Okay, good evening everyone.
Continuing our study of the Dhammapada.
Today, verse 205, which reads as follows.
pavi-veka-rasang-pitva-rasang-upasamasacca
nindaro hoti nipapo tam piti rasam pivam which means having tasted having drank having drank the flavor of seclusion and the flavor of
tranquility or quietude.
Upasama.
One has no suffering, no pain, no sorrow, and no evil.
drinking the taste of rapture in the Dhamma, Dhammapitira Sampivam.
There's no evil, no suffering and no cause of suffering.
No evil.
Papanipapu.
For one who tastes the flavor of
Seclusion and quietude Upasama, the quenching or the pacification, something like that Peace is what it really means So this verse was taught in regards to Tissa In regards to the Buddha's passing away, there was a monk, Tissa
Four months before the Buddha passed away, he declared to the monks, he said, in four months I'm going to pass away.
It was a big deal.
They say the earth shook, I think.
It was a big deal for the monks.
They say those monks who were not yet enlightened cried, wailed.
Those monks who were already enlightened were moved, moved with a sense of the impermanence of all things and the importance of the clarity and the peace and the wisdom that comes from enlightenment.
removed by the gravity of the situation, not disturbed by it, but moved.
Some monks would get together and those that hadn't become enlightened yet and were depending on the Buddha would get together and think to themselves something like Kim Karisama, which means, what are we to do?
Kim Nuko Karisama, what in the world will we do?
They spent a lot of time concerned with this.
They say the monks and lay people as well, of course, not just the monks, spent a lot more time being around the Buddha, trying to get their last chance to be in the presence of the Buddha.
And who wouldn't, right?
Well, you know who wouldn't.
There was one monk, his name was Tissa.
And while all this was going on, he was ignoring everybody.
Sitting off in a corner and the monks came up to him and asked him what he was doing and he ignored them.
And he said, hey, the Buddha has said he's going to pass away in four months, don't you know?
They didn't even reply.
Didn't say anything.
So the monks thought to themselves, hmm, this isn't right.
And they went to the Buddha and they said, look, venerable sir, there's this monk, Tissa, and he certainly doesn't care at all about you.
He hasn't come to see you since you've declared your passing away.
All he does is sit in the corner, doesn't even pay any attention to anything.
Something's wrong with this monk.
He has no love for the Buddha.
And so the Buddha called and said, well, bring him here.
And he said to Tissa, is this true?
And Tissa confirmed, and he said, what's the meaning of this?
Maybe he didn't say exactly that, but it's a good phrase, good question.
What is the meaning of this?
We say it in English when we're angry, I think, but he wasn't angry, obviously.
And Tissa said, Honorable Sir, I heard that you're passing away, and I thought to myself, I'm not enlightened yet, and what should I be doing?
Now the Buddha is here in front of us for a sankhaya,
Asankhaya means uncountable, an uncountable period of time.
Four of them, plus a hundred thousand great eras.
Now a great era is like a big bang to a big crunch kind of thing, like the universe.
A hundred thousand of those, and those are small compared to an asankhaya.
Those are nothing compared to an asankhaya, plus four of those.
That's how long it took for this Buddha to, this being to become a Buddha.
And after all that time, we have such a short time to hear what he has to say and learn from him and practice his teachings.
And he thought, what a shame, how shameful of me if during the time that the Buddha was here, I didn't become enlightened.
And so reasonably, he spent his time in meditation.
And the Buddha of course said, sadhu, very good.
And he said, if anyone loves me, if anyone cares for me, respects me, appreciates me, they will do as Tissa does.
Those of you who bring candles and flowers and incense to me, you're not doing the greatest homage, but the one who
Practices my teaching.
One who practices my teaching to realize the truth.
Practices the truth.
Practices the Dhamma to realize the Dhamma.
That's what it means.
You practice the Dhamma, so one part of the Buddha's teaching is how to practice.
The other part of the Buddha's teaching is the truth.
And you practice one to realize the other.
that person pays homage with the greatest sort of homage.
That person truly loves me, kind of thing.
And then he taught this verse.
And so the verse is not exactly
It's not exactly a summary of the story by any means.
It's only related tangentially.
But this seems reasonable.
It seems like the sort of thing the Buddha did.
It's the sort of thing a teacher does.
When an opportunity for a lesson arises, sometimes the lesson they teach is only tangentially related to the opportunity because their intention is to teach the important lesson.
That being said, it is related.
It's clear why the Buddha taught this verse.
