Bloom: Buddhist Reflections on Serenity and Love

By Ajahn Sona

Bloom is an important collection of teachings and reflections on serenity (samatha) and loving-kindness (metta) meditations, practices that are immensely relevant to these times of uncertainty in all areas of our lives. By cul

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sumeru Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781896559629

Ajahn Sona

Ajahn Sona, the Abbot of Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery in British Columbia, Canada, brings a gentle, intelligent humour to his inspired writings. A Theravadan monk for over 30 years, his compassionate guidance resonates with a deep and insightful understanding of the Buddha's teachings.

Book preview

Bloom: Buddhist Reflections on Serenity and Love by Ajahn Sona

Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery

7000 Smith Lake Forest Srv Rd., Knutsford, BC V0E 2A0 Canada

Contact: [e-mail]

© Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery 2020

Additional print, video, and audio talks by Ajahn Sona may be found at birken.ca/teachings and on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/AjahnSona)

Photo credit: Adobe Stock

Published by

The Sumeru Press Inc.

301 Bayrose Drive, Suite 402

Nepean, ON

Canada K2J 5W3

ISBN 978-1-896559-60-5

ISBN 978-1-896559-62-9 (e-book)

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: Bloom : Buddhist reflections on serenity and love / Ajahn Sona.

Names: Sona, Ajahn, 1954- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20200228900 | ISBN 9781896559605 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Love—Religious aspects—Buddhism. | LCSH:

Compassion—Religious aspects—Buddhism. |

LCSH: Peace of mind—Religious aspects—Buddhism.

Classification: LCC BQ4570.L6 S66 2020 | DDC 294.3/5677—dc23

For more information about Sumeru Books,

visit us at sumeru-books.com

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Serenity

1 As a Child

2 Binoculars Clear and Focused

3 What Benefit

4 Pleasant Abiding

5 Breathing in the Noble Path

6 Abandoning the World

7 Jhana Bodies

8 Due Season

Part II: Love

1 Dive In

2 Be Kind to Yourself

3 The Sun and The Moon

4 Knocking from the Inside

5 The Four Quarters

6 Another Word for Trust

7 A Year of Metta

8 All I Ask of You

9 Opening the Eye

References/Glossary

About the Author

Introduction

When Ajahn Sona asked me to write the introduction to this book, I was honored, as well as a bit flummoxed. How to infuse just a few paragraphs with the wealth of beautiful, insightful teachings offered on these many pages? As Ajahn Sona often suggests, the best way to begin Right Effort is just to start. I will attempt to follow his wise advice.

These teachings ahead of you began as Dhamma talks from retreats given by Ajahn Sona here at Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery over the past few years. As one of the co-editors of the book, along with Ajahn Sona and Upasika Sumana, I was handed the marvelous gift of these words. What started as transcriptions from the original audio talks (many thanks to Upasika Sumana as well for those precious transcriptions), became a mindful craft of turning them into written adaptions of those talks. The melding of themes and the gentle building upon each preceding chapter has been a profound and humbling experience.

It’s been over 2,500 years since the Buddha walked upon the earth and offered teachings to countless beings. Those fortunate enough to hear him speak would have undoubtedly encountered recurring themes on many occasions and heard something different each time. That was the case for me in working with Ajahn Sona’s inspiring reflections. The many seeds of Dhamma planted over these past few months of the editing process have reaped a harvest of new insights and new ways to be in the world. I cannot thank Ajahn Sona enough for his Dhammadana, the greatest gift that can be shared with others.

The Buddha once offered a simile to King Pasenadi of Kosala. Oh, great king, the Buddha said. "There are trusted messengers arriving from the east, the west, the north, the south, all carrying the same message for you. Each will tell you this: ‘There I saw a great mountain, as high as the Himalayas, coming this way, crushing all living beings in its path.’

Should such a dire threat arise, a terrible loss of human life, what would you do?"

Sir, the King replied, what could I do but practice the teachings, practice morality, doing skillful and good actions?

That’s so true, great king! So true! the Buddha said. What can you do but practice the teachings, practice morality, doing skillful and good actions?

As everything around us continues to change, and uncertainty becomes the new paradigm, I find even more solace in these immensely relevant and important teachings from Ajahn Sona. There are no surprises here; only assurances that what lies ahead for us all must be met with moral fortitude, generosity, serene understanding, loving-kindness, and boundless compassion for all beings on this tender planet.

May the seeds of these teachings bloom within every one of you.

Homage to the Triple Gem.

