Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 57, which reads as follows.
Tesang sampan nasilanang, apamada viharinang, samadanya vimutanang, maromagang nawindati.
Which means for those who are endowed with morality dwelling in vigilance or without negligence who are liberated through wisdom, through right wisdom or rightly through wisdom.
Mara is unable to find their path and this teaching was given in regards to a story that is a little bit hard to to explain a little bit controversial and I'll explain it'll become clear as I tell the story there was a monk Godika
He was dwelling in Black Rock near Rajgaha.
When the Buddha was dwelling in Rajgaha, Godhika was dwelling at Black Rock and he was practicing what appears to be Samatha meditation.
So he was attaining what we call Jeta Vimutti, liberation of mind, which comes through the attainment of the Jhanas, the Samatha Jhanas.
profound peace and tranquility in his mind and he was able to enter them quite easily but then he became sick and he had this sickness that prevented him or didn't prevent him but it was such that every time he attained to this liberation or to the worldly meditative attainment
he would slip away from it.
So he was unable to sustain it.
And this happened once, it happened twice, it happened three times, it happened six times.
And so the seventh time that it happened, he made a resolution.
He said, look, I'm dying here.
And if I die without, it's clear I'm going back and forth in between the jhana and an ordinary mind state.
And if I die in an ordinary mind state, that's not sure where I'm going to go.
I might wind up in hell.
I might wind up as an animal.
But if I die in the meditative state, then for sure at least I will go to the higher god realms as a Brahma.
I'll explain about that after.
And so he made a decision.
He took his razor that he would use to cut his hair, and he went into his kuti, his hut, and he lay down and he decided that he was going to kill himself.
He was going to cut his windpipe with this razor.
And Mara, the evil one who is like the Buddhist Satan, he came along and saw that this was happening and due to his own understanding, seems to be misunderstanding of the way things work,
He agreed with this monk.
He said, well, if this monk kills himself, he'll go to the high Brahma realms where he'll be free from my domain.
And I don't want that.
So I'll go and I'll convince the Buddha to tell his student not to kill himself because surely the Buddha doesn't want his students to kill themselves.
And so Mara went to the Buddha, Mara is like this evil spirit, and he said to the Buddha, oh you're a student even though he's practicing to overcome death and he's entered into this state of trying to overcome death or overcoming death or whatever, still he's afraid of death or he's still contemplating death or he's going to kill himself.
And the Buddha brushes him off and says that this monk is someone who is not afraid of death, someone who has overcome death, who is set in morality and so on and so on.
and brushes off Mara and says leave me be and goes to Black Rock to where this monk is staying takes some monks there and goes and sees Godika and sees that Godika actually has it has taken his life and
Mara is there as well and Mara comes and sees that Godika has died and he vanishes and starts racing around the universe trying to find where Godika has been reborn and he appears as this kind of a black cloud and this is something you see it reoccurs in the Buddhist teaching where Mara whenever he's looking for
So someone, where they've been reborn, he's like this black cloud going through the, racing through the skies trying to find this being where they've been reborn, where they've continued.
And the Buddha says, you see that black cloud up there?
That's Mara and he's trying to find where this monk has been reborn and he won't ever find where Godika has been reborn because Godika has become an Arahant.
He's become free from suffering.
Mara comes back and asks him basically that, where has he gone?
And the Buddha said you'll never find such a person.
You'll never find Godika.
And then he gave this verse teaching.
He said even
even a thousand of you, a thousand Maras or a thousand angels or a thousand spirits couldn't find such a being."
And then he gave the verse, for those who are endowed with morality and virtuous conduct, who dwell in vigilance and are liberated through right wisdom, Mara cannot find their path.
And so this is a controversial teaching because it can be taken in several different ways.
For some people this seems to be an allowance for suicide or a nullification of any ethical quality to the act of killing yourself.
The commentary takes it in probably the most or the least dangerous way.
It gives the least dangerous interpretation to it by saying that Godika and another monk like him who did a similar thing in his record in Svitika, they weren't enlightened and then when he cut his windpipe,
thinking that he was somehow going to go to the Brahma realms, he realized what an idiot he had been and he became afraid of death and practiced then insight meditation.
And the point being that the moment of death is actually a really good moment to practice insight meditation.
It's a time when you have to let go of everything, where you're confronted with your whole life, you're confronted with all your good and bad deeds, and you're forced to confront a lot.
