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Guided Meditation: Reflecting on Generosity

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started. Nice to see everyone there. Welcome. So just settling in for today's meditation. Yesterday, we talked about four qualities that are the basis of spiritual friendship and are also forms of inner wealth, and so I'm going to pick out one of those today to provide some of the background for our meditation at the beginning, and then we'll settle in again with a period of silence. So we're going to focus on generosity.

But first, let's just begin by settling in, closing the eyes, allowing the attention to come inward. Sensing the posture that you're sitting in, or maybe lying down in, and just checking in that you're in a balanced posture.

If you're sitting upright, it's one where you don't have to exert a lot of effort; the body feels naturally upright and straight, relaxed. If you're lying down, you can still have a sense of straightness in the body, balance in whatever posture you're lying down in.

It can help to sense where you're sitting, what's supporting you, and even rocking back and forth a little bit, or forward and back, just to find that middle point where you're the most balanced that you can be in this posture.

You can even think of resting in your sitting spot as a way of giving yourself to the support. Instead of trying somehow to do it all ourselves, hold ourselves up, give your weight to what you're sitting on and ultimately to the earth. Let it support you.

And then softening into this balanced posture. Softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Often looking at a screen you can get a little tense in the eyes. Even softening behind the eyes as if we could relax a muscle in the head, relax the brain. Softening the neck and letting the shoulders drop.

Releasing down the arms and hands, and just inviting some openness through the chest and the belly area. Checking in while you're there if you have any sense of tension, background emotions, just to know how you are.

Inviting some ease, and releasing any bracing in the legs. Just letting the legs be natural, the muscles soft.

Letting the in-breath encourage a straightening of the central part of the body, and letting the out-breath encourage a softening forward, way around that straight center, just in a gentle way.

So I'm going to drop in a short quote from the suttas^[1], from Buddhist teachings, and the invitation is just to let it resonate inside like ripples in water or like an echo. And there will be some ripple, and then you can just let it fade out naturally and go back to the breath or the body.

So the Buddha said, "If beings knew, as I know, the results of giving and sharing, they would not eat without having given. Even if it were their last morsel, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared it, if there were someone to share it with."

And as it fades out, just turning the mindfulness back to the breath, the body.

So we'll have two more brief connections with generosity, and the second one is just a simple reflection in the mind. So I'll ask you to recall a time of simple, unentangled giving, when you were able to give something just simply. It was easy, it was natural, it flowed. Just remember that time and how it was.

You could let images arise in your mind, or a recollection of the feeling you had, or how the person looked when you gave something. And maybe notice how it brings some joy into the mind. And you can also let that fade away, let the mind settle back into your usual mindfulness.

And now the invitation is to feel directly and deeply into the body how it is when the mind is imbued with the quality of generosity. So you can re-evoke memory, or you can recall the quote, that beings would not eat their last morsel without giving if there were someone to share it with. And really take that feeling deeply into the body where we have the direct experience of a body and mind imbued with generosity, and rest in that feeling.

What is the energy of generosity like? Does it move? Does it have lightness, heaviness, certain location? Does it extend outside the body? There are no expected answers to this, just getting to know that quality through our own experience.

So we've encountered this quality of generosity through hearing the teaching on it, through reflecting, thinking about how that matches our own experience, through directly sensing that quality in the mind, the experience of it. These are different ways to encounter a quality like generosity.

So now we'll have a period of silence, sitting for a little while, just allowing it to resonate, settle out, move into your usual mindfulness practice.

Reflections on Wholesome Qualities

So as we continue to sit for a few more minutes, we may consider how wholesome qualities feel in the body, in the mind. How even the thought—thinking, the thing that we think isn't so good during meditation—but even thinking about wholesome qualities has a certain impact on the body, different from thoughts that are less good.

Thoughts of generosity have an easier impact on the body than thoughts of anger, for example. And how even hearing, passively hearing a quote about a wholesome quality, something that we might resonate with, impacts the mind-body system. So we can start to be wise, maybe sensing internally how these wholesome qualities feel, so that when we're doing actions out in our life, acts of giving, or more neutral acts of speaking or preparing food, walking around, we can notice how that feels in the mind and the body so that we can keep our mind directed well throughout the day.

And also, in a more nuanced way, if we are giving something or sharing something, there are ways that we can do that from a mind that isn't totally wholesome. For example, it's possible to give out of fear, or give out of a sense of duty or obligation, with some heaviness, and we'd be able to feel that. We would be able to feel that it was different from that very simple, unentangled giving that I asked you to remember. So our direct experience can also help us throughout the day to do things from the most wholesome intention that's available at that moment. It's a very practical skill.

So this might be an interesting thing to remember as you go forward today, is how wholesomeness feels, and how just tuning into that naturally, quietly, simply, can help others through the way that you talk and speak and hear and act. Always helpful to include that internal dimension when we can.

The Dharma of Uncommon Lists (3 of 5): Three Kinds of Wisdom (truncated)

Okay, so today we are continuing with the Dharma of uncommon lists. And so that means that today we will explore a list of three, and I want to talk about the three kinds of wisdom that are mentioned in the suttas.

Wisdom is such an important quality in the Buddhist teachings that maybe it's not surprising that it's considered multidimensional. And these three are sometimes mentioned in Dharma talks but not often in much detail, and usually, the first two of them are minimized. But I like to think of these three kinds of wisdom as forming a kind of ecology in the heart and mind where we need each one to support the others. So all three are important. There is one that, of course, is more liberating than the others—that's why the other two get minimized—but I see them as an ecology that all of them should be there.

So the first is called the wisdom of hearing or listening. So this is a kind of understanding or wisdom that comes from listening, listening to teachings generally. So it's good to listen to things that are worth listening to for at least part of our day. So that means here in the Dharma, we can listen to AudioDharma, we can come to talks like this. In these days, I think listening probably includes reading, where we take things in also through the linguistic part of our mind. And we can also maybe include talking with wise friends as hearing, listening to what they say.

So sometimes people want to discount the wisdom of hearing or listening as just the first step, but nonetheless, hearing the Dharma is actually listed as one of the factors for reaching the first stage of awakening^[2]. It's said that we need wise attention and the voice of another, so I assume that means we need to hear the Dharma, most of us.

So this form of wisdom is called sutamaya paññā^[3]. Paññā^[4] being the word for wisdom, and then suta^[5]. That's not the teachings, the suttas—that's s-u-t-t-a. This is s-u-t-a. It's a different word, and it means "what is heard." So suta means what is heard. And in other contexts, this word suta is used to mean learning or one who has learned. So it has to do also with learning.

I think that's kind of interesting because anything that involves thinking tends to get short shrift in the Dharma world. And certainly it's true that spending a lot of time thinking on the cushion is distracting, but across the teachings, it would be hard to ignore that the Buddha did emphasize the importance of learning. And so I want to quote from a sutta that talks about learning as a form of wealth. It says this way:

"And what is the wealth of learning? Here, a noble disciple has learned much, remembers what they have learned, and accumulates what they have learned. Those teachings that are good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end, with the right meaning and phrasing, which proclaim the perfectly complete and pure spiritual life. Such teachings as these they have learned much of, retained in mind, recited verbally, mentally investigated, and penetrated well by view."

So that's kind of a lot.