Good evening everyone.
Welcome to our evening Dhamma.
I've been thinking a bit about society.
I find myself in society to a limited extent.
In going to university, I meet people who I might otherwise not meet, get a taste of the diversity of character types in the world.
It's quite a blessing to live in a monastery, in a meditation center, to meet only with wonderful people who are keen on bettering themselves.
To not have to worry about things like lying or cheating or stealing or manipulating.
To live in a world that is
for the most part, drama-free.
Free from all the problems associated with ambition and passion and arrogance and conceit and so on.
Not that we all don't, in the meditation center, that there aren't defilements, but there aren't a whole greater level of refinement, more subtle level
So when you go out in the world, you get to see a taste of the unmindful society, and the unmindful, and unmindful environment.
Not just unmindful, but filled with people whose views are far, far from mind.
I think either way, whether we talk about a Buddhist society or whether we're talking about society in general, the greater non-Buddhist or pluralistic society, global society,
our intentions remain the same generally.
It's to get along, to have peace, to find happiness.
I think in general, there is movement in societies to try and find some sort of peace and happiness.
Sometimes it can be rather selfish.
The people in power are not so concerned with the unwashed masses, only concerned with their own peace, their own happiness.
And so maintaining the peace means oppressing people, that kind of thing, right?
But let's put it this way, as Buddhists, whether we live in a meditation center or whether we live in society,
our goal remains the same, which is to get along, to have a peaceful society, a kind and compassionate society.
They're the same principles that we aspire to here in the Meditation Center, of course, hopefully much more successfully
in the meditation center, and less something for us to remember, something for us to think of, and something maybe even to see as a positive outcome of our meditation practice.
The Buddha called, the Buddha talked about something called the sarniadamma.
I've talked about this before.
I think I'm inevitably going to repeat myself again and again as I make more and more videos.
The saraniya dhamma are dhammas that make us think well of each other, or that make us worthy of friendship.
and that allow us to think fondly of each other and to have a peaceful and harmonious society or community.
Siksaraniyadam is a simple teaching, something for us to keep in mind.
The first one is bodily acts of kindness.
Now with kindness of any sort, this isn't the practice of vipassana, but it's in many ways the outcome of a practice of insight meditation.
Something for us to strive for is to be a kinder person, to do things.
So when we live in a society where everyone is
observant and caring and outgoing, noticing when there's a need and working to fulfill that need with kindness.
Someone who is hungry, feed them food.
Someone who is poor, give them money.
Someone who is scared, provide them with shelter and so on.
Someone who is confused, provide them with insight, with wisdom.
So the first one is bodily acts of kindness.
This is actually doing things that benefit others.
Giving them food, giving them help, helping people, helping old people across the street, that sort of thing.
Helping your parents, helping your grandparents, helping your children, helping your friends.
This is how we'd expect to work in a monastery as well, monks helping each other
The story of these monks who didn't talk to each other.
They would only talk once every five days they would get together.
And the rest of the time, they wouldn't open their mouths.
If there was a chore, they would just beckon with their hands and not say anything.
Just use the hands to beckon to them.
When it was time to eat, the first person there would set out the seats for eating and eat.
The last person to come back from alms round would clean up.
And there was no communication, except once every five days they would get together and recite and memorize the Buddha's teaching, go over it again and again, and talk about it.
but acts of kindness.
The second one, of course, is words of kindness, words spoken out of kindness.
So it's not just kind words like, may you be happy.
But it can be advice, but given out of kindness.
Any speech, the intention of which is the benefit of the other.
We speak with thoughtfulness.
We don't speak, we try not to speak, but that is out of a desire to hurt, to harm, out of a desire to assert our dominance, right, arrogance and conceit, to cultivate fear or jealousy.
How much of our speech is just designed to make us look good, impress others, which of course is just designed in the same way to make them feel inferior.
I think it's innocent to want people to look up to you, but all it does is encourage them to resent.
It's not a very wholesome, it's quite selfish.
Kindness is praising others when you see someone doing something good to be happy for them and to encourage them and to compliment them in a true way, not flattering, trying to make them like you, but
affirming the good in them, that they might be wavering about, did I do a good thing?
Good for you, you did a good thing.
That's kind of kindness of speech.
The third one, of course, kindness of thoughts.
We think of each other kindly.
That which leads to the other two, to all acts and deeds of kindness, of course, has to be thoughts of kindness, because it's actually possible to be kind with body and speech and yet hate someone, or be very corrupt in mind, because we can suppress it.
But it's not enough, and it's not true, and it's not real, it's not sincere, right?
Much more important than our acts and our speech is our thoughts and our intentions, our state of mind.
