This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Mindfulness of Breathing (68) Relinquishment as Generosity

So, we come in this series of talks to consider the final step of anapanasati^[1], the sixteenth step of mindfulness of breathing. And the way it's worded in English, the most common translation into English is something like: "Observing relinquishment, one trains, 'I will breathe in.' Observing relinquishment, one trains, 'I will breathe out.'"

This word relinquishment translates a Pali word, paṭinissagga^[2] (p-a-t-i-n-i-s-s-a-g-g-a). That has a double meaning. It means a kind of letting go, relinquishment, and it also means generosity, to give. In some contexts in the teachings of the Buddha, it clearly means being generous. And that's so nice, this passage. I'll read it to you.

So a noble disciple, someone who has come now towards the end of these sixteen steps, noble disciples recollect, consider their own generosity like this: "It is truly my good fortune and gain that in a world of people obsessed with greed, I dwell freely generous, open-handed, delighting in giving, devoted to charity, delighting in giving and sharing." And the expression "delighting in giving," the word giving is the same word as this final step in anapanasati of relinquishment. So there is a letting go, a deep letting go that's almost an act of choice.

If you review these last four steps of anapanasati, as we settle in, having gotten concentrated and quiet and still, then we come to a stage where it just feels best to not be working in meditation anymore. We don't have to work, and we just settle back and observe. We're observing. We're kind of like in the process of life, the flow of life, and we're just observing the transiency and the changing nature of moment-to-moment experience.

And now there's a fading away of clinging, and greed, and wanting. And that fading away happens up to the point where the greed and the hatred that we have ceases and stops. And wow, to have a qualitatively high experience of the stopping of these unhealthy movements of the mind and heart. And wow, this is good. This is right. This is health. This is freedom, an inner psychological freedom.

And then knowing that, seeing that, having wisdom about that, then saying, "I would like to be done with this. I no longer want to invest in these kinds of ways of being. I no longer believe in them. I no longer stand behind being greedy, or hateful, or resentful, or complaining, or jealous, or having any kind of annoyance or hostility. That I keep living in cynicism." And we don't do it punitively, it's not like we feel bad about ourselves, but now we know something much better.

And so we're letting go of what is unwholesome. And if you look carefully, read carefully the teachings of the Buddha, when he talks about what we let go of, he doesn't talk about letting go of things so much, hardly at all, or if at all. Like, we don't let go of our material wealth, or let go of our friendships, our relationships. What we're letting go of, what we're relinquishing, are inner psychological states, things inside of us. And they're clearly the ones that harm us, what the Buddha calls unwholesome or unskillful.

He says that explicitly in one place. He says, "If when one gives away something, unwholesome mental qualities grow and wholesome mental qualities waste away, then I say one should not give away in this way." And the word "giving away" here is that word relinquishment. So the word "give" captures the idea that it's an act of generosity. And so I'll read it a different way: "If one relinquishes anything, and then unwholesome mental qualities grow and wholesome mental qualities waste away, then I say one should not relinquish in this way. But if one gives away, if one relinquishes something, and unwholesome mental qualities waste away and wholesome mental qualities grow, then I say one should give away, one should relinquish in this way."

So this is not blind relinquishment. It's not the blind letting go of something just because we hear we're supposed to let go of everything. It's really we're letting go of that which interferes with our betterment, interferes with the best qualities we have. We're letting go so that the better qualities of who we are can come forth. And we have a much clearer sense of what those are and what gets in the way, the obstructions, when we get quiet and peaceful.

One of the most wonderful meditation instructions that I received many years ago was from this wonderful English bhikkhu^[3] monk named Ajahn Amaro^[4]. He said something like, "Set yourself at ease, and then notice what takes you away from that." And that was the instruction. No sixteen stages, that's so complicated. So just recognize, set yourself at ease, and I think I understood that to be whatever modicum of ease that's accessible. Just the simplest kind of softening and relaxing. But then the important part, the wisdom part, is to notice what takes you away from that. And then consider, is it really worth it? Is it really for your betterment to lose whatever ease you have?

It's through that, then deepening the ease, pushing the ease, deepening that ease, coming to more ease and more ease, we get better and better recognition of the goodness that's here within us. Better recognition of when there's an unwholesome direction, and when there's a wholesome direction that we're going. When it's for our betterment or for the opposite.

