Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we look at verse 178, which reads as follows.
Which means,
We have to start to translate it with the last word.
Wara means excellent.
Excellent more than being the one ruler, the one king or rulership over the whole world.
to be the one king over the whole world.
King of the earth.
More excellent than going to heaven.
More excellent than being the ruler of
the ruler of the whole world, king of the earth, ruler of the world.
More excellent than all these is the fruit, , the fruit of attaining the stream.
It's one of the verses that I'm quite familiar with.
And the story, not a long and complicated one, the story is of the son of Anathapindika.
His name was Kaala.
And we know, those who know anything about Anathapindika know that he was, you should know from some of the stories we've been telling, that he was a virtuous sort of person and a devout follower of the Buddha.
But as these things often go, this sort of virtue and goodness is not shared with family members or shared in various degrees.
They say blood is thicker than water.
Blood somehow has some meaning to it.
And I think in spiritual matters, that's not always the case.
you'll find there's something spiritual about being born in the same family as someone else in the sense that there's some past that ties you to this life together.
But that past is often very mundane and has very little to do with things like goals, spiritual especially.
And so his son Kala, Natapindika's son, was not interested in spirituality, was not interested in bettering himself mentally, certainly not interested in going to see the Buddha.
Not virtuous, not high-minded, an ordinary individual all around.
Or perhaps you might say, not ordinary, but not inclined.
He had never given any thought to the spiritual life.
Anathapindika was very, perhaps over the top.
I don't know if you could fault him for it.
I would never want to do that.
He's considered a great person.
But he was quite over the top in his devotion to the Buddha.
You might think that, hey, if he was really sincere and perfect, why didn't he become a monk or become an Arahant?
And of course he didn't.
He was a Sotapanna when he passed away, as far as I understand.
And so you have to leave room for some element of imperfection.
And those imperfections are often what impresses people who are not inclined immediately to the spiritual life.
And so he must have seen that his father was a bit over the top in his lavish praise and devotion to the Buddha.
And he was never inclined to go see the Buddha.
Just an ordinary person.
Someone inclined to enjoy life.
His father was, his family was quite, quite rich.
That's the thing about rich people is they often become complacent.
When things are good, what need have you of spirituality, right?
Buddha said it's very difficult.
It's a, when things are good, when you're surrounded by
Sensuality, it's very difficult to understand the truth.
There's often a complaint of Buddhist teachers that we see in these texts where they would get a request to teach and they just feel it was a hopeless task.
I can't teach you anything.
And the Buddha would say, how could that person possibly learn anything?
They're so surrounded by sensuality.
mired in this pleasure that just keeps you complacent.
Anyway, Anathapindika thought to himself, I can't let this stand.
This is my son.
I'm considered to be the greatest disciple, a lay disciple of the Buddha, greatest supporter of the Buddha.
How could I not have my son be such a
get him on the right path and interested in these good things.
So when he said, don't do this, don't do that, I paid no attention.
Oh, and he thought to himself, well, if he doesn't clean up his act and get his act together, he'll wind up in hell.
Who knows what his future has in store, but he'll wind up doing bad things and
Or he may wind up doing bad things and end up in hell.
And he thought, I have to do something for him.
And he thought to himself, well, everyone likes gifts, right?
Everyone likes getting things.
He's a businessman in Atapindika.
And so you would have people who worked for him.
And everyone has a price, is how they'd say it, in the crass sort of way.
I thought, well, my son must have a price, he said.
I said, look, I called his son over, I said, look, I'll give you a hundred gold coins, kahapana.
I think the word is probably kahapana.
It just means it's the standard measure of currency, probably worth more than a hundred dollars.
an American or whatever.
Probably more than that, though I don't have a calculation.
So quite a bit of money.
Or a substantial little bit of money.
Maybe it's a hundred dollars.
I'll give you a hundred gold coins.
If you go to the Buddha's monastery and listen to the Dhamma and come back.
And undertake the precepts.
Eight precepts.
Go to the monastery, maybe just five precepts, I don't know.
It looks like uposatha, so that would be eight precepts.
Which means he wouldn't eat, he would only eat in the morning.
Do that for one day and one night.
And come back.
And he said, you give me a hundred kahapana.
Yes, I'll give it to you.
So, having been bought,
The son went to the monastery and probably ate something at the monastery, but he went to the monastery and lay down and slept.
Found a place to sleep, off in a corner somewhere, maybe under a tree.
Came back early in the morning.
His father saw him coming.
