Guided Meditation: Stillness and Movements with Thinking; Dharmette: The Story of Kisa Gotami, The Teachings of the Mustard Seeds

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Stillness and Movements with Thinking; Story of Kisa Gotami, the Teachings of the Mustard Seeds. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 10, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Stillness and Movements with Thinking

Good day. Hello everybody. I'm seeing the chat messages coming in, so good morning everybody. We'll get started. Let me start my recording here.

Warm greetings from everywhere, good to be with you all. Today is Thursday, so we're going to move to another phase of our stillness and movement journey. Today we'll be incorporating, expanding from where we were in the stillness and movement journey, to include the mind, or the thinking mind, in our practice. If you follow along, we'll begin right here where we are. I'm going to ring the bell to start.

Begin by entering into this body, mind, and heart. Maybe this entering is an orientation of turning inward. Maybe there is a sense of immediacy and a sense of presence coming forth. Each morning we enter into this temple—the temple of this body, mind, and heart—with reverence, with care, and tenderness. Here and now is where we enter, and in which to feel.

Settling into a posture: sitting, lying down, or standing. A posture that expresses a kind of inner alignment, inner harmony, and inner commitment to the practice. Maybe you're feeling the lower half of the body grounding on the earth, and the torso is uplifted. There is a totality that combines steadiness, balance, and uplifted wakefulness right here.

And right here, maybe already feeling a sense of stillness in the body, expressed in the posture of sitting. Sitting like a mountain. Maybe just a hint of it, or a hint of a hint. A possibility, as one of my teachers often says.

What is the felt sense of the body sitting here? Earth element: solid, unmoving, grounding. The movements are very natural to be felt, with the stillness in the body being in the background. The movements of the breath: expansion and contraction of the torso. Temperature changes as you breathe in and out. Like a breeze coursing through a tall mountain, both the stillness and the movements are present. The flow of the breath enlivens the whole body, giving life. It's such a wonder. A live mountain.

You may already notice the movements of the emotions bubbling up, rippling. A sense of wonder, a sense of awe, curiosity. The emotions may have a somatic imprint or a bubbly energy in the body related to joy and happiness. Feeling and sensing the embodied field of emotions.

Maybe thoughts are coursing through, related to emotions. Feeling and sensing those movements in the mind, whether they are emotions or thoughts. They are just different energy forms that we can feel and sense. Notice the feeling and sensing has a flavor of quiet stillness right there. Letting go of the stories, the content of the thinking, and resting in the felt sense.

There is a stillness in the body and a stillness in the mind. There's a stillness in the knowing, in the feeling, and the sensing. And there are movements in the body, movements in our mind, emotions, thoughts, images, and words. Without pushing or pulling, resting in the still, quiet field of knowing.

Sensations in the body may be very different right now. The breath has changed. Being available to the wonder of our lives, right here and now. Being available to the blossoming of the inner being, without wanting or not wanting, without preferences or judgments. Whatever is here, in whatever form, can be received by a kind, loving, still field.

Sound may flow through—the sound of my voice, the ambient sound. Noticing the difference between the content of our thoughts versus the felt sense of thinking in the embodied field. Thinking can have a somatic, energetic feel to it. It's present, immediate. The mind is often detached from the body^[1]. Feel that felt sense in the body right now. The inner movements, movements of the breath.

You know where some energetic shape shifts as I transition from quiet sitting to talking. And as you shift from quiet sitting to listening—listening to the stories and words—you listen from a settled, quiet, open, and loving field. Allow the words to drop in and flow through, without grasping onto anything in particular. Whatever might touch you, center in.

Dharmette: The Story of Kisa Gotami, The Teachings of the Mustard Seeds

So we're transitioning to another story—the stories of the great women disciples of the Buddha that I've been speaking about this whole week. But I forgot one thing that I meant to say, so I'm going to put it in now. I forgot to say that for these stories I've been sharing up to today, it's best not to take them as absolute truth. Many details of these stories were pieced together from parts of the Pali Canon and commentaries, so there's no way that we can be really definitive about all the details that came through.

We hear this with some lightheartedness. At the same time, each of these stories has certain aspects of the teachings that are meaningful and inspiring for us, and that are supportive for the Dharma path. Maybe that's good enough to consider taking some aspects of this in. For the parts that are harder to connect with, and are not connecting at all, we can simply put them aside.

This is an art of learning how to study and work with teachings that are offered in all different forms. In ancient Buddhist traditions, and maybe almost all spiritual traditions, storytelling has always been a very vibrant part of the teaching mode. Stories touch us in ways that may be quite different from simply receiving a set of instructions.

Today I am bringing in a story some of you may have already heard: the story of Kisa Gotami^[2]. Maybe I'll offer some new perspective here as well. Kisa Gotami is said to have been born into a low-caste family. She was also very frail and weak. She is said to have been quite skinny and haggard. The Pali word kisa means frail or skinny, and so that's what she was known as—a very fragile woman. Because of that, it was very hard for her to get married, which was a challenge for young women in those days.

