Okay, welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we are looking at verses 188 to 192, which read as follows.
bahumve sarnanyanti pabhatani vananica ara marukha cetiani manusa bayatajita
netankho saranam kemang netang saranam uttamang netang saranam magamma sambha dukhapam ucyate yocha buddhancha dhammancha sanghancha saranangato chatthari arya saccani samma pannaya pasyate
So it's a lot, five verses all together.
There's not a lot in there.
It's a simple, straightforward, but quite powerful teaching, I think.
So this teaching is in regards to refuges.
The translation is as follows.
Many go, indeed, for refuge.
To mountains and to forests.
to ashrams, to trees, to jeityas.
A jeitya is a shrine, I guess.
Nowadays we use it to mean this statue or large marker in Buddhism, a jeitya or a pagoda.
People go to these places for refuge when they are terrified by fear.
This is not a safe refuge.
This is not the highest refuge.
Not an ultimate refuge.
Going to such a refuge, such a place for refuge, one doesn't free oneself completely from all suffering.
But who goes for refuge to the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha sees the Four Noble Truths with right wisdom.
or rightly with wisdom.
Dukhang dukhasamupadang dukhasaccaatikamang Suffering, the arising of suffering, the cessation of suffering, aryangcatangikamagang, and the eightfold noble path, tukupasamagaminang,
The Eightfold Noble Path which leads to the tranquilizing of suffering or the cessation of suffering.
This indeed is the safe refuge.
This is a refuge in the ultimate sense.
Having gone to such a refuge, one frees oneself from all suffering.
These verses were taught in regards to Agidatta, an ascetic.
But his story goes that in the time before the Buddha, he was the minister or advisor to the king of the Kosala country.
When the king died, he became advisor to King Pasenadi Kosala, who was the king of Kosala in the time of the Buddha.
Kosala was one of the kingdoms in that time.
And the story goes that Pasenadi was very good to this Agidatta out of reverence for his father and reverence for him as his father's advisor.
He took him as his own advisor, but held him up as an equal to himself.
So normally when a king would sit higher than everyone else, he would sit with Agidatta.
He would have Agidatta sit equal to him and treat him with great respect as his advisor.
Aghidatta thought to himself something that's a little bit interesting because even though Pasenadi was treating him very well, he thought to himself, well kings are unpredictable and today he's treating me well but who knows what the future will bring.
Maybe one day he'll have a whim and he'll decide he no longer has need for me.
I think there's some underlying context here because Pasenadi was not an enlightened being by any means.
He had a lot of his own attachments and partialities and so on and he appears to have been a little bit of a rough sort of character.
And so I imagine some of the things he saw Pisanity doing, killing and beheading and going to war and the greed and so on, the whim.
Pisanity was a good person, I think, in some ways, but he wasn't a great person.
And so, Aghidatta probably seeing this thought to himself, he realized, and I think even deeper, on a deeper level, well, there's a teaching here, and it's this
realization that there's a lot of suffering involved and potential to living in lay life, living in any situation where you have to put up with the whims of others.
When you have a boss, when you have a master, when you have even just
fellows in life competition and relationships and society.
All the many people we have to meet with in society are some good, some bad, but there's many challenges and potential for great suffering.
And so he probably started to realize all of this, that this life as a minister was
not all that was cracked up to be.
There was still something missing and there was still this insecurity.
He would have seen all of the suffering that comes to the people who commit bad deeds or people who were victims of others' bad deeds.
He would have seen how the king sometimes made mistakes or followed his own partiality and did bad deeds.
And he would have started, he seemed to have started to realize that
life in this sphere is not safe.
There's always the potential for suffering, for someone to harm me or to
manipulate me in various ways.
So he decided that this was no longer the life for him and he asked permission to leave the kingdom.
And he ended up shaving off his hair and beard and putting on a robe or some such thing and not becoming a Buddhist monk but going off and becoming an ascetic.
And they say he took a whole bunch of people with him and ended up being a fairly well established teacher.
Not as an advisor to the king, but as a teacher to people who were also interested in leaving the household life.
And the way he would instruct people
based on this sort of wisdom that he had gained, which I think is perfectly valid and valuable.
This wisdom that living in society, living amongst people is fraught with danger.
You're always subject to their whims and proclivities and their defilements, your defilements, and the conflicting of defilements, the conflicting of unwholesome mind states.
If I want something and you want something, we fight over it.
If I'm
prone to anger and you're prone to anger we will fight and so on.
So based on this, he taught his students to leave society.
He said, true refuge is on the mountains.
It's in the forest.
It's under the trees and so on and so on.
It's in these lonely places.
Leave behind people.
Leave behind society.
And you'll find refuge at the top of a mountain or deep in the jungle.
