Okay, so today we'll be continuing to talk about the Mangala Sutta, which we stopped some time ago.
Just to recap, the Mangala are those things that do away with evil.
So we've gone through three stanzas.
And now we come up to some that are not so directly related to the meditation practice.
So we'll try to skip quickly through them.
But in order to be complete, we'll go through them in order.
And there are things that you can say on these blessings about meditation.
These are blessings that generally relate to people who live in the house, people who live ordinary lives and have jobs and make money and employ people or are employed by other people.
But the general purpose of these blessings is to create peace and harmony just the same.
And for people who are looking to make their way closer to a meditative state of life,
who find themselves surrounded by obstacles or surrounded by worldly activities.
These are very important ways to create peace and harmony and a
meditative state or a meditative way of life that will bring anyone closer to the Buddha's teaching.
If someone's goal is to ordain, then it will bring them closer to that goal.
because of the peace and the harmony that it brings.
If someone's goal is to live a meditative life as a lay person, then these are the sorts of things that will allow.
Besides the things that we've already talked about, here are more things that are useful for all of us.
As monastics, some of them aren't even directly useful.
But they are those things that we have to keep in mind and the general principles that we have to keep in mind in terms of creating peace and harmony.
So the next ones are...
So, caring for one's parents, caring for one's mother, caring for one's father.
having good relations with one's relative with ones or having a good relationship with one's spouse and children and doing work that is uncomplicated or that is not crooked having straight straight affairs Affairs that are not crooked or not complicated
So this is the next stanza, and it goes with the next one, so we might as well add them all in here.
The next one is, dana means charity, dhammacharya, the practice of the dhamma,
nyāta kānaṁ ca saṅgahu, having good relationships with all of one's relatives, and anavadjāni kamāni, performing deeds that are not blameworthy, that are free from blame.
So what we'll see here is now a progression and the Buddha begins
in these stanzas by talking about those things that will be useful specifically in the lay life.
But we can see towards the end it starts, or in the second stanza, it starts to get a little bit more involved with the meditation.
So we'll go through all of these today.
They're all quite similar, actually.
This is something, looking after your parents is something that meditators...
will quite often overlook, forget about, or even disdain.
I've even had arguments with people who have told me that, have explained their view that their parents only gave birth to them out of desire, out of lust for each other,
And they only cared for us in their womb because they wanted to.
And it was all because of their desire to do so.
And therefore we don't owe them anything.
We never ask them to give birth to us.
And even when we were growing up, we didn't ask them to take care of us.
Of course, some people have the misfortune to have bad parents, parents who didn't look after their children, who didn't perform the duties towards their children, didn't take care of them and maybe even abused them.
And so these people will argue or either argue directly or at the very least have a difficult time appreciating this teaching or figuring out how they themselves, because of their history, can put into practice this teaching.
So with all of these, we have to understand the situation that we find ourselves in.
Scientifically speaking, it's correct to say that, or biologically speaking, that human beings procreate based on instinct in the mind.
And there's nothing...
really special about the relationship between a parent and a child.
If you break down the chemical composition of the parents and the child and all beings, it's only the genes that get passed on by our parents.
There's no part of our existence from a materialist point of view that gives us some responsibility towards our parents.
this is from a materialist point of view, but from an experiential point of view, we have to account for our birth, our conception in the womb of our parents, which from a point of view of experience is not at all an obvious outcome of the deeds in this life.
It's not obvious to us how
I mean our goals and our dreams, we're not preparing ourselves, not intentionally, to be born in a human womb.
Very difficult to understand how it is that we come to be born in a womb again at all.
And the answer to this question is a very important part of why we have such an important duty towards it or why we have such a profound relationship to our parents.
Even before arguing this, what we should point out is that it's clearly the case for a person who comes to practice meditation.
This is why this one actually does have some relationship to meditation practice.
Anyone who comes to practice meditation who does have a bad relationship towards their parents,
will be struck by the feelings of guilt and shame and even anger or sadness towards their parents if they've had a bad relationship.