Three lessons from this verse and the story.
The first lesson comes from the story.
It's the obvious lesson.
It's a very classical Buddhist lesson.
It's instructional for new Buddhists, instructional for old Buddhists.
And that's that Buddhism is a practice.
Whatever you want to say about Buddhism, you can call it what you like, you can cling to whichever, hold on, focus on whichever part of Buddhism you like.
It's impossible to deny with the texts that we have that Buddhism is about practice.
The Buddha said it himself.
He often criticized monks who just study.
He certainly criticized, or not criticized, but put in their place people who simply worship
Because, of course, there's nothing wrong with paying homage with candles and flowers and incense, which we see Buddhists do.
There's nothing wrong with chanting and religious ceremony.
But there's nothing great about it either.
There's nothing deep or profound or core about it.
It certainly isn't the sort of thing the Buddha taught.
The Buddha favored always those who practice
And so for old Buddhists, this of course is a lesson because we grew up Buddhist, often we grew up with Buddhist culture and we are very focused on ceremony and ritual.
And sometimes it's very much in line with the Buddhist teaching, sometimes it's not.
The problem, of course, with ritual and ceremony and culture is that they are not always grounded or connected to the religion and it's easy for them or it's possible for them to drift.
And you see a lot of Buddhist cultures and societies engaging in practices that seem very un-Buddhist.
or have drifted from the original teachings.
And so while these things are good often, they're only good if they're connected and supportive of the practice.
Culture is like a shell.
Ritual and all that is also like a shell.
It protects the egg, protects what's inside.
It can be very useful as a support, but only if it's supportive, not if it's contradictory or unconnected.
And it's useful for new Buddhists as well who want to know what is Buddhism.
So these sorts of teachings are very instructional in terms of giving a clear view of where Buddhism focuses.
Because of course, if you read texts, or if you read theory, if you read what people have written about Buddhism and theory, it seems like so much.
And there's so many aspects of it.
And so it's good to have sort of a focus, a lens through which to view all of the Buddha's teaching, not to be memorized or thought about, talked about, taught about, to be practiced.
If you want to follow the Buddha's teaching, go and sit in a corner or in a room in a quiet place like Tissa and practice them.
It's instructional when you're listening to a Dhamma talk like this.
Sometimes you'll be listening and you're doing, I know people watch these on YouTube or even listen to them when they're driving and that can be useful, I think, but it's important that you're mindful of the fact that this is meant to be practiced, not just to be
thought about, enjoyed, and that sort of thing.
If you really want to follow my teaching or the teaching that I present through, that comes through me that I say is the Buddha's teaching, you really have to be practicing it.
And so when you're sitting here listening, you should really be trying to be mindful as you're listening.
When I give the talk, I should try to be mindful, even of my lips moving, being mindful of that feeling.
When you hear my voice, you should be mindful of hearing.
When you feel, of course, sitting cross-legged, you'll feel pain or you'll feel tension.
You should note that.
Hot or cold, that sort of thing.
All of this should be noted.
Then you can really say you're listening to the Dhamma.
It's honestly, if you talk about listening, listening is a way of describing meditation.
You're listening to the Dhamma.
It's not just the sound of my voice or the words.
It's the sound.
It's the experience.
And of course all the mental activity that goes on.
You like it.
You dislike it.
You feel happy.
You feel unhappy.
Doubt.
Confusion.
All of these things are the Dhamma and you have to listen to them.
Because they'll tell you something.
They'll teach you about yourself.
So that's the first lesson.
The second lesson
is that Buddhism is a practice that very much is concerned with happiness.
And you hear this expressed by different teachers in different ways.
So we have to be a little bit careful, and we have to be fairly precise about this.
But there's no doubt about the fact that Buddhism is very much focused on happiness and peace.
And there's a sense that peace and happiness are one and the same or are interconnected.
I think we're still in the Sukhavagga, the happiness chapter of the Dhammapada.
So all of these have been somehow related to the idea of happiness.
And it really is the
the point of Buddhism.
I don't want to quite say it's the goal, though you could say that as well, but I have a problem with language that talks about goals, because it's not how you should be thinking when you meditate.
It's the point.
That's maybe a better way of expressing it.
Because Buddhism, of course, isn't about the future.
It isn't about trying to achieve something in a sense.
It kind of is, but language is difficult.
It's about the present moment.
You're trying to achieve presence.
You're trying to get to now, to have less and less concern about the future.
But nonetheless, Buddhism is all about happiness.
