Welcome everyone.
Thank you all for coming.
Tonight we stand in the Adhita Pariyayas with the
I've gone through it before, so I'm not going to go through it again.
Not tonight anyway.
But you notice how when the Buddha was giving the discourse, at the end, the last paragraph, ima sminca panavaya karana smin,
While this exposition was being delivered, the minds of the thousand bhikkhus became free from defilements without attachment.
Just while the Buddha was talking.
What does that suggest to you?
And how'd they do it?
How'd they do it?
How did they do it?
It's the answer you know I want.
Of course, through meditation.
It's funny because actually some people who read these suttas, they actually think that the Buddha had some power to enlighten beings.
I heard of at least one well-known Western scholar who
who believed this.
He explained to me his theory that it's not possible to become enlightened now because the Buddha is gone.
The only way you can become enlightened is when you hear the Buddha's words because he read all the suttas and everyone was becoming enlightened when they heard the Buddha's words.
It's an odd theory.
It certainly doesn't stand up in the texts.
And he told me he'd read the whole of the Tipitika twice in Pali.
What's the difference between study and practice?
The point is they were practicing and that's not the point I want to make.
The point I want to talk about tonight is the difficulty we have sometimes in coming to terms with this divide between study and practice because it's easier to read the teachings, it's much more difficult to actually put them into practice.
We have the story, the biography of Mahasi Sayadaw, how he had studied the Buddha's teaching but couldn't figure out how to put it into practice.
It's easy to understand what the Buddha is saying when he talks about the Four Satipatthana, but how do you put them into practice?
So he went up, he left his monastery and went up into the mountains and found this monk who was living in the cave or something.
And he asked this monk, he said, you know, look, I've studied Buddhist teaching, but how do I practice it?
And the monk just looked at him and said, it's right there in front of you.
He said, what are you doing coming to me for advice?
Look, the Buddha already taught how to meditate.
So even such a learned scholar, having read through all the teachings, having passed all these Dhamma exams, still had no clue how to put any of it into practice.
Or not no clue, but was at a loss as to how to practice it.
which is common.
It has to do with the state of our mind when we read something.
If you're reading something to process it intellectually, you see that's one brain pattern, one mode.
When you're in the intellectual mode, it's amazing what you can take in and even put out.
This is where hypocrisy comes from.
It's easy for someone to sit around and teach.
I can sit around and teach you all to become enlightened without knowing anything myself, without having become enlightened myself, because it's on the intellectual level.
This is sutta maya paññā.
And it really is a mode of the mind that can completely remove you.
It's probably where psychopathy comes from as well.
You can totally remove yourself from the situation and this is how we manipulate other people and so on.
But in the Dhamma it's how we get to this point of being at a loss is how to put the teachings into practice.
So I wanted to talk particularly about one facet of the Buddha's teaching, or one way of looking at the Buddha's teaching and try to apply it practically.
And this is the Buddha's teaching on the Bodhipakya Dhamma, which really isn't just any random facet of the Buddha's teaching.
It's one way of outlining the entirety of the Buddha's teaching.
It's quite a...
a comprehensive overview or outline of the Buddha's teaching.
Bodhi-Pakya Dhamma.
Bodhi means enlightenment.
Pakya means have a part, I think.
Those which play a part.
The Dhammas which play a part in enlightenment.
So it's really all of them, and it's 37 Dhammas, so it really is a large set of things.
And that's why I said set of things, because I had just been looking at the number in the Pali text.
So 37, it's one of those lists that you kind of dread as a Buddhist monk, having to remember 37 different things.
But actually it's easy because it's made up of just sub-lists of Dhammas that the Buddha taught as being related to enlightenment.
And so it's one thing to rattle them off, remember them, memorize them.
But it's entirely another thing to put them into practice.
And that's what I'd like to talk about.
I'll just go through them.
I'll try not to take too long.
And then we can actually do some practice.
Of course, while I'm teaching, there's no excuse to not be practicing.
We can all be meditating while I talk.
So the first set is the Satipatthana, of course.
If there was any doubt in anyone's mind as to the importance of Satipatthana played, this is, among other things, should put it to rest.
In the Bojangga, what is the first Bojangga?
Satisambhojanggo.
In the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha called them the Ekayanamagga.
The Satipatthana are clearly a
Very important part of the Buddha's teaching.
When anyone came to the Buddha asking for brief teaching, it's not necessarily the first thing he would say.
He would say it like this a couple of times.
He said, okay, what I want you to do first is set yourself in morality and right view.
So it means do a little bit of soul searching.
It's probably a bad word in this context, but look inside yourself and straighten out your views.
wrap your head around the concept of karma and good deeds having good result and so on and do some study about right view and cultivate morality means set yourself in not killing, not stealing, not lying, not cheating and so on so right view and morality and he said and then practice the four satipatthana so it really is the entrance as I talked about a few nights ago it's
Is anyone here?
What is another word for sati?
Do you remember what I was talking about?
Vigilance?
But in Pali, what's the other word that is almost synonymous with sati?
No, it's a Pali word I'm looking for.
It's not exactly synonymous, but in the Buddha's teaching it's... What's the core of the Buddha's teaching?
In one word.
No.
That's it.
You remember.
The Buddha's final words.
It really is the essence.
The commentary says,
This is the essence of all of the pitikas.
When you condense them down, that's it.
The path of appamāda.
And then I went on to talk about how the Buddha said, never being without mindfulness, this is what is meant by appamāda.
So sati and appamāda are quite synonymous, not exactly synonymous, but it's how the Buddha wanted us to cultivate appamāda, by this idea of sati, this concept of sati.
So it really is the start of the practice.
And this one is not, there's not much I need to say about this because I'm always going on about it, but basically this is where our practice starts.
So in walking and sitting meditation, where are the four satipatthana?
When you walk, your mind being with the foot, recollecting this is right, this is left, or this is lifting, this is placing, or this is lifting, moving, placing, and so on.
This is sati.
This is kaya nupasana satipatthana.
When the
rising, falling.
This is gaya.
Vedana is when you have pain or aching or soreness and you say to yourself, pain, pain, recollecting.