And he taught his students one other thing that's sort of incidental to the story that he said anytime when you're living alone you give rise to some unwholesome action or speech or thought
take a jar and go down to the river and scoop some sand into the jar and bring it and dump it right in this one place.
And they designated a place where they would all come and bring this sand and they would have a pot full of sand for every time they did something wrong.
It was kind of something, some cultural, some teaching method of his to help people to...
recognize and admit their failings and their faults, which I think is also quite wholesome.
And eventually, as these people were off in the forest, and I guess he didn't have anything much more profound than that to teach them, well, absolutely they were going to still give rise to unwholesomeness.
And so this sand pile started to accumulate and it got bigger and bigger until eventually it became a shrine.
It became a very special place and people would come and worship it.
And the story goes that there was a dragon living there, some kind of a snake king, like in one of our previous stories, decided to live there and was living in this sand pile.
And then comes along the Buddha.
So this is the introduction to the story.
This ascetic, teacher of ascetics, was off living on his own, preaching about the refuge of the solitary places.
And so the Buddha sent Moggallana.
And he said to Moggallana, go and teach this guy what's wrong with what he's saying.
And Moggallana went and the story goes that he ended up, well he asked for permission to stay with these guys.
He was going to spend some time there and maybe question them about their views and tell them about his own views and so on.
But they wouldn't let him stay.
This Aghidatta said, there's no room for you.
I don't know if he was afraid or
Just didn't like Buddhism or something.
Didn't like these ascetics, these disciples of the ascetic Gautama.
But they wouldn't let him stay.
And he said, well, what about that sand pile?
Can I stay on that sand pile?
And he said, oh, no, there's a great naga, a dragon living there.
And he said, oh, that's fine.
I'll go and stay with him.
And he said, oh, that dragon is very temperamental.
He'll surely kill you.
And Moggallana had magical powers.
So in the morning anyway, that part of the story is really inconsequential to our teaching.
This is the fantastical part that I fully am willing to accept that many people will not believe that part.
Absolutely optional.
You don't have to concern yourself with that.
But the story goes that Moggallana went and subdued the dragon and then in the morning he was sitting and they came to the sandpile thinking, I wonder if he's still alive or if the dragon killed him.
But he was sitting on top of the sandpile and the dragon was, the snake was, extended its hood like a cobra over Moggallana.
And then that day the Buddha came and Moggallana got down and the Buddha went up and sat on the sand pile and he talked to Aghidatta.
Aghidatta came and talked to him.
He talked to Aghidatta and said, what is it you teach?
And Aghidatta told him, I teach this.
This is what I teach my students.
So barring the whole dragon part, it's a simple story of a monk, an ascetic off in the forest, teaching his students to find true refuge in solitude.
Quite simple.
The Buddha said that's not true solitude.
That's not true refuge.
It's not safe.
You're telling these people they're going to be safe from defilements.
They bring all their defilements with them.
And so he taught these verses.
So from the story, I think one important lesson we can gather is what Agitata got right.
And that is the nature of the household life and how powerful it is to leave behind the household life.
You give up so much, you give up
a lot of wealth and pleasure and ease and comfort.
But you gain a great amount of safety and security.
Not real and true safety and security.
We'll get to why, obviously.
That should be fairly obvious why this guy had the wrong idea.
there is a certain amount of safety and security that comes because there's no thieves, there's no murderers, there's no temptations, there's no addictions, right?
If you live off in the forest, maybe these guys were living off of fruits and nuts and leaves, whatever they could gather in the forest.
So they're living a very simple life.
Probably they had simple robes.
Some of them even more just tree bark.
They had special, they had from certain trees, you could get this sort of soft cloth from the tree bark.
Like you just cut the tree bark off and wear it, something like that.
Maybe they would go naked even.
And these were all very simple ways of living.
It was a way of answering this question of how you escape, how you find security when it seems like anywhere you go in society, any path that you pick is fraught with danger and uncertainty.
The falling prey and being a victim
of the whims of other people and of society in general.
So this is an important teaching.
It's an important thing to realize that there are ways and there are alternatives and there is a way of living, a choice we can make to live our life more simply and there's a great security that comes from that.
But the verse teaching is, I suppose, more core and more important.
It's the difference between finding safety, security, peace, happiness in physical things, in your physical location.
People come to our meditation center sometimes thinking that they're going to be able to leave behind all of their problems.
Quite often, to be honest, people will come and think that meditation should be quite peaceful and comfortable and pleasant.
They should be able to leave behind all the suffering of life.
People become monks for the same reason.
I often get requests from people to give information.
They want help with becoming a monk and I tend to dismiss it because too often we see people who are focused on becoming a monk
have the wrong attitude, their inclination is to run away and they end up complaining and suffering and not being able to fit in or live or become comfortable as a monk because
they're unable to face the suffering and the problems that exist inside.
And that's the point, is you come here to a meditation center to face your problems, not to leave them behind.
