Adventures Of Sariputta & Mogallana 9: Freedom

In this episode, Sensei Morris Doshin Sullivan talks about how Mogallana helped the Buddha bring a number of people to the truest, safest refuge. And then he shares a dharma talk he gave at White Sands Buddhist Center on the subject of Freedom. Specifically, he talks about what he has learned about freedom from his weekly trips to a state correctional institution, where he volunteers at the chapel with a group of incarcerated Buddhists.

Transcript

You are listening to The Adventures of Saraputa and Mogulana.

I'm your host,

Morris Sullivan.

Today I'm going to share with you a Dharma Talk I gave at White Sands Buddhist Center on the subject of freedom.

And in that,

I'll talk about my experiences volunteering at the chapel of a state correctional institution where I work with a group of incarcerated men who practice Buddhism.

But first,

I'll tell you about an interesting encounter that Mogulana had and how the Buddha used Mogulana's help to offer refuge to a number of spiritual seekers.

There was a priest,

A Brahmin named Aghidata.

He served as the head priest under King Pasenadi's father.

And after his father passed away and Pasenadi became king,

Aghidata gave away all of his belongings,

Just gave them to charity,

And then left home to live as a sadhu,

As an ascetic.

While many of his followers stayed with him,

In fact,

Aghidata ended up living with about 10,

000 of them in northern India where Buddhism had been established.

And it happened that they settled near a large mound of sand where the powerful Naga lived.

So I'm assuming that this large mound of sand was kind of like what eventually became stupas in India,

The big mounds that mark a holy site of some kind.

And Nagas are semi-divine serpents.

They're sort of like half demigod,

Half cobra.

And they show up in Buddhist mythology in kind of interesting ways sometimes.

Well,

Part of Aghidata's teaching was apparently something kind of like nature worship.

He had his followers pay homage to trees and parks and gardens and things like that.

And he told them that this practice would lead to their liberation from suffering.

The Buddha became aware of him and his followers and he realized that they were pretty close to enlightenment.

They just needed a little nudge in the right direction.

And so one day he sent Venerable Moggallana to visit them and he said that he'd follow along not long afterward.

So Moggallana got there and he asked Aghidata and his followers for shelter for the night.

And at first they refused.

I guess there was a little professional jealousy going on there or whatever,

But then they agreed to let him stay.

But they sent him out to the mound of sand to stay there,

You know,

This place where the Naga lived.

Well,

The Naga wasn't too happy about that.

So when Moggallana showed up,

He started trying to scare him away by emitting smoke and flames and things like that.

So he kind of like a fire breathing dragon,

I guess,

And trying to intimidate Moggallana into leaving.

Moggallana,

As you know,

Had quite a few special powers of his own.

So he fought back and the two beings dueled for a while.

And finally,

The Naga was so impressed with Moggallana's spiritual powers that he not only let him stay,

But he decided that he would protect him himself.

He coiled himself around the mound of sand and then spread his vast hood out over Moggallana to shelter him through the night.

Well,

You can imagine what Agidata and his followers must have seen or heard with these two beings fighting and everything and then things getting quiet.

So the next day,

His followers came out to the mound of sand,

Fully expecting to see Moggallana just dead there.

They were very surprised to find him calmly sitting in the shade provided by this Naga.

They were quite impressed by this.

Well,

As this was going on,

The Buddha arrived.

And as soon as he saw him,

Moggallana jumped up and he shouted,

That,

That's my teacher,

The unexcelled Buddha.

I'm just a humble student.

Well,

Agidata and his followers were awestruck.

I mean,

If Moggallana was this powerful and he was just a student,

Then the Buddha must be pretty amazing.

And so they approached the Buddha and started talking to him.

And the Buddha asked,

Well,

What is your teaching?

Well,

Agidata explained his beliefs that he had his followers bow to the natural world.

And in response,

The Buddha said,

Well,

Okay,

But there's a better refuge.

He said,

When threatened with danger,

People go to many refuges,

To mountains and forests,

Parks and gardens and to sacred trees.

But that's not the safest refuge,

Not the best refuge where one is freed from all suffering,

One who takes refuge in the Buddha,

In the enlightened one,

The truly awakened one,

In the Dharma,

The enlightened teachings,

And in the Sangha,

The enlightened community,

Who sees with clear eyes the cause of suffering and the path to its transcendence.

