Adventures Of Sariputta & Mogallana 3: Working With Feelings

People come to spiritual practice to feel better. But unpleasant feelings are an inevitable part of being human. In this the dharma talk included with this episode of the Adventures of Sariputta and Mogallana, Sensei Morris Doshin Sullivan talks about working with unpleasant feelings. First, he talks about the young woman Kundalakesi, a tragic love story with a truly happy ending.

Transcript

You are listening to The Adventures of Sarah Puta and Mogulana.

I am your host,

Morris Sullivan.

Today I'm going to talk about feelings,

What they are and what to do with them when they arise and things like that.

But first,

I want to tell you about Kundalakesi,

A woman who's the subject of some verses from the Dhammapada,

And her story also appears as one of the great epic poems of Tamil literature.

So full disclosure,

I'm not an expert on Tamil literature.

In fact,

I'm not sure I've ever read any Tamil literature,

But I mention this because you may encounter this story in other contexts.

And as stories like this are told and retold,

They evolve.

And so you might hear it with some differences and you know that's part of the adventure.

Well Kundalakesi was an attractive young woman.

Her name means woman with curly hair,

By the way.

And she was the daughter of a very prosperous merchant from Rajgir.

Rajgir is an interesting region.

I've been there.

The famous Vultures Peak is there.

The area has numerous tall hills,

Although if you're from a flat place like Florida where I live,

They're low mountains.

These hills have long been sites for pilgrims and pilgrimages,

And there are shrines and monastery ruins up there,

Including a very famous one,

The Peace Pagoda,

Which marks the spot where the Buddha is said to have delivered the Lotus Sutra.

One day,

Kundalakesi saw a thief who had been sentenced to death.

This thief,

A man named Colin,

Was being led off to his execution.

When she saw him,

She fell in love with him.

Love at first sight.

Begged her father to intervene on his behalf and save him.

Her father agreed,

But it cost him a lot of money to buy Colin's freedom.

But he had saved the life of the thief,

And he arranged for Kundalakesi and Colin to marry.

They lived happily for a while,

But the passions faded as passions will,

And the couple quarreled as couples will.

At one point,

Colin got very angry,

And he decided that he wanted out.

Having lived as a thief,

He was mainly interested in her money.

Kundalakesi had quite a collection of expensive jewelry,

And so he came up with this plan that he would kill her,

Take her jewels,

And go somewhere to start a new life financed by what he got from selling off her jewelry.

So one day,

He said he wanted to go to a shrine at the top of one of the mountains to pay homage to the mountain spirit who lived there.

He said that he felt that this spirit had saved his life when he was going to be executed,

And he asked Kundalakesi to go with him.

He had her get dressed in her finest clothes with all of her best jewels so they could show proper respect to this mountain deity.

When they got to the top of the mountain,

Colin revealed his plan to kill her and rob her.

Kundalakesi begged for her life.

Her father had bought his freedom,

His life,

So let her buy hers.

She began to take off her jewels and thrust them toward him,

Begging him,

Take my jewelry,

But spare my life.

But he refused.

She was desperate.

She realized that if she was going to survive,

She would have to trick him somehow.

So she begged him for one last wish.

She had worshipped him from the moment she first laid eyes on him.

So let her pay her respects to him as if he was a god,

So that she could go to her death with a clear mind.

Please at least give her that.

He agreed,

And so she began to bow,

Circumambulating him as one would a shrine.

This is an ancient spiritual practice that you'll see in different places,

Going in a circle around a holy site or an object like a stupa,

For instance,

And bowing,

Reciting prayers and things like that.

So she was circumambulating Colin,

And as she moved behind him on one of her rounds,

Suddenly she rushed at him and shoved him over the edge of a cliff to his death.

She had survived,

But she was heartbroken with grief,

Consumed by remorse,

Overwhelmed by the trauma of this thing.

The thought of returning home and having to explain what had happened was just unbearable.

She simply walked away,

Even leaving her jewels behind.

She wandered for some time.

Eventually she came to a place where there were some Jain nuns staying.

Jainism is a religion with some similarities to Buddhism,

And there are still Jains around.

Jains at the time were these ascetics whose practices were kind of similar to what a lot of the Buddhist monks did.