Clearly this is pain.
Not good, not bad, not me, not mine.
This is vedana nupasana satipatthana.
When you're thinking and you know clearly that you're thinking, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, good thinking, bad thinking, good thoughts, bad thoughts, when your mind is, whether your mind is clear or unclear or so on.
Whatever thoughts, knowing them as just thoughts.
This is Chittanupasana Satipatthana.
When you acknowledge liking, disliking, drowsiness, distraction, doubt, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking.
This is Dhamma Anupasana Satipatthana.
It's amazing to think that Mahasi Sayadaw could have read and totally memorized the Satipatthana Sutta but still didn't know how to practice it.
It's clear because when you look at it, you kind of think, okay, I kind of get it.
I remember when I first went to Thailand, this was before I was Buddhist, probably my first introduction to what I was about to practice.
I remember the Lonely Planet Guidebook to Thailand.
I was kind of not really interested in Buddhism, actually.
I was looking for Taoism.
I was a Taoist at the time, and I was trying to find a Taoist center.
But, you know, in the Lonely Planet, they got this section on Buddhism.
I thought, well, you know, I think they must be close, or at least there's, you know, Zen Buddhism, which is kind of cool, but this Buddhism thing, I'm not sure if it's for me.
And so I was reading through it, and the author happened to have been a student of my teacher.
He had practiced meditation at the center of my teacher.
And I think that's where he got such a wonderful description.
He said, what the Buddha taught is when you see, know that you're seeing.
When you walk, know that you're walking.
When you walk, only walk.
Something like this, when you walk, only walk.
When you sit, only sit.
And I had no clue, no understanding of what that meant.
I'm like, okay, well...
That sounds wise.
But you see how you can't penetrate to actually think, okay, let's do it.
When I walk, let it just be walking.
You've got no concept without any instruction.
There's no concept of how to do it.
It sounds wise.
That's as far as you can get.
As far as I could get anyway.
Maybe I'm just dense.
It's amazing how your mind is in a specific mode that you can't even penetrate the teaching even though it's right there in front of you, like the Buddha said, like a spoon in the soup.
The spoon can be in the soup for a hundred years, it will never taste the flavor.
You really can be in that mode.
It was only when I went and actually had someone literally explain it to me, kind of baby me through it.
Seeing when you see, say to yourself, seeing, seeing, seeing, actually give you something to do.
Otherwise you read the Buddhist teaching, gacchantova gacchamiti bhajanati.
Okay, when you walk, know you're walking.
Got it.
No, no, no.
When you walk, say to yourself, walking, walking, walking.
Then it becomes practical and you actually do it and then you see, ah, this is mindfulness.
And you're clearly aware of the movement.
And there's bare awareness.
So this is the four satipatthana, or the first.
This one is pretty easy.
We don't have difficulty.
But without a training, you see how important it is to have a technique and to have a teacher, someone to tell you to do it, not just give you intellectual information.
Because even if I give you a book to read and you
You could read through my whole meditation book and think, well, that sounds interesting, and never put it into practice.
It's two very different modes, mental, I don't know, mind frames, frames of mind, frame of mind, yeah.
So that's number one.
Number two is samapadana.
The four samapadana.
The four.
The samapadana.
You know what these are?
Samapadana.
D-H-A.
What are they?
No.
Those are the idipada.
Those are next.
These are the samapadana.
You know what these are?
Let me see.
What's the first one?
The first one is trying to think of the Pali.
No, no, no, wrong, zero, fail.
Absolutely not.
What's the first one?
You'll get it once I remember these Pali words.
First one is, well, let's start in English and then maybe it'll come to me.
The first one is the guarding, right?
No, no, it's not guarding.
It's the preventing.
What's the Pali word?
I've got three of them, can't remember the first one.
The preventing bad states from arising.
The effort to prevent the arising of unwholesome states.
The samabhadana are the four right efforts.
So it's viriya.
It's what we mean by viriya.
The right effort is fourfold.
It's called the samabhadana.
The effort to prevent unwholesome states from arising.
Unwholesome states that have not yet arisen, prevent them from arising.
Number two is to abandon bahana, to abandon unwholesome states that have already arisen.
The third is to cultivate wholesome states, the effort to cultivate wholesome states that have not yet arisen.
And number four is the effort to maintain or guard wholesome states that have already arisen.
Sanghvara, that's it.
Sanghvara, to guard against.
Sanghvara, pahana, bhavana, anurakana.
Anurakana, anuraka.
These are the four samabhadhana.
So the four right efforts, it's quite simple.
You have wholesome and unwholesome states.
And it's the effort that we make to prevent and abandon the unwholesome ones and to cultivate and maintain or guard the wholesome ones.
So how do these work in our meditation practice?
This is the Buddhist teaching in the Satipatthana Sutta, ātāpi sampajāno sati madhi ātāpi is the effort.
So this is the aspect of meditation that requires you to go to the object, to be with the object and to repeatedly observe the object.
from moment to moment and to not lose track of the present moment.
This is the effort that's made to straighten out the mind and keep the mind straight from moment to moment.
The mere effort of keeping your mind on the foot, it straightens out the mind and creates the subjectivity.
It prevents, because it prevents habits, you see.
We have the habit to abandon our
Or we have habits that lead us to do and say bad things sometimes and to do and say good things sometimes, but it's sort of a natural, ad hoc, cultivated...
mishmash of habits and conditioning that we have through our lives.
So we think of it as who I am.
We have this personality idea.
But actually it's just habits upon habits cultivated and aggregated.
So sometimes we're nice to people, sometimes we're mean to people without really having much control over it.
And the effort is to steer ourselves in another direction, to steer ourselves into a straight path so that we're perfect.
You think I'm joking, no?
You can't be perfect, right?
Society tells you accept who you are, right?
Or maybe not.
Maybe it tells you to strive, but we're all, we have this idea that you're only human, right?
But you're only human because you believe you're human.
You can actually be somehow perfect.
It's possible to be perfect.
Perfect is perfect.
Perfect is as perfect as perfect in this moment.
