This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Free of Mara’s Traps; Animal Similes (4 of 5) Deer – Vitality and Confidence. 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 to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Let’s go ahead and get started with our theme and meditation for today. I think we’ll just jump right in, so let’s go ahead and start meditating together.
Find a posture that has some ease in it, allowing the body to settle into sitting, or perhaps you’re lying down. Gently close the eyes if that’s comfortable for you; it’s encouraged. Bring the attention inward.
Sense the contact points: the chair or the cushion that you’re sitting on, or the bed; your legs or feet against the floor. Just allow yourself to be supported by what you’re sitting on.
Bring gentle attention to softening the body into meditation. Soften the eyes in their sockets. Soften the jaw. Allow the shoulders to relax, maybe drop a bit. Soften down through the chest and the belly area. Release tension in the arms and legs.
Sense if the body feels aligned, balanced. I have found this sense of alignment or balance to be dynamic. It’s not that I can set it at the beginning and then it’s there; it’s more that I attune to it and find it helpful to keep adjusting toward balance.
Then, bring in the quality of mindfulness, consciously attuning to clearly knowing what’s happening in experience in a simple, gentle way.
As we’ve been doing throughout the week, I encourage choosing some kind of an anchor for awareness, for mindfulness. A common one is the breath—the sensations of breathing in and out. Or, more general sensations in the body. Or sometimes, what feels most natural is to just connect to the sounds in the environment. People can find a lot of ease in the way the sounds just come and go; we’re not controlling them.
The idea of the anchor is simply to have a home base for the mind. It doesn’t exclude other experiences. I sometimes see it as foreground and background. So, maybe putting the breath in the foreground, and then other things come and go—thoughts or sounds—more peripherally, in the background.
Inevitably, the mind will sometimes catch on to one of these other experiences, and then we find ourselves thinking or distracted or zoning out in some way. The invitation for today is to see the return to mindfulness as an opening of freedom. In a certain way, once we know that the mind is being tempted by something that it wants or something it would like to push away, if we see that—just stepping back enough to see it—is a little bit of freedom.
There’s a wonderful phrase that people use sometimes: noticing forces that would take the mind out of balance, you can say, “I see you, Mara.”1 Mara, representing the forces of destruction. And then simply returning to the anchor in the foreground and resting with experience.
Seeing the flow of the mind and seeing the forces that distract as somehow not really us, like winds that blow through or eddies in a stream. And when we don’t believe them or buy into them, then the mind remains free, simple.
As we practice with seeing the flow of the mind and its distractions, we begin to gain a sense of confidence. Ah, it is possible. It is possible to see just before the mind slips away. Maybe there’s a little wavering or a little flutter of energy, and there can be a moment where we see that and the mind doesn’t go off. Maybe it goes off again the next time, but having seen that, there’s increasing confidence in the mindfulness, in strengthening awareness, just seeing in this gentle, clear way.
As we come toward the end of this sitting, sense that just as in sitting we started to realize, “Ah, many things can be seen,” we can carry this out into the world. We can also bring a sense of confidence that it’s possible to notice the state of our mind, to be able to see things—reactions, perhaps—before we say something. And understanding that this way of seeing clearly and with a caring attitude will protect others as well as ourselves.
Sometimes it helps to have a deliberate sense of, “Yes, I know this can work.” Not every time—mindfulness goes up and down—but yes, this is a way that continues to support me and others. And as I practice it, it becomes stronger. Potentially, it’s always possible to see the mind. And to realize how wonderful, how wonderful that possibility of bringing our care to the world in whatever it is that we’re doing, in support of ourselves and others. May our mindfulness and our practice be of support to those around us.
May all beings partake of the goodness of this path.
Our dharma path of insight continues today. Through practice, the mind is learning to see rather than fall into things like greed, hatred, and delusion that come up in the mind. We start to understand through the journey of insight that these issues are not really us. We’re not a greedy person inherently; it’s just that wanting and grasping can arise in the mind due to certain conditions. As our view becomes clearer and more accurate, we can gain some confidence in this skill of seeing clearly.
