Good evening.
We're continuing on with our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we're looking at verse 200, which reads, Which means,
Happily indeed we live, we who have nothing.
We will eat, we will feed off of rapture, like the angels in the Abhasara realm, the Abhasara angels.
ones who have a radiance, an abha.
So this is the third.
If you remember, the last two verses were also susukang vata jivama, happily indeed we live.
This is the sukavagga.
So it's talking about happiness.
I think the Buddha was talking always about suffering.
The only reason he talked about suffering was in order to find happiness, freedom from suffering.
This verse was taught in regards to a story about Mara, really.
The Buddha was dwelling in Panchasala, a Brahmin village called Panchasala.
And he thought to himself, well, he thought, who can I teach today?
And he had this vision of this large group of maidens, young women, , young women.
And he thought, oh, they will understand the Dhamma if they hear it.
And so he went into the village on alms, but he didn't get anything.
And the text says that Mara, it's about Mara, Mara came into the village and went into their hearts and tricked or somehow made it so that none of them gave anything.
People who would, I guess, otherwise have given.
And the Buddha came out of the village and Mara came to him and taunted him and said, oh, so you went into the village on alms and didn't get anything.
He said, did you get anything?
The Buddha said, oh I got, no I didn't.
He said, oh well, go back into the village and try again then.
And he thought, and Mara thought, if he goes back into the village again, I'll get people to be mean and nasty to him.
And at that time, this large group of young women
came to the Buddha when he was sitting there.
And so it was an opportunity to teach the Dhamma.
Mara was taunting him and said, Oh, you must be really hungry.
You've got nothing to eat.
And the Buddha said, I have nothing.
It's true.
But it's not true that I will not feed.
He said, I have no hunger because I feed off the rapture of enlightenment.
It's a very simple teaching.
It's also a fairly well-known teaching.
It's a memorable one.
Because being without is a part of life.
It's a reminder to us of a good attitude to have in the face of what really just amounts to a change of experience.
That's the key here, and that's the key in Buddhism.
So the real lesson here in the story, in the verse, is about not getting what you want.
How hunger comes from not having something that you want, or wanting something that you don't have.
For some people, happiness depends upon a great deal of things, not just on food.
For some people, for addicts, without drugs, there's no happiness.
For ordinary people, without the objects of the sense that delight us, there's no happiness.
But even for
For people who are otherwise not addicted to sensual pleasure without things like food or what we would call the necessities of life, there can be no happiness.
And it really highlights the
shift in perception that we undertake in our practice of mindfulness.
What does mindfulness change?
What good is mindfulness?
What does it do?
It changes the way you look at your life, at reality.
Instead of looking at your experience, your situation, in terms of what you have and what you don't have,
You come to see it of what you're experiencing.
You come to see your reality in terms of experience.
The idea of getting or not getting, having or not having disappears.
There's a quote, George Orwell once read a book by
He was writing memoirs of when he had nothing.
He fell into great poverty living in Paris and London.
And he said there's a great freedom that comes from when you reach rock bottom, when you have nothing.
Because you know there's no lower you can go.
Your perspective changes.
There's nothing to be afraid of because it can't get any worse.
This is a good reason to think about becoming a Buddhist monk or leaving home and undertaking a reclusive life.
Because it changes your perspective and it brings into contrast what you have and what you don't have, what you have and what you need to have to be happy.
And you're able to see all the things that you require to be happy.
You're able to change your perspective and work on these cravings, work on this suffering.
So people will say things like, you need friends to be happy, you need possessions to be happy, you need something to entertain you in order to be happy.
At the very least you need food to be happy.
Our idea of happiness is in the externals, in things.
Because we dwell in the realm of things.
We think of me eating food is getting a thing called food and putting it in my body.
We don't think of it as just an experience.
We aren't able to see that eating food and the feeling of fulfillment that comes, the pleasure that comes from eating the food, is all just experiences.
And so we lack, well we cultivate partiality and we lack the flexibility that comes from seeing reality as experience.
When you're able to perceive food and friends and possessions and all the things that make us happy as simply experiences, you gain a flexibility, well you come to see that
There's no difference between one experience and another.
You can't cling to an experience.
An experience can't be something that you wish for or want for.
Once you see the momentary experiences, I'm not talking about an experience in a conceptual sense, but in a momentary sense, you can't cling to it because it arises and ceases and it has no quality.
that is good or bad or even desirable or undesirable.
When you look at things in terms of experience, you're watching, when we say to ourselves, pain, pain, thinking, thinking, when you watch in that way, you gain this
flexibility, sort of an adaptability or flexibility.
The peace that comes from from being content with whatever come
We can talk about contentment in things, but ultimately, if we have craving, if we have attachment, there are things that we like and things that we don't like.
