Okay, good evening.
Tonight we continue on with our study of the Dhammapada, verse 203, which reads as follows.
Cighacca paramaruga, sankhara paramadukha,
Which means hunger is the greatest sickness.
Formations are the ultimate suffering.
For one who sees
sees that as it is, yathā bhūtaṁ, as it is.
Nibbāna is the ultimate happiness.
Nibbānaṁ paramāṁ sukhaṁ.
So this was told in regards to a story.
It's fairly well known.
It's a particular story.
It's often used to, it's extrapolated.
It's used in a way that justifies certain practices or provides guidelines.
Because the story is about a man, a farmer who had oxen.
And he heard that the Buddha was teaching
and he wanted to go see the Buddha, listen to the Buddha's teaching.
But he woke up in the early morning and realized his oxen had run away.
So he debated what to do.
He wanted to go hear the Buddha teach,
my oxen, they're my only livelihood, what can I do?
And so he decided he had to go after his oxen and spent all morning looking for them and chasing after them and bringing them back home.
And he was quite hungry by that time, but he thought to himself, well, maybe I can catch the end of the Buddha's teaching if I go now.
And so he put his oxen in the corral and
went off to find the Buddha.
Went off to the monastery to listen to the Buddha.
Now the Buddha had as it turns out come specifically to teach this man.
He had this capacity to
connect with the man's psyche and understand that this man was ready to understand the teaching.
And so when he came to the place, the monastery, and everyone had come together to listen to his teachings, he sat there and held his peace.
He said to himself, I came all this way just to teach this man.
I'm not going to teach until he gets here.
And because he sat still, all the monks sat still and sat quietly.
And because all the monks sat quietly, all the lay people sat quietly and no one dared to say anything.
So rather than listening to a talk, which they expected, they all sat quietly and meditated.
I assume it actually doesn't say quite in that detail.
I guess it would have depended on the individuals, but I can imagine all the monks were quite quiet and orderly, sitting, waiting for the Buddha to speak.
And so when the man arrived,
they were waiting for him and when he came he sat down off to one side and prepared to listen and not really sure what was going on but he found that he couldn't actually pay attention or focus on the Buddha he couldn't actually sit still his mind was distracted by hunger and so
Here they were all sitting quietly waiting for the Buddha to speak and this man couldn't listen.
He couldn't even sit still.
He was fainting perhaps with hunger or restless because of his bodily needs.
And the Buddha actually spoke up at that point and he said to the monks,
Is there any food left over from the meal?
And the monk said, there was.
And he told the monks, he said, directed the monks, could you feed that man off there in the back?
In a sense, it appears to be simply the Buddha
cutting through any nonsense, any sort of bureaucracy or formality.
It's like, I'm going to teach this guy.
And so, oh, now he's here.
Good.
Oh, but he's hungry.
OK.
Feed that man over there in the corner.
Because that was his whole intention of coming.
And so the monks, well, I guess the lay people would have arranged to feed him.
But anyway, food was given to the man, and once he was given food, then the Buddha began to talk and gave a speech to all the people, which this man was able to understand and was able to realize the Dhamma for himself when listening to the teaching, along with other people perhaps.
But the monks were talking about it afterwards, and they thought, well, isn't that remarkable?
This has never happened before.
It's just out of the blue, the Buddha decides that this man should be given some food.
And the Buddha came in, of course, and heard what they were saying, or asked them what they were saying, and they told him.
And he said, hey, monks, it's really a big deal, he said.
hunger is the greatest sickness.
And he taught this verse.
So the verse is used sort of generally to, or the story is used generally to support the idea of, well, first of all, they're being
conditions required for understanding and appreciating the Dhamma that are mundane.
And so I mentioned this story briefly in a talk I gave recently about things that might supersede the need to practice.
And here's an example, food.
If you're very hungry, it's practically speaking hard to understand and appreciate and take up the Buddhist teaching.
Same if you're falling asleep, for example.
But it's used even more broadly to talk about societal requirements.
For example, the need for just economic policy.
You have lots and lots of poor people.
It seems to be going against the Buddha's teaching here, if you extrapolate it to that extent.
Because as Buddhists, we're promoting the Dhamma.
But in order to promote the Dhamma, we have to ensure that people are able to appreciate it.
And so an argument could be made to extrapolate this verse to talk about justice and equality.
I mean, equality not of outcomes, perhaps, but equality of opportunity.
so that we allow people who have the potential to develop spiritually.
We give them the resources necessary, make open the opportunity for them.
So that's one of the reasons why it's quite popular.
It doesn't really have anything to do with our practice.
