Okay, welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verses 51 and 52, which read as follows.
Yathapi ruchirang pupang Vannavantang agandhakang Evang subhasita vaja
Almost the same.
They're actually a pair of verses.
And the meaning is,
just like a beautiful flower just means with beauty endowed with color but without a smell without a scent without a beautiful without a perfume such are
well-spoken words are so too well-spoken words do not bear fruit for one who doesn't act according to them.
And then the second one, just as a beautiful flower endowed with color and with a beautiful perfume as well.
Or just so, words that are well spoken do bear fruit for one who acts according to them.
So a fairly standard verse, the sort of thing you'd expect from the Buddhist teaching, which places so much emphasis on practice, on sincere appreciation and
realization of the teachings as opposed to just intellectual appreciation or understanding.
It's an interesting story that goes along with this verse.
Interesting in that it
As with many of the stories, there's not much explanation as to how the story relates.
In this case, it's not even immediately clear why the story is told as it is in relation to the verse.
But I'll explain it.
I think I can see where it's all coming from.
It's quite interesting, actually.
It's a short story.
The story goes, and a little bit of background to the story is that in the Buddhist time, there was a tradition to take the eight precepts for the Uposatha days, which
would have been at the very least the Poya day but seems to have potentially been a weekly thing where on the eighth day and then the fifteenth day of the lunar cycle so every lunar month has 30 days 29 or 30 days and so the first after eight days the eighth day was the half moon
Then the 15th day would be the, if I got it right, the full moon.
And then the 22nd day, I got it right now, 15th plus 8, 23rd day would be the half moon again.
And then the 29th or the 30th day would be the empty moon.
So basically, with a little bit of fudging there, it turns out to be 30 days.
And so it would be standard for the people who are endowed with virtue and goodness, but not yet enlightened.
It would be their habit to go to the
go to Jetavana or wherever the Buddha was staying or wherever the monks were staying and request the eight precepts just as we do now in Sri Lanka they do on the Poya day except they only tend to keep them till 5pm it's not true some places like Mitrigala or Mahamayona I think they do the whole 24 hours
But the background to this story is that for enlightened beings, anagamis, anagamis on up, it seems they would keep the eight precepts naturally.
I'm not sure that's ubiquitous, but it does seem, or whether that's...
true for every anagami, but it seems to be, according to the commentary, true that, and it may be in the Tipitika somewhere, that an anagami always keeps at least the precepts.
I think there's even some idea being floated around there that they keep ten precepts.
You know, you have the story of Gatakara, who, he looked after his mother, but he didn't use money, it seems.
He may not have used money.
Anyway, the point is they have natural morality, so they don't go to
They don't go and request the precepts.
They're always keeping them.
And there was one lay disciple of the Buddha who was an Anagami.
He was in this category, but he would still go every Uposatha day to hear the Buddha's teaching.
And here's where we get to the background story.
He went to hear the Buddha's teaching and he paid respect to the Buddha and then he sat down to one side.
And then King Pasenadi came along and he thought to himself, well, what do I do?
Do I stand up?
for King Prasenadi and pay respect to him.
If I don't, he'll get angry.
But if I do, then I'll be disrespecting the Buddha because it was apparently a custom when you're in the presence of a higher person, you would never stand up to salute a lower person.
And because he held the Buddha as higher than the Badesa Raja, the Buddha was the Raja, the Agaraja,
the highest king, the king of the Dhamma and Pasenadi was just a Padesa Raja which is the king of the country so because he held the Buddha higher he thought well I'll have to just sit still even though I know Pasenadi is going to get angry because King Pasenadi wasn't wasn't enlightened by any means and Pasenadi saw this and saw one of his his
What do you call people under the king?
Subjects, one of his subjects.
Boy, my English is terrible.
One of his subjects failing to stand up and salute him.
And he got very angry.
And the Buddha, of course, understanding what was going on in King Pasenadi's mind, he extolled the virtues of this lay disciple.
Oh, how great he is.
This is my lay disciple.
He's endowed with virtue.
He's very wise and humble and so on.
Patient.
Doesn't get angry easily.
And Bhisenadi was appeased.
for the time being but then later on Pasenadi saw this lay disciple walking near the palace and so he had his guards call him in and he was walking with his sunshade and sandals on.
