Dharma Talk: The 10 perfections

This is a Dharma talk about 10 perfections, given at the Kuan Yin Centre, Lismore NSW Australia on Oct 13, 2022. In Theravada Buddhism, the 10 perfections are generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment or wisdom, energy or persistence, patience or endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity. This 25-minute talk briefly outlines how each of the perfections develops good character as well as represents good qualities cultivated on the path of the Bodhisattva.

Transcript

So welcome,

Welcome all you good folk to our Dharma talk tonight.

And the Dharma talk tonight is about the 10 perfections.

And I thought I'd talk about the Paramis,

They're called the Paramitas or the Paramis in Sanskrit,

Paramitas in Sanskrit,

And it literally means having reached the other shore.

It also means transcendence and perfection.

And as far as I understand,

The Paramis are related to what was ascertained from reading the tales of the Buddha's previous lives,

The Jataka tales.

And the Jataka tales tell the stories of Buddha's previous lives,

Where he was perfecting various qualities,

He'd spent a whole life perfecting of various quality.

And then he became a Buddha.

And so people who decide to be on the path of the Bodhisattva path,

The Bodhisattva path is the path of practice in order to reach Buddhahood.

For them,

The Paramis are all important.

And that's what they call it.

And I think the Paramis are also just wonderful character building qualities.

They are something we can consider as real achievements.

You know,

In this world of the world of worldly things,

We often think of achievements in terms of material,

That material,

Things that we acquire,

Or status that we acquire.

And the Paramis transcend that,

Because they give us something that is really of value,

Something we can,

If you believe in future lives or past lives,

It's something we can carry forth throughout our history as a human and into beyond.

And they're just simply very good character building qualities.

There's something that we can cultivate in our daily lives.

And if you're like me,

I aspire to awakening.

And I'd like to meditate every day,

But I noticed that I don't have much time sometimes,

Sometimes I wake up and I go to work and do all sorts of things.

And I might just sit for half an hour or 45 minutes or something like that.

It's not the ideal.

But when we cultivate the Paramis,

It brings us back into our daily activities.

It reminds us that we can cultivate wonderful qualities in every activity.

And I'm thinking about when I spend hours and hours and hours going through my books,

For example,

When I say books,

I mean,

With my practice,

Bookkeeping,

Like making sure the accounts balance and so on.

And also ensuring that,

You know,

There's appointments done in the right time.

And today I rang up an insurance company WorkCover Queensland,

Trying to work out how I can get my put in my invoices with this particular organisation.

It can get a little bit frustrating in our daily lives.

And when we find things that are happening in the home,

Like finding little rat's nest underneath the house or somewhere,

Something like that,

It all takes time.

And you think about getting back on the cushion.

But in reality,

These little difficulties give us opportunities to cultivate the Paramis.

And our interactions in daily life,

With people,

With friends and clients and so on,

They're all opportunities to cultivate the Paramis.

So these are the Paramis.

Generosity or dana,

Wholesomeness or ethics or virtue,

Renunciation or letting go.

Wisdom or panya,

Energy or virya,

Energy,

Effort,

Same thing.

Patience or endurance,

Kanti in Pali.

Truthfulness,

Saccha in Pali.

Resolve or determination,

Aditana in Pali and goodwill.

And I include amongst goodwill,

Loving kindness or metta and karuna or compassion.

And the final one I've got listed here is equanimity or pekka.

So as you probably know,

I'm being familiar with me,

I could give hour long talks on each of these Paramis.

But tonight,

I'll just list them in a way,

I'll talk a little,

I'll mention them and talk about them in just briefly.

Almost in a way of,

Almost in a way for us to be reminded of them.

And to remember that they are wonderful qualities that we can access whenever we're feeling frustrated with a menial task,

For example,

Or difficulties with people that we might encounter.

If we can just remember these Paramis,

It's a good way of transforming what could be unwholesome reactions to wholesome ways of cultivating awakening,

And wholesome ways of being in the world and developing a good character.

So generosity,

Generosity,

Bahana is generosity is a wonderful quality.

And the Buddha said,

If we knew the value of generosity,

We wouldn't let a meal go past without sharing it.

We wouldn't allow that to happen.

And it is actually the basis of the path.

Generosity is the opposite of the very things that cause our suffering,

Clinging,

Craving.

It's the opposite of that.

It's about giving.

And it's the beginning of,

Sometimes called the beginning of the path,

Even though it's not in the Eightfold Path,

That you don't have dana,

Sila,

Samadhi,

Panya.

But in fact,

It's like that.

It's like that.

And I remember in talks that I listened to in the temples in Thailand,

The achans would always lay people around,

They would always talk about the importance of dana because it provides the foundations of letting go to then be able to think about cultivating sila.

And it's also the way of the awakened heart.

It's just we have a generous heart.

When awakened,

We live like that.

So,

And the way we cultivate it is just by doing it.

We cultivate it by being generous,

Wisely,

Not in a way where we're taking away from ourselves but in a way where we're all experiencing joy.

That's the function of dana,

Joy.

So the next one,

Virtue or what I call impeccable ethics.

