Guided Meditation: Joy; Dharmette: Social & Communal Harmony (4 of 5) Friendship

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Joy; Social & Communal Harmony (4 of 5) Friendship. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Kodo Conlin at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 20, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Joy

Good day everyone, welcome back. It's our fourth meeting on the topic of social and communal harmony. Let's start with the sitting.

Today, we will continue along with this pattern that we've been using the last couple of days. We will first settle in mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of breathing, and then about ten minutes into the sitting we'll switch to practicing one of the brahma-vihāras^[1], today sympathetic joy. So let's find our seat.

Into that world of sensation, letting our body physically settle on our support.

Sensations of the body as we sit or recline. The breath flowing in, the breath flowing out. The heartbeat and quiver of the body after the heartbeat. Movements of the body and sensitive to any stillness that's already present.

In a steady, gentle, but deliberate way, with the arising of each new breath, connecting again with this moment of physical experience.

Experience a shift to the arousing of sympathetic joy—joy in the happiness of another.

We'll begin again by generating a touch of loving-kindness for ourselves. Perhaps taking the mental posture of kindness, kind regard, and wishing ourselves well.

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I be safe.

May I live with ease.

May I be happy.

Loving-kindness. Perhaps drawing to mind someone who is experiencing a wholesome form of happiness. Maybe you can even see their face in the mind's eye. Something in their eyes or their smile that communicates contentment or joy.

Connecting with this other person to arouse the wish: "May your good fortune continue."

And registering your body's response, your mind's response to the wish.

As often as is appropriate for you: "May your good fortune continue."

Muditā^[2], showing joy in the goodness, the well-being of another.

Like a bright moon, sunlight shining beautiful. This joy welling up in the heart, now we can shine upon all beings in the first quarter, to the front. Gently radiating: "May all beings in this direction, may their good fortune continue."

And in the second quarter, to our right. To all beings in this direction experiencing wholesome happiness: "May your good fortune continue."

To the third quarter, behind. To any being experiencing wholesome joy: "May your good fortune continue."

To the fourth quarter, to our left: "May your good fortune continue."

And below, all beings, large and small, experiencing wholesomeness: "May your good fortune continue."

And above: "May your good fortune continue."

The brightening light of sympathetic joy shining in the four directions, above and below.

Bringing the meditation to a close, celebrating, wishing well to all beings everywhere.

Dharmette: Social & Communal Harmony (4 of 5) Friendship

Hello again. I don't know if this was happening for you, but I noticed as we were doing the sympathetic joy meditation, without my intending it, I had this tiny smile growing over one side of my face. Wow, such a way that giving joy comes back.

So this week we've been talking about social and communal harmony, the practice of it, which begins with Right View^[3], which is then made real through our effort. We've been talking about this in terms of Rahula's^[4] repeated reflection. And then, as a sort of application yesterday, we examined working with anger—reflecting on its causes and its effects, and the encouragement to make the most wholesome contribution possible, whatever is available. We've been talking largely in personal terms about the Buddha's teachings on social and communal harmony, and today I think we're going to move in a more communal, social direction.

So again, I'd like to begin with a story, one you may have heard before. The details are a little fuzzy, so we're just going to have to imagine. The way that I recall this story, it's something like there's a circle of, I don't know the number, let's say ten dharma practitioners. People who've been practicing on the path together for thirty, forty, fifty years, and they're having a time to share. The topic comes up: "What are the difficulties that you're facing in your practice?" When I hear this setup, I get interested. I wonder how a practitioner of thirty, forty, or fifty years relates to the difficulties in their lives.

And then the first person shares: "These things are going well, and I've got this thing going on... I'm still noticing that this form of attachment is arising in me. And isn't that something?" And then the second person is going to share, and they talk about a conflict that they're involved in. Someone they care about, but there's a disharmony in the relationship for now. And one by one, they sort of discuss some of their difficulties.

What I remember—the impression of this story that was so interesting to me—was that these practitioners that have matured over decades, what we're seeing is not perfection. It's not that there's no difficulty in their social lives. But what stands out is the earnestness with which they engage, and a sort of levity, a sort of lightness: "Oh, look at this. Isn't that something? I've still got this... I've still got this issue going on after all these years." It's not a hurtful self-criticism, but a sort of lightness. There's that sort of humor. There's a Zen story of the teacher saying something like, "Oh, even after all these years, I still put on my robe with a flair." [Laughter]

So I have this wish for all of us that we have a circle of support like this. A circle of good dharma friends that grows over the years, that maybe we find ourselves thirty, forty, fifty years down the path, and we can sit in a circle and share our treasures of practice that includes our difficulties with this touch of levity.

In the teachings, it's also there that something we all know pretty well: the choice of our friends has a profound influence on our lives. So maybe it may be useful to contrast these two terms in the teachings. One is kalyāṇa-mitta^[5]—good friendship, admirable friendship, beautiful friendship. And it's contrasted with this other word, pāpa-mitta^[6]. Pāpa has a sort of dramatic translation in English; usually it's translated as "evil." Looking into it, it looks like the word is associated with qualities like unruliness and stubbornness. Whereas kalyāṇa-mitta, good friendship, is associated with gentleness and being easy to correct. I think of someone who's open to good advice.

