This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Reverence & Renunciation; Grief as a Facet of Dharma. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Okay, so welcome folks. It’s nice to see your names. Let’s practice together.
Finding your posture, whatever posture it is, a sense of your heart being open to the world, a sense of sanctity and relaxation. We know we’re doing something, maybe we say, sacred and ordinary, and we can relax amidst it.
Just breathing into your belly, maybe a slightly fuller, slower breath than you’ve taken today.
Meditation can feel old hat or familiar, especially if you’ve practiced for years or decades. But we ought not to forget that we’re stepping into something sacred, that we’re connected by our breath and our sincerity to a 2600-year lineage of wisdom and compassion. And so the thought, “just little old me meditating in my home online,” that’s not the end of the story. We take our seat and remember the lineage, all the shoulders we stand upon, all that we owe to those who will come after us. And we breathe with that.
It’s a practice of reverence, also renunciation.1 In other words, what is skillful to put down? Renunciation is not animated or sponsored by aversion or moralism, not sponsored by egoic processes, but a simple recognition: this can be put down.
Perhaps we renounce the multitasking of our mind, or we renounce some measure of worry or other grasping. We renounce the false promises that clinging makes. We renounce the urge to make a story out of this moment.
We have sense contact, and the proliferation—largely a function of the lack of equanimity—feels like, “I must tell some story, maybe just a sentence, about this sense contact.” Amidst the sanctity of our practice, we renounce. Not forever, but for right now.
We renounce knowing that it may rearise just moments later. We renounce not like holding 50 ping-pong balls underwater at the same time, but opening the fist and putting something down on the ground. In this way, we become more intimate with our breathing.
It always feels like we’re preparing for the rest of our life, but our life never arrives. And so, we practice putting all of our hope into this moment.
Clinging complicates everything, turns me into a spy and a crook, conniving, scheming. Letting go simplifies. And samadhi2 is the momentary resolution of all ambivalence.
Okay, good to sit with you.
So, every Dharma teaching is a kind of footnote on some other Dharma teaching. In other words, no teaching is the last word. One teaching is never enough. The more I practice, the more I find that the path is found in a kind of dynamic tension between two teachings. So yesterday, humor, playfulness—just indispensable, actually. And today, grief—also indispensable.
The gap between the freedom we know is possible and the unimaginable vastness of suffering—that gap is filled with grief. For all the ways in which no consolation exists for the agony of this realm, grief exists. The Dharma is said to meet the second arrow, but what meets the first? I would say there’s some measure of grief in the first arrow. That’s not exactly a consolation for it, but it means there’s something left over, even when the Dharma is practiced exquisitely.
And so I feel like grief is a kind of irreducible element of Dharma life. In other words, there is no cure for love. Leonard Cohen said, “I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who’s waiting for it to rain, and I feel soaked to the skin.” If you’re awake, you’re soaked to the skin.
The Buddha witnessed aging, sickness, and death, and this anticipatory grief launched his spiritual quest. The inevitability of loss, for many of us, is a profound engine for Dharma motivation. It’s said to be one of the thoughts that turns the mind to the Dharma. And the story of the Buddha, as I understand it, is that his mother died around the time of his birth—the most primal form of longing and grief.
Generally, the Buddha wanted to be free from grief, beyond grief, sorrow, and lamentation. It’s the refrain. But then again, when Sariputta and Moggallana3 died, the Buddha is in this hall with 500 monastics and said, “Without them here, this hall feels empty.” Then, to my mind, kind of unfortunately, the sutta goes on to say, “But the Buddha did not suffer.” And it’s maybe not controversial, I don’t know about you, but I want my Buddha to grieve.
The notion that if we only understood impermanence, anicca,4 more completely, we wouldn’t suffer… I don’t know. Understanding anicca, even understanding it very deeply, I do not feel implies the absence of grief. This kind of explaining away of grief may be an example of what the primatologist Frans de Waal called anthropodenial5—the implicit denial that we humans are animals. False.
So I don’t place grief in the cluster of afflictive emotions. There are many painful emotions I could imagine being free from, but grief is not one of them. And yes, we can get stuck in it. Grief can become a kind of placeholder for more amorphous pain. It’s like grief becomes the explanatory mechanism for everything wrong in our mind, in our heart, in our life. That’s not the species of grief I’m talking about. Sometimes it’s true, where we must act in disobedience to the grief. But generally speaking, I feel like it’s onward-leading, in the sense of grieving consciously, sensitively, receptively, listening.
