Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 124, which reads as follows.
Which means...
If one should not have a wound, if there should not be a wound on the hand, a cut on the hand, one can pick up, one could or might pick up poison with the hand.
For poison doesn't enter
It doesn't harm one without a cut, one without a wound.
And likewise, evil, there is no evil for one who does not do it.
For one who does not perform it, there is no evil.
So this is actually an important verse.
It's kind of unique in answering this question, a certain question.
And so a little bit of backstory.
It's a fairly well-known story of the hunter Kukuttamitta.
But the story is more about his wife.
Or it's about the two of them.
So it starts with his wife.
His wife it seems became a Sotapanna when she was very young so she must have maybe listened to what the Buddha had said or maybe even practiced meditation based on what another monk had taught but it was in Rajgaha she lived and kind of like
Like Kesa, Kuntala Kesi, this woman who became an ascetic and then a Buddhist monk.
When she was young, they kept her up on the seventh floor of this kind of palace to try and keep her away from men.
If you remember the story of Kundalakesi, how she snuck out while this woman, the wife of Kutamita, did the same thing.
But how it happened here is that she...
She looked at a window one day and saw a hunter, Kukutamita, coming into the city to sell his deer.
He killed deer.
So he brought 500, probably not 500, but many
many, many, many, many deer and put them in a cart and brought them into the city to sell or cut them up and was selling their flesh.
And when she saw him, she fell in love with him, kind of love at first sight kind of thing.
And so she snuck out with the servants by dressing herself in rags and dirtying her face and so on.
and followed after the hunter as he left the city.
Now he tried to get her to go away and she wouldn't go away until finally he realized what she was after and so he picked her up and put her in his cart and carried her on his way and they lived together from that time on.
Her mother and father, when they found that she was missing, they looked for her everywhere, couldn't find her and thought that she was dead.
And they had a funeral ceremony for her and everything.
But meanwhile, she's living in the forest with this hunter and over time had seven sons.
And these seven sons got married and lived with seven women.
And so altogether, there were 16 of them.
This is the story.
And this is the back story.
So we come to the present time where the Buddha, which he was wont to do in the morning, they say when the Buddha lay down to sleep, he would spend his time, he would lie down during the night to rest and he would send his mind out to the universe trying to decide who he would teach that thing.
Who was ready?
Was it maybe someone in the village that he was in, or maybe it was someone far away, or maybe it was even the angels up in heaven, in one of the heavens.
And when he decided, when he came upon someone who seemed ready, he would find a way to get to them.
And so on this day, he saw these 16 people,
And he considered that all of them, first of all, he knew that the wife was already a sotapanna, but he knew the rest of them would benefit if he were to go to them.
And so he walked through the forest and came upon the nets.
And it happened on that day that the hunter didn't catch anything.
So maybe it's somehow karmic or somehow related to the Buddha.
But at any rate, all of his nets were empty, all of his nets and his snares.
And whereas normally he would always catch a deer, on this day he didn't catch anything.
And so the Buddha went to one of the nets and stepped
stepped into the net with his foot, leaving a footprint that the hunter would see, leaving tracks.
He left footprints by the net.
And so the hunter came by to check on his nets.
He came to see what he had caught, found that he hadn't caught anything and started getting more and more annoyed.
Till finally he came upon the net with the footprints.
And he thought to himself, someone's been freeing these deer.
Someone's been setting the deer free, has been maybe robbing me of my game.
And so he went and he followed the tracks and he came upon the Buddha.
And here's the story gets a little bit supernatural.
And I don't want to really be too hard on these stories because I don't know.
I mean, magical things could happen.
But I know it's hard for a modern audience because we don't have these kind of magical powers now.
And many people are skeptical that anyone ever did have these magical powers.
So here's how it goes down.
he sees the Buddha and he and all of his sons draw their bows and are ready to shoot the Buddha that part is in the story and that part we don't have to get into the magic for that his wife sees them with their bows drawn pointed at the Buddha and cries out at them
Don't kill my father, she says.
Don't kill my father.
What are you doing?
You're going to kill my father.
Please don't.
And they were shocked and they all
completely sobered up and well were in shock because they didn't know who her father was obviously because she had lost connection with her family but here this was her father her father was a monk of course that wasn't the case but this is how Buddhists would look enlightened Buddhists from Sotapanna on up will look at the Buddha as being their father and so they were all ashamed and they were
put their bows down went and paid respect to him this is my father-in-law this is your grandfather and so on and they were all friendly towards him so you see I didn't have to get into any supernatural any magic now what the story says is he came and he drew his bow and the Buddha made him unable to shoot so he froze him in place and then all the seven sons came slowly and they held up their bows and they likewise were frozen became frozen in place
And they stayed like that for a while actually.