That one has found the refuge where they are truly free.

And as soon as they heard this,

Agidata and all of his followers became arahants,

Became fully enlightened themselves.

A few years back,

I added some lines into a traditional prayer that we say at the end of our services on Wednesday nights.

I started including groups of people that I felt that we should always keep in our hearts,

And among them are those who are incarcerated.

And so I,

You know,

Especially for those who are unjustly,

Unjustly in prison,

But also those who were tried and convicted fairly.

My hope is that they find freedom,

Freedom from oppression and spiritual freedom.

I think I mentioned not too long ago,

I started back,

Going back to the state correctional institution outside of Daytona Beach a few weeks ago,

After I got vaccinated.

And so I lead a Buddhist group at the chapel.

And now and then,

Somebody will ask me why I go there,

What it's like,

And that sort of thing.

And so since I returned,

And they've been on my mind a lot,

I thought that this would be a good time to talk about that.

So when you first go into the compound there,

And probably most correctional institutions of that kind,

You have to identify yourself at a control room.

And there's a hand scanner there that identifies you by your handprint.

And then they let you through this big chain link gate and into an enclosed area.

And you go through a metal detector,

And they x-ray everything that you're bringing in.

And then they scan you with a wand,

And sometimes they'll bring somebody out to pat you down just to make extra sure that you're not bringing in any contraband.

And then finally,

They give you a body alarm,

Which is a little plastic black thing with a button on it.

It looks kind of like a garage door opener.

And if violence breaks out or something,

Or you feel like you're in danger,

You can push this button,

And an alarm goes off somewhere.

I've never had to use this.

I've been going there since 2006,

So quite a while,

But theoretically,

If you push this button,

An officer would show up.

And they used to let us bring in refreshments once a month.

And so one day I was coming in,

And I had plastic grocery bags with cookies and coffee.

And the officer checking me in said,

Oh,

No,

You can't bring those in here.

And I thought he was talking about the cookies and stuff,

So I started to reply to that.

And he goes,

No,

No,

Cookies are fine,

But plastic bags are contraband.

You can't bring in plastic bags.

But he let me through that time,

But he warned me to use paper in the future.

And so I thought this was very weird,

And so I started asking the guys about it when I got to the chapel.

I said,

What's the deal with plastic bags?

And somebody said,

Well,

We could use them to make wine.

So in case you want to make some home-brewed prison wine,

Here's the recipe.

Steal some fruit,

Whatever you can get your hands on.

In fact,

Ketchup will work,

They tell me.

Anything with sugar in it.

And put it in a plastic bag with some crumbled up bread for the yeast.

And hang it up in a dark place out of sight.

And eventually you'll have some wine.

Not good wine,

But it'll give you a buzz.

So I've been going to this correctional institution,

Like I said,

For 15 years now,

A little over 15 years,

Except for the year that COVID was an issue.

And I spent a couple of hours at the chapel there on Tuesday afternoons,

And I've really learned a lot from that experience.

Most of what I've learned doesn't have very much to do with making wine.

But I might share some things with you that you could do with ramen noodles and Cheetos that you probably never thought of before.

So by the way,

I used to talk about them as inmates,

But in prison education,

And they've got some college programs now where professors are going in and helping them with their education.

They have seen that term used to dehumanize people.

So I try to avoid using that word now.

Anyway,

I've learned a lot about the nature of freedom and the relationship between freedom of body and freedom of mind.

To be physically free is not freedom.

And to be in prison is not necessarily to be a prisoner.

I've seen people who've been completely written off by society,

By their families and things like that,

But managed to free their minds and their lives.

And I've come to see very clearly that we're in much greater danger of being in prison by the workings of our own minds than by things like walls and fences.

So if you ever go to one of these places,

The one that I go to looks a lot like a community college from the 1970s,

Only there's very high chain link fences and razor wire,

Which you don't see around most community colleges.

And when I got there my first time,

I was just absolutely terrified.

So I was actually invited in.

There were some incarcerated people who wanted to practice Buddhism and they wouldn't let them do it without a volunteer present.

