Hi and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 60 that reads as follows.
Which means
The night is long for one who is alert or awake, one who is full of energy.
A league is long for one who is tired, who is weary.
Dīgho bālāna saṅsāro.
Saṅsāra is long.
Wandering on is long.
For fools, saṅdhammaṁ avijñānataṁ, who don't, not knowing the saṅdhamma, the good dhamma.
So we have three types of things that are long.
The story behind this verse is regarding a certain man, but actually more regarding King Pasenadi.
But I think the name of it is Anjatarapurisa, a story about some man or other.
The story goes there was this man who had a very, very beautiful wife that he kept up on the top floor of his house.
or whatever, she was in the house, and there was a festival.
And King Pasenadi went riding on his white elephant through the city.
Sunwise, it says, whatever that means.
Maybe that would be clockwise, no?
Probably clockwise.
And as he was completing his journey around the city, he looked up on his elephant and saw this woman standing in the window.
the top floor of her house and she stood there for a second and he looked at her and then she went back into her house and he was totally enchanted by this, completely enchanted and taken away by this woman's beauty and vowed that she should be his wife, his queen.
And so he completed his trip around the city, went back to the palace, and he called his minister up to see him, one of his attendants, and said, did you see that woman there near the end of the trip?
He said, yes, I saw the woman.
Go and find out if she has a husband.
And so they sent a man to the house to go and find out what was up with this woman.
Come back and says, yes, she's got a husband.
And so he says to him, okay, bring her husband here.
And they have the husband brought before the king.
And the husband somehow knows, I think, I can't remember exactly how it goes, but he knows, he gets an idea because he knows how beautiful his wife is and so he knows there's something going on.
And he goes before the king and the king says, from now on I want you to be my servant.
And he says, oh, but I'm quite happy doing the work that I do, Your Majesty.
Well, regardless, from now on, from this day forward, you are to be my servant.
Of course, if you don't listen to the king, he can cut off your head.
And so the king thinks to himself that he'll find some way to find fault in this man and cut off his head and take this guy's wife.
And he spends a lot of time trying to do that.
He has them go on dangerous errands and fight in battles.
But he's so meticulous and so concerned and he's so aware that the king is out to get him that he performs his job flawlessly and the king is unable to find any fault in him.
So the king finally finds this scheme.
He sends him on an errand to get.
He says, look, I'm going to bathe, and I want this special red clay and I think lotus flowers as well, white lotus flowers that can only be got in a location that is one yojana away.
One yojana is about 12 kilometers.
So,
He says, and I want it there before my bath, which is in like an hour or two hours or something.
Not two hours, but it's in a short time, so short that he knows it would be very difficult to make it.
So he goes back to his home, and he gets his wife to make him some, or his wife is making the food.
He said, is the rice ready?
And she said, no, it's not cooked yet.
So he takes some half-cooked rice and puts it in a pot and carries it with him, and it cooks while he's on the journey.
He was running 12 miles.
12 kilometers.
And he gets to this place and, you know, I'd like to just say he finds the clay and the lotus flowers, but it's not that easy.
The story goes, and so let's say the unelaborated or unextrapolated...
No.
What do you call when something you, not elaborate, but you make it more fancy?
Exaggerated.
The unexaggerated story.
I think that's sort of what it is.
I think it's not, but anyway.
The unexaggerated story is there.
He got the clay and the lotus flowers and came back.
But the story in the Dhammapada goes that the clay and the lotus flowers were guarded by dragons.
And so he knows this and he knows it's an important, it's a neat story, even though I'm not asking you to believe necessarily that this is what happened.
Because
he knew that this was going to be something very, very difficult to get.
And so he sat down to eat his rice, and he took the best part of his meal and put it aside.
And he ate the rest, or most of the rest.
And then a traveler was sitting by the side of the road.
He saw a traveler going by, and he said, friend, come here.
I have set aside the best portion of my meal.
Please partake of this.
And the man's like, oh wow, that's very nice of you.
And he takes the food, eats the food, and goes on his way.
And our hero takes the rest of the rice, a little bit that's left, and he throws it into the water.