We’re using the animal similes this week as a way to understand the path, and today we turn to the deer. In suttas, deer generally have a positive connotation. We talked about the cow yesterday and noticed that deer and cows are similar in the sense that both of them are herd animals. But cows are domesticated and handled by humans, whereas deer are wild. They’re inherently freer, more independent-minded. Maybe they have to be somewhat smarter and tougher than cows by virtue of living in the wild.
In the Buddhist texts, the deer is a symbol of not being tied down. They have some measure of strength and independence, and yet at the same time, deer can still be led astray or trapped or hunted. So they’re still in some ways vulnerable and need some protection. But overall, these qualities add up to deer tending to represent a person who is on the path, someone who is making their way to freedom.
There’s a text called the Nivapa Sutta,2 which means “The Bait,” that contrasts different herds of deer in how they relate to a trapper’s traps. It starts out by noting that the deer trapper has bad intentions for the deer. A deer trapper laying down traps is likened to the way Mara goes to distract or take over a meditator’s mind. Deer trappers lay down this bait with the hope that the deer will unwittingly eat the bait and become intoxicated, and then be at the trapper’s mercy. In the same way, Mara, in the form of our own habits, can trick us into becoming unmindful, and then we become vulnerable. Remember at the beginning of the week we talked about how the quail and the monkey stray out of their ancestral domain of mindfulness, and that’s when they can be harmed or trapped or attacked. When we believe the stories that our mind tells us, or when we identify strongly with things that come up like anger or envy, then we could say that we are intoxicated like the deer. We’ve taken the bait, and then we’re likely to do things that bring harm. In Buddhist understanding, we would say then Mara can do with us as he will.
That’s the framework for understanding these herds of deer that are described in this sutta. It’s said that the first herd of deer goes right in among the bait and gets trapped. They don’t pay any attention. This is like somebody who lives without mindfulness, always falling into greed, hatred, and delusion, always suffering the consequences of those kinds of mind states in their life.
Then the second herd of deer sees what happened with the first herd, so they’re learning by watching the others. This second herd decides to ignore the bait, to shun it. They just try to avoid it. But then it happens that near the end of the hot season, a time when there isn’t much water available, they lose their resolve and they eat the bait anyway. So they also get trapped. This is a little bit like trying to avoid hindrances or difficulties by bypassing or ignoring them. We close our eyes or we plug our ears and say, “la la la.” We don’t associate with any irritating people. We just try to restrict our life so that we don’t have things that bring up the challenge or hindrances. That kind of works, but it’s artificial. We’re trying to control the outside in order not to have those things come up in us, and eventually that will break down. That’s not actually the path to freedom, just avoiding things that we find difficult.
Then the third herd of deer is trying to learn from both of the other ones. They don’t want to do those things, and they decide to be clever. They live within the range of the trapper, but they’re very cautious about what they eat and they hide at night. But the trapper is able to add extra surveillance and see where they are hiding. The trapper notices that they’re being very careful about what they eat and don’t eat, even though they’re right there among the bait. So the trapper adjusts and adds in extra surveillance. This is a way in which Mara is actually adaptable. When we try to avoid Mara in some way, Mara might change his tactics too. The mind is subtle and clever; it finds ways to be distracted even when we think we’ve solved one issue. And so the trapper is still able to lure this third herd of deer into eating the bait anyway. The Buddha likens people like this to those who adopt certain fixed views. They live their life seemingly peacefully because they’re adhering to some kind of a fixed view, but they’re not really responding authentically; they’re living more in an idealized world. This is a more subtle way of being caught.
And then the fourth herd also learns from the others, and so they make their home outside the range of the trapper. This is likened to jhānas3 or samādhi4 practice. When the mind is deeply in the present moment and practicing concentration, hindrances cannot take hold in the mind. It’s said that Mara is temporarily blindfolded when the mind is practicing, especially in jhāna. At the beginning of this path, we become free of greed, hatred, and delusion. We can use that samādhi for insight. The sutta then goes on to say that if samādhi is used for insight, one can become completely free.
