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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness as Truthfulness

Welcome to our meditation.

One of the faculties or capacities we have that's closely related to mindfulness is truthfulness. In a sense, being honest out loud is just mindfulness out loud. Practicing mindfulness is being honest to oneself. It is to really recognize what's happening for us, perhaps with an honesty or a clarity that maybe is not often done in daily life. This is not because we're necessarily dishonest, but rather we don't acknowledge fully what is here.

So closely related to mindfulness is truthfulness and our honesty, and also to truth in the sense that we are aiming in mindfulness to sit in the truth or to become the truth. The word dharma^[1] could sometimes be translated as truth, and to sit in the dharma is to sit with what is true, what is most true. The path of vipassanā^[2], the path of mindfulness, is the path of discovering what is really true here.

Sometimes it's useful to put a question mark behind what we're understanding about ourselves or our experience and say, "Is this really true? Is this an interpretation that I'm doing? Is this a projection of my own ideas?" What if I get really quiet? What if there are no projections, no bias, not even memory to influence how we experience the moment? What's most true about now?

And then to find our ability to be at ease in that truth, to find a way of being at peace. To find a way to wake up and have no conflict, no struggle with what is most true about life. In fact, find the opposite: find that it frees us.

So, to sit up or to assume a meditation posture. That may be a posture you would assume if someone came along and sat you down to really tell you the truth, what's really true. Someone who's kind, compassionate, is concerned with your welfare and well-being, and gently, lovingly wants to tell you about this life of ours and tell you what's really true. It's really valuable. And you sit down, and maybe sit up straight, maybe you're attentive. You're really present like this, and you get quiet to really hear what this person has to say.

And surprisingly, the first thing the person points to about what's true is your very attentiveness. That the search for truth maybe begins in seeing the truth, the value, the freedom in a certain kind of attentiveness to the present moment. And if we don't have this attentiveness to the present moment, then we're in our thoughts, wandering off in the past and the future, telling stories, reacting to what's happening. But to really discover the truth, we first discover the truthfulness, the truth of attention, attentiveness.

And with your attentiveness, really attentive, really caringly attentive to yourself, to your experience, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathing in deeply and lovingly for yourself, exhaling. Maybe with care for yourself, inhale, and let your breathing return to normal attentively. This wonderful capacity for attention—there is no spiritual life without attention, attentiveness.

Becoming attentive to your breathing, to your body breathing. An attentiveness that is also embodied awareness. The awareness that the body has of the body breathing.

And as you exhale, to release the body, relax the body. As you exhale, to let go into the pull of gravity so the whole body settles a bit, settles into the place of contact against your seat, your bed, the floor.

And then gathering yourself around your breathing. This simple breathing in, in the dedication to truth, to truthfulness. It doesn't have to be complicated or elaborate. It can begin with the simple truth of the body breathing, and the truth of our attentiveness, our attention to the breathing.

And the attentiveness we're looking for is one that is quiet. This has a stillness to it that maybe is a little bit like the quiet, still surface of a very calm mountain lake, unruffled.

With attention resting in the experience of breathing. With attention riding on the experience of breathing in and breathing out, here, now, with the truth of breathing.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting. We sit and meditate so that our thinking, our feelings, our actions, our body have no clinging as part of them. That we don't grasp or close down or turn off from the world. Without clinging, without grasping, without resistance. With the strength of the truth as our foundation, we can become aware of the profound heart connection we can feel or have with other people and other beings.

And one of the times to feel that is at the end of a meditation session, when perhaps a lot of the dust and clouds of the mind have settled and we can see in a different way, with different eyes, and look upon the other world with kind eyes, caring eyes. And perhaps discover we have within us a capacity for well-wishing for others, a capacity to care for the welfare and happiness of others, a simple care. And so at the end of a sitting, it's a profound thing to give voice to our care for the world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may we, in however small ways we can, or big ways, may we contribute to this.