Immediately he took down his sunshade and took off his sandals and walked and paid respect to the king and stood to one side.
And the king gets all sarcastic and says, oh, so I see you.
That was nice of you.
Why did you take down the sunshade and take off your sandals and pay respect to me?
He said, because you're the king.
And I said, oh, so today you realized that, did you?
You just realized that today, did you, that I'm the king?
This guy's an anagami, so nothing's going to faze him.
He's not like, oh, I'm sorry.
He says, no, I always knew that you were the king.
And I said, what do you mean?
I saw you.
You didn't even stand up to pay respect to me when you were sitting with the Buddha.
And so I explained to him, like an adult would explain to a child patiently.
Words that he could understand.
I was sitting with the Agaraja.
I couldn't stand up and pay respect to the Badesa Raja, the king of the country.
I was sitting with the highest king.
Anyway, there's a point to the story.
It's kind of weird how this all fits in here because it doesn't have anything to do with the verse.
But the point being that he then tries to...
use this to shame this layman into teaching his queens because he has this idea that Buddha had said that oh this is he's a very wise wise meditator and wise teacher so he says all right fine well to make it up for me you can
I want you to teach Mallika and Wasabha Katia, is her name?
Wasabha, I'm going to mangle the names, I think it's Wasabha Katia, who was the daughter of Mahanama, who got us in trouble in the last verse with Vitadaba, whatever his name was.
Wasabha Katia.
Virudabha.
You know there's actually different ways to say his name.
Virudabha.
Different spellings.
But yeah, Virudabha, right?
Virudabha was the son of, was her son.
The whole thing, Pasenadi, if you remember, Pasenadi married Malika.
Malika, right?
Was it Malika?
And then he, what was this?
This was one of our recent verses.
the monks wouldn't stay and eat his food.
And he thought, well, if I marry one of the Sakyas, then they'll respect me.
They'll think I'm related to the Buddha.
So they'll come and stay with me, which of course was a silly idea, but he did.
And he demanded a wife and they sent him the daughter of a slave.
who Mahanama had fooled around with a slave and had a daughter and she was quite beautiful and so they sent her along and it caused big problems when they found out and Pasenadi's son killed all the Sakyas as a result so that's who was the bhaktiya so he said he wanted to teach his two queens, his two queens wanted to learn the Dhamma they were both quite interested and so he needed a teacher and he said you can come and teach me teach them
And this layman, he was adamant, he said, no, I can't do that.
He said, what do you mean you can't do that?
I'm the king.
And he said, look, if I knew that, it's very dangerous for a layman to be in the king's harem.
Any rumor that goes around could get him in big trouble.
It's not appropriate for me to do it.
I shouldn't be doing it when it's the work of a monk.
So the Sainadi argued with him and finally said, fine, then you may go.
And then he went to the Buddha and asked the Buddha to send a monk.
The Buddha sent Ananda.
And Ananda ended up being the teacher of Malika and Vasubhagatya.
So that's the background story.
Ananda tries to teach the story that leads up to the verses.
Ananda, while he is teaching this, teaching the Dhamma to these two queens and of course all their attendants, he finds that Mallika is actually quite quick.
She's very quick to memorize the teaching, quick to, she's very good at retaining it, keeping it in mind, pondering it.
And moreover, she seems inclined to put it into practice.
Whereas Vasubhakatia doesn't remember anything, doesn't pay attention.
She's like one of those people, they say, that keep it in their lap.
When they're sitting there, they can remember it, but as soon as they stand up, it falls out of their lap.
It's like they keep the teachings in their lap, they say.
The implication seems to be that she wasn't paying attention, she wasn't really sincerely interested, which is the case.
You can't expect everyone to.
Not everyone responds to the Dhamma the same, responds or appreciates the teaching in the same way.
Much of the teaching is uninteresting on the sensual level.
It doesn't inspire excitement in the mind.
Some of it is dry and dull and requires great patience and depth of mind to appreciate.
I would say actually the teaching overall is quite inspiring, but you have to be interested in
meditation, you have to be able to free your mind from the sort of things that queens are not free from.
Queens will often you would assume because they just have to sit around and look pretty in those times, it was quite a horrible sort of life to imagine.
Sitting around looking pretty all day, that's that's your job.
Like a flower, hence the verse, you know, when the Buddha comes out with the, he likens these two queens to flowers.
