Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Choedak introduces calm abiding meditation in this foundational 45-minute teaching by breaking down the seven-point meditation posture in precise detail. He guides beginners through sitting position—cross-legged or lotus, back straight, hands placed below the navel in a gesture of balance—explaining how each element embodies specific Buddhist principles: the legs promise stability, the hand position symbolizes reconciling inner opposites, the straight back cultivates awareness. He emphasizes that correct posture is not rigid discipline but a graceful, dignified expression of the Buddha’s attitude. The core of his instruction addresses how to work with bodily sensation during meditation, particularly pain: rather than avoiding or resisting discomfort, practitioners transform it through compassion and right understanding, realizing pain stems from attachment and aversion. He illustrates these principles through the example of Milarepa, whose devoted practice of posture-based meditation under Marpa eventually freed him from all bodily suffering. Suited for beginners learning basic meditation technique.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 TtT.mp3
UUID: d9d9d985-042b-4a95-8fa0-6cb1134cd55a
Teacher: Choedak
Collection: Calm Abiding (Choedak)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,509
Because there are quite a few of you who are beginners, the first few sessions will be led particularly in the posture itself, how to sit and observe that. You try to sit in a comfortable relaxed meditation posture in the attitude of the Buddha. In the posture of the Buddha and attitude of the Buddha. And a very simple mind, very simple and simple request asking yourself please sit still and I’ll be happy. I don’t want anything.
I’m not asking you to do anything but sit still and please agree with me. You know, it’s not going to be forever, but just one hour or whatever it is. And that’s not a lot to ask, but that’s your decided cause of happiness. That’s not a lot to ask. And then yourself constantly remind us, just remain calm and abide in that.
Mindfulness of the body is the first of the four mindfulness, the building blocks of this palace of enlightenment. It is the four mindfulnesses. First is the mindfulness of body, to be able to contain your own body and being able to rally the support of the body and make it do what you are set out to do. And don’t bring inconsistent demands on you while you’re meditating. Treat your body and five senses as careless children, as your five children, and you are now minding them, containing them.
Don’t let the child of the eyes, don’t let the child of the ears and child of the five senses go wild and make incessant demands other than just simply sitting with you and be contented. Just containing that. And you do that by giving the whole body a job to do, a work to do. Each bodily posture is a profound body language because body language is quite understood today the study of behavior. What you’re thinking inside is easily expressed in the posture of your body.
Whether you consciously knew it or not, you know, the posture says a lot, they say. So don’t let the body do anything it sees fit. But choose the posture of the Buddha. Sit in a cross legged posture.
When your legs are crossed on the floor, think what you’re asking the legs to do. What are the legs asking us to do? See whether there is talking between us and within our legs, when you cross your legs you are using the crossing of the legs as a promise to hold, that throughout this session I shall remain still and not moving. And crossing of the legs is your own promise, symbol of your own promise. And the legs provide basis and a foundation for the rest of the body to be supported for the duration of the session, because crossing of the legs is like the symbol of the foundation.
Your faith in the meditation, your assertiveness to yourself, what you ask yourself to do. Often we may have delayed or procrastinated, neglected, but here not. We have just set out to do and try to express that, ask the leg to express that. Some people call it Lotus posture, others call it Diamond posture. Lotus posture because as soon as you pose in that posture, it allows you to blossom some qualities of humility and stability.
And when you sit in that posture, you’re cultivating qualities of humility. And humility means just being able to watch yourself sit and be contented with that, not wanting to do anything, anything extraordinary, just being able to sit still with yourself and decide to be happy. That’s quality of humility. Even if you’re not so comfortable in that posture, still try to make peace with yourself. That is humility.
Stability means you don’t let anything to destabilize, don’t let your senses to be distracted by anything, but bring back to the posture of meditation itself. So it gives a gravity of center of focus where you can focus your rest of the mind and the body. When the legs are crossed, legs are crossed like the lotus flower blossoms. Lotus flower blossoms, relinquish its seedness and transforms into beautiful flower. Likewise, what you are, you’re going to change it into something.
Some negative karmic forces may be out of your way, but you’re going to change that. You’re going to change your relationship with them. You’re not going to lose to them, but you’re going to surmount them by doing this practice. karma is constant changing, in constant flux. It makes the change more creative by deliberately pressing on.
