I vow to test the truth about the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Good morning. In the last four weeks, I've been giving more lectures than I've ever given before. And what I found is that in doing more Dharma talks, there arises a kind of conversation that's happening, a conversation with myself as I study and prepare,

[01:01]

and a conversation with people who have attended, by virtue of being in the practice period or living at Green Gulch, have attended a number of the talks. So the conversation begins to grow and develop. And so I wanted to include you in the conversation this morning and see, for those of you who are in on the conversation, if it goes in different directions or shines some light in some dark corners. So today I want to talk about friendship. This is kind of the general topics. Friendship, greed, hate, and asidya.

[02:04]

Asidya is this new word that I've learned. It means spiritual torpor or ennui. And it's a word that's familiar in monastic situations, in Catholic monasticism. And I think there's situations that arise in monastic life not dependent on what particular religion or brand of monastic life, but just monastic life in general. But not just monastic life, just our regular everyday life. Monastic life also sometimes has a monastic, monotonous, repetitious quality to it, where we begin to kind of run down and don't know if we can keep going on, burnout. And so asidya, and then what are the antidotes to asidya?

[03:14]

How can we help ourselves and our friends when this kind of situation arises? And what fans the flames, maybe you could say. And then I also, as a little preview, want to tell you a story about a Buddhist nun who lived during the time of the Buddha. Her name was Pattachara. So I'll see if I can weave this all together this morning. So I wanted to read from this book called The Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris. The subtitle is Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work. And she talks about asidya and quotes from the 4th century monk Vagrius who writes about asidya, this spiritual torpor.

[04:16]

And he states that they think of asidya as like Mara or the evil one or a demon that kind of enters your consciousness or state of mind and begins to eat away at your resolve and your vows. So the bad thought or demon of asidya, quote, makes it seem that the sun hardly moves, if at all, and that the day is 50 hours long. Then it constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun, to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour, which is lunchtime. So do you get the feeling of sort of, whether you're in the monastery or at work, kind of looking at your watch, looking at your computer screen, watching the time. When do I get to take that old lunch break and get out of here? And the sun hardly moves.

[05:17]

Or in school, I remember feeling that way in school, in high school mostly. So then the monk is distracted by this. You know, they're supposed to be meditating or doing mindful work or directing one's thoughts to attention to what is before you, and instead you're kind of gazing around, hoping lunch will come. So then what happens is that asidya moves away, asidya moves inward and, quote, instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, his or her very life itself. And then you begin to think less of the other monks or your co-workers or your family members or your neighbors, brooding on the ways they have angered, offended, or merely failed to encourage you.

[06:19]

You know, you just get, they're ruining your practice, these people. So then this demon drives the monk then to desire other sites where he or she can more easily find work and make a real success of him or herself. So you begin to think, gee, you know, if I just moved there or got another job or got a new apartment or got a divorce or got married or whatever, then I'd make a real success of myself. So this kind of, they call it a demon, you know, that begins to eat away where you think you can manipulate the externals, change things around, so then, you know, it'll be okay. So you reject the present company, you reject what's going on with yourself, and you start to pity yourself and think about the memories of your dear ones and your former way of life. You know, it used to be better in Seattle.

[07:24]

Then it says Asidiya moves in for the kill, and it depicts life stretching out for a long period of time and brings before the mind's eye the toil of the ascetic struggle, meaning, you know, wherever you are, just being that way forever, it's going to be just bleak, you know. And as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight. So you kind of give up on even making effort. And this, it has an eating away quality to it, Asidiya. The word itself comes from a word that means to lack care, a lack of care. And care, the word care, means to cry out, to lament. So I think this is familiar to all of us,

[08:31]

and how do we understand this and look, turn the light inward? You might say to look at what are the causes and conditions of this rather than believing that, you know, it's the person who sits next to you. I remember my first Sashin, the person who sat next to me had her jaw cracked every time she chewed. So for seven days, all the meals, there was this noise when she chewed, and I hated her, you know. I really felt she was ruining my whole Sashin. She was making it so difficult. I turned it all on her, and that was the problem. If she just would get out of the way, get another seat, then I'd be able to practice, right? Rather than understanding that the practice is right there in front of us, in front of me, working with annoyances and irritations, and this is the field, this is the fertile ground of our practice.

