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Mindfulness as Refuge, Pasture, and Ancestral Homeland

Good morning again and good day to all of you. I was coming down here today on Mother's Day in the United States. Happy Mother's Day to all who are mothers. We express our gratitude to them and our appreciation.

Coming down here today, I was thinking about this talk and what I would talk about. I had one thing in mind, but when I sat down to meditate and was sitting here now with you, I think that I'm still very much in the middle of the current retreat that I'm teaching. There's a very different feeling inside of being settled, tender, and open. So, I'm in a little different mood perhaps than I usually am when I come down to teach.

I want to share some of the things I said on the retreat, but it's mostly an excuse to try to express something tender, caring, or loving. Something a little bit warm—warmth, settledness, even contentment that I happen to be feeling right now.

This is closely connected to the practice of mindfulness, of sati^[1]. Some of you know that these days, after many years of study and practice, I actually prefer to translate sati, the Buddhist word most commonly translated as mindfulness, as awareness. Awareness is always something that's occurring in the present moment, even though it might be directed towards thinking about the future and the past. Awareness itself is almost coterminous with the present. Our experience of the present is coterminous with our ability to be aware. Here we are aware.

The Buddha talked about this awareness, this sati, this mindfulness in some really wonderful terms. Sometimes he talked about it as a refuge. Sometimes he talks about it as a pasture. And sometimes he talks about it as an ancestral homeland.

I think of these, but I don't know if refuge always has these connotations. A nature refuge is a place. A pasture is a place. And an ancestral homeland is a place. I often see in the teachings of the Buddha this sense that the practice and the references for the practice are very localized, very grounded in the location that we're in. There's languages of being rooted, standing, of being in a place. It's not a vague ambiguity about just being aware, just open awareness. There's a real sense of being grounded, connected, and localized here.

Mindfulness as a Refuge

One of the ways he talks about sati and awareness being a refuge is in a fascinating teaching. Someone comes to the Buddha and says that there are these five senses—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. They ask, "Do these sense perceptions that we have, this ability to sense and experience the world through these five sense doors, do they have a refuge?"

The Buddha answers, "Yes. The mind is their refuge." I think one of the things he's pointing to in this teaching is that it's explicit that each of these sense doors has a different domain, a different pasture. Sight goes out and what it takes in, what it experiences, are sight objects. Ears take in or experience hearing objects, sound objects. And so forth for the other senses; they each have their pasture where they graze, where they pick up things and experience things.

The pasture of each one is distinct. The pasture of sight objects is not experienced as sight objects by the ear. The ear hears. What is heard, the noise and the sounds that the ear hears, is a different pasture, a different domain, and a different realm than what the eye sees, what smells, what tastes, or what the body touches. There's a distinct way these senses work, and each of them is very distinct from each other.

But the mind is their refuge. The mind is what gathers all these together and holds them. The mind sees, experiences, and knows the experience of each one. So, it's like the clearinghouse or the repository where all these five senses come together.

The person talking to the Buddha then asks, "What is the refuge for the mind?" And the Buddha says, "The refuge for the mind is awareness." It is sati, mindfulness. The mind takes in all this stuff and knows all this stuff. The mind is partly a place of recognition, of understanding, of comprehension. It's a central clearinghouse, a reconstruction of a reality, a maker of a reality. It's a maker in the sense that we take in all the sense data and it gets reconstructed in the mind, hopefully often accurately enough to represent what's out there.

But what is the refuge for this mind and its doing? Where is it safe? Where is it protected? Where does it rest? It can rest in awareness. This idea that we should be awareness creates safety, refuge, or protection for the mind. We know what the mind is up to through being aware, and so we can be wiser about what we do. The idea that there's a refuge for it is a support for it.

What's nice about this idea that awareness is a refuge for the mind is that it doesn't posit a self—me, myself, and mine. The "I" is all a product of the activities of the mind. There is something that's beyond the mind, part of the mind, and a kind of awareness that holds it all.

The person then asks the Buddha, "What's the refuge for awareness?" And the Buddha answers, "It's liberation, freedom, a deep letting go." Somehow awareness itself is supported and protected by our capacity to let go, be open, be non-contentious, be non-contracted, to be free. It is the expansiveness or limitlessness of the freedom of awareness.