It really is the point.
Buddhism isn't about doing the right thing because God says it's right, or that sort of thing that comes in other religions following some doctrine.
That's why the focus in Buddhism is always on suffering and understanding suffering, not because we want to suffer, but because it's what's stopping us.
It's what's in our way.
It's between us and happiness.
If there was none of that, the way would be clear to be happy.
Again, it's not about a way that we would be happy.
The mind is like a
A shining gem.
The Buddha said, This mind is radiant.
It's lustrous.
It's beautiful.
It's perfect.
But it's soiled and covered over and sullied by defilements.
So if you get rid of all of those, the things that are causing stress and suffering, you're left with something beautiful.
Something perfect.
And there are two happinesses.
So this verse gives a good example of the distinction between... Well, it gives us an opportunity to talk about a couple of distinctions.
And the first one is mundane and super mundane.
But the other one is tranquility and insight.
Because worldly happiness comes from
from meditation.
When we talk about sensual pleasure and what most, the vast majority of people think of as happiness, we don't consider that happiness in Buddhism.
Yes, there's pleasure when you enjoy the senses, but we discard it.
We don't even consider it because it's caught up with defilement.
It's caught up with attachment.
And when you get what you want, you want more of it.
And
It's a very basic teaching in Buddhism, not an easy one, and not to trivialize it, but it's important to understand it's a very core foundational idea that sensual pleasure, we don't have any sense that it could possibly be happiness.
Our whole practice, in a sense, is to free ourselves from that.
And so we discard it immediately, giving no quarter to the idea that sensual pleasure might be happiness.
But worldly happiness does exist.
It's this paviveka.
the seclusion and it's mental seclusion and it's of two types really and that's where we get this distinction between tranquility and insight because if you want to have a secluded mind, a mind that is secluded from defilements and a mind that is not harassed by worry and stress and anger and frustration and greed and desire, you have two choices.
One, you seclude yourselves from those things that are causing those desires and aversions and worries and so on.
And you focus on something that has no connection with that.
Like a simple object, often a light or a color.
Even the breath is a good object.
And eventually your mind becomes so fixed and focused that you have no sense of any disturbance.
And your mind is very peaceful and quiet.
The other option is to change the way you look at these things that cause you stress and suffering.
So the things that cause you to get angry, change the way you look at them.
And this is what we do with our practice.
When you feel pain, change the way you look at it.
Rather than getting harassed by disliking of the pain, see it as just pain.
Say to yourself, pain, pain.
You'll cultivate this ability to see it just as it is.
And of the two,
Well, they are quite distinct.
The first one, I would use the word artificial.
And it's not really in a pejorative sense.
It's in a limiting sense.
Even the Brahma world, rebirth as a god, is artificial.
In the basic sense that it's created and it's temporary, it's limited.
When you cultivate this fixed state of mind, that's very peaceful, very pure, very strong, very good, very wholesome, very positive.
you're avoiding or ignoring the relationship you have with all the other stuff.
And so when you stop practicing and the concentration dissipates, you're left back where you started with the potential and the eventual development of greed and anger and delusion.
So it's temporary and it's artificial.
And if you keep it up, you'll be reborn as a god and you'll live for billions or billions of years or however long as a god.
But even after that, you'll be born as a human again and you might do all sorts of evil things.
In the Buddha's time, once the Buddha smiled at a pig.
They were walking on Amjron and he smiled at this pig.
And Ananda saw him smiling and
I thought, well, I'll have to ask about that.
And after they'd eaten, he said to the Buddha, he said, I saw you smile, Venerable Sir.
Why is it that you smiled?
And the Buddha said, oh, that pig.
Did you see that pig?
That pig was once a Brahma.
That pig was once a god.
And it passed away from there and was eventually born as a pig.
And so there's this poem that was in Burmese and translated into English.
In Brahma's realm she shines bright, in pig's pen too she finds delight.
We're happy wherever we're reborn.
We don't realize the danger of our situation, the precariousness of it.
The other method, the one that we favor, not really trying to dismiss the other one, but there is a limit to it.
And it can be very supportive in practicing insight meditation, but I think it can never be more than that.
It can never be a replacement for ultimately changing your relationship with experience, which is what we do.
We kind of streamline, simplify, and
Well, it can be a lot more unpleasant and a lot less grand or exalted, but it's a lot simpler and more straightforward.
So meditators in this tradition often don't feel so happy or peaceful, in the beginning at least.
And it's important to understand that that's a sign that you're not proficient.