And so we come here to the last stage of anapanasati. There is a real, deep relinquishment now, where we're really ready to put something down and be done with something. Enough of this already. And even though we can't necessarily stop certain mental habits that we have, or tendencies we have, it's a powerful movement to have made an inner choice, an inner turning, and say, "I no longer stand behind this. I no longer believe in this kind of behavior." And we can do that without any aversion, hostility, or feeling better about ourselves. We can do it with joy, delighting in this word relinquishment, delighting in it. That now I'm going to move in a good direction. I know there's a better direction. And to know that deeply is one of the great gifts of this practice, great gifts of life, and to be inspiring.

So rather than seeing our inner foibles and inner old habits coming back, and feeling depressed or upset by it, there can be a stance, a recognition: "Oh, here it is again, and now I get to practice. This is what this practice is about now. I know I'm on a direction, a movement on a journey to really... I know what freedom is, I know this is not where it's at, and now I have an opportunity to practice with this." And that is a fortunate thing. Anyone who has the practice has good fortune. Anyone who has a practice is involved in a path of great goodness and benefit.

And so to celebrate and delight in the fact you have a practice, more than being upset by the fact that one more time you got angry, or irritated, or greedy, or something. Just keep turning it over to appreciating it, and looking for the generosity, and the goodness, and the delight in the possibility of being on a path of liberation, or freedom, of letting go.

And so no matter where you are on these stages of anapanasati, these sixteen stages, each step in the way is good for itself, is good enough. In fact, the ancient commentaries said that each step of the sixteen can be a complete step in itself. They contain within each step the path to all sixteen. So if you stayed at the first step of just breathing in long, knowing you're breathing in long, the other fifteen steps kind of will follow along as you really settle in and just do that one, get concentrated doing that. But it doesn't matter. Just the fact that whatever stage you're at, that's the right place for you. That's a good place. And that's where your delight, and pleasure, and joy can be. That you're so fortunate you have a path, this is your step now. This is your movement, your ability to practice.

And the further you go, the more you'll understand what's wholesome. The more you understand what's wholesome, the more with generosity, delighting in generosity, you can give away, give up the unwholesome. And I use these words like "give up" in the original meaning of the word, which is to offer something up on an altar. Or the original meaning of sacrifice, to make sacred. Or the original word of surrender. Then the Latin, I think, maybe in the French as well, the roots of the word is also to give something, give up.

So we've come now to the end of these sixteen steps, and the discourse on anapanasati has further things to say about this. And what is most interesting for me about the next kind of instructions after the sixteen steps, is how the fruit of the practice, the liberation of the practice, becomes more and more the basis for the practice. And how liberation becomes a basis for practice is the topic for next week.

So thank you for all this. I can take a little bit of time for taking some questions if you'd like. Anything really, but if you'd like to ask me sixteen steps or anything about this, I will try to do my best to track the questions if they come.

Q&A

Any additional advice on how anapanasati can be practiced in a relaxed, open way without turning it into a linear checklist? I'm finding this as I sit.

Great. Yeah, I think that with every meditation practice we do, all these funny habits of the mind will come in and kind of take over. And sometimes the practice starts becoming mechanical. Sometimes it may be a linear checklist: "Where am I?" And don't be discouraged by this, but learn to recognize it, and then figure out a way to not do it.

And sometimes I've done some similar things. I've just backed off, and I just gone back to the very beginning, or just come back and just not try to do the practice of anapanasati, and just open my awareness. And then one of my great defaults for practicing when it seems like nothing's really working is to tell myself the word "here" (h-e-r-e). And just say "here." And it's not a command like to a dog, it's just the recognition, "I'm here," and I say the word. And then I open my attention to just recognize what is here.

And sometimes what I recognize is my mind is out of control and spinning around: "Oh, here, this is what it feels like to have a spinning mind. Here, this is what it's like to be upset. Here, this is what it's like to be agitated." And there's a generosity in that "here," in that opening. "Oh, this is what it's like." Nothing has to be any different, it's just a clear recognition of this. And I'll do that for a while. And then at some point things settle down, or if I got a mechanical or a checklist approach to practice, then I've stopped doing it, and then I can start fresh again.

