Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verses 137 through 140, which read as follows.
Yodandena adandesu apadutesu dusati Dasannamanya tarantanam kippameva nigajati
vedanāṁ paruṣaṁ jāniṁ sarīraṣa vabhedanaṁ karukaṁ vāpi ābādhaṁ citta-khepaṁ vāpāpunē rājato vāupasaṁgaṁ abbhakkhānaṁ vādhādhāluṇaṁ parikhāyaṁ vānyātiṇaṁ bhogaṇaṁ vāpabhanguraṁ
It's a lot.
But it's simple, easy to understand and translate.
The first verse is whoever punishes someone who doesn't punish or those who don't punish.
Meaning those who attack those who aren't violent.
Someone who is violent towards those who are not violent.
who is wicked towards those who are not, who is evil towards those who are not evil.
In regards to one of ten, one or another of ten states, such a person comes to one or another of ten things.
So someone who is evil, not just an evil person, but evil towards those who are good, those who are kind, those who have never done anything wicked towards oneself.
one of ten things, or maybe more than one of ten things, but these ten things, and maybe more than these ten, but these are ten good examples of things that happen.
So, number one, they experience great and sharp and terrible pain.
Number two, injury.
Their body is broken up.
They break a bone or something like that.
So they come to harm in the body.
Number three, they experience great sickness, harsh or terrible sickness.
Number four, or they come to the breaking up of their mind, the destruction of their mind.
They lose their mind.
Insanity.
Number six, right?
One, two, three, no, number five.
They come to some problem or some
danger from the king, from the government, from the law.
Number six, they experience harsh slander.
People will say bad things about them.
Number seven, they lose their relatives.
They lose wealth.
Nine, or their house is destroyed by fire.
Their possessions are destroyed.
At the breakup of the body, this person, this foolish person, person with poor wisdom, weak wisdom, such a person arises in hell.
Number ten, they go to hell.
So this is clearly a teaching about karma.
What's it about?
Well, the story goes, this is about the death of Mahamoggalana.
Mahamoggalana was one of the Buddha's chief disciples.
He was a great, great being who was responsible for some of the teaching that we have in the Tipitaka.
He was responsible for
supporting a great number of people in their quest for enlightenment.
Between him and Sariputta, Sariputta was the other chief disciple of the Buddha.
The story is that Sariputta was like a mother in that he would bring newcomers to understand the basics of the Dhamma and then he would send them on to Moggallana who would help them further cultivate their practice.
And they worked together in this way.
He's one of the many unsung heroes of Buddhism.
We don't hear in modern times too much talk about him, but if you learn Buddhism in depth, you'll get a sense that he was a historic figure, historic as any Buddhist figure can be from that time, who did a lot for spreading and passing on the Buddhist teaching.
But we have a story here, believe it or not, about his death and that his death was somewhat violent.
Moggallana had incredible magical powers.
This was one of the great things about him, that he had great mental fortitude and was able to alter and modify the laws of physics.
He could fly, he could read people's minds, he could create images, telekinesis, all sorts of magical powers.
This is how the stories go, believe it or not.
So the story goes, the short story goes that in the time of the Buddha of course as the Buddha taught and he taught for 45 years his teaching became quite popular and as a result other teachers and there were other teachers at the time
became less popular and found that at least a portion of their followers were leaving them to go and follow after this upstart youngster actually because the Buddha began teaching at 35 and so for some time at least he was significantly younger than many of his contemporary teachers, his contemporaries.
And so they were not so, the others were not so pleased and of course not all of the other teachers at the time of the Buddha were particularly ethical.
Many of them would have been corrupt and simply feeding off of the support of lay people without actually providing any
benefit or any great service.
And so they were jealous and obsessed with their own fortune and greedy for their own supporters and followers and so on, right?
And so one day they gathered together and tried to find a reason for why the Buddha was able to gain so many followers.
And they came up with the idea that it was because of Maha Moggallana.
That Maha Moggallana's magical powers were actually the main reason why the Buddha was so popular.
Because people knew that he had all these magical powers.
