This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Patience As Opening Instead of Enduring - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, good morning everyone and welcome to IMC. What’s on my mind this last few days is the topic of patience, so that’ll be the subject of this talk. As a way of maybe opening the door to patience and why it can be interesting, there’s a teaching of the Buddha that goes something like this: of all the things accomplished, you’ll find nothing more beautiful than patience. How many of you associate patience with beauty? But can patience be beautiful? That’s the call, that’s the possibility. And how is it beautiful is maybe what this talk will point to.
Part of the reason why I’m focusing on patience is that I’m also focusing on a larger list called the 10 Pāramīs1, or 10 Perfections, where patience precedes truth, the Perfection of Truth—the ability to be present and see the truth clearly. There’s something about patience that allows us to do one of the most important tasks of Buddhism, which is to see things as they are, to see the truth.
The truth is not often easy to see. Sometimes it’s difficult to see it in ourselves, and some people don’t even want to admit some of the things they see in themselves. It takes a long time to finally say, “Okay, well I guess it’s true that I’m selfish,” or “it’s true that I’m angry,” or “it’s true that something in my life is not working and I was trying to pretend it was.” Sometimes it has to do with the world that we live in. I’ve heard a lot of people now in the last few months, for whatever the reasons are, who have decided not to read the news as much as they used to because it’s too difficult or too something. But maybe being able to see the world as it is is really important for Buddhists—to stay informed, to not turn away because it’s difficult. There’s good reason, I think, why people are turning away, because the impact the news can have on them is so difficult they don’t want to have this difficulty. But that’s why patience is needed.
It’s possible that “patience” is not the best word to translate the ancient Buddhist word khanti2. In Sanskrit, it’s kṣānti. I’ve seen repeatedly that there are very important words in Buddhism where the Indic word, as it was used in India, has very strong associations with something special, something sacred, something spiritual, or something wonderful in human life. When you translate these words into English, we lose that. The way that khanti, I think in the original context of Indian Buddhism and maybe India in general, was one of those words that had very strong, welcoming associations—that this is really a good and inspiring thing. Whereas “patience” in English is often associated with enduring. You might see a little bit of that in the very etymology of the word patience in English, where it comes from the Latin root pati, which means to suffer. So sometimes patience is understood to be suffering with something.
But the Indian Buddhist word khanti has very different associations. Besides being a kind of sacred word, one of its close associations is that it’s often taught together with the word metta3, which means kindness or loving-kindness. There’s a teaching, it’s called the Acrobat Sutta, and in there, there are four things listed: patience, non-harming, loving-kindness, and empathic care. These four things are kind of a little family. To put patience together with non-harming—which is a wonderfully powerful, inspiring topic in India, central to some religions of India—and with loving-kindness, friendliness, and with this empathic care for others, puts patience in a very good family. The tribe is a really good tribe to be part of.
We get a little bit of a sense of a very different association for what patience can mean when you realize that in Sanskrit, you see it more clearly, that the etymological root of the word is kṣam, which means Earth. So rather than the root coming from the idea of suffering, it comes from the idea of Earth. And Earth is something that is stable, or can hold, or has a certain kind of equanimity or space to hold all kinds of things. There’s this teaching the Buddha gave that speaks to this, where he was giving meditation instructions to his son. The Buddha said this to him:
“Cultivate your practice like the Earth. By cultivating a practice like the Earth, pleasing and unpleasing contexts, pleasing and unpleasing experiences, will not take hold of your mind and remain there. Suppose clean and unclean things are thrown on the earth—feces, urine, spit, pus, and blood. The Earth isn’t troubled, worried, or repelled because of this. In the same way, meditate like the Earth. When you cultivate a practice like the Earth, pleasing and unpleasing contexts will not take hold of your mind and remain.”
So this idea of knowing how to be present for things which are pleasant and unpleasant, pleasing and unpleasing, and have the mind have this spaciousness or stability or largess that we’re not triggered easily, we’re not upset, we don’t get caught up and lost in the reactivity to it, is part of what patience is about, this khanti. So maybe there’s another word in English besides patience that would capture this better. I don’t know what that would be, or we have to kind of learn the Buddhist meaning of patience.
