The Buddha And The Sitar Player - A Lesson In Balance

The Buddha and the Sitar Player is an old Buddhist tale that illustrates a key principle in balance. In meditation and in worldly affairs, you should find a balance between focusing (which in this tale is represented by tightening your strings) and letting go (which is represented by making your strings looser). In this talk, I go over a few examples of this lesson that can be applied in your life.

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and I'm sitting next to my Buddha statue over here and today I want to talk to you about an old Buddhist tale about the Buddha and a sitar player. So the sitar is a stringed instrument that resembles a guitar and the Buddha's disciple was a well-known sitar player in the time and when he started practicing meditation he took his practice a bit too seriously and brought a lot of zeal but he went to the extreme of being an ascetic. So what I mean by this is that he only ate one meal every other day, He was constantly starving himself, He didn't sleep much and he had a very strained approach to meditation and he eventually noticed and other people noticed around him that his physical condition started to deteriorate, His mental condition also started to go down as well and they were really worried about him. So eventually he went to the Buddha and asked him, Hey what's going on how can I fix this because here I am really straining and making an effort to meditate and I'm not focusing on my body as much and I'm really focusing on my inner experiences but it feels like every time I'm practicing it goes nowhere. So the Buddha looks at him and says calmly, Okay you're a sitar player right? He says yes. Well what happens when your sitar strings are wound up a bit too tight? And he responds saying that obviously the strings will break when you play it when it's too tight. The Buddha says yes that's right. And what happens if your strings are wound up a bit too loose? What will happen then? And then the disciple says then no sound will come out when I try to play the instrument. The Buddha says yes that's also correct. So in the same way your meditation practice should be neither too loose or too tight. So if you try to strain too much in your meditation practice then you cause yourself to be burnt out, To have too much strain and too much pressure and resistance but you don't actually find a healthy medium. And meanwhile if you go on the other side and you take a more relaxed approach this is what they called the Zen tradition calls the stone Buddha where someone sits very placidly and with his eyes closed and he has nothing going on in his mind. That's almost like sleeping or dreaming so that's not meditation either. So you want to find a healthy medium between the two extremes. And this applies not only to meditation but it can also be applied to various stages in your life. So for example in a person's life they could be in the college age so or even in high school so let's just say you know 14 to 22 early stages when they're studying. If they have their metaphorical strings wound up too tight they will be under a lot of pressure to study. Maybe they focus too much on studying and not enough time to actually relax and as a result these type A personalities tend to burn themselves out. They get a lot of stress, Panic attacks, Worry and on the other side you have people that have their strings wound up a little bit too loose and this is kind of where I fell in back in college where you take it a bit too easy and you have more of a chilled approach so this is person that plays video games a lot or maybe goes out and hangs out with friends all the time but doesn't actually get their work done. And you would think that they would have more energy or they're enjoying life more but in reality that's not the case because they don't have the tension or any kind of good stress placed on them so they are there to relax and as a result they don't feel aliveness. And then eventually when they go to be a working professional so a couple years later if they have their strings wound up too tight they are too focused on their mission and they are too competitive and they block out that side of themselves where they can actually take their experience in maybe come up with new insights so they're too focused on the one end and on the other hand if they are too chill and they take their you know younger years as more of like a hedonism and just partying all the time then they also miss out on the other side where they can actually gain a lot of experiences and deeper meanings behind a little bit more of resistance. And you can also see that eventually when people retire if they retire too early they can actually have more problems than they did when they were working because at least when they worked they had some kind of purpose some kind of challenges that actually allowed them to grow their mind and expand more. So you never want to be either too on the stressed out side or too much on the chill side because when your strings are wound up too tight and you're very stressed out that's not conducive to anything or even special practice because you're too wound up you're just very stressed out and you're not able to relax and be with everything but then on the other hand when you're too laid-back too chilled out you don't have a force such as like an exercise or any kind of thing that can actually gets your your mind active and your body active then you don't have any kind of aliveness to you so you feel very dull and this is also something I noticed when you go on vacation for too long you think this is gonna be great right but actually you actually crave work and crave things to do because that provides a little bit of aliveness. So carry out this metaphor in your spiritual practice and even just daily activities see which line you're falling under and people typically fall between one or two categories they usually lean a bit too much more to the lax chill side or they lean too much towards the work or work side so understand where you're at in this process and you might need to shift it a bit more so in your meditation practice for example if you're a little bit more laid-back you can actually benefit from more of a focused based activity such as Vipassana where you can focus on your breath in and out in and out and the other side if you're prone to stress and prone to working too much you can actually benefit from a open awareness meditation like a Shikantaza where you're just taking everything in as it comes and just being with everything so they're both valid paths to get to the same goal but it really depends on who you are and where you're at so you can find balance between the two and ultimately the same goal is the same but there's different paths to getting there so I hope this helps and I really like this story hope you do too thank you