Anyone who's had a very good relationship with their parents or who has had very loving and kind parents will come to feel great love and appreciation for their parents, first and foremost.
And it will really, for a new meditator, it will be quite a surprise that this should be the case because they didn't come with the intention of cultivating love towards their parents directly or for dealing with the issues involved with their parents directly perhaps, but they will be shocked by how deep this relationship really goes.
So it doesn't have to be argued that this relationship is an important one.
It just has to be understood why it's an important one.
From the point of view of a meditator, it is important to argue it with people who have never practiced meditation.
But perhaps the easiest way to argue it is to point to people who have meditated and explain that, listen, when you do take the time to look at your own mind,
you're going to realize how important, how... what a profound effect this relationship has on your mind.
But just briefly to explain the theory behind why this occurs, it has to do with the theory or the fact of us being born as a human being.
To be born as a human being, you can't just arise in a lotus flower.
Apparently in the Buddha's time there were cases of people who just arose spontaneously in a lotus flower.
These are stories or legends.
Whether they're true or not, I don't know.
But what we do see
99 out of 100 times, or 99 million out of 100 million times, or more, is human beings being born in a womb.
And as I said, from an experiential point of view, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Why should we be born into the womb of another from the point of view of experience?
So the point of it is,
Our minds and our lives are very much geared towards this reproductive cycle.
This is why shortly after we're born, maybe five or ten years, we begin to have interest in the opposite gender in general, or in an ordinary, for the most part.
Of course, homosexuality and so on is a part of the human state,
For the majority of humanity, there is this heterosexual reproductive desire.
Even for people who are not attracted to the opposite gender, there will often arise a desire to have children.
The male gender will often have desires to protect others and the female will often have desires to develop stability or a nest or a home or so on.
So in this way we behave a lot like animals and the materialist scientist will explain this in terms of genes and so on.
We explain it in terms of habits that are accumulated from life to life.
So our experience cultivates habit.
From an experiential point of view, looking at the human state, you have to say this is quite an intensely contrived state.
It's not at all obvious.
You wouldn't think, well, if you have experience, if you start with just basic raw experience, that somehow you're going to get beings being born inside of each other's bodies.
It's quite a contrived state.
And so our very existence as in this state relies and depends on two people, depends on our parents.
And this is where our mind is at.
If we deny, like if we have parents and they've taken care of us and so on, and we deny that,
We reject that.
We're basically rejecting the very foundation of our very being, this brain, this body.
This is the implication of what it means to inherit them from your parents, is that we have a very strong connection to these people.
So, this is just some ideas of where this comes from, that really our parents are very much a part of who we are.
And we chose really to be born in their womb.
We came to this through a cultivation of habits and relationships in past lives.
When you reject this, you reject harmony and stability.
So what I would like to explain for many of these is whether or not you understand that it's truly wholesome or unwholesome to do either way, to leave behind your parents or to take care of them.
When you live in the world, if you're going to have children of your own, if you want to live in the world and have a stable life, you have to play by the rules.
If we become anarchist and reject societal norms of some sort, or the basic norms of what it means to be a human being, then all that we'll find is chaos and confusion.
And many problems will arise.
So some sort of system of stability has to be appreciated, has to be honored.
the care that we take for our parents is a very important part of this.
It's something that brings stability to the world.
When people stop taking care of their parents, then of course the whole system breaks down.
Parents will begin to neglect their children, or neglect their children's education, will not have any interest in taking care of their children, and the cycle breaks down.
Of course it goes on.
either in both ways our future when when we have children they will not think to take care of us having seen the the the example that we've set for them and so on and society becomes quite upset of course then we we stop respecting elders in general and we stop expecting respecting experience nowadays people will often think it's intelligence that is more important and will
laugh at our parents and their old ways and so on.
And it's only when we get old ourselves that we realize how important wisdom and experience really are.
