So tonight we continue on with a little Mangala Sutta.
Discourse on Blessing.
Again, we study the Mangala Sutta as a means of encouraging ourselves and directing our minds and our intentions and our goals in a good direction in a way that is to our benefit and to the benefit of the world around us.
to bring goodness and to do away with all suffering and sorrow and stress, all kind of fear and worry.
All evil things to be free from.
And also to encourage ourselves in terms of what we've already attained and already gained and how we're living our lives to be happy and confident in the practice of goodness.
It can be quite difficult often to practice goodness in the faiths of so much.
busyness and stress and evil in the world.
So we need encouragement.
And so much stress inside of ourselves even, even here in the forest.
We need encouragement because we find much stress and unwholesomeness even in our own minds.
And this can be discouraging.
So it pays to remember what are the blessings and how well off we are.
And to realize that life's blessings are not something that you need to live in a certain place or so.
That many of life's blessings are
are independent of your location.
Certain of life's blessings do require a particular location.
And so the Buddha made it clear that actually you can't get away from the fact that, as the Buddha said, dwelling in a suitable location, this is the next blessing in order.
Actually, many of the blessings do seem to require a specific lifestyle, and people might begin to complain that when they hear this talk that so many people can't ever hope to it, or don't have the opportunity to enjoy these blessings.
And so they might think that this is somewhat of a biased or self-aggrandizing teaching.
We have to look very much in the bigger picture of things, that we are where we are for a reason, and we're surrounded by the people that we are surrounded by for a reason.
This was, as mentioned yesterday, Buddhism is about empowering yourself, taking control and taking responsibility for your own future.
In theory, Buddhism makes it quite clear that in theory you can become anything you want.
If you want to become king of the world, it's not an incredibly difficult thing to do.
It's something that takes time and effort and, of course, dedication.
For a person who has all of these things, who develops all of these things, it's quite possible.
So when people say they're surrounded by people who are not meditating or not practicing, there's no one in their area who they would consider to be a wise person, so how can they enjoy these blessings?
And when we talk even more about living in a suitable place, well, we're suddenly being very specific.
But part of taking control of your own fate is aligning yourself with what is right and accepting that change has to come.
Accepting necessary change.
Many people complain about their problems but don't do anything to fix them.
They feel stuck or attached to this or that and don't take the effort, make the effort to
change their lives now here we see we have very good example here because none of us are in our home country we've all taken the jump taken a leap and often at great expense to ourselves in many ways having to give things away having to give up opportunities having to lose any potential for job security or
Sometimes even against the wishes of our family and friends.
So many things, so many sacrifices, let alone the cost, the monetary cost of getting a ticket to come here.
Having to give up your safety and your security and your comfort to come here.
It's not that it's not possible for most people.
It's that most of the time we're too short-sighted to think that we could possibly do such a thing.
And so we don't take the focus and the effort and the perseverance to get ourselves here.
It's quite encouraging to think that here we've come all this way.
You think about where you were born and how far you are from where you were born.
just that, we've done something quite special.
So even finding a suitable place to live, if we consider that it's important, then we should make effort to acquire this as a blessing in life.
Of course it goes without saying that without this blessing you can still survive, you can still even become enlightened.
But the Buddha said it's a blessing, so we have to ask, what does it mean to live in a suitable location?
The Visuddhimanga goes into some detail about this.
I don't think it's quite so useful for us at this point.
We're stuck here where we are.
But it's important to understand what is meant by a suitable location so we don't become discouraged or averse to our living condition.
A suitable location doesn't mean that we have all of the luxuries and all of the
and all of the requisites that we need.
We had this discussion that the Buddha even said, even if you don't get adequate alms food as a monk, if you're in a place and the people don't have so much faith, you should ask yourself whether it's a suitable place for meditation.
Whether living here you obtain insight and you obtain calm in the mind or not.
And even if you do obtain all the requisites that you need and you have a nice place to live, but you don't obtain insight, you don't obtain calm, your mind doesn't become focused and clear, and wisdom doesn't arise, then you should not stay there.
This is what the Buddha meant by a suitable place.
So sometimes people will come to the forest and think this isn't a proper place to live for me.
This isn't a place where I could stay for any length of time because the food is not perfect and there are many mosquitoes and leeches and bugs and snakes and scorpions even.
So they think this is not suitable because actually it's quite dangerous in many ways.
It's quite uncomfortable in many ways.
And sort of longing for the comforts and the pleasures of beds and hot food and comfort foods and so on, and friends and entertainment.
