(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - And we need to remark that I found very interesting. They would own, I think, the first retreat of their anxieties was that the more they would get into Buddhism, the more they would become this part of this generic group of nice Buddhists. And their observation was that the people who, as people practiced more, it was almost like they became more distinct. And you get this sort of strange thing. There was obviously something that linked them. But it's like, you know that metaphor you get in that Woody Allen movie where everybody looks slightly out of focus. At least he looks slightly out of focus. Just this sense that as people practice more who they sort of distinctively are, gets more and more sharply in focus. I think one of the fantastic things about the Dharma, one of the fantastic things about Dharma practice is that your expression of it comes out of who you really distinctly, uniquely are, although there are things at a very deep level that connect you to other practitioners. Guess again, this language of the individual that as you grow more deeply into awareness, more deeply into emotional openness, paradoxically, you become more individual, more and more distinctly who you are. I was just thinking you could see my Jaya Raja as responsibility for fundraising. Very naturally good at what he does. So welcome again to people who have just joined us, remembering some of the early lecture series. Sanger, actually, at the time he got to lecture seven in a lecture series for the benefit of people who had just joined at lecture seven. They would give a brief pracy of lectures one through six. And I remember sitting a lot as a beginner's class. He's playing a tape lecture, the first 40 minutes of which were just him recapping what he had done in the previous lecture. I'm not gonna do that, but I do want to say a little bit about yesterday for people who've just joined. There's a little bit about a motif to this event from me. It's bringing a lot of people together and encountering shared practice and step by step, looking at the implications of practice deepening. I've gone to quite a lot of trouble to try and get quite experienced practitioners up here and are we speaking out of their own experience? As Ratnaguna did yesterday, and he was just a few days after the Wesak full moon, a few days after the enlightenment of the Buddha. You had Ratnaguna yesterday morning, speaking about the early teachings of the Buddha. I must have found it a really stimulating talk, but just seeking some of the phrases what Ratnaguna described as pre-buddhist Buddhism, I think was the phrase that he used. But before the whole thing was systematized, the whole thing was formulated. Just this sense of the Buddha, immediately after his enlightenment, trying to find ways of articulating and communicating that experience, is that you almost got a sense of the Dharma finding its first forms, its first shapes. You could sort of see it in the process of developing. And then yesterday evening, Ratnaguna Prabha, in a more sort of narrative way, gave us the story of the Buddha coming out of the forest, finding the Bodhi tree, sitting down under the Bodhi tree, and the first moments of the dawning of the enlightenment experience. So this morning, today we carry on that process. Kamala Shila is going to talk about what happened after that first moment of enlightenment, and talking about this period of absorption that the Buddha seemed to go through. And I hope talking about some of the implications of that experience of absorption in terms of our own practice. Remember something that Sanger actually has said once, that one of the real tasks of the spiritual life is to find the emotional equivalence of what we understand. So in a way, the Dharma is very easy to grasp how that becomes an experience that gradually, deeply becomes transformative as the work of spiritual practice. So this morning, Kamala Shila is going to be speaking about absorption. Very briefly, let me just introduce Kamala Shila. Again, let's say we're really pleased to have some very skilled practitioners, at least serious practitioners, talking from their own experience over this event. I would guess a lot of people know Kamala Shila. He's an active teacher. Perhaps most people know him from the book that he's written on meditation, or the couple of books, that the big book is written on meditation. Kamala Shila has also been very, very influential in the whole shape of the meditation teaching of the movement. It was one of the very early members of the Vangeloka community. Very influential, very engaged in the whole body of teaching that's come from Vangeloka. One of the ways that I've been most impressed in the last few years, I know Kamala Shila from a lots of contexts, but I know from a couple of meeting contexts, like living at Madger Maloka, what used to be called the preceptor college council. And just watching Kamala Shila make this decision in the last few years, basically to withdraw from a lot of that organization. I think he spent something like a year and a half, more or less on his own, more or less concentrating on meditation and meditation practice. I think I'm doing well. I'm doing a serious solitary retreat if I go away for a month and concentrate on my meditation for a month. To watch Kamala Shila do it for 18 months, I have to say I've found inspiring in something else I'd like to do before I die after I've done the Karunarpeo. (audience laughs) And that focusing on meditation is something that Kamala Shila is clearly about to carry on with, with his move up to the Pyrenees, I think he's based in these days. I'm very, very pleased indeed to welcome Kamala Shila, talking about what happened after the enlightenment in that period of absorption. (audience applauds) (audience applauds) - Thanks very much. - Don't worry. - By now, I imagine we've finally arrived here at Taraloka on this event, International Retreat. I would imagine that most of us have anyway, some of you