You become a monk to face life, to face your problems.
So going to the mountains or to the forests or to a tree or anywhere and thinking that you're going to find safety there is ridiculous.
In fact, in a deep sense, it's the opposite of what's going to happen.
A person who goes off into the forest without any guidance is going to have a large pile of sand, if that's the thing.
They're going to have done a lot of bad deeds of action, speech and thought.
There's nothing to temper them.
They might even go crazy because they have to face themselves.
When you go off into the forest, off into the mountain,
The first part of what I said is true.
You gain some security from the outside.
And what's great about it, and why the Buddha recommended it, certainly, as a part of the practice, is because it gives you the opportunity to face your demons.
You can't face them in society.
You're constantly bombarded by other people.
You're forced to engage with and to get involved with their problems and their situations.
So facing your
own demons is very difficult when you're living in society.
And that's the reason why one should leave.
Not because one wants to run away, but because one wants to do good work, hard work, the hardest work perhaps.
And that's the work of purifying your own mind, fighting your own demons.
Fighting your demon, not running away from it.
And so that's why the Buddha said, these things are not a refuge.
You can't take refuge in these things and hope to these places and hope to be safe.
The true refuge is the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha.
And particularly the Four Noble Truths, as you notice, that's what the Buddha talked about.
Here he doesn't just talk about, doesn't just mention the three refuges, the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha.
He specifically brings out the Four Noble Truths, which I think is important and worth commenting on.
But the second part is the teaching that the three refuges, the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, are truly safe and ultimate refuge.
The Buddha is a refuge.
The Buddha is a refuge in a physical sense, on a superficial level, because living with the Buddha is a great support for your practice.
If any of us had the opportunity to be with the Buddha and were open to it and
had the great capacity in our hearts to listen to the Buddha's teaching, then it would be a great support.
It would be a great refuge to have the honor and the opportunity to hear the Buddha's teaching and to follow his teaching directly.
It would be a great refuge.
That's not, of course, in the deeper sense.
Taking refuge in the Buddha is a psychological thing.
It's a mental thing.
When you say to yourself, I will follow the teachings of the Buddha, when someone goes to the Buddha and
accepts, puts themselves in the position of a student, lowers himself and puts the Buddha up, you are my teacher, and makes a promise or an intention to do what the Buddha tells them to do, to follow his teachings, to practice accordingly.
That's what it means to take refuge in the Buddha.
It doesn't mean you have to vow your life to the Buddha and convert to Buddhism.
That's not what I'm saying.
It's the sort of thing we do when a person comes to do a meditation course here in a traditional setting.
Here we haven't started doing it, but I've thought about making it optional.
We would do a traditional opening ceremony where one would take the refuges and the precepts.
More importantly, one would ask for the meditation practice, please teach me, and would say, I give myself over to the Buddha.
For the duration of this course, I give myself over.
I'm no longer going to follow my own whims.
I'm no longer going to be in charge.
I'm not going to have any say.
I'm going to listen, follow, and practice whatever you tell me to do.
Putting yourself in that position is a part of what it means to take refuge.
You really wholeheartedly say, I go to the Buddha.
I'm putting myself under their care, under their protection.
The Dhamma is the refuge, of course, is the
The most central part of the Buddhist teaching is that the practice itself.
We practice the Dhamma in order to realize the Dhamma.
This is the most central refuge.
How is the Dhamma the refuge?
Because this is what truly leads to safety.
It's a safety in the path, in the practice, and it's a safety in the result.
The safety in the practice is you start, you are kept in a
a fortress, sort of.
You are kept safe, safe from your own defilements, from your own unwholesome thoughts.
When you give rise to anger and you're mindful, it's able to cut off and prevent you from shouting or hurting other people with speech or action.
It's even capable of preventing anger from arising or greed from arising or arrogance, conceit, or all these things from arising.
If you're
skilled and capable of being mindful in the present moment and you're able to cut it off and you know when you have pain for example and you say to yourself pain pain there's no reaction to it no anger need to arise when you see something you like or feel something pleasant there's a feeling feeling or seeing seeing or whatever it might be
And you don't give rise to the unwholesomeness.
So the Dhamma, the practice of it is a great refuge.
And what it leads to, the wisdom that it leads to, the Buddha said, when you see with wisdom, is the ultimate refuge, is the highest and most supreme refuge.
That's the freedom from suffering.
Because what happens as you start to see things clearly and are more objective is you start to let go.
You start to see the difference between clinging to things which leads to suffering and objective, equanimous observation which keeps you free from suffering.
And you see that more clearly and more clearly until finally your mind lets go.
There's a realization.
Nothing's worth clinging to.
And you let go.
The Sangha as the refuge is, I think, underappreciated.
The Sangha is an important refuge.
It's an important one of these three.
It's most important for us, but even in the time of the Buddha, the Buddha was constantly reminding his students about the importance of the Sangha.