In the context of wider Buddhism, especially these things called the Perfections, we have to also understand what gives rise to patience, what gives rise to this earthlike ability to hold in a beautiful way the life that we have, to hold in a beautiful way what is unpleasing, what is difficult. And that is to understand something about the Buddhist notion of wholesomeness. I like to translate patience not by a single different word, but rather to call it “wholesome patience.” Then maybe you get a sense that it could be beautiful if it’s wholesome.
One of the functions of wisdom in Buddhism—and Buddhism is often seen as a wisdom tradition—is not to read an encyclopedia about Buddhist philosophy and then become wise, but rather for you to take a deep look in yourself, to really be present for yourself, to be able to see, feel, and observe within yourself what feels healthy for you and what is unhealthy. What feels like it diminishes you and what kind of opens you, inspires you. To feel what nourishes you versus what de-nourishes you. To feel what gives you good energy and what drains it away. All those ideas are kind of held within this concept of wholesomeness and unwholesomeness, which I kind of like because it means part of the whole or not part of the whole. The unwholesome is what takes us away from the whole. What whole? The whole of who you are, the whole of what this world is like, that we want to be in it in the whole as it is, not partial, not selective, not with blinders on.
There’s something about clinging, resisting, assertiveness, conceit, something about even anxiety and fear sometimes, that become kind of like blinders. It’s like we diminish ourselves; it’s a selectivity process that takes us out of the whole. So to return to the whole, to the whole experience of the present moment—the Buddha often talked about the whole body, being mindful of the whole body as we meditate, being mindful of the whole mind, not the divided mind, but the mind as a unified, whole phenomenon. As we do that, what we start having is a clearer and clearer sense of what feels healthy for us and what doesn’t.
One of the areas of feeling that and really getting to know for ourselves is how we use our awareness, how we use attention—the very thing that is the means by which we navigate through our world. It’s kind of like if the medium for fish to get through their world is water, the medium for humans to get through our world is our awareness, our attention. Everything that we experience in the world goes through that filter. So how are you aware? How are you attending to the world? How are you observing? How are you seeing it? And is that wholesome or unwholesome? Is it beautiful or is it not so beautiful how you see it?
Awareness itself, or why we attend to the world, can be full of greed, can be full of hatred, can be full of delusion. It could be full of anxiety, restlessness. It can be filled with preoccupations and doubt. It can be filled with interpretations and bias through which we see the experience of the world. This focus on what is healthy and not healthy is not to interpret these things, but to feel what we’re doing and feel, “Oh, when I’m seeing the world through my hatred, this is unhealthy for me. This doesn’t feel good. There’s tension here, there’s stress here.” When I’m seeing the world through my greed, there’s tension here. It diminishes me, it takes me out of the whole. When I’m caught up in my anxiety, it’s hard with anxiety because anxiety is so concerned with what it’s anxious about that we don’t see the effect anxiety has on us. It just seems like it’s true. But if we turn the attention around 180 degrees to really look at the effect that our behavior has, the effect of how we’re relating to things, we can feel, “Wow, this is actually… no wonder I’m exhausted by the end of the day. I’m just constantly reacting against everything, I’m constantly afraid of everything and trying to establish my place, or I’m constantly wanting something and constantly disappointed, the world’s not living up to where I want it to be.”
So we see that and say, is there another way? Is there a way that’s not stressful? What’s the opposite of stress? Not just the absence of stress, but some kind of wonderful vitality, a wonderful, relaxed, open vitality in which we live our life. The wisdom factor in Buddhism, the mindfulness practice in Buddhism, is here partly for us to be able to read ourselves well. That’s the encyclopedia we want to study. The book you want to read is your own heart. You want to have a very acute sensitivity to what goes on in your heart, in your mind, in your body, in your speech, so that it stops being unwholesome and starts being wholesome. It stops being, I don’t know if I want to say ugly, but I just did. Instead, we want it to be beautiful. Can we make what we do and how we live beautiful?
Is that wise? Is that useful? Well, if what you want to do is get wealthy really fast, maybe not. So don’t bother, you can go now. But what if you want freedom? If you want to find not just be distressed and be calm, but to find this higher capacity for living a life that’s beautiful, the qualities of heart and mind that come forth in you are deeply, deeply satisfying for you. You feel like, “Ah, I’m home,” because I know inside of me now, this feels good. We become our own friend. Our inner life is our friend. Ah, this is beautiful, this is nice.