[09:34]

But this acedia makes it seem like it's somebody else's fault, and we can't find the energy actually to make that kind of effort that pays attention to what's going on, that studies the self in that way. So one of the antidotes to acedia, which is hard when you're in the grips of it to meet, is to throw yourself into your daily life, the details and the daily practice. In the monks of this lineage, it would be of worship, and in some other lineage it would be the practice, to throw yourself into the practice, which at the time seems like the worst thing, that you just can't get the energy up, but that's kind of the key.

[10:36]

And also another key is to encourage others, to help others, because helping others is a way of encouraging ourselves. You may know this very clearly, that when you extend to someone else when they're in need or needing encouragement, you can find words that really are for yourself. They're really encouraging you right at the same time as you're encouraging others, which for me is mostly what Dharma talks are, this kind of encouraging, supposedly encouraging others, but encouraging myself at the same time. Which is where the good friend comes in, and friendship. So in Buddhism, the good friend, when you see it written, it's capitalized, G and F are capitalized. The good friend is Kalyāṇa Mitra, Mitra's friend, Kalyāṇa's good friend.

[11:39]

And the Buddha, as the teacher of Dharma, is thought of as the kind of quintessential good friend. The way you actually help another is to give teachings rather than other things. That's the kind of greatest gift you can give someone, is the teaching or exposing them to the teachings. But we can help one another in many, many ways. And in fact, having good friends is one of the main proximate causes, or in terms of assembling causes and conditions for yourself that are conducive to practice, having good friends is one of the main things. So our friends are those that we can trust in such a way that it feels like, this is what's described in the sutras,

[12:42]

as if you're a baby putting your head down on your mother's breast, that feeling of complete reliance and trust and faith in our friends, that's a true friend. And if the friend has any ulterior motive for being your friend, like gratifying one's own needs in a selfish way, then one has to be aware of this and careful. If you're being that way as a friend, and if someone is acting that way towards you, you have to be able to distinguish. Because we're influenced very, very strongly by our friends. The sutras talk about if you take a wonderful stick of incense and wrap it in an old fish, a dead fish,

[13:44]

it will begin to take on, it will smell like an old fish. Right? And the same with our friends, that kind of influence. You could have great resolve, but if you... Gee, I didn't think that was funny, but I guess it is. I guess there's that old saying, friends after four days begin to smell like fish or something like that. Guests. Guests, right. Right, right. Thank you. So anyway, if you take incense and you wrap it in an old fish, and same with our friends, if you are wrapped in friends that are not upholding the precepts, let's say, are taking what is not given, killing, slandering, harboring ill will, and so forth,

[14:46]

you are influenced by this. And the opposite is true. If you surround yourself by good friends, that may have an amazing effect on you as well. So it's important to know the difference. And sometimes I have a friend who has an illness, a chronic illness, and she's found by carefully watching her life and taking care of her body that there are certain people she now can't really spend a lot of time with because they drain her. They pull her energy and it's not reciprocal, the energy flow, and she actually feels sicker after spending time with these people. You know how that is sometimes? So to be aware of this, and although the bodhisattva eventually can go everywhere and be with anybody in the early years of the bodhisattva's career,

[15:51]

you have to protect. The bodhisattva needs protection and care like a young flower or something. So this is something to be aware of, how important our friends are. So what is friendship? I have this quote about friendship, I think. This always happens to me. I like to speak extemporaneously and then I have a few notes to help me, but then I can never find the quote I need, so I might as well just talk. The root of the word friend, and somehow when I read this I had this wonderful feeling arise in me, that the meaning of the word friend means to love or beloved, belonging to the loved ones, not in bondage or free. All these words come from the root of the word friend. Dear and precious and safety