And then he makes a determination.
He said, now I have done great merit, a thousand times merit, by giving my food to someone.
And I've gotten a hundred times merit for giving food to the fishes in the water.
By the power of this merit, may I be worthy to receive this special red clay and these white lotus flowers.
King and the dragon comes along, and I can't remember, they talk about something, I forgot what it is.
And somehow he gets these lotuses.
The thing is, he gets the clay and the lotuses, comes back to the king, and the king, thinking that he might be able to somehow actually get the clay and the lotuses from these dragons, against all odds, has them close the gates to the city early that day.
So he's got no hope and he stands outside the gates of the city.
And he throws the clay down and he throws the lotuses down and he says, I have brought these as I was required.
And he shouts out that the king has framed me, set me up to be killed.
And no one heard him.
So he leaves them there and in fear of his life, he goes to the monastery.
He says, where will I go?
Oh, I'll go hang out with the monks.
I mean, duh, where do you go when you got nowhere else to go?
He goes to the monastery and he falls asleep at the monastery in some corner of, would be Jetavana, I guess.
The king, having bathed and having gone back into his room,
lay down and tried to sleep but found that he couldn't sleep so he was up all night tossing and turning thinking about this woman and how how in the morning he was going to kill this man and take his wife and he was so full of this passion and just just rip raring to go and that he couldn't sleep and so he was up all night and then in this in the morning the sun came up he had gotten no sleep he
Near the end of the night Just before the sun was going to come up Suddenly he heard a noise Anyone heard this story?
What noise he heard?
Do Sa Na So Four voices Four different voices he heard Do Sa
Na, so, like that.
It gave him the heebie-jeebies.
As you imagine, you're a king, protected by all your guards and fortifications, and suddenly in the dark of the night, you hear these four words.
He freaked out.
So in the morning he totally forgot about this man.
And he calls his ministers and he says, look, something really strange happened last night.
I heard these three sounds.
What were these four sounds?
What were the four sounds?
And the Brahmins are like,
Oh yeah, we know what that means.
That means you have to kill lots of animals.
They hadn't a clue what it meant.
But to hide their confusion, they said, of course, of course, yes, this is terrible.
Your Majesty, you're going to die.
Is there any way of avoiding it?
Oh yes, yes, of course there is.
You can count on us to know the cure.
You must get 500 bulls and 500 horses and 500 sheep and 500 goats and kill them all.
And that, of course, will save your life.
It's just how physics works.
There's lots of physics.
There's an equation for it.
500x plus 500y.
And the king, Pisanity, is not known for his erudition.
Is that a word?
His smarts.
Neither am I.
And so he believes them and he gathers them all up and everyone's going crazy trying to, he's just stealing people.
I think he just confiscates people's livestock and everyone's so upset and getting in a big kerfuffle.
And Malika, she sees all this craziness going on.
Malika's his queen.
And she goes to King Basenadi and she says, Your Majesty, what's going on?
Oh, my dear, it was the most horrible thing.
I heard these four noises in the night.
And in order to save my life, these four deadly noises that are just going to somehow kill me.
And in order to save my life, I've had to arrange a sacrifice, a great sacrifice of a thousand, two thousand animals.
And Mallika looks at him and says, you're an idiot.
He says, you're a simpleton.
And he's taken aback and he says, okay, what do you mean by that?
And she says, you heard four sounds and these Brahmins tell you that you're going to die and that you have to sacrifice.
What is the relationship between these four sounds and killing 2,000 animals?
Do you really see some sort of connection there?
Are you really that gullible?
And he says, well, what do you think it means?
She says, I haven't a clue what it means, but at least I'm ready to admit it.
Those Brahmins haven't got a clue either.
They're just making stuff up because it makes them money to perform these sacrifices.
And I said, well, then what would you have me do?
He says, well, find someone who knows the answer.
Well, who knows the answer?
Well, duh, Jetavana, Buddha.
Ever hear of this guy?
And he's like, you're right.
I should go to see the fully enlightened Buddha.
And then so he says, but you must come with me.
And so they go together.
