Okay, welcome everyone to our study of the Dhammapada.
Tonight we'll be continuing with verse number 42, which goes as follows.
Which means,
What an enemy could do to their enemy.
What one enemy could do to another.
Or one who is vengeful towards another.
The ill-directed mind.
Or the mind that is set wrongly.
is of greater evil, does greater evil than that.
So pretty powerful words where the meaning is
What an enemy could do, you know, an enemy or someone who is seeking vengeance, anyone who could ever seek vengeance upon someone else, wreak vengeance upon another person.
The Buddha said, in some pretty strong words, that it's not possible, basically, for them to do as much damage as the ill-directed mind.
It's worth listening to, no?
But first, we have a story.
It's not much of a story.
This story is quite a short one.
The story goes that Anathapindika, this great lay disciple of the Buddha who donated so much and donated Jetavana, this Buddhist monastery for the Buddha, had a cattle herder, the person who looks after his cows.
And this cattle herder, he from time to time would go with Anathapindika to listen to the Buddha teach.
And
He gained great faith in the Buddha and so he invited the Buddha to come to his house to receive charity or receive some kind of gift from him.
He thought that, wow, this is someone worth supporting.
So he decided he wanted to provide some requisites to the Buddha.
And the Buddha, seeing that this guy had some strong good qualities in him and the potential to understand the Dhamma, accepted the invitation and walked all the way to this man's, this cattle herder's house.
And for seven days, as I understand, for seven days he spent, he went every day to receive the five products of a cow.
So he got milk and butter and cheese and so on.
All of these good things that come from the cows.
So he had these cows that he looked after and he was able to provide the Buddha with dairy products.
and the story goes that he offered these to the Buddha seven days in a row and on the seventh day he was taking the Buddha back to he invited the Buddha for seven days and on the seventh day he was going to follow the Buddha back to Jetavana and he carried the Buddha's bowl now they got halfway through the forest on the way back to Savatthi I guess and
Suddenly the Buddha turned around and received his bowl from Nanda.
Nanda was his name, Gopala, the cattle herder.
And he received his bowl from him and said, Nanda, please turn back, don't come any further, we'll go by ourselves.
And the Buddha turned and walked away and Nanda turned around to go home.
And on his way home, some of the monks were coming later.
They had left the house later, I guess, after the Buddha.
And noticed that what happened was Nanda turned around and as he was walking back through the forest, he ran into a hunter.
There was a hunter who saw him going through the forest and thought he was a deer or something and shot him and killed him.
Shot him with a bow and arrow and killed him.
And some of the monks noticed this.
The hunter realized he was wrong and I guess just ran away.
But some of the monks saw this, that he was a guy who had done so much good deeds.
And it's almost as though the Buddha knew what was going to happen.
And it really seems strange.
The reason this story is so well remembered and is actually in the commentaries is because it's a curious story.
Here we have someone that the Buddha spent seven days with.
And it's almost as though the Buddha knew.
And of course, there was this idea going around that the Buddha was omniscient.
So he wouldn't have sent Nanda back if he didn't know what was going to happen.
And yet, he purposefully sent Nanda back, kind of like as though he knew that he was going to get shot by this hunter.
That's just the curious part of this story.
and what leads to this verse.
And so the monks are kind of like, and they heard that the Buddha had sent him back, and they went and they're kind of like, I don't know how to approach this, but you sent Lord Buddha, you sent Nanda back, knowing that, did you know that this was going to happen?
If you hadn't have sent him back, you wouldn't have gotten shot by the hunter.
So what's up?
And the Buddha said, whether I told him to go or didn't tell him to go, whether he had gone north, south, east, west, in any of the four directions or the four minor directions, wherever he had gone, there's no way he could have escaped from the effects of his bad karma.
And then the Buddha taught this verse.
He said, and as he's taught elsewhere, you can't escape this karma.
The point being that the blame that we might place on an enemy or on someone seeking vengeance against us,
is much better placed or is properly placed on our own mind which has caused us to arise in such a situation, caused us to give rise to such a situation.
So it's really an interesting story because it requires, for understanding it requires a sort of a
a profound understanding of karma, not just on a moment to moment level, but you have to somehow see that there's a relationship between this hunter killing this cattle herder,
and something that the cattle herder has, I guess, done in the past, probably to this hunter.
And the even more curious thing about this is we don't know what it was.
Because as with most of the stories, then the Buddha says, in the past, this man did this and this and this.
But the curious note that we have is at the end of the story, the commentary says, but the monks never asked the Buddha what this guy had done.
So we don't know what the karma was.
But it's actually a unique story in that way, because normally the monks go up to the Buddha and ask him, what did Nanda do?
What did Nanda Gopala do to deserve that?
And in this case, they didn't.
So first of all, it talks about karma.
And it's a sort of an example, a strong example, of how this verse comes into play, how this verse
or the truth of this verse, how this verse has meaning.