So wisdom begins helping us discern the difference between what’s healthy and not healthy for us, wholesome and not wholesome. And one of the things it teaches us then is where to put our energy, how to apply our energy. We have to make choices. As we have a better sense of what is wholesome and unwholesome, we can make wiser choices about where we take this wonderful human capacity of vitality that we have and use it to awaken a healthy kind of energy, and stop doing things which are exhausting, agitating, stressful. It’s one of the great delights of Buddhist practice to start feeling this wonderful engagement with the world and things that we do, an engagement with practice that feels like it has a vitality and an aliveness to it that feels good and healthy. It brings us joy.
Before I was a Buddhist practitioner, if someone had told me, “You know, we have to go do some gardening or we have to do some work,” as soon as they said “work,” it was like, “Oh no.” I mean, work was like a four-letter word it used to be for me. And now if someone says, “Gil, we have this work to do,” I’m just delighted. The first thing is, “Okay, what is it? I’m ready.” It isn’t because of the activity, but because I’ve learned something about how to offer myself to the activity which is healthy and wholesome, that feels really nice. One of the big things I had to learn to do in this process, when I was in the Buddhist monasteries and we had to work, was when I still had this resistance to it. I didn’t know I had resistance. I had to be able to start looking at the resistance I had, how I held myself back, how I collapsed, how I became so tired. “Oh, work, but I’m exhausted, you know, I’m kind of tired today.” And that wasn’t real exhaustion and tiredness; that was a strategy to get out of the work. That was an expression of disappointment. I had better things to do.
In the monastery, it was set up to keep coming back: study the book of yourself. And I got to see how I applied energy, how I did what I did, could be healthy and unhealthy. And I learned something about healthy engagement, and that made a world of difference. What that can do is then the healthy engagement, the healthy application of energy, doing healthy things for us, increases what’s healthy. It increases the wholesome. As that happens, the ability of wisdom to distinguish what is wholesome and unwholesome increases. The more we learn about this, the more we apply and develop ourselves, the more sensitive we become to more and more refined versions of healthy and unhealthy. The more we discover, the more subtle we become in meditation, the more subtle we become in our life, the more at ease, the more peaceful we are. That gives us a better vantage point to notice when we are doing something unhealthy, something that’s stressful.
I saw in myself, and still see it sometimes, if I get in a flurry of activity, doing a lot of different things, I have a long to-do list, I’m rushing around to do things, I’m too scattered or too busy or too engaged, too involved to notice that the next thing I do, I’m doing in a stressful way. I’m so stressed out already, it’s like they say in Buddhism, it’s like if you have a very clean cloth, maybe a white cloth, where any stain is highlighted. But if it’s already stained, just full of… you use it for cleaning your car and changing the oil and you just never clean it and it’s just full of stains, one more stain is not going to be noticed. But if you bleach it and it’s completely clean and white, the slightest little drop on it is going to be, “Oh no, it was clean and now it’s not.” So it turns out, the more we get settled, the more we get at ease, the more we find this more healthy way of being, the sooner we’ll notice the slightest little way that’s stressful, that catches us.
So the application of energy supports this whole process of deeper sensitivity. And now we come to patience. Something happens. You leave IMC today, and if you drove here, you have a flat tire. Maybe two tires are flat, so your spare tire is not really going to do that much good for you. And you have important places to go. So you stand there looking at it, and because of the nature of this talk, which I’m sure will penetrate deeply and you’ll remember when you go out there to see your flat tire, you’ll say, “Now, what’s the beautiful thing to do here? What’s the healthy thing to do now?” Then you’ll think about it, you’ll reflect. “Should I really now get really angry at the world for flat tires? Is that the best use of my energy and time? Should I now get despair? Should I now get really worked up and desperately try to fix this problem as fast as I can and get myself all tense?” Maybe you’ll say yes, because the lawyers of the mind are very convincing.
Maybe. But is that really necessary? Is that really the best way to live your life? Is that really… do you want to do the healthy thing? If what you want to do is apply Buddhist practice, integrate… people often ask, “How do I integrate my practice into daily life?” This is an example. You would stand there looking at your two flat tires, and you would not just get right involved with the issue with the tires. You would be tracking how you are. You’d use your wisdom. “How am I right now? How am I taking this in? What has been triggered? What is the healthy thing to do now?”
