Okay, good evening.
Tonight we're continuing our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we look at verse 201, which goes as follows.
Jayaṁ vairāṁ paśabhati dukhaṁ seti parajito
which means victory breeds enmity or vengeance.
Those who are defeated
Those who are not victorious dwell in suffering.
Those who are tranquil or who have found peace dwell in happiness.
Having abandoned victory and defeat,
So this was told in regards, we're told it was in relation to Ajatasattu.
Ajatasattu was a prince in the time of the Buddha and he fell in with the wrong crowd.
He became friends with Devadatta who was
out to destroy or take over the Buddhist congregation and so he teamed up with Ajatasattu and Ajatasattu
Devadatta suggested that he kill his father who was the king and he would be able to take over the kingdom.
And Devadatta would kill the Buddha and he would take over the, I'm not sure what you call it, the religion I guess, religious organization.
And they tried, and Devadatta was unsuccessful, of course.
Ajatasattu was eventually successful.
He tried to kill his father.
He couldn't bear to actually kill his father, so he threw him in the dungeon, had him tied to the wall or chained to the wall.
had him starve to death not bringing any food to him the story goes that Bimbisara was Bimbisara was his father was so happy because his jail cell he was able to see the monastery where the Buddha lived and so he was able to
And he was able to survive for quite some time.
That's a long story.
He would, in jail, he would do walking meditation.
And I can't remember, he was so happy that he wasn't even concerned about being in prison.
Eventually he chained him to the wall.
And the queen brought food in secretly, and eventually he refused to allow the queen to see the king.
Eventually, King Bimbisara died.
I'll make a long story short.
But that's not this story.
This story is about Ajatasattu after he killed the king.
He became quite an imperialist or a colonialist, trying to take over the rest of the world.
and he fought with the king of Kosala, who I guess was Pasenadi.
And it says he was his uncle, so I'm not really sure where the connection is, but he fought with his uncle, and he kept beating his uncle.
And Pasenadi, or Kosala, the king of Kosala was so upset by being beaten by Ajatasattu,
That he refused to eat and he became very ill and very weak.
And he was just tormented lying on his bed.
It's actually quite a short story.
But there's much background to it.
The background of this prince killing his father, of Devadatta trying to kill the Buddha.
of Bimbisara and his greatness at the moment of death.
Ajatasattu tried to actually stop his father from starving to death.
At the last moment, he went to see his father, but he was too late.
His father had died.
But the essence of this is about victory and defeat.
What are the results of our perspective on the world?
A person who strives constantly to
to defeat and to beat others.
So on the surface it appears to just be a good religious advice telling people not to fight with each other.
When you fight, it's what we tell kids, when you fight you end up hurting others, it's not very nice, and you end up breeding enmity and vengeance and so on.
But there's a deeper lesson here.
And the lesson for us as meditators is that this perspective is one that leads to suffering.
dukhaṃ si-diprajito
Buddhism is very much about our perspective.
The Buddha used the word ditti a lot when we talk about our views.
It really refers to the way we look at the world, the way we approach experience, the way we approach our experience.
And it's similar to people who have ambition, like Ajatasattu had ambition, Devadatta had ambition.
even simply approaching reality as problems that we have to fix.
People who fall into this game of vengeance, of victory and defeat, have a sense of what they call a zero-sum, I think it's a zero-sum game, is what it's called.
It means that
In order for me to benefit, someone else has to suffer.
And so in the end it equals out to zero.
It's like the law of thermodynamics or something.
In order to find happiness, it has to be at the expense of someone else.
And so on the face of it, it seems practically or conventionally sort of a terrible outlook.
And yet it is a sort of a conventional outlook that people have, thieves and warlords.
But also ordinary people have a sense of trying to find happiness through manipulating others, through harming others, through defeating others.
It's something we fall into quite easily when making enemies.
We identify people who are in our way.
But it's a deeper psychological issue.
It's our outlook.
And these actions affect our outlook and they spring from our outlook.