And so that’s why sitting your cross legged is a promise and also it reminds yourself to let some qualities blossom as you sit in that posture. And diamond meaning it is, you know, every moment you sit it’s just like a small diamond strung on the thread of your practice. The longer you’re able to sit with that kind of vigilance and humility, that much indestructible, stubborn and strong you become. No wonder you have felt short supply of strength and stability in your certain areas of life, because you need to cultivate this, and you might find this strength working in your everyday life as well, and that’s the whole thing.
Indestructible means be firm and unshakable like a mountain in your conviction, of course. And this is not invoked by rigidity, neither by rigidity nor by laxity, not rigidity by being stiff, not laxity by not holding the posture, but holding the posture but completely in a relaxed state of mind. Mind should be completely natural. This is the posture that we knew first and probably the first posture in which we sat when we were able to sit up as a baby. We just forgot it.
So it’s not something new. So therefore feel very comfortable in that posture, not something imposed or introduced to us new. And then your hands placed on the lap, your right and left hand placed on the lap, right on the left with the two thumbs touching to each other below the navel. And the point of this is a gesture of that is, this is called gesture of meditation or gesture of balance, gesture of equanimity. These three can define it very clearly.
Gesture of balance meaning balance meaning two extreme sides are often in disharmony. And when you can slowly negotiate the two, there is balance. So the right and left is a symbol of our inner conflict, inner conflicts. Masculine, feminine, creativity, passivity, compassion and wisdom, strength and weakness, and all these things are often as cross purposes. They never make harmony in between the two.
So here we’re bringing the both two opposites of ourselves, right out of its own way, left out of its own way, bring to a neutral ground in the middle. And the meeting point of these two hands is no other than the below the navel, the place of our first creation of a body. So you’re going to recreate yourself, if you like. You’re going to give your rebirth to yourself, to your existence. State of mind, it’s called Nirmana chakra by the way, the chakra below the navel is called Nirmana means creation.
It’s a posture of recreating your own self. The very gesture of your hands bringing together there, it will cause the sense of new sense of renewal. Yeah, renewal of yourself. Renewal of because normally we are not we are often out of balance. We are trying to bring that balance by this gesture of balance.
And therefore bring a greater degree of harmony and equanimity, a sense of contentment and naturalness by the very posture. Joining your ten fingers together, joining your palms together in great prayer and great mood brings the hands naturally in the heart. When you place the two hands below the navel, not letting it become too emotional. Putting it as low as possible below the navel, to be grounded as possible so it’s not emotionally too jumpy as such. So bringing the hands together below the navel.
The navel is the most earliest form part of the body where the body was formed from the egg and cell of our parents, and where this physical body, the incarnation of this body created in mother’s womb, and that’s the very initial place of the body, so recreating your whole self in existence. Because if a state of mind that is stayed most of the time unbalanced, it to be tuned to become balanced is rebirth, is a re-creation, is a renewal that we have longed and delayed. And so the posture of balance in many ways is to remind yourself to sit still in that posture stability reminded by the legs by avoiding these two extremes of rigidity and laxity, but with compassion and wisdom. Meaning that you don’t fall too much saying, you can’t do this posture, come on, stretch your leg, this is too much for yourself. I mean, if you do it, that’s a complete laxity.
You’re losing too quickly, too laxity. Rigidity means you are too harsh on yourself, you are sitting in that posture, miserable, but you are denying that you are almost saying that oh this will be gone over okay, just bear with me, it will be done with in a few minutes time. And in the meantime, addressing the problem at all, just try to suppress that, that’s the rigidity. So we will have to avoid these two extremes, rigidity and laxity. So the hand gesture of placing below the navel is to remind us to not fall into these two extremes if you are meditating.
And stay in great harmony and peace. Have some kind of communication between the two extremes. Not fall, you know, not just fall too low when the pendulum or the thing goes on the left or to the right. Try to bring it balanced and calm. And by this hinges you this is a constant reminder.