So care for your parents is, not only is it a very wholesome thing to do, to take care of them, to be grateful, but it's also something that leads to stability and harmony in the world.
On top of that, there is something to be said about gratitude.
The argument I've had before is people don't understand this word gratitude.
They don't understand why they should be grateful towards others.
Gratitude is, and in this sense you have to just understand what gratitude is like.
Gratitude and ingratitude.
Ingratitude is a shriveling mind state.
It's a mind state full of anger and aversion and discord.
And it's a selfish mind state.
Because you have this logical one-to-one relationship where someone has done something for you and you have the opportunity to do something for them.
When you don't do that, you create friction.
You create tension and you create suffering in your mind.
This is something that you have to see, but meditators become more and more grateful as they practice.
And so if we have gained whatever benefit we have gained from other people, we tend to be very keen to pay it back, even if the other people are...
are in general mean and evil people, even in that case we think more and more about the good that they may have done for us, and less and less about the bad things that they've done.
So if your parents have done bad things for you, the meditator will still find themselves
wishing and having great love towards their parents for whatever good that they did do for them.
This is how the meditator's mind starts to incline.
It inclines away from revengeful and reactionary mind states and it inclines towards grateful and loving mind states.
So this is actually quite important for meditators and it's important for people thinking to come to practice meditation who should realize that starting with their parents they should clear up all their relationships, they should create a stable life where they are, at least in terms of
settling all their affairs, all of their relationships.
So if you have a problem with your parents, don't run away to come meditate.
It won't work.
Many meditators run away for that reason.
Settle your affairs first and then come and meditate so that it won't bother you when you're practicing meditation.
Now, there is one sort of exception.
I mean, monks are not expected to have direct contact with their parents.
We're not expected to take care of them when they're old or so on.
We're not expected to have much relationship with anyone at all.
A monk can go off in the forest and leave the world behind.
But even as monastics, we shouldn't take this too literally and think that if our parents are in need, we should avoid contact with such worldly people, even if our parents are worldly sorts of people.
The Buddha was quite clear on this, and it's a good example of how
Rather than seeing relationships as an obstacle to our practice, seeing them as our practice, monks are allowed to take care of their parents.
There was a monk who was praised by the Buddha for taking care of his parents.
So, anyway, this is the first one.
Taking care of your parents, of course, what needs to be said, the core of this blessing, this is just explaining why it's important, but the core of the blessing, what does it mean to take care of your parents?
It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to give them medicine and you have to bathe them and clothe them or however, when they get older or at any time.
The Buddha said that in this way you can never pay back your parents.
If your parents have, even to the extent that your parents have given birth to you, to the extent that your mother carried you in her womb for nine months and your father was protecting her during that time and the love that they gave and the years and years that they put into raising you.
As the Buddha said, it's very difficult to pay back such parents.
Of course, if your father ran away after your mother got pregnant and your mother had no interest in you and abandoned you when you were born, it's a little more difficult to see, even though we understand this to be karmic and it still points to the strength of the relationships.
The Buddha said the only way to clear this up is with the Dhamma.
Even if your parents are mean and evil people, if you think that your parents have done nothing for you or so little or have done so much bad to you that the good that they've done is totally outweighed.
Even still the teaching applies to administer to them with the Dhamma.
If you still have a relationship with your parents or have an abusive relationship with anyone, a bad relationship, or if you have a good relationship, if your parents have done great things and you feel somehow you want to pay them back, somehow you want to show your gratitude or you have the chance, the gratitude that we should show is in the Dhamma.
That we should practice and we should teach and we should set an example and we should encourage them in the practice.
We should be a support for them to find peace, happiness and freedom from suffering.
And not just in a material sense.
Of course this goes with anyone.
Happiness in a material sense can easily be bought
can easily be found in the world at least for some time.
But happiness in the spiritual sense takes much more.
It takes wisdom, it takes mindfulness, it takes diligence, it takes patience, it takes contentment, it takes many qualities that can only be gained through the practice of meditation.
