Burlington Buddhist Sangha

Forgiveness is not a parami or a brahma-vihara. However, forgiveness is an important skill for us to develop along the Buddha’s path. Forgiveness requires love, compassion, joy and equanimity. As part of the human experience we will naturally be hurt and hurt others. If we cannot forgive others or cannot forgive ourselves, our suffering will only continue the cycle of harm. Forgiveness offers a path to freedom from this cycle.

This week, Jeff shared a talk given this year by Tara Brach titled “The RAIN of Forgiveness,” in which she moves beyond inviting us to forgive and lays out mindfulness-based tool to heal and free our hearts: RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture).

You can listen to the talk here: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/76321/

• Our “armoring” is tied to preventing further harm and represents an ancient coping strategy
• Forgiveness begins when we start to sense the pain that comes from pushing others out of our heart
• We cover our inane purity with our defenses and then we identify with the coverings
• “Should” is an argument with reality
• “If you want to see the brave, take a look at those who forgive.”
• Our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive
• Forgiveness is a process
  • We bring compassion to the wounded place within us first
  • We see that the other person is also suffering
• RAIN practice
  • Recognize the feelings within ourselves
  • Allowing the feelings to be there
  • Investigate the felt sense within our bodies
  • Nurture the wounded person within ourselves
• When we forgive, we still protect ourselves against future harm
• Tara also discusses forgiveness as a societal level, moving from a system of punishment (and banishment) to a system which includes forgiveness

Eveline guided our reflections this Sunday, exploring how we can learn a lot about being equanimous by investigating our interbeing with the earth.
      The Buddha often remarked that the earth accommodates everything that happens to it without reactivity: it is whole and equanimous.  We often feel we need to find our way back to the earth, when really we have never been separated from it, as the wave is never separate from the ocean.
      If we want a peaceful world, we need to be peaceful people—to find inner quiet, with a heart as wide as the world.
      In honor of Earth Day, we explored these the deep, intimate, and expansive connections, drawing from Eveline’s framing perspective, excerpts from a talk by Howard Cohn, and our own shared inquiry.

You can listen to Howard’s talk here: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/53452/

Earth Poem by Bhaswat Chakraborty: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/earth-40/

If we look at the stories that make up most of our mental chatter, we come to see that even if they seem to range broadly, they are mostly in fact about ourselves, and actually help to create and the sense of self.   This phenomenon, called mana papanca (mental proliferation around the sense of self), and is the subject of a talk by Christina Feldman, excerpts of which was be offered for discussion as Sam guided our reflections at this week’s sangha.

A link to the talk is forthcoming.

We reflected this week on the instructions that the Buddha gave to Bahiya about what is sometimes called bare attention, or sometimes mindfulness:  “In the seen, let there be just the seen, in the heard let there be just the heard”, and so on.  These ostensibly simple instructions are at the heart of the practice, and worth aspiring to implement, although doing that is not quite so simple. Margaret guided our reflections, drawing on the teachings of Sally Armstrong and others to explore this theme.

You can listen to Sally’s talk here:

https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/73215.html

You can read a translation of the teaching to Bahiya here:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html

Also read was this excerpt from the Malunkyaputta Sutta:

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN35_95.html

When we study a natural phenomenon or a discipline, we usually seek to accumulate knowledge, hoping to find wisdom that will help us to grasp the situation clearly. With meditation, the approach may sometimes be reversed: we may seek to shed old ways of seeing, and genuinely attempt to not-know. Eric guided our reflections this Sunday, with the help of excerpts from Stephen Batchelor’s bringing to light his work in Korean Zen, and guiding us into the heart of Not-Knowing, freshly asking of whatever we may encounter, “What is this?”

You can listen to Stephen’s talk here:

https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/57897.html

Darryl guided our reflections on the Surprise of Impermanence this Sunday, drawing on excerpts from a talk by Carol Wilson, and using a musical recording to explore our shifting response to impermanence itself.

Carol’s talk can be found here:

https://dharmaseed.org/talks/73270/

You can listen to the music that was shared from Plum Village at this link:

https://web.plumvillage.app/item/cello-and-shruti-box-piece-4

Darryl also read an excerpt from a poem called “Teijitsu’s Awakening” which is available here.