You can have a perfect moment and if you have effort, you can have perfect moment after perfect moment.
It's not that difficult to be perfect.
It's quite difficult to maintain it because of our habits.
So it's about changing our habits and the effort is what does that.
The effort to guard against unwholesomeness.
So when someone says something nasty to you and you say, hearing, hearing, you're guarding against the unwholesomeness.
Because the habit would be to react to it.
But you change that habit and you can see how you avoid the unpleasantness.
When unwholesomeness arises and you say to yourself, angry, angry, you stop it from building.
Because the bigger problem than just getting angry is getting angry about your anger.
When you're angry and you say, oh, that jerk made me angry, and it makes you more angry.
Or you hate yourself for your anger and so on.
Or you're afraid of your fear, or you're worried about your worry, or you're stressed about your stress.
Or you're attached to your attachments.
All of these things, we like our desires.
So this is the snowballing effect.
This is what the second samapadana is, the abandoning of the unwholesomeness.
When we have these addictions and aversions inside of us, arisen inside of us, to catch them.
This is why the Buddha had us acknowledge
when they are present.
When unwholesomeness is present, know that unwholesomeness is present.
This is what straightens out the mind and this causes one to abandon it.
because you don't feed it.
All of these things come with a cause.
Anger, for example, requires you to react to a cause.
You have to be reacting to the sound.
So when you say to yourself, hearing, hearing, you don't give rise to the anger.
When you say angry, angry, you don't give rise to anger about the anger, or you don't give rise to anger about the subject either, because you're no longer focusing on this, and you're no longer reacting to this.
So it doesn't perpetuate the cycles.
This is the abandoning.
Number three is the cultivating of unarisen wholesome states.
So by cultivating sati, or by engaging in the meditation practice, you cultivate all sorts of wholesome states.
You cultivate clarity of mind, of course, the mindfulness, vigilance, alertness, wisdom, understanding, impartiality, humility,
non-attachment contentment all sorts of things come from it and you see it's this breaking through this breaking out of this mind state of intellectualizing to actually practicing even now you can see yourself listening to what I'm saying and trying to appreciate what I'm saying and then you see yourself go into the other mode and you can see they're actually two very different modes the mode of actually
engaging in the Dhamma, engaging in the practice, being aware that now you're sitting here, now there's pain, now there's thoughts, now there's emotion.
This is the cultivating of unarisen wholesome states, states that may never have arisen before.
You can actually become something that in all of samsara you may have never given rise to.
This is exciting, actually.
We have some unique experience here that
maybe we never had in all of samsara because in all of samsara we never became a sotapanna for example unless it was in the past seven lifetimes probably not maybe for some of us but for most of us not and so we have an exciting opportunity here to learn things that we have never learned before this is bhavana to cultivate things that have not arisen
And we do this through the meditation practice by becoming objective.
By seeing things as they are, you become all of these things that I mentioned, content and humble and wise and clear-minded.
And it also, of course, gives rise to many other side effects like compassion and love and sympathy and equanimity, impartiality and so on, all these good states that are highly regarded in the world.
Renunciation, the ability to give up and to let go and to not cling and
to be flexible and react appropriately and so on.
All these things come from having a clear mind.
This is what happens through the meditation.
It certainly doesn't happen just from hearing the Dhamma.
It has to do with the state of mind.
There are stories of actually, we have these stories in the commentaries of there was a story of a frog that went to heaven.
A bunch of bats that went to heaven.
There's a story of a dog that went to heaven.
All because of their state of mind.
This frog was listening to the Dhamma and heard the Buddha speaking and just heard the sound, blah, blah, blah, blah, like.
but somehow got the idea that it was somehow appreciated the sound or got the vibe and actually was born in heaven just by listening to the Buddha's teaching.
I think this is where people get the wrong idea that somehow the sound of the Buddha's teaching can lead to enlightenment.
As I was talking about last night, this woman who I taught her to say, and somehow magically it got her out of this situation.
Magically these...
She was in a very bad situation, living in someone else's house, and they were very mean, and they told her to throw away this Buddha image that someone had given her.
And instead of throwing it away, she called a friend to take it away.
She had been contacting me, it's a really interesting story, she had been contacting me for almost a year now, I think.
and she wanted to become a nun, but she wasn't sure if she'd be able to leave her place or get transportation here, couldn't get a job, and the people she was staying with were controlling, and they wouldn't even let her bathe.
It was like she was allowed to bathe once a week or something.
There are weird things happening in America.
You know, out in the countryside, some places are like this.
And so the final straw, you know, and then so I told her, I said, you know, I can't fix your life, but try this.
Try to cultivate wholesomeness in the mind.
And of course meditate.
She'd been meditating based on my instruction.
And then she disappeared for like a month, two months.
I didn't call me.
I didn't email me.
And then suddenly I got an email two days ago or yesterday and they'd said that having idols in the house would attract demons.
Just like they say that about meditation.
They say don't ever do meditation because it invites demons into your body.
Be careful.
But you see, but my point is, this is exactly my point, because you see what that does to their minds.
It puts their minds way over here.
And her mind was way over here.
And they couldn't live together.
It was like magnetic repulsion.
So buddho me na to, every day I had her do buddho me na to, and she was, I guess, lighting incense for the Buddha and so on.
And they told her to throw this away.
Instead of throwing it away, she got her friend to come and pick it up.
And when her friend came,
And they started talking, or it was a friend of a friend started talking, and the friend of a friend gave her a job.
And she left the house just that day, left the house, went to live with this person and was like a caretaker for their grandmother or something.
And she said, my life has just changed totally upside down, all because of the Buddha image.
All because these people couldn't put it.
So you think, well, it's just a silly coincidence, but it's not.
You see, because if her mind hadn't been so clear and pure, these people who came to pick out the wood image wouldn't have had any interest in talking to her, wouldn't have thought, hey, here's a good person to look after my grandmother, and so on.
And she maybe wouldn't have even had the Buddha image.
She maybe would have just thrown it away if she had been more like the people she was staying with.
If she hadn't been so strong in mind, she maybe would have said, well, I don't want to upset the people here.