Now, since he had been practicing meditation up until that point,
even though it seemed all he entertained was Samatha insight, it was a base for quite clear insight to arise as a result of the impending death.
So that answers a lot of the questions as to how can you condone suicide, how can suicide be a good thing, how can someone
do it innocently but there's still the question of whether whether suicide itself is a bad deed and well of course in Buddhism we don't consider deeds to be good or bad and so actually the the act of killing ourselves isn't the problem and I think this kind of solves some of the dilemmas about this verse about the story
in that an ordinary person when they want to kill themselves is doing it out of generally anger a desire to end whatever or to be free from whatever suffering they're going to have the suffering they have out of depression or anger and or sadness or whatever people decide to kill themselves and that's a really dangerous thing to do because that act is done out of negative emotions
and as a result that sort of person is going to go to a bad place or is likely to go to a bad place but that having been said they still have the moment from the time of the doing that moment of doing that act of cutting their throat until the moment that they die and that in the case of cutting your throat or splitting your wrists that's still some time
if during that time they're able to come to grips with their experience, it's possible that a person who kills themselves could go to a good place because they're forced to deal with those things.
That doesn't take away the negative impact of killing yourself.
It can be a bad deed.
It's just that
It seems likely that it would be a bad deed in most cases.
Even in the case of Godika, there's still a good argument for it being a bad karma.
It's just that in the interim period between the killing himself and the actual dying, he was able to gain insight.
That being said, it seems like in certain cases there might even be an argument for an arahant to be able to kill themselves.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, I think he interprets this, the Sanyuta Nikaya version, or maybe it's the story about Channa, there's another monk who kills himself.
And it seems reasonable to interpret it as actually an arahant, someone who's enlightened, who has no defilements,
There's nothing wrong with them killing themselves.
In that case, the point being, the only reason they would kill themselves is because they're dying anyway.
And it's like a cure for the sickness or it's not wanting to be a burden on other people.
Now, to me, that's kind of controversial.
I'm not going to go that far.
But I might suggest that it's possible in certain situations where a person is...
is free from any attachment to other people.
I guess that the point is, if it's just the effect on yourself, it's not murder.
It doesn't seem to be on the scale of murder.
Killing yourself seems to be a voluntary choice that people make.
If it's not affecting others, if you're not leaving dependents behind or people who love you, like if you're a monk living off from the forest alone and it doesn't matter to anyone, you're not hurting others by killing yourself.
It seems that Buddhism doesn't have anything specifically ethical to say about it.
Now monks aren't allowed to kill themselves.
It's actually explicitly against the rules.
But I think the safest thing we can say is that in certain cases
Killing oneself gives one the opportunity to, let's not even say that, but in certain cases people have committed the act of wanting to kill themselves and then been able to, in spite of that, come to become enlightened.
And it seems actually
to have indirectly or in a roundabout way somehow helped them because it brought them closer to death and helped them understand death.
It's by no means a encouragement for suicide or even a
an allowance for the condoning of suicide in any way as suicide is considered to be it's not allowed by monks and it's certainly considered in Buddhism to be a negative thing in general as I said it's something that is based on anger and based on negative emotions and I would say there's argument to be made for even in the case of Godika or these monks who were practicing hard that it was a bad choice to make
It just happened that by fluke they were as a result able to contemplate death and die.
It's like a gamble because you know that death is a time when you can study yourself.
It's a time when you'll be able to learn more about your emotions and
come to terms with him.
So I guess the argument that you'd make against that is that Gorikov's dying anyway and if he had waited until he was really going to die naturally it would have actually been a much better situation and for sure he would have still been able to deal with the emotion.
So he didn't gain anything by killing himself but it just hastened his eventual enlightenment which came not as a result of killing himself but as a result of dying.
Which was going to come anyway.
Okay, so that's how I would resolve, in my mind, the ethical ambiguity there.
But more importantly, let's not concern ourselves about the question of suicide too much.
It's certainly something that has to be taken seriously and you really have to...
No, one last thing I want to say is about the gamble, right?
Because the negative aspects of wanting to kill yourself, the anger, the self-hatred or whatever the depression or the negative emotions are,
is not going to set a good stage for your last moments.
And so to take this as anything like encouragement for suicide is really to take it the wrong way.
Death is a gamble and that's what Godika did realize.
He was just trying to stack the odds in his favor.
He didn't actually succeed, right?