have arrived quite recently. But have you really arrived? Have you really arrived? And I wonder even when I use that mode of expression, whether you really know what I'm talking about, it's a peculiarly Buddhist expression I think, it's a peculiarly Buddhist way of talking. You know, people say sometimes, "Oh, I really feel that I've arrived now." Or they might say, you know, between you and me, I don't really, I have to say that I don't quite feel, I've totally arrived here yet. And I imagine that some people would find that quite an odd way to talk. I mean, after all, you are actually here. You're obviously present. It's totally clear that at some point, you must have arrived. Yet there you are, trying to tell me that actually I haven't quite arrived yet. So what on earth would you mean if you did say that? Well, it only starts looking odd when you start examining the actual words that are used. I mean, words, words and meanings never really coincide. A word is a completely different thing from a meaning, isn't it? We've all become used over the process of our lives. We've all become used to trying to put our very complex experience into words. But actually, you can't do that. At least not fully and not accurately. The words never fit properly. Simply because words are never the experiences that they're supposed to be pointing to. The word moon is not the actual moon that you can see there up in the sky. They're different things. And it's a very, very basic truth, but it's still very, very profound. The phrase I don't feel I've arrived here yet is not the experience of not having arrived. But then what is the experience? What is that experience of not having arrived? I mean, what is an experience anyway in the first place? And there's a vital issue here. There's a vital issue here. And the one that's, it's an issue that's right at the core of whatever the Buddha realized at his enlightenment. Last night and yesterday we heard, many of us heard about what took place when the Buddha gained his enlightenment experience. And today we're wondering what happened to the Buddha next? Well, he just spent weeks absorbing the impact of his realization. Some say it was seven weeks. Others say it was nine weeks. But either way, it took him the best part of two months to get used to being an enlightened being. He wasn't used to being awakened. He just sat around in the forest sitting under various trees. He moved from the Bodhi Tree. After a week, after his enlightenment, he moved from the Bodhi Tree to a giant Banyan Tree. And he sat there for seven days in meditation without moving. Then he went and sat under the Moochialinda Tree and did the same. After that, he spent a week under the Rajayatana Tree. And then he went back to the big Banyan Tree for another week. He just sat there. That's about all he could manage. And I think it's fair to speculate that the Buddha had a lot going on inside. He'd known the real nature of things. He'd awakened to his own real nature. His awareness had reached way beyond the usual constraints of the body reached even beyond time and space. He'd experienced beyond the ordinary mind that's limited by an idea of me and mine, subject and object. He connected up with the whole of existence somehow, in some way. He'd somehow seen the big picture. And we can't really attempt to describe what happened. And it might sound a little bit silly at this point, but do we sometimes ourselves have moments like this? Okay, different in quality, very, very scaled down. But still, I think it's worth recognizing that we ordinary human beings do have this ability to see a whole picture, for some extent. The mind can work in this comprehensive, all-seeing way. Usually, on a daily basis, we try to get our mind to work for us. Work a little bit like an employee within very well-determined lines of inquiry. We tend to treat our body a bit like that as well. We treat our body as though it's a machine, or like an animal like our horse or our donkey, who's just there to carry us around. We forget that we have very little idea what our body and our mind really are. But just occasionally, our mind manages to escape this conviction of ours that we own and control it, that we can own and we can control it. Maybe we dream, or maybe we meditate. Or maybe we simply stop doing so many things all the time. And in moments like that, our mind can simply expand. It can get larger, lighter, far more open and spacious. And in Buddhist texts, mind's nature is often compared to the openness of the sky. The essential nature of mind has the sky's all embracing and transparent quality, open quality, the quality of being everywhere at the same time, just like the sky. And the Buddha's awakening had this quality. And that was what he was getting used to. As he sat under the leaves in the forest, with the trees, he was finding out how he could live in this vastly more spacious world. And in a very special sense, the Buddha was arriving, adjusting to being in this quite different realm of experience. You know, I started by trying to draw attention to that way we use this idea of arrival. As a kind of exercise, trying somehow to evoke this really quite elusive and shifting experience that we all have of inhabiting, if that's what we do, inhabiting this strange, changing body. Trying to evoke that. You know, what it's like being in our world. Trying to evoke that. We take life for granted. We kind of have to. We take life for granted. But Buddhism doesn't do that. Buddhism says, look, you know, look, life is so mysterious, and you can understand its real nature. And when you do that, if you could do that, it'll make all the difference in the world. It'll make so much difference. And understanding the real nature of things, gaining insight into it, is on the whole something progressive. That there's a whole process of awakening. And everyone who practices traverses this process in one way or another. It may happen quickly, it may happen relatively slowly. And Sankarakshi, the founding teacher of the FWBO, he's