachings on social and communal harmony: that not only is the Dharma well-spoken, but that it's apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, that it leads onward, and it's to be experienced by each of us using wisdom.

The source I'm using for the teaching is this book, this anthology Bhikkhu Bodhi^[5] put together called The Buddha's Teachings on Social and Communal Harmony. It has ten sections, but I've sort of reorganized things and distilled them to some key points so that we can talk about this in five sessions. My hope is that our practice and discussion together will reveal, refine, and remind us of how we can apply the Dharma in our everyday lives.

I've been thinking why this topic was so up for me, interesting to me. And what's arising this morning is that it feels like a time of transition, both personally and in the world. And maybe there's something about being in the United States and us being more or less perpetually in the election cycle where I thought, "Oh yes, this is where I want to focus my attention: social and communal harmony." I wonder what the Buddha said about this. There's so much wisdom he shares with us about the inner life. Also, how does he talk about community? How does he talk about society? What's available to us there?

The first thing that I want to propose is that with an unclear view, with a foggy view, despite all of our efforts and our best intentions, we end up not acting in accord with the world, not acting in accord with things as they are, or with others, or with ourselves. In a very real way, with wrong view, unclear view, harmony is absent.

So the point of this morning: right view is the forerunner of harmony, an upright view. The Buddha said that just as the dawn is the forerunner of the sun rising, so is right view the forerunner of the Noble Eightfold Path^[6]. It's the thing that precedes and leads into all of these wholesome qualities. And as we'll talk about this week, right view is the forerunner of happiness here and now, and of social and communal harmony.

So what's right view? What's the Buddha talking about here? It can sound a little bit like "right opinion," which is decidedly not what the Buddha meant. In fact, the Buddha warns over and over again against clinging to views. Instead of right opinion and the sort of fallible stability that can come from that, I think of right view more as a working hypothesis, something we can test, something we can try out.

In the Majjhima Nikaya^[7], the Buddha talks about right view in a number of ways. He says it can be the knowing of wholesome and unwholesome. It can be understanding the relationship with any of the factors of the twelve-fold chain^[8] and how they arise and how they pass away.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, with social and communal harmony in mind, pulls out some particular aspects of right view for our attention. And he points out something interesting: that the Buddha formulated right view in response to some prevailing ideas of the time about conditionality, about cause and effect. Three things in particular. He formulated right view to say: one, our actions now have an effect in the future; our actions of the past have an effect now; and third, and this is crucial, that we can discern the beneficial from the unbeneficial.

So maybe we can already hear some of the connections to social and communal harmony, and maybe even think of how the opposites might interfere with our harmonious, aligned interactions with others. One way we can flesh this out a bit is by getting to know a little bit what the Buddha was talking about when he said wrong view, micchā diṭṭhi^[9]. You might hear the word "wrong" and go, "Wait, what? Are we allowed in the Buddha Dharma to talk about rights and wrongs? Is that okay?" But I think we can consider that if we're running a working hypothesis and running an experiment, we need to be able to define some terms and make some distinctions. In fact, in Majjhima 117, the Buddha defines right view as this capacity to distinguish right view from wrong view.

So what view was Bhikkhu Bodhi pointing at that the Buddha was responding to? Again, it's in three parts. One, that there are no fruits of our deeds, either in this life or beyond. That what we do now actually doesn't have an effect. Using the classic metaphor of karmic seed and karmic fruit, this would be like saying if we plant seeds right now, nothing will grow. And the quality of the seed that we plant—nothing's going to come out. So "no fruits of our deeds" was the first aspect of wrong view that the Buddha was pointing away from.

The second is that there's no way to distinguish a wholesome deed from an unwholesome deed. Can you imagine? In the karmic seed and karmic fruit analogy, this might be like saying that a kale seed, which brings up something wholesome that can nourish our bodies, is the same as a poisonous castor bean seed that is toxic to the touch. That there's no difference between these two things, we can't actually know that this is wholesome and this is unwholesome. So that's the second aspect.

And then the third is that with regard to the path, beings, in the language of the texts, are defiled and purified without cause. Now, what this actually means is that we have no say in the quality of our life, that we have no moral agency. And in the analogy, this means that we can't plant any seeds, and even if we did, they wouldn't produce anything.

Wrong view. The important upshot for communal harmony is that if we act in accord with these three views, actually there's no possibility for growth in the path, and there's no point in conducting ourselves ethically because ethical conduct has no effect.

So Bhikkhu Bodhi extends the idea this way and he says that harmony in any community, whether a small group or a whole society, depends on a shared commitment to ethical conduct. And we might say that right view is what makes shared ethical conduct possible. It's the observation that our deeds now actually do have results in the future. That how we've acted in the past is conditioning the mind of now, the group of now, the scenario of now, and that it's possible for us to distinguish a wholesome deed from an unwholesome deed.

The syllogism that Bhikkhu Bodhi is putting together here is pretty simple: Right view is a condition for virtuous behavior, which is a condition for a harmonious community. We might say that the harmonious community that the Buddha envisioned had as its basis a shared understanding in wholesome conduct and a commitment to live according to our observations.

This scope of right view about cause and effect is called "mundane right view," in contrast to what Bhikkhu Bodhi calls "transcendent right view," which has more to do with a matured right view that supports the path of liberation specifically. And this mundane right view is where we begin. This is our working hypothesis. He puts it another way and calls it the right view of one's personal responsibility for one's deeds.

It's worth repeating and reflecting on this notion of karma, of causality, of karmic fruit, karmic seed, and the effect of karmic seeds fruiting. It's worth reflecting on this and repeating it because it's so central to the path. And as we'll see through the week, it is the basis for an understanding in social and communal harmony.

Now, how we go about training in this is something we'll unpack over the next several sessions, but I'll say right now—and flesh this out a bit more tomorrow—that the basic beginning exercise, similar to what we did in the meditation today, is acting reflectively. Observing for ourselves the effect of our actions. Observing the quality of our impulses. And making sure that we are paying attention: Are we doing things that are wholesome? Are we harming others? Are we working for their suffering, or are we working for welfare and happiness? This is the practice in right view, and it shows up in all sorts of ways in the teaching. But it's worth saying again: harmony in any community, a small group or a whole society, depends on this commitment.

So in closing, I'll quote Bhikkhu Bodhi once more. He says: "Through mundane right view, one understands that unwholesome karma—deeds arisen from impure motives—eventually rebound upon oneself and bring suffering, a bad rebirth, and spiritual deterioration. Conversely, one understands that wholesome karma—wholesome action, deeds arisen from virtuous motives—lead to happiness, fortunate rebirth, and spiritual progress."

So for us, perhaps the centrality of right view can be a powerful motivator to pursue the path with clear vision, clear seeing. It's inspiring to think that we have agency, that our actions matter, our actions have an effect on ourselves and others, and we can distinguish harmful from unharmful. And then we have this practice of refining our conduct iteratively, because we understand that our deeds not only ripple out, but they also rebound upon us. We take great care with our motives and observe the effect our actions have. And then, as reverend angel^[10] likes to say, it's a practice, not a perfect. So we keep refining our skills. It's not only us who benefits, but the entire community.

So, right view is the forerunner of communal harmony. Tomorrow we'll continue with this theme of the Buddha's teachings on social and communal harmony, and we'll turn specifically to the topic of personal training, particularly as it relates to sīla^[11], virtuous conduct. Best wishes. I wish for you a fruitful day of practice. Take care.