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Guided Meditation: Homecoming

Hello, and welcome to this meditation. In all these years I've been meditating—fifty years—I look forward to meditating. I wake up in the morning, and while I'm getting up or still in bed, I can look forward to the chance to meditate. When I sit down to meditate, I feel so fortunate. So coming together to meditate, I'm happy to be here. I don't have much on my mind, which is a nice thing. Maybe partly after all the engagement with the last series we just finished on Friday, I'm delightfully without a series, without too much of a theme. I have an idea for the Dharma talk, but I'm just happy to be here with you all, happy to meditate with you. So we'll keep this quite simple.

In your own way, enter into a posture that supports your meditation. On different days, different postures are the right thing. Different degrees of sitting alert or sitting relaxed are appropriate, but there is some deep relaxation that can happen. Sometimes it is deeper if we begin by sitting, laying down, or being in a way where the posture is alert and balanced, so that something deeper can relax. Something deeper can trust the way we are engaging with having an attentive body, a body that is quietly and calmly alert.

Gently close the eyes. If sitting in meditation is a homecoming for you—a homecoming to yourself, into your body, maybe your heart—how would you tune into that sense of homecoming? Even if you're having difficult emotions, is there some way to feel like you're coming home to yourself? To really sense, feel, and be with yourself while meditating?

A common thread that runs through a period of meditation is the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Maybe that sense of homecoming can be there with every inhale and every exhale. The rhythm, the thread of continuity of breathing in and out, is a gentle protection from being caught in thoughts, judgments, and conclusions, or from being caught in emotions and feelings. Stay close to your breathing as a loving protection from losing yourself in your thoughts, your ideas, your reactivity, and your conclusions. Trust your breathing to keep you steady and continuous in a way of being that's not caught up in anything.

As we come to the end of this quiet period of sitting, imagine that whatever quiet is in your heart, in your mind, and in your body is a quiet that has space for love. Whatever quiet or spaciousness there is around you has room for love to spread. Just as the sound of a bell travels through space, so does love, ready to touch everyone.

Wishing for the welfare and happiness of all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we know each of these things for ourselves so we can wish them well for others. May we all experience degrees of happiness, safety, peace, and freedom. And may we carry it with us, not expecting it from others.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Nun's Poems (1) Sama and Uttama's Poems

Hello and good morning. This is a new week for our YouTube sangha. Having finished the series on love last week, I find myself happily content and empty of topics and things to teach. That long series on love was wonderful to teach, and the immersion in that topic left me feeling content and happy now that it's over, with nothing really engaged for a series this week.

What I'd like to do this week is read some poems from the verses and poetry of the ancient Buddhist nuns. I've been involved on and off for the last ten years with translating, thinking about, and studying these poems. Since I've been doing some of this work through the summer, it's fresh on my mind, and it's a nice, simple thing to do for this week.

These verses are from the Therigatha^[1]. Gatha^[2] means verse, and theri^[3] means elder nun. So, it is the verses of the elder nuns. Some people translate the word gatha as "song," and in some places, it is translated as a ballad rather than a poem or verse. We don't know exactly how they were chanted or presented, but as I read these poems, I suspect that they were partly performative, at least some of the longer ones. They likely had an oral way of presentation that is lost in the written word, which sometimes makes the written word come out a bit flat.

On the surface, these poems are meant to be understood as being composed by different early Buddhist nuns. Sometimes I think a narrator composed them about the nun, or it's someone speaking to the nun, or a recorded conversation between the nun and someone else. But the remarkable thing, over and over again in these texts, is that I see them as a celebration of women's potential for awakening, and also their potential for independence, even though that word is not explicitly used.

Becoming a nun, and especially an enlightened nun, in ancient India meant stepping out of what was most often a very oppressive social system for women. Women were not just wives; as wives, they were probably closer to slaves, with dramatic subservience to the man, working more like servants in the household than as equals. Life was quite hard back then, and medicine was very different. Many women died in childbirth. Many children and babies died. A lot of verses talk about the grief women experienced in losing not just one child, but multiple children, or losing a husband who took care of everything. These poems touch heavily on what it was like to be a woman in challenging social times and conditions. They address this in a way that the comparable verses of the monks, the Theragatha, do not. The monks' verses don't really talk much about their social conditions and the kind of deep personal challenges they might have had, perhaps because they held a very different place in society and didn't face the same degree of existential challenges that women had back then, and maybe still do now.

