Gregory offered a series of Insight Dialogue-based teachings to the Metta community, Grandpa Greg’s Sutta Chats. The talks were attended by people who offer ID or support the practice through engagement on a Metta Programs team. Each teaching includes reflection on one or more discourses of the Buddha. The intention in this series to engage the text not as philosophy but as instructions for a whole life practice, including formal meditation and in-life reflection. At the same time, Gregory is modeling a variety of approaches to these early discourses, including traditional, in-depth dhamma analysis of one sutta, reflection on the relational implications woven into the texts, surveying multiple teachings to see what resonates at the time of reading, and, above all, opening into the human-to-human nature of the Buddha’s teachings.
The first talk in this sutta study immersion is the Girimananda Sutta, in which the Buddha instructs Ananda to offer to an ill bhikkhu ten pithy reflections, suggesting he might as a result experience some healing. We see both the compassionate care among the monks and the richness of each reflection being offered.