The Buddha had them frozen in place.
And the wife was wondering where they'd been and where they went, what happened to them, why they weren't back for lunch maybe.
And so she went out and found where they were.
The Buddha was just meditating there.
And they're all frozen in place.
And then she cried out.
Do not kill my father.
So you take which version you prefer.
I don't mind.
And so they sat down and they asked forgiveness from the Buddha and they listened to his teaching.
And upon listening to his teaching, all of the other 15, they called the daughters, the seven daughter-in-laws as well,
And altogether, all 15 of them became Sotapanna.
So along with the wife that made 16 of them, we're now enlightened beings, or Sotapanna.
And he went back to the Buddha, after preaching he went back to the monastery and Ananda saw him and Ananda asked him, where have you been?
And the Buddha told him what he had done and he said, oh did they become, did they all become Sotapanna?
And he said, well they all did except for his wife because she had been a Sotapanna since she was a girl.
And wow, so Ananda was impressed and whatever.
But the monks got wind of this because, you see, the curious thing there is, as they were talking about it, they thought, well, that's understandable.
I mean, Angulimala became an Arahant, so hunters can become Sotapanna.
But the problem here, and it's a problem that the monks had when they were discussing it is,
She was a Sotapanna from a girl, so what the heck was she doing with a hunter?
Because a Sotapanna is incapable of killing, intentionally.
Really, a Sotapanna shouldn't be able to perform any significantly immoral act, like killing or stealing or cheating or lying.
Even drugs and alcohol they wouldn't get involved in.
And so they said, you know, what the heck's going on here?
How could she have been a sotapanna when she's cleaning his traps and his arrows and preparing them for him and putting out his bow and arrows and doing all these things that ostensibly she would have to do as a hunter's wife, maybe even cleaning carcasses and so on, you know, cooking the meat that he had killed, even eating the meat that he had killed.
Certainly eating it, right?
And when he says, bring me my bow, bring me my arrows, bring me my hunting knife, bring me my net, she would obey him.
And then using that he would go and take life.
So how could she do that if she was a Sotapanna?
And here was the Buddha's reply.
Monks, of course, those that have obtained Sotapanna do not take life.
Kukuta Mita's wife did what she did because she was actuated by the thought, I will obey the commands of my husband.
It was a thing in India.
It never occurred to her to think, he will take what I give him and go hence and take life.
Never occurred to her to think that.
Well, I mean, I suppose that's maybe stretching it.
Maybe the translation's a bit off.
But she didn't think.
That wasn't the thought that she had.
She didn't think about him taking life.
If a man's hand be free from wounds, even though he take poison into his hand, yet the poison will not harm him.
Precisely so, a man who harbors no thoughts of wrong and who commits no evil may take down bows and other similar objects and present them to another and yet be guiltless of sin."
And then he gave this, he taught this verse.
And I think this is quite controversial.
This leads into the controversy that we often face about how Buddhists can eat meat.
Some Buddhists, us Buddhists, my tradition.
How can you eat meat?
How can you be so hypocritical when you say killing is wrong and yet eating meat is okay?
And it's this verse that really drives that teaching home.
Because ethics in Buddhism is quite different from ethics as we think of it.
And so this kind of confusion and criticism comes quite often as a result because people have ordinary ideas of ethics.
Something is wrong because it hurts someone else.
But since you can't know what is going to hurt someone else, it makes many things potentially wrong.
You can't then easily draw a line in the sand.
I don't know what consequences my actions are going to have.
And then you might argue that based on this there's a greater likelihood or so on, but you see you can't draw a line in the sand, which points to how problematic that kind of ethics is, but it still misses the point that our ethics are categorically different.
Our ethics don't involve the consequences to others.
Ethics are solely how they affect you.
So if I hurt you, that's unethical from a Buddhist point of view because of the damage it does to my mind.
The damage it does to your face is not really
not directly involved in the equation.
Now if you get angry because I hit you, then that in and of itself is unethical of you.
So if you are sad and are hurt and suffer because of what I did to you,
then that is unethical.
Your suffering is unethical because you're hurting yourself.
So it's very much self-centered, and that's another criticism that Buddhism faces.
But it's funny how
we really get a lot of hard criticism like this and vegetarians will often get quite upset about Buddhists and there's this divide that we can't bridge because they think they're right in getting upset and we think we think they're wrong we think you're the unethical one you getting angry at me for sitting here chewing something that is dead
is a problem, the anger that you have.