They're unable to stay in such a place.
It's hard, I think, to think of such a place as this as a suitable place to live.
I don't think you'd find many people when they're looking for a place to live.
They'll come driving out here and asking if this place is for sale.
Can they come and live here in one of the caves?
When people go searching for a place to live, they look for some luxurious house in the city or in a place that is... Nowadays, people will find a place that is guard-gated.
Gate?
Guard?
No.
Guard-gated?
I don't know.
I think that's what they call it.
Guard-gated community.
Gate?
Guarded?
Guarded gate community.
Garden gate community.
A place with guards and gates.
That's a suitable place to live because there you're perfectly safe.
No suffering will come to you.
No danger will come to you.
Buddha said, This is not a refuge.
This is not safety.
It's not a safe refuge.
When people hear about us living in such a place, they're quite shocked to think of people living like this, living in a cave, for example, or living off of one meal a day or two meals a day, living in the forest, living among snakes and scorpions and leeches and mosquitoes, in the very most bare of conditions.
But this is, for us, for those of us who have dedicated our lives to this, this is exciting for us, that we've actually managed to make it to such a wonderful place.
I think we all feel, I think I speak for everyone when I say we feel blessed to have this place.
Here we are sitting up on the roof under the Bodhi tree.
We can hear the far away sounds of the roads in the city.
And sometimes we hear the music that they're playing in the village.
Can't even hear any horns honking.
The loudest sound is the crickets and the frogs.
You don't even have to speak of arguments and busyness and
advertising, games, and entertainment, and people, and talking, and chatter, and going here and going there, all that we're free from.
It's exciting, and it's inspiring.
It's reassuring that we found such a place.
And moreover, where are we?
We're in Sri Lanka.
We found the most suitable country in the world, I think, from what I've seen, for what we're doing.
Here we have a country where the majority of the people are happy to know that we're doing what we're doing.
supportive both materially and intellectually and spiritually supportive of us to the point where they'll give us food go through the village and they appreciate so much what we're doing that they give us food sometimes they have to wake wake up early in the morning just thinking that they're going to make us food make food for the for the meditators
This is not easy to find.
This is something that is a great blessing for us to live in such a place.
Something that we certainly shouldn't take for granted that here we are given this place and given these, the requisites, given food even.
Even people have decided that they want to give us food.
We didn't do anything for them.
We didn't ask them.
We didn't make any deal with them.
people out of desire to do good deeds, knowing that what we're doing is something important for the world, something beneficial, that there's a blessing being cultivated here.
Where in the world could we find such a place where you walk in the town and people don't think you're crazy for wearing a bed sheet?
When I was in America,
horrible things.
I was arrested and put in jail just for sitting under a tree by the ocean.
I was stopped by the police routinely, stopped by Christian missionaries, stopped by an old man in a pickup truck, stopped by so many kinds of people.
It was quite an experience, quite eye-opening, especially the jail term, my night in jail.
But you can definitely say it's not a suitable place in that regard.
Sri Lanka has many advantages over America in this regard.
Here we have people who understand and appreciate.
You go to the cities and you see the people in the monasteries are chanting.
Even the little kids can chant the Buddha's teaching, the Mangala Sutta.
Small children in this country chant it.
This is on the lips of every Buddhist in this country, the Mangala Sutta.
People know the Mangala.
They know the blessing.
And we're very lucky to be here.
This is where this school of Buddhism first arose.
And in our tradition, this is where we say Buddhism is going to come back to.
The legend or the story goes that eventually, in maybe another 2,000 years, Buddhism will come back to only in Sri Lanka.
And from Sri Lanka, it will go back to India.
And then in India, the Buddha's asana will end in India.
But they say it will come through Sri Lanka.
This could just be a myth or a legend.
It's a legend.
At the very least, in the minds of Buddhists, this is the hub in our tradition.
This is where the Buddhist teachings were preserved and disseminated, where the commentaries were written and the Visuddhimagga was written here.
The school of Buddhism arose in this country.
Very ancient Buddhist history.
So in this way, we're very lucky.
And in so many ways, we have a blessing to live in this place.
So we have a blessing here.
The second blessing for today.
Having done good deeds in the past.
So many people wonder why it is that the village people would want to give us food, and why it is that we feel comfortable taking food from people, and that we didn't work for, that we didn't make an agreement for.
All we do is walk and sit and serve ourselves, self-serving.