The king gets on his white elephant and she gets on her pink elephant or whatever.
And they go together to Jetavana and step down from their elephants and go into the monastery and go before the Buddha and sit down and pay respect to him.
And the Buddha says, so for what reason have you come, your majesty?
And the king is so frightened, he doesn't talk, he doesn't say anything.
So Mallika says, Mallika speaks up and says,
this guy over here, he heard these four sounds, and then the Brahmins told him, da-da-da-da-da-da, and he decided to follow along after them.
Please tell us, Venerable Sir, what is the meaning of the noises?
And so he says to King Pasenadi, what were the four noises?
And Pasenadi says, do-sa-na-so.
That's what I heard, I think.
Something like that.
And the Buddha says, ah, relax.
There's no danger to you, your majesty.
What you heard?
Well, let me tell you a story, he says.
Sometime in the long, in the past, in the time of the Buddha Kasapa, there were these four men.
And
While everyone else was doing great good deeds and performing wholesome acts, giving gifts and keeping morality and practicing meditation and doing good things in the Buddhist dispensation, these four guys looked at them and said, man, that's really tiresome to be engaged in wholesome acts like that, helping other people.
These guys were also very rich, and so they had lots and lots of money.
I think they had 100 gotis of gold or something like that.
They had a lot of money.
And so they sat down and they said, well, what should we do with our money?
And one of them said, well, let's get lots of the choicest rice.
Let's eat only three-year-old rice and curry, special fermented rice or aged rice somehow.
and the other one said let's just have the nicest curries and let's do this and that and the fourth guy says you guys all have no imagination here's what we're going to do he says there is no woman out there I think this is what he says this is not Buddhism this is the bad stuff there's no woman out there who won't cheat on her husband for money
So here's what we'll do.
We'll go and we'll offer money to all the beautiful women, all the beautiful wives in the city, and we'll commit adultery with them.
We'll bribe them to come and run away with us.
And they're like, oh, that sounds like a good idea.
And so they decide that's what they're going to do with their money.
And they spend all their money on women.
The Buddha said, and when they passed away,
They fell into, they appeared into, the body, the coarse body disappears and they're reborn with a fine body in a boiling cauldron called the Great Cauldron, I think, or something like that.
The Iron Cauldron, right?
It's the hell called the Iron Cauldron where it's full of molten lava, maybe, or just maybe it's water, boiling oil, maybe.
I can't remember.
Boiling oil, maybe.
And it takes 30,000, I'm making this up, I'm not quite sure, 30,000 years for them to sink to the bottom of the cauldron.
And then 30,000 years to float back up.
And then they take one breath and then they go back down.
And back up.
And they've been there for, they've been there since the time of the Buddha Kasapa, which I don't know how long ago that was.
So there's a time frame, a long, long time.
And they're going to be there until the karma, the results of their bad karma is expiated.
And he said, so what you heard is you just caught them at the moment when they were all at the top of the cauldron.
And they wanted to say something to you.
But they couldn't.
They wanted to each say a verse.
But all they could get out was the first syllable.
So he said, the man who said du, that was dujivita.
We have lived a bad life.
We had lots of wealth, and we never gave it away to anyone.
We never did good deeds with all of our money.
We wasted our time and our lives.
In a wrong life, an evil life, a life of evil.
For 60,000 years, right?
30 down and 30 up.
We've been boiling.
I guess that's what it was.
The Buddha Kassava would have been 60,000 years ago then, I guess.
60,000 years and now finally they're at the top.
But then they have to go back down again.
It's not over yet.
For 60,000 years we've been boiling in this cauldron for the evil that we've done.
Something like that.
The third guy, na, means na-ti.
Na-ti.
Na-ti an-to, I think.
There is no end.
Na-ti an-to, ku-to na-to.
Where is the end?
Ku-to?
Where can there be an end?
I don't see any end.
Because we have done these evil deeds, there is no way out.
And the fourth one, so.
This comes from so-a-hang.
So-hang.
So-hang means I.
When I get out of here and I'm born as a human being again, you can be darn sure that I'm going to spend all my time doing good deeds, giving charity, keeping morality and practicing meditation.
