Welcome to the Mindfulness Meditation Podcast.
I'm your host,
Dawn Eshelman.
Every Wednesday at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea,
We present a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area.
This podcast is a recording of our weekly practice.
If you would like to join us in person,
Please visit our website at rubinmuseum.
Org slash meditation.
We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg,
The teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center,
The Interdependence Project,
And the Shambhala Center.
The series is supported in part by the Hemera Foundation.
In the description for each episode,
You will find information about the theme for that week's session,
Including an image of a related artwork chosen from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection.
And now,
Please enjoy your practice.
Hello everyone.
Welcome to the Rubin Museum and to our mindfulness meditation practice.
My name is Dawn Eshelman.
Welcome.
So we're talking this month about refuge and what it means to take refuge.
And in Tibetan Buddhism,
There is something called the three jewels.
And these three jewels are the things that we are invited to take refuge in.
And those are the Buddha,
Whom we have right here with us today,
The Dharma,
Which is the Buddhist teachings.
However,
We might like to interpret those no matter our religious or philosophical persuasions.
And then the Sangha,
The community.
And just so lucky to have this Sangha,
This community here.
And we're really honoring that today with a little holiday tea that we're having after this session.
So if you have a few extra minutes,
Come and hang out right outside.
Be nice to say hi and chat with you and just celebrate our Sangha,
Our community.
So Sharon Salzberg is our beloved teacher today.
Always great to have you back,
Sharon.
And she comes to us,
Of course,
As the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry,
Massachusetts.
She is a renowned and beloved teacher of meditation,
And she's the author of some fabulous books,
Including her most recent,
Real Love.
Please welcome her,
Sharon Salzberg.
Hello.
You all came out in the cold.
Thank you.
I just was thinking that was so beautiful.
Isn't it beautiful,
That image?
And it reminded me of I was once in Atlanta at Emory University and the Dalai Lama was speaking.
And he was being hosted by the art department.
And the sort of panel was the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere and Alice Walker.
And they kept trying to ask him questions that had been collected about art and beauty and creativity.
And one question,
The first question,
Which I've always get a lot and I always found kind of interesting was,
Well,
Don't you have to be in some state of like tremendous suffering in order to create powerfully,
Which is a very Western notion.
And he was like,
I didn't get it.
And stuff about beauty.
And it was so interesting because he basically said,
He said,
People always take me to look at things.
And they say,
What do you think?
Isn't it beautiful?
And he said,
Our belief in that culture,
He said,
Our belief is that the estimable nature,
The beauty,
The awesome nature of a piece of art is based on what happens in the mind and heart of the person who's creating it.
So if somebody gets more enlightened,
They get wiser,
They get more loving in the process of having created that through whatever medium,
Then that's considered like a beautiful piece of art.
And even it takes 20 years,
It doesn't matter because the process is also within you.
So that was really interesting and so different.
I think about things like that because I feel like there's some other pieces up here in the collection.
And this is certainly one of them where I feel like I could just stay all day and keep looking at it because something's happening within me,
Perhaps in response to what happened in them when they were creating it.
It's really very special.
And this is the gesture of the mudra of the Buddha.
It's actually Bodhisattva at that point reaching his hand over his knee,
Which I'll talk about in a second.
That's my favorite depiction of the Buddha,
Although I have no fears,
Kind of nice too.
But this is really my very,
Very favorite.
I've written about it like 10,
000 times.
So the Buddha,
The Dharma and the Sangha and taking refuge.
Interestingly enough,
None of that has to do with becoming a Buddhist or declaring an identity or rejecting any other identity.
It has to do with a certain sense of possibility.
It has to do with a vision of what you think your life can look like.
The Buddha's always talked about as having been a human being and a human being who had some very powerful questions about life and happiness and suffering,
Basically saying,
You know,
What does it mean to be born in this human body,
To be an infant,
To be helpless and so dependent on the actions of others and to grow up,
To grow older,
To get sick,
To die,
Whether you want it or not.
And is there a kind of happiness or peace that isn't going to shatter as the body does its thing?
And what does it mean to have a human mind in the ordinary way of emotions?
And you wake up in the morning and you're full of joy and then you're afraid and then you're exhausted and then you're angry and then you're delighted and then it's just like this constant churning,
This cascade of change.