Dharmette: Sutta Stories - Aṅgulimāla's Conversion

Continuing to share the stories that exist in the ancient discourses, one of the more famous stories that involves the Buddha is the Buddha's encounter with Aṅgulimāla. Aṅgulimāla was a mass murderer at the time of the Buddha, and this encounter raises all kinds of important questions about karma^[3] and retribution and punishment and the possibility for reform. What kind of people can be reformed? How much can people leave their past behind and their terrible actions behind and start life anew in a new way? How much can people be transformed and changed?

The story of Aṅgulimāla begins with a description of him: that he was a murderous, bloody man who took to blows and striking people and killing people, and that he would kill whole villages and devastate whole territories. Ten, twenty, forty men would go out after him, and he would slaughter them all. He was amazingly, surprisingly strong and athletic and fast.

So one day, the Buddha went into town for his alms to receive food for the day. He finished and had his meal and put everything away, and then he started going into the forest where Aṅgulimāla was. The villagers, the people in the road, said, "No, don't go in there. There's a terrible murderer, Aṅgulimāla. Don't go in there, he'll kill you." And the Buddha said nothing, was silent, but just kept walking. Three times people said that: "No, no, don't go in there. Aṅgulimāla is there." And the Buddha silently continued walking into the forest where Aṅgulimāla was.

The word Aṅgulimāla is a nickname, and aṅguli means finger, and māla is a kind of necklace, like a rosary kind of thing, a necklace. And he was called that because he had a necklace made of the fingers of his victims.

And so the Buddha goes into the forest, and he's walking along the road, and Aṅgulimāla sees the Buddha and he says, "Wow, I am really strong and murderous and capable, and no matter how many men they send after me, I kill them all. And here comes a solitary monk" — he doesn't recognize the monk as the Buddha, he just recognizes a solitary monk with no weapon and walking undefended — "this is going to be easy for me."

And so he goes after the Buddha to kill him. And now the Buddha just continues to walk calmly down the road, and Aṅgulimāla can't catch up to him. Aṅgulimāla starts to run, while the Buddha just calmly walks, in a slow, meditative way, perhaps. And Aṅgulimāla, who says he can run faster than any chariot and horse and elephants, and is very athletic, he just can't catch up to the Buddha just walking quietly. It's a little bit of a supernatural event.

So Aṅgulimāla finally yells out, "Stop! Stop!" to the Buddha. The Buddha keeps walking, but the Buddha replies to Aṅgulimāla, "You should stop. I have already stopped."

And Aṅgulimāla says, "These recluses, these monks, they never lie. They always speak the truth. So what does he mean?" And he says, "I have stopped, you should stop." And so he asks the Buddha, "What do you mean by this?" And the Buddha says, "I have stopped fully harming any living being, but you have no restraint and you go on just killing."

And this simple statement by the Buddha, in the context of this little supernatural thing that's going on—that he can't catch the Buddha—he understands that the Buddha is talking figuratively. The Buddha is not talking about literally stopping, that he stopped walking. He stopped the killing, the harming.

And this gets the attention of Aṅgulimāla. He sees maybe the light, he sees a different way. He realizes maybe that the life he's been living is a life that is not worth living anymore. Something happens to him.

And so he renounces his evil ways, he throws away his weapons, and asks the Buddha for ordination as a monk. Back in those days it was quite simple; the way one was ordained, the Buddha simply said, "Come monk," you know, "so come now, you're a monk," so that's all.

And so Aṅgulimāla became a monk and went to live with the Buddha in a little forest place where the Buddha and the monks lived. And so that's nice. He's been converted so simply, it's almost like a fairy tale that it should be that simple for someone who's so murderous. But the story goes on.

The story goes on, and one of the next things that happens is that now as a monk, Aṅgulimāla goes out for alms. He comes across a house where a woman is giving birth, but the birth is not coming; the baby is breech or something. And he hears the screams and the struggles that are going on, and he goes back to the Buddha and tells him what he saw.

