10 Lecture on the 4 Thoughts, Shamata and Vipashayana

2020-10Lecture-4thoughts-shamatha-vipashyana.mp3 [00:00:00] Do they some day free? Because we just began the retreat. We had this day with the normal schedule, but from the next Sunday, we can have a free day for everybody, so that you do your own schedule, your own practice in the way you want. It’s also good to come a little bit out of schedule and do things a little bit different. Next Sunday, we won’t have formal sessions or mandatory sessions, and we won’t have interviews and will see how we feel with that.

[00:00:34] So we have a few more minutes. Let’s begin talking a little bit about these teachings, where they come from. Many of you already have some studies of Buddhist dharma or Buddhist philosophy. Some of you have taken introductory courses, I think mainly Tibetan Buddhism. Maybe some of you Theravada, and that’s good. But let’s just have a little summary of these teachings for those of you who are not very familiar with the Buddha and his teachings. So as many of you know, the Buddha was born more than two thousand five hundred years ago, a long time ago. And his father, well, many people consider him a king, but there’s debate about that. They say maybe it was a monarch of a region in the kingdom of Kapilavastu. But he was someone with power, someone important in the region for simplifying, we will call him a King. We won’t get into that debate. The Buddha’s mother died when she had him, when she give birth. So he was raised by the sister of his mother. This happening Lumbini, many of you maybe have visited this place, very nice. The story says that he was a prince, he had everything. He received the very good education, he was trained in many in many skills, and he was very smart, didn’t have to worry about food or getting certain possessions because he already had access to all of that. XXX

[00:02:16] He also was married with Princess SABERA, and they had a son, Rahula up and they had a good life. He could have been the king of that region or the monarch or whatever the governor or whenever you want. For most people nowadays, if we we had his life, we would have a very comfortable and wouldn’t have to worry about much. But necessary story says that he went out of his kingdom one night and he so treat things or treat persons that change his way of understanding life radically. One of these was a corpse GenCoin in at that time. Well, at this time on. So it’s very easy to go out and see people carrying corpses or burning them in the gods way, Nancy. So it’s not difficult for him to make a corpse and reflect on the reality of impermanence. He also found an old and sick person at a time in India. There was like these wandering assets. He’d given up all their possessions and they were kind of like beggars. But they follow a spirit took. And this person, he was smiling. He was very happy. He thought, well, this guy so happy if he doesn’t have anything. And so this makes him reflect. He went back to his palace with his father and told him he wanted to leave the palace and give the life of a sceptic. And the father said, no, don’t go. I will give you anything you want. They won’t do one more wives or they are one better horse or something. I don’t know. Feel for him all their pleasures, right. And he said, well, if you if you can assure me these things, I will stay. If you can assure me that I will not get sick and old and die.

[00:04:17] And if you can show me that that I can be happy always, then I will stay.

[00:04:23] So the king cried because he knew he had lost his son. So he left. He went as an ascetic at that time. In India, there was a lot of already screeched to a practitioners, a lot of practicing meditation.

[00:04:39] They actually had already achieved different concentrations. Tradition like the practice. They also had a cosmology. When you were asking about the goldies you son called bias and all these cycles of time will be an explanation of the universe. They had a. A philosophy coming from the bed us. So there was a was a rich spiritual tradition. There was also a lot of philosophers. And so he went and sat and looked for the best teachers. Right. He found these two teachers, a lot of Kalama and have come from a poor though was a member of the teachers.

[00:05:19] He went to train with them. They were very skilled teachers. He training in meditation and achieve very deep states of concentration.

[00:05:30] And this was that like the most they were the more successful teachers at that time. They have lots of disciples and they were teaching him all of this deeper concentration, some ascetic practices where you kind of restrain the body a lot from old pleasures and eat very little or almost don’t eat. They were kind of make the body suffer like a lot of challenges when deceased.