But the point would be that it would be very easy to get caught up in the vanity of it and the attachment to sensual pleasures and sensual desire, beauty and scent and so on.
And so the Buddha, so Ananda came back every day from King Saram to having taught these two queens, and the Buddha asked him one day, how's it going with the two queens, Mallika and Vasubhakatia?
Are they learning the teaching?
Are they putting it into practice?
Are they remembering it?
Are they respectful?
Sakkacha is the word.
Sakkacha is kind of respectful, attentive.
Are they...
putting it sincere are they being sincere about it and Ananda said well Malika is very sincere about it and she's learning it and keeping it in mind and seems to be putting it into practice but he says but your your relative the daughter of your relative Nyati Dita or something like that the daughter of your relative your the Sakyan Masabakatya is a
She's not picking it up.
And the Buddha gives the verse.
He says, yes, this is the way it is.
Not all flowers have beautiful scent.
And in the same way, not everyone puts the teachings into practice.
Or you could think of it as kind of an admonishment.
But the interesting thing here is
If you look at the background, at first I couldn't see how this all fit together for the verse, because it's not quite clear that there was anything to do with practice.
Ananda was going to teach them the teaching, but it doesn't say anything about them putting it into practice.
And it certainly doesn't say anything about them speaking.
But there's another interesting way of looking at this story.
You have another two people, right?
He's talking about the two queens as being flowers, or you could say speech as being like a flower.
And so it's kind of an admonishment for Ananda to give to the two queens, not to just be content with hearing the Dhamma, not to just be content with learning the Dhamma, but should actually put it into practice.
It's useless to them.
It's useless.
Good speech is useless if you don't put it into practice.
But there's another two people, and that's the layman and Ananda.
And why you can see this is because the beginning story talks about how for an enlightened being, an anagami, they don't even have to hear that.
They don't have to say, I'm keeping the precepts, for example, which is what the commentary says.
It says they just keep it naturally.
They just practice the teachings naturally.
So he, and he wasn't teaching it, he wasn't this layman was
not reciting it and who knows maybe he didn't have so much great knowledge and he wasn't a monk but here he was practicing it quite well practicing it almost to perfection and then we have Ananda and you see this occurring more than just in this instance where the Buddha will give these subtle pokes to Ananda because Ananda was brilliant he was at the top of the class photographic memory
And yet here he was sitting at the bottom of the totem pole.
It was just a sodapana, which is nothing to shake a stick, more than you can shake a stick at.
A sodapana is something quite special.
It's a great, great thing.
And he prays on and on many occasions for his learning and for his wisdom.
But it seems to me that a better way of looking at this story is the Buddha taking a chance to remind Ananda and to even use Ananda as an example in this case.
Anyway, the verse stands on its own.
The two verses stand very much on their own and as sort of an epitome of much of what the Buddha reminded his students and which we try to remind Buddhists and remind ourselves
in our own practice, that it's not good enough for us to have an intellectual appreciation of the teachings.
This isn't what the Buddha would want for us.
And these kind of verses are in this way good to keep in mind and recall to mind.
They have a great power to kick you in the butt and set you in motion, set us on the path.
We realize that appreciation of the teachings isn't enough.
Even teaching the teachings is certainly not enough.
Being able to recite the teachings, if you can tell me what the Four Noble Truths are, that isn't what the Buddha wanted for us.
We see this very much in cultural Buddhism where we have Buddhist societies and it's not just in Asia but also here in North America.
where you become Buddhist and somehow that takes on a meaning for you.
Just being Buddhist somehow takes on a meaning for you as opposed to practicing Buddhism.
And I've talked about this before, how it doesn't seem right to call yourself a Buddhist for any reason other than the fact that you're practicing the Buddhist teaching.
Just like you couldn't call yourself a Marxist unless you were acting according to the teachings of Karl Marx.
Or Groucho Marx, depending.
And you see this in, I've seen this, I've lived in Thailand, I've been involved with many, in Sri Lanka, with many different cultural Buddhist communities, even here in the West.
And you'll see this on all levels of the Buddhist teaching.
Morality, for example, once I went to a dinner, a lunch, not dinner, lunch,
at some lay people's house, I won't say which cultural group it was.