But the real reason why people give is really
Well, not just for our benefit, but very much for their own benefit as well.
This can be a very self-serving thing as well, which is a good thing, to serve yourself, to make yourself a better person.
One thing that many meditators find is they realize that they haven't done enough good deeds in the past.
It's an interesting way of phrasing it.
The Buddha didn't say doing good deeds is a blessing.
He said having done good deeds in the past is a blessing.
Because the blessing of good deeds is the fruit that they bring.
When a person who hasn't done good deeds comes to practice meditation, they find it very difficult.
And they've cultivated only unwholesome mind states and they've never been generous or kind or caring or moral or...
supportive of others and so on.
And they were taking the time to focus or concentrate their mind and do good deeds of body, speech and mind.
Very difficult for them to practice meditation.
So much pain and suffering and stress and agitation in the mind.
It can be even too much and cause them to run away and leave the meditation entirely.
Lose the opportunity.
Some people fly out here and can't even stay for the whole course.
simply because it's too stressful, too painful, too difficult, because they have not done enough good in the past.
So we realize this in meditation.
This is one thing that is quite eye-opening, is that often we realize we're lacking in this blessing.
We haven't done enough good in the past.
Meditation is one of the greatest eye-openers in this regard to, as I said, to karma, to the realization that karma is a part of reality.
It's not a theory or a philosophy.
It's an intrinsic part of how the body and the mind work from moment to moment.
We've been cultivating unwholesome moments and that's all that we have.
We see this.
We see that our goodness is counteracted, counterbalanced by our unwholesomeness.
We realize the truth of the Buddha's saying that there's a great importance on doing good deeds now, in fact having done them already.
If we haven't done them, we have to incorporate that into our practice.
Very important to develop wholesome mind states of generosity, of renunciation, of giving up and giving.
Let these people in the village give and maybe even give more than is comfortable for them to give.
It's not something that anyone should feel guilty about or bad about.
It's something that we should rejoice in.
Often we have arguments about whether we should go.
We know people are waiting and we have enough food.
Should we turn around or should we go on?
We can't decide.
We can't make a clear decision on it because
We know how important it is for them to give.
It's not like we think, oh, then I'll get some better food or something like that.
We're not that shallow that we think, oh, then I'll get some food that I like.
This house gives me food that I like, so I'll go there.
But we're often feeling bad because we didn't give them a chance to help themselves.
I suppose it sounds kind of perverse to say such things, and arrogant to say such things, but it's very much the truth.
A person who gives food gets much more than a person who gets food.
That's quite humbling for us, who are on the receiving end.
Because we get nothing from it except greed and attachment to the good food and the bad food.
All we get from the food is just more morkilesa.
I like this food.
I don't like that food.
Oh, this house gave me this food.
That's good.
Oh, I didn't get any of this food.
We get the short end of the stick.
And then we eat too much and we feel tired and we fall asleep and so on and we get lazy as a result.
Maybe even some of the people who give us food go hungry for the day because they had so much faith that they gave us their food or something.
And here we are falling asleep because we ate too much.
Very dangerous.
This is why people might say that monks are lazy and good for nothing and so on.
Because it can happen that we're good for nothing.
It can happen that we waste the opportunity that we have.
These people who give are getting a great blessing.
We can sometimes get a curse.
The food can be our curse.
Very dangerous.
Many people actually, when they become monks,
especially in Buddhist societies, they decide that it's not for them, that it's actually a detriment to their practice.
Because they don't see how these monks can do good deeds.
They don't want to ordain some people.
Because they think as a layperson you have much more chance to do good deeds.
Because they understand good deeds to be only giving or charity or helping other people.
They think of this as good deeds.
They see that the monks only do meditation or stay in the monasteries or just eat food.
They see many corrupt monks as well.
So they say it's very dangerous.
Being a monk is a very bad thing.
You have no chance to do good deeds.
You just sit in the monastery and wait for people to come and give you stuff.
So I think with this we can see how important it is to teach, how important it is to find something to give.
As monks we don't have much we can give.
We're not even allowed to give food away to people.
We're not allowed to give things because it's considered that we're corrupting them.
Then they think, oh, the monks are a source of things for us, a source of money sometimes, people employing laborers or so on.
They think monks are a source of income for us.
They never think to practice meditation.
So we corrupt the minds of these people thinking that Buddhism is a way for us to make money.
a way for us to find work if we go to the monastery.
We're not allowed to do this, so what good can we do?