Because the point being that not only will your ill-directed mind hurt you on a momentary level, like if you get angry, you're in pain, or if you cling to things, you're stressed out about them.
But it has profound reaching effects that can lead over into the next life and can chase you throughout your journey in samsara because of how they affect the mind.
So it actually, you know, you would say maybe requires a little bit of faith and people will start to question this idea of karma and say, well, here we're entering into a realm that is outside of the core of the Buddhist teaching because it's starting to deal with faith and belief in
in some sort of magical karmic potency of acts that when you kill someone you magically get punished for it.
Or that the things that we have done have some connection, unseen connection to things in the past.
But all it really shows, if you understand how Buddhism, how karma works, how rebirth works, all it really shows is the profound and
intrinsic connection between moments of consciousness, between our acts and the world around us.
So, like they'll say about the weather, they've come to realize this about the weather, how small things in one part of the world can have a profound impact on other parts of the world.
They have this saying, which is probably not true, that if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, there's an earthquake in America or something, or there's a tornado in America.
The point being that it's very easy for things to change, and
something very small or very specific can have an effect on the long term.
It's not difficult to understand really at all when you think about how an act affects your mind and how your mind affects your future.
So if you have done bad deeds in the past, if you've hurt other people or if you've clung to, if you're clinging to things, it's going to change your whole attitude towards life.
It's going to affect your mind.
It's something you'll think about on a daily basis.
And the Buddha said, whatever you think about, that's what your mind inclines towards.
It's a very obvious sort of teaching.
something we don't think about because we don't really understand karma.
We don't really get that our thoughts affect our lives.
And yet they absolutely do.
When we're stressed about something, it changes all of our interactions with other people throughout the life, with the world around us, throughout our life.
It changes even the direction of our lives.
People who have gone through traumatic experiences, of course it changes their whole life.
It changes their outlook, it changes their potential, their...
possibilities in their lives.
The things that we do, the things that we engage in, change us.
People who are addicted to things have to spend money and put resources into the things that they want and that they might have put elsewhere.
They have to put time, dedicate time to their addiction and energy and brain cells and thoughts and so on.
And so it
it actually gets, the effect can actually get bigger over the long term.
So that the effect that a karma has in the short term might be minuscule compared to the effect that it has later on in life or even into the next life.
Because of course as Buddhists we're not thinking of the next life as something separate from this life.
It's a continuation.
There's
So there's a shift at the moment of death, but only because we've entered into this state of being born and die, this human state that is very coarse and requires or associates with the physical body.
Actually at the moment of death nothing happens.
Life just continues and our mind just continues.
Now that's the part that has to do with karma.
When we're talking about
the mind and the potency of the mind.
Why is the mind so potent in creating karma?
Once we accept the fact that our bad deeds have an effect, why would it be that the deeds of others are less potent than our own minds?
And further, why is it the mind that the Buddha is focusing on and not the deeds?
So people are still asking me,
Why is it that when you do something, it doesn't have karmic potency?
We have this idea that karma is some kind of magic, because we've been brought up generally, in the West anyway, we've been brought up to think in terms of God, to think in terms of nature as having some kind of watchful or some kind of...
some kind of power to affect and to intervene with our lives.
So we think when you step on an ant, bad, you've done a bad deed, right?
Because we're used to sin being something that God decides.
Is it sinful or is it right?
And he's watching you like Santa Claus.
But karma is absolutely not that.
Karma is the effect that something has on your mind or the effect that something has on the choices you make and on your state of mind into the future.
And that which has the biggest, the most profound effect or really the only effect is your own mind.
Another person, the harm that an enemy can do to you or someone who wants to take out their vengeance on you
is actually absolutely zero.
The harm that they can perform directly upon you is none.
It's not even little.
It's not a little.
It's not something you can mitigate.
It's zero.
No one can hurt you.
No one can cause harm to another.
So what the Buddha says is actually an understatement of the fact.
There's no comparison between the harm that an enemy can do to you and the harm that you can do to yourself.
And this is due to the theory, or the Buddhist theory, which is accepted and not accepted, not accepted by many people, that the mind is
apart from the body, that it's not a physical process.
You're not locked into your environment.
The mind reacts to the environment.
It reacts either in a positive or a negative or a neutral way.
So when we experience something painful, we generally tend to react in a negative way.
When we experience something pleasant,
We react in a positive way.
The body reacts, but the mind also reacts.
And the key to understanding and to practicing Buddhism is realizing that these two things are separate, that the mind need not react in a negative or a positive way.
The mind can react in an objective way to reality.
If the mind is, if and when the mind is aware of the pain as just pain, then the pain will not harm the mind.
If when someone yells at us or scolds us and we see it simply as hearing, we understand it to be sound arising in the mind, arising at the ear, then we
And observation proves this.