[16:52]

all come from the root of friend. The root of friend. And I think that's how we feel with our true friends. We feel safe to reveal ourselves and express ourselves. We feel that we're amongst beloved, we are beloved and we love, and there's a kind of peace and freedom there with our friends. So one of the fuels of this asidia or spiritual torpor is actually a discontent within ourselves, a dissatisfaction and a dis-ease within ourselves that's not being attended to. And it begins to be fueled by the daily round of annoyances

[17:59]

and irritations and slings and arrows and sufferings of just our regular everyday life, which we cannot avoid. Being human beings there is no way we can get outside and around and away from these kinds of difficulties and pains of the day, be they extreme form of illness and suffering and lamentation and grief, or just having someone's jaw click who sits next to you for seven days, or all the other things, the sound of someone's voice. So when those things begin to annoy us and irritate us, if there is a dissatisfaction or a dis-ease or discontent that we are not examining in our life, which may be unconscious, it may not be...

[19:00]

There are always this... Samsara means an axle that's broken, so it's out of whack, it's always lumbering along in disarray, dis-ease, which is the characteristic of samsara. But when we're not examining this and taking it up and looking at our life in a certain way, we begin to be annoyed, and this annoyance works in such a way that we begin to get angry and hateful, and the slightest thing can tip us into full-blown expression of anger. So it's a mental discomfort, because it's not necessarily that you're in pain.

[20:00]

I think many of us know people who have physical difficulties and pain and they're at peace, they're dealing with it, they're not on the edge and irritated all the time, and they're a great inspiration. They're working with it in a way that's an example to everyone. So it's more of a mental discomfort and mental dissatisfaction. And this kind of unhappiness and dejection, when this is unattended, there's the conditions for outbursts of anger and envy and jealousy and greed, and these kinds of afflictions, they're called, or unwholesome states of mind, you could say. And hate is sometimes seen as a snake, because it's ready to strike.

[21:01]

Some kind of annoyance happens, and you're ready to strike out at whatever it is. Or another traditional way of thinking of hate is like an enemy who's got his chance or her chance. They see their chance to get in there and do some harm. So this mind that has this unattended disaffection and unhappiness, this kind of feeling fuels anger that's ready to strike, like a snake that spreads poison then, because the snake is venomous. It strikes out and spreads poison. So we affect people very strongly, even those that we love or even those that we call our friends. So this is...

[22:10]

What is the nature of friendship? What are friends? What are true friends? And it may get kind of mixed up in our minds. We may feel like someone's a real friend to us, and then something will happen and we are shocked, shocked that... I mean, this sounds petty, perhaps, but that they talked about us in such a way and we heard about it. These are the pains of our life. Or we may find ourselves talking about someone in a way that may be bordering on slander, actually talking in such a way that the way we speak ruins their reputation or plants the seeds of other people thinking less highly of them. So these are all things to be aware of. And a true friend is beloved, is love and peace and safety and relying.

[23:11]

So are we being a true friend to our friends and family? And are we able to be? Or does something kind of unconsciously get constellated and we strike out in such a way that we don't even know what's going on ourselves, you know? Is that familiar? It's familiar to me. So one of the ten wholesome virtues or one of the ten wholesome dharmas, meaning phenomena, that's present in every wholesome state of mind is something in Sanskrit called prashrabdhi. Prashrabdhi is translated as serenity, lightness, pliant, pliancy. So I wanted to read a definition of pliancy,

[24:15]

which is fitness for action, fitness for action that freely applies the full energy of body and mind toward good purposes. This is pliancy. Fitness for action that freely applies the full energy of body and mind for good purposes. And this ease, you know, because fully applying your body and mind to good purposes, pliant, at will, turning freely, this ease comes from relaxing rigidity, and rigidity in body and mind, rigid ideas and rigid views about how it should be and the way it used to be and how we want it to be, and looking around and discriminating in that way