So the best thing you can do for anyone, especially your parents, is to encourage them in the practice of meditation or help support them in the practice.
Okay, so this is the first one.
Then we have in terms of, we'll just lump them all together because here we have in terms of one's spouse and children and relatives.
And the commentary even goes further and says this is even in terms of our employees and our employers and really everyone that we have relationships with.
It could be our fellow employees, it could be fellow students if we're studying, it could be fellow monastics in the world.
this harmony in the community.
And on the one hand, many of these, as I said, are not directly related to meditation.
But if you look at it another way, these are really an indication of the mental development of the individuals.
If someone doesn't have
good relationships with other people then you might want to
assume that that person has not a very good meditation practice.
If someone is constantly causing friction and strife in their family, arguing and bickering and backbiting and so on, and jealous and stingy and so on,
with their relatives, with husbands who fight with wives, and parents who fight with children, and employers who scold or treat their employees poorly, employees who cheat their employers, friends who backbite and gossip and so on.
All of this is because of a lack of mental development.
The important point I want to make is that we can't separate our meditation practice from our life.
A beginner meditator will often want to discard the whole world and give up all of their relationships.
So when a person comes to bother them in their meditation, they might even yell at them or scold them.
I'm trying to meditate, why are you bothering me?
And this can go on for some time until they finally realize that relationships, as I said, should not be seen as an obstacle to the practice.
They should be seen as the practice.
When someone comes to you, the Buddha was clear about this.
He said, when people come to me, I think, what can I do to teach them that will make them go away the quickest?
And so when we hear this, we think, well, just tell them to go away, no?
But it actually doesn't work that way.
We've all tried that.
As meditators, we've all tried to push people away.
And we think, well, that's the way.
Get rid of them.
Tell them, look, if you don't like meditating, I don't want to have anything to do with you.
But relationships have to be solved.
The fact that there is a relationship with parents or relatives or anyone is because of some past karma that we have with them.
So while it might be possible for us to go off in the forest and send loving kindness and never be bothered by anyone,
If it happens that in the course of our quest to find such peace, we are bothered by other people, then we have to treat them with dignity and respect and give them the time and the support that they need.
Otherwise, they'll never leave us.
I've even tried this with evil people.
There was one monk who was always causing problems and I tried to just shut him off and it just fueled the fire.
It's like in India when you go to Bodh Gaya or you go to these Buddhist places and the beggars come and the worst thing you can do besides giving them something is to say no.
If you give something you get a thousand of them swarming you and then you're in real trouble.
But if you say, no, no, no, then they continue to pester you.
This is the way of people.
It's only by being patient and kind.
So in India, the example of India is a good one, I think, because there's such greed in these, even these little kids who are actually not, they're not without.
They're going to school and they have a little bit of money, I think.
But they found how easy it is to get money from dumb tourists.
So they come up and they ask you for money and money.
And many people just say, no, no, no.
And they never stop.
Because for them it's a game.
Or else it's serious and they really do need the money.
But what I found was that when you just give them a big hug and say, what's your name?
Learn a little bit of their language even.
And suddenly they're a totally different person.
And they say what their name is and you ask them what they're studying in school and so on.
And then they go away.
Like you untied the knot and there was never a problem in this respect.
It's kind of like they talk about aikido or jiu-jitsu or these kind of ways of redirecting energy.
Anyway, relationships are an important part of our practice.
And we all have them even as monastics.
At the very least, we have a relationship with our teachers or with our students.
And these relationships are very important and should be treated as such.
No one is an island.
Buddha told us to be an island to ourselves, but he also said, associate with wise people.
So part of being an island unto yourself is to respecting and assisting other people to do the same.
So we have this supporting of our parents.
Now we have two more here that can be associated and that is not having crooked work and not doing blameable deeds.
The first one has to do more with livelihood.
The second one has to do with our deeds.
And so these are generally used as teachings for lay people.