expressed the process in loads of different ways. And one of the ways he talks about it is in his system of meditation. And this has four stages, and I'm going to tell you about it. In the first stage, the mind comes together. It becomes what he calls integrated. It's a very similar idea to this notion of arrival. Our attention starts knitting together, and we become naturally focused. And it's brought about, especially through meditation practice. And the classic practice at this stage is the mindfulness breathing or anupana sati practice. But other methods also help to integrate the mind. For example, we might just decide to simplify our life. I don't know what, you know, maybe spend less time on eBay, watch less telly, go for walks, or even meditate more, you know, make some decisions, whatever works. But the effect is, there's more space. We naturally feel a bit more grounded and present and solid. Also at this stage of our lives, we start getting a bit more ethical. More consciously ethical, we consider others' needs a bit more than we did. We also start considering what our own real needs are. Rather than the more superficial things that masquerade as our needs. Probably our lives become a little bit less dependent, determined by the media. We become less of a consumer, more of an individual, rather free individual. And we do this because we just see that it makes us happier. This is quite a difficult thing to see sometimes. In fact, we start understanding from experience what actually makes us happy. We discover the correspondence between happiness and concentration of mind, integration of mind. A concentrated mind is happy on the whole. A happy mind on the whole is a concentrated mind. I mean, we know an unhappy mind can be concentrated as well. But it's concentrated in a way that Buddhism describes as unskillful. That unskillful kind of concentration is an obsessive, fixed and hard concentration. It's about getting what I want. It's not spacious, it's not open, and it's not really interested in a deeper understanding. It's more like a cat catching a mouse, that kind of concentration. But real concentration of mind is not something you should have to make yourself do. You shouldn't have to screw up your face or anything like that, ideally, except give your attention. It should come, it should feel quite natural. Of course, you do sometimes need actively to turn your attention towards whatever's happening sometimes. But concentration is much more a general state of mind than something you do with your mind. And that focused, integrated state of mind is the result of all Buddhist practice. I think integration is a peculiar characteristic of Buddhism. It's something that characterizes Buddhists. So a second thing that characterizes Buddhists is positive emotion. On the whole, we're not such a miserable lot. I mean, there are exceptions I'm trying not to think of, but generally Buddhists seem unusually friendly. Unusually friendly. I suppose if people practice ethics and meditations like the metabhavana, they'll be getting familiar with positive emotions like faith in the path. Confidence in themselves. A kindness and encouragement towards others. Negative emotions like envy, resentment and concealment are going to find less of a place in their minds, in our minds. They'll be able to let go of those negative emotions a bit because they'll have realized that they can let them go a bit. People who meditate and practice ethics experience emotions like joy, you know, like the joy of being alive. It's not such a rare thing for them. And also they experience amazement. And what about openness? That quality of spaciousness I mentioned can also be an emotion. And what is an emotion? An emotion is basically an expression of a desire of some kind. It's a wish and probably you could take any emotion, positive or negative and formulate it as a wish. I mean, let's try, for example, friendliness. Well, the wish there could be, I want you to be happy. Or I want to help you. What about an emotion that's negative? Say like envy or resentment? Well, the wish there could be, I don't want this person to be happier than me. Or prettier than me or better off or more popular or just nicer than me because I can see that they are. It makes me feel bad when I see them. And this is, as some of us know, it's a really horrible state to be in. Or the wish with concealment could be, I don't want you to notice what I'm doing. Kindness, let's take a positive one. Kindness might possibly be, I'd like you to be safe from harm. And expressions of emotion like this are a bit like prayers. Or else they're a bit like curses. This is just an illustration really. It's like generally when you practice dharma, you get more aware of the tone of your emotional life and its effects. And Sankarashta calls this the stage of positive emotion in his system of meditation. It's number two in the list, but in terms of the process of unfolding potential, it can happen pretty much simultaneously with the stage of integration and it can also come first. Some people are naturally very positive, but everyone can see they aren't really that concentrated. Others are quite concentrated, but everyone knows they aren't that positive. