This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: Power and Safety. 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.
So, welcome folks. Welcome to you all. It’s good to be with you. I trust you all have some way of practicing and are not relying on my instructions for that purpose. I’m sort of like ornamental on the base layer of your practice. Should have said that like 15 years ago, but let us sit.
Relaxing whatever can be relaxed. Everything that can be relaxed, we relax. Whatever tension remains, we give a complete blessing to remain.
If anything’s tight or hurts in your body, just remaining in the flow of meditation, but go ahead and gently massage wherever there’s tightness or pain. Sense the way that kindness is manifest in that gesture, a certain expression of loving-kindness. Just feeling the transmission of that care, perhaps from your hand to your body.
We find ourselves in this lineage of love and care. The same gesture of kindness manifested a million ways, a million times over millennia. The wish to be free of suffering is the animating theme of history; it’s just that generally, people don’t understand happiness well enough.
We’re learning here on our cushions, our seats, our beds, learning about our nervous system and about this realm of experience, sorrow. Learning about what’s worthy of our reverence and protection, where we can let go.
Our worries will not stop until we stop. So we sense into the flow of breathing, but something in us stops.
Instinctively, we place so much hope into a future that never exactly comes. So we renounce the protection and acquisitiveness, the ownership, the control. We refine our relationship with helplessness, and in this way, cultivate our power.
Our attention is usually a kind of appendage of our wanting and our fear. But we can’t fool Mother Nature. We have to let go to receive this moment.
And when, at those times it doesn’t work, maybe nothing works, we actually get to see what we were trying to do and manufacture. It’s okay.
Maybe we can say in any given moment, insight into one of the Four Noble Truths1 is on offer. We just do our best not to miss it.
Okay, it’s good to sit with you. No class next week, I’ll be away, but back on the 23rd.
Several years ago, following an episode of some harm, some unethical leadership, some insight teachers were asked to say something about Sila2, ethical conduct, and to write a short thing. Kittisaro3, who is also known as Thanissara’s4 husband—that’s not all he is, meditation teacher, Rhodes Scholar, whatnot, but also Thanissara’s husband—wrote this, and I condensed it slightly, but it has stayed with me over these years.
He wrote:
“After a meal offering in rural northeast Thailand, I was sitting with Ajahn Chah5 and a group of young Western monks from several different countries. He told us that one day we’d all be teachers, bringing the dharma back to our own countries. He warned us, ‘Don’t be the kind of teacher that gets so puffed up you can’t get through the door. Don’t go around thinking, ‘I’m a teacher.’ Always remember you’re a practitioner. If a situation arises that calls for teaching, let teaching happen. It comes and goes. In your heart, you are a practitioner, mindful and empty.’
Ajahn Chah was warning us about the dangers of being inflated and intoxicated by the power and prestige of the leadership position. We are regularly reminded that the blessings do not belong to us, that we are riding on the perfection and power of the awakened one. As our practice of the path deepens, we’ll naturally grow in personal power, cultivating Sila, Samadhi6, Panna7, plugging into the measureless merit of the triple gem. We potentize our actions for good or for ill. It’s vital to be interested in and sensitive to our impact on the world and those around us. We must regularly ask ourselves, ‘Are we doing harm?’ Because we have ignorance, we must open ourselves to feedback, using the Sangha8 to help us see where we do unconscious harm to our community.
Being a dharma teacher or a dedicated Buddhist practitioner, we are waving the banner of the awakened one, representing that extraordinary heritage, partaking of that trustworthy power and prestige. When one has power, one’s wholesome actions are amplified, but so are the unwholesome ones. Everything we do has more impact. We have the potential to do great good and also great harm.”
Just the image of that scene kind of touched me. Ajahn Chah, this revered figure back then, revered and his legacy only grown, but sitting around and Ajahn Chah foreseeing the spread of the dharma. I’m very curious who was there, what people were there. Jack Kornfield overlapped, I believe, for some years there, and I’m curious where they went and what goodness their lives have brought. It’s likely that my life somehow is tied to that moment after that meal offering, maybe 50 years ago. And that means, of course, in some way you’re tied to that moment too. And that moves me, the ways that goodness ripples in a manner that’s hard to anticipate and imagine, to be feeling the blessings just reverberating down through the decades.
He says, “If a situation arises that calls for teaching, let teaching happen. It comes and goes.” It’s like identification with our roles, imagining that we are actors, not roles. It’s insidious. The ego is insidious, not an enemy, but insidious. And especially when there are things that we love at stake, we have to be very awake.