But since we're in a meditation center and we're dealing mainly with meditators, we should talk about them in terms of meditation.
Obviously we have to give up bad deeds, not killing, not stealing.
We have to give up not cheating.
The Anakula Chakamanta refers to not cheating, not acting in a...
a tricky way not to cheat other people, not to be crooked.
But we do this with everything.
As I was saying before, we will do this with all of our things.
Even as monastics, we do this.
We have all these rules that monastics have to keep, and we'll find a thousand and one ways to break the rules, to not break the rules, but to somehow get around them.
I had a conversation with a monk, and the argument were, and he was quite with me, we were talking about cheese, how monastics have found a way to say that cheese is allowable in the evening.
It's like stepping from one to two to three and eventually you get to the fact that cheese is allowable because somehow it could be allowable as a medicine.
It really can't, but somehow there's a way you could think that it could.
But then rather than as a medicine, once it's allowable, then every night they're eating cheese and chocolate because they find a way to say that chocolate's allowable.
We do this with, as I said, with robes or clothing and so on.
We do this with lodging even.
We come to say that we need this kind of lodging or that kind of lodging.
With all of these things, the Buddha said contentment is the most important.
Rather than trying to accumulate or trying to find some perfect situation, we should be content with what we have.
Our actions should not be to find anything or even to keep anything.
Our actions should be to maintain
a state of clarity of mind.
So we should always be wary of what's going to take us out of this state of clarity.
Clinging to anything will do that, clinging even to good things.
If we cling to, for example, cling to staying in a cave, if you want to stay in the cave and that's somehow important to you, then it will cause, it will be an obstacle in your practice.
If you cling to staying in a room, you say monks shouldn't stay, or real meditators shouldn't stay in rooms, and then you come here and you're in the forest and you think, oh, now I get to stay in the cave monastery, and then we put you in a room with a bathroom and tiles and so on, lights and windows and curtains and so on, and then you think this isn't appropriate.
Buddha said, be content with whatever you have, whatever it is, even to that extent.
Of course, it usually goes the other way.
People will expect to have, they will think, okay, I'm coming to the forest, but I need a washroom, I need lights, I need a fan, I need a mosquito net, and so on.
We practice meditation, but we think, well, you need a roof, and you need a mosquito net, and so on.
And so when you don't have these, you have a great problem.
I think it was a good test for us to try to do walking meditation in the rain because it does fight against many of these things, the idea that you can't do meditation in the rain.
There's apparently a monk who even did meditation in the snow.
So the point is that all of our actions should be clear and should be strained.
That we should never even use speech to try to get something from other people.
We should be very clear that if we truly need something and it's appropriate and it's something that is blameless and something that is according to the Buddha's design, Buddha's teaching,
then we should say openly and clearly about it, talk openly and clearly about it.
I mean, it's just an example.
But the real point from a meditator point of view is that every moment, every action we do should be clear.
When we step with the foot, we should be very careful.
My teacher said just like when someone is rocking a crib,
In the old days they would have a string, they would sit in a chair and they would pull this string and they would have to be very careful to pull the string or the hammock maybe it was.
to pull it in an even fashion.
If their mind slipped for just a moment, then they would lose it and the baby would wake up.
And it's the same with our meditation.
If even for a moment our mind slips away, we'll lose the focus on the foot and the mind will wander and start to dream in the mansion and take us away in fantasy.
When we're sitting in meditation, it's even worse.
The mind is, as we learned in the Dhammapada, the mind is flighty, lighting on whatever it desires.
And so to guard this mind is something very difficult.
In the Tao Te Ching they talk about this, how a master has to act like a soldier in enemy territory.
So you should always be on your guard.
The enemies are inside, the defilements, and the mind will chase after them, liking or disliking or so on.
So this gets us through many of these.
Then we have dana and dhammacharya.
Just the last two.
So dana is charity.
Charity is another one that seems only indirectly related to meditation.
And indeed, during the time that you practice meditation, you're not expected to give charity.
as human beings, whether it be monastic, meditator or lay people.
is a very important part.