And so,

Long story short,

Somebody found me and I started going in.

So that first day I was pretty scared.

I was pretty nervous about it.

And I thought that a guard would escort me to the chapel,

But no,

They processed me through the gate and all of these wandings and scanings and x-rays and everything.

And then said,

Okay.

And so I started to head toward the chapel.

Fortunately there was another chapel volunteer who got there the same time I did and knew that this was my first time.

So he accompanied me over there.

And we had about four guys show up for our first meeting.

And over time that grew quite a bit.

Attendance,

Waxes and wanes,

New people arrive,

Unfortunately.

Happily,

Some people get out,

Some are transferred.

And I was glad to see when I went back about six weeks ago,

I guess,

That our little group had held together in my absence.

In fact,

There were actually more fellows going than there had been when I left.

But from the very beginning they had a lot of questions.

Different forms of Buddhism resonate with different people.

And you know,

You'll find this if I walked around and asked everybody,

You know,

What Dharma teachers do you like,

What kind of Buddhism appeals to you and stuff like that.

I'd probably get a bunch of different answers.

And that's fine.

You know,

That's the nice thing about Buddhism.

You're not limited by one thing.

We're basically a Zen group there,

But some of them like to read Dharma talks by the great Thai masters,

Which I like too.

And there have been some who wanted to practice Tibetan Lam Rim meditation and rework with these complex visualizations of Buddhas and things like that.

But they're all looking for the same thing,

And probably the same thing that you come here for,

A way to live a better life with less stress and more meaning.

So one week,

And this was a couple of years ago,

We had several newcomers show up.

And so we started talking about why people come in there every week and sit for a couple hours and listen to me talk.

And one guy summed it up really well.

He said,

I started coming out because I wanted some peace of mind.

He said,

I got that.

But it also helps me understand what causes my problems better.

And he said,

Usually I'd be in confinement right now,

Meaning locked up in solitary for behaving badly.

He said,

Usually I'd be in confinement right now,

But this helps me with my anger and helps me put up with the kind of things that go on around me all the time.

And my bet is that even though you're not locked up in a correctional institution,

Most of you would say something along that line if I asked you why you're here.

It helps you live a better life,

Helps you deal with your stress.

There was another fellow who was a Muslim,

And he's a chapel clerk.

He's one of the people whose job it is to be there and check people in and out and that kind of thing.

And one day he had come into the room for some reason,

And he said,

Something was just different here.

I didn't know what it was,

But I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

Some years ago,

One of our members came up after a meeting to tell me that he was getting transferred to a lower security program.

And what he said really helped me understand what I was accomplishing there.

You know,

If you're in this position,

Sometimes you wonder if anything is ever landing and if anybody's ever being changed by what you're saying.

But he said,

As you can imagine,

A lot of guys live in the past remembering the things they did before they were in here.

And a lot of them live in the future thinking about what they're going to do when they get out.

But what I've learned from this practice,

If you want happiness,

You have to find it in the here and now.

We sing about that after services just about every time.

Happiness is here and now.

So it doesn't matter what your circumstances are.

If you can't find it here and now,

You're not going to find it in the future.

So Buddhism is a path to freedom.

But that path is only available to us because we have freedom.

The ability to free our minds.

When we say the vows at the beginning of services,

That's really what we're bowing to,

This recognition that we can free our minds and thus free ourselves from the rounds of coming and going.

We're free whenever we decide to act out of compassion rather than to act out of anger.

We're free when we decide to act out of generosity instead of greed.

We're free when we decide not to go for refuge to booze or television or money or any of those things,

But to go for refuge to our spiritual path.

You've probably heard the old song,

Me and Bobby McGee.

There's a line,

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

So if you think about that in terms of your mind,

What keeps you stuck in your stress?

It's the idea that we have to hold on to things.

To material wealth,

Sure,

Stuff that you've got that you think you have to have,

But also to ideas that keep our ego running in circles around itself,

Keep circling us back to our stresses and our afflictions.

So members of an incarcerated community can lose everything in a moment.

If you talk back to a guard,

They can take a little freedom that you have,

And when they put you in confinement,

They open up your locker and they go through and they confiscate everything that might even remotely look like contraband.