One of their key spiritual figures,

Mahavira,

Is also associated with that area around Rajgir.

So she joined up with the Jains.

She became one of them,

And they began to instruct her in their philosophical reasoning process.

She was a very good student.

Didn't take long before she learned the answers to all of their philosophical problems.

So eventually her teacher told her,

Go make the way in the world on your own.

She said if she found a holy person who could answer all of her questions,

She should become their student.

As it happened,

She ended up at Savatthi,

And it happened to be when Saraputa was staying at the monastery there.

And they met while preparing to go into the city on an alms round,

And recognizing that Saraputa was a monk of some sort,

Of some accomplishment,

She challenged him to a philosophical debate.

You know,

When the Buddha first ordained women,

He wanted to make sure that they got the best possible instruction.

So he had put Saraputa in charge of teaching the Dharma to the nuns.

So Saraputa was prepared for this challenge.

Kundalukesi started asking him questions.

She asked him a thousand questions,

And he answered them all very easily.

Well then she ran out of questions,

So he asked her a question.

What is the one?

Basically Saraputa had asked Kundalukesi a koan,

And this question stopped her in her tracks.

Oneness can't be figured out through philosophical inquiry.

You have to realize it directly.

And she didn't know how to answer it.

She knew that she had met her new teacher.

So she asked to become his disciple.

Saraputa said that first she would need to become a bhikkhuni.

She'd need to join the order of Buddhist nuns.

Within a matter of days,

Studying with Saraputa,

Bhikkhuni Kundalukesi had become enlightened.

Not too long after that,

The Buddha came to stay at that monastery at Savatthi,

And some monks came and told him about this bhikkhuni Kundalukesi and how she had survived by winning a victory over her larcenous and homicidal husband.

And they wondered,

How was it possible that someone like her had become an arahant after hearing just a little bit of the Dharma?

The Buddha's answer became verse 102 and 103 of the Dhammapada.

Better than reciting a hundred senseless verses is the recitation of a single line of the Dharma,

If on hearing it one is calmed.

And one may conquer a million men in battle,

But the noblest victor is the one who conquers the self.

So let me ask you this.

What do you need to conquer?

Several years ago,

A woman came to one of our meetings in Dhillen.

It was her first time,

And she came up to me after the meeting,

And she was talking to me a little bit about why she was there.

She said she'd been reading about Buddhism and meditation,

And she was going through some transitions in her life.

And she thought maybe this could help her through some of the rough spots.

And she said,

But I'm not really interested in taking the precepts.

I'm not really interested in learning about the religion or any of that stuff.

I just want the part where you feel good all the time.

So unfortunately,

Spiritual practice doesn't work that way,

Not even in Buddhism.

We all have emotions,

And it's rare that anyone feels good all the time.

In fact,

I think it would be a little weird if you felt good all the time.

And honestly,

Life would be pretty dull without emotional ups and downs,

If you think about it.

Of course,

We like pleasant emotions.

We don't like unpleasant ones,

And a lot of people come to Buddhism and other spiritual paths,

Hoping to somehow reach a point where everything you feel feels good.

But the reality really kind of reminds me of a song by Albert King that I really like.

Everybody wants to go to heaven,

But nobody wants to die.

And life has its ups and downs,

And we can't have the ups without the downs.

Buddhist practice,

And I think you could say this about most spiritual practice,

Is kind of fundamentally,

In essence,

A better way to equip ourselves for the downs.

It's not about feeling good all the time.

It's about living authentically.

And so if we practice sincerely,

If we live more fully,

That doesn't mean that we're always buoyed up by superficial,

Warm,

And fuzzy feelings.

If you practice with some degree of determination,

You will probably feel happy much of the time.

But in part,

That comes from accepting even unpleasant feelings as part of life.

So you still have to live your life in your body,

In your circumstances,

And with your feelings.

And that means having some unpleasant experiences and unpleasant feelings that go along with that.

But even what we often see as bad emotions can be good,

Can be useful,

If we put some effort into working with them.

So if you study Buddhism for a while,

Sooner or later you're going to encounter this idea of non-attachment.

And a lot of times people think that that means that you won't have emotional responses to anything.