There is something to that, honestly.
Foolish people tend to be attracted.
Foolish people meaning simple people, people who, it's not exactly pejorative, but
people whose spiritual understanding is somewhat limited.
So simple ordinary folk who don't really have a strong grasp of what's important and what's not important will tend to gravitate towards parlor tricks, magical powers.
You get this even in modern times that any monk who is thought to have magical powers will actually get a significant number of followers simply for the fact that they are able to perform magical powers, often because there's a belief that they can perform magic to cure or to protect, to provide blessings and protection.
rather than actually because they can provide wisdom and understanding, right?
Which is really the true reason why the Buddha became so incredibly popular.
So, they're barking up the wrong tree in a sense, but on a superficial level, this would have been the obvious answer because it appears that the general populace, the people who don't really know any better, are flocking to the Buddha
because of the magic that he and his disciples are able to perform.
But it's certainly not why in the long run, because of course this sort of faith is fickle and not particularly based in fact.
And over the long run, there's much more of a cohesive sort of religion, I suppose, that comes from teaching, that comes from wisdom.
Anyway, this is what they came up with.
And so they thought, well, if he were gone, if it weren't for him, we'd be fine, you know.
Specifically, the Moggallana...
Moggallana is able to tell people, they say, who has been reborn in hell and who has been reborn in heaven and what they did.
And so as a result, people are, they want to know where their relatives went, I guess.
Anyway, the tricks, the magic that Moggallana is apparently able to perform is bringing people to him and to the Buddha.
And they say,
So if we can get rid of him, off this guy, we'll be back in glory.
The Buddha won't have any support.
I mean, it seems somewhat simplistic, and I imagine it probably went more like, well, if we get rid of him, it would significantly, because we can't get anywhere near the Buddha, but if we got rid of one of his chief disciples, well, that would be a good start anyway.
I don't suppose they were naive enough to think that Moggallana was the only thing
But they conceived of this incredible evil intention that they should kill Maha Moggallana or have him killed.
And so they got together money from their supporters and formed a plot to kill him.
They found these wandering mercenaries or bandits and they gave them a thousand gold coins to kill him.
Maha Moggallana had great magical power and this is interesting whether or not you believe in the magical power it's interesting how this is worded and how it's it'll be interesting for sort of the lesson that comes from this which there is I think a significant lesson maybe more than one is that the elder was able Maha Moggallana was able to escape using magical power and he was able to escape for two months they hounded him and every time they came to his kuti he was able to escape using magical means
But in the third month, whether he resigned himself to his death or whether
it simply, it could even be deeper than that in the sense that his resigning himself or his decision not to use magic to protect himself was a result of what we'll see is the workings of karma.
And I would argue that there's something to that, that the choices we make are affected by our karma.
Even though he was enlightened,
There's a sense that the external
physical and maybe even the brain, you know, in some sense conspires against him.
Not that it's a problem for him because he is fully, fully at peace with this.
But at any rate he decides not to, because the wording is somewhat ambiguous, but he decides not to escape.
He doesn't use his magical powers.
But it says because of the ripening of his karma he makes this decision.
And so they caught him.
And when these bandits caught him, they beat him.
And it says, in the English anyway, it says, they tore him limb from limb and pounded his bones until they were as small as grains of rice.
And then thinking to themselves that he was dead, they left him there.
No, they tossed his bones in the bushes and went on their way.
Thing is, Maha Moggallana did still have great magical power and he was able to preserve his life force.
And there's something about when you die, the mind still being active.
So there's a potential for the mind being able to bring the body back together.
You know, these legends or myths or whatever.
ghost stories about animated corpses and that kind of thing.
There is a sense that that's possible even after the body is not medically able to support life.
The mind is in certain extreme instances, especially with people like Maha Moggallana, a great magical power, to reanimate it.
Believe this all or not, it's not really important.
But at any rate, he went to see the Buddha, and he informed the Buddha that he was passing away.
And the Buddha asked that before he leave, he give one last teaching, which Moggallana did.
After giving that teaching, he passed away, entered into Parinibbana.