Or if you test this hypothesis, if you test it out for yourself, you can see this for yourself.
If you listen to the sound of my voice and just take it for sound, hearing, hearing,
then you find that any other judgments or thoughts you might have about what I'm saying disappear.
Any boredom or aversion to what I'm saying or any
attachment or desire or appreciation of what I'm saying, melts away.
And you simply know it for sound.
And you find that suddenly you're in the realm of peace and of contentment.
You're unshaken by what the person is saying.
If they're saying something nasty or unpleasant, even if they're hitting you or beating you,
It's actually the only way to be free from suffering is to free yourself from within, because you can't be free from enemies, you can't be free from harsh speech, you can't be free from the cold and heat and hunger and thirst and sickness and old age and death.
We can't be free from these things.
There's only two ways to be free from suffering.
It's not have any of these things which are ubiquitous, which are an intrinsic part of life, or overcome them, be free from them.
Free yourself, free your mind from them.
And this is what the Buddha is referring to.
This is the key theory that we have in Buddhism.
You need to accept this in order to practice Buddhism correctly.
It's key to understand that you can change the way you react to reality.
You need not react.
You can interact objectively with reality.
This is why the Buddha said the mind that is set wrongly, the mind that is set in a bad way, is of much greater or incomparably greater harm to the individual than anyone else could be, than an enemy could be.
And furthermore,
What this means, this means actually more than just karma.
What the Buddha is talking about here is not just someone doing a bad deed.
What he's talking about is setting the mind in a bad way.
Which is actually even worse than doing a bad deed.
So up until now we're just talking about bad karma.
But even worse than bad karma, there's something even worse than that.
If you kill someone, if you steal, if you do bad things, it's setting your mind
in a bad way.
Panihita means set or sent in a wrong way.
It refers, you can think it refers to wrong view.
So there are three kinds of wrong.
One is wrong perception.
Another is wrong thought.
And the third is wrong view.
Wrong view is the worst.
Wrong perception is the least serious.
If someone says something to you and you get angry right away, that's wrong perception.
You perceive it as bad.
But when you start thinking about it, that starts to get worse.
You think, oh, what did that person do?
That was really mean of them and so on.
Really nasty of them.
That's worse because then you start to think how you're going to hurt them and hurt them back and so on.
But when you have the view, when you set yourself in the idea that person is evil, I didn't deserve that, they deserve to be punished.
When you have the wrong views,
Because we can all, even as Buddhists, we all have these first two.
But we need not have the third.
And as Buddhists, we generally don't.
Because this is what we're taught.
We're taught that, no, it's not good for you to hurt other people.
Or that someone say, treat other people well, not because they deserve to be happy, but because you do.
which I think is very pertinent.
I mean, of course, you can think they deserve to be happy, but that's not the real reason.
The real reason is, you know, look, if you get angry at them, it's not good for you.
You don't get anywhere by hurting other people.
You don't help them, obviously.
You don't help yourself.
And it's pertinent because it's how the mind reacts.
The mind is looking for happiness.
It's not really looking for happiness in other people.
We help other people because it makes us happy.
If it didn't make us happy, it wouldn't excite the mind.
The mind wouldn't be pleased to continue it.
So if you want to really encourage your mind and really get the attention of your heart, you have to put it this way and say, look, let's not get angry, not because they don't deserve it, but because we don't deserve it.
We don't deserve to suffer from this.
So let us stop ourselves.
Because we have this idea, because we have this understanding, and this is the understanding we try to give to Buddhists and to meditators, we're free from this wrongly directed mind most of the time.
Still, we have to always be on guard.
When we're in training, this is something important to understand.
Guard against your mind, first of all, from having bad perception, you know,
At the very core, you're best off when you can just perceive things as they are and not misperceive things as good, as bad, as me, as mine, as right, as wrong.
But even when you do, then be careful not to let it come into your thoughts.
Be aware of the anger, be aware of the wanting, be aware of the desire.
Don't let your mind start thinking about how you're going to get what you want, how you're going to chase away what you don't want.
And if it does come to thoughts, try to be aware of the thoughts and don't let them become views and think, yeah, I deserve that.
That's right for me to get that.
Or I don't deserve that and this is wrong and I'm being unjustly treated and so on.
Not because they don't deserve it, but because you don't deserve it.
Because we don't want to suffer.
So let's stop making ourselves suffer.
We have to see that these things are causing us suffering.
And the worst is this third one, when you set your mind in the wrong way.
This is what the Buddha is talking about.
This is the key to this verse.
Something for us all to remember.
Whenever you think your problems are other people and situation in the world around you, never forget what the Buddha said.
an enemy as an enemy would do to an enemy or one seeking vengeance would do to another the wrongly directed mind is far far
will do far, far greater evil than any of those.
So, that's the Dhammapada verse for today.
Thank you all for listening and tune in next time.