Satya Robyn retells the Buddhist story of Queen Vaidehi, King Bimbisara, and Ajātasattu to explore guilt, shame, and repentance. She connects their suffering to the four brahma viharas—compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity—and uses modern examples like surgical checklists to show how openness to failure builds compassionate practice.
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Satya Robyn. So, I'd like to talk about Queen Vaidehi. She's a woman, and I think it's partly due to the work I've been doing with a lot of women lately that has brought her to my mind. She was a layperson, and she opened a spiritual door to many people. And the story is set in Magadha, India, about 2,500 years ago. And it's a tragic story. It's a really terrible story, so it's very much a story that is about how this woman dealt with her immense sorrow, her distress, by calling upon the Buddha's love, and how he was able to show her a vision of the Pure Land. And because of her, we are now here today practicing Pure Land tradition. So the characters involved are her husband King Bimbisara, her son Prince Ajātasattu, and the Buddha's cousin Devadatta. And what's happened is Prince Ajātasattu has put King Bimbisara in prison and has taken over the throne because Devadatta urged him to do so, and He also said, "But don't kill your father because that's one of the gravest sins ever." So he put him in prison and was starving him to death. So eventually he would die, but not because of an act of violence. And Queen Baidehi, she would visit the king and bring him food. Secretly. The guards found out, and so they prevented her from doing that. She hid some food in her shoes, and again the guards found out and prevented her from doing that. And it got to the point where she would go and take a shower, clean her body, and she would cover herself in ghee and flour paste so that they couldn't see that she was carrying any food, and she would hide grape juice in some of her jeweled ornaments. And she would take it into the prison. So after several weeks, the king, Ajatashatru, thought, "Well, he must be pretty weak now," and so he asked the guards, "How is my father?" And they said, "Oh, he's fine. He's actually quite content and at peace." And of course, this It did not go down well, and he was wondering why, and so the guards told him, 'Well, it's the Queen. We can't— we haven't managed to stop her from sneaking in food to feed him.' And this outraged her son, so he took his sword, and out of rage, he was about to kill her, and there were two ministers there who said in their very, very calm and royal way, "Well, in the Vedic scriptures, there are 18,000 counts of kings being killed because of the throne, but never has there been an account of anyone killing their mother." "If you do this, then we will be outcasts, and we can't allow you to do this." And he checked with the other minister, "Do you not give me permission to kill my mother?" And he said, "No." And they drew back their swords and they were about to leave. And so at that point, he realized he couldn't do— he couldn't kill his mother. And so he begged their forgiveness, he said he wouldn't, and instead of killing her, he also locked her up in a chamber so that he could keep an eye on her. And after some time, she becomes emaciated, weak, she's in a very, very, very poor state, and so she closes her eyes She worships to the Buddha and she calls out to him and says, "There were times you sent Ananda to me to give me teachings. Could you please send him now?" And by the time she opens her eyes, the Buddha is teaching on Vulture's Peak in Rajagriha. He hears this and he sends Ananda and Maudgalyayana to her, and after he sends them to her, he disappears and reappears in her chamber. So by the time she opens her eyes, there he is, all purplish-gold majestic, and she then whips off her jewelry and prostrates down to him. So I want to pause on this part of the story, to just look at what she's done. And what she's done is she is a woman of great wealth, she is the queen, and she takes off her status as queen and lowers herself to the Buddha. Now it's not like the Buddha can magically take her out of the chamber and save her and the king, It's not like he's going to transform her life, and yet she places him above her. And this is what we do when we prostrate, when we lower ourselves, showing that what we value is the fact that Buddha's given us this wonderful Dharma, and we place it above our own, so that it's very much the sense of We're trapped in this prison that we've created, and it's almost like we've imprisoned our heart. And we lower all the things that we've done to accumulate a kind of status in today's society, and we cast that away. We see that we no longer need them. And we can lower ourselves and raise up something else that's much bigger than us, that's much better than what we can think of ourselves. So this is from an act of the Buddha's love coming to the Queen, and the Queen can then take off everything that she's used to define herself, her whole identity. And so what's left? She's this naked person. And when you're, when you're stripped of all the accoutrements, all the things that give us our identity and our self-importance, we're left feeling vulnerable. It's that sense of opening up and feeling, well, what's left, our own frailty, our own vulnerability, our own just all the human emotions that come from being a human born in all the different conditions that we experience in life. She doesn't then go into blaming Ajātasattu, or even herself. And what I find nowadays in so many areas of life is that there's so much blame. If something doesn't go right for oneself, we blame. So there is this incident that I saw. It was at just a dance class, and there's a little girl, probably about 5 years old, and she was just doing her thing, and then all of a sudden she tripped and she fell. And she automatically turned to her mom, "Mommy, you put your purse there and it made me trip!" And She's only about 5 years