So you can lose all your possessions in a heartbeat.

But even for us,

As long as we cling to the idea that freedom comes from wealth or power or things like that,

We're always imprisoned by our own walls,

By the walls that we make.

So incarcerated people who have jobs and families and things like that can sometimes get money and they can buy things with a canteen.

They really don't get to own much.

Their choices are pretty limited.

But yeah,

They learn to find pleasure and contentment in very little.

One of them once told me,

He was very happy he had had a birthday and he had had a big birthday party.

And I said,

How does that happen?

How do you have a birthday party?

And he said,

Well,

The guys in my dorm threw me a party.

And he said,

I made a nice dinner to share with everybody.

So I wondered about that.

How had he made dinner?

I've eaten lunch there.

I had heartburn for a week after.

So I can imagine that anything that's better than that is probably a cause for celebration.

And he said,

Well,

I made soup.

And he told me about his favorite soup recipe.

So some of his friends had donated packages of ramen noodles,

Which you can buy at the canteen.

They cost you about five times what they cost if you buy them at the supermarket,

But you can get them.

And that was what he used as the base.

And he used some of the flavoring packets.

But then they had embellished it with some other stuff.

So for instance,

There were some pieces of meat that guys had smuggled out of the chow hall and then held onto.

And there were Slim Jims.

You know,

Those little dried sausages you get at 7-Eleven.

You get those at the canteen too.

So they had held onto some Slim Jims.

And people had hoarded packets of ketchup and hot sauce.

And then he crunched up a few bags of Cheetos to make it nice and cheesy.

So it was this cheese,

Chicken,

Mystery meat,

Vegetable,

Slim Jim,

Hot and spicy noodle soup.

She said it was delicious.

Apparently it was a real big hit.

So someone had taken some ramen noodles and added hot water from the sink to make them kind of pliable.

And then they mixed in sugar and peanut butter,

Which comes in a little plastic packet so that you can get at the canteen.

And then you can mash all that together apparently,

Shape it into a disk,

Let it dry out,

And you have a peanut butter cookie of sorts.

And so that was his birthday cake.

So like I said,

You know,

You can find pleasure in small things.

Once during a retreat here,

Somebody asked me,

How can you have compassion for convicted felons?

Because you know,

These are not,

They're not where they are because they're good guys.

They've done some bad things.

But I pointed out that except for the workings of karma,

Any of us could be locked up.

There's a very famous poem by Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh,

Call Me By My True Names.

If you haven't read it,

You should look it up.

It's probably,

I'm sure it's online.

But he talks about having compassion for sadistic pirates by recognizing that had he grown up the same way they did,

In the same culture,

Same family,

Same circumstances,

He'd be a pirate too.

So some of these incarcerated Buddhists didn't have much of a chance really to turn out any other way than they did.

Some of them got into really bad situations when they were young,

But they're working hard to train their minds now to stop leading them into trouble so they don't come back.

Some will never get out.

And yet,

Because of their spiritual practice,

They're able to find meaning and purpose.

And I tell you that because a lot of times we can feel like there's a pandemic and there's war and all of these things going on.

But if we let ourselves be guided by our spiritual practice,

Then we can find meaning and purpose.

So sometimes I'll joke around work that Tuesdays are always good days because I get out of school.

And,

You know,

People chuckle.

But it's true.

Going there always reminds me how fortunate I am to be in this body,

In this place,

At this time,

And to be free.

So I have this little ritual that I do when I get out.

I'll pause just outside the gates and just for a moment,

Just take a breath and realize that I'm outside.

I'll take a moment to be grateful to be there,

To not be surrounded by fences and razor wire.

And then I will remind myself that walking out the gate only takes me part way to freedom.

I need to continue moment by moment to loosen myself from the bonds of ego,

Of attachment and aversion so that eventually I can experience true liberation.

So thank you for your attention.

Thank you for joining me for Episode 9 of the Adventures of Saraputa and Mogulana.

Don't forget,

If you have a question or something you'd like me to talk about,

You can post it on the anchor.

Fm profile page for the show.

I hope you found something in this episode that you can put for use in your own practice,

A way to find your own refuge,

A way to find true freedom.

Now go save the world.