That's what we see in meditation now.
ultimately we're going to become whatever we think about.
We're going to, not what we think about, we're going to become physically and verbally, our acts and our speech are going to come inevitably from our mind.
If our mind is impure, inevitably speech and acts are going to be impure, going to be corrupt, going to be cruel, unpleasant, cause for stress and suffering.
So even just cultivating thoughts of love, I mean this is a great sort of artificial way of cultivating positive thoughts, thinking about all the people around you, may they be happy, may they be free from suffering.
And then of course cultivating insight, more natural, more sustainable, more true.
Because it makes you a nicer person.
It helps you see the disadvantages of being a cruel and manipulative and unpleasant person.
You don't have to believe it.
You don't have to pretend.
You don't have to force yourself to be good.
If you're trying to force yourself to be pure, to be free, to be enlightened, if you're pushing for it, you can know that you're actually quite far from enlightenment and not going in the right direction.
It's only when you stop forcing, when you start looking, and when you begin to see, when you begin to see the difference between right and wrong and good and bad without any reference to anyone's beliefs or teachings, it's only then that you can truly become a good person and have pure thoughts that are natural and sincere.
The fourth is sharing your possessions.
Let's say communion, let's make it more general.
So it refers to anything from what you get, share it with the community.
I mean, taxation, voluntary taxation, I suppose.
People don't like, many people, or there are some people who are critical of taxation, saying it's like forced.
But I don't look at it so much as force.
Taxation is an agreement that we've come to as a society.
That we haven't abolished it is ideally because we agree that we should be sharing.
If I am very lucky and very fortunate and even very good at what I do,
and I become very wealthy as a result, I should share.
I think many of the things, the social, in Canada anyway, we have a social net that prevents people from suffering terribly.
Many of those things are what we consider to be important as a society, which is a really good thing to see.
It's really encouraging and heartwarming.
We have this principle of charity and, well, just charity, but communion.
Or if I get very happy and very lucky and very fortunate, I don't do it alone.
I bring everyone else with me to some extent.
Communion means seeing the community as important
On the one hand, in Buddhism we are very focused on the self.
Set yourself in what's right.
Do what's in your own best interest.
But what's in your best interest, of course, is a harmonious community.
Not only that, but how can you be concerned about your own best interest if you're not supportive of other people seeking out what's in their own best interest?
If you deny other people the opportunity to find peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering, how could you find it yourself if you're not supportive insofar as it's in your sphere of activity?
So one of the greatest aspects of harmony is communion, community, commune, communal resources, communal benefits, communal happiness.
The fifth is
purity of ethics, a common purity of ethics, meaning quite obviously that to have a harmonious community you need laws, and everyone has to be keeping those laws.
You need good rules, and the rules need to be kept.
You see this very clearly in Buddhist monastic circles because we have a monastery is an interesting place because you have people
and dealing with the very innermost poisons in their mind, right?
They're dealing with their mental issues.
They don't have a lot of outlet for them.
And so it can be quite a stressful activity until you learn to be without chasing after the things that you want and avoiding and running away from the things that you don't want.
And you have such a diverse group of people whose reasons for being together have nothing to do with anything like friendship or common history.
Often in a monastery monks will come together from very different backgrounds.
And so there's a great, in monasteries, surprisingly to some, there's a great potential for conflict and strife for these reasons.
And everyone's dealing with emotional issues.
It's not a good time to be around other people who are also dealing with emotional issues.
So rules become increasingly important.
And so we have this very rigid, in fact, strict set of rules, pretty much for that reason.
You have such a charged environment and such a diversity of backgrounds and karmas, right?
It's in some ways a clashing of karma, because our narrative that we've built up, that's led us here, is often very different from where we find ourselves in the monastery.
I was supposed to be, I don't know, personally, I was supposed to probably be a mathematician or something.
And I've cut that off.
I could have become probably quite a successful mathematician or, I don't know, even an author.
many of the different things in the world and cut them all off when they became a monk.
And you see that.
You have stories like this.
Everyone had their paths.
Anyway, the point being that when you come together, there's a need for rules.
The same thing goes for society.
There's such a diversity of opinions and backgrounds and potentials, capabilities.
Until or as long as things aren't sorted out, you need rules.
Harmony comes from keeping rules, obeying laws, and having good laws.
There are people who believe that laws should be abandoned.
They think there should be no, one of the laws is there should be no drug laws.
And I can sympathize with that because drug laws only serve to put more people in jail because there are people doing drugs.
But it doesn't take away the fact that doing heroin and to a limited extent I would say marijuana, alcohol, these are not good things for society in my opinion.
