This essay continues our series on The Ten Paramis, taken from a talk given by Mark Donovan on February 10, 2026

This talk includes excerpts from Lila Kate Wheeler’s talk,
Parami of Truthfulness: Living the Truth, Dharma Seed 2010-10-25.  

Here is my effort to be truthful: It’s almost 10 am Tuesday morning, this morning, and this talk is not yet composed, there’s confusion, a feeling of some anxiety and cold sweat with each minute that passes, awareness of a background narrative of unworthiness, a sense of being stuck.  There’s some identification with this state - I AM these things - and yet I am also able to zoom out a bit and remember how these states historically arise and pass and to know deep down that I am much more than the mind objects presently arising.  This makes me think of Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree assailed by Mara: you’re unworthy of becoming the buddha, you’re not worthy of being free.  Maybe you can identify with that? Lila Kate Wheeler says: A big piece of the Buddha’s victory was being able to set aside that voice and go beyond it.  She says: One way of interpreting the earth-touching mudra - when the Buddha touched the Earth and called on it to witness his right to enlightenment, to exist - was that he dropped down from the level of the thoughts in his mind to a different form of reality. 

We experience this ourselves when we anchor attention in the body, ground our attention in the body, just having something where we know we were distracted when thinking that we can come back to, gives us a sense of the relativity of this whole world of thought.  That’s why we often emphasize the pause when you recognize you’re thinking, when you pause you’re no longer carried away by the stream of thoughts, you can actually take a stand somewhere else- touching earth, grounded.  And then you get a choice how you’re going to relate to those thoughts.  We’ve probably all had that experience of the thought balloon kind of popping and it was like being lost in a daydream and now I’m back to reality.

This essay is the first of a series on The Ten Paramis, and is based on a talk given by Mark Donovan at Prescott Insight Meditation on January 13, 2026

Last week Carol gave an overview and introduction to the paramis, which we will be exploring together over the next ten weeks.  The paramis are ten noble, virtuous qualities that we can cultivate in our daily lives.  While the entire list is not found together as a whole in the Pali canon– the oldest Buddhist texts in which our tradition is based– these qualities are referred to individually in the suttas.  The paramis found their fruition in the Mahayana tradition and the ideal of the bodhisattva, a spiritual practitioner who is devoted to liberation from suffering for all beings. 

The word paramii derives from parama, "supreme," and suggests the eminence of the qualities. Paramita, the word preferred by the Mahayana texts and also used by Paali writers, is sometimes explained as ‘gone to the beyond," and indicates the transcendental direction of these qualities.  As Carol noted, cultivating the paramis leads us in the direction of both compassion and liberation.

Tonight I will talk about dana paramis.  Sean Oakes, a Spirit Rock teacher, says it can be helpful to distinguish between the Pali words for giving (dana) and generosity (caga).  “Generosity is an emotion and an intention, while giving is the action that follows, bringing our intention to fulfillment.  Generosity turns our attention away from what we can get and keep for ourselves toward what we can offer to others.  The emotion of generosity contains aspects of all the brahmaviharas –lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity– as we feel how easily we can help others in need, and how much satisfaction it can give us.  Bringing generosity into form as giving asks us not to just wish well for others but act to support their well-being.” 

Gil Fronsdal says the practice has two important functions: “First, it helps connect us with others and with ourselves. Giving creates a relationship between the giver and receiver, so acts of generosity help us to learn more about the nature of our relationships. It also develops those relationships. Practicing generosity together with a meditation practice helps ensure that our spiritual practice doesn’t occur aloof from others.  Second, through the practice of generosity we begin to understand where we are closed, where we are holding back, where we feel our fear. We learn what keeps us from being generous. We take on the practice to see where we resist it.”

The Buddha says: And what is the accomplishment of generosity? Here, a noble disciple dwells at home with a mind free from stinginess, freely generous, open-handed, delighting in relinquishment, one devoted to charity, delighting in giving and sharing.   