And then the person asks the Buddha, "Well, does freedom itself have a refuge?" Sarana or patisarana^[2] is the word in Pali. The Buddha says that liberation has nibbana^[3] as a refuge. I translate nibbana, nirvana, with the English idea of release. So, becoming free is protected by being released, by continuing to open, to release, to free. It is the release that leaves us with an absence of clinging. Nibbana is perhaps best understood as that absence—the absence of clinging. It's not a thing.

So, the mind has sati, awareness, as its refuge. We learn to rest in awareness, to trust awareness. It is a deep trust of being aware of what's happening. That's a refuge and a protection. Sati is protected by liberation, by releasing our clinging. And that release, that liberation, is protected by really appreciating that absence of clinging.

The person then asks the Buddha, "And does nibbana, this absence of release, have a refuge?" And the Buddha says, "Now you've gone beyond the realm of questions and beyond what can be asked appropriately."

So, mindfulness and awareness are a refuge. Sati is a refuge.

Mindfulness as a Pasture

Elsewhere, the Buddha talks about sati being a pasture. The word for pasture is gocara^[4]. Go, G-O, is the Pali word for cow. In the Indo-European languages, there's a continuity and a connection; they all have the same root. For something as central and important historically to human culture as the cow, some words don't change much. In English we have cow, in Norwegian it's ku, and in Pali it's go. I think these words are deeply related. I kind of love this family connection. And cara probably is related to our word chariot. It means to go or to wander. So it's where the cows wander, where the cows go.

If you ever spend much time with cows, when cows wander, they're grazing. They go to where the grazing land is, and they're constantly grazing unless they're sleeping or chewing their cud. So, the word gocara is sometimes translated into English as pasture. Sometimes for other animals, the gocara is their feeding grounds, where they go to feed.

When the Buddha says explicitly that the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[5]—mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of feeling tones, mindfulness of mind states, and mindfulness of the inner dynamics of clinging and freedom—are the pasture for practitioners. Not only is it a place where we can be, but if we really want to delve into the world of practice, we want to stay on the pasture. We want to stay in the place where the practice is. Knowing what the pasture is allows us to graze there. It allows us to be fed and nourished there.

Certain ways of being with our experience provide us with a contact with reality that can be nourishing, deepening, settling, and unifying. Other ways of being in contact with reality are fragmenting, dispersing, contracting, and far from nourishing. They can even be the opposite—stressful.

If we say that we're sitting in meditation, and we're filled with anger or fear about something. If we're thinking about how this person said X and I should have said Y, and I'm going to get back at them or that person's no good, and we're just reviewing the story—that's stressful. That's a very un-nourishing way of thinking.

So, we ask ourselves, "Where is the pasture at this moment?" The pasture is the direct, immediate experience of our anger or fear as it is experienced through the body. It's not a denial of anger, fear, happiness, or anything else, but rather finding the place we can be with that experience so that instead of being stressed and un-nourished by it, we get nourished in some deep, important way. Feel it, experience it in an embodied way, and then we're not lost in the story. Experience the feeling tone of it, pleasant or unpleasant. Really feel, sense, and take in the mind state as it operates when you have these preoccupations. That lends itself to a pasture, to grazing, and to a nourishment that's supportive for us. Or pay attention to the ways in which we're caught in clinging to something, and to where the freedom from it is. So here we have this idea of pasture, of being nourished and fed.

Mindfulness as an Ancestral Homeland

The final idea I want to talk about today is the ancestral homeland. Here again, the Buddha says that the Four Foundations of Mindfulness—sati, our awareness—are our ancestral homeland. I don't know what associations you have with this, but I love this idea. It's our home, the place where we're from. When we're there, it's not just a house that's our home, but the very land that we're home in, safe in, and grounded in. It's where our roots are.

About eight years ago, I went back to a place where I grew up in Italy. I lived there for five years and hadn't been back for maybe fifty years—a long, long time. It was quite something to be back at that childhood home, an ancestral home in a sense. As soon as I got to some of the places I was familiar with, the smell, the lighting, and all of it, I thought, "I remember this." It was an embodied sense of being nourished by a place.