But one day, a young, rich merchant somehow saw her. He saw something different inside of her and fell in love with her. He decided to marry Kisa Gotami, even though his family didn't seem to buy into this decision. Nevertheless, the young man was quite persistent, and so they got married.

In those days—and maybe even today in some parts of the world—when a young woman gets married, she goes to the husband's household to live. That was tough for Kisa Gotami because the in-laws often found faults in her, and it was very challenging. Even though the young couple seemed to love each other very much, at some point Kisa Gotami became pregnant with a baby boy.

When the little boy was born, this changed her life. The young boy was energetic, vibrant, cute, and handsome, and all the grudges that the in-laws had against her went away. You can see how much this meant for Kisa Gotami. This young boy didn't just bring a new life into the family, but also gave Kisa Gotami a sense of a life of her own. Her own existence now depended on this young boy. So she was very happy and contented for a while.

That did not last very long. One day the boy got sick—very sick quickly—and he died. You can imagine the death of this child. For Kisa Gotami, it was more than the death of her son, because her life depended on this boy. It was as if her own life was being taken away. The whole family was distraught. They all turned against Kisa Gotami, blaming her and accusing her. You can imagine all the stuff that would come up in situations like this. Even her husband began to reject her.

This was too much for Kisa Gotami. In a very short time—maybe hours or days—her whole life turned upside down. She started hallucinating and began to imagine things. She refused to accept that her son had died; she imagined that he was just sick and needed medicine to bring him back to normal. She carried this young boy in her arms and started running from one household to another, asking for medicine to bring her son back to life.

Everyone she met said, "No, your son is dead, and there's no way that you can bring him back." But at some point, she met a wise, compassionate person who told her, "Maybe you should see a physician who might be able to offer you a medicine to treat your son, and that physician is the Buddha. So you should go see the Buddha." I get the sense that this wise person sensed something within her—some hope or wisdom at her core—and so he sent her to the Buddha.

She now had a sense of hope and possibility. She ran to Anāthapiṇḍika's Monastery^[3] where the Buddha stayed. In the middle of the assembly that the Buddha held, she ran right in front of the Buddha in total despair and begged, "Please, Buddha, give some medicine to my son."

The Buddha stopped his teaching right then. Kindly, without dismissing her, blaming her, or ridiculing her, he responded with these verses that Kisa Gotami recounted later in the Therigatha^[4]. It is said the Buddha is skilled in crafty speech. He said, "Bring me a white mustard seed collected in whichever home where people dying is unknown."

The Buddha asked Kisa Gotami to collect a white mustard seed from any household that didn't have death in their family. In those days, generations of people lived in these households, and it was pretty impossible to find a house that didn't have anyone who had died in it. So Kisa Gotami went to each house. First asking for the white mustard seed—which is very common in Indian cuisine, it's one of the spices pretty much everybody uses—that was no problem.

But when she got to the second part of the question, that was unexpected. "Was there any death? Well, mustard seed, yes we have. But how about if there's any death in the family?" And everybody said, "Yes, there was death."

So she came back to the Buddha empty-handed. This journey itself was a powerful teaching right there and then. She already got a sense: Wow, no one escapes death, and this is inevitable. So she said in her poem:

Throwing away my baby's corpse, I went to the Buddha. Having seen me from a distance, the Buddha said this to me: "Better than a hundred years of life not seeing how things rise and fall, Is living for a single day seeing things rising and falling."

This is the condition of the entire world: the impermanence of all that arises. She realized the truth of what the Buddha was pointing to.

This story reminded me of many years ago when I did the Sati Center chaplaincy training. I was going on patient rounds in the Kaiser Hospital, meeting with cancer patients and their caregivers. I remember very vividly each time I went and then went back home, it was like being sent for mustard seeds. Again and again, I came back empty-handed. Who doesn't get sick and who is not going to die? That hit me very strongly. Wow, this is the truth of our lives.

There is a reason why these are called Divine Messengers^[5]. Directly and deeply, they start challenging our grasping or the tight grip we may have on things that are ever-changing. For me, this is still an ongoing, unfolding process. And yet, each time I meet this, there is such a sacredness that's unfolding.

I remember in the days when I was meeting with the cancer patients, each time sitting with them, my gratitude towards everything kind of deepened little by little. I also started witnessing the possibilities of liberating right there and then. The advanced cancer patients were moving through the phases of a traumatic experience—from the beginning, to maybe a surviving mode, and in some ways also in a thriving mode. This is not necessarily about defying death, but about how they live each moment. So we coined a term: we called this group the "Can-Thrive" group. There is some part of our lives that feels vibrant and thriving, in the midst of maybe meeting with illness and death.

So maybe this teaching from Kisa Gotami offers this possibility for each of us: to bow to the sacredness of our lives and not to grasp onto anything, but to open to the possibility to thrive in the midst of all challenges and difficulties, even facing death.

Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful, peaceful day.