In the Thai Forest tradition, a dhamma talk must be requested. I think it’s usually a very junior monastic, sometimes an anagarika9 or something like that, asking formally for the talk. This means that a talk is only ever a response to a need, not a product. It means that the dharma is always shared consensually, that the teacher only exists because a student exists. Otherwise, she would not exist. And this ensures that the teacher speaks into a kind of field of sincerity, that the dharma is transmitted from warm hand to warm hand.
The blessings of the path do not belong to us, and you cannot own goodness. The dharma, just like a person, is unpossessible. And ownership is really a core egoic fantasy. Part of a dharma life, of living a dharma-centric life, is living a life amidst the felt sense of unpossessibility. Because the ego is always trying to exert power, we talk often about surrender, the dissolution of willfulness. We talk about vulnerability and softening and suppleness. Yeah, that’s all necessary.
We don’t talk about it in this lineage, but I had a mentor in the Tibetan lineage, and they’re always talking about power. The path cultivates power. Wisdom is power. Love is power. Cultivating Sila, Samadhi, Panna, plugging into the measureless merit of the triple gem, we potentize our actions. Actions become more potent, more good, more ill. And the more powerful one becomes on this path, the more force one is marshalling, and that cuts both ways: the power to heal and to harm. That’s sometimes like saying in medicine, anything potent enough to heal is potent enough to harm, to have side effects. And as practitioners, we become interested in accruing power insofar as it helps us alleviate suffering, our own and that of others.
The more powerful I become through my own practice, through my own maturation, the more seriously you will take me when I say something like, “Be kind with yourself,” or “It’s safe to let go,” or a million other things. But there’s another part of me that doesn’t want power or attention at all. Once the student is gone, the teacher dissolves.
Kittisaro goes on to speak about Sila as a protection. We do our best to follow the principles of non-harming, but we, in a sense, can never have a completely lucid view of ourselves. There’s some measure of unconsciousness, and so we rely on others to harmonize our understanding of our intentions and our effects, our impacts. And we become more and more calibrated, you know, our intentions and impacts become more tightly coupled, but we can never be sure. The open loops of feedback are essential for communal safety. That’s how a Sangha stays well.
“We’re waving the banner of the awakened one, representing that extraordinary heritage, partaking in the trustworthy power and prestige.” That’s big. Those are big words. I like those words. Partaking in the trustworthy power and prestige. We want to be worthy of that banner. And we do our best to—it’s not emulating something—we do our best to be ourselves and represent that heritage. You can’t perform the dharma. You can’t partake in that power and prestige through performance. You’re becoming the dharma, and in becoming it, you are also becoming yourself. And that experience of becoming dharma, becoming oneself, that evolves on our path.
So, power and reverence. Cultivating power means it’s even more important to cultivate the safety of Sila. And we see when power and love diverge, there’s tremendous damage. So we must be powerful and must be safe. Insight into emptiness gives us power, and deep self-understanding makes us more and more safe. And our life becomes a kind of trace of goodness, less and less debris, more and more a kind of quiet trace of goodness.
So this week, how will you cultivate and use your power? And how can you serve as making your heart serve as a refuge, making your heart a refuge for all beings? Can you do this? It’s our homework.
Okay folks, lots of love. Wish you well.
Four Noble Truths: The foundational teaching of Buddhism, which outlines the nature of suffering (Dukkha), its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. ↩
Sila: A Pali word that means “ethical conduct” or “morality.” It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Kittisaro: A former Rhodes Scholar and Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest tradition of Ajahn Chah for 15 years. He is a co-founder of Dharmagiri Hermitage in South Africa. ↩
Thanissara: A former Buddhist nun in the Thai Forest tradition of Ajahn Chah. She is a co-founder of Dharmagiri Hermitage in South Africa. ↩
Ajahn Chah: (1918-1992) A highly revered Thai Buddhist monk and a master of the Thai Forest Tradition. He was instrumental in establishing Buddhism in the West. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word meaning “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to the development of a calm, focused, and collected mind through meditation. ↩
Panna: A Pali word for “wisdom” or “insight.” It refers to the direct, intuitive understanding of the nature of reality, particularly the three marks of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). ↩
Sangha: A Pali word that can refer to the community of Buddhist monks and nuns, or more broadly to the community of all Buddhist practitioners. ↩
Anagarika: A Pali term for a person who has committed to the eight precepts and serves a monastic community, often as a step towards full ordination. It literally means “homeless one.” ↩