Upasika Piyadassi

Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery

British Columbia, Canada

1

As a Child

So we’re off to a very good start. You’ve taken the precepts, arrived at the monastery and made a great effort to get here as well. The intention just to go on a substantial retreat like this needs to be formulated sometimes months in advance, and all that effort is not something that is an impediment to it. Actually, it’s something which enhances it. To make an effort over a period of time, stay with a determination, and then carry that out is a very good message to oneself. It sounds strange to be talking about messages to oneself, but we do talk to ourselves. We tell ourselves stories, and every time we do, we train ourselves.

One of the features of the eight precepts and the five precepts is to abstain from false and harmful speech. What happens psychologically is that if one indulges in false and harmful speech, these become little circuits that feed back on themselves. If one has to misrepresent reality to others, then one ends up misrepresenting reality to oneself. Then after a while we become uncertain about what reality is. It no longer becomes a story; we genuinely get lost and then we can’t recover it. This is the nature of the truth. It is very, very important to tell ourselves the truth, to speak, at least not falsely, to others. Everything we do is a feedback circle, and when we make determinations to overcome distances and time and all of the other things that have to be done to go to a retreat, we’re telling ourselves some very brave and clear messages. That your inner life is important, that the quality of your life is paramount, and that your life is made within you, it’s not an external feature. And you are also committing to the results that come from practice and work on the mind itself. So to make such determinations transforms you. We’re always changing, but we have choices about how we will change. If we decide not to do these things, we give up, we feel lethargic, we don’t have hope, and that is exactly the reality we will create.

And so the beginning of this retreat is not now, but it started weeks ago, and for some of you, years ago. Some of you have been to retreats here on several occasions over the years and those are all still playing themselves out; the results of those retreats are still affecting and changing you. They are being put into this complex structure called the mind, but it’s not the mind alone; that’s not really the important part. It’s the emotional life, the emotional quality of our life. And all the teachings of the Buddha are about that. They are not about ideas. Ideas are only useful if they lead to the end of suffering. And the end of suffering is just one way of putting it; it’s the negative way of putting it. Obviously what remains after the end of suffering is truly profound well-being and happiness, and that is the unabashed goal of the Buddha. What he says about himself is that he dwells unshakably in wellbeing, he’s purified the emotional structure. He also says, I have many thousands of disciples that have done the same thing to one degree or another. Some to a profound degree, some to a lesser degree. And I have many thousands of lay disciples who have done this as well, transformed their lives and purified the emotions.

So this is a transformation of emotions. You have to understand a little bit about how they work. Those are the ideas in the suttas, the discourses of the Buddha. There are ideas, some fancy ideas like dependent origination which is causality in the mental, emotional structure. But remember it’s not about sophisticated ideas; it’s about powerful techniques for changing your mind. This is a kind of technology for these modern times, when we really don’t have any such technology regarding the emotions. We’ve got all kinds of gadgets now, people playing with biofeedback and such things, but they are not as effective as the structures the Buddha offers. One of the differences Buddhism has with modern psychology is that modern psychology’s approach is through the intellect and through analyzing the story of one’s life. The Buddha is different in the sense that he is questioning the whole validity of the story itself. He is saying it is a story, but there isn’t a character behind the story. The story is fiction and the character is fictional as well. Fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a way out. All you’d be able to do is modify the story. So he’s actually asking you to see through the story of your own life, and even deeper: the story of your own self. The very sense of your own self is a fabrication of various unexamined assumptions. So how do we do this?

This retreat is unique in the sense that I’m going to try to stay on the topic of breath meditation the entire retreat. I will bring in other things, but my primary purpose is not to give you a smorgasbord of meditation techniques, but to concentrate primarily on breath meditation. And breath meditation is a very meager description for what’s really going on here. There are incredibly profound possibilities. Your life, the value of your life, is in your emotional structures, and we can utilize this breath as a means to put you into an utterly different zone.

We learn all these Dhamma ideas, such as: we shouldn’t feel guilty, we shouldn’t feel remorse, we shouldn’t feel sad, we shouldn’t feel angry. And then we have an argument with somebody and it sticks with us for 18 months! We can’t get over it! Then it’s 10 years…and we still can’t get over it! What’s going on here? We know perfectly well we shouldn’t hang onto these things, but it’s somehow impossible to let go of. So it’s not good enough to try to think your way through, it’s not good enough to have a doctrine like this. We need some means to actually shift us out of our normal compartmentalization of things, where we think and where we live must become one. Occasionally it happens to people that they are brought into some other emotional space by a certain set of circumstances, powerfully good interactions with people for sustained periods of time, or some sort of musical experience or artistic experience, or a drug of some sort will put them in a mood where all of their troubles have dissolved. It’s a powerful experience because you’ve stepped right out of an emotional area that seems to have been a locked room; the locked room of normal thinking processes and the baggage of our stories.