Our outlook is a much more basic sense of trying to fix things, trying to force, trying to bring about resolution by sheer force of
Our disliking of the situation doesn't have to be a person, though people, other human beings become galvanizing icons of hatred.
If you stub your toe, you might get angry at the table, but if someone hits you, you can develop a grudge for a lifetime.
If someone says bad things, it becomes galvanizing, very strengthening.
focal point for hatred but ultimately it's the same the same habit we don't like something and so we fall into this habit of reacting trying to get rid of what it is that we don't like change what it is that we don't like force the bad circumstance the bad conditions to become good
And so it leads directly to our understanding of the practice of mindfulness as an antidote for this sort of behavior.
And sort of as an alternative, it shows quite clearly how mindfulness is different.
Mindfulness is not like fixing problems.
It's certainly not like achieving goals.
And it's absolutely not like forcing or controlling reality or other people, especially, to try and be the way we want.
Mindfulness is about experiencing things as they are.
We talk about this and we explain mindfulness as just being aware of things as they are.
But this sort of verse, this sort of teaching, this sort of example of the story of a Jata Sattu or any story of people holding a grudge and fighting and even killing each other over their desire for some beneficial outcome.
This kind of story shows how different it is to be mindful and it shows the contrast with what we're doing.
The contrast would lead to when someone tries to harm you,
to change your perception of the situation from trying to defend yourself and trying to keep yourself from experiencing suffering to being able to see the experience as just an experience and let it happen and let it go.
which is a very radical sort of approach.
It shows how different this approach is from ordinary way of living.
But the difference is quite apparent, quite profound as well, the difference in result.
A person who engages frequently, regularly in hatred, of course, is going to find suffering.
They're going to cultivate enemies and enmity.
And they're going to suffer defeat and they're going to lead to situations where people want to hurt them, want to manipulate and take advantage of them.
And so you see at a very deep level, this sort of approach, this perspective of trying to force, trying to conquer
it has very real results.
This isn't a very, this should be quite obvious that this is the way things are.
When we try to hurt others, it's unsustainable in terms of providing peace and happiness.
Not only does it create enmity, but it changes who you are.
And so, really it's this,
The teaching is that there are two levels to reality.
There's the conventional level and then there's, I guess you could call the psychological level.
And they work off of each other.
So when we act and speak trying to harm others,
It affects us psychologically.
Our psychological makeup, how we relate to experience, how we perceive reality, is going to inform our decisions.
It's going to affect the way we relate to other people, the way we relate to problems and situations in our lives.
So when you take on a philosophy of non-harming that this verse sort of suggests,
of not trying to conquer others, of not seeing situations as something to be conquered, as a zero sum game.
Because of course the reality is not anything like where you defeat others and suddenly you're on top, you've won something.
The reality is that it's a constant changing sort of flux where by sometimes you're winning and sometimes you're losing.
And enmity breeds enmity.
When you hurt others, you make them want to hurt you.
So it's not a zero sum game.
It's an everybody loses sort of game.
When you hurt others, you make others want to hurt you.
And all of this affects our psychology.
It affects our makeup.
When you cease to do that, when you stop wanting to hurt others, when you allow other people their anger against you and you experience the results of
bad blood without reacting.
And this affects your psychology, it affects your mental makeup.
It's a very sort of good practical teaching in terms of the direction we want to be heading of trying to be more peaceful, happier, free from suffering.
But from the other end as well, when we hear about this, when we look at this teaching, abandoning victory and defeat, hitvā jaya parājayam,
we see the deeper teaching of being mindful.
And when you yourself approach reality in terms of experiences to be understood rather than problems to be fixed or challenges to be overcome or whatever, enemies to be conquered, absolutely.
Pain being an enemy.
Even our defilements as being enemies is really
problematic way of looking at them.
If you look at anger as an enemy or greed as an enemy, it takes on an adversarial sort of state of being and there's stress involved and you cultivate this habit of trying to control and force and change reality.