Now the aftermath of this is of course that there was great distress and sadness among Buddhist followers and even the general populace.
Of course there would have been a funeral and the monks would have observed some period of reflection.
The king, King Ajatasattu, actually sent out spies to try and find these guys, found them, had them tortured and killed, and along with the heretics, the guys of another religion who instigated or who paid for the killing, brought them all together, had them burnt and killed in a very horrible manner.
And that was that.
So everybody dies.
And the monks got together and of course they could understand why all these ascetics had been killed.
But the question is, why did Moggallana die in the first place?
And they had this thought come up that Moggallana didn't deserve it.
He was a great being, perfectly pure and never a negative thought towards anyone.
Well, the Buddha found out what they were talking about.
He asked them, what are you talking about?
And they told him, and he said, monks, of course, in this life, from what you can see, he doesn't deserve it.
But samsara is much more complicated than that.
And as a matter of fact, the manner of death was in exact conformity with the deed he committed in a previous state of existence.
And the monks asked, well, what did he do?
And this is a famous story.
The story goes that in a past life, Moggallana was a young lad, or the guy who was to become Moggallana was a young lad, and his parents were persistent in getting him to choose a wife.
And because he was somewhat uninterested in having a wife, they chose one for him, and they didn't do a very good job choosing.
They chose...
a woman who turned out to be rather cruel and vindictive.
And when she came to live with them, live with her husband and live with his parents, because his parents were living with them,
she became resentful towards his parents and she conspired to have him get rid of them.
She lied and she would make a mess in the house and blame it on his parents who were blind.
And so she kept nagging him to get rid of his blind parents.
And eventually, he, not being a terribly wise individual at the time, this would have been many, many eons ago,
So he wasn't a terribly evil person, but he wasn't terribly wise either.
In fact, he was somewhat evil in the sense that he went along with it and decided that he would kill his parents.
And so he took them on a long trip, said they were going to visit some relatives, and when they got somewhere in the forest, because his parents were blind, he started making lots of noise and shouting that there were bandits and that they should run, and they told him to run.
His parents said, oh, save yourself, don't worry about us.
His parents were actually incredibly nice.
Besides the choosing of a poor, making a poor choice of wife or their son, they were actually quite good people.
Immediately thinking of their son and telling him to run, save yourself.
But it was all just a ruse and he ended up taking a stick and beating them to death.
and discarding their bodies and going on his way.
So that's the story.
And because of such a monstrous act, he suffered torment for numberless hundreds of thousands of years in hell.
And thereafter, because the fruit of his evil deed was not yet exhausted in a hundred successive existences, he was beaten and pounded to pieces in like manner and so met death.
And this is just the ending of it.
And then he gives the verse and says, there are ten ways by which one suffers.
I would argue that there's probably more.
I mean, it would be odd to think that there were only these ten ways, but it's a great thing that he gives us this list of ten, gives us a really sort of a perspective on the sorts of things, reminds us of the sorts of things, because all of these are easy to understand, even in this life, right?
If you do evil deeds, bad things are going to happen to you.
If anyone had found out that he had killed,
his parents, terrible things would have happened.
Many of these things would have happened.
There would have been mobs and his house would have been burnt to the ground.
Or the king or the government would of course put him in prison.
Or even if no one found out, there would be whispers of slander and people would, he would lose his stature.
He would go crazy of course.
Anyone who kills their parents would lose their mind.
the potential and the great sickness that comes.
All of these things happen even in this life.
Forget about future existence.
Evil does, evil brings evil.
Good brings good and evil brings evil.
There's no question.
So,
The lesson here is obviously about not doing evil deeds and about the consequences of evil.
But what's interesting, I suppose, specifically about this is how it relates to past and future existences.
This is where Buddhism, in my experience, comes under a great amount of criticism.
Because if you limit karma to this life, then all that I've said is understandable.
But the idea that somehow, millions of years later, a person can still suffer from something they did in a past life seems incomprehensible to people.
It's really a cheap shot in a sense, and I find that the people who tend to attack Buddhism for this are the people who don't really want to understand Buddhism at all.