The Buddha tells an analogy story. He said that in the foothills of the Himalayas, there is a forest or jungle area where there are lots of monkeys. This jungle area is their ancestral home. They've lived there for a long time. The Buddha said, "As long as they stay in that jungle in the foothills, they're safe." Hunters don't come into that jungle; maybe it's too dense or too difficult to get up the mountainside. But there, they are safe.

But if the monkeys wander further up into the Himalayas where there are high, steep cliffs and very few trees to hold onto, they go someplace where they're not safe. They can fall, hurt themselves, or get killed. And if they go in the other direction, out onto the plains of northern India where it's more open and flat and people live, that's where the hunters can catch them. They're exposed. But if they stay in their ancestral homeland, they're safe.

In the same way, practitioners of mindfulness are safe when they stay in the ancestral home of sati, of awareness. Present moment awareness, present moment attention, being grounded in attention in a place—here and now. The place where we're standing, our feet on the ground, or where our bottom is on our cushion or chair. There's a location where awareness resides. In this body, here and now, to really be here and feel it is the first foundation of mindfulness. Then we're in our ancestral homeland, and there we are safe.

The Buddha doesn't say this, but if we extend the analogy: if we go out into the world of people and we lose our groundedness and our attention, we get preoccupied and swept up in the crowds and the concerns. We get caught up in the activities, what people are saying and doing, and we become part of the arguments and worldly pursuits. We can lose ourselves and our clear, grounded presence. It's very easy to be dangerous. We say and do things which are not nourishing or supportive, and which can actually be harmful and that we later regret. We can lose ourselves in the world. It's like being well-grounded and centered in meditation, and then deciding to become fully absorbed in all the activities of Las Vegas. Pretty soon, we're frazzled and not so connected.

Going up into the high wilderness of the Himalayas, with its cliffs and mountainsides, might be like disconnecting in a different kind of way. We're not in society, but we're not grounded in ourselves either. Maybe we're in the high cliffs of fantasy, dreaming about the past and the future. Being high up in our thinking mind is disconnected, and that can also be a dangerous place.

So, there is a refuge. There is a pasture to be nourished in. There is a place in which we're safe—our ancestral homeland. All three of these things are referred to as sati, as mindfulness, as awareness.

Trusting Awareness

To me, these are very warm, nourishing, inspiring, and embodied reference points for understanding what awareness and mindfulness can be for us. Mindfulness is not a duty, it's not a tension in the mind, and it's not a lot of work. It's the place where we can relax. It's the refuge where we're safe and where awareness can open, relax, and just be itself. It's not like the muscle of mindfulness is pushing and trying. It's more like a place where awareness can operate naturally.

We can just relax, trusting awareness. We trust awareness more than we do awareness. We allow awareness rather than work awareness. Allowing that awareness because it's a refuge means we can relax in there. The "thinking muscle" can relax, so we can just trust our inner intelligence.

It's also a pasture where we can graze and be nourished by our experience. Imagine being aware, and what we're aware of feels like food coursing through our body. "Oh, this is good. This is subtle. This is comfortable. This is nice."

And it's our ancestral homeland. We're home. Here we can let go of our self-preoccupation—me, myself, and mine. Because now we're at home. We're here. We're allowed just to be who we are.

What a great thing. To sit in mindfulness, sit in meditation, and really be allowed to be who you are in all your ways. It's an experience not a lot of people have. Society, people, and situations sometimes work against our allowing ourselves to be who we deeply are. In doing that, we come to a deep appreciation for ourselves, a deep care, deep love, and deep support. Not because we're selfish and conceited, but actually the opposite—because we're truly present in a deep way.

So here you are. You're in a location listening to this. That location—to be grounded, to be centered, to be here, to really be present with your body—is always the place you're at. That is where the refuge is found. This refuge of awareness, of mindfulness: awareness of the body, awareness of feeling tones, awareness of mind states, and awareness of how we're caught and how we're released.

May you be delighted and happy with your capacity to trust awareness. Trust awareness, so it becomes your support. Thank you.