The more you’re balanced, the more you will be aware whether you are balanced or not, because you’ll be checking whether your balance is there or not there. This constant self checker is called awareness, and this is reminded by your back posture, posture of your back. Keep your back very, very straight. Keeping your back straight requires almost like moment by moment awareness as how each of the vertebraes are behaving to each other. Whether the lowest one is acting like an elephant, carrying all the load that is placed on his neck, and the one above that, the one above that, and one above that, there’s quite a few of them by the way, a few of them, And you walk your way from the lowest and slowly straighten that balance up because it’s really nice to work with your body and joints up so that your body has a degree, a certain sharper degree of awareness to sit upright.
So the energy that you the awareness that you have of straightening your back almost causes your back gap straighter and straighter. And some kind of energy rise within your backbone to straighten you so much so to feel yourself connected to the highest point up in the space. They’re almost like your top of your crown is almost pulling you up and there’s no bending or no, you know, no bowing, neck coming down or on the side. You can keep very, very straight. And the good students who are doing calm abiding for the first time just learn to just work with the body, mindful of the body, with the back, with the hands.
First you start with legs and then with hands and then when you’re talking about the back you’re talking also of the shoulders. Keeping your back straight. Keeping your back straight increases your sharpness awareness. Become you become more aware of your body, and particularly the amazing sort of effect it has when the positioning of the lowest backbone has on one above it, and then one above it, and one above it, one above it, and all of that have the one, how it tunes, sharpens your awareness of meditation. Buddha spent most of his time under the bodhi tree doing calm abiding meditation.
And just checking, his final teachings, which has become a sūtra, became full mindfulness. And of which first is this mindfulness body. And of this there’s the legs, hands, the back, and the fourth one is neck, because the neck is the joiner, the connector between the body and the head, the trunk, the main trunk and the head. Then slightly bending your neck in the front, slightly bending your neck and not too much so that to avoid you bending from the right to the left and also avoid you from leaning back onto anything. You shouldn’t lean on the wall.
Preferably keep a couple of inches away from the wall. Even if you’re sitting close to the wall, but sitting a couple of inches, try to keep the back as straight as possible. Think that your body, which is tangible and material, has become light, and everything around you is supporting that. Or vice versa, you can think of it. All your body is as it is, but all the space around you is supporting to keep straight.
So you don’t really need to lean on material object because you’re leaning on energy. So that keeps your back straight. And the straightness of your body, straightness of the body, keeping the back straight and bending of your neck. Then the fifth posture is that of your eyes. The eyes have to be half open.
Open your eyes half, not closing at all. This is completely unallowable. It’s never allowed to close eyes. Because eyes must be half open to be able to see things. It shouldn’t be blinking, it shouldn’t be tightly closed, it shouldn’t be widely open.
Because eyes got very discursive knowers, it’s one of the very sensitive and highly prized organ. And if we are able to preciously treat the gaze of the eyes in the mood of the meditator’s stability of the legs, whether the eye expresses the stability of the legs, whether the eye expresses the balance and harmony expressed by the mind and the hands, and awareness on top of that by back. So whether the eyes are able to express all of that in the correct gaze of one who is meditating. And he or she must focus straight on the floor, a couple of feet in front of you on the floor, and so you wouldn’t have, your eyes wouldn’t be looking anywhere far on the right or left or far in front or anywhere, just straight in front. Keeping the gaze in the right gesture of meditation.
Right gaze of eyes of a meditator. Keeping the gaze. What does that mean is because you are correcting, you’re dealing with negative karma of gazes, eyes, looks. Because we create negative karma with also our eyes, every day, by the way. If you give a kind look, it gives a kind.
If you generate a look that is crook, then of course it creates negative karma, you know, because an unrelated karma brings unrelated negative karma interestingly. So correct the gaze of the eyes in the post gaze of the meditation. Gaze in the sense that you feel happy. It’s a happy look. It’s a calm look.
It’s a contented look. It’s not an anxious look. It’s a it’s not a fearful look. It is not a not a confused look. All of trying to correct the gaze of eyes, just working it away.
There’s there’s a lot of work going on. All what you’re doing is these bodily postures are tuning the mind, tuning the mind so much so to bring everything in order. Because a meditator’s posture should be dignified and looks like pose of great grace and dignity and serenity. And that should come from legs as far as your eyes. And your face as well.