“I think the healthy thing to do right now is to walk around the block and cool down. Let’s see… maybe the healthy thing to do is to call the people I’m supposed to go see and explain what’s happened and say, ‘I have two flat tires, I’ll come as soon as I can, but it might take a while.’” Then you walk around the block to cool down, and then you come back and you look at that and you say to yourself, “Now, the tires are on top of the Earth. Make your mind like the Earth. That Earth doesn’t seem to mind flat tires. The Earth can make space for that. Can I make space for that?” So then when I address the flat tires, I do it with spaciousness. I do it with ease. I do it with patience.
Am I supposed to endure this too? No, you’re supposed to turn this into something beautiful. Khanti is beautiful. How do you make this beautiful? How do you make this nourishing? How do you make this so that by the time you’re done with this, you feel like you’re a better person? Maybe if you have a AAA card, you call AAA, and you’re always so worked up about it. So the time the person comes, they’re like five minutes late and you’re ready to yell at them and be all upset. That’s one way. The other way is to say, “Thank you for coming.” And the person says, “Yeah, I came as soon as I could.” “Here’s my tires.” “Oh, let me help.” And in the process of helping, maybe you learn something from this person. Maybe the person’s phenomenally friendly and kind and compassionate. Maybe they’re generous. Who knows how they are, because you’ve made space for it, because you were beautiful in how you were there with this difficult challenge. Something beautiful could come out of the person who came to take care of your tires that could not have come out of that person if you were in your whole worked-up mode. And you’re a better person because the better part of that person was shared with you. Who knows what’ll happen.
The tradition talks about three different areas to practice khanti, this wholesome patience, this beautiful patience. One is in the efforts we make, and sometimes it’s called gentle perseverance. Sometimes it’s hard to persevere when there are challenges, hard to keep going if there are a lot of things that are offering resistance or obstacles. Sometimes it’s hard to do it in practicing meditation, for example, when there are so many things to see on Netflix. And so to persist no matter what’s going on, but a gentle persistence, a beautiful persistence. This is one of the real keys of doing Buddhist practice like meditation practice: keep doing it steadily in all the ups and downs of your life. If you only do it when you feel good, you see only part of your life. If you only do it when things are difficult, you only see part of your life. The idea is to have the practice address your whole life, so you want to keep it going, a thread through your life, so it provides a vantage point, a reference point for all of who you are. So this gentle persistence, no matter what, just keep going. That’s a form of khanti, patience.
The next one that’s emphasized is patience under insult and patience when things are offensive. The world, you know, there was a kind of an insult that those tires should be flat. More seriously, I think sometimes we live in a world of a lot of conflict, and people do offend each other, people do insult each other, people do take advantage of each other, people do terrible things. The idea is not to condone it, not to accept it—that’s not what patience is—but to maintain this beautiful patience, this beautiful khanti, this wholesome way of being as we try to address it, as we meet it. And what it explicitly means is: don’t succumb to hostility. Whatever is happening, don’t succumb to hostility. That’s a core meaning of patience under insult.
And the third one is acceptance of truth, kind of what I started this topic with. And that is that seeing the truth can be quite difficult. As I said earlier, seeing the truth of oneself is quite hard, and many people are trying to avoid it, or some people are even using spiritual practice as a means of avoiding it. Buddhist practice is all about, especially if you do mindfulness, sooner or later you have to be honest: “Oh, this is how it is in me.” So the ability to be honest, the ability to see clearly… in Buddhist practice, as mindfulness practice gets strong, and especially on retreat, there comes a time when the usual reference points by which we make ourselves feel safe in the world begin falling away. There comes a time in meditation—not before and after, but in meditation—when holding on to identity, holding on to clear definitions of who I am, holding on to clear senses of who I am, just feels too stressful. It’s too much work to keep it up, and so that begins to drop. But that can be very frightening because the very way that people have made themselves safe is to become and be a certain kind of person.
We start seeing suffering, unsatisfactoriness, how many of our pursuits are not really that wholesome and healthy. And when our whole life is kind of based on these pursuits, then it can be frightening and disorienting. Sometimes, the desire for some people to really want things to be stable, have a constancy to it so that things can be reliable—and that’s reasonable in many ways—but in deep meditation, the world becomes inconstant. Our experience of everything is constantly shifting and changing, like we’ve entered into the stream of life, the river of life, where everything’s always flowing, everything’s changing. And so there’s nothing there in that stream, in that river, that’s constant, that’s solid, that’s stable. For some people, that gets disorienting and difficult.