How do we get out of that room? You do things. You can. We are going to open the door and get out of that room, into a space where the story is not there anymore. It’s wonderful! It’s all gone. It’s all trivial. It doesn’t mean anything anymore and you feel wonderful. How do you get out of the door, you ask? There’s a man sitting in the corner, and that’s the Buddha, and you say, How do I get out of here? He says, Breathe.

What? Is he crazy? What kind of answer is that? It’s gotta be more sophisticated than that.

No, it’s breath. Breathe. He’s been in the same tangle as you. Before he was the Buddha he was tangled. He was trying to figure his way out of it, and that’s where we begin with this beautiful story. There are many accounts of the technique, of how to do breath meditation. But I’ve found the most important part of the story is almost always excluded. He takes up the idea of the breath as a child. I remember my own childhood. I would be lying there, seven years old, eight years old, on my back, especially in the summer; it’s still light out and you’re supposed to go to bed. And you have nothing to do, so I’d start to notice I was breathing. As a child you do blunder across that. I think everybody must have. Of course I’ve had a lot of time to remember things. I’ve been just living the meditative life for 35 years and often in places where there’s nothing else to do, so sometimes you remember your childhood and so forth. I remember all these experiences. And how you can become aware of the fact that you’re breathing and what a strange thing it is, it just goes by itself.

I think it’s very important that the preliminary story of the Bodhisatta’s struggle towards enlightenment begins with him leaving the palace, his dismay with ordinary life, even a very good material life. Dismay is a sign of a sophisticated, very sensitive person, the things other people do to spend their time, he just doesn’t understand; they are too shallow. It’s not enough. It just cannot be enough. He’s not an ordinary person. For him it’s so unsatisfactory that he has to go in search of something more profound. He’s looking for the big vision of life. At some point it had become overwhelming to him that life just goes by and you die and you can lose everything along the way as well. How do you make sense of that?

So that’s what drives him out. And he falls in with people who are trying to solve the existential problem as well. And they’ve got very elaborate techniques. They’ve got authoritative statements about absolute truth and he tries all kinds of things in a very, very dedicated way. Some of these techniques are very painful, self-destructive, and misleading. Eventually though he drags his sorry, skinny body out of there and says, Enough of this. This is after six years of very harsh treatment of his body and very harsh treatment of his mind. He’s still intelligent and sensitive enough, and basically such a good human that he has enough insight to say, This can’t be the way. I’m looking for something else. I’m not sure how to find it, but it isn’t this.

That’s a very wise decision he makes in the midst of perhaps a very authoritative culture. These guys are telling him, This is the way, you gotta stick with this. But he leaves anyway. And I find the setting of the story is very important too. He’s decided to eat. And that’s a very beautiful moment too. These stories become very, very poignant and beautiful. How many times in our lives have we practiced self-deprivation, imposed all kinds of difficulties and relentless demands on ourselves, refused to eat in some ways? What is eating? Eating is a very primal act. The Buddha says, What’s the one thing? By the way, if you’re teaching Dhamma Sunday School class, that’s a great one for kids; this puzzle question: What’s the one thing? Eventually kids get it if you give them a few hints. It’s food. Every being in the universe has to have food, some form of food.

The one thing. It’s also your earliest experience with your mother…to be fed. And there’s a lot of emotion and love around that as well. He’s actually returning to love in some ways by stopping this deprivation at the material level, just eating again. And really joining the universe and saying everybody has to eat, you can’t not eat. And he accepts food with gratitude. There’s a very beautiful element to the story which depicts Sujata, the first person to spontaneously and generously offer him a meal. It’s a very primal act in the story, isn’t it? It’s so moving. We’re continuing the story to this day, we’re acting this out. The lay people are offering food to the monks and we’re accepting it as well. So this is a very kind and human story that’s being told here. The first thing we have to do is stop indulging in pain, you know. It’s just not the way. Pain is not the way. We need to sustain our body. That’s the function of food. We need to sustain our body. The body comes alive when you’ve eaten.

And then he’s got to take care of his mind. It’s very beautiful that he’s chosen a shady tree by a river. A huge banyan tree beside a river and you can imagine the breeze coming across the river. It’s May, this month. On the 20th will be the full moon of May and that will be the time of the year that the Buddha was supposed to have obtained awakening under the Bodhi tree. Formerly he would stay out in the baking sun (it would have been hot at that time of year in India). He was trying all kinds of things that were supposed to be spiritually good exercises, but were really just conducive to ruining your health and making you miserable. He’d freeze at night. Bake in the day. But all that is over. So he has taken up residence under a beautiful, spacious, shady tree. In India at the time there was just no cooler place to be. And the body, I’m sure his body was just celebrating the fact that he’d given it some calories.

And here arises something spontaneous. He remembered being under a tree as a child, in