This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Doing the Practice Together; Dharmette: Animal Similes (3 of 5) Cow – Sangha and Trust. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an unknown speaker at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Why don’t we go ahead and start as people are continuing to trickle in. While people were arriving, I commented on how long it’s been. Somebody wrote it’s been since April 2020, so that’s right around the beginning of the pandemic. I think it’s nice now and then to reflect on the value of connecting with other people in our practice and the support that we gain from meditating together in a group. Even if we’re not physically in the same room, I think for some that’s been a real discovery. Maybe some weren’t surprised by that; the dharma doesn’t really have a place and a time, but nonetheless, it does matter.
So carrying that with us, let’s begin our meditation together, closing the eyes if that’s comfortable for you and finding a posture for sitting. You could be lying down or standing. Maybe taking a long, slow, deep breath, and on the out-breath, just softening a bit into the position that you’re in, whatever posture your body feels is good for you today for this sit.
And inviting some ease in the body, which is always possible even if there’s pain or illness. We can invite just a sense of being at home. So perhaps bringing attention into the face and just softening the expression on the face, softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Sensing into the head area and just inviting some calming, some easing of any thinking that might be going on. Not that there’s anything wrong with thinking, but just making it softer.
Down through the jaw and the neck. Bringing some attention to the shoulder area, maybe letting the shoulder blades slide down the back. Releasing the arms. Letting the chest area and all the way down into the belly, just letting that be itself, how we do this right now. Softening the low back area. Sensing where the hips and seat are resting if you’re in the sitting posture, and then down through the legs, softening any bracing that might be there.
In a way, we’re just trusting the body to be as it is. By touching it with the attention, we let it know that we’re here, we see it. And that begins to bring into the mind the simple awareness that we call mindfulness. Knowing things clearly without demanding that they be a certain way, knowing them as they are.
For the process of meditation, it is helpful to intentionally choose something to orient around. Often people use the breath, but if that isn’t so right for you, you can use body sensations or sounds. These are present-moment objects. I find that when I use the breath, for example, it’s kind of just a touchstone, and I can still sense the flow of thoughts and emotions. I do still hear sounds, but I’m breathing along with all of those things. Mindfulness isn’t really exclusive, but it is a way of orienting so we’re not just following anything that happens.
The invitation in this sit is to have a simple intention of being simple. When the mind gets complicated, it gets lost in its thoughts or fantasies, memories, and we notice that, we simply return. The support for that, also an invitation, is to bring in a brief acknowledgment that we are all doing this together. There are actually hundreds of people around the globe doing this sit. So without adding any complexity, just remembering that we’re doing this together and see how that goes with simple mindfulness.
Gently present with our own experience, and yet a small part of awareness attuned to being part of this larger group. How does that feel as we continue to stay with the flow of our own experience?
The instructions for mindfulness meditation are actually quite simple, and they’ve worked for countless people over millennia. We are not an exception to this rule. These lines are from the Dhammapada1:
Think not lightly of good, saying, “It will not come to me.” Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise one, gathering it little by little, fills oneself with good.
Breath by breath, moment by moment, the mind gathers goodness, clarity, and strength from doing this practice that so many have done and so many are doing together right now.
As we move toward the end of our sit together, we can begin to bring the mind toward thinking about our life out in the world. And really, it’s the same mind. We can continue with the simple trust in mindfulness and wholesomeness. This kind of trust is not about blindly following instructions or rules or creating algorithms that might not be so wise. But we know that we can trust in the Eightfold Path because we’ve seen for ourselves that it’s beneficial. To whatever degree you’ve practiced—and everyone here has now practiced at least 30 minutes of mindfulness—we can see that there’s something beneficial there. That’s the basis for trusting in mindfulness and wholesomeness.
