This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: This Moment; Poetry of Practice 4 (5/5): Living with Integrity. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
The Poetry of Practice. So I’ve been, these days, taking poems that have been written perhaps for a general audience and then kind of pulling out some Dharma teachings from them. Maybe that was the intention of the poet, maybe it wasn’t, but I kind of like this idea that we can find teachings, we can find support for our practice everywhere. Whatever life is offering us. And I’m choosing specific poems to support that.
But today, I’d like to do something a little bit different as we end our time together on the Poetry of Practice. I would like to share a poem that is by somebody who is a Buddhist practitioner, who practices in our tradition here and is using poetry to express her practice. Who is explicitly—she’s not a poet, right? She’s a practitioner, and it’s a way to use straightforward, clear language to express practice in what I think is a beautiful and inspiring way.
It’s one thing to take the Dharma out of the poetry, but maybe for this last day, we’re putting the poetry in the Dharma. You know, pretending like they’re different, poetry and Dharma, but maybe there’s some way, of course, that distinction is a little bit too artificial or heavy-handed.
There have been times when I’ve been on some long retreats, I’ve jotted down short little poems just as a way to… I don’t know, I felt like that could express something that was being experienced or known. I don’t know what it was exactly, just these short little poems. And it’s not uncommon, right? There are a number of practitioners who put together poems and publish little books of them. I know some people have sent me—a number of people have sent me books of their own poems that are associated with their practice.
So today, as I’ve done in the preceding days, during the guided meditation, I’ll drop in a poem and then talk about it a little bit in the dharmette afterwards. And again, you don’t have to like these poems. You don’t have to agree with them. You don’t have to understand them. You don’t have to do anything. We just allow them to be heard, and it’s that simple. It’s that simple. And of course, that’s what practice is, right? It’s just meeting what each moment brings as best we can. And we can do that with these poems as well.
So just taking a meditation posture that expresses our intention to meditate and to be present for whatever each moment brings.
Tuning into just the experience of the body as a whole, like inhabiting the body, bringing a sense of aliveness, a sense of presence to the bodily experience in general. Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We’re just allowing the mind and the body to get on the same page, so to speak.
As I’ve done the earlier days, feeling the body resting on its sitting surface, feeling the contact. There’s a way in which the mind might have a feeling of flying around in a dreamscape, and the body is here.
Noticing if there are any areas of tightness or tension, and then just gently resting our attention there. Maybe in the same way that we put our hand on the back of, just slightly touching someone’s back as a way of support or consolation, care.
Notice if there are any feelings, sensations of well-being, maybe a certain amount of okay-ness. This might be a small part of your experience, it might be your dominant experience. Whichever it is, can you rest attention there? Is there a location in the body? Is it a feeling of okay-ness, well-being, dare I say, contentment?
And we let that experience get as big as it would like. This is an allowing, this is not a doing.
And can we abide in this, with this, as this sense of well-being, okay-ness, even if it’s just a small part of your experience? Staying here in this moment.
If you find the mind wandering, just very simply, gently begin again, either with a feeling of okay-ness, well-being, or with the sensations of breathing.
Tuning into the bodily experience, feeling embodied. And is there a way you can just abide in the body in this moment?
I’ll drop in a poem. The poem is called “My Religion” by Ayya Medhanandi.1
To live and die without regret, that is my religion. To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment, now my only moment. How otherwise to spend it? For tonight I may die.
To abide in the fragrance of goodness in the world, enduring, awake. To bring no harm to myself or anyone. To be a cause for kindness and compassion, a joy that defeats despair. To smile with courage through life’s storms and trials, trusting the inherent principle of love. To pray, to live and die a simple way.
I’ll read this poem again. “My Religion” by Ayya Medhanandi.
To live and die without regret, that is my religion. To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment, now my only moment. How otherwise to spend it? For tonight I may die.
To abide in the fragrance of goodness in this world, enduring, awake. To bring no harm to myself or anyone. To be a cause for kindness and compassion, a joy that defeats despair. To smile with courage through life’s storms and trials, trusting the inherent principle of love. To pray, to live and die a simple way.
Thank you. Thank you for practicing together.
