Patrick has practised mindfulness meditation (satipaṭṭhāna vipassanā) since 1977. At that time there was little or no Buddhist meditation training available in Australia, so he spent years travelling in Asia and the USA working with teachers from different Buddhist traditions to learn the craft of meditation practice. Most of his training has been in the insight meditation lineage of Mahāsī Sayādaw of Burma, which included several years as a Buddhist monk. His main teachers were Sayādaw U Paṇḍita and John Hale. He has also trained in the Diamond Sangha lineage of Zen where his teachers have been Robert Aitken Rōshi and Paul Maloney Rōshi.
Patrick has been a full-time teacher of mindfulness meditation for over 20 years. He conducts residential and online retreats, workshops and seminars. He has studied early Buddhism at post-graduate levels and has a particular interest in the original teachings of the Buddha, before the invention of “Buddhism.” This allows him to bring the radical insights of the Buddha to our contemporary situation. He sees meditation as a physical practice that reconnects us with the felt world of our senses, allowing us to live our lives directly rather than through the cling-wrap of our habitual thinking.
Here we examine the nature of effort in meditation practice. We see how the traditional understanding of meditation as war is not necessarily an effective way of conveying right effort (sammā vāyāma) in the contemporary world. We find that our relationship to time is central to finding right effort, and how the work of meditation can become play. Finally, we see how the Buddha teaches different strategies fit different situations, and that right effort takes different forms in different contexts.
Here we look at one aspect of the teaching of anattā, that of life-after-life, or rebirth. We see that this teaching does not say that any being or thing transfers from one life to the next, and yet because we are caught up in identity we can’t help but think in such terms. We also look at some characteristics of our culture that make it particularly difficult for us to come to terms with this teaching.
Tonight we follow the Buddha from Isipatana, just north of Bārāṇasī, to Uruvelā, on the near side to the Nerañjarā river. At Bārāṇasī he converts some of the commercial elite of the city, and when he has 60 arahant students sends them off on missionary journeys. The Buddha himself goes on a targeted mission to convert a community of dreadlocks-wearing (jaṭila) ascetics to his teaching. He does so by “shirt-fronting” Uruvelā-Kassapa, the senior leader of this community, with his shamanic powers, in order to prepare the way for his third teaching.
We look at Āditta Sutta (SN 35:28), where the Buddha teaches 1,000 former dreadlocks ascetics that “everything is burning.” This teaching focuses on the six sense fields and the ways in which we become entangled with them. The practice the Buddha teaches is direct, intimate, physical, and it focuses on our relationship with vedanā, the realm of affect.
We examine the first part of Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, The sweet essence (MN 18), where Mahā Kaccāna unpacks a brief teaching by the Buddha on how we construct our dukkha. We begin with the six sense fields and the vedanā that arises from them, and then construct a world though obsessive thinking (papañca), to the point where we find ourselves living in a world of concepts about our experience, rather than the experience itself.
In the second part of Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, Mahā Kaccāna unpacks the process of delusion and drivenness to reveal the not-constructed (asaṅkhata), nibbāna itself. He does this by showing that what we take to be the solid ground (ṭhāna) upon which we build ourselves and our world turns out to be no thing at all. That beneath this web of concepts there lies a realm beyond concept, beyond language, yet so intimate that it is always available to us. It is available, now.
We explore how the ordinary experience of dukkha becomes dukkha ñāṇa, understanding of the universal characteristic (samañña lakkhaṇa) of dukkha. We look at the how the perception of impermanence (anicca-saññā) creates anxiety when the heart intuits the groundless of experience, and how the unfolding of this anxiety is mapped by the dukkha ñāṇas of classical Theravāda Buddhism. Finally, we see how the experience of dukkha gives way to that of not-self (anattā), when the heart stabilises through the maturity of mindfulness (sati) and equanimity (upekkhā).
We explore the role of the body in our meditation practice, using the Buddha’s practice of kāyagatā sati (mindfulness immersed in body) as our guide. We forget we are bodies, fooled by our mind’s ability to create realities that are separate from the bodies we are. We explore the practice of mindfulness immersed in body using the Buddha’s instructions to Mahā Kassapa as our guide: “You should train yourself in this way: “I will not abandon mindfulness immersed in body associated with joy.”
After his awakening at Bodh Gayā, the Buddha walks to Isipatana, north of Bārāṇasī, where he finds his five former companions and delivers his first teaching, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (Turning the dharma wheel), on the full moon of Āsāḷha (July). Here he introduces the principle of the middle way (majjhima paṭipadā), the dynamic centre between extremes, or the place of no fixed position.
Having opened the hearts of his five companions with his teaching of the middle way, the Buddha now teaches the four truths of the noble ones (cattāro ariya-saccāni). These are: dukkha; its arising; its cessation; and the path leading to its cessation. This discourse centres on dukkha and craving (taṇhā), because the Buddha is concerned here with what coloured his own practice before his awakening – his sense of drivenness, of trying to get in the future something missing now.
