Hello and welcome back to our study on the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 135, which reads as follows, yathādaṇḍena-gopālo gāvo-pājeti-gocaraṁ evaṁ ca rāca-macchucca āyuṁ pājēnti-pāniṇam Which means,
Just as a cowherd with a stick drives the cows to the cow pasture So too, old age and death Old age and death drive the life of beings
drive the age, drive our age onto old age and death.
Drive us on.
They direct us.
They control us.
They are the master, the cowherd.
They herd us.
We have nowhere to go but to the pastures, dictated by old age and death.
We can't avoid them, like the cows can't avoid the cowherd.
So the story behind this, another short story, is about Risakha, the Buddha's chief female lay disciple.
In the time, it's about the Uposatha, which would be the holy day.
And so in the time of the Buddha in India, it was tradition in Indian society to consider the full moon as a holy day where you would undertake religious practices.
So for Brahmins or Hindus, as we know them, they would take it on themselves to worship whatever god they followed.
So in Buddhism, this was modified to suit Buddhist religious principles of ethics, morality, so it would be a time where people would take on advanced or more strict and serious ethical and moral practices of abstaining from things like entertainment, romance, beautification,
sleep, that kind of thing.
So they would dedicate themselves to the Buddhist teaching.
So Vaisakha would of course keep these precepts as a, she was a Sotapanna, so she had already seen Nibbana for the first time.
She was on her way to enlightenment.
So she was keeping them for the right reason, but she saw all these other women
Her women followers actually.
So they kept it with her.
And some of them were girls, young girls.
Some of them were newlyweds, young women in the prime of life.
Some of them were middle-aged.
Some of them were old seniors who were already showing signs of old age, close to death even.
So all range of ages and so she wondered why these women were keeping.
She was somewhat I suppose suspicious you can imagine.
Are they doing it for the right reasons?
I bet she was asking in her mind.
And so she came to them and she asked the old women first, why are you keeping the Uposatha?
Why are you keeping these precepts?
Why do you come and listen to the Buddha's teachings?
Why do you take this holiday?
What does this holiday mean to you?
And they said, oh well, we're old and the pleasures of life have faded and so we're looking for the pleasures of heaven.
We're hoping that through this practice, we've heard that it's great wholesomeness and that's what leads you to heaven.
So we figured that this is the way to go.
And then she went and asked the middle-aged women, why are you coming here to practice and keep the holiday
keep the precepts and so on.
And they said, oh, well, we're here to escape the control of our husbands.
I suppose it's a temporary escape, being able to leave the house to go to the monastery, because, of course, women in India at the time, and to some extent even today in traditional societies, were often little more than servants or possessions of their husbands.
So they were very much under their power.
But when they came to the monastery, of course, there was an excuse to leave.
potentially there was a path out, so if they practiced spiritual teachings they could leave the household life and become nuns or female monks.
And so that was why they were doing it, completely just to get away from their husbands, who were in many cases abusive or at least domineering, controlling.
And then so she went on, you know, that's interesting, she went on and asked various young women who were, you know, in the prime of their life, married but still young.
And so she wondered what they would say, and they said, oh, we're keeping it.
And perhaps not entirely, but by and large,
And she found that they were keeping it for things like, and it gives the example of having babies.
So it was a big deal among many of them.
That religious practice was and to some extent still is in traditional Buddhist societies understood to facilitate childbirth.
Like there's something special about the karma.
You could explain it.
I think it's a lot of superstition, obviously, that's what it sounds like.
the idea that it leads to childbirth because of how birth comes about.
It's not just chance or random acts, blind luck that a woman is able to conceive.
Now, it requires, of course, the male and the female.
But it also requires a mind.
It also requires a being that is coming to be reborn.
And so for a being to be reborn as a human being, they have to have wholesome qualities.
It takes something special to be born as a human being.
And so the idea is that it also requires something special, something attractive to such a being.
So there's the idea that religious practice is somehow attractive and therefore puts one in a state where one is receptive or is attractive to such a being, pleasant and peaceful.
