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Samatha at Home Issue 18 Thursday 7Th January 2021

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Samatha at Home Issue 18 Thursday 7Th January 2021 Samatha at Home (and elsewhere) A newsletter for the Samatha Sangha: 18 Thursday 7th January 2021 www.samatha.org Samatha at Home 18 Dear friends, Happy New Year! The beginning of the year presents us with some mixed news – two new vaccines are now available and being rolled out, but in the meantime a new strain of the virus is spreading significantly faster and our health services are straining under the pressure. Yīnyáng indeed! The parallels with the practice, dealing with mental defilements and the spread of the virus, have been remarked upon before, but at the moment they are particularly striking. The need to maintain discipline and deal with daily life in a mindful way applies not just to our development of our practice but to dealing with Covid-19 as well. In fact we can draw a comparison with the threefold training of Sīla (keeping precepts), Samādhi (concentration) and Paññā (wisdom). With Sīla we practise restraint in our daily lives to ensure the defilements do not get stronger and in maintaining our social distance, wearing a mask and regularly washing our hands we are practising restraint with regard to the virus, ensuring it does not overwhelm us. With Samādhi we calm the mind through breathing mindfulness (for instance) and thereby clear the mind of hindrances, developing skilful states and providing a firm foundation for further work. With the vaccine the virus is suppressed in a similar way and the way is cleared to returning to some semblance of normality. Finally, with Paññā the cause of the defilements is uprooted, the conditions for their arising eliminated. With the virus too, there is potential for us to finally eradicate it by denying it any footing to subsist and therefore remove the prospect of it spreading again. As with Paññā, this will almost certainly take a while, but it can be done. In this month’s issue we start with an obituary and tribute to our good friend Bill Wexler, who passed away on December 20th. He will be missed. We follow with a series of articles and contributions on the four bases for success (iddhipādas) an excellent topic to explore in our current circumstances. The four iddhipādas, was the topic of a number of groups that met in October and November, and this month’s issue draws from some of those contributions, with an introductory piece first. What is success, and how does it work? The contributions explore that a little more here. Many thanks to all those who contributed to the iddhipāda groups and those who posted contributions on the noticeboard which have helped inspire this month’s issue. We would also like to thank Chris Westrup and the Sowers, the group of teachers responsible for guiding direction in Samatha in the UK for three years, for their last-minute initiative to invite groups and individuals to take part in the twelve days of Christmas as a series of events. At short notice, people from different areas and age groups, gave talks, told riddles, set puzzles, danced, moved, and dreamed up adventures. There was always an underlying practice thread as well. Meetings went, in the end, to stillness, and most had a meditation. This exercise was greatly appreciated by many – as shown by the high number of participants each day. In the fun, silliness and seriousness of the talks and sometimes movements some unusually creative perspectives on the meditation practice emerged. The occasional quiet at some moments of this midwinter rest amidst the darkness was profound and satisfying: a sense of a twelve-day series at the end of the year and start of the new seemed to make a therapeutic circle for us. Warm wishes, Guy and Sarah [email protected] [email protected] 2 Contents 1. Remembering Bill Page 4 2. Iddhipāda Groups: The four bases of success Page 6 3. The Iddhipāda Noticeboard Page 10 4. A traditional simile for the four Iddhipādas Page 10 5. An enlightening realisation Page 11 6. Early Morning Exercise Page 11 7. Looking for success Page12 8. Iddhipāda tetrahedron Page 13 9. The Iddhipāda as a form of practice Page 14 10. Food for the path Page 14 11. The four bases of success Page 16 12. Reflections on some insights during the in-depth study of the Iddhipādas Page 16 13. Luminous Mind Page 17 14. The Four Foundations of Psychic Power (Iddhipāda) Page 18 15. Image of a body Page 20 16. Citta has a complex face Page 21 17. A Haiku Page 21 18. Reflections of working in an Iddhipādas group during lockdown Page 21 19. Random thoughts Page 22 20. Iddhipāda Practice Page 22 21. Some references for further reading Page 23 This month our video is the Story of the Golden Goose, which is another tale from the Jātakas, birth stories of the Bodhisatta. It tells of how the Golden Goose, the Bodhisatta, is befriended by a great King, of the Golden Goose's formidable powers, and how the King comes to learn about the Dhamma. You can view the video by clicking on the link below: https://player.vimeo.com/video/492104332 All previous issues of Samatha at Home can be found at: www.samatha.org/samatha-at-home 3 Remembering Bill Many samatha meditators will have been saddened to hear of the death of Bill Wexler, a longstanding practitioner, living in Lowestoft and part of the East Anglia sangha. This is what David Hall, on behalf of the East Anglia sangha, wrote the day after his death on December 20th: Our good friend Bill Wexler died last night at his home in Lowestoft. He'd been ill for some time and had recently spent some weeks in a local hospice. Bill became involved with Samatha in the mid-70s when he was studying Ancient History and Archaeology at Manchester University. He then spent 13 years working in various record shops around Manchester before training as an archivist in Dublin. From there he went to work for the Suffolk County Council archives, first in Ipswich and then in Lowestoft. He retired in 2012. Some of you will remember Bill from his work on the Management Group, others will remember him from Ajahn Maha Laow's Mahāsamaya Sutta Chanting Group that travelled to Thailand. For years Bill would often join the Cambridge group for their meetings, this would require two train journeys, an overnight stay, and then a 7am train journey back to Lowestoft. After he became ill Bill would attend our groups via Zoom. 4 Alongside his Samatha activities, Bill explored body work: Karate in Manchester, then Tai Chi, and in recent years he had become a teacher within the Feldenkrais Guild. His biography can be found here: http://www.feldenkrais.co.uk/profile.php?id=247 He knew so much about the body and about how to find stillness and peace within. He was very gentle and his quiet wisdom taught us so much. With metta East Anglia Sangha This all echoes with my own memories of Bill. I met him in Manchester when he was involved in the early days of the centre there. He had a certain gravitas in his bearing and in everything he did. On a meditation week he took once he thought carefully about everyone concerned, took pains that the week would go well for them, and ensured everyone could talk freely about any problems they might have come up for them. The whole week for him was a serious and kindly process of finding out what the problems were, and then addressing them with deliberation and method. And then, when it got too serious, he would suddenly make a deeply funny joke, and his eyes and everyone else’s lit up. This is what he said in his bio information for the bodily movements he taught: Some people teach because they are naturally good at something; others because they are not, and have had to work things out from first principles. I’m in the second category, "born clumsy", and studying movement with fascination and longing. But he clearly mastered the physical base well. He struck a deep bass note just in what he was, that exuded reassurance. On one chanting tour he came on in Thailand, the group sat after the chant as a very large assembly of listeners were invited to ask questions. Our photos and names were on the front of the chanting sheet. A very serious man at the back rose and said: “I would like to ask Mr Bill Wexler a question. Sir, why did you come to Buddhism?” It was clear that the man had seen him, related to him immediately as someone whose words he could trust and looked up his name on the sheet: it had to be Bill that answered the question. Bill responded with his customary care and deliberation; the man, satisfied, clearly felt he had met a kindred spirit. He was at one time chairman of the management group, and did a considerable amount of work on archives and historical records concerning Greenstreete. We had some zoom meetings with Bill in his last weeks: he was still the same, facing the problems and difficulties ahead with steady aplomb and his characteristically dry humour. We will miss him. 5 Iddhipāda Groups: The four bases of success A new year: and we have the benefit at the start of this one with contributions from the various online groups that have been meeting over the last few months. Francis Beresford originally set this project in motion, but it is now set this managed by a coordinating group of teachers.
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