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. The main point is positive emotion is a key quality. We all need it and the world certainly needs it. Without love, there can be no ethics, there can be no depth of meditation, there can be no insight. So in Buddhism, the whole area of developing integration and positive emotion is mapped through what are known as the eight levels of dhyana. I'm not going to go through them, but these are states of great purity and openness of mind and heart that are potential for everyone. They are increasingly integrated and also increasingly emotionally positive. The dhyanas, they occupy a large segment of experience that's available through skillful activity and especially meditation. But interestingly, they're short of enlightenment. Through your practice, you can become almost unbelievably happy and integrated, very, very together, very clear and open-hearted, that you may feel like the king of the gods or the queen of the gods in heaven. And according to Buddhist tradition, it's perfectly possible that you might actually be born as the king or the queen of the gods. Or even, dare I say, as God himself, with a capital G. Even that, even the big G option is available if you practice really intensely. So it is said, but that's still not enlightenment. In traditional Buddhist texts, the king of the gods, the big G, is portrayed as being very happy. He's powerful, yes, he's very powerful, and certainly he's not stupid, but he's not wise either. He's not insightful. And for that reason, he's incapable of real compassion. This is according to traditional texts. So, enlightenment, the understanding achieved and then taught by the Buddha, is something other than what is developed through ethics and ordinary meditation. I wouldn't say it's completely separate, but it's also something other. It's something other than the states of mental health and happiness known as the jhanas. The mental states experienced by gods and some more fortunate members of the human race, like people who meditate. So, I'm trying to imagine what it was the Buddha was absorbing in the forest. By going through these four phases of meditation. And now we come to the third phase and this is something a bit different because phase three is called spiritual death. Now, some people don't like that term. They feel it's negative. It puts them off and this notion of spiritual death. I can understand that. I mean, maybe we should look for some kind of alternative term. We could maybe call it the stage of insight. I think that will be fair enough in a way because at this stage of practice, you're less concerned with developing a good state of mind. You've done that. You'll have to keep that up. I mean, you don't stop practicing in ways that integrate the mind and develop positive emotions. But now you start engaging in various insight meditations, special reflection meditations. There are many, many approaches to this. Insightful reflection could simply be part of the way your approach metabhavana and the mindfulness of breathing. But there are many special practices that are designed to look right into the nature of our existence and generate insight into what really is. You might, for example, meditate on the insubstantiality of things, anything you like. You look closely at anything you like in your experience and question how exactly it exists. What kind of existence it has. It could be a physical object out there like a plate of food, a lawnmower or something big like a city or a planet. It could be the person sitting in front of you. It could also be you, yourself. And in each case, we can ask, what is that actually? If we're truthful, we'll eventually have to admit that we don't really know. We don't have a way to answer the question. The question actually doesn't seem to be very approachable. Beyond saying very obvious things like a plate of food is a piece of China with food on it and a person is well somebody. We don't have much we can say. And these beyond definitions or just descriptions of the experiences that we have in words. They don't tell us very much about what they actually are, about the world we're actually living in. And actually it may take quite a long time to see how crucial this point is. To even notice that it's significant that we don't know what our world is in the first place. And that this is very, very significant. But when we do, then at last we'll have some room in our mind for some new kind of insight. I think that's what this kind of practice does. It creates room for something new. And minds tend to be quite full, I think, already. We tend, you know, it's like we need to hire a skip, you know, and chuck out a lot of stuff. We're quite full. Anyway, I suggest. Anyway, when we start doing insight reflection, one of the first things we notice is that whatever we look at doesn't have any kind of permanent existence. It had a beginning, yeah, it's changing now, it will come to an end sooner or later. Or again, since it is changing, it will never be quite the same again. Since it will never be quite the same again, it has in a sense already come to an end. At least in terms of what it was before, that has come to an end. And people are like this, for example. They're continually changing. They are never quite the same from one day to an end, to the next. They will never be quite the same again. It's happening all the time, everywhere. And just noticing this little fact, just taking in these very simple facts, can actually have quite an unexpectedly strong effect. We might also start noticing that in our behaviour, we are sometimes in a kind of denial about impermanence. We can catch ourselves assuming or hoping that in fact certain things or certain people won't come to an end. Or won't even change. Some people will be begging that they might change, but other people will kind of hoping that they won't. And this unconscious thinking, it's all very unconscious, it gets exposed when we do these insight reflections. So this whole third stage is definitely about insight, something quite different. And it comes now after positive emotion and integration of mind have been established. Because on the whole, it's helpful and necessary to have that as a foundation for these more challenging realisations. You need a certain emotional robustness and confidence, and of course you need a concentrated mind, otherwise you're not interested anyway. It's best to be nice and relaxed with the discovery that everything is impermanent, in substantial and empty of self-nature. And that's just not usually how we feel. Usually we cling on to the things in our lives and hope against hope that they will be solid and last forever. You need to have some emotional stability or solidity to be able to feel that actually it's okay that things never stay the same. So you can truly let