So as I said at the beginning of the guided meditation, rather than taking the Dharma in a poem, today we’re looking at the Dharma being expressed as a poem. A Dharma practitioner, somebody describing her practice in poetry, which, you know, sometimes it’s like we can’t find the words. Maybe it’s not so clear. I know I’ve offered practice discussions and I’ve been a student in practice discussions where the practitioner can’t quite find the words exactly how to express what’s happening. And so maybe poetry is a way in which we can, you know, it’s a different way to express. We can use it to point indirectly to what’s being known or what’s being experienced.
So this poem is called “My Religion” by Ayya Medhanandi. And maybe before I read the poem, I’ll say a little bit about the person who wrote it. So she, this person was born in Canada. Maybe I’ll say a little bit about her name. So her ordination name, so she’s a Canadian. Medhanandi is her ordination name. Ayya2 means sister. So this is something that’s given to nuns in our tradition. Instead of like bhikkhu,3 she is an Ayya. And Medhanandi, her name means, we could say it’s like medha is wise and nandi is joy. Wise joy. Or the way that Pāli4 works, it could also be the joy of wisdom. I love these two qualities, wisdom—sometimes it can be translated as intelligence, but I like wisdom—and joy. So the happiness of wisdom. It’s a beautiful name.
So she ordained as a 10-precept nun in 1988. This is quite some time ago, under Sayadaw U Pandita. And then when Burma closed their borders, she left and went to England and practiced there in Ajahn Chah’s lineage at Amaravati. Some of you might know Amaravati. And then it wasn’t until 2007, maybe almost 20 years later, that she received full ordination, and that was in Taiwan. And then in 2008, she returned to Canada. So an inspiring woman, I would say, who had this dedication to practice, that ordained even before full ordination was available for women. And now she’s the founder of Sati Saraniya,5 this is a hermitage, a monastery for women in Canada, in Eastern Ontario.
So here’s somebody who’s dedicated her life to practice. And something that I appreciate so much, in the suttas, we see that the Buddha was taking the words of the dominant religion of his time, which would have been Brahmanism, kind of like a proto-Hinduism. And he used words of that dominant religion and then redefined them for what he was teaching. So he was using words that people would have been familiar with but redefining them. We find this all throughout the suttas.
And here, Ayya Medhanandi is doing the same thing. So this is a subtle thing that maybe if you didn’t know about the suttas, you wouldn’t appreciate as much. But when I read this, I just loved how she’s finding a way to bridge between the dominant religion, which I would say is Judeo-Christian in Canada and the United States, and her practice. So here’s this poem called “My Religion” by Ayya Medhanandi.
To live and die without regret, that is my religion. To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment, now my only moment. How otherwise to spend it? For tonight I may die.
To abide in the fragrance of goodness in this world, enduring, awake. To bring no harm to myself or anyone. To be a cause for kindness and compassion, a joy that defeats despair. To smile with courage through life’s storms and trials, trusting the inherent principle of love. To pray, to live and die a simple way.
I don’t know, I feel really touched by this. You know, there’s the real simplicity of the words that she’s using, kind of supports this simplicity she wants to have her life to be. And I like how it’s kind of like a list of things: to do this, to do this, to do this. So she has this clarity and this simplicity.
So maybe I might say we could summarize this as presence, integrity, compassion. Presence, integrity, compassion. For this to be one’s religion, what a beautiful thing. What a beautiful thing to move through the world this way.
So I love this opening stanza: “To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment, now my only moment.” To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment. This way of bringing something maybe divine or something bigger than oneself, or something that feels holy to this moment. To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment. I know I feel touched by this, just recognizing the preciousness maybe of each moment. Because later, right, she says, “for tonight I may die.” Just recognizing that, you know, why put it off? Like, why think that you’re going to be mindful later? Why are you going to be present later? You might not have a later. We’re not promised anything. So why not taste the divine, the holy, I’d say maybe the beauty, the grace of this moment? And to taste the cup, so it’s not that we’re thinking about it, it’s more that we’re experiencing it.
So, presence. And then integrity: “To bring no harm to myself or anyone.” I would say, can you imagine what a world it would be if all of us decided even to do one of these? No harm to myself or no harm to others. Like to have this commitment to do either of those, how the world would be different. How the world would be so different. Because there’s a way, if we have this commitment to not harm others, it means that we also can’t harm ourselves. Or to not harm ourselves, we’re not harming others also, right? As our practice deepens, we start to see how you can’t separate harm from oneself or others. There’s a way in which we can think that we’re not going to harm others, and then we end up harming ourselves because we’re bending over backwards and allowing boundaries to be crossed or something like this when we’re trying to not harm others. But if we really have this as a guiding principle of one’s life, then we start to see how it’s just this non-harming in general, and we can’t make a distinction between ourselves and others. In the beginning, there definitely is, but as we go deeper and deeper and it more and more flavors and colors our life, we start to see, “Oh yeah, this commitment to not harm impacts everybody.”