You could also say that the mind that comes from spiritual practice is both physically more receptive to childbirth, but also mentally.
So any being that is interested in being born as a human being will gravitate towards the minds that are at peace, the minds that are wholesome.
So there is an argument I think to be made that it probably increases your chances of
not only of giving birth, but of giving birth to a child who has wholesome qualities, obviously, right?
If you're an unwholesome person, it's more likely that your children, the beings that are going to be attracted to your womb, are going to be equally unwholesome.
Some food for thought.
But at any rate, they had this belief.
And it's not a Buddhist.
None of these are really the proper reason.
So she's at this point starting to shake her head and wondering if anybody's really doing it for the right reason.
These are not proper reasons to practice.
They're not bad or unwholesome, but they're quite limited.
And so that's what the Buddha is going to talk about when she finally gets to him.
So she goes to the maidens, the young girls, and asks them, you know, why are you doing it?
All these other ones have these ulterior motives.
What's your reason?
Maybe it's pure.
She found, by and large, the unmarried women
Why were they practicing?
Because they felt that spiritual practice would help them to obtain a husband while they were still young, which is kind of funny because the older women are trying to get away from their husbands and the younger women are wishing to get husbands.
Now, it's not entirely contradictory or
absurd because there was the sense that it was actually worse than whatever you might face at the hands of a husband to be unmarried.
If you're unmarried then you're a burden on your family who would treat you as little better than a servant.
An unmarried woman in this society was not very well, was the lowest of the low and disrespected.
in favor of women who were fruitful and didn't marry, and gave honor and wealth and status to their families.
So not getting married was probably a fate worse than getting married, and neither one is all that pleasant.
This was the state of women in India at the time.
Suffice to say they had their reasons.
Now these are not goals that are unwholesome, but they're limited.
And so shaking her head and not really understanding, she went to the Buddha and said, what's going on with these people?
Why don't they see?
Why don't they see the true benefit of spirituality?
Why can't they see that?
And the Buddha taught this verse and he said, you know,
Birth, here this is the quote, birth, old age, sickness and death are like cowards with staves in their hands.
Birth sends them to old age, old age sends them to sickness, and sickness sends them to death.
These things cut life short as though they cut with an axe.
And he says, but despite this, there are none that desire absence of rebirth.
This is the most interesting part of the story.
It's an important point that he makes.
None, none, it's not none, but he's saying, no, basically none, more or less.
Nobody in the world desires absence of rebirth.
Very few, that's the idea.
Rebirth is all they desire.
And then he says this verse.
So not only rebirth, the word is, it's actually not rebirth.
What doesn't mean rebirth?
It means existence, becoming, I guess.
So the idea is that, just a second.
Okay, now what they hear means the rounds.
So it's the cycle.
They desire this cycle.
Nobody, that's right.
So the cycle is a birth, old age, sickness and death.
And nobody desires an end to it.
They all desire this.
And it's kind of what you're seeing here.
It's kind of a cycle.
Everybody wants the next step.
So an unmarried woman wants a husband.
And in fact, it's not only to avoid suffering.
It's actually, of course, there's attachment.
And young women desire husbands.
It's a thrill for them, the idea of having a husband.
It's sort of culturally bred into them.
And young men desire a wife equally.
And then when you're married, what's the next step?
Well, you desire a child, and wouldn't that be wonderful?
Of course, there are reasons to desire a child beyond just the pleasure of it, because a woman who is unfruitful is a shame and is barren, you know, considered to be useless, because that's all they were good for in some people's eyes.
But also, on the other hand, women and men both desire children.
It's something that they look forward to.
So it's a continuation, the next step, and then the next step, and the next step.
And finally, once you've squeezed all the pleasure out of this life that you can get, you want to do it all over again.
We are like, Mahasi Sayadaw says, we're like ducks and chickens that squawk and fight and play, thinking that they have this long life ahead of them.