If your eyes does it, the rest of the face will do it. So the rest of the face should also have calmness, peacefulness, total contentment. Everything is perfect type of attitude. Everything is just the way it ought to be. You have no complaint as it is.
That’s the kind of gaze of the face, posture of the face. And the lips and tongues and mouth and teeth also has to be synchronized with the rest of the physical posture. Your lips, of course, natural. Most people, you know what is natural, just leaving as it is. And teeth one above another, you know, which may not be quite natural.
On top of another. Normally, I don’t know whether, most of us, I am definitely so, tend to have my lower teeth inside my upper teeth. And I have to do it, I have to bring the lower one out, and bring under the above, almost like about to smile, about to smile, that’s both teeth one above. Because if you have lower teeth inside you can’t smile, you can but it would be quite a different smile. Isn’t it?
So when people smile usually their teeth are one above another. That’s what we need to do. We have to be very happy. Happy to sit in. It shouldn’t be any hardship imposed upon us, should be a complete act of love.
Meditation should be an act of loving kindness and should sew it from your feet to the hands and to the eyes to your mouth. And teeth not grinding. It’s touching but not touching and the sense of grinding. So there’s a lot of work in the mouth area too. A lot of work in the mouth area.
And there’s a lot of warranted attention to all these things, from the feet to the hands and the back and the shoulders as well, of course. Shoulders is part of the hands. When your hands are balanced, so don’t you have arms or elbows attached to your ribs. No really rigidly flexing, but just relax, relax. Almost your shoulders are balanced, but at the same time they’re not dropping down.
No, are they stretching apart, but they’re almost there’s something that keeps you keeps the space between your ribs and your inside of your elbow, which what do you call this inside your elbow? Double o word, I think. Yeah? Crook. Yeah, crook.
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Anyway, not touching the inside of your elbow to your And this says that if you touch your particularly if you’re wearing warm clothes, you touch like that, it generates unnecessary heat and you feel drowsy and sleepy. So, keeping your arms slightly stretching apart so it’s not too attached. And wear a fairly light clothing.
Don’t make the room or place of meditation very hot. A slightly coolish room would be much better for meditation. It keeps you awake. Try to generate inner heat by having the hand gesture below the navel because that’s the place of inner psychic heat. So if you have got that right, it should be okay.
It should be okay. But at the same time, make it very cold. Keep it calm, very cold unless you have succeeded in Tummo practice, succeeded in this inner side, inner heat practice. There’s no danger of that happening. Keep generally comfortable have Bodily posture is very important.
Even some people say, I’ve been doing this meditation a long time, I can move on to something. Sometimes it’s not true, you know. There’s no danger of us overdoing bodily posture meditation. Marpa, the great Tibetan teacher, after he came back to Tibet he was a really difficult character to understand. He made it even worse by making this statement to Tibetans.
He said, Tibetans don’t know how to meditate. If all the virtue of Tibetan meditators were put in one side and virtue of my bodily posture I learned in India, mine will be better. Of course he wasn’t really boasting his meditation posture, he was highlighting the importance of bodily posture. Most Tibetan people, I suppose, go to the number of mantras or whatever they can do, or whatever other practices they think. The basic meditation, most people do not pay enough attention, particularly the posture.
They go in higher teachings, advanced teachings, secret teachings. The ultimate teachings, highest of highest, Most people get into that highest trap. So coming back to the basic, to sit still, and the posture of I mean, why Marpa became so impacting a teacher to Milarepa, was he emphasized this bodily posture and sheer practice. I don’t know how anybody can change people like Milarepa. It’s a hard case.
Milarepa was not a saint by birth. He had a hard life where his aunt and uncle completely swindled his parents’ world, and his father died when he was so young, and mother was overwhelmed mainly by the grief of losing her husband with two very young children left. And she she completely followed the instruction of her husband saying, leave all the wealth and field and property in the hands of uncle and auntie, and they look after until the kids grow up. But before the kids grow up, uncle has done it all. He’s taken all the property and horses and fields in his his name and gave very little or nothing to young Millipa and his mother and sister.