He wanted to go to Brahma realms.
He actually did something quite different and that's became enlightened and therefore was not reborn.
But for most of us, death is a gamble.
And so if you think that somehow hastening your death is going to put you closer to enlightenment, it just puts you closer to that gamble and you're stacking the odds against yourself, actually, if you're committing deeds like killing yourself based on anger, based on depression, based on negative emotions.
So certainly bad idea and most likely to lead you to a bad destination.
It's actually just an exception here, I would say.
It's a curious exception that we have that these monks were in such a state that
in such a state that their death was a cause for them to become enlightened.
It basically didn't matter or didn't matter enough that they had killed themselves.
That's how I would interpret it.
But the point here is actually in the verse which isn't dependent at all on the story.
It was a cause for the Buddha to say this to Mara or to say this to the monks.
to teach this to the monks but the actual emphasis is on the qualities that allow one to become free from Mara's search
So take this how you want.
Mara in Buddhism, there are five Maras.
There's Kanda Mara, which are the five aggregates.
Our aggregates are considered a kind of evil because they cause us lots of suffering.
Our body, our feelings, our memories, our thoughts, our consciousness are things that cause us a lot of suffering.
You know, like when a person's sick, that's Kanda Mara because
their bodies cause them suffering, so it's kind of an evil in that sense.
There's kilesa mara, which are the evil deeds, or the defilements that we have inside, so anger, greed, delusion, conceit, arrogance, worry, depression, etc., etc., all of the negative emotions and bad stuff inside, these are called kilesa mara, they're evil, bad.
So evil is just a word, the word we use to describe these things.
The third Mara is Abhisankara Mara.
These are the bad deeds that we perform as a result of our defilement.
So killing, stealing, lying, cheating, all the bad stuff that we do, these are evil.
It's evil to kill, it's evil to steal, etc., etc.
The fourth kind of Mara is Machu Mara, death.
Death is considered an evil.
It's the kind of thing that it's this big gamble that you take.
You don't know where you're going after you die.
Totally based on the mind state at the moment of death and all that you've cultivated up to that point.
And number five is called Devaputta Mara where we this angel of evil.
It's an evil angel who
have tormented the Buddha and torments all of us.
So he's this guy who whispers in your ear and tells you to do bad things and tells you to kill yourself, for example.
Or he was the guy who would go around whispering to the monks to tell them to do this or that and who tried to dissuade people from practicing or encourage people to practice in the wrong way, this kind of thing, kind of like Satan in Christianity.
So there's this idea that there is this angel who does these sorts of things, but you can also just think of it metaphorically dealing with our struggle to become enlightened.
Mara is chasing us around and trying to find our path, trying to keep us on the wrong path and trying to keep us under his control.
Every time we get angry, this is a mara.
Every time we have greed, this is a mara.
This is our path and this is the path of mara.
All of these things keep us going round and round, keep us tied to the wheel of samsara, keep us being reborn, keep us suffering, keep us hurting others.
All of these things are the realm of Mara.
There are seven paths that we have to choose from.
There's the path to hell and that is the anger.
Anger leads us to hell.
This is a path that Mara can clearly see and encourages us on.
There's the path of greed.
This is the path to become a ghost.
This is the path of greed.
And so all of our greed and attachments, all of our desires and likes and so on, this is cultivating the addiction that eventually turns you into a ghost.
This is a path of Mara.
The path that Mara knows.
There's the path to become an animal.
This is the path of delusion.
A person who is full of delusion.
All of our delusions, these are leading us to become animals.
All of the intoxicants and the drugs and alcohol that we take and all of our arrogance and all of our conceit and all of our bigotry and all of our prejudice.
This is all leading us to be born as animals.
This is the path that Mara knows very well.
There's the path to become a human, even this path, Mara knows very well.
This is the path to keeping the five precepts.
So people, sometimes Mara is this guy who encourages you, it's okay, you don't have to practice, just keep the five precepts.
I was talking about that earlier.
Don't worry about it, don't practice meditation, it's enough.
Practice, keep the five precepts, you'll be born as a human being.
But Buddhists often get tricked into this one, thinking that it's enough to just keep the five precepts.
At least I'm keeping the five precepts and I'm a good person, I'll be born as a human being.
Still the path of Mara, still you'll be born again and again and again.
It's not a stable path because eventually you forget the Buddha's teaching and you can veer away into one of the three lower paths.