This is one of the functions of patience, khanti: to give us that wholesome quality of attention, that beautiful quality of attention, that something can hold all this, something has the generosity to be with this, the willingness to be with this. I’ve seen that the people who have the most challenges with deep Buddhist meditation practice are people who’ve gone too quickly into concentrated, deep states without having built up and developed this wholesome repertoire, this wholesome way of being in the world; who’ve learned how to develop joy and happiness, who’ve learned how to be generous and kind, who’ve learned metta, who’ve kind of developed their inner life to be a friendly place, a happy place. Then when there’s no self to be found, where everything is changing, where everything is somehow unsatisfactory, it’s more okay because the very awareness that knows that has become beautiful, has become wholesome. So then it’s easier to have this wholesome patience, patience with truth.
In this way, maybe for khanti, either we choose a different word than patience, or we redefine it and make it into a new meaning. It’s not suffering and enduring. It’s not stiffening up and just kind of toughing ourself through something. It’s the opposite. It’s the opposite of toughing, you know, steeling ourself or something. It’s softening ourselves as we go through it. So that’s my idea of khanti, patience.
So what are your thoughts now? Do you have thoughts or questions, or maybe you want to offer a different word than patience for khanti after this presentation?
Questioner 1: Um, so this is not… when you talk about reality, I have been going, and this may not be very Buddha of me, but I’ve been going to protests. [Laughter] And, you know, I’ve been trying to come up with… because I don’t know what else to do, so I go to these protests because I have aversion to what’s going on, I guess. And, you know, there are signs that you hold up, and some of them are not very Buddha… I mean, some of them are very… So can you… first of all, is that a skillful thing to do? Or is there another way? And what protest sign would you have?
Gil Fronsdal: I think with anything at all, it’s the consequence of what you’re doing that measures whether it’s wholesome or unwholesome. The consequence can be in yourself as you do it. So if you do it with hate, that’s unhealthy for you. If you do it with animosity and hostility for someone or anyone, that’s unhealthy for you. If you’re doing it out of greed, if you’re doing it out of… you know, if you do something out of fear, it might be healthy and appropriate, but to do something out of anxiety is a very different animal, a very different phenomenon. And then what is the impact you’re having? Are you doing something, and in doing it you feel justified, but the consequence is that there’s more divisiveness, more hostility in the world? Or are you doing it in a way that actually heals the divisiveness in the world? Is there a way of not creating more hostility, but to create goodwill across all kinds of divisions that we have?
So the Buddhist question is, how do we do this? Is there a wholesome way to do it? And what is the wholesome way? In this regard, I kind of almost prefer that Buddhists don’t do protests; they demonstrate. Because that gives us a chance to demonstrate a different way. We might go, we might be in the same place, we might be doing the same, you know, trying to have the same impact on the world, but we’re there to demonstrate an alternative. We’re there to show a different way in how we do it. And so the signs that are there, maybe what they write is very important. So that’s my take. The answer to the question is not for me, but rather your way of reading yourself: what is wholesome, what is healthy for you, and what comes out of you that is healthy for the world around you. And I don’t want to be in the position to answer that question for you.
Questioner 2: My question, Gil, is around reactivity. I can find myself sometimes being very reactive and coming out with hostility or huge disappointment, whatever. So can you give some thoughts around how to relate to that and how to respond to my own reactivity?
Gil Fronsdal: For myself, how do I respond to this? So you know it’s happening while it’s happening?
Questioner 2: Sometimes I do, but oftentimes I don’t think I do. It’s just, boom, you know.
Gil Fronsdal: So what do you need? So the first thing you need to do is to catch it. So what has to change? How do you change your behavior in such a way you’ll catch your activity when it happens?
Questioner 2: Well, before I respond to that, can you say what you mean by “catch it”?
Gil Fronsdal: Notice it, recognize that it’s happening.
Questioner 2: Well, if I’ve already… if I’m already reacting and saying something, or excuse me, or you know, looking disgusted or something to the other person, it’s already happened. So I guess what I’m asking is, if it’s already happened, I can then be aware of it, but how do I be aware of it before it happens? That’s what I’m asking.
