Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue with verse 225, which reads as follows.
ahinsakā ye munayo nityāṅkā ye na saṅguta te yanti accutaṁ thānaṁ yathagantvā na saucare
which means non-violent, those sages, ever restrained in body, they go to a place they never fall away from, where having gone, one suffers not, one sorrows not.
This verse was apparently taught in response to a question that relates to a story about the Buddha when he was living near Saketa.
The story goes that there was a Brahmin living in the area.
And when the Buddha went on alms round this Brahmin,
saw the Buddha walking and rushed up to him and said, my son, my son, what are you doing?
Where have you been?
Why have you not come home?
Why have you not come to see us?
And he invited the Buddha to his house and to his wife.
And his wife said, the Brahmin woman said, my son, where have you been?
Why have you not come to visit?
And they called out all of their children and said, come, come, pay respect.
Your brother is a rishi, is an ascetic.
Come and pay respect to your brother.
And the Buddha was silent and he waded through it patiently and they asked the Buddha, they said, our son, please, you must come to eat at our house every day.
Why would you go anywhere else when you're in our, in your home, when you're near us, your parents?
And the Buddha said, oh, it's not the way, it's not our way to
to go to the same place regularly.
Buddha's way is to support and commune with all sorts of different people by moving, by traveling.
And they said, well, then please send us monks.
Send us your followers.
Send us other followers of your teaching, other monks.
We'll care for them.
And they did this and whenever the Buddha was free he would go to their house and again and again they listened to his teachings and they came to the monastery always calling him our son And they became anagamis throughout this time They practiced the Buddha's teaching and listened to his teaching and became devout followers
and were successful in becoming anagami, the non-returner, meaning when they passed away they would never be reborn again.
They had given up all greed, all anger, all sensual greed anyway, and all anger.
They were very pure.
And so the monks took this up as a topic of conversation one day, asking, what's going on here?
Not only do these Brahmin people erroneously label the Buddha as their son, the Buddha doesn't correct them.
They know that the Buddha has a father and a mother, Suddhodana and Mahapajapati.
They were his parents.
And the Buddha doesn't bother to correct them.
It's quite exceptional.
And the Buddha heard them and he said, oh, you want to know the reason why they call me their son?
And he told a story of the past, the Jataka.
And he said, in 500 lifetimes, in 500 births,
Both of these two lovely people were my parents.
In 500 births they were my aunt and uncle.
And in 500 births they were my grandparents.
So again and again and again we were related.
And as a result this perception, this recognition has stuck with them.
From that time on, the story goes on to say that they spent the rains with the Buddha, that the Buddha relied upon them.
And during the three months of the rainy season, he went ever and again to their house.
And through his guidance, they became Arahant and passed away.
And when they passed away, the monks asked the Buddha, where did they go, Venerable Sir?
Not realizing that they had become arahants, never to be born again.
Buddha said, oh people, sages like them, special individuals, quite exceptional, are never born again.
They go to a place, where do they go?
They go to a place that you'll never fall away from.
And then he taught this verse.
So the lesson of the story, if there is one, I think especially relating to meditation is in regards to perception and in regards to concepts, specifically concepts of relationship.
The story reminds us that our relationships are conceptual based on our perceptions.
Many of us, I think, can relate not necessarily to the specific perception of this Brahman couple but to the general type of perception where you recognize someone who you've never met before.
They're in sharper focus than everyone else And your connection to them is quick And strong and lasting We see this with people we just met for the first time And it might be good, it might be bad It might be negative in the sense that we become enemies, rivals It can be just as sharp as with friends But we generally don't
look at family the same way.
And this story gives us a reminder that even our family members are no less conceptual than our friends or the relationships with our friends and so on.
Our loved ones, our lovers, our romantic involving partners.
Who's to say that this couple is any less the Buddha's parents than Suddhodana or Mahapajapati or Mahamaya?
Just because their relationship with the Buddha is older, has passed away, has changed?
In the end, it all comes down to our perceptions.
So if there's any lesson to be had for a meditator, it's to remind us that our reification of things
is just conceptual and helping us to see that our perception of everything, of people and places and things and our attachment to things is based on this cultivation of a perception that builds up over time and with attention.
The more attention and the more focus we put on something, if it's a person, then on our relationships,
the stronger that perception becomes.
Lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, it builds up.
And that's the only reason why we are the way we are, and why we have the personality we have.