Besides the goodness that we do for ourselves in making our minds pure, what good does it do to the world?
If people refuse to teach, you could actually argue that this is a self-centered practice.
The point to make here is that it actually can be a detriment to our practice.
If a person decides they want to just go off in the forest and practice, if they don't have the requisite kusala, the requisite punya, the requisite goodness, they can go crazy and many bad things can happen because of the instability in their mind.
I talked about this before, about teaching, but there is something to giving some dhamma to people.
Not putting yourself up as a teacher, I don't think that's ever a good idea, but to be a friend to people, to give them what is useful.
Buddha said you can't compare the gift of dhamma when you give, when you show other people the way.
You consider that you've paid back the lay people.
The Buddha said it like this.
He said, these lay people are very useful to you monks.
They give you food.
They keep you alive.
They give you all the requisites that you need.
A place to stay, food to eat, medicines and robes.
They'll give you these.
They have much faith and they're very useful for you.
And he said, you monks are also very useful to the lay people because you teach them the Dhamma, because you give them the truth,
So the Buddha said it like this to remind the monks that it is good for them to teach.
It's good for them to give something back.
This is what it means to have done good deeds in the past.
Once you've helped other people in this way, your practice will become much smoother.
Teaching, I've said before, is something that really helps your own practice.
It helps you see your own defilements.
I was joking today about how in Thailand, the head monk at Wat Lampung, he was saying, I think he said, or else I extrapolated it from what he said, that the best way to disrobe a monk is to make him a teacher.
And it seemed like that, really.
Every monk that he made a teacher disrobed quickly after, or sometime after.
Because when you become a teacher, you get to see all your own defilements, your hypocrisies, and you sit around telling other people to realize nibbana and you yourself have not realized nibbana.
Tell other people to be mindful and you yourself are not mindful.
Tell other people to give up and you yourself haven't given up.
It can be very difficult.
Actually, I think people often overreact to that.
They think they have to be perfect to be able to teach and so on.
Of course you don't want to be a hypocrite.
But the way I've always thought is when I teach you I'm also teaching myself and I'm also reminding myself.
I think that's fine.
This is equally applicable to myself and I'll just follow the advice as well.
I tell you something and I tell you we should be without defilement but I still have defilements.
Okay.
I'm telling myself as well.
Teaching doesn't mean you have to be perfect.
It doesn't mean you have to be proficient.
All that's required, I think, is that you're trying yourself.
And this is what it means to be empowered.
Not that you're perfect, but that you're practicing, that you're developing yourself.
Having done good deeds in the past is indeed a blessing because it's a support for our practice.
When we haven't done good deeds in the past, all we can do is begin.
We should never become discouraged that we have to stop meditating to go and fix our problems or to go and do good deeds first.
If anything, we should think that the meditation is what we've been neglecting.
And it is the good deed that we have to do, the purification of our minds.
Once we've done this, then we can feel blessed.
And so all of us should feel quite blessed in this regard.
We've done meditation.
We've begun the path.
We've set out on the path.
What we've gained in meditation is very hard for people to gain in this world.
Some people, even just a few days of meditation is an impossibility for them due to their difficulties in life.
to their situation which has been caused by their karma and by their way of living so here we've managed to make it all this way we've done something right we've done some good in the past for sure to make it to this place to come all together like this to listen and to discuss the Dhamma and then to practice the Dhamma together
day by day by day, and to have this opportunity every morning, every evening, all day to be practicing intensive meditation, to meet together in this way, and to live together in this way.
We must have done some good in the past.
This is the blessing, and it's something that we should always be clear about and never lose sight of.
But it's taken something for us to get here.
If we're complacent now, we can easily lose it.
If we become lazy, if we become complacent.
So we should always, not only should think about the punya, the good things that we've done in the past, but also realizing the importance of doing punya for the future.
If you want to have a good future, do good now.
The good that you do now might not make you happy now, but the cultivation of goodness.
The Buddha said this is happiness.
It's the accumulation of goodness.
This is happiness.
This is number two.
Number three on this stanza.
Atasamapanidita.
Setting oneself in the right direction.
This is one of life's greatest blessings.
So we dwell in the right place, we've done good deeds, what's next?
This one is really a term for the entire practice, for the meditation practice.
Setting yourself in the right direction.
Because when we talk about the right way or the right path, we're not talking about a specific lifestyle.
We're talking about setting your mind in the right direction.
No matter what you do in life, where you live or who you live with, your situation in life, set your mind on the goal.