So she would have just thrown the Buddha image in the garbage.
The point is how important the mind is, the cultivation of good states in the mind.
It's not the words.
It might sound like I'm trying to say that these words have some magic power, but they have a power over the mind.
And there's a power over people's minds when they engage in bad deeds, the ideas of throwing away Buddha images and so on.
Very dangerous.
Right, so that's number three.
Number four is the guarding of wholesome states once they've arisen.
The Buddha said it's like holding a pot full of oil.
He gave the example of the pot full of oil.
You know this simile?
the man has to walk through the carnival, the crowd, and there's a woman dancing or something.
There's women dancers, beautiful dancers, and he's told, okay, we're going to give you this pot full to the brim with oil, and we're going to have someone walk behind you with a sword, and if you spill so much as one drop of oil, we're going to cut your head off.
And he says, do you think this guy would take his time to look at the beautiful women dancing as he walked by?
No.
Look at the shows and so on.
And he said, this is a simile he wanted the monks to keep in mind when they practiced to guard their meditation.
My teacher likened it, I'm not sure, I think it's in the Visuddhimanga actually, but he brought up this simile of a cradle.
He said when someone's rocking the cradle, in the olden days they would have maybe a hammock or something and they'd have it on a string and you had to watch it or else the baby would wake up.
You had to pull just at the right time to rock the cradle or rock the baby.
your meditation is like that to keep your mind on the practice is very difficult so guarding is a very important part of our practice it's something I can say it but if you don't practice you can't understand it so I think for all of us when you get a sense of this when you're practicing you see how easy it is to get sidetracked this is the effort our right effort is to try to
To guard it and to see when our mind, to catch when our mind wanders and to be there to catch it.
So every time I remind you, let's meditate on this, you see your mind goes back to the body, catching the feelings, catching the thoughts and so on.
And then I say something else, or you think of something else, and your mind wanders again.
This is what is meant.
The effort that we have to cultivate is to prevent that, to be there to catch the mind when it wanders.
So this is the second set, samapatana.
The third set is the iddhipada.
These are the four roads to success.
And these ones are good teaching for anyone, for worldly affairs as well.
Do you know what the four iddhipada are?
Then how can you hope to succeed in life?
You must be a real failure then, I suppose.
Your parents didn't teach you the four iddhipada?
Don't they know it's their job to teach you how to succeed in life?
What a horrible monk, no?
Well, I hope I've piqued your interest, because they are very important, and they will help you succeed in life.
And when you hear them, it's kind of like, oh, yeah, well, I kind of already knew that.
Or they make sense, and some of them are clear.
Chanda, Viriya, no, Viriya, no?
Chanda, Viriya, Viriya, Viriya, Viriya.
Am I wrong?
Vidya is number two, isn't it?
Alright, let's go by my way and I will retract it if I turn out to be wrong.
My memory can be so bad sometimes.
It's interesting.
No, I'm pretty sure I teach this a lot.
I could be wrong.
But okay, let's think about it.
It means you have to like what you're doing.
You have to be interested in what you're doing.
Right?
If you...
If you aren't interested in what you're doing, it's very difficult.
This is why some school subjects are difficult.
For some people, some are easy, like biology.
I could never get into biology, really.
That was my one trouble subject, but not because it was bad.
I just didn't care.
You had to cut up pigs, and I didn't want to cut up a pig.
And then some people don't like math, right?
You like math?
Yeah.
You?
Yeah.
You know those people in your class who are just like, think you're just crazy or something like that.
You need chanda.
Some people have, some people don't.
Meditation is very much the same.
You see how difficult it is for us to meditate.
because it's something not familiar to us and actually not so...
The problem with meditation is it's not addictive.
That's the problem with the Buddha's teaching is it's not addictive.
It's easy to like something that's addictive, like ice cream, you know, not problem, not a problem, right?
You want me to eat ice cream, I can do that.
I can do that every day.
Most people would say such a thing.
I'm not saying, I want ice cream, please.
This is my example.
I don't have a very strong imagination, so I just use simple examples.
It's not that I want ice cream.
I have to say that, otherwise I know what I'll get tomorrow morning.
But yeah, the Dhamma goes opposite, because it's unaddictive.
It's the freedom from addiction.
So a lot of the chemicals in the brain that we rely upon to give us this sense of interest, dopamine, for example, are not activated, or not activated in the same way.
It'd be interesting to see what sort of
And I bet it is possible to give rise to these.
But this is what we have to work towards.
This is what we have to work for.
We have to have this kind of interest in the Dhamma.
They say you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
And so this is the experience we have when we try to convince people to meditate.
If I went around to all of you and tried to coerce you and maybe shame you into meditating, I could get so far.
But if you don't have the interest in it, if it's not innate in you, if you don't have the goodness, it's a lot like trying to make a horse drink water.
It can yank your chain and pull you all the way to the river.
But if you're not hungry, if you're not thirsty,
Chanda is very important.
So it's important in meditation.
I guess I'd also point out how we can cultivate it in meditation.
In meditation, we actually cultivate the dhamma kama, dhamma kamo bhavangoti.
We become one who is content with or desirous of the dhamma, who desires to practice the dhamma.
A person who practices meditation cultivates chanda, dhamma chanda, through their contentment, through their clarity of mind, through their wisdom, through seeing that addiction doesn't, or sensual pleasure and addiction doesn't satisfy.
Let's go there.
Number two is virya.
We cultivate virya.
I've already talked about that.
Either number two or number three, depending how you list them, apparently.
Citta, it is this order, I know it is.
Citta means, citta here is mind, but the meaning here is keeping things in mind.
So if you want to succeed, you need effort, right?
This is clear.
I've skipped it because we've already talked about how effort, the four samabhadhana are effort.
I guess I should mention how you need effort.
If you don't have effort, for example, when you're practicing meditation and we tell you to watch the stomach rising and falling, just a simple exercise, because the breath causes the body to expand.
This expansion takes place for a stressed person, it'll take place in the chest.
For a relaxed person, it'll take place in the stomach, abdomen.