So he said, there's no harm to you, your majesty.
Wink, wink.
The between the lines is unless you do exactly what they did by committing adultery.
And it was just these four poor souls who had fallen into hell.
And then they hear a voice off to the side saying, Venerable Sir, I now know the true length of a league.
And they look over and there's this man who was sleeping in the monastery.
And King Pasenadi looks at him and he shivers and he said, to think I was going to kill this man for his wife and I could have been in hell.
And he said, Venerable Sir, I now know the length of a night.
And Buddha said, well, the length of the night is long.
The length of a yojana is quite long.
But even longer is the length of samsara for fools.
who don't see the true Dhamma.
So that's the verse he told.
So that's the story.
What's the meaning of the verse?
How does this verse apply to us?
Obviously we're not fools.
Everyone is here interested in the Buddha's teaching.
But the reason we're not here is because we have heard and understand these teachings, because we have these teachings and we have them to remind us of the danger inherent in falling astray.
The mind is powerful and power can be used for good or evil.
It's not a game that you can just turn off the computer or the Xbox or whatever, press reset.
You can't just wipe the slate clean.
Everything has its effects.
If you engage in evil deeds, evil results come to you.
If you're constantly engaging in evil deeds, it becomes a habit.
And that habit lasts with you.
Your mind carries it.
It becomes who you are.
We become the things that we do.
And then when we pass away, we can be born in even hell if we've done lots and lots of evil deeds and our minds are impure and so on.
So the meaning of the whole long as the night, well, long as the night is actually an important Buddhist teaching because the Buddha said Buddha once was sleeping out in the open and on some, with just his robes, was sleeping on some dry leaves.
He was traveling somewhere and he got caught in the night and so he gathered together some leaves and put his robe, one robe down and put one robe on top of him in the middle of winter.
And this man came up, can't remember who it was, Brahmin I think, came up and said to him, Venerable sir, it's cold, those leaves are thin, your robes are thin, and it could snow tonight.
This is the between the eighths.
Between the eighths is the eighth of one month and the eighth of another month, the two coldest months.
It was the coldest period, it's called the between the eighths, the period of the coldest period in India of the year.
He said it could snow.
During this period sometimes it snows.
So it was down near the freezing point.
And the Buddha said to him, well, let me ask you, he says, how are you going to sleep?
How can you possibly sleep like that?
And the Buddha says to him, he says, let me ask you something.
Suppose a person is full of lust.
No, suppose a person, sorry, suppose there's a rich man on a down filled, what would it be like a comfort?
No, what do you call these things?
What do you call the things people sleep on?
Mattress.
No, but there's something else.
Futon.
Futon, I'm thinking.
I don't know.
Anyway, some expensive mattress or something.
Waterbed, maybe, in this day and age.
With silk sheets and pillows, down feather pillows and rich...
whatever bedding and the most softest delicate most comfortable bedding that there is warm quilts and comforters and so on but suppose their mind is full of lust do you think they would sleep well that night and the Brahmin said no probably they'd be up all night tossing and turning what if their mind was full of anger no likewise if their mind was full of anger and hatred they also wouldn't sleep well at night no matter what
luxury they were sleeping in.
What if their mind was full of delusion, arrogance or conceit, self-righteousness, or even just ignorance, thinking and ruminating and worrying, for example, doubting all night.
no then they would be up all night as well and we said well none of those three things are present in me and so for me to sleep here for one night isn't a big deal so it's a important teaching is sleep doesn't comfort peace doesn't come from luxury it doesn't come from without it comes from within you can be surrounded by all the luxury you want if your mind is not pure you don't sleep well
How long the league is, well there's not much Dhamma there I don't think.
But the point of the verse is compared to these things, compared to samsara, compared to the wandering on of fools, a league and a night are nothing.
They're not even worth talking about.
Because a fool, a fool is someone who does evil deeds with body, with speech, and with mind.
So they kill, they steal, they cheat, commit adultery, they hurt others, they scam others, they commit evil deeds by speech, meaning they lie, they cheat, they lie, they back, they...
backbite and gossip about others and speak harshly to others and speak useless speech and in the mind they're full of anger, greed and delusion.