I want to read a few of these poems today and throughout this week, so you can get a sense of them. In a good number of the poems, the name of the nun has a meaning, and sometimes the verses play with that. For example, there's a short poem by a nun named Mutta. Mutta means to be awake, free, and liberated (related to mokkha^[4]). The poem begins by using her name as an instruction: "Free yourself, Mutta. Free yourself, Mutta." There is a lot of wordplay going on with the names.

It's not completely obvious that the next poem is playing with the woman's name, but her name is Sama, which means "peaceful." She writes in the first person, or composed this, about her twenty-five years since she had "gone forth"—meaning she had been living that lifestyle of radical simplicity, devoted to practice and liberation, for a very long time.

In the twenty-five years since I have gone forth, I do not know if I ever obtained peace of mind. I have never known attaining any peace of mind. I gained no peace or control of my mind. Then, remembering the Conqueror's instruction...

The "Conqueror" is the Buddha, and what he conquers is himself. He conquers his own inner challenges, attachments, and fears.

Remembering the Conqueror's instruction, A sense of urgency arose in me.

There is a word, saṃvega^[5], which I translate as "urgency." It has to do with feeling the preciousness and dangers of life, realizing that if you want to be awakened, this is the time to do it. It is a strong motivation to practice now.

Then, remembering the Conqueror's instruction, A sense of urgency arose in me. Being devoted to vigilance regarding all suffering states...

So, she had been a nun for twenty-five years, but maybe she hadn't really given herself completely over to being vigilant and attentive to all her suffering states. Whatever suffering arose for her, she decided she was no longer going to be complacent about it. She wasn't going to ignore it, deny it, or distract herself. She was going to stay right there and pay attention to it.

Being devoted to vigilance regarding all suffering states, I reached the destruction of craving and accomplished the Buddha's instructions. Today is the seventh night since craving dried up.

She is writing this seven nights after her awakening. After twenty-five years of practice, something happened where she said, "Okay, I have to get serious here. I have to really give myself to the practice." And she did, reaching her own liberation.

She uses the expression "drying up" here. It's not about abandoning, throwing away, or destroying something. Somehow, through vigilant attention to suffering, the attachments and craving are no longer fed, supported, or reinforced. They begin to dry out and fade away until she is free. I'll read it again:

In the twenty-five years since I have gone forth, I do not know if I ever attained peace of mind. I had gained no peace or control of my mind. Then, remembering the Conqueror's instruction, A sense of urgency arose in me. Being devoted to vigilance regarding all suffering states, I reached the destruction of craving And accomplished the Buddha's instruction. Today is the seventh night since craving dried up.

It is a remarkable thing to say that craving is dried up, that she accomplished what the Buddha had to teach. I see this poem as a celebration of that. After twenty-five years, what a relief, what a joy, how wonderful! Twenty-five years devoted to something, and then finally getting serious enough to see it through to the end and accomplish the end of craving. Not only are these poems celebrating women's capacity for liberation, but they are also clear testimonials that it is possible to become free.

Here is one more poem that follows this one and is very similar. It is by Uttama^[6], who was also struggling to find peace:

Not attaining mental peace, And with no control of my mind, Four or five times I left my meditation hut. I approached a nun who was trustworthy. She taught me the Dharma. I listened to the Dharma as she instructed me. For one week, I sat cross-legged in one spot, Filled with joy and happiness. On the eighth day, I straightened out my legs And shattered the mass of darkness.

She was living in a certain kind of darkness, a mass of ignorance and suffering, having no mental peace. She found another nun who could teach her, she listened to the instructions, and then she went and followed those instructions for one week, and she too became liberated. Here it is described as "shattering the mass of darkness."

These are very confident poems and wonderful testimonials, made even more profound by the fact that this happened in an ancient world that was incredibly difficult for women. We can bring this to our world today—we too can shatter the mass of darkness.

Thank you. I look forward to continuing this, and hopefully, you will enjoy these delightful little poems. Thank you.