He said, oh, bring food for my son.
Bring him some rice porridge.
Yagu, morning food, breakfast.
So they brought him food and they set the food out in front of him, but he stood in front of his father with his arms crossed and said, give me my money.
I'm not going to eat until I get my money.
And the father was perturbed because, you know, here's this son who hadn't eaten since the morning before.
And he thought, okay, okay, give him the money.
He gave him the money and then he sat down to eat and he said, he doesn't say, but I guess he must have told them what happened.
He said, oh, yes, yes, I just went.
And clearly he hadn't learned anything.
I think the clear thing here is that he was still a grabby sort of person, greedy sort of person.
Anantapindika could maybe tell by his behavior.
So he said, okay, I tell you what, today I want you to go back again.
I'll give you a thousand gold coins.
If you stand, but this time, you must stand before the Buddha.
Go before the Buddha himself.
And master, memorize a single verse of his teaching.
He thought to himself, the least I can do for my son, have him memorize a single verse.
The Buddha will know what to teach him, give him something useful.
Just a single verse.
I mean, it's a trifle, really.
Right?
I just recited a verse that I've memorized.
It's not that hard.
It gets easier when the clearer your mind is.
Some people are able to memorize the whole of the Buddhist teaching because they've devoted their whole lives to that and their whole of their attention.
But he figured, well, my son can memorize a verse.
That shouldn't be too hard.
Then I'll have done something for him.
Maybe he's just at his wit's end.
So the son said, okay, it's your money.
Well, it's going to be my money soon, but okay.
And off he went back to the monastery.
Went before the Buddha and listened to what the Buddha was teaching.
Of course, the Buddha would come out every day to teach.
And the Buddha saw him coming and, oh, the Buddha knew what's going on.
He knew the mind of this young man and said, I'll give him something difficult to understand.
difficult to memorize, difficult to get his mind around.
And so he taught a verse, and the boy couldn't master it.
I wonder what the word for master is.
Let's look at the Pali.
It just means to learn.
It's not mastery.
Learn a single verse, Dhammapada, in fact.
Ekam Dhammapadam.
So these verses that we have are called Dhammapada.
Learn a single Dhammapada.
I couldn't do it.
The text says that the Buddha used his influence, some sort of magical influence,
We talked about perfections.
One of the Buddha's perfections was, of course, determination.
And he could determine something.
He could say, let it be thus.
So he made it set in his mind.
And the power of his mind said to be such that he was able to influence other people's abilities in this way.
Or he could exercise some influence.
over weak-minded people, let's say, because this man would have been easily distracted.
So the Buddha contrived some way to make it difficult for him, just like a manipulative sort of person.
I'm not saying that the Buddha was, but a manipulative sort of person could manipulate others into giving rise to certain emotions,
giving rise to fear, fear mongers, propaganda and all that, how you can manipulate people with words.
So the Buddha was able to manipulate this boy for wholesome purposes.
And it was just so troublesome for this boy to
Another thing you might throw into the mix is how pure the Dhamma is, and how it is quite difficult for people who are not clear of mind to understand.
A person who isn't meditating will have quite difficulty understanding.
If you've ever read the Buddha's teaching, you might find it quite difficult until you've undertaken some meditation practice, at which point it becomes quite much clearer.
And so he was forced to suddenly have a goal, to suddenly have something to strive for.
You know, his whole life he had just been kind of indolent and negligent.
It wasn't even apparently that he was a bad person.
He clearly had some good potential.
And I think you could say that of a lot of people, great potential.
But he clearly had never used it.
And suddenly he had a chance, he had a reason, something to strive for, even though it was for money.
And perhaps you might say it was no longer about the money.
At this point it was the challenge and the fact that something was no longer easy for him.
When you have money, when you're a rich, spoiled son, everything comes easy.
especially when perhaps he was endowed with good qualities and was a strong young man and he had all the best teachers and so he was smart, skilled in business perhaps, and so everything came easy to him.
And suddenly there was something difficult.
I think that's something we all find in meditation, how surprisingly difficult it is.
Like you talk about how difficult it must be to meditate, but
You don't realize how surprisingly difficult it is.
Difficult in ways you've never thought.
It's like trying to, what's the word?
What's the word?
Like herding cats, I think is the expression.
Herding your mind is like herding cats.
They don't really form groups like that.
The mind as well is not easily corralled.
And so he cultivated, just in that one night, he cultivated so much goodness, spending the time.
