This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Renunciation and Dana; Wholesome Qualities of Mind (4 of 5); The Parami of Metta. 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, welcome folks. Good morning to you. Good afternoon. I need a little help on a meditation theme. So, crowdsourced, I see renunciation and generosity, and maybe we’ll orient around that. So, it’s good to be practicing with you, and let’s be still together.
We never put down anything which brings genuine happiness. But we practice putting down everything that does not. In other words, we find what we want. We find more and more freedom amidst restriction.
So what can we put down in order to arrive here more fully?
The gesture of putting down is not one of forcefully throwing something away, ripping something from our grasp. It’s a kind of unclenching of the fist, relaxing, recognizing that something was held in place by holding on.
We practice putting down the anxious project of our life. It’s not to say that we don’t have much to tend to. But for right now, we lay down greed and distress with respect to the world. A basic instruction from the Satipatthana Sutta.1
And that doesn’t mean we stop feeling aversion and grasping. It’s just that we give up the illusion that aversion and grasping can ever work out just how we envision. And so we breathe and relax and absorb whatever backlash there is in letting go.
It feels like each moment is bound into a trajectory towards something good, something not good. It’s our job to mold and direct it. In renouncing some measure of control, we stop imagining where this moment leads, what it means for the project of my life, and use it as a kind of invitation to let go.
It’s said that ownership is a node around which greed and hatred coagulate. So we keep letting go.
As the territoriality of the mind and self starts to soften, we are reborn into a world of gratitude and generosity. In other words, in the wake of letting go, a million forms of goodness are a cause to rejoice. We enter our life with gift-bestowing hands.
As we drain the egoic pressure from our mind, we create less defensiveness in others. And warmth and goodwill, generosity and gratitude flow more and more naturally. Deep ties between letting go and love.
When the grip is softened, the territoriality of the mind is softened, life becomes a gift. This breath is dana.2 Your body, dana. Your life, whatever is left of it, is dana. And we receive it with a kind of heartbreakingly poignant gratitude.
Okay, it’s good to sit with you. So all that about non-ownership was not me side-eyeing Sandra with the rental car break-in or something like that. No, that was… I mean, not technically your car, and I’m sorry. But I’m speaking in a different register here. [Laughter]
Anyway, it’s good to be with you. So today, moving through the paramis—only five days in the week, ten paramis, but we’re doing what we can. And I talk about love often and not infrequently get some real pushback. And not from the haters, but from sincere people for whom the word “love” has weird associations.
And so let me just declare at the top of the hour here that I am allergic to saccharine, sentimental, Hallmark card love. I like my love adjacent to death, personally.
At Christmas time, the in-laws watched a Lifetime Christmas movie and played Christmas movie bingo, which was the first time I’d partaken in this particular pastime. But people get different bingo cards, and you sit around watching the TV, watching a Lifetime Christmas movie with your bingo card and a pen. And everyone has different squares, right? And the squares include—and these movies are so predictable that you can have bingo squares that routinely nail what happens in these movies, right? And the squares include things like: “romantic lead has sworn off love for good,” “implied that someone is actually an angel or Santa,” “city girl learns to love small town,” “hot cocoa.” These are the kind of squares.
And I sit there like a kind of grizzled old curmudgeon, you know, and I just rejoice in this profoundly cynical exercise. And it makes a very, very bad movie incredibly exciting to watch, you know, reviewing my bingo card. That is not the love of which I speak.
Dharma love is a love thoroughly infused with wisdom. And most teachers—maybe it’s not fair, but the way I feel, most teachers tend to be love teachers or wisdom teachers. It’s not that they don’t have both, but they tend towards one side or the other. And some are truly a blend. It’s not like the blended characters are the most valuable or something like that. But for me, Michelle McDonald is one of those people where you really, you know, in sitting with her, listening to a talk, you really can sense actively the indivisibility of love and wisdom.