[25:15]

is a kind of rigid quality to that. So relaxing that, allowing what is to come forward and realize itself and have you witness it, this kind of ease with whatever happens, lightness, serenity, tranquility, just saying the words, the beautiful words, I know that's a kind of discrimination, but serenity, tranquility. So this pliancy, along with that, is supreme happiness and joyfulness, preceded by faith and clarity, gradually making the mind joyful, pliancy eliminates non-virtuous class of errant tendencies. So this errant tendencies of this kind of striking out,

[26:17]

when there's this lightness and fully using the body and mind towards good purposes, meaning beneficial, meaning being the good friend and expressing the teachings, and freedom to move. So it calls up a kind of, it reminds me of this, watching the Aikido black belt Dan tests that I went to at the Aikido dojo where my son takes Aikido lessons, and did I tell you about this last time? I told some group. In these tests, the teacher calls out a particular move that someone attacks them in a certain way and there's a certain move to counter that and defend themselves, and they're called out, just one after the other,

[27:21]

and they repeat them over and over in different ways. And then the final, this goes on for quite a long time, and then the final test, they're surrounded by like five or more black belts who come at them from all sides doing different moves and they're not announced ahead of time. You just have to be ready. You're just totally ready and you, however they come, you meet that one and then you turn in that one and you turn to this one and throw that one. And in a circle. It was amazing to see. And this kind of pliancy, allowing the full energy of body and mind to meet whatever is coming, and a kind of tranquil feeling. There's no, in Aikido especially, it's a peaceful way. There's no hate. There's no striking out venomously. There's no trying to get the better of. It's just meeting, meeting all the way around. 365 degrees, literally.

[28:21]

And the one person who the teacher at the end said was the finest one, I don't know if they usually say that, was this woman who was a grandmother, I think she was in her late 60s, little, little tiny lady, and her face was very, talk about serenity, her face was completely serene as she just met these people who were much larger than she was, most of them, all of them I think, and threw them over her, you know, back and around, and her face was just, it didn't show strain or furrowed brow, you know, it was just fitness for action that freely applies the full energy of body and mind. Very beautiful. And this is a way to live in the world with pliancy. But if we are encumbered by these unattended

[29:25]

parts of ourselves, it's very hard to turn, because, well, that person may be, you know, you may have envy or jealousy about what they have or covet what they have. Now, covet is an interesting word. To covet, you know, in the Ten Commandments, which I was exposed to as a young person, I never knew what the word, do not, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife? No, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not covet, I think, just plain old, and I didn't, that wasn't a word that was sort of bandied about in my house, covet. But covet has to do with envy and contemplating another's successes and another's possessions or another's good qualities and wanting those for yourself, you know. This is also envy, and the feeling of discontent and resentment around this very contemplation

[30:31]

of others' desirable possessions. And the root of envy, the root of the word envy is to look out, to look out at other things, you know, to be looking out. The root of the word covet, now this really, this really got me, the root of the word covet means to smoke and to cook. And I, you know, I had this feeling when you covet something, you're just right over the fire in a slow rotisserie. And then, this is another part which reminded me of being on a rotisserie, it's, the root of covet means to smoke, to cook, and to move involuntarily, no, not move involuntarily, to agitate, let's see, to smoke, to move violently and agitate emotionally. So part of this envy or coveting others' successes

[31:31]

and good qualities and possessions is that you smoke, you know, you are agitated emotionally, your mind is the one that's disturbed. There's a prayer from St. Teresa of Avila, is that how you, St. Teresa of Avila said, Thank God for the things that I do not own. I think that's so great. That's a prayer, thank God for the things I do not own. Now that's, you might say, the opposite of envy or covetousness. It's like you see the pain that these material possessions and so forth can cause someone and you just are so happy that, you know, your life is simplified or whatever. So looking out, looking out at what other people have and contemplating it, and then having resentment and dissatisfaction arise and then cooking in that, you know,