And perhaps, though the text doesn't say, perhaps he spent the night in deeper contemplation and, of course, meditation as a result of his newfound appreciation of the Dhamma, at least in terms of how challenging this exercise was.
That's the thing about the Dhamma, it's open, it leads you on, it pulls you in.
You might meditate for just a bit, but then you find how much more there is.
It's like you find a thread on your sweater and you start pulling, and oh, pull and pull and pull until you find that there's no sweater left.
The Dhamma does that with the world.
It unravels so much of what we think is, so much of what we wrap ourselves in.
And so he became a Sotapanna, which means he had realized the Four Noble Truths.
He had an experience of realization, like an epiphany, where his mind was so focused and so clear and bright that he suddenly realized that clinging is only a cause for suffering, that nothing is worth clinging to, and that it's wanting that's the problem.
And he let go.
His mind, it's not an intellectual thing, his mind actually let go as a result of this clear and perfect realization.
So he became what's known as a Sotapanna.
It doesn't mean he was fully enlightened, but he had entered onto the first stage, what we call the first stage of enlightenment.
And the next morning, of course, the
Anathapindika was waiting for his son but also waiting for the Buddha and he came with the Buddha to Savatthi the Kala, the young son came back to Anathapindika's house with the Buddha and how changed was he the day before he had
refused to touch the food without asking for money and now he saw they were coming closer to his father's home and as they approached he thought to himself, oh dear, he made a fervent wish, may my father not offer me money in front of the Buddha.
Oh, may he keep it hidden, may he not let on the fact that the only reason I went, of course he was a changed person at this point, someone who had great respect and reverence for the Dhamma, and to feel like he had been a mercenary, he had been basically bribed into listening to the Dhamma.
He had to be bribed, and the day before he had no interest in it.
may he hide this from the Buddha, may he not expose me in front of all the monks.
And so they sat down and they fed the Buddha and the son ate as well and after they ate right in front of the Buddha and in front of all the monks, Anathapindika came out with a bag of gold coins and said, here's your money.
He said,
He says, actually this text says, he says, Dear son, you will remember that I persuaded you to take up the obligations of the Uposatha and go to the monastery by promising to give you a thousand pieces of, a thousand kahapana.
Here are your thousand kahapana, right in front of the Buddha, lays it all there.
And hands it to the son.
And the son says,
Perhaps he doesn't say, but perhaps he crosses his arms over his chest and he refuses to take it.
Greatly embarrassed.
The exact opposite of the day before where he refused to take food until he got the money.
He says, I care not for the money.
His father is quite disturbed and says, son, take the money.
He refused to touch it.
turned away astonished and Adipinda of course goes to the Buddha and says wow my son has changed it's wonderful he says the day before yesterday I sent him giving him a hundred gold saying I'd give him a hundred gold pieces and he wouldn't eat because he got the money he wouldn't eat until he got the money and now he won't take the money
And the Buddha leapt right to the conclusion and said, what he's attained is your thousand ghappana, hundred ghappana, thousand ghappana, hundred thousand, million, billion ghappana.
It's nothing.
What he has attained is greater than, greater than emperor of the earth.
greater than heaven.
There's nothing greater.
Well, it's greater than all those things anyway.
It's not much greater than attainment of Sotapanna.
How many taught this verse?
So there really is only one lesson involved here, and that's really, I would summarize it all with goals, talking about goals.
Many people in the world are like the sun, people who have no, you might say, have no real goals.
Goals are not, I think, something that everyone subscribes to on a grand scale.
We all have goals.
They just tend to be, for the most part, quite capricious.
They'll last a day or a week if we're lucky, but most often they'll last an hour or a few minutes even.
We'll see something we like, our goal is to get it.
We see something we don't like, our goal is to find some way to be removed from it or have it be removed from us.
There are, of course, goals that creep up on us and end up staying with us and being long-term goals.
When we're sick, our goal is often to be healthy and that might take some time.
When we're poor, our object is to be wealthy and that might take time.
When we're in school, our goal will often last several years.
Our goal is to get a degree, right?
My goal, I've been trying to get a degree for, I made a promise with my father many years ago, and it's been 20 years almost.
And I'm just almost getting ready to get my degree.
So there's a long-term goal of sorts.
But I go to university.
I'm going part-time.
And it's interesting to watch the students as they graduate.
And it's clear to them that it's not much of a goal, really.
You get a piece of paper.
And what did I just do for four years?
