Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 148, which reads as follows.
Which means,
Parijinamidangrupang, this body is old, is aged, completely worn out.
Roganirang, a nest of disease, sickness.
Pabhangurang, it is subject to, or it is weak, it is subject to destruction, it's fragile.
binjati putisande ho, this mass of
filth breaks.
This one is, I think, a reference to the idea of a pot filled with, we have the idea of the body being a pot full of urine and feces and when you die it breaks.
Or a pot that has many holes, it's leaky, it's cracked and there are leaks.
That's what the body is like.
And when you die it breaks.
for death is the end of life.
Not a very pleasant or upbeat verse, but a useful one nonetheless.
So the story goes, this is a story of the Nan Uttara,
I'm not sure which Uttara.
It seems there were several Uttara nuns.
But Uttara was committed.
She was quite a committed or devoted, reckless bhikkhuni.
And for all of her life she went on alms round until she was 120 years old.
Alms round is an interesting thing.
You start to appreciate food.
in a whole new way.
And people give it to you.
They often give you what's left over or they give to you what is most dear to them.
But having to go out into the village really makes you mindful of the need to eat.
How it's the one thing that we can't escape.
It's this one sickness that we have, this need to eat.
We're addicted to food.
This body requires constant and repeated nourishment day after day after day.
And so you sort of look at food in a whole new way, not as this thing that I must have, but this thing that I may get.
And if I get, it means my life will continue.
And if I don't get it, well, my life may end.
You become somewhat liberated.
Amtran is liberating.
I mean, it's incredibly liberating through its humility.
It's almost as though you're begging.
Of course, we're not allowed to beg, but you would walk through the village.
It's wonderful because people are delighted to offer food to monks, not just in Asia, but also in North America and Europe and throughout the world, really.
I would take that as the basis of this story because the story goes that this nun, 120 years old, having practiced alms round her whole life, at one time she saw a particular monk walking on alms round.
It doesn't say anything about this monk.
as a certain monk, but perhaps he was enlightened, perhaps he appeared enlightened or appeared somehow worthy of respect, or perhaps not.
Perhaps it was a means of humbling him.
She gave him all of his food.
She asked permission if she could give him his food, and she gave him all of her food.
I don't think I've ever done that before.
I've given some of my food.
Often on alms round you'll meet another monk or a nun.
And especially the nuns, I would often give them food because in Asia it's not always sure that they're going to get food the same as the monks.
Of course, honestly, I think what I realized is that they often get more because people are so appreciative of the rarity of the nuns.
Anyway, she gave him all of her food and had none for herself.
I think another thing you could say is at 120, she wasn't really all that concerned with living on.
whatever her reason, she did and went without food for that day.
The next day she met the monk again and did the same thing, and so on for a third day.
At which point she started to become quite weak.
It was an interesting choice that she made of practice, probably not a wise one in the end.
On the fourth day she met the Buddha.
Perhaps the Buddha was interested in
sort of maybe jolting her back into proper practice.
I'm not sure.
But when she met the teacher, I guess it was crowded, it says.
And so she stepped back to let the teacher go by.
And when she stepped back, she stepped on her robe and tripped and fell, sprawling on the ground.
Well, the Buddha has an interesting way about him, obviously.
Quite a unique mannerism.
Very much in terms of letting people deal with their karma, it doesn't appear that he actually tried to help the woman up or get someone to help her up.
It was a learning experience for her.
I mean, she could get up on her own, I guess.
But what he did is he walked over and he gave her a teaching.
This was a teaching for her.
And he didn't criticize her.
He didn't say, hey, why are you giving, why are you so weak?
Why are you not eating?
That kind of thing.
But he gave her a teaching that was actually somewhat apropos, because it wasn't really wrong what she was doing.
That's something that could easily be realized in her situation.
And this is the teaching he gave her about her body.
Look at this body that you've made very weak, and that is weak by its very nature.
And it's so fragile.
Perhaps it was even a reminder that this body is not something that you can take lightly.
You can't just abuse it.
Anyway, he taught her this verse.
As a result of the verse, apparently, she became a Sotapanna.
Many beings around were able to gain benefits.
The teaching was of great benefit to many.
It's a great benefit to us, I think.
I mean, all of us are quite young here in Hamilton.