They invited the monks to their house and so we sat down and I was invited to give the five precepts because they always like to see the Canadian monk give the precepts.
So I gave them the five precepts, everyone took the precepts and then they fed us.
We ate and right after we ate, we were sitting there and they took all our food away and then they brought out food for everyone else.
And I sat there and we were just kind of winding up and getting ready to leave.
And then I saw the coolers of beer come out and they started passing around bottles of beer to everyone.
And I thought it had been about a half an hour, half an hour after I gave them the five percent.
This is an extreme example of For one who doesn't put the teachings into practice, they're useless.
They're just like a flower that has no smell, has no scent.
So taking the five precepts, taking the eight precepts is not the important thing.
So this we have.
This is what I scolded everyone about on Vesak.
That you can't just take the precepts without having any intention of keeping them.
Vikalabhojana means you have to stay for the whole vikala.
Otherwise it's not really keeping it.
And the same goes for concentration.
For meditation, it's easy to have an understanding of meditation and to know the technique.
It's very easy to teach meditation.
Teaching meditation and practicing meditation are two very different skills.
There was a meditation teacher in our monastery who was still smoking cigarettes and I thought that was quite odd.
To see someone teaching objectivity.
But this is the case.
They're two very different skills.
Teaching meditation is
It's difficult, but it's difficult in many ways it's difficult in a different way from actually practicing.
So you see this often people after they finish meditation course they run back, rush back home to try to teach all their friends meditation and end up spending more time trying to convince others to meditate rather than doing the hard work of trying to cultivate their own meditation practice.
Like I think everyone in this room
knows about anapanasati about practicing the four satipatthana probably all of most of the people in this room could rattle off the four satipatthana for me but this is a quite different quite a different thing from actually being able to practice it if you look through all of the buddhist teaching so much of it is just about how to sit in meditation how to be objective how to be here and now the five khandas the five aggregates it does you nothing to know what they are
until you actually look at them.
But I think most pronounced is this concept of knowing the teaching but not putting it into practice is under the heading of wisdom.
Quite often we'll see Buddhists talking the talk, but not walking the walk.
Very erudite scholars teaching Buddhism in university and giving dhamma talks that are just top notch.
but not practicing themselves.
I've given stories about this before.
There's the story of Ducca Potila, how he memorized the whole Tapitaka.
So he knew everything.
And yet he, Buddha still called him empty book.
And this monk who was a teacher and all of his students became enlightened.
I've taught you that one before.
And then finally he ran off into the forest and started meditating and
He was such a good teacher that when he started crying, the angels started crying.
And they said, he said, why are you crying?
And the angel said, well, you're such a good teacher.
I thought if you're crying, then it must be the way to become enlightened.
So they cried along with him.
But he was such a good teacher.
He knew everything.
This is a real danger in Buddhism because it can be so easily misconstrued as a philosophical teaching or an intellectual teaching.
And people can very easily get caught up in learning the Buddhist teaching, studying the Buddhist teaching.
And lots of crazy things happen when you just focus on the study.
I've seen some.
This doesn't just go with...
with the large populations of Buddhists in Asia.
But this man from England, he said he'd read the Tipitaka twice.
He told me he'd read the Tipitaka twice in Pali.
Read the Tipitaka in Pali twice.
And he had some weird ideas.
He had this idea that becoming enlightened was, you can only become enlightened by hearing the Buddha's voice.
It's by hearing the Buddha's voice that you could imagine, having read the Thabitika twice, he had this view that there was some magic quality to the Buddha's voice that enlightened people.
And that's what is Buddhism.
Scary stuff.
He also thought that, just as a side note, we had an argument, not an argument, it was a friendly argument.
He's actually a well-known Buddhist scholar, and I met him in Bangkok, and we spent an evening together.
Remember, who was it?
Mahakasapa was going on alms round, and the leper drops a finger in his bowl.
Have you heard this story?
There's a leper, and his finger falls.
He's giving food to Mahakasapa, and his finger falls off into the bowl of food.
And how did the conversation start?
He said, we're talking about meat eating, I think.
And he said, well, you know, arahants, we were basically saying that, you know, vegetarianism is not, it's not certainly not spelled out.
Obviously, the Buddha didn't require vegetarianism from his students.
That was Devadatta.
And he said, yeah, I mean, I think we were talking about how hard it would be to be a monk.