Oh, there's much that comes from studying.
organize your thoughts and so on, but as with all goals in life, all of our ordinary goals, they tend to be hollow and empty.
We talk about the midlife crisis.
Midlife crisis often comes to people who have had their goals met, only to find out that those goals were
far less impressive than they seemed 20, 30 years ago.
Goals to get a career, family, house, even a station in life to become outstanding in your field.
They become hollow in the end.
Look at the history of kings.
The kings of Britain, of the UK.
The well-known kings in this part of the world.
Look at their lives.
The greatness.
How great is their lives?
Look at the presidents and the
dictators throughout history, people who have ruled over great nations and great kingdoms and empires.
There are many different types of goals.
I think one of the reasons why we become complacent
or have become complacent throughout history is our reliance on religion.
You might notice that to the extent that one becomes proportionately less ambitious in a worldly sense, the more proportion, the more one becomes religious.
So we studied Simone Weil recently in one of my classes, and it was interesting reading about her.
I mean, it was inspiring in a way, even though I didn't agree with everything she taught, of course.
She talked about how devoted she was to poverty, to giving up the worldly possessions and gold, because she was so sure
of her religion.
And so many religions, I think Christianity stands out to me because it's very familiar from my upbringing, from the society I grew up in.
Much of Christianity, many strains of Christianity are about faith over
over ambition.
And by faith I mean being content and, from a Buddhist perspective, being complacent and believing that your belief alone will help you attain a goal.
Your faith in someone else.
We put our faith in something outside of ourselves.
and it makes us complacent.
I mean in a good way in some ways.
It makes us less ambitious in a worldly sense.
Religion has that power because we believe in heaven.
There's this belief in these things.
In Buddhism of course we have parallels as well.
There are strains of Buddhism.
There are strains of Buddhism that have come to believe
that it's far more efficacious to purposefully avoid good deeds, purposefully avoid good acts, virtuous acts, purposefully avoid bettering oneself.
Because if you better yourself, it means you don't have faith, you have imperfect faith in your salvation through another.
There are Buddhists who believe that our salvation comes through another, who believe that there are Buddhas who will save us, and if we try to save ourselves in any way, it shows a lack of faith.
So there are many different types of goals.
I suppose this is not just about the striving for a goal, but it's about those goals themselves.
What's the difference?
What's the distinction?
As they say in the Buddhist texts, what's the distinction between these various goals?
So there's something very base about ordinary goals, goals of getting good food, goals of having sexual intercourse and romance, goals of finding pleasure of the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body.
There's something very base about these, and we've come to understand it scientifically as what we call addiction.
But addiction is ongoing throughout our lives.
You don't have to be addicted to cocaine to be an addict.
There are people who are addicted to alcohol.
There are people who are addicted to sex.
But there's addiction throughout our daily lives for ordinary people of all types.
We're addicted to good food.
When we have bad food, we're not happy.
We're displeased by plain food or ordinary food or even the same food.
Food we were really keen to have yesterday might displease us today.
Kind of an addict sort of mindset.
And then there are worldly pursuits like money.
This young man's pursuit of money.
While his father saw, we must assume,
the baseness of that and the limit of that, that there's a limit to money.
And philosophically we understand this.
There are rich people in the world who... There's something noble and great about that.
It's certainly better, more lofty a goal, I think, than simply enjoying the base pleasures of life because it has
loftier nature.
Money, for all we say bad about it, when you get lots of it, there's a certain intellect required in attaining it, keeping it, using it.
Money is removed from pleasure.
Of course, money can be used to get lots and lots of pleasure.
And rich people do abuse it and end up becoming drug addicts of the worst type.
But
Having as your goal when you seek to make money, there is something about it that's as base as it might be and as much as it's derided.
There are rich people who do great things with it, because money is something a bit intellectual, to be able to use it, spend it, invest it, just to be able to keep it.
requires some loftiness and you have to think you have to plan and you see rich people not most rich people but some rich people doing things like trying to eradicate diseases around the world
and poverty and hunger, finding ways to set up foundations.
I was once staying in a residence owned by a house owned by a very rich, a fairly rich woman in California.
And she had quite a, it was quite a feat for her to try and manage her wealth.
She inherited it from her husband.
And she set up a foundation.
And so just learning about that and the troubles she had to go through just to do good deeds.
She went to quite a bit of trouble to work it out.
So money is, there's something about it.
But it's base, relatively base.
You worry about your money.
You lose your money.
You become obsessed with your money.
You become like Ebenezer Scrooge and let it consume you.