And this leads back into what I said before about relationships, how you can't just avoid them, you can't just give them up.
Part of the dealing, working out the relationship is the dana, the charity that we have.
This is what I was talking about earlier.
I wrote a web blog post about the free lunch idea.
You don't give thinking, I have to give so much.
per day.
This is in terms of material or in terms of spiritual.
You don't think, I have to give a talk every day or so on.
I have to teach people, teach everyone who comes to the monastery.
Obviously, if I did that, many people would run away.
If they came up, and everyone who came, I had to find the need to teach them, give them long discourses and so on.
Many of them would run away.
So it's obvious from a point of view of teaching that you only give where it's necessary.
But people will often think that in terms of material support and in terms of how you are charitable and generous that somehow there is an obligation.
And so we have a real difficult time
figuring this out in Buddhist sense.
People have discussed this.
When you hold a meditation course, should you charge for it?
Is it okay to charge for it?
And there's so many views about this.
Would you charge for the lodging and not for the teaching?
Should you charge for the lodging and ask for a donation for the teaching or just ask for a donation for the whole thing?
Or how are you going to
conduct meditation courses if you don't ask for donations.
But it really is all beside the point.
Dāna is giving when the opportunity arises to give.
when it is appropriate to give.
See, an arahant doesn't do good deeds in the sense that they don't do deeds with the expectation of creating something.
They don't do deeds that are for the purpose of having a good result for themselves, thinking this will make me happy or this will make someone else happy.
They do it because it's appropriate.
When someone comes and asks an arahant for something, if it's appropriate, they'll give it without hesitation.
Often even if it means they are without, they will have to go without.
So this is the idea of the free lunch.
You give someone a free lunch because they are hungry.
You don't give it thinking, well then they'll give me something back.
You don't even give it thinking, well they will go and help someone else.
You give because they need a lunch.
When someone comes to the monastery and wants teaching, we don't think, well then this person will have to give some sort of donation to us.
Even to that extent, that is inappropriate to think.
We teach them because this person has come to teach.
And it may be that our support comes from totally a different place.
It may even be that people who support the monastery have never gained any teaching from us.
When we go on alms round, the people in the village, some of them have never come to listen to Dhamma from us.
But they know that we need food, so they give us a free lunch.
And the people who come here to practice, we may never see them again.
Some people come from other countries and they come and they use our facilities, they eat our food, they use the electricity, they use the rooms, they take the practice, they get everything.
And they might go home and have supported the monastery with nothing.
And I've heard people rail on about how awful this is, how ungrateful it is.
I don't think it's not necessarily ungrateful at all.
They came for a purpose.
They came because they were hungry, because they needed something spiritually.
And we gave it because they needed it.
We're not looking for X number of dollars a month or so.
When we need support, there is the idea that people will give it.
People who understand this concept of dana will give it because it's needed.
Once it's no longer needed, we don't expect everyone else to give as well.
If one person gives us what we need to survive for a month, we don't expect everyone else to give as well.
These are examples of this concept of dana that I think is very important to understand.
Dana is giving when it's appropriate to give, when the need arises and when you perceive a need.
Why this is important?
Well, for obvious reasons, it's important for any system.
If you take the meditation center as an example, it's incredibly important.
The meditation center is only existing because of the support, because people want the teachings first, because there are people who can give the teachings.
If people wanted the teachings but there was no one here to give, no one to give the Dhamma Dhamma, then there would be no teachings.
But even if there is a teacher but there is no one else supporting the meditators or supporting the center, even anyone working in the center, even people coming to sweep the center or coming to clean or coming to build or coming to repair, coming to fix.
then there's no way the teacher can, if I were here alone, there's no way I could run a center with international meditators.
And on top of that, if there were no one supporting the monastery financially, giving support for electricity, support for construction and repairs and all of the many expenses that we have, then it couldn't run as well.