That's the foundation of the Eightfold Path.

As I mentioned just a minute ago,

We have dana,

It's a foundation,

But it's more like a prequel for sila.

Sila is ethics.

And I know that when we can maintain ethical principles,

It gives us a certain sort of power,

Certain sort of strength,

And a certain sort of resilience.

And we just build a sense of being a good person.

In Greek philosophy,

They talk about udamania,

And it's genuine happiness.

It means genuine happiness.

And it's talked about as living a good life.

And the good life is a virtuous life.

Virtue is the main characteristic of this udamania,

A really good life,

To live virtuously.

The next one is patience,

Or kanti.

And the way I understand patience is like when I'm getting frustrated with the phone calls that I need to make,

Working out the books and all the rest of it,

I realise that if I could turn my mind to understanding this is cultivating patience,

It's an instant shift from the unwholesome to the wholesome.

And it is a way of being,

Allowing the dharma or allowing life to unfold in its own natural timeframe,

Rather than getting caught up in anticipation that something should happen within the timeframe I want.

It's just allowing life to unfold in its own timeframe.

And it's a wonderful quality.

Energy.

Energy or diligence or persistence or perseverance.

This is a factor of awakening,

Actually.

It's one of the factors of awakening.

I won't go through,

I've given talks on the seven factors of awakening,

But it's a primary factor.

It's essential to wake up to have energy.

And when they talk about energy or effort,

It's often talked about in four different ways.

First of all,

It's the energy,

The wholesomeness of this,

Is the energy required to let go of something wholesome,

To stop an action that is unwholesome.

The energy involved with that,

That's the first effort.

The second effort is to prevent the energy involved in preventing the unwholesome in happening or preventing it from arising.

The third effort is the effort involved in doing something wholesome.

And the fourth effort is maintaining wholesome activities.

So they're four efforts.

So it's a good way of understanding effort.

And right effort is also the sixth factor in the eightfold path.

It precedes mindfulness and concentration.

So it's considered as one of the meditation factors.

And in meditation,

It's often considered as balancing from not being too slack,

And also not being too enthusiastic.

And one comparison the Buddha made was,

They didn't have guitars in those days,

But they had guitar-like instruments,

Like just tightening or tuning the guitar to the right tension,

Not too tight,

It's out of tune,

And not too loose,

It's also out of tune.

It's just that right tension.

Truthfulness is the next parami.

And truthfulness,

You could relate to right speech,

Which is the right speech,

Right action,

Right mind.

It is a right view,

Right intention,

Right speech.

It's the third factor on the eightfold path.

And it is an essential thing for us to be honest.

If we can be honest with others,

We can be honest with ourselves.

And if we can be honest with ourselves,

We can wake up.

When we're not honest with ourselves,

When we're deceiving ourselves,

We're deluding ourselves or denying the truth,

Well,

I won't say we'll never wake up,

But it certainly makes it very hard to wake up,

Because we're blocking the path.

And it is the basics,

It is one of the factors of the ethics,

Of ethics in the eightfold path.

And it enhances the capacity to perceive things clearly,

Like we're being honest with things,

So therefore,

We see things clearly rather than having a deceptive mind cloud our clear perceptions.

And it builds good qualities.

It's a good character building quality and with awakened ones,

They have nothing to hide.

So we have the courage to be responsible for our actions,

In being honest.

Renounciation,

The sixth one.

Renounciation is essentially letting go.

And it's powerful.

What we let go of is that which is not helpful on the path to awakening.

It's also that is what let go of what is not helpful on living a life of ethics,

Living a wholesome life,

What is not helpful on living a life in communities.

And relinquishment or renounciation is relinquishment of a lower hedonic pleasure for a greater happiness.

So it's not like you let go of happiness.

But it's like letting go of something quite gross or something that's not really helpful in order for something else to flourish.

The higher happiness of Udomania,

For example.

I think that's the way you pronounce it.

Udomaniac.

Udomania.

Yeah,

I think that's the right way.

So the next one,

I'll just finish something else about that renunciation.

It's a way we can refine our understandings of pleasure.

So we move away from hedonic pleasure to a more spiritual pleasure with renounciation.

Discernment or wisdom is the next one.

And I mean,

There's a lot of Dharma talks about cultivating wisdom.

It's what we cultivate when we walk on the path.

And essentially,

I think wisdom is the capacity to choose the wholesome and let go of the unwholesome.

When you think of the path,

The eightfold path as cultivating,

Letting go of the unwholesome or letting go of the unhelpful,

Or letting go of the Akusala and also cultivating the kusala,

Cultivating the wholesome,

Cultivating the factors of awakening,

For example,

And the path of awakening.

So wisdom involves seeing things as they actually are,

Free from the veils of delusion.

And wisdom is also the aim of the eightfold path,

As I mentioned.

And in the eightfold path,

The wisdom factors are called right view and right intention.

And right view is actually seeing things as they actually are,

That things are impermanent,

Things are not self,

Things are unable to satisfy or dukkha as their characteristics.

It's also seeing cause-effect relationships.

It's also seeing dependent arising,

Seeing how one thing works with another and how this leads to that and so on.