So the question, as always, is what does this verse mean to us?
How does this relate to our practice, and what's the lesson we can take from it?
So I think there's two parts and it really relates mainly to the verse.
The first part is the idea of hunger being the greatest sickness.
And it can be taken in two ways.
I'm not entirely sure that the Buddha was simply referring to physical hunger.
But it's not entirely clear that he was hinting at something greater, because of course there's two kinds of hunger.
You can think of tanha, which means thirst, but it's referring to greed, desire, addiction, that sort of thing.
And that's a kind of hunger.
But simply referring to physical hunger, it's still a very important point.
When we talk about suffering, when we talk about the nature of our existence, suffering goes far beyond simple physical pain, for example.
It goes beyond things that we can avoid.
Our ordinary understanding of suffering is generally that it's something that you experience once in a while and you can and should find ways to avoid it, ways to fix it if it comes up.
But there are things that get in the way.
Of course, sickness is something that gets in our way of doing that.
And so we spend a lot of time and energy and money on trying to avoid sickness.
And some of them are easy to avoid, easy to eradicate, easy to fix.
Others are not.
There are sicknesses of course like heart disease and diabetes.
Diabetes generally often being manageable at best and of course cancer which is quite often even though you might go to great extremes to destroy the cancer inside, in the end you succumb to it and die.
But hunger, just physically speaking, hunger is really at the top of the list, because ultimately it's a sickness that we can never avoid.
If you look at it in a certain light, it's the one thing that we always have to take medicine for.
Of course, we've adapted it to being something pleasurable, where we look at eating as something that actually is a positive thing.
Not having to eat would be quite unpleasant for most people.
But nonetheless, it points out that the very fabric of our existence as human beings is a dependency,
is susceptible to great suffering.
Simply being without food, which is of course something that we've become desensitized to.
But if there were a being who didn't have to eat and saw that we all had to eat, it would seem horrific.
Wow, you mean three times a day you have to take medicine from the moment you're born, every single one of you, and you haven't found a cure for this yet?
How horrific.
And if you don't eat even one day, if you go one day, you start feeling pain, you start feeling weak, your body starts to waste away, your whole being starts to crumble, and you could die if you go long enough without food or water.
Horrific.
So physically speaking, it puts us a little bit into perspective in the greater scheme of things, what we are as human beings.
Our existence is something very contrived, very specific, and very much a
We are slaves or prisoners to our own humanity.
We don't have free reign over our experience.
We are dependent on things like food and water, air, even temperature and so on.
We couldn't just walk out into the snow.
We need to be aware of heat and cold.
And then we have to be aware of what kind of food we eat and so on and so on.
So this is a basic teaching, but it's an important basic teaching to reframe things, where instead of looking at all the good things that we can chase after, starting to see that we have a great potential for suffering as human beings.
it helps to open us up to somehow freeing ourselves from this realizing that we are vulnerable and trying to seek out a way to be invulnerable so that the potential for suffering isn't there because of course that's
That's reality.
There will be people who go hungry.
There will be people who get sick.
There will be death.
There will be old age.
This is a part of life.
It's a negative side.
Something that we could potentially find a way to free ourselves from.
Of course it gets much deeper when you look at mental thirst and mental hunger because then you really get to the solution.
The solution is to change the way we look at things rather than seeking them out, rather than craving and clinging for good food and so on.
We learn to let go rather than craving for the pleasant feeling of having eaten.
And we're okay with being hungry or sick or so on because that's really the only way, giving up our partiality, our thirst for I want this, I want that, giving up our hunger.
It's the only way to really be free from the potential for suffering.
But the deeper teaching, I still say that's on one side.
And if we talk about mental hunger, then yes, we're starting to get into the deeper sort of philosophy of meditation, why we're trying to be more objective, because we're trying to change this.
But
The other part is the rest of the verse is on the deepest level, let's say.
And it's on a level that's very hard for people to appreciate.
It makes Buddhism hard to teach at the deepest level, which often newcomers are looking for.
It's very hard to appreciate and often unpalatable, hard to swallow.
Because you're talking about the ultimate, and that's what's important to understand, you're talking about the ultimate level of understanding.
And by that I mean something that goes beyond this, I need food so I have to seek out food and pleasure and the
constructed sort of artificial nature of being what we call human.
The things that we think of as being true and right, like I have to go to school and get a job and work and make money and even just more simply get food to eat and live and find pleasure and get married and have sex and have children and so on and so on.
It goes beyond the human existence to ask what is the nature of reality?
What does it mean to be?
What does it mean to exist?
What is the truth of the universe?