Not because we were born with it.
No, it's much deeper than that.
It's because we cultivate it, and we've cultivated it and continue cultivating it.
And so meditation is very much a practice of refining and adjusting those habits, straightening out our personalities.
We don't have to lose our personalities, just straighten them out.
And what we lose, what we remove are the ones that we see clearly for ourselves without any reliance on others at all.
And that as being
harmful and stressful and a cause for suffering.
But the deeper lesson, of course, comes from the verse, as usual.
And the lesson, I think, the main lesson from the verse relates again to this difference between worldly pursuits and spiritual or holy religious pursuits.
Because it relates to violence.
It relates to activity, unrestrained activity with the body.
You know, acting on impulse, acting on ambition, acting on desire.
It's the way of the world.
It's a way that gets you what you want, very often.
Anger, violence,
And by violence, not just physical violence, verbal violence, verbal conflict, very often gets you what you want.
Verbal manipulation, physical acts of manipulation, of coercion, of threat, of intimidation, very often gets people what they want.
And so the way of the world is one way.
The way of the Dhamma is very different.
And it's in stark contrast
Because the way of the world always, whether it relates to anger and violence or whether it relates to greed, which also has to do with violence, is ultimately about the reliance on certain situations to make you happy.
We get what we want, we accomplish what we desire, we become proud and attached and identify with things.
More and more we become dependent and reliant on them.
We suffer from the anger of the violence, we suffer from the greed, the desire which stresses our, taxes our system.
We suffer from the worry and the fear of other people's violence and their greed, the concern for losing what we have, from having it threatened.
The more violent you are, whether it be through greed or anger, the more concerned you become, the more susceptible you become.
Because you become familiar with loss, the concept of loss.
Only someone who has something to lose suffers from loss.
Only someone who is attached to the things that they have or the things they might get can suffer from losing or not getting what they want, what they like, what they want, what they need.
And we suffer when it is taken away, when we are conquered.
The conqueror who is conquered suffers more than the one who conquers not.
We suffer when we are taken advantage of, when we lose the things we want to others.
We the manipulator are manipulated.
The greedy one has things taken from them.
This is how we suffer.
So it's constantly in a state of uncertainty.
And this is the essence of the Buddha's teaching on uncertainty, on anicca, on impermanence.
Or someone who relies upon this king of the hill, king of the castle mentality where you can rise to the top.
Someone who rises to the top has that much further to fall.
It's that much more susceptible to loss.
And so it seems that the person who wins, who is victorious, that they've got it made.
There is no way, there is no instance, there's no possibility for that to be lasting, permanent, stable, to be any sort of everlasting goal.
Even putting aside death, the ultimate end to any accomplishment, any worldly accomplishment, the simple reliance on victory, the simple frame of mind is one that is unbalanced, requires this, is constantly
stressed, constantly in a state of suffering.
A person who gets what they want feels so happy, and thinks they are so happy.
They're so full of greed and anger and delusion that they can't see while they're suffering.
They can't see how tense and stressed and perverted their mind is, how perverse the mind is.
A person who is perverse misses the fact that that perversion is a cause for suffering.
So we have this example of, worldly example of police brutality and we have on the other side the example of protesters being angry and violent and not to really get involved and not to create an equivalence
Because clearly there is something to stand up and say something about.
Clearly there is something wrong with the system.
The system, the society that we have built for ourselves is based on greed.
There is a problem with what might be called police brutality.
There's no question.
And that's an issue that is worth standing up for and speaking out about.
That being said, stepping back and looking from the point of view of all who might wish for good things.
No good things come from anger, from
From violence Whether it be on the side of the police Who think they're so good Getting their way They have the power Not realizing how torturous it must be To be such a violent And cruel individual Fearful Even How much There's apparently a great amount of trauma Because they're under pressure Peer pressure from other police officers From their superiors and so on
And on the other side of the protesters who have such a noble aspiration to end racism, to end discrimination, to end cruelty, brutality, to end evil states of mind, ultimately, they may not phrase it, they may not realize it, ultimately it comes down to
evil states of mind.
Without the evil states of mind, the unwholesome, the states of mind that cause stress and suffering, without those mind states, there would be no tension or there would be no conflict.
And so as a result, it's self-defeating to increase and to cultivate anger.
It may get us what we want.
It may even be the solution in the sense that on a worldly level it does change things for the better.