Thoughts of lust, thoughts of desire, thoughts of hatred, thoughts of arrogance and conceit and so on.
Because of all that they
They're like a drunk person, like a person who is so tired with the journey, who is wandering through the wilderness looking for shade and they become so tired and burnt out with heat stroke or dizzy with heat stroke that they don't even see a shady tree when they walk by it.
They're not even able to see the shade.
So to a fool is not able to see goodness.
They're not able to see the right path.
They're not able to find the right path.
They're not able to see the danger in what they're doing.
Like a person who is dazed and confused and has heat stroke and is walking down a path and at the end of the path there's a big pit full of burning, blazing embers.
But they don't see it because their mind is too dizzy.
Now the reason why they are so dizzy and why they are so caught up and intoxicated is, as the Buddha said, because they don't see the saddhamma.
So our practice as Buddhists is, the most important practice for us is to see the saddhamma, to see the truth, not just the truth, but the good truth, the important truth.
So we have three aspects to this.
One is pariyatti sadhamma, two is patipatti sadhamma, and three is pativeda sadhamma.
Paryatisadhamma means our study.
So as we study, when we hear these teachings about how these guys were in hell, you might not believe it, and you might think, well, that's ridiculous, and hell doesn't exist, and so on.
You might believe such things, but you might also start to understand in your mind and think, oh, well, it really seems reasonable that there are consequences to our actions.
At least in this life, we have pretty major consequences to evil if we do them.
And so by hearing this, it gives you some pause, some pause, cause for reflection, and so as a result you become less inclined to do, say, and think evil deeds, evil of all kinds.
A fool who hasn't had this kind of learning is at a disadvantage.
I mean, just learning the five precepts, if someone had taught them to me when I was younger, explained them to me, I think I would have been a lot better off.
I think a lot of people would be if they had heard about, heard other people speaking badly about killing and stealing and talking about the dangers inherent in these things, how it corrupts the mind and how that therefore leads to suffering.
But it's not enough because you still have no experience.
So you might have doubt, you might decide that, well,
Your desire to do and say and think bad things overwhelms it.
And when you have desire, you aren't able to make yourself believe the things that you've studied because it's not as strong as the desire, the habitual inclination of the mind and all the chemicals that are working in the brain and so on.
So the second part is patipatisadhamma.
Patipatisadhamma helps you to see, helps you to compare good and evil.
And it cultivates habits of good to counteract the evil.
So if you cultivate habits of wholesomeness, including knowledge,
the observation that evil deeds lead to suffering.
So as you sit in meditation and you see how anger inflames the mind, how greed inflames the mind, how delusion boils the mind,
You start to incline away from evil deeds and they have less power over you.
And you have an inclination towards wholesomeness through the practice.
This is all we're getting from walking back and forth and sitting still.
We're gaining these habits.
I'm sorry, it's not all we're getting.
This is the preliminary benefits, the practical benefits.
The third one is Pativedasa Dhamma, is the real, true seeing, proper seeing of the true Dhamma, which is when the mind enters into Nibbana, when there is the realization of the Four Noble Truths and the mind lets go of experience and as a result sees that everything ceases, gains an experiential knowledge
that there's nothing that arises that doesn't cease and so loses the desire to cling and to strive and to crave and to chase after evil or chase after objects of desire, objects of aversion, to chase them away.
Any desire to cling or get involved with anything.
And so as a result, one is naturally uninclined to commit evil deeds, knowing that they just lead to stress and suffering.
wandering on, that they just lead to mindless, meaningless samsara.
This comes through the practice of the Buddhist teaching.
And so this is what we have to be thankful, grateful, and proud of, as far as Buddhists are allowed to be proud.
that we're not fools, that we are engaging and trying and fighting the fight to try to cultivate wisdom and understanding and goodness in our hearts.
So that's verse number 60, and that's the story and the meaning as far as I can tell it.
So thank you all for tuning in.
I hope this has been useful, and I wish you all to find peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
Thank you.
Have a good night.