So that means doing actions like wise speech, living mindfully, having intentions of harmlessness, and appropriate kinds of letting go as a way of being in the world. We may find then that by knowing, just internally knowing that we have a path, we can relax a bit as we go through our life in the world. We don’t always know what to do or how to deal with certain things, but we have a path. It’ll be good to approach with mindfulness and wholesomeness, and that’s enough. And even that small amount of ease that we have from knowing internally that we have a path can support others. They can feel our own ease, and that helps them too.
So may it be that we walk through the world clearly knowing that mindfulness and wholesomeness are beneficial for all.
This week, we are using animal similes to discuss the journey that the mind takes from not being wise to being wiser or even free. There’s a dharma instruction in each of these cases that comes forth as we use each of these animals. With the quail, it was about getting to safety. If you stray into mindlessness, come back to the body or the feeling tone or the mood of the mind or some aspect of the dharma—just coming back to the present.
Then with the monkey yesterday, there was a little bit more. Monkeys also stray out of mindfulness, but then we were also asked to notice the various patterns that are taking the mind into distraction. So monkey mind, as it’s called, is to be investigated to understand how it is that we get caught up. That’s the beginning of insight practice.
Once the mind is protected by mindfulness and has a sense of how to investigate its own activity, we could say that we’re engaged in what this tradition calls “crossing the flood.” It means that we’re learning to navigate this mind and body while living our life here with other people. The “flood” is kind of a word for distractions like greed, hatred, and delusion, and other challenges that come into the mind: wanting to have certain identities, wanting to grasp on to things. Those are all the floods that can overwhelm us. But once we have the tools, we can begin to cross over that toward having some freedom from these forces in our mind. And sometimes freedom is called “the other shore,” as if we’re going to that place, although it’s not really a place; it’s right here.
But today, for our animal, we are moving on to the cow. Now, there are a lot of cows in the suttas.2 It was an agricultural society at the time of the Buddha, so everybody knew about cows. If you said “cow,” everybody had an image of what that was. It may be less obvious for us, but I think you’ll get the point. There’s a wide range of cow analogies, but the majority are in the realm that we’re going to talk about today.
Cows are herd animals, and they tend to follow a leader. This is actually an important aspect of our path. There’s a sutta about cows crossing a river under the guidance of a cowherd. In the sutta, the Buddha first talks about the cowherd. In one case, there’s an unwise cowherd who doesn’t look carefully to understand the near shore and the far shore, and then she drives her cows across the Ganges River where there isn’t a ford. So there’s kind of no understanding of what’s going on, and this doesn’t turn out very well for the cows.
But then there’s a wise cowherd who understands both the near shore and the far shore and drives her cows across the river at a place that has a ford. She’s also further wise about which cows can swim better than others, and she chooses to send them across in a wise order. First, the cowherd drives across the bulls, the kind of strong leaders of the herd. And it says in the sutta, “they breasted the stream of the Ganges and safely reached the far shore.” So you imagine these bulls having no trouble crossing a river.
Then after that, she drives across what are called the “strong, intractable cows,” and they too breast the stream of the Ganges and safely reach the far shore. Then she drives across the bullocks and the heifers, the younger cows, and they all breast the stream and reach the far shore. And then finally, the calves and the weak cattle, the ones maybe who are sick or otherwise weakened, and they too can get across and get safely to the far shore. Then it adds this little line that said, “Once it happened that a baby calf had just been born, urged on by its mother’s lowing, even it managed to breast the stream of the Ganges and safely reach the far shore.”
It’s a nice image of these cows, and then there’s an analogy created. The bulls are likened to arahants,3 to people who are fully awakened. Then the other groups of cows are likened to people who are not fully awakened but do have various degrees of wisdom. This is a smart way to do it, right? So that when the smaller or the weaker or younger cows see the other ones before them getting across the river and reaching the far shore safely, they feel confident in entering the river also. Some cows are not very strong swimmers, but even they can get across. Even the tiny calf is inspired when cheered on by the lowing of its mother.