[00:05:59] So he became very skilled at these practices. And then he achieve all these deeper stages of meditation. But he realized that when he come out of them, the mental afflictions were still there, that he was not quite finding complete liberation of the cause of suffering. So he decided to leave and find his own path. And then the teachers offered him to stay, to have his disciples because he was the best practitioner. But he said, no, I think I reached my limit of where I can learn here from living. And there were five companions of him. Cool. Who said, well, he looks like a very smart guy. Let’s follow him. And so this start following him. Everything was OK. They consider him kind of their leader in that little group. But then he fainted because he was very weak. His body with so much, Chris, trains. And there was a girl in the village near MAhaboddhi in Gaya Sujata. What’s her name? And she brought him a little bowl with rice and feed him because he was very skinny. And he a little later, his body starts recovering and his friends look at him and said, oh, you’ve done something terrible. You gave up into pleasures into him one day in life. And so they they kind of felt he was not following quite the right path. And they left him. So he was alone. But he realized there that it was known as Sari to to put your body into so much hardship. And so after recovering his body and feeling more healthy, he went and sat under the body tree in the car.

[00:07:50] And he sat there and he said to himself, I’m not going to stand up from here until I either find quite a soul face about how to find true liberation or a day. So he said they’re in this concentration, what he remember knowing this, which as we can see, that he he’d remembered a time when he was very young. He was with his father and his father was blowing the fields or something.

[00:08:21] And he kind of naturally entering to somebody in this meditative state. And he remember that and thought that that was the path. So he sat under the tree and stuck meditating. He went deeper and deeper and deeper into deeper concentration. And probably he had karmic seeds from previous lives because you point he was a child, he access these states very easily.

[00:08:48] So normally at that time in India, many people felt, well, if you enter into this state of Somalia of concentration and you’re remaining in bleeds clarity and long conceptually to these things, we were talking the state of feeling very good, then that must be liberation on them as must be the way to remain there. But he recognized that there was not enough. And this was to think that he kind of brought to the world or implemented and was up. He used these refined, powerful concentration of his mind to investigate, to investigate reality, to investigate phenomena. So this is a person to investigate how he existed in relation to others. And he discovered the three marks of existence or the tree, you know, or so throughout the reality of impermanence, that everything is impermanent. So Anika is impermanence, and that is the lack of inherent existence of phenomena of the self and these constant dissatisfaction we were reflecting in the meditation, the suffering, that all condition phenomenon. Bring your suffering because we relate to them with ignorance, with attachment, with aversion. So he uses this powerful concentration to start remembering his life and he was able to remember all the details of his life and see the relation between cultures and conditions.

[00:10:18] And then he went to memory when he was in his mother’s womb. He asked the question quite what I said before. And he remember a previous life. In a previous life. In a previous life. And so he made every current of many best life. And at that time, there was the belief that there were many lives before because many other judges were able to also remember past life. But they thought there was a beginning because that was kind of before this they could remember. So they thought, well, this must be the beginning, but they would. I keep remembering and remembering that he came to their conclusion that there is no beginning and there is no end, that we’ve been experiencing birth and death continuously in cyclic existence. And so with these penetrating with some of the person that combined with it shamatha that he was able to cut the roots of ignorance and delusion, attachment and ignorance and liberate from some sorrow. So later we’ll see a wheel of life where quote, we can do this.

[00:11:22] Caught in the cycle of life, of some sorrow and some sort of cyclic existence. But he was able to liberate and complete liberation by cutting the roots of some sort. They he became an enlightened and he thought, well, sure, I shared this with somebody else. Nobody will understand this or I just stay here. He spends a few days enjoying his enlightenment. And so he decided to go to Sana, which is maybe some of your crap in there. It’s like maybe half an hour from where I see word from book guy vipassana is pretty far. He went walking. He went there to find his five friends because he thought, well, maybe they will understand they have cattle dust in their eyes. So he went to Sana and they were there, these five students. His first five disciples, when they saw him, they said, oh, here he comes. Let’s ignore him this and talk to him. He approaches. But as he was coming closer, they saw him very radiant and transformed. They couldn’t avoid value and to him. So he came and told them his first teaching. Teaching opened for no truth. So in this teaching, he tells some of the first truth, the truth of suffering that we suffer and that condition existence is suffering.