Dana was the first teaching the Buddha shared with a practitioner because he considered it the most accessible and practical, the most easily practiced, and the most beneficial. Practicing dana cultivates joy, softens attachment, builds interconnectedness, and fosters happiness by letting go.  The Buddha typically followed a series of steps in what is referred to as a gradual or graduated training, anupubbasikkha in Pali, because each step progressively builds on the prior one and advances one’s spiritual path.  This was originally intended as a curriculum for monks and nuns.  The first step is dana, followed by sila/ethics/nonharming, then mindfulness and concentration, and so on with teaching of the Four Noble Truths much further down the list.

by Mark Donovan
From a talk given at Prescott Insight Meditation, April 8, 2025

Tonight I’d like to explore anger - understanding it with a little more nuance.  What is anger? What is anger for each of us? I’ll offer some reflections.  Is it good or bad? And how do we practice with it - the other important question.

This talk is inspired by a recent experience I had with a work colleague where I  reacted with anger to a perception that this person was dissembling about their understanding of current events.  I had regrets about my reaction, apologized, and we have since repaired the relationship.  However, the intensity of my emotion scared me, so I met with a counselor to explore what happened.  He helped me to see that underneath the anger was a lot of fear related to my perceptions: the undermining of democratic norms,  public health, national security, bullying and alienating longtime geopolitical allies, nihilistic destruction of government from a president I view as having an appetite for unlimited power.

In my previous role as an occupational therapist I facilitated anger management groups at the Albuquerque VA, a common “problem” emotion for persons with PTSD and hyperarousal, overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system.  Excessive anger can cause health problems and relational problems.

This talk includes material and insights from Zohar Lavie of Gaia House and Donald Rothberg who teaches at Spirit Roth.  Both of them suggest that this is a really important and underexplored topic in western Buddhism today –that western Buddhists have a lot of confusion about anger.  An important topic for our times and the interplay between our practice and present social realities.  Rothberg notes the core teaching of dependent origination in which it’s said if we’re not mindful of what’s difficult and painful, and when we’re organized by habitual tendencies, we go into reactivity, we use various ways to push away pain including being judgmental, rigid, having views.  Anger can quickly go into negative views about others and about ourselves.  He notes how many people in the US harbor anger, maybe it’s about economic hardship or confusion about changing gender roles, and when people don’t skillfully work with their pain it’s easy to manipulate them–whether we call it scapegoating, divide and conquer, whatever.  

by Mark Donovan
A dharma talk given December 17, 2024

Tonight I’d like to explore our practice through a lens of courage.  Courage — from the French word, coeur, heart. Recent talks by our group of teachers have explored the experience of uncertainty that is arising for many of us in these times of rapid change — and how uncertainty can seed a sense of danger and feelings of fear.  Fear is an afflictive emotion, some say the root of the three poisons: clinging, aversion, and delusion.  In Brian Lesage’s talk on uncertainty, he pointed to how fear can be constricting when it gets the upper hand — when we avoid and withdraw into a protective stance, life gets cramped and small.  As the writer Elena Ferrante puts it in one of her novels:
Everything in the world is in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who don’t agree to take the risk waste away in a corner, without getting to know life.”

Ken, Brenda and Carol all suggested how challenging it can be for us to hang out in a place of groundlessness, of not knowing.  Our nervous systems evolved to keep us safe and to find security in the predictable; we want answers to our questions but may have to wait patiently for them to be revealed in their own time.  We might say that learning to be more comfortable with uncertainty is exactly what this practice is all about.  Pema Chodron’s teachings are all about this.  Just listen to her book titles : The Places That Scare You, When Things Fall Apart, Comfortable With Uncertainty, The Wisdom of No Escape.  Last week Carol suggested another response to uncertainty, one of opening to the mystery and wonder of life as it arises moment–by-moment, perhaps a continuation of her talk on improvisation, of responding to whatever life may present to us with, “Yes, and…” as we join in the dance.