And often, the more obsessed you are with keeping your money, the less you actually enjoy it.
The less happiness you have in life because you're constantly caught up in gaining money just for money.
And again, you become an addict.
And there's kind of a theme we should be seeing here that it's all caught up in addictions.
Kingdom, royalty, rulership.
Yes, that's the next one.
What does it mean to be a mayor or a senator or a president?
What does it mean to be an emperor?
Well, there's a greatness there, no?
We can acknowledge a certain greatness even in Hitler in the fact that he was very great in his diabolical, we might say, pursuits.
There was a greatness in the sense that he didn't aim for simple goals.
He aimed to conquer the world, and it was great evil.
But it wasn't just evil, it was greatness in the sense of
having something higher to pursue.
But it shows that greatness itself isn't necessarily good.
You can have great evil.
Hitler wasn't content.
Apparently he was a painter early in his life, I think.
He wasn't content with simply painting.
He had greater goals.
Yes, and he carried out, apparently, it seems, he carried out, it seems, what seems to be many of his goals.
He did terrible things and he was responsible for
a lot of suffering.
And so again, we're not free from this evil or addiction or suffering.
Rich people are not free from it.
Powerful people
You look at some of the rulers in the world and you think, wow, what evil they're doing.
But not only what evil, what suffering must be caught up with that evil.
The corruption of their minds, the downfall of their whole being.
If only powerful people would listen to these things, if only powerful people would take ear, lend ear.
Spiritual teachings.
How different the world would be if they would just listen to me sit here and talk.
Hey, this is your downfall.
It's not me, I'm just passing on the Buddha's teachings.
My teacher once said, oh, if those, very simple, it just seems like a trite thing to say, but he said,
When he heard about the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Towers, he said, oh, if those people had meditated, they would have never done that.
It's simple.
It seems perhaps trite, but oversimplified.
It really is, all of it.
It's so easy to get lost.
We're like lost in a vast ocean, like the sun.
He was lost and all it took was something to strive for, some simple thing, memorizing a verse.
suddenly had to take stock of his mind and what he'd been doing to it and realized that it was his own fault that he really that he couldn't memorize this verse he was vulnerable susceptible to manipulation and susceptible to distraction and being emperor of the world doesn't change that going to heaven doesn't seem to even change that we hear about angels and all in some of these stories we have many stories of angels who were quite foolish
negligent, indolent, lackadaisical, and suffer the consequences as a result, and lose their station, have their fall from grace.
And so there's one goal that stands out as different.
Every religion will tell you this, well, ours is different, this is different.
But we have to state, regardless of the fact that everyone else is stating it as well, we have to point out there is one goal that's different.
And the Buddha says greater, it excels.
Warang means it excels.
But not only does it excel as being better, it's categorically different.
Sotapanna is different, this state of entering the stream.
It's called entering the stream because it pulls you on, it sets you on a course.
And it sets you on a course because it involves not wanting.
It involves freedom from wanting.
It involves letting go.
It involves the knowledge, the realization that wanting is the problem.
It's not that we have the wrong goals or that we're not achieving our goals.
It's this goal seeking, this seeking out for this or that.
The real goal is, in essence, to be free from seeking, to be free from goals.
And it's quite different from the ordinary state.
We say, well, I'm free from goals.
But it's not really true.
We have goals every moment of every day.
Something good comes, as I said, our goal is to get it.
And that's only a difference of scale from, I want to be emperor of the world, I want to go to heaven, I want to be Brahma, God, whatever.
I want to become this or that.
There's only a matter of degree involved there.
But quite different is letting go of wanting.
Sotapanna is someone who has seen nothing is worth wanting.
That wanting is the problem.
Not the not getting part, or the getting what you don't want, the not getting what you want.
That's not the problem, that's the symptom.
That's the suffering that comes from wanting.
And so this is a verse that's important.
It's important.
It really sets up Buddhism, the Buddhist philosophy, in a very succinct way.
Goals are a very important part of spiritual dialogue, to put in perspective material goals, even spiritual goals, to put them all in perspective.
Help us ask ourselves, what is the reason that we do all these things?
These things that we strive for, are they worth striving for?
Our direction is our direction in a way that's going to lead to peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
Or is it going to lead to stress, unhappiness, and suffering?
So that's the Dhammapada verse for today.
That the realization of this truth and entering onto the path towards complete freedom from wanting is greater than all goals, any other goal that we might attain in this world or the next.
So thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.