[00:12:49] As long as we then realize the lack of inherent existence of phenomena that we don’t liberate, tell ourselves and transform this basic ignorance into wisdom. So the second no truth was that the suffering, this constant, this at dysfunction and recurrent problems has caused this and that that causes our ignorance, attachment, an anger or aversion and that all build their mental afflictions arise from this tree roots or tree poisons. And the third novel Truth is that we can stop that suffering. Then we can cut the strips of suffering that we can finish, stop cultivating those courses. Now we can be completely free. And the fourth noble truth, the truth of the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. The path to lift to enlightenment. And they say so. His teachings, all the dharma teachings are oriented towards eliminating this cause of suffering and to liberate to enlightenment. And so just to finish, there are some nice metaphor of the shamatha to be person quite. We need to combine them in order to cut this root of conflicting emotions.

[00:14:04] One is that if you think you have a ax and you want to cut the roots of a tree and you have the ox and you have some of that, which means single point detention or concentration. Right. And you hit in the same spot. But it’s not sharp, your axis not sharp. And you keep hitting in the same place forever. You’re never going to throw down the tree. You’re not going to cut the shoots. Why? Because he has no sharp edge. In the other hand, if you have a passion, you have this sharp edge of wisdom, of discerning, of investigation, but you don’t have shamatha things. You’re hitting the trunk in different parts. But never in the same place. And that happens when you do we personal.

[00:14:46] Before doing shamatha attack, you can have some insights into the nature of existence, into the lack of self, into the lack of a currency existence. APPL phenomena. A little insight into emptiness. But if one. It will be a moment and then you’ll be living your life as normal. You will be a memory because you’re kicking the tree in different parts. No, in the same place. So you need both. You need some of that engineer to be passionate, to heat wave the wave some on the same place and you cut completely ignore. So first you need to develop shamatha and we’d have refined mind. Then you can do the investigation of a person. And then when you come to investigate, break a habit. Very clear.

[00:15:32] Understanding they do will sustain that, understanding that feel that way of perceiving with the shamatha for a longer time until it becomes irreversible, until you can sustain their way of perceiving reality. SCD is and not with all our projections and conceptualizations and our delusions. Right? So there different ways of doing this. One is to focus and retreat until you achieve shamatha and then go directly to a person. There are so ways you could be practicing shamatha that and doing a lot of shamatha or analytical mutations and then combining them both in kind of a practice. Sheremeta practice with person and then kind of parallel develop being them and joining them. When you do an analytical meditation, for example, in the goal actuation, there’s analytical meditations that Quinn-Judge reached the conclusion of the mutation when you follow some steps for the analysis of when you reach the conclusion.

[00:16:37] Jurist There you can put your shamatha to work there to remain in that understanding.

[00:16:44] And then you do the meditation again and again and again and you may take in different things. And then there’s others. Traditions like in this auction tradition or in the same thready shown Claire isn’t more combined. They shun Madame Bea person that can be practiced kind of in a more integrated way. So there’s different ways of doing it, but definitely we need to do for some progress in the show. So the first teaching of the Buddha over the four noble truths. Let us first to see this dissatisfaction we have with life and to generate the motivation that renunciation and renegotiation is bad on those too as well. I’m going to give up all material things or play a short live what I left his wife or his son. I’m going to leave my responsibilities and to this kid, even leave them Beth. He left them without good life. And then he came back and they also learned oldest teachings and became his disciple. So it’s not about quitting everything. Your job, your family, everything. It’s about giving up the attachment and the expectations. And so developing this renegotiation, this spirit of emergence. You want to emerge from this samsara cycling existence is a way of doing things based on mental afflictions. And this trip. Boysen So failure on set pashminas and anger. So we will continue with this. Keep practicing the full body, our NASW in your next sessions and ask questions related to a practice if you can. I want you to understand it very well and to see what’s happening in your body. If he easy or not, what’s happening in your mind? If you’re able to sustain attention, if you’re getting drowsy or distracted and ask all the questions you’ll have so that you can understand how to do it properly. We will meet in the next session and continue with more of this.

[00:18:54] We’re going to incorporate some of this meditations now in our daily practice. Therefore, thoughts that turn the mind towards deliberation that once we meditated just the beginning of this mission, we want to incorporate them everyday. Because if you meditate on those everyday, they give directions to practice. They give motivation. They they have a very powerful effect. So let’s do this dedication, in your own mind, in your own words, like silent dedication.

Transcribed by: Miguel Angel de Anquin