Because it's the Sangha that
carries out and protects and supports the Buddhist teaching, supports the practice.
It doesn't even have to be the Buddhist teaching, just the practice of goodness.
Sangha means community.
It's the community of people who have practiced rightly, who are able to help others practice, who are practicing together as a support, as a model, as an example for others.
And those who provide advice and encouragement.
And those who simply remember the Buddhist teaching and pass them on and protect them.
Those who keep the Buddhist teaching, writing them down and memorizing them and chanting them and teaching them and so on.
All of this is the Sangha and it's a great refuge.
It's a refuge because of the teachings that we get.
Just the information alone, all of the books that we have on the Buddha's teaching, it's all because of the Sangha.
And so the Sangha is providing this to us, their support, their protection, keeping us in the realm of right view by giving us teachings that teach right view, how to see things in the right way.
it's a great support I think more more deeply there's also the idea of the teacher so we don't call it I don't call myself a teacher anything but a person who gives teaching is someone we should take refuge in and so we during the meditation course we put ourselves in there
in their protection as well.
So we say, I give myself over to you, I will follow the things you say, that sort of thing.
And by doing that, that's a great protection for us.
It gives a certain sincerity and wholeheartedness and freedom from fear or doubt or worry.
Just having someone, you know, the great difference between practicing on your own at home, trying to decide for yourself what is the correct way to practice, and having someone who will guide you, lead you.
It's night and day, really.
Anyone who's done these courses, sometimes it seems magical how easy it is when you have a teacher, how much easier it is, and how much more powerful and how much further you can go when you have someone guiding you.
So taking that as our refuge, just coming to do a meditation course or finding a teacher somewhere is a great refuge.
If they're teaching, if they're actually the Sangha and they're teaching the Buddhist teaching.
The last part of the verse, or the last point in the set of verses is the Four Noble Truths.
It's said that the Buddha tried always to include the Four Noble Truths in his teaching because it's the core message.
It's the essence of what the Buddha taught and if you miss that, you haven't actually taught the Buddha's teaching.
If you teach something off to the side,
That's not touching upon at least in some way the Four Noble Truths.
You haven't actually gotten to the point.
You've missed that which will lead people to freedom from suffering because that's what the Four Noble Truths are.
But in another sense, the Four Noble Truths are a refuge.
The Buddha doesn't say that exactly.
But as the core of the Dhamma, it's clear that they are a refuge.
Suffering is a refuge.
Suffering as a teaching is a refuge.
Suffering is not a refuge.
But the understanding of suffering is the greatest refuge.
When you see what it is that causes you suffering, when you see what it is that is going to hurt you if you cling to it,
then of course that's the greatest refuge because then you don't cling to it.
So this is the idea in Buddhism of why we suffer is because we cling to things.
The second noble truth, the cause of suffering is craving or clinging.
And so when you start to see that these things that we cling to are suffering, are stressful, when you see that our trying to control things, when you see that our stressing out over things or getting angry about things or clinging to things or needing things,
When you see that that is suffering, you let go of it.
You stop.
You no longer engage in those activities.
Why?
Because they cause you suffering.
So the first noble truth, just understanding suffering, is a great refuge.
The second noble truth is a refuge when it's abandoned.
Abandoning, craving, of course, means no suffering.
It's what comes from seeing the first noble truth clearly.
The third noble truth is nibbana, freedom from suffering.
So it is the highest refuge.
And the fourth noble truth is the path.
So again, getting back to practice as a refuge.
Just having a path of practice is a huge safety.
Again, as I said, it's like having a fortress.
So the path which leads to cessation from suffering is the ultimate practical refuge because not only it leads to nibbana, but because it protects us.
It's a way of life.
It's a way of being that is simple, pure, and perfect.
If you can put it into practice.
So that's the Dhammapada for today.
Really a reminder that the greatest refuge is our practice and our commitment to
I guess the organization in a sense.
The organization or whatever word you want to use, religion maybe, that includes the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha.
But it includes them as a program by which we practice to free ourselves from suffering.
There's no great refuge that comes from being here or being there or having this or having that.
Even just being at a meditation center or becoming a monk is not a true refuge.
Refuge has to be deeper.
True refuge, true safety.
Another place the Buddha said it's the four foundations of mindfulness.
So in the Eightfold Noble Path, the path that leads to freedom from suffering, we have the four foundations of mindfulness, sort of as the practical aspect there, what you engage in in a practical sense when you cultivate meditation.
When you're doing walking or sitting, you're cultivating the four foundations of mindfulness and all the other parts of the Eightfold Noble Path.
But it means you make yourself a refuge.
The Buddha said, one should be one's own protector or refuge.
And the way you do that is through your practice.
So, another good teaching, very core teaching in the Buddha's
Dhamma so that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for listening