And it's much more complicated than that.
It doesn't mean we should do away with all laws or rules.
It means we have to have a better way of actually ensuring that the rules are kept, that we're able to build a society where we have an order whereby people don't fall into behavior that is conducive to conflict, either inner conflict or conflict in society.
And eventually, ideally, a society that encourages people to become wiser, to become better, to become more pure, more free, more happy.
And the final one is having common purity of view.
So this relates to what I've been talking about.
Not only do we need rules, but
to have a pure society, to have a harmonious society, you really do need to some extent a community of a common purpose, right?
So most of Canada is in agreement that providing healthcare to all people is a good thing.
And having that right view of kindness and support
and caring for our society.
You could say that's an important part of creating the harmony.
If you look in America, there's incredible disharmony.
America is very much divided down party lines, and probably there's some intent behind that, the intent to create a divide and conquer, a divided society.
I don't want to get too much into it,
when you've got such ideological diversity, that's where conflict arises.
So this recent, in Canada, it's come up recently, there's been a move to, I mean, I'd say it's fairly radical, but this move to try and criminalize, or criminalize hate.
And not just hate, but physical and verbal acts of hate.
and to apply some fairly broad criteria for what we understand as hate.
So if you deny a person's identity, gender identity is the big hot topic now, that can be considered hate speech or an act of a hate crime.
I mean, if it was done with malicious intent, it's not like policing speech.
It's not what everyone thinks it is.
If you are doing so in a dismissive fashion, where you really and truly...
Anyway, I don't know.
It's a bit complicated and perhaps radical in a sense, but it's caused a great division in our society, I think.
I mean, on the one hand, there's one side, there's people who are quite militaristic in their push for their own rights, a push for their own, what the other side calls agenda, the liberal extremist agenda.
I mean, in the end, there's some real good there.
trying to make sure that people feel and have this sense of self-worth and sense of grounding in who they are and that they're not left out of the conversation, that they're not dismissed or forced to be something they're not.
that they can have this space to breathe.
But it does get quite vehement and angry, which is not conducive to progress and harmony.
Not when it gets to that level, I think.
It can be so much better done if it was tempered and, you know,
associated with kindness.
On the other side, there is an incredibly vile and corrupt form of hatred and bigotry that is cloaked in the guise of free speech, but really is just about hating people who are different and people who have
a different way of looking at the world.
We see this in society, we see this in monasteries, the story of many stories of monks beating on monks and monks attacking monks and monks fighting with monks.
We have stories going back to the Buddha's time, this sort of thing.
Right now we're talking about view.
We have stories of monks arguing with monks.
We have divisions from the time of the Buddha.
Right after the Buddha passed away, there was right away a split.
And it split, and it split, and it split.
And now we've got forms of Buddhism that I don't even recognize has anything to do with Buddhism.
very different forms.
I've got splits among communities.
I was in a monastery once where there were three groups of monks.
They had a split.
And in the monastery, there were three communities.
And they didn't interact with each other.
They schemed against each other.
It was quite, well,
impressive in a way, I guess.
Having the same view.
Now, for us as meditators, this means really having a view of the Four Noble Truths.
That gives you the greatest harmony.
When you see that, then there's none of this.
There would never be a question about identity.
There would never be a question about a clique or a group or a division of the Sangha.
It just wouldn't have any sense or meaning or purpose.
Not to mention all the anger and greed involved would just have disappeared.
It's important that we're clear and that we have these debates in society.
It's important that we debate.
It's important that we discuss.
It's important that we listen to each other.
It's one thing that being in the university has taught me is how to listen, and how to listen to people who I might disagree with.
And it gives you interesting perspective on why people think things they do, and it helps you understand how people get to the views that they get to, even though you might completely disagree with their views.
You at least can understand what that makes them and where they come from.
And by listening and by talking we can break through and come to an understanding with each other.
There's many aspects, many factors involved.
You need rules, you need kindness, you need a desire for truth and a desire for harmony.
The worst enemy to harmony, of course, is the desire for conflict.
If society is keen to hurt and to cause harm and to disrupt,
It doesn't matter how well-intentioned you might be or how clear you might be in your mind, you're never going to succeed in bringing harmony to society.
And that's a sort of view in itself, right?
The view that harmony and peace are worth working towards.
The view that the true goal should be happiness and should be peace.
That there is no happiness without peace.
Once you have peace, you have happiness.
So there you go.
Those are the Saraniya Dhammas.
They're Dhammas that we should all recollect and they help us think fondly of each other.
They help make the community a harmonious community.
So thank you all for tuning in.
Have a good night.