Me sitting here eating something that is dead is not a problem.
I'm just chewing, chewing, chewing, swallowing, and so on.
Our idea of ethics is quite different.
And so if you carry poison in your hand, it only hurts you if you have a cut.
And the same idea is with acts.
So if I shoot a bow
at a tree and it turns out that the tree is you know maybe it's someone dressed up in a tree costume and the person dies or you know maybe there's a person in the tree that I didn't see I'm not guilty there's no crime in that there's no problem on the other hand if I
If I shoot at the tree thinking I see a bird in the tree, and it turns out there was no bird in the tree, I've still done a very, very evil thing.
My intention was evil.
You see, it's still a bad karma because I had a bad intention.
There's an interesting story of the past.
I suppose I shouldn't go into it because it'll take way too much time.
So the key here is understanding ethics.
Someone recently asked me about how it was about monks not being able to act as doctors and the idea that how cruel that would be if you came upon someone who was sick and didn't help them, who was dying and didn't help them.
And this idea of the cruelty and the idea of lacking compassion and so on, it's really looking at things, and this is why people get kind of misled by compassion, because
It's just like in this case of not being able to do anything, being totally paralyzed if you had to really consider the consequences of what you did.
But the same token, if you were required to help anyone anytime you could, then we'd never rest.
We'd collapse in exhaustion because we'd always be capable of helping others.
So the idea that
compassion means helping people when you can or even when you hear about it.
It's something that has to definitely be tempered with wisdom and understanding.
It has to be led by wisdom and understanding.
If it was just about helping when you can, then you'd never end.
And you'd never really help anyone.
You'd never really change the world because there'd always be more people.
There will always be people who need help and furthermore those people who you do help.
There's no saying, there's no telling what's going to happen to them in the future except that really in the end they're going to die anyway.
So, I mean, all of it points to the idea of really having a wisdom-based concept of ethics and morality and goodness and compassion.
Now, definitely you should help people when you have the opportunity.
Now, monks have certain rules and monks are very, you know, have devoted themselves to a path.
But even still, the idea that you have to help people, and there are stories about how you should kill, these dilemmas of how you should kill five people to save one, or if there's a time bomb, you should,
put that one aside but you do a lesser evil to prevent a greater evil but it implies that you are required to do something that it's unethical to do nothing
Or in the case of this story, it's unethical to do anything that's related to evil.
If the consequences of the act are evil, you see.
So the consequences of action or the consequences of omission.
And this isn't how Buddhism looks at it.
Now, if someone is suffering in front of me, now technically I can be at peace with myself without helping them.
I mean this is possible now I would argue that in most cases you would not be at peace with yourself in most cases being at peace with yourself just naturally is helping the person I mean that's I think how compassion works but in certain circumstances where maybe they're being you know someone's attacking someone else right and
The only way to fix the situation would be to maybe harm the first person.
Maybe hit them and so on.
So hurt the other person.
I mean, I don't even know then.
I think even then you could
argue that you should act.
But there is a line, you see.
There is a line which requires defilement, that you wouldn't act.
And
The same, I think, goes for acts.
Like if you were to not do it, it would cause problems.
Doing it is the going with the flow.
So you say, well, her handing him his bow and arrow was enabling him.
Well, that's not how she thought of it.
For her, it was a mindful act.
My husband asked me for something, I get it for him.
I remember when I was, many, many years ago, I was working in a restaurant,
And we had to serve alcohol.
And I was already practicing meditation.
I wasn't a monk yet.
And so I had to carry the alcohol to the people.
And I thought, well, this isn't very ethical.
You know, here I'm enabling them.
But I thought of this verse, actually.
I had read the Dhammapada, and I thought of this verse.
And so I thought, OK, this is what I'm doing.
I'm lifting the bottle, lifting this thing, moving it and placing it.
I'm actually doing a good deed.
I'm serving someone.
I really enjoyed being a waiter.
for the short time that I did it because I was serving people.
It was a kindness really or it was a humbling activity.
And so this is important.
I mean it's important as Buddhists philosophically to understand where we stand and understand why we stand that way.
We stand this way because we're interested in happiness and we're interested in peace.
And because our understanding is that you have to find happiness and peace for yourself.
No one else can do it for you.
No one else can also either make you suffer.
If someone hurts you, it's up to you how you react to that.
So our idea of ethics and morality have very much to do with our state of mind when we do something.