It means much more fundamentally than anything that being human could possibly mean.
So it's two parts and they're directly related.
The first part, the idea that sankhara is, sankhara are the ultimate suffering.
And the Buddha says, once you've understood this, as it is, yatha bhuta.
And that's important because
We're talking about something that doesn't make any sense until you understand it for yourself.
At best, it's a claim that we can make, and it's a very bold claim, and I think that's useful.
Because we don't have to present it as a belief, as a theory, as a dogma.
But we can boldly claim that, and what it literally says is that all arisen things, Sankara is anything that arises, are dukkha, are suffering.
which of course goes very much against any
non-buddhist framework to think that anything that arises is dukkha now of course you can explain that part of it by saying we don't really mean suffering you can say it just means that it's not satisfying or it can cause you suffering if you cling to it and so on and that's not technically wrong but it's even a little bit deeper than that what it's saying is that
Once you gain the perspective, so it's not even a theory or an idea, it's just a perspective, the way you look at experience.
It's not having the theory, I believe all sankaras are dukkha.
It's how you look at what arises in front of you, because our ordinary way of looking at things is, oh yes, that will make me happy, oh yes, good, bad.
Seeing them all as dukkha,
It means seeing them without any desire, any attachment.
Seeing them as not something to cling to, not something to seek out.
Having a sense of dismissal at best.
I wouldn't say you get disgusted.
You can be quite disgusted in meditation by things.
Often food becomes quite disgusting.
It's quite remarkable.
I think one of the most remarkable things that a meditator will come across is the experience of not wanting to eat.
Whereas normally we're very obsessive about our food and thinking, oh, tomorrow morning I'll have this food and that food.
But there comes a point where you're just like, all right, now I've got to go eat again.
And you realize, wow, that's quite a change.
And this is a sign you're starting to change.
And we make the claim and an important claim that this has nothing to do with dogma or indoctrination.
We try to keep our teaching and our dogma at a minimum because what we want and what we claim to be giving you is an understanding for yourself of things just as they are.
And our claim is that when you look objectively, this is what you'll see.
This is what will happen.
You'll start to see the passion, the desires, all quite uncomfortable and unpleasant, unnecessary, unhelpful, unbeneficial, and you'll start to let go and your perspective will change.
Rather than looking at things, ooh, that's interesting, is that going to make me happy?
You say, oh no, I've seen, I've been there, I've seen that that doesn't make me happy.
And you'll start to become disenchanted, nibida.
And as a result of that you'll see things as dukkha.
You'll say, oh no, that's no, no, no, no.
Until you get to the point and it's kind of
in an ultimate sense, this idea that all sankaras are dukkhas, sankaras are the ultimate suffering, is just a moment of realization.
And it's so hard to explain this, and it must be, for some people hearing this, this must be quite repulsive and uncomfortable to hear.
Certainly something that people will not be happy to, not agree with, let's say.
But there comes a moment, and this idea that it's the ultimate suffering is a moment of experience where you have an attitude, a perception, a perspective that inclines away, that turns away from samsara, from even experience.
It's like, it's hard to find an analogy, because really anything, if we were to say, oh, instead of, often you hear about people talking about just, it's like a child who likes certain toys or something, and if you gave them gold, they wouldn't like the gold, but an adult would know what gold is, but that doesn't quite do it justice, because gold is still wanting something.
At best, there's one in the Visuddhimagga that talks about a bird, a bird hopping through the trees and looking for fruit.
So it hops from branch to branch looking for fruit until it finally realizes the fruit.
It gets it.
It's like, oh, wait a minute, this tree has no fruit.
So it's presented as that, the letting go is when the bird flies off, and the bird flies off because it realizes there's no fruit.
But that also doesn't quite get to the point, because it still gives you the sense of, well, this bird is looking for something that it didn't find here.
It goes deeper than that.
Seeing sankara as dukkha is not even in the sense of, oh, there must be sukha somewhere else, there must be happiness somewhere else.
It's a changing of perspective in the sense of, I often talked about this idea of a bird and maybe a bird in a nest would be a good analogy.
There's this horrible fact of life that I understand that mother birds will kick the baby birds out of the nest when they get old enough to fly.
So it's like us being kicked out of the nest.
The bird being kicked out of the nest is at that moment it has a great horror and that feeling of
feeling of loss and of the potential for suffering is how we exist as human beings.
We're very happy in the nest, happy with our mother bird feeding us, happy with all the things that we can find, all the joy that we can find.
And anytime we get kicked out of the nest, we're horrified because we're losing
while we're losing our firm foundation and potentially falling into great suffering.