It’s hard to look at the world, even for all the progress our species has made over centuries, it’s hard to look at the world and see the carnival of greed and delusion and not feel some measure of grief, a sense of powerlessness in the face of it. And so I associate grief with some of our best qualities of sensitivity and love and morality. It’s hard to imagine what our sila,6 our ethical conduct, would look like without grief, without being informed by grief. Loss is part of what makes the sanctity of life intelligible.
Grief is a trope in our practice, even when we haven’t lost something. For many—not for all, but for many—just as children have growing pains, you know, an 8-year-old says their leg hurts at night or something like that. Dharma practice has growing pains too, and the growing pains of Dharma often taste like grief. How does it actually feel to change in the trenches of change? How does it feel to grow, to deepen our compassion, to release, to let go? Release feels great, right, once we’ve put something down. But the process of opening the clenched fist of grasping, that process of letting go, often is inflected with a sense of grieving.
How does it feel to mature ethically, to have our heart expand to include more beings, to expand over space and over time to beings not yet born? How does this feel? Often it entails a measure of grief. The Buddha said, “Comprehend dukkha.7 Comprehend suffering.” Sometimes that will hurt, that process of comprehending, of really, really opening one’s heart to the first noble truth. But that truth ennobles us even as we grieve it. And that ennobling quality of grieving the first noble truth goes on for a long time. I don’t even know if I understand dukkha.
Some research from Shelley Taylor and some of her colleagues on positive illusions… she writes, “Self-aggrandizing self-perceptions, an illusion of control, and unrealistic optimism are widespread in normal human thought.” These “illusions,” quote, “foster the criteria normally associated with mental health.” She called it positive illusions. It’s said that these illusions bolster and stabilize our sense of self. And I do get the comfort of those kinds of illusions. Certainly, I’m not commending that we live every moment in death contemplation, but there’s a subtle agitation in that self-deception, in the grandiosity, in the fantasies of control, the sense that everything goes on. When some part of us knows we’re fooling ourselves, we can’t settle.
And so the Dharma is a longing for truth. The chickens come home to roost. And if we’ve not grieved the homelessness of ego, the ungovernability of existence, the end of all things—if we’ve not grieved that, we will be shattered when we discover that the Buddha was not joking.
The expansion of our heart, as the circle of empathy grows and we evolve as moral creatures, our sila evolves. That growth of waking up to more—to wake up is to wake up to more, to moralize more in the sense of more and more things matter morally that did not matter before. That entails a measure of grieving.
This is not the grief of stagnation. James Baldwin once said, “People can cry much easier than they can change.” This is not wallowing in stagnant tears. This is a process by which something else becomes love. Grief is completely pregnant with bodhicitta.8 Pema Chödrön said, “awakened heart.” Completely pregnant. This is the path of purification, where we’re transmuting that which is not wisdom and not love into wisdom and love. And grief might hurt, but the love never feels far.
I offer this for your consideration. And yeah, it’s tender to speak about these things together. Okay, see you tomorrow morning.
Renunciation (Pali: Nekkhamma): In Buddhism, this refers to the letting go of attachments and desires that cause suffering. It is not driven by aversion, but by the wisdom that sees the freedom in non-clinging. ↩
Samadhi: A state of deep meditative concentration, where the mind becomes unified and still. It is a key component of the Buddhist path. ↩
Sariputta and Moggallana: Two of the chief male disciples of the Buddha, renowned for their wisdom and psychic powers, respectively. Their deaths were a significant event in the life of the early Buddhist community. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence,” one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. It points to the truth that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩
Anthropodenial: A term coined by primatologist Frans de Waal to describe the tendency to deny human-like characteristics in other animals or animal-like characteristics in humans. ↩
Sila: A Pali word for “ethical conduct” or “morality.” It forms the foundation of the Buddhist path and includes principles like non-harming, honesty, and generosity. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” The first of the Four Noble Truths states the existence of dukkha as a fundamental aspect of life. ↩
Bodhicitta: A Sanskrit term in Mahayana Buddhism that translates to “awakened heart” or “mind of enlightenment.” It is the compassionate aspiration to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. ↩