You won't have a response to a loss,

Or even think that emotions are unwanted.

But the truth is,

There's nothing wrong with having emotions.

It would be probably unhelpful to not have emotions.

The problem isn't emotions,

It's how we deal with them when they arise.

So a lot of people are going to react to an unpleasant emotion in one of two ways.

One is that we just kind of give into it,

We rationalize it,

We seek justification for it,

We add to the storyline behind it.

So we get angry and we start coming up with reasons why our angry is justified.

Or we get depressed and anxious and we ruminate about the things that we're depressed or anxious about.

And in the process,

We nurture the bad feelings and we cause them to increase.

One of my teachers would say,

What you pay attention to will grow.

And so if you're angry and you want to get more angry,

Well,

Think about all the reasons that you have to be mad and you'll make yourself madder,

Which I don't really encourage you to do.

On the other hand,

People will avoid unpleasant emotions and deny them and repress them,

Either in an attempt to kind of escape from them or maybe to hide from them.

So we get angry and say we're not.

And then we end up becoming passive aggressive or something like that.

Or we get anxious,

But we tell ourselves that we shouldn't get anxious and we make ourselves anxious about our anxiety.

I used to do that all the time.

It was terrible about public speaking.

And I'd feel a little anxiety come up and I'd start to think that I shouldn't feel that way.

And the only thing I knew,

I'd go from a little nervous about getting up and talking in front of people to a full-blown panic attack.

I was never really that bad,

But pretty close to it.

There's a story that the Buddha told.

There's a man came to the Buddha and he was upset about something.

I don't remember exactly what it was,

But someone had disrespected and harmed him in some way.

And legitimately he was harmed,

He was wronged by this person.

And so he was telling the Buddha this story and as he was telling it,

He was reliving the whole thing.

So he was reliving the way his feelings got hurt and how angry he got that someone had done this thing and all of that kind of stuff.

And the Buddha says,

Stop.

So let me ask you a question.

If you got shot by an arrow,

Would it hurt?

And the guy said,

Well of course it would hurt.

He said,

What if you got shot by two arrows,

Would it hurt twice as bad?

Well yeah.

He said,

Why do you keep sticking yourself with arrows over and over?

Yes,

You were wronged,

But you keep creating and compounding more wrong by reliving it and by turning it into this major thing.

And so we do that all the time.

We get nervous and then we stick ourselves with another arrow because we shouldn't be nervous or we get angry and we stick ourselves with another arrow either because a lot of times people think because they've started practicing Buddhism that they're not supposed to get angry.

And so they get angry anyway and then they're down on themselves for getting angry and that kind of thing.

So we can compound a feeling by belaboring the facts or by thinking that we shouldn't feel a certain way.

Either way we end up really becoming victims of our emotions.

But there's a middle path where we don't compound them and we don't deny them,

But we use our mindfulness to direct ourselves skillfully.

So let's think about what emotions are.

As a Buddhist psychologist,

Padmasiri Da Silva,

And I like the way he describes them.

I think it's very useful.

He says that an emotion is the meaning that we give to a felt state of arousal.

I like that.

So a physiological or a mental state arises and you feel it.

And then you give significance or a value to it.

So this state that has arisen in my heart gets connected to things like my preferences or our beliefs about ourselves and others and our culture and our sense of morality and ethics and all of those kinds of things.

So I'm not a neurologist.

I'm not an expert on this.

But basically as I understand it,

Information follows different pathways into the mind.

And some of that information actually bypasses the part of the brain that analyzes and evaluates things and can very quickly go to the part that reacts physically.

And so something might happen and we might react with the fight or flight response where something can trigger lust or hunger or a craving without any involvement with what we might call the conscious mind.

In fact,

I was sitting here as we were getting fixed up.

I'm hungry.

I didn't get hungry because I wanted to be hungry because it's a certain time and it's time for me to start getting hungry.

This physical response arose to the fact that I haven't eaten in a few hours and I felt that.

And then you give meaning to it.

That's what that is.

And so where you go from there depends a lot on how you react to what has arisen.

So for example,

Say you're driving down I-95 on your way home and a big truck suddenly swerves in front of you.

So probably what's going to happen is you're going to skid out of the way and say it's a really close call.