But as a rule, and for our own spiritual health, for our own mental health and well-being, which ultimately is what it's all about,
for our own spiritual mental well-being, we can't succumb to anger and violence.
Ultimately, it's self-defeating because if the goal is to be achieved with anger and violence, then what kind of a goal is it?
What is the result?
If that's the outcome, then we haven't really fixed anything.
It's not a world worth living in, even if it does change.
So that's on the side of, that's the disadvantages to that.
And in opposition, we have the way of the Dhamma, one who is non-violent.
One who is controlled.
Kayena sambhuta, which means controlled in body, but the commentary says it doesn't just relate to body.
It's actually body, speech, and mind, of course.
The Buddha wasn't just praising physical restraint.
Kaya often just means in the being, so it refers to all three.
This way is very different.
We might put up an equivalence and say, well, what about you?
Aren't you attached to your way as well?
We don't want to think that there might be one thing better than another, one way of life better than another.
Meaning, we quite often put up these false equivalences between different things.
So we have to point out the stark
Contrast between these two ways One is always inclining Always reaching And the other is never inclining And never reaching Never pushing and pulling The Buddha said Never coming or going Where there is no coming and no going And so the issue of impermanence Of instability is solved
why the second part of the verse talks about a permanent achyutta achyutta means falling away achyutta never fallen away you can never fall away from it because it's at the bottom already it's at the base already if something desirable comes no matter how desirable something desirable goes
Something undesirable comes undesirable.
It makes no difference.
It is a way of being, a way of relating to reality that is inherently, by its very nature, without any cause for doubt or uncertainty, stable, consistent, unshakable, invincible.
No.
The question as to whether or not such a state is possible or really exists, that's the question that Buddhism seeks to answer and to demonstrate.
And that's where meditation comes in.
Our practice of mindfulness, the question that often arises in people, why are we repeating to ourselves something like pain, pain, or if we're angry, say angry, angry.
If we want something, wanting.
Why do we say to ourselves seeing, seeing?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we reminding ourselves about these mundane realities?
And this is the answer.
We're trying to cultivate a state of objectivity where we relate to things just as they are.
Because our actions, just like the actions of anyone who gets angry and violent or greedy and covetous and ambitious and so on, our habits have power and influence.
They change us.
And if we cultivate this state of objectivity, where we remember things, where we remember, oh yeah, I'm not going to forget that that's just pain.
Because if you forget that that's just pain, you will get upset about it.
When you see delicious food, for example, I'm not going to forget that that's seeing.
Because if I forget, I will get caught up in all these concepts.
Oh, I know what that tastes like, and that's something I like.
When you're angry, I'm not going to forget that that's anger.
Because if I forget, if I lose track of the experience, I will get caught up by the anger, by the greed.
I will become violent.
I will become covetous.
I will be manipulative.
I will do all sorts of things to get what I want and to remove what I don't want and so on.
This is what it means to be restrained.
Samuddha.
It doesn't mean you have to force yourself in any way, really.
It means you have to keep the mind with the experience.
Keep the mind in the reality of the experience.
Not getting caught up in our reactions and our perceptions of things.
So when the Buddha talks about this achyutatthana, achyutantanam yatagantvanasocchare, where when sorrow is not, he's talking about at its base, this state, this way of life, way of being.
that one comes to, through training and through practice of non reactivity, of non judgment, of simple, true and pure experience of reality as it is experience of this of what we're all experiencing, but experiencing it purely and truly.
And without judgment or reactivity.
Because that is the way of life, the way of practice.
That is the way that carries on to eternity, that has no falling back.
There is no tension in it.
There is no opposition.
When you strive and strive and strive to get something, you build up and build up this attachment to it.
When you live your life in objectivity, in clear awareness of things as they are, there is no build-up like that.
There is a shedding off.
There's a freeing.
And so the result, rather than a building up and a building up of some formation that is going to topple down, there's the deconstruction and there is a reduction in needs and attachment.
And the ultimate destination, the ultimate result is freedom from suffering.
in a way very different from any conception of freedom from suffering that we might have in a worldly sense.
Because it is independent.
It has nothing to do with samsara or our experiences of this or that.
And so it's free and it's free from any of the uncertainty and the impermanence, the unpredictability of samsara, of the world.
And so there's no fear of sorrow from one who has gone to this place.
That's the Dhammapada for today.
Thank you all for listening.