And the Buddha said, "Go back to the woman and make a statement of truth, and the baby will be born." In ancient India, there's this idea that certain statements of truth have an impact on the natural world, and they're so powerful, saying the truth. So the Buddha says, "Go tell this woman the truth and give her a statement of truth and say this: 'Never in my life have I harmed anyone.'"

Aṅgulimāla is surprised by this and he says, "But I can't say that, it's not true." And the Buddha says, "No, say it: 'Ever since you were born in your life as a monastic, you have not killed anyone.'" This kind of radical change is so radical that he can actually take a stand of truth on the fact that now he doesn't harm anyone; he hasn't harmed anyone in maybe just a few days.

And so he goes back and he makes a statement in the presence of the woman, and the baby gets born. I lived on The Farm in Tennessee, a large hippie commune that was famous for its midwives. They have a book called Spiritual Midwifery, and so we got a lot of stories there from the midwives about the births they attended. Sometimes they would tell stories about how the baby wouldn't be born until the couple, who had tension between them, worked out the tension between them; they spoke the truth and cleared the air, and then the baby could come.

So anyway, the story of Aṅgulimāla making this true statement made a difference for the woman. But it's kind of a fairy tale and a literary work, and what's happening here in a rhetorical way is that there's a contrast between Aṅgulimāla who kills people, and then Aṅgulimāla who supports or helps the birth of a new life. Aṅgulimāla who kills cannot stop. There's this idea of not being able to stop; the baby's birth is stopped. And Aṅgulimāla in his new life as a monastic, he now is able to support and help the birth of life. So it's kind of a rhetorical play going on in the text, this contrasting of these two things.

The story goes on a little bit, and at some point, Aṅgulimāla goes into the town—a town where people knew about him and maybe were even impacted by him, by his murders and family members and all that. He goes in for alms as a monk, and understandably, people are pretty angry with him and upset, and so they're throwing rocks at him and yelling at him. Some of these rocks hit his head and he has a gashed head and he's bleeding, and he comes back to the Buddha.

And the Buddha sees him bleeding, and the Buddha simply says to him, "You have to endure this, this kind of pain, this kind of attack that you're receiving, you have to just endure it, bear it. If you had not become a monk and changed your life radically in this way, your punishment would have been you would have ended up for eons and eons living in the worst of the possible hells. Just a little cut on your head is not really such a big deal. But you have to endure it. Don't defend yourself, don't justify yourself. This is just your karma in a sense for all the things you've done."

And this is a surprising teaching for people to hear, this idea that there's no retribution and he's not punished, he doesn't go to jail. The worst that can happen is he has some cuts on his bloody head. Is this really okay? Is this right? Shouldn't there be some kind of justice that requires more punishment or more impact on Aṅgulimāla?

In any case, at some point he goes into the forest to engage on a retreat and to practice meditation, and he becomes fully awakened.

And as he's fully awakened, he gives a poem, his awakening poem. One of the interesting things about the poem is he mentions that before he got the nickname Aṅgulimāla, his given name was Ahimsā^[4]. Ahimsā means harmlessness, non-violence.

So he ended his life living up to his birth name. It's a story that's rich in interpretations, rich in challenges, rich as maybe a mirror to look at our own values and beliefs and our reactions to all these stories. And, you know, this fairy tale story perhaps, but still, many, many people study the story and write about it, interpret it, and find it a very, very valuable story.

In England, there is, or maybe it was until recently, a non-profit organization called Angulimala that was Buddhist chaplains who would go into the prisons to minister to people in prisons in England. I think the idea being that every human being has the capacity to be reformed. Every human being has the capacity for a radical change of heart, and perhaps we can give them the opportunity to do so.

So Aṅgulimāla, Ahimsā. Finger necklace or non-harming. May all of us find the tremendous truth and value and impact on the world that a life of non-harming has. Thank you.