your reactions go and focus on what is of genuine importance. And that's the real point of insight. So though it definitely works to call this insight, the notion of spiritual death carries that word, that phrase spiritual death carries an important and essential meaning, which insight on its own does not. Because when death actually comes, what happens? Well, there is a total collapse of everything we know, everything that has become familiar. And that's also what happens with the experience of insight, except of course you don't die. The familiar world around, which is largely our conceptual construction, now dissolves. After all, we've been working in our insight meditation to see through these constructions. And the practice really works. We do see through. We see what really is. It may be a very dramatic experience of the whole world being shaken and turned inside out. That often happens. Or there may be a number of less dramatic experiences, but the net effect is much the same, the bubble is burst. Now you might think that this all sounds rather strong, but there it is. That insight for you, it is a kind of death. Insight is threatening, at least to our egos, our comfortable collection of assumptions about reality. Therefore, insight is not something easy to handle. So, so Dante's term for it, spiritual death, is very appropriate. The word insight on its own, just on its own, can suggest a kind of serene and detached understanding of things. But this is far more than that. As I say, insight is a total collapse of all our assumptions about the way things are. And this is just stage three. Death. Great. Well, fortunately, in Buddhism, there is definitely life after death. In fact, it's even that for Buddhism, death is the beginning of real life. This is very, very important. Stage four, Sankarachta calls spiritual rebirth. There's a spiritual renaissance. In a way, it's a whole new level of absorption and even arrival. In a way, it's a whole new integration, you could see. And this time, what is absorbed is the insight. It's a very, very important time. We need time and space to absorb our insights. And it's unfortunately a need that's often neglected by practitioners. People who've really had some kind of insight experience often do not take the time to stabilize and understand what has happened to them. Anyway, for Sankarachta, this fourth stage of spiritual renaissance or rebirth is characterized by visualization practice. As a stage of awakening, spiritual rebirth isn't necessarily marked by a particular kind of meditation. And simply doing visualization meditation doesn't in itself mean that one is being spiritually reborn or is even particularly well integrated. But still, visualization meditation is very much about spiritual rebirth. Spiritual transformation. In our FWABO tradition, these practices are given to people at ordination when they make that full-time commitment to a Buddhist path. They're introduced, say, to Tara or Manjushri or Pava Samava, and they start to meditate on them. Most of them must do this. And these practices involve, first, meditation on the Shinnita or the empty, impermanent nature of things that we've just been talking about. They start with that, and then out of that sense of impermanence, you create, somehow, in your mind's eye, the presence of one of these Buddhas or Bodhisattvas who have realized that impermanence. That ultimate nature of things. And the nature of this kind of practice is though you're actually with them, you're actually, you can pick up on their special atmosphere. You can receive what's known as their Adishthana or transmission of their realization. You pick it up somehow through the practice. You receive this into yourself and you feel transformed by it. Perhaps this is a little bit like maybe with being with any teacher or kalyanametri you find inspiring, but here it's the Buddha. And, of course, you're doing this in your imagination, but the imagination is a very powerful thing. The Dharma really works through this kind of practice. Over time, to create a special channel for this kind of transformation really to happen. There are many different sardanas as these practices are called, and sometimes they're much, much more complex than I've described. I don't have time to say anything much about them, but sardanas all have these three common elements. They're all based on Shinnita or emptiness meditation. They all employ the imagination of a visionary world of form and color in which the presence of an enlightened being is evoked. That's two. And three, in all of them, there's some sort of transmission of Adishthana, the essence of the Buddha's realization. So this little excursion into the four stages of Bantis system was just to give some idea of the transformations that culminated in the Buddha's enlightenment. There are other important aspects of Bantis system that I haven't mentioned, but you can see, I think, that there's a kind of complementarity of practices that can work together. Concentration of mind, positivity of heart, the ability to let go basic assumptions and die to attachment and cling to them. And finally, that spiritual renaissance, that rebirth, that recreation of one's life in the light of the previous letting go. And these components, they're not at all rigid, they're all developed on different levels, and each of them can contain the others, and so in their own particular way, they can all lead directly to realization of the true nature of things. And we're all, I hope, getting involved with this kind of process, and in that we're all still arriving, we're all still arriving actually on this planet. We're still, we're all somehow in through this process, still arriving in this mysterious existence, all trying still to make sense of it all. I don't think we've done that. And what we need to do is get clearer and more concentrated in our lifestyle, our thinking, and our meditation. In other words, become more integrated. We all need to generate positivity in these areas as well, and become happier