And it's seeing the beautiful truth.

So right view,

Very powerful aspect of wisdom.

And I would say that it's like insight,

The insight component of wisdom.

But wisdom also has within it in the eightfold path right intentions.

And intentions here are what bring forth the insights we have like enable the insights that we have to go in a particular direction.

So in Buddhism,

In the eightfold path,

There are three types of good intentions or right intentions.

These are intentions of harmlessness,

Intentions of renunciation or letting go,

And intentions of goodwill,

Meaning intentions of kindness and compassion,

Warm benevolence and helpfulness towards oneself and others.

So it's a lovely way of thinking about wisdom.

And of course,

It's not the only way of thinking about wisdom.

But within the eightfold path,

It's a nice way of thinking about wisdom.

When we have good understanding and right intentions,

We then act on those good understanding and insight and our good intentions.

And that's where we find the ethical part of the eightfold path.

But in daily life,

We could have an insight about anything,

Something even quite mundane,

And then we can create a good intention.

And we can have,

We can act in a way that supports that insight and that good intention.

And so it is wisdom is very strongly character building.

The termination or resolve.

And in Pali,

It's called adhitan.

But I would also think that resolve is very strongly related to right intentions.

But it's a little bit more powerful.

It's like determination or resolve is like making a decision.

Yes,

I'm going to do this.

I'm just going to do it.

It's about embracing smart plans.

Smart is a psychological term,

Specific,

Measurable,

Realistic,

Specific,

Measurable,

Achievable,

Realistic and timeframe.

It's about embracing and engaging smart plans to forge ahead with something that is smart,

Is worthwhile.

And we need determination to do that.

I know,

Just in our mundane life,

It takes a lot of determination for us to complete courses,

For example.

Like most,

A lot of us have been to university,

Well,

We've all been to university here,

I think.

And remember the resolve that you must have to complete the task that can continue over those years of university study.

But anyway,

This resolve gives us power.

It gives us strength in our directions.

It helps us make decisions actually.

And it helps us follow through when we've made a decision.

And in the Buddha's,

On the night of awakening,

Or the time when the Buddha was awakened under the Bodhi tree,

It said he had the resolve to not move until he was enlightened.

I don't think I've got that sort of resolve.

But little bit by little bit,

You make a resolve to do something,

You're just going to do it.

You're just going to do it.

And a vow is really powerful.

We make a vow to do something.

Or we take precepts,

Say,

In Asia,

When we go on in retreat centres,

You take the five precepts every day,

Or the eight precepts every day,

Or the 10 precepts every day.

And as a monk,

It was 227 precepts I used to take.

That was,

We used to chant that every two weeks.

So it's like making these resolves and sticking to it.

It's very powerful.

Goodwill is the next parame.

And I could talk a lot about metta and compassion.

But also,

I mentioned how goodwill is one of those right intentions as well.

Goodwill,

As boundless qualities,

Loving kindness and compassion and appreciative joy,

Or even gratitude,

As boundless divine abodes,

They are considered as temporary freedoms.

We're living like,

And we're relating to ourselves and others as if we are enlightened.

They are considered as temporary freedoms,

Temporary awakenings.

And it is the way awakened ones live and relate to themselves and others with qualities of warm benevolence,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy,

And equanimity.

Actually,

Equanimity is the next parame that I'd like to talk about.

And equanimity is a wisdom quality.

There's so many ways we can cultivate it.

It is an unshaken mind.

It's not blown around by the eight worldly winds.

The eight worldly winds of praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure,

And fame and disrepute.

It is steadfast,

It is stable.

When we talk about upekka as equanimity,

It's also this sense of stepping back and having a clearer view of things.

So you're not caught up in it.

But at the same time,

You're not caught up in the stories that you're looking at.

At the same time,

You are getting a perspective on it.

So you can see it clearly.

And you're engaged,

But at a distance.

So you're not entangled in it.

Interestingly,

When we talk about the jhanas,

There's the fourth rupa-jhana,

Or the fourth material jhana.

Its main quality is equanimity.

That's the main feature of that fourth jhana.

And it's described as being with a sheet,

A luminous sheet covering them,

Covering them.

So they're luminous in that they are bright and aware.

But in my view,

It's like they're kind of somehow insulated from the hassles of the world.

They're engaged in the world,

They're part of the world,

But they're insulated from the gait-worldly winds of the world,

If that makes sense.

And of course,

Equanimity is one of the seven factors of awakening and the way the seven factors of awakening work.

They work from mindfulness to investigation,

To energy,

To joy or p-e-t,

To tranquility,

To concentration,

And then it all culminates in equanimity.

Thank you very much.

I would like to end this little talk by saying,

Working with the kilesa or that which is unwholesome and cultivating the wholesome such as the paramitas,

Such as the paramitas,

Are not only ways to build character and perfect good qualities,

Buddha-like qualities,

But they're also the way of the bodhisattva,

The way of being as a bodhisattva on the path of awakening for all beings.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Reviews

Thank you Malcolm. I enjoyed listening immensely. There was a lot of practical advice for daily living while cultivating a life on the path, or at least trying to.