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Guided Meditation: Releasing the Six Sense Doors

Welcome here in San Francisco. It's Tuesday morning and we are discussing the ten Perfections, the ten pāramīs^[1]. My name is Kodo. Let's take a few minutes to arrive, and then we will gently begin with a meditation.

Something you'll hear me say quite a lot this week is one of the features of the practice of the Perfections, the practices of the pāramīs, is that they apply on the cushion when we're meditating and off the cushion in what we call the rest of our life. Though we know well that that line is arbitrary. What we do on the cushion follows us off, and what we do in the rest of our lives follows us to the cushion; there's no real line there. But these pāramīs are deliberate ways we can reflect on and approach experience, and bring the possibility and the beauty of the Dharma into everything that we do. So for now, let's do that in the form of meditation.

So, settling yourself in the way that you know best. It could be that it's time to take a few deep breaths as you feel and roll yourself into your body. Tuning into sensing. This sensing that's happening all the time. To support our arriving, or sensing our way to the sitting base. Feeling the connection with the seat, or whatever is supporting us. And then sensing our way through the spine. Feeling upright. Feeling relaxed and alert.

For this morning, we're going to turn our attention deliberately to each of our senses one at a time. Turn our attention there, sense for any tension, and then relax.

Let's begin with the eyes. Directing attention to the eyes. Before making any adjustments, just feeling any tension or discomfort and letting that register. And then, with our breathing and in time with our breathing, just gently relax. Letting go what can let go. Then registering any ease, pleasure, or relief. Keeping our attention here with the eyes. If more tension coagulates in the area, just repeating to register that discomfort. We gently release and know the relief.

Then, when the moment feels right, turning to the area of the ears. Maybe not the ears themselves, but any tensions in the area. Or maybe you have a sense linked to hearing. Gently release.

Now, letting go of the ears, turning to the nose. In the area of the nose, sensitive to any tensions. Gently release.

Now letting go of attention to the nose, turning to the tongue. And not only the tongue; maybe there's tension in the jaw, chin, even the gums, or the upper throat, if it feels okay for you to sense into these things. Just long enough. And gently relaxing. And really registering the relief.

Relaxing the tongue, the mouth. Turning our attention to the tactile sense of the body. With a gentle touch, registering anywhere that tension is calling for attention. And first coming to know it, not doing anything. Bringing the attention into the area that's being called for. And then gently relaxing whatever can be easily relaxed. Then another area may call, and so on.

And finally, the mind. Feeling any tension in mind. Gil^[2] sometimes calls it the "thinking muscle"—the head, the temples, maybe around the eyes. Sensing, relaxing, and registering the relief.

Eyes, ears, the moments, body and mind, released.

May our practice bring relief and release to all beings.

Dharmette: Pāramīs (2 of 5) The Perfections of Renunciation and Wisdom

So, hello again. After this meditation on releasing and relaxing the sense bases, I wonder how you're doing. You've just participated; I would be interested or open if you have any comments in the chat.

We'll proceed today with our discussion of the Perfections, the pāramīs. Part of what we just did was an experiential way of introducing the practice of what we call renunciation. You'll see as we go. These ten Perfections we're talking about are ten noble qualities that can apply in all sorts of areas of our life. Importantly, each of these qualities and practices is accompanied by compassion and skillful means. They're accompanied by compassion—something heartful—and skillful means, which is the wisdom aspect.

The ten, as you might remember, are giving, virtue, renunciation, wisdom or discernment, energy is fifth, patience sixth, truthfulness, resolve, goodwill, and equanimity. These are the ten, and today we'll focus on renunciation and wisdom or discernment.

We've been talking about the pāramīs in pairs, as both practices that we can do and the qualities that arise based on those practices. As we said yesterday, the practice of giving supports our quality of generosity, and as we'll see, the practice of letting go supports our quality of wise renunciation. We're talking about these pāramīs as mutually supportive, and with the potential not only to apply everywhere in our life but also to bring about a thoroughgoing freedom for the benefit of both ourselves and for others.

So we practice these pāramīs step by step, sort of in the way that it's taught in this text. We practice them in order. We practice giving, and then that is followed on and complemented by virtue, ethical conduct, sīla^[3]. It's interesting how these two work together. It is said that giving benefits other people in sort of obvious ways, and then virtue or ethical behavior prevents the affliction of other people. So we're benefiting them with our giving, and then we're preventing harm with our ethical behavior. In a way, we could say that establishing ourselves in a conduct that's compassionate and wise means that we turn the potential for harm into the potential for benefit for ourselves and for others through our words and our deeds.

As Gil will sometimes teach, through this practice of mindfulness, just by the nature of the practice of mindfulness, we start to develop what he calls an ethical sensitivity. That is, we become sensitive to identifying what actions we do that cause an "ouch" and those actions we do that cause an "ah." We sense the difference, and we'll see that this naturally sets the stage for renunciation.

Let's pick up the thread there, first with a quote from Bhikkhu Bodhi^[4], the well-known translator and teacher who tends to put things in such a clear way. Bhikkhu Bodhi talks about renunciation this way: "The tool that the Buddha holds out to free the mind from desire is understanding. Real renunciation," he says, "is not a matter of compelling ourselves to give up things still inwardly cherished." I'm going to repeat that: not a matter of compelling ourselves to give up things still inwardly cherished. But he goes on, "of changing our perspective on them so that they no longer bind us." He concludes, "When we understand the nature of desire, when we investigate it closely with keen attention, desire falls away by itself without need for struggle."