And instead, this idea of “to abide in the fragrance of goodness in this world.” Fragrance of goodness. The sense that goodness is maybe something not so tangible. You know, sometimes maybe you walk into a home and somebody has finished baking cookies, or in a bakery and it smells like fresh-baked bread. There’s just the scent, even if you can’t quite precisely put your finger on what it is. This fragrance of goodness. This way in which maybe you have a conversation with somebody and you feel… it doesn’t have to be big brightness, but it’s not this feeling like you had to protect yourself in a subtle way, or you had to make them feel better, or there was a lot of work in the conversation or something like this. This way that sometimes when we meet a moment, there is this subtle feeling of… is there allowing, this more openness, this more ease, more spaciousness, more freedom, or is there not? And I would say the goodness is this which allows the most openness, the most freedom.
“To abide in the fragrance of goodness in this world.” There is goodness. The media wants to tell us otherwise, other people want to tell us otherwise, but there is goodness. I’m not denying that there’s badness, I’m not denying that, but I feel like I want to overcome this negativity bias that so many of us have and also point out that there’s goodness.
And then this presence, integrity, and compassion. She uses this word compassion explicitly: “To be a cause for kindness and compassion, a joy that defeats despair.” Recognizing there is despair, but to act in a way with kindness and compassion and to create the conditions in which others can have kindness and compassion, this brings a joy that defeats despair. Can we treat ourselves with kindness and compassion and treat others with kindness and compassion?
So Ayya Medhanandi and her religion: presence, integrity, compassion. I feel inspired by this. May you feel inspired by this. Maybe there’s a way in which, if not an actual poem, maybe there’s a way in which there can be some unspoken sense of possibility and some actual experience of presence and integrity and compassion, maybe with some simplicity sprinkled in there as well.
So here’s this poem again, “My Religion” by Ayya Medhanandi.
To live and die without regret, that is my religion. To taste the cup of the sacrament of this moment, now my only moment. How otherwise to spend it? For tonight I may die.
To abide in the fragrance of goodness in this world, enduring, awake. To bring no harm to myself or anyone. To be a cause for kindness and compassion, a joy that defeats despair. To smile with courage through life’s storms and trials, trusting the inherent principle of love. To pray and live and die a simple way.
Beautiful. So thank you. Thank you for joining me these days on the Poetry of Practice. It’s been a pleasure practicing with you all this week.
I’ll say that some of you might know that tomorrow, the Sati Center, which you can find at sati.org, there is an offering by John Brehm. Mr. Brehm has written a few books, the last one being “The Dharma of Poetry.” He’s freely offered something at the Sati Center tomorrow, so you might want to look at that. It might be fun and interesting. I think he’s calling it “The Poetry of Not-Self.” You know, I wish I had the specifics right here in front of me, but you can find it at sati.org.
And for those of you who live in the area, in a couple of weeks, on Saturday, I believe it’s the 18th, I’ll be doing an in-person “Poetry of Practice” daylong. This will not be online, nor will it be recorded, I’m sorry to say. So it’s one of those things that if you’re there, we can practice together. It’ll be some poetry and a lot of mindfulness and silence as well.
So thank you again. And may you find some beauty, some poetry in this moment, whatever the moment is bringing.
Ayya Medhanandi: A Canadian-born Buddhist nun in the Theravada Forest Tradition. She was ordained in 1988 and is the founder and guiding teacher of Sati Saraniya Hermitage in Ontario, Canada. ↩
Ayya: A Pāli term of respect for a Buddhist nun, often translated as “Venerable Sister.” ↩
Bhikkhu: A Pāli term for a fully ordained Buddhist monk. ↩
Pāli: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the scriptural language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Sati Saraniya: A monastery for women in the Theravada Forest Tradition located near Perth, Ontario, Canada. The name can be translated from Pāli as “Mindfulness as a Refuge” or “Friendly Mindfulness.” ↩