[32:32]

and smoking and being agitated emotionally, it's very, very painful. Envy, jealousy, covetousness, your body and mind experiences those as very painful and it's actually unhealthy. If you look at some of the medical literature, these kinds of emotions, you know, cause constriction of the blood vessels literally and high blood pressure and all sorts of things, right? Very different from pliancy, serenity, freely moving and engaging with whatever, prashrabdhi. So, so I wanted to read something about friendliness and how to develop friendliness

[33:34]

because friendliness is the antidote to hate, one of the antidotes to hate. I wanted to say another thing about hate, which is a person who has hate in them, I want to say the word temperature, but it's temperament, their particular temperament is very conducive to wisdom, the hate type, the venomous one, because you have a disaffection from people and so forth just as disaffection means unattachedness, but in an unprofitable way, they say, or in a hurtful way or an unwholesome way, but just as in wisdom you have a disattachment from objects of the senses or objects' externalities, the hate type or the wisdom type, it's the same kind of temperament,

[34:34]

but one is just unprofitable and one is profitable or beneficial, unbeneficial, wholesome, unwholesome, but it's the same person. So the hate type, when it transforms, it becomes wisdom. So I don't mean to sort of put down people who are, all of us who are dealing with hateful feelings and so forth, this can be transformed, and one of the antidotes is friendliness. And the Bodhisattva cultivates friendliness, and friendliness, Maitri, is one of the four, they call them the four Brahma-viharas or the four heavenly abodes, including equanimity, even-mindedness, or equanimity, compassion, friendliness, and there's one more which will come to me.

[35:37]

So because no other being has a mind so full of friendliness, this is the Bodhisattva, only the Buddha has more friendliness than the Bodhisattva. And the Bodhisattva radiates great friendliness and compassion over all the beings that they actually see don't exist in a substantial way. But even so, they radiate great friendliness and they give their attention to them, thinking, I shall become a savior to all those beings, I shall release them from all their sufferings. So this is a kind of vow, this is the Bodhisattva's vow of saving all beings, which we will recite at the end of the lecture. And with a mind of friendliness, oh, the fourth Brahma-vihara is loving-kindness or love.

[36:39]

So, or maybe the friendliness is that, in this case. Anyway, this friendliness that radiates all throughout the world, and there's practices where you start feeling friendliness towards those you know and that are close to you, those who are a little less close to you or just acquaintances, and then your enemies, and then the entire world, as a practice to call up friendliness for them, towards them. For hatred, friendliness is the antidote. And not to see, this is another antidote, is not to see unpleasant people. And I think that means, what I said about my friend who's ill and actually realizes she can't go out to dinner with certain people because she gets sick. So another antidote to hatred is to, for a time anyway, remove yourself from those beings. Not forever, but this will help you too.

[37:40]

And then encouraging the pleasure that comes from association in such matters as common meals. Now I thought that was interesting, that this is an antidote to hatred. You know how these studies about French, the French who sit at a meal for hours on end and they eat all this cream and butter and all these things that we're not eating anymore, right? But they don't have heart disease? I think that's what this is about. This is, for hatred, friendliness is the antidote. By encouraging the pleasure that comes from association in such matters as common meals. I think that's true, I think that's really true. Friendliness means to have hopes for the welfare of others, to long for it. This is hopes for the welfare of others.

[38:43]

This is like the opposite, this is, that from coveting, where you contemplate what other people have and want it for yourself and feel resentment and so forth. This is, friendliness means to have hopes for the welfare of others, to long for it, to crave for it, to delight in it. It is affection, unsullied by motives of sense desire, passion or hope of a return. And I think that's another part of this, is we may want to become friends with someone, but if you look carefully, it's a kind of gratification of our own sense desire or our own lust or our own passion. It's not about wanting the welfare for them, it's more about us, and it's a kind of unconscious, it has to do with our own unhappiness, our own disaffection and dis-ease. And so we look out and we want things to take care of that,