old, and from my own experience of seeing children up until that age, they trip, they fall, but there's no blame yet. But there comes an age when they pick it up from somewhere that whatever happened to them that caused them embarrassment or harm wasn't their fault. If that bag hadn't been there, she wouldn't have tripped. So, and then I saw it when there was the terrorist attack in London and the young boy and young girl, Jack and Saskia, were stabbed to death by an Islamic terrorist. And the response from the politicians was that it was the other political party's fault. And so it was Labour's fault because they had already started making changes in the criminal justice system, and it was the Conservatives' fault because they're the government in power now and they changed it so that when someone is charged and arrested, whatever period, they do half of that in prison and then they do half of that on probation. Of course, because there's been so many cuts to the criminal justice system, there hasn't been enough proper funding for the probation officers to do their job properly, so he slipped out of their radar. And so there's a wonderful article by the young man's father saying, please don't use this incident as an act of hatred, because his son was studying rehabilitation and wanting to actually change the way that we treat criminals. And rather than create more hatred, more fear, he wanted to change it so that there's more understanding, more communication, more people working together and cooperating. And let's hope that that message filters out, because to get into that position of blame, it is very much of, "Let's not allow ourselves to feel vulnerable. Let's blame someone," because blame is often described as a discharge of pain and discomfort, but it's not really anything to do about accountability or holding someone to account. So she doesn't do that. She doesn't blame Ajātasattu. And importantly, she doesn't blame herself. So the flip side is, is when something happens, say someone leaves a group, the person responsible often feels, "What did I do? Maybe it was my fault." And then they start feeling guilty because perhaps it was them all along and it was something they did, and then they start feeling like they're the ones to blame. But that's also just the other side of the coin of blaming someone else. It's also the conceit that we have in thinking, "Well, if we had done something better, then that person wouldn't have left. If we had been perfect, then everything would have been okay for everyone." And of course, that's not the reality of the situation. And so what she says to the Buddha is, "What karma did I do in the past that made me have a son like Ajātasattu?" And then she goes on to ask the Buddha, "What bad karmic relations did you have?" to have a bad relation like Devadatta, because he was pretty wicked. So what she's tapping into is this sense of failing on her part. She must have done something in the past. And this also taps into a sense of shame. The sense of vulnerability opens us up to all sorts of feelings, not just the good ones, but the negative ones. Like failure, like fear, like shame. And shame is kind of different from guilt. So shame is this sense of, "I'll never be good enough. There's always going to be a part of me that isn't— it doesn't deserve it. I'm not good enough." Whereas guilt is, I've done something wrong, I'm guilty because of an action, and that action will have consequences. But shame you can never get rid of. There's nothing that you can do to actually make up for this lack. It's this sense of, um, because I'm not good enough, I'm always going to get it wrong, I'm always going to be a failure. And that's not a bad thing. So what we learn from Queen Vaidehi is that in seeing this, not even knowing, just feeling that it's a failure somewhere in her past, she repents, she begs forgiveness, she asks for the Buddha's love, and the Buddha gives it to her. And she longs for a— she longs, she entreats the Buddha to show her this place where there is no suffering, where there is no defilements, where there's no wicked words being said, where there's no blame, where there's no anger to be heard. And out of that comes this wonderful vision. So I just wanted to give you an example of how looking at failure, feeling the shame of not having done something properly can actually lead to a good outcome that benefits everyone. And the example is of Honin. Honin— there are lots of Pure Land sutras, lots of different scriptures about Pure Land Buddhism, but he chose these three: the Larger Pure Land Sutra, the Smaller Pure Land Sutra, and the Contemplation Sutra, and put them together as a a threefold story of the Pure Land tradition. And he, like we heard this morning, he was encouraged by his father who had just been assassinated not to seek revenge. He said, "Do not seek revenge. Seek the Dharma for the good of all." And so Honen then went into the monastery to study, to train to be a priest. And at that time in Japan, Buddhism was a state religion. It was for the upper classes. And so while he was there and while he studied and he trained, and when he came across the Pure Land Sutras, I think what he did feel was that there's this failure on the state religion because they're not actually reaching out to everyone. It wasn't a Buddhism that was for the benefit of all beings. It was a Buddhism that was for a particular class of people. If you had the privilege, if you had the money, and if you were able to live in a particular lifestyle, which then meant that you could go to the Pure Land, but for a lot of people he saw that that was impossible. And what we see in this interaction between the Buddha and Queen Vaidehi is this Buddha's unconditional love to teach her about this Pure Land, and there's lots of other Buddha lands that he shows her as well, but she chooses, and he specifically mentions Amitābha's, Amitāyas' Pure Land of Utmost Bliss. And it's so bright, it's so wonderful that even King Bimbisara in the other cell in the prison can see