Five is the path to become an angel.
This is the path of good deeds.
So again, we're often coerced and convinced by Mara, tricked by Mara into just performing good deeds, being good people, being charitable, being nice to others.
We can get quite caught up in the excitement of that, the goodness of that.
It's a wonderful thing.
And as a result, we're born as angels.
And that can be a long, long lasting thing.
But it's still the path of Mara.
It's a path that Mara knows well and still encourages people in if he thinks it'll keep them under his control.
The sixth path is the path to Brahma.
This is the path of Samatajana.
This is the path that Godika was practicing.
He was practicing meditation to gain ceto vimurti, which is liberation of mind.
It means the mind is free from all greed, anger and delusion, but it's only the mind states that are arising.
These mind states are free from all of that.
the potential for those states is still not eradicated.
So as a result of practicing this one is born in the Brahma realms for a long, long time.
Many meditators are convinced, are tricked into practicing this path and as a result are reborn as Brahmas.
lived there a long, long time, but it's still, I'm not sure if it is a path that Mara is able to find.
He seemed to think from this story that it was outside of his path.
I think Mara is an angel.
And as a result, when he sees people go to the Brahma realms, they disappear.
He can't find them.
So he thinks they're gone.
But actually, they're just in a higher realm, the God realm.
So even Mara can't find them.
I'm not sure about this, but if I remember correctly, they're outside of his realm.
But they're not actually.
They're still going to come back.
And when Mara passes away, or some Mara is going to see these Brahmas come down.
They're going to come back and eventually they'll be back in the lower realms, the angel realms or the human realms.
So they're still not free, still not free from Mara.
But the seventh path is the path that the Buddha is talking about in this verse.
Sampanna sila nang, someone who has...
who is endowed with morality or endowed with virtue.
This doesn't just mean keeping the precepts.
This means someone who has a mind that is well trained, a mind that doesn't incline towards evil deeds or even evil thoughts, evil speech, a mind that is well controlled and well subdued, well guarded, a mind that
stays with the present moment, stays with reality, stays with the here and the now.
This is endowed with true virtue and conduct, so the mind that is here and now.
Appamada viharinam is the one who dwells vihari in appamada which is free from negligence or drunkenness intoxication the mind that is pure totally clear conscious sober alert mindful this is the mind that is mindful the mind that is aware of things as they are seeing as seeing hearing as hearing and sees things
on a one-to-one level it is what it is and it's nothing else not projecting or judging or identifying or attaching to anything any aspect of experience someone who is liberated through wisdom liberated through wisdom is different from liberation through this mind state of the jhanas this mind state that fixes the mind
Liberation through wisdom is through knowing better, through getting the mind on a different track so that the mind has no potential for the future arising of bad thoughts or deeds or speech.
The mind that is clearly aware
That whatever arises ceases, that nothing in this world is permanent, satisfying or controllable.
The mind that has no attachment or no reason to attach, no inclination to attach or to desire or to strive after anything.
the mind that sees no benefit in clinging or in chasing after anything or running away from anything or controlling anything the mind that sees things as they are and therefore doesn't get confused or misunderstand or do things or say things or think things that lead one to suffer that lead one to be disappointed that lead one to be dissatisfied
Such a person doesn't go anywhere The mind doesn't go anywhere Nibbana is not a place, it's not a destination It's the seventh path that doesn't lead anywhere
There you go.
There's a good description of Nibbāna.
It's not that it's a nowhere or a nothing.
It's the non-going.
Nibbāna means the mind doesn't go anymore.
It doesn't go out to the eye or to the ear or to the nose or to the tongue or to the body or even to thoughts and objects of mental
cognition, such a person is free from all suffering and is outside of the realm of Mara.
Mara cannot find such a mind.
So that is the meaning of this verse and that's the lesson that we take away from this.
the idea of all these other paths as being within the realm of Mara and our duty, our job as being to rise above these to free ourselves from these traces that we leave behind that allow Mara to track us all of the karma, all of the things that we cling to that keep us tied to samsara tied to the world, tied to the universe tied to suffering
So another good verse and one that we can take a real lesson away from and use to help us and support us in our mental cultivation and our cultivation of the Buddha's teaching and the path to Nibbana.
So thank you all for tuning in.
I hope this has been useful and I'll try to make more videos now, try to keep this series going.
So wishing you all to progress on the path and find true peace, happiness and freedom from suffering.
Thank you.