A thing is something you can attach to.
It's a concept in the mind, something that you can remember having.
It's a thing that can provide stability, satisfaction, control.
You can control things.
You can keep things.
You can be satisfied with things.
Comfortable furniture or pleasant food, electronic devices, people, places.
All of these things can provide stability and satisfaction and control.
But they don't really exist.
The problem that we have with things is that they're dependent on the underlying experiences, and experiences are unpredictable.
When you talk about having food, what you really mean is having the potential to have experiences, moments of experience where you're eating, even where you're just seeing the food as an experience.
And these are unpredictable, uncontrollable.
Another important lesson of this story is about Mara, about evil.
Whether or not you believe that there was this malevolent spirit taking over people's minds and hearts and making them stingy.
Stinginess does exist and manipulation
There are people where the circumstances of your life are plotting against you, people plotting against you, just chance, fate plotting against you, your own bad karma coming back to haunt you, so many things.
But evil is in particular something that we have to recognize.
Whether you recognize Mara as a being who came to the Buddha and taunted him,
Going into a village and not getting any alms is a common experience for monks.
It certainly happens.
And by extension, anything, any activity that we undertake, trying to obtain something that we want and not getting it, that's common to everyone.
Often because of the evil intentions of others, stinginess, miserliness, not wanting to share, not wanting to give, not wanting to help, wanting you to be without so they steal from you or they break things of yours or they hurt you with speech or actions.
We think this body is a source of so much pleasure, but someone with bad intentions comes to you, they can do great harm and cause great suffering.
All because of our attachment to things, the concept of something that is stable, satisfying, controllable.
And in fact, reality is not like that.
So this really speaks to the power of mindfulness, the power of wisdom, the power of seeing things just as they are, being able to see things just as they are, rather than react to them or conceive in them, like this is food that I'm eating, this is my body that is healthy, that is full and nourished with food.
The Buddha indeed every day went to nourish his body.
But when he didn't receive nourishment, there was no suffering.
The Buddha had a greater nourishment.
And that's the nourishment of the present moment, the nourishment of mindfulness, the nourishment of enlightenment.
Being enlightened means seeing things clearly.
Being without food is simply a different sort of experience.
It may make you incapable of doing certain things, but it simply means a different form of experience.
The state where the body is weak, is tired because of food, is an equally valid experience to the state where the body is energetic and full of effort.
For a person who is attached to things like food
Nourishment can be a detriment.
When you are too well fed, you can become intoxicated by the strength of the body.
The chemicals in the body start to work and you feel aroused.
Having too much food can be a problem for people who are attached because it leads to addiction, it can lead to belligerence.
People who are well fed are much more capable of fighting with each other.
Having less food can sometimes be good.
And for certain, not getting what you want is always good.
As I said, for becoming a monk or even a recluse of some sort, there's a great power and benefit to it because it teaches you.
It gives you a new perspective.
The life of someone who has everything they want, gets everything they want, is fraught with peril.
The potential for losing what you get, what you have.
The potential for clinging to what you have and desiring more, becoming addicted to it.
And needing it and being dissatisfied whenever you can't get it.
The happiness of having nothing is a very powerful thing.
And it's not that having things is a cause of suffering necessarily.
But the power and the happiness that comes from not needing anything, being happy without things, having your happiness not depend on things, is the highest sort of happiness there is.
It's invincible.
You have no vulnerability.
A person whose happiness depends on things.
My happiness depending on me going for food and getting food is very dangerous for me.
Setting myself up for suffering.
Now if everything, if I could control everything and everything went as planned that would be great but this verse
highlights a very important part of reality, that is, the potential for us not to get what we want, the potential for evil.
We don't know what's going to happen, we don't know what our future is, but more specifically, we don't know when evil might hit.
It could be in the form of another person, they might harm us, steal from us.
They manipulate or lie to us, cheat us, might come in the form of the body, sickness, might come in the form of accidents, weather, natural disasters.
certainly come in the form of our own defilements, when we get angry and do things that harm ourselves, when we get greedy and become addicted and attached to things and create ambitions and actions that cause us suffering.
Happy without anything.
I mean, it's a real powerful statement.
We can use it to apply to not getting anything in our lives, but
We can always think of the Buddha when we don't get what we want and remember that even when the Buddha had no food, which is something that for many of us is a very difficult thing psychologically, I mean, emotionally to be without, just the fear of not having enough food to eat, the stress of going hungry, worry about
not being able to nourish your body.
Think about the Buddha and how he said he had a greater nourishment than the food.
His happiness wasn't dependent on getting what he wanted because his way of looking at things was not in terms of things that you can get.
It's in terms of experiences which frees you and liberates you from
the slavery really of needing things.
So that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for listening.
Wish you all the best.