Isn't that wonderful, that the potential for freedom is right there with the desire through our clear investigation? This is the power of the practice of mindfulness. I also want to highlight how in talking about renunciation, sensual desire, and sense objects, the difficulty is not necessarily in the thing. What we're studying in this Buddhist practice is the glue that we call craving and clinging.

I want to share a personal story to illustrate this, which really well illustrates how the mind will let go of itself at the discovery that something will no longer be serving me—actually, that something I'm desiring is causing me harm. Just before my 30th birthday, I received a surprise diagnosis that switched the way that I relate to food. I was 29, and a surprise to me, I became a late-onset type 1 diabetic. As is obvious, that has all sorts of implications for what can be eaten.

Right after the diagnosis, I couldn't eat sugar anymore. I'd go to the grocery store and I would just pine; I would wish for sweets. At this point though, the ice cream aisle was just a location of suffering for me. At the time, I remember getting very, very interested in sugar-free anything—sugar-free Jell-O or whatever. What I had along with this suffering was some really hard data about cause and effect. Eating such-and-such a food would lead to such-and-such a consequence. This sort of tracking that I was doing throughout the day and the experience of my illness, along with a very clear potential for bodily harm, yielded a relatively swift change in understanding and way of relating. After a pretty short time, sugar no longer registered as a food item for me; it may as well be paper.

It was with a sensitivity to the drawbacks that really changed the landscape for me, and the desire for, let's say, cake, just kind of faded out. Really, to emphasize this point, it wasn't that I drove out the thing that I loved, but that the mind was no longer bound by it. So within a couple of months, I could walk down the ice cream aisle with no problem whatsoever.

Sweets may be a sort of simple, low-stakes example, but the logic applies to many of our compulsive desires. Some of them may seem harmless enough, but yet that process of compulsion re-conditions a process that's at work during some of our most intense difficulties in life. Ice cream is one thing, but craving and clinging conditions things like conflict and quarrel. You can think of its influence on robbery and theft or harm, and all the ways that that energy of craving and clinging supports us in indulging in what we might call misconduct of body, speech, and mind, or ways that our actions support harm for ourselves and others rather than benefit.

This is one really good reason for seeing the connection between these practices and qualities, because you hear right there how renunciation and the practice of ethical conduct and sīla work together. As we said earlier, as we practice virtue, as we practice ethical conduct, our sensitivity to the harm or benefit we cause others becomes more subtle. This sort of observation of how we help and how we hurt is right where renunciation practice belongs.

It's one thing to say, "Oh, you know, just think about the drawbacks," but these cravings and clingings that we have relative to sensual pleasures are often so well ingrained, well practiced. We have—I can sort of playfully say—perfected the art of craving and clinging over many, many, many years. So this teaching suggests employing some other means to help shift the perspective, really thinking about the nature of desire and what we actually get out of it.

Some of the metaphors that Acharya Dhammapala^[5] uses in his treatise on the pāramīs help us to shift our perspective from thinking and experiencing the way we normally do, which is that sensual pleasures are long-lasting, ultimately satisfying, only pleasant, and not at all painful. Instead, he encourages us in this reflection using these pretty dramatic metaphors. First of all, emphasizing their brevity, like a flash of lightning. He encourages a reappraisal of the mix of pleasure and pain out of sensual desire, maybe like a drop of honey that's smeared over a blade, or their promise of satisfaction that they can't ultimately deliver—like needing a drink of water but only having that little thin bit of dew on your fingertips. Maybe even thinking that embracing a sensual desire is going to satisfy us, but in fact, it makes the situation worse; it actually intensifies the craving. The image here is so apt: it is addressing our thirst by drinking salt water and feeling like that's going to solve the issue and diminish the craving, but in fact, exacerbates it.

Just one final thought about renunciation, and that is in this reappraisal of sensual desire and our relationship to them, it doesn't mean we need to stop enjoying life. As Bhikkhu Bodhi said at the beginning, it's not that we push out the things that we enjoy, but we learn to shift our relationships to them. I think of food as a great example. There was a monastic who trained his monks to really pay attention to how long food actually stays pleasant in the mouth after starting to chew it, compared to how long we obsess over food. How long does that pleasure actually last once a morsel of food is in the mouth?

Renunciation has the consequence of being a strong support for settling, unification, concentration. This is where renunciation and wisdom come together, as Gil so beautifully covered last week. In the tradition, discernment or wisdom is associated with the ability to make distinctions, and particularly the ability to make distinctions that are supportive of freedom and liberation. The image here is of an archer who shoots an arrow at the target and penetrates it, and I like how in that image the target is split in two; we made a distinction.

There are sort of three modes of developing these distinctions, developing this sort of discernment and wisdom. One is simple hearing and learning. The second is reflection, what we call reflective acquiescence—it's a fun phrase—where you sort of chew on, turn over, and start to have these aha moments about how the practice lives in your life. And then the third is through meditation. Whether we deliberately bring our study or reflection into our meditation or not, it's in there working on us. The manifestation of wisdom is non-confusion, and its proximate cause is the concentration associated with renunciation.

To close, I want to suggest, as we did yesterday for bringing this into your day of practice, that same mode of practice of observing and reflecting on how renunciation shows up in my day. And how does its opposite show up in my day? Just to know. And then how does wisdom, how does discernment show up in my day, and how does its opposite, delusion, show up? Again, we're not trying to just do it right 100% of the time, but we really want to know this whole range, the quality and its opposite.

We'll pick up here tomorrow with energy and patience. Thanks so much. Have a beautiful day of practice. May all beings be happy, peaceful, and well.