The Six Paramitas - Protecting Our Practice (Ethical Discipline)
David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded January 29, 2023
In this mahamudra style meditation we visualise the mind as a clear sky and each thought or emotion as a cloud passing through it, observed rather than followed. David turns to the second paramita, ethical discipline, describing it not as rules imposed from outside but as a fence protecting a young seedling, a fledgling practice easily undone by an outburst of anger the moment we step off the cushion. He talks about how avoiding harm builds the trust that relationships and genuine wellbeing rest on.
So that practice [referring to meditation on seeing the mind as like the sky and thoughts as like clouds] we've done a few times during these sessions. It's not the easiest practice, belongs to the Mahamudra tradition, but it is a very worthwhile practice to learn and try, because it's learning to be still in the midst of the motions of your mind. It's learning to not be carried away by the thoughts and stories in the mind, which is a very useful skill to have, because as we know, we have monkey mind. We have a mind that can be very busy, that can torment us, that can take us to all sorts of places, and a mind that often is not always telling us the truth. It can be adventitiously defiled, it can be under the influence of delusion, it can be thinking along the lines of aversion or attachment, trying to exaggerate stories and so on. So if we can learn to remain relatively still in the midst of all of that, then that's how we start to exercise power and control and decide, actually, no, I'm not following after that thought because I know where that's going. I'm going to instead follow after this one. So whether you found it difficult or easy, it is a practice I would encourage you to try and get familiar with because it's how we start to unlock the ability to work with our minds and our thoughts. So then the talk - to be quite brief then - for this week as we're going through these Six Paramitas, this week it is morality, ethics, the second paramita, the six paramitas, the six transcendent perfections, if you missed the first one. And so this one is about avoiding harm very simply, it's about refraining from any behaviour which is destructive, which is harmful. And so as I mentioned [before the meditation], they are not commandments from a higher being. There's nobody watching over you and sort of enacting punishment for what you do. It's not like there's anybody else that you really need to answer to other than yourself because ethical discipline is for your sake,
Anger and aversion Genuine happiness and wellbeing Relationships and family The bodhisattva path The six perfections (paramitas) Mahamudra