Courage is a quality that feels important and useful for facing the challenges of uncertainty and change.  Courage is not a quality that appears on any of the Theravadin Buddhist lists.  It is not one of the 37 awakening or liberating qualities.  But although it is given little status on its own in the scriptural writings, I believe it is a quality that we manifest often in many different ways in our practice — this practice that aims at the unshakeable release of the heart, the coeur.

In its earliest forms, courage meant "to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart".  Heart and mind together.  To me this sounds a lot like the meaning of the Pali word citta, which refers to the heart-mind, not separate but one.  Merriam Webster defines courage as mental or moral strength to venture, persevere and withstand danger, fear or difficulty.  Another definition includes a quality of spirit — spiritual strength.  So we can think of  courage as mental, moral and spiritual strength to persevere in the face of fear, danger and difficulty.

I wanted to start tonight's talk with a poem:
The Buddha's Last Instruction, by Mary Oliver

“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
It thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire -
Clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Sunday I worshiped in the tradition of my family at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The preacher, who was a child during the Cold War, remembered practicing “duck and cover” at school, the fear that arose in her with the loud and shrill ringing of sirens, images that played in her mind of victims from the nuclear bombs dropped in Japan. In 2018 she was visiting Maui when, you may remember, there was a false missile alert. The alert stated that there was an incoming ballistic missile threat, advised residents to seek shelter, and concluded: "This is not a drill". The preacher commented that once again she was paralyzed with fear. She wondered what had become of her faith. And she contrasted standing strong in faith and hope to a state of fearful paralysis. There is a really huge gulf between those states of being, isn’t there? I think this is at the heart of our spiritual practice--the good news that draws us to this practice like a moth to the light. It’s the message of a cross-stitch sampler that hangs on my wall and reads, “Fear knocked on the door, Faith answered. No one was there.”

In a recent dharma talk on Dharma Seed, Brian Lesage described the spiritual journey in the following way: Exploring what can help our hearts to be here fully for this journey--this spiritual journey from birth to death, a journey that I hope this practice brings us more depth, kindness, love and wisdom. So we can have a wholeheartedness to our journey.

By Mark Donovan
A Dharma Talk given in August, 2020

Note: This piece is primarily a synthesis of two talks on Dharma Seed with text borrowed directly: Spiritual Hope by Tara Brach and Hope, Hopelessness and Equanimity by Jill Shepherd.   

I suppose I wanted to investigate hope to cheer myself up.  I felt like I got clobbered over the head last month with a long bout of insomnia that threw me off balance.  My mood was unstable with high anxiety related to lack of sleep, personal issues, and the background clamor of the pandemic and politics.  I suffered.  I was also aware that I wasn’t in this alone, that humanity as a whole is suffering at this time as the pandemic disrupts lives and livelihoods.  And I appreciated the expressions from my doctor, and the director of the clinic where I work, who reminded me that many, many people are going through exactly what I was going through.  Our suffering is universal.

This time of massive transformation and uncertainty is both scary, with many of our old moorings loosened or lost,  and also cause for new hope that a more fair and just world will emerge.  Rebecca Solnit, in her essay “The Impossible Has Already Happened: What Coronavirus Can Teach Us About Hope,” writes “I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.”

I imagine that some of you watched the televised funeral for John Lewis.  Listening to stories from his life I felt great hopefulness.  What a remarkable man, known for his “moral clarity,” a conscience backed by tireless action that for 60 years worked for equality and justice.  A man who lived by his motto of “making good trouble,” civil disobedience, putting his body on the line as he led 600 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 for civil rights.  He suffered a fractured skull, but that did not lead him to hate his attackers, but to continue making good trouble through non-violent means.  Lewis said, “We must be bold, brave, courageous, and push and pull until we redeem the soul of America and move closer to a community at peace with itself, where no one will be left out because of race, color, or nationality.” He recently expressed pride as he watched his legacy in action: a new generation of activists fighting for equality.  Lewis’ example of living into the promise of greater equality gives me inspiration and hope.  Tara Brach would call this “spiritual hope”, this growing into a greater potential, the hope of what’s possible.