I mean, that's really how the practice works.
That's how you know where you are in your practice.
How are you feeling?
Are you full of greed, anger and delusion?
You're not there yet.
You haven't cleaned off, polished and purified the mind completely yet.
And this often leads to a great discouragement among meditators.
And that's something to be addressed as well.
This shouldn't be a reason to be discouraged.
So often a meditator will not feel peaceful and happy, especially when I talk.
That's why I say we have to be careful.
Especially when we talk about happiness, it's often quite discouraging for those who are not happy in their meditation.
Don't find it a pleasant undertaking.
And so I think the best and most honest way is to describe and explain the meditation in this way, that it's like polishing a dusty gem, or maybe more viscerally,
more clearly.
It's about cleaning a pigsty or it's about cleaning your house or a bathroom or something very dirty.
So the reason why for some of us and for most of us I think meditation is difficult and often unpleasant is because of this.
We're very much corrupted.
Our minds are not clean.
And you shouldn't feel discouraged about that, because that's the whole point of meditation.
Don't feel like, I can't practice meditation, I'm too corrupt, I'm too defiled, I have too many attachments.
What else are you going to do?
I mean, that's the whole point of meditation.
That's why the Buddha created insight meditation, why the Buddha taught.
If you feel discouraged and if you say that sort of thing, you're really doing a disservice to Buddhism.
It's a sign you haven't really understood.
That's exactly what this is for.
That's exactly the point.
So don't be discouraged.
Be encouraged that you're doing something that has the potential, very real potential, and not even just potential, but has the effect of purifying the mind.
That's the whole point.
The Buddha called his teaching the Visuddhimanga, the path of purification.
But nonetheless, and it shouldn't be denied that as you practice, you should and will
gain happiness and peace.
By the time you get through an intensive meditation course, as an example, by the end of it you often feel very peaceful and very happy, we might say.
I want to use the term delicately because it's not like you'll be jumping for joy or smiling or laughing.
You might often smile, but it's not even about smiling.
It's about peace.
It's about freedom from suffering.
It's about a sense, a deep sense of peace.
deep sense of contentment, satisfaction.
Because you stopped clinging to things, because you've changed the way you look at things, you gain a profound temporary sense of equanimity towards things.
And I stress temporarily because it is as well, I don't want to say artificial, but it's fragile.
It's preliminary.
It's like you haven't quite come into focus when you have the camera lens.
It's not quite in focus.
So you can't quite say that it's going to be permanent.
It's real.
I would say it's natural in a way that tranquility meditation, the other kind of meditation, isn't.
I don't want to get in trouble with that.
I don't mean to be pejorative about it, but it's different.
It's much more natural because you're not avoiding, you're not limiting your experience to anything.
You've created the same sense of clarity about everything.
But you're not quite there yet.
And that's the distinction.
The Buddha said, pavivita paviveka paviveka risang
I forget the Pali now.
Pabhiveka rasang pitva.
Pabhiveka, I think he says.
Pabhiveka rasang pitva.
That's the... Pabhiveka is seclusion.
That's mundane.
That's these two types.
And the other one is rasang upasama sacca.
The flavor of upasama.
So he made a distinction between these two.
And...
The distinction is upasama refers to the quietude that I said, quietude, peace, quenching.
That refers to something super mundane.
It refers to nibbana.
So once a meditator practices and sees things perfectly clearly, it doesn't stop there.
It leads to something.
It leads to this second type of peace, which is truly
earth shattering, mind shattering, mind blowing.
Mind blowing might be a good adjective.
It truly shatters the foundation of
of the mind, in the sense of being stuck to samsara.
It changes the way you look at things in a very fundamental sense.
It gives a perspective that wasn't there before.
It's like when you're inside here, you don't know what the weather is like outside until you go outside.
Once you go outside, you have that sense, you have the knowledge of
And so you might think this air is okay to breathe, but when you go outside and you feel the fresh air and the sun on your face, you realize that these lights and all is very limited.
You have a different perspective.
It's like Plato.
Plato talked about this very interesting, very famous simile of a cave.
If you know Plato's simile of a cave, then you know what I'm talking about.
He talks about people as like cave dwellers who have never seen the outside.
You can read his simile.
It's an interesting one.
It's kind of the same idea here.
Upasamma is something very different.
It's peace that goes beyond the mundane.
It's ineffable in a sense that you can't describe it.
You can't even remember it.
When you have an experience of Nibbana, there's no memory of it because there's nothing to remember.