In the way that the Buddha does, he celebrates this factor of the path, good friendship, by saying there's not a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities or makes unskillful qualities decline like good friends. When you have good friends, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline. So our choice of friends can have a profound influence on us. In the spirit of social and communal harmony, one of the things that Bhikkhu Bodhi^[7] says this brings forth is a sense of discretion. That's of interest—a sense of discretion.

Looking into the qualities of beautiful friendship, there are some very beautiful lists in the teachings, and I'll just mention one. The Buddha was talking to a young person and he says that there are these four kinds of kind-hearted friends. There's the one who is helpful. There's the friend who shares one's happiness and suffering. Third, there's the friend who points out what is good in terms of action. And there's the friend who is sympathetic.

He explains the friend who's helpful is someone who's willing to look after you when you're heedless, gives more than is required, and is a refuge for you when you're frightened. When I think to the circle of support, the circle of dharma friends that can grow for us over years and years, one of the qualities I feel in that circle, whether it's explicit or not, is that these people can be a refuge when it's difficult.

A friend who shares in happiness and suffering: this is a friend who is willing to practice muditā for us—sympathetic joy—is willing to practice compassion for us when we're suffering, "Oh, may you be free of suffering." It's someone who cares.

This third type of kind-hearted friend, the friend who points out what is good—it's here that we see that in the texts there's an emphasis on kalyāṇa-mitta. A good friend is someone who is a teacher or a mentor for us. I like to reflect on good friendship in this broader sense; it's like all of our relationships. And there is this way that trusted mentors can help point us away from what's harmful and toward what's helpful.

And then there's the friends who are sympathetic. So important to social and communal harmony, I think this is someone who will actually commend other people who are speaking well of you, speaking well of your virtues maybe, and will, it's said, stop people who are speaking dispraise of you. They undermine divisive speech.

Then, in contrast to the beautiful friend, the wise friend, the wise person in the text, we have this person that we call the fool. Maybe not what it sounds like at first glance, but a fool is defined in terms of actions. It's someone partaking of unskillful actions of body, speech, and mind, and that ends up having the effect socially of a sort of calamity that brings harm. In the Dhammapada^[8], it says that as long as evil has not borne fruit, the fool thinks it is like honey. Isn't that so?

But a really important principle here is that, it seems in the teaching, "fool" status is not permanent. A fool is someone who's acting in a misguided way, and they can always become a wise person.

In a story that's really well known, the Buddha's attendant, Ananda^[9], declares, "Half of the holy life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship." And the Buddha in his well-known response says: "No, Ananda, don't say that. Don't say that. The entire holy life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship." And when he says the "holy life" here, it's the training, the life of training. When a monastic has good friends, when a practitioner has good friends, it can be expected that they develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path^[10].

This has always been an interesting point for me, that one of the ways that we can recognize good friendship in this dharmic sense is: are we growing in skillful qualities? Is it supporting what's wholesome, what's helpful? Or is it leading us into its opposite? Then the Buddha carries on. He asks this rhetorical question: "How is it that a person with good friends cultivates the Eightfold Path?"

And the first thing he says is that based on good friendship, they develop Right View. We're right back at the beginning of the week. There's this very interesting thing happening here where Right View—we've made our way from Right View through practice to good friendship. The Right View points us to good friendship and allows us to recognize good friendship, and then good friendship points us right back into Right View. It's this positive feedback loop. Good for us, good for others.

So good friendship is something worth celebrating. And also worth noting, I think it applies for most of us—maybe I'll just speak for myself—we're not perfect people. Sometimes we act in a way that we are the fool, and sometimes we act in the way of a wise person. But there's this great way that Norman Fischer^[11] mentioned in a talk. These actions we take that we're talking about as maybe foolish, he calls them our "little Buddha foibles."^[12]

I love the levity of this phrase. You know, it doesn't dismiss the fact that something might be amiss, but there's something compassionate and accepting that gets communicated in the phrase "little Buddha foibles." Whatever those might be, in the spirit of Rahula's repeated reflection, if we act in a way with our little Buddha foibles, we lay it open, we share it with a good dharma friend, and we resolve on something else in the future.

So maybe at times we're the fool, maybe sometimes we're the wise person. I hope that allows us to include everything in our practice, all of ourselves. There's nothing that has to be outside. Sometimes we're the good friend, sometimes we need the good friend. Sometimes someone comes to us and says, "Oh, I notice I'm having this difficulty. It seems like you kind of have some skill in this area, what do you suggest?" Maybe we're the good friend they come to. Maybe sometimes we go to them: "I'm having this difficulty, what do you think?"

There's some way that the relationships are nourished by mutual trust, and by our practice of mindfulness. Our practice of mindfulness supports this movement to a bond that's deeper than pleasant and unpleasant. When we practice mindfulness, we learn how to not respond immediately to pleasant and unpleasant, and I think that opens up a field where we can connect on a deeper level.

So good friendship—I hope good friends in this sense can be inspiring, encouraging, helpful, and that we cultivate and make our way toward relationships that are conducive to the path, conducive to our growth, to the well-being of ourselves and to others. May that be for the benefit of all beings. May it be so.

And tomorrow we will continue the Buddha's teachings on social and communal harmony. Please take care.