And if you can eat meat without any thoughts of harm, and the Buddha said, you know, you send love and kindness, compassion, send out these thoughts, then you can do that while you're eating meat.
And I know many people don't like this idea.
They think this is horrible.
I've actually had people get angry at me.
There's this divide where they can't understand us.
But why I thought it was funny is because it doesn't really matter.
If you get angry at me and you believe I'm evil and cruel because I won't make medicines for people or because I won't go out of my way to help people or so on, it doesn't really matter.
It's a problem for you because it makes you suffer.
I feel sorry for you and I hope that you can free yourself from that.
But it really fails, you know.
I mean, you can say someone is cruel, but cruelty is a state of mind.
And we have these sort of nebulous ideas of ethics and morality and goodness and compassion and right and wrong that just have much more to do with our partiality.
We don't want to see people suffer.
We get angry and upset when people suffer.
when we hear about these animals that die or we hear about animals that are killed we get arrogant and self-righteous and angry and we think we're in the right and that's why we end up getting burnt out you know activists people who work for social justice often burn out because they are full of emotion and they're full of want and desire for change and it burns you out
And they never look carefully to see that, oh yeah, in the end, the world, the sun is going to explode and burn the earth to a crisp anyway.
In the end, you can't save this earth.
You can't save mankind, humankind.
You can't solve the problems of the world.
There's no logical reason to try.
All you can do is what's right.
Do good.
Do good things.
Better yourself.
Because your mind stays with you.
The only thing that stays with you is your mind.
It's really a very solipsistic sort of viewpoint, but I think that's proper.
It's not that we don't believe other people exist.
It's that they exist in their own world.
We can't change their world.
We can't live their world for them.
And whatever good we can do for them is only as a catalyst.
I think there's room for not supporting hunters, for even telling hunters that it's problematic.
I think there's even room, you could argue, for a husband or a wife to tell their husband or their wife that they disagree with hunting, that they wish for beings to not have to die or something.
I think there's room for being a vegetarian if you like.
I think it's a good thing.
But we have to be very careful when we accuse or when we make claims of what is moral and what is ethical as these monks.
And it has to be based on our understanding, a proper understanding of our own.
So that's the teaching.
How it relates to our meditation practice is this is, I mean meditation is a way that you really understand this.
You understand what the universe is made of, how it works.
And you start to get very logical and rational about things.
You stop freaking out or getting upset and judging acts and people.
Like when you see someone who does, you hear about someone who does evil things or you think of someone or you know someone who does evil things, you don't think of them as an evil person because you know how it goes.
They probably have some very good mind states at times.
And even if they don't, it's still just temporary.
They can always become a better person.
But more clearly, they aren't really a person.
Those states are just states.
It's not an evil person.
It's cause and effect.
It's got reasons and causes.
Where it comes from and it's just states of mind, states of body that arise and cease.
And to us it's just experiences.
This person yelling at me is just sound.
This person hitting me is just a feeling or then pain.
This person stealing my things is just a thought that I have that that's mine and that's a person stealing something that belongs to me.
Meditation is what helps you understand this.
I was a vegetarian up until the time I practiced meditation and then I stopped and even today I'm still not full of vegetarian.
I've always thought it's a good thing.
I understand that meat comes from a bad place usually.
So I like to be vegetarian, but I think that's an important sort of attitude to have, is not be too serious or too obsessed with trying to fix the world, you know, trying to solve all the problems.
I think on the other hand, it's good not to be complacent, and it is good to help.
It's good to speak out.
It's good to say what's right.
It's good to try to help people.
It's good to try to be kind and compassionate.
But it's not about ethics.
It's about really about going with the flow.
And to some, I mean, not quite, but going with not the flow of people necessarily, but with the flow of life, which can be somewhat cause friction and create conflict at times.
But it has more to do with your state of mind, not upsetting the equilibrium in your mind, not upsetting your mind or giving rise to greed, anger or delusion.
That's really all.
Because nothing unethical can come to you except through one of these three things.
Anyway, it's complex, and I think people complicate it.
And I imagine that I'll probably, for this kind of talk, I'll get a lot of people confused and uncertain.
I think that's why it's important to meditate.
I mean, even rather than taking anything I've said or any of these things as solid views or dogma or so on, the most important is that you find out for yourself.
You learn for yourself what is ethical.
Don't believe your gut or your feeling
or what you've been taught, because we have a lot of wrong ideas and wrong habits of understanding.
Try to look at reality, watch how your mind works, learn how your mind works, and come to see for yourself what is a truly ethical act.
So, anyway, that's the Dhammapada teaching for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wish you all good practice.