it. So there's this this wonderful vision of the Pure Land being spread, it's like transmitting it to people who are in deep distress, who are open to it, and they see it. And this is the Buddha coming with and showing us how to be, how to have equanimity, upeksha. Upeksha is one of the four measurables, and it's very hard to know what upeksha is without seeing someone demonstrate how to be someone of that equanimity. The Buddha was able to demonstrate it, and it's very much about taking things in your stride, accepting that Things will happen to us that we have no control over, and even though bad things happen, we can still find a way to live a noble life. And the Buddha demonstrated this to King Bimbisara. And King Bimbisara got it, so that he was ready and willing to die. He knew that his fate was sealed, almost, and because of Receiving this unconditional love, he was able to break free from the conditions that he was in and accept it in a very open-hearted way. And because of that, he became a stream-enterer. A stream-enterer is just one of the four stages of enlightenment that's part of the Buddhist tradition. We won't go into it, but it's just enough to know that this small act of equanimity, someone who was able to show him unconditional love, was able to help him break through his own conditions so that he was willing to die. And Honen got that, I believe, from the story. I think Honin was a great example of someone who went out into his society at his time, meeting people who were bound by rather limited conditions, and he was able to go and teach them how they could be saved as well. So through his teaching of unconditional love, they too were able to break through their conditions, chant the Nembutsu, and feel saved by Amida Buddha. So there's this wonderful sense of, from the Buddha's love, we get examples of how someone can be, and someone can demonstrate, upeksha, equanimity, so that we can find a way to remove the conditions that we've put around our heart so that we can open up to our vulnerability and live with a sense of shame, with the sense of knowing that we're vulnerable and that we will die. And in that, if we can accept it and know that there's still a way to live a normal life, then we can live so much better and die in a loving way. And out of equanimity also grows the other three immeasurables: mettā, uditā, and karūṇā. And before I go on to explain explain those. I just wanted to share another example of a man who was— you might have heard of him— he's a surgeon called Atul Gawande, and he was the director of the World Health Organization. And he, at the time— this is going back probably a decade or two ago— and he was concerned about all the deaths that were happening in operating theaters. In the States, there is such a high number. And as a doctor, when you train, you learn all the, all the things that you need to learn about being a doctor. So when patients come to you, you're an expert. There shouldn't be any mistakes made. The patient expects the doctor to know what to do. So they stitch up their vulnerability as they train. They show that they're not vulnerable, that they're strong, they know everything. And so what was happening was a lack of communication. Because if— what Atol Gawande was wondering was, If doctors could just check and talk to the other doctors, nurses, everyone involved, and the patient, then maybe less mistakes will happen. But for nurses, doctors to accept that they've made mistakes, they have to make themselves vulnerable. They have to be able to feel that maybe they were wrong. And for someone to check, "Did you scrub the right area?" There's a certain amount of pride that comes up. "Of course I've scrubbed the right area. I'm trained to do this, of course." So there was a lot of resistance. A lot of doctors, nurses didn't want to do this simple checklist because they didn't want to see the mistakes that they were making. And the mistakes that they were making were so simple. 'Is this patient John?' Is your name John? Did they know? Sometimes it was the wrong patient. And, um, uh, Kathy, is it your heart that you're having problems with? And sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't. So the mistakes that they made actually killed a lot of people. And when they were able to admit that maybe they should check in case they're wrong, then they started to improve and there were less deaths happening. And now most, most hospitals in the United States and probably across the world have adopted this checklist. And this is also a great example how, if we can open up to our shame and our failures, then change can happen. It's sort of like a two-step mechanism. We can't actually open up to our shame and vulnerability without being held and loved. It's too hard. If we're constantly feeling judged feeling like someone's going to blame us for something, we won't want to admit that, yeah, it might have been us, or let's look at what's going on. So the Buddha's love is so crucial here. And when he tells Vaidehi— now he wants Vaidehi to feel that that there is a pure land where there's no suffering. But it's not just for Queen Vaidehi or King Bimbisara. He's saying, "This is not just for you, this is also for people in the future, because they too will need a place where they can go to, and somewhere that's free of suffering." So what's nice about the Pure Land tradition It's not a here and now tradition. It's not about dwelling in this moment now, because this moment now is one where if we're really locked up in prison, we don't really want to dwell in this place and feel that everything is okay. It really is about, let's feel this sense of, "We must have done something that brought us to this place where we feel trapped, and there must be a way out that isn't now, but in the future, that can help all sentient beings, not just a handful of people that are special, or have got it, or have the privileged conditions." This is very much about a compassion that's unconditional to everyone. And Honen knew it. So Honen would