Here, the deer are smart. First of all, they can learn by watching others. Smart meditators can outsmart Mara in certain ways. The dharma lesson is that it’s through the training of our mind, and especially by practicing samādhi and even jhāna, that we can overcome the forces of harm in our mind and hence in the world. It isn’t a way that we can just fiddle with things externally and become completely free. It doesn’t work that way. We have to train from the inside, particularly through these deep mental trainings of orienting the mind around a concentration object. This is an extended analogy for the path where we do what we can externally to try to avoid the bait of Mara, but all of that is for the purpose of getting the mind into a concentrated state from which we can do insight practice and really see down to the roots of suffering.
The deer analogy goes on into many other suttas. They talk about how deer live confidently because of this adaptability and intelligence. For example, in one of the suttas where the Buddha talks about his own awakening, he gives an analogy to a deer. He says, “Suppose a forest deer is wandering in the forest wilds. He walks confidently, stands confidently, sits confidently, and lies down confidently. Why is that? Because he is out of the hunter’s range.” There’s something about the deer—when practice becomes clear in us and we’re understanding what we’re doing, we’re not free yet completely, but we kind of know how to walk the path. There’s a confidence that comes with that, a confidence that comes from our own stability inside.
This is where the gentle, ongoing practice of the cow that we talked about yesterday—trusting in the instructions, just continuing to follow them—bears fruit into the deer of confidence, the confidence of “Yeah, this really does work. I’m not free yet, but I can see the path.”
There’s a lovely story of a monk named Bhaddiya,5 who was a former king. He used to live a royal life with a lot of guards protecting him, but he became much happier when he gave all that up and became a monk, living openly in the forest. He has a quote that says: “Formerly, when I was a layperson, a king, my guard was well organized within and without the royal compound, within and without the city, and within and without the country. Although I was guarded and defended in this way, I remained fearful, scared, suspicious, and nervous. These days, even when alone in the wilderness, at the foot of a tree, or in an empty dwelling, I am not fearful, scared, suspicious, or nervous. I live relaxed, unworried, surviving on alms, my heart free as a wild deer.”
In this, we see that you can do what you can externally to protect yourself, but the path of meditative development, of developing the mind, is what really frees the heart. We start to see the deer in us, maybe the essence of the deer in us, as we practice longer, as we have more insights. We start to see clearly and start to understand something about how suffering comes about, how the mind gets drawn into it, and how it gets free of it. It all starts to feel like a process. We’re not free yet, but we see the path.
If the cow is about healthy humility, the deer is about healthy dignity and confidence, without going as far as overconfidence or conceit. Deer can still be trapped, they can still take the bait, they can still be hunted, but we are starting to trust in our heart’s sense of confidence and dignity, vitality and confidence.
May we discover the deer within us as we continue to walk the path of insight.
Mara: In Buddhism, a demonic celestial king who personifies the forces of temptation, distraction, and spiritual obstruction. He is the archetypal enemy of the Buddha and his teachings, representing the passions and delusions that bind beings to the cycle of rebirth. Saying “I see you, Mara” is a practice of mindfully acknowledging and disarming unwholesome mental states. ↩
Nivapa Sutta: The “Discourse on the Bait” (Majjhima Nikāya 25). The speaker refers to it as the “Napa Suta,” but the standard Pali name is Nivapa Sutta. This text uses the simile of four herds of deer to illustrate different approaches to the dangers of sensual pleasures. ↩
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption, characterized by profound stillness, concentration, and bliss. There are traditionally four form jhānas and four formless jhānas, each representing a progressively deeper level of concentration. ↩
Samādhi: A Pali word for concentration or a state of meditative calm. It is the practice of steadying the mind on a single object, leading to tranquility and clarity. It is one of the three divisions of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Bhaddiya: One of the Buddha’s disciples, formerly a Sakyan prince and a king. He was known for exclaiming “Oh, what happiness! Oh, what happiness!” after becoming a monk, reflecting his relief from the fears and burdens of his royal life. The story is found in the Udāna (Ud 2.10). ↩