And he said, I don't think I could ever be a monk.
What you have to go through, like he said, like Mahakasapa, when he had to eat the leper's finger.
And I said, what?
Wait a minute, this isn't the story I remember.
And he said, yeah, I remember the finger fell off and it says that he picked it up and ate it.
And I said, no, I don't think that's what it says.
I think it says he took the finger out and ate the food.
And so we weren't upset.
It wasn't an argument or anything.
It was just a debate.
He was like, oh, really?
And he said, oh.
And so I said, wait, wait, let's go back and we'll look at the text.
And, uh, you know, I argued, I said, well, you know, because there's a rule against eating human flesh for one thing, monk cannot eat human flesh.
It's against the rules.
And so we went back and looked at the text and, uh, it actually doesn't say, it says the finger fell in.
He took it out.
He, he wasn't, the big thing was he wasn't moved.
He wasn't turned off by it.
He just took it out and ate.
But it's quite clear, it quite clearly could be the case, and should be the case, that he took the finger out and ate his food.
A finger went into his food, he took the finger out and ate it.
That's what it says.
So it actually could be construed either way, which is quite funny.
Anyway, a little bit off topic, but an interesting story.
He was a nice guy, but certainly didn't have any we're talking about, I was talking about meditation.
I said, Have you ever tried?
And he said, No, I tried to do it.
And he's from England.
And he said, I tried and I just, I can't sit still.
Which, of course, is the reason why you take up meditation, because you can't sit still, you want to learn.
But this is a big problem in Sri Lanka, I'd have to say.
And I think everyone, we all kind of agree, accept this, is that there's a lot of study going on there.
Sri Lanka is the number one, maybe Burma, I'm sure Burma must compete, but from what I've seen, Sri Lankans are very well versed in the Dhamma.
It's incredible.
I was talking to a bus driver about the Dhamma, I remember coming back from Kandy, and I was sitting in the front seat, and he turned to me and we started talking, and
I was just asking him about the Dhamma and he's giving me answers and he knows things that I don't about the Dhamma.
It was quite surprising.
And that wasn't an isolated case.
People know the Dhamma there.
There's not so much meditation.
There is, but not to the level that you'd think.
You'd think that in a country where 75% of the people
maybe 75% of the 75% of the people, or let's say 50% of the population knows the Dhamma very well, that there'd be a lot more meditation going on.
But again, it's a different skill set.
It's one thing to appreciate the Dhamma, and it's a dangerous thing actually to get intoxicated by knowledge.
You know what are the Four Noble Truths,
And it seems like a simple thing.
Four Noble Truths, everyone knows what those are, right?
Every Buddhist in Sunday school knows what the Four Noble Truths are, no?
Adit, what are the Four Noble Truths?
Not to kill.
Oh.
Unlike.
Want to show your brother up?
That's it?
No.
The Four Noble Truths.
You don't know the Four Noble Truths.
That's okay.
Because we're not so concerned about that.
We're concerned much more about meditation practice.
But if I asked any of the adults in the room, everyone would be able to tell me what are the Four Noble Truths.
But that doesn't mean you understand the Four Noble Truths.
Actually, just those Four Noble Truths is the core of Buddhism.
If you can understand those Four Noble Truths, you never have to learn anything else for the rest of your samsaric existence, which would be very short, in fact.
It would be very short anyway, because you'd be an arahat.
Understanding the Four Noble Truths is the key to becoming enlightened.
And there's just four of them.
Quite simple.
You better learn them.
This is not to say that you shouldn't learn or memorize the Buddha's teaching.
But you should put them into practice.
For example, the First Noble Truth is the truth of suffering.
So we know that birth is suffering, old age is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, getting what you don't want is suffering, not getting what you want is suffering.
Is it?
When you get what you want, is that suffering?
When you don't get what you want, is that suffering?
When you get what you don't want, is that suffering?
Like a knuckle sandwich from a monk.
I would never do it, you know that.
When you get what you don't want, is that suffering?
What's your least favorite food?
Do you like liver?
What if you got liver, would that be suffering?
You see, getting what you don't want.
Yeah.
We know this, but this isn't the noble truth of suffering.
The noble truth of suffering is the understanding that all things are unsatisfying.
The panchupa dana khanda, the five aggregates.