Mother, out of great vengeance and great anger, could not do nothing but ask her son to go and learn black magic and destroy who but uncle and auntie and anybody else associated with that. And Milarepa, as dutiful and obedient as he thought was good to be to his mother, learned the art of black magic, and little time did it take for him to master it, because his purpose was so strong. Milarepa didn’t fail in doing whatever he did, And it included in that black magic as well. He completely succeeded in his art of black magic and caused a huge havoc to his uncle’s wedding day. Uncle’s, you know, that’s what happens to be his aunt cousin’s wedding day, which was happening on uncle’s palace or house.
And there he caused a huge creature, a huge creature, like crap like creature. He just descended upon from the sky and came down through the ceiling. Skylight or something of the big gathering place. Everybody was having big party. It just whole roof collapsed, and eighteen people were killed.
And uncle and auntie was the primary target of course, and he succeeded all. But what did he achieve? He realized what a big mess I’ve done. It evolved out of anger. He didn’t achieve anything.
He only achieved creating huge negative karma, and then he went to how best to go and purify that. And then he met Marpa. So Marpa had a big reason to give a task for Milarepa, and one of the very pertinent instructions of Marpa to Milarepa was to sit in meditation in one spot, no matter what cravings there come, don’t listen to them, just sit to purify your negative karma. And sure Milarepa knew he had a lot of that. And that’s the whole practice, really earned Milarepa the sainthood, by just staying in place of meditation, particularly working on his bodily posture, and slowly of course many many other practices, but primarily working with his body to the extent of having no attachment to the body whatsoever.
Most people’s obstacles to bodily posture is the attachment of the body and listening to it too much and then not quite succeeding in delegating the body to observe the posture of Buddha, the attitude of Buddha in complete posture of meditation. They say if one sits in the right meditation posture, right meditation posture, one actually is every single minute that ticks away, you are creating positive karma of body. You’re dealing with your negative karma of the body that you haven’t effectively dealt with in the past, and better still you are sowing the seed of Buddha Vairocana, who is the form, very form in which you sit, direct cause of attaining Rūpakāya, the form body of the enlightened ones. And so it’s not some kind of, not something that you’re working as a basis, but you’re actually creating so many things as you sit. As you sit you advance more.
You get much more things done. And you’ve got to have that confidence and then sit still with that discipline. And so the mindfulness of observing, just bringing your mind back to the body, from the feet to the hands and shoulders and backbones, the neck, eyes, face, teeth, tongue, and the mouth. You will find a lot of things to correct every now and then. Just going around, can see yourself as a supervisor walking around, going to seven spots, work stations, making sure all these are happening.
And a lot to go around and perfect and improve, definitely so. The more you work on your lower part of the body, because most much of the time you have a lot of discussion with the leg, you know. All of your problems will start from the base and slowly move up, you know. I don’t know a lot with hands, but definitely with a lot of legs, and your bottom, and the back, and shoulder, and and you don’t know how heavy the head is sometimes. How heavy the head is.
So, you work your way, you work with that. So, a good few sessions of today must be focused on that when you’re sitting. You know, Even within a session you can have a mini break, would say. Just relax a couple of minutes and then again exert all your effort, try to focus on the body. If your mind is distracted, you bring it gently back, gently back.
Look at the image of the Buddha to remind yourself how the posture should be, how graceful and meaningful it is, and it will be, for sure. Even if it’s not now, it soon will be. And then again focus your concentration. Remind yourself the symbolism and meaning of each of the postures. Feel the presence of all the people sitting next to you.
How wonderful it is to have a supportive group of people doing the same thing. There is no better place you can learn and try. And that way you feel very, very inspired and focused again and again and again. If there’s any tension in the particular part of the body, do not localize it. Do not deny or resent.
Allow the body body is constantly changing, remember. There are seventy two thousand channels. In Sanskrit they call nadis. It’s called river waves, you know. Let them flow through.
Don’t localize the stock at the knee or any of let the upper part of the body say, oh, pass it over here. What’s happening down there? Come on over here. We’re fine. Okay.
Oh, and the knees. Oh, thanks. Inhale, and then out of breath comes. And if you have those tensions, which is quite natural for everybody to have, because you haven’t sat long on the floor at all, let alone ten days and then continuously. Of course, you have to work one moment or one day at one session at a time, but even as you do that, you you don’t deny thinking, I’ll be over after this session, I’ll be fine.