have great conversations with warriors, with prostitutes, and his story is filled with him connecting to ordinary people and other people. And in that connection is compassion. In the compassion is communication. So it's very much about what we say to one another, what we convey, not just with our body and what we can do, but how we say things, how we are able to show our compassion through words. So that brings me back to the four immeasurables. The four immeasurables, they're a bit confusing. So you have upeksha, you have karuna, which is compassion, mudita, which is like a vicarious joy, and mettā, which is loving kindness. Upaksha is an antidote for discrimination or favoritism. It's the antidote for when we cling to the things that we like and push things away that we don't like. And so if King Bimbisar— let's say we can either use King Bimbisar or Queen Vaidehi. Locked up in their prison. When the Buddha hears Queen Vaidehi call out to him— because King Bimbisara did this as well. King Bimbisara used to send messages longing for the Buddha to send him Maudgalyayana to give him teachings, and Maudgalyayana would go and he would fly there at the speed of light and be there. So both of them were able to to express their longing to have one of the Buddha's followers to go and see them. And when the Buddha sent Maudgalyayana, Maudgalyayana was acting with uppeksa because Maudgalyayana would go. There was none of this, "No, I'm too busy. We're here at Vulture Peak and we're giving a teaching. I'm not leaving to go into some guy's prison." 'Let's wait till we're done.' Or he didn't say, 'Well, Queen Vaidehi, she's a woman, she's a layperson. I'd rather go to King Bimbisara, please.' So they accepted. They were willing to go wherever they were asked to go. That is uppeksa. Compassion grows out of upeksha. Compassion can be confused with pity. If it was pity, then Maudgalyayana or Ananda, they wouldn't go into the prison. They would stand outside and look in and go, "Oh, it looks pretty awful in there. Poor you." Yeah, compassion is very much about them going into the prison to be with them. They're beside Queen Vaidehi and they feel her sorrow. They're not gonna put them in the same situation as them, but they're side by side, they're holding her hand, and they're telling her, "It's not nice to be here. I feel your distress, and you're not alone." And compassion is an antidote for cruelty, or wishing someone to be— to suffer. So, and then after that, comes mudita. This can also be confused— mudita is an antidote for envy, jealousy, but it can be confused with hypocrisy. So when, when The Buddha shows the vision of the Pure Land to Queen Vaidehi. Maudgalyayana and Ananda aren't going, "How come she gets to see the vision and not me?" And/or, "Oh, good for her," but they're actually quite sorry that they didn't get the vision. So it's not true mudita. Mudita is Maudgalyayana and Ananda saying, "Oh, that is amazing. That is excellent that she has been given a vision. So now we can find a way to teach other people to also have the vision, to take everyone out of this prison, their distress." and help them to free themselves from whatever trap they've set themselves in. And then, mettā, loving kindness, is an antidote for fear, dread, anxiety, or panic. And it is not— so this is The danger is that we love someone because they can get us out of there. So it could be that Maud Galliana and Ananda, they now revere Queen Vaidehi because she's had this special vision, not because she's actually seen this wonderful place, but because they are— they need her in order to see it. If you see what I mean. There's a kind of clinging. Because she's found a way to see the vision, they love her in order to— that's not a true Maitreya, true loving kindness. Loving kindness is loving the other person in a way that isn't clingy, needy of that person in order for them to escape from their own self-misery. So there's nothing conditional about loving in that person. They love them unconditionally. It's not because they have a way to get to the Pure Land. So Honen was able to open up this gateway for so many people, and it came to them from a feeling of contrition. It is very much about being told that the Pure Land is not far away, longing to get there in less than a day, and then feeling, feeling contrite, feeling that we could never do this on our own. And seeing this light shining on so many other things that we then take refuge in that, we surrender ourselves to it. So what's lovely is this morning we heard Dharmavijja's talk about the difference between Buddhism and Western religions and the lightness. I think from a Westerner's point of view, when they see anyone prostrate to someone, there is a sense of, "Oh no, are they being forced to bow down to a Buddha?" Because in Christianity it is very much, there's the God, the Almighty God, the powerful God, you bow down, and it is this heaviness that you have to surrender to God. Otherwise, you're proud, and it's kind of similar, but this one, there's a lightness. It is very much about we're carrying this weight, and Amida is saying, but here's the Dharma that's supporting us. We don't have to anymore, and isn't it nice just to get down and just to put everything down? So that the Buddha's love, the Dharma, can hold us all. And in that way, the prostrations aren't about making a sacrifice of ourselves so that we get the love from God. It's very much about the Buddha's love is there, so we can easily bow down to it and give everything that we have to the Buddha's love, to the teachings, to the Dharma, to everything that will help us take off our protective gear, our status, whatever it is that always invites people to say, "Look at me, look at what I've got, look at what I've done," so that we can actually allow ourselves to open our hearts, liberate our hearts, and shine a little bit of light out there to reflect the Buddha's light so that other people can get this intuition or glimpse of a pure land. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