and friendlier. Stage two, right? And we all need to recognize how much we don't understand so that we can die a little to our old entrenched views about reality, let them just drop away, at least some of them, and then allow in something new. And find a more colorful life that is about awakening. Now, this is what had happened to the Buddha, you know, in space. You know, he practiced with all his heart and mind. He died with respect to the ordinary mind. He awakened to the real nature of mind. He fully, completely arrived in this existence in a way no one had ever done before. And there are quite a few different stories told in the scriptures about what happened. I think we might have heard some last night, but I wasn't there. Mara trying to scare the Buddha. Mara's daughter is trying to seduce the Buddha. The earth goddess bearing witness to his efforts. It's all around the enlightenment, the Buddha's enlightenment. The great god, Big G, in Indian mythology called Brahma Sahampati, asking him to teach. And also the giant serpent, Michelinda, wrapping him in his coils, wrapping him with his body. And these stories may seem hyperbolic. They might seem rather too much to believe. Because over 2,500 years odd, the amazing events that actually happened became legend. They became cartoon-like versions of what happened. But I think we love this kind of thing. We love stories of superheroes, super baddies like Mara, and giants like the incredible Hulk, who isn't in the Pali canon. These stories give us a way to think and reflect about things on a deep level of our minds, to take them in somehow quite deeply. Anyway, the story that really sums up today's theme of absorption is something that we're told happened three weeks after the Buddha's Great Awakening. He was sitting under a big tree, under this big tree meditating. It was daytime, but the sky started getting darker. The sun became hidden by clouds, which became darker and darker, blacker and blacker. And it grew, first it got cool, but cool, and it just got really cold, really quite cold. And there was an enormous, there was obviously an enormous storm brewing up. And it was going to be a storm bigger than any of the animals in the forest could remember. The birds stopped singing, and they got into their nests, or under what ever shelter they could find. Every mammal, every reptile went to its home. Even the tiny insects, they got deep inside their tiny holes and crevices, or they found themselves some kind of covering, or maybe it was a leaf or a stone. They needed to do that. So as the cold deepened and the darkness gathered, it became strangely quiet. The Buddha just carried on meditating, of course. He was completely absorbed in his realization. He was aware of all that was happening, but he was aware in the way of the two targetters, the Buddhas who dwell in the true nature of things. But I tell you, the silence in those woods, just before the storm, was profound. It was awe-inspiringly quiet. And then for a few moments, you couldn't work out what the sound was, but suddenly you realized it was the very finest first pattern of raindrops. And the sound got gradually more pronounced, and then, yes, it was clearly, it was raining. You know that feeling when you're in a tent, and it sort of just starts raining. Yes, it is raining, isn't it? It was like that. It's clearly raining, and suddenly you could smell the dust as the first drop started hitting the dry ground. And the raindrops got bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier. And it was just a minute or two before it was really chucking it down. It was really, really chucking it down. The rain was streaming down, bucketing down, you know, great sheets of rain were coming down. And then at that point, then came the wind. The wind howling and screaming through the dense undergrowth and just lashing the rain against the tree where the Buddha was sitting. Still meditating. It became even darker, and even almost as dark as night, and just at the point where it was blackest across the tree tops, there came streaking bolts of lightning and deafening crashes of thunder. And the animals and the birds and the insects, they really got dug in, and they covered their ears. And the Buddha of course was fine with all this. For him, it wasn't some kind of spiritual test. This wasn't Mara up to his tricks. It was just nature. It was just the elements, earth, water, temperature and wind, the same as those that made up his body. The great elements were just doing what came naturally to them. Yes, he was going to get soaked to the skin. You know, yes, it was cold and noisy and it was all moving about quite a lot. But hey, you know, he was okay, he was enlightened after all. So he just continued sitting as calm and concentrated as he was before the storm started. But then something new happened, all of a sudden, out of the base of the tree, their slid a very large and very long and very green snake. It was so large and so long, extremely long, I just want to emphasize that point, that it seemed almost impossibly enormous. The serpent was considerably bigger than the Buddha. It wasn't that, you know, anyway, considerably bigger than the Buddha. And in his scales, he was a beautiful, deep, green color with red and gold markings. He was so impressive. So who was this? It was mucha Linda, the king of the serpents, the naga king. It was an enormous cobra with a gigantic hood, intense red, snakey eyes and a full tongue that flickered between his fangs. Constantly like, just like little pink flashes of lightning. And this being, this wonderful being, looked at the Buddha. The Buddha didn't say anything. He wasn't hissing, the snake wasn't hissing, the Buddha also looked at the big snake. They just looked at one another and somehow they both knew what was about to happen. And then it happened. It happened. The naga drew himself right up close to the Buddha and he started winding his body around the body of the Buddha. He was taking care, he wasn't trying to constrict the Buddha. He was