Everybody in Second Life, of course, looks young and beautiful, but we don't really know the truth.
But it doesn't matter.
The commentary says about this pabangurang.
No, yeah, pabangurang.
Pabangurang means fragile or subject to pabanchati, which means breakage or destruction.
Easily broken.
It says about this word that it means even a young person is frail.
Even young people are fragile.
So the lesson for us, I think, there's so much that can be said, but to start at the beginning is we think of all the ways we look at the body as being powerful, healthy.
Some people even think of the body as a temple.
We have many ways of looking at the body.
Most of us just have a concept of it being our body, subject to our whim, capable, capable of so much.
We may not consciously think of it, wow, this body is capable of so much, but we take for granted that the body is, we can do anything we want with the body.
We take our legs for granted that we can walk.
We take our arms and our hands for granted that we can manipulate all the many things, anything that we like.
We take our eyes for granted that we can see, our ears that we can hear.
We take our teeth for granted.
We take everything for granted.
And you can see where I'm going with this, that it's quite misleading.
It's one of those many things, the body is one of many things that we become incredibly attached to, to our detriment, to our eventual detriment.
People think that old age, the suffering of old age is a part of life and we just have to bear with it.
Really the truth is we set ourselves up for it.
We set ourselves up for a great amount of fear and worry and anxiety about growing old, about getting sick and about dying.
How many people are afraid of death, afraid of their own death?
or repulsed by the thought of dying because of how intoxicated they are.
The body is such a great producer of chemicals as well and pleasure.
When we run and jump and play and sing and dance, so many wonderful hormones in the brain become activated and give us such wonderful pleasure.
So we become intoxicated by this.
to our detriment.
Because we don't become happier, we don't start to live happier lives, we just get more and more addicted.
We don't smile more, we don't feel more at peace.
These things come from somewhere else.
These things come from wisdom and understanding and in fact letting go.
That's why you see old people often quite at peace because they've had to come to terms and they've had to realize, I can't get all this pleasure that I wanted.
Old people, once they realize they can't have sexual intercourse anymore, once they realize they can't dance anymore, once all of these things fade away,
They become much more peaceful.
Perhaps not happier because there still will be residual addiction and they'll find other ways to find pleasure but in general they have to come to terms.
Which is a good thing because as I said they tend to be more peaceful.
So a person who wants to find peace, we go through our lives agitated, stressed, thinking we're happy, thinking the body is bringing us happy but with such stress and suffering
Whereas if we took this kind of teaching, even now, even as young people, and we saw the body for what it is, a nest of disease, a nest of sickness, a place where sickness grows, right?
It really is a nest.
These bacteria and viruses, they just love our body.
It's a breeding ground for them.
Oh, look at this wonderful nest that has been put here.
It's just walking around, touching things and picking up.
Picks me up, puts me in its mouth.
Oh, wonderful place to live and grow.
To our benefit.
Seeing this is not a pessimistic teaching.
It's not meant to make you feel awful.
It's in fact meant to free you from addiction to the body.
The body is such a curious thing, right?
Scientists have convinced us that it's just sort of by natural selection, right?
But we would argue, science has never been well able to take into account the mind.
Just as I was preparing for this talk, one of my Sri Lankan friends in Florida sent me a quote.
We'd been arguing about science and whether science actually says anything about the nature of the world.
And he sent me a Bohr quote, a quote of Niels Bohr.
And Bohr is wonderful.
He says, there is no quantum world.
Physics doesn't attempt to explain the nature of reality.
It just describes our experience, really.
Our experience of it, or our encounters with it, or whatever.
Why I bring that up is because it calls into question the idea that the body even exists, or that this idea of natural selection is even the right way of looking at things.
Certainly from a Buddhist point of view, we look at it quite differently.
It's the mind playing a large part.
The mind did this, right?
We did this to ourselves.
Which sort of makes you look at it in a different way.
When you look at the body as something we've done to ourselves, you say, well, jeez, this is the best I could have done.
No titanium bones or
A skin that was a little tougher.
Maybe this facial hair we could have done without that.
So much we would have done better.
Teeth, make my teeth a little stronger.
Sugar, what's up with this?
Sugar rots my teeth.
How puny.
bacteria.
Bacteria get on your teeth and they eat the sugar and they rot, they corrode.
They corrode the enamel of your teeth.