Gil Fronsdal: What I’m offering to you is, you know, you’ve been tracking this for a long time. You’re aware of this for a long time, and you have a lot of data. Or maybe you need to start collecting the data, and then you have to answer the question: how do you physically, behaviorally change how you live your life so you can catch it earlier? It’s a joke, because if you expect that you can just barrel ahead in the life that you’re living and somehow a magic formula is going to be there to help you see this, it’s not going to work. You have to actually reflect on your life and see what you have to change about your life in such a way that you’re there and present for what you do as you go through the day, that you catch it earlier. So early that it doesn’t come out of your mouth, or maybe it doesn’t come out of your grimace or something.
So what does that take? I don’t know your life well enough. Some people find it makes a world of difference to meditate every day. Maybe what really needs to happen for someone like you is maybe it needs to be at least an hour a day. I don’t know how long you meditate, but if you’ve been coming to IMC for a long time, that tells me that this practice is important for you, and maybe this is a time to do more of it. And maybe it’s temporary. Maybe for three months you meditate for an hour, two hours a day—an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon. It’s crazy in the life people live here, right? That’s so filled with doing, doing, doing. But if this is important enough for you, if the question is being asked because this is really important for you, then maybe you have to do something that really allows you to.
Maybe meditating more, maybe it’s doing less. Another neurotic thing that goes on in our culture is there are so many opportunities, so many things to do, more here in the modern world than probably anywhere in life, certainly more than the time of the Buddha. There’s so much available to us. So there’s a way in which people are trying to do so much and catch everything, stay up on everything, and get all the movies, get all the books, get all the recreational activities, you know, do, do, do. And some of it’s because they have to work, and people are working long hours. But if you want to answer that question for yourself, maybe you need to look at what you spend your time doing every day. Maybe you need to create more space in the day. Maybe for everything you do that takes maybe 45 minutes, whatever how long something takes, you always add 10% more time to it, so there’s space between things. You don’t kind of run out of breath and then you’re off to do the next thing. So you have to decide what kind of change you want to do in your life. Otherwise, I don’t see any way to answer your question. Thank you.
Questioner 3: I just want to share something that might be helpful, helpful for me. When I come home, I will park in the garage and meditate for 10 minutes before I enter the house, and that has really been helpful for my interaction with my family. And same thing when I go to work, I will also sit in the car and meditate for 10 minutes before I go to the office, and that really also has been very helpful.
Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. I love it. I used to do that. Park about 300 yards from my house before I went home into my house because we had these little babies at home, and I had to get ready for what was coming. It was often like I’d open the door and it’s, “Your turn!” And so those few minutes of getting settled from the day got me ready.
Questioner 4: Thank you, Gil. You know, I really appreciate your love of language because using the way you’re using patience in this talk has kind of really opened a new dimension for me. I was reflecting on it in the context of what happened to me in the past 12 hours. I had a beautiful dinner last night, and I got home angry. Yes, and it was like out of nowhere. And I remember looking at the mirror and seeing my anger, and I was just too tired. I just went to bed. In the middle of the night, I wake up and I’m still angry. I meditated and I fell asleep. And then when I woke up, I just started to feel the anger in my body, and I felt, “Oh, is there a better way to react to this?” And to this situation, it just opened up a whole new thing for me. But I would have not described this experience as patience, but it makes a lot of sense the way you’re bringing patience, because I had to be patient with my not being able to see my negative contribution to the situation. And it’s only giving me that chance, instead of staying in the reactivity, in a way.
Gil Fronsdal: I love hearing that. Very nice. So the patience gave you the chance then to ask the question, “Is there a better way?”
Questioner 4: Yes. And I couldn’t have asked that question before because I was just focused on, “I need to tell this person this is not a good way to behave.” And yeah, so I really appreciated this angle in finding beauty in patience instead of enduring something I didn’t like.
Gil Fronsdal: Very nice. Thank you. So maybe there might be some little occasion over the next few days to have some patience, just maybe. And so maybe you’ll be better prepared. So thank you. And if you want to say hello to someone who’s next to you and wish them well in their adventure with patience, that might be nice. And then thank you all.
Pāramīs: A Pali word meaning “perfections.” In Theravada Buddhism, these are ten qualities cultivated on the path to awakening: generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity. ↩
Khanti: A Pali word for patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. Its Sanskrit equivalent is kṣānti. The talk suggests its root is related to the word for “Earth,” implying a quality of stability and acceptance rather than mere endurance. ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, goodwill, and active interest in others. It is the first of the four brahmavihāras (divine abodes) and a central practice in Buddhism. ↩