[39:48]

but outside things cannot be brought in to take care of that. And we can use people, that's how we use people, and I think one can survey one's actions of body, speech and mind and see where there was a using of other people for one's own gratification. This is not friendliness, although it has the guise of friendliness sometimes. So, and just to go a little further with this, friendliness is explained as threefold. In the Bodhisattvas who have first raised their hearts to enlightenment, it has beings for its objects, so for Bodhisattvas friendliness towards beings as the object. In Bodhisattvas who progress on the course, it has dharmas for its objects, and dharmas are these elements of reality that aren't necessarily,

[40:52]

you know, a being would be made up of many elements, of a sound, a sight, a smell, a taste or a touch, those are all elements of reality, or dharmas in terms of the Buddhist system of 75 dharmas, the list of dharmas. And included in the dharma is prashrabdhi or faith, lust, greed, hate, those are all dharmas. So the Bodhisattva who has progressed along has not beings for the object of friendliness, but dharmas, literally these elements. And it's Bodhisattvas who have acquired the patient acceptance of dharmas which fail to be produced, that have no object at all. They don't need... These are Bodhisattvas who understand emptiness, they understand the non-production of dharmas,

[42:02]

the dharmas that fail to be produced, and they have no object whatsoever for their friendliness, they're just friendliness, they are friendliness. They don't need anything to direct it towards, it's just friendliness, it covers the universe. So, I may have spoken too long, maybe I don't have time to tell my story. What time is it? Five past eleven. Well, I think I will tell the story. This came to mind because of listening on the radio to... It came to mind for a number of reasons, but one is listening about what had been going on in Mozambique,

[43:04]

these terrible stories, and I hesitate to tell the story because this is a Buddhist story, a story of a Buddhist nun, and it calls up these same images of the terrible flooding in Mozambique and the dire circumstances that people found themselves in, and it reminded me of this story which is in the literature, and I'm sure that there's a kind of legendary quality to it, like many of the stories, this is what has been written down, this is what has been passed on as a teaching story, and so some of the motifs may be from folklore or legend, and yet it's in the canon, and it's the story of how Bhattacharya, the Buddhist nun Bhattacharya, came to practice. So it is, there's many sad parts to the story,

[44:11]

but I will tell it anyway. So Bhattacharya was born into a banker's family in India. She was from a well-to-do family, and when it came time to betroth her, I should say, once upon a time there was a young woman named Bhattacharya, and she was the daughter of a banker, and when it came time to betroth her, her family chose a young man who was equal to her in social standing and wealth, but she didn't love him, and she had fallen in love with a servant, a young man who was a servant in their home, in her home, and so she secretly left with him and married him and left her family's home, and the two of them lived together. Well, after several months she became pregnant,

[45:15]

and at that time she wanted to return and go back to her mother and her family's home, which was customary to have the child in your own home, but her husband was afraid to go back. He had been the servant there, and he was afraid to go, but she really wanted to go, so one day when he was out doing something, she decided she would just head on back, and she did, and when he came back he found she was gone, and so he went after her, and she went into labor right there, and she ended up having the baby kind of on the way home, and they decided not to go home, so they went back to where they were dwelling. About a year or so later she became pregnant again and decided she wanted to go back home again, and it was a discussion again with her husband of what to do, and he didn't want to go back, and she really felt she needed to go,

[46:17]

so off she went again, and a storm came up, a big rainstorm came up while she was traveling, and her husband went out after her and found her, a big storm, and he decided we can't go any further, so he was going to build some kind of shelter, and while he was out cutting grass and branches for a little shelter for her, he was bitten by a snake in the forest and killed. She thought he was abandoning her and left her, and she had the baby, the second child that night, and all night long she sheltered with her own body, the newborn child and her little toddler. In the morning, it was still stormy, but she went and she found her husband and realized that he had been killed, and she was grief-stricken, and she had a stronger resolve