So the first very good reason to give dana is it's an important part of creating this stability, which will be a very important part of our meditation.
Another very good reason, of course, that we all know is that dana makes you happy.
Dana, charity, brings you peace of mind.
One of the reasons it does that is because you know that you've done something appropriate.
You know that you've come one step closer to living the life of an arahant.
When there was need, you filled that need.
This creates peace in the mind.
It creates stability in the mind and it's a great support for meditation.
It removes the greed in the mind.
So it brings happiness to know that we've done a good thing.
And it changes our habits, our ordinary habits of wanting.
It changes our attention.
Our attention is normally on getting.
For all of us this is the case.
It's how we were born.
We were born looking for our mother's milk, looking to get something.
And constantly, constantly getting.
If you think back over your life, what was it all about?
It was about getting.
Even when we came to meditate, it was about getting something.
And it's only when we break away from that, when we cultivate the other side, that we can overcome this need to feed ourselves, to feed our desires and to accumulate or to cultivate craving and attachments.
So dana is very important from a meditative point of view.
If you haven't done good deeds for others, this is what we learned earlier, if you haven't done good deeds for others, very difficult to practice meditation.
It's very important for us to support each other and to help each other and to give generously in whatever way.
When there is the need, we should all be ready to fill that need.
And the final one is Dhammacharya.
Now Dhammacharya is quite broad, but if you look in the context, it's probably a little more directed towards lay people, reminding lay people to live a righteous life and so on.
But certainly this is only an excuse to use this word.
The Buddha certainly wasn't talking only about lay people being righteous.
It may have been directed towards the lay people in the audience,
But the word itself is, of course, a very powerful word.
Dhammacharya, living or faring by the Dhamma.
And this, my teacher would always say, this relates to the Dhammavihari Sutta, one who lives by the Dhamma.
If you know that discourse, I've often given the talk that my teacher would always give about the five kinds of people.
Dhammacharya is one who practices...
mental development.
This is one we call one who lives by the Dhamma.
Because Dhamma means reality.
So it doesn't only mean righteousness.
Dhamma means reality.
It's one who lives according to reality and whose mind is in line with reality, whose actions are in line with reality.
This is the interesting thing about the Buddha's teaching that it's not a belief or a faith.
It's just doing things that make sense.
The theory behind Buddhism is that we cause suffering because we think it's going to bring us happiness.
The theory is that we would never cause suffering if we understood that our deeds were causing suffering.
You could never do it.
It's impossible for the mind to knowingly cause itself suffering.
It's intrinsically impossible.
This is something that people will argue with this.
But when they come to practice meditation, they'll see that when you truly understand moment-to-moment reality as it's occurring, you can never give rise to unwholesome mind states.
You can never give rise to suffering.
You can never do something because you know that it's going to cause you suffering.
You know the object for what it is and you know the causes and the effects that lead to suffering and that lead to happiness.
Once you understand it, it would be illogical for the mind to do something that was against its own best wishes or its own benefits.
So living by the Dhamma means living according to reality.
That's it really.
Once you live according to reality, you're also an intrinsically or inherently good person.
You don't need to try to be good once you understand reality.
Buddha said ignorance is the only reason why we give rise to unwholesome mind state.
So all we have to do to be free from unwholesome mind states and therefore suffering is to get rid of delusion.
This is the importance of our practice here.
This is really talking about the practice of meditation.
The only way to live a righteous life, a truly righteous life, is to live according to reality.
And the only way to live according to reality is to understand reality.
The only way to understand reality is to see reality.
The only way to see reality is to look.
If you don't look, you won't see.
If you don't see, you won't know.
So vipassana meditation, insight meditation, is the looking.
The four foundations of mindfulness are our reality that we're looking at so we can see clearly reality, so we can give up our greed, our anger and our delusion and be free from suffering.
Okay, so that is a fairly lengthy talk about these topics because it's longer because it takes time to explain how they relate to meditation.
So thank you all for being patient and now we'll continue with our meditation.