I’ll have to bear with another fifteen or twenty minutes. Don’t think like that. Then you’re just denying it, then you’re putting it aside to be so that you will meet it next time again. No, handle it straight away. Where the thing is?
Where is the pain? What is pain? When did it come? And how long will it go? Where is residing?
Just look at that. Just sensation, the pain. It’s a difficult sensation. Maybe it’s going to be If you understand it, it might be an easy sensation. Pain is only a difficult sensation, misunderstood sensation.
And if you localize it, it sure will be misunderstood. You know? And then, therefore, you flow it to different parts of the body. There are seventy two thousand channels through which you can send it to different parts of the body. And nostrils are open, and they’re really there as an outlet.
Just exhale these tensions. Don’t hold it there and exhale them. If you have difficulties, don’t ever deny and despise and ignore and think that you can just focus on the body and be okay. It’s one way of coping, I saw strategy, but not very effective coping strategy. The best way to coping strategy is transformation, transmutation.
You’re transforming the pain. What was something that turned into pain? What was it before pain registered in your mind? Was it calm? And what happened to the calm?
It is still hiding, hidden inside the pain, isn’t it? So it just needs to be churned a bit, churned a bit more and bring it back. And that’s what exhaling is. You don’t hold it there, don’t resent it there, don’t suppress it there, and then use and that’s why when you’re doing mindfulness of the body, you’re not just trying to have the seven postures correct, but even when you have pain, deal with the sensation. Sensation is transient as anything is.
Think that pain is transient, particularly if you allow it to flow. If you allow it to flow, it can’t stay at the same place. If you don’t allow it to flow, it sure is staying. Remind yourself the meaning of the hand gestures. Remember, overcoming rigidity and laxity is flexibility.
Flexibility is finding a different way to respond to pain than rejecting it. Because in many ways you said, may all beings be free from suffering and the cause of suffering. That was the very beginning. You have a slight pain, this is not a big suffering, slight pain. And just remind yourself, this pain is a symbol of the world that we live in.
And develop compassion. Use your pain or difficulty as a way to enlarge your heart, to develop compassion for the world that is much bigger a pain than that of yours. Yours is so minor and miniscule. Isn’t this so? And straight away you’ll find you can not only tolerate your pain, but you have transmuted it to become compassion for the sake of other beings.
Yeah? A being for the sake of other beings. Because that’s what the prayer you said at the beginning. May all beings be free from suffering and the cause of suffering. Cause of suffering is aversion.
If you have aversion to pain, it’s not going to get better. And so you’ve got to make friends with pain. You say, hello pain, where did you come from? Oh, you just arrived unannounced. How long are going to stay here?
When you ask the pain really gently he says, no, I didn’t come here at all. Oh, my misunderstanding. My misunderstanding about the muscles, is that right? So, it’s really your relationship with the body and how you want it to be, it wasn’t fulfilled. That’s the problem.
The pain is that. That’s the pain. Pain is because you’re too attached to the body having its own way and here it’s not getting it. And that’s, oh really? Word understand it.
Right understanding means you know, you have the correct view of this pain. There is no inherent pain, there’s no pain that is inherently there. It never will be, it never was. It was an illusion, and you don’t you can’t be bothered being trapped in that. When you attach to an illusive body, sure there will be illusive, sure there will be a much bigger pain than you are ready to, you are able to cope with it.
When you realize body is illusory, so is pain. So the pain doesn’t so the mindfulness of body therefore teaches us not only to work with the body but also to develop non attachment and grasping. Because remember aversion is the cause of unhappiness, but what is aversion caused by? Attachment. Attachment to comfort.
Attachment to comfort causes aversion to discomfort and therefore the pain becomes a problem. So the pain doesn’t exist inherently on its own. It can, the one who has greater attachment to comfort has have to have greater pain. Like it or not, that’s the order you place, and here comes the delivery. Oh, there’s a lot of responsibility there, oh, then you don’t reject it.
You really learn so much from pain. You say, this must be you really feel so much develop a new sense of faith in Buddha. This must have taken long. You know, you can understand why a guy can sit under a tree for so long. If it could be so rewarding like this, you know, looking at pain and you learn, overcome so many aversions and attachments like that.