Okay. It's a lot of thank yous. I appreciate them, it's very nice.

Is it to be expected that grief would come with disenchantment?

Ah, no, it's not to be expected, but it's pretty common. And so I think we should just... that sometimes when we do this practice, we realize that even when we let go of things we know are unhealthy, there can be a grief too for the going away of something that's been our companion for a long time. Or there's a grief around what we lost because we were caught up so long in some unhealthy way of being, and we have to grieve first before we can really move on.

There was a psychologist who did a lot of this practice, and his take on all this is that the path to liberation is one continuous process of grieving. So it might have been true for him, it hasn't been true for me. But grief can definitely be an important part of this whole process, and it's not to be pushed away or feel like it's unfortunate to have grieving. I did give a talk last Sunday on grief, a Sunday morning talk here, so I talked about liberating grief. That might intrigue you, if you didn't hear the talk, to hear it.

The folds and the unfolding, yeah.

What is the source of the excerpt you read about generosity today?

It's my own translation, so all I have here is a reference. It's from the Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, Chapter 6, Sutta^[5] number 25.

This... it's very nice to read all these little comments and thank yous, and it's really a wonderful thing to share this path and this practice together with all of us here.

"Grief arises in unexpected times." Yeah, for sure. I think I've heard teachers say that if you haven't had a good cry, you're probably not really on the path to liberation. At some point or other it does, not all the time, but...

Can you please clarify again the relationship between the sixteen steps of our practice off the cushion as well as while meditating?

Yeah, well, that's a good question. I generally don't think about too much about the sixteen steps in daily life. I do spend a lot of time—because I spent much of my adult life meditating on my breathing, and it's kind of been the foundation of my meditation practice—that it spills over into daily life where I'm frequently attentive to my breathing, or include my breathing in whatever I'm doing and have an awareness of it.

And so it's been a great gift in my daily life to track and watch my breathing when my breathing gets held, or tight, or constricted, and how it shifts and changes. And sometimes it's the first indication I have that I've gotten caught, or stuck, or reactive, or hot in something. And so just being familiar with the breathing and connected to it, and then being able to come back and relax the breath and have an easeful breath as I go through my daily life, has been beneficial in many, many ways. And whether I'm on any particular step of anapanasati in daily life, I don't really think about so much.

Is the 16-step open awareness?

Some people might experience open awareness with the sixteen steps, but I wouldn't want to identify the two together. Because letting go, the deepest letting go we do is just a phenomenal absence. And to give it any kind of description, that it is something, even something like open awareness, just a little bit diminishes it or misses the point a little bit.

Oh, what is the Pali word you said at the beginning meaning generosity?

So there's three different Pali words that mean both letting go or relinquishment—translators often translate all three of them as relinquishment—but also mean generosity. And the one for this sixteenth step of anapanasati is paṭinissagga (p-a-t-i-n-i-s-s-a-g-g-a). And then there's cāga^[6] (c-long a-g-a), and then there's vossagga^[7] (v-o-s-s-a-g-g-a). And so it's a wonderful thing, you see this, that there is this close association in Pali with letting go and generosity.

Reflections and Announcements

Okay, so this is wonderful. So I need to stop, and thank you all. And we'll continue this exploration of anapanasati in the context of liberation next week, and I look forward to it.

And also, maybe I mentioned this, but I'm teaching two retreats coming up that are not part of IMC that might be interesting for you. They're actually kind of at the same time, some of them, so I'll be moonlighting from one to the other. One is with the San Francisco Zen Center. I'm doing an interesting dialogue retreat. It's not a full retreat, but it's like a couple hours, a few hours a day on the weekdays, a few days in the evenings and the weekend. That's a kind of dialogue between two of the senior teachers at San Francisco Zen Center and myself on the harmony of Vipassana^[8] and Zen. That starts on the 19th of April, and it'll be folded into the 7:00 AM sittings. So I'll do the first week, and then Paul Haller^[9] and Fu Schroeder^[10] will do the other two weeks instead of me teaching the 7:00 AM. So you get a taste of the retreat just by coming here at 7:00 AM.

And the other is I'm teaching a retreat at Spirit Rock online for six days, starting April 25th. And that should be quite a lovely retreat. And I love these online retreats. So, okay, thank you.