It's understanding that the five aggregates are impermanent suffering and non-self.
So it's basically the practice of vipassana meditation or the realization that comes from the practice of vipassana meditation.
And this sort of gets closer to the point is that often people who practice meditation looking for or thinking about analyzing everything based on the three characteristics as opposed to just experiencing, as opposed to actually experiencing them.
So it's one thing to sit here and think, oh, that's impermanent.
Yes, that ceased out, means it's impermanent and so on.
And to say, yes, yes, therefore it's unsatisfying and doesn't belong to me.
It's quite another thing to sit here and be subject to impermanence, not know what's coming next, which is horrifying.
And it's what creates all of our suffering.
You don't know what's going to come next.
Pain, maybe that pain will come back, that pain that was just there.
Maybe it'll suddenly get hot, suddenly get cold.
So just a second ago it was enjoyable, maybe I told a joke and it was kind of funny.
Now that joke is gone, things have changed.
It's insipid and dull.
When can I leave?
When can you go home?
This is where the meditation starts with this stuff, dealing with impermanence, dealing with the difficulty of reality.
And this is where the learning starts in changing our understanding of reality, understanding that reality is stable, satisfying, controllable.
That we can come to a state where we're always going to be at peace and happy.
That we can find something, find some way to live our lives in stability.
Most adults in the world have a big problem with this.
Children don't have such a big problem trying to find stability because they're trying to learn a lot.
They're quite unstable.
But once you become an adult, you really start to look for stability.
Try to find a good job, a family, a house, settle down, find something stable.
And so adults get devastated by change.
This is where depression comes from.
Stress, anxiety, and so on.
worrying about the things that we love things that we cling to.
So the only thing I want to stress here is that it's important to put the teachings into practice.
It's important to differentiate between an intellectual appreciation and ability to rattle off and even explain and talk about the Four Noble Truths, the Three Characteristics, the Eightfold Noble Path, and to actually put it into practice.
And most importantly, I would say the three characteristics because they're the most poorly understood and the most practical.
They're the front line.
They're what you first experience when you sit down and when you watch your stomach, for example, you'll be sitting here watching the stomach rise and fall and wondering where the three characteristics come in, wondering where wisdom comes in.
And watching your stomach doesn't seem like a good way to bring about profound realization of the truth.
It's kind of like if you ever saw the Karate Kid.
You probably didn't.
The original, the original Karate Kid.
You saw the original with the... Yeah, I watched it.
With the Italian kid?
Yeah.
Where he does this?
Yeah.
What was it?
What was this one called?
Down here?
What did he call this one?
Wax on, wax off.
And he thinks it's so stupid.
What am I going to get out of this?
This is very similar to the mind state of the meditator and the nature of meditation.
The wisdom that comes from meditation is something very mundane or very ordinary.
It's so ordinary that you almost miss it.
Or it's so inherent or so close to us that we miss it.
But it's what sets us off all the time when the things that we think of as stable change.
Someone you love changes or disappears, runs away, dies, gets sick.
Something you love breaks, malfunctions, is stolen.
If you've ever had something stolen from you, it's a horrible feeling.
You just feel like you're violated, like someone violated your body.
This was part of me.
Having things change.
You know, this place, this wonderful monastery, it might burn down, whatever, burn down tomorrow.
Then we'll be there.
You never know what's going to happen in the future.
So the meditation is not about thinking about these things.
It's about viscerally realizing this, about absolutely everything that we cling to, even our pleasures, our identities, who we are, who we think we are, change.
To see that the things that we find pleasurable are actually a cause for stress and suffering.
They force us to seek.
They push us.
They impel us to seek.
We become drug addicts.
We become addicted to our desires.
And to see that the things that we try to control, the things that we identify with, are actually out of our control.
People.
We try to control our children.
We try to control our loved ones, our friends.
We try to control our lives, we try to control our machines.
Have you ever seen someone yelling at their car, kicking the car?
Stupid.
Have you ever seen someone hit their computer because it's not working?
Punch a hole in the computer screen because it's not working.
When you throw your Game Boy down, you get a Game Boy and you lose and you throw it down.
We think we want to control, we want to be in charge, and we're not able to deal with not being in control when things are not in our control.
It's very difficult.
So just watching your stomach is a very good lesson in these three things.