So we focus on the abdomen and try to focus our attention there.
Once we relax, it will become clear and you'll be able to watch it rising and falling, just as a basic exercise.
But if you just say in your mind, rising, falling, rising, falling, without putting your mind there, you gain nothing.
It's not just a magical exercise where you can say rising, falling, rising, falling, and somehow you become enlightened.
You need the effort and the push to send your mind to the object.
The same when you're walking.
If your mind doesn't go to your feet, it's useless.
You gain nothing from saying stepping right, stepping left, or so on.
But of course, effort arises through the practice, through the clarity of mind, through the abandoning of the dull states.
It's interesting, fatigue or laziness or sloth and torpor in the mind,
is actually a state that can be removed.
We normally think of fatigue as kind of a lack of something, and so you need caffeine or something.
I need something to fill me up.
I'm running on empty kind of thing.
But have you ever had that feeling when you're lying in bed and you kind of don't want to get up, and then suddenly you remember something good?
You remember, oh, there's ice cream in the fridge.
Suddenly, bing, you're awake.
And where did all that fatigue go?
Suddenly it disappeared.
So it's important not to trick yourself into thinking that fatigue is something that is unavoidable.
This is how meditators feel.
Sometimes we ask meditators to stay up all night.
And they get all freaked out and think it's not possible.
How can you do that?
You need your sleep and so on.
But when they actually do it and when they actually get comfortable and get proficient at keeping a clear mind, they find that actually, no, they don't need sleep.
Sometimes in sitting they'll fall asleep, just naturally fall asleep.
But otherwise, they find themselves totally awake.
And I did this once for a week, doing like a half an hour of sleep a night.
And it was amazing to me because at night I'd say, well, that's enough.
In the morning, I'd say, well, that's enough, and I'd go and put my head down on my pillow and fall asleep for half an hour, and then get up and go on with my day, and then at night, okay, let's do it again.
Not feeling tired, and was actually able to do it extended.
It was because it was my teacher's birthday, and I started doing it for a few days, and
Then I went back to my teacher's monastery, and I thought, hmm, that'd be a good gift to give him.
And so I got a couple of monks to go say, hey, let's stay up all night.
Okay, so we stayed up all night, and then the next night I said,
let's do it again.
And I got everyone back together and we sat actually outside of my teacher's room in the meditation hall and we're sitting there and he gets up at four in the morning or he gets up at three, but he comes out at 4.30 to go for chanting and his attendant says, these monks, they were sitting here all night just for you.
And he was so happy.
He said, oh, very good.
He said, very good effort.
He pointed out that this is
If you have effort, you can, like Jakubala, he stayed awake for three months.
He never lied down for three months.
And you can fall asleep sitting sometimes.
It's not to say that he didn't fall asleep, but it is certainly possible to stay awake.
So you gain this from the practice.
You gain effort.
And number three, citta is important.
You have to concentrate on what you're doing.
If you want to succeed in life, you need interest.
You need effort.
You need to put out the effort.
You need to focus on what you're doing.
Keep your mind on it.
Don't let yourself get distracted from it.
You know how you have these reports due and then suddenly you're off playing Xbox or something.
I don't know what you kids do these days.
Whatever it is kids do these days.
I'm out of touch.
And so you lose track of what you're focusing on.
Like when I start giving a talk and then I'll suddenly start wondering about Xbox.
Or you're sitting here in meditation and suddenly your mind starts to wander.
Keeping your mind on the practice is an important part of it.
It's also important in our life as well.
It's easy to get sidetracked and say, I want to meditate and then never find time for it.
And then we make up excuses like, I have no time for it.
Which is just probably the most embarrassing excuse there is because I know there's time for meditation.
24 hours each day.
If you can't find time, that's a good excuse.
But saying you don't have time is like saying you don't have time to breathe.
I think Ajahn Chah said that if you have time to breathe, you have time to meditate.
True, because anything you do can be a meditation.
Eating can be a meditation.
Do you have time to eat?
Both reading as well as thinking, they all can come under meditation.
Reading and thinking?
Yes.
It depends.
Do you have... Now, for example, sometimes this is what I do in the morning.
I recite the three suttas, that is the Mangala Sutta, Pratara Sutta,
and the Karaniyam with the Sutta.
Well, that can be meditation, because you're focused.
But thinking can't really, in and of itself can't.
While doing that, I'm also meditating.
What are you meditating on?
For example, you take a thing like this.
In the Karaniyam with the Sutta, there is one verse where
you describe what, how you should love other people.
Just like a mother who has only one son and how much love and care she gives for that child, you should apply the same thing to all the others.
Yes.
So,
How do you meditate when you're thinking about that?
What is the meditation you do?
You are bringing good ideas to your mind.
Yes, but that's not meditation.
Bringing good ideas in is study.
It's not meditation.
Meditation would be when you actually cultivate the love, when you actually send love to all beings.
That would be meditation.
But thinking about it is the study part.
And the reason it's not meditation is you don't have ekagata, you don't have the focused mind.
Your mind is still wavering.
And so there's still the potential for liking, disliking, judgment, discursive thinking, and so on.
It's not strong enough.
To call it bhavana, you have to be focused.
You have to enter into jhāna, really.
The two kinds of jhāna are aramanupani jhāna, so you're focused on a single object, like love.
If you're focused on love, that's jhāna.
Or you're focused on the three characteristics, and so you say lakkanupani jhāna, a jhāna that is absorption into the three characteristics, so seeing everything as arising and ceasing.
So when you see those thoughts arising and ceasing, that's meditation.
A thing like this, now may I be healthy, happy and peaceful.
May my mother be healthy, happy and peaceful.
That kind of
Yeah, that's meditation.
But it's preliminary meditation.
You're not actually meditating.
In one sense you are, in one sense you're not.
You're meditating in the sense that you're cultivating meditation, but your mind might still be all over the place.
You might still not be focused.
If I just say, may you be happy,
That doesn't mean I'm meditating, but it means I'm cultivating the meditation.
So if I do it enough, I'll start to meditate.
My mind will start to actually feel love for you, actually want you to be happy.