Oh, this is not bad at all. It’s not just calm abiding. This teaches me more. And then you’re really using the body as a like the mirror. You’re seeing yourself in the body.
Your aversion, that unresolved aversion attachments are manifesting in the body. They were trapped in the body. Now they are manifesting. Ah, here, what better time than now to deal with it, to purify it, to exhale it, to get rid of the negative karma while experiencing that. So it is a form of purification.
Buddha, he was so well fed when he was a young prince, but he when he went to retreat, he would turn to his skeleton, you know, because he was practicing so much of this discipline and he didn’t have time to become attached to how the body looked and how the body fared and, you know. And then, Milarepa, by the way, who having followed the strict instructions of Marpa, didn’t have the skin of a smooth bottom of a baby. He had a skin of an elephant’s bottom. Most profound and last, by the way, most profound and last instruction Milarepa gave to his disciple was show his bottom. There wasn’t much designable bottom as such.
Everything was just dark, flat, creased, callused. He liked that. Actually his eminence bottom is like that too, you know. Really, really. It’s amazing.
It’s amazing bottom. It’s completely, you know, there’s no flesh there. There’s really there isn’t there. There’s no flesh whatsoever. There’s just a thick skin there.
Thick skin and totally dark. But that’s it. That’s that. I had the profound instructions too. That’s the honor not everybody gets.
Yeah. Then only you you really realize what is faith, what is devotion. It’s not just here intellectually speaking on a teaching, it’s practicing with sheer devotion, dedication. And of course a person who dedicates his or her time in meditation practice like that, they don’t have any physical problems. They’re beyond that because they have no attachment to the body.
So but the physical related problem doesn’t manifest. There’s no aversion about physical related objects, so therefore so so much of the suffering and that causes objects are completely destroyed by the sheer lack of attachment to the body. There is no suffering. Objects of suffering whatsoever is is what manifests to other people. So just look at the sitting meditation itself as a profound practice and what it learns, what you can learn from that.
It’s very simple but really, really completely confronting, but at the same time very settling. At least there is you you have to deal with, you know. At least now you know that you who have to deal with, you know. It’s very nice to get to know that, because in the past we thought there is something else out there we got to deal and and to make our world better and reality reality improve. But when we sit we get a completely different message and that’s the empowering element of of the meditation.
It’s mindfulness of the body makes us to focus on the body and see whether this is me or this is what I have. And you realize this is definitely not me, this is something I have temporarily. And what you have temporarily, you tend to use it skillfully for the purpose that you have had it for. It’s a body you have learned from your parents or from somewhere. It definitely is a learned vehicle.
So to become attached to the learned object is not a good idea. And if you have anything that is not loaned, show me. You can’t find one. When your own body you have discovered to be a lone object, you can’t afford to become trapped in it, become attached to it, try to preserve the unpreservable, try to protect the unpredictable, And therefore you you understand what it means by practice. Asceticism, one of very very strong practice.
Buddha himself tried, but he he taught, he warned about, you know, extreme asceticism. But I don’t think there’s a danger of that happening. It’s a problem we have nowhere near facing. We have the extreme opposite of the other. Instead of extreme asceticism, extreme indulgence and comfort.
So that’s the whole practice. Yes. But but try to be gentle with oneself, of course. We are we are beginning the practice out of faith and devotion and and and therefore work with the body. This is sheer mindfulness body.
It also means that what you do, what you’re going to use the body as an instrument. Instrument of happiness, instrument of help or harm to oneself and others. Previously becoming attached to this body, you know, we have caused a lot of negative karma for ourselves and for others. Now realizing that being the cause of all the suffering, we develop a slight, I would say, sense of indifference, and not attachment definitely, not aversion, but try to review your relationship with the body. And when you do change that, there’s complete realization of mindfulness of the body.
And end result of mindfulness of body is physical pliancy, which is one of the benefits of calm abiding meditation down the track is pliancy of body and pliancy of your mind. Tibetan word plant really means bliss giving, body is just comfortable, body is always fine as it is, body is never an obstacle for you, it is always there at your disposal and there’s a great harmony between great sense of relationship in mind, sense of the body and sense of the mind, and the body is more willing to follow. It may have done a lot of leading in the past.