During the discussion, Eric shared a talk by neuroscientist Anil Seth, which you can find here. Darryl referred to the Mind and Life podcast which you can find at their website.

Surrounded by bad news, in media’s algorithmic echo chambers — how can we find and nurture the joy that is our birthright? The practice of Mudita gives us countless opportunities to savor happiness as we celebrate the good fortune of others.  And such cheering information is available if we seek it out.  Lorilee framed our discussion this week after we heard Brian LeSage’s recent dharma talk “Expanding Joy”.

You can listen to Brian’s talk here:

https://dharmaseed.org/talks/75026/

Michael, drawing on the teaching of British dharma teacher Martin Aylward, centered the discussion this Sunday on the evolution of our relation to the dharma as our lives unfold. As we observe how our own practice has changed over time, we might come to see how it resonates with different phases of the life of Siddhartha as he came to awaken to his own Buddha nature. This is not to make us out as good little Buddhas, but rather to point out that the shifts and comings and goings of our own lives can be illuminated by the about-faces that characterized the far from straight unfolding of the life of the bodhisattva.

We may begin our spiritual explorations quite tentatively, dipping a toe in, experimenting with this or that technique early on, seeking ease and comfort—even escape. But at some point in our lives, we may find ourselves longing to lean into a more disciplined practice, perhaps an echo of the maturing Siddhartha’s about-face from a life or luxury and comfort to a stricter, more ascetic and disciplined focus. Perhaps like him we learned a good deal from this tightening up: it can be very energizing, but also, in time, exhausting, as dedication to a distant goal saps away energy for a fulfilling life in the actual present.

At one particularly strenuous point in his evolution, the Bodhisattva remembered a day from his early teens in which he was present at a great agricultural festival with his father, a scene filled with the labor of those who tilled the earth and the stresses experienced by the ruling family, of which he was member and heir. Yet amid all this strain, he managed to sideline himself, finding a quiet place in the shade of a rose-apple tree, where he relaxed profoundly, and effortlessly took in the beauty of the shifting light and shadows of the breeze-blown leaves, and the relief of not being at the center of things.

This restoration and renewal he experienced allowed him to remain fresh, easily energetic and committed through the long night leading up to his awakening . . . after which . . . after which, he did not burst forth into the world ready to promote new ideas and insights, but rather took an extended time—days and weeks—to look into the subtleties and implications of what he had come to understand about the world and himself. Before turning to speak of this, to move beyond what can be spoken about change and suffering and identity, he entered and dwelt in an understanding that allowed him to move through life with grace and generosity.

In the end, we, like him, can find an underlying direction in a life filled with switchbacks, seeming inconsistencies and contradictions. We can discover a mind that is by its nature inherently free, and deeply wed to the whole of life, with all its joys and sorrows; capacious, steady, tender, forgiving and grounded in life as it is, rather than how we once imagined it might turn out to be, if we only followed a straight and narrow path which seemed to present itself early on.

The basic disposition of human beings is to avoid unpleasant or painful feelings, and to seek more and more pleasant feelings, believing that doing so provides lasting happiness. Vedana, or feeling tone, arises in the moment of each sense contact and is experienced in one of three ways: as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Each of the ways is in the nature of a bare feeling with no associated emotional tones. However, based on the pleasant or unpleasant aspects of sense experience we form likes and dislikes. And based on the neutral aspects we form ‘overlooks’, the tendency to not even see people or things or events that don’t excite our passions.

This week Stephanie shared a talk by Carol Wilson in which she describes the vedana and the gratification and danger and escape from getting entranced by them.

You can listen to Carol’s talk here:

https://dharmaseed.org/talks/73038/

This week, Don guided our reflections on the relations (more complex that we might think) between meditative stillness and the way our mind usually operates: “Monkey Mind”, always looking for the next pleasure or trying to get away from the latest problem. We discussed the concept of samādhi as the Buddha meant it in his discourses. This is typically translated as “concentration”, but that implies success through force of will. In a talk by Marc Weber, we learned that samādhi is not so much something we do, but the result of practicing to bring the mind together, to collect all its wild experiences into a unified whole.

You can listen to Marc’s talk here:

https://dharmaseed.org/talks/74618/

Also brought up during the discussion was this video about an antarctic explorer retracing his path back from the south pole and joyfully discovering the supplies he had left for himself weeks earlier.