That would be the meditation.
But you do need to focus on what you're doing.
Jitta means to focus on what you're doing, to succeed in anything.
You need to focus on what you're doing.
And this goes for meditation, of course.
Just reciting is of no use.
It's of some use, but limited use.
You see, it's good to remember these things.
Reciting is good for remembering.
That's why we do reciting every day.
But it's not meditation.
It's study.
Study is important.
Sutavudho bhikkave aryasavaka.
Awuddha.
Do you know what awuddha is?
A weapon.
Sutta is awuddha.
The Buddha said learning is a weapon for an Aryasavaka.
So someone who is a noble one or a disciple of the noble ones.
It's like a sword.
It can cut you.
Swords have two sides.
The double-edged sword, it's an idiom.
It can cut yourself.
So like Devadatta, he knew stuff and he cut himself with it.
But it is powerful.
The Dhamma is something that's powerful.
There are people who use the Dhamma to make money.
use the Buddhist teaching, there's, I told you about the Buddha bar, right?
In Japan, there's this monk, a monk who runs a bar, and everyone's all drunk and they're doing chanting, and ringing these bells.
I don't, I mean, I don't know what to say about that, but I think it's a fair example of
Maybe I would say a fair example of misuse of Buddhism.
Although I don't think this guy is particularly bad intentioned.
But there is an actual Buddha bar out there.
They call themselves the Buddha bar and you would say that's a misuse.
I don't know, anyway, it's a little bit far-fetched, but you could, you know, there are scholars who translate the Buddhist texts to make money.
So this is their career, and they do it to make money, and they're not even Buddhists, they don't meditate or so on.
So it can be used for other things, not exactly unwholesome, but not wholesome anyway.
Okay.
You could even use the Buddhist teaching to, if you distort it, you could use it to justify war.
I bet you could find some way of distorting the Buddhist teachings.
Very difficult, but I think you could do it.
to justify, you just pick some thing and take it out of context, that's all.
I'm just making a general point that study is useful, powerful, but in the wrong context it could potentially be harmful.
Like, for example, there's the story of these monks who, anyway, I don't want to go into that.
Let's not go there.
Citta, so you have to keep your mind on the practice, right?
Let's keep our mind on the practice here.
And Vimangsa is number four.
You have to not only keep your mind on the practice, but you have to be clever about it.
So you have to pick the right meditation.
So suppose you're doing sitting meditation, and you start to feel drowsy.
Then you get up and do walking meditation.
And one of our meditators said, you're talking about standing up, no?
Yes, when you feel very drowsy and then you stand up and you find that the drowsiness shifts.
This is vimamsa.
Vimamsa means discrimination.
So it doesn't mean just pour your heart into something.
Like if you're...
If you're working out or something, you have to be able to, you can't, you know, if you're learning a sport, you can't just keep doing it.
You have to have, this is why they take videos of themselves when they're doing sports and replay them because they say, ah, you see, you're missing that there.
And if you just keep doing it, you'll actually develop bad habits, right?
You ever play sports before?
And like tennis, if you just keep doing it, keep doing it, you have to watch your swing.
Golf, you have to watch your swing.
And so you have to adjust.
This is vimangsa.
And in meditation, it's the same.
You can get into bad habits with meditation.
And if you don't reflect every so often and say, look, I'm getting caught up.
Why am I doing this wrong?
Like ananda.
All night he practiced walking meditation.
Great, good for him.
He built up all sorts of effort because the next morning they were going to have this council, the first council.
They were going to recite the Buddhist teaching and he wanted to join because he was the only one who knew all of the Buddhist teachings.
But he wasn't an arahat, so they wouldn't let him join.
It was like Catch-22, I don't know.
He had to join, but he couldn't join.
So they came up to him and they said, we're going to have a council tomorrow, and we need you to join.
He's like, great, but you can't join.
So he was in a real dilemma anyway, some sort of catch of some sort.
And so he was so stressed and he did walking meditation all night to try to become enlightened and he put out too much effort and then he sat down and he said, or he didn't sit down, he stood there and he said, Buddha said I was going to become enlightened, the Buddha said I was not going to fail this, how could the Buddha, Buddha couldn't be wrong, what's wrong, what am I doing wrong?
And then he thought, oh wait, I can't just do walking meditation.
I'm cultivating too much effort.
And so he thought to himself, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to lie down.
And so he went to the bed and he said, lying, lying, being aware of the movement.
And his feet came off the floor and his head hadn't touched the pillow and he became enlightened.
It's a famous story because he's the only one of the great disciples who became enlightened in none of the four postures.
He wasn't walking, he wasn't standing.
Yeah, and people say, well, is that like condoning suicide?
And the answer is, of course, no, actually, because what happened was when he cut his throat,
He realized what an idiot he was and he got afraid.
He got all frightened and realized he was dying and realized that he was probably going to go to hell.
And so he reflected on this and he saw the truth of the Buddhist teaching.
He saw that really this is a scary thing, the mind, where it can lead you.
And so somehow he became an arahant through the reflection.
Because he had tried very hard to practice, but he felt like he was a failure.
This is another example of why it's important not to give up just because things get tough.
When things get really tough, it's a sign that you're just about to have a breakthrough.
When things are really easy, you've got a long way to go.
That's not a rule, but it can very often be the case.
Okay, so we got clear on the four iddhipada.
Now you know how to succeed in life.
What are they?
Effort.
Effort is number two.
Don't listen to them.
Interest and discrimination.
Yeah, like racism.
No, discrimination means being able to discriminate between right and wrong and good and bad.
Not the discrimination they teach you about in school, no.
Discrimination can be a good thing, being able to discriminate.
Like if I put a bowl of milk in front of you and a bowl of beer, to be able to discriminate, which is good.
The dogs can discriminate between milk and beer.
This is a good thing about dogs.
Humans haven't evolved that far yet.
Some humans.
So that's how you succeed in life, and that's how you succeed in meditation.
I hope that's clear.
How are we?
We've got 12 done, right?
Only 25 left.
But it's okay.
They get easier.
Next one is the five indriya, right?