And here too,
Is there some trait,
Some ability,
Some capacity that we can awaken that will have us connected and caring and peaceful and okay,
Even as all this may be going on because we don't seem able to stop it.
And it said that whatever answers or resolutions the Buddha came to,
He came to through the power of his own awareness and so can we.
So when we take refuge in the Buddha,
It's like an assertion.
Oh,
You know,
I don't have to just settle for mediocrity maybe or getting by or being a little less stressed.
We would say today,
You know,
Maybe there's a vision of human life that I can also turn my sights to because he was just a human being too.
So he's a representative.
That's what taking refuge means in the Buddha.
It's like aligning oneself with that vision of possibility as a human being.
The second,
The Dharma also means many things.
It's commonly used to describe the Buddhist teaching or the way,
The path.
And that really is aligning yourself with the truth,
The truth of your experience,
The truth of the present moment.
Being willing to look more deeply into the nature of things.
It's another meaning of Dharma is nature,
The laws of nature,
Being willing to explore,
To examine,
To investigate.
And the third of the refuges is Sangha is as Dawn said,
Sangha meaning community.
And it's meant different things historically and over time.
So one original meaning of the word Sangha was really the monastic Sangha,
The monastic communities whose job,
So to speak,
Was to remember and transmit the Buddhist teaching.
And that's why there's so many lists.
It was an oral tradition for hundreds of years.
Nothing was written down.
And I know that's a cause for a lot of doubt for some people.
They think,
Well,
You know,
It's just an oral tradition.
But I've heard anthropologists say that an oral tradition actually can have more validity than a written tradition because people invested.
They knew it was their responsibility.
I've got to remember this.
I've got to learn it.
I've got to be able to pass it on or it'll die.
And I can kind of get behind that.
I think of myself these days where I'll just like Google something and then I'll think,
I don't have to remember it.
I'll Google it tomorrow.
It's like I don't remember anything anymore.
You know?
Just like,
OK,
I'll look it up again.
I can't add anymore.
I can't spell anymore.
It's like,
I don't know.
It's like,
I don't think it's just the degeneration of me.
You know,
I think it's like just not really paying attention in those old ways,
You know?
And then another meaning of the third sangha was those beings who had actually walked the path.
Here too,
It's like the original sense of the Buddha.
It's like,
Oh,
People did this,
You know?
They were just people.
And they devoted a lot of time and a lot of energy to stepping away from ordinary definitions of happiness and being willing to look deeper.
Like,
This is a real thing.
And it's an ancient,
Ancient teaching.
I was once teaching,
I think it was Connecticut,
And I was teaching loving kindness,
Which is probably the meditation I'm most associated with in the eyes of the world.
And somebody said to me,
This stuff is incredible.
When did you make it up?
And I said,
I actually didn't make it up.
And you are so lucky I didn't make it up.
You know,
This is like,
This is like the lived experience of people who've practiced and practiced and explored and examined.
Right?
This is like the legacy that we are left.
And the most contemporary meaning of the word sangha is like community.
It's all of us gathered here today.
It's people who come together to practice together,
People who share the same values and can help one another.
Because we always take turns needing help,
Right?
And receiving help.
And so they're really like communities in a very full on sense of the word,
Particularly around practice and examination of the truth.
So I said,
This is my favorite representation of the Buddha,
Which it is.
And I think the symbol of that particular gesture has a lot to do with why these three things can be a powerful refuge,
A reminder of what's possible for us.
So the legend of the Buddha's enlightenment was that,
As I'm sure many of you know,
Maybe all of you know,
He was born a prince.
When he was born his father called in,
Remember this is legend,
Right?
So it's like myth.
And it's got the power of myth as well as kind of the symbolism rather than kind of literal perhaps truth.
It said when he was born his father called in two astrologers,
One of whom was slightly better than the other.
And the first one said,
This baby has one of two paths ahead of him.
He can either stay in the world and become a world reigning monarch with tremendous riches and territory and power,
Or he can leave the world,
Worldly concerns behind,
Become a spiritual seeker and become a fully enlightened Buddha.
And the second astrologer was a little more with it.
And these guys are holding up fingers.
He held up one finger and he said he's going to be a Buddha.
But the Buddha's father didn't really want that.
He wanted his son to stay in the world and have that whole accumulation.
So he knew that suffering was the way that people are often goaded to look deeply,
To look more deeply.
Things aren't working out.
It's painful.
It's frightening.