She says, “Loving-kindness is what holds the universe together.” It’s the fabric of the universe. And you can say that it holds us so that we can actually face how things are. Without kindness, without care, without appreciative joy, we don’t have the strength or courage to be with things as they are. Without love, life is kind of hellish, you know. And I use “love” in the broadest sense of the word, but the Buddhist cosmology includes a hell realm that is utterly devoid of love.
And in my moments of deepest concern about our humanity’s future, it’s the dissolution of love that I’m picturing. And when you become committed to love, it matters a little less how everything’s going. In some ways it matters more, but also less. At least it matters a little differently. You still root for things to go well, but when they don’t, you actually have confidence that there’s a secure net to fall back into. When we know in our bones, “I’m going to have to love my way through this,” through this moment, through this life, things actually change.
And so we train in love. And sometimes it’s hard to know how deeply the love has been entrained until we get a fantastic opportunity for hate. And maybe we’ve had such moments.
And samsara,3 this realm where suffering is endemic, samsara is not utopia. There will forever be things to object to. There will forever be that which might be hated. And the truth is, even if we did somehow manage to find our way into utopia, we’d have to put our aversion somewhere. We’d have to start hating something because it seems like problems find us. The defects of the world find us. But sometimes that’s merely illusion. And in fact, the gestalt of it is that our pain is finding a placeholder.
Non-hatred lies at the intersection of many, many Buddhist teachings. Letting go—hatred, we find this in our own circuits. Hatred requires that we hold on. Love is completely compatible with letting go. Renunciation, this theme from the meditation, the flavor of renunciation is quite alien to hate. We study the pain involved in aversion, become sensitive to it. We study sila,4 ethical conduct, and the indivisibility of goodness and happiness. There’s no such thing as a closed-hearted happiness. Pleasure, yeah. But deep happiness is foreclosed to those not living in love.
This is Ajahn Sucitto’s5 idiosyncratic description of the Brahma-viharas:6 of metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha.7
This is a malleable love, a love taking different shapes. Today, metta, this willingness, sense of offering itself. Metta is love in the face of goodness, love moved by goodness. Love takes the form of metta when we perceive goodness. And we come to perceive it in so many places, become more sensitive to it. And the alternatives to love, namely apathy or hatred, they’re just not viable. And so we’re kind of stuck with love. There are details to work out, but the path is very clear.
There’s a character from Dostoevsky8 who famously said, “If God doesn’t exist, everything’s permitted.” And I get that fear, but to my mind, it’s almost the reverse. If this life is all we have, if we are living in the blink between the two halves of all the time there is, love makes even more sense.
And we discover the necessity of love in our nervous system. It’s not an idea. It’s not some moralistic vision. It’s not Hallmark card love. We really find it in the circuits, the kind of architecture of our nervous system. We discover sila, ethical conduct, non-harming, in our nervous system. It’s not an idea. And so in a way, you can say we discover love as the highest form of hedonism.
I offer this for your consideration and wish you all a good day. And do keep out an eye for the opportunities to notice goodness and to rejoice in it. So I wish you all well. Have a good day. See you tomorrow.
Satipatthana Sutta: The Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a key Buddhist text providing instructions on mindfulness practice. ↩
Dana: A Pali word meaning “generosity” or “giving.” It is a fundamental virtue in Buddhism. ↩
Samsara: The cycle of death and rebirth, characterized by suffering, to which all beings in the material world are bound. ↩
Sila: A Pali word that means “ethical conduct” or “morality.” It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Ajahn Sucitto: A British-born Theravada Buddhist monk and the former abbot of Cittaviveka, Chithurst Buddhist Monastery. He is known for his poetic and insightful teachings. ↩
Brahma-viharas: The four “divine abodes” or “sublime states” in Buddhism: loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha). ↩
Metta, Karuna, Mudita, Upekkha: These are the four Brahma-viharas. The original transcript had “meta karuna mud pekka” and later “widpan” for upekkha. ↩
Dostoevsky: Fyodor Dostoevsky, a 19th-century Russian novelist. The quote “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted” is often attributed to his character Ivan Karamazov in the novel The Brothers Karamazov, though the exact phrasing does not appear in the book. ↩