But when you take up mindfulness,
It's no longer just about our actions and our speech, but our whole approach to reality, that pain is not an enemy.
Speech, harsh speech from other people is not something to be conquered, not something to be fought against.
I don't deserve to hear that.
I don't deserve to be spoken to that way.
Instead, experiencing it as sound, experiencing it as sight.
Seeing reality as made up of experiences.
This is what it truly means, I think, to give up victory and defeat, because your whole way of looking at reality is no longer adversarial.
You rise above, I might say, or you change the
the perspective.
There's an old saying, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And it points out something, what it means is when your outlook is adversarial, you're constantly going to be trying to, you're going to react in a certain way.
And it points out a very important reality that the world around us
Our environment, our experience of the world is very much dependent on our outlook.
And so, I mean, an argument against this sort of passivity whereby you let other people harm you, for example, as it may happen.
Where you are not only non-violent but you're passive.
You're not only peaceful but you're passive.
The criticism might be that you're going to allow people to hurt you.
You're going to be taken advantage of, for example.
And so they would say, well, if you look at it this way, it's not a very good way to live.
But the point is that there's a deeper reality going on here.
You're changing the way you look at things.
A person who is harmed when someone attacks someone else or speaks violently, speaks angrily to someone else,
The reality is still just experience.
Another way of looking at this is rather than an adversarial situation, looking at it as experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking.
If you can see it like that, it doesn't change the situation where suddenly people are nice to you.
It changes the perspective and reality is suddenly
objective, meaning it doesn't matter whether you're being hugged or you're being attacked.
It's a very radical, again, sort of outlook.
And I think this exemplifies, or this shows us clearly
how radical it is to be mindful and the extent to which mindfulness changes our lives.
It doesn't necessarily change our situation, so it can be quite uncomfortable at first.
We don't have to even talk about other people who might want to hurt us, but our own body wants to hurt us.
Because of our reactions and our emotions, we make the body quite sick and we can be quite tense.
When you first come to practice meditation, it can be quite painful.
Your own body can cause you great suffering.
And if you look at that as an adversarial sort of thing, something to be fixed, something to be fought against, something to be controlled or tamed,
You're just going to create more stress and suffering.
You have a never-ending torment.
It can be quite painful and quite unpleasant.
So our way of looking at things when we're mindful is quite simple.
It's not at all easy, but it's quite simple.
It's about seeing things just as they are.
This is why we repeat to ourselves, for example, pain, pain.
If you're happy, you would say happy, happy.
Just trying to see things as they are without reacting.
Trying to cultivate a new perspective, a new way of looking at things.
that is not adversarial not about conquering reality or lives or winning or anything achieving any goal but it's about cultivating a perspective of objectivity of peace that rises above experiences of victory or defeat
So someone might look at you and say, wow, that person is a real pushover.
They're being defeated.
And you won't even see it that way.
In the end, you see it only as experience.
It's quite powerful because, I mean, the practical reality is someone who is mindful is often quite revered, respected.
You'll find that people respect your opinion.
They lose their desire to harm you.
a person who is very mindful often finds that people who they thought were their enemies are suddenly able to come to terms and work towards a more peaceful resolution because the person has changed the parameters.
A lot of our
adversarial conflict, a lot of our conflict as humans depends on both sides continuing and perpetuating it.
Our anger perpetuates conflict.
Our reactivity perpetuates it.
So it's not something that you should be scared of or
perhaps not see it as so radical, because it's not as though you have to suddenly let people
harm you.
It's about changing the way we look at reality, changing our perspective, which also of course means changing our lives and gradually, gradually you come to live a more peaceful life where you work out all your problems.
You start to look at your enemies as just people who have problems and your interactions with them rather than as fights to be won, their experiences to be understood.
You rise above, you abandon victory and defeat.
That's the verse here.
So that's the Dhammapada, a very simple verse, but I think it ties in well with the understanding of what is mindfulness.
So that's, I think, the lesson we take from it.
Thank you all for listening.
Have a good night.