[47:19]

to go back to her family to get there. The rain had been coming down and there was swollen rivers and it was hard traveling, and she knew she couldn't cross this river that had gotten very large with both of the children, so she went first with the newborn and went across the river and laid the newborn in a pile of leaves safely, not wanting to leave him all by himself. She had to go back for the other child, so she kept turning back to see that he was okay as she went into the river, and then all of a sudden a large bird of prey came down and picked up the newborn and carried it away, and she began screaming and screaming, and the toddler on the other side of the bank thought she was calling him, and he went down to the river and fell in, and he was washed away. So she was grief-stricken and in a terrible state

[48:25]

and just headed off to go to her parents' village town. And when she got to the town, she met a townsman and asked him whether he knew her family, and he said, Don't ask me about them. Ask about anything else. And she said, But there's nothing else I care about. And he said, You saw how the god rained all last night. Your family's house collapsed and fell on them, and they are all burning on one pyre, the banker, his wife, and son. You can see the smoke. And at this point, Patachara went out of her mind. She lost her mind through grief and pain, and she began wandering around in circles around the town, and the word patachara means cloak walker because her clothes became tattered and ragged,

[49:28]

and she just, she was a crazy person in the town, and people tried to keep her away. They would throw sticks at her and try to make her stay away from the town. They drove her off. So one day while she was still mad and walking around in circles, she entered the Jeta Grove where the Buddha was preaching, and the people who had assembled to listen to the Buddha's teaching didn't want her to be there, and they tried to keep her away. You know, she was going to spoil the gathering. But Gautama, the Buddha, followed her and put himself in her path. As she encountered him, he said, Sister, recover your presence of mind. And she recovered her presence of mind. And she looked down and saw how she was dressed, that she was practically naked,

[50:28]

and a man threw his outer robe over her, and she said, Help me. And the Buddha replied, and she told the Buddha her terrible story of what had happened, and the Buddha replied, Patachara, don't think you have come to someone who can help you. In your many lives you have shed more tears for the dead than there is water in the four oceans. And this lightened her grief somehow, what he said to her. And she then asked if she could be ordained, and so he brought her to the nuns' order, and she was ordained. And she became one of the main teachers, apart from Mahapajapati, who was the Buddha's foster mother and aunt, both aunt and foster mother, who was a leader of the nuns' order, the first leader,

[51:32]

and Patachara was the second one. Many nuns, when they wrote their enlightenment poems, they would mention that she was the one who taught them. So her enlightenment poem, I'll just read it to you, comes later, after she had been practicing for quite a while, and it has a very detailed... These enlightenment poems have some stock phrases and motifs that are used over and over, but this particular one has details, very particular details. So this is her poem. When they plow their fields and sow seeds in the earth, when they care for their wives and children and husbands and children, young Brahmins find riches. But I've done everything right and followed the rule of my teacher. I'm not lazy or proud. Why haven't I found peace? Bathing my feet, I watched the bath water

[52:36]

spill down the slope. I concentrated my mind the way you train a good horse. Then I took a lamp and went into my cell, checked the bed and sat down on it. I took a needle and pushed the wick down. When the lamp went out, my mind was freed. So that's her poem. She was, you know, practicing, concentrating, meditating, taking care of her life, and she watched, bathing her feet, she watched the water run down the hill and then went into her cell, got ready to lie down and with a needle pushed the wick down, and it was that moment she had her realization. But the part of the story that I appreciate the most, I think,

[53:40]

is when the Buddha said, Sister, regain your state of mind. And I know there's someone who has that on their computer screen as their screensaver. So when they're at work, you know, and the demon Asidiya has entered and they're looking, when is lunchtime going to come, you know, and it begins to, you know, eat away at your pliancy and joyfulness. Then, Sister, Brother, regain your state of mind. Recover your presence of mind. And we have the ability to do this. You know, the Buddha said, You cannot get help from me. I am not the one. It doesn't come from outside. Patachara, don't think you have come to someone who can help you. She says, Please help me. Don't think you can get it from somebody else.

[54:41]

Recover your presence of mind. Recover your presence of mind. So our good friends can help us recover our state of mind, but we have to be the ones to do it. Nobody can kind of give it back to us. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. May our retention,

[55:26]

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