The point is, all of these groups are things the Buddha talked about at various times.
And then he just brought them all together and said, this is it.
All of these groups that I've been talking about, these are all the different ways of looking at his teaching.
All of them are, that's what leads to enlightenment, these 37, seven groups.
So the five faculties, everyone, we've all learned about these.
In meditation, saddha is the confidence in what you're doing.
You need confidence.
If you doubt what you're doing, you'll never get anywhere.
In meditation, this is very important.
If you doubt what I'm saying and you say, I'm just not sure whether noting is any good, whether I say to myself, pain, pain doesn't go away, what good is it?
So often you actually need your teacher to help you, to encourage you and to give you the reasons and causes and help you to see through the doubt.
Otherwise you just have to say to yourself, doubting, doubting.
And either way it goes away.
It's a funny thing.
Someone goes, I'm not sure about this noting thing.
I have some doubts about the practice.
Okay, say to yourself, doubting, doubting.
A little bit hard to swallow.
But if they do it, doubt is gone.
So what's the problem?
Viriya, we've talked about this enough, but it has to balance with concentration.
Mindfulness, we've talked about this.
Samadhi, we haven't talked about concentration yet.
You have to be focused in the practice.
We've talked about citta is kind of samadhi of sorts.
Samadhi means your mind has to be focused, and it has to be focused long enough to experience the object.
In Samatha meditation, it has to be focused on an object continuously, moment after moment.
Just to love someone for a moment is not really practicing meditation, but when you are set upon this state of love, and you're continuously feeling love for all beings, this is Samadhi in Samatha.
In vipassana, samadhi is kanika samadhi.
It means every moment you're clearly aware of the three characteristics.
Everything that arises, you see it arising and ceasing, arising and ceasing.
And you see things as impermanent suffering and non-self every moment.
moment to moment seeing hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking this is Kanika Samadhi being focused but it's not just when you walk knowing that you're walking well dogs know that they're walking when they walk otherwise they would fall over but this Samadhi is to be actually focused on the movement the phenomena this is a phenomena, this movement this is a phenomenon, this movement
You don't have to catch everything, but focus on something as it's happening.
It doesn't mean when you're walking you have to be aware of all the hips moving and the hands swaying and so on, and the heart beating.
It doesn't matter what you focus on, but you have to be focused on the present moment, something.
So we pick the feet, it's a useful object, and be aware of it and be focused on it.
and paññā, wisdom.
Wisdom you need, wisdom from thinking, wisdom from studying, and wisdom from meditation.
So the first type of wisdom is you need to study.
The second type of wisdom is you have to think about it.
We monks, that is discrimination and so on.
And then you have to realize for yourself, through the meditation you'll gain wisdom, you'll gain an understanding about your own self, about your experience.
You'll see what causes what, you'll see what is useful, what is harmful, what is good and bad, and you'll react accordingly, you'll adjust accordingly.
Wisdom has to be balanced with faith.
If you have too much study, but
not enough practice, you'll have a lot of doubt.
So you need to cultivate faith through the practice, confidence by practicing.
Confidence by trying it out.
When the Buddha said, the Dhamma invites you to come and see.
Come and see for yourself.
We don't want you to believe anything.
Try it out for yourself.
Don't believe or disbelieve.
When people hear about this meditation practice or are taught it, they start to get all sorts of doubts.
They think, well, this isn't what I signed up for.
Why do I have to sit there and say to myself, it seems pointless to say hearing, hearing, seeing, seeing, pain, pain.
This is the same as having too much faith.
I don't want you to just jump in and say, okay, I'll do whatever you say and just go blindly into it.
You have to be balanced with wisdom.
This is where vimamsa comes in, as I said.
But when people have too much doubt, they can analyze it and they can say, that's not what the Buddha taught.
See, in this sutta it says this, or this sutta says this, or so on.
Just try it.
See if it actually does work.
When you try it, you'll see.
This is when you say doubting, doubting, and the doubt disappears.
So what's your problem?
Very difficult, no?
Not what most people want to hear.
This whole process is depicted in the Taittir.
You get the faith down below, then above that the three rings, sila, samadhi, paññā.
Then the merits that you collect, followed by
We call that pinnacle.
In the pinnacle, we get the Chauhan, Sapagatagami, Analagagami.
Four.
I never noticed.
In Thailand, it's a little different.
Interesting.
And the five faculties, you have to balance them.
And once you balance them, the next set, see we go through this quickly, because the next set is the five bala.
Bala means the five powers.
The five powers are identical.
It's saddha, viriya, sati, samadhi, bhajna.
But they're separate.
The Buddha talked about them, other times he talked about them separately because he was referring to when these five become balanced and get quite strong and so then you have great confidence, when you have great effort.
These are something the Buddha pointed out as signs to look for.
Or if you want to know, am I progressing?
Well, do you have more confidence?
Do you have more effort?
Do you have more mindfulness, more concentration, more wisdom?
Because if these aren't balanced, they will never grow.
If they're lopsided, then they'll never be picked up.
They have to be balanced in order to progress, just like horses in a carriage.
There's the horse, the rider, and the four horses.
They have to go together.
If they're all over the place, the carriage will go nowhere.
So you have to tie them together, rein them together.
The person has to have hold of all four reins and keep the horses together.
Then the four powers will arise.
So these arise through the meditation practice.
There, we're already at 22.
Then we have the seven bojangas.
The bojangas, I'm not going to go into detail.
It would take a whole talk in itself, but let's go quickly through them.
Sati we already talked about, we know where that comes about in meditation.
Once you have mindfulness and you're able to catch everything moment by moment, the bending, stretching, moving of the body, seeing, hearing, the pain, the thoughts, the emotions, this is Sati Sambo Janga.
Dhamma Vichaya.
Yeah.
Dhamma vijaya means the investigation of mind states.
So the wisdom that comes through the practice or the realizations that come, you start to observe and you start to see how the body and the mind work, cause and effect.
Body is the cause, mind is the effect, or mind is the cause, body is the effect.
Sometimes you hear something, it makes you angry.
The body is the cause, mind is the effect.