They just want to find something to criticize, especially when we say that Buddhism doesn't rely on belief.
They say, well, what about belief in karma?
That's the first thing.
I've heard this many times.
And it's not really a fair criticism, but it's based on a really superficial and not really adequate understanding of karma.
Because we know and we see how karma, how our deeds, our ethical and unethical deeds affect our lives in the immediate future.
We can see how they affect our minds on the one hand, so they drive us crazy and cause us to become evil and evil people.
But how they also affect the universe around us and they change fundamentally our lives and our experience.
They change the universe around us.
They change our place in the universe.
They change our course in samsara.
We can see that.
Anyone can see that.
This is a good example.
Kill your parents.
Don't think that you're going to be able to live your life in any way the same as before you did.
This is a mistake people make.
They think they can commit an evil deed and continue on as they were.
Absolutely, it doesn't work that way in so many ways.
Even in more fundamental ways than we might understand, because of the power of the mind, because of how the universe is kept together,
based on experience, based on the mind.
My mind, your mind, our minds are the fabric of the universe, from a Buddhist perspective.
And this is of course where we might have an argument as to what is the fabric of the universe.
From Buddhist point of view it's based on experience, which is based on the mind.
It's not based on the material.
Material is completely dependent on experience.
Quantum physics has something to say about that, I would argue.
So,
When you affect someone else, when you hurt someone else, you tear at the very fabric of reality.
Not just your own mind, but your own mind of course is affected by that.
But also the minds of others.
And so it's simply a...
paradigm or a claim of laws of nature in the same way as gravity or electricity or to say the weather works.
You know, if you want to predict the weather you can predict it within a day or two.
You can even go up to seven days.
But the further off you go, the more it becomes conjecture.
And yet you can still say that, obviously, I mean it doesn't even take a leap of faith to suggest that a weighty event, like say a volcano or something,
is going to have far-reaching consequences of a similar type.
A volcano erupting will have specific consequences and a specific effect on the weather.
You can't exactly predict what, but you can predict that it will.
And no one's going to say, oh yeah, that's just your belief.
Well, no, not really.
I mean, we know how systems work.
We know how physical systems work.
Now, a Buddhist
meditator knows how mental systems work.
They can see how our actions affect our mind, affect the minds of others.
If you kill someone, you're affecting their mind.
You're affecting the minds of a great many people.
You're affecting the way you relate to others.
You're setting yourself up for further bad karma based on your habits.
And all of that is going to have repercussions.
It's different from the physical reality, but it's no less complicated.
But because it's based on intentions and reactions and habits and memories, it can come back and bite you.
And it does come back and bite you many, many, great many times and many, many years later because it doesn't have anything really to do with time.
It has to do with...
with the mind and how the mind evolves.
So if you cling to something, and if other people cling to it, it's certainly going to have an effect.
Now, for Moggallana, here was the end of his clinging.
He was no longer clinging to it.
But his past, the effect that it had, had already been set in motion.
This is sort of the interesting realization that karma isn't just about the mind.
You can be pure.
And this is the great thing to realize, the important and weighty thing to realize, is that you can't escape karma.
You can't be ensured of escaping your bad karma.
And it doesn't mean that a person who experiences bad karma, or the results of bad karma, is a bad person.
It means that there was something that set this in motion, or maybe many, many things, right?
And that's another thing, is you can't point to one karma and say, this is the cause.
Because of course we commit karma all the time.
We're constantly affecting our own minds, changing our own minds, and we're constantly affecting the world around us.
Every time we say something to someone else, every time we do something, we're changing their opinions about us.
Maybe if we continuously act like a jerk or act in evil ways, eventually something will snap and someone will attack us or hurt us or do something terrible to us in return, which you would call the ripening of karma, but it might be the ripening of many, many karmas.
So it's complicated.
And it's more complicated than the Buddha is suggesting here.
And the Buddha, of course, taught on many occasions how complicated it was.
He said, you can't really understand, but this is certainly the case.
You can look at this and say, well, this happens in this life.
But the...