And so you've gone all the way off of the shoulder of the road and it happens so fast that you're hardly even aware of your reaction.

But there you are sitting by the side of the road and your heart is pounding and your mouth is dry and your hands are shaking and all of that.

We've all had that experience probably if you've been driving very long.

So that didn't happen because you thought,

Oh look,

This truck is running me off the road and I'm going to die if I don't do something so let me do this.

You happen so fast you don't think about it.

It goes right straight into the part of your brain that just reacts.

And then you start thinking about what's happened.

Now you're aware of the sensation in your body and you start to add meaning to this and you can develop those feelings into a variety of different responses.

You could turn it into road rage.

You could turn it into fear of freeway driving.

Or you could be glad that you're alive and you can check to see if the truck driver is okay and things like that.

What you do,

What emotion you associate with this physical sensation and physical response you have depends a lot about what you have practiced thinking about situations like that.

And so here's a place where we can focus.

What are we practicing?

So that point where we add meaning is where we can start by kind of helping along our emotions so that we're not waylaid by them.

So when he was still seeking liberation,

When he had just set out on the spiritual path,

The Buddha realized that his mental activities fell into two categories.

Those that led to stress and suffering and those that led to happiness and well-being.

So an unpleasant feeling can actually contribute to our well-being.

If we didn't experience disappointment,

For example,

We'd have no reason to keep trying.

If I were going to try to solve a problem and then fail,

I'd like to feel a little bit frustrated or disappointed.

I don't want to feel okay with it or feel happy about it because then I wouldn't try again.

And so disappointment,

Frustration,

And things like that,

As long as they're within certain kind of skillful boundaries,

Actually help us because they keep us going.

Pleasant feelings aren't necessarily good for us either.

The world is filled with people who get drawn into addictions and compulsions and bad relationships and so on because there are some pleasant feelings,

But then ultimately they end up with very unpleasant consequences.

So rather than making feelings the problem,

Embracing some feelings and rejecting others,

We can instead practice understanding things differently.

So develop a habit of observing our mental states without attaching to them.

And that's where the non-attachment part can happen.

We don't have to feel a certain way.

We can see what has arisen and we can kind of select what we're going to do as a response of what has arisen.

I don't have to hook onto every pleasant feeling.

I don't have to reject every unpleasant feeling.

And so then we're able to more skillfully manage what arises and we can develop out of that those values that help us live more authentically.

So a lot of our trouble,

Our disturbances,

Our unwanted or our emotions that create problems for us really arise out of misunderstanding reality.

We don't understand our relationship to circumstances,

To other people,

Even to ourselves.

So think about circumstances for example.

We tend to think of circumstances as being good or bad.

But most of them really aren't until we give them some value.

Circumstances,

Here's a koan for you to work with between now and the next time I see you.

Circumstances are neutral.

So I started going back to Moka Correctional Institution this week.

I hadn't been there since the pandemic happened and things started to shut down.

And so I was meeting at the chapel with my Buddhist group there.

So most of us would rather not go to prison,

Right?

And the incarcerated guys don't like it very much.

But I was leaving the chapel one day and this was a couple of years ago.

And as I was heading back toward the main gate,

I saw that there was this little bird in the flower garden that they have out there.

Now this bird didn't have to be in prison.

It could fly out.

But it was just hanging out in a bush looking for bugs to eat and that kind of thing.

And it seemed very happy to be where it was.

Some of the guys in my group have actually said things like being sent to prison was the best thing that could have happened to them.

Some of them figure that if they hadn't gone to prison,

They probably would have done worse things that they'd have to regret more.

Or maybe gotten killed because of what was happening in their lives.

So even being incarcerated is neutral until you ascribe meaning to it,

Decide how you value it.

So by the way,

I don't think anyone should be okay in general with being in prison.

If you were happy about being in prison,

Then you might not want to leave.

And if you left,

You might want to come back.

So it wouldn't deter you from committing crimes again.

So there's an advantage to not wanting to be there.

But if you're doing life in prison with no chance of getting out,

Well,

You might want to rethink that.

But we have a Zen monk in our group there at Tomoka Correctional Institution.

He ordained inside.

He's been in the correctional system for a very long time.