Sometimes you think about something in the mind and it causes you to do or say something bad or good.
So we see how the mind and the body work together, and we start to understand impermanence, suffering, and non-self, and as a result become detached, become free from our desires and partialities, and become objective through the practice.
Dhamma vijaya means this investigation that goes on.
Once you're mindful, you start to realize, start to see how things work.
Start to understand reality.
That gives rise to vidya.
Vidya is the effort.
So once you have strong effort and you're really with the object, you're able to pinpoint all experiences moment by moment and have them clear in the mind.
And you have this strength of mind to take you from moment to moment.
This is vidya sambo janga.
Piti is the aspect of the practice that is fixed.
Piti means rapture.
But here it means in the sense of being enraptured by the practice.
So when the practice becomes somehow effortless,
This is the aspect of the practice that is piti.
So in the beginning it's quite difficult to practice.
You sit down and just to keep your mind with the object is quite difficult.
But once you get stronger in the practice, you'll find that your mind just goes naturally from one object to the next.
When you're walking, lifting, heel, lifting, moving, lowering, touching, pressing.
And without pause, this is rapture.
This piti pasadhi, pasadhi is the quiet, quietude that comes.
So in Samatha practice this would be the quietude of jhāna, in vipassana practice it's the quietude of equanimity, or it's the quietude that's associated with equanimity, it's the quietude of not judging, not reacting.
The mind starts to settle down and it's just clearly aware, the objectivity of just seeing things as they are.
Once your mind has quieted down, this is basadi sambodjanga.
Samadhi sambodjanga is when your mind becomes, is the aspect of the practice that is focused on the object.
And upeka sambodjanga is the equanimity.
So all of these come about through the practice and they're what we're trying to cultivate.
In the beginning we don't have much of any of these.
Through the practice we cultivate all of them.
They're important for the practice.
Finally, and last but not least, we have the Eightfold Noble Paths, another teaching of the Buddha that is incredibly practical.
But I think a lot of people, when they study it, they apply it only in terms of a daily life sort of situation.
So they think that this is some way to live your life.
And there's a lot of talk about the Eightfold Noble Path for householders.
But in fact, it is a teaching that is much more designed for the meditator, with the meditator in mind, even though it talks about right livelihood and right speech and right action.
Those are just the very basics, the very foundation of the practice, the sila part.
Right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
Right view is the knowledge of the Four Noble Truths.
This comes about through the practice.
We talked about this yesterday.
The Four Noble Truths were two days ago.
The Buddhist teaching of
of suffering.
So we talked about how suffering is to be seen and we have to actually watch and focus our minds on this experience of suffering to see why we suffer.
So very clearly this is a practice of meditation.
We should never take the Four Noble Truths as some kind of philosophical teaching.
They're very much a practical thing.
We have to watch, we have to see things as suffering.
We have to understand suffering in order to let go of it.
Once we see that it's causing us suffering, we don't cling to it.
So when we're sitting here and we see that the pain is causing us suffering, as we look at it, we see that actually the pain is not causing us suffering at all.
It's our reactions to it.
It's our clinging that causes us suffering.
This leads to right thought.
Right thought is when you have no thoughts of sensuality, no thoughts of ill will, no thoughts of arrogance or oppression or harm, causing harm to others.
This comes from the clarity of mind.
This is what we
This comes about from being objective and being focused on the object.
If your mind is focused on walking or focused on sitting, focused on the four satipatthana, then you keep your mind free from these bad thoughts, thoughts that are harmful or unwholesome or a cause for suffering.
It doesn't mean you stop yourself from thinking, but it means you don't cultivate them, and you don't follow them, and you don't indulge in them.
This comes about through the right practice.
Right speech is not an issue because we're not speaking during the practice, but this is an important point because without mindfulness, you can say, a lot of meditators will say, okay, I'm not going to talk, but then they find themselves talking, and then once you find yourself talking, it's just the next step to start saying things that are
harmful or useless or a cause for distraction, a cause for diversion and so on.
So right speech comes about through the practice, through mindfulness.
Just because you're here in the meditation center doesn't mean you're accomplished in right speech.
Right speech comes about through the intention to have
and the intention not to speak, speak wrongly, which comes about through a clear mind.
Right action is the same.
And on an ultimate level, right action would be any action that is performed with mindfulness.
So any action that's performed without mindfulness would be somehow unwholesome.
So even just walking mindlessly, if you're walking and you're daydreaming, this is an action that is performed.
Or suppose you hear the ice cream truck down the road and so you start walking quickly.
You see there's a reason behind that, it's unwholesome.
If you're heading to a bar or a dance or your boyfriend or girlfriend's house, there's an unwholesomeness involved there.
So this would be something that would give a rise to encourage more craving and more addiction.
This would be wrong action.
Right action would be the clarity of mind when you walk, walking, walking, walking.
Then you would have right action.
Right livelihood is based on right speech and right action.
Right effort, we've talked about right effort, it's the four samabhadana.
Right mindfulness, we've talked about that.
Right concentration is the four jhanas, or the jhanas associated with samatha, or the jhanas associated with vipassana.
It's the clarity of mind, the focus of mind on the object, not straying from the object, clearly aware of the object at every moment.
But in brief, the Eightfold Nomopath is just sila, samadhi, panya.
Sila means guarding your mind so that you don't give rise to wrong speech or wrong action.
Samadhi is the focus that comes from guarding your mind and panya is the wisdom, the understanding that we get from meditation.
It's important not to misunderstand wisdom.
Often people think of wisdom as the kind of philosophical teachings you read about in
in school, in university.
Wisdom is just the sorting out of your mind and understanding how it works, understanding how experience works, understanding how addiction and attachment work, understanding how aversion works, conceit, arrogance, all of these things that cause us suffering and cause us to hurt others.
So there we have 37 Dhammas.
It's a lot, no?
I think that's enough time.
Oh, that's more than enough time.
Sorry, everyone.
Was I really talking that long?
Thank you all for your patience.
Let's try and do a little bit of meditation now.
Can you stop the camera?
You did start it, didn't you?
Still recording?
Great.