And they don't know in fact that they're going to be slaughtered at the end of their growth.
They're just going to have their heads cut off and be cooked for someone's dinner.
But they don't see it.
As humans, we're like that.
It's a similar situation.
We don't pay attention to the fact that our pleasure and our happiness is circumscribed, and we're doing nothing to prepare ourselves for the inevitability of suffering.
If it's not as we get old, then it's when we die.
And if it's not when we die, then it's when we're reborn again.
And we forget.
We forget not only of our past deaths, but we forget about in this life all the suffering we've gone through from childhood.
So people want to be born again.
Most people in modern society don't think about being reborn, but when they hear about it,
it's exciting to them.
Oh, I can do it all over again.
Wouldn't it be great?
Instead of thinking, oh, that's horrific, I have to do this all over again.
Most, or many if not most people will think, oh, that's great, I get to do this all over again.
Which is funny because we've gone through so much stress and suffering for the most part in our lives.
But for the most part we've forgotten all about it.
And so we've got this idea, this rosy idea of life, that it's all fun and games, that it's all pleasure and happiness.
Because we're not willing, no one wants to dwell on the unpleasantness.
if you're unable to see the suffering.
So this is the general philosophy.
Now how it has to do with our meditation specifically.
Meditation helps you to see through this.
It helps you to see the good and the bad.
It helps you see the pleasant and the unpleasant.
And it helps you to see these things objectively.
It helps you to see that the things that you cling to are unstable, unsatisfying, and uncontrollable.
That they're not what you think.
That happiness is not the default state.
Happiness is something that, in fact, you have to work for.
And if you don't work for it, you can eat it up and eat it up.
It eventually is consumed and all you're left with is the craving for more and you're always going to be subject to this disappointment, this restlessness, this agitation of not getting that what you want that impels you.
to seek it out further, whether in this life or in being reborn somewhere else.
It's something we have to work, it's something we have to strive for, it's something that takes a lot of stress and suffering just to get.
And so this is what we don't see, we forget.
I mean, another important
is that our attachment to things that we desire is not rational.
It's not, there's no, if you look at it clearly, there's no explanation for why we cling to these things.
I mean, a drug addict knows this clearly.
They're able to see because it's so extreme that it's not rational that they desire these drugs.
but they still desire them.
Now a person who's addicted to ordinary things, however addicted to music or food or sexuality or so on, is less clear, but still upon examination sees that it all falls apart and depending on how strongly they're deluding themselves they can actually acknowledge, at least temporarily, that there's no rational reason for obtaining again and again and again these
these activities, you know, like, what is sexuality?
You're bumping two bags of fluid, you know, bags of disgusting fluids and matter together, fat and pus and blood and, you know, senus and tendons and so on.
flapping them together because it stimulates the chemicals.
I mean, if you take it apart, it's actually kind of silly.
Why, you know, delicious food, you're just stimulating these chemical reactions.
You look at the food and it's beautiful and so on.
Music.
What is music?
It's just this rhythmic...
pressing on the eardrum right that creates a sort of a trance in our minds that is pleasant I mean it's all stimulation in the end it all comes down to that and and and in the end all it brings is a a Cultivation or a stimulation of the addiction cycle in the brain which means that using the word addiction for all these things is proper because that's what they are and
They all come down to some sort of chemical stimulation or some kind of stimulation for the brain and hence the mind.
And thereby stimulate, increase the need and the desire for these things.
Them being impermanent and unpredictable, they therefore can't satisfy.
They therefore lead to dissatisfaction at times.
And so this is kind of what Visakha is seeing because she's practiced meditation and she practices and she sees that these things are not, there's no rational reason, these are not true happiness, these are not the true goal.
True happiness and true peace has to come from letting go, it has to come from freeing yourself from any kind of need so that you have no wants, you have no needs, you're satisfied.
The only way to be satisfied is to let go.
It's not to always get what you want, because that's, of course, not possible.
So that's the Dhammapada for this evening.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.