There's no arising during that time.
But it shakes you.
It shatters something.
And so that one is real and lasting and enlightening.
So that's the second lesson, it's about happiness.
The third lesson is just, I think, I separated it out because it's an interesting point, and that's this idea of nipapo, because it relates back to the story.
It's how the verse relates to the story, is that people were criticizing this monk for his meditation practice, and the Buddha said, nipapo, he has no evil, there's nothing wrong
And it's the point that when your mind is pure, you have no evil, no corruption in your heart.
And so criticism is unwarranted towards such a person.
It is a bit of a debate.
I think not so much among Buddhists, though it can come up.
But it's often a debate that Buddhism has to enter in with other religions and non-religious people.
I've heard people talk about Buddhist monks and meditators as lazy and parasites.
And it's a little bit strange.
I think it does have some credibility when we find that
monks are encouraging people to give them things and support them and so on.
And maybe when Buddhist meditators are just engaging in mundane pleasures, like tranquility meditation or just the pleasure of being in solitude, it can be a little bit self-serving and even
can be a cause for evil to arise.
It's possible that meditation centers, monasteries, often you hear and you find about some places become corrupt.
But the idea that practicing meditation is laziness or the idea that it's not contributing to society here, the idea that one is a parasite if they're being supported for their spiritual practice is really unfortunate because of how powerful and beneficial meditation is.
If you have someone
If there exists someone in the world like the Buddha, the last thing, the farthest thing from the parasite, because of the great beneficence they give to the world, even not intentionally by going around trying to teach people, but first of all just by example, by providing the option or the
a vision of another way, rather than trying to prop up a society that's based mostly on greed.
We have an alternative, and that's leaving society, even not just Buddhists, but religious people in general who leave society and go and live in seclusion.
offer a really great, I mean, a great alternative.
I mean, hearing about them myself when I was 13, I think from a computer game, actually, I was playing at the time.
I read about the Dalai Lama in this video game, and it got me learning about this idea of leaving society, and it was very interesting.
I was very interested in that.
It was one of the things that propelled me to go to Asia in the first place.
But more importantly, when a person has accomplished all of the goodness that comes from meditation practice, not only are they incapable of evil, the relationship with them is so mind-changing.
I mean, just having an association, listening to the things they say, taking their advice, learning how to practice meditation from them,
It has an unmeasurable benefit.
And it benefits, you know, the Buddha benefited his disciples who benefited their disciples who benefited their disciples who benefited eventually, benefited my teacher and benefited me and then I benefit you, hopefully, and then you benefit others.
The greatness of our emphasis on self-exploration and study and enlightenment is beyond compare.
It's so much more beneficial than running around like all these monks did, wailing and moaning about the Buddha going away and ensuring that they saw the Buddha before he passed.
None of that is anywhere near.
Or the social work that many religions and Buddhists engage in is nowhere near as beneficial as changing your mind.
Because if you talk about good deeds,
and the avoidance of bad deeds, they only really are possible because of your purity of mind.
So if you're a good person, it means you have some purity and you're able to do good things, but you're only able to do good things to the extent that you're a good person.
And so if you still have evil inside of you, if you still have corruption, defilement, anger, greed, delusion, your good deeds will always be tainted by that and limited by that, affected by that and contrasted with the evil that you do based on your greed, your anger, your delusion.
So your effect on others will not always be positive.
Your effect on the world will not be entirely positive.
And it will be negative if you talk about people who get involved with the world and you say, well, they're better because look at how hard they're working or so on.
Quite often the work that they're doing is hurting people, hurting the world, giving people the wrong impression, leading people towards greater greed, anger, delusion.
So if we talk about them as industrious and meditators as lazy, well, better to be lazy in that case.
Better to not do anything.
You go off in the world, at the very least, you've freed all sorts of people from you.
And that's actually a Buddhist teaching.
The Buddha talked about abhayadana, which means freedom from fear.
When a person keeps the five precepts,
And they have freed countless of beings from them.
From killing, from stealing, from lying, from cheating, drugs, alcohol.
Well, the first four anyway are very much related to others, but drugs and alcohol as well.
When you stop doing them, you're much less likely to break the others or do anything evil.
So keeping those five precepts has already been a great gift to society just by not doing lots of things.
A person who practices in this way, a person who experiences the great peace and happiness of enlightenment and just meditation in general, does the world a great service.
They're incapable of evil.
They have no sorrow or fear.
And that's the third lesson.
So that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for listening.
Wish you all the best.