just wrapping himself and he wrapped himself around the Buddha at least three times, quite gently. And finally, completely covering him, completely insulating him from the weather, which was definitely going on outside him. And then he unfurled his great hood overhead even more and stood protecting him. And the Buddha just continued, of course, sitting there inside what was now almost a kind of tenet, carrying on with his meditation. And the storm raged all that night with no let up. The thunder and lightning came again and again. The rain of the wind lashed the forest constantly and it wasn't long before the ground became completely waterlogged. And in fact, the storm continued for that whole week, a whole week before it started dying down. All that time, all that time, the Buddha remained by motionless, by relaxed in his meditation, perfectly relaxed, and it was the same with the naga king, both completely relaxed about this. So that's how the story goes. That's the legend. That's the image, rather strange image. And we have to try to understand what actually happened. But something certainly happened. And it may have something to do with the energy of awakening, the energy of awakening. There's a lot of energy around when you see a snake. At the best of times, most people find snakes unsettling. I mean, and a directing counter can be downright terrifying. So to me, this great naga so powerful and bizarrely coiling himself and protecting the Buddha suggest the hidden strength of nature. But like the form of the snake is unsettling and not easy to handle. It's that aspect of nature, that aspect of experience. It's also there in the great storm, in the elements going a bit wild. And here that wild energy is welling up, it's overflowing, and then joining forces with the Buddha's enlightened energy as a vital part of his enlightenment experience. And sometimes, as a yogic experience, this is called Chandali or Kundalini. The coiled up serpent unfolds its coils. Because enlightenment is a transformation, not only of the conscious mind, but of the whole mind. The mind that includes the whole physical, even evolutionary process. It wasn't just his mind that became awakened, his body awakened as well. And this is a really great mystery in the body. Our experience of physical matter is something really mysterious. The elemental forces and functions of nature that usually happen quite unconsciously, spontaneously, now became awake in the Buddha's mind. And they became powers and sensibilities of understanding which could support his efforts as a teacher, as a Bodhisattva. Later on, as a teacher, the Buddha introduced the practices that nowadays still work to cultivate the awakening he experienced. The ethical practices, meditation practices, and wisdom practices. All of them informed by the special experience that happened with Mucha Linda. All Buddhist methods cultivate this connection with the subtle energies, the natural forces of mind and body. Because this is something subtle, we can't talk about it much. But we can see it when we look at our experience in terms of energy. All experience has an energy equivalent. I remember Bunty once reformulated the five precepts in terms of energy. Because when we're being truthful, being kind and helpful to others, not acting in violent ways, this also connects with and aligns with the subtle energies of nature. The ethical behaviour harmonises our relationship with others and with the whole natural world. You can feel the difference. This is what I'm talking about. You can feel the difference physically, tangibly. And the practice itself awakens the sensitivity that enables you to feel that. And once ethical sensibility is awakened, you can feel it when it's not there as well. At least you come for a while until you lose it again. You can feel the harshness, the insensitivity, the jarring quality. When you're unkind, you can feel it for a while until you lose it. And where you feel it is in the subtle elements, in the subtle energies and physical awareness that come from mindful Dharma practice. You feel it in your bones and you feel it in your water. And we are all involved with these energy processes. And in many ways, there's no mystery about it. We just don't have many words for it. Whenever you feel that disharmony, you can know directly that there's an ethical issue to be tackled. And in meditation, one is working with these energies. Indeed, the reason inside experiences happen, the reason why they are so transformative is because there takes place a profound shift in the prana or the subtle energy in the body and in the mind. So, muchalindas surrounding the Buddha with his body communicates all this. He shows how the connection works between this world of nature and the Dharma, the truth the Buddha discovered. You can say that his teaching of ethics, meditation and wisdom are none other than the cultivation practice of deep nature. And even to sound a more contemporary note, deep ecology. And the science of ecology strives in a similar way to understand all the relationships between all species at all levels. In a similar way to how Buddhism has an overview of all existence, ecology develops its own big picture of all life systems. This has now become very influential and bound up with very urgent political and social issues. So, people often try to square Buddhism with these issues. And it seems a vitally important bridge to make. We need perhaps to be a bit careful about that we do justice to the formists of the Buddhist vision. But it seems to me that Buddhist practices quite naturally cultivate ecological values. Dharma practice promotes harmony and understanding not just between all humans, but between all species. Buddhism doesn't really differentiate between species. It speaks to all beings and its teaching is not limited to human beings. Obviously, beings have very different capacities, including mental capacities, and humans do seem to be special. But humans do also vary quite a lot. And then many animals have ethical