It's even devastating.
And so we're not going to just buy into those conventional answers.
We're going to really look for another meaning of happiness or another access to happiness.
So it said that he tried to spare his son through his growing up years any inkling or sight of suffering at all.
And so the Buddha then known as the Bodhisattva was like before his enlightenment.
So it was usually Bodhisattva means of being aspiring to enlightenment,
But he wasn't even aspiring yet.
So he was still the prince.
He had pleasure groves and everything he ever wanted and was completely indulged for about 29 years.
And then at the age of 29,
His charioteer took him outside the grounds and he saw an older person,
A sick person,
A corpse.
And then he saw a mendicant,
Like a religious aspirant.
And for the first three,
He asked his charioteer,
Does that happen to everybody?
Like,
Is that going to happen to me?
And the charioteer said,
Yeah.
And then he saw the mendicant who formed the symbol of a kind of result.
So the prince left home that night and he spent the following six years in the opposite way.
If the first 29 were just indulging himself or being indulged,
The next six were spent in these very strict self-mortification practices,
Which were very prevalent in India at the time.
The idea was that if you could just torture your body enough,
Your spirit would soar free and you would be free.
And he did that for six years.
And at the end of that period,
He decided that wasn't the way either.
And so it's always interesting,
I think,
In one's own life to just reflect,
What does that path of indulgence look like?
What does that path of self-mortification look like?
You know,
If not physical and certainly psychological.
And at the end of that six year period,
The Bodhisattva decided that wasn't the way either.
So the middle way,
Neither indulgence nor really self-punishing is the way.
And he went and sat under a tree.
He ate some milk rice.
Somebody fed him because he hadn't been eating that was part of his austerity.
Milk rice,
As you can get in an Indian restaurant in case you want to try it.
Here.
He ate some milk rice.
He went and sat under a tree with the resolve not to get up until he was fully enlightened,
Until he was really free,
Until he'd broken through all the veils of conditioning.
And there's a legendary,
Kind of looks like a kind of satanic figure in Buddhist teaching called Mara.
Unlike Satan,
I guess,
Mara is a heavenly being.
But he didn't want this person,
The Bodhisattva,
To leave his dominion.
So he did not like him sitting there under that tree trying to become free.
And so he tried to tempt him away.
Tempted him with these visions of like dancing girls.
And he tried to frighten them away in hailstorms and rainstorms and these horrible apparitions and all these attacks of different kinds.
And with each one,
The Bodhisattva just sat there calmly and wasn't persuaded to give up.
And then the very last attack of Mara is basically self-doubt.
He more or less said to the Bodhisattva,
Especially if you're from New York,
He said,
Who do you think you are?
He said,
Who do you think you are to even imagine you can be free?
Who do you think you are?
Get up.
And in response,
The Bodhisattva reached his hand over his knee and touched the earth.
That's the gesture.
He touched the earth and called upon the earth itself to bear witness to the fact that he had a right to be there.
And as they would put it in those mythological terms,
Lifetime after lifetime after lifetime,
He had practiced qualities like generosity and ethics and so on.
So he had a right to be there.
He had a right to even think he was capable of so much.
And seeing that the earth shook and seeing that Mara knew he was vanquished and he ran into the night and the Bodhisattva sat until the morning and was enlightened at the appearance of the first morning star.
And as a consequence of that,
We are here today.
Is it Chelsea or Flatiron where we are?
Chelsea.
We're in Chelsea in a museum.
It's amazing.
2600 years later.
So why don't we sit and folded by that sense of refuge.
You can sit comfortably,
Close your eyes or not.
Let your energy just kind of sink into your body.
You can bring your attention to whatever place your breath is strongest for you or clearest for you.
Look at that.
The breath is happening anyway.
It's kind of a middle path thing right there.
You don't have to lean into the breath,
Try to make it be a certain way or anticipate the next breath.
You don't have to be really distant from it.
So you couldn't care less what this breath feels like.
See if you can aim your attention toward just one breath and connect to it fully.
Really feel the sensations wherever they're strongest for you.
If you like,
You can use a quiet mental notation like in out or rising falling,
But very quiet.
So your attention is really going to feeling the breath.
If you find your attention wandering,
Go to the past,
Go to the future.
You follow sleep.
Don't worry about it.
You can recognize you've been gone.
See if you can gently let go.
Bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath.
Di Colonel.
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