Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Batchelor answers a student’s question about equanimity and emotional expression in Buddhist practice by exploring what the Buddha’s inner world may have been like after enlightenment. He draws on canonical sources to show the Buddha as emotionally responsive yet undisturbed by his feelings, illustrating the difference between feeling and acting from disturbance. He recounts stories from the Pali Canon — the Buddha leaving noisy quarreling monks to sit in silence, and his sharp rebuff to his cousin Devadatta’s political challenge — as evidence of a deeply human Buddha engaged with difficult circumstances. He concludes with a personal example from his own teacher Master Kusan, who wept during a death ceremony while simultaneously teaching the ultimate view that there is no death, no birth, no life, embodying equanimity as non-disturbance within full feeling.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 IT.mp3
UUID: 3e4fc6b5-8110-44d4-8d21-11b86c4d39bb
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Insight Tapes (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~773
If you have the the children who are crying and think like this, you know, we we have to see where can we fit it. And sometime you can fit thirty minute. Sometimes maybe you can fit two ten minutes period. Again, you have to see. But I would start small.
And then if you feel, oh, I like to sit a little longer than twenty, thirty minutes or more again if you have the time. And then to see that this is not the only meditation. But also you can do walking meditation because sometimes people also forget that they can do walking meditation And they have many opportunities for walking meditation. And also to see, to bring the meditative awareness in what they do. I’ll talk more about that towards the end of the week, but the way one listen, the way one work, the way one type at the computer, you know, to bring awareness.
I feel that too is meditation. Yes? I was interested in what you said about equanimity at the beginning, particularly when you mentioned grief and someone dying. When you look at statues of the Buddha, you see this imperturbable being and it’s difficult to imagine what sort of emotional world the Buddha did after his enlightenment. I was wondering, is there anything in the canon that that sort of talks about?
Oh, yes. Steven is a specialist of it. He has Steven has read the whole canon, the Vinaya, back and forth because of his latest book, the life of the Buddha. And he has great moments where the Buddha is, I would say, relatively emotional. One of them is wonderful.
He is with the monks, and they’re really cantankerous. And they get into fight and argument. And I mean, you thought he was a Buddha, you would think, well, he would go and sort them out. No. He said, they’re cantankerous.
They’re noisy. This is worrisome for me. I am off. And he goes. And so he goes off some way and sits quietly under a tree because this is too noisy.
And then the monks realize, oh, he’s not here. What’s the matter? And then they kind of improve, and then he comes back. So it shows he was equanimous, but he was not imperturbable. And there is another very good one when you have this is towards the end of his life when you have cousin Devadatta Devadatta who wants to take over.
Devadatta thinks that the Buddha is over the hill and he would make a much better kind of chief of the Sangha. So three times, in front of people, says to the Buddha, Let me become the chief because you’re getting on with your age. And the Buddha said, no first time, no second time. And so the first time the Buddha said, I would not give the leadership to Śāriputra or Moggallana, who are his two very praised disciples. Let alone speak of someone like you.
One could say these are relatively strong words. And again, you see, I think it’s important to see, and that’s what Stephen tried in the book he’s working on at the moment, to see in a way the human, the humanity of the Buddha, how he engaged in the politics, how he You know, he was a human being entangled in very, at times, difficult conditions. And he responded as a Buddha, but also as a Buddha who had feelings. But not possibly what we would call disturbing emotion. To me, this is a difference between having feelings and acting upon them, and then becoming disturbing emotion, which you generally don’t see with the Buddha.
Which is in a way like, for example, with my teacher, Master Kusan, whenever he had to give a special ceremony for the death of someone he knew, I could guarantee that halfway through, where he would give me really kind of really kind of very absolute teaching. You know? There is no death, there is no birth, there is no life. And then in the middle, was kind of crying for about two minutes, you know, because he he liked that person, and that person was dead, and he was sad. And then he would go back, there is no birth, there is no life.
And I thought this was great. You know, that in a way to me, this is equanimity. It doesn’t mean that you don’t feel, but that in a way you are not disturbed by the feeling. Okay. I think we have to stop so you can walk a little.
Thank you.