We're afraid of the suffering of falling.
Anyone who that would happen to would have great fear.
But the truth of reality that we don't understand as human beings and that the baby bird doesn't understand is that we have wings.
is that reality isn't like that.
Reality and the greatness of Buddhism and why it's not a pessimistic religion and meditation is not at all pessimistic is that happiness is something very different.
Reality is something very different.
This whole concept that somehow happiness has anything to do with things that you get, pleasure that you receive, is just wrong.
It's based on delusion, it's based on misunderstanding, it's inferior.
And when the baby bird is kicked out of the nest and then it starts, it just, I guess, by instinct, it spreads its wings and it's flying.
It's like, oh, well, that wasn't so bad after all.
In fact, it's much better.
It's a necessary change of perspective.
And suddenly this is no longer a feed me, feed me, a big mouse in a bird's nest.
Suddenly it's a bird flying through the air.
I think that's a fairly good analogy.
this change of perspective.
The second part related is, I think, perhaps the most hard to swallow part, the most unpalatable part of Buddhism, hardest to explain.
You could explain that nibbana, nibbanam paramang sukham, for someone who has seen that all sankaras are suffering, nibbana is the ultimate happiness.
So they look at happiness in a different way.
It should be easy to understand, easier to understand now that I've explained that side.
So you get the context.
I mean easy to understand in the sense you understand it's quite specific.
It's not something that relates at all to any kind of happiness in the world.
So if you say, what, how could Nibbana be happiness?
I mean, maybe you think that if you don't know what Nibbana is, you say, oh, that's okay.
Nibbana, that's kind of cool.
Maybe it's this place that I go to and there's crystal trees and music and Buddha is sitting there.
No, not at all.
Nibbana is cessation.
It's an experience of cessation.
So when people hear about that, it's quite frightening.
And it's because it's out of context.
We compare it to any kind of happiness in the world and it's not, it doesn't work that.
I mean, it's so unpalatable for that reason.
It's like saying, I'm going to kick you out of the nest and you'll be much happier.
The truth is you would be.
The little bird will be as well.
I think the mother bird would be happier as well, but the baby bird doesn't know that and so it freaks out.
because its understanding of happiness is very specific, very dependent on experiences and partiality to certain experiences.
So Nibbana is the greatest happiness because it's freedom from that.
It's freedom from all of the incessant
getting and liking and needing and wanting and chasing and getting again or not getting again and being disappointed.
Nibbāna is the highest happiness specifically because it's non-arising.
So it was even asked, someone asked, well how can Nibbāna be happiness if there's no vedana, no feeling in there?
Because of course happy feelings are what you think of when you think of happiness, pleasurable feelings.
And Sariputta answered, this is actually in the exams when as monks you have to know this answer.
Sariputta said it's precisely because there is no Vedana, there is no feeling, that Nibbana is the highest happiness.
very hard to understand, and I think unpalatable.
I want to appreciate that, but use this.
This is an important teaching to help us understand how that has to be contextualized.
And I'm not trying to trivialize it or marginalize it or say, oh, don't worry about it.
I'm just saying it's not something we can understand, and that's the whole point.
Why it's an ultimate happiness and why sankars are the highest suffering is because
our understanding, our perspective is so very different.
Our perspective on suffering is wrong.
Our perspective on happiness is wrong.
And those are bold claims, but I present them as claims and Buddhism presents them as claims that can be investigated.
And so absolutely, if that's not what you find when you look objectively at reality, then maybe we're wrong.
There's no fear of being wrong.
We're not afraid that people investigate.
the real tragedy is when people don't investigate and instead they rely upon belief and this constructed carefully lifetime after lifetime constructed culture of as I said getting going to school getting a job getting money and marriage and children and pleasure from food and drink and music and all sorts of
Things and thinking, yes, this is reality.
This is what makes sense.
And wondering why it is that the world is falling apart and why it is that we're destroying the environment around us and the air is becoming polluted and the water is becoming polluted and society is becoming polluted and so on and so on.
And the reality is that it's just wrong.
We've got it all wrong.
And the only good, the only real happiness that comes is when people change and gain a better perspective and realize that greed and craving and hunger and thirst are not sustainable.
They don't lead to happiness.
And that in fact getting things is not the way to find happiness.
And if they go deeper, the
they'll see that the real way of finding happiness is letting go.
You hear that, not just in Buddhism.
Just in Buddhism, we take it seriously.
And we go all the way and say, don't hold on to anything.
Let go completely, because guess what?
You've got wings.
That's the analogy.
So, that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Very good verse.
Thank you all for listening.