sensibilities. So, there's a certain potential for them, both for spiritual growth and also spiritual deterioration. So animals do sometimes practice the Dharma. And this is quite well documented in Buddhist literature. In one of the scriptural accounts of the Buddha's meeting with the Naga King, Mutulinda afterwards becomes a follower of the Buddha and practices his teaching. That's one example. I once attended a retreat with a Tibetan lama, who at one point he asked us all to go out and teach what we'd learned to the animals living around the retreat site, which resulted in some quite humorous sights. As you went out on a walk and you see other retreats and it's discoursing, we're trying to discourse, some kind of discourse with birds, farm animals, and even with insects. And the lama was in the tradition of Medarepa, who is also said to have helped animals to achieve definite degrees of awakening. The Buddha himself taught his followers to cultivate loving kindness to non-human beings, as well as humans. In fact, there's one record in the scriptures of him teaching a specific metabolic meditation to all the different species, all the different families of snakes. And I think the Mutulinda episode of the Buddha's enlightenment experience offers us some very important advice. There's more to nature. There's indeed quite a lot of people answering the calls of nature in them. There's more to life itself than we tend to think. Even the Buddha needed to learn this. Even the Buddha, who's brought up in a traditional society, and who'd spent pretty much all his time after leaving home outdoors, he still had a lot more to learn about nature. And meeting Mutulinda, I think, was an important turning point for him. Somewhere, realizing the ultimate nature of reality must involve insight into the nature of nature. And that must involve a certain quality of contact with nature. I admire traditional cultures which in the past have cultivated a very deep awareness of the animal and vegetable life, because it obviously gives them a perspective on the value of human life. I think of, probably you think as well, of native American traditions, just to give one example. They see so many inspiring qualities in animals and plants. And as humans, it keeps them balanced, knowing that. It keeps them from becoming too proud and too complacent. And to know directly the vulnerability of both humans and non-humans. It keeps alive a keener sense of ethics, of what it really means to be kind. Of course, right now in our human history, we're realizing how far, collectively, we've moved away from nature. There are many ways we can change. I think we just need to be open to there being much, much more to discover. There's enormous depth, I think, beneath the shiny surfaces of our, what's become a very neat and shiny and box-like world. I think realizing this depth is an aspect of Buddhist practice. On the one hand, we need to let go our over-solid, rather fixed ideas of what about what nature is. While on the other hand, letting go any unreal or sentimental feelings about it. We need to find somehow a new and dynamic way of realizing our connection with nature. I don't think we've done that yet. In one of his very earliest teachings, just to sum up a bit, the Buddha spoke about a snake casting off its old skin, casting aside its old skin. He's probably still thinking about mucha Linda. Some of us might be rather envious of this quite amazing attribute that snakes have. But actually, there's no need because we can all do a version of what they do. From time to time, if you don't know this, from time to time, in a snake's life, there's some rather intense sort of wriggling. And all of the old, wrinkly, crusty body surface just splits, it just drops away. And underneath, there's a completely new skin. Amazing. It's like having a new body. A new life. And off goes this new snake. And that's what the Buddha meant. He was saying that from time to time, we need to do that intense wriggle. We need to split off our old skin and burst free of the past and emerge and be reborn as a shiny, shimmering new beast. And then off we go. Our whole civilisation needs to do this, actually. I mean, right now, as a culture, we know nature from experience, less and less. Even though, ironically, we know more and more about its workings from external observation. It isn't just that the effects of our alienation is stripping the planet of its resources and killing it and impoverishing the lives of all its living beings, all of them. That's certainly very bad. But if that were all, it would not be special as an issue for Buddhists. After all, Buddhism is about liberation from all conditionings, the most essential conditionings being in our mind. Of course, we need to be kind towards all these suffering beings. But beyond that, it's nothing new that beings are harming other beings. That's just samsara. I think it's for this reason that you can sometimes get a rather kind of so-what feeling from Buddhists when you mention the ecological crisis. So what? This is typical of human nature. It's just samsara. Just more samsara, and this is quite true. It's kind of true, but a point we Buddhists should take note of is that as a culture, we seem to be losing awareness of our own nature. And that creates a particular kind of obstacle to liberation. The main reason I feel we need nature is because contact with it gives essential clues about who we really are. It offers a much needed balance. Sangha Rachaela once said that for famously, that for Buddhism to take root in the west, it must somehow incorporate the ancient pagan pre-Christian wisdom. And this is why. It's because of what we can call the muchalenda factor. We need to recognise more clearly our connection to the earth and the other elements of water, fire and wind. The quality that the subtlety and power of that connection. And incorporate it in all the many ways we practice the dharma. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freeBuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