I like to say that what we see here is the value of having a teacher on our path and having real guidance, you know, having good meditation instructions and also having some kind of a group that we’re working with, like a Sangha.4 We do need this in some way along our path. That might be being with a literal in-person group, but not everybody has that. It can also be an online group like this one, for example, or it could be taking guidance from a teacher in some other way, but somehow getting clear instructions and a sense that we’re doing this in line with the tradition and in line with other people helps a lot.
The Buddha is likened to the cowherd. He claims to fully understand the human condition—that’s the near shore and the far shore—and also to know that there is a ford. He knows that the teachings he’s offering really will work and that we can get across the river of difficulties in our life and in our mind if we do mindfulness practice and follow the various kinds of instructions that are found in the Buddhist teachings.
There are also lots of suttas that use this image of crossing the flood to talk about the journey to freedom, so it isn’t just this one with the cows. We can even do all of this now in this modern world where we don’t have a living Buddha. Notice that the cows were following the stronger cows. It’s good enough to watch older dharma students and to listen to a modern-day dharma teacher by whom you feel inspired, like the calf listening to its mother, for example.
I remember when I went on my first residential retreat. It was a nine-night retreat, and I had only done a daylong before that. That was the longest I had ever meditated. I was going on this nine-night retreat, and it was very helpful for me when I was there to see the more experienced practitioners. What were they doing? Sitting, walking, sitting, walking, following the schedule, sitting still in the hall. And so I just did that too. I figured that was what you did on retreat, and it worked great. I fell in love with retreats right away. So yeah, I was listening to the dharma talks and instructions also, of course, but the teachers aren’t in the hall all the time. So it was really important that I could watch people who had been on more retreats than me.
Maybe it’s worth some time of reflection: what is your inspiration? What keeps you going? Are there ways in which you have observed others and gained confidence on the path in some way?
It’s also worth pointing out that this is not a static process, if that makes sense. If we want to get all the way across the river and not, say, stop in the middle, we’re going to need to move forward in some appropriate way. For example, if you started meditation by listening to guided meditations, that is great, and it’s great for a while. It may keep you on the cushion; it keeps your mind coming back to have prompts coming through your ears. But at some point, it’s also important to learn how to guide yourself in meditation and not have to listen to a guided meditation.
Or if you like listening to dharma talks, that’s great. I listen to dharma talks from time to time. But also, you may want to try some study to directly learn the teachings. This has effects at levels that we can’t even see—to study the suttas or to learn the structure of the dharma. If you have a regular sitting practice where you find a time to sit every day, that’s really great. That’s not easy for everyone to do. But then how about trying a daylong? You know, set aside a whole day where all you do is sit and walk and listen to the dharma. And probably eventually, most of us will benefit from some kind of extended retreat time if we’re able to manage that, get the conditions in our life. That can take longer to arrange, but you know, keep going. Keep going across the river. Keep looking to those who are farther along.
At the same time, keep listening to that within you that wants to cross the flood. Sometimes, and maybe eventually more and more of the time, the guidance that we take—the cowherd and even the other cows—seem to come from inside as well as outside. This is again a way of talking about our ongoing insight journey.
In the cow, I see an element of humility. We do need help crossing. That’s not about self-deprecation or making ourselves small; that’s different from real humility. In a sense, it’s just the reality that we won’t go as far on our path if we try to walk completely alone. So I have a certain fondness for the humble cow. Maybe we could say that the cow is about Sangha and trust in just continuing the work of going step-by-step across the river. And we can do it. We can cross this flood.
So continuing on, we’ll have another animal tomorrow. Thank you very much. Be well.
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. ↩
Sutta: A discourse or sermon by the Buddha or one of his disciples. These are collected in the Sutta Pitaka. ↩
Arahant: In Theravada Buddhism, an arahant is a “perfected person” who has attained full awakening (Nibbana) and is liberated from the cycle of rebirth. ↩
Sangha: The community of Buddhist monks, nuns, and laypeople. In a broader sense, it refers to the community of all those on the Buddhist path. ↩