When you see that it's changing constantly, never the same.
Sometimes it'll be smooth, sometimes it'll be tense, sometimes it'll be long, sometimes it's short.
not under your control, not satisfying, not stable.
Just the stomach, you can become enlightened.
It's like a pill.
My teacher said it's like a medicinal pill.
It's got everything in it.
You just take one pill, like the Matrix, take the red pill.
It's just one pill.
It's very simple.
We have many more.
Obviously, the four foundations of mindfulness.
You should be mindful of pain and happiness and thoughts and emotions as well.
But any one of these things, most especially the body, and for that reason the stomach, have an incredible power to bring about enlightenment.
They help you to see things that are so obvious that you almost miss them.
You think there's something missing.
But if you practice continuously, watch your mind, watch your experience, you come to learn such profound things about yourself.
Anyway, this is what is meant by the second verse, kubato, one who puts into practice the words.
So the important point of this verse is that we should never be content with just knowing the Buddha's teaching, any of it.
None of it is for the purpose of knowing and sharing with others.
It's for the purpose of bringing home to yourself.
If you want to spread Buddhism, first you have to spread it to yourself.
There's this teacher in Thailand who said this to me, talking about spreading Buddhism.
He said, first you have to spread it to yourself.
It's very apt and it's very much how the Buddha would have it.
He was never concerned about making teachers.
He was about teaching people.
You will all be students.
The most important is to be a student, to learn the teachings.
Someone who has learned the teachings is naturally a teacher, is an example and is a signpost and is so in line with the teachings that they give rise to
All the time.
Proper speech, good speech, they give rise to the teachings.
They declare the teachings in its purity because they practice for themselves.
Anyway, so that's the meaning of this verse.
obviously a practical teaching of the Buddha, something that we can all keep in mind, something that we should constantly remind ourselves.
It's not enough to know meditation.
The question is, are we putting it into practice on a daily basis?
This is much more important.
The Buddha said a person who knows the teaching but never puts it into practice, this is not someone who has lived the holy life, it's still a waste of their holy life.
But a person who even for a moment cultivates loving kindness or mindfulness, just for one instant, he says their spiritual life is not wasted.
So it's not to discourage everyone or I'm not here to scold everyone or you're not practicing.
It's to encourage us in putting into practice the teachings moment by moment by moment.
Even one moment, that's a maha kusla.
They say one moment of mindfulness kills off seven lifetimes worth of defilement.
Because of the seven jawana.
If you're mindful, those seven jawana are neutralized.
And those seven jawana could give rise to seven births.
Just by one moment of mindfulness.
And it's accumulative.
The power, the wholesomeness of the mindfulness.
This is something that we shouldn't think of doing when we go to a monastery or even just in the morning or in the evening when we do formal meditation.
We should be constantly
striving to cultivate mindfulness throughout our lives, throughout our days.
This is what the Buddha would have of us.
This is the emphasis here clearly stated here and in many, many other places in some of the other Dhammapada verses as well.
but we don't want to just be a beautiful flower being able to spout beautiful words if they're not put into practice they're meaningless and this is the point you can take the example of the two queens Ananda with the one queen he was wasting his breath they were beautiful words he was teaching and these are beautiful words that just float in the air like a beautiful flower
But the Buddha said they're useless like a flower without, they're useless because they're not being put into practice.
Whereas with the other queen, because she was putting them into practice, they were like a beautiful flower with a beautiful smell, beautiful scent.
It means there was actually something that came of the flower.
There was something that came of the teachings, some fruit that came from it.
That's another part of it that for a teacher, the good doesn't come from the teaching, the good comes from the practicing.
I'd like to thank everyone for coming tonight.
We have a large crowd here and for everyone for tuning in on YouTube.
And I'd please take this as an admonishment for all of us not to be content with just learning the teachings, not to be content with just coming and hearing the teachings, but that we should put these teachings into practice.
and give purpose, bring purpose and meaning to our lives, give purpose and meaning to the Buddhist teachings.
The purpose and the meaning of the Buddhist teachings isn't in the words, as beautiful as they might be, it's in our practice of the Buddhist teaching and the Buddhist words, which we should strive to do.
strive to cultivate for ourselves, not just intellectually, but practically, morality, concentration, and wisdom.
Thank you for tuning in, and wishing you all the best on your path.