The important thing, and it is important, is that the fact that it happens, it can happen in future lives, which translates to the fact that the things happened to us in this life can be caused by, can be a result of past deeds, you know, deeds from a past life.
It's simply a extrapolation.
It's not a leap of faith.
It's just coming to the logical conclusion
that the deeds that we do and the effect that our deeds have doesn't suddenly disappear just because of what we call death.
because death doesn't change anything.
I mean, that's really the point, I think, and the hard thing for people to understand is that it's not that Buddhists believe in reincarnation or rebirth, it's that we don't believe in death.
Death itself is just a concept, because the body is just a concept.
The physical world is just a conglomeration of experiences.
Our experiences are what is the underlying fabric of reality, and that doesn't change when you die.
You don't suddenly get a clean slate and a new mind.
That's not how rebirth works.
It's completely based on past experiences, as is everything else about our experience.
So, lots of bad things happen to bad people.
That's the point.
And it's also, you know, how it really works for us is that we understand that many of the consequences or the difficulties and problems that we face in this life don't mean that we're bad people.
They're a sign that we've made mistakes in the past, and we've all made mistakes in the past.
Of course, we all know that we've done terrible things, and in our past lives maybe we did other terrible things.
Doesn't mean we're a terrible person.
Doesn't mean we're terrible people.
This isn't something you should look down upon people because bad things happen to them, saying, oh yes, you must be terrible.
We've all done it.
We've all been there.
Some of us are still feeling the repercussions of it.
What's important, of course, is our reactions, our new karma.
What's important is these heretics somehow picking up or becoming a part of this and finding this weakness.
and not even consciously perhaps, but being a, you could argue, being sort of a tool of the laws of nature, you know, somehow picking up on this.
There's a some part of reality that somehow got it in these guys' heads.
Maybe in past lives one of them was a relative of Moggallana and so was suspicious and developed, or whatever.
You don't have to be specific.
There's a sense that the universe conspires against those who do evil deeds, which is how nature works.
There are consequences of evil deeds.
Even the fact that Moggallana would have felt guilty about it, would have been haunted by this evil deed, would cause him to change his universe, change his reality and be born in situations that would cause him to suffer as a result out of guilt, out of fear, out of anger, out of cruelty, out of all the evil that comes from evil.
But the point is that these ascetics didn't have to act on it.
These other religious people, they're the real evildoers.
They're the ones who sort of showed us how the law of karma works by doing the evil deed and having evil things happen to them right in that life.
See, the point is that not only in that life.
These evildoers, you might think they got off easy, you know, dying once.
Or sometimes you might think people get off easy.
They just are put to death, right?
The death sentence.
People think, well, the death penalty is actually quite inhumane.
It actually doesn't really make up for the cruel deeds that people do.
But it's merely a very small part of the evil consequences.
And that's the point, is that we should not do evil deeds.
So there's much to be learned here about how karma works.
But of course as meditators our focus should be on our mind states.
It should be focused on our learning about the very building blocks that make up and create karma on a momentary level.
How our greed, anger and delusion affects both our habits of mind and the state of our body.
It affects our physical health, our mental health.
It affects our relationships with the people around us.
And how this has real and lasting repercussions.
It can change your life.
If you do good deeds, it can change your life in a good way.
It does change your life in a good way.
If you do evil deeds, it changes your life in a bad way.
Change your whole universe.
Set you on the wrong path.
Even lead you to hell.
And therefore we work not to worry about... We work two ways.
To become...
patient and be able to bear the consequences of past evil deeds without reacting to them, without creating new karma.
And we work on our minds.
We work on the causes of unwholesome karma to make ourselves better people.
I mean, this is all reasonable.
You don't have to have any belief for this.
The person is unwilling to believe the sorts of things that
happen from past lives or happen in future lives.
It's not really important because it's all just an extrapolation of what we know to be true and what we can easily verify through our meditation.
That deeds have consequences.
Ethics.
Ethics is very real and very much a part of reality.
That's one of the great lessons that Buddhism has to offer to the world.
So, that's our teaching today.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.