And he was with a Zen group,

I think in South Florida.

There was a Dharma teacher who was coming in and ordained him.

So he actually took robes,

Although he doesn't get to wear them because he has to wear the blue suit that they all wear.

But he's a monk,

Just like I am.

And he's doing life with no chance of getting out.

But yet he's found purpose in meaning in what most of us would consider to be pretty horrible conditions.

So wherever you are,

You can develop a set of values that's more appropriate to the circumstances of your life.

And you can find reasons for joy regardless of your circumstances.

So other people is another source or another thing that we find to get disturbed about in the form of anger.

And that's one of the three poisons in Buddhism.

So again,

A lot of people will come and go,

Well,

I've been a Buddhist now for a year and I still get mad.

How come this happens?

Well,

Because you've been a human being for 45 years or whatever.

You're going to continue to get angry because that's what happens with human beings.

Even the Dalai Lama admits to getting angry.

And the Buddha himself once said something along the lines of,

Anger finds no foothold in my heart.

So it would arise,

But he just didn't give it a place to stand.

And we can do that too.

We can work with developing compassion and goodwill.

After I met the abbot and started coming here for events and stuff,

I liked the metta prayer and the way we do that.

So I took it back to my meetings in the land and we started doing it there.

Well,

There was a fellow who was a long time member there who works at the county jail,

Volusia County Jail.

Not the place where I go with the Buddhist inmates,

But just down the road at the county jail.

And his job was to check people in as they came in.

And he said,

As you can imagine,

A lot of people are unpleasant to deal with coming in there.

But we started chanting that,

May I be happy and well,

May no heart come to me,

May I learn compassion.

We started doing that every week.

So there's a meditation practice called metta bhavana,

Where you develop metta,

The goodwill toward other people.

And he'd work with that,

Because I teach it.

But something about saying those words every week really kind of started working on his mind.

And so he started doing it at home as part of his meditation practice every day,

Just saying those metta prayers.

And he said it had really changed the way he interacted with the people who came into the prison.

And he said before,

Somebody would be unpleasant and I'd be unpleasant back to them.

And he said,

Now I see them as their suffering people.

And he said,

I still have to follow the rules.

I can't always do what they're wanting me to do.

But he was reacting to them with compassion.

I'm going to go into more detail about some of these things later on.

But in short,

If we value our kindness over our belief that others should treat us in a certain way,

If we can work on accepting others as being imperfect,

Just as we're imperfect,

If we can try not to make matters worse by making ourselves victims of our own anger,

Poking ourselves with more arrows,

Then we're going to experience less anger.

So most of you have probably heard of the four seals of the Dharma.

These are the four key teachings of Buddhism.

And the first one is the truth of dukkha,

Of stress.

If you're born,

There's going to be stress.

And the second one is impermanence.

Everything in this material world is going to change.

Everything that arises due to cause is going to fall due to cause.

And then there's the not-self characteristic.

There's no me as such.

Everything is empty of self.

If there's no me,

How can it all be all about me?

And finally,

There's Buddha nature.

There is awakening.

Awakening is possible in every moment,

In every circumstance,

In every emotion that arises.

We have the opportunity to work with that to awaken.

So those four seals,

That's not just mystical mumbo-jumbo.

A lot of these times you hear these teachings and they're kind of like,

Yeah,

That's what we Buddhists think.

But you don't realize that these are not just abstractions and concepts to be chanted about and forgotten.

Our stress and disturbance comes from not realizing those things.

So in future talks I'm going to unpack those a little bit.

But in the meantime,

Be aware if you embody those teachings,

If you use those as ways to guide your life,

It will transform your life.

So thank you very much for your attention.

I hope you enjoyed today's installment of the Adventures of Saraputa and Mogulana.

And I hope you found a way to conquer or at least subdue your own self a little bit.

I want to thank the people who helped make this podcast what it is,

Like Sprinkle Graphics,

Who designed our logo,

And Edward Simon,

Who provided his music for us.

Next episode,

I'll be talking with Edward for a bit,

And I'm sure you'll find that interview very engaging.

The world needs more Dharma superheroes.

So I hope you will subscribe so that we can continue this adventure together.

Thank you for your attention.

Now go save the world.