Set your mind in the right direction.
Wake up your mind.
Wake up.
See the power that you have, the ability that you have as a human being and as a spiritual being to develop yourself and to become free, to become blessed, to bless yourself, to bless your life.
So the finding the right direction, finding direction, and people are always asking, what is the right way for me?
It doesn't mean to become this or to become that, to become a monk or to get a good job or so on.
What should I do with my life?
It means to set your mind in the right direction, to set your mind in the right path.
Set your mind to become free from greed.
Set your mind to become free from anger.
Set your mind on becoming free from delusion.
If you can set your mind in just these three things, there's really nothing else that needs to be done.
If all of your life can be directed, and your goal in life can be the abandoning of these three mind states,
then you can live your life as it comes to you.
In whatever country, in whatever place, surrounded by whatever people.
Because all other blessings come from this.
The Buddha said, The mind comes first.
All dhammas are preceded by the mind.
They are led by the mind and they are created by the mind.
So when we set our minds in the right direction, all of the other blessings will follow.
The people that we associate with will begin to change for the better.
The place that we live will change for the better.
We'll begin to gravitate towards goodness, gravitate towards blessings.
So here we are setting ourselves in this way.
This is really the practice of meditation is cultivating this way, cultivating the path.
We call the Eightfold Noble Path.
This is the path that we're walking, that we're cultivating here.
We're here to develop mindfulness.
We're here to develop wisdom.
We're here to develop morality, concentration.
We're here to develop insight.
And we're here to liberate our mind.
This is the path that we're following.
This is setting our sights on the path.
This is a great blessing.
It's something that changes a person's life.
It changes who they are, what they do.
It changes how they speak.
It changes how they think.
It changes everything about their life.
in a very real way, in a very empirically observable way.
The number of people that contact us just to tell us how great the meditation has been for them and how amazed they are at how it can change their life, even from just a little bit of meditation, even from just once a day, twice a day, even once a week or so, even from just accepting and adopting the principles of the meditation.
So how blessed we should feel having the time to do hours and hours of meditation and to dedicate our whole lives to the meditation practice.
This is something that is a great blessing for us.
Something that is
It should be very encouraging that we found this.
We should never be discouraged living this life.
We should never let ourselves become discouraged in what we're doing.
We should be patient and persevering and try to better ourselves, try to make ourselves more inclined towards this way.
again and again to set our minds on goodness and to try and free our minds from the unwholesomeness, from the clinging, from the craving, from the aversion, from the judgments, from the conceit and the views that we have inside of ourselves.
This is life's greatest blessing, setting your mind in the right direction, setting yourself in the right way.
So there's three more blessings for us to count and to be encouraged by and to set ourselves on.
And here we are.
We've come to a good place.
We've done so much good that we were able to be born a human being.
And not only that, but to meet with the Buddhist teaching.
And not only that, to actually come to practice the Buddhist teaching.
And not only that, but to actually have the desire and the intention to practice the Buddhist teaching.
And we actually are practicing it.
and that we're undergoing the process of setting ourselves in the right direction.
This is the blessing that we have being here.
So more for us to feel good about.
You should feel good as a meditator.
You shouldn't feel depressed or hate yourself or feel like you're unworthy.
You should never think that humility means hating yourself or means saying
saying bad things about you or talking bad about yourself or thinking bad about yourself or chastising yourself.
Humility just means letting go of yourself and not having a thought for yourself.
Now when we feel poor, when we feel
low self-esteem and so on.
We need encouragement to see that actually what we're doing here is giving up the self.
What we're doing here is already good.
We may not be perfect at it, but seeing that even not being perfect at it is a sign of non-self.
Coming to let go of the need to be perfect.
Being content with what we have and seeing the blessings in what we have.
Seeing the blessings in being free.
Not the blessings in acquiring and accumulating.
Seeing the blessings in letting go.
Blessings in finding a place in the practice and practicing to free yourself.
To see that we are on the right path and to be encouraged with how things are going.
This is important.
It's important to keep the mind, to incline the mind towards it.
If the mind is not happy about what it's doing, it won't continue.
It won't put out energy.
It won't develop effort.
contentment in what it's doing.
So we need these blessings and we need to feel good about what we're doing.
It's important to have right view and right perception to see that this is something good and what we're doing is good and that we are capable and that we are blessed.
We have a blessing too.
We have received this blessing.
So, time for more blessing now.
We can undergo the real blessing of the practice and continue with mindful prostration, walking and sitting.