What a worthless, poorly made instrument.
It gets old, sick and dies.
They're machines.
Machines that we make now.
will last longer than this body.
But the body is a manifestation of all that we are.
It's pretty pitiful, really.
This is all we are.
We don't think like this, but we should.
Couldn't I have done better?
You can.
Angels do better.
Gods do better.
Wow, their bodies must be wonderful.
You can always become an angel or a god.
So these are different ways we can... There's so much that we can learn from this idea, this way of looking at the world.
They talk about the nature of the body for a long time.
But to delve right into how it's useful for us as meditators, I think that's the most important.
I think this is sort of a...
a good description of the sort of thing that you'll come to understand through meditation.
You see that the body, the body is how we contact, the body is how we experience sensations.
The body is responsible for much of our pleasure and pain, right?
Well, for all of the physical pleasure and physical pain that we experience.
So we come to see that the body is something we have to carry around with us.
When you meditate, well, it'd be nice if we could meditate and leave our bodies, right?
Do some transcendental meditation.
The more you meditate when you're here doing a meditation course, you start to realize, this body isn't something useful.
It's something that I have to care for and take care of.
All I want to do is meditate, and look, I have to go and eat.
I have to sleep.
I have to adjust my position.
I can't just sit.
I have to get up and walk.
I can't walk forever.
I have to sit down.
I itch, it gets hot, it gets cold, I urinate, I defecate, sometimes I get sick.
Never mind if you fall down and break a limb, get cut, get bruised, poke an eye out.
So many things can happen to this body.
So as meditators this sort of thing comes up and I think talking about it, always talking about the things that we might experience in meditation or should experience in meditation is quite useful.
Because when we do realize them it helps reaffirm what we're experiencing and clarify it for us.
Yeah, that is what I'm seeing.
Realizing that this body is not quite what I thought it was.
Realizing how silly we were to think of how wonderful this body is.
It's so silly.
And you want to understand how silly it is.
Dogs think the same things about their bodies.
They look at our bodies and say, huh, that's ugly.
But their own bodies, wow, those are beautiful.
And bodies of other dogs, rats, bugs, insects.
Insects will look at each other and think, wow, you're beautiful.
They'll look at their bodies.
If you ever know birds, birds are wonderful in this way, always preening their feathers.
I think they have to do it to fly as well, but it's pretty clear that they're vain.
How attached they are to their bodies.
Flea-infested bodies.
Smelly, dirty bodies.
Yeah, we don't have to be negative.
That is so negative.
In fact, that's all conceptual.
The body is even all conceptual.
On a deep level in our meditation practice, this teaching has to be taken on a momentary level.
So the real destruction of the body is every moment.
When you extend your arm, that arises.
When you stop, it ceases.
When you flex your arm, you're born and die.
That movement is what we mean by body.
It arises and it ceases in that moment.
When you feel pain, physical pain, that's an experience that arises and ceases.
So we come to this sort of thing that Bohr came to, that this quantum physicist came to.
The world doesn't really exist.
All that we can say about the world is what we experience.
So we have to work on both these levels.
We have to work on the conceptual level to help us see through our attachments to concepts.
Once we see that the body is not a source of refuge, we see that it's subject to dissolution and impermanence, and we see deeper that it doesn't actually even exist.
We die every moment.
The body is born and dies with every experience.
And we really let go of the body.
I mean, that's where the greatest peace comes from.
Because when you see the body as not even existing, it's really just experiences arising and ceasing.
then old age, sickness and death can't come to you.
And that's a real good reason to, it gives us impetus to practice.
When we realize that our attachment to the body is a real problem, we're going to die soon.
We're going to get old, we're going to get sick and we're going to die.
Much to our benefit if we can practice meditation and learn to let go of it and learn to see through it.
Learn to see this truth that the body doesn't even exist.
Then when it gets old, sick and dies, you didn't lose anything.
People say Buddhism is nihilistic.
Buddhism is denialistic, I suppose.
We deny the existence of so many things that most people take for granted as existing.
I think that Bohr quote is more apt than he perhaps understood, although I think he was a rather wise individual in that
It's really only experience that exists.
So there you go.